Bad Men

If she turned to him for help, they would kill him.

They would kill them all.

Dupree stood at the station house door and watched the snow fall. Already, Island Avenue was empty. The stores had closed early and the Rudder and Good Eats would not be opening for business. The ferry would return to port any minute now and Thorson would kill the lights on the dock and hang out a “Sailing Canceled” sign. The snow was already sticking to the sidewalks, the shadows of the flakes made huge by the glow of the streetlights as they descended. No cars were moving anywhere on the island. The risks of ending up in a ditch or, worse, taking a tumble into the cold sea were too great.

He heard footsteps behind him. Macy was wrapped up warm. She had added an extra sweater to her uniform, and her hands were double wrapped in a pair of woolen gloves and a leather pair from the station locker.

“No luck,” she said. She had been trying to raise Portland on the radio for the last hour, but there was only static. The phone line, meanwhile, had exchanged a dial tone for a steady hum. Dupree had wandered over to check with Larry Amerling in his house behind the post office, but his phone was also without a proper tone. It looked as if the entire island was going into communication meltdown.

“Did you get out to the Site?” Amerling asked Dupree as the policeman prepared to leave.

“Yes, I went out there.”

“And?”

“There were moths. A lot of moths.”

“That’s all?”

Dupree debated telling him about the vibrations in the ground, then decided against it. The postmaster looked edgy enough as things stood.

“That’s all, and after this snow I don’t think we’ll be seeing too many more moths on the island until the summer. Stay warm, Larry. I’ll check in with you at the post office tomorrow morning.”

He left the postmaster, pulling the front door closed behind him. A moment or two later, he heard the sound of the dead bolts locking.

Now, beside him, he saw Macy trying to dial a cell phone number. The display showed a ringing phone symbol, indicating that it was attempting to make a connection, then returned to the Verizon home screen. The aerial strength indicator read virtually nil. Even the reception on the TV in the rec room was terrible.

“Guess we batten down the hatches,” she said.

“Guess so.”

He didn’t even look at her.

Quiet time, she thought. I can do quiet time. I just wish you’d close the damn door.

Macy’s day had been spent on largely mundane matters. There was the B amp;E that turned out to be nothing more than an embarrassed husband who had climbed in through the kitchen window while dead drunk the previous night, broken plates, and knocked over the portable TV in the kitchen, then fallen asleep in the spare room because he was afraid of waking his wife, unaware that she had popped enough sleeping pills to allow half of San Francisco to sleep through an earthquake. His wife had eventually come to, spotted the damage, and called the cops. The first her husband knew about it all was when Macy arrived at their door while he was throwing up in the john. The woman began hollering at her husband and calling him ten types of asshole while he just held his head in pain and shame.

Macy left them to it.

Apart from the happy couple, she had issued a warning to the owners of a scrawny mongrel dog that was trying to bite passing cars, and talked to a couple of kids who were smoking and probably drinking (they’d hidden the beer cans somewhere in the undergrowth, but Macy was damned if she was going to go beating the bushes with a stick for a couple of Miller High Lifes) out by the old gun emplacement. She’d taken their names, then told them to haul their asses back home. One girl, dressed in a black leather motorcycle jacket and combat pants, with a Korn T-shirt underneath and a spiked dog collar around her neck, hung back.

“Are you going to tell my mom and dad?” she asked Macy. The girl’s name, according to her driver’s license, was Mandy Papkee.

“I don’t know. You got any reason why I shouldn’t?”

“We weren’t doing any harm. We just came out here to remember Wayne and Sylvie.”

Macy knew about the accident on the island the week before. A lot of the people she had met that day insisted on talking about it, if only to assure her that things like that didn’t happen very often on Dutch. Sometimes, the older ones said “on Sanctuary,” reinforcing the seemingly dual nature of the island’s existence.

“You knew them?”

“Everybody knows everyone else out here,” said Mandy. “I mean, duh, it’s an island.”

“Duh?” repeated Macy, pointedly.

“Sorry,” said Mandy. “Look, we’re not going to be back out here, not for a long time. I can promise that.”

“Why?”

“Because it gives us the creeps. This was, like, a stupid dare. We shouldn’t have come here. It just feels wrong.”

“Because of what happened to your friends?”

“Maybe.”