Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

  THE BONE ORCHARD

  Daniel Judson

  Book Two of

  THE GIN PALACE TRILOGY

  THE BONE ORCHARD

  All Rights Reserved © 2002 by Daniel Judson

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

  or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including

  photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Daniel Judson

  Originally published by Bantam Books

  Shamus and Barry Award nominee, 2002

  The Poisoned Rose was a stunning and wondrous debut, and The Bone Orchard only confirmed Daniel Judson’s artistry and unique style, but those two dark gems do not prepare the reader for the huge leap forward that is The Gin Palace. The final outing of Declan “Mac” MacManus, one of our most compelling PIs, shows an author at the very height of his dizzying power. Fresh, vibrant, startling, and beautifully rendered, Judson’s The Gin Palace Trilogy breathes a whole new energy into the genre. -- Ken Bruen, author of Headstone

  A vivid cast of characters and a frightening plot packed with dead bodies combine to make Judson’s atmospheric debut thriller one of the year’s more memorable reads. The narrator, part-time PI Declan “Mac” MacManus, is a dirt-poor, disheveled young man living in a Spartan apartment above a bar in Southampton. After witnessing a vehicle plunge into a sinkhole pond in a bizarre single-car accident, Mac is thrown into the center of a smalltown murder conspiracy that will affect him more than he could ever imagine. With the help of his two best friends, a former DEA and a Jamaican taxi driver, Mac struggles to bring down a corrupt PI who has the police chief and a number of other town officials in his pocket. Judson’s plot is packed with intrigue, and his telling of the story--most of which takes place during the hours between dusk and dawn--is brilliant. Using sparse language to create lush, cinematic images, Judson transforms his colorful yet generally unlikable characters into empathetic creatures. What’s more, the story unfolds slowly and beautifully, revealing critical character details only when the plot demands them. A dark tapestry of life gone mad in a trendy Hamptons summer town, this promising debut is ripe for a big-screen adaptation.

  --Publisher’s Weekly.

  Daniel Judson is so much more than a crime-fiction novelist. He’s a tattooed poet, a mad philosopher of the Apocalypse fascinated with exploring the darkest places in people’s souls.

  --Chicago Tribune

  Daniel Judson is a thoroughly accomplished writer. --Kirkus Reviews

  for my mother and father

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Also by Daniel Judson

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  It was dark when I left my apartment above the Hansom House and went down the two flights of stairs to the street below to wait for Frank Gannon. The stretch of gray clouds hanging low overhead had cores the color of lead, and the few spaces of night between them were starless and empty. I would have been warmer had I remained up in my rooms and watched for Frank from my living room window, but it seemed to me that the early night air was the place to be right then. Frank had called me in the morning and told me that he would come by around five, after I had gotten home from work. It was just five now and I was ready for him, wrapped against the cold in a second-hand overcoat with torn seams, waiting at the curb and wondering a little just what it was he wanted from me now.

  I tried to stay clear of Frank as a rule, but Southampton is a small town, particularly in the winter. He had done me a favor when I was in a jam with the Chief of Police not too far back, but I had paid that off three months ago and was not expecting to hear from him again. He had a phobia about talking on the telephone, so he had hung up this morning before I had the chance to tell him to go to hell. He had simply said, “It’s Frank, we need to talk. I’ll find you after work.” And then he hung up. My first instinct was to pretend I hadn’t heard him, but by breakfast I knew there really was no point in that.

  The wind was out of the south, an ocean wind, and it stung my face and ears and pried through the weak seams in my coat like long fingers. Just two nights ago it had been Indian summer, days in the seventies, nights in the fifties. In my rooms above, and in the dark bar below, windows remained opened to the mild night air.

  The clientele of the Hansom House, mainly local laborers and artists, had sat in their summer clothes at the crowded bar and on the half dozen overstuffed antique sofas in the main room, listening to live music. One night it was three white boys play reggae, and another it was a jazz quintet made up of kids under twenty.

  The Hansom House was an old three-story wreck that had been turned a quarter of a century ago by a local artist into a funky bar and restaurant with apartments above. It was something of a holdout for us year-rounders, not favored by the tourist trade, and this annual stretch of warm days and nights that came always somewhere between October and Christmas was the hard-earned summer vacation we counted on.

  But now, and suddenly, it seemed that winter was here, that maybe it had been here all along. These warm nights had been an illusion or trick. The old trees that lined my street were bare, and their branches tapped and hissed in the steady wind. The leaves tumbling across the pavement were dead and brittle and sounded like the quick scuffling feet of the last people to leave town.

  I saw headlights turn onto the far end of Elm Street a few hundred feet away and head toward me. I could see that they didn’t belong to a silver Cadillac Seville, Frank’s car, but instead to an old-style Checker cab that had been long ago repainted red. It was Eddie’s cab, and it was slowing down for me.

  It pulled over to the curb, its wide tires rubbing against the concrete. Eddie leaned across the seat and jerked the handle of the back door. It swung out, and immediately I smelled clove oil and the pungent odor of cigar.

