The Unlucky Ones, page 1
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For you.
For being here with me.
Mercy did not exist in the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law …
—JACK LONDON, The Call of the Wild
PROLOGUE
He said I would never leave you.
It’s been almost eight years since my ex-husband spat those words at me, and I hear them as clearly as if he’s speaking them to me now. I feel the way they sink into my skin like a row of teeth, breaking and burrowing underneath, taking harbor in my hollow spaces. I even smell the reek of urine as he unzipped his jeans and pissed on my belongings, material things that mattered enough for me to return to the duplex we shared so I could shove them all into a laundry basket and escape from him and the miserable city he’d brought me to—a place that swallows people whole.
Black Harbor.
Your sidewalks glitter with rocks of crystal meth; frost-colored and sharp, they catch the light of the streetlamps and shine like shards from a fallen star. Wind rolls off the whitecaps of Lake Michigan and pushes heroin needles into your curbs, where they nestle among malt liquor cans and food wrappers and the occasional fingernail that’s been torn off in a fight.
You’re not unique in that regard, you know.
A lot of places have crime. A lot of places have cold winters and coldhearted people. And yet … you have me. All those pieces of myself that I surrendered.
A little glass shamrock.
A bracelet with my name spelled out in beads.
My wedding ring.
Years ago, I stood on your coal-blackened railroad bridge and dropped them into the river. Not all at once. Sometimes weeks, even months would pass between my ceremonial offerings. But I always came back. I always had one thing left to give.
Until I almost gave my life.
As if summoned, the scar on my right leg pulses. Raised and pinker than the rest of me, it resembles a wire. Sometimes, I suspect it’s what keeps me tethered to you, although there are nearly a thousand miles between us.
My feet pound the pedestrian walkway. The streetlamps illuminate the path as it snakes toward the Brooklyn Bridge, a famous, floating masterpiece. It’s just after 4 A.M. There are a handful of runners and walkers, early-morning commuters, but for the most part, the bridge is mine.
Cables shoot toward me, reeling me into the gothic double arches. I feel myself being pulled to the bridge’s center. My hands slice the air. My stride lengthens and I drink in the mist that lingers from last night’s rain as I race against ghosts that, until recently, I hadn’t realized had followed me here.
I thought I’d escaped you.
I thought I’d escaped him.
I’m sprinting now. Away or toward, I don’t know. The memory takes hold of me and suddenly, I am tiptoeing back into that duplex, as unsuspecting as a rabbit about to walk into a trap. The house was silent, empty (I thought), filled with a swirling quiet like when you press a seashell to your ear. The handgun was on the dining room table, next to the vestiges of Tommy’s breakfast. Beyond it, in the kitchen, beer cans were spread across the countertops. There were more on the floor, another on the mantel by a stuffed possum. He’d been on a bender since I left to stay with my sister.
Stale cigar smoke stung my eyes. It was threaded into the fabric of the curtains, the soiled throw pillows, the paint. I was only here to collect my things—my laptop, clean work clothes, books—anything he hadn’t shredded or burned as revenge for me having cheated on him. For me trying to leave him.
I was so blinded by my mission that I didn’t see him sitting on the couch. He scared me when he spoke, startled me into dropping my basket full of belongings, and as he closed the distance between us, I saw the anger that eclipsed his eyes.
He yelled. He berated me. He pissed on my things. I deserved it; I had committed a cardinal sin. I had slept with another man. Worse, I had fallen desperately, irrevocably in love with another man or at least I had fallen in love with the idea of there being more to life than existing in the squalid duplex filled with dead animals and a husband that marched me upstairs every three days to fulfill my wifely duties.
He didn’t care that it hurt me. Afterward, my spine would curl as I folded myself as small as possible, as if minimizing the space I took up would minimize the pain that tore through me.
Finally, after all this time, I’ve come to understand that what hurt him the most wasn’t that he had lost me to someone else—because in the end, I had chosen to go alone. It was that he had simply lost me, the one thing he could bend and push to its breaking point.
Then, he uttered those five words that froze my blood: You’ll never leave Black Harbor.
Recalling memories from that time in my life feels like watching a TV series with each episode reaching a dramatic climax as the screen fades to black. It’s as if my brain has rearranged them that way, edited them, and only lately have I been discovering my deleted scenes. Thorny details have started to surface, tearing the thin fabric of protection I have draped between past and present, details sharp enough to wrest me out of a dead sleep.
Now I know that it didn’t end there, with Tommy defiling my things. For the past several nights, I have woken drenched in sweat and tangled in my sheets, drowning in the shame of what I did and what I let him do to me. And suddenly I’m back there, in that duplex with him.
My knees digging into the hardwood floor.
His hands cradling the back of my skull.
The handgun on the dining room table, always loaded. Always threatening.
All eyes are on me, glass marbles fitted into sockets of all the animals he’s killed before, and I am just another one of his trophies.
Don’t struggle, it will only make it worse. I wonder if that’s what they told themselves, all his taxidermied creatures, before he stood over them and watched them bleed out.
