

### Slings and Arrows

John E. Dahlborg

Copyright © 2015 John E. Dahlborg

All Rights Reserved

Distributed by Smashwords

No part of this book may be copied by any means except by a reviewer who may excerpt short sections for use in a review. All other uses must be granted in writing by the author.

Published in the United States of America

Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

for Willie

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

# Chapter 1

### October, 2001

Ort's Barbershop sat mostly below ground. Its short, broad windows, high on the the wall that fronted Main Street, revealed a procession of passing legs and a row of second story windows on the buildings across the street. A side entrance opened onto a short flight of wooden steps that led down into the faded grandeur of this establishment. The theme here was Art Nouveau, primarily in black and white: black and white marble tiles on the floor, cracked black leather upholstery on the three, white-enameled barber's chairs. Three large asymmetrical mirrors, etched along their borders with twining grape vines and set in black, faux-marble curvilinear frames filled the wall behind the chairs. Beneath these, carved wooden cabinets in black with white marble tops held the tools of the trade. Lithesome ladies of frosted glass held lighted torches on the wall between the mirrors, their clinging gowns a mere suggestion of clothing. The walls below a stamped tin ceiling were scenes of social congress, a painted Aubry Beardsley-like mural of these ladies and their cousins. The more suggestive activities depicted thereon had been decorously covered by the strategic placement of various sports posters and advertising material for hair care products.

A customer, waiting his turn in chairs under the high windows, could squint and blur his vision and see past the cracked and scored floor tiles and the fly-specked glass to a more elegant, and somewhat more decadent, past. What would be more difficult to see past would be Ort himself and his one associate. Ort, with his substantial girth swathed in a red apron, his gleaming pate, and missing front tooth. Maddy, svelte, thirty-something and dressed in leopard-print pants and top that fit as tightly as the skin of the original beast and matching stiletto heels, long black hair piled atop her head with two artful tendrils escaping to frame her face. These two were a study in contrast.

This warm, sunny Saturday morning, two customers occupied the barbers' talents while two awaited their turns in chairs along the wall. Maddy and Ort snipped and traded barbs over the empty chair between them.

"I can't tell if your stomach is getting bigger or your arms are getting shorter, but pretty soon you're not going to be able to reach over far enough to cut hair," Maddy said.

"Never you mind, girlie. This is a steady rest," Ort replied, patting his stomach. "Gives me a third point of balance and stability. That helps when you're using a real razor, not one of those sissy blades you got." Ort leaned against the back of the chair to demonstrate and took the last bit of shaving cream from his customers neck with the sharp edge of his straight razor, wiping it off on the napkin draped over his shoulder.

Maddie was using a pink plastic, twin-bladed disposable razor to clean the neck of the man occupying her chair. "Yeah, well, most of my clients leave here without losing any blood, and with both their ears, too." She turned and addressed Ort's customer. "Better look on the floor before you leave, make sure you're not leaving anything behind other than your hair."

Ort applied witch hazel to his man's neck while addressing a man awaiting his turn. "Joey, which would you prefer? A nice, clean shave by a man experienced in the use of a professional tool, or a rough scrape of the neck with a plastic spoon?"

Joey smiled, but knew that he didn't have to answer. Maddy answered for him. "Ha!" she said, "No contest. Given the choice of sitting close to a beautiful woman or risking his life to the shaking hands of an old man, who wouldn't choose my chair?"

"Moot point," Ort said. "I'm done and it's his turn." Joey took the place of the elderly man in the chair who paid and left smiling and shaking his head, thinking that this Saturday's entertainment was worth the price of a haircut.

Ort walked around the chair, deliberating. "Maddy, come here a minute. Need a consultation."

Maddy's client paid and left and she waved to the other waiting man to take his place in her chair. She joined Ort in his examination of the problem before him. "It's a challenge, alright," she said. "Can you remember what you did last time?"

"Must have blocked it out of my mind. Too painful to remember. I think I could get it all the same length, but there's these whorls and flat spots, you know? Got to work around that scar, too." Ort rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

"Forget about trying for a part. Where would you put it?" Maddy tapped her foot. "I got it. Gel. Cut it best you can and paste it all down with that super-hold stuff. You can sell him a big tube of it to take home."

Joey couldn't keep quiet any longer, but didn't lose his smile. "Do the best you can, that's all I ask. Try to make me look presentable to society," he said.

"Big date?" asked Ort.

"Just dinner with a friend," said Joey. "And a christening tomorrow."

"We'll do our best," said Ort. He sighed and tentatively began to snip, after turning the chair at a forty-five degree angle to the mirror. Both barbers worked at this angle to facilitate conversation, using the mirror as a visual link to the dialog.

Maddy turned and faced her customer, putting her hands on her hips. "You do not appear to be in great need of a haircut," she said. "You've been coming in every week and I'm beginning to think that you have designs on me."

The man in her chair developed a quiet, ironic smile. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties, tall and slim, with tightly waved, black hair combed back from his forehead. He wore pressed, pleated khaki trousers, a pale yellow shirt with the sleeves rolled up twice to reveal a thin gold watch on a black leather band, and soft, black leather loafers with a thin sole. Although he was clean shaven, it was obvious that his beard was heavy. "How could I stay away, when your image remains constantly in my mind to occupy my dreams?" he asked, a slight latin accent in his words.

Maddy sauntered around to the back of his chair, put her hands on his shoulders, and leered at Ort. "Hoo, boy," yodeled Ort, rolling his eyes and giving Joey's chair a three-hundred and sixty degree spin. "Getting deep in here, Joey. Better lift your feet, you want to keep your shoes clean."

Maddy sniffed and looked away, the very picture of aloof womanhood, forced by necessity to work with a rube such as Ort. But still, when she went back to her work, she stood somewhat more closely to him than she would to a less attractive client. Ort picked up on it and gave Joey a look, standing in front of him to block her view in the mirror and raising his eyebrows.

"Don't think I can't see you," said Maddy, standing with her back to him.

Ort's eyebrows went higher for a moment. "Joey," he said, changing the subject. "I understand you're getting your life back."

"Yeah, mostly," Joey said. "I've got a valid driver's license now, and a social security card. So I can work above the table and have a bank account."

Ort looked over to Maddy's client and said, "This here is Rock Harbor's most famous citizen, Joey Warnecki, celebrated statewide on television, radio, and in the newspapers."

Joey almost smiled, showed a palm out of the side of the striped barber's apron and waved. "Not really," he said.

The other man did the same and touched his palm to his chest. "Al Santos," he replied.

"Alejandro," said Maddy, pronouncing the j as an h and rolling the r. She giggled and waggled her head.

Ort rolled his eyes again and returned to his subject. "Must feel good to get all that business behind you," he said.

"Yeah, not that it's all over. There's still the court case with Charles Adams and some probate stuff to settle," Joey said, "but things are getting better, piece by piece."

"Mister Warnecki," said Al Santos. "I've been meaning to call you. I have your name from June Sims. I am meaning to have some extensive work done on my home and she recommended you. Do you think you could stop by and take a look?"

"Hold on a minute," said Ort. Any business gets done here I get a percentage. Ten percent of the gross."

"Gross is right," offered Maddy, reverting to her role as foil.

Joey thought for a moment. "I'm pretty much free, except for a couple small jobs. I could come by on Monday morning, if that works for you. Around nine or so?"

"That would be good. I am in the first house south of the light house, on the ocean side of the road."

"The Stedler place?" asked Joey.

"Yes, that is the one."

"Nice location," said Maddy, "Except during a hurricane." The plot she was referring to was an acre of sand-strewn granite attached to the mainland by fifty yards of broken blacktopped causeway, unprotected by the barrier island that sheltered the adjoining harbor, and subject to storm surges enhanced by the larger lighthouse causeway two hundred yards away. A single-story, stuccoed concrete-block house with a mansard roof had last been occupied by the Stedler family and had been empty for the past three years. Water marks rising three feet high on the stucco walls explained why the aging couple had finally given up the fight against the elements.

"I like it very much," said Al Santos. "I knew it was right for me the first moment I saw it. It has a two-hundred and seventy degree view of the water and the coastline, the lighthouse, and a piece of the harbor beyond. I know it is a risk to live there, but it is a beautiful risk."

Silence for a moment, and then Ort said, "Well, the property is exposed, but weather reports are pretty good these days, mostly give you enough time to get out to higher ground."

The sound of clicking scissors replaced speech while the four people ruminated. Alejandro Santos had been a topic for speculation in town since arriving a few months previously. He was exotic enough in this small Down East harbor town to attract attention from the local watchers and talkers, and his purchase of the Stedler property only increased his mystery. Of the three other people in the barbershop, only Joey had not heard of him, being tied up in his own problems and his fight to regain his life after the trouble of the previous year.

Ort had done all he could to restore order to Joey's scalp and now applied shaving cream to his neck, sideburns, and above his ears. He took a few deliberate swipes on the leather strop that hung from the side of the chair and wiped away the cream above Joey's left ear with a broad thumb, transferring it to the linen towel draped over his own shoulder. Left hand holding the head steady, fingers splayed, while the right hand wielded the razor. Joey heard, as much as felt, the blade scrape is skin: ch-ch-ch, and the skin was clean. "You heard about Edith Sloan's brother?" Ort asked him.

Joey held his head still, feeling some nervous tension from the presence of sharp steel next to vulnerable flesh. "No," he breathed. Ch-ch-ch, the razor said.

Ort moved to the rear, readying to take a swipe behind the ear. "Found him dead in Boston the other day. Tortured and murdered, throat cut, they say." Joey twitched. "Damn," Ort muttered, "Keep your head still." He wiped at Joey's neck where he had just applied the blade.

"Got him, didn't you," Maddy said. "What did I tell you about that straight razor?"

"Just a little scratch," Ort said. He applied a styptic pencil where a small red line had blossomed and took a firmer hold of Joey's head. "Read it in the paper." He scraped with the blade. "Police in Boston and the DEA refused comment, wouldn't speculate, but the reporter did. Suggested it might tie in with what happened up here, considering the guy used to work for the DEA and was Harry Sloan's brother-in-law and all."

Maddy stopped, faced her partner with her hands on her hips. "Hey, Ort," she said.

Ort stopped and straightened. "What?" he said.

"A little psychology," she said. "When you want someone to relax and stay still, you talk about flowers and small children, not death and torture. Especially to someone who almost got killed himself in the not-so-distant past" She waited.

Ort stood still, brow lowered, mouth opening. He looked at the razor in his hand, looked at Joey. "Sorry, Joey. I guess you would be a little antsy still."

Joey lifted his eyes to the mirror, saw Santos looking back at him in a measuring way. Joey dropped his eyes. "Well," he said, "yeah... I guess I'm kind of jumpy about it."

"Ah." Ort got it. "So, how do you feel about flowers and small children?" he asked, returning to his work. When he was done, Joey declining the offer of super-hold gel to tame what remained, Ort's last comment was a request that Joey not reveal to anyone where he had gotten the haircut. He said he wanted to preserve the reputation of his shop and didn't consider Joey an especially good walking advertisement for his services.

On his way out, Joey stopped to exchange phone numbers with Al Santos, in case either of them had a problem with meeting up on Monday morning.

Two blocks further along Main Street and a right turn towards the water lay Molly's Bar, a squat, flat-roofed structure nestled next to the trash-blown parking lot for a defunct cannery. Inside, three early-afternoon customers sat at the bar drinking shots and beers and watching a show designed for stay-at-home women. The skinny senior citizen tending bar stood inert, seemingly watching nothing at all.

At a small wooden-topped table in the corner farthest from the door sat a man nursing a beer, hunched over his glass, tracing circles with a finger in the condensation left on the table from the once-cold beverage. He appeared to be in his mid-twenties, maybe two hundred pounds, ginger hair and freckles, the kind of skin that would burn easily in the sun, which was unfortunate considering that he had spent most of his working life on the water. Worn blue jeans over heavy construction boots and a faded blue denim shirt, untucked. His name was Randal Minor and he had been waiting for most of an hour to meet someone.

The door opened and another man walked in. He could have been called good looking, even pretty, were it not for the two inch scar that ran over his left cheekbone, and his eyes, which carried no expression. Five and a half feet tall, average build, black jeans over black leather shoes, black silk shirt with the top three buttons undone and turned up once at the cuffs, also untucked, not quite flowing evenly over his lower back, as though something was tucked into the waistband of his trousers. A big gold watch and three gold chains contrasted against his latte skin. Two gold rings with stones on the middle and pinkie fingers of each hand and dark, wavy hair combed back and cut square on the back of his neck. He walked directly to the rear table, looking neither left nor right, as though he owned whatever space he happened to occupy at any particular point in time. He sat opposite the other man, his back to the door and regarded him silently for a full minute.

"You been using," he said. "You got sweat on your lip and your nose is running. I think you got a little shake in your hands like you anticipating a fix. Not smart. Stupid people who use are careless people. I don't like stupid people working for me."

Randal wiped at his nose. "Carlo, I'm just chipping a little," he said. "It's not like I'm using a lot, just enough to take the edge off, calm my nerves. There's been a little heat lately, people from the rehab center, some parent types putting pressure on the cops."

Carlo leaned forward enough so that a small gold cross on one of the chains hung out of his shirt and swung back and forth. "Uh-huh. And you driving a shiny new red pickup with chrome wheels when you not bringing in any fish or working any regular-type job. Like I said—stupid. And don't use my name, even to yourself." Carlo tilted his head minutely to one side, narrowed his eyes. "You been dealing in your own backyard, haven't you? That's why you got heat on you, huh?"

Randal looked down at his glass, picked it up and finished the warm remainder. He sighed and considered that he hadn't seen the other man blink since he'd sat opposite him. "I'm thinking maybe I should let things cool down some, maybe leave town for a while 'til, you know..."

"Nuh-uh, not yet. I still need your eyes," said Carlo. "What's going on with Adams since I was here last? He still out on bond? Hanging around his house?"

"Yeah," said Randal. "I see him around. He wanders around town on foot after dark, thinks nobody notices him. Obvious that he's drinking all the time the way he steps so careful. Not allowed to leave the county they say, no passport to leave the country. No friends, wife moved out to her farm. Maybe one light on in the house after dark, the times I checked."

"Police go up there a lot?" Carlo asked, "checking up on him?"

Randal shook his head. "I don't think so," he said, "not so much anymore. First few months after everything went down, lots of people, town cops, county cops, staties, feds, everybody, but now they're all waiting for the trial, or trials. Eye of the storm. Month or two, court time starts, then the newspeople and everybody else comes back."

Carlo nodded. "Good," he said.

Randal waited for half a minute, then asked, "You don't think I could step away for a while? Get out of the way?"

"No," Carlo answered. "You owe me. Now come out to my car, I got something for you."

Carlo stood, turned and walked away, sure that the other man would follow. Randal pushed himself to his feet heavily, and came after him, head down and hands in his pockets.

Up the gently sloping street, about thirty yards away on the corner of Main, a slight female figure with long gray hair stood watching the two men as they exited the seedy bar. She watched as they approached a dark rental sedan and the shorter man in black clothing unlocked the passenger side, unlocked the glove box and removed a small package, which he then handed to Randal Minor, who glanced around before stuffing that package in a front pocket. She noted the license plate number of the sedan before moving slightly around the corner to where she could see, yet not be easily seen herself. She watched Randal go to his red pickup with the shiny wheels and the other man enter his own vehicle. Then she faded away around the corner and disappeared before they drove off.

Pickup bed filled with empty trash barrels and wooden sawhorses, Joey pulled his elderly Ford 150 into his driveway in the early afternoon to find his neighbor Louis standing in front of the double doors of Joey's garage/workshop, arms crossed over a barrel chest. Louis wore pressed tan chinos and a yellow polo shirt, flip-flops on his feet. Joey exited his truck carrying a new sport coat and pants on a hanger and a Walmart bag.

"Hey, Lou," he said. "You're beginning to look like a suburban wolfman. Good look for you."

Louis had a newly-grown full beard that had come in gray, like the fringe of hair that circled his head. His skin was dark and the whites of his eyes slightly yellow, his nose broad and his forearms heavily muscled. He was not amused. "Little more respect, boy," he said. Joey just grinned back at him, well accustomed to and comfortable with Louis' sometimes paternalistic attitude.

"What's up," Joey said.

Louis looked at Joey's new ensemble. "Didn't realize your date tonight was a formal affair."

"It's not a date, Lou," said Joey. "And the jacket is for the christening tomorrow." He laid the hangered clothes on the dusty hood of the truck and dumped the contents of the bag next to it: new blue jeans, red-checked flannel shirt, a bagged, white dress shirt, brown suede slip-on shoes, and a solid maroon tie.

Louis picked the hanger off the truck and brushed at the dust adhering to the back of the new jacket. "You bought a tie?" Louis said. "This must be the first one you ever owned. Lord, lord. I wish Kat was here to see this."

"Right," Joey replied, "and that beard would have been nipped in the bud."

"And she'd say you were sartorially challenged," Louis replied. "You need to wear something more than ratty tee-shirts and flannel shirts." Joey's faded blue tee-shirt had a breast pocket that was ripped loose on one side.

Joey fingered the torn pocket, shrugged and smiled.

"Anyway," said Louis, "you can present yourself for inspection before your big date. I'll give you some tips on how to handle yourself with women." With that, he turned to go to his own house.

"Not a date, Lou," Joey said again, gathering his purchases. He waved without looking at the opposing neighbor's house , knowing that the elderly man there would be looking out a window at him or at anything that happened within view. Joey went into his quiet home.

This neighborhood, four streets of post-war, mostly single-story wood-sided homes, was largely occupied by retirees of the cannery across town that had shut down years before. As older residents left, or died, some younger families would move in to keep the area alive. They were modest homes and mostly well kept. Ash trees and maples were bare now, the oaks and the beech trees hung on to their drying foliage, waiting for colder weather to come.

Mary Hartz retained a friendship with Joey, but kept what she thought of as a professional distance from him since the events of a year past. There was a personal element to it, too, in that she was still pissed off at him for behaving impulsively then and putting both of their lives at risk. In less generous thoughts, the word that came to her mind was "stupid". She still traded books with him and they spoke when meeting on the street, would occasionally have coffee together, but it couldn't be said that their relationship had advanced beyond the casual. Not that it should, or could, she thought, as she drove to his house late in the afternoon.

She parked her red Honda Civic on the street in front of his house, looked to see if old Joe Soucup was peering out at her from the next door windows, didn't see him, and walked to the front door. Tall, with short brown hair, she felt good, having lost fifteen pounds through running and weight training over the past year, but was still a sturdy hundred and fifty in stocking feet. She wore tan slacks and a blue and white striped shirt, cordovan penny loafers and a yellow sweater tied over her shoulders in anticipation of a cooler evening.

The burnt shingles around the door had been replaced and the entire front wall and door had been repainted since the fire. She rang the bell and then noticed both next door neighbors watching from their front porches. Just a little bit creepy, she thought.

Joey welcomed her in wearing his newly-bought jeans and flannel shirt. New shoes, too, she saw. "Hey," he said. "Good to see you. Come on in."

"Ready to go?" she asked. "Thanks for doing this." She looked to the far wall where a Van Gogh print hung over the patched, she assumed, bullet hole that had broken the mirror that had hung there before.

"You bet, no problem," he answered. "Just got to grab a sweater or something." He pulled a zip-up hooded sweatshirt that didn't appear to him to be too shabby from the front room closet and they exited to her car, their audience yet watching. A wave from Louis, nothing from Joe.

The drive to Mary's mother's home in an adult community was an hour away. Joey was to be a beard for Mary, a ruse to foil her mother's continuing attempts to fix Mary up with a "suitable" husband. Mary couldn't think of anyone other than Joey who would be safe for her to take, or be willing to do it without making an even bigger problem for her. Joey was easy, uncomplicated, and didn't require anything in return for his friendship.

"Saw you driving plainclothes with your new partner the other day," Joey said. "Guy's from New York, they say?"

"Yes," Mary said. "Del Datura. When Waters got bumped up to chief, he recruited a buddy from the city to be our new detective, our first detective, after Knowles retired on disability. And I'm in training to transition to be detective number two in the department. I'm taking some classes, Del's showing me the job, and I'm educating him in the ins and outs and desperate characters of Rock Harbor, Maine."

"Charlie Knowles," Joey said. "Was it the car crash on Frenchman's Hill that put him on disability?"

Mary shook her head, watching ahead on the rural roadway. "They don't know. His headaches began after that and they just seemed to be getting worse and more often. He hated to go and we all did too, but it got too hard for him to work. He's been back and forth to doctors in Portland and Boston. It drives him crazy not to be working, though he won't admit it."

"You're keeping in touch with him," Joey said.

"He comes around the station sometimes and we talk a bit, but Charlie never was much of a talker. He's more of a presence. He used to loom, like a dark eye in the sky. He kept the petty thieves and brawlers looking over their shoulders wondering if Officer Knowles was going to put a big hand on their shoulders and drag them away. I know just the thought of him was enough to prevent some crime," said Mary. "He's been losing weight the past few months, becoming more like a specter than the force of nature he used to be on the street."

They drove in silence for some time, each remembering and considering the events of the year before and the consequences for the several people involved in them. Ticking them off in their heads: Chief Sloan dead. Shake-up in the police department. Charles Adams indicted on several charges. Elwood Trott dead. Joey dragged through several news cycles and only now beginning to get his life back and claim his own identity.

And then there was what was yet to come, presaged and punctuated by the recent torture slaying of Edward Bracken, late of the DEA and Harry Sloan's brother-in-law, namely the upcoming state and federal trials of Charles Adams that promised to drag them all through the hassle and publicity again.

And then there was the continuing investigation into the thousands of gallons of toxic waste discovered in leaking barrels beneath the concrete floor of the old cannery. The clean-up would be massive and expensive. The consequences to the marine fishery and the tourist industry of Rock Harbor were yet to be determined, but a giant shadow was cast upon a town that depended almost entirely on these resources for its livelihood.

Pulling into the parking area of the complex where Mary's mother resided broke the chain of those thoughts, bringing them into the immediate present. "Listen, Joey," Mary said, "my mom doesn't read the paper or watch the news on t.v., so there's no need to get into history here. We're just going to have a nice dinner with polite conversation and leave early, okay?"

Joey nodded to her look of concern. "Hey, I have no wish to talk about all that stuff. It'll be like a breath of fresh air to talk to someone who's out of it... I mean separate from it."

Mary's mother greeted them at the door. She had a pat and a kiss on the cheek for her daughter and a tentative smile and handshake for Joey.

"Mom, this is my friend, Joey," Mary said.

"Pleased to meet you I'm sure," her mom said. She looked him up and down, perhaps expecting someone else, maybe a handsome, professional man dressed in a suit and tie. Maybe armed with a bouquet of flowers.

For his part, Joey had not expected the mother of the solidly-built Mary Hartz to be such a tiny sparrow of a woman. When she offered her hand, it all but disappeared in his. And her eyes, magnified by her oversize glasses, only emphasized her smallness. "I'm very pleased to meet you, Missus Hartz," he said.

"Evelyn, please," she said. "Please come in, have a seat in the living room. Dinner is just about ready."

Joey sat on one end of the couch under the front window in the living room area that was separated from the dining room area by the fact that a couch and two upholstered chairs were at one end of the room and a dining table with room for four chairs was at the other. Mary was deciding whether to seat herself next to him or in the chair alongside when her mother said, "Mary dear, why don't you help me put some things on the table."

Dinner was of roast chicken, string beans, and mashed potato, with carrot cake and coffee for dessert. Throughout, Evelyn Hartz quizzed Joey on his occupation, parentage, and education while observing how he handled fork, spoon, and knife. Joey managed to keep his napkin on his lap and not eat the chicken with his fingers, but he did keep a knife in one hand and fork in the other at all times. He answered all questions cheerfully, if not completely, and ate all that was on offer to him until there was no more to eat. He really seemed to enjoy himself, without displaying any discomfort for the apparent third-degree questioning.

For her part, Mary was beyond feeling any embarrassment for her mother's style or manner. She was able to accept her as she was for all these many years, especially since Joey didn't seem to mind her, either. She found enough humor in the situation and good will toward her dining companions that she discovered herself enjoying the meal.

On the way out, Joey thanked Mrs. Hartz for a delicious dinner. She said, "Well, it's nice to have someone come with such a good appetite." She turned to her daughter and said, "No leftovers for you to take home this time, but maybe that's not a bad thing." She hesitated. "We'll talk tomorrow, dear."

Driving from the parking area, Mary had to laugh. "I kept getting flashes of that old Gilda Radner and Bill Murray thing where they were Todd and Lisa," she said.

Joey smiled. "How about 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner'," he said.

Mary drove Joey to his home in a companionable silence. She wondered what it was about him that made him so comfortable to be with. He was easy to like, friendly and open. It he had a flaw, it was perhaps that he was too accepting, too uncritical. He judged things on the face that was presented to him. He could even be said to be reckless in that regard.

He wasn't handsome, he wasn't ugly. His features were somewhat oversized and revealed every emotion that came to him. Nothing was hidden. He seemed to have no hidden inner dialog. Mary considered that he might possibly be the direct opposite of a sociopath. Did she feel she needed to protect him?

He didn't gossip, didn't criticize, didn't try to fix anyone, seemed to give everyone the benefit of a doubt. He wasn't stupid, but not overly intelligent, either. He went along to get along. Maybe that was enough reason to like somebody.

# Chapter 2

The sun rose on Sunday morning to promise a beautiful fall day, the skies blue with a crystalline clarity. By eleven a.m. the morning chill in Rock Harbor Town Park had warmed to a comfortable sixty-five degrees, with a light sea breeze caused by the warming landmass.

The park was ten acres of grass and trees, with a small playground adjacent to the parking lot and benches along a cinder pathway that eventually led gently upslope to the lighthouse of white-painted brick and the lighthouse keeper's house, white with a red asphalt-shingled roof. The graveled road to the lighthouse was closed to public traffic and the keeper's place was occupied by a couple who were retired from service in the Coast Guard. The light itself had been automated in the 'sixties and operated mostly unassisted.

Thirty yards past the playground against a backdrop of spruce trees, a small group stood facing a woman with curly, short blond hair wearing white vestments. Over her shoulders, a white stole outlined with gold thread and patterned with doves and olive branches and other symbols of her trade set her off from the others. She was Pastor Harriet Burke-White of the local Unitarian/Universalist Church.

Before her, and set a bit apart from the others, stood Emily Jacobsen and Doris Reeves. Emily was radiant in a long floor-length white silk gown with flowing balloon sleeves, cinched at her waist with a gold-colored wide belt. Her curly golden hair flowed below her shoulders. When the breeze lifted the gown from her feet, it could be seen that she was wearing pink ballet slippers. She wouldn't have looked out of place carrying a magic golden wand.

Doris, standing tall next to her, wore a black formal suit with a white dress shirt and a string tie set with a large piece of turquoise at the top. Doris was holding their baby daughter, Amanda Louise Reeves-Jacobsen, born August 17, 2001.

Amanda Louise was swaddled in a pink blanket, covering up all but the very bottom of her white christening dress and the top of her head, with little golden curls peeping out from a white linen cap.

Behind the parents and a bit to one side was Joey Warnecki, godfather to Amanda Louise. He was wearing his new jacket and trousers. His new tie was knotted inexpertly and his white shirt yet showed the folds from its recent packaging. He beamed.

The group of eight attendees behind Joey were all women, mostly dressed for the occasion, excepting Martha, the dishwasher at Emily's Rest, who wore her standard uniform of shirt, jeans, and black athletic shoes.

Pastor Harriet went on about the miracles of love, peace, hope and joy, proclaimed a blessing upon all who were present and especially upon the new parents and baby. The Holy Spirit was mentioned, and Jesus, and the Buddha. Muhammad was not mentioned, neither was God, and the word christening was left out in favor of the word blessing. All in all, the ceremony was an uplifting experience and no one felt excluded. After the short ceremony, the company repaired to Emily's Rest for a reception.

