THAT AFTERNOON THEY HAD closed the job site early. It was the Thursday before the long weekend, and Roy was leaving for Weirs Beach the next day and needed to cash his paycheck. He had asked Lilly to go with him, but she couldn’t get away. He couldn’t get over the feeling that she was messing with him, trying to fuck him up. She was clearly trying to end things-she had told him that-but there was no way. If anyone was going to end things it would be him, and he would be the one to say how and when. Not that it was such a bad thing. Lately she’d been crying a lot. And guilty about what she’d been doing to her kids and to the man she had started to call “Sweet William,” which bugged the shit out of Roy. Sweet William was just some rich fuck who’d been lucky enough to snag one of the prettiest girls in town and now couldn’t keep her in his bed.
Roy’s construction crew had done some work at her house. Well, not his crew, really-it was owned by a general contractor, another rich fuck, but a working guy, so he wasn’t so bad. And he let Roy run the show, stopping by only to do the bids and pick up the checks. When they worked on the Braedon house, they never saw the husband. They just dealt with Lilly, and she did things like make lemonade for the crew if it was a really hot day, or maybe some cookies, even. All the crew got a little crazy when she walked through the house, though Hawk hadn’t been part of the crew then, but the other guys just went wild for her. When Roy had finally nailed her, they’d made him talk about it for a week, and they were coming in their pants just hearing him tell how wild she got the first time out, taking her clothes off in his truck in broad daylight down by the Marblehead Lobster Company and doing him right there.
“Psycho Pussy” was the best. He’d heard someone say that once. They were right, too, at least at first. For a while he thought she was the best time he’d ever had. It wasn’t so good lately, though. And it definitely wasn’t good since she’d started to give her husband the name Sweet William and talk about her kids all the time. Talk about losing wood.
All year he’d been seeing a new woman in New Hampshire. Lilly didn’t know it, and nobody had better tell her either. It wasn’t serious, just some biker chick he’d met last June. A bleached blonde with stand-up tits bought for her by the guy on the bike she rode in on. She’d had a catfight right there on the boardwalk with some girl who’d been flirting with the biker. Roy hadn’t seen it, but everyone was talking. From what he heard, she left the other girl with four stitches across her right cheek, and he didn’t mean her face cheek either. She walked out on the biker after that, and when Roy met her, she was in the bar at the end of the boardwalk, and she was looking to make the guy jealous, so she took up with him. Left the guy there, too, taking off in Roy’s truck-or really the company truck, a good one, though, top of the line, a Ford F-350 with four-wheel drive and an extended cab.
The next time he came up, she told him to make sure he brought drugs with him, the good kind that came in on the boats, not the kind that left you with a headache and a bloody nose, which was pretty much all you could get around here, especially now that she’d left her biker, who was her only good connection. She was class in that department, didn’t do crank the way he’d heard some of the biker chicks did. She didn’t want to rot her teeth, she said. And she didn’t smoke crack either, just liked the good stuff the old-fashioned way. Anything smooth, that you can snort through a straw, was what she told him when he asked what she liked. She wore a twenty-four-karat cross around her neck that hung low into her best assets and had a straw built into its stem. When he told her how clever he thought it was, disguising the coke straw that way, she got mad and told him she was a Christian, too, and never to assume otherwise. Then she sat on his lap and undid his fly and hopped onto him right there in the truck, which was a little too much like what had happened with Lilly, though he wasn’t complaining, not at all. He just hoped he hadn’t picked another psycho.
It made him really angry when he thought about Lilly, even angrier when he heard about Lilly and Hawk.
It had happened the afternoon he’d gone to get the check cashed. She’d come into the Rip Tide, looking for Roy. She’d been wearing a T-shirt, one of the guys on the crew got some great pleasure telling him, and it was wet because of the rain, and you could see everything. And she didn’t even seem to notice. But the rest of the crew noticed. Especially Hawk.
Hawk bought her steak tips. He didn’t know why the guy told him that part, except to lead to the next. That Lilly had left with him. The guy had gone out to have a smoke, and he saw her go into Hawk’s apartment with him. Stupid shit.
He already had an issue with the guy. Adam Mohawk. What kind of name was that? That he called himself “Hawk” pissed Roy off. He hated these college types who worked construction. They weren’t good at it, and they were always complaining.
They’d had a lot of trouble that summer with crews. Hawk was hired by Roy’s boss and sent over to do some finish carpentry at the Braedons’. Roy hated him on sight. Not because of anything he did-his work was good enough-but because Lilly had taken a liking to him. She wouldn’t admit it to Roy, but everyone could see it. Roy had recently had to fire a couple of people and was dangerously close to being understaffed, or he would have found a way to get rid of Hawk. When Roy’s hammer disappeared on the job site, he had accused Hawk of stealing it. Actually, it wasn’t Hawk, it was another guy, someone Roy had already let go, but he needed someone to blame. As payback, Roy took Hawk’s hammer, which was a twin to his.
“You should write your name on your tools,” he heard one of the other guys say to Hawk.
“This isn’t the first time,” another said.
The next day the hammer was gone from Roy’s box. He went over and grabbed it from Hawk, who pointed to his name and phone number scratched on the side.
Stupid shit.
ROY HAD BEEN WAITING FOR Hawk that Sunday night after he heard about Lilly. Sitting in the alleyway in the truck, lights off, just waiting. Hit him in the side of the head with one of those hammer staplers he’d stolen from the job site. College boy deserved what he got. Hawk never even saw it coming. Wasn’t back on the job site for almost a week. And when he came back, he had a line of stitches down his right cheek, and this time it was the face cheek he was talking about.
49
HAWK HAD DRIVEN ZEE’S Volvo the back way out of town, heading up Elm Street and cutting down Green Street to West Shore Drive. Even if Roy was following them, Hawk had managed to lose him.
“I don’t mean to scare you,” he said. “But Roy is a pretty dangerous guy.”
“I’m aware of that,” she said.
“Plus, one of my buddies told me they’re laying off some of the crews. After the job he’s working on is finished, Roy will be out of work. So his anger level is pretty high.”
“He doesn’t know that I’m in Salem,” she said.
“Who does know?”
“Just Mattei. And Michael.”
“You need to call them. I’d tell you to get a restraining order, but then he’d find out where you are. Not to mention that they don’t always work.”
Before Hawk’s mother had moved back home to Marblehead, to the house on Salem Harbor where she’d grown up, there had been several restraining orders. Not only had they not helped, but they seemed to simply challenge the man she was living with after her divorce, a man who was not Hawk’s father. Thank God that Hawk’s grandfather had taken them in when he did. In Hawk’s opinion restraining orders weren’t worth the paper they were written on.
“Make sure you stay out of Marblehead for a while. The good news is that I hear he’s planning to move to New Hampshire,” Hawk said.
“Why is he so angry with you?” Zee asked.