Third Rail (14 page)

“What's that?”

“My liver beeper from Mass General,” Jeet says, finally. “Stage four liver cancer. I'm number one hundred fifty-six on the list of people waiting for a transplant. No way that thing's going to ring in time. There can't be enough motorcycle wrecks.”

Harkness stares at the black square. “I'm really sorry. Thalia didn't tell me.”

“She doesn't know. No one does, except my mother back in Hingham. And now you.”

Harkness remembers what Candace told him in the hospital waiting room, about how her father's guilt grew inside him like cancer. “Look, you can't feel bad about not stopping Mach. There's nothing else you could have done.”

Jeet tosses his napkin on the table and lifts his glass, eyes closed, blue Mohawk spiking toward the ceiling, beer dripping down his chin and lobster bib. He puts the empty glass down on the dark table, carved with decades of initials.

“That sounds good, Eddy. But way too many people think they can get away with shit, know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“When you got the finish line in sight, excuses don't cut it anymore, Eddy. People who do bad shit have to pay for it. Full price. No matter who they are.” Jeet stands up and edges out of the narrow booth. “I should have done something to stop it instead of just drinking and fucking around.”

“Hey, Jeet?”

Jeet looks back from the doorway to Union Street.

Harkness taps the top of the box. “You just did.”

“S
O I'VE BEEN
meaning to ask you,”
Dr. Lauren North says during a break in her monologue. “Do you like to get high?”

Harkness stares across the booth at the bestselling author of
Kill the Pain, Free the Brain
:
Dispatches from the New Drug Frontier.
She's wearing a black business suit and a cream-colored silk blouse, her long blond hair held by a tasteful silver barrette.

“A joke, Eddy,” she says. “We're at the top of the Prudential Tower. Get it?” She points across the bar toward the dark windows. It's almost midnight and the lights of the city waver fifty floors below. The Blue Hills lurk in the distance beneath the blinking red lights of radio towers. Jets descend to Logan like slow comets.

“I get it,” he says. “I wonder if we'll ever be able to walk into a restaurant at the top of a tall building and not think about 9/11.”

“I wasn't thinking about 9/11,” she says. “But now I am. Thanks for that.” Dr. North shivers.

“I started college a couple of weeks before,” Harkness says. “Watched the Twin Towers burn on the crap TV in my dorm room. Kind of altered my educational path.”

“That's when you decided to become a cop?”

“That's when I decided to quit pretending I was anything else.”

The waiter brings a second round of drinks, a draft IPA for him and for her a glass of Austrian Zweigelt, which is the next pinot noir, Dr. North assures him. They're the last people in the restaurant except for a couple of tourists. Harkness tracked Dr. North down to find out more about Third Rail. But they've been in the Top of the Hub more than an hour and all Harkness has heard about is Dr. North and her book.

“You really should read it,” she says. “I mean, you can't influence policy or anything. But you're in enforcement, kind of. There's a lot of new stuff out there that you're not going to find on the street.”

“Looking forward to it,” he says. “Haven't had a lot of time to read lately. Been kind of on a . . . mission.”

She leans forward. “I know, I know. That's exactly how I feel when I'm writing a book. Like I can't do anything else. Can't drive my kids to school and talk to their dullard teachers. Don't want to hear from my friends about their little first world problems, their tedious divorces and custody battles, hormone imbalances and cancer treatments. I just want to write the next chapter so I can find out how it ends.” She sucks in a quick breath.

Harkness jumps in during the brief lull. “So can I run a couple of questions by you?”

She nods.

“Heard of something called Third Rail?”

“Third Rail.” Her gaze drifts up to the ceiling. “In the general category of smart drug, though that underestimates it. Taken in liquid form. Also goes by Thrilla, Mindfuck, and ADA. Which stands for Attention in Disturbing Amounts. And also a reference to the first computer programmer . . .”

“Ada Lovelace,” Harkness says.

Dr. North squints at him.

“So what is it?”

