John Verdon

As he thought about it—and through his teenage years he’d thought about little else—a plan for his future slowly took shape. He came to know what his specialty would be—his art, his expertise, his field of excellence. And that was no small thing, since previously he had known almost nothing about himself, had no sense of who or what he was.

He had so few memories of anything before he was twelve.

Only the nightmare.

The nightmare that came again and again.

The circus. His mother, smaller than the other women. The terrible laughter. The music of the merry-go-round. The deep, constant growling of the animals.

The clown.

The huge clown who gave him money and hurt him.

The wheezing clown whose breath smelled like vomit.

And the words. So clear in the nightmare that their edges were as jagged as ice smashed against stone. “This is our secret. If you tell anyone, I’ll feed your tongue to the tiger.”

The conversation might have deteriorated from there had Madeleine’s attention not been diverted. She tilted her head.

“What is it?” asked Gurney.

“Listen.”

He waited—not an unusual experience. His hearing was normal, but Madeleine’s was extraordinary. A few seconds later, as the breeze rustling the foliage subsided, he heard something in the distance, somewhere down the hill, perhaps on the town road that dead-ended into the low end of their pasture “driveway.” As it grew louder, he recognized the distinctive growl of an oversized, undermuffled V8.

He knew someone who drove an old muscle car that sounded exactly like that—a partially restored red 1970 Pontiac GTO—someone for whom that brash exhaust note was the perfect introduction.

Jack Hardwick.

He felt his jaw tightening at the prospect of a visit from the detective with whom he had such a bizarre history of near-death experiences, professional successes, and personality clashes. Not that he hadn’t been anticipating the visit. In fact, he’d known it was coming from the moment he’d heard about the man’s forced departure from the State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation. And he realized that the tension he felt now had a lot to do with what had happened prior to that departure. A serious debt had been incurred, and some kind of payment would have to be made.

He was briefly tempted to stay on the hill until Hardwick left, but he knew that would accomplish nothing—only extend the period of discomfort before the inevitable meeting. With a small grunt of determination he got up from his place on the boulder.

“Were you expecting him?” asked Madeleine.

Gurney glanced down the slope. The GTO came to a stop by his own dusty Outback in the little makeshift parking area by the side of the house. The big Pontiac engine roared louder for a couple of seconds as it was revved prior to being shut down.

“I was expecting him in a general way,” said Gurney, “not necessarily today.”

“Do you want to see him?”

“I’d say he wants to see me, and I’d like to get it over with.”

As they turned to start down the trail, the mirror surface of the quarry pool shivered under a sudden breeze, dissolving the inverted image of the willows and the sky into thousands of unrecognizable splinters of green and gray.

If Gurney were the kind of man who believed in omens, he might have seen the shattered image as a sign of the destruction to come.

Hardwick had a way of getting under Gurney’s skin. It wasn’t just the little jabs themselves, or the pleasure the man seemed to take in delivering them; it was the uncanny echo of a voice from Gurney’s childhood—the relentlessly sardonic voice of his father.

“Right, the one with the blight. What can I do for you, Jack?”

Hardwick cleared his throat with disgusting enthusiasm. “Question is, what can we do for each other? Tit for tat, tat for tit. By the way, I noticed your door is unlocked. Mind if I wait for you in the house? Too many fucking flies out here.”

Hardwick, a solidly built man with a ruddy complexion, a prematurely gray crew cut, and the disconcertingly blue eyes of an Alaskan sled dog, was standing in the center of the big open room that composed half of the lower floor.

“Because it has a nice sound?”

“Ah, Davey boy, now there’s the kind of direct no-nonsense insight you’re famous for.” Hardwick licked his lips. “But do you know what it is exactly that makes that particular sound sound nice?”

“Why don’t you just tell me, Jack?”

“And deprive you of a fascinating little puzzle to solve?” He shook his head with theatrical resoluteness. “Wouldn’t dream of it. A genius like you needs challenges. Otherwise he goes to pot.”

As Gurney stared at Hardwick, it dawned on him what was wrong, what was off. Underneath the prickly banter, which was the man’s customary approach to the world, there seemed to be a not-so-customary tension. Edginess was part of Hardwick’s personality, but what Gurney detected in his expression now was more nervousness than edginess. It made him wonder what was coming. The man’s unsettledness was contagious.

Hardwick grimaced. “Ah, Davey, Davey—all business, as usual. You dismiss my attempt at a few pleasantries, my efforts at social lubrication, a few friendly compliments on the puritan simplicity of your home decor—”

“Jack …”

“Right. Fuck the pleasantries. Where do we sit?”

One of Hardwick’s distinctive traits had been a bold independence, the kind of let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may independence that comes from not being too attached to anything or anybody or any predetermined goal. But the man sure as hell was attached to this new project and its intended outcome, and the change didn’t strike Gurney as all that positive. He wondered what it would be like working with Hardwick in this altered state—with all his abrasiveness intact, but now in the service of a resentful obsession.