edge.
'One thing I've been meaning to ask you,' said Cullen. 'I saw the pictures from Sinclair's camera. The one of your house here. What was that?'
'I don't know. I don't think I want to either. You ever crack open an egg and get a bloody yolk? Crack open Sinclair's head, and that's what you'd get.'
'But what do you
'I don't know how he saw me. I had a secret. A secret job, a secret life. He was drawn to that. I think he wanted that for himself. A great secret existence.'
'Maybe he found one. I'd watch yourself, anyway.' Cullen patted his own knee, uncrossing his legs. 'And now I get to go home.' He stood, returning the wheel pillow to the corner of the divan, reaching for his file. 'What about you? What's the night hold?'
Maddox shrugged, getting to his feet.
'Alone with your thoughts, eh? Well, enjoy your downtime. God knows, it never lasts.'
The moment had arrived either to shake hands or not. Cullen tapped Maddox lightly on the chest with the file folder, then nodded and started away. Sometimes it ended that way. No finish-line string-breaking or end-zone spike. There was an excellent chance they would never even see each other again.
On his way out through the garage, Cullen took another look at the old Ford pickup. Its rusted wheel wells and dinged sides and mud-browned tires marked it as a true, working truck, a farm rig, and, as such, unsuited to Maddox's needs. Cullen checked the front seat through the driver's window and saw a package of breath mints, a garage door remote control, and a paperback with a pink and blue cover he recognized as being one of his wife's book group novels.
A pickup truck and chick lit. Cullen was only sorry he'd never been introduced.
50
TRACY
TRACY WENT DOWNSTAIRS after she heard the car drive away.
Donny, alone in his kitchen, turned and raised a 'there you are' smile.
'Sorry,' he said. 'I didn't know he was coming by.'
She shrugged. 'That's okay.'
'I'm not used to mixing work with my private life. Not really used to having a private life at all.'
'Okay,' she said again.
'He's from the Mitchum County District Attorney's office. I don't know how much you heard?.'
'Was I supposed to be listening?'
He shrugged like it was all right if she had been.
'Most of it,' she admitted.
He nodded. 'I never, ever lied to you. To everyone else but you.'
'You never told me much truth either.'
'I know. But I'm about to.'
Tracy stood against the dishwasher to steady herself. This buildup was too much. She folded her arms protectively, to stop herself from trembling. 'Okay.'
'This isn't my first job in law enforcement. I've been with the state police for just over ten years.'
Tracy had guessed as much, listening from the foot of his bed upstairs. But hearing him say it now blew holes in her ears. 'You're a state trooper?'
'Never actually wore the uniform. Not for one day on the job.'
Tracy stared, trying to picture him in the shirt, the hat, the boots.
'Issued me a gun too, but I never carried it. Both have been in storage since the academy. They pulled me out right before graduation to work undercover. Which I've done continuously ever since.'
'Undercover?' she said, a term she thought she knew from the movies, but which, when applied to Donny Maddox, had no meaning for her at all.
'Narc work, mostly. I think it started off as an experiment. They wanted someone with a clean background, who could walk around with a real name and a real social security number with real mileage on it. So I kept no personnel file with the state police. Only one captain and one major within the organization knew my cover. My police salary was always paid out into an account under my mother's name so that I never drew a paycheck. It wasn't very much anyway. Unlike uniform troopers, I couldn't pad my take-home with detail work.'
He shook his head like he was rambling.
'I kept what I earned working my cover jobs, lived off that. That was the life. All real jobs, lots of bars, day labor, some under-the-table stuff. Building up visibility and street cred. Every step of the way, I was wheeling and squealing. And always managing to be somewhere else when the cops came knocking.
'Most undercovers go four, five years max. It's a fast track to promotion. But with me, it wasn't something I dipped in and out of. I was always in it. Birthdays would come and go, and I'd think, This year, this is the last. Only to see another one come around again. I used to blame the SP, but it was me just as much. Fact was, I liked it. It was what I knew, and it came easy to me. Until the job before this one.'
