Bad Men

  This did not strike Braun as at all odd.

  “You ever wonder about names?” asked Dexter, from out of nowhere.

  “Wonder how?” said Braun.

  “About how only some colors become names, and not others.”

  “Like?”

  “Like black. You know, Mr. Black. Or Mr. White. You got Mr. Green too, and your Mr. Brown, but that’s about it. You ever meet anybody called Blue, or Yellow, or Red? Doesn’t happen, except in movies. You think that’s strange?”

  “You know, it never struck me before.”

  “You think it’s interesting?”

  “No. You got too much time on your hands, is what I think. You need to be doing something useful to keep your mind off shit like that. Just drive.”

  “There was a time,” said Dexter, “when you thought I had a lot of interesting shit to say.”

  “I thought you were deep. Then I got to know you.”

  “You saying I’m not deep?”

  “If you were a pool, little kids could paddle in you.”

  “If you were a pool, little kids would piss in you.”

  “Just drive, will you? The sooner we get to where we’re going, the sooner I can get away from your shallow black ass.”

  But both men were smiling as Dexter tapped the gas, Moloch momentarily forgotten in the darkness behind them.

  Shoot the women first: it was an axiom of antiterrorist units, quite literally a maxim to live by. The women were more fanatical. They had more to prove, and when they made a decision, they were less likely than their male peers to experience doubts or second thoughts about it. Women attempted suicide less frequently than men, but they were far more likely to follow the attempt through to its fatal conclusion. Similarly, when a woman picked up a gun and put her finger on the trigger, there was a good chance that someone’s body was about to be endowed with an extra hole.

  If Willard was the most unpredictable of the little band of killers slowly making its way north, and Tell the most volatile, then Leonie was the most lethal. Braun was right to suspect as much, and Moloch, had he been asked, would have confirmed that his faith in her resolve was based entirely on the evidence of his own eyes. Leonie enjoyed power. Specifically, she enjoyed wielding the power of life and death, and had always done so. As a child, spiders and insects had briefly provoked her interest. They were simple to catch, and had enough easily detachable limbs to keep her amused in the clean little bedroom of the clean little unit that she shared with her mother in one of Philadelphia’s more desirable low-income housing projects. The young Leonie quickly tired of bugs, though, for there was no challenge to them. Similarly, unlike some of the boys who shared her environment, she did not enjoy tormenting cats and dogs. Instead, Leonie retreated into her own world, growing slowly quieter, a stillness creeping over her as she sat at her window and waited for the time when fantasy and reality might coalesce.

  It was from that window that she watched as the slim black boy walked across the basketball court toward the one who called himself Ex. Ex had touched her once, while she was coming back from the store with an armful of groceries. She had been unable to move, fearful that she might drop the bag in her arms. It was the middle of the month, when money was always short for her momma, and so she had endured Ex’s touch, and the sour taste of his breath when he placed his mouth upon her own. Ex had grown bored when she did not respond, and called her some names that she did not understand. Secretly, her stillness had disturbed the young dealer, who found it unnerving the way her eyes had never left his, not even blinking while he fondled her. Since then, he had not approached her again, even as she matured into the fine-looking woman she would eventually become.

  Now the boy was facing Ex, and Ex was saying something to him. Leonie felt her mouth grow dry. She pressed her fingers and face against the glass, a smear of breath pulsing, then fading, upon it.

  She knew what the boy was about to do. She felt it from him, could see it in his stance.

  Kill him, she thought. Kill him now.

  And he did.

  By the time Ex’s body hit the ground, the girl was running to the door of her apartment. She intercepted the boy on a patch of waste ground that led to the river. Already, she could hear sirens. The boy could hear them too. He looked scared.

  “Give me the gun,” said Leonie.

  The boy didn’t move. Instead, he just stared at the pretty girl with the thick black hair who stood before him. She was a year or two younger than he was, he guessed, but everything about her spoke of a maturity beyond his own.

  “Give it to me,” she repeated. “They won’t search me.”

  To their right, a patrol car made an arc into the project, spraying dirt and water from the rutted concrete. A second car came in from the left, effectively cutting off his exit. He couldn’t understand how they’d gotten there so fast.

  Suddenly, the girl moved toward him, her hands slipping beneath his jacket as she hugged herself to him. She buried her face in his chest, then pulled back and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Gotta run,” she said. “I’ll see you later, baby.”

  And as the cops approached she skipped away across the dirt, the gun tucked into the waistband of her skirt, her shirt hiding the butt. He watched one of the cops glance at her, and saw her reward him with a little smile.

  Then she was gone, and Dexter never saw the gun again.

  But he saw the girl, and although that kiss was the only one she would ever give him, Dexter loved her, and he knew that she loved him too, in her way.

  Still, he had never crossed her, and he never would. If it came down to it, he believed that she would kill him. She loved him more than she loved anyone else in the world, yet she would take his life if he failed her.

  Dexter figured that, where Leonie was concerned, the rest of humanity didn’t stand a chance.

