Джеймс Паттерсон - The Inn

“Maybe in Boston it’s literal, but up here, it’s a figure of speech,” Clay said.

“Mitchell Cline deserves to be dragged from the back of a crab boat,” I said. “The law and the beautiful system isn’t going to give us that.”

“I know.” He put his hands up. “But it’ll give us something if we’re patient and careful enough.”

“I don’t have any patience right now.” I waved my hand. “Marni is dead. She’s dead . Do you understand that? Do you feel it yet?”

“Of course I do. You’re upset,” he said. His voice was gravelly with emotion. “I am too. Everyone is. She was our little baby in the house, like Ange said. It’s too quiet without her.” The silence, like a fog, fell around us. Clay looked toward the stairs as though he thought he’d see her rushing down the steps to the front door. “But don’t let the anger drive you to do something stupid.”

“Whatever I do, it won’t be stupid,” I said. I turned to go, but his voice followed me.

“Don’t stray outside the lines again, Bill,” he said. “You know what happened last time.”

CHAPTER FORTY

SQUID WAS SCARED of Dogtown.

It wasn’t often that he acknowledged his fear. Living and working with Mitchell Cline had burned his nerves down to nothing, so terror was something abstract. He had enough difficulty just feeling the regular everyday emotions, and fear was an effort. Maybe the numbness had started earlier than Cline, under his father’s fists or in the rattling cell-blocks of juvie. Squid didn’t know. He hadn’t been forced to see a shrink in a long time, and anyway, he always lied to them.

But on his bike, pedaling through the dark woods of Dogtown, he felt the old familiar tingle of something like fear. The forest north of Gloucester was so dense, the morning light barely penetrated it. There were legends about this place, stories he’d heard from the locals of witches and ghosts and shit. There were weird rocks carved with words that appeared from between the trees like messages from someplace else, somewhere scary. He passed one that said USE YOUR HEAD, the letters green with moss. It made him think of the Druly woman, the sick, wet sound of the saw going through her spinal column as Turner heaved the tool back and forth. He swallowed hard, tried to shake off the feeling that someone was watching him as he rode. When Squid told Cline he didn’t want to do the drop-offs out here anymore, the man had laughed and increased the number of people on his route.

Squid looked over his shoulder at the winding road. Nothing.

In the distance he spied safety. The double-wide trailer that served as a makeshift bar in the evenings sat nestled in the trees. Squid had passed this place a couple of days earlier in the car with Cline and the others, everyone in the vehicle silent with the weight of their dark mission. Vermonte, the bar owner, would be pissed they’d dumped the Druly woman’s body out here, would probably bitch about it. But Squid wouldn’t pass on the dissent to Cline. Cline’s people looked out for one another, didn’t snitch. They all knew the man’s mood could turn on a dime.

Squid looked back, thinking he’d heard a car. Nothing again. His chest felt tight. There’d been what felt like a rock lodged in his throat since Cline had come to him the morning before and asked him to text Marni, a girl he’d known from school. The rock had grown as the ambulances and squad cars arrived at the house and people left the party and fled into the woods and surrounding streets. As he did with his fear, Squid pushed thoughts of Marni down. They would go away eventually. Nerves frayed. Emotions burned. There was no such thing as witches and no room in his life for guilt. He was a soldier who’d done what he’d been directed to do.

The car came out of nowhere, veering out of the oncoming lane and heading right for him. Squid jerked the handlebars and hit the slope on the side of the road at an odd angle. They seemed to be on him before he had even stopped skidding and rolling on the dirt and pine needles; they grabbed his wrists and shoved his face in the earth.

He thought it was cops until the hood came down over his head.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

THE PLAN ROLLED out almost naturally, as though it was our only available course of action. Kidnapping. Violence. I stood in the tiny, abandoned house in the dusty darkness created by the boarded-up windows and looked at the boy in the chair as Effie secured his wrists and ankles with duct tape. Nick, Effie, and I had come together in the forest in the early hours of the morning; it was as though we felt our plan would stain the house if we were to build it within its walls. Later that morning we had tailed Squid as he left Cline’s house for a drug run into Dogtown. He had been a pitiful kidnapping victim, his body nothing but bone and taut sinewy muscle, as easy to pin and bind and pick up as a struggling lamb. From the old student ID I found in his wallet, I learned he was sixteen. He had cried nonstop from the moment we grabbed him to this moment, and now he sat hooded, waiting to know his fate.

Nick ripped the hood off the kid’s head and he took in the sight of us, his surroundings. His face was wet with tears and sweat. I watched a hundred emotions flicker over his face. We’d bagged him too fast for him to know who we were, and now that he knew, he was confused. We weren’t a rival drug crew who would kill him and leave him somewhere with his genitals in his mouth for Cline to find. We weren’t FBI agents who would extract whatever they wanted from him and then dump him in a jail cell for the rest of his life. There was relief, but there was also terror. He knew we were Marni’s people.

“Oh, fuck.” Squid dissolved into sobs again.

“Yeah, fuck .” Nick kicked Squid’s chair, jolting the boy.

“Please.” Squid looked at me, figuring for some reason that I was the friendliest of his three captors. “Please, man! You can’t do this. You can’t. This is kidnapping, man. This is serious shit. Let me go, okay? Please! Let me go. I won’t say nothing.”

“Squid.” I held up the boy’s phone. “Don’t try to give me a lecture on serious shit. I’ve got your message here to Marni inviting her to the party two nights ago. Cline asked you to invite her because she knew you from school and trusted you. She’s dead, and there are a bunch of photos from the party that put the two of you together.”

“You can’t prove nothing.” Squid sniffed.

“Yeah, famous last words,” I said.

“We just went to a party, that’s all.”

“That’s all, huh?” I said. Effie took the backpack we’d taken off Squid’s shoulders and dumped its contents at his feet. Baggies of colored pills spilled out onto the bare boards. There was also, as the boy had promised us, another huge gun. The boy refused to look at the items.

“Did you know that when you die, your stomach becomes a kind of time capsule?” I folded my arms, sat on the edge of an old table a few feet away from Squid. “It immediately stops digesting whatever’s in there. Addison Gilbert Hospital pulled a couple of pills identical to these out of an OD victim last week. I wonder if they’ll find any in Marni’s stomach.”

“That’s bullshit, man,” Squid snapped.

“You better hope so.” Nick was circling Squid like a wolf, every muscle in his body taut and ticking with desire for violence. “Because if it’s not, we’ve got you, a drug fatality, and the lethal drugs that were supplied all together and wrapped up with a nice little bow.”

Squid hung his head and sobbed soundlessly, shuddering with fear. He gave himself a minute and then let the rage take over, kicking in the chair, spitting as he exploded at me.