Bad Men (2003) (32 page)

The truck had pulled up alongside Larry Amerling. The man leaning out of its window wore a dirty green windbreaker and a Sea Dogs baseball cap. His face was permanently tanned from years of working outdoors, but his nose was red and swollen and veins had broken badly across his cheeks. He made a sucking sound with his teeth as Macy approached and allowed his eyes to linger on her thighs and crotch. She was relieved to note that Amerling looked embarrassed on the man’s behalf.

“This here’s Carl Lubey,” said Amerling. “He lives up the road. Carl, this is Officer Macy.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Lubey. He made it sound like an invitation to his bed.

Macy contented herself with a nod and gave no indication that the man’s name meant anything to her. So this was the brother of the man Dupree had killed. She hated herself for agreeing with Barron’s assessment, but if his brother had been anything like Carl, then Dupree might have done society a favor. Carl Lubey was making her skin crawl.

“You got something wrong with your truck?” she asked him.

“Truck’s running fine,” he replied.

“Seemed to me like you were producing a lot of fumes. You ought to get it looked at.”

“Don’t need looking at. I told you, truck’s fine.”

“If you say so. It happens again and you could be looking at a citation.”

Lubey made that sucking noise through his teeth again.

“You want to come over, maybe help me clean out my pipes, you let me know,” he said. He winked broadly at her, then put the truck in gear and went on his way. This time, there was only a hint of exhaust smoke.

“Does he live alone out there?” asked Macy.

“Does Carl look like the kind of guy who has women beating down his door? Yeah, he’s alone. I don’t think he ever got over—”

He stopped.

“I know about it,” said Macy.

“Yeah, well, then you understand. He always did have a lot of bitterness inside him. What happened to his brother just added a little extra piss to his vinegar, if you’ll excuse the phrase. Pardon me saying it, but it didn’t look like there was anything wrong with his truck.”

Macy shook her head. “When he was coming up the road, it seemed like he was surrounded by gray smoke. Then it just sort of…faded away. It was real odd.”

She turned to Amerling but he was looking away, staring at the road Carl Lubey had just taken, as if hoping to see some trace of the smoke for himself.

“I’d best be getting back,” he said. He stomped his cigarette out on the ground, then picked up the butt and put it in the pocket of his jacket. “Mail won’t sort itself.”

They drove in silence for a time, until Macy said, “I couldn’t see the Site from the top of the tower. That’s what they call it, isn’t it, the Site?”

Amerling took a moment to reply.

“Trees keep it hidden.”

“Even in winter?”

“Even in winter. There’s a lot of evergreens out here.”

“It’s over to the south, isn’t it?”

“That’s right, but you can’t get there by car, and even on foot you need to know where you’re going. At this time of year, with the light fading so early, I’m not even sure I could find it.”

“Another time, then,” said Macy.

“Sure,” Amerling lied. “Another time.”

Moloch saw Dexter staring back at him in the rearview. Leonie and Dexter sat up front, Braun behind them, and Moloch farther back. There was a hollow panel in the floor, big enough for a man to lie in, if necessary, although if he was there for longer than a couple of minutes, he’d probably suffocate. Moloch knew it was for weapons, maybe even drugs. It was a last resort for him in the event of a police search, and nothing more.

“You okay?” asked Dexter.

Moloch nodded. They had been traveling for about three hours, and his back ached. They had passed the toll booth at the New Hampshire state line shortly after nine and entered Maine. The traffic was light, most of it headed south toward Boston. They took the Kittery exit, and pulled up outside the Kittery Trading Post. Braun and Leonie went inside, leaving Moloch to rage alone silently.

As they had drawn closer and closer to Maine, Moloch had felt a pain building in his head. He found himself drifting into sleep, his eyes closing and his chin nodding to his chest, until a charge like a jolt of electricity forced him back into waking once again. But in those glancing moments of semirest, his body racked by exhaustion, he was tormented by visions, images of pasts both known and unknown, at once familiar and strange.

