“You in a hurry?” Baxter asked, the question tinged with irritation and menace.
“I got work.”
Baxter nodded toward the front counter of the diner. “You gotta eat, right?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Doug said.
“You fucking guess,” Baxter said, sneering. He leaned across the table and dropped his voice to a cruelly intimate whisper. “Don’t be a little bitch, Doug.”
“Baxter—” Franco started.
“Shush,” Baxter said, keeping his eyes fixed on Doug. “When Franco said we oughta bring you in, I only went along with it because we both grew up on Copper Hill. You were a hardass little kid, man. I remember the day Benny Hayes stripped off Julie what’s-her-face’s shirt on the basketball court. What were you, twelve? Benny had two years and thirty pounds on you, easy, and you beat him bloody. Kid lost a couple of teeth and any chance of ever being respected by the neighborhood again.
“Now, I figure you were playing white knight, rescuing the damsel in distress even if the damsel was a tiny-titted China girl with a mouthful of braces. Maybe it was an Asian thing. But you had fuckin’ steel that day, man. And the white-knight shit … that’s what it was. Shit. We were
all
stealing from the White Hen back then, and the night I stole that Caddy, you were my fucking lookout. You were with me, Kelly, and the Deeley brothers that whole night, man, riding around in a stolen car, drinking stolen beers, smoking stolen cigarettes.”
Baxter dropped back against his seat. He took a wad of cash from his jacket pocket and threw it onto the table.
“So go get your lunch, Dougie. I don’t want you late for work. But let’s stop pretending you’re some kind of saint.”
Doug’s heart pounded. He glanced at Franco but knew there was no help coming from that direction. Taller and leaner but jacked from years of lifting free weights, and quick as the devil, Franco probably could have taken Baxter if it came to fisticuffs. But something about Baxter made people uneasy and therefore compliant. It had always been that way, but never more so than now. With his prison tats and those cold eyes, Baxter was the alpha dog in pretty much any room he entered.
“I’m no saint,” Doug said quietly, glancing over his shoulder to make sure nobody was looking at them. A couple of old townies were two tables down, drinking coffee with their scarves still on. The mom had picked up her order and left with her boys in tow. He turned back to Baxter and Franco. “But this is bigger than stealing condoms and cigarettes from the goddamn White Hen.”
Baxter smiled. “We’re grown-ups now, Dougie. Stakes are higher. I know you’re out of practice. Hell, I’ve seen how out of practice you are. And I know it’s been twenty years since you took something didn’t belong to you. But I told you when we brought you in … you’re either in or you’re out.”
Doug stared at him for a few seconds and then he laughed. “For Christ’s sake, all I did was bust your balls because you were late.”
Franco scratched at his goatee and looked out the window.
Baxter just shook his head. “It ain’t what you said. It’s the vibe that’s burning off you, today and every other time we’ve gotten together. You’re about to crawl out of your skin, man.”
“Doug,” Franco said, finally speaking. His prior silence made the single word stop the rest of the conversation dead. “You and me, we worked together off and on, yeah? But we were never friends. That hasn’t changed. I like you well enough, but you and me don’t have the history you got with Baxter. I suggested we bring you in because you had the access and you had the need. You were squirrelly right off the bat, but me and Baxter, we figured you’d calm down once you got a little money in your pocket. So far, that hasn’t happened.”
No longer smiling, Baxter leaned in again. “What we’re saying is, chill the fuck out or we cut you loose.”
Something fluttered in Doug’s gut and he wasn’t sure if it was fear or anger.
Hunger, probably,
he thought. The guys were right, he definitely had the need. He might be the first guy Timmy Harpwell brought in when he needed an extra mechanic, but he was also the first guy kicked to the curb when business took a downturn. The last two years he’d been picking up a couple of days a week at Harpwell’s Garage, money under the table so he could collect unemployment. He’d looked for other, more reliable work, but there were too many idle hands and hardly any jobs.
The fluttering in his gut halted and an icy knot took its place.
“I told you I’m in. Damn right I need it,” he said, glancing from Baxter to Franco. “I just don’t think it’s real smart to be having lunch together at fucking Chick’s Roast Beef in the town where we’re doing shit we don’t want to get caught doing. One of you gets picked up, I don’t want to be a Known Associate. You see what I’m saying.”
Baxter exhaled, sitting back for a moment before he looked at Franco.
