Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

chair and looked out my window. I watched the night bleed pale. In my mind I kept seeing that photograph of the four of them. Eventually I got up and took the photo out of the bureau drawer and held it again. I kept looking at Augie’s face, nothing else, just his face, and it wasn’t long before I knew what I had to do.
    I went down the two flights of stairs to the bar and closed the door of the old-fashioned phone booth behind me and opened the phone book. I didn’t care about James Curry anymore, about our deal, about the reservation, about who killed his girl and why. I didn’t care what he thought he knew about me, about the secret I keep. I didn’t care about anything except this truth: Men like Augie Hartsell don’t die so rich men can get richer. There was no way I was going to let that happen.
    I looked up the number of the local branch of the FBI and dropped two quarters and dialed. It was early but I was connected to an agent and told her just what to look for and where to look for it. Then hung up and went back upstairs to my apartment. My heart was pounding. I didn’t give a damn about Curry now, or his land deal. I didn’t care about anything, just like he wanted me to.
    A few days before Christmas I was coming back from JFK when Angel called me on the dispatch and told me that Eddie wanted to see me. I told her I was a half hour away. I heard nothing more for a minute, and then her voice came over the speaker again. “He’ll meet you at Road D in a half hour,” she said.
    That didn’t seem right to me for some reason. I had a half hour to think about it. I did nothing else. I felt curious and guarded when I made the turn off Dune Road onto the short dead end called Road D. Eddie’s old repainted Checker was the only other car in the lot. I parked beside it. He wasn’t behind the wheel. I got out, looked around, then headed between the dunes to the beach. It was the only place he could be.
    When I spotted him he was a hundred yards away, at the shoreline, facing the ocean. When I finally reached him I said, “Eddie, what’s up?”
    He turned his head to look at me but kept his body facing the ocean, which looked like melted steel just before it hardened.
    Eddie looked at my denim jacket. I had sewn the slice in the left sleeve closed and had scrubbed out most of the blood. It was by my standards presentable, no worse off looking than I was.
    “You need a winter coat,” he observed.
    “I think Tina got me one for Christmas.”
    He was looking out over the ocean again. I studied the side of his wrinkled, black face. He chewed on his unlit cigar pensively.
    “What’s going on Eddie?” I said.
    “I need to talk to you.”
    “What about?”
    “There’s something you should know.”
    “What?”
    “I just heard it myself an hour ago. I don’t think too many people know yet.”
    “Know what?”
    “It’s about Frank and … “
    “And what?”
    Eddie said nothing. He couldn’t look at me. He stared at the waves rolling in. The tide was moving out, somewhere between high and low.
    “Frank and what, Eddie?”
    He still didn’t say anything.
    “Eddie.”
    He turned his head and looked at me then. He had tears in his already glassy eyes.
    “You heard about the FBI finding bodies in that clearing on the reservation?”
    “Yeah.”
    “In the last three days they’ve found eight, and they’re still looking.”
    I shrugged, as if to assert that it had nothing to do with me now. “Okay.”
    “They’ve been running checks, trying to identify the remains, find out who they were back when they were alive. They had four of the eight identified, but just a little while ago they figured out who the fifth was. According to the FBI this body had been buried there longer than any of the others they’ve found so far. They’re thinking that it might be the first body that had been buried there, the first victim. That’s their word, ‘victim’. They think that body has been in the ground for thirty years.”
    The wind moved past my ears. I waited for more from Eddie, uncertain still what this had to do with me.
    “I’m sorry, Mac, I don’t know how to tell you this.”
    “Tell me what, Eddie?”
    “Everything’s going so good for you now. But that’s when it hits us, right?”
    “Eddie. Eddie, Jesus. What is it you can’t tell me?”
    Tears sprang from his eyes and wormed their way down the creases in his skin. I was prepared for the worst, or at least thought I was.
    “The