He saw himself as a small boy, hands pressed against the window of a black car as it pulled away from a suburban house, the boy’s bicycle momentarily forgotten, his fingers brushing the glass as the car sped up, a man struggling in the backseat, his eyes wide with panic, two men holding him down. The man’s hand reached out, as if somehow the boy could save him, but nobody could save him.

Dad?

No, not Dad, not really, but the closest he had come to finding one, a foster father and a foster mother on a street of identical houses, each with a small square of green lawn, its quiet disturbed only by the hiss of sprinklers and, now, the noise of the car as it pulled away from the curb.

Inside the house, the woman was crying. She lay slumped in a corner of the kitchen, blood running from her nose and mouth. She had been baking a cake, and now flour and broken eggs covered the floor around her. The boy went to her, and she took him in her arms and held him to her.

The next day, more men came, and they were forced to leave the house. The boy fled with his not-mother, moving from town to town, watching her as she grew more and more desperate, descending into some terrible dark place all her own, where men came and pounded on her body and left piles of ragged bills on the dresser when they were done. And the boy wondered, as he grew older: Who am I, and where have I come from, if I am not of this woman?

Then there were other women—mothers, sisters, daughters—flashing before him, and he heard half-familiar names spoken. He was in a house by a lake. He was on a streetcar, a man holding his hand.

He was on the island, and his voice was whispering:
Know me, wife.

Moloch jerked into wakefulness again. Dexter was now reading a newspaper. Moloch closed his eyes again.

This is not my past. It is a past, but it is not mine. I am more than this.

The island returned to him and he smelled the sea and the pines, and he heard a sound as of a moth tapping on glass, struggling to escape the darkness.

Or to return to it.

The others returned about a half hour later. They had bought warm clothing, waterproofs, and a selection of minor weaponry: knives, mainly; a handheld ax; and a hunting bow for Dexter. As for guns, they already had what they needed.

Powell handed Dexter the bow case. Dexter opened it and removed the big bow contained within.

“I don’t understand why you need that,” Moloch said. He still felt groggy and ill. He needed sleep, proper sleep. The tapping sound that he had heard in his dream had not gone away now that he was awake. Instead, it remained there, like water trapped in his inner ear.

“It’s not about needing. I like the feel of a bow.”

“You ever kill a man with a bow?” asked Powell.

“No. Killed one with an arrow, though.” Dexter grinned.

“You really think we’re going to need all this stuff up here?” Braun asked Moloch.

Moloch shook his head, as much in answer as in an effort to rid himself of the infernal noise in his head.

“We get there, find her, make her return my money, then we kill her. We don’t want to make trouble for ourselves and bring them down upon us. If everything goes according to plan, we’ll have her before they even know we’ve been there.”

“So, like I asked, why do we need all of this?”

Moloch looked at him the way he might have looked at a slow child.

“Because nothing ever goes according to plan,” he said simply.

The ferry to Portland contained just two passengers: an old man going to see his oncologist, and Marianne. She missed Danny and wished that he were with her, but she had to visit the banks and he would quickly have become bored with the waiting and the filling out of forms.

Bonnie had asked her little about her date, apart from inquiring whether it had gone well. She told her that Danny and Richie had enjoyed their evening together, and she didn’t mind if he stayed with her for the best part of another day. Richie had cheered at the news. Richie was a wonderful kid—she could never think of him as anything but a kid—and the people on the island looked out for him. In some ways, Dutch was the best environment for a boy like him. No harm could come to him, and in the close-knit community, he knew affection and support. To Danny, he was almost like a big brother, even though Danny, who was a smart boy, recognized that his playmate was different and that, in some ways, Danny had to look out for Richie more than Richie had to watch out for Danny.

But she had warned Danny not to follow Richie when he went exploring on the island. She knew that Richie liked to ramble through the woods and that Bonnie had given up trying to discourage him from doing so because Richie would go anyway, sneaking out of the house and sending her wild with worry. Better that he told her where he was going than to have him simply disappear without a word. While Marianne liked Richie, she knew that he was incapable of looking after her son, and Danny had been told, on pain of eternal grounding and loss of his allowance for the rest of his life, not to go anywhere with Richie unless Bonnie went along too.

