Deadout (15 page)

I was becoming increasingly frustrated when I pulled up next to the big pink house with the tulip flag and the bad smell. A rough-looking workman with an impressive belly and knee-high boots was standing ankle deep in the front lawn. The truck parked on the cross street said
BILL'S SEPTIC SERVICE
on the side.

“How do I get out of here?” I yelled.

He pointed at the next left, and I took it. Minutes later I was driving along the ocean.

West seemed to hold fewer people, and that's what I was in the mood for, so I drove toward the Gay Head Cliffs. Hell, if I could find my way there, maybe I'd drive right off them.

I smiled at the juvenile melodrama of it. Yeah, that'd show them, I thought, mocking myself. The speedometer was reading eighty-five, so I took my foot off the gas and coasted down to seventy. I'd calmed down a little, but figured maybe I should calm down a little more. I chucked the cheese and the bread into a trash can by the side of the road, then pried open one of the beers and drank half of it. I didn't want to risk getting caught with an open bottle in the car, so I drank the rest of it, too.

The Gay Head Lighthouse was rising up on the right. I knew that at the height of the summer, the road that looped in front of the lighthouse would be crawling with tourists, parked up with buses and cars. But as I rocketed toward it at seventy miles an hour, I could see it was completely deserted. I smiled and let my foot sink down again, shooting up the hill, then screeching around the first curve of the loop, my rear wheels drifting just enough to be fun. I laughed out loud on the straightaway, then held on, screeching around the second curve. As I straightened out to shoot back toward the entrance, though, I took my foot off the gas.

A police cruiser was stopped at the entrance to State Road, blocking both lanes. My foot came down on the brake, and I eased to a stop next to it.

It was Jimmy Frank. He shook his head as he got out of his car and walked over to mine.

I held up my license, making sure he saw my badge.

He waved it down. “I know who you are, Detective Doyle Carrick. I looked you up after the fight at the Alehouse.… Made some calls after the incident at the ferry, too. What I want to know is why you're driving like a maniac around one of our island treasures.”

I nodded, like I understood. “Been a rough day, Sergeant Frank. Girl trouble. I was blowing off a little steam.” I looked around us. “There wasn't anyone around, so I kind of hoped no one would mind.”

He leaned toward the window, resting an arm across the top of the door. “Sorry to hear about your woes.” He put his face closer to the window and sniffed. “Say, you been drinking?”

“I had a beer,” I said, wondering which way this was going.

He nodded. “Take a walk with me,” he said. “I'll buy you another.”

“Okay.” What was I going to say?

We parked our cars and walked down one of the side roads, in awkward manly silence until he said, “So, what's your story, Detective Doyle Carrick?”

I wondered myself what my story was. I decided to start with the basics.

“My girlfriend got a temporary job up here for a couple of weeks. I drove her up here, decided to take a little vacation time.”

He looked at me. “That the girlfriend you're having problems with?”

I nodded. The road was secluded, lined with thick brush. I wondered where we were headed.

He nodded back. “What's the deal with you and Teddy Renfrew?”

“That's who she's working for. She's a farmer.”

“A lot of people don't like that guy.”

“I'm one of them.”

He laughed at that, pointing to the left, down a side road that could have been a driveway. As we angled down it, he looked at me, serious. “What about that whole thing in Dunston? You want to tell me what that was about?”

“Most of it I can't talk about. My folks had a house there. When they died, I inherited it. I went up to take care of the house. That's where I met Nola.”

“On suspension?” he asked as we turned from the narrow rutted road onto a narrow rutted driveway.

I sighed. “Yes, on suspension. Caught a lead, busted a drug ring. Turned into a whole lot of other stuff that I'm not allowed to talk about.”

“I heard it was some crazy shit.”

“You heard right about that.” Crazy shit, indeed.

We walked a little farther without talking but I knew we weren't done.

“What's the deal with you and Dr. Paar?”

“Annalisa?” I laughed for no reason. “Why do you ask?”

