HardScape (22 page)

That was news to me, and grim news for Silicon Valley. Back when, Leslie Harkin had frolicked by my side in the Rustbelt. There wasn't a machine tool shop in the state of Michigan she hadn't put into play at least once. To many a battered trade unionist she was the she-devil incarnate. And since I'd been the she-devil's boss, they lit bonfires the night I went to prison.

I did not want to confront Leslie, and yet she looked like my best source. Like a train whose locomotive had jumped the tracks, I was joining the wreck, like it or not. “Is she vulturing on her own?”

“Where have you been?”

“Home.”

“You never heard of Harkin & Locke?”

Before I could comment on that grim alliance, I heard a scream from the barn.

Chapter 19

Four seconds after ripping a pocket on the kitchen doorknob, I burst into the barn. The cars were on the ground floor, quiet in the shadows, the Mealys' apartment up a rickety interior staircase.

“Don't!” Alison screamed. Janet shrieked. Something fell heavily overhead, shaking dust from the rafters.

I took the wooden steps three at a time. Their door was smashed open, sagging on a broken hinge. Through the little living room I could see the kitchen: Mrs. Mealy crawling across the floor; a large man rearing back to kick her; Alison clinging to his leg, screaming, “Don't, Daddy!”

Tom Mealy had won parole.

He faced me as I came through the door. When he recognized me, he balled his fists. “You're screwin' my wife,” he slurred, spit trailing from his heavy lips.

“No,” moaned Mrs. Mealy, dragging herself over the linoleum.

He whirled on her, aiming another kick. He was tall and broad, with arms as big as my waist, but he was drunk, so I took a chance and went straight at him, inside the big arms, hoping to do quick damage to his gut. Tom tried to bearhug me. I butted him until he stopped trying and kept on hammering his belly. His anger turned to shock, then bafflement as his legs gave way.

I had been taught the hard way to finish a fight. Punching his neck as he went down, I launched a kick at his head to make sure he stayed there.

Alison flew at me, her little body all desperate bone and muscle, clutching my leg, pleading, “Don't hurt him, Ben.”

Adrenaline was popping through my skin and I was breathing hard and fast. Tom eyed me blearily from the floor, trying to gather his legs.

“Don't,” I warned him.

He gave it up and sagged on his back, his face going slack as he closed his eyes. I pried the child off my leg.

“Alison. Take your mother to the house. Can you walk, Janet?”

“I'm okay. I'm okay.”

“Draw her a nice hot bath and call Dr. Greenan.”

“No.”

“Janet, let's just make sure you're not hurt.”

But she insisted she was fine, just a little sore—Tom hadn't really meant to hurt her. He was just drinking and sometimes he got that way when he drank. “I can't afford the doctor,” she concluded. “I'm fine.”

She was, in fact, white as the kitchen wall. Her cheek was swollen and there was blood on her lip. I insisted that Steve Greenan look her over. “No,” she whispered, explaining that the doctor would tell Trooper Moody and Oliver would arrest her husband. I looked at Alison and saw that this warped logic made equal sense to her.

“Ben, don't you understand? They'll send him back to jail.”

That struck me as a terrific idea, an opinion I couched carefully and gently, as I caught my breath. “Maybe that would be better for a little while until he calms down. They can help him there.”

“Detox didn't work last time,” said the eleven-year-old.

“Hush,” said her mother.

I looked at the big, inert form on the floor and tried to figure out some way to protect his family. One thing was for sure: I wasn't going to New York that afternoon. For that I felt relieved. Tomorrow, with any luck, we'd get a forest fire. Or maybe the river would flood.

“All right,” I said. “Go over to my house. Take a hot bath, lie down. I'll talk to him.”

“Ben, don't hurt him.” Alison had seen another me, and the fear on her face told me it would take a long time to convince the child that all I was, was a survivor. When I leaned over to kiss her hair, she shrank back. “Promise,” she demanded.

“Don't worry. There's no more fighting today. Go on now. I'll just sit with him and sober him up and get him out of here. Okay?”

She stared, clear-eyed and anxious.

“I promise. Go. And put some ice on your face, Mrs. Mealy.”

They went at last, with fearful glances, as if I would carve him up with a breadknife and stuff the parts in garbage bags—another terrific idea.

