Bad Men

“Supplies,” said Thorson. “I promised Huddie Harris that I’d carry over some machine parts. His sister said she’d carry them along before five.”

“It’s five-fifteen now.”

“Ayuh.”

That was it, thought Macy. Thorson’s “ayuh” was the equivalent of a shoulder shrug, a complete abdication of responsibility. He had promised Huddie his parts, Huddie had probably promised him a couple of six-packs and some cash in return, and nobody was going to be allowed to get in the way of their arrangement. She kicked at a stone and pushed her hands deeper into her pockets as a woman wearing a quilted jacket shuffled along the dock pulling a beat-up metal box on wheels. Erin Harris; she lived in Portland but spent weekends out on Dutch with her brother. Macy recalled her face from an altercation outside the Eastland Hotel a month or two back, when the wife of one of Erin’s sometime boyfriends had decided that enough was enough and that Erin should quit messing with her man. Macy found it kind of difficult to figure out what the man in question saw in either of the women because Erin Harris was ugly on the outside and uglier still on the inside, but she was a bargain compared to the woman with whom she had been slugging it out that night. Barron had tried to intervene but Erin Harris had taken a swing at him and Macy had been forced to spray her. Maced by Macy, as Barron had put it later. It had all been kind of ugly. Macy kept her head down and watched quietly as the box was passed down to Thorson. Erin shot a glance at Macy as she passed. There was no disguising the hostility in her face. Macy didn’t look away.

“Okay,” said Thorson. “All aboard. We’re good to go.”

The four passengers climbed aboard the ferry, three occupying the wooden benches on the lower deck while Macy took a seat on the exposed upper deck. Minutes later they were heading out to sea, the gulls crying above them and gray waves breaking at the bow. Macy was already in uniform. An L. L. Bean backpack lay at her feet. She had taken Barron’s advice and brought a couple of books with her, as well as a Discman and a bunch of CDs. She slipped a CD into the player as Portland grew smaller behind her, the first bars of the Scud Mountain Boys’ “Freight of Fire” filling her ears as the spray splashed her face, the lead singer Joe Pernice advising her to bring her guns and all her ammunition; and she felt the weight of the pistol beneath her jacket and smiled as she recalled Barron’s tales of giants and the bones of men buried beneath pine trees.

Dupree was dealing with another reporter, one who was clearly trying to kill time during the early shift. This one was calling from Florida, so at least the interview didn’t have to be conducted face-to-face, which was something. Like most beat cops, Dupree had a natural distrust of reporters. There had been an accident down in the Keys a couple of days earlier in which three teenagers had drowned after a stolen car went off a bridge. The reporter was trying to pull together a feature about the danger of wayward teens and the accident on Dutch was a good tie-in.

“Yeah, the boy was dead when we got there,” said Dupree. “There was nothing we could do for him. The girl was badly injured. She died at the scene.” He grimaced even as he said the words, then listened to the next inevitable question about what safety measures had been introduced in the aftermath.

“We’re doing everything we can to ensure that a tragedy like this never happens again. We’re looking at ring-fencing the entire area, maybe sowing the slopes with scrap metal to stop anyone taking a car up there again.”

It should have been done years before, thought Dupree. I should have forced them to do it, but they wanted to leave the emplacement as it was, and anyway, kids will be kids. There had never been an accident on the slope before the deaths of Wayne Cady and Sylvie Lauter. It was just one of those things.

The reporter thanked him, then hung up. The clock on the wall read 6:25 A.M. The ferry would be due in soon, bringing with it his partner for the next twenty-four hours. Barker was already down at the little jetty, smoking a cigarette and kicking his heels impatiently, Lockwood sitting quietly beside him.

Dupree wondered again about Sharon Macy. The arrival of a new face was always difficult. The older cops were used to Joe by now, but the younger ones could never hide their feelings toward him when they encountered him for the first time; usually it was just surprise, sometimes amusement, and very occasionally a kind of uneasiness. He knew that there were those who referred to him as a freak. In addition, rookies and trainees rarely got sent out to the islands, but the rotation had been hit by illness, family obligations, and amassed vacation time. The department was filling in the gaps with whatever it had.

He climbed into the Explorer and drove down to the dock, trying to pick out the ferry in the semidarkness. The ferry service was subsidized by a small tax levied on the island’s residents each year. Nobody ever complained about the tax; they valued their independence, but the islanders still needed the safety net that Portland provided, with its stores and hospitals and movie theaters and restaurants. In the event of a medical emergency, like that time Sarah Froness had fallen off her roof and broken her back while stringing up Christmas lights, the cops on duty could radio for a helicopter pickup from the baseball diamond north of Liberty. It had taken the chopper crew just thirty minutes to get to Dutch on that occasion, and Sarah Froness could still be seen ambling into the market to buy her weekly supply of trash magazines and six-for-five beers, although she didn’t go climbing ladders on December 1 anymore and she walked a little more gingerly than before. Sylvie Lauter hadn’t been so lucky, and Dupree blamed himself for what had occurred. He replayed the events of that night over and over, wondering what might have happened if they had gotten to the crash site a little earlier, if old Buck Te

Sanctuary: he had found himself using that name more often in recent days, not only when he was talking to older islanders like Amerling or Giacomelli, but also to visitors and new residents. He had even caught himself using the name when he was speaking with the reporter earlier that morning. He always thought of it as Sanctuary in his own mind, but over the years he had managed to make a distinction between that name and its official name in his day-today work. Sanctuary was its past, Dutch was its present. The fact that he was increasingly slipping into the old usage indicated a leaching of the past into his perception of the island, an acknowledgment of its grip upon him, upon all of them.

He thought of Sylvie Lauter’s final moments, of her pain and of the blood that had stained his clothing. He thought too of the autopsy and the peculiarities it had uncovered; there had been damage to the back of Sylvie Lauter’s tongue and throat, as if something had been forced into her mouth. Maybe she and Wayne had been arguing or fooling around before the crash, and somehow she had managed to wound herself. As he had told Jack and Amerling, gray matter had been found in one of the cuts, and had subsequently been identified as wing material from a moth: Manduca quinquemaculata, the tomato hornworm moth, a member of the sphinx moth family. Dupree had never seen one, and didn’t even know what the insect looked like until a specimen was sent to him from a sympathetic university researcher up in Orono. It had a four-inch wingspan and a large body that tapered almost to a point. Five or six pairs of yellow spots ran down its abdomen. There was a kind of beauty to its wings, which, even on this dead specimen, seemed to shimmer, but overall Dupree thought the insect ugly, the markings on its body and its strange pointed tail making it seem like some peculiar hybrid of moth and reptile.