Third Rail (2 page)

They stop at a Franklin's, a brass-rail-and-plastic-fern bar on Mass Ave, and drink whiskey until they turn the lights up bug-kill bright to chase everyone home. Then Thalia remembers there's a loft party down the street and they're walking again. The nice part of the neighborhood thins out and they pass into the Lower South End, walking by places Harkness remembers from when this used to be his beat—a meth lab in an SRO hotel in Albrecht Square, a coffee shop that dealt Mexican shitweed.

Whatever the street-corner thugs think of a cop and a girl in a white leather jacket wandering through their turf long past midnight, they keep it to themselves. Harkness and Thalia are protected by the impermeable aura of new love—and the heavy Glock hanging from his belt.

 

The loft party is on the top floor of a crumbling brick warehouse, entered via a lurching freight elevator perfect for more grappling in the dark. Upstairs, the unfinished drywall hallways are scrawled with drawings and messages lit by a string of bare bulbs. To Harkness, it looks more like a construction site than a place to live. Thalia introduces him to some of her friends—a guy who runs a gallery on Thayer Street, a couple of photographers, and her rabbity friend Marnie, who works at the Zero Room and moonlights as a webcam girl and a
sex worker,
as she calls it.

Marnie's hard to miss with her rainbow hair and pierced eyebrows. Tonight's a halfhearted costume party, though everyone seems to be dressed like some subspecies of hipster.

“Great costume,” Marnie says. “You really look like a cop, you know that?”

Harkness is tall and thin and stands up straight. He keeps his black hair cut short on the sides. When he's not drinking, his brown eyes spark with intelligence and enthusiasm. When he's drinking, they go dark and dead. Strangers pay attention to him because his voice is strong and he looks right at them, a lost art.
A natural,
they'd thought at the Police Academy.

“Yeah, Eddy's going for
Bad Lieutenant
.” Thalia presses her hand on his chest just below his badge.

Harkness summons up Harvey Keitel lurching through nasty New York City, snorting coke by the bucketful and obsessing about a nun. “I don't think he wore a uniform,” he says. “And I'm not a lieutenant.”

Thalia leans close. “It's a party, Eddy. Don't be so fucking
literal
.”

She steps away and Marnie whispers something in her ear.

“Be back in a few,” Thalia says. “Stay where I can find you.” She walks across the room with Marnie, and Harkness stands alone in the crowded, dim loft, which thrums with bass and feedback. He drifts toward the band, too arty and slow for him, but better than silence.

The twitchy lead singer looks like a fledgling Nick Cave, pressing his eyes closed and muttering deep lyrics into the microphone. Up front, zombies, goddesses, and nurses dance, faces lit blue by their iPhones when they pause to take pictures of each other.

Harkness hits that magic point when drinking resets his mind. Disobedience is cleansing—one of the many truths they don't teach at the Academy. Tomorrow he'll be whiskey scoured and ready to try again.

He finds the bar, a worktable lined with stalagmites of crusted oil paint and a couple of handles of Yakov. Harkness skips the fake Russian vodka. But there's a trashcan full of ice and beer next to the table. He takes a couple of bottles and twists the tops off, drains one and starts the second.

Little Dorothy dances by, weaving around the dancers' legs, white plastic mask over her face. Harkness pushes through the crowd. She surfaces again for a moment, her blue dress fluttering behind her as she darts around the loft.

Little Dorothy shows up after Harkness hears about any dead girl. Doesn't matter how they die—washed up on a Hyannis beach, rotting in the locked trunk of a car on the Southeast Expressway, or mauled by a pit bull in Franklin Park. They're all Little Dorothy to him.

After a few minutes, when he still hasn't found her, Harkness gives up and decides Little Dorothy was just someone's kid in a costume.

“Hey. Brought you a beer.” It's the rabbit-girl with the circus hair.

“Thanks, Marnie.” Harkness takes the beer. Why not? Thalia's friends are his friends now.

“Thalia just told me you're that Harvard Cop!”

He shakes his head and drinks.

“Dude. That was like the fucking worst thing
ever
?
That happens, then the Sox haven't won ever since?”

