Джеймс Паттерсон - The Inn

“Clay?” Nick scoffed. “Clay couldn’t move a throw pillow from one end of a couch to the other without fucking it up somehow and injuring himself in the process.”

I shushed him, glancing up to the second floor, where Clay’s room was. Nick moved closer to me, lowered his voice.

“Winley Minnow’s built like a double-wide and he was buzzed this morning,” he said. “That shit is strong. What happens if someone like Marni gets ahold of it? She’s maybe a hundred pounds dripping wet.”

I turned away. Nick was talking like a man who’d already gotten on the train and taken his seat and was beckoning to me through the window as the gears began to grind. I couldn’t leave him to wander into a situation by himself, hypervigilant and ready to fight whether there was a battle to be won or not.

Gloucester was not my city, but it had been Siobhan’s. My wife had dreamed of running a hotel by the sea since she was a little girl, and she didn’t have the time before she was taken to really enjoy what she had built. I knew that at the moment, I was staring into the blood and bone and muscle of a new town with new people to protect. It was a familiar feeling. I was not a cop anymore, but I could throw myself into this mission and become a part of Gloucester, let it take me up into its heart, fight for it. The feeling of having something to love and protect the way I had Boston made the hairs on my arms stand up. No, I decided. Nobody would prey on the kids of this town. Not while I was standing guard.

“It’s up to us,” Nick said.

“It’s up to us,” I agreed.

CHAPTER TEN

I WALKED DOWN the hall and saw Marni sitting on the steps, a cigarette clamped between her lips, tuning her violin. Marni had stopped going to school about the time she moved in with Siobhan and me, but she hadn’t given up the violin. Music was the only subject she hadn’t been failing. I tried to avoid Marni completely, even when Siobhan was alive, having exactly zero experience in the emotional requirements of volatile, vulnerable teen girls. I was aware that, now that Siobhan was gone, Marni was kind of my responsibility. But I’d become a master at ignoring my responsibilities.

I was about to make the girl aware of my presence when she finished tuning the violin, placed it under her chin, and played a few notes I recognized from one of Chopin’s nocturnes. I’ve always wanted to tell Marni that she’s a gifted musician. She plays only sad stuff, and sometimes I hear her practicing and just the sound of it tears me to shreds inside. But telling a teenager a thing like that could make her pitch the instrument into the sea and never play again. I stood in the hall and listened, my throat tight and my fists clenched, until she stopped to adjust something else. I crept away and then walked back down the hall loudly and sat on the stairs beside her.

“Here he is,” she said, the cigarette moving as she talked. “Mr. Freeze.”

“Mr. Freeze?”

“The guy with the cold, dead heart.”

“I see.” I folded my arms. “You think I didn’t appreciate the little thing you organized this morning for Siobhan.”

“You sprinted off like someone was shooting at you.”

“I had to help a friend,” I said. “But I appreciated it. I just grieve differently than you. I’m not a ‘Let’s all get together and hug it out’ kind of griever, Marn.”

“Yeah, you’re a ‘Keep pushing it down until it rises up and explodes’ kind of griever,” she said. “That’s healthy.”

“I congratulate you on your career choice of psychologist,” I said. “Fifteen might be a bit young to get licensed, but I’m sure your professional colleagues will make an exception in your case.”

“Did you come here just to annoy me?” she asked.

“I want to know if you’ve had anyone approach you with one of these.” I took out the capsule with the smiley face and showed it to her. She examined it and then made like she was going to throw it into her mouth. She started laughing when I grabbed it back.

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“You’re too easy.”

“Have you seen one of these before or not?”

“No, I have not. Why are you asking? Are you the new drug police in Gloucester? And here I was, thinking you’d reached peak lameness. ‘Just say no to the drugs, Marni.’” She crossed her eyes and said in a stupid, lisping voice, “Drugs are bad, m’kay?”

“Now who’s being annoying?”

“Of course there are drugs around.” She looked away. “Gloucester’s not the moon. There’s weed. The boys in the kitchen at work huff nitrous oxide from the whipped-cream cans we use on desserts sometimes. Whip-its. You ever done a whip-it?”

“No. I like my brain cells too much.”

“Well, the boss caught them, so they’ve mostly stopped now. But I don’t blame them. There’s nothing to do here. How the hell are we supposed to spend our free time?”

I knew exactly how Marni spent her free time, and it was worrying enough without the drugs. She fit right in with a posse of similarly badly dressed mopey teens who had body parts dripping with piercings or crisscrossed with free tattoos they got from local apprentices practicing in their mothers’ garages. From what I could tell, they did the kind of things I did when I was their age. Smashed the windows of abandoned houses. Sat around campfires on the beach talking trash. Threw bottles off the break wall into the water. Kids who, in a couple of years, would either straighten right out or flush their futures gleefully down the toilet.

“I’m not talking weed and whip-its,” I told her. “I’m talking about the hard stuff. This here?” I showed her the capsule. “This did about ten thousand bucks’ worth of damage to a lady’s house this morning and almost got me a kitchen knife in my forehead.”

“I don’t know anything about it, man.” Marni waved me off. “I work at a pizza shop. Everybody there is on something. How do you think they don’t go nuts with the sheer mindlessness of it all?” She stuck her chin out, made sleepy eyes. “Thin crust. No anchovies. Double cheese. Thin crust. No anchovies. Double—”

“Not you, though, right?”

“Oh, of course not.” She rolled her eyes. I got an itchy, unsettled feeling in my chest. I wanted to come down hard on Marni, tell her all the things Siobhan would have told her if she were alive: that she was too smart to spend the rest of her life wearing a Dough Brothers uniform by day and wasting her time with losers and washouts at night. But I knew too much of that would only push her away. I decided I would keep a closer eye on her, even if I had to do it covertly. Marni was on the edge, and the smallest breath of wind could blow her into a dark place. I had to keep a grip on Siobhan’s little cousin.

“Well, then, I suppose if you’ve never bought any drugs, you don’t know how to call up for some,” I said, pulling the piece of paper with the phone number out of my pocket. Marni looked at the number with interest, then her big eyes flicked back to me, suspicious.

“I need someone with a young voice,” I said. “You ever take a drama class?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE BOY WAS sitting on a wooden ledge outside Dogtown Used and Unusual Books, watching the crowds go by and sucking on a lollipop. A section of Gloucester’s main road had been shut down for a street festival, and the curb was lined with carts selling lobster rolls, corn dogs, and ice cream. There were photography stalls selling sunset shots of the boats in the harbor. Nick and I observed the skinny kid in oversize clothes as we stood behind a stand selling nautical antiques, the jumble of polished brass navigation equipment and salt-encrusted buoys providing cover. Marni was casually flipping through tiles painted with colorful starfish on the counter of the stall. She glanced over at the boy when we pointed him out.