Ahead of her, she could see the boats bobbing at the docks on Commercial. Resigned now to a day without Danny, she was looking forward to getting a few things done. She planned to visit her hairdresser, eat a leisurely lunch, maybe even head out to the Maine Mall for a while. She would have the best part of four hours to herself.

But first, there was the money to take care of. Once that was done, she would breathe a little easier. She was wearing a money belt beneath her sweater, and while she would certainly have preferred not to have to carry so much cash around, Portland’s streets didn’t worry her. She would not be walking them at night.

Behind her, gray clouds gathered. There would be snow by morning, according to the Weather Channel. She had checked the forecast before leaving, and the worst of the weather would not hit until much later that night. Thorson had announced that the ferry would leave Portland at six-thirty that night, with a final sailing at ten. She would probably make the six-thirty, or else the last sailing with time to spare, and she and Danny would be locked up safely at home by the time the snows came.

In her kitchen, Bonnie Clauson was watching CNN while chopping vegetables for dinner. She thought that she might make something special, since Danny was with them: a pot roast, perhaps, and a pumpkin pie.

On the TV, she could see a vehicle being pulled from a river somewhere in the south. It looked hot down there, and the backs of the policemen’s shirts were dark with sweat. She wondered if Mike, her current boyfriend, might be persuaded to chip in some cash so that they could take Richie away this summer. She’d ask him when she saw him next weekend. Mike drove trucks for a living and was sort of quiet, but he was patient with Richie and kind to her, and that was enough for Bonnie for the present.

Now the picture had changed, and a man’s face filled the screen. He looked handsome, she thought, apart from his eyes. They were sort of narrow, an impression accentuated by the thin vertical lines that ran down each cheek, and the intelligence in them was marred by contempt. Maybe it was just the law he despised, she mused, but she didn’t think so. She figured this guy hated just about everything.

Bonnie turned the TV up in time to hear his name.

Moloch. Wasn’t that a biblical name? It sounded kind of biblical. Bonnie wasn’t much of one for churchgoing or Bible thumping, but the name gave her the creeps. She went back to preparing her food. The soaps would begin soon, her “stories” as her mother used to call them.

Soon she forgot all about the man named Moloch.

But her son did not. He continued to stare at the television with rapt attention, watching the parade of faces. There was the man with the piercing eyes, and the black man, and the young man with the blond hair. Their pictures had been on TV a lot lately.

Richie sat very still and took them all in.

They arrived in Portland shortly before one. Moloch had by now moved into the front bench seat, sick of being incarcerated in the back of the van. The changes he had made to his appearance meant that only someone who took the time to examine him very closely would even begin to connect him with the face on the news reports, and if Moloch found someone examining him that closely, well, that person wouldn’t live long enough to tell anyone what he or she had seen.

They pulled up on Commercial and looked out to sea. Close by was the dock for the Dutch Island ferry. There was nobody onboard. Braun had gone to check the schedule.

“Last sailing is at ten,” he said when he returned. “Ferry comes back to the mainland first thing tomorrow morning.”

Moloch considered this. “For now, we rest up, get some motel rooms away from the center of town. We can talk about it again after we meet Scarfe.”

Dexter nodded. There was a Days Inn out by the mall. He’d seen the sign on the way into town. Dexter liked Days Inns. Once you got used to the fact that they all looked the same, they became a little like home.

Marianne had no problems at the banks. In total, she withdrew some $8,000 from three separate accounts, depositing each wad of notes carefully in the belt beneath her sweater. When she was done, she treated herself to a cab ride out to the Maine Mall, and allowed herself to be pampered in the hairdresser’s for a couple of hours. Then, feeling better than she had in many months, she ate Chinese food at the mall’s food court, then walked across the parking lot to T. J. Maxx, where she bought herself a DKNY leather jacket that, according to the tag, had been reduced by $300. She bought new sneakers for Danny and added them to the Harry Potter trading-card game in her bag.