“A nootropic cocktail,” she says. “Powerful. Really hard to make. Has some ephedrine tacked on for focus and energy, the unstoppable kind. Dopamine to shake up your brain. Plus some Chinese herbs no one's ever heard of to make the trip a little strange.”

“Má huáng?”

Another stare. “How'd you know that?”

“A pissed-off, one-eyed jeweler told me,” Harkness says. “What does it do?”

“Delivers focus, of course, that's the cost of admission for the whole category. Plus you get kick-ass cognition and a sense of euphoria.”

“Possible side effects?”

“Triggers bad ideation, so users tend to get in trouble. They give in to urges. They reach for things they know they should leave alone. Especially kids who don't know better and older people with nothing to lose.”

Harkness envisions Hammond inside his crushed silver Volvo.

“Problem is it's not illegal, per se. At least not yet. In my book, it's one of the drugs in the category I call
invisible menace
.”

“Addictive?”

“Absolutely. And dangerous. Really easy to overdose on Third Rail. And even easier to have some kind of accident. Users tend to be grad students, tech guys, high achievers. People who think they can stay on top of it.”

“So it's a smart drug for people who are already smart?”

“You could say that. But Third Rail has a sweet spot. Something nothing else does.”

“What do you mean?”

“If opiates are about forgetting, Third Rail is about remembering, sort of.” Dr. North nods for a moment, her lips moving silently as she simplifies her thoughts for a street cop. “Here's the way I like to describe it. Everyone carries around a ball of string all tied in knots. Not actually, Eddy. It's a metaphor.”

“Got it.”

“The knots are all the things that went wrong—bad luck, worse choices. The older you get, the more knots you collect.”

No need to ask Dr. North to clarify. Harkness knows about the knots.

“Third Rail rewrites history and unmakes the mistakes,” she says. “Tragedies become triumphs. Pain seems like pleasure.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Sure it does. But when it wears off, the knots all retie themselves, like in a myth. The Fates. Clotho. Penelope, Odysseus's wife . . . but you don't care about mythology, literature. You want to know what Third Rail does. Just the facts, right?”

“Right.”

“Eventually, it induces irreversible anhedonia, the inability to experience anything. Leads to extreme behavior. People start looking for new thrills.” Beneath the table, Dr. North's leg edges closer.

She leans forward, eyes widening. “Sex on Third Rail is amazing. Wrote about it in Chapter 16. Check it out. Let me know what you think.”

Harkness moves his leg.

“You're not the only one interested in it,” she says. “Lange Pharma, headquarters is in that big building right across the river in Brighton? They're in early-stage clinical trials. They call it Valoria.”

“If Third Rail makes people lose it, why would any drug company be interested?”

“Think about it for a minute.” Dr. North shakes her head. “You're just a local cop. But think international. Third Rail is about focus and clarity. It triggers audacious behavior and squelches messy emotions. Might be just the thing to rally the troops. Makes the pills they handed out in Vietnam look like . . .”

“Candy,” Harkness says.

“Well, that's what they all say. For a while.” Dr. North tucks her notebook into her black leather purse.

“One last question,” Harkness says. “You ever take it?”

She leans forward. “Are you crazy?”

Harkness says nothing, waits for the truth.

“Yes, of course I tried it,” she says. “Write about what you know. That's what they say.”

“And?”

“Third Rail is in-
fucking-
credible.” Dr. North leans forward, green eyes flashing. “Let me know if you find any. I'll pay whatever they're asking.”

***

A last-call beer at one of Harkness's favorite bars, Geidt's, isn't chasing away the headache that Dr. Lauren North gave him along with the inside story on Third Rail. Drug dealers are easier to talk to than drug experts. Less to say, faster at saying it. Even her perfume was annoying, a jasmine scent like hotel hand cream, though Harkness knows it has to be expensive. Dr. North is a connoisseur, with rarified taste in clothes, wine, and drugs.

He takes the amber vial from his jacket pocket and holds it up to the ceiling light. The liquid rolls from side to side, innocent as maple syrup.

He unscrews the top and pauses for a moment, wondering whether this is a good idea, whether any drug can really rewrite his past. Then he tips the vial over his glass until a thick droplet falls into his beer.