He cleared his throat. He was telling her everything and it was too much at once. Tracy prepared herself for the worst.
'An OxyContin ring operating out of Haverhill. You know what Oxy is, right? Pharmaceutical painkiller. Heroin users love it because it's control-released. A sustained high over time. These were bad boys, taking off pharmacies at gunpoint. Ran down a Haverhill cop once on a getaway, the guy died of a heart attack. I worked them through this girl I had conspired to meet, a roommate of one of their sisters. A good girl, basically, with a good heart, but kind of tragically naive and gullible. Perfect for me. I contrived to get myself kicked out of my own apartment, knowing she would take me in. That was how I was trying to break in with her friend's brother. But it was slow going. I would hit up this girl for information, things she'd heard. These guys were all Latins, and 'roid ragers, paranoiacs. When things started to go bad for them, when they had to shade off some jobs because they picked up on stakeout heat at the scene, they went on a witch hunt. One night I came home and she was gone. No word, nothing. Turned out they had fingered her for the leak instead of me. Her body was found underneath a bridge. They'd forcefed her a couple of crushed-up Oxy, which, outside of its control-release capsule, delivers a twelve-hour high in one bolt. They took turns urinating on her as she was dying.'
Tracy's arms were crossed so tightly she could hardly breathe.
'Yeah.' Donny cleared his throat again. 'I knew how it happened, I knew who did it, but had no proof. So I poured myself into it that much harder, breaking in with them in order to seal this murder rap. But to get there, to run with these scumbags and earn their trust, I had to do some things. Things I wouldn't ordinarily do. The rules of the game that are meant to be bent? Well, I really bent them. Tied them in knots. But as far as I was concerned, the end more than justified the means.'
He was nodding hard. He looked sick.
Tracy felt paralyzed.
'The other side of it was, I knew my mother was ill. She would tell me she was okay, and I let myself believe her because I couldn't get out to see her anyway. I was living with these guys by then, this hyper-paranoid bunch?totally insular was how they rolled, you never mixed with anyone outside the crew?and everything was coming to a head. So I put off seeing her, and put it off, and fucking put it off. It was right after I got these guys picked up in the act of knocking over a CVS in Salem, New Hampshire, that she had her fall.
'There was real static coming my way after the case, the rules I broke, and I was at a point where I just didn't care. So I quit. The day after my mother's funeral, in fact. Tried to, anyway. Then they came to me about Sinclair, who had been beaten up by Bucky Pail during a DUI stop. He had made some narco allegations against the Black Falls police, and Pinty had already been to the DA's office about corruption in the department he once ran. It was my hometown, it was a good fit, so they offered me this probationary rehab assignment, a straightforward fact-finding case of possible rogue cops running amok. I didn't really care about making good myself. It was for Pinty I did it. Aside from my mother, he was the only one who knew what I was?knew that this was the reason I never came back after graduation, never served my scholarship time. He got me hired on to the force here, and I've been working this case ever since.'
'Sinclair?' Tracy said, trying hard to understand. 'You were his??'
'He was my informant, yeah. I had that distinct privilege. He was just starting to figure out that this thing was bigger than even he had originally thought when he disappeared. Now, somehow, my small-town criminal conspiracy case has dovetailed into a double-murder investigation.'
She was breathing hard like she had been running the entire time he was speaking. Running away from what he was saying and at the same time racing to keep up with him. 'So then, Wanda?'
'She was the only one close to Bucky Pail. That's what that was all about. But she stayed loyal to him. Or rather, she stayed loyal to his drugs.'
Tracy said, 'In the movies, undercover drug agents, sometimes they have to take drugs themselves. To prove they're not police.'
'Yeah.'
She waited. 'That's all you're going to say?'
Donny said, 'Yeah.'
She felt
