03 wicked fix, p.1
03 - Wicked Fix, page 1
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PDB Name: Sarah Graves - 03 - Wicked Fix
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Wicked Fix
by
Sarah Graves
WICKED FIX
SARAH GRAVES
BANTAM BOOKS
New York Toronto London
Sydney Auckland
A Bantam Crime Line Book / April 2000
Copyright a 2000 by Sarah Graves.
ISBN 0-553-57859-6
Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada bb
WICKED FIX
"I don't see why Reuben Tate had to come
back to town at all," Ellie White complained,
digging into her lobster tortilla.
We were at La Sardina, Eastport's Mexican
restaurant. The menu was south-of-the-border
with a downeast Maine twist--thus the lobster--but
the atmosphere was all laid-back Key West:
Strings of tiny, twinkling colored lights framed the
tall front windows. White gauze beach umbrellas
slanted over the old wooden tables. And potted plants
grown to enormous sizes lent a tropical flavor: palm,
spathiphyllum, a flowering bougainvillea like a tree full
of purple butterflies.
With her tortilla, Ellie was having a tomato and
mesclun salad with blue cheese dressing, and a Dos
Equis. "And I don't see," she added, "why he had to
come now."
Beside me, my son, Sam, went on attacking his
combination plate. "You could strip varnish with this
hot sauce," he remarked appreciatively; at seventeen,
Sam thought flaming coals weren't quite hot enough
unless you doused them in Tabasco.
"Reuben's like a bad rash," Ellie's husband,
George Valentine, said. "He comes back."
He cut a slice off his well-done ribeye steak; to
George, the French fry is about as foreign as food
needs to get, with the possible exception of the English
muffin.
"The trick," he added, "is getting rid of him again.
But this time I hear he means to stay."
At which my friends all sighed sorrowfully. Reuben
Tate was the sly, grinning worm in the apple of
their happiness that autumn, and it seemed unfair just
when everything else in town was looking up:
Summer had come and gone but we still had the
taste of it in our mouths, tart and sweet as a drop of
lemonade. Dahlias with bright shaggy heads big as dinner
plates bloomed in the perennial beds; ripe tomatoes
loaded the vines in our back gardens, and the rosebushes
massed along the seawall bowed low under
their heavy burden of rose hips, huge and juicy as Bing
cherries.
Also, for once the town had cash. Sea urchins and
sardines had been freakishly plentiful that season, the
boats coming back half-capsized by the unaccustomed
weight of their catches, and scallop harvest promised
to be as bountiful. Until then, foreign freighters--their
names, unpronounceable, stenciled in white, rust
mottled Cyrillic letters on their towering sterns--
loomed at dockside, loading paper pulp and particle
board from the mills up in Woodland, making overtime
for the stevedores and truckers.
Finally, at September's end came the annual
Eastport Salmon Festival, the last outdoor bash of the year
on our little island in Maine, which meant that cash
registers in the cafes and shops on Water Street would
soon be jingling with tourist money.
So we were content. Only the thought of Reuben
with his quick, twitchy ways, his pale, wandering eye
and odd laugh--a harsh, painful-sounding bark like a
strangled cough; when he uttered it, he meant to hurt
someone--kept putting a damper on people.
"Could be this time Reuben's luck will run out,"
said my main squeeze, Wade Sorenson.
Just off the water after guiding a cargo vessel into
port--it's what he does, as Eastport's official harbor
pilot--Wade wore a navy turtleneck, jeans, and a
cable-knit sweater the color of vanilla ice cream. His
gray eyes reflected the light of the candle stuck in the
neck of a wine jug on the table.
"Not soon enough," my ex-husband, Victor
Tiptree, said sourly, and I glanced at him in surprise.
"Reuben Tate's luck," he emphasized, "can't end
soon enough for me."
"How do you know Reuben?" I asked, and the
others around the table looked inquisitively at him,
too.
Six months earlier, Victor had moved here to
Eastport from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and in
remote, thinly populated downeast Maine his arrival
had of course been newsworthy. But I hadn't thought
any of the local people were newsworthy to Victor, and
especially not a ne'er-do-well like Reuben.
Tonight, Victor's dinner had consisted of the olives
from his martinis. "It's not important," he muttered,
and gulped the melted ice from his glass.
