His eyes fluttered open. Squinting directly into the harsh glare through a heat-distorted haze that made it seem as if he was looking into some other dimension, he could see the glittering outline of a sailboat glide away from the dock that jutted from the end of Main Street.
"Hey, Westwood! What the hell do you think you're doing?"
Westwood allowed himself to slowly come out of his self-induced fog and shifted his gaze in the direction of the two cops twenty yards away from him on Main. Cops, he thought, with contempt. They weren't cops. They were children. Summer help. They were lifeguards let loose on un-suspecting motorists who might, heaven help us all, back up several feet to try to catch a precious parking space or, even worse, park in a public space for one second longer than the allotted two hours.
"Westwood! Seriously, man. What the hell's goin' on? There're two cars that've been here more than two hours and you didn't slap a ticket on either one! What's up with that, man?"
Justin Westwood was thirty-seven years old. These summer cops were maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, and they not only thought he was duller than shit, they thought he was a total loser. They wouldn't be handing out parking tickets in a half-assed, middle-class resort town when they were thirty-seven. They would be police chiefs somewhere where there was real action. Or retire early and own a great bar that served fish and chips and had two big-screen TVs for Monday Night Football and March Madness. Or they'd be working in their daddy's business, knowing that, thanks to the time they spent in the EEPD, they could bully with impunity any neighbor who dared complain that their music was too loud and they were drinking too much beer. They wore Keanu Reeves sunglasses and walked around with a swagger and a smirk. They liked nothing better than writing up tickets and lecturing drivers who were making somewhere around fifty times their salary. Although they had holsters-cool, black, shiny leather holsters-they didn't carry guns. They kept cell phones in their holsters, because that would be the single most helpful tool they could carry in case there was ever an emergency.
Which there wasn't.
East End Harbor did not have a lot of emergencies. The occasional case of food poisoning. Plenty of arguments about the level of noise and the amount of garbage generated by the club in the back of the town's public parking lot. Constant and heated council meetings about the difference between a roundabout and a traffic circle. Politicians came to the Hamptons to raise money and they'd sneak into East End Harbor for a photo op, which raised the town's blood pressure. A few months ago the vice-president had come, along with several cabinet members. They'd had to shut down Main Street and it caused a hellacious traffic jam, and several store owners went ballistic over the lost business. But that was the extent of it. There were no real emergencies.
Justin didn't carry a gun either.
He did have one, though, back at the station. And it was at times like this-when they tauntingly called him "Westwood," because he was always looking to avoid confrontation, because he shied away from anything remotely violent and was, let's face it, out of shape and as far from being a Dirty Harry-type cop as they could imagine-that he was glad he didn't have his gun handy. He had not kept up on the latest mandatory prison sentences, but he was fairly sure it would still be a lot of years for shooting his fellow police officers in cold blood.
He took a step toward the two cops-one was named Gary; he didn't have any idea what the other one was called, even though they'd been working together for at least six months-but he was interrupted by the shrill beep of a car horn. Justin turned back toward the honk and saw an old lady, her car stopped in the middle of the street, frantically waving for him to come over. When he reached her, he tried to say "Can I help you?" but she didn't give him the chance.
"There was a truck on my street this morning!" the woman screeched when he was still several feet from her car. There were two cars behind her now. Justin knew the drivers would wait patiently for all of about one minute. Then they'd start honking or sticking their heads out the window to roll their eyes impatiently or ask what the hell was taking so long.
"I'm sorry to hear that," he said as politely as he could.
"I'm in a no-truck zone!" she yelled. "There shouldn't be any trucks in a no-truck zone!"
"What street are you on?" he asked. "If I know where you are, maybe we could-"
"I'm on Harrison Street! And no trucks are supposed to cut through on Harrison Street!"
"You're Mrs. Dbinsky," he said.
"How'd you know that?"
"You call us every day to complain about the trucks on Harrison Street."
"Yeah? Well, a fat lot of good it does! Every day there's another truck!"
"The thing is, Mrs. Dbinsky, even though it's a no-truck zone, that doesn't mean that no trucks are allowed. They can come to make deliveries."
"These trucks weren't making deliveries! They were just driving around, making noise! You know how little my street is? And you know how big those trucks are? The walls are cracking in my house from those goddamn monsters!"
There were six cars behind her now. Any second now, one of them would start getting pissed off and the chain reaction would set in. He started to ask Mrs. Dbinsky if she'd mind pulling over against the curb, but he knew that would set her off again, and he had a feeling there was more on her mind than just trucks today, so instead he said he'd come by her house later this afternoon, how would that be? He'd come by and they'd discuss what he could do about the trucks-
"What you could do and what you're gonna do are two different things!" she said. "You could put up signs, you could give 'em tickets. You could get the damn trucks off my street. You're gonna do absolutely nothin'!"
The first horn honked now. It came from one of the nine cars backed up behind Mrs. Dbinsky. But Justin Westwood wasn't concentrating on the honking. Or Gary and the other idiot-boy cop who were smirking at him, enjoying this whole thing. He wasn't even concentrating on Mrs. Dbinsky. Because from the middle of Main Street, from inside a building somewhere-it sounded like it was near the yoga center-there was a scream. A loud, frightened, and frightening scream.
People were coming out of their stores now, looking around for the source of the noise.
Gary and What's-his-name were running, sprinting toward a small house in the middle of the block.
Westwood was running too. His hand instinctively went to his belt. Even after all these years that instinct hadn't left him, and he was shocked when he realized that. But of course there was no gun there, so he dropped his hand, trying to pretend it hadn't happened, that those instincts were long dead and buried, and just ran.
And he thought: Son of a bitch.
East End Harbor has an emergency. The girl's name was Susanna Morgan and Westwood knew her, of course. Everybody in town knew her. She was bubbly and friendly and curious. She had interviewed him a couple of times, nothing serious; she didn't know anything about his background, hadn't done any probing before they talked. It was just human interest-type stuff, wanting to know the way the local police force worked and thought. Basically, he had told her that the force worked hard and didn't think much, and Jimmy Leggett, his boss, had not been too happy with that quote so that was the end of the interviews.
He'd bumped into Susanna a few times after that. It was hard not to bump into people in East End. There were only so many bars and restaurants. Once he'd seen her at Duffy's. He hadn't pegged her for a Duffy's girl. Not that it was hard-core-nothing was hard-core out here-but it was fairly serious for East End Harbor. Duffy's didn't have any real food, just nuts and pretzels in red straw bowls and sometimes sandwiches that were wrapped in plastic and looked like they came out of a vending machine. They served a lot of beer and straight liquor, didn't keep cranberry juice as part of their stock, and there was a dart-board off to the side, which was about all the atmosphere the place had. It wasn't a pickup place or a place to take anyone you wanted to impress. It was a place to drink and to be lonely, if not alone. So he'd been surprised to see her there one night. She was with a girlfriend and they drank a couple of beers. He was sitting at the bar when she came in and they nodded at each other. He was still sitting at the bar when she left. She had smiled at him on her way out.