Deadout Read online

  Simeon fucking Jarrett.

  He took off like a shot. I paused long enough for a heavy sigh, because I really wasn’t up for a chase. Then I took off after him.

  “Police,” I yelled, holding up my badge. “Simeon Jarrett, you are under arrest.”

  Jarrett cut down an alley next to a house being gutted and rebuilt. I followed, pushing as hard as I could and closing the distance between us. He was at least ten years younger than me, and if the chase dragged on I knew stamina would become an issue.

  Halfway down the alley, he jumped onto a row of Dumpsters, running along the lids. I followed suit, maybe not quite so gracefully. As I was bounding across the third Dumpster, my foot hit the gap between the two sections of the lid, and my leg went in up to the thigh. The lid scraped the length of my leg, something pulled in my groin, and my foot hit something squishy, suddenly soaking wet. Jarrett was extending himself to reach for the bottom rung of a fire escape hanging over the last Dumpster. I knew if he pulled himself up, he was gone.

  I launched myself at him, but my arms closed on air. I looked up to see him swinging around the ladder, using his momentum and his upper-body strength to propel himself back the way he had come.

  He planted one foot between my neck and my right shoulder and landed his other foot on my left triceps, squashing me back into the Dumpster and using me as a springboard to vault back onto the pavement. By the time I pulled myself up, he was turning up another alley and out of sight.

  I punched the lid of the Dumpster and growled, my face burning with a mixture of humiliation and fury as I climbed out. No way I was going to catch up with him, but there was a good chance he was going to double back up Second Street.

  I sprinted, hoping to head him off. The sounds of my own heavy breathing and the rhythmic squelch of my wet left foot were soon drowned out by a pounding noise in my ears. My lungs were aching almost as much as my leg and my neck and my shoulder and my arm. I knew Jarrett was probably gone, halfway across the city, laughing once again at some dumbass cop who couldn’t keep up. The heat from my face spread throughout my entire body with exertion and shame and anger. And hatred.

  I threw myself around the corner, and was almost startled to see Simeon Jarrett coming straight at me.

  I swung a left into the middle of his face. At the speed he was going, I could have just held up my fist and the effect would have been the same. His face seemed to split: the lower half trying to keep going until he flipped up into the air, ass over elbows. Somehow, he managed to land on his toes and his fingertips, ready to take off again, but I planted another left into his face, knocking him back onto his heels. As I closed on him, his right arm came around with a knife, sweeping toward my midsection in an arc that would have disemboweled me if I hadn’t pulled back at the last second. I kicked him hard under the elbow, and I might have heard a crack, but I definitely heard the knife go spinning off across the concrete. I looked down and saw an eight-inch slit in my shirt, and that’s when I set on him. Two more in the face with enough in them to push him back onto his ass. He still had a little fight left in him, landing a vigorous kick, so I used the last bit of mine to beat it out of him.

  By the time we were both done, his face was a bloody mess, but only marginally worse than mine. I read him his rights and tumbled back onto the sidewalk.

  That’s when I saw Nola standing fifteen feet away, her face twisted in horror and disgust.

  I went to her and she stepped back, away from me. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay.”

  She wouldn’t look at me. “Then I’ll see you at home.”

  3

  “I’m not saying he didn’t resist, I’m not saying he didn’t try to stab you, and I’m not saying he didn’t hit you. I’m not denying he’s an asshole who deserved everything he got and more, but Jesus, Carrick, you broke his wrist, fractured his jaw, and bruised his spleen for Chrissake.” Suarez sat back and rubbed his face with both hands. “I mean, what did you do, run him over with a truck?”

  “Hey, I got a little nicked up, too, you know. It’s not like he’s some boy scout.”

  “I know, Doyle. And I’m sure maybe you used appropriate force. But you busted up this asshole pretty good, and you’re supposedly on light duty.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You sure you don’t want to take some time off?”

  “I’m leaving tonight.”

  “For how long?”

  “The weekend.”

  “A long weekend?”