  “You’ll freeze to death out here, Mac.”

  He had been on the East End for almost twenty years, but his Jamaican accent remained for the most part intact. The thick bristles that grew from his face were dull silver, like metal shavings, and by the shape of his face you could tell that he was missing most of his back teeth. What remained were yellowed and seemed to always have an unlit cigar wedged somewhere between them. He didn’t smoke as a courtesy to his passengers.

  Eddie had a way of sometimes knowing things that went on around town before anyone else did, and there were times that he sought me out to fill me in on what he knew, when he thought I might do well to know. We didn’t in any way socialize, but our paths crossed often enough, and he was there for me in one way or another more times than I could remember.

  I leaned forward to tell him that I was waiting for someone, but before I could speak, he said, “Frank Gannon sent me to get you. Come on, get in, it’s cold. I’ll take you to his office, my friend.”

  The heated air blowing from the vents under the dashboard felt good. It flowed past me and disappeared fast into the cold night.

  Eddie steered us away from the curb and to the end of Elm Street, then turned left and passed the empty train station, then turned left again onto North Main and headed us toward the village. Frank’s office was about a mile away, across the alley from the Village Hall, where the police station was. For the past few months I had gone out of my way to avoid either of those places, staying clear of that whole corner of town. It seemed the smart thing to do, and I wasn’t happy about being dri
ven toward it now.

  The first quarter of a mile Eddie and I rode in silence. I saw that his eyes were fixed on me in the rear-view mirror. I knew what was on his mind.

  “Cold came suddenly,” he said.

  “Very.”

  He glanced at the road ahead, then back at me again. “You back working for him again?”

  “No. No.”

  We came to the stop light on the corner of Newtown Road and Main Street. The village was ahead of us and looked empty; there were maybe a dozen cars lining the length of Main. Frank’s office was just beyond our sight. We’d be there in less than a minute.

  The clouds over the village were low, brushing the treetops, flying like phantom ships racing into the east. I watched this for a moment, then turned my head and looked into the reflection of Eddie’s eyes in the rear-view mirror.

  I watched his bloodshot eyes. He usually worked sixteen-hour days just to make ends meet. He never charged me a cent for any of the rides he had given me over the years.

  “He’s a dangerous man,” he said. “You know that.”

  Eddie looked forward after a moment and waited for the light to change. It was obvious from what was around us that within a month Southampton would be little more than a ghost town, and Eddie and I and everyone else like us would be in on that long haul to spring.

  His office was dimly lit and sparsely furnished. It ran the length of the top floor of the narrow building. Frank was behind his desk when I came in, reading a file with a look of concentration. He gestured eagerly for me to come in and take a seat on the leather couch by the door. I passed on his offer and stood leaning against the brick wall, my hands deep in my overcoat pockets, my eyes on the bare trees outside the storefront window that overlooked Main Street.

  A smaller window in the back of that long room overlooked the parking lot behind the Village Hall, where the police patrol cars were parked. Frank could watch the shift change from there and know, if he wanted, which cops were out on any given night. Everyone in town knew this about him. And Frank made a point of letting everyone know.

  He glanced up from his reading and looked at me over his half-frame glasses. “Thanks for being on time, MacManus.”

  The only light on in the room was the desktop reading lamp by his right elbow, but I could see him well enough by it. He was fifty-five or so, not very tall but thick through the torso, built like a keg. He wore his black hair slicked back and his dark mustache thick but trimmed just above his upper lip.

  “What do you want, Frank?”

  He closed the folder, then removed his reading glasses and dropped them on the desktop. He leaned back in his chair, the springs protesting under his weight, and rubbed the bridge of his nose between his index finger and thumb. He seemed genuinely tired, but I really didn’t care.

  “Augie’s coming back to work for me, starting tomorrow night. Did you know about that?”

  “Augie’s a grown man.”

  “Grown up more than most people I know. Always has been. See, I don’t like to turn friends down when they come to me for help, especially a friend like Augie. They don’t come any better than him. And I know how much he wants to get back to work and put the ‘accident’ and the past six months behind him. But the truth of it is, he isn’t one hundred percent yet. If he wants to work, he’s got to pair-up with a partner at first. But of course he’ll only partner with one person.”

  “He’d know I was there to baby-sit him. He’d see through the both of us in a second.”

  “Not if we told him you were tired of driving around without car insurance and you broke down and came to me for some work.”

  I wanted to ask Frank how he knew that my insurance had lapsed, but I didn’t bother.

  “It’s simple, Mac. You didn’t know he was coming back to work for me, right? So when you came to me tonight it was because you didn’t think it was wise driving around without coverage anymore, what with things being the way they are between you and the Chief. You needed money, and I was the only place you could turn. He’ll buy it because he has no choice otherwise.”