Around noontime, Mary Hartz and Del Datura were parked on Main Street. Del had been in the department for three months. After 9/11 he had returned to New York to aid in volunteer efforts of search and recovery, and to attend too many memorials and funerals of the lost. He came back to Rock Harbor this past week a disheartened man, but anxious to pick up the threads of his new existence and start working again. That the flag at the municipal center yet flew at half-mast was a constant reminder to all who passed.

Mary was on the passenger side of the new, unmarked Crown Vic, police interceptor model, talking about patrol schedules after the labor day holiday, when there came a tapping on the window on her side. Bent over looking in at her was a woman with long gray hair. She had prominent cheekbones and serious, dark eyes, a thin, straight nose and thin lips in a straight line.

When Mary lowered the window, the woman said, "Can I talk to you a minute? Do you remember me, Mary?"

"Of course, Sophie," Mary said. "I was sorry to hear about your brother. Do you want to sit in the back and talk?"

Sophie got in the back, noting that there were door handles inside, though it wasn't evident that they would operate without some release from the front of the vehicle. She was wearing a dress, having perhaps been to church services in the morning.

Mary turned to Del. "Del, this is Sophie Trott. It was her brother who died in an accident in New Jersey last year." Mary turned in her seat to face Sophie, who moved to the center of the seat to make conversation easier.

"Sorry for your loss," he said, also turning in his seat.

Mary and Del stayed quiet then, waiting for Sophie to speak what was on her mind. Sophie put her thoughts together. "You know I'm working at the rehab center now, right? No, there's no reason you should know that. I just... well, I've been working with recovering addicts there, knowing something about their problems from personal experience, but that you do know, because of the trouble I got in back awhile, and the reputation I got and everything, but I've been working hard to be a citizen and make up for all that and..."

Mary interrupted her then. "I do know, Sophie. I've heard from people, even the director there, that you're doing good work there. So, set your mind at ease and just tell us what's on your mind, okay?"

Sophie nodded. "Well, I've been seeing new cases and a lot of old cases that are coming back. And because I see signs in the community that non-junkies might not notice, things that aren't right on the surface for straight people, I've been keeping my eyes on certain things, certain people, and I thought you should know some things. Maybe you could do something." She put on a small, bitter smile and went on. "You know, it's still hard for me to talk to the cops. It's stupid but it feels like a betrayal, like some old junkie betrayal. It's hard to change a mindset fortified by something as strong as heroin is."

Del raised an eyebrow. "I know it," he said. "I've seen it and I know, too, what the junk can do. Seems to me you're working the program just fine. My hat's off to you, for having the strength and courage to beat something that's so strong."

"It's never really beat," Sophie said. "But I'm going day by day. And part of it is to tell you what I'm seeing here, and to hope you can do something about it."

"So," she said. "What I've been seeing, and watching, is a guy named Randal Minor, who is definitely selling smack. Originally, I thought it was all coming in from out of town, because the signs weren't here, nothing being exchanged in the park at night, out of the bars, at the high school. But, lately..."

Wait a minute," interrupted Mary. "You mean you've been actively investigating this?"

"Yes I have," said Sophie, with no apology. "I have a definite vested interest. I've been discrete, though, I'm not broadcasting anything, and I have experience in living below the radar."

"Could be dangerous," said Del.

"I know it," said Sophie, "and I'm careful. I've got partial custody of my kids now so I know the stakes here. That's why I'm to the point where I want to turn it all over to you."

"So, you say the stuff used to be coming in from out of town, but now you think this Randal Minor is dealing here," Dell said.

"I don't think it, I know it," Sophie responded. "I've seen him dealing out of the park and other places. He's got a stupid red truck with chrome wheels on it that he make deliveries with. Sticks out like a sore thumb—real discrete vehicle to deal dope from."

"Yesterday, I think I saw him meet his source," she said. "He got a package from a guy in a rental car outside of Molly's. The guy was wearing a silk shirt and lots of gold and I got the license number off his car and I'm gonna give it to you."

At Emily's Rest, a breakfast joint in the center of town, the tables had been shifted around to better accommodate the reception. The restaurant was closed to the public this day and pride of place was given to the wicker bassinet perched upon a formica-topped table in the center of the room. The group of women there sipped coffee and ate cake, cooing over the baby. Joey hovered close by, nervously watching the coffee cups held too closely near his godchild.

Gray-haired Martha sidled up to him and peered up at him through the bottle-bottomed glasses that sat near to the end of her nose. "So, why'd you get to be the godparent of this child?" she asked. "You're no relation or anything."

"Well," Joey said, "Doris and Em and I have been good friends for a long time, you know."

"Yeah, so? The got a lot of friends," Martha said.

"And Em thinks I could be a good male model."

"A male model?" Confusion etched Martha's face.

"Did you know that we have the same birthday?" Joey said, changing tack.

"No," said Martha, "but I could see where Emily might take that into account, what with her astrology and all. You'd think Doris would talk some sense into her." Martha walked away, picking up stray cups and paper dessert plates on her way into the kitchen area.

As the guests began to thin, Doris took Joey aside. "I'd like to thank you for helping out, for the gifts, and for being godfather to Amanda Louise," she said.

"Oh, I'm just happy to help," he replied. Joey had converted a room upstairs to a nursery, sanding and refinishing the floor, and installing new drywall and trim. He had donated his time and let Doris and Emily pay for materials. He would have liked to do it all on his own dime, but had been too strapped for cash for the past year to manage it.

"But, listen, Joey, as much as we appreciate everything, you have to stop buying stuff for the kid. All the toys, clothes—we're running out of room. And now that," she said, pointing to a baby carriage in a corner of the restaurant. It was black faux-leather with chrome fittings, grand in scale, with bicycle-sized spoked wheels and white rubber tires. It rose to a height where a person would barely have to bend at the waist to attend to it and it was lined with white silk. The top pivoted to protect an infant from the sun, coming or going. And it came complete with a clear, plastic cover that would snap on to protect its occupant on rainy days. It appeared to be roomy enough to contain four average sized babies in complete comfort.

"It's really something, ain't it?" Joey said. "It's a Perego, the Cadillac of baby carriages. I got it at a yard sale for fifty bucks."

"It looks like a hearse, Joey. And it's too big to haul up the stairs." Doris crossed her ams over her chest.

Joey's expression turned to one of concern. "I thought you could keep it downstairs in the hall, by the door to the alley," he said. "Wheel it outside, push it to the harbor park on sunny days."

"We have one," Doris said, "Folds up the size of an umbrella, weighs about two pounds."

"Well, yeah, I've seen those. Got little wheels, barely make it over the cracks in the sidewalk. This one," he said grandly, "this one you could push over roots and stumps, rocks and curbstones."

"If we go hiking with the baby, you mean," Doris said.

Joey looked from Doris's determined face to the carriage, put his hands in his back pockets, thought for a moment, and looked back to her. "All right," he said. "I'll take it away. Let me try it out once, though. Okay?"

Doris looked at her watch, considering. "It'll be cooling down soon," she said.

"I'll just go to the park and back. Hour, hour and a half, tops," he said.

Doris was agreeable to this compromise. "If Em says it's okay with her, then I guess it's okay with me. Be good exercise for you, anyway, pushing that thing around."

Al Santos sat on a park bench in the mid-afternoon facing west, soaking up the rays of the sun. Before him lay the empty playground with its swing sets, steel lattice of monkey bars, and fiberglass riding animals set on coil springs. Broken glass glittered in the sunshine from where someone had shattered a liquor bottle against the wooden retaining sides of a sandbox. He was still but for the movement of his eyes.

He was leaning forward, elbows on his knees. His eyes followed the narrow pathway from the lighthouse with its single, rotating eye to the gate in the chain-link fence separating the park from the parking lot where a figure in a dark sport coat pushed a limousine of a pram into the park. His gaze returned by an indirect route, jumping from wind-stunted tree to rusted, dented trashcan and empty benches to glint of broken glass and, finally, to a creditcard-sized glassine bag held down at one corner by his left shoe. It bore a stamp, in red ink, of an eye with an elongated pupil, like the eye of a goat. The stamp mark was faded, but had it been whole, he knew there would have been a red teardrop to be seen at the corner of the eye.

Late in the afternoon, shadow was touching the bow of a small skiff tethered to a wooden dock attached to the small peninsula that was Santos's new place of residence. The hull was painted blue-green with red paint at and below the waterline. Cream-colored inside, it had three varnished thwarts. The little boat looked brand-new, no scratches on the unfaded paint and brightwork. No barnacles, no algae, no dirty water sloshing in the bottom. Oarlocks hung from cords inside and an empty, dark green wine bottle rolled about in the bottom of the boat with each small wave that lapped against its sides. No oars were evident.

Santos sat on the floor of the boat, shoeless, in jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt, his back to the transom and his legs draped over the center thwart. His elbows rested back on the stern seat and his hands grasped the rub-rails of the boat's sides. He remained there, unmoving, until the sun sank in the west and the wind picked up and the evening chill drove him inside.

The town of Rock Harbor put itself to bed on Sunday evening. At around eleven o'clock, a dark sedan drove slowly uphill past the few dark houses and cottages that lined the road that terminated at Charles Adams house. The two-story, white colonial backed to a fifty-foot cliff of shale and granite that fell steeply to tumbled rock and swirling water below. Some tall spruce trees sheltered the driveway to the landward side of the property. Evergreen plantings surrounded the granite foundation on three sides of the house.

The sedan turned off its lights as it reached the drive and stopped, idling for a minute before the engine was switched off. One light burned behind drapes on the lower floor, on the right side of the house.

A figure in black stepped from the car, closed the door quietly with a hip, and listened. With no movement noticed within the house and no sounds from the area other than the soft sigh of a damp breeze moving through the trees, the figure moved to the house, first checking the front door and finding it locked and then moving around the lighted window to the rear. A bluestone patio ringed by a low wall lay to the seaward side, containing white-painted, metal, outdoor chairs and round table. One chair lay on its side, blown over by wind and left for its cushion to molder on the ground. The stone of the patio and the ghostly white furniture were slick with condensation. His shoes left dark footprints that showed when clouds blew past the full moon.

He tested the latch to the french doors there at the back of the house, the inside of the house dark and silent. The door was not locked and he entered a combination kitchen/dining area, lit feebly by ambient light cut into skewed rectangles from the mullioned windows. He listened again, hearing what sounded like television programing turned down low in a front room.

He moved through the open kitchen door to pass a bathroom to his right and a dark room on the left. The hallway opened up in the front of the house where an ornate staircase centered in the space; a formal living room lay to the right. The door to his left was shut, a line of light reaching out from under it.

He reached out a gloved hand and turned the handle, silently opening the door and stepping into the room.

He regarded the man slumped in a leather recliner. Mouth open, snoring lightly, the man's blue-striped shirt was wrinkled and unbuttoned, his belt unfastened, trousers unzipped. The flesh of his face was sallow, pouches under his eyes, his graying hair tousled. The television played, a soft-porn channel with little dialog and lousy music.

To the sleeping man's right, a mahogany side table held a television remote, a ceramic lamp, and a glass tumbler containing a half-inch of amber liquid. Water marks overlapped one another on the table. To the left, on the floor, an empty liquor bottle lay on its side. The room was unkempt, with dust clinging to horizontal surfaces and litter, socks and papers, scattered about here and there. The smell of body odor, mainly booze sweat and foul breath, caused the intruder to wrinkle his nose.

Diagonally across the room from the chair, a golf bag leaned in a corner by the built-in bookcase. From it, the intruder selected a driver. He removed a head cover from it and examined it, admiring its balance and construction. The club was an expensive one, with a carbon-fiber shaft and a sewn, leather-wrapped handle. He set himself in position, feet shoulder-width apart, gloved hands in position, club head resting on the floor before an imaginary tee. The custom-made club was inches too long for him. He readjusted his stance, rocked his hips, and tested his backswing, which was truncated by the height available below the ceiling.

He moved to the side table and picked up the television remote, turning off the television. The man in the chair did not stir. He took the tumbler, placing the glass upside-down on the floor where he had tested his swing and put the remote atop it. It would be a tricky shot, to hit the remote without hitting the glass. He reassumed the driving position and took several practice swings, set and reset his feet, held the club high one final time, paused, and swung the club down with force.

Whatever the cause—the too long club, the shortened backswing, the un-standard target—the club head caught both the remote and the glass, pulverizing both, and sending shards of glass and plastic across the room to splash against the man in the chair and the wall about him. A large piece from the bottom of the heavy glass hit the man in the chair in the forehead and rebounded with enough force to knock over the table lamp, which did not break but was laid over on its side on the table top.

Charles Adams awoke in total confusion. His mouth opened wide. An unfamiliar man stood before him, dressed all in black, smiling, holding a golf club. A drop of liquid ran into his eye. He swiped at it, it was red.

Charles looked down, saw his pants were open, zipped up and fastened his belt, tried to rise. The man in black reached out with the club and tapped it to Charles's nose, forcing him back in the chair.

"Who the hell are you? What are you doing in my house?" Charles said, looking about to make certain that he was, really, in his own home.

"I am a cat," the man said, "And a cat plays with its food." He set the club head down, overlapping his hands on the end of the shaft.

"I am Carlo Diaz," he announced. "You are Charles Adams, and you took something that belonged to me. I am here for it to be returned to me."

"What are you talking about?" said Adams. "I've never seen you before in my life. Get out of my house before I call the police." Charles did not fully appreciate his position, having been accustomed to a more elevated status before his fall from grace.

Carlo Diaz pursed his lips, frowned. He moved forward, adjusted his grip, and swung the club horizontally to stop an inch away from Adam's ear. Adams recoiled, fear awakening in his eyes.

"I realize that you no longer have my goods," said Carlo. "But I will accept the value of my property in cash."

"What property?"

"The heroin and the cocaine that was taken from my business by the federal police, that you and your people stole from them, of course," stated Carlo, as though it were a matter not in dispute.

Charles gaped, awareness of his position coming to him, and of what kind of man stood before him now holding the club so comfortably in his gloved hands. "I have no money," he said. "Everything's been taken from me. My business, my accounts, all my assets have been seized. Even the title to this house is being held."

"Everything," Diaz said.

"Just about, yes."

"It is true," Diaz said, "you do not look like a wealthy man anymore." He looked at Charles's lap. "You zipped up your pants but did not button them. Button them, button your shirt, make yourself a man."

Adams colored and did what he was told. He reached for the glass that was no longer on the table, realized it, and folded his hands over his lap. He was definitely afraid now.

Diaz thought for a while. "Perhaps you will win in the court cases and your property will be returned to you," he said.

Adams' eyes searched about the room. "Sure," he said. "They don't have enough to convict me of much. They won't be able to keep everything. And then we can work something out, get you your money back, some of it at least."

"Yes," said Carlo. "We must work something out. Business must be taken care of. A man's reputation depends on being known to be able to manage his business, yes?"

Charles nodded, not entirely certain of being able to manage this situation, but hopeful. After all, he was Charles Adams, a man whose family had been important in this town for well over a century.

"Come," Diaz said, gesturing with the club. "It stinks in this room. Let's go outside into the air. We can discuss how you are going to pay me, after you regain your wealth."

Charles rose unsteadily from his seat, tucking in his shirt, and trying on a confident smile. The worry in his eyes belied the smile. He preceded Carlo through the door, turning toward the front of the house. Carlo stopped him with the club extended and directed him to the opposite end of the house.

As they moved through the dark kitchen and stepped onto the cool wetness of the patio, Charles realized that there were no shoes on his feet, only socks, now damp and hanging loose at the toe. He wanted to turn back to get his shoes, but Carlo's close presence kept him from doing so. He stood on the patio, looking about him and up at the moon, which could be faintly discerned through the clouds that obscured it.

Carlo moved around Adams, picking up the overturned chair, setting it at the table, moving the other furniture about to set all in order. He was casual about turning his back to Adams, seemingly unconcerned with the fact that Adams was a half-foot taller and fifty pounds heavier than he. He had upended the club in his hand, holding the shaft near the club head and using it as a balancing stick as he picked up chair cushions and set them on the chair seats.

Adams watched, turning with Diaz's movements. He moved near a chair and grasped it by the top rail, tightened his grip.

Carlo pivoted and spun the club, rapping Charles's knuckles with the end of the handle. Charles pulled his hand to his chest, cradling it with his other hand. The blow had been admonitory, controlled, sharp but not especially painful and the message was clear: Diaz was in charge.

"I have been thinking," Diaz said. "My time to take care of my business here is limited. I cannot wait here for you to recover what you have been so careless to lose. What do you have to give me now, this week, as part of what you owe?"

Adams rubbed the knuckles of his bruised hand. "I have some paintings in the house. They're worth something. Some silver dining things, antiques. You could take them, sell them, as a good faith gesture that I'd get you the rest."

Diaz shook his head. "I do not work in such business." He stepped over the foot-high, dry-laid stone wall that ringed the patio, gesturing to Adams to do the same.

Adams hesitated, Diaz waved him on again. "What can you give me in cash, tomorrow?" Diaz said.

Adams reluctantly stepped over the wall to stand a few feet farther from the cliff's edge than Diaz, who now stood with his feet just inches away from the almost vertical drop, his back again to Adams. The air about them was filled with mist, the water below unseen, unknowable but by the sound of wave upon rock.

Adams's expression hardened; his jaws clenched together, hard. His hands rose before him and he stepped forward, focusing all his intention on the back of the smaller man in front of him, a primal grunt rising in his throat.

But Carlo side-stepped him, spun around and swung the club with both hands, catching Charles behind the neck and propelling him over the edge. Charles's scream had barely begun to rise before it was cut off. Two seconds in the air was all it got.

Carlo stood, listening. The foghorn was sounding from the lighthouse across the harbor, a thousand yards away. The light there could be seen winking through the mist and fog, but the lights of the harbor town were only a ghostly penumbra, lower than where he stood on the hill.

"A reputation can be known," he said, "even when the hand that creates it is not seen."

He re-entered the house and returned to the front room, where he wiped the club clean with a discarded sock from the floor. After inspecting the club for any visible residue, he re-fitted it with its cover and slid it back into the golf bag. He took one more look around and retraced his steps through the french doors. He pressed the button on the door's edge that would set the lock and closed the door.

His car was not seen by any person as it passed through the quiet streets of the sleeping town.

# Chapter 3

When Joey Warnecki awoke at six o'clock on Monday morning, the sky was clear. The fog of the previous evening had blown away, leaving behind dripping eaves and wet grass and pavement as the only evidence of its passing presence. The thermometer suction-cupped to the outside of his bedroom window showed the temperature to be forty-five degrees. That fact, and his observation of blue skies and unmoving tree limbs suggested a repeat of the weather of the day before, and dictated his dress of the day: jeans and work boots, flannel shirt over tee-shirt, and ball cap; jacket not required.

He started out the back door of his house, buttoning his shirt as he went, and stopped. He returned to his bedroom and retrieved a small, spiral-bound notebook which he tucked into a back pocket. Moving outside again, he noticed that the bed of his pickup was full of his gear from the week gone past. It took about a half-hour to put it to rights and sweep out the bed.

On his third attempt to leave his property, he made it to the end of his driveway before again stopping. Back in his kitchen, he saw that it was coming up close to seven o'clock, probably not to early to call. He woke Al Santos from sleep and invited him to share breakfast at Emily's Rest. Santos agreed, blearily, and said that it would take him a while to shower and dress, but that he would meet Joey at the restaurant.

Moving out again, Warnecki got his shirt buttoned up the front, but not at the cuffs. Why bother to button them when he would have to roll up the sleeves to eat breakfast, anyways? He walked quickly, long legs eating up the distance, arms swinging, shirt cuffs flapping an inch short of his wrists. He was lanky, with big feet and big hands. His frame made him look taller and heavier than he actually was. He was all tendon and sinew with long, ropy, work-hardened muscles that showed prominent veins, even at rest. It would be difficult to estimate how strong he might be, but his hands were obviously those of a working man, as scarred and calloused as they were.

A half-mile walk to Emily's Rest elevated Joey's appetite and he greeted the diners and staff there with nods and waves, with a special greeting to Amanda Louise in her basinet in a corner behind the counter.

He finished a large breakfast before Santos joined him, Santos ordering only a cup of coffee to begin his day. Santos had brought with him an accordion file containing three inches of paper: blueprints, engineering specs, torn scraps of paper with seemingly random jottings, sketches and more sketches, and a water-color rendering of the desired outcome of his project. The rendering was a radical revision of what Joey had known as the old Stedler place. Clearly, Santos had done a great deal of preparation and was ready to begin work. He was focused and excited and his excitement was contagious.

They discussed the work proposed by Santos for an hour before leaving together, Santos offering a ride back to Joey's place to pick up his truck before proceeding to the work site.

Mary Hartz and Del Datura were traveling along Main Street after discussing how to go about investigating Randal Minor's possible involvement in the drug trade. Upon passing Green Street, Datura saw Warnecki and Santos walking towards Main. He did a double take.

"Holy shit," he said. Mary began to step on the brake. "No, no," he said, "just pull over to the side here. I can't believe it."

"What," she said, coasting into a parking space twenty-five feet further along the street.

Del remained silent, watching in his side mirror as the two men turned the corner and walked past their car. Two cars ahead, Santos and Warnecki got into a silver-gray Audi sedan.

"What's going on?" Mary asked. "What are you looking at?"

"I'm looking at a ghost. God damn, it's 'Felonious Thelonius', Alejandro Thelonius Santos, late of the five boroughs, New York City."

"Who?"

"Just pull out a few cars behind and follow them," he said. "And I'll tell you all about it."

Dr. Felix Wickman's first appointment of the day sat in his office wearing a blue nylon windbreaker zipped to the throat, tan pants and black cop shoes. Dr. Wickman noticed that the once solidly-built Charlie Knowles had lost even more weight than the last time he had seen him; his eyes were more hollowed out, also.

"Charlie," Wickman said, "I'm sorry." The file folder before him was closed. He'd spent much of the previous evening going through it and going through it again. There simply was no good news therein, and no way to change any of it.

Knowles waved off the sentiment. "Forget it," he said. "It is what it is. I didn't come here for sympathy, or hoping you could work a miracle. I left all the miracle workers behind, in Boston, weeks ago."

Wickman looked down at the folder and then up to Knowles. "I know," he said. "It just sucks."

Knowles rubbed a hand over his face, ended the gesture by running the hand back over his skull. He crossed his arms over his chest and looked to his left for several seconds, then returned his gaze to the doctor. "I am looking for something from you, though," he said.

Wickman thought, nodded. "Pain medication," he said.

"Well, yeah," said Knowles. "But. I'm looking down the road the next month or so when it gets really bad and I'm in no position to do anything about it."

"In hospice, you're saying," said Wickman.

Knowles shook his head. "No hospice," he said. "No hospice, no hospital, no putting my old lady through all the end-of-days bullshit. I'm not gonna have anybody washing my ass, emptying my bedpans, listening to me moaning all day and all night. I'm gonna go clean, when I decide it's time."

Wickman stared at him. "What are you asking me, Charlie?" he said.

"One way or another, doc, the decision is going to be mine," said Knowles. "I'm hoping you could help me out to keep it... tidy, you could say."

Wickman rose slowly from his chair, walked over to the window. He looked out at the lawn outside his residential office, looked at the trees going into dormancy. "Jeez, Charlie," he said, "I don't know."

"I don't want to ask you to do anything that's going to get you into trouble," Knowles said. "You maybe could write me a prescription for pain meds that, I don't know, that I could decide how much of to take. For the pain, I mean."

Wickman stood at the window. Knowles got up, took two steps toward him, patted him on the shoulder, said, "You think about it, make peace with it. I have."

Then, Knowles left him there, closing the door softly behind himself.

Mary drove, following the Audi from two cars behind, as Del Datura told the story.

"Santos popped up on the radar about twelve years ago when a new source of marijuana began spreading around the city," he said. "Pot is nothing new, and the amounts from this new source weren't terribly great, but it began to attract attention, particularly because the stuff didn't appear to be connected to any of the organizations that controlled the business in the various boroughs. The Italians, the Dominicans, the Russians, the street crews uptown, none of them seemed to have a hand in it. And these established organizations began to lose their higher-end customers: rich folk buying ounces of good reefer, college students, yuppies. So they began to take notice. Because they were taking notice, we began to notice, too.

"There were rumors: the stuff was locally grown; it was a network of college kids; the C.I.A. was behind it, yada, yada, yada. But nobody could get a handle on who was really behind it.

"And another thing: it was only pot. No heroin, no coke, no meth. Not typical at all for drug dealers. Oh, and best of all, it was a blind operation: Dead drops, no face-to-face after first contact. And if you ripped off your supplier, who you never saw, you were cut off forever, pushed back to street vendors who might rip you off or turn you in to the cops for more lenient treatment when they got caught. Oh, yeah, it was a tight operation, reliable, very business-like.

"I was on an inter-borough task force for controlled substances and it became like a game to us. Who were these guys who were so invisible? Why were there never any guns involved, no violence at all that we could attribute to them? Why weren't the usual mopes involved and why didn't our confidential informants have a clue?"

They followed until there were no cars between them and the Audi and Mary dropped back to where she could just keep sight of the car. It turned onto Fourth Street. "They must be stopping at Warnecki's house," she said. She continued past the street and turned around in a driveway, parked idling on the street where they could keep an eye on the intersection.

"So, who's this guy?" she asked. "And what the hell is he doing with Joey Warnecki? I just had Joey to dinner at my mother's, for crying out loud." The Audi turned out of Fourth Street, Warnecki's blue pickup close behind. Mary let them get a block ahead and resumed following, thinking, 'What is it about Joey that attracts trouble?'

Datura turned to Mary with a wry smile. "Alejandro Santos was the man on top. He ran his business with a minimum of fuss for a number of years, growing slowly, not getting too greedy. But then things began to get ugly."

The rusty chain-link gate of the fence that separated Santos's property from the roadway was open and sagging when the car and the pickup entered the drive. High tide washed the riprap sides of the fifty-yard causeway, the water five feet from its surface at the lowest point, near the middle of the span. The causeway terminated at a small turn-around, having risen in elevation to about twelve feet above the level of the sea.

The square house rested amidst bare rock, loose gravel, and drifted sand. Only a few desiccated tufts of sedge and a few straggling clumps of hardy weeds found root in the bony ground.

The two men exited their vehicles and regarded the structure in silence. It looked tired and alone, sitting on its half-acre of rock, square to the sea. The concrete building, about twenty-four feet square, rose nine feet to the roof eaves, pierced by centered doors on the two sides that could be seen from Joey's vantage point. The doors, clad in scabby, faded red paint, were flanked by arch-topped double-hung windows. The sloped, plane-sided mansard roof rose another eight feet, presumably to a secondary roof, though its slope could not be seen from the ground. Dull red shingles on the roof were cracked; some were missing corners, or were missing altogether.

"That's a pretty optimistic water-color rendering you showed me," Joey said. "Could be tough to support the big cupola you want to put on top. What was it, about eight by eight?"

Santos nodded. "An engineer designed steel-tube framing for me. It's being fabricated in sections. We'll remove the rooftop, they'll drop it in by crane, weld and bolt it in place. Then we'll reframe and sheathe everything, put in a nice kick at the eaves. Put four little round-top dormers in the lower roof. I have a roofing contractor that will then roof everything with terne metal." Santos smiled. "No sweat," he said.

"Terne?" asked Joey.

"Zinc and tin coated stainless steel," said Santos. "We'll paint it with red iron oxide paint."

Joey took his eyes from the house, looked to the rowboat bobbing at the dock to his left. "You know," he said, "this is a big job for a guy like me. You might want to think about hiring a bigger crew, get it closed in before the snow flies."

"Outside contractors can build the sea wall around the front and sides," said Santos. "Electricians will rewire my home and bury the wires to the street. And plumbers can fix the pipes.

"No, A big crew would cut me out. I intend to do much of the work myself, be involved in every detail. I will work with you and we two will rebuild my house."

"With all the planning you've done, all the detail, I guess you must be a builder, yourself," Joey said.

"No, no," Santos answered. "I have never held a hammer, never used a saw. This is all new to me. My knowledge of building is a paper knowledge, but I intend to learn from you how to use my hands. This will be a new life for me.