  It was the absence of lights that alerted Karen Meyer. She heard the van pulling up outside her house, but no headlights matched its progress. Her first thought was that it was the cops coming, and she ran through a mental checklist as she climbed out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans over her panties. The dummy passports and driving licenses were hidden in a panel behind her gas stove, accessible only by taking apart the oven from the inside, and she deliberately kept it thick with grease and food waste to discourage any possible search, even if it meant that the oven was rendered practically unusable as a result. Her inks, pens, and dyes were all in her studio, and were indistinguishable from the materials she used in her regular design work. Her cameras were an expensive Nikon, a cheaper Minolta, and a Canon digital. Again, she could argue that these were an essential part of her job, since she often had to take photos as part of her initial preparations. The last batch of material had gone out a few days before, and there was nothing on the slate. She figured that she was clean.

  She had moved up to Norwich, Connecticut, to be close to her mother. Her mother had suffered a bad stroke that left her with impaired mobility, and Karen, as the only daughter in the family, had felt responsible for her. Karen’s brothers lived over on the West Coast, one in San Diego, the other in Tacoma, but they each sent money to boost the coverage offered by their mom’s insurance and to help Karen out, although, unofficially, Karen didn’t need their help because her sidelines were quite lucrative. Still, she wasn’t one to turn down free money, and the cash had helped her to rent the pretty house on Perry Avenue in which she now lived. Much as she loved her mom, she couldn’t live with the old woman, and her mom wanted to retain some degree of independence anyway. She had a panic button and a day nurse, and Karen was three minutes away from her. It was the perfect arrangement for all of them.

  She looked out of the window and saw the van. It was black and comparatively clean—not so beat up that it might attract attention, and not so clean as to stand out.

  There was no other vehicle in sight.

  Not cops, she thought.

  Her doorbell rang.

&nbs
p; Not cops.

  She went to her dresser and removed the gun from the drawer. It was a Smith & Wesson LadySmith auto, its grip designed for a smaller, woman’s hand. She had never fired it anywhere except on the range, but its presence in the house reassured her. Although Meyer made a point of no longer dealing with violent criminals, there was no telling what some people might do if they were desperate enough.

  Barefoot, she padded down the stairs, the gun held close to her thigh. She did not turn on any of the house lights. The street lamps cast the shadow of a woman against her door.

  “Who is it?” she said.

  She glanced to her right, where the display panel for the alarm system was mounted, and began checking the sensors in each zone. Front door: OK.

  “Karen?” said a woman’s voice. “Karen Meyer?”

  “I said, ‘Who is it?’ ”

  Living room: OK.

  “My name is Leonie. I’m in trouble. I was told you could help me.”

  “Who told you?”

  Dining room: OK.

  “His name is Edward.”

  Garage: OK.

  “Edward what?”

  Kitchen: DISARMED.

  Her stomach lurched. She felt metal at the nape of her neck. A hand closed over her gun.

  “You should know my name,” said a voice. “After all, it’s the only one that you didn’t give me.”

  Dupree awoke to pain.

  His joints and muscles, even his gums, still ached, although he’d taken some painkillers the night before. He felt too weak to lift his own weight from his bed, so he lay still, watching shadows on the ceiling rise and fade like smoke. He wondered sometimes if the symptoms he felt were phantoms too, shadows cast by the knowledge of his impending mortality. The pain had been coming more frequently in recent months. He had been warned by old Doc Bruder that his size and build left him open to a variety of ailments, and the pain he was experiencing could be the onset of any one of those.

  “You’re not frail by any means,” the retired physician had said while Joe sat on a couch in the old man’s den, Gary Cooper striding down a dusty street on the TV screen, forsaken by his darling, “but you’re not as strong as you look, or as people seem to think you are. Your job puts stresses on you. You’re complaining to me of pains in your chest, aches in your joints. I’m telling you that you need to get yourself checked out.”

  But Dupree had not taken Bruder’s advice, just as Bruder had known that he would not. Dupree was afraid. If he was told that he could no longer do his job, then that job would be taken away from him. His work on the island was more important to him than anything else. Without it, he would be lost. He would die.

  Dupree was thirty-eight now, and would be thirty-nine in May. He recalled a picture he had once seen of Robert Pershing Wadlow, the so-called Alton Giant, the largest man on record, Wadlow towering over the two men at either side of him, their heads barely reaching his elbows. At eight feet, eleven inches tall, he was taller than the enormous bookcase behind him. His hands were buried in the pockets of his dark suit, and he appeared to be teetering to his left, as if on the verge of toppling over, his thin frame buffeted by an unseen wind. Dupree guessed that Wadlow was twenty when the photograph was taken. Two years later he was dead, felled by the great curse that was his condition.

  Lying on his bed in the house in which he had grown up, Dupree remembered his father’s stories, his tales of old giants, told to reassure a boy who felt himself alienated from his peers by his size. His father had lied to him. They were lies of omission, but lies nonetheless, for his father had tailored his stories to the boy’s problems, cutting, distorting, softening.

  For his stories were not truly about giants.

  They were about the death of giants.

  Outside it was still dark. Ordinarily he would have been on his way to the station house by now, but he had juggled the rotation so that he could spend the evening with Marianne. He lay back on his bed and tried to rest.