He gave me a sidelong look. “That part of the problem with your girlfriend?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

He let out a deep sigh. “This whole bee thing has a lot of people worked up. People on the island, but people off the island, too.” He looked at me. “People in high-up places. And they don't want any trouble however any of this goes.” He shook his head, laughing. “It's like a goddamned mantra, ‘smooth, smooth, smooth.' Even more than usual, you know?”

“From where?”

“Who knows? Upstairs somewhere.”

At the end of the driveway was a modern house, mostly glass, but still tasteful. In the back, surrounded by tall sea grass, was a slate patio with a massive fieldstone fireplace. Beyond it was a hundred yards of brush, then the ocean.

“Nice place,” I said.

We walked up the steps to the front door, and Jimmy turned to give me a serious stare. “You don't see this, okay?”

I nodded and he unscrewed the porch light and took out a key, opened the front door. “Most of the local cops have side work caretaking some of these properties. Some of them do a bunch, make a nice supplement from it. I have this and a couple of others.”

As we walked through the house, he flicked a couple of light switches but that was about it.

“These people are loaded,” he said, as if reading my mind.

We walked into the kitchen and he took two beers out of the fridge.

“So what's your deal?” I asked as we stood in some rich guy's kitchen, drinking some rich guy's beer.

“Me? I don't have a deal.”

I gave him a look.

He opened the door from the kitchen to the garage and motioned me to follow.

The garage held a black Tesla Roadster, plugged into the wall. I made a sound in my throat.

Jimmy smiled and disconnected the plug. “Sweet, ain't it? I have to take it out every now and again so it don't get lonely.”

“And that's electric.”

“Crazy, ain't it?”

We got in and put our beers in the cup holders. He pressed a couple of buttons. The garage door opened, and we silently surged down the driveway.

“So you were telling me your deal,” I reminded him.

He laughed, turning onto the road and rocketing forward. “Okay. Grew up in Tisbury, left the island to seek my fortune. Joined the Boston P.D., but didn't like it. Realized that just because my fortune wasn't on the island, didn't mean it was off it, either. Figured some folks don't get a fortune. Met an island girl. Married for six wonderful years, then another four after that. Been on my own a year and a half.” He took another swig of beer, then looked at the bottle. “Had my eye on being chief, but things got a little bumpy when Diane left.”

He raised his bottle, like a toast, and winked at it. “So, if Dr. Paar isn't the issue, what did you do to get yourself in the doghouse?”

“With Nola you mean?” I shrugged. “I think at this point me just being here is annoying her.” I paused. I didn't really know the guy, but I felt like I could trust him. At least a little bit. “We've been living together eight months or so, and it isn't always easy. I found a little work up here, too. A side job. So I could stay up here while she's here. I thought she'd be happy I was staying.” I took a drink. “She wasn't.”

He smiled. “That work have anything to do with Renfrew senior?”

I'd like to think I didn't show any reaction.

He leaned toward me conspiratorially. “I saw you going over to his humble abode.”

I nodded.

“Well, that whole family's a pain in the ass,” he said, “but if you're working for senior, he's probably paying you well. Most likely you're going to earn it.” He took a deep drink of his beer. “My instincts tell me you're a stand-up guy. You've been on the right side of two bad situations, and I feel I can trust you. Plus I have my sources, and not everyone's as tight-lipped as you are about what went on up in Dunston. Hero might be a little much, but from what I hear you're one righteous badass.”

I laughed and started to protest, but he put up a hand to stop me.

“So I'm going to give you a little background on these Renfrews.”

He waited to see if I had any objections.

I raised my beer: have at it.

“Renfrew family has roots here, and they've been coming up summers for generations. They're not real old money, not for up here—no whaling money. But they're plenty rich. You ever hear of Thompson Chemical Company? They sell lawn care and garden products?”

I nodded.

“That's Renfrew. Big, established, family-owned company. One of their first locations was up here, but worth millions now. Anyway, Renfrew senior is running the family business, selling fertilizers and weed killers and pesticides, and your friend Teddy, he's running around with these eco-warrior knuckleheads, pulling stunts like putting red dye in the chemical in the lawn trucks, so when the trucks spray the lawns, they're painting them red.”