Now, come inside and see what we must do in there."

Mary and Del were parked a hundred yards before the house, watching the two men. "Looks like they're talking about that wreck of a house," Mary said. "Makes more sense to me now, why Joey would be with this guy—not that I like it much. Tell me more."

Del put his thoughts together. "Okay, like I said, it became like a game to us, almost a hobby, trying to run down the who, what, where, and why of this new crew that could stay so well out of the light and didn't leave any bodies lying around.

"But other people took a more serious view: their business was being cut into by a crew that didn't respect the established boundaries and didn't pay tribute to the bosses. They just wouldn't play by the rules. Respect was not shown. Someone would have to pay.

"A downtown yuppie lawyer was snatched and badly beaten. He wasn't just some nobody on the street and it made the news. We knew he dealt some weed to his circle of friends so we talked to him, after he got out of the hospital. He eventually, with his lawyer present, was willing to tell us that the guys who beat him were asking him about his source. He talked to us because he was afraid it might happen to him again.

"All he could give them was a phone number, a phone number that changed every month. He would call the number, order what he wanted, and be told where to leave his money. A day later, he would get a call as to where he could pick up his merchandise.

"The same thing happened to a theater director, then to a board member at MOMA. The press got more involved and real heat began to be applied to the usual suspects. We reached out and got assurances that none of the known organizations had anything to do with the beatings of prominent individuals. That would be bad for business, after all.

"Then, a guy who owned three nightclubs went missing and turned up a week later, found floating in the river. It took us three months to piece it all together, picking a scrap of information here, matching up rumors there, putting it all together and coming up with a picture of who was involved, and why.

"Turns out, there was an individual building up his own crew, trying to muscle his way into the business. Father was Dominican, mother Italian. Those two ethnic groups don't associate together much anyway, and this guy wasn't accepted by either, mostly because he didn't respond well to authority, wouldn't take orders. Also, he was a particularly vicious predator with no regard for the need to keep his business out of the papers.

"He kidnapped the nightclub guy and made him set up a deal, made him do the money drop, watched for the money pickup and the dope delivery, and followed the couriers. They eventually led him to two lieutenants and, lastly, to the man at the top: Alejandro Thelonius Santos."

"Sounds like a spy novel," said Mary. "Did you come up with a name for the other guy?"

"Carlo Diaz," said Del.

The front half of the house was a living room area, with a staircase on the left leading up to the second level. The ceilings were water-stained, presumably from multiple roof leaks. The air smelled of bleach with an undertone of mildew. The wood flooring was warped and heaved from water damage, but was swept and scrubbed clean; scant trace of finish remained. A mattress lay on the floor under a front window and a card table and chair was set up under the side window. An blue Apple G3 computer shared the tabletop with books, papers, and writing tools.

Separated from the living room by a wall, the sea side contained what remained of a kitchen and dining area, appliances gone, cupboards torn out. A forlorn, ceramic sink was held up by the skeleton of a cabinet. A minuscule bathroom in the corner was missing its door.

"I want to tear everything out," said Santos. "Open everything up to the top, build a loft area on the right side for sleeping, put in a spiral stair to the loft and the cupola. Bath and utility closet under the loft. L-shaped kitchen beyond, everything else to be open living space.

"I want all new windows and doors, tile floors over radiant heating. My home will be filled with light."

"Going to be expensive," said Joey.

"Yes," said Santos, "Everything has a cost."

Joey looked around, estimating.

"Well, I'm game," he said. "Sounds like fun."

Santos smiled. "Good," he said.

"I like to work for time and materials," Joey said. "But I'm not really financially solvent at this time. You'd need to front for materials and pay me as we go, say, every two weeks or so. That okay?"

"That works for me," answered Santos. "When do we start?"

"Well, let's work up a list of things we need to begin," said Joey. "Put together a plan of attack.

"I've got a meeting tomorrow morning. You can order a dumpster, stop at the building supply and order a first delivery, pick up some things for yourself—safety glasses, hearing protection, maybe a hammer and a tool belt, tape measure... whatever. After lunch, we can get to it."

"Perfect," said Santos, and they shook hands on it.

"You've got to remember that we put this all together after the fact, after the bodies were buried and people went on to other things," said Del.

"Diaz caught up with Santos, killed his two lieutenants right in front of him, shot them dead. Word was that Santos was wounded, but got away. And then Santos disappeared, never to be seen again, until just today, three years later."

"So, why does he end up here?" said Mary.

Del shook his head. "No idea."

Mary rolled down her window a couple of inches. The interior of the car was warming up with the sun almost overhead. "What happened to Diaz? Did he take over?"

"No. With Santos gone, there was no business. His sources dried up and Diaz didn't have the patience or the smarts to operate like Santos. Diaz was driven out of town by the other crews. A rogue like him just can't co-exist in that environment. Word on the street had him starting up in Providence; some said Boston."

"You never caught up with either of them?" asked Mary.

"Nope," said Del. "And we were never able to pick up enough solid evidence to prosecute either of them. People associated with Diaz were too afraid to testify and Santos was a shadow, never showed his hand, left no traces. Hell, I only know what he looks like from a picture we found, of him and what must have been his parents, that we picked up in the hotel where he was staying. It was in front of that hotel that Diaz shot the two guys.

"You know, with the time I spent running everything down, I could probably write a book about it—but then I could probably be sued by Santos for libel and defamation of character."

After two hours of watching the house, Mary and Del saw Joey come out and get into his truck. He backed and turned, came to the end of the drive and turned onto the road, heading in their direction. When Warnecki recognized Mary in the driver's seat of her car, he smiled at her and waved.

Mary gave a half-hearted wave in return and shook her head. "What the hell, Joey," she said to herself. "Why don't you just drive along like a normal person living a normal life in a normal little town full of normal people?"

"Del," she said. "How about we go back to the station, put out some inquiries on the rental car license plate we got from Sophie Trott. If we're lucky, maybe we'll run into Charlie Knowles. If anyone has any history on this Randal Minor character, it would be Charlie."

# Chapter 4

Mary Hartz awoke on Tuesday morning at six o'clock, set up her coffee maker, and went for a run. Returning at seven, she entered her rear door into the kitchen, clicked on the small television on the counter to catch the early news and weather, and fed her cat. She poured a cup of coffee and made herself a bowl of cereal, sat at the kitchen table and listened to the broadcast with half an ear. Her mind, focused on her work since waking, had barely registered the progress of her run. She wore gray sweatpants and sweatshirt that were damp from her exercise and held in the generated heat, but she wasn't paying attention to that discomfort.

The words "breaking news" lifted her attention to the television. There, on the screen, was her sometimes friend Tina Bronki of Channel 26 News, reporting at the scene. A body had been pulled from the waters off Thomaston by a lobsterman and deposited on a wharf in that town. Bronki had evidently beaten the police to the scene, who were only now arriving in two police cars. She was barely two feet from the body which lay on its back, clad in waterlogged, twisted trousers and a torn shirt. The body had been much abused by the sea. Describing the occasion of the discovery of the body, she was a few seconds away from being evicted from the wharf by the police, who were walking quickly from their cars.

"And this reporter," she said, "has recognized the drowned man as Charles Adams of Rock Harbor. How Mr. Adams came to die in these waters we do not know, but his notoriety arising from events of the year past might suggest suspicious circumstances to law enforcement officials and others." She cast a glance to the patrolmen closing in on her cameraman and quickly concluded. "This is Tina Bronki, Channel 26 News."

The feed cut off and Mary sat frozen, mouth agape, spoon poised between bowl and mouth.

"Good god, Tina," she said. "Don't you think the next of kin might be notified before blasting the news and pictures of the corpse over the air?"

She dropped the spoon into her bowl, pushed her chair back, and went to the wall-mounted phone. She punched in the number of the dedicated line to the switchboard and asked to be connected to the first shift commander, Lieutenant Clarkson. Clarkson had been bumped up from Sergeant after Chief Sloan had been killed the year before. (The new chief, Captain Lawrence Waters, was the prior lieutenant.) Reaching him, she asked if he had caught the news of the death.

"No," he said, after a few seconds of silence. "How the hell does Bronki get to the scene before we even hear about it?" Mary had no answer for him.

"Never mind," he said. "I'll connect with the Thomaston police to get confirmation. You get on the road to the wife's place. I'll call you on the way to update you. Hopefully, you can get there before she sees the pictures of his body on the damn t.v."

He paused a moment. "I'm going to sent Datura to the Adams' house. See if you can get permission from the wife for us to get in there without a warrant, then call Datura and tell him. You can meet him there when you're done with the wife."

"Letty," she said, cooly.

"What?"

"His wife's name is Letty, Letitia."

"Whatever," he said. "Get going."

Alejandro Santos spent two hours at the lumber yard, arranging delivery of the first materials needed for his project and picking through the tool racks to equip himself. He bought enough tools to fill the trunk of his car, several hundred dollars' worth of top-of-the-line items, power tools and hand tools. It was a substantial cash outlay for a raw beginner in the building trade.

The bright day full of promise, he carried everything out to the car, intent on getting to work.

A man stood outside the door to a unit in the motel located across the street from the lumber yard. Shading his eyes from the sun, he watched as Santos made three trips from the building supply to load the car. When Santos opened the driver's side door to get in, the man started across the parking area of the motel and jogged across the road. He reached the driver's side of the car just as it began to pull away.

Surprise and alarm showing on his face, Santos stepped on the brakes, the nose of the car beginning to breach the travel lane.

"Hola, Alejandro," said Carlo Diaz, wearing a smile. "I could not believe my eyes, to see you here, in this time and place. Truly, it is a miracle."

Santos blinked and remained silent. His face composed itself and he met Carlo's eyes through the two inch gap of the partially opened window. His feet were on clutch and brake pedal, his right hand on the gear shift knob. Carlo brought himself close to the window, lapping his fingers with the four big rings through the opening.

"We must talk," Carlo said, still smiling, his eyes searching the interior of the car and then returning to those of Santos. "We have much to discuss."

Santos stared back at him and then shook his head. With his left hand, he toggled the window switch, closing the window to trap Carlo's fingers behind the rings. He waited for a car to pass, then looked forward and slowly pulled out into the travel lane. He gradually accelerated to ten miles per hour, forcing Carlo to run alongside, awkwardly, panicked.

"Hey!" Carlo yelled. "Stop! You bitch, I'll kill you!" After twenty running steps he tripped over his tangled feet and fell, tearing loose from the grip of the window and rolling into the opposite lane, where traffic stopped suddenly to avoid running him over.

Carlo's four rings dropped to the floor carpeting next to the car's door and Santos accelerated away, his eyes on the rear view mirror.

Joey met with his lawyer, Daniel Drew, at nine a.m., in that lawyer's office. The small office had space for a desk and chair, two filing cabinets, and a cramped seating area where two upholstered chairs crowded a low, wooden coffee table. The boyish-looking lawyer was dressed neatly in an off-the-rack suit and tie, Joey in his standard work attire.

Drew sipped coffee from a take-out cup. "We're nearly there," he said. "Probate court proceedings have been concluded and are being recorded and filed as we speak. Pay the inheritance taxes and late fees and probate costs and your aunt's house is yours." He finished with a big smile and slapped Joey's knee with his free hand.

Joey flinched and smiled back weakly. "That's great," he said. "Ah, how much do I owe for the taxes and such?" he asked.

"Oh, yeah," said Drew, remembering Joey's financial straits. "It's upwards of twenty thousand dollars. They all, state, county, and federal agencies, were willing to let a lot of things go, but as far as money is concerned, they let nothing go."

"That's a problem," Joey said. "I'm beginning a job that could bring in some good money, but that will take a while. I suppose they want the money right away."

"Soon, yeah." Drew frowned, then brightened. "I'm sure you could get a loan from the bank using the property as security."

"Um, maybe." Joey picked at a hole in the knee of his jeans. "That might work."

"Also," said Drew, concentrating now, "You probably have cause to sue Charles Adams for what he did to you, and you could have a claim against Sloan's estate for the same reasons." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, revealing shirt cuffs that were slightly frayed. "Even the town might be liable for the malfeasance of a town official."

Joey took a deep breath, blowing it out slowly. "I don't know that I could do any of those things," he said. "That's, that's just not part of my world. And I want to be able to live in this town,too. Without creating any more problems."

Drew put his cup down and showed his hands, palms upward, as if to say, "What, then?"

Joey shook off the notions. He grinned and said, "Never mind. I'll figure it out." He stood and extended his hand. "I owe debts in a lot of places, not least to you for your help. I'll pay the money debts, by and by. The other debts, who knows?"

Drew rose to shake his hand and the meeting was concluded.

Carlo Diaz sat on the toilet seat in the bathroom of his motel room, picking out bits of gravel that had become embedded in the skin of his palms. His knuckles were bloody and scraped from the road surface and from having his rings forcibly yanked off. His shirt was ripped to the elbow, exposing more scrapes and his pants were torn at the knees. Looking up at the mirror, he saw the damage to his face, bruises and road rash not obscuring the hatred revealed in his eyes. His gaze moved to the scar through his eyebrow, remembering.

They had attended the same schools together, until Diaz dropped out in his first year of high school to fulfill his destiny on the fringes of society. Their neighborhood in the Bronx was a tough one, one where attaining an education was valued less than establishing a place of power on the street. Diaz opted for the street; Santos would continue to attend school.

While they were in school together, Santos and Diaz were always preeminent in any grouping of their peers. The best athletes, the smartest, the strongest. And there was a competition between them, unspoken but real, for the top spot in the hierarchy of the neighborhood. This competition went unacknowledged by Santos, who seemed to Diaz to feel himself above such petty considerations. It felt to Diaz that Santos thought himself superior in some way, and it chafed him to be disregarded, disrespected.

Truly, Santos went out of his way to separate himself from Diaz. They were selected to be on the same team as twelve year-olds in an organized baseball league. Santos switched teams to avoid partnering with Diaz in team play. He didn't speak to Diaz, would separate himself from any activity at all in which they found themselves together. These affronts caused a hatred to grow in Diaz's heart, a heart already growing hard from the abuse he received at home from his drunken father and the poverty of his circumstances.

The enmity between the two of them came to a head near the end of that year's baseball season, when their two teams vied for the top spot in the league. In the second to last of the games played against each other, Diaz was struck out swinging three times by a slight, lanky young pitcher with a good fastball. After that game, Diaz lay in wait for the young man in the evening dark by the bicycle rack where his bike was chained. He smashed the boy's wrist with a bat, warning what else would happen to him if he told anyone how it had happened. It ended the boy's baseball playing. He never was able to pitch again with that arm, but he did keep his mouth shut.

In the last game, Santos was the starting pitcher. First up against him was Diaz. Santos leveled his gaze on Diaz's eyes, held his eyes for several seconds, the knowledge of what Diaz had done to the young pitcher after the previous game flowing between them. Santos wound up, held his pose for a scant second and hurled the hardball straight to Diaz's head, hitting him below the batting helmet and splitting the skin over his cheekbone, knocking him down and out of the game. Santos was removed from the game and Diaz went to the hospital for stitches.

When Diaz had recovered from his injury, he looked for his chance to get even. He knew that he couldn't best the larger Santos in a fair fight, but a fair fight wasn't a consideration for him. Santos seemed to have a preternatural awareness of the environment around him and never allowed Diaz an opportunity to get behind him.

Two months after the incident, Santos's family moved out of the Bronx and into Queens, where his father got a place with the firemen there. Diaz harbored his hatred of Santos, but never was able to catch up with him. Not then, and not until years later. And now here, again, where he intended to finish it between them.

Mary's meeting with Letty Adams had not brightened her day. Letty had been preparing to go riding when she saw the unsettling news on television. She was wearing her riding togs and sitting alone in her kitchen when Mary came calling. Letty was sad, but calm. Mary was saddened, and growing more angry at Tina Bronki.

Letty politely made coffee for them both and accepted Mary's condolences graciously. She gave the police department carte blanche to investigate the house she no longer lived in. She asked them to lock up when they were done, and to leave the key in its hiding place under the door mat. Mary called Del on his cell phone to tell him where to find it, though he had apparently found it within the first five minutes of his arrival.

Mary reached Charles Adams's house shortly after ten a.m. to find Del in the front room with the television and the bookcases. He was standing quite still in the doorway, studying. "I've been through the house, superficially, once," he said. "This is the only room where disorder exceeds the house's average. Other than here, the place looks like what you might expect from a drunk living alone, with no one to pick up after him."

"So this room deserves a closer look?" Mary said.

"I'd say so," said Del. There's bits of glass and pieces of what must have been a television remote scattered along that side of the room. You'd expect some to be on the recliner there, but except for a small shard of glass on the shoulder of its back, that chair is clear."

He turned to face her. "I lugged your kit out here in the trunk of my car. I didn't bring it in, yet. I was told you have a somewhat, ah, proprietary feeling about your evidence tools."

"Who told you that? Knowles?" She smiled.

"Yeah," he answered. "You know what else he told me?"

"What's that?"

"He said that, when they hired me, they must have been looking for a replacement that looked like him before he got sick. 'Doppleganger' was the word he used."

"Really," she said, surveying his appearance. "Well, there's a definite resemblance. You're a better dresser, though. Your socks match.

"And I am willing to share my tools. Just not with people who don't respect the process. Let's start picking through the pieces here."

They bagged pieces of glass and plastic, testing for fingerprints on pieces large enough to hold a print. Inspecting the golf clubs, Mary's latex glove was sliced open by what seemed to be a sliver of glass embedded in the driver club head. They concluded this to be the agent of destruction in the room, but left the question open as to the why and how of it all. The rest of the house bore no anomalies worthy of note.

A trip to the rocks below the cliff face entailed a drive back down the land form to where they could access the shore at low tide. Picking through the bits of plastic, pieces of frayed rope, and mauled styrofoam lobster buoys, they did find a men's argyle sock, sodden and left behind by a receding tide. They kept this, in case it could be identified by Letty Adams as having belonged to her estranged, late husband. If so, it might suggest the route by which Charles had entered the water.

At about the same time that Mary Hartz got to the Adams house, Joey's tool-laden truck pulled up next to a tan, late-model Ford station wagon parked in the turn-around at Santos's place. The front door to the house was open, a gray cloud of dust drifting out through it into the air outside. The sound of destructive pounding accompanied the dust through the opening.

Inside, he found Santos standing in and surrounded by piles of debris—broken stud framing and wrecked plaster and lath. Santos started at the sound of Joey's footsteps crunching behind him and turned with raised sledge hammer, ready to strike.

"Whoa," said Joey with upraised hands, "it's just me." Joey scanned the destruction. A good portion of the interior walls and ceilings were smashed, seemingly randomly. Some ceiling joists were hanging loosely; wall studs and door jambs were broken out. "You know," he said, "you might want to leave some of the framing, some structural stuff, to hold the house together until the steel goes in. And we could maybe re-use some framing pieces here and there, pull the nails and such."

Santos let the handle of the sledge slide through his hands until the head rested on the floor and examined a fresh blister on his palm. He coughed and waved at the dust in the air around his head. He wore blue jeans and a black tee-shirt, all grayed and streaked with dust. A red bandanna was twisted and tied around his forehead, pirate style. What might have been new work boots were scraped and scarred from kicking at the stud framing.

"And, not to be a pain in the ass or anything, but gloves, safety glasses, and a dust mask might make things more comfortable for you," Joey added.

Santos chuckled, the sound low in his throat. He picked at the loose flap of skin from his blister with his teeth and looked at Joey. "So you say," he said. He shook his head and looked about. "I guess I got carried away.

"You wear that stuff, gloves and all?" he asked.

Joey looked at his own hands, heavily calloused and scarred, with torn nails and ragged cuticles. "I guess I've sort of developed my own set of natural gloves," he said. "I'll wear gloves when it gets too cold to work without them. I'll wear a dust mask for this kind of demo."

Santos hawked up a lump of phlegm and spat it out, raising a plume of dust where it landed.

"You think we might want to move some of your stuff out to a safer environment?" Joey asked, indicating the computer and keyboard on the table nearby, all covered in trash, and the mattress and bedding, all but invisible beneath debris. Santos looked, but did not reply.

"Were you planning to live here while we do this?" Joey asked.

"I really haven't thought about it," Santos said. "I suppose I should move out, for a while."

Joey removed his ball cap and scratched his head. "We're looking at a couple of months, at the very least," he said, "assuming everything goes well. Close the place in, wiring, plumbing, heat—gonna need heat when December rolls around.

"There's a motel opposite the lumber yard," Joey said. "I'll bet they'd give you a better rate for long-term stay."

Santos worked up a tight, little smile. "I don't think I would be comfortable there at this time," he said. "I'll look around, find somewhere suitable."

Joey thought. "Well," he said, "you could bunk at my house for a few days, until you found somewheres."

Santos tilted his head to the side. "Yeah?" he said. He considered the offer. "That would be very generous of you. I may accept, for a very few days, until my situation is resolved."

A deep, rumbling sound brought Santos to a window, where he peered out cautiously. Joey stood in the door opening. A flat-bed truck carrying a large, green dumpster was backing down the driveway. Joey stepped outside to direct it, waving it back and pointing to the side of the drive opposite the dock. A closed fist signaled the driver to stop and the flatbed rose, sliding the dumpster out to rest on its back edge. A slow pull forward of the truck and the rest of the container slid out to fall with a soft thud exactly where it was wanted. Joey signed for the delivery and the driver pulled away.

"Okay," Joey said, "We're good to go." Santos joined him in pulling wheelbarrow, shovels, and brooms from the pickup.

"What happened to your car?" Joey asked.

"It needed some work," Santos said, without hesitation. "I rented this one for a few days."

"Quite a change from the Audi," Joey said.

Santos simply nodded and they went to work inside, Joey offering direction as to methods and priorities.

An afternoon end-of-shift meeting in the conference room at the police station included Mary and Del, Lieutenant Clarkson, and Chief Waters. Mary and Del in plainclothes, Waters in uniform, Clarkson with his uniform jacket off and his sleeves rolled up above the elbows, tie loosened at the throat.

The room was about ten by fifteen feet and had six steel folding chairs set around a plastic laminate-topped table of the sort used for church suppers. The fluorescent lighting in the room was not flattering to human skin and the light that reflected off the green-painted walls did not help in that regard, either.

Chief Waters was writing names on a white-board hung on the wall opposite the door. The names were written to circle about one central word: drugs. The name at the top of the diagram was Sloan and it was connected by lines, left to Charles Adams, right to Edward Bracken. Below Adams was the name Mr. X, and it was connected to that of Randal Minor. The name Alejandro Santos stood alone, with the name Warnecki in parentheses below it. All the names (save Warnecki's) were connected by lines to the central word.

Above and between Adams and Sloan was the name Elwood Trott. It connected to those two and the word in the center. Sophie Trott's name was written below those of Mr. X and Randal Minor. Her name had a dotted line to the central word and the appellation "witness" was appended to her name.

Mary stood and walked around the table. She took the marker from Waters and drew lines from all the other names to that of Warnecki, excepting those of Mr. X and Edward Bracken. She then changed the black pen for a red one and wrote a "d" for deceased before four of the names.

The others in the room regarded the markings she had made and Del spoke up. "I think you should make another change," he said. "Erase "drugs" and write heroin, cocaine, and pot. Stop Santos's line at pot. Everything I know about the guy leads me to believe he never dealt in the harder stuff." Mary looked to Waters, who nodded, and she made the change.

"All right," said Clarkson, "Who the hell is Mr. X? The registration on the car comes back to a rental place in Portland. The credit card used to rent it belongs to a shell company incorporated in Delaware, trustees in St. Kitts. The signature on the rental agreement is illegible and the driver's license used for it is fake. The copy they took of it is a useless smudge."

"The fake license lets us stop him and arrest him as soon as we see the car," said Mary.

Del drummed his fingers on the table. "Do we want to pick him up right away, or do we want to watch him, get him on a drug charge?" he asked.

"Resources. We have one detective and one detective-in-training," said Waters, taking the marker back from Mary and flipping it in his hand. Mary returned to her seat.

"I got in touch with the DEA guy, Stennis, this morning," said Clarkson. "He's interested that Adams's death is a possible homicide. Couple that with the murder of Sloan's brother-in-law a week ago and there are questions to be raised.

"Maybe they'd be interested in Mr. X now, the card used to rent the car suggesting more than small time involvement in the drug business. DEA has lots of resources."

Waters flipped the marker several times. "Okay," he said. "Let me make a call right away to Stennis, see if they want to invest some time up here.

"In the meantime, every officer keeps a lookout for the car. The lieutenant can call up some of the guys for overtime—Sims, LeBeau, ones that can be depended upon to be discreet in their actions. They use their personal vehicles, maybe get a handle on Mr. X without him knowing he's being watched. We'll be keeping an eye on Minor, too, but put our focus on Mr. X since we can't expect him to be sticking around here. If the Feds show an interest in him, we can concentrate on the local guy."

"And if Mr. X makes us?" asked Del.

"Then we take him in at that point. And let's assume he may be dangerous."

Mary raised a hand. "Charlie Knowles spends most of his days walking around town. Let's give him the information on the car and the description that Sophie gave us."

"Good," said Waters. "Now. Do we reach out to Warnecki, find out what he knows about Santos?"

Mary blew out a breath through pursed lips. "That would be me, I guess." All eyes turned to her. "Hey," she said, "we're just friends. We trade foil-back books, have coffee once in a while."

Waters made a calming gesture with his hands. "You're the only one of us that has any contact with him at all. Just run into him, have a casual conversation about his new job."

Mary ran her hands through her short hair. "Sure," she said. "I can do that."

Joey and Santos worked straight through to four in the afternoon, stopping work only to drink water. They emerged from the house into the afternoon sunlight, slapping at their trousers, shaking out their shirts to rid themselves of the plaster dust that clung to them everywhere. Their hair was gray with it, their eyes stung from it, it was caked in the corners of their eyes and dried in the sweat of their bodies.

Joey walked down onto to the dock next to the rowboat, knelt, bent forward, and stuck his head in the water, hands working the grit loose from skin and scalp. Santos followed him, removed his headband, shook it out, and used it as a washrag on his face and arms.

"I think we got enough done for one day," said Santos. "I'm beat."

Joey looked at the boat. "You have oars for that?" he asked.

Santos wrung out his bandanna. "Next to the house."

"Let's take it out for a ride," said Joey. "I got sandwiches in the truck. We bring the water jug, eat out on the water, enjoy what's left of the sun."

Santos looked at him. "You row," he said.

The boat had two rowing stations, two sets of oarlocks. Joey sat in the stern sheets, rowing facing forwards. Santos collapsed in the bow, his weight up front evening out the trim of the little craft, which handled the load without any problem at all.

The tide was full—slack tide. Joey pushed the boat two hundred yards out from the lighthouse and they drifted, the waves small and regular except for the wake from the few boats that passed, returning to harbor.

"This is really pleasant," Joey said, passing a foil-wrapped submarine sandwich forward. "Ham and cheese."

"All I will be able to taste is the dust between my teeth, but thank you," said Santos.

Joey took a bite of his sandwich and spoke around the food in his mouth. "How do you come to be here, in Rock Harbor?"

Santos took a moment to answer. "I had a business that ended a few years ago. I travelled. I went to Santo Domingo, where my mother was from, but there was nothing for me there.

"My grandfather on my father's side was from near here. He was Portuguese, a fisherman. I came here to see this place and found that I liked it. I probably have some distant family around here."

"What kind of business did you have?" asked Joey.

"I had a part ownership in some bars, some restaurants."

"So, are you retired now?"

Santos waggled a hand. "Sort of retired, maybe."

"And you've decided to settle here," said Joey.

"That was my hope," said Santos.

The breeze picked up and the tide began to run. After an hour of drifting, the two men grew chilled and Joey rowed them back.

In the early evening, Mary stopped at a bookstore and bought a paperback book she had been meaning to read. She called Joey's house from her cell phone outside the bookstore. When he answered, she said, "Hey Joey, you busy?"

"Not really," he answered, "just getting some things together to eat."

"Is it okay for me to stop by for a minute? I've got a book to drop off for you you might like."