Annoyed but determined not to argue--the rule,
when dealing with Victor, is never wrestle with a pig;
you both get dirty and the pig likes it--I turned away,
as a voice from the next table rose in worried complaint.
"Did Reuben really say that?" Paddy Farrell, who
ran a textile design studio out of an old canning
factory building he'd rehabilitated down on the waterfront,
had clearly been listening in on our conversation.
Sitting with Paddy was his longtime companion, Terence
Oscard.
"Did he?" Paddy demanded, his close-clipped salt
and-pepper head coming up pugnaciously as he caught
my eye. "He's staying?"
Paddy wore a navy blazer and a tailored button
down shirt, a maroon silk scarf at his throat.
"George?" he persisted as George stolidly went on
chewing. "Did you actually hear him say that?"
"What I said," George confirmed after a sip of
Miller Lite. "Stayin' in his mom's old place out in
Quoddy Village, got the little trust fund she left him to
live on. It ain't much, but I guess that's nothing new to
Reuben. He's never had any job at all, that I've known
of."
Terence Oscard, a big-boned, pale-haired man with
a beaky nose and a big, pointy Adam's apple, wore a
light blue chambray shirt, khaki slacks, and Topsiders.
Good-looking in the way some very ugly men can be,
his jutting features regularized by intelligence and kindness,
he sat listening with his usual thoughtful attention.
But Paddy seemed agitated. "Reuben can't do that.
Why, the town won't be worth living in. It'll be the bad
old days all over again."
Terence leaned over to me. "I've got a new Red
Cross first-aid book," he confided. "I'll be glad to lend
it to you when I've finished it."
He was a martyr to numerous imaginary ailments
and, perhaps on account of these, a self-taught first-aid
expert. I liked him a great deal; everyone did.
"Thanks, Terence, I'll look forward to it," I said,
and he sat back, pleased.
"Doesn't anybody," Paddy demanded, "remember?"
He glared at us, fists clenched as if he might
punch someone just to refresh people's recollections.
"Don't see as there's much we can do about Reuben
sticking around if he wants to," George said, his
tone unperturbed as he went on eating his steak and
potatoes. "Still a free country."
I noticed, though, that George didn't raise his eyes,
a sign that he wasn't enjoying Paddy's conversation.
Paddy was intense, quick to anger, and inclined to
pound the table, while George was the opposite: the
quieter he became, the more tactfully and carefully
you'd better go, or eventually he would lower the
boom on you.
"Unless," George added to Paddy, "you've got
some brilliant new idea."
At this, the air around us seemed to grow darkly
electric, charged with some knowledge I didn't share.
Silence lengthened as the three Eastport natives at our
table--Ellie, Wade, and George--went on eating their
dinners, concentrating on their plates. Sam and I
looked puzzledly at them, while Victor
drumming his fingers on the table, wanting the drinks
waitress.
"No," Paddy said at last. "No new ideas. Finished,
Terence?" Shoving back his chair, he flung down his
napkin furiously.
Nodding agreeably, the big man got to his feet.
Then he staggered, briefly but unmistakably, placing
his hand on the table to steady himself. But he recovered
smoothly, dropping some money by his plate and
smiling his farewell to the rest of us.
He hadn't been drinking. Terence never did; the
faint muzzy feeling induced by even a single glass of
wine always made him think he had some rare neurological
condition. And as they left together, he seemed
fine again: bending as always to hear whatever Paddy
was saying, Paddy accompanying his words with his
usual energetic gestures.
Watching them go, I sensed an ongoing liveliness of
interest undimmed by the comfort of habit; they were
by all accounts a devoted couple. I thought they were
lucky, and that Terence had somehow simply missed
his footing.
But Paddy's comments had dropped a pall over our
table, with George, Ellie, and Wade looking suddenly
even more dismal.
"Come on," I said. "How bad can it be? I'm sure a
few of the boys from the dock can take care of Reuben
Tate, if he gets to be too much trouble."
Ellie's lips pursed. "You only know him by reputation,"
she began, and was about to say more.
But just then a harsh bark of laughter was followed
by the warning rasp of barstools being shoved back.
Next came the voice of Ted Armstrong, La Sardina's
formidable bartender and bouncer.
"Okay, now, that's enough. We don't want to be
breaking any expensive glassware, make the price of a
beer go up another half-buck just to pay for it all."
