Bad Men

But Macy remained uneasy for the rest of the shift, and she spoke little to Barron until they were on the steps of the headquarters building. There, Barron had reached out a hand and grasped her arm.

“Are we okay?” he asked, and Macy looked into his eyes and knew better than to disagree.

“Sure. I just don’t have a good feeling about Scarfe. We should have brought him in.”

“He’s dumb. If he is up to something, we’ll spot it soon enough. At least if he goes down again, it will be for something more than time remaining.”

He gave Macy his best shit-eating grin, then headed toward the lockers. Macy watched him go, and wondered if she’d seen what she thought she’d seen: Barron frisking Scarfe, then palming the small bags of white powder that he’d found in the man’s pocket. She said nothing about it to anybody. She didn’t figure Barron for a user, and maybe he was holding on to the bags for future use, possibly as payment to snitch junkies, but that didn’t sound right either. It simply wasn’t worth the risk for Barron to carry drugs, no matter what the excuse.

Which left the possibility that Barron wanted to protect Scarfe. Once again, as she headed for home, Macy was glad that her time with Barron was now over, and despite his stories, she was curious about her upcoming island detail. Macy was not a credulous person, and while police work tended to encourage a certain amount of superstition-lucky shoes, lucky routes, lucky bullets-she was still a little surprised by what Barron had said, and more particularly by the sincerity with which he had said it. Barron really believed everything he had told her about George Sherrin and Dutch Island, or at least had fewer doubts about it than he might otherwise have been expected to entertain. Still, he had pricked her curiosity, although that would be as close as Barron ever came to pricking anything of Sharon Macy’s.

She was curious too about the policeman, the one Barron and the others called Melancholy Joe. His story was pretty well known in Portland: his father and grandfather had both served as police officers, doing the bulk of their time out on Dutch Island. It was a peculiar arrangement, but it suited the department. They knew the island and its ways, and when police officers from outside the community had been tried on the island in the absence of a member of the Dupree family, the experiment had foundered. Crime-mundane crime, but crime nonetheless-had increased, and the nerves of the cops on temporary duty had become steadily more frayed. In the end, given that nobody particularly wanted to spend time out on Dutch anyway, the Dupree family had become the de facto first family of police work as far as Dutch Island was concerned.

But old Frank Dupree’s marriage had produced only one son, and that son was big enough to have even other cops label him a freak. She heard that the cost of altering a police vehicle to suit his size had been met by the department. He carried the standard-issue Portland PD sidearm, the.45 Smith amp; Wesson, but he had adjusted the trigger guard in his own workshop so that one of his huge fingers could pass through it more easily. Occasionally, one of the local papers would do a story on “The Giant of Dutch Island,” and during the summer, tourists would sometimes travel out there to catch a glimpse of him or to have their photographs taken alongside him. Joe didn’t seem to mind; or if he did, it made no difference to his permanent expression of worried bafflement.

Melancholy Joe. Macy smiled and said the name aloud.

“Melancholy Joe.”

Her headlights caught the sign for the interstate, the wipers striking out at the first drops of rain, and she took the north ramp.

“Sanctuary,” she said, testing out the name. She decided she liked that name better than Dutch. “Well, it’s better than being on traffic duty.”

Moloch lay in silence on his bunk. From a nearby television came the sound of a news bulletin, but Moloch tuned out the background noise. He had more pressing matters to consider.

His lawyer hadn’t been able to tell him much about the grand-jury hearing when they’d met ten days before, across a bare steel table in the prison’s visiting area. “All I know is that they have a guy named Verso.”

Moloch’s mouth twitched, but otherwise he gave no sign of his irritation. “Is Verso the target of this grand jury?”

“I don’t know.”

Moloch leaned in closer to the little man. “Mr. Braden, why am I paying you if you know nothing?”

Braden didn’t back off. He knew Moloch was merely venting steam. “You finished?” he asked.

Moloch leaned back, then nodded.

“I’m guessing that Verso has spoken to them and offered them something in return for immunity from prosecution. Verso’s a nasty piece of work, and you’re already locked up for the foreseeable future, so it could be that the county prosecutor might like to see what you can offer them to put Verso away.”

“What do I get in return if I testify? A cell with a view?”