be?” Lincoln asked. “I was really hoping to talk to him.”
Kevin shrugged. “He’s staying someplace here on the island is my understanding. But he’s dealing with Delia now, so who knows? He might’ve hired a water taxi to take her back to the Cape.”
“Delia?”
“The singer? Purple hair?”
“What’s her story?”
The bartender made a syringe with his thumb and forefinger and injected himself in the arm. “She was supposed to be in rehab, but apparently checked herself out.”
“She usually sings with the band?”
“When she’s clean. Great set of pipes.”
“Are she and Mickey together?”
“That I wouldn’t know.” For some reason Lincoln suspected otherwise, but the man’s tone made it clear that he was through answering questions. “Can I get you something?”
Not wanting to head back to Chilmark until he had a better sense of where things stood, he ordered a beer and checked his phone for messages. If Kevin was right and Mickey had taken this Delia person back to the mainland by water taxi, he’d probably call or text when he got there and return to the island by ferry in the morning. He had tried to reach Lincoln earlier, but the hospital had a strict no-cell-phone policy, so Lincoln’s had been switched off, and he didn’t see that Mickey had called until he went outside later and turned it back on. The background noise at Rockers had been so loud that he’d had to listen to his voicemail three times: Text me when there’s word on Teddy. Got a little problem here myself. I’ll explain later. Sorry about all this, Lincoln. Something about this message had felt off, so he listened to it again now. Was it the word all? If he was reading between the lines correctly, it wasn’t just what had happened to Teddy that Mick was feeling bad about, but also whatever had led up to it. In hindsight, he probably wished he hadn’t dragged them to Rockers to hear his band play in the first place. Since now the whole weekend was a clusterfuck. But maybe the regret was more specific—the purple-haired singer who’d shown up unexpectedly. Had Mickey known she’d be there, he maybe would’ve warned them that her voice was a dead ringer for Jacy’s—possibly why he had hired her—and that she’d be covering many of the same songs Jacy used to sing. Whatever. If Mickey had regrets, he could join the club, because Lincoln did, too. He never should’ve returned Coffin’s call. If he hadn’t been distracted by what the man was telling him, he might’ve truly registered Teddy’s distress and caught him before he passed out. Come to that, he wished he’d never gone to see Coffin in the first place. Really, had he done a single thing right since stepping off the ferry?
“Jesus,” said a familiar voice at his elbow. “What kind of shape is the other guy in?”
Lincoln had been so deep in thought that Joe Coffin, speak of the devil, had managed to slide unnoticed onto an adjacent barstool.
“He’s in the hospital, in fact,” Lincoln told him. “It’s my friend Teddy. He fell on a wineglass.”
Coffin studied him, blinking, his eyes red. He’d clearly been drinking, with purpose, unless Lincoln was mistaken. “Trouble does seem to follow you three guys,” he said, and then, before Lincoln could respond, he rotated on his stool and called down the bar, “Kevin! I hope you’re not pretending you didn’t see me come in, because we both know you did.”
The bartender regarded Coffin over his shoulder for a long, weary beat before heading in their direction.
“Tell me something, Lincoln,” Coffin said when Kevin arrived and assumed the iconic stance, both hands flat on the bar. “Do you have an opinion about guys with goatees and tats who wear their baseball caps backward? Is that a thing where you live?”
Kevin shook his head. “You gonna cause trouble, Joey?”
“No, I’m not,” Coffin replied matter-of-factly, which Lincoln was relieved to hear, the same possibility having occurred to him. “How about you, Lincoln?” Coffin nudged him with his elbow. “You gonna cause any trouble?”
Lincoln assured both men that he wasn’t.
“There you go,” Coffin said. “No trouble at all.” He eyed Lincoln’s beer, saw that he’d barely touched it, and ordered one for himself.
Kevin held a fresh glass under the tap. “One’s your limit tonight, Joey.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because you’re already shit-faced. Did you drive here?”
“I didn’t walk.”
“So, one beer. You get in an accident on the way home, your old friends will send me to jail for