Chapter Forty-Four

“HERE’S WHAT I’VE got,” Clay said as we hit the sand. It was dark enough on the beach that I could make him out only as a big round silhouette against the distant gold lights of Gloucester. “I got a truck that had obviously been run off the road and abandoned in the woods just outside town. I got a suitcase with a headless body in it. I got enough shell casings in the surrounding area to melt down and make a statue of myself to put in the town square.”

“Why don’t they make more statues of sheriffs?” I pondered aloud. “They’re the backbone of municipal law enforcement. Some would say modern-day heroes.”

“Bill.”

“I know. I know. It’s bad,” I sighed.

“The abandoned truck is registered to Mark Bulger,” Clay said. “That’s your buddy who just died, isn’t it?”

I said nothing.

“We did a welfare check on the son, Henry,” Clay continued. “He’s been in Los Angeles with his girlfriend since yesterday. But the widow, one Shauna Bulger, is unaccounted for. Is she around town?”

“I just can’t say, Sheriff,” I said.

“Did Shauna kill that woman in the suitcase?”

“No comment.”

“You were there in the truck,” he said, putting something in my hand. I didn’t have to look to see what it was. I’d noticed Susan rubbing her bare wrist in the back of the taxi, looking for the watch she twirled when she was nervous. “Or at least Susan was. Tell me why.”

I shrugged. Clay shook his head and turned, and we looked at the black horizon. Finally he said, “You know, I do a lot of work with teenagers in town. Bored kids up to no good. In small towns, you get a lot of that. Marni was like that.”

I tried not to think about Marni, a teen we’d lost to the last drug dealer who blew into town. A fishing trawler was coasting along the horizon toward the harbor. It let out a blast of its horn, which sounded to me like a mournful moan.

“Anyway, you know the expression ‘ride or die’?” Clay said. “When like, you’re so loyal to a person you’ll ride out anything with them? You’d die before you bail out on a friend?”

I felt heavy with dread, standing there silently, knowing where this was going.

“You’re ride or die for the wrong people here, Bill,” Clay said. “Nick. Shauna. Whatever those two are tangled up in, you’re risking everything that you have for them. Everything that we have, here, in this house. These people.”

I thought quietly for a long moment, turning and looking back at the house, the lights beyond the trees.

“I have to,” I said finally.

“Why?” Clay asked.

“Because someone has to,” I said. “They’re my friends. If I can just buy them time, maybe—”

“Maybe they’ll come to their senses and let you rescue them?” Clay asked.

My words faltered. He put a hand on my shoulder. It felt impossibly heavy with his own certainty and my crushing trepidation.

“Some people can’t be saved,” he said. “And you’re going to die trying.”