"Sure," he said, "come on by."

"Be there in a minute."

Santos had followed Joey home after a brief stop at the food market. They blew off their clothing with the air hose from the compressor in Joey's garage and blew the dust from Santos's computer and clothing-filled duffel bag, also. Santos elected to return the bag and the computer to the back of his rental car, removing only the clothing he planned to wear that evening.

They showered in turns, Joey making up the pull-out couch in his front room while Santos cleaned himself up. Their work clothing shared the washing machine in the cellar.

Mary pulled into the driveway and parked behind a station wagon, giving a cursory look at its dim interior as she made her way to the rear of the house. To the left of the garage, she saw Joey and Santos watching as Joey's neighbor Louis spread the glowing coals of a barbecue grill that stood in his back yard. A picnic table with a red-checked plastic table cloth held a tray piled with hamburger patties, buns, condiments, and paper napkins and plates. An opened potato chip bag and four beer bottles were also on the table. A double flood light illuminated the yard from the porch, natural daylight having faded into dusk.

The first to notice her approach was Santos, who tapped Joey on the arm. Joey looked up. "Hey, Mary," he said. "Care for a burger?" Louis looked over his shoulder at her, gave a wave. Santos appraised her cooly, feet apart, arms crossed over his chest, wearing a dark windbreaker.

"Uh, I don't want to intrude," she said, aware of Santos's gaze. She wore jeans and running shoes and a gray, zip-up hoodie.

"It's no problem," said Louis, "We've got plenty." Louis's yellow polo shirt revealed muscular brown arms. His tan chinos bore a knife-edged crease and his feet were bare though the evening was growing cool.

"Sure," said Joey, lifting his beer bottle in display. "Grab a beer from the cooler." Then, remembering his manners, "This is Al Santos, we're working on his house. Al, Mary; Mary, Al." Joey's usual plaid flannel shirt was unbuttoned over a white tee-shirt and his sleeves were rolled up above his elbows.

Santos stepped forward, unfolding his arms and extending his right hand. "Pleased to meet you," he said.

Mary hesitated for a second, and then took the offered hand. It was cool and dry; his grip was firm but gentle. "How do you do?" she said, shaking the hand once and then releasing it.

"I believe I have seen you around town," he said. "This very morning, in fact." A slight, ironic smile accompanied a tilt of his head.

Mary's smile was hesitant before arriving along with her self-confidence. She looked to Louis. "Well, thank you, Mr. Armstrong," she said. "Perhaps I will have a burger, a small one."

Louis nodded his approval and loaded the grill with hamburgers. They hissed on contact with the hot grill. "That's good," he said. "They all the same size. You can cut one in half, if you want. The skinny guy's always ready to eat an extra half.

"Nice to have some female company for a change. Maybe make some of us remember how to behave in polite society." He gave Joey a look that Joey didn't seem to understand. "Why don't you open a beer for the lady, get a proper glass out of the house?"

"No,no. The bottle is fine," she said.

Joey stepped to the cooler and pulled out a dripping bottle, handed it to her. Louis said, without looking away from the grill, "Aren't you going to open that first, Joey?"

Mary laughed and twisted the cap from the bottle, handing the cap to Joey. He frowned in Louis's direction. Mary glanced at Santos. He seemed amused at the interplay between the two other men. His posture was relaxed now, too, his hands at his sides.

The burgers were flipped; cheese slices were applied; buns were split and placed on the grill's upper level to toast. Santos put four plates on the table, folded napkins beside them, and sliced a tomato onto a separate one.

"Want me to do anything, Lou?" Joey asked.

"Y'all can sit down," he replied, loading the burgers onto half-buns on a platter, the tops of the buns piled next to them.

Joey and Santos sat together on the side of the table facing the house. Mary maneuvered to sit opposite Santos as Louis set the platter in the center of them all. Santos met her eyes with a smile. "It's good to have good neighbors," he said.

"Yes, it is," she said, after a moment's hesitation. She looked down at her plate, annoyed with herself at being disconcerted by his easy manner and his direct gaze. Apparently, he had noticed her with Datura following him in the morning. Maybe. Had he recognized Del? The others were helping themselves to hamburgers and chips. She joined in, deciding to have a whole one.

Silence ensued, as each person prepared their meal with their condiments of choice: onion, lettuce, tomato, ketchup, pickles, salt and pepper, etc. The neighborhood was quiet; all about them was darkness. Their circle of lighted yard seemed an isolated world unto itself.

Louis finished chewing what was in his mouth, put his burger down on his plate, and said to Mary, "Guess you must have had a busy day today." Mary nodded, chewing. Louis turned to Santos. "Mary is with the police. Guy in town died today, drowned."

Joey stopped chewing, looked across the table to Louis. "Who?" he said.

Mary wiped her mouth with her napkin. "Charles Adams," she said. "Didn't you hear?"

"No," Joey said. "I've been working all day, haven't heard any news. What happened?" His eyes strained to see Mary's against the light from the floods behind her.

"We don't know," she said. "We think he may have gone into the water behind his house. He was picked out of the water early this morning off Thomaston." She could see that Joey was rattled, the burger in his two hands forgotten, his eyes not finding anything to focus upon.

"Was it an accident?" Santos asked. His voice was low, controlled, his posture still.

Mary turned her attention to him. "We don't know," she said. "It's an open investigation at this point."

He put his elbows on the table, steepled his hands to his chin. "I haven't been here very long, but I have read about the trouble you had here last year. Could this be connected to that business?"

Mary held his eyes, waited several seconds before answering. "We are keeping an open mind. Anything may be possible at this point."

"Oh, man," Joey said. "Edith Sloan's brother last week, Adams today. I don't like to think about this."

Louis pointed a finger at Joey. "None of this has anything to do with you," he said. "You mind your own business, you be all right."

Joey froze for a second, looked at Mary. "What about Letty? Has she heard? How is she?"

Mary's brow lowered. "Oh, yeah, she heard all right. That irresponsible Tina Bronki broadcast his name and a shot of his body on the wharf before the local police could get there and stop her. I'd like to strangle her. Letty saw it on the morning news."

Louis shook his head, rapped the table with his knuckles. "I'm sorry I brought it up," he said. "This's no thing to talk about at the table. Let's talk about something else, eat before everything gets cold."

"You're right," said Mary. "Let's change the subject." She looked at Joey and Santos including them both. "Tell me about your new project."

Joey was too slow to respond, staring at his hands holding the burger. Santos gave him a nudge. "You tell about it," he said. "You're the project boss."

"Huh?" Joey came back to himself. "Oh. Yeah, the job." He put down his food, took a swig from his bottle, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Louis gave a small shake of his head, discretely pushed a napkin to the side of Joey's plate. Joey didn't notice, though Mary and Santos did.

"You should see the drawings for this job," Joey said, brightening. "It's gotta be the best job I've ever had. A complete remodel, new steel to support a big cupola. A new look to the roof, open interior space, all new windows and doors. It'll be like something you'd see in a magazine."

Mary didn't ask for the location. She had an idea that Santos knew that she was aware of it. "Oh, boy," she said. "Sounds like a big project. Sounds expensive,too." She looked at Santos. "You must have a terrific job to afford something that extensive."

He retained a smile. "I am retired from business," he said. "It was my hope to settle here, quietly. The project gives me something productive to occupy myself with." The undercurrents of the exchanges between Mary and Santos were picked up subliminally by Louis, who frowned slightly and sat back.

"What business was that?" asked Mary, pressing on.

"I had an investment in some restaurants and bars," he answered. "Events conspired to cause me to lose interest in that arena. At the end, it proved to be too... unsettling for my constitution. My outlook on life has been changed. Now, my wish is to live simply and comfortably, with good neighbors and to be a good neighbor. If that can be at all possible." He showed her open hands and returned to eating.

They all returned to eating, thinking their separate thoughts, until the food was gone and Louis began to clear the table. Offers to help with the cleaning up were waved off by Louis, who preferred to do things his own way.

Mary thanked Louis for his hospitality, wished a good evening to Joey and Santos, and left.

After she had been gone for a few minutes, Joey said to the empty table, "I thought she was bringing a book for me."

# Chapter 5

Business was slow at the restaurant early on Wednesday morning. Only four customers had as yet arrived. Sunlight flooded the front windows, smells of hot coffee and frying bacon scented the air. The floors were clean, the tables set with napkin holders and salt and pepper shakers were waiting to be filled.

Charlie Knowles was sitting at a corner table at Emily's Rest having a breakfast of coffee and a bagel with cream cheese when he began experiencing a cerebral event. A word in an article in the newspaper he was reading became obscured by a spot. When he moved his eyes, the spot followed the movement. He studied the spot and it grew. It was irregular, dark in the center, and was surrounded by a many-colored corona of scintillating light. By the time five minutes had passed, the phenomenon eclipsed fully a third of his central vision before it stopped growing. It now occupied all of his attention and he looked up. He felt sweat on his brow and his hands were clammy. A chill of anxiety ran from his neck down along his spine. He suspected that he might be having a stroke.

By force of will, he calmed his breathing and sat still, hands flat on the table. He looked straight ahead and began to listen to the sounds around him. A table to his left, two tables away, had the sounds of two men talking. His mind recalled them to be Warnecki and a man he did not recognize. He could hear dishes clattering in the kitchen further to his left. He heard the voice of Emily asking a customer at the counter if he wanted more coffee. He heard the door opening, ringing a bell, and the sound of footsteps leaving the restaurant. He heard the door opening again and the sound of leather soles stopping just inside the entrance and then continuing slowly and deliberately toward his side of the room.

He looked to where the figure should be and felt that the hole in his vision might possibly be abating. If he looked to where the head should be, his peripheral sight could surmise dark shoes below black pants. Looking down told him that the upper half of the man was wearing a black shirt and that the man had black hair. The man approached the table where Warnecki sat with his companion and stopped, letting go a small chuckle. Something in the sound brought Knowles's full attention to him. He could see more of the figure now, but could not see him fully.

A chair scrapped out and the man lifted his right foot atop the seat and leaned forward, resting an elbow on the raised knee. "I knew I would see you again," he said. "The last time we met was unsatisfactory for me. Our conversation was one-sided." There was no answer from the table.

The occluding spot was reduced now to the size of a man's head. In his slowly improving vision, Knowles thought that the man's posture showed something wrong in the fall of the man's shirt over his belt line. In Knowles's experience, it suggested a concealed weapon. Despite his debilitated condition, he eased his chair back, readying himself to move if action became necessary. The instinct to act, ingrained in his psyche and by long years of service to public safety, was not subject to his physical weakness. He waited, listening.

"Who is your new friend?" the man asked. Knowles saw that Warnecki was holding an swaddled infant in his arms, feeding it from a baby bottle. Though he couldn't quite discern his expression, Knowles could feel a tension in Warnecki's stillness. The stranger's voice carried a menace, despite its superficially friendly cadence.

Emily approached the table, pencil and order pad in hand. She wore a blue denim, western-cut shirt and a matching skirt, cut to the top of red cowboy boots. "How's she feeding?" she asked Warnecki. "Taking to the bottle okay?" Warnecki nodded, but didn't speak. Frowning slightly, she looked at Warnecki for a moment and then turned to the newcomer. "Will you be joining us for breakfast this morning?" she asked him.

The man turned his head to her, but kept part of his attention on the two sitting men. "Another new friend," he said. Emily then seemed to feel the tension in the close atmosphere and her normally friendly pose began to stiffen. She took a half-step away from the stranger and glanced to the baby in Warnecki's arms.

"The friends and associates of a man are important," he said, addressing the group as a whole. "They are called upon to support one another, and they often come to share the same fate.

"For instance, Alejandro here and I played baseball together as small children. We were never on the same team, but we should have been, given our shared heritage. He had a mother from the D.R., my father came from there also. We grew up in the same neighborhood, went to the same school. It would only be natural for us to become closer as we matured into men. But this did not happen. We grew apart, even to become rivals. This makes me sad, that two who should be natural allies should grow so far apart."

Doris, though continuously occupied in the kitchen, always kept partial attention on the service area of the restaurant. She was especially attuned to the moods and demeanor of her partner Emily, who was radiating an air of unease. Doris left the grill to fend for itself and made her way through the kitchen doorway and past the counter to stand behind and slightly to Emily's side of the stranger. She was a half-foot taller and fifty pounds heavier than him in her grease-spattered apron over white shirt and black and white-checked cook's pants. She wore heavy, black leather shoes with wide soles.

The man did not look at Doris, looming behind him. "And yet another new friend," he said.

"If you're not here to eat, then I think you should leave," Doris said. Her voice was low and controlled and did not carry far from the group.

The man removed his foot from the chair and stepped back three feet to where he could take in the group. He looked Doris up and down, regarded the others in turn. "A most unnatural alliance," he said. He turned enough to include Knowles in his vision, evaluating his presence, momentarily facing him full on. He seemed to disregard Knowles as a threat.

Knowles full vision was restored to him, but he was too engrossed in what was happening before him to notice. Even his constant headache disappeared from his consciousness. He was recording everything in his mind. The man's hands, bruised and scraped and with scabbed knuckles, extending from the long sleeves of a silk shirt. The scar running from dark eyebrow over the cheekbone, almost eclipsed by fresh cuts and scrapes. A purple bruise on the sharp chin. Red, cupid's-bow lips on a small mouth that barely showed its teeth in speaking. 'Mr. X', Knowles thought.

Warnecki had been holding the bottle too firmly to the baby's mouth. She turned her head and spit out the nipple, gave a small cry. Emily moved to Warnecki's side, plucked the infant from his arms, ignored the baby's bottle which fell to the floor and rolled to the stranger's feet. She turned away and walked briskly into the recesses of the kitchen, holding her child closely to her shoulder. Doris did not move. The stranger idly kicked the bottle away.

Warnecki's expression was of surprise and distress. He rose from the table, pushing his chair back with his legs. His big hands opened and closed at his sides. Santos sat in position, still silent, his face unreadable, his tension revealed only by the tight grip of his hands on the edge of the table. He never moved his eyes from the man.

The stranger backed further away. "We will have an accounting, you and I," he said. "Fate has brought us together again for this reason." He took two more steps backward, then turned and made his way unhurriedly to the door and out.

Doris watched until he was out of sight and then faced Warnecki, hands balled into fists on her hips and a scowl on her face. Santos slumped in his seat, hands over his face. Warnecki stood, fight or flight written all over him, with feet anchored to the floor.

Knowles stood, dropped some bills on the table, and went out of the restaurant without saying anything to anyone. He turned and walked in the same direction as the stranger, wishing that he had his cell phone with him.

An hour later, Knowles sat in the conference room at the police station opposite Lieutenant Clarkson. They were waiting on Chief Waters and Mary and Del to arrive after they were called in by Clarkson. Knowles's nylon windbreaker was zipped to the neck. His face was drawn and pale, his thinning hair uncombed.

"How you been feeling, Charlie?" asked Clarkson. "You been getting any better?" Clarkson, with his sleeves rolled up and his tie at half-mast looked as though he had already been working a full day. Perhaps he had never left the station from his shift the day before.

Knowles waved away the questions. "I'm the same," he said. "I'm just getting old faster than everybody else. Don't worry about it."

Mary, Del, and Waters arrived together, Mary and Del in neat plainclothes, Waters out of uniform in dark green corduroy pants and a blue pullover sweater, white running shoes. Mary took a seat beside Knowles and patted him on the arm. He gave her a nod. Waters sat himself at the end of the table, folding his hands before him.

"Your meeting," Waters said, nodding to Clarkson.

"Okay," he said. "Charlie here witnessed an event at the breakfast joint, Emily's, like I told you on the phone. It's our guy, Mr. X. Charlie followed him to his car and got the license plate. I'll let him tell you the whole thing." He opened a palm in Knowles's direction, sat back, and folded his arms over his chest.

Knowles related the events at the restaurant with clarity and precision, leaving out only his own problems with his vision. He described the man's features and his manner, down to the scrapes on his knuckles and the scar over his cheekbone. And the almost certainty that the man was carrying a gun.

"What happened after you followed him from Emily's?" asked Mary.

"He went to his car parked half a block before the place and sat in it, watching the entrance. I walked up past him, got the license number, and continued on up the street another half a block. I know he saw me walk by him, but I didn't look at him. I thought he wouldn't react to me, because he didn't pay any mind to me in the restaurant. But I screwed up. I should have gone around the block to catch him from a different direction, but I crossed the street and came back too close on the other side. He must have caught me in his rear view mirror. He pulled out and drove away. I waited around until Warnecki and the other guy came out, less than a minute later, and then gave it another couple of minutes to see if the guy came around the block again. He didn't, so I came right here."

"So," Mary said, "maybe they got away without Mr. X following them."

Datura was chewing on a hangnail, looking at the table before him. "Was the guy wearing a lot of rings?"

"No rings, but he had a few chains, one with a gold cross."

"And the scar. It was on his left cheekbone?"

"Yeah, that's what I said." There was a hint of annoyance in Knowles's answer.

Datura put up two palms in protest. "I'm not doubting that you saw what you saw," he said. "It's just that I'm putting a few things together in my head that shouldn't be. At least, they shouldn't fit together here, hundreds of miles out in the sticks."

"What do you mean?" asked Waters. "Like what?"

Datura drummed his fingers on the table. "It's obvious that Santos and this guy have a history. And they have an animus that goes beyond a casual dislike. Frankly, I only know of one guy that fits that physical description and has that kind of history with Santos. Man, oh man, I wish I could get a look at him." He went on to relay the story that he had told Mary the day before, with disclaimers that his evidence was not actionable. And he put forward the name of Carlo Diaz.

"If this is the same person, the coincidence of all the characters, including you, being brought together in this small town is close to unbelievable," said Waters.

Datura shrugged. "What can I say? You're absolutely right."

"Coincidence," Mary said. "When you add in the brutal murder of Sloan's brother-in-law and a connection to mucho weight of heroin, it becomes slightly less unbelievable."

The five people in the room sat together in silence for a minute. Then, Clarkson leaned forward and spoke, "Does this Diaz have a rap sheet? A booking photo?"

"He's got an extensive juvie record. The scar shows up on a photo in it. I got a peek at his record, under the table, since those are supposed to be sealed. He was a violent offender from his early teens, quick to hurt, likes to hurt people.

"There was also a picture from a security camera at a club, few years ago. It was taken at night time, kind of blurry, you can just get things like his height and body type. Other than those, he's almost as much of a ghost as Santos."

"Do you think you could get that juvie picture, to show Charlie?" asked Clarkson.

Del waggled his head, blew out a breath. "I don't know. Maybe. I still got contacts. Since nine-eleven the old-timers are more willing to bend the rules just a little bit, if it's in a good cause.

"Problem is, you got to ask for those kinds of things in person. Nobody's going to help you over the phone, somebody maybe listening in."

"I don't think we're going to be able to spare you the time to travel down to the city," said Waters. "There's too much happening here, too fast." He looked around the table. Everyone seemed to be in agreement with his assessment.

Knowles kept quiet. Unless he was asked a question or for a comment, he wasn't going to put his nose in. He wasn't part of the process any longer. He shuffled to his feet, rising with a wince as a stab of pain hit him behind the eyes. "I'm gonna go," he said. "I'll keep my eyes open." He left without saying goodbye to anyone, shutting the door behind him while four sets of eyes tracked his progress. The people that remained in that room knew that thanks and handshakes would not be appreciated by Knowles.

The silence grew in the small room as the three people who had known Charlie Knowles as an imposing bull on the streets considered his rapid deterioration. To talk aloud about him now would be to speak of him in the past tense and they wouldn't do that, not yet.

Waters was the one who had to bring the others back together. "We have a good description and a possible name. We know what he's driving and we know he seems to have more business in town, at least with Santos. We need to keep Santos in view now, too, further reducing our pool of resources.

"Stennis hasn't gotten back to me yet. We're not going to be able to count on anyone coming to our rescue here."

"Double shifts, as long as we can maintain them," said Clarkson. "Eyes on the streets."

Waters blew out a breath. "I'll put in time on the road, too, as much as I can spare." He looked at Clarkson. "You barely need me here to run the place, anyway." He smiled at Clarkson who did not return his smile, merely pulling himself away from the table to get back to work. The others followed.

"I'm sorry," Santos said. "I have dragged my problems behind me like a corpse on a chain. The responsibility is mine for the trouble that has come here." He was stripping the sheets from the fold-out couch in Joey's front living room. His duffle bag was packed and laying on the floor alongside. Joey sat in an overstuffed armchair in the corner of the room, head hanging, forearms on his knees, hands hanging limply. He did not reply.

At he restaurant, Doris had scolded him for bringing distress to Emily. She said she could not tolerate him giving her any anxiety. He would have to stay away from the restaurant unless and until he could guarantee the return of safety and peace. After her stern censure, his immediate impulse was to flee, to walk the streets until totally exhausted, but Santos held on to his arm in the doorway, insisting that he wait until Santos had seen Diaz's car passing by out of sight going south. Then, he instructed Joey to drive his truck out of town, to go north several miles, to take many turns and make sure that he wasn't being followed. He should then return home by an indirect route, put his truck in the driveway and wait for Santos to meet him there.

Two hours afterwards, Santos parked a dark, Ford sedan behind the truck in the driveway. He found Joey in his kitchen, staring at the red blinking light of his answering machine. The blinking light indicated several unheard messages. Joey looked up at Santos's entrance and pushed the button on the machine to hear the messages. There were six from Tina Bronki asking him to call her. He erased them in turn, not listening beyond her introduction. The last message was from Mary Hartz telling him to contact her or the Lieutenant at the police station at the earliest possible moment. He erased that message, also, before following Santos into the living room where he was packing up.

"I will be leaving tonight, if you can allow me to remain here until darkness. Hopefully, any problems will disappear with me," Santos continued.

Joey raised his head. "Where will you go?"

Santos shook his head, pulled the pillow from its case. "I don't know, far from here."

"What about your house? You're going to leave it like that?" The prospect of losing the opportunity to work on such an interesting project was only now entering Joey's calculus.

Santos sighed. "I have no choice. You don't know how much I will regret the loss of this dream." He stopped straightening the couch for a moment. "I realize it is a loss to you, also. I will compensate you for your time and for your effort."

"Ah, shit." With a flap of his hand, Joey waved away his own funk and regret. "Forget about it. You've got more problems than I do. I'll be okay."

At the sound of a passing car, Santos peered out at the street around the edge of a lace curtain hanging over the front window. "No. I am not poor. It isn't a for lack of money that I have to abandon my house. I will send you some money."

Joey dismissed that subject. "I don't understand what happened. Who was that guy? What's his problem with you?"

Santos sat himself down on the now re-folded couch. "His name is Carlo Diaz. He has been a torment to me and to many others for many years. It is because of him that I left my business and have been traveling for three years. He is a very violent man, a monster."

"Couldn't you get help from the police? Couldn't they arrest him?"

"No. I couldn't ask the police for help. Some of my business was... other than strictly legal. It was in this area that I became vulnerable to Diaz's methods of... taking what he wanted for himself." Santos faced Joey squarely, making no apology for his unwillingness to reveal all.

"When you say 'other than legal', what do you mean?" asked Joey.

"I think of it as a gray area," said Santos. "You don't need to know the details and, anyway, that's all in the past. It's not who I am now."

Joey screwed his face up in confusion. "This Diaz said his problem with you was because you wouldn't be his friend."

"You cannot be friends with a monster," Santos said. "You cannot say anything to a monster. He hears only what pleases him, not what you say. You cannot reason with him. It's best to reveal nothing to him, nothing of what you want, nothing of what you do, nothing of who you are. The monster takes and twists and then destroys all."

Joey's mouth dropped open. "You make him sound like something out of Grimm's fairy tales, ogres and goblins, things that don't exist in the real world. He's just a man, isn't he?"

Santos couldn't smile at the comparison. "He's as close to a real monster as anything you have ever seen. You had a touch with evil last year. I know you came close to being killed. But the men who tried to hurt you then were simply greedy, venal men who wanted money and, perhaps, the power it could bring—I can't say. Diaz wants that and more. He takes pleasure in the suffering of others. He hurts people because he enjoys to cause pain. And there is no sane way to deal with him."

"So you have to keep running," Joey said. "There's no other way to stop him."

"There is no way to stop him other than killing him. It may be simply fear of the consequences, but it isn't in me to kill. The thought had occurred to me. More than once."

Joey was not comfortable with talk of killing. He changed the subject. "How did he find you up here?"

Now Santos could put on a wry smile. "Maybe it was fate, as he said." He shook his head. "No, but perhaps he was able somehow to track me, though I don't see how. I have been very careful. This place is very different than where he should feel comfortable. There is nowhere to hide in a town so small that everyone knows your business. I cannot think that he would feel safe here. Perhaps he has grown so confident in himself that he thinks he cannot be hurt. Yes, I think he would feel that way after many years of being feared.

"It may also be coincidence, which would be a stretch to consider. I saw his mark on a bindle in the park on Sunday."

"What's a bindle?" asked Joey.

"It's a little bag for drugs. This one came to be under my foot, by a bench next to the playground. His mark is of the eye of a goat with a tear dropping from the corner of the eye. It is a trademark of his vanity. He must be supplying drugs to someone around here."

Joey was hearing of things he had no wish to know. They swirled around in his head and cycled through again. His knees began to bounce his feet on the floor. He stood. "I'm getting antsy," he said. "I need to walk, drain off some energy. How about you?"

Santos looked at his watch. It was not yet noon. "I don't feel comfortable going out on the street now and you shouldn't, either.

"No, no," said Joey. We'll hop the fence in the backyard, go into the park, walk up the mountain."

"Even there, people may see us. We shouldn't take the chance." Santos was still sitting, watching Joey pace the room. The energy in the room was growing, seeking an outlet.

"The park's closed on weekdays after Labor Day. There's a chain across the gate. No one's going to be in there. Come on." Joey broke free and headed for his back door. Santos followed, thinking to watch for trouble before they stumbled into it.

They hopped the wire farm fence separating the neighborhood from Frenchman's Hill State Park and hiked the mountain, taking trails that wound a convoluted route around it. They stayed away from the fenced-in area that enclosed the property holding the house at the top of the mountain and didn't make their way back to Joey's house until four hours had past.

Mary and Del stopped at Joey's house three times in those four hours. The first time they stopped, Del waited out front while Mary took it upon herself to enter the house through the rear door when she had received no response to her knock. She felt that Joey knew her well enough not to mind if she intruded. The fact that the door was not locked caused her to frown when the house was found to be empty of people. She left the duffel bag in the living room alone. For her to go through it would be unacceptable. She looked at the car behind Joey's truck. Though it was a different vehicle than the one Santos had been using before, it bore a sticker from the same rental agency.

The next two times they stopped, she knocked and then left when there was no response. She did notice that Joe Soucup was keeping an eye on things through the windows of his house next door.

The fourth time they drove by, they did not stop. The Channel 26 News van was parked on the street and old Joe was out in front haranguing Tina Bronki. Mary couldn't hear what he was telling her, but knew that whatever it was, Tina wouldn't be able to use it on television. Del had to ask her what was so amusing about the confrontation. Mary explained about old Joe as best she could, but said Del really had to experience him at first hand to really understand.

Joey built a pile of sandwiches upon their return. The work boots they had been wearing in anticipation of a day of work were lined up at the rear entrance to air out. Santos had fresh blisters from hiking in footwear that hadn't had time to become broken in. Though fit, he was tired from keeping pace with Joey on the up and down terrain of the mountain. The walk had burned off accumulated stress and anxiety and left them with clear heads. There hadn't been much conversation along the trail and there was little now.

When the sandwiches were stacked on the kitchen table and accompanied by full glasses of water, they sat down opposite each other under the kitchen window. Two bites into the meal, Louis rapped twice at the rear door and entered the kitchen. Mouth full, Joey waved and indicated for him to take the third chair at the table. Louis walked to it, but didn't sit, instead choosing to stand behind it with his hands holding the top rail of the wooden chair.

"Got a strange call," he said. "Crazy Joe next door said the police came by several times and the television news van came by, too."