Tom opened his eyes.

I stepped out of reach.

“They gone?”

“They're gone.”

He fingered his nose and winced. Closed his eyes and lay silent. I didn't remember hitting his nose. Probably when I butted him.

“Wha'd you hit me with?” he mumbled.

I didn't answer.

“I'd have taken you easy if I wasn't drunk.”

“You wouldn't have had to if you weren't drunk.”

“You screwing my wife?”

“Who told you that?”

“Heard it at the White Birch.”

“From some old friend you met an hour ago?”

“Screw you.”

“When'd you get out, Tom?”

“Last month.”

“Took you a whole month to come home to beat up your family?”

He said nothing.

“Where you living, Tom?”

“By the river.”

I had heard that somewhere ten miles downstream the homeless were camped. “You working?”

Tom Mealy opened his eyes. He was far from sober, but getting slammed around unexpectedly can clear the head. “They hit me with a DWI suspension when I was waiting for sentencing. Got a year to go before they give me my license back.”

That was reassuring. Sometimes the system actually worked. Would that the parole board had read their man as accurately as the traffic-court judge.

He was too drunk to reason with, but maybe I could scare him. I said, “Tom, I'm sorry, but I've got to call Trooper Moody.”

He sat up on the floor, looking around wildly. “No.”

“Yes. You would have killed your wife if I hadn't come along. You terrified your daughter.”

“No. They'll send me back for violating parole.”

“Maybe we can get you into a program.”

“No way.”

“Sorry.”

“Hey, what business is it of yours?” he demanded belligerently.

I watched his feet. “You've put Alison through hell. She was just starting to unwind from last time.”

“What do you mean, last time? Wha'd that kid tell you?”

“It was in the newspaper, you idiot.”

“Oh, yeah…It didn't really happen like that. I didn't mean nothing. Anyway, you got no right to interfere with my family.”

“Don't stand up, Tom.”

“What?” He paused on one knee, reeling a little.

I said, “Your family isn't here to protect you now. I'll massacre you if you stand up.” I had taken no satisfaction in what I had done to him before, but I was angry now, remembering how Alison had shied from me, and I think he sensed that. He tried a hard glare anyway but couldn't hold on to it.

“Will you go into a detox program, or do I call Trooper Moody?”

“I ain't going in no program!” he shouted. “Give me a break. You don't know what it's like.”

I didn't know whether he meant jail or being a drunk. All I knew was that I was getting nowhere fast. “Tom, if I give you a hundred bucks, will you get on a bus and go to Florida for the winter?”

“There's no snow in Florida. I'm a snowplow driver.”

“Then go to Alaska. Just out of Connecticut.”

“For a lousy hundred bucks?” he asked with a crafty smile. “
Five
hundred.”

“I don't have five hundred.”

“Then I'm staying.”

That tore it. I yanked him to his feet and marched him out and down the stairs before he realized we were moving. “What are you doing?” he whined.

“We're going to Trooper Moody.”

“No.” He dug in his heels. He was too big to drag. I wound up to kick an ankle, but he suddenly began to weep, sat down on the wooden steps, and cried.

“Come on, Tom.”

“Please don't make me go back.”

“Tom, I got to. You're just going to get drunk again and come and cause trouble.”

“I won't.”

“You know you will.”

“I won't. I swear it.”

“I've got to protect your kid. Do we go quietly, or do I have to call Trooper Moody? You don't want that. You know what he's like. Better to just turn yourself in.”

Tom Mealy knew what I meant. An arrest by Oliver Moody under the wrong conditions could make what had occurred upstairs feel like a friendly arm wrestle. He dried his eyes, and when he looked at me they were suddenly surprisingly alight with hope. Hope, and the crafty look I had seen a moment before.

“If you let me go I'll tell you something about the guy who shot Renny Chevalley.”

“
What
?”

“You gotta give me the hundred bucks too. Hey, let go. You're hurting my arm.”

I was gripping it like a vise—not to control him, but in amazement. “
What
?” I shouted again. “What do you know?”

“Leggo!”

I let go. By the light that spilled in through the window over the cutting garden, I could see a parade of ideas lurch across the drunkard's face. My heart sank. He didn't know what he was saying. “What?” I repeated.

“You let me go.”

“Only if you leave the county.”

