There was static on the other end of the line. “You should talk to Rivard about that coyote,” she said. “He might have some idea who the local jokers are.”
“OK.”
Rivard and I were scheduled to meet later that morning. My new sergeant had woken me at dawn, saying that he needed me to accompany him to a nearby school to confront some teenagers who might or might not have broken into several vacated summer cabins on the shores of Bog Pond.
“How you holding up down there, Grasshopper?” Kathy asked.
“Fine.”
“Liar. You’ll be all right once you get laid.”
“Jesus, Kathy.”
“We’re breaking up here,” she said before we finally lost the signal.
Washington County has lots of nicknames.
It’s sometimes called the Bold Coast because of its wave-washed cliffs. Others refer to it as the Sunrise Coast because, as the easternmost stretch of land in the continental U.S. it is supposedly the first place to see the sunrise-provided there’s no mist, rain, or snow, which is almost never. There are stony capes and islands here that see more fog than San Francisco or the entire Olympic Peninsula.
But the most common term people use to refer to Washington County is Down East.
In Maine, you might say that up is down. You travel down the coast from New Hampshire to New Brunswick-not up it-despite the fact that you’re heading north the whole time. Down East is an old nautical term from the age of sail, when schooners sailed downwind from Boston, carrying passengers and rum to Maine’s eastern ports and the Canadian Maritimes.
The windjammer trade might have blown south, but the contraband was still flowing freely in Washington County, although rum had largely been replaced by coffee brandy (Maine’s unofficial state liquor), crystal meth, heroin, locally grown marijuana, and illegal prescription drugs, many of which were smuggled in from Canada. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the border with New Brunswick had hardened. There were more checkpoints, more Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, more unmanned surveillance of the boundary woods and waters. Certainly there were more hassles for anyone who wished to drive from one nation to the other. None of these impediments seem to thwart smugglers.
By most measures, the state of Maine has the worst prescription-drug-abuse rates in America. The Maine Drug Enforcement Agency had given wardens a list of commonly abused medications, which included Dilaudid, Lorcet, Lortab, OxyContin, Percocet, Percodan, Tylox, Librium, Valium, Xanax, Adderall, Concerta, Vicodin, and Ritalin. Cross-border smuggling was only part of the problem. Addicts also forged prescriptions and conned multiple doctors into writing multiple scripts. They stole pills from the medicine cabinets of sick friends and relatives. Occasionally, some drugstore cowboy would even hold up an actual pharmacy. Painkillers were easy to obtain in Down East Maine-provided you had the money.
The problem was, nobody had any money. The street price for an Oxy 80-an eighty-milligram tablet of oxycodone-was eighty dollars. Very few jobs in depressed Washington County paid half that much for a day’s work. As a result, burglaries and home invasions were epidemic. Aside from the drug dealers themselves, the only entrepreneurs thriving in my district were the backwoods fences who dealt in stolen electronics and Grandma’s heirloom jewelry.
After I showered and shaved, I buttoned my uniform up over the thin ballistic vest I was required to wear each day. The uniform was olive-colored, like the fatigues worn by soldiers in Korea or Vietnam, with POLICE stenciled across the back. The trousers tucked into black combat boots. My P226 rode low on my gun belt, counterbalancing a holster containing Cap-Stun pepper spray. Every day I dressed like a man going to war.
I opened the fridge to see what I had for breakfast. Inside was a single blue can of Foster’s, half an onion in a plastic bag, and a box of baking soda. I’d purchased the beer the night I’d moved in as a housewarming gift to myself but had decided against opening it. Toward the end of my relationship with Sarah, I’d been drinking way too much, and I worried that living alone, I might fall into bad habits. Seeing that can of Foster’s every day and not opening it had become a personal test of will.
I was still studying my bare cupboards when Rivard’s GMC pulled up to my trailer. He gave the horn a honk, scattering a flock of Bohemian waxwings from the crabapple tree across the right-of-way.
I zipped my parka and stepped outside into the barbarous cold. Instantly, my eyes began tearing up and my cheeks burned as if I’d been smacked in the face with a bag of ice.
I slid into the passenger seat. “Jesus, how cold is it?”
“Minus four.”
As usual, he was wearing dark sunglasses despite the overcast sky. Marc Rivard wasn’t that much older than I was-I would have guessed thirty or thirty-one-but he seemed to have suffered an early onset of middle age. The black hair along his temples was edged with gray strands, and he had a developed a paunch, which bulged over the top of his gun belt. Rivard had grown up in a Franco-American household outside Lewiston, and his speech reminded me of my mom’s French uncles and aunts. You didn’t hear many people of my generation with that singsong accent.
“So where are we headed?” I asked.
“SAD seventy-seven,” he said. “Whitney High School.”
SAD stood for school administrative district, but the acronym seemed sadly fitting in this part of the state.
“And what are we doing, exactly?”
He pulled the truck out onto the road that led down to the coast. The asphalt was lined with five-foot-tall snowbanks. A week of subzero temperatures had hardened the drifts into rock-solid ice. If an ambulance came speeding along behind us, there would be no room to pull over, I realized.
“There’s a kid I want to talk to named Barney Beal. My snitch says he’s the one who broke into those cabins over on Bog Pond, the ones with satellite dishes.”
“He was stealing TVs?”
“No, there’s this microchip inside the relay that connects to the television. It goes for one hundred dollars a pop. It’s small and easy to hide in your pocket. It’s like stealing hundred-dollar bills.”
“Why do you need me for this?”
When he turned his head, I saw my fun-house reflection staring back from the bronze lenses of his sunglasses. “What’s with you and all the questions today?” he said. “It’s more intimidating if there are two of us showing up in his classroom.”
Rivard was in a foul mood again. He had gotten divorced and remarried the previous summer, and many of our “conversations” were long monologues by him on the inequities of the state’s laws concerning alimony and child support. His new wife was already pregnant, too, but he didn’t seem to see it so much as a blessing as another expense he couldn’t afford.
He removed his hand from the wheel to sip coffee from an aluminum mug. It occurred to me this was yet another difference between my two sergeants. Kathy would never have come to my house without also bringing me a cup of coffee.
“Do you mind if we get some breakfast first?” I asked.
He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. “The McDonald’s in Machias has a drive-through.”
Ever since I’d moved to Whitney, I’d been in search of a regular breakfast joint. Back in my old district, I’d become a fixture at the Square Deal Diner. Just about every day, I’d stop in for a molasses doughnut and some good-natured ribbing from the owner, Dot Libby, or her plainspoken daughter, Ruth. They’d been among the first people to welcome me into what had started out as an unfriendly community. Over the course of the two years I’d spent in Sennebec, I’d formed an unexpected attachment to the restaurant. It surprised me, thinking about the Libbys, to feel such intense homesickness.