Bad Men

Despite the heat, all of the windows were closed. There was no sign of the pretty boy.

Harry stepped inside, and his nose wrinkled. Something smelled bad in here, he thought. He heard flies buzzing.

“What’s happening?” said Veronica, and there was that whining tone to her voice again, except this time Harry barely noticed it.

“Stay there,” he called back. “And lock the car doors.”

“What-”

“For Christ’s sake, just do it!”

She was quiet then, but he heard a snapping sound as the doors locked. Beyond him, the darkness remained untroubled by sound or movement, but for the noise of the insects, still invisible to him.

Harry stepped into the house.

Many miles to the north, two police officers sat at a table in the Sebago Brewing Company in Portland’s Old Port. It was shortly after four o’clock and already growing dark. There were few tourists around at this time of year, and the streets, like the bar, were quiet. There was talk of a storm brewing, and the coming of snow.

“I like it better without the tourists,” said the first cop. She was small and dark, with short hair that barely troubled the nape of her neck. Her limbs were slim, and she appeared almost delicate out of uniform, but Sharon Macy was strong and fast. Cute too, thought Eric Barron. In fact, very cute. She’d joined up only six months before, and in that time it was all that Barron could do to stop himself hitting on her. Barron was smart, and he’d watched as the other cops had made moves on her in bars and clubs, hiding wedding bands in some cases, as if Macy would be dumb enough to fall for that. But Barron had held back, and now he believed that he was one of the few cops who could safely suggest to Macy that they head out for a beer or two after a tour, y’know, to unwind. He could feel her starting to trust him, to relax in his presence, and she didn’t seem to mind any when he patted her arm or let his leg rest against hers. Baby steps. Barron was a great believer in baby steps. It might actually have made him a decent cop, if he had cared to be: not flashy, or glory seeking, but conscientious and careful. Unfortunately, Barron wasn’t a decent cop. He had a lot of people fooled, maybe, but even the ones who considered him adequate at worst wouldn’t have used the word “decent” of Barron. He gave off a bad vibe. Nobody was ever going to ask Barron to baby-sit a kid, or pick up a daughter after cheerleading practice. It wasn’t anything that could be put into words, exactly, but if you were a parent, then Barron was the kind of guy who put you on your guard. Local kids, even the real troublemakers, knew better than to mess with him. Barron liked to pretend that it was because they respected him, but secretly he knew better. He could see it in their faces, those of the boys in particular.

Barron didn’t usually go for women like Macy-hell, he didn’t usually care much for grown women, period-but Macy was thin, with kind of a boyish ass, and Barron was all for experimentation. Plus, he’d been out of the loop for a time, keeping his head down. He’d let his appetites get the better of him a little while back, and had almost brought a ton of trouble down on his head. He needed an outlet for his frustrations.

“It’ll be cold out there on the island,” he said. He rubbed his hands over hers, as if trying to increase the circulation to frozen limbs. She smiled at him, then drew her hands away and hid them beneath the table.

Damn, thought Barron. Not a good sign.

“I don’t mind,” she said. “I’m kind of looking forward to it. I’ve never been out there before.”

Barron took a long pull on his beer. “There’s nothing ‘out there,’ ” he said. “Just a bunch of yokels living some damn island fantasy. Inbreds, mostly. Banjo players.”

She shook her head. “You know that’s not true.”

“You haven’t seen it. Believe me, just twenty-four hours of island life and this place will seem like New York and Vegas combined.”

Barron had that tone when he spoke, the know-it-all one that really grated on Macy. Then again, Macy was just a probationary patrol officer, while Barron was her field training officer. She’d put in her eighteen weeks of basic training, and now was at the end of her six weeks under an FTO. She had almost another two years of probation to go, with transfers to new duties every six months, but she didn’t mind that so much. She would just be happy to get away from Barron. He creeped her out, and his attitude toward her wasn’t simply that of a senior patrolman to one fifteen years his junior. Barron was just plain bad news. The force was already under federal review, and morale was suffering. A lot of good cops were simply working toward their twenty-five so they could retire and open a bar somewhere. Cops like Barron only made things worse.

Still, he’d offered to buy her a beer to celebrate the end of their time together and she hadn’t been able to refuse. There were one or two other cops in the Sebago, although it wasn’t a regular haunt. Barron didn’t go to the cop bars. Macy figured that she wasn’t the only one who felt uneasy around him.

Macy sipped her beer and watched the cars pass on Middle Street. She was still getting used to Portland, but it reminded her a little of Providence, where her parents lived. There were a lot of young people, although Portland’s university wasn’t quite as grand as the one back home, and it still had kind of a small-town feel. She liked the fact that there were good bars and decent places to eat in the center of the city. She didn’t miss Providence too much, and was happy to leave the bulk of her bad memories there. If things had worked out there, then Macy would have been married by now, might even have been talking about having a child. Things hadn’t worked out, of course, which was why she was sitting in a bar 150 miles away with tired legs and an aching back.

It was strange, but one of the things that she had liked about Max was the feeling he gave her that, even half a century down the line, she would still be discovering new things about him. In the end, it had taken barely eighteen months for her to discover a new thing about Max that blew any hopes of marriage out of the water. Max couldn’t remain faithful. Max would screw a keyhole if there wasn’t already a key in it. When he couldn’t pick up a desperate student on Thayer Street, or a bored secretary during the five-to-eight happy hour (which was how Macy, a bored secretary in a law office, had met him, come to think of it), he’d screw hookers. He even seemed to prefer hookers, she discovered, when he was released on bail and they’d met for that last time, after she had packed her bags and returned in humiliation to her parents. He confessed everything, spewing poison and bile out onto the table of the diner, so that it seemed that the Formica would corrode beneath it. He would tell the hookers that he was single and would get a kick when they asked how a good-looking guy like him could be single. Even as he spoke about it, his career in tatters around him (associating with hookers was the least of his professional problems, for he had been under surveillance for some time, a consequence of the investigation into the mayor’s operation in Providence, and was now facing charges of graft and corruption), she sensed that he still found it flattering. Max was sick, but the sickness was moral as much as psychological. She was just grateful that she had found out the truth before the wedding and not after it.

That was two years ago, and Macy had begun toying with the idea of becoming a cop shortly after. She had been helping out at a center for women who were victims of domestic abuse, and had heard horror stories from some of them about their dealings with the police. There were good stories too, hopeful stories, but it was the bad ones that stayed with Macy. She wanted to make a difference. It was as simple as that. She had visited Portland in the aftermath of the breakup, while she was still trying to come to terms with what had happened, and had decided that it suited her. It was close enough to her parents to enable her to drive home when she chose, yet far enough away that she would be in no danger of meeting any of Max’s old associates (or, God forbid, Max himself). The cost of living was reasonable, and the force was recruiting. Her modicum of legal knowledge and her experience in the battered women’s shelter had made her a shoo-in as a recruit. She had no regrets, although working with Barron had been her most trying ordeal yet.