I laughed. I couldn't help it.

Jimmy did, too, shaking his head. “I know, almost makes you like him, right?”

I shook my head and said, “Not even close,” earning me a clink of our beer bottles.

“Some of the stuff is not so harmless, either. He seems to love tweaking the old man. Him and some of his friends hung banners from one of Thompson's regional headquarters, embarrassed the hell out of them. But he's also been arrested for some other stuff that was more serious. They set off the sprinklers at a biotech lab in Atlanta, protesting pharmaceuticals in the water. Short-circuited a bunch of equipment and actually started a fire. Three people got pretty badly hurt, trampled by folks trying to get out of there. He was also involved in a group that was spiking trees. I don't know if he was directly involved, but someone lost an eye.

“Anyway, we got all sorts of rich assholes up here, even in the off-season, all different orders of magnitude. The Renfrews are among the richest and the assholiest.”

“Do you think young Renfrew is one of the reasons your higher-ups are so nervous?”

“Probably. But I think they would be anyway. My sense is this thing is just big.”

I nodded. “What about Johnny Blue? What's his story?”

Jimmy laughed and shook his head “You seen him on TV, you know his story. He ain't that rich, but he is for sure a big asshole.”

“Not that rich? What's he doing with that big farm, then?”

Jimmy shrugged. “His investors are rich. I don't know what he's doing, and I doubt he does, either. But I wish he was doing it somewhere else.”

He held up his bottle and looked at it again, maybe checking the level, maybe just admiring the bubbles. Then he put it to his mouth and tilted it back. We came to a stop, and I realized we were next to my car.

“Anyway,” he said, “you be careful around these rich motherfuckers. They don't call them that just because they're rich, you know what I mean? From what I hear, Renfrew's been on a bit of a tear, bringing in lots of VIPs, buying back shares in the company, and leveraging himself to the hilt to do it. He's up to something.”

“Seems to be doing something right, living in that massive house.”

“Yeah, it's big, ain't it? It actually belongs to the company.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, but he owns most of the company. It's all the same in the end, I guess. They've got everything twisted this way and that, avoiding taxes over here and sheltering assets over there. It's crazy.”

“I guess that's how they get to be so rich.”

“Yeah, and a lot worse stuff than that. Like I said, you've been on the right side of two bad situations. I'd just as soon not see you on the wrong side of the next one.”

 

26

Driving back down island at a reasonable speed, I realized I still didn't have a good excuse for staying. Part of me wanted to stop in and see Nola, try to patch things up. Part of me wanted to stop in and get my stuff, maybe fire off a few choice words, something stinging that would even us up a bit. A growing part of me just wanted to get off this damned island. I thought about telling Renfrew I'd changed my mind, giving him his money back and going home. Then I pictured my apartment.

For years it had been just right, and for months it had felt too small. Picturing it without Nola now, it seemed cavernous, empty, and lonely.

The part of me that was sitting on the gas pedal decided to just keep driving, but while my right foot was decisive on the matter of acceleration, it hadn't communicated anything to my hands regarding steering. Not only did I not know what I was doing, I didn't know where I was staying, either.

An image of Annalisa flared in my mind's eye, but I snuffed it out, smothering it with a damp cloth until it was gone.

It might have taken longer than I thought, though, because by the time I'd stopped thinking about her, the sky was dark and I was pulling up at the Wesley Hotel.

It was like a different place from the week before—bustling like it was the height of the season, people coming and going through the lobby, heading up and down the steps. Everyone was moving with a kind of crispness, a sense of purpose, but there was something else that stood out.

The guests were all men. All young, in their twenties and thirties. A tiny bit of salt sprinkled over one or two forty-year-olds. I stood in the middle of the lobby, looking around, but there were no women, no children. And no seniors except for the old guy at the desk, who observed the buzz of paying guests with a satisfied smile.