Joey stopped chewing. The relative peace he had obtained through exercise evaporated. "I'm not sure what they'd want with me," he said.

"Not sure, or you don't know?" said Louis. "What ever it is, it can't be bad enough that I have to get calls from that crazy bastard... is it?"

Santos addressed Joey. "It is likely that they have heard something of the disturbance at the restaurant this morning. Perhaps they got a complaint from the owners."

"What disturbance?" asked Louis.

Joey reluctantly put down his sandwich. "Could be. Or, the fellow at the other table. He was a policeman, retired now. It can't be bad that the police are interested in Diaz, can it?"

"Diaz who? Who's Diaz?" asked Louis.

"I was hoping to just leave town," said Santos. "Perhaps do something to tell Diaz that I have gone, draw him away from you all."

"Hey!" demanded Louis. "Tell me what's going on. What all are you talking about?" He was leaning over the chair, intruding on the space over the table.

"There was a guy named Diaz at Emily's this morning," said Joey. "He made some threats against Al, maybe against everybody there, I'm not sure. But it felt like it, anyways. Al says the guy is a very bad person."

Louis pulled out the chair and sat, hands on his thighs. "This isn't trouble left over from last year, is it? Does it have anything to do with Adams being drowned?" Joey gave Santos a questioning look.

"If the drowning wasn't an accident, then it is not unlikely that Diaz had a hand in it," said Santos.

"Why would this Diaz guy be here at all?" Louis asked Santos.

"I couldn't say," said Santos.

"Couldn't or won't?" said Louis. He got a cool look from Santos.

"Hey, Lou," said Joey, "Al's okay. You don't need to worry about him."

Louis looked from Santos to Joey. "Not to criticize," he began, "but frankly, Joey, you haven't shown yourself to be the best judge of character. You need to wise up."

"Lou, let's settle down. Let's just take a little time to..." There came a knock at the front door.

Santos slid from his seat and passed through the dining area and into the front room to look out the window. "It's the police. Mary Hartz and one other," he said.

Joey and Louis were craning their necks to look through the doorway to the front. "You should let them in," Joey said.

Santos opened the front door and Mary and Datura entered. "We're in the kitchen," Santos said. Mary led the way, Datura inviting Santos to go ahead of him with a sweep of his arm. After a good look at Datura, Santos followed Mary.

The kitchen seemed somewhat crowded with the five adults. Joey stood. Louis moved to stand next to him. Datura remained in the doorway, with Santos standing between him and Mary. Mary wore a blue linen pants suit over a white blouse, Datura a gray, variegated tweed sports coat on a white shirt, no tie, and gray trousers. Louis in neat, casual attire, Joey and Santos in work clothing, still slightly damp from their walk.

Mary spoke. "Mr. Santos, Mr. Armstrong, Joey, this is my partner, Detective Datura." Joey and Louis nodded to the detective. Santos merely acknowledged him by looking at him and Datura did the same in return. "We have a few questions, if you don't mind," she said.

"I got a few questions, myself," said Louis, "if you don't mind." His hands were in his pant's pocket, jiggling change.

Mary address him. "Mr. Armstrong, we need to speak with Joey and Mr. Santos. I'm sure Joey will fill you in later. Right now we would like to speak to them alone. If you wouldn't mind. Sir."

Louis opened his mouth to reply and Joey lifted a hand. "It's all right, Lou," he said. "I'll catch up with you in a little while." After a few seconds of glaring, Louis went out through the back, muttering about constitutional rights.

With Louis gone, the kitchen didn't feel much larger. Mary suggested they sit at the dining table in the next room. They did so, Mary sitting opposite the double windows, Santos to her right, Datura to her left, Joey across the table. Through the sheer curtains, she saw Joe Soucup in the window of his house next door, keeping track of them.

Though Datura was very aware of Santos watching him, he took in his surroundings. To his right a doorway revealed a bathroom across a narrow hallway. The wall next to the doorway held a tall china cabinet with glass doors. It was filled with plates and decorative pieces, vases and glassware. A buffet table abutted the wall separating dining area from kitchen. He knew from Mary that a bullet hole lay beneath the picture that hung over it.

The front room had a couch under double windows, an entrance alcove to the right. The couch was flanked by two round tea tables. Two upholstered chairs were placed kitty-corner to the couch.

The living and dining areas were separated only by purpose and the fact that each had a large, multicolored, circular braided rug to define the spaces.

All of the wooden pieces were of dark walnut. There were a lot of lacy or knitted things to cover tabletops and the arms and backs of chairs. All in all, it was not a typical bachelor's pad.

He felt the surface of the table before him. It was smooth and polished, seemed barely used. "You made me the first day, didn't you?" he asked, addressing Santos without looking at him.

Santos waited until Datura looked up to meet his eyes before nodding, once. Datura smiled while the others looked back and forth at the two. "I was chasing after you for a long time, not knowing who you were, and you knew all along who I was, didn't you?" Santos nodded again, slowly, and a wry smile touched his lips.

Datura kept at it. "It was a game for you, too, wasn't it?" Santos pursed his mouth in a way that suggested a shrug. "I know you're not going to come right out and say anything, admit anything, but I know what was going on. I just couldn't do anything about it." He paused. "Pissed me off, too."

Joey tapped the table. "Could you tell me what you're talking about?"

Datura looked at him, pointed to Santos. "Your buddy and I were involved in a big game of hide and seek in the city, up until three years ago, when he left the playing field and vanished, until just this week."

"I still don't know what you're talking about," Joey said.

"Alejandro Thelonius Santos sold pot—a lot of pot—and I was a cop who tried to catch him. He got away clean, no warrants, no nothing, until this morning when his past walked up to him and stared him in the face. And what is he going to do about that, I wonder." Datura left his hands flat on the table and met Santos's gaze.

Santos spoke for the first time. "I am going to leave. I am going to leave my house and this town and go far away from here." His voice was calm and held a trace of regret.

Mary looked down at her hands, open on the tabletop. They were average hands, she thought. Capable hands, not too soft, not too strong. Del's hands, she saw, had blunt fingers, evenly trimmed nails, freckled backs. Santos's hands were darker, elegant—piano player's hands. Joey had the hands of a basketball player, or would have had, were they not so rough and beat up. His hands were the strongest at the table, she thought. His knuckles were large and the veins and tendons on the backs were prominent. She imagined them with arthritis in thirty years.

Enough, she thought. "Carlo Diaz. We believe him to be bringing heroin into the town. We'd like to talk to him about any connection he might have had to Charles Adams. And we know he has a hostile intent toward you, Mr. Santos. In fact, you may well be a priority for him here."

"When I leave, that priority leaves with me. If you can connect him to the selling of heroin, more power to you," Santos said.

"I would love to take Diaz down," Datura said. "It would almost make up for not catching you."

"You have my blessing," Santos said. "I will not stand in your way."

"How about helping us," said Datura.

Santos chuckled. "Bait," he said.

Datura shrugged. "I guess there's no better name for it... but we would protect you."

"Protect me."

"Yes, protect you. If you help us draw him out into the open we can get him and put him away for a long time." Datura went still, his body leaning forward toward Santos.

Santos shook his head. "If you could pick him up, you might be able to charge him with some small things, even put him in jail for a short time. But he will be very hard for you to find.

"Diaz does not come out into the open. He does his work in the dark. Even now I am sure he has changed the place where he sleeps, changed his vehicle. He is aware of you before you are aware of him. And, forgive me if I say this, but he is smarter than you."

Mary flushed. "We have the entire force in the town looking for him and we're not as stupid as you may think."

Santos held up a hand. "Forgive me. No, you are not stupid. But you operate with rules. You have procedures that must be followed, procedures that are known and can be predicted. The police are the police. They say, 'Stop! Put down the gun!' Diaz will not put down his gun; he will shoot before you can say the words you are required to say.

"Diaz has no rules at all and he knows how the police will act. Right now he is watching the police. If you have been looking for him, he knows it."

"We can get him," said Datura, "with your help."

"You have not gotten him after years of effort already, even with him laying a trail of blood behind him like a highway painted red.

"I know him. I dream of him at night and he is in my thoughts every day. I know him better than his mother knew him. I know that he has his drug dealers out watching for me, so that he may follow. I know that he has found my house, found it in the property records of the county. He may know this house already, may know that you are here, now.

"The best thing is for me to draw him away from you, let your town not know any more bloodshed. I will leave a trail for him to follow and then vanish from under his nose." Santos slumped back in his chair, drained.

Silence held the room. Del leaned back in his seat, folded his arms across his chest. Joey stared at the table top. Mary took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "What happens next, here," she said. The others turned their attention to her. "If you leave here tonight, I mean. What is Diaz likely to do to find out where you've gone? Will he try to extract information from Joey or other people you've had dealings with here? He made threats, or at least made what might sound like threats, to Doris and Emily at the restaurant, right?"

Santos looked at the others in turn, ran his hands over his hair and then placed them flat on the table. "Yes," he said, "Diaz will surely come to Joey for information. Perhaps others, if he thinks they may know something of my whereabouts."

Joey opened his mouth to say something, paused, addressed the opposite wall. "He can't bother Doris and Emily."

Santos looked at Joey and then at Datura. "I will stay for you to try to capture the beast. You set up your stakeout and I will be your staked goat."

Del nodded once, slowly.

As twilight deepened, Carlo Diaz sat in his rented car in a parking lot one mile north of the center of Rock Harbor. A supermarket anchored one end of the retail space and a discount clothing store the other. Sandwiched between the two were smaller shops—a dollar store, a paperback-book shop, a video rental store, a small hardware and paint supply store, and a launderette. Parked in the middle of a row of cars to the rear of the three acre lot, his car was not notable amongst the fifty or so other vehicles.

He made a call on his mobile phone and waited quietly for an hour until two cars arrived, driving slowly around the lot until they saw his and parked in the row behind him. The three drivers got out to confer for a minute and keys were exchanged. Diaz removed a small soft-sided suitcase from the trunk of his rental and transferred it to a brown, three-year old Toyota sedan and drove away from the lot as night fell completely.

He drove south slowly toward the town and made a left turn onto Wharf Street, traveling its length for a hundred yards to the sand and shell parking area of the commercial docks. Randal Minor's red pickup truck was parked there along with three other trucks. Minor's stood out like a new coin from the other trucks, dented and rust-streaked work vehicles that they were. Diaz parked apart from the others, backing alongside a row of weather-beaten and leaning fisherman's storage shacks of gray, unpainted wood. He turned off the ignition and waited for a few minutes, accessing the area for activity and the presence of people.

The docks were quiet. Four seventy-foot fingers spaced well apart from one another extended perpendicularly from a floating dock that paralleled the shore below a granite seawall which was connected to the shore by a wooden-decked ramp that allowed the docks to rise and fall with the tide. A lone metal lamp stood on a pole at the head of the ramp and provided just enough illumination for a person to navigate down to the docks. A dozen fishing boats stood offshore on moorings.

Diaz exited his vehicle and stood by it, scanning the shoreline. Behind him rose the brick backsides of the two and three-story buildings that occupied the commercial district on the seaward side of Main Street. They were dark shadows in the night, vaguely outlined by the light from streetlights beyond and none showed any light of occupation. The sky was clear, the air was cool, about forty degrees, and still. Diaz zipped up the black nylon jacket he was wearing.

To his left, the lobster pond was dark, closed down indefinitely by pollution seeping from the defunct cannery beyond where industrial chemicals had been illicitly stored by the now late duo of Charles Adams and ex-Chief of Police Harry Sloan. The fishermen of Rock Harbor now brought their catch elsewhere.

To his right, the yacht club marina a hundred yards further along the shore held a few sail and motor vessels. One sailboat was lit from within and faint voices carried across the still water to him, but no figures were active outside the hull. Halyards clinked faintly against metal masts in syncopated time.

Before him, a dozen small row boats lined the docks, bobbing slightly on the barely ruffled water of the harbor. Three lobster boats were tied up alongside the docks, two showing no light, one showing two lit portholes forward of the wheelhouse above them. Diaz recognized this boat as Randal Minor's. He walked from the lot to the ramp and down to the dock and out the leftmost finger to the end. There, Minor's boat, about 35 feet in length overall, was tied bow and stern to the left side of the dock, pointed outwards to the sea as though ready to head into the harbor and away.

The wheelhouse was amidship, open to the rear and starboard. Though the white-painted topsides were scuffed and stained, the work deck behind the wheelhouse contained no work equipment, no lines or lobster pots, bait barrels or boxes for catch. A half-dozen crushed beer cans shared the space with fast-food wrappers and other trash. An aluminum lawn chair with frayed webbing sat alone. A radio playing country music could be heard tinnily from within.

Diaz stepped onto the rail and down onto the deck, rocking the craft. To the left of the wheel, a four-foot tall hatchway provided entry to below decks. Diaz opened this and peered within. A shallow dome lamp on the ceiling provided a soft light. Minor lay slumped against the cabin wall on a v-berth forward, feet in work-boots, untied, on the opposite berth amidst scattered articles of unwashed clothing. He was beginning to come awake, likely from the unexpected rocking of his boat. He rubbed his face, a cigarette that had burned down to his fingers falling to his lap as he did so.

"You better make sure that cigarette is out before you burn a hole in your pants," Diaz said. Minor jerked fully awake, mouth open and eyes wide in surprise at the appearance of a visitor. Minor appeared to be wearing the same clothing he had been wearing at Molly's when they had last met.

Diaz grinned. "I feel like I've been in this scene before, or one very like it, just the other day," he added. Diaz stepped down into the cabin. The space was about ten feet long and perhaps seven feet wide at the entry, narrowing forward in a curve to the chain locker. He could almost stand upright in the space; an inch more of headroom and his hair would just brush the ceiling between the deck beams. To his left was a small two-burner cookstove on a cabinet, to his right a matching cabinet held a minuscule sink. A small w.c. stood next to the sink cabinet, its lid open and smelling of urine. Trash of the same sort as that on the work deck littered the floor. He turned off the transistor radio that sat on the sink cabinet.

Diaz shook his head. "I don't understand how people can live like this, in this filth and stink." Crouching a bit, he moved forward to sit next to Minor, brushing aside a rumpled sleeping bag and checking the cushion beneath for dirt before he sat. He slipped off his shoes and put his feet up on the opposite berth, folding his hands in his lap, his movements slow and relaxed.

Minor had not yet said a word. Diaz addressed the opposite wall. "I'm going to spend the night here with you, if you don't mind," he said. "I shall be leaving here in the morning and my previous place is no longer suitable." He turned his head to Minor. "Is it okay with you for me to stay here?"

Minor's voice was cautious. "Ah... sure," he said. "No problem." He attempted a smile that didn't quite take hold. "I wasn't expecting company, but sure, mi casa es su casa."

Diaz nodded and returned his gaze to the opposite wall again. "I was thinking about what you said, about perhaps leaving the area for a while until the situation here becomes comfortable again. I have decided you may be right. We should both of us leave. You can get in touch with me in a month or two and we can decide together how to go forward. Does this sound like a good plan to you?"

Minor let out a breath that he seemed to have been holding for a while. "Oh yeah," he said. "Sounds like a good plan."

"Well, it is settled then," Diaz said. "Do you have any proceeds from our business to give me before we separate?"

Minor pulled his feet from the berth cushion onto the floor and leaned forward. "Yeah, yeah. If you could move you feet? So I can get it?" Diaz put his feet on the floor and Minor lifted the berth decking to reach in.

Diaz said, "And do you have any product left on hand?"

Minor paused, his hand still reaching into the storage area beneath the berth. "Yeah," he said. "A little, maybe five or six bindles. You want that,too?"

Diaz looked upwards, considering, shook his head. "No. It's best if I am not holding at this time."

"You want I should sell it, send you the cash?" Minor's hand still in the compartment.

Diaz pursed his lips, frowned. "No," he said, giving a light pat to Minor's leg, which twitched in reflex. "You do what you please with it, keep the proceeds as a parting compensation. I hope you do not use all of it on yourself, though."

"Oh, no, like I said before, I'm just chipping once in a while," Minor said, retrieving a cigar box from the compartment. Placing the box on his lap, he lifted the lid a removed a loose stack of bills—singles, tens, and twenties—handed them to Diaz, and closed the lid again.

When the lid had been open, Diaz had noted the presence of a dozen or more bindles with the goat's eye and teardrop amid a scattering of plastic-wrapped syringes. He counted the money slowly. It amounted to four hundred and ten dollars. Toting figures in his head, it seemed that Randal Minor had been more than chipping. It appeared that Randal had a full-blown habit. He said nothing, folded the money and slipped it into the side pocket of his jacket.

He put his stocking-clad feet back up on the other berth, folded his hands in his lap again and regarded them. "It may seem to you that I am unnecessarily severe at times, but you should understand that is only about business. On a personal level, I am not that way. I am loyal and fair to those who return my loyalty." He paused. "If it is true that we are not exactly friends, I hope you can regard me as someone in whom you may have confidence as to my loyalty."

Minor gripped the box in his two hands, shrugged. "Of course," he said. As silence seemed to build and fill the small space of the cabin, the question on his mind rose to the surface and left his lips before he could consider the advisability of speaking it. "Is it because Adams fell in the water and drowned that you're going away?" He felt a hot flush of regret rise to his throat at his rash question. Whether or not Diaz was acting friendly towards him at the moment, he knew that caution and deliberation was always the way to interact with the man sitting beside him. An ill-defined air of menace seemed always to glow below the surface of the man.

"A tragedy, yes," said Diaz. "And unfortunate for me, since I never was able to confront the man as to the whereabouts of my goods. There is no longer any point to me remaining here and my continued presence can only be to my detriment. You are entirely correct.

"But remember, we will return, you and I, assuming that conditions for business improve. So take care in your activities, stay out of the attentions of the authorities, yes?"

Minor bobbed his head up and down. He wasn't going to ask any other questions. He hadn't had a hit for eight hours and the presence of Diaz sitting right beside him added to his desire to alter his state of mind and being with a bit of what was so close to hand in the box. But he would have to become a great deal more desperate than he presently was to potentially antagonize the man beside him by asking if he could indulge his own desire for self-medication.

Diaz was completely aware of Minor's present condition. "Listen," he said. "I can sense your discomfort, with my showing up here so unexpectedly. Please, relax." He again patted Minor on the knee and Minor's leg again twitched.

"I am thinking that you may be feeling the need of the narcotic to relax." At this, Minor opened his mouth to protest, but Diaz put a finger to Minor's lip. "It's okay," he said. "I understand. In fact..." he began, reaching into the left pocket of his jacket, "since I am here and you are here and you are in a position to give me the benefit of your experience, perhaps you might sample a new product for me and judge its value and marketability." He withdrew an ordinary white paper envelope from his pocket, of the type one might use to mail a letter or pay a due bill. It was folded in half. He unfolded it, lifted the flap, and held it open with two hands before Minor's eyes.

Minor looked within it and could see that it contained a small amount of white powder nestled in one corner, perhaps a quarter of a teaspoon. "What,ah... what is it?" he asked, his focus narrowing now upon the powder, a powder possibly like that which had become for him the perfect solution to any problem, question, or discontent.

Diaz moved the envelope away from Minor and looked inside it himself, tapping the corner that held the powder, making it jump and settle again. "It is supposed to be similar to what you have been getting and it is from the same people, so I assume it is of comparable quality. A person I know tasted a tiny bit of it and thought it was satisfactory, but you might be a better judge for me. Would you give it a taste?"

Randal shrugged. "Sure," he said. "Glad to help."

Diaz withdrew a folding knife clipped to his pant pocket and flicked it open with his thumb. Holding the envelope by the corner holding the powder, he neatly sliced off the corner, now a triangle about one inch on a side. He squeezed it open between thumb and forefinger and held it before Randal. Randal wet his little finger and touched it to the powder and tasted it. He moved his tongue around in his mouth and concentrated, looking up at the ceiling as though he were tasting and judging a fine wine. "Seems fine," he said, and shrugged again.

Diaz nodded in approval and carefully folded over the open end of the triangle twice, sealing what remained. He made a move to return it to his jacket pocket and Minor put a hand up. "You know," he said, "just tasting it like that won't tell you much. If you really want to test it, you know, maybe I should hit just a bit of it." He shrugged yet again, not really caring much.

"Maybe you don't want to be carrying it, anyway, I mean. And there's no sense just throwing it away, dumping it in the sink." He chuckled. "Be kind of a waste, to my way of thinking."

Diaz turned the folded corner in his hands, considering. He smiled. "Okay," he said. "Since my being here has disturbed you somewhat, perhaps I owe it to you to let you become less tense." He held up a finger. "But," he said "after this night you really must try to stop using the drug. I need you to be sober and smart when next we begin business again." He closed the knife and put it away.

Randal contemplated the box on his lap. "I know," he said. "It's just that I've been under some pressure lately. What with the heat increasing and all. I'm gonna get straight, soon as I get out of here to where nobody's watching me." He caressed the lid of the box with the palm of a hand.

Looking to Diaz for his implied consent, he opened the lid of the box and removed a sealed new syringe and needle, a disposable butane lighter, a pair of scissors, a two-foot length of brown, surgical rubber tubing, and a tablespoon, bent into the shape of a small dipper and scorched black on the bottom. He tore open the packaging with his teeth, assembled the works, and set them on top of the box lid on his lap. He fished the burned down cigarette butt from a fold of his pants at his lap and snipped a quarter-inch from the filter, placing it next to the spoon.

He held the spoon up before Diaz, who unfolded the magic triangle and tapped its contents into the spoon. "Let me hold that for you," said Diaz, taking the spoon from Randal.

Randal picked up a plastic, sports-drink bottle from the floor. It was half-full of a green liquid. With reverence, he tipped a teaspoon of the liquid into the spoon. To Diaz's quizzical glance, he explained, "It's got electrolytes and B-vitamins." The two men were now half turned to each other, two knees touching.

He flicked the lighter on and held it beneath the spoon, moving it in small circles to heat the vessel evenly until small bubbles started to form in the solution. A smell of burnt sugar and citrus arose from the spoon. While the liquid cooled, he rolled up the right sleeve of his flannel shirt to his bicep and knotted the surgical tubing above his elbow, pulling the knot tight with his other hand and his teeth. Clenching his fist, the veins rose on the inside of his elbow. "Good veins," he said. His arm and hand were yet well muscled, though he hadn't been working the boat for some time.

He carefully fitted the filter bit over the aperture of the needle and placed it in the solution, waiting a moment for the filter to soak and then drawing the plunger, filling the syringe with all the available liquid. Upending the syringe he expelled excess air from it until a single drop of liquid appeared. His movements were like those of a priest enacting a sacred ritual.

He clenched his fist and located a clear place on a prominent vein on the inside of his elbow. Tiny scabs and scars indicated where the vein had been previously punctured. The sharp, new needle entered easily and professionally and he drew the plunger back enough for a small amount of blood to enter and swirl with the clear contents. Depressing the plunger, he allowed a fifth of its contents to enter his bloodstream and paused.

In fifteen seconds, his mouth opened and his head tipped back. "Whoa," he drawled, "That's... that's some shit." His hand on the syringe relaxed and Diaz was now holding his wrist with his right hand.

"Is it very strong?" Diaz asked. Minor blinked several times and nodded slowly. "Perhaps I should take it from your arm if it is too strong." Minor nodded, his eyes closing. Diaz wrapped his left hand around the barrel of the syringe and depressed the plunger slowly, all the way in, with his thumb. "Oops," he said.

Randal, his jaw sagging, opened his eyes half-way and turned his face to Diaz with an unspoken question. "It's seems to be about eighty percent fentanyl," Diaz answered. "Very strong. Too strong, I guess. You need prompt medical attention, I fear. Otherwise, your respiration may become depressed and your heart slow beyond what is required to support your life." While he was speaking, Diaz held on to Minor's wrist and removed the needle, placing it on the opposite berth.

Minor slumped sideways, away from Diaz, his mouth slack, eyes struggling to stay open. The cigar box fell from his lap to the floor, spilling its contents. Diaz watched quietly for five minutes and Minor vomited without reacting to the process, the mess dripping from the side of his mouth to the cushion under his head. After another five minutes his breathing ceased and his bowels relieved themselves, adding to the funk already present in the closed cabin.

Diaz moved to the entryway and opened the door. He stuck his head out, listening, and emerged onto the open deck, taking great breaths of fresh, cool air. After purging his lungs of the miasmic air of the cabin and surveying his surroundings carefully, he returned to the cabin, leaving the hatchway open behind him. Picking up the syringe, he wiped it with a tee-shirt from among those on the berth and tossed it next to the body. He cleared a space for himself and sat on the berth opposite the still form of Randal Minor and covered his own legs and torso with the sleeping bag. Then he leaned back against the cabin wall, clicked off the overhead light, and awaited the dawning of a new day.

# Chapter 6

Joey was awake an hour before the dawn, troubled in his mind and without a plan. He got out of bed, went into the bathroom, peed, washed his face, and brushed his teeth by the low illumination of the bathroom night-light without consciousness of what he was doing and without looking once into the mirror over the sink to regard himself. He shuffled into the kitchen in his pajama bottoms and wearing the tee-shirt he had been wearing since the morning before. Without turning on a light, he crossed the kitchen to the window over the sink and looked out into space that was barely brighter than the inside of the house. A sound from his right, from the living room, reminded him that he wasn't alone in the house.

Santos appeared in the kitchen doorway, buckling his pants. His sleeveless, white tee-shirt glowed softly in the pre-dawn shadow. He moved beside Joey at the window, put a hand on his shoulder. "Sorry," he said. He slid his hand off Joey's shoulder.

Joey nodded, distracted. "Nothing you could do," he said. "Question is, what can we do."

"We have to wait for the detectives, the police, to set up their plan," said Santos. "I think they will want me to be visible, out in the open, to snag Diaz when he approaches me." He sighed. "I have to say, I don't have a great deal of confidence that they will be successful. But, we will do what must be done and hope for the best, yes?" He ended on a falsely optimistic note and a half smile that Joey couldn't appreciate in the darkness.

"Well, I suppose we could start the day with come coffee and toast, anyway," said Joey, reaching for the light switch on the wall beside the sink. Santos stopped his hand. "Perhaps we should not have a light on," he said. "Better to be cautious."

Joey reached instead for the carafe of the coffee maker and filled it at the faucet, put a paper filter in the coffee maker and dumped in an unmeasured quantity of coffee from a can on the counter. The little switch on the machine glowed red when he clicked it on.

As the coffee maker gurgled and perked, the light outside the window was gradually brightening until Santos thought he could see a pale visage pressed close to the window in the house next door, just twenty feet away. "I think I see a face in the window across the way," he said. Joey took his eyes away from the red light of the coffee maker and leaned over the sink close to the window. He squinted to see. "That's old Joe," he said. "Joe keeps track of things."

"Unusual," Santos said, "for a man to be so observant so early in the morning. More like a cat than a human."

"Joe doesn't sleep much," Joey said. He paused. "Oh... I take him to the grocery store on Wednesdays. Missed it yesterday, with everything going on. He's pissed off. He'll be over to bitch at me."

The time reached seven o'clock and the wall phone next to the door to the dining room rang. The two men looked at it until the answering machine clicked on and Mary Hartz's voice was heard telling Joey to pick up. "Hey," he said into the handset.

"Joey," she said. "How're you doing?"

"Okay," he said. "Just got up."

"Listen," she said. "We've got things in motion. We've got a car down the street from you and a guy in the park behind your place keeping an eye on the neighborhood. They're staying out of sight, but you should be secure at your house."

"That's good, I suppose," he said.

"Do you have plans for the day?" she asked. "What about Santos? What's he doing?"

"Haven't thought of anything yet. Waiting on you guys to come up with something."

"Good, good. Best you stay right where you are for now until we have everything sorted out, okay?" She sounded confident.

"Yeah, alright. We'll wait to hear from you. Bye." And he hung up.

