Bad Men

“Sure,” he said. Terry wasn’t going to argue. He needed some cash. Even if he hadn’t needed it, these people weren’t the kind you refused. They owned Terry Scarfe, and he knew it.

“You’ll get a call, usual place, fifteen minutes,” the man said, then hung up.

Terry rose, swayed a little, and pulled a pair of sweatpants and an old T-shirt over his scrawny body. He found his heaviest overcoat, then walked two blocks to the pay phone, along the way picking up a coffee at the Dunkin’ Donuts to warm his body and his hands.

Life had not been particularly kind to Terry Scarfe. Most of the time it seemed to treat him like he had screwed its sister. Other times, it went after him like he had screwed its mother as well. He had one failed marriage behind him, a failure that was due, Terry felt, to a combination of factors, including excessive alcohol intake on the night that he had proposed, his arrest and incarceration shortly after the wedding itself, and the unforgiving (and, in fact, downright unpleasant) nature of the woman to whom he had attached himself. His wife had divorced him while he was in jail on burglary charges, then married someone else while Terry was locked up for possession of a controlled substance. Her significant life events, Terry concluded, seemed to coincide with his government vacations. Maybe if he stayed out of jail for a while, her life wouldn’t be quite so good, while the quality of his own existence would improve considerably.

A smarter man than Terry might have concluded that his criminal ambitions for himself far exceeded the talents available to him to achieve them, but like most criminals, Terry wasn’t particularly smart. Unfortunately, his career options were now even more limited than they had been to begin with, and few of them were likely to meet with the approval of the forces of law and order, which was why he was standing beside a telephone in the darkness waiting to talk to someone he had never met and who was unlikely to offer Terry a job tasting beer or testing feather beds for softness. Just as Terry was starting to notice that he could no longer feel his feet, the call came through.

“Terry Scarfe? My name is Dexter.”

Terry thought the guy sounded black. It didn’t bother him, except that black people tended to stand out some in Portland, and if the guy was planning on coming up, it could present problems.

“What can I do for you?”

“There’s an island, somewhere off the coast there. It’s called Dutch Island.”

“Yeah, Dutch. Sanctuary.”

“What?”

“Some folks still call it Sanctuary, that’s all, but Dutch, yeah, Dutch is good.”

He heard the black guy sigh.

“You done?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“We need you to find out as much as you can about it.”

“Like?”

“Cop stuff. Ferries. Points of access.”

“I’ll need to bring in someone else. I know a guy lives out there. He’s got no love for the big cop on the island.”

“Big cop?”

“Yeah, fuckin’ giant.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Nope, for real.”

“Well, find out all you can. And get your friend to track down a woman. She’s using the name Marianne Elliot. She’ll have a little boy with her, about six years old. I want to know where she lives, who she’s friendly with, boyfriends, shit like that.”

“When do you need this by?”

“Tonight.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Terry thought that he heard, in the background, a soft pop. Terry knew that sound. Somebody had just taken a bullet.

“No,” said Dexter, “you’ll do better than that.”

Dexter stared down at the body of Karen Meyer. She had never been a pretty woman, but Leonie and Willard had removed what little superficial attractiveness she might have had. They worked well together. It was kind of worrying. Dexter would have to talk to her. He didn’t want her getting too close to Willard. He and Shepherd had talked, and the way things were going, Willard wasn’t going to be around much longer.

Meyer had been easy to find. She’d transferred her business north, but had left word with the kind of people who might need her services in the future. It had taken Dexter just one phone call to find out where she was.

He’d always thought Meyer was smart, and relatively unsentimental. It was all money with her, and he guessed that the woman had given her a big share of Moloch’s stash in return for her help. It must have been a lot to make her risk crossing Moloch. He hoped that she’d had a good time with it because, in those final minutes in her basement, she had paid in spades for what she’d done.

“Did you find someone?” asked Moloch.

“Yeah. He’ll cost us five Gs to our friends Boston, plus a straight ten percent of whatever is on the island and some favors in the future.”

“He’d better be worth it.”

“They threw in a bonus, as a sign of goodwill.”

Moloch waited, and Dexter smiled.

“They gave us a cop.”