  Sharon Macy sat in the tiny kitchen of her apartment, sipping a mug of hot milk. She had a lot on her mind. Her father was due to enter the hospital the following week for a series of tests after he had complained of pains in his back and chest. He was laughing off the concerns of his wife and daughter, but there was a history of cancer in the family and Macy knew that the fear of it was with each of them. Under other circumstances she might have returned home immediately, but the department was already buckling under the combined weight of illness and leave—which was why Macy, although still on probation, had found herself on the island rotation—and she suspected that only a real emergency would enable her to absent herself from duty. Anyway, her father had told her in no uncertain terms that he did not want her hanging around the house fussing over him. Her tour on Sanctuary would leave her with five days off at the end of it. She would drive down to Providence as soon as she was back on the mainland, and would examine her options in the light of what, if anything, her father’s tests revealed.

  Macy thought too of Barron and the drugs that she had seen him take from Terry Scarfe. Maybe she was mistaken in what she believed had occurred, but she didn’t think so. She wished that she had someone with whom she could talk about these things, and for the first time since the break up of their relationship, she felt herself missing Max, or at least missing what he had once represented for her.

  To hell with him, she thought. To hell with all of them.

  She placed the empty mug in the sink, returned to bed, and at last fell asleep to the sound of a ship in the bay, its horn rising like the cry of a sea creature lost in the darkness, seeking only to return to the safety of its kind.

  The call woke Terry Scarfe from a deep, alcohol-induced sleep, and so it took him a couple of seconds to recognize the voice and the distinctive Eastern European accent.

  “We have a job for you. Someone has purchased your expertise.”

  Even in his dazed state, Terry knew that whatever expertise he might have was worth next to nothing, unless you were dealing in pesetas and were happy just to count the zeros.

  “Sure,” he said. Terry wasn’t going to argue. He needed some cash. Even if he hadn’t needed it, these people weren’t the kind you refused. They owned Terry Scarfe, and he knew it.

  “You’ll get a call, usual place, fifteen minutes,” the man said, then hung up.

  Terry rose, swayed a little, and pulled a pair of sweatpants and an old T-shirt over his scrawny body. He found his heaviest overcoat, then walked two blocks to the pay phone, along the way picking up a coffee at the Dunkin’ Donuts to warm his body and his hands.

  Life had not been particularly kind to Terry Scarfe. Most of the time it seemed to treat him like he had screwed its sister. Other times, it went after him like he had screwed its mother as well. He had one failed marriage behind him, a failure that was due, Terry felt, to a combination of factors, including excessive alcohol intake on the night that he had proposed, his arrest and incarceration shortly after the wedding itself, and the unforgiving (and, in fact, downright unpleasant) nature of the woman to whom he had attached himself. His wife had divorced him while he was in jail on burglary charges, then married someone else while Terry was locked up for possession of a controlled substance. Her significant life events, Terry concluded, seemed to coincide with his government vacations. Maybe if he stayed out of jail for a while, her life wouldn’t be quite so good, while the quality of his own existence would improve considerably.

  A smarter man than Terry might have concluded that his criminal ambitions for himself far exceeded the talents available to him to achieve them, but like most criminals, Terry wasn’t particularly smart. Unfortunately, his career options were now even more limited than they had been to begin with, and few of them were likely to meet with the approval of the forces of law and order, which was why he was standing beside a telephone in the darkness waiting to talk to someone he had never met and who was unlikely to offer Terry a job tasting beer or testing feather beds for
softness. Just as Terry was starting to notice that he could no longer feel his feet, the call came through.

  “Terry Scarfe? My name is Dexter.”

  Terry thought the guy sounded black. It didn’t bother him, except that black people tended to stand out some in Portland, and if the guy was planning on coming up, it could present problems.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “There’s an island, somewhere off the coast there. It’s called Dutch Island.”

  “Yeah, Dutch. Sanctuary.”

  “What?”

  “Some folks still call it Sanctuary, that’s all, but Dutch, yeah, Dutch is good.”

  He heard the black guy sigh.

  “You done?”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “We need you to find out as much as you can about it.”

  “Like?”

  “Cop stuff. Ferries. Points of access.”

  “I’ll need to bring in someone else. I know a guy lives out there. He’s got no love for the big cop on the island.”

  “Big cop?”

  “Yeah, fuckin’ giant.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Nope, for real.”

  “Well, find out all you can. And get your friend to track down a woman. She’s using the name Marianne Elliot. She’ll have a little boy with her, about six years old. I want to know where she lives, who she’s friendly with, boyfriends, shit like that.”

  “When do you need this by?”

  “Tonight.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Terry thought that he heard, in the background, a soft pop. Terry knew that sound. Somebody had just taken a bullet.

  “No,” said Dexter, “you’ll do better than that.”

  Dexter stared down at the body of Karen Meyer. She had never been a pretty woman, but Leonie and Willard had removed what little superficial attractiveness she might have had. They worked well together. It was kind of worrying. Dexter would have to talk to her. He didn’t want her getting too close to Willard. He and Shepherd had talked, and the way things were going, Willard wasn’t going to be around much longer.