Joey was removing toast from the toaster when a thumping came from the back door. He opened the door to the back hall and saw Joe Soucup standing outside. He unlocked the back door to let him in. Joe opened the door for himself and stood in the open doorway. "Your door was locked," Joe said. He rattled the door handle to demonstrate. "It's never locked. Why is it locked? There's a cop in a car up the street and cop a couple of hundred feet out back of your house in the field. What are they doing there? Who's that guy?" The last question referred to Santos, who had come to stand behind Joey at the kitchen door.

"Come on in, Joe," Joey said, turning and heading back into the kitchen. "Have some coffee." Joe shut the outside door harder than was necessary and rattled the handle again. He followed Joey into the kitchen, shut the door behind him and snapped on the light switch on the wall next to the door. Joey flinched a bit and looked at Santos who shrugged and sat at the table, taking a piece of toast from a plate and buttering it. Joey sat opposite him, took a piece of toast for himself and waited out the storm.

Joe stood at the door, glaring at Joey and Santos in turn. A few wisps of white hair stuck up from his head over gray eyes set deep in their sockets. Hearing aids rested atop his ears, the earpieces sprung out to the sides of his head. An eagle's beak of a nose lent authority to his pale face and a jutting, thin jaw overhung a long, thin neck with a prominent adam's apple. None of the many lines on his face appeared to be smile lines. He wore a gray, quilted nylon overcoat that hung below his waist. Much of the stitching of the quilting was missing or hanging loose and polyester filling leaked from tears in the coat's fabric.

Santos regarded him cooly, but not disrespectfully. "Not a cat," he said. "Maybe a hawk, the way he spotted our discrete police presence."

Old Joe unzipped his coat to reveal a stained, once-white undershirt and brown trousers that hung long in the crotch and puddled about open-toed carpet slippers. "What are you saying?" he asked, fitting the earpieces where they should go with a squeal of feedback until they were seated properly. "What the hell happened yesterday? I thought we had an appointment."

He was interrupted by the door opening behind him and hitting him in the back. He stepped away enough for Louis to enter and squeeze by him. Louis passed by Joe without a greeting and stood by the door to the dining room, hands on his hips, looking at the two men sitting at the table. He was neatly dressed for the day in a blue, button-down oxford shirt, ironed khaki trousers, and cordovan penny loafers. Joey gave him a nod to acknowledge his presence, looked back at the uneaten toast in his hand and said, "Have some coffee if you like, Lou."

Old Joe and Louis started asking questions at the same time, talking over each other, wanting to know what was going on, what was wrong, why this and why that. Joey held up a hand. "Stop, guys," he said. "I'm not in the mood for questions."

His two morning visitors were taken aback. They weren't used to seeing Joey so out of sorts. Their usually happy-go-lucky, everything-is-just-fine neighbor had disappeared, to become someone else, someone with cares on his mind.

"Sorry, Joey," Louis offered. He got a mug from a cupboard and poured himself a cup of coffee. "But if you could tell me what's happening, I would appreciate it. If I can help with something, you know..." Joey remained silent. Old Joe stood by the door, motionless.

Santos looked at Joey, then at the other two men. "I have brought some old trouble behind me to this town. Joey has been affected by it simply by associating with me, by agreeing to work on my house. The police are aware of this trouble and are moving to extract us from it. It is my hope that the problems will be resolved within a day or two and then I will leave and trouble will disappear with me."

"Al," Joey said. "I'm not blaming you for what's happening. And if it were just you and me that were being affected, I could deal with it. But that guy threatened Doris and Emily and even the baby. All I care about is that they're kept safe and unharmed. And I will do anything to make it so."

Sofie Trott had arisen at six a.m., made breakfast for herself and her two kids—a boy of seven and a girl, five—got them dressed and was out the door by seven to drop the children off at school. She had a lot on her mind. She had an eight o'clock appointment to view an apartment that would allow her kids to each have a bedroom of their own. If she could nail that down, it would be the final step in getting full, unsupervised custody of her children from the state. They were in a foster home until recently, but her present lodgings, a small, one-bedroom trailer in Bierkan Park were not suitable for the long term.

Also on her mind was the fact that two of her clients at the rehab clinic where she worked had disappeared the week earlier and then had shown up at Mid-Coast Regional Hospital the night before, having overdosed on heroin and been taken by ambulance to that facility.

She left her children at the school, walking them to the door where they joined a raucous crew of other elementary school kids after receiving a final hug and kiss goodbye. On her way to see the apartment, she detoured for a minute to drive down to the commercial docks where she noted Randal Minor's boat and bright red pickup truck.

The apartment was on First Street, not far from Warnecki's house on Fourth Street. It was a two-bedroom place on the second floor above an elderly couple who didn't mind having children living above them. It needed some paint and more cleaning, but it would suit her just fine. She would sleep on a fold-out couch in the living room and the kids would each have their own bedroom. Best of all, the price was within her range. A month's rent in advance, a month for the security deposit, and a month on the back end. She left feeling better about her day and for her kid's future.

The day was warming, the sky was clear. She had three hours free for herself before she had to pick up the little one, who attended school for a half day. The seven-year-old boy was in school until the afternoon. She had an evening shift at the clinic; a baby sitter was lined up to watch the kids. She planned to work the day shift when they were moved in to the new place. Money would be tight, but wasn't that always the way? Life would be good.

The only fly in her ointment was Randal Minor. She put him behind the fact of her clients' recidivism. She had the time; she drove back down to the commercial docks and parked where she could observe both the truck and the boat. Minor's boat was the only one not out working. He was probably sleeping after a night out spreading poison around. She'd like to drag him out on deck and dump him over the side, turn him into fish food.

A passing trawler, returning to its mooring after days and nights of meaningful work, trailed a wake behind it, rocking Minor's boat. As his boat rocked and thumped against the dock, she saw the hatchway door in the wheelhouse swing open. She expected to see Minor crawl out, but the next wave partially shut the door and no one emerged. She sat in her aging car in the parking area and waited for a half-hour, gradually growing more incensed with him. Her impatience overflowed and she got out of her car, slammed the car door shut and strode down the gangway to the docks. Her long, graying hair swept behind her on the shoulders of her gray, hooded sweatshirt. Her thin figure in blue jeans and white tennis shoes thumped along the leftmost finger of the docks until she reached Minor's boat.

She stepped up onto the boat's rail to give it a rock and jumped back down to the dock. "Hey, Minor," she yelled. "Get your dumb ass out here." There was no response from within; the hatchway remained partially open. No light showed in the cabin. "The police are onto you. You'd better get out of town and get lost." No response. He was probably nodded out down there. In a drugged stupor. Best case, he o.d.ed and the town would be done with him. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

She stepped back up onto the rail and jumped down onto the deck. She crouched down by the hatchway and peered within. There was enough light through the portholes that she could see him half-lying on the left berth, feet on the cabin sole. The small of feces, vomit, and sundry stale odors wafted to her nose. She waited by the opening until her reluctance to enter the foul space was overcome by her essential humanitarian nature and she entered, slowly.

She approached him, stepping over his legs and sitting on the opposite berth. She could see the vomit, pooled in his slack, open mouth and drooled onto the cushion by his head. Nothing for it but to attempt C.P.R. She stuck her fingers into his mouth, dragging out what vomitus she could. She cleared his airway, pulled his jaw down and leaned into him to breath for him. But, before making contact with her mouth to his, she noticed the temperature of his skin was too cool for a recent overdose. She recognized his death. He had been gone for several hours. She was familiar with death; she'd seen it before.

She gave him a moment of final acknowledgement before wiping her hands off on a piece of clothing beside her. She would go to the police department building to report his death. She'd walk and leave her car where it was. It was a few blocks; she could get her head together on the way, clear her lungs. Deal with some of her guilt for wishing him dead.

Charlie Knowles was walking down Main Street. He'd been to Emily's Rest, had a cup of coffee but no breakfast. He didn't want to eat much these days, his hunger seemed to have vanished with each pound he lost, as though his body was feeding upon itself. His right hand was in a pant pocket, wrapped around an orange plastic vial. It contained twenty capsules and the prescription label read: Take one (1) every six (6) to eight (8) hours as needed, not to exceed four (4) times in a twenty-four (24) hour period. If he didn't hold on to the vial, he could hear it rattle as he walked.

He'd been walking about town, watching for any sign of Diaz. It wasn't like he had anything else to do, anyways. He wasn't going to hang around home, watching stupid television and letting the demons of his decline occupy his thoughts. Better to be at least somewhat useful.

He wasn't really watching where he was going when he nearly knocked down a pedestrian who was walking quickly and not really watching where she was going, either. It took a second for him to recognize the woman with the long hair and tears on her cheeks, but he stopped and held on to her arm before she slipped past him. "Sophie," he said. "You okay?"

She stopped, smeared the tears from her face with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. She knew Knowles well, having had dealings with him in a past life. "I'm headed to the police," she said. "Randal Minor's dead on his boat. I just found him."

Five people sat around the table in the conference room at the police department. In addition to the Chief and Clarkson, and Mary and Del, DEA Agent Roy Stennis was present. Tall, solidly built, Stennis wore wire-frame glasses and had short brown hair. His navy blue suit was pressed and his solid-color red tie was tight against the collar of his white shirt. He could have been taken for a business executive or a sales rep from a pharmaceutical company. He would never have passed as an undercover narcotics agent, which is why he had never undertaken such a role in his twenty-plus years with the agency.

"Edward Bracken was under suspension for the nine months preceding his death," he said. "He had custodial access to controlled substances that were marked for high-temperature incineration at a facility in the southwestern U.S.

"When it was determined that the heroin that turned up here last year had the same chemical signature as a quantity supposed to be in our possession, an investigation revealed that the stocks in our inventory had been adulterated, cut by upwards of seventy-five percent. Bracken and two other men came under suspicion, due to their access. Bracken being the brother-in-law of your past chief was of particular concern. Then, when his finances and lifestyle were examined, they proved to be beyond what one might expect from an agent of his grade and longevity. He was under unpaid suspension while charges were being considered."

"Seems like a long, slow process," said Mary, "given the fact that a year has almost past since all that happened."

"Yes, well, we are a federal bureaucracy," Stennis replied, with a wry smile. "And concrete evidence was slim and not entirely definitive. Enough to push him out, not necessarily enough to convict in a court of law."

"Could you tie him at all to Carlo Diaz?" Mary asked.

"Gossip and rumors, that's all," he answered. "We've been interested in Diaz for quite a while. When he moved away from New York, we lost sight of him. His slash and burn methods of operation began popping up in the Providence, Rhode Island and Boston area in the past several months, so we've been looking for him there. Mostly more gossip and rumors, but credible, none the less. If he's in this area, we'd really like to grab him up."

Clarkson tossed a small, translucent envelope on the table. It spun to a rest before Stennis at the opposite end. "Have you seen this before?" he asked.

Stennis looked at the goat's eye and teardrop logo and nodded. "This could be connected to Diaz's operations. It's his mark. Why it would end up here, I don't understand. No offense, but mid-coast Maine can't be considered a very profitable hub of operations for a mover like Diaz."

Waters, quiet until now, added his reflections. "We're thinking he may have been drawn here to pick up on the track of the missing drugs. Maybe they were originally his, or maybe it was just an adventitious operation. Whatever his reasons for being here, we'd like him gone."

"I don't blame you," said Stennis. "He's one of the most vicious operators I've come across in my years of experience. In a business that has very few rules, he recognizes no rule at all. A modicum of trust is needed to do business, even in the drug world. But even there, he is considered an outlaw."

A knock on the door preceded the appearance of a uniformed patrol officer. "Excuse me for interrupting," he said. With a nod to Waters, he addressed Clarkson. "Something's happened. A woman just came in, says she found a guy dead on his boat down at the docks."

"Do we know who it is?" asked Clarkson.

"Says his name's Randal Minor. Says he's been dead for a while."

"Oh, gees," said Mary. She turned to Stennis. "Minor's a guy we've been watching, lately. Small dealer, maybe. Probably." She looked to the lieutenant.

"You and Del, better check it out," Clarkson said. To the officer standing at the doorway, he said, "Get an ambulance down there. Maybe he only looks dead. And bring the woman up here after Mary and Del talk to her."

The bell over the door to Ort's barbershop rang to announce a new customer. Ort was snoozing in his barber's chair on a slow business morning. Maddy, dressed in pink capri pants and a yellow blouse buttoned just to the limits of decency expected in this small community, was sweeping up around her chair from her last client. She directed an automatic smile at the man dressed all in black who was entering the shop. Her smile faltered as she took in the scrapes and bruises on his face and hands. He gave her a smile and an appraising look in return. "Can you give me a trim?" he asked.

Ort woke to the bell. "My turn," he said. "Sit right here and I'll fix you up." He heaved his large frame from the chair and gave it a few slaps with a towel to indicate its readiness. "Seat's still warm, for your comfort."

Diaz continued to look at Maddy, willing her to pre-empt Ort's offer, but she turned her head away and stooped to brush her sweepings into a dust pan, leaving Ort as the only option. She was uneasy with his direct stare. Something about his demeanor didn't smell right to her. In fact, as he passed by her, she picked up a slight, unpleasant physical odor from his clothing. She looked at Ort as the man settled into the chair. Ort was clearly not picking up on any subtle cues given off by the stranger.

"Looks like you got a little scraped up," Ort said, draping the man with a striped gray apron. "Been brawling on the street?" Ort chuckled at his own humor.

"A small accident," Diaz replied. "Hurt my vanity more than anything else."

"Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, and a striving after wind," quoted Ort. "That's in the book." The man didn't smile at what was clearly intended to be a witticism. Ort tried again: "How about 'Pride goeth before a fall'?" No response; the man was tracking Maddy's reflection in the shop's mirrors. Ort shrugged, no skin off his nose if the guy didn't have a sense of humor. "Okay then, just a trim, no pleasantries." He took up scissors and comb and began desultorily snipping at a few stray hairs on a head that didn't need a haircut.

"I'm here in town to meet up with a couple of friends," Diaz said. "Perhaps you know them."

"Well," Ort said, pleased to finally get some dialog going. "If they get their haircut in town, chances are they come here, this being the only barbershop. Unless they're women, of course, in which case they probably go to the hair salon down the road."

"No, they are men," Diaz said.

Maddy's antennae were up. She wouldn't care to meet up with this fellow, and didn't suppose she knew people who would. Her mother said that she was an instant judge of character; said she should have become a psychologist, not a hair stylist. She found a spot behind Ort where the man couldn't track her in the mirrors or catch her eyes and where she could discretely fasten up two buttons on her blouse.

"One man is named Santos, Al Santos," Diaz said.

"Oh," said Ort. "He sat in that chair right over there this past Saturday. Flirted shamelessly with Maddy, got his hair cut. Very handsome man, right Maddy?" Ort snipped the air to punctuate his words.

Maddy moved to where she hoped she could catch Ort's eye, give him a signal, a head shake to head him off. Ort didn't react to her, but the stranger did. He watched her closely in the mirror, his gaze an unspoken but clearly received constraint. She bent her head and coughed in her fist.

"Bought the old Stedler place, down the road just past the lighthouse," Ort continued. "I set him up with Joey Warnecki, help him to rehabilitate the place." He paused. "Don't suppose I'll receive my commission on the deal, though." A few more snips to the air and Ort swiveled the chair to appraise his work. Five minutes of minor cutting was all he could put into the effort without ruining what was a neatly trimmed head of hair to start with.

Ort put his scissors down on a folded towel on the counter and dropped the comb in a jar of blue disinfectant liquid. Maddy folded her arms and paced behind the chair, wishing the man were gone and away so she could rip Ort a new one.

Ort dispensed a small amount of warm lather from a chrome machine on the counter and applied it to the defined edges of the man's haircut. He took up his straight razor, gave it a few careful swipes on the leather strop. "I'm not going to shave by your right ear, there. Don't want to disturb the healing of that scrape." He cast a glance Maddy's way, frowned slightly at her unusual lack of comradely behavior. "Some people accuse me of being dangerous with this thing." She didn't look at him, merely walked away through the curtain that hung in the doorway to that back room. Ort watched her leave, shrugged. "Must not be feeling well," he said, under his breath.

"I have a razor like that one," Diaz said. "Mine is of German steel, an antique, with a mother-of-pearl handle. I enjoy the feel of it, the idea of it."

Ort carefully removed the stubble from the man's neck, leaving a clearly delineated line on the skin. "Dangerous tool in the hands of an amateur," he said.

"That is true," Diaz admitted. "I'm quite good with it, though."

Mary and Del drove down to the docks after speaking with Sophie Trott and sending her upstairs to the conference room to further flesh out her account of what she had witnessed. An ambulance was parked next to the ramp leading down to the docks and two white-uniformed EMTs were standing with Charlie Knowles on the dock next to Minor's boat. The relaxed posture of the three men talking together seemed to indicate that no medical emergency was in progress. Mary and Del each took a metal-sided case from the trunk of their unmarked Crown Vic sedan and carried them down to the boat's side.

With a nod to Knowles, Del addressed the two EMTs. "What do we got here?"

"Adult male, definitely deceased, likely a drug overdose judging from the paraphernalia at hand," said the taller of the two men, a beefy fellow with short-cropped blond hair and a ruddy complexion. The slighter, darker-complected man beside him nodded his agreement. They both had leather sheaths attached to their belts containing scissors and hemostats. The taller man had a stethoscope folded up and stuffed in his shirt pocket.

"Any idea of how long he's been gone?" asked Del.

The first EMT shrugged. "He's pretty cooled down, blood's begun to settle with lividity, but I couldn't really say. Medical examiner will have to give you his take on it, he's on his way. Just saying, from what I've seen in the past, likely happened last night, not too late. Don't quote me or tell anyone I stuck in my two cents."

Del nodded his assent, looked to Mary. "Shall we take a look?"

She nodded, looked to Knowles. "How'd you end up here, Charlie?"

Knowles looked past her to the boat. "Ran into Sophie Trott on her way to the station. Thought I'd come down here to watch over it until you guys showed up. Haven't taken a look or stepped on the boat."

"Thanks, Charlie," she said, placing her hand on his shoulder for a moment. She noted the lack of substance in his once substantial frame. She set her case down on the dock, opened it and removed a flashlight, a camera, and two pairs of blue nitrile gloves, one pair of which she gave to Del.

"Looks like it's going to be pretty tight in there," she said. "Let's go one at a time, ladies first."

Del pursed his lips, nodded in agreement, and set his case down beside hers. He looked about the docks. A few men—fishermen, judging by their rubber boots and rubberized bib overalls—were gathered at the foot of the ramp, drawn by the presence of the authorities. "I'll talk to a few of these guys, see if any of them know anything." He put his hands in his pants pockets and casually walked toward the men to ask his questions.

Knowles and the EMTs watched Mary snap on her gloves and step onto the quiet boat. Crouching at the open hatchway, she directed the beam of her flashlight onto the still form of Randal Minor and then around the cabin area. Initial survey complete, she took several flash photos from the entrance before stepping down into the disorder of the tight quarters. She stepped carefully to avoid treading on potential evidence and tried to ignore the olfactory distractions of the scene. She took several pictures, the flashes from her camera seeming to imprint the images on her brain as much as on the memory card of her digital device. She wouldn't remove anything until her partner had an opportunity to see everything in situ for himself. She noted the vomit, the surgical tubing tied about Minor's arm, the cigar box with its contents spilled about the cabin sole, and the emptied syringe lying beside the still form. The last pictures she took were of the scattering of small envelopes imprinted with red eyes, like a many-eyed Argus Panoptes visiting in Rock Harbor.

Mary emerged from the fetid atmosphere of the cabin grateful for the cool, fresh air available on the outside. She felt that the stink of the cabin had permeated her clothing and her lungs. She took several deep breaths and slapped at her clothing to rid herself of the bad air and stepped up onto the dock. She snapped off her gloves, turning them inside-out in the process, and stuffed them inside a side pocket of her windbreaker. Del had rejoined the other three men. "Your turn," she said. "Hold your breath in there." He took the flashlight from her and went onto the boat, scanning the littered deck before entering the cabin itself.

Knowles stood with his hands in his pants pockets, not speaking, but questioning Mary with his eyes. She blew out a breath, said, "Looks like an o.d., yeah. Fair number of tracks on his arm, seems like an experienced user. Maybe just got a hot shot, I don't know." She addressed Knowles directly. "Did you know him from your time here?"

Knowles nodded. "Ran into him a few times. Had to talk to him once in a while about partying too heartily, drinking and making noise in public. Seemed like an average kid, maybe a bit on the loud side, maybe lazier than most when it came to working his boat. Never knew about him using junk, though."

The EMTs stood listening. "Will you guys stay here until the examiner pronounces him, take him to the hospital?" Mary asked. She would have to wait for the medical examiner to do his job before sifting through the mess on the boat or removing anything.

The taller one answered. "We'll stay, yeah, unless we get an emergency call, in which case we'll have to come back."

Mary nodded her thanks and moved with Knowles to the foot of the dock where they could speak more privately. "We were just starting to watch this guy," she said, "and now he turns up dead. Two unattended deaths in Rock Harbor in less than a week. If someone were to speculate a possible connection to Edward Bracken's death, it would be enough to make the hairs on my neck stand up."

Knowles looked at his shoes, his thinning hair wafting in the light breeze that had sprung up from the harbor. "Does seem to be starting to look like more than coincidental," he said. Scintillating flashes of light had begun to appear again in the periphery of his vision. He focused on his shoes, anchoring his consciousness to something solid, hoping he wouldn't fall down and embarrass himself in front of other people.

Mary stepped away from him a foot, sensing some discomfort in him. "You mind if I toss some thoughts to you, see what you think? Maybe if I can think aloud a bit, I can figure out what plan of action to pursue, get my head right." Knowles nodded, listening, still staring at his shoes, black and substantial with heavy soles anchoring him to the wooden dock that floated on cold water six feet above the harbor mud.

She recited the facts and incidents of the past week as she knew them, ordering them in her brain, rocking slightly as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other: Warnecki and Santos getting together; Charles Adams drowning, the oddness of the mess in his house; Sophie Trott seeing Minor and Diaz together; Mary and Del visiting with Joey and Santos and where the investigation now stood.

The two considered all she had said, letting the tethered rowboats bump against the docks and bear witness to their thoughts. The noon sun fell on their shoulders, a pleasant contrast to the freshening breeze off the water. Knowles looked up, his vision nearly restored. It was nice, discussing a police matter with Mary. It made him feel almost alive, almost useful. He looked about the harbor. Boats were moving on the water trailing seagulls like disorderly kites. Fishermen talked together on the shore side, watching and waiting for access to their boats. Traffic sounds from Main Street a block away reached faintly to the water.

"Okay," he said. "You got a watch on Warnecki and Santos; you're looking for this Diaz guy. Are you watching the Stedler place, see if Diaz sniffs it out?"

Mary shook her head. "Not as yet. We have the word out for any inquiries as to property records for Santos. No calls yet, so no static observation there. We were thinking it would be better for now to be mobile. Six cars are looking for Diaz, assuming he's still around."

"I got nothing much to do. Maybe I'll spend some of my valuable time near there," Knowles said. He directed his attention to Minor's boat, where Del was just now climbing onto the dock. "This thing on the boat, if it turns out to be hinky..."

Mary looked from Knowles to Del. "Yeah, that would add a whole new dimension to the situation, wouldn't it?"

Joey watched the second hand on the clock on the wall as it traveled to line up with the other hands—twelve noon, straight up. He's explained all he could to his two older neighbors and was tired of answering their questions. He wasn't hungry, either, in spite of having had only a piece of dry toast and a single cup of coffee. Louis was sitting at the table with Joey and Al. Old Joe was wandering about the house, looking out windows, shuffling in his carpet slippers and still wearing his coat.

"Do you really think this guy is a threat to your friends at the restaurant?" Louis asked.

"If you saw him, his manner, the way he looked at them, you wouldn't just brush it off," Joey said.

Louis looked at Santos. "What do you think?"

Al lifted an eyebrow, let out a breath. "It's not to be disregarded out of hand," he said. "The possibility is slim, as long as I am available to him. If I were to disappear, he would use anyone he thought could help him find me again."

Joey pushed his chair back from the table and stood. "I gotta move," he said. "Think I'll take a walk." He left the room and went into his bedroom. Louis and Al could hear a door open and hangers rattling on a clothes pole. He returned wearing a blue denim jacket over his tee-shirt and dropped a pair of high work boots on the floor next to his chair. He sat and began putting on the boots, tying off the laces below where the hooks began above the eyelets.

"We should wait here until we hear from the police," Santos said.

"Been waiting five hours already," Joey answered. "I gotta get out. You stay, wait for the call." He bounced his feet on the floor.

"Joey," said Louis. "Remember the last time you took off without thinking. Stop for a minute, think about it."

Joey halted, put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. After several seconds, he looked up. "All right," he said, "how about this? Al and me will take my truck over to the place, pick up the tools, lock up, come back here. The cop up the street can follow us over. I'll tell him what we're doing." Joey spread his arms. "No problem."

Louis just shook his head. Old Joe had come back into the kitchen. "Better then sittin' here doin' nothin'," he said. He pointed a bony finger at Louis. "You and me can watch this place. I'll go out and tell that cop in the back where they went." He pointed again. "You can go home and polish your pistol. Heh, heh. Polish your pistol; good one. Maybe make some sandwiches for us for when they come back."

Louis refused to acknowledge him with a glance. "You can go to hell," he said.

"I'm just tryin' to help," Joe said, stretching his arms out wide. "Besides, ain't this guy supposed to be out where he can be seen? We're just acceleratin' matters. Get things back to normal sooner."

"You just want someone to take you to the grocery store," Louis said.

Joey stood before Joe could answer the insult to his integrity. "Stop," he said. "Al, you gonna come with me?"

Santos shrugged, stood. "Let me get my shoes and a jacket," he said.

Joey and Al left in the truck and left the two retirees behind, who did not remain long in the house together. Driving up the road, Joey stopped by a blue Volvo wagon and rolled down his window. "Officer, er, Sergeant Sims, How are you today?" he asked.

"Mr. Warnecki," the man said. "What's going on?" Plain clothes today, the man was hatless with thinning hair and wearing a tan suede jacket. The two men were familiar with each other though they had not had much contact since events of the previous fall.

"Going to Al's house to pick up tools and lock up," Joey said. Santos watched the side view mirror and did not look at the cop.

"Do the detectives know what you're doing? I haven't heard anything," asked Sims.

"I haven't heard from them since early this morning. They must be busy." Joey put his elbow on the window edge. "You can follow behind, if you like."

Sims had his portable radio with him and was aware of where the detectives were tied up. He considered and decided. "I'll follow," he said. He had to back and turn around and then made a left turn behind Joey on to Water Street Extension.

Joey's was the last of the four streets that made up the development known locally as Cannery Row, originally built to serve as housing for the employees of the now idle cannery. Three streets along, they made a right onto Court Street, two blocks above Main. Santos had been watching his side view mirror as they travelled and noticed a car pull onto the road behind Sims as they passed Third Street. He asked Joey to pull to the side of the street for a moment. After a questioning glance, Joey did as asked, but without signaling his intention to Sims's car behind. As a result, Sims was forced to stop abruptly in the travel lane. Sims lifted his hands from the wheel in a gesture of frustration as the car behind him pulled around to pass. Neither Sims nor Joey paid attention to the passing car, but Santos watched as it pulled past and continued along the road and then pulled to the side halfway down the block.

"What are we doing?" Joey asked.

"That car up ahead. Rental sticker on the back. Young white guy driving, baseball cap on backwards."

Joey looked, didn't see anything remarkable. "So what?" Behind them, Sims was backing up to give himself enough room to park.

"Pull out now," Santos said. "See if he comes behind us."

Joey shook his head, but checked his side mirror and moved forward into the travel lane. Sims, behind them, had only managed to get over to the curb as Joey pulled away and uttered a mild profanity under his breath before following again.

A hundred yards down the road, Santos saw the rental car re-enter the traffic behind Sims. Past the police station, Joey turned left on Green Street and it made the turn also. Again it followed as they made a right turn on Main Street, U.S. Route 1. "My phone's back at your house," Santos said. "Don't suppose you have one."

"No," Joey said. "Why?"

"Car's still behind us. Thought we might alert someone to the possibility that we're being watched."