That happens
—his notorious incident reduced to two words.

“You go to jail?”

“No,” Harkness says. “They don't send cops to jail for doing their job.”

“Good, 'cause that whole thing was fucked up? I mean way fucked up. What kind of douche would do that shit? Drop a friend off a bridge . . . down onto the Pike?”

It's a question Harkness asks himself every day. And its darker twin—
Why couldn't he stop them?

“Beantown is a mean town,” Marnie recites.
“That's what I always say. Looks all nice and historical on the surface. But underneath it's fucking rotten. Boston's built on these piers from the 1700s, you know? When they rot, the whole city is going down. Gonna be total fucking chaos.”

With her curling voice and fake tough talk, Marnie makes Harkness feel old at twenty-nine. “I'll remember that,” he says. “You seen Thalia?”

“Saw her in the kitchen.” Marnie points. “Over there.”

“Thanks.” He makes his way through the crowd. Like Marnie, half of them think Harkness is wearing a costume. The others sidle away, sure he's here to shut down the party. He walks across the loft floor trying to keep it together, one foot in front of the next.
No staggering. No falling.
That's the order of the day.

His cell phone rings and Harkness clicks it open.

“Thalia, where are you?”

“Don't you know?”

“Who's this?”

“Pauley Fitz,” a man's voice says. “
Turnpike Toreador
. Happy anniversary, Harkness.”

 

Thalia's passed out, face down on a paint-stained wooden table crowded with empties, surrounded by a clutch of art guys in thin leather jackets smoking cigarettes. They turn toward Harkness, decide he's not a real cop, and keep talking. The tallest of them, wearing old-style black jeans and a tight white pocket T-shirt, is telling a joke. Harkness hangs back.

“So there's this clown and this little girl. And they're walking into a forest.” Art guy bends his shining bald forehead toward the listeners. “The girl says, ‘I'm scared, these woods are creepy.'” He pauses. “Then the clown stops, turns to the girl, and says,
‘How do you think I feel? I'm gonna have to walk back home alone
.
'”

They laugh, paper-white faces twisted, crooked teeth flashing. They've never seen a dead girl. Or pieces of one.

“C'mon, Thalia.” Harkness shakes her shoulder and her eyes open. “Gotta head out. Now.”

Thalia reaches back for her coat. No confusion, no fighting it. Harkness takes her arm and leads her out of the kitchen. The art guys watch them like crows.

“Never seen anyone that drunk,” someone whispers in their wake.

“Thalia? Thalia Havoc?” another says. “That girl's legendary.”

 

Harkness shoulders the heavy door to one side and they fall into Thalia's loft, locked in a kiss so hard that Harkness feels her teeth. She's peeling off his uniform before the door slams closed. She helps him unbuckle the belt and the leather and metal viscera of his job clunks to the floor.

Thalia strides across the dark wood floor. There's a studio with an easel and canvases on one side and a cluster of mismatched furniture and a futon on the other. Ten minutes ago she was passed out at a kitchen table. Now she's wide-awake, buoyed by a brutal second wind, stalking across the splintered loft floor to light candles on the windowsill. The candlelight and a night of drinking transform her from waitress-artist into something much more primitive. As Harkness watches, his head turns heavy. The room narrows and tilts like a funhouse, dropping him to his knees.

“Whoa.” He shakes his head to clear it, but it doesn't help.

“Too much whiskey?”

“Maybe.” He takes a deep breath and stands, shakily, sure that more than whiskey is messing with him.

“This should perk you right up.” Thalia pulls off her tall boots and jeans and kicks them across the dim loft. Glass shatters. She rips off her blouse and buttons click across the floor.

Thalia lowers her thong and flings it across the room with a deft kick. She kneels on the battered red couch, her breasts pressed against the velvet curve of the couch. “M'ere, Eddy.”

Harkness sways toward the couch. He reaches out to trace the skein of freckles across her shoulder blades, then runs his finger down her spine. Deep at its base, hidden where no one except her lovers would see it, waits a tiny tattoo of a red hummingbird with a crude black
X
slashed through it.

She pulls back. “Don't touch that.”

“What is it?”