  “Back on Monday.”

  He shook his head with a weary laugh. “That wouldn’t be what I’m talking about anyway, Carrick. You need to take some time off.”

  “I’ll take the weekend off, and I’ll come back good as new.”

  “You’ll take the weekend off, and you’ll come back to admin duty.”

  “Bullshit, admin duty. You can’t do that. I just brought in Simeon Jarrett.”

  “You think I want you on admin duty, Carrick? You think the folks in admin want you in admin? You don’t think they die a little bit inside, knowing they’re going to be working with you? Watching you move your fucking lips as you fill out forms, taking five times as long as them and they know they’re going to have to redo it because you always fuck something up?”

  “Fuck you, I’m not that bad.”

  “Worse, Carrick. Seriously, you suck. But that’s what I’m going to have to do. You leave me no choice.”

  “But—”

  He put up a hand to silence me. “Have a nice weekend.”

  * * *

  When I got home that night, there were suitcases by the door, and my stomach lurched before I remembered we were going on a trip. Nola was putting dinner on the table. She smiled awkwardly and returned to the kitchen without looking at me.

  “Sorry about today,” I said when she came back with salad and bread.

  “I know. You were just working.” She sat down, still not looking at me. “It’s just … I have a hard time thinking that’s what you do when you’re out there.”

  “Not usually, baby. But he resisted, he went after me.” Even in my ears it sounded lame: He started it.

  She closed her eyes, almost in time to hide them rolling. “A lot of them resist, don’t they, Doyle? And that doesn’t make it easier, knowing these criminals and drug dealers are attacking you.” Her eyes went moist, and her voice thickened. “I worry about you out there. I worry about you getting hurt. And I worry about you hurting people. What does that do to you?”

  “It’s scrapes and bruises, Nola. It’s just part of the job. Speaking of which,” I said, grateful to change the subject, “how was your interview?”

  She looked down, away from me. “They offered me the job,” she said quietly.

  “That’s great—” I started to say, but when she looked up I stopped.

  “I didn’t take it.” Her cheeks were wet.

  “You didn’t…”

  “It’s on a brownfield, Doyle. An industrial waste site. The ground is … tainted.”

  “I thought it was organic.”

  “It’s all up on platforms, off the ground.” She shook her head sadly.

  “It sounds kind of cool.”

  “It is cool,” she snapped. “And good for them, but it doesn’t help me any. I can’t work at a place like that.”

  “Well … are you sure?”

  “Doyle, don’t start that again.”

  “Well, it’s just, you’ve been exposed to a lot of chemicals, and you haven’t had a reaction, not even to the decontamination in Dunston. The whole reason you went to the biodetox center with Cheryl was because there was a chance it could cure you. Don’t you think it’s possible maybe it worked?”

  “It didn’t work for Cheryl.”

  “Yeah, but you’re not Cheryl.”

  “Doyle, you just … you just don’t understand.” And then she started crying for real.

  Part of me was annoyed at her, but seeing her like t
his was breaking my heart, too. I moved my chair next to hers, put my arm around her, and kissed her head. She leaned into me for a moment, then pulled back.

  She turned to me and said, “I need a break from this city. I hate it.”

  Now, I hate this city, too, but I also love it. “Come on,” I said softly. “You don’t mean that.”

  She gave me a look that said yes, she did.

  We were quiet after that. Finally, halfway through dinner, Nola said, “I spoke to Moose today,” as if she had just remembered it. Moose was a friend of Nola’s, and mine, too. We were driving up to Martha’s Vineyard to visit him. It seemed crazy to me, spending most of a night driving up and another day driving back, for a little more than a day in between, but I had offered to do the driving and maybe getting away from the city would do us both some good.

  “He’s really looking forward to seeing us,” she said, “but he says he’s really busy with work. They’re having trouble with the bees up there, so he might not be as available as he had hoped.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  She didn’t know exactly, but I wasn’t listening anyway, preoccupied with my own troubles at work. And at home.