“White Knight has a point.”
Franco nodded, then gave a shrug. “Next time we get together at night? At Dougie’s place?”
“That works,” Baxter said, turning to Doug with a smile. “We’ll come in the back door. I’ll bring the beer if you get the food.”
The idea of these guys coming to his house after dark to plot more of the small-time heists they’d been living off the past couple of months made his skin crawl. But it made sense, especially since the alternative was spy shit that none of them had the brains for.
“Sounds good,” he said, keeping his tone level and wondering if he could ever get his own eyes to look as cold as Baxter’s.
Wondering if that was something to wish for or something to dread.
The bell above the door rang again. Doug glanced up at the big man who stepped into the diner and froze, unable to breathe. The guy nodded in recognition and Doug found himself just able to return the nod, watching as the new arrival brushed a few snowflakes from the lapels of his wool coat. His paralysis broke the moment the man reached the counter, talking happily to the counter girl, musing aloud about the relationship between Chick’s onion rings and his cholesterol.
Doug knew the big guy. They’d played football together at Coventry High years ago. Got shitfaced together at a few parties junior and senior year. They’d both dated Victoria Allen at some point, though the chronology escaped him.
Local boys,
Doug thought,
but only one of us made good.
“Meeting adjourned,” Doug said quietly, sliding to the edge of his seat.
Baxter grabbed his wrist, the grip strong, but maybe not strong enough.
Yeah,
Doug thought.
Could be I’ve been going about this all wrong.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re—” Baxter began.
Doug shut him down with a glare. Maybe his eyes were cold after all. “Call me later and we’ll pick another place,” he said quietly, and then lowered his voice further: “Somewhere without cops.”
Franco, idiot that he was, actually turned fully around and gave Detective Joe Keenan the once-over. Doug wanted to put his face through the plate glass window beside the booth. Something inside Doug had broken when Cherie died. He’d been sleepwalking, just moving with the current of his life. But the last couple of months with these guys, cloning the keys from the most well-to-do customers at the garage, smart enough not to hit anyone whose car he worked on personally, doing a little quiet, very rewarding bit of burglary … something was waking up in him, too. Maybe not the thing that had died along with Cherie—his hope, he guessed—but something with a little ambition and not a lot of patience.
Doug got up from the booth and left them sitting there. They’d already drawn the cop’s attention and he didn’t want to say another word to either one of them about their next job, whether the cop would hear them or not.
“Manning,” the cop said, looking him up and down.
“Keenan,” Doug replied. “Heard you’re a detective now. That entitle you to extra doughnuts?”
Detective Keenan smiled. “Actually, it does.”
Doug grinned. “Looks it.”
The cop shot him the finger. “Fuck you.”
“You don’t need to say it, Joe. I can read sign language.”
Keenan laughed. “How’s things?”
“Been better,” Doug replied, a thin smile forming on his lips. “But I’m still breathing, so life can’t be all bad.”
“Some days I wonder,” the cop said.
“I’ll see you around,” Doug said, heading for the door.
The bell rang when he pushed it open. As he glanced back he saw Keenan looking over at the table where Franco and Baxter still sat.
“Yeah. Drive safe,” Keenan replied.
The wind smacked the door shut behind him as Doug stepped out into the bleak January mess. Light snow fell and he blinked several flakes from his eyes as he dug out his keys, swearing under his breath. He climbed into his old Audi—a battered piece of shit everywhere but under the hood, where it gleamed—and started it up. As he backed out of his parking space, he glanced at the diner windows but couldn’t see inside. Slamming it into Drive, he tore out of the tiny lot, tires gripping the road despite the slickness of the wet snow.
He smacked the wheel with an open palm. “Fuck!”
Keenan didn’t have psychic powers or anything, but Baxter had done time and one look at Franco and you knew he was up to no good. The cop would be filing the moment away for future reference, and it pissed Doug off. If he’d sunk low enough to turn into a two-bit thief—and he had—he was going to have to insist on a little bit of discipline from these pricks.
He’d been haunted for twelve years, damning himself for not going straight home after Timmy had fired him that night. If he had, Cherie might be alive today. He’d been in his own kind of jail. He’d be damned if he’d end up inside a real prison now that he was starting to see a little light.
As the engine roared and the wipers skidded back and forth on the windshield, Doug told himself that stealing from rich assholes didn’t make him a bad guy, just a desperate motherfucker who no longer cared about the rules.
