Hauling Paquette out into the corridor, Shea whirled on him. “What the hell’s wrong with you? We need this job!”
“We need a job,” Puck said stubbornly. “Not this one.”
“Bullshit! This is a fat deal, Puck. I’m not kicking it in the head over forty- year-old politics!”
“It’s not just politics!” Puck flared. “I’ll tell you something else that happened in nineteen sixty-nine. I picked up my nephew at the airport in Saginaw. Fresh back from Vietnam, with a chest full of medals and an empty sleeve where his left arm used to be. And he had spit dripping off his uniform. Spit! Some long-haired freak called him a baby killer, and spat on him! Mike was hurtin’ so bad he barely noticed, but I won’t ever forget that. Or forgive it. Mike died of his wounds four months later.”
“Look, I’m sorry as hell about your nephew, Puck, but that was a long time back and we’ve got bills to pay. This project will keep the crew working into the winter. The structure looks sound, the remodeling should mostly be carpentry 101. It’s easy money, Puck.”
“Whorin’s easy money, too, Danny, or so they say. Buildings have character and the work a man does on ’em should be honorable. I don’t like the feel of this job. That said, I know the crew needs the work, so if you want to take this deal, go ahead on. Don’t worry about me, I’ll carry my weight.”
“All right, then.” Shea nodded slowly. “I’m going to take this gig. We’ll bring it in on time, under budget, and be home and dry for Christmas.”
“I expect that’s what the rent-a-cop was thinking,” Puck said. “Just before the bomb went off.”
Two days later, a ragtag caravan of work vans and pickup trucks rolled into Port Martin. A gypsy construction gang in flannel shirts and work boots, six hard-hats plus Puck and Shea. North-country boys from the tip of the mitten near Valhalla. Wild, woolly, and rough around the edges. Skilled workers who knew their trades.
They ripped into the Port Martin Jail building like a wrecking crew. Reshaping the old city offices was a dirty job, but not a difficult one. The outer brick walls of the ancient building were far stronger than modern code requirements, built to bear the weight of massive rooftop water tanks that no longer existed.
The inner walls were only partitions, panels and doors artfully crafted from native oak trees that were ancient at the end of the last century, perhaps even the one before that.
The work progressed quickly, but without the crew’s usual barking and good-natured curses. Puck was right, the old building had a dour, brooding atmosphere. Dark corners and shadows. Odd creaks and groans as it resettled itself, like an aching patient undergoing major surgery without anesthetic.
Mostly, the strange shadows were caused by the obsolete lighting fixtures that dated from the Second World War. But there were other shadows and sounds which had no connection with reality. The spirit-echoes of men who’d stood before the bench, hearing their lives sworn away. Then rode the rickety freight elevator down to their dank basement cages. A living hell for roughnecks used to ranging the forest for lumber or furs, or sailing free on the Great Lakes.
The cellar cellblock seemed to be the dark soul of the structure, with rusty iron rings set in the walls, the width of a man’s wrists, the endless whisper of wastewater trickling beneath the floors. You could almost smell the despair.
North-country boys aren’t easily spooked, don’t fear much, living or dead. Still, Shea found himself walking soft in the dim corridors, half expecting to meet a ghost around the next corner. So when he stepped into the courtroom and saw a cop staring up at the photo display, for a crazy moment he wondered if...
But the cop was definitely real.
A big man, half a head taller than Shea, wearing a summer blue uniform, short sleeves that showed muscular biceps and a Semper Fi tattoo. Horse-faced, underslung jaw, oversized stallion’s teeth. His smile was probably scarier than his glare, but he wasn’t smiling now. He was glowering up at the poster shot of Red Max Novak holding the AK over his head, silently screaming his defiance.
“Can I help you?” Dan asked.
“I’m Sheriff Martin Doyle. Marty to my friends. You can call me Sheriff Doyle.”
“I didn’t call you at all,” Shea said mildly, “and this work site is closed to the public. So is there something I can do for you? Sheriff Doyle?”
“Yeah. You can bag this whole cockamamie project and head back where you came from. Valhalla, right? You boys are a long way from home.”
“Work’s not so easy to find up north.”
“You should have tried harder. This project’s a lousy idea.”
“I agree with you a hundred percent,” Puck said, joining them from the hall. “But I’ve got my own reasons. What’s your beef, sport?”
“You see the lawman in that photograph, the one with silver hair, standing by that damned tunnel? That’s old Tom Kowalski. Sheriff Kowalski, in those days. He went out of his way to welcome me when I took his job, twenty years ago. Brought me up to speed, helped me all he could, though he owed me nothin’. A good man, a good cop. The jailbreak destroyed his career. Made him a joke in his own hometown.”
“Must have been tough,” Shea said.
“Not as tough as having the city council vote to raise a damned shrine to the murderer who wrecked Tom’s life. There’s nothing heroic about Red Max Novak. He was just another radical commie psycho. Colleges campuses bred ’em like rats in those days.”
“We’re not politicians, Sheriff Doyle,” Dan said, “we’re in the construction business. Just hired help doing a job.”
“Doing the wrong job,” Doyle said. “Just so we’re clear, guys, there’s no statute of limitations on murder or breaking jail and abetting either one is a felony. It seems to me that’s damned close to what you people are doing. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. We have a lot of veterans in this town, and a lot of working men who thought the hippies were scum and still do. So you boys better keep your eyes peeled for vandals and lock up your tools every night. Because if you have any problems on this particular job, our response time might run a little slow.”
“No big surprise,” Puck snorted, “considering your department lost the most famous prisoner you ever had. We’ll keep an eye on our gear. Feel free to get back to the hunt.”
“What hunt?”
“For Red Max,” Puck said innocently. “Bein’ there’s no statute of limitations and all, shouldn’t you be out looking for him, Sheriff?”
Sheriff Doyle wasn’t the only one unhappy about the job. Four days into the project, Maph Rochon, a bull-necked, bullheaded Ojibwa ironworker, stormed into Shea’s temporary office, demanding to be paid off.
“You gotta be kiddin’, Maph,” Dan said. “You haven’t worked a full week yet.”
“Ain’t gonna work one, neither,” Rochon said. “I don’t like this place.”
“Fine, you want to quit, go ahead. But you can whistle for gas money, I’m not—” He broke off as Puck grabbed his bicep.
“Whoa up, what are you doing? You can’t cut Maph loose.”
“Watch me! He’s a drunk and a hothead, more trouble than he’s worth.”
“He’s also a freakin’ artist with an acetylene torch and we’re gonna need him bad when we start reconfiguring those cells. You’re the boss, Danny, act like one. Cool your jets and solve the damn problem.”
Shea opened his mouth to argue, then closed it again. Because Puck was right. As usual.
“What seems to be the trouble, Maph?” Shea grated, forcing a smile.
“This freakin’ place bums me out,” Rochon said stubbornly. “If I’d known what the job was gonna be, I wouldn’t have signed on.”