  “Don’t you think?” Nola asked, bringing me back to the moment.

  “Absolutely,” I said, refilling her glass from the wine bottle.

  “I shouldn’t,” she said, raising a hand next to her glass. I poured for another second before stopping.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “I’m driving.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Are you sure you want to drive the whole way?”

  “Absolutely.” I don’t mind driving at night, but I don’t like riding shotgun, and I wasn’t looking forward to six hours of forced conversation. I poured her a little more wine.

  * * *

  I took a quick nap after dinner and we left around midnight so we’d be there for the first ferry of the day. Nola fell asleep as soon as we left, and I made good time. Would have been better in my own car, I thought sadly, but it was gone forever, demolished back in Dunston. I was driving a brand-new Chevy Impala on loan from a grateful nation until it could figure out how to replace the vastly superior Nissan Z that had been destroyed in its defense. I felt a wave of sadness thinking about the car, and a wave of something like vertigo as I tried not to think about how it had been destroyed.

  Nola woke up when we got to the parking lot for the shuttle bus to the ferry.

  “Are we there?” she asked, squinty-eyed and groggy. I don’t think she quite knew which “there” she meant, but I said yes anyway.

  I took our luggage out of the trunk, and as I was putting my Glock in the gun safe built into the trunk, she appeared at my side. She had asked me earlier not to bring it, saying it was like bringing work on vacation. Work that shoots bullets. I was ambivalent on the issue, but she smiled when I did it, so that was something.

  The morning was gray and cold, with a stiff breeze. On the ferry, the breeze was even stronger. We sat inside, Nola leaning her head against my shoulder and drifting back into a semi-sleep as we watched the mainland receding. I felt somehow liberated, as if I had escaped the continent where all my troubles lay. I watched it slowly shrink, until the island in front of me was bigger than the continent behind me. Forty minutes later, the ferry shuddered as its engines thrust into reverse, and minutes after that, the entire vessel gently rocked as it came to rest against the dock.

  4

  Moose was waiting for us at the end of the gangway. I didn’t see him at first, hidden as he was behind a woman and her children there to meet their dad. Moose stood up on his toes, and his face split wide with a smile that should have hurt so early in the morning.

  Nola let out a squeal that sounded as perky as Moose looked, and she ran the last bit, wrapping him in a hug and swinging him around with a level of energy that made me think I should have gotten more sleep.

  When she put him down, he turned to me. I put out my hand but he came past it for a hug, a quick squeeze and a pat on the shoulder. He stepped back and winced up at my face.

  “You look tired,” he said. Then he turned to Nola. “How was the trip?”

  She gave an awkward shrug and looked at me. Moose followed her gaze.

  I put my arm around her shoulder and pulled her in. “She took a shortcut through la-la land.”

  “Crafty,” he said, giving her a sly wink. “So it was the red eye for the big guy, huh? You want coffee or sleep?”

  Hotel check-in wasn’t for a few hours yet, so sleep wasn’t an option. We stopped in Oak Bluffs for coffee, a place called Mocha Mott’s, then Moose took us on a quick tour of the island. Nola had known Moose longer than I had, so I sprawled across his pickup truck’s narrow backseat.

  Starting in Oak Bluffs, Moose pointed out the Flying Horses carousel, then Back Door Donuts, which apparently sells the best apple fritters in the world every night from the back door of a bakery.

  Next we drove around the Campgrounds, an almost cloyingly cute community of miniature Victorian homes, many done up with ornate gingerbread wood trim and painted in vivid pastels. In the center of it was a big, open-air church with a cross on the top. At one point, we drove past a garish pink confection with a big tulip flag, but the effect was ruined by a massive brown puddle in the front lawn. As we got closer, we could tell from the smell that it was what it looked like.

  Moose hit the power windows a moment too late, and the odor of it filled the truck.

  “Septic systems,” he said. “Something goes wrong, and it becomes a poop swamp.” He sped up, and a few turns later we were driving along the ocean.