  Last May a kid from the high school where Augie’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Tina, was a student died from a heroin overdose. The kid had bought the drugs on school grounds, and when he heard this, Augie waged a one-man war against the pusher. It ended with Augie almost being beaten to death in his own house after taking surveillance photographs of a major player in the local heroin trade. That man was dead now, and the man he had hired to beat Augie, an ugly ex-boxer named Searls, was in prison and blind. I had taken out both eyes in a fight when he had come after Tina.

  Augie had spent three months in the hospital and another four pushing himself toward a full recovery. He had retired from the DEA a few years ago and returned to the East End to live a quiet life. It had been anything but that.

  We had met during my brief stint with Frank and had been friends since. Augie was the only man, outside of Eddie, whom I trusted. I wouldn’t let anything happen to him, no matter what the cost, to me or anyone else. And Frank knew this, knew this well.

  “What’s the job?”

  “A father wants his son-in-law tailed, thinks the young man has something on the side. Simple documentation. Easy.”

  “You need two men for that?”

  “One to drive, one to take pretty pictures,” he said. “The client has very deep pockets, and he wants results. No bullshit, MacManus. I’m telling you exactly how it is, take it or leave it.”

  “Except, of course, I can’t leave it.”

  Frank sighed and looked down at his hands folded now over his stomach. His fingers were thick, his hands probably twice the mass of mine. “You know, when Augie walked in here with that cane, I wondered, ‘Who the hell is this cripple?’ To be honest, I don’t think he’s going to cut it. I think he’s setting himself up for a hard fall. But I owe him a shot, if that’s what he wants.”

  The sound of a car door slamming shut echoed up from just below the front window. Frank looked toward it curiously but didn’t get up to check. He just sat there for a moment, alert, listening and waiting for the sound of the street door opening and footsteps moving up his stairs.

  I saw the world he lived in then, the world he had created for himself. Maybe for a second I felt for him, but only a second.

  “If I do this, Frank, I don’t get paid. We have to be clear on this up front. I don’t want any confusion. I’m not working for you. That’s not why I’m here.”

  He watched me then, the way a father would a son he didn’t understand. He paid well, and I could have used the money badly, everyone knew that. But I didn’t ever want to need money bad enough to where I’d take it from a P.I. like Frank Gannon.

  “Look, however you want it, MacManus,” he said. He was still staring at me, but I got the sense then that maybe a part of him had just given up on me. There was real comfort in that. “There’s no reason to make an opera out of it.”

  I nodded at that. “Good.” I removed my right hand from my overcoat pocket and reached for the doorknob. As far as I was concerned, we were done. But I wasn’t fooled by the pitch. There was more to this, and I just wanted to see it coming before it hit. “See you around, Frank,” I said.

  “Take it easy, kid.”

  It was the next night that we parked on the shoulder of a narrow back road on the edge of town and waited.

  There was nothing where we were but the kind of stillness and darkness you’d expect to find so far from the heart of things. There were fields around us, dormant farm fields, and border trees that stood in the distance like hedges of briar against a sky. There was no wind, but it was cold enough without it. The air outside the cab of Augie’s pick-up truck was arctic air, killing air, and even with the heater running full blast the glass around us was as cold as metal to the touch. I was glad to be inside.

  Augie beside me, I was behind the wheel, his camera equipment between us. He was wearing an army field jacket and scarf over a heavy knit sw
eater, jeans, and Timberland boots. All I had over my jeans and thermal shirt and ten-year-old work boots was my ratty overcoat. I kept my bare hands tucked inside my coat pockets.

  Augie and I had barely gotten ourselves settled in for the wait when a car appeared on the dark road behind us. I watched it in the rear-view mirror; Augie eyed it from the side mirror mounted outside the passenger door. The car appeared around the sharp turn a hundred feet behind us and approached and passed us fast.

  “It’s not him,” Augie said. I followed the car as it went by. It was a station wagon, not the Fiat for which we had been instructed to follow.

  We tried to settle in after that. There was the potential for a long wait. Our mark lived less than a mile down this road. The only way for him to get anywhere was to drive by us. His wife was home, so if he was planning to see someone, if there was someone for him to see, he would have to leave and we would follow.

  Augie took a deep breath and then let it out. “It’s good to be back,” he said.

  “It’s been a long time for you.”

  “I don’t mind telling you, Mac, I was starting to go crazy, pacing around the house all night, standing at my window watching for the dawn ‘cause I couldn’t sleep, the whole nine yards. I’d open a bottle of Jack and the next thing I knew it was over halfway gone and there was sunlight in my eyes. Poor Tina was ready to kill me. She’d get out of bed in the middle of the night just to tell me to go to sleep. The scary thing is, she’d remind me of her mother so much. When I was half in the bag and she’d come out, I’d swear it was looking at a ghost. After that I’d be too creeped out to sleep, you know.”

  Tina had stayed with me in my apartment during the three months last summer he was in the hospital. She was fifteen then. Having her there brought me shit, especially from Frank and the Chief. But it was a bad summer for everyone, all around.