Bad Men

“I won’t forget that,” said Dexter.

Scarfe, his burst of adrenaline receding, backed away. Shepherd, who had stayed quiet throughout, followed Moloch to the edge of the forest.

“He should be here,” he said. “Lubey should be here.”

“It’s the weather,” said Moloch. “It’s just delayed him.”

He called to Scarfe, but Scarfe wasn’t looking at him. Instead, he was staring down at the sea below.

“Hey,” he said softly, yet there was something in his tone that made Moloch and the others approach him, even causing Dexter to forget his animosity in order to follow his gaze.

“Hey,” repeated Scarfe. “The guy, he’s still alive.”

Carl Lubey lay on his back among the newspapers and the fallen boxes, slowly coming to. His head ached. He didn’t know how long he had been out, but he guessed it had been no more than a minute or two. There was light coming from somewhere close by, and an acrid smell.

Burning.

He turned his head and saw the flames licking at the newspapers beneath the basement stairs. Carl tried to raise himself, but there was a weight across his chest and he couldn’t feel his legs. He reached out and encountered no obstacle, merely a coldness in the air that chilled his fingers despite the growing heat. The flames were licking against the back wall, devouring paper and clothing and old suitcases. Soon they would reach the shelves of paints and spirits.

Carl saw more flames flicker in the darkness to his left. He couldn’t figure out how the fire had spread over there, because it was as far away as you could get from the conflagration over by the far wall, yet he could clearly discern flares of light close to the floor. They were slowly moving toward him, but they weren’t increasing in size and he could feel no warmth. Instead, they seemed to hang in midair, like sparks carried on a breeze.

And suddenly Carl understood that what he was looking at was not fire but the reflection of fire, caught in shards of mirror that were now drawing closer and closer to him, the smell of dead fish and rotting seaweed growing stronger, filling his nostrils with the stench of decay. A woman’s ruined face emerged from the shadows and Carl opened his mouth as the flames reached the paint and turpentine on the shelves, and his final agony was lost in a great roar.

Chapter Thirteen

Dupree leaned back in his chair and stretched. Chair and bones alike made cracking noises, so he stopped in midextension and carefully eased himself back toward the desk. If he broke the chair, he would have to requisition another and that would mean dealing with the jibes, because the wiseasses in supplies would assume-correctly-that his great bulk had taken out the item of furniture in question. In the end, it would be easier for everyone if he just bought his own damn chair.

He checked his watch and shuffled his completed paperwork to one side of the desk. None of it had been very urgent, but he had allowed untyped reports to pile up these last few weeks and the blizzard had given him an excuse to remain at the station house and catch up on the mundane details of speeding offenses, DUIs, and minor fender benders. The reports had also allowed him to forget, for a while, his worries about the island. The time spent immersed in the routines of day-to-day life had enabled him to put those concerns into perspective. When Macy returned, he would take a drive over to Maria

He heard the main station door open and footsteps in the reception area. Dupree had asked headquarters to consider putting in a counter to section off the office from the public area, but so far nothing had been done. It wasn’t a big deal at this time of year, but during the summer, when the incidence of petty thefts, lost children, and stolen bicycles took a sudden sharp rise, there could be up to a half dozen people crowding around the office door.

He left his desk and stepped out into reception. To his right, a pretty black woman with an Afro was ru

“Can I help you, ma’am?”

The woman looked at him, and her eyes widened.

“My, aren’t you the big one?” said Leonie.

Dupree didn’t react. “Like I said, can I help you with something, ma’am?”

“Sure, baby, you can help me,” she said. She turned away from the engine and he saw the silenced pistol in her hand. “You can help me by taking the thumb and middle finger of your left hand and lifting that gun from your holster. You think you can do that?”

Dupree caught movement to her right as a man appeared from the shadows behind the fire trucks. He was redhaired and wrapped up tightly against the cold in a padded blue coat, but Dupree could see that he was a big man even without the padding. He too had a gun in his hand, the silencer like a swollen tumor at its muzzle, and it was also pointing in Dupree’s direction.

“Now,” said Braun. “Do it.”

Slowly, Dupree moved his hand to his holster, flipped the clasp, and drew the gun out using his thumb and middle finger, as he had been told. The two strangers didn’t tense as he performed the action and he felt his heart sink. He had only read about people like this in newspapers and internal memoranda.

They were killers. Real, stone-cold killers.

“Lay it down on the floor, then kick it toward me,” said the man.

Dupree did as he was told. The man stopped the gun with his foot as it reached him. Beside him, the woman closed the door to the station house and turned the lock.

“Who are you?” asked Dupree.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Braun. “Tell me where your partner is at.”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t fuck with me.”

“She’s out on patrol. I don’t know where she is exactly.”

“Call her.”

The man and woman moved in unison, keeping the same distance from each other as they advanced on Dupree in a ten-to-two position.

“She’s out of radio contact.”

Braun fired his gun, aiming to Dupree’s left. The shot blew a hole in the computer screen on the desk behind him.

“Why would you think I’m fucking with you, Andre? I want you to call her and bring her in.”

Dupree didn’t know if the radio was still out, but he had no plans to use it even if it was functioning again. Macy would be no match for these people if he brought her back here. The way things were looking, he was no match for them himself.

“I can’t do that,” said Dupree.

“You mean you won’t do it.”

“Comes down to the same thing. Why are you doing this?”

Braun smiled regretfully.

“You shouldn’t have fucked his wife,” he said.

He raised his gun and sighted down the barrel.

“You really shouldn’t have fucked his wife.”

Then, without warning, the lights went out.

Doug Newton was sitting downstairs in his favorite chair when the power died. His first reaction was that of most people on the island: he reached for a flashlight so he could check the fuse box. When the flashlight wouldn’t work, he went scouting for candles, eventually finding a pack of tea lights behind the spare bulbs in the kitchen cabinet. He dropped a tea light in an ashtray, lit it, then took a second candle and placed it on a saucer. His mother would be frightened if she woke and found that her TV wasn’t working. She liked the light from the tube, found it comforting. Her greatest fear, Doug believed, was that she might be alone when she died, and she would rather die with Nick at Nite than nobody at all.