“Bad luck. Ancient history.”

Harkness tries to remember where he's seen that red bird before.

“Hurry,” she whispers.

Harkness moves his fingers lower to part her from behind. Thalia's breathing turns faster. He inches inside.

Thalia gives a low growl.
“Yes.”

Harkness closes his eyes and the room spins. He opens them to see Thalia's pale back moving in the murky light. “You're so beautiful.”

“Don't talk shit.” She shakes her head and presses her eyes closed. “No more talking. Need to concentrate . . .”

Harkness reaches out and cups a swaying breast to still it.

Thalia grits her teeth and bucks hard against him. “More. Now, Eddy.”

Harkness wraps his arms around her and pulls her to him, then harder. He's about to come inside her but wants her satisfied shout to be the last sound he hears before he passes out. To distract and delay, he goes through a litany of Back Bay cross streets—Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth . . .

When Harkness gets to Gloucester Street, his strangled call echoes through the dark loft as Thalia turns her head and screams into the red velvet.

H
ARKNESS WAKES
with his arms wrapped around Thalia from behind—one hand on her hipbone, the other tucked under her breasts. Sprawled on the futon, where they finally collapsed, their bodies dovetail, legs tangle, and skin adheres. The planty scent of sex wafts from the wrinkled sheets. Thin October light slants off the splintered floorboards to limn the dusty footprints and the smudged giveaway pint glasses on the windowsill. Morning is about flaws.

He picks up his phone and squints at the screen—a few minutes after six. He uncurls from Thalia. He can't shower, might wake her. He's not even sure where the shower is. He gathers his uniform from the floor. It's wrinkled but should pass. Then he looks for the thick black leather belt that holds his gun and radio. He remembers dropping it on the floor when they came in from the loft party. He nudges the clothes on the floor with his foot.

Thalia stirs and sits up. “Eddy? Come back to bed.”

“Can't. Got an early shift.” His brain hurts when he talks.

“Call in sick.”

“Doesn't work that way.”

Thalia reaches out and touches his leg. “Call in well, then. Tell the other cops you can't get out of my bed before noon.”

“I wish.”

“It's rude to fuck and run. Especially the first night you stay over.”

“Got to be at work by seven.”

“Minding the meters.” Thalia lowers her head back down on the pillow, her hair a red-tinged tangle. “Least you still have a job.”

“Thalia, I lost my gun.”

“It's probably with your jacket.” Thalia points toward the couch.

Harkness lifts his coat and finds the belt coiled underneath but no gun. He pats his coat pockets. They're empty. “It's not here.”

“Well, you were pretty out of it last night.”

“What?”

“Talking shit. Crashing like a dead man, then waking up all wired and weird. You walked to the donkey place to get me smokes, 'member?”

Harkness doesn't remember. “What donkey place?”

“That gas station on Southampton Street, the one with the donkey on the sign.
Gas that's got kick
. Must've dropped it on the way back or something. Just walk toward the corner.”

“No. No. No.” Harkness lifts up clothes, newspapers, dishes—and throws them to the floor.

Thalia pulls the creased sheet up to cover her breasts. “Don't get all freaked out.”

“This is serious, Thalia.”

“Then go find it. Didn't you tell me you were really good at finding things?”

 

Harkness retraces the straight route to the gas station with a kicking donkey on its sign, scanning the sidewalk and finding only cigarette butts, burger wrappers, beer bottles, receipts, losing scratch cards, crushed vodka nips, and a couple of mismatched gloves. He walks past tow lots with prowling Dobermans, a food bank with a line stretching around the block, and the low, hulking South Bay House of Correction, where Narco-Intel sent dozens of dealers. Harkness wonders if any of them are watching out the tiny square windows as he dives down over and over, hands on cold cobblestones, to look beneath cars.

The Southeast Expressway roars with morning traffic and his head throbs like a slowcore band warming up. He's had rough nights out before, but nothing like this—a lost night giving way to a cold reckoning.

He walks into a cluttered convenience store attached to the gas station, the air thick with the smell of dawn smokers and burnt coffee.

“You!” The man behind the counter waves him forward. “What the fuck're you doing back here?”