Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

had no way of seeing just what he was setting me up for, if he was in fact setting me up at all. Everything I had left was telling me not to go. But he was right. I had no choice. The trouble I had left behind in Montauk could burn me bad. I’d be just as useless to Augie in that town’s jail as I would be in Southampton Village Hall. I had to keep one step ahead, even if that step brought me that much closer to the edge.
    “Well?” he said finally.
    “Okay, you write me out a report and I’ll do what you want.”
    The Chief nodded. “It’s already done. There’s a copy in my car. I’ll leave the report downstairs with that bartender friend of yours on my way out.”
    The Chief walked past me then. I didn’t move, even after I heard the door close, even as his footsteps faded down my hallway. I just stood there and let everything fall away till only one question remained.
    In all the time I had known Augie, why hadn’t he said anything to me about having known my father?
    I borrowed George’s Volkswagen Bug and in it drove to the 7-Eleven on Sunrise and bought a pair of cloth work gloves. Then I headed west on Sunrise Highway, turned left at the college onto Tuckahoe Road, and turned left again at the end of that, heading east on Montauk. The reservation was on the right.
    The muffler on George’s Bug was shot, and it sounded more like a Harley than the tiny car it was. I kept telling myself that this wasn’t my game, that this wasn’t the kind of thing I did, but it didn’t seem to make much of a difference. I felt like a stranger to my own life. The Volkswagen felt powerless compared to my old LeMans, and that seemed only fitting.
    Somewhere in the dark East End, under the broad sky, in one of those contemporary houses built on potato fields or one of those great mansions standing on the primary dunes of the long stretch of beach between Southampton and East Hampton, the rich were playing their game. I knew too well the cruelty that can come with wealth.
    My adoptive father had made it clear often enough that I was more servant than a son, more playmate and protector to his own troubled son than brother or son. I was free labor, trapped in a world I did not belong, and it took a boating accident and more than I care to talk about to set me free of them. I was twenty when I finally escaped, a criminology major at the college and broke. I turned my back on that unreal world and never looked behind me. I worked my way through my senior year tending bar at an Irish pub in Hampton Bays. I slept on the couch in a professor’s office in the Humanities wing of the Fine Arts Building for a month till I moved into an apartment over a real estate office across from the IGA in Hampton Bays with a dark-haired and beautiful business major named Catherine. At night we slept in a tangle of limbs and blankets in a room that overlooked Main Street. The only furniture we had was a kitchen table, three folding chairs, and her bed. We stayed together for a little more than a year, till she took a job in New York and moved to Queens with a girlfriend of hers who had never liked me all that much. During that year everything took a dive. My grades slip and I began to drink. I barely managed to graduate and was nonetheless accepted into the police academy, though I never ended up making it there. I had learned the hard way that I was the last person who deserved to carry a badge and a gun, let alone much else.
    The reservation was mainly wilderness, the least affluent part of the East End, though the property, south of the highway bay front and undeveloped, was worth a fortune. Its roads were narrow, some of them just packed dirt, and there were no street lights, just rows of cottage after cottage. Townsend’s place was small and set on a treed-in lot on Cemetery Road. It was a single storey, box shaped nautical with a glassed-in front porch. Its windows were dark and looked to me like a row of blank faces staring back at me.
    There was a small pick-up in the driveway, new. The hurting business always did pay well, and Frank Gannon wasn’t the only one who prospered by it out here.
    I passed the cottage and parked on the shoulder of the tree lined road three houses down. The sky was overcast, and the darkness outside the windows of the Bug was complete. I turned off the motor and the headlights and waited for my eyes to adjust to the blackness and my heart to stop its violent spasms in my chest.
    When I was ready I put