I run over the East River now. From here, Manhattan skyscrapers look like shoeboxes standing on end. Little pinpricks of light blink on as the city awakens. I stare down at the path, my feet clipping in and out of my frame of vision. Orbs from the streetlamps reflect in the puddles, stretching into ghoulish things. But I’m not afraid.
There isn’t much that scares me anymore.
I slow down at the bridge’s center. Hands on hips, I turn slowly, taking it all in, this metropolis wherein I have carved a life for myself. A life far away from you.
But if I’m being completely honest, a part of me—perhaps a part of me that I left up there on your railroad bridge—has been dying to return. To fight, for once, instead of fleeing. To show you how I have been remade. To charge into your maw and let you swallow me whole again, and this time, you’ll note that I have grown quills.
A warm breeze feathers the hair around my face. I lean over the railing and close my eyes. Then, as if by muscle memory, I extract a talisman from my pocket. The key is nondescript. It looks like any old house key, except I know it is the one that unlocked the duplex. How many years has this key been with me, hiding in plain sight among all the others on my key ring?
I hold my arm straight out over the water. A tremor runs through it. The key is an anvil, heavy with the weight of your ghosts, the memories that have been haunting me. I can’t hold on to it any longer. I don’t want to.
I watch the bones in my hand contract, shifting like gears in a machine.
“Fuck you, Tommy.”
The key falls and disappears quickly from sight. I don’t even hear it plink into the water, but worse than that is the realization that terror isn’t the most terrifying feeling in the world.
It’s feeling nothing at all.
You’ll never leave Black Harbor. For years, I’ve wondered whether his words were a prediction or a promise. Either way, he was wrong. Because I’m the one who left. And he never will.
That’s a promise.
SUNDAY, JUNE 30
1
KOLE
The sucker punch happens as soon as he walks in. A metaphorical sucker punch, but still, it has the same effect as a row of knuckles slamming into his skull: his eyes water, his nose crinkles, his head snaps back. The stench of rot is so visceral it could bring a grown man to his knees. And it has. His eyes shift to the edges of the room where ribbons of steam rise from puddles of fresh vomit. At least the baby cops got their retching out of the way before his arrival. They stand outside now, brushing their tongues over their teeth and guarding the perimeter.
That being said, he’s smelled worse.
The Mineshaft is derelict even by Black Harbor standards. An afterset on Heeley Avenue, it’s a hangout for biker gangs and dope dea
The body’s in the back, although the palpable reek makes it seem as if it’s right under his nose.
Sergeant Nikolai Kole takes another step inside, his steely gaze already searching for bullet casings and blood. The floor appears to be covered in it—blood, that is—as if someone dunked a paintbrush in a bucket of it and went to town like a knockoff Jackson Pollock. It’s just paint, though; helter-skelter splatters of red and white make his job extraordinarily more difficult than it needs to be.
“Well, this is fucking annoying,” he grumbles to no one in particular.
Two paces away, near a cow skull hanging cockeyed behind the bar, Investigator Fletcher pauses. “What’s that?”
Kole gestures to the floor. Fletcher nods, understanding. They just got here and the guy’s already sweated through his black tactical T-shirt. It suctions to him like cling wrap, making Kole suddenly aware of his own shirt sticking to his chest, back, and biceps. Thank God he isn’t wearing body armor on top of it; he’d croak from heatstroke.
The Mineshaft is a genuine hellhole, and if there’s one thing you can count on with those it’s that, no matter the time of year, hellholes are always hot. Now, being the weekend before the Fourth of July, with temperatures skyrocketing into the high nineties and not a drop of rain since May, it’s a fucking inferno.
Admittedly, this is the first time Kole’s ever set foot in this particular hellhole. The fact that the Mineshaft operates like a bar but identifies as an afterset is a loophole that has chapped the Black Harbor Police Department’s ass for years.
Investigator Riley enters the frame, fanning herself with the complaint form. Beads of sweat dot her lip. “Afterset, huh? There’s a lot of empty liquor bottles for a place without a liquor license.”
Kole matches her gaze to the three hundred or so plastic cups and shot glasses that litter the tabletops and the floor. Liquor bottles lie on their sides as if waiting for someone to give them a spin. “You know the defense is gonna want all these tested for DNA,” he says.
Riley snorts. “Ain’t nobody got time for that.”
“This place should’ve been shut down a long time ago,” says Fletcher, and Kole would love nothing more than to throw a dart at his thick skull. Shutting down the Mineshaft was a fool’s errand, reasons being that (1) they’ve got bigger, scarier fish to fry, and (2) it’s members only. Any cop stupid enough to go undercover would get his a$$beat.
According to the “House Rules” anyway. The letter board is on the back wall, behind the bar.
THE MINESHAFT—H0U53 RU3$
NO
HANDS ON MY MF DOORS
FIGHTING IN MY MF HOU$E
GLASS BOTTLES
WEAPONS
PICTURES
COPS
WHEN THE HOU$E IS TALKING SHUT THE F%CK UP!
