Bone Orchard

Chapter One It was dark when I left my apartment above the Hansom House and went down the two flights of stairs to the street below to wait for Frank Gannon. The stretch of gray clouds hanging low overhead had cores the color of lead, and the few spaces of night between them were starless and empty. I would have been warmer had I remained up in my rooms and watched for Frank from my living room window, but it seemed to me that the early night air was the place to be right then. Frank had called me in the morning and told me that he would come by around five, after I had gotten home from work. It was just five now and I was ready for him, wrapped against the cold in a secondhand overcoat with torn seams, waiting at the curb and wondering a little just what it was he wanted from me now. I tried to stay clear of Frank as a rule, but Southampton is a small town, particularly in the winter. He had done me a favor when I was in a jam with the chief of police not too far back, but I had paid that off three months ago and was not expecting to hear from him again. He had a phobia about talking on the telephone, so he had hung up this morning before I had the chance to tell him to go to hell. He had simply said, "It's Frank, we need to talk. I'll find you after work." And then he hung up. My first instinct was to pretend I hadn't heard him, but by breakfast I knew there really was no point in that. The wind was out of the south, an ocean wind, and it stung my face and ears and pried through the weak seams in my coat like long fingers. Just two nights ago it had been Indian summer, days in the seventies, nights in the fifties. In my rooms above, and in the dark bar below, windows remained opened to the mild night air. The clientele of the Hansom House, mainly local laborers and artists, had sat in their summer clothes at the crowded bar and on the half-dozen overstuffed antique sofas in the main room, listening to live music. One night it was three white boys playing reggae, another it was a jazz quintet made up of kids under twenty. The Hansom House was an old three-story wreck that had been turned a quarter of a century ago by a local artist into a funky bar and restaurant with apartments above. It was something of a holdout for us year-rounders, and this annual stretch of warm days and nights that came always somewhere between October and Christmas was the hard-earned summer vacation we counted on. But now, and suddenly, it seemed that winter was here, that maybe it had been here all along. These warm nights had been an illusion or trick. The old elm trees that lined my street were bare, and their branches tapped and hissed in the steady wind. The leaves tumbling across the pavement were dead and brittle and sounded like the quick scuffling feet of the last people to leave town. I saw headlights turn onto the far end of Elm Street a few hundred feet away and head toward me. I could see that they didn't belong to a silver Cadillac Seville, Frank's car, but instead to an old-style Checker cab that had been long ago repainted red. It was Eddie's cab, and it was slowing down for me. It pulled over to the curb, its wide tires rubbing against the concrete. Eddie leaned across the seat and jerked the handle of the back door. It swung out, and immediately I smelled clove oil and the pungent odor of cigar. "You'll freeze to death out here, Mac." He had been on the East End for almost twenty years, but his Jamaican accent remained for the most part intact. The thick bristles that grew from his face were dull silver, like metal shavings, and by the shape of his face you could tell that he was missing most of his back teeth. What remained were yellowed and seemed to always have an unlit cigar wedged somewhere between them. He didn't smoke as a courtesy to his passengers. Eddie had a way of sometimes knowing things that went on around town beforJudson, D. Daniel is the author of 'Bone Orchard' with ISBN 9780553584165 and ISBN 0553584162.