"Diaz?" Joey slowed, head turing to check his surroundings.

"No. Not Diaz. Maybe someone working with him."

"Ah, shit. What do we do?" Joey slowed even further, causing Sims to come up nearly to his bumper.

"Just keep going, see what happens." Santos kept his cool, alert and aware.

"We gonna keep going to the house? They'll know where it is." Joey checked the rear view mirror. In it, Sims wore a peeved expression.

"If they followed us from your place, it's a sure bet they already know about my place," Santos said. "Maybe it's like your neighbor said, be out there, draw them in and get it over with."

Joey thought about it, wasn't sure he had an opinion on the matter. Didn't think he had much of a choice, either. He continued driving, past the commercial area, past the park, to turn left onto the sandy drive over the causeway to Santos's house. He parked in front of the once bright project that now looked like a pile of failed hopes.

Just a mile and a half of following Joey's truck had turned Sims's mood sour. He did not even consider staying on the roadway to retain a discrete police presence, but turned into the driveway and parked behind the truck. He got out of the Volvo and moved alongside Joey's window. "What the hell was that all about?" he asked, leaning forward with hands on hips.

"Al said someone was maybe following us," said Joey, hands still on the wheel.

Sims turned to look behind, scanned the road. "What do you mean? Who?"

Santos got out of the passenger side and spoke over the roof to Sims. "Rental car. Stopped when we stopped, then followed again to here and kept going down the road."

"I didn't notice," said Sims. He looked at Joey. "I was trying to not run up on your bumper or maybe I would have." Nonetheless, Sims felt a touch of embarrassment. Santos recited a plate number to return him to present purposes.

"Okay, then," said Sims. "I guess I'll move back out on the road and watch. I'll call in the plate number, let the lieutenant know where we are." He looked out to the road. "Chances are, if someone was following, he made me for the police." Nothing for it but to keep on with the program. He shook his head and got back in his car; backed out to the road and parked a hundred yards away, facing the property.

Joey and Al looked at the house, the property, the water. The little rowboat at the water's edge bobbed cheerily at its tether, seeming to beg for release. In silence, the two men moved to the doorway. The door hung up on a scrap of two-by-four and Santos gave it a shove. Inside, the air was still, dust motes suspended in light from the windows. Skeletal framework stood where plaster and lath had been beaten away. Wiring and conduit hung untidily from ceiling joists and walls. Santos's new tools, most yet in their plastic and cardboard packaging, were stacked in a corner, coated with a dusting of plaster. Joey's tools—wrecking bar, sledge, reciprocating saw, others—lay in a dented, blue wheelbarrow next to a set of sawhorses and two large, plastic trash barrels.

"Two more days, we would have had it all in the dumpster, cleaned up and ready for framing," Joey said.

"Should have left it all alone," Santos replied.

Joey indicated the new tools. "I'll keep those in my garage for you, 'till you get settled."

"You can keep them. I have no use for them." Santos spoke matter-of-factly, no obvious regret in his tone.

"Listen," Joey said, "Don't give up entirely. Things can turn out all right."

Santos shrugged, surveying the house. "Just accepting the probable, that's all."

They packed all the tools into the truck bed and turned the wheelbarrow upside down on top of the pile. They worked mostly without comment, finishing with a last sweeping of the floor surface with a push broom. It took less than an hour to load everything and clean up. Santos locked the door on their way out and gave the keys to Joey to hold, for now. The early afternoon sun was becoming obscured by diffused cloud and a light fog was moving in, giving the air a slight chill.

"We should come back for the boat," Joey said, getting into the truck. "Don't want to leave that here."

"You can keep that, too," Santos said. "Partial payment."

"I'll hold it for you," Joey said. "Maybe use it once in a while as a storage fee." He managed a smile, physical activity having raised his spirits.

They drove back to Joey's house to unload everything into his garage. Sims travelled behind. There didn't seem to be anyone following them.

Mary and Del spent two hours processing the scene after the body of Randal Minor had been taken away. The contents of his pockets had been unrevealing: billfold with three dollars in it, truck keys, crumpled paper napkins, disposable plastic lighter. They bagged and tagged everything that seemed relevant and there wasn't much besides the cigar box and scattered paraphernalia. Most of what they collected was simply trash—soft drink and beer cans, fast food wrappers, and used napkins. They left the dirty laundry and bedding in a pile on a berth.

Minor seemed to have been living on his boat, but it did not contain the creature comforts one might expect. The boat was not hooked up to dockside electricity or water. There was a transistor radio but no t.v. One battery-powered lamp on the ceiling provided the only artificial light. There was no provision for heating the space. No books, magazines or newspapers, no games, no recreational materials other than the drugs.

Any prints they could lift were smudged partials overlaying each other on surfaces that probably hadn't been cleaned in months, if not years. Checking for prints on any material they collected would wait until they returned to the station. Examination of blood and DNA evidence did not seem warranted on anything other than the syringe.

The truck was a bust, as impersonal in character as the boat. It would be towed to the impound lot and examined but neither detective thought there would be much to discover in it. When they left the area, the yellow tape they had fastened to the wheelhouse and to stanchions at the foot of the dock finger were already beginning to peel away in the damp breeze beginning to overspread the harbor.

Knowles had disappeared from the scene when the body had been removed. His car, a five-year-old Toyota sedan, mud-brown in color, was parked on Main Street close to where he had earlier encountered Sophie Trott. He considered whether he should get some food in his stomach and opted for a cup of coffee and a chocolate bar from a shop next to his car that dealt in convenience items and tourist trash.

He sat in his parked car and ate the candy and sipped the coffee. Neither was very satisfying and his constant headache was a distraction from food enjoyment, anyway. He capped the paper cup with its plastic lid and drove aimlessly around the town for a while, ending up in the parking area of the lighthouse park.

The park was empty of people, the sun having hidden itself and the air carrying a damp chill that was not amenable to strolling or watching kids play on the playground equipment. The fog horn on the far side of the lighthouse had begun sounding, its single low note echoing faintly from the far side of the harbor seconds after each spaced occurrence.

Knowles removed the orange pill container from his pocket and read the label. It carried the generic name of a synthetic opioid, a manufactured cousin to the heroin Randal Minor had enjoyed right up until the evening past. Push down and twist the top, remove the first one—an undistinguished white tablet. He put it in his mouth, swallowed it with the aid of the last of his now-cold coffee. He would see what the effect of taking just one might be.

Mary's lab, on the basement floor of the police station, was a converted storeroom, six feet wide and twelve feet long. A row of white, glass-front cabinets overhung a soapstone counter atop a long base cabinet. An air evacuation hood hung under the upper cabinets, like one might see over a common kitchen range. A deep sink, also of soapstone, lay at the end of the counter. The counter and sink had been salvaged from a high-school chemistry lab that was slated to be refurbished; the cabinets had been bought new.

Behind the glass of the doors were brown, glass-stoppered bottles of labeled reagents, various glassware, and bound manuals and textbooks. What looked like a ten-gallon aquarium shared space on the countertop with an elderly triple-beam balance scale, both items also obtained from the high-school renovation. Walls and ceiling were painted white and the space was well-lit by ceiling fluorescent fixtures.

Del had not been inside the room before this day. "How did you rate getting a room like this when the conference room upstairs looks like a tenement room overdue for demolition?" he asked.

Mary was spreading out items of drug paraphernalia on sheets of clean newsprint. "Because I did all the work myself, including installing the cabinets and hauling in the counter and sink. Also doing the painting and putting in the floor tile."

"All yourself, really?" Del's voice held equal parts of admiration and skepticism.

Mary hesitated. "Well, except for the plumbing and the electrical. Insurance wouldn't allow me to do that."

"I'm truly impressed," Del said, looking at the material behind the glass doors. "You installed these cabinets. I couldn't have done it myself, and that's the truth."

Mary hesitated again. "I had a little help with the cabinets and counter."

"Yeah, I would hope so. That counter must have been heavy."

"Okay. Warnecki helped me drag the stuff over and put it in." Mary, in blue gloves, arranged items on the counter.

First up was to test the syringe for prints. Mary was reluctant to fume it, afraid to contaminate residual contents. She carefully dusted it with a dark powder and examined it closely. "It's been wiped," she said. I can see streak marks in what was probably grease from somebody's fingers. We've got the wrapper here and I'll bet it has a print, but I see nothing on the barrel or the end of the plunger." Mary put the syringe down on the clean white paper and they both looked at it.

"Hard to understand how he could have shot himself up and then wiped his own prints off, seeing as how he was most likely comatose when it was still in his arm," said Del.

"Must have had help," Mary said.

The two of them speculated silently on who might have been Minor's assistant while Mary put items from the upper cabinet on the counter: a ceramic tray with six shallow bowl-like depressions, a brown reagent bottle, a bottle of distilled water, two small beakers, and a flask that held an assortment of pipettes.

She poured an inch of distilled water into each beaker and drew enough water into the syringe from one to fill it a quarter of the way. Pulling the plunger to the end, she agitated the contents and released a few drops into one of the depressions of the tray. In an adjacent depression, she tapped a small amount of powder from one of the eye-stamped envelopes after snipping a corner from it with scissors. With a pipette, she added a few drops of water to it from the second small beaker.

"Now, Marquis reagent," she said. A second pipette transferred a few drops of clear liquid from the brown bottle to each of the depressions containing material. In a few seconds, the solution in each turned color. While the material in the second depression turned a purple-red color, the solution from the syringe had more of a brown tint, as though orange color had been added.

"Different," said Del.

"Different, yes," said Mary. "That's the limit of what I can do here with a spot test. It'll have to go to the state lab for qualitative testing. The color in the one from the envelope comes up like heroin, but the other has something else in it."

"No room for gas chromatography here," Del said. "Need a bigger lab. Put in a requisition."

Louis came out of his house while Joey and Santos were transferring tools from the truck bed to the garage. He spoke from his back porch. "Come on in when you're done," he said. "I made some sandwiches." Joey gave him a wave and said they'd be done in five minutes.

In Louis's kitchen, Santos held back in the doorway until Louis invited him to sit at the table. Louis had made a pile of sandwiches and a pitcher of iced tea. He stood leaning back against the counter with his arms folded across his chest while the other men ate. There was little conversation, no one had much to say though each had much on their mind.

Old Joe came into the kitchen from the back door without bothering to knock. He was dressed as he had been earlier, except that he had exchanged his carpet slippers for a pair of slip-on suede shoes, no socks. He eyed the plate of sandwiches, walked over and picked one up for himself.

"Don't recall inviting you," said Louis.

Joe spoke around a mouthful, standing next to the table. "Got no food in my house," he said. "Guy could starve around here and nobody would care."

"Not me, anyway," said Louis. Joe merely watched him as he chewed.

Joey looked up. "I'll take you to the store," he said. "Give me a minute."

" 'Bout time," Joe said. "Got my wallet in my pocket, ready to go."

Santos stood. "Thank you for the food," he said. "I appreciate it." Louis nodded to him and Santos placed his plate in the sink. "I think if you take your neighbor to the store, I'll take my car for a drive, see who's around."

"You think it's safe, driving around on your own?" Joey asked. He stood and put his plate in the sink on top of the other one, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and put the napkin in his pocket.

"The police will be watching, I think. I want to know who is around and how many there might be. I will have my phone. I can call for help if need be, but I don't think anything is likely to happen in the daytime."

"You'll tell the policeman on the street what you're doing, right?" Joey said.

"I will. Your truck is behind my car in the driveway. I'll wait a few minutes for you to get clear before I leave. If anyone is followed, it would be me."

Joe headed for the door. "I'll wait in the truck," he said.

"Thanks for lunch, Lou," Joey said, and followed Joe and Santos out the door. Louis shut the door behind them and began picking up.

As Joey backed his truck from the driveway, Joe said, "Don't know why your neighbor is such a sourpuss all the time."

Diaz was parked a short block below Court Street, on School Street, near its intersection with Water Street and where he could observe any vehicle that emerged from Water Street Extension. He could look over a white-painted picket fence that surrounded an open yard and not be easily seen himself. Warnecki's neighborhood was a cul-de-sac, backing up to the state park with no exit other than the one Diaz was now watching.

Joey's truck came down Water Street past Diaz's position, on the opposite side of the street. Traffic going in the other direction obscured his vision of the occupants, but he was able to see that the truck cab contained two people and he knew that Santos had been in the truck with Warnecki earlier that day.

He let four cars pass before turning onto the street and following. If the police had been trailing, they would most likely have been in one of those cars and he discounted any of them as carrying police.

At the intersection with Main Street, the truck turned left and continued onward to the same shopping area in which Diaz had exchanged vehicles. When the truck turned off the roadway, the four cars that had been between continued on and Diaz followed the truck, fifty feet behind. Now he could see that the passenger was not Santos, but rather a bald, old man.

Joey knew from experience not to park where Joe could open his passenger door into another vehicle. Also, he needed to place the truck where there was little traffic because Joe tended to walk down the center of a lane rather than on the side and would react badly to anyone who honked at him to get him to move out of the way. Accordingly, he pulled into a space on the right end of a line of cars at the edge of the lot and close to the front of the supermarket.

Old Joe was out of the truck and heading for the entrance before Joey could shut down the engine and remove his seatbelt. Joey caught up with him as Joe was tugging loose a cart from a line of them inside the store. Joe hung on to the front of the cart and walked beside it as Joey pushed from behind. They had done this route many times and little communication was needed, especially since Joe picked up the same items every time. Joey would pick up a package of butter while Joe grabbed a pound of processed, individually wrapped, sliced cheese. In the meat section, Joey got a pound of sliced deli baloney while Joe poked at the wrappings of whole roasting chickens to determine which to select. Joe would buy two chickens, which he would boil and share with his cat. A loaf of white bread, a six-pack of the cheapest beer, canned beef stew, a roll of toilet paper and then it was on to the produce aisle.

The produce aisle was where Joey wanted to be inconspicuous. For such a scrawny guy, Joe took up a lot of space and it was hard for other shoppers to get around him. He sampled things as he went along, even though he would buy only a large onion and two bananas. He would sample the grapes, thump the melons, squeeze the tomatoes and comment loudly on their poor quality. And then he would tear a single banana loose from a bunch and eat it on the way to the check-out registers, leaving the peel on any convenient shelf along the way.

They left the store with two brown paper bags of goods, Joey carrying both. Joe toted the six-pack of beer. He intended to drink one on the ride home.

Diaz approached the pair as Joey was leaning over the tailgate to settle the bags in the truck bed. Joe was about to instruct him for the umpteenth time to bungee cord them in snugly, but noticed the man dressed all in black and turned to face him. Diaz stopped two feet behind Joey, who almost knocked into him when turning from the truck. Joey's jaw dropped and his eyes went wide.

Diaz paid no attention to the old man, but Joe did not like to be ignored. Even with his somewhat stooped posture, Joe was two inches taller than Diaz and stepped up close, leaning in and breathing in his face. "Who the hell are you, with your dead eyes?" he said.

Diaz put a hand to Joe's chest and pushed him back a foot, not sparing him so much as a glance. "Where is Santos?" Diaz said, his hand on Joe's chest.

"I... I don't know," Joey said. "But you'd better get out of here, the police are looking for you." Joey's hands were clenched into fists at his sides, but he didn't move.

Old Joe swiped Diaz's hand away and shoved him back. When Diaz brought a hand up to slap him, Joe swung the six-pack at Diaz's head. Diaz stumbled back six feet and before he could recover and move on Joe, Joe had torn a single can loose from its plastic necklace and hurled it at Diaz's head. Diaz batted it away to the pavement, where it sprung a leak and spewed foam. Another can was thrown, this one carrying over Diaz's head to thump against the hood of a car in the next aisle and open a leak of its own as it rolled to the pavement. The third caught Diaz on his right shoulder. Backing from the onslaught, he was now across the drive lane to the next row of cars, Diaz's hand came out from behind his back with a handgun. Joe threw a fourth can. Diaz ducked and it bounced from the roof of the car behind him.

A heavy woman of middle age dressed in blue stretch pants and green sweater was watching the commotion from behind a loaded shopping cart twenty feet away from the action. When she saw the gun appear, she screamed. "Gun! He's got a gun! Somebody call the police!"

Others began to take notice. This was Thursday, Thursday was payday for most people, and the there were a lot of shoppers in the lot. Cars about to park or unpark halted to watch and Diaz became aware of his position. He decided to retreat.

"You too, old man! All of you!" he yelled, and slipped between the row of parked cars to his own vehicle, parked facing outwards from the row beyond. Joe was about to sling the remaining two cans still attached to their plastic halter when Joey stayed his arm.

They watched Diaz gun the car out of the lot, run the red light at the end of the drive and turn north, heading away from the town. Joey led his agitated old neighbor to the passenger door and coaxed him inside. Then he walked around to the driver's side and got in behind the wheel.

"I seen eyes like that before," Joe said. "In the camps there were thugs that had that look. Sons of bitches." He pulled a can loose from the plastic and opened it. The warm beer foamed over his hand and into his lap, filling the truck cab with its smell. Joe sucked at the can and both men waited for the adrenaline to leave their systems.

They stared out through the windshield, waiting for the police Joey was sure would come. Dusk had nearly arrived and, though the fog that encroached upon the harbor had not reached this far inland, the air was chill and damp.

"He lost him for a while, but now Santos is back at Warnecki's house." Clarkson was speaking to Mary and Del in his office at the end of the day shift. "Beshloss and Peterson just finished up with Warnecki and the old man, Soucup, out at the shopping plaza and are following them back home. Some damage to a car parked there, but no one got hurt. Diaz was headed north when last seen. No sign of the car Sims reported earlier." Clarkson was seated behind his desk, sleeves rolled to his elbows, tie off.

"No one was on Warnecki when he went out?" Mary asked. She was standing in front of the desk. Del had taken a position leaning on the wall next to the door.

"No. Sims's was the only car there and he stayed with Santos until they got separated in traffic."

"You want me to work another shift, keep an eye on the Stedler place?" Mary asked.

"No, you go on home and get some sleep, get up fresh tomorrow. You and Del did good today. Work too long and you'll get stupid. Peterson and Beshloss will tuck Warnecki and Santos in tonight and then take turns watching the street there."

In the hallway, after leaving the office, Del spoke. "Beer cans. The old man drove him off by throwing beer cans at him. How about that?"

Mary shook her head. "The car that got dented? I pity the owner if he expects Soucup to pay for it to be fixed."

It was after six o'clock by the time Joey's truck pulled into his driveway and the sun had set. His headlights reached through the rear window of the rental car before him to reveal the silhouette of Santos's head above the driver's seat.

Joey shut down the engine and lights and got out. Santos got out of his car to meet him.

"Why are you sitting in the dark?" Joey asked. "Why didn't you go in the house?"

Santos shrugged. "I didn't want to go in your house without your permission," he said.

Old Joe came around the front of the truck, holding the last can of the six-pack, still trapped in its plastic noose. He stripped the can free and handed the plastic to Joey. "Souvenir," he said, and opened the can. He took a swig, belched, and headed for his home.

Joey went to the rear of the truck and collected the two bags of groceries. "Go on in the house, Al," he said. "I'm just going to drop these in Joe's kitchen and be right in."

In his own kitchen, Joey opened the refrigerator door and looked inside. "Guess I should have gotten a few groceries for myself," he said. He looked in the freezer compartment and removed a frozen pizza. "Emergency supplies," he said, and put the box on the counter. He turned on the oven to pre-heat.

The two men sat down opposite each other at the kitchen table and Joey told Santos about the incident at the supermarket. "So," he said, "and how was your afternoon?"

Santos scratched his jaw, which had darkened considerably since an early morning shave. "It would have been better if the police had followed you instead of me this afternoon," he said. "I drove around seeing if I would pick up a tail. I did see one vehicle that may have been a confederate of Diaz, but it declined to follow me. Probably because of the police behind me. I separated myself from the police, but didn't see that car again."

Joey stood and moved to the counter, where he removed the pizza from its packaging and set it on a baking sheet. "You should have seen old Joe go after that guy," he said. "Chased him right out of the area." He shook his head. "Made him mad, though."

Santos lost the half-smile that the picture of the scene had raised in him. "That is not good," he said. "Diaz is not known for a sense of humor, nor for an appreciation of the absurd. He holds a grudge forever, until he can even the score. In his world, he cannot be seen as an object of ridicule."

The phone rang as Joey slid the baking sheet into the oven. He waited for it to go to the answering machine before recognizing the caller as a man who sometimes steered work his way.

He picked up the receiver. "Hey, Tom," he said, "How are you?"

"I'm good, Joey, how you doing?" the caller said.

"Okay, mostly. A few glitches, but I'm getting along."

"Listen, Joey. You remember Bill Richardson, the lawyer? You helped me on a rehab of the rec room in his basement? Cottage in Rockport?"

Joey thought for a moment. "Yeah," he said. "About three years ago. I finished up of the job we started together when you had to go on to another project."

"That's right. Well, I'm stuck on a good size job right now and he wants someone to install new cabinets in his kitchen. He called me and I offered him your name to do it for him. He remembers your work and would like you to give him a call."

"That would be great," Joey said. "A project just fell through for me and I have a hole in my schedule." He turned to Santos with a thumb's up and a grin.

"You still have his number?"

"I have it in my notebook here."

"Good. He's leaving for Florida tomorrow morning, fairly early. He's busy tonight, so you need to get in touch with him in the morning. Call him before seven, maybe six-thirty would be good. He's willing to pay time and materials, like you like to do it. He'll just leave a key for you and a deposit for materials and such. You work out the details with him."

"That sounds good, Tom. Thanks a lot."

"You betcha, Joey. I'm off with the old lady tonight; gotta celebrate our tenth anniversary. Dump the kids on the grandparents and spend the night up in Camden. Wine her and dine her, sweep her off her feet again."

"Congratulations to you both," Joey said, "and thanks again."

"No prob, Joey. See you later."

Joey hung up the phone and checked the oven. Not ready yet. "That's a piece of good luck," he said. "Things seem to work out, most of the time."

"That's good," Santos said. "I'm glad you're not going to be left in the lurch because of my problems."

"Ah, forget about it," Joey said. "Shit happens."

Knowles woke in darkness, thirsty, and with vague memories of bad dreams. The pill he had taken had knocked him out and left him sitting in the driver's seat of his car in the lighthouse parking area unconscious for several hours.

He looked at his watch, pressed the stem to light the dial. Eight o'clock. The darkness outside was nearly complete, the stars invisible above, a vague presence of the moon struggling through the cloud cover and wispy tendrils of fog moving low over the ground from the sea. The circling beam from the lighthouse ahead and above him cast its light in regular intervals and the echoing foghorn reached him in his seat. An occasional car passed on the road behind him, the sound of tire upon pavement faint in his ears.

His mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton. He shook the coffee cup beside him to confirm that it was empty. The water fountain at the entrance to the playground should still be operating; it wasn't usually turned off before Thanksgiving.

He opened the car door and got out, the vial of pills rolling from his lap onto the gravel of the parking area. He stooped and picked it up, returning it to his pants pocket. His joints were stiff from hours of sitting and he walked to the cast-iron water fountain, leaving the car door open and the interior light spilling out to provide scant illumination of the area. He drank deeply, the water cold and refreshing in his mouth and throat. A simple pleasure, available even to the sick, appreciated perhaps all the more for its simplicity.

He stood upright, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and considered what he should do. He walked to the car, leaned in to pop the trunk release, and then shut the driver's side door. He then walked around the front of the car to the passenger side. He opened that door and bent over to access the glove box. In it was his off-duty semi-automatic pistol, which he removed and tucked into a pocket of his windbreaker, where its weight pulled the fabric taut. In the opposite pocket, he put a pair of handcuffs taken from the same glovebox. He'd carried them on him for so many years he saw no reason to discontinue the habit, retired from the department or not. He patted his shirt's breast pocket, where his cell phone lay.

In the trunk, he found a brown, woolen blanket which he unfolded and wrapped around himself against the evening chill. He picked up the big, four-battery, metal flashlight, too. He closed the trunk, its hinges rasping a protest.

On the right side of the parking lot stood a line of spruce trees that stretched along the side of breakwater for two hundred yards of its length to the lighthouse at its end. The gravel surface crunched beneath his feet until Knowles passed between and beneath the trees to stand on the soft accumulation of fallen needles that bordered the rough fitted granite boulders of the breakwater. The untroubled waters lapped and sucked at the stones fifteen feet below him.

From where he stood near the base of the breakwater, he could discern the darker mass of shadow that delineated the causeway and house a hundred yards across the small cove. Fog was low on the water, broken in places and pushed around by slight breezes.

Where the road lay, he thought there might be a vehicle parked several yards beyond the road surface, but he couldn't be sure. Perhaps there was a police vehicle parked there to monitor the Stedler property.

He backed under the branches of a tree and sat, pulling his knees up and re-wrapping the blanket around him and covering the top of his head. Not a bad place to go out, he thought. Better than at home where his wife would find him. Someone would stumble across him in a day or two, probably a police officer wondering why his car was parked in the lot. Maybe should have left the gun locked in the glove box, though. He'd sit here for a while, enjoy the peace of the night, go back and lock up the gun in the car. While he was doing that, he could fill up his coffee cup at the fountain, make the pills easier to swallow. Come back here, go to sleep.

At ten o'clock, Joey was preparing to go to sleep. He would read in bed for a while, take his mind off things. The last thing he needed to do before brushing his teeth and getting into his pajamas was to locate his little red notebook with the phone number for Bill Richardson. Santos watched him from a chair in the living room as Joey rifled through drawers and looked in the pockets of jackets for it.

"What are you missing?" Santos asked.

"You seen my red notebook lying around anywhere?" asked Joey.

"I may have seen it the other day at the house," Santos said. "That notebook you used to make a list of material for me to order from the lumberyard?"

Joey slapped his forehead. "Damn. That's the last I used it, I think. I must have left it there."

"Well, we can run out in the morning and look," Santos said. He paused. "Actually, I think I may have seen it next to the sink in the kitchen when we were sweeping up."

"Okay. Okay. I can run out early and get it." Joey paced in the living room, thinking. "I wish I had it now," he said. "Hate to miss out on calling 'cause I slept late, or traffic held me up."

"It'll be all right," said Santos. "We'll get it early enough."

"Maybe I ought to run out now and get it," Joey said. "I'll sleep better not having to think about it all night."

"No, no. Not a good idea," said Santos. "You don't want to go out there in the dark. Not safe."

"Half an hour," Joey said. "Out there and back. The cop on the street will probably follow me there and back, anyway." Joey was in jeans and a tee-shirt, no socks. He went into the kitchen to put on his boots.

Santos, still dressed except for his shoes, followed him there. "Joey," he said. "Please don't do it now. It makes no sense to take the risk."

Joey sat on the floor by the door and pulled his boots on over sock-less feet, not tying the laces, but rather tucking them inside behind the tongue where they wouldn't trip him. He stood, grabbed his keys from the counter. "Back in a jiffy," he said, and headed out the door.

Santos hurriedly pulled on his shoes and followed, jumping in the truck just as Joey put it into reverse. Joey backed down the driveway and out onto the street, turned the wheel and drove away.

The policeman parked one hundred feet away did not notice, having closed his eyes for just a minute or two to rest them. Working a double shift was a strain on the eyes.

Diaz had spent the afternoon and early evening driving. Seething and driving. An hour north and then an hour south, skirting the town of Rock Harbor on an alternate route. The sock on his right foot and the bottom of that pant leg were wet with beer. Smelling that beer filled him with rage. The old man would die, along with Santos and all his friends. He would burn them all down in this stupid little town. But first he would burn down Santos's house.

He stopped at a drug store in Thomaston and bought a can of lighter fluid and several copies of the local paper. He called his local associate on his cell phone and told him to meet him off the roadway opposite Santos's house. The idiot who wore his baseball cap backwards should at least be able to keep an eye out for trouble at the house.

Knowles thoughts were deep within himself and he almost missed seeing a car coming from the south turn off the road acrossthe street from the Stedler place. From driving by the area in the daytime, he knew it to be a weed-strewn lot that used to accommodate a seller of fruits and vegetables. The wooden stall that had occupied the lot behind a small parking area had been burned down by vandals several years before. The abandoned lot was now obscured by a loose fabric of raggedy trees that had grown up between it and the road.

