Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

was wearing black dress shoes, Oxfords.
    “Untie the laces, then tie them together tight, in a knot,” I said.
    He did what I told him. I watched him as he worked. The belt around his neck meant he couldn’t look down without cutting into his breathing, but I didn’t care. He gagged and took shallow, panicky breaths.
    A distended artery crossed down his forehead like a slash of lightening. Even in the dark I could see that his face had reddened significantly.
    When the laces were knotted together I moved across the back seat and out the door. I got into the driver’s seat and removed my belt from around my waist and bound his hands together by the wrists. His eyes were on me but I didn’t care if he saw my face. When I was done I sat and looked at him for a moment, then turned on the interior light and leaned across the seat till we were face to face. The distended vein in his forehead looked ready to burst. He strained to look at me from the corner of his eye.
    “Remember me?” I said.
    He said nothing. His strained breathing was the only sound around. After a moment of this foolishness I flipped off the overhead dome light and sat back behind the wheel and cranked the ignition till the engine caught.
    I switched on the headlights and saw in their long beams a swirling of white flakes. The storm I had been sensing all day was here. I could imagine the bulk of it still to the west, past Peconic Bay, past the Pine Barrens, past Queens, pouring heavy and silent onto Manhattan.
    We rode the back roads toward Southampton. I kept my eye out for cops when I wasn’t glancing over at the limper. He kept perfectly still, watching the road ahead, his breathing short and measured, his eyes bulged. Fear was sobering him up fast.
    It was still a good hour and a half till dawn, till we lost the cover of dark. In the village of North Sea I stopped at a deli and dialed Frank’s beeper number from a pay phone outside. All the glass in the booth had been smashed in and the cold night air flowed through it, carrying snow. The air seemed colder with all that metal around. On the floor of the booth was a pile of bits of broken glass that looked in the dark like diamonds. But they crushed into powder beneath the toe of my sneaker.
    When I heard the tone I punched in the number of the pay phone. Then I hung up and waited. I watched the man strapped to the headrest in the passenger seat of the warm LTD. I looked at nothing but him, or the shape of him, which was all that was visible in the dark. I could barely feel the earth beneath me; I could barely feel anything but the wind that moved through the booth and the snow that touched my face. I think if I had looked at my own reflection then I would not have recognized much of what I saw. I was glad it was dark.
    Five minutes went by and then the phone rang. I picked it up on the second ring. I could hear what I always heard when I spoke to Frank on the phone: the hiss of a pay phone connection. He was probably at the one near Cameron Street in the village, by the camera shop. His house wasn’t far from there.
    “I’ve got it,” I said. “Where do you want to take delivery?”
    “Road D, off Dune Road.”
    “When?”
    “How soon can you get there?”
    “Ten minutes.”
    “I’ll be waiting.”
    I drove around the village to avoid being seen. I passed the hospital and then followed Gin Lane till it became Dune Road. Here is where the road changed from a coastal road to a peninsula that ran for a little over a mile and separated Shinnecock Bay from the Atlantic Ocean. Across the bay to my right was the Shinnecock Indian reservation and, in the low hills above it, Southampton College. To my left were the dunes and the fantastic homes built upon them. Beyond the dunes was the beach and the Atlantic. I could hear the sound of the surf, faint like a whisper over the engine and through the closed windows.
    It was a dark, inky morning, made even more so by the heavy storm clouds. There were no streetlights on Dune Road. The snow was falling heavier now, in straighter lines. I wondered if inland it had begun to accumulate. Here by the ocean fallen snow never lasted long enough to amount to anything.
    I turned left into Road D, which was really just a hundred-foot-long parking lot cut into the tall beach grass. Frank’s Seville was the only car there, and he was waiting beside it when I parked.
    He was dressed for the weather in a heavy black leather coat and black gloves. His