He told himself that a lot.
Keenan ordered a cheesesteak sub and onion rings, knowing that the grease would sit in his stomach later and not caring. He needed comfort food today. Truth be told, what he needed was a six-pack of MGD and maybe a few more besides, but he’d realized a long time ago that drinking to forget only gave him more bad memories. These days, when the snow came down hard and he started thinking about the Wexler family and about Charlie Newell, he just let it come. He’d seen worse things in the past twelve years than the electrocuted corpse of Gavin Wexler and he’d watched other people die; little Charlie Newell had just been the first. People thought he’d worked and studied so hard to become a detective because he had ambition, but he had them fooled. He just didn’t want to be the first guy on the scene anymore. Not ever, if he could help it.
The crazy thing was that when he had nightmares, they were mostly about Gavin Wexler’s father, who’d been there one second and gone the next, like a gust of wind had carried him off. In Joe Keenan’s dreams he would be searching for Wexler—sometimes in a storm but at others in the woods or along some downtown alley—and he’d have the total conviction that the guy was there, just out of sight, that if Keenan turned at just the right moment he’d find Wexler. That certainty grew more and more heightened until he woke up. Even in his dreams, he never did find Carl Wexler.
“You okay?” asked the girl behind the counter.
The ring in her nose wasn’t his style, but otherwise Keenan figured she was pretty enough. He tried not to let himself think in those terms about girls that young, but the purple streaks in her hair intrigued him. Of course, his wife would’ve preferred he not think that way about anyone but her, but she was realistic—guys always looked. So did women, Keenan knew, but he and Donna both pretended otherwise.
Detective Keenan gave her a lopsided grin and rubbed a hand across his blond buzz cut. “Just a few cobwebs in the brain today.”
“Snow does that to everyone around here,” the girl said.
“Yeah. I guess it does.”
She handed the order slip for his sub to the irritated-looking cook in the back and then went to get some frozen onion rings to dump into the fryer. As bad as they were for him, he loved to hear them sizzle. The owner—not Chick, who’d been dead for a quarter century, but a Brazilian named Maurice—used some brilliant concoction of herbs and spices that made those onion rings the town’s best-kept secret.
Keenan always joked with Donna that they were his personal crack and perhaps one day his doom. Donna didn’t think it was funny. They had two little boys she’d have to raise on her own if her husband committed suicide-by-onion-ring. He made light of it when Donna teased him but he had no intention of going anywhere. He’d watched Jill Wexler at her son’s funeral, still hoping her husband would reappear as suddenly as he’d vanished. He had never seen anyone so alone.
Perusing the offerings in the soda case—trying to force himself to believe that flavored water tasted as good as grape soda—he glanced at the two guys sitting in the back of the diner. The tall, skinny, olive-skinned guy might be Italian or Latino. He ID’d the other guy as Pete Baxter. Any cop in town would have known Baxter right off, and not just because of the spiderweb tattooed on his neck or the ugly black tattoo on his left forearm, which looked more like a sea lion but was supposed to be a cat.
Cocaine seemed almost quaint these days, but Baxter had a deep and abiding love for powder, the more the better. From what Keenan remembered, the guy had been arrested half-a-dozen times or more for petty theft, burglary, and a variety of other charges, but had somehow managed to avoid doing any real time until Coventry PD had caught him with enough coke to charge him with possession with intent to distribute. Nobody actually figured Baxter for a serious dealer. He’d sell off half the coke to pay for procuring it, set a startling amount aside for himself, and then give the rest away to family and friends like he was Santa Claus.
Pete Baxter was the kind of guy Detective Keenan’s grandfather Leo would have called a turd. And maybe that was true. Maybe Baxter was just a piece of shit that Keenan could ignore until he committed another crime. But the few times he’d seen the guy, Baxter had made him antsy. Cocaine didn’t have the same effect as meth, but Baxter always seemed like a runner, crouched on the starting line and ready to bolt. Only for him, the starting gun would be permission to lash out, to hurt people, to inflict pain and suffering. The cocaine might have been his way of tamping down the jittery, violent thing inside him or it might have been his attempt to find the courage to unleash it, but that thing was there inside Pete Baxter. Most of the cops he’d ever heard talk about Baxter thought he was a joke—just another lowlife—but Keenan thought he was a savage, looking out at the world through a human mask.