  The island was larger than I had expected, and stunningly beautiful, speckled with ponds and inlets providing water views seemingly every few hundred yards. Inland, the rolling landscape was crisscrossed with walls made from smooth, round fieldstones.

  Moose kept up a running monologue on the island’s topography, geology, and agriculture that counteracted the effects of the caffeine. Nola peppered him with questions about what crops they were growing, and how: low-spray, no-spray, no-till, Integrated Pest Management, all the agricultural esoterica that had become vaguely familiar since I met Nola.

  Once again the car filled with a noxious odor, but before I could ask, Moose said, “Skunks. Island’s full of them. Some knucklehead brought them over in the fifties, and they just went nuts, like the rabbits in Australia, no natural predator.”

  Moose was in the middle of a long stretch about something called Island Grown and the local agricultural and beekeeping groups when he snorted and said, “Speaking of exotic invasives.”

  On our left was a huge, brightly colored sign with incongruous palm trees and large gold script that said, “Johnny Blue’s Berry Farm,” and under it, “Home of Johnny Blue’s Berry Jamz.”

  “What is that?” Nola asked with obvious distaste. I don’t usually have strong opinions about signs, but it did seem out of place.

  Moose shook his head. “You know Johnny Blue?” He named some reality talent show I’d never heard of.

  “Well, I wouldn’t know him either if he wasn’t such a big story around here,” Moose rushed to explain. “He’s awful—I think he was like third runner-up or something—but he had a song that was big last summer, catchy in a fast-food-commercial kind of way. As far as I can tell, his entire interest in farming stems from the fact that his last name is Blue, and he thought Johnny Blue’s Berry Farm would be a hoot. He’s promoting some kind of berry-flavored snacks called Blueberry Jamz. Apparently, you can make a lot of money from one awful song, because it’s a pretty big operation.”

  The sign loomed in front of the trees. Someone had nailed it with an egg.

  Down the road was another farm, Squibnocket Biodynamic. Nola and Moose launched into a detailed discussion of the merits of biodynamic farming. I sat in the back, snickering at the name.

  I was drifting off to sleep when Moose said something about how the situation with the bees had gotten really sc
ary. I knew he had taken a job with a group called BeeWatch after Nola lost her farm. They sent him to Martha’s Vineyard, which was so far pretty nice. I had no idea what he was actually doing, but I decided that if the whole police thing went down the tubes the way it was constantly threatening to, I could get a gig watching bees.

  “What’s scary?” I asked.

  Moose turned around, surprised, like maybe he thought I’d fallen asleep. “The bees disappearing.”

  “Doesn’t sound so scary,” I said. I like honey, as far as it goes, but my relations with bees have generally involved swatting and flailing, the occasional smacking and squashing, and every now and then wincing and swelling.

  Nola rolled her eyes. “It is if you’re a farmer. Bees pollinate crops. No bees, no food. It’s already affecting production.”

  “Well, yeah, that’s the worst part,” Moose said, “but the way the bees are disappearing is even creepier.”

  I sat forward. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, bees have been in trouble for a while. There’s mites that have been killing them for years, but more recently there’s colony collapse disorder, or CCD. With CCD, when people talk about bees disappearing, they’re not just dying, they’re literally disappearing. They fly out of their hive like they do every morning, but then one day they just don’t come back.”

  “Where do they go?”

  “No one knows. First time it happened this big-time beekeeper has all these tractor trailers filled with bees. It’s a big business. They drive around the country, down south for pecan season and peach season, come up north for blueberries and cranberries. Anyway, between seasons this guy parks his bees in this huge field in Florida. So there’s all these trailers parked there, sixteen million bees. One day his workers come out to check on the bees, like they do every day, and three quarters of them are gone. Millions of bees. The hives are intact, but the bees are gone. And no one ever finds them, either. Millions of bees, vanished without a trace. And now it’s happening everywhere. In England, they call it Mary Celeste Syndrome, after the famous ghost ship.”

  I actually felt a chill. “That is creepy. So what’s causing it?”