Always good to know what you're up against.

***

Harkness stands outside the bar and waits to see what Third Rail has to say. It doesn't take long. The Mass Avenue Bridge pulls him toward Cambridge like a magnet. He walks toward it, sees that the sidewalk is marked off in red-spray-painted increments. Instantly, Harkness remembers that they're
smoots
. In the 1960s, frat brothers measured Oliver Smoot, marking how many of the drunk freshman it took to cross the bridge. It's part of the nerd lore of MIT. But now Harkness knows the name of the fraternity—Lambda Chi Alpha. He knows that a smoot is a unit of measure five feet seven inches long, that the bridge is slightly more than 364 smoots long, and that Smoot ended up working in the field of standards.

All of this information resurfaces when Harkness sees the first red line. Maybe he read an article years ago in the
Globe
. Or the information could be beaming from the bridge to his brain.

Harkness manages to turn back toward Kenmore Square. His teeth are grinding from the initial rush and his fingers are gripping and opening, looking for something to pull apart. He has to hold himself back to keep from running. He drops down and does twenty push-ups on the sidewalk. Then twenty more. When he walks by a BU frat house he wants to go in and talk to everyone.

It's already late and Thalia will wonder where he is, but Harkness can't turn back. He's devouring data like an insatiable human search engine. Semaphore glimmers beam from the last lights glowing in apartment windows. Encoded patterns hide in the slate scales of mansard roofs. Sidewalk cracks reveal hieroglyphs that only he can decipher.

In a few minutes, his mind quits racing and euphoria takes over. Everything Harkness sees around him, the events that led him here tonight—it all makes beautiful sense.

When he sees the Citgo sign over Kenmore Square, Harkness knows where Third Rail is taking him. He can't wait to get there.

 

Standing at the railing of the Brookline Avenue Bridge, Harkness hears the sound of the crowd come roaring out of his memory like static amplified. Third Rail brings back all the memories in high-def, whether Harkness wants them or not, and casts him in the staring role in
The Incident,
now projecting in the home theater of his mind.

The story begins when a three-run Red Sox homer shoots out of the ballpark into the indigo sky and bounces past the Lansdowne Street bars and nightclubs, just opening their doors. The crowd roars. It's the last game of the playoffs and thirty thousand people gush into Kenmore Square to drink, chant, set fire to cars, harass Yankee fans, and beat up their friends—the kind of low-grade tribal violence that passes for celebration in Boston.

The plot turns darker when Harkness spots the Doyle brothers—pale faced, black haired, and swaying drunk. Billy, the bigger Doyle, clutches the ankles of Pauley Fitzgerald with both hands and holds him, squirming, head down over the railing of the Brookline Avenue Bridge, above the roaring Turnpike. His brother Dickie thinks this is the funniest thing he's ever seen.

Harkness knows this film isn't real, that it's just Third Rail bending his memories, but he can't stop watching.

“You!” His cop voice echoes. “Pull him back up. Now.”

Bleary and beer soaked, the Doyle brothers turn and squint. “Just havin' some fun with Pauley,” Dickie says.

Harkness gives a quick smile. Best to try to keep drunks on the sunny side. “Doesn't look like he's having much fun,” Harkness says. “Pull him up now and you head home with everyone else.”

“And what if we don't?” Billy sputters.

“What then, fuckin' cop bastard?” Dickie, the smiler, reaches into the pocket of his running pants and waves a black-handled knife.

At least it looks like a knife to Harkness.

Third Rail summons up the circling crowd.
“Drop him, drop him, drop him,”
they chant.

“Fuck yooooouuuu,”
Dickie shouts, and the swarming crowd laughs. A long howl comes from over the railing.

“Pull him up, now,” Harkness says.

Billy pulls Pauley up until Harkness can see his face again, a rictus of fear, forehead bloody from scraping on the bridge. He flails his arms toward the railing and manages to slap a hand on it.

“Stop.” Harkness unsnaps the guard and draws an invisible Glock.

Here, the film slows for the crucial final scene, the one Harkness replays in his mind every day.