The Inn - James Patterson Page 0,17
needles all over the floor. He gets child endangerment? It should have been murder.”
Mayburn wiped his face with his hand. I now understood his distress at Craft’s claims that he and his wife were trying for another child. I felt the rage rising fiery and hard, like a heated steel ball stuck in my throat.
“The drugs even looked like candy,” Mayburn said almost to himself, staring into his glass, defeated. “The capsules were bright and colorful with faces printed on them.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CLINE COULDN’T UNDERSTAND it. Gloucester was crawling with seafood. Every morning he suited up head to toe in Nike and ran along the empty gray beach, and everywhere there were crab, lobster, and tuna boats returning from predawn runs. He saw the slippery black heads and flippers in the boats’ wake, seals that trailed the vessels for scraps and throwbacks. And yet despite that, there was only this one sushi place in town, and it was a dump.
He sat at the windows of the restaurant with his men, gazing at the fading light on the water, his nose wrinkling at the smell from the kitchen. Unchanged industrial fryers, the tang of tartar sauce and lemon. The wine, at least, was passable. He’d certainly been less comfortable than this for much longer in his life.
Attempting to spread the business in the north, Cline had done all he could to make himself comfortable in seaside Shitsville until he could get boys on every corner, a morgue full of bodies, a police force under his thumb, and a steady population of clients buying his product. As soon as Cline was satisfied, he would be out of here, taking the virus north to cities that better suited his tastes. He had his eye on Portland next. There was great sushi in Portland.
Town by town, higher and higher, Cline planned to spread his business. He was building a franchise. He established control of a town, trained his managers, handed over the reins, and then moved on. Gloucester was a prize Cline had wanted for quite a while. It was untouched territory. Terra nullius. A couple of times in Boston, Cline had had to squash local competition and deal with the problems they’d left behind. Resentful cops who were impossible to bend. Burned politicians and judges. Old junkies with high tolerances who couldn’t be fed economical, low-percentage product. But Gloucester would be Cline’s jewel. His chance to establish things just the way he liked. He’d thought about opening a sushi place here, just to make it tolerable.
Someone shouted something, interrupting a brief by his man Turner that he’d hardly been listening to, and when Cline looked up, he saw a furious late-middle-aged white woman leaving her table and coming over to their booth. One of the locals, he assumed, judging by the stretched neck of her Walmart T-shirt, the bottle dye job, the eighties ice-blue eye shadow. Cline sipped his wine, steeling himself.
“You.” The woman pointed across the table at him, ignoring Russ, Turner, and Bones. “I know who you are.”
The woman was spitting as she talked. Cline glanced at the table from whence she’d come and saw the remains of battered-shrimp cocktails, wilted salads. A beer-bellied man cowering in embarrassment and a toddler in a filthy high chair smearing itself and everything within reach with ketchup.
“My daughter goes to your people for oxy,” the woman said. “She’s twenty-one. Kaylen Druly. Do you know her? I bet you don’t know any of their names. Her wrists are like this. Like this!” Cline watched the woman make a circle with her fingers about the circumference of a golf ball. “I haven’t seen or heard from my daughter in two weeks. I’m raising her son because of you. Did you know that? I’m sixty-three years old!”
Russ and Bones were out of the booth, pushing the woman and swearing, but she struggled with them, knocked Cline’s glass of sauvignon blanc into his lap. Cold rushed over his shirt, his thighs; the chilled wine reached into his jock and sent icy fingers around his balls. Cline stood, dabbing at the fabric. He had a huge stain, like he had pissed his pants. A couple of waiters entered the fray. People were leaning out of their booths, pointing, whispering.
“They brought their poison into this town!” the woman howled.
It was a good performance. The crowded restaurant fell silent. Cline knew the story; the girl had probably started with oxycodone prescribed by her doctor for some mild injury. Whiplash from a fender-bender.