The Inn(71)

“Something’s going to go wrong,” the boy said, watching the tall pine trees whiz past us on either side of the road. “I can feel it. Something bad’s about to happen.”

“I know what that feels like,” I said. The fever, hot and heavy, had been nesting in my chest since we left the house. I told myself it was just memories of Boston and my fall. Trepidation about what lay ahead on the road.

“You don’t trick Cline like this,” Squid said. “He reads minds. He’s like a fucking vampire or something.” The boy’s eyes were a little too wide. I let him rattle off the words, getting it out of his system. “That’s how he came into my life, you know. Like a vampire. Like he’d always known I was there and now it was, like, time to come get me. Bring me into the family. Make me one of his own.”

“How did you meet him?”

Squid rubbed his nose, laughed a little.

“I was stealing bags at the airport,” he said. “I had a good scam going. I’d go in dressed really nice with a suitcase full of magazines, make like I’d just gotten off a flight. I even had one of those neck pillows that I’d dirtied up so it looked like I traveled all the time. I’d find a flight that had just come in, so there were only a couple of people down in the baggage area. I’d watch the first bag come along, and if no one jumped at it, I’d grab it and walk out.”

I heard Susan give a little laugh behind me. Somehow, even with all that was ahead of us that night, Squid’s story lightened the tension in the car. We crested a hill, and I saw the cluster of lights on the horizon that I knew was Boston.

“Anyway, one day I picked up the wrong bag,” Squid said. “It had two bricks of heroin in it. The guy had been dumb enough to check the bag with all his personal stuff too. I worked out who he was, bought a burner phone, and texted saying he could have the bricks back for ten grand. The guy didn’t show up. Cline did. And not at the meeting place. At my house. He knew my name, my mother’s name, everything.” Squid shuddered. It wasn’t cold in the car, but he rubbed his arms. “Maybe it wasn’t the wrong bag,” Squid said. He drew a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, extracted one, and rolled down the window slightly. “Maybe it was the right one.”

“What do you mean?” Doc asked.

“Cline will give you everything you want.” Squid shrugged. “You want money? He’s got money. You want girls? He’s got girls. He’ll tell them to be in love with you and they’ll be in love with you. It’s like magic. You can have everything you want—all you got to do is stay out of trouble. Because if you trip once …”

The car fell silent. Squid smoked his cigarette too fast, leaning and blowing the smoke out of the crack in the window with shivering breaths.

“What happened to the guy who lost the drugs?” I asked. “The one whose bag you stole?”

“He’s in a drainpipe off the highway,” Squid said. “Cline stabbed him in the head with a letter opener in his nice big office.”





CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT





COMING HOME. RETURNING to where it had all begun, the happiest and the most horrific days of my career, when Malone and I had walked the streets with no idea of the downfall that awaited us, the cliff edge about to crumble beneath our feet. We’d been untouchables in uniform, hunting down the drunk, violent, careless on our streets, two faithful dogs rounding up wolves and driving them away from our flock of innocent sheep. Now I drove and watched the wide streets rolling by, the windows of grand old hotels where we had responded to weddings gone wild, the banks where we had stood guard with our brothers foiling brazen stickups. Every corner had a memory.

Here, outside the Union Oyster House, we had stopped to examine Malone’s trooper badge in the sunlight when he finally made rank, the clash and clatter of the bar’s patrons on one side of us, press of tourists celebrating St. Patrick’s Day at the other.

Here on the steps of the courthouse, we had elbowed aside journalists huddling around accused murderers, fraudsters, and priests caught up in the Catholic archdiocese scandal. I’d copped a microphone in the eye from a Fox News reporter here once. Just one block down, Malone had nearly tripped on a DVD player tossed over the shoulder of a meth addict running for his life across a parking lot.

All of that was lost to us now. The two of us had thrown in everything one night when we’d decided to take the law into our own hands, Malone for one reason, me for another, more than two years ago. Tonight, I was doing the same thing, driving toward the fateful street where we had crossed the line into that dark territory, knowing in my heart that what I was doing was the right thing and maybe being horribly, irreversibly wrong about that.

We drove around the block, passing Malone and Nick in their car as they pulled into a space directly across the street from the apartment building where Malone and I had sealed our fates. I met my partner’s eyes and hoped he knew that I forgave him for what had happened here, what his actions had taken from us both. I desperately missed this city, these streets, the way the people had looked at me in my uniform, some lovingly and some hatefully. But what was happening to him, the disease that was eating at his bones and slowly taking him from whatever remained of his life, was not what he or anyone deserved.

I parked my car at the other end of the street, in view of Nick’s vehicle and the apartment building’s door.