Bad Men

He turned back to Scarfe.

“I make no promises about the cop.”

“It might be easier to get rid of him at the start.” It was Leonie.

Moloch bit at his lip. If the cop was seeing his wife, then the cop deserved what was coming to him. There was nothing worse than the thought of another man inside his wife.

Scarfe unfolded papers from his pocket. “This is a map of the island. I’ve made some copies. It’s kind of rough, but it shows the main roads, the town, and the location of the woman’s house and those of her nearest neighbors.”

Moloch took the map, examined it, then folded it and handed it, along with the copies, to Leonie.

“I couldn’t help but notice that you said ‘you’ in your detailing of the arrangements made. ‘You’, not ‘us.’ That worries me.”

“I’ve done what you asked me to do.”

“You’re coming with us.”

“You don’t need me.”

“You know about boats, and you know this area. Some of my associates have experience of such matters, but these are unfamiliar waters and there is bad weather approaching. And if your friend Mr. Lubey lets us down, we will have someone to fall back on. Heavily.”

Scarfe nodded.

“I understand.”

Moloch turned to Barron.

“Your role in this affair is simple, Officer. You monitor the police bands. If there is even a hint of police activity that might concern us, I want you to nullify it. I understand that there is no cell phone coverage on the island?”

“There are pockets, but only close to town. The eastern shore is out of range.”

“You will take up a position on the dock. If our return is jeopardized in any way, you will signal us with your headlights as we return to land. Is that clear?”

“That’s all?”

“For now. Mr. Scarfe, you’ll come with us. Our departure is imminent.”

Moloch, Dexter, and Willard dropped Leonie and Braun on Commercial. The two older men sat in the van close by the Casco Bay Ferry Terminal while Willard stayed in the shadows and watched the approaches along Commercial. The plan was virtually unchanged: one group would make for the island with Scarfe, while Leonie and Braun would follow by water taxi and land at the Cove, as the late ferry crossing had been canceled due to Thorson’s i

“I didn’t want her to see us before we came,” Moloch said to Dexter. “I didn’t want her to know. I wanted to see the shock on the bitch’s face myself.”

“You’ll still see it. I reckon she has a lot of shock left in her.”

Moloch didn’t look so happy, Dexter thought. He had been sleeping badly. Dexter had heard him crying out. That happened to men who had been jailed, Dexter knew. Even after their release, part of them always remained incarcerated, and that was the part that intruded on their dreams.

Dexter, meanwhile, had his own worries.

“I don’t like this whole island deal,” he said. “Too many things can go wrong. I don’t like having just one escape route. I don’t like having to leave the same way I came in. And we don’t know shit about this Lubey guy.”

“We have a boat. One of us will stay with it the whole time. Like I told you, we can take her and be gone before anyone even knows we’ve been there. We just need to stay out of trouble. As for Lubey, he’s a driver, nothing more.”

“Do you trust the cop?”

“No, but I think he’s too frightened of the consequences to cross us. Plus, our friends in Boston have promised him a little gift for his cooperation. His fear and his lust should combine to keep him in line.”

“And the policeman out on the island?”

“When they get there, Braun and Leonie will kill him, if only for having the temerity to fuck my wife.”

“And Willard?”

Something like regret flashed across Moloch’s features.

“No pain,” he said. “I want him to feel no pain.”

In the shadows, Willard was looking at a small map of the bay held behind a protective Plexiglas screen. He had changed his clothes and was now wearing a tourist’s fleece with a lobster on the front. He had darkened his hair in a men’s room with a kit he had bought in a drugstore, and it was now a shimmering black. With the index finger of his right hand, he traced the route of the ferry, following each little dot as carefully as if he were tracing the route onto paper. His finger stopped on the island, then he jerked it back suddenly.

A spider was crawling across the map. Its body covered the island. Somehow, the spider had found its way inside the case and now it was trapped, vainly seeking a way out. Maybe it had been trying to shelter from the cold, but now the case would be its tomb. There would be no insects in there for it to feed on and eventually it would grow thin and die. Willard watched it crawl, its legs occasionally slipping on the surface of the map, causing the spider to drop an inch or two before its silk arrested its slide. At last it crawled back up to the top-right-hand corner of the case and huddled there, waiting for its end.

Willard’s mouth was dry. He looked up from the map and stared out to sea, trying to find light in the distance, but he could not. His stomach felt bad. He was concerned about Dexter and Shepherd, but he was worried too about the island. Willard had a survivor’s instincts, and now that little i

Chapter Eleven

Powell was having trouble with the boat guy. He was fat and old and dumb, with grease stains on his shirt. He didn’t smell so good. Powell had to turn his face away anytime the guy spoke to him, his breath was so bad. Powell just hoped his boat didn’t stink as bad as he did. Powell wasn’t happy on the sea. He didn’t need any encouragement to puke on boats, but he suspected that the stench from this guy’s boat might be about to give him a little push in the right direction, just for good luck.

The boat was a fifteen-footer, with a small, enclosed wheelhouse barely big enough for two men. Powell knelt down close to it, took a sniff, and backed off. It reeked of rotting fish and the boat guy’s breath, as if it were so toxic that it had stuck to the hull and cabin like gum. Powell had read somewhere that all smells are particulate, which meant that tiny little molecules of the boat guy’s stench were now wending their way through his nasal passages. It made Powell even more irritated with the boat guy than he already was, and Powell had been pretty pissed at him before he even got within ten feet of his stinking boat. The guy wasn’t even supposed to be here, but he had started to worry about his boat being taken out in bad weather and had come down to the dock to express his concerns. Now Powell was left to clear up the mess before Moloch and the others arrived, because if they got here first, then the boat guy was dead. The way Powell saw it, the last thing this operation needed was more dead people. They already had enough corpses to form a conga line from here to Virginia. Scarfe had assured Powell that the boat guy would keep his mouth shut, just as he had done in the past. Powell hoped that, for his sake, the boat guy started shutting up pretty soon, because Powell was begi

“You got paid, right?” said Powell. “I know, ’cause Scarfe says he did it.”

“Yeah, I got paid. I got the money right here.”