The scuffling quieted as the sound system began
playing a cut of Bela Fleck's new jazz-bluegrass fusion
CD, "Throwdown at the Hoedown." La Sardina's
owners had eclectic tastes in music, and so as a result
did the guys who tended to occupy their barstools.
Or most of them did. "Throwdown" cut off in the
middle of a banjo lick so breakneck, it had to be heard
to be believed, and the music switched to something
about how lonesome somebody was going to be tonight.
"He's in there," Ellie said quietly. "One thing he
hates is decent music. You wait, before the night's over,
Teddy'll have to toss him out of the place, and then
won't there be hell to pay?"
"Is there anything," I asked, "that Reuben doesn't
hate?"
"Money and misery," George replied, forking up
the last of his baked potato.
With his dark hair, milky-pale skin, and a bluish
black five-o'clock shadow darkening his small, neat
jawline, George looks as if he stepped out of the hills of
Appalachia about five minutes ago. His black gimme
cap, with GUPTILL'S EXCAVATING embroidered in orange
script on the front, sat on the table beside his plate.
"The one he tries getting from you and the other
he tries giving you, when he can. Which," George
added, "is pretty often."
"Well, what's the matter with him?" Sam asked.
"Is he sick? I mean, you know, disturbed?"
Sam's own disposition is so sunny that he has managed
to stay on good terms with both his father and
me, which as a feat is a little like being Switzerland
during WWII, only for longer and with more bombs. In
fact, it was mostly due to Sam's ongoing diplomatic
efforts that his father was with us that evening.
But as I watched Victor fidget, I thought he had
some other motive for coming, too, like maybe he
hadn't wanted to be alone for some reason.
Not that I cared much. Victor and I weren't having
a truce, exactly. More like a ceasefire.
George looked at Sam. "Reuben Tate's not sick.
He's broken. Like a dog you can't cure of being vicious.
Stay away from him, Sam. He's got more ways
to clean a guy's clock than you'll ever learn. And," he
emphasized seriously, "you don't want to."
Sam blinked. "Wow. Okay." For George to utter
so many words in a row was unusual. In the tone he'd
taken, it was stunning.
"Someone," Victor piped up from behind his fresh
martini--the drinks waitress had taken pity on him--
"ought to get rid of Reuben Tate once and for all."
As always, he resembled an ad out of Gentleman's
Quarterly: blue striped silk tie, charcoal slacks, tasteful
gold cufflinks. Even the hairs on the backs of his wrists
looked groomed. Only the look on his face conveyed a
sense of rumpled disnevelment, in part I supposed on
account of those martinis. But I remember thinking
again that something else was going on with him.
Wade put down his glass of O'Doul's. "Think so,
do you?" he commented mildly to Victor. "Someone
should get rid of him? Just take him out?"
"Yeah." Victor glowered. "As a matter of fact, I
do."
When Victor first moved here, I was concerned
that he would become a serious fly in my ointment, in
the romance department especially. Having your crazy
ex-husband living down the street from you might just
tend, as a for-instance, to discourage your boyfriend
from parking his pickup truck overnight right out in
your driveway where everybody can see it.
Lately, though, Victor hadn't bothered me quite so
much. It wasn't that he had gotten saner; maybe the
opposite. His personal idiosyncrasies--his obsession
over physical cleanliness, for example--seemed to have
gotten stronger. But here in Eastport everyone's a skinful
of quirks, so in a way Victor was just like the rest of
us. Also, Wade parked his pickup where he pleased, as
he always had.
None of this, however, made Victor a congenial
dining companion. Now his immaculate, close-clipped
fingernails tapped the table again, impatiently, as if he
couldn't just get up and leave on his own whenever he
wanted to.
"So, are you people finished or what?" he asked.
"Stop it," I hissed at him, and for a wonder he
subsided, though his gaze still strayed anxiously to the
bar area and then to the door, as if calculating some
daring exit strategy.
But I still didn't put two and two together.
Instead I turned back to Wade; the O'Doul's interested
me. Ordinarily, he enjoys breweries so micro that
they measure their ingredients out by the thimbleful.
But in reply to my silent inquiry he just lifted his
glass, and the suggestion his amused gray eyes conveyed
to me then was so personal--and so fully detailed,
right down to my keeping the dog not only off
the bed but actually out of the whole bedroom--that I