OBEY OR GET YOUR A$$BEAT!
“House Rules,” he knows, is a play on words. The Mineshaft’s owner is a guy named Joseph Orien, but everyone calls him Big House, because he’s built like a brick shithouse and he basically grew up in the big house, aka Sulfur County Prison, getting locked up for things like assault and grand theft auto. They’ll have to get in contact with him. But first, Kole wants to identify the poor bastard who’s stinking up the joint. Maybe Big House will know him and how he got himself murdered and they can all go home.
Yeah, right.
“You get the name of the caller?” he asks Riley. The call filtered through Dispatch at 0446 hours. Patrol responded to a noise complaint, only to hear a rumor from several people outside the establishment that someone was dead. Officers arrived and forced entry, and Kole’s phone rang at 0542 hours.
There’s only one reason his phone rings that early, and it’s never anyone inviting him to breakfast.
Riley squints to read the form. She states the complainant’s name and adds: “Lives over on Meacham.”
Kole’s head tilts back as though the address tells him most, if not all, he needs to know about her. Just two streets over, Meacham’s a tough area, its inhabitants fairly transient. Not a lot of good comes out of there, but a lot of bad passes through.
“Why don’t you two head over there. See if she’s willing to share whatever she knows.” Then, “Where’s Winthorp?”
“Him or her?” asks Riley.
“Him, the one I’m responsible for.”
“Axel’s with Patrol on the perimeter,” offers Fletcher.
“Good, tell him to start canvassing the neighborhood. Look for other dead bodies, and any live bodies who might’ve seen or heard something. Check doorbell cameras, surveillance cameras … he knows the drill.”
They depart with their marching orders, and Kole plunges farther into the place, weaving through a maze of tipped-over stools and bright-yellow evidence placards. A new scent infiltrates the air. It smells like cleaning products.
A propped-open door in the back leads to a closet-sized bathroom, inside of which is a body cocooned in trash bags and duct tape. It’s lying supine, head pushed against the base of the toilet and feet angled toward the door. A pool of blood leaks out from underneath, matching the stuff splattered on the stucco walls.
Kole catches a flash of blond hair in his peripheral vision. Medical Examiner Rowan Winthorp is squeezed between the door and the pedestal sink. “You beat me here,” he says.
“I rode in with Axel.” Rowan snaps on her black latex gloves. “Figured we were going to the same place.”
“What do you make of this?” Kole asks, pointing to shallow pools of liquid glistening on the trash bags.
“Bleach,” says Rowan, and Kole notes the discarded container. “I’d say whoever doused this guy was in a hurry, probably trying to erase their fingerprints.” Then, she plants one foot on either side of the body, and hovering over the torso, she drags a knife from the top of the head to the chest. She peels the two halves of plastic apart to reveal a Caucasian male with dark hair, the whiskey nose of an alcoholic.
Kole steps aside, giving her room to work. He leans over to get a good look at the victim. Beneath the blood and the bruises, he recognizes the poor bastard. The edges of his vision darken, forcing him to home in on the dead man’s face. It’s been years since he last laid eyes on him. He’s a little older, a little heavier in the jowls—clearly he’s spent a lot of his time at the bottom of a bottle—but otherwise, he looks the same.
“Friend of yours?” poses Rowan.
“Not exactly.”
“But you know him?”
Kole sighs. Yes, he knows him. Or, he knows of him, rather. They’ve never so much as exchanged a word, but the hate that Tommy Greenlee harbored for Kole these past eight years hovers over his corpse like a toxic aura. For a fleeting second, Kole feels mildly guilty for how things turned out. It passes, though.
Guilt is a wasted emotion.
“I slept with his wife.”
Rowan’s eyes widen. “The transcriber?”
Kole flinches. “Everyone knows about that, huh?”
Her silence is telling. He crouches down to examine the body up close. Tommy’s lip is split. A dried river of red glares on the bridge of his nose. His eyes are the most disturbing part, though. The iris and pupil are gone, having dissolved into two blackish-brown stripes. It’s called tache noire and means “black stain” in French, a phenomenon that occurs when the eyes are not fully closed and postmortem drying occurs. The eyes are literally melting, losing their structure.
Kole’s gaze travels to the shredded chest. He must have been shot five or six times. Maybe more. The work is sloppy. Whoever killed Tommy Greenlee was angry.
In their mind, he deserved to die like this.
“Gang-related?” Rowan’s question pulls him out of his trance.
“Could be.” The truth is, while gangs have always been prevalent in Black Harbor, tensions now are worse than ever. Teenage boys are being recruited at an alarming rate; they’re naïve about how expendable they are until they’re getting whacked in an alley. Houses are being shot up on the daily and cars are being stolen right out of people’s driveways. Maybe it’s the heat lately, but it feels like the city is ready to erupt. Perhaps this—his gaze flicks back to Tommy—is the start of it.