A light came on and went out, followed by the thump of a car door closing. He thought he could hear voices, but they may have been in his imagination. Along with his headaches, he had developed tinnitus, just one further humbling of his condition.

He strained his eyes to see, hoping that his vision would not decay into the scintillating light and blackness he had been experiencing of late. He discerned movement in that area and a figure separated itself from the darkness of the scrub into the lesser dark of the street. It crossed the road onto the causeway and made its way to blend into the black mass of the house. Two minutes passed. Knowles stood up. There was light in the house, likely from a shielded penlight.

Before he could take a step, a pickup truck, moving fast, came from the north and turned into the driveway through the opening in the sagging fence. Its headlights bathed the structure at the end and came to a stop facing the door. The headlights went out, the engine shut down, and two men got out of the truck. Knowles shed the blanket and took the pistol from his pocket, moving toward whatever was happening.

Santos held the light of a flashlight on the door while Joey fumbled with the key. His attention was on the road behind them though, waiting to see the lights of the police car that should have been following them, but wasn't.

"Got it," Joey said. "This is going to take just a second and then we'll be on our way back."

Santos kept his silence and the two men entered the dark space of the house where a single wall remained between them and the kitchen area. Santos led from behind with the flashlight lighting the floor as Joey moved toward the kitchen to retrieve his all-valuable notebook.

Too late, Santos felt the breeze that shouldn't have been flowing past him from the other side of the structure, as from a broken window. Diaz appeared in the kitchen doorway with a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other.

"Welcome," said Diaz. "Keep your light pointing to the floor, please."

Joey was three feet in front of Diaz, frozen and with mouth agape. Santos was still by the open front door, deciding whether he could duck outside before being shot.

Diaz anticipated his thoughts. "Move away from the door," he said, waving with the pistol to indicate which way for Santos to step. He wanted Santos to move a few feet to the left to put space between the men. "That's good, stay right there."

Diaz was alert, pistol moving between the two other men and watching for lights out on the roadway. "Where is your escort? Don't you have a chaperone with you tonight?"

"Right behind us," said Santos.

Diaz smiled. "Maybe, maybe not," he said. "We'll wait a minute to see, but I think you may have come out on your own."

"I would like you to place the flashlight carefully on the ground," Diaz said. Santos bent and placed the flashlight at his feet, the beam still pointing in Diaz's direction.

"This is truly amazing, that you bring yourselves to me. I can finish my business here and leave for more productive endeavors."

"I can get you money," said Santos.

"Ah, yes," said Diaz. "Money would be good. You should give me your money and then I will forgive you for the damage you have done to me."

"I'll go with you tonight," said Santos. "You and I will leave the people here to live their lives and settle between us what must be done."

Diaz touched his lips with the barrel of his gun, considering the offer. "I must think a minute." He paused for three seconds. "I think I would like to have your money, but I don't want to wait to get it. No, I really can't take the time."

Diaz relaxed now, totally in control. He let the hand holding the pistol rest down along his leg, showing his confidence in his speed.

Joey swallowed and closed his mouth, alert but holding no plan, no course of action. "What is it you want?" he asked.

Knowles moved under the line of spruce trees along the breakwater to the road without using his flashlight, stumbling over exposed roots and fallen branches but not falling or even thinking about falling. Once on the road surface, he could hear faint sounds of speech coming from the house and see a light that moved inside, as from a flashlight. He walked on the road with his head facing the house and almost missed sensing a figure standing at the entrance of the driveway. The figure was still, apparently also focused on what was happening in the house. Knowles slowed but kept moving to come up behind the other man. The man was holding something in his right hand. It could have been a flashlight or can of beer, but Knowles decided that it was a gun and clocked the man on the ear with the butt end of the heavy flashlight, hard. The man went down and lay still, something clattering away on the ground. Knowles tucked his pistol under his belt so that he could shine his flashlight through the closed fingers of his other hand. The diminished beam of light revealed a man, his eyes closed, a baseball cap upturned a few feet beyond, and a handgun, released from the man's grip but with his fingers touching it.

A shot rang out from the house and Knowles froze for a moment, then looked up from the still figure on the ground. He briefly considered the man's condition, considered calling for an ambulance, dismissed the thought. "Screw him," he said, under his breath. He picked up the gun and put it in his jacket pocket. He pulled his own gun from his waistband and strode toward the house, where things seemed to have grown suddenly quiet.

Diaz pursed his lips. "I must fulfill the promises that I made to myself," he said. "I must deal with my old friend here. I must deal with his friends, too. That would include you and must especially include the old man who insulted me." At the thought of the old man, some of the rage he had felt earlier threatened to overtake him.

"In truth, I would like to burn down this whole stinking town and everyone in it, including the restaurant run by the two butch women." Diaz's eyes flicked upwards, momentarily envisioning his complete revenge.

Joey blinked. Then, without conscious thought, he took a step forward and his right arm struck out. His hand, like the jaws of a snake, fastened itself on Diaz's neck and Diaz was forced back to be pinned against the doorframe. His head struck the wood with a thud and his hand on the gun clenched, releasing a loud retort that did not cause Joey to flinch in the slightest. The ropy muscles of Joey's arm stood out and froze in sharp relief, veins popped against the skin. His large hand spanned underneath Diaz's jaw from ear to ear and he squeezed, cutting off air and blood to Diaz's brain.

Diaz brought up the gun in his right hand and Joey caught it by the barrel without looking away from the man's face. Diaz tried to pry Joey's fingers from his throat, clawing at the hand, drawing blood with his nails, but the arm may as well have been made out of stone for all the effect Diaz had upon it.

Diaz's face went red, his eyes bulged. His legs lost their strength and he began to slide down the wall. Joey's hand rode the throat all the way down until Diaz was sitting, unconscious on the dusty floor.

Knowles reached the open doorway to see Santos prying Joey's fingers from the throat of Diaz. Santos looked back over his shoulder briefly, noting Knowles's presence and turning back.

"He's out, you don't want to kill him," he told Joey, calmly, but in a louder than conversation tone due to the diminished ability to hear caused by the gunshot.

Joey allowed his fingers to be removed and looked at his hand, streaming with blood from Diaz's fingernails. "He said he was gonna kill my friends," he said.

Knowles walked around the low figures on the floor and kicked the pistol away from Diaz's outstretched hand. He knelt to join them and felt for a pulse in Diaz's neck. "He's alive," he said after a moment. He stood. "I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not," he said.

Joey, on his knees, turned his head to look up at Knowles. "What are we gonna do?" he asked. Santos, on on knee, put one hand on Joey's shoulder and rubbed his jaw with the other, silently regarding the unconscious man whose back was against the wall, legs stretched out and pant legs pushed up around his calves.

Knowles took in the tableau by the light of his flashlight and the elongated beams of the two flashlights angling along the floor. He turned and looked through the doorway into the night where he presumed the man out by the roadside was yet lying still, perhaps dead. Or not. He shook his head, the persistent pain residing therein temporarily eclipsed by the need to think and to act. "Well," he said, "first things first, I guess." He turned to Santos. "Give me a hand for a minute while Warnecki here keeps an eye on Mr. Sleepyhead. There's a guy out by the road we need to drag back here."

Santos gave him a confused look, but rose to his feet and cast a look to Joey and Diaz before following Knowles through the doorway into the night. No cars on the road, no light in the sky, just the crunch of their footsteps on the driveway. The beam of the flashlight directed before them brought them to the entrance to the property. The two of them regarded the crumpled figure.

"He dead?" asked Santos.

Knowles shrugged, the gesture unseen. He went down on one knee to feel for a pulse, put his gun on the ground. He peeled back an eyelid, the pupil fixed and not reacting to the beam of the flashlight at all. "He's gone," he said. He picked up his gun, stood, and looked at the dead man.

"You should make a call," Santos said. "Maybe before somebody drives by and sees us here with a dead man and calls before you do."

Knowles was thinking. He looked up and down the roadway. Nothing happening in either direction. "Not just yet," he said. "Grab a hand, let's drag him back to the house, determine a proper course of action." He went to put his gun in his right jacket pocket, found there was already one in there. Holding his gun in the other hand which already held the flashlight, which was awkward to do, he removed the other gun from its pocket and attempted to give it to Santos. "Here," he said. "Take this for a minute."

Santos looked at the gun and put his hands in his pockets. "I don't think so," he said. "You better hold onto it." He tilted his head to the side, considered questioning the other man as to what they were doing and then decided to follow Knowles's lead for the time being. His own phone was back at Warnecki's house, anyways.

Knowles put the gun back in his pocket and stuck his own gun under his belt again, in the front.

"Safety on?" asked Santos. "Hope so," said Knowles. The two men each grabbed an arm by the wrist and dragged the body on its back to the house, the heels of its shoes making faint parallel tracks in the sandy driveway surface. They stopped before the doorway and released the arms. The body flopped back, stretched out in a straight line. Knowles shined the light about him: on the pickup truck, down along the driveway, out to the sides of the property and the dumpster, and over to the dock where the little rowboat bobbed at its tether. His light dwelt on the boat for a full minute.

He clicked off the light and the night flowed in around them. They could see the light revolving in the sky above the lighthouse out at the end of the breakwater. The foghorn was not sounding and the low fog along the water had largely dissipated, leaving just a few wisps close to shore that drifted like quiet ghosts. "Let's go inside and talk about this," Knowles said.

Inside, Joey had not moved. He remained on his knees, hands on his thighs, looking at Diaz. One flashlight on the floor was aligned to illuminate the two men and Diaz's eyes could be seen moving behind his closed eyelids. Knowles stepped around Joey and got down on one knee. Joey shuffled back to give him some space and Knowles took the handcuffs from his pocket and fastened Diaz's hands in front of him. "My final arrest," he said. He got back up on his feet and stumbled, a blinding pain behind his eyes threatening to put him back on the floor. Santos stepped to his side and steadied him.

"You all right?" Santos asked.

"... outrageous fortune...," Knowles mumbled.

"What?" asked Santos.

"Nothing," said Knowles. "Just a headache, that's all." He tool a moment, eyes closed, tips of his fingers pressing on either side of his temples. "So," he continued, "what are we to do, what shall we do?"

Joey, coming out of his funk, shared a questioning look with Santos, who was clearly becoming uncomfortable with the behavior of Knowles. The police didn't move bodies at the scene of a crime or fail to call in the authorities in a timely manner. Whether Knowles was retired or not, this was not the usual protocol being pursued here.

"Time to make the call now, right?" Santos asked.

Knowles opened his eyes, dropped his hands to his sides. "Well, now," he said. "Let's think practically. What do you suppose is going to happen when the troops arrive?" He gave a look to Joey and Santos, each.

"Gonna be a big mess, but what else can we do? said Santos. "No way around it. No alternative that won't put us in deeper shit."

"That's pretty much the way it would be," said Knowles. "Warnecki here gets thrown right back in all the crap he's been climbing out of for the last year and you, Mr. Santos, get thrown in the spotlight and get to reap the inevitable result of all that attention. I'm sure if you allow yourself a minute or two to think about it, you can pretty much guess what happens to your life and your plans for a new start." He paused for a few beats. "But the big problem, as I see it, is what happens with Mr. Sleepyhead here, going forward."

Santos looked at Diaz. He nodded his head slowly, up and down, up and down. "He's arrested, maybe gets convicted of something, maybe gets off, maybe serves some time, maybe makes bond on some charges. But, eventually, he gets out or gets off. And then he comes back."

At that, Joey stood and looked back and forth at the two other men. "Comes back," he said. And all three considered the consequences of that possibility.

"I can run—again," Santos said. "But Joey can't. Neither can the others Diaz threatened. And Diaz will come for them. Question them to find me and then hurt them."

Knowles exchanged a long look with Santos, leaving Joey completely out of their silent discussion. Santos committed to nothing in this discussion but Knowles nodded once, as though he had. As far as Knowles was concerned, he would carry events forward. Santos could wash his hands and pretend he didn't know what Knowles was proposing. Warnecki was still in shock, clueless, which was fine with Knowles. Degrees of guilt. Shades of gray. Didn't matter anymore.

"I'm going to borrow your boat," Knowles said. He then addressed Warnecki. "I'm going to load these two guys in the boat and row them around to the marina. I'll call for assistance while I'm on the way there and you two guys can avoid the attention for a while. No reason for you to get involved, you know?"

Joey wasn't quite so far out of it that this made good sense to him, but his mind was not in a good state for rational and clear thinking. He was willing to leave the responsibility for things to the retired policeman. It was simply the easiest way out for him. He'd just put his brain on hold for a while, let the retired policeman take charge.

Knowles picked up Diaz's gun and put it in the jacket pocket that has lately held his handcuffs. Both jacket pockets now sagged with the excess weight. He took Santos aside and spoke lowly. "Warnecki's out of it for a while. Call it temporary mental paralysis. Give me a couple of hours and wait for the cars to come. When the police get to you, tell them what happened and what I said I was going to do."

Santos shook his head. "No way this can come out right. You have to call them now."

"Listen to me," Knowles said. "I promise this won't come back on you. I'll call the department when I'm on my way and tell them to meet me at the marina, at the police patrol dock. There might be an accident on the way, but there's nothing you could have done about that, right?"

Again, Santos shook his head. "There's no way a cop, a veteran like you, would handle it this way. It's not credible. Nobody would believe it."

Knowles gave an avuncular pat to Santos's shoulder. "Let's just say there are exigent circumstances concerning my seemingly irrational behavior that will explain it away, at least to a few who matter in this thing." This statement elicited another shake of the head.

"You have a cell phone with you?" Knowles asked.

"No," was the answer.

"Well then, you couldn't call anyone now, could you?"

"No."

"And I have all the guns, don't I?"

"Yes, but..."

"Well, that's settled then. Nothing you could do. And like I said, none of this is going to come back on you, promise. I have it under control." Knowles gave him another pat. "Now help me get these guys down to the boat and we'll be on our way."

Reluctantly, Santos helped Knowles drag the outside corpse over to the dock, its feet dragging behind. With difficulty, they managed to slide it half-way under the center thwart, leaving its head and shoulders propped up on the narrow bow seat. "This is a real nice little boat you got here," Knowles said. "Hope you don't mind me borrowing it." Santos did not reply.

When they returned to the house, Diaz was coming around, Joey watching him as if ready to run. "Good," Knowles said. "We won't have to carry you down."

Diaz looked at him, flinching from the beam of the flashlight in his eyes. His eyes were shot with blood, tiny capillaries burst from nearly being choked to death. "I will kill you," he croaked. His hand went to his throat and he tried to swallow, pain from the effort constricting his features.

"Come on, Mr. Sleepyhead. We're going on a little boat ride," Knowles informed him. Joey watched from five feet away, fists clenched, and Knowles and Santos lifted Diaz to his feet from either side, hands grasping him from under the arms.

Diaz appeared to notice the handcuffs for the first time. "I want a lawyer," he said. "I refuse to say anything outside the presence of my lawyer."

"That's just fine," Knowles replied. "I won't ask you to say anything that might tend to incriminate you. You have the right to remain silent, because anything you might say could be used against you in a court of law."

Diaz accepted this as his due and stared hatred at the other three men by turns as Santos and Knowles led him to the doorway with Joey following behind. When they moved toward the dock, Diaz balked and dug his feet in. "What the hell you doing?" he rasped. "Where's the cop cars?"

They were stopped. Knowles tried to explain. "We're going to take the boat, you, me, and your friend." He pointed his flashlight to the boat where the corpse lay, its head lolled to rest against the side of the boat.

Joey might have been regaining some sense of himself. "Why would you do that?" he asked. Aren't the other police coming? Who's that in the boat?"

Knowles ignored him and addressed Santos. "We're gonna have to turn him around and drag him backwards if he won't walk on his own." He looked to Diaz. "But if we have to do that and have a problem getting him into the boat, he might fall in the water and drown. What do you think, Diaz, you want to take the chance, maybe falling in the cold water in handcuffs? Maybe have a hard time getting out of the cold water?"

"Charlie," Joey said. "Aren't the police coming?"

Knowles sighed. "Listen. Kid. You're not helping. The road's temporarily closed. Big accident up the way. Why don't you try to scare up the oars. Be a help. Not a hindrance."

Joey blew out a breath. He didn't know what was happening here. He looked toward the roadway. No vehicles were traveling in either direction. He stood where he was as Knowles and Santos led a reluctant Diaz to the boat and helped him to get settled in the bow, his legs straddling the body of his late cohort.

"He's fucking dead," Diaz said, feeling the slackness of the body that pressed against his right leg. "What the fuck did you do?"

"He had an accident," Knowles said. "Very unfortunate. But don't worry, I'm going to get you where you need to be."

The boat had already reached its ideal weight capacity and was low at the bow until Knowles got himself in and settled on the center of the rear thwart. He put his lit flashlight on the boat's floor between the legs of the corpse where its light was mostly lost.

Joey had found the oars, which had been lying at the shore end of the small dock. He handed them to Knowles. Leaning forward to set the outboard oar in its oarlock, Knowles grunted. The gun in his waistband was very uncomfortable. He removed it, checked the safety, and laid it behind the flashlight. The trim of the boat had evened out but it rode low in the water, the lowest point of the gunwale six or seven inches above the ocean surface.

"See?" said Knowles. "Clean and dry. No problems. We'll just take a nice trip around the breakwater and meet some new friends. Good to go?" Diaz did not react. He would bide his time and wait for his moment. "Say," Knowles continued, "could you shift your old friend's weight a bit? Get him centered between your knees? Want to maintain trim in the boat, avoid any accidents."

Diaz looked away from Knowles then, and at the dark water. It was placid, barely moving except from the motion of those in the boat. The coldness of the water could be felt from this close, seemingly stealing heat from a face that gazed upon it.

"Cast us off, please," Knowles asked Santos, who paused before untying the tether and dropping it in the boat behind Diaz. Knowles pushed them away from the dock and installed the second oar. He began to row, pushing the boat through the calm water. The little craft was not designed for the load it was asked to carry, but it moved well enough, at least on this protected side of the lighthouse breakwater. It was peak high tide as they set out. They carried no personal floatation devices as were required by law.

When the boat had moved thirty feet away from the dock, Santos called out, "You're going to make the call, right?"

"You bet," said Knowles. "See you on the other side, later."

Joey and Santos watched the boat moving away into shadow. At fifty yards distance the craft could no longer be discerned from its surroundings. By not looking directly at it, a glow from the muffled flashlight could just be perceived until it too was entirely lost.

"Does this make any sense to you?" Joey asked. "I don't understand why he wouldn't call from here, even if there's an accident on the road."

"Nothing is making a lot of sense, lately," answered Santos. "We don't seem to have a lot to say in the matter. We're going to have to wait here and see what happens."

"How long do you think we'll be here?" Joey asked.

"Don't know," Santos said. "He's got to make the call."

Knowles navigated by the lighthouse beacon behind him at the end of the breakwater. He did not head left around the end of the breakwater toward the marina area, as would be expected. Instead, he bore to the right and headed out into the channel that would lead past the barrier island and into the open water of the bay. In the dark, with just the light behind him to navigate by, there was a certain amount of guesswork involved. His focus was on staying to the right side of the channel markers, so as not to run onto the rocks of the barrier island that gave the town its name.

The discrepancy in their intended route did not pass unnoticed by Diaz, who could see the lights of the harbor-side. "What are you doing?" he asked. His voice was not raised, nor was there any fear in it.

"Ah," said Knowles. "We're taking arms against a sea of troubles, that's all. I thought we might have a little time for a talk before we go in."

"What is this bullshit," Diaz said. "Cops don't do this. You have to follow the rules."

"Well, the truth is that I'm not really a cop anymore," Knowles answered. "So I don't have to follow all the rules. I can take a page from your book, follow your rules." He rested on the oars for a moment. The tide was running now, carrying them out into the bay with about as much momentum as he could provide by using the oars. A low swell lifted and dropped the boat gently. The absence of any wind made the ride easy; it would have been pleasant under other circumstances.

"So you're planning to dump me out here," Diaz said. "You think you can do that? Climb over this dead body and toss me out, old man?" Maybe you think you will shoot me, first, and then heave me over."

"No, no, no," Knowles said. "I promise I won't try that. I'm an old man, relatively speaking and I wouldn't want to try and lift you out of the boat. You don't have to concern yourself with that. But, by the same token, it wouldn't be wise of you to think you could leap over your buddy here and get to me, get to the gun." Diaz had been leaning forward, as though he might be thinking of doing just that. Now he sat back.

Knowles bent back to the oars, pushing water behind them. "Whew," he said. "That's hard work, with the drag from the excess weight. I'm out of shape. Have to exercise more." An irregular string of beads of light along the shoreline showed where it lay and Knowles angled away from them, headed outward into Penobscot Bay. Running lights from the few other boats on the water did not come near them as they traveled.

After an hour of continued rowing, the lights of shore were much diminished and Diaz was now getting very concerned. Concerned enough that his pose suggested that he might have been considering doing something desperate. The flashlight's batteries were weakening, its glow barely able to reveal Diaz's posture to Knowles.

Knowles let go of the oar's handles and allowed them to move free in the locks. He picked up his gun from the floor and held it for Diaz to note that he had it in his right hand. With his left hand, he fished the vial of pills from his pocket and shook it. From the rattling of it, there may have been a dozen or more in there. He squeezed the plastic vial in his palm with three fingers and pressed and twisted the cap off, letting the cap fall to the bottom of the boat. He tipped it to his mouth and shook out its contents. Chewed and swallowed, dropped the empty container.

"What are you doing?" Diaz asked. The light in the boat was not sufficient for him to see what Knowles had done, though he could hear something was happening in the back end of the boat and he knew Knowles was holding the gun.

"Pharmaceuticals," said Knowles. "Similar to the ones you like to deal in. Yuck, what a taste." He unzipped his jacket enough that he could pluck the phone from his pocket. "Now be quiet for a minute so I can make a call."

For several minutes, Knowles sat with the phone in one hand and a gun in the other, listening to his environment, feeling the breeze on his face, the boat gently rising and falling beneath him. He felt oddly at peace with himself, or perhaps it was simply the drugs beginning to kick in.

The police department was number one on his speed dial. The call was answered on the third ring. He identified himself to the dispatcher and informed him that police units were needed at the old Stedler place, that there was no emergency, and that he himself was not presently at the scene. He related the events that had taken place there and said that he had Diaz in his custody and would deliver him to the proper authority. He did not mention that the two of them were presently on a boat. By the time he had delivered as much information as he cared to impart, he was slurring his words. He quit the call and dropped the phone over the side.

Diaz was confused when he heard the port side oar being lifted from its lock and slid into the water, but when the other oar was similarly disposed of, he knew he had to act. He tensed his legs and half rose to throw himself at the back of the boat. He froze in place when Knowles fired off every round in his pistol and was very surprised to discover that he himself had not been hit.

"You missed, old man," he said. "Now it's my time."

Knowles chuckled. "Whoa, that's cold, ain't it?" he said. There were three inches of water in the boat now and it had soaked his feet. He had blown a three-inch diameter hole through the bottom of the boat, all of his shots aimed at the same approximate area of the hull.

Diaz then realized that his own feet were wet. In rage and frustration he flew at Knowles. His body hit Knowles high in the chest and both men went overboard into the cold, dark water. They went under and came up apart from each other. Diaz flailed to the shadow that was the boat and latched onto the gunwale of the flooded craft with manacled hands. It was awash to the tops of the thwarts. He looked wildly around him. There were no other boat lights in sight. The faint shore lights were impossibly distant. The sky above showed not a light from the heavens. And the corpse of his companion did not float free from the boat.

Knowles feebly paddled his arms and kicked with his legs, trying to keep his tipped-back head at the surface. The drugs were strong in his body, sapping his body of all strength. His headache was gone and he could no longer feel the cold of the water that sucked away all sensation. The two guns trapped in his jacket pockets soon pulled him under and he went down.

It was not yet eleven o'clock when Mary Hartz got a call at home from Lieutenant Clarkson. Rather than explain what was going on in detail, he gave her a brief overview and played the recording of Knowles's call to the dispatcher. She had him play it again before she could accept its reality. "He sounds drunk," she commented.

"Or dopey on pain meds," Clarkson said. "At the end there, anyway."

"And he hasn't shown up?" said Mary.

"Not as yet." Clarkson moved on. "Two cars are at the Stedler place. Just Warnecki and Santos are present. No sign of Knowles."

"Did you call Del?"

"I'm calling him right after you."

"Good. I'll be on my way there in two minutes." Mary was pleased that the lieutenant had called her first.

Mary arrived at the scene to find Joey and Santos in handcuffs inside the house and being questioned by two uniformed officers that had trouble believing the story Joey was telling. She had parked on the road and walked on the edge of the drive to preserve any potential evidence. The two patrol cars had pulled into the driveway and were parked in line directly behind Warnecki's pickup, headlights on, roof lights strobing.

Joey was talking, Santos was not, and the patrolmen had not separated the two men before asking questions and hearing answers. Mary stepped in and had Joey go through his story from the beginning before asking the patrolmen to remove the handcuffs from the two men. Del arrived at the end of the telling and Joey was asked to repeat himself for the third time. Mary noted that the story did not differ substantially from the first time she heard it. She also noted the dried blood and raw nail marks on his hand.

"You choked him," she asked. Joey nodded and looked down at his boots. "But you didn't kill him." Joey shook his head, not looking up at her. "And you say Knowles killed the other guy." Joey shrugged and looked to Santos. "And you're not talking," she said to Santos, who returned her gaze evenly but did not comment."

"Didn't Charlie get to the police dock?" Joey asked. "He should have gotten there a while ago. He left at... I don't even know what time it was, or is." His voice trailed off to nothing. Time seemed to have become a relative concept to him.

Mary turned to Santos. "I suppose you don't speak to the police on general principles, but everything is going to come out in the wash, you know." She paused. "Could you tell me at least what time you got here, approximately. What time it may have been when Knowles left with Diaz?"

Santos sighed. "We got here around eight or a little after. Knowles has probably been gone from here for two hours. I don't know the time, but it feels like we've been waiting for you for at least two hours."

Mary shook her head. "Alright," she said. "Let's continue this down at the police station where you both can tell it six or seven more times." She directed the patrol officers to bring the two men down to the station without handcuffs and to string police tape across the entrance of the driveway on their way out. She and Del took a cursorily look about the house. The floors were swept, scuff marks in the dust could have meant anything or nothing. Nothing seemed indicative of a struggle except for scattered drops of blood which were likely from Joey's scraped hand. No particular significance was given to the pile of crumpled newspapers in a corner of the kitchen area or to the yellow plastic bottle of lighter fluid resting on the corner of a kitchen cabinet. Mary did recover a crushed ball cap at the end of the driveway on her walk back to her car. She put it in an evidence bag and took it away with her.

Joey and Santos were taken away separately in the patrol cars. Joey did not think to gather up the notebook for which he had come.

A long night of questioning at the police department resulted in no charges being filed for either of the two men. No bodies were recovered, no guns were found, no hard evidence collected that would definitively confirm Joey's account of what had occurred. There was nothing that contradicted it, either. Santos would agree basically with Joey's statement but was reluctant to sign a statement himself. At the end of the night, Mary and Del, Lieutenant Clarkson and Chief Waters decided to investigate quietly, to wait and see what might turn up to tell the story more fully. They were very concerned about the missing Charlie Knowles.

The mystery of Knowles's behavior and participation could not be confirmed by any evidence beyond the recording of his call to the department though his car was found parked in the lighthouse park lot. Also, two rental cars were discovered near Santos's property. Those two cars were rented through credit cards belonging to non-existent persons.

A late-returning trawler rode through an abandoned rowboat in the darkness of the night. The fishermen stopped to examine the churned wreckage and notified the Coast Guard of the wreckage for insurance reasons, as the propeller of the trawler was damaged from chewing up the little craft.

Though rumors would surface and questions arise concerning certain people and events, the news media came up with nothing they could credibly run.