“I'll go to Massachusetts. I got a buddy up there.”

“Fine.” I would have preferred a more distant state, but he held the cards now.

“You going to give me the money?”

“Not till you tell me what you're talking about. What guy? Did you see him?”

“Buddy of mine did.”

“Where?”

“On the Morris Mountain road.”

“He
saw
him? What did he look like?”

“I don't know.”

“Why didn't he tell the cops?”

“Yeah, right.”

“Where is this guy?”

“By the river.”

“Take me to him.”

“First the hundred bucks.”

“The minute he shakes hands with me. Not before—Get in the car.”

He climbed into the Olds. I opened the barn doors and drove out. “Put on your seatbelt.”

Tom Mealy did what I said and gave me directions to his piece of the river. I swung by the bank to withdraw a hundred dollars, then stopped at the General Store for three packs of Marlboros and extra matches. Tom fell asleep, mouth open, reeking and snoring loudly. I reached under the seat for my radar detector, which is thoroughly and completely illegal in the state of Connecticut, and floored it.

Eight and a half minutes later, I spotted the overgrown logging road that Tom had instructed me to look for. I nudged him hard in the ribs. Several nudges and a few bouncing potholes later, he woke up. Eventually he remembered why he was in my car.

“Right past that oak.”

The tree in question was spiraled like a barber pole with blazing red poison ivy. Several turns down roads I didn't know, and we stopped in a small clearing, which, to judge by the litter on the ground, was a parking lot for active practitioners of safer sex.

“Now what?”

“We gotta walk.”

I left the car unlocked—anyone who wanted to break in had privacy enough to open the windows with a chainsaw—and followed Tom Mealy into the woods. We walked a quarter-mile on a deer path, me worrying about ticks. Tom stopped. I looked around. Just dense growth. He opened his fly, watered some of it, and resumed walking.

Ahead, the tree canopy thinned, marking the bed of the river. The deer path descended steeply until we found ourselves on the open bank. The river was deep here, deceptively smooth as the current raced.

“Where's the barn? I heard they were living in an old barn?”

“Some guy tore it down. Sold the beams.”

“How'd he get it out of here?”

“Made a raft.” Tom gave a low whistle. At an answering whistle he said, “Come on,” and headed down the bank, ducking low limbs. A hundred yards of that brought us to a little meadow, at the back of which, hard against the woods, was a twelve-by-twelve blue poly tarp pitched lean-to style. Three people were sitting cross-legged under it, watching a fourth try to start a fire.

“Wha'd you bring?” asked the one woman.

Tom looked abashed. “I forgot.”

“Jesus, Tom, you were supposed to bring food.”

“I was drinking.”

“Who's this?”

I was wearing my tweed jacket. Old as it was, it looked a little out of place. The men and woman under the tarp were wearing dirty blue jeans and hooded sweatshirts. The guy building the fire—who looked oddly familiar to me—was upscale by comparison, with cleaner blue jeans, a moth-eaten sweater, and a bright green nylon windbreaker of the kind they sometimes give away at a Salvation Army prayer meeting. Burn scars speckled the backs of his hands.

“He wants to talk to you,” Tom told him.

He was about forty-five—a weather-beaten forty-five—with a walrus mustache and a gentle but weary look in his eye that reminded me of Mrs. Mealy. His movements were economical and precise. He finished piling squaw wood and lighted it with the last match in his book. It flamed instantly, igniting the larger wood he had arranged above the dry twigs. Then he looked up with a lopsided smile and said, “I didn't do it, Officer.”

“I'm not a cop.”

“I still didn't do it.”

I looked at the others, who were watching curiously, and back at him.

“Could I have a little of your time?”

He considered that, gravely. I kept thinking I knew him. I knew I knew him, but I couldn't place the face. I opened a pack of Marlboros and passed them over. “Like a smoke?”

He took one out, lit it in the fire, and passed the pack to his friends.

“Keep 'em,” I said, and walked to the river. He bent his head in discussion with Tom a moment, then joined me. “Tom says you're paying him a hundred bucks for me to talk to you.”

“I'm paying Tom a hundred bucks to go away and stop beating up his wife.”

“Someone told him you're screwing her.”

“Someone's full of it. I gave them the apartment in my barn.”

“Tom's a menace,” the man said quietly.