The Inn(7)

“Just a bit of good old-fashioned kid wrangling.” Nick made fighting fists and slow-punched Effie in the ribs until she pushed him off. We told Effie about the situation and she tugged on an earlobe, thinking.

She made a typewriter motion and pointed to the house, and I nodded.

“What is that?” Nick asked. “Piano?”

“Typewriter.” I started walking. “She means we should go ask Susan.”

“When are you gonna learn proper sign language?” Nick asked Effie. Effie raised her middle finger over her shoulder and went back to work.

I don’t know what brought Susan Solie and Effie Johnson to the house or what their history together is. They came not long after Siobhan was killed and asked for cheap permanent rooms, and I knew right away they were not what they seemed. The jagged scar across the beautiful black woman’s throat was enough to tell me she had a past, and I’d glimpsed her in her room doing chin-ups on a steel bar she’d erected near the windows; the bed was made impossibly tight, with razor-sharp hospital corners, and the shelves were completely bare of possessions. Susan was ex-FBI and didn’t mind admitting it. She explained that she had moved into town after taking early retirement. She’d shrugged when I’d asked about her friend Effie and her mildly psychopathic living habits.

Nick and I trudged into the dining room, where Susan was working on her laptop, writing articles for the local rag. I pushed the laptop closed and Susan gave an exaggerated sigh as Nick sat down beside her.

“We need you,” I said.

“What are you two bozos up to now?” she asked, picking up a mug of coffee and sipping it while she looked us over. “I’m on deadline here.”

“Deadline?” Nick flipped Susan’s blond ponytail. “What happens if you miss the cutoff? The crab wranglers of Gloucester won’t have their weather report this week? Oh, wait, you’ve got a big scoop—yarn-store sale this Saturday, twenty percent off crochet hooks.”

Susan gave Nick a withering look. Next to her computer was a sheet of paper she’d been using to design the newspaper’s weekly crossword.

“Four across, five letters. The clue is ‘intelligent,’” I read. “Susan, that’s a bit narcissistic, don’t you think?”

“Ah, yes.” She wrote the letters of her name in the boxes with a pencil. “I knew I was onto something there. Now state your purpose or leave me be. I’m actually being productive. You might try it some time.”

“Clay’s sleeping off the night shift and there’s a rumor someone’s moving in on local high-schoolers with free samples of candy,” I said. “You heard anything like that?”

“No.” Susan’s smile disappeared. “Jesus. Here? In Gloucester?”

“Yeah, here,” I said. “Yarn-store central.”

We told her about Winley, and I put the capsule I’d found in the kid’s bedroom on the dining-room table between us. Susan examined the pill, then took the paper with the phone number from me and turned the laptop away from Nick. As I’d hoped she would, she used whatever mysterious connection she still had with the Bureau to find the number.

“Burner phone,” she said. “It’s untraceable. Registered to no one.”

“Can we find out where it was purchased?” I asked, taking a seat beside her.

“Bill, I’m not your federal connection,” Susan said. “I don’t work for the Bureau anymore. If you want to go down a rabbit hole, you’ll have to do it on your own.”

“But you still seem in league with them somehow,” Nick said, gesturing to the laptop.

“Just call up your old friends and get them to help us out,” I said.

“I can’t call up my old friends and ask them for favors any more than you can,” she said, looking at me. I felt a chill run up the back of my neck. I wasn’t sure if Susan knew what I had done in Boston, what had gotten me severed like a gangrenous limb from the job I loved. Her comment suggested she knew something.

“Look,” she said. “A drug dealer using burner phones and giving out free product is probably part of an outfit. Junkies don’t have the cash to keep buying devices—they use public phones, and they sure don’t give anything away for free. The guy on the end of this number? He’s probably just a soldier delivering the goods.”

“So what are you saying?” I asked. “This could be a gang or something?”

“What I’m saying is you need to decide whether you want to get involved,” Susan said. “You might end up with a whole pack of them on your tail. If you target the wrong guy, you could be in a world of trouble.”





CHAPTER EIGHT





THE APPOINTMENT WAS for one Mitchell Antoine Cline, but when Dr. Raymond Locke looked up from his desk, he saw three men entering his small office. From the information in his files, he figured that Cline was the smallest of them, a man with a well-toned body filling out his Hugo Boss shirt and long, narrow feet in patent-leather shoes. He sat in a chair while the two men with him—a thickly built Asian guy with an enormous silver watch and a much bigger black guy with a neat goatee—stood against the wall and looked bored. Locke noted that he hadn’t clicked the alert button on the computer screen to tell the front desk to send the next patient in.