Bad Men

Bill shrugged on a robe, rearranging it to conceal his dying hard-on, and shuffled to the door, swearing as he went. He left the lights out in the hallway and pulled back the curtain at the side window. He didn’t recognize the woman on the step, but she looked fine, maybe even finer than the woman he’d just left, and that was saying something. She had a map in her hands.

Bill swore louder. How hard could it be to get lost with a mall slap bang in front of you? Christ, if Bill stood on his lawn, he could see the mall, clear at the top of Yale Avenue. He took his time looking the woman over, lingering at her breasts. Bill swore once again, this time under his breath and more in admiration than in anger, then opened the door.

He barely had time to register the gun in the woman’s hand before she jammed it into the soft flesh under his chin and forced him against the wall. Behind her came a redheaded man, and after him two others, a real pretty boy and a Richard-Roundtree-after-a-beating motherfucker with a big ’stache, who brushed past Bill and headed straight into the house.

“The f-”

“Shut up,” said the woman. She ran her left hand over Bill’s body, stopping briefly at his groin.

“We disturb something?”

From the bedroom Bill heard a scream, followed by the sound of Jenna being dragged from the bed.

“Just the two of you?” asked the black woman.

Bill nodded hard, then stopped suddenly as he considered the possibility that the action might get his head blown off. The pretty boy stayed by the half-open door while Bill was forced back into the living room. Jenna was already there, a sheet wrapped around her. She was sobbing. Bill made as if to go to her, but the woman stopped him and gestured toward the wall. Bill could only shoot Jenna a look of utter helplessness.

And then he heard the front door closing, and footsteps coming along the hallway. Two people, thought Bill. The pretty boy and-

Moloch entered the living room. “Billy boy!” said Moloch. His eyes flicked toward the woman, then back again. “I see you haven’t changed a bit.”

“Aw, Jesus, no,” said Bill. “Not you.”

Moloch moved closer to him, reached up to Bill’s face, and grasped his hollow cheeks in the fingers of his right hand.

“Now, Billy boy,” said Moloch. “Is that any way to greet your brother-in-law?”

Dupree nodded approvingly.

“The house looks good,” said Joe. “You’ve done a lot with it in the last year.”

He was holding the glass as delicately as he could while she showed him around her home. To Marianne, the glass still looked lost in his grip, with barely enough capacity to offer the policeman a single mouthful. They had paused briefly at her bedroom door and she had felt the tension. It wasn’t a bad feeling. After looking in on Danny, who was fast asleep, they went back downstairs.

“I wanted to put our own stamp on it, and Jack didn’t object. He helped us out some, when he could.”

“He’s a good man. There’s been no more trouble, has there? Like before?”

“You mean drinking? No, none that I’ve seen. Danny likes him a lot.”

“And you?”

“He’s okay, I guess. Lousy painter, though.”

Joe laughed. “He has a distinctive style, I’ll give him that.”

“But he was friendly, right from the start, and I’m grateful to him. It was kind of hard when we got here. People seem a little…suspicious of strangers, I guess.”

“It’s an island community. People here tend to stick pretty close together. You can’t force your way in. You have to wait for them to loosen up, get to know you. Plus, the island’s changed some recently. It’s not quite a suburb of Portland, but it’s getting there, with people commuting to the mainland for work. Then you have rich folks coming in, buying waterfront properties, forcing up prices so that families that have lived here for generations can’t afford to help their kids set up homes. The assessments for waterfront properties out here are based on one sale made last year, and the assessor in that case only went back three months to make his valuation. Lot prices increased one hundred percent because of it, almost overnight. It was all legal, but that didn’t make it right. Island communities are dying. You know, a hundred years ago there were three hundred island communities in Maine. Now there are sixteen, including this one. Islanders feel under siege and that makes them draw closer together in order to survive, so outsiders find it harder to gain a foothold. Each group is wary of the other, and never the twain shall meet.”

He drew a breath. “Sorry, I’m ranting now. The island matters to me. The people here matter to me. All of them,” he added.

She felt the tension again, and luxuriated in it for a moment.

“But working in the store, that’s a good way to start,” he continued. “Folks get to know you, to trust you. After that, it’s just plain sailing.”