It’s a Mystery: “You can choose forgiveness or revenge, but revenge is always costly”
/Where it Hurts
It was a paragon of nothing so much as proximity, proximity to Long Island MacArthur Airport. And MacArthur, an airport of three airlines, was nothing so much as an unfulfilled promise, the little airport that couldn’t. The Paragon was a way station, a place to pass through on the way to or from the airport…. People came here to leave.
Still consumed with grief over the loss of his son, he has seen his once happy marriage come unraveled and his ex-wife Annie turn into “a hornet from a butterfly.” When Thomas Delcamino, Tommy D, a small-time crook Gus knows well, tracks him down and pleads with him to investigate his son TJ’s violent murder, Gus turns him down. He has no intention of stirring up his own heartache by tangling with another’s. Soon after, he is summoned to the Fourth Precinct to bail out his daughter Kristen, known as Krissy, who since her brother’s death has become trouble with a capital T. This time she was caught smoking weed in front of the Precinct in a car with an open bottle of vodka.
Detective Peter Francis Xavier McCann came to collect what was left of me so that I could collect what was left of my daughter…Pete was seven years my junior. I’d been one of his training officers…. He’d been transferred to the detective squad at the Fourth around the time I retired. …His charm was his deadliest weapon. He had the knack of making you feel you were the best friend he ever had…. And even so, even after what had gone on between us, I got a jolt at the sight of him.
It turns out that during the downward spiral of Gus and Annie’s marriage, she had an affair with Pete. And while Gus hasn’t forgiven him, he knows Pete has his back where Krissy is concerned:
“You gotta get her some help, Gus. She’s gonna do something soon that none of us can save her from.” …The implication was clear enough. If we didn’t do something soon, Krissy would self-destruct…. I knew he was right—I hated that he was and because I knew I couldn’t let Kristen suffer consequences, not yet, anyway.
As an afterthought when Gus and Krissy are leaving the station, Gus brings up the Delcamino homicide. Pete goes ballistic and warns him that he needs to stay very far away from the case. The warning kicks in Gus’s dormant cop instincts. Not long after, he finds Tommy D’s body and narrowly escapes being shot by his killers. Then he’s warned off the case both by cops who wouldn’t give Tommy D or his son the time of day and by a deadly drug dealer with his own agenda. Now the proverbial wild horses won’t keep Gus away. He’s abetted by Tommy D’s notebook, obtained from an unlikely source. Gus tenaciously digs in his heels by investigating the handful of suspects-cum-witnesses listed in what might be dubbed Tommy’s amateur murder book. He finds that everyone involved with the late T.J. Delcamino—from his best friend, to a former outlaw biker, an outcast con man, a mafia capo and even a very senior police official—has something to hide and all are willing to go to great lengths to keep it hidden. Gus dodges attempts on his life with the help of Slava the night doorman. Slava has an iron fist, a murky past, and is fiercely loyal to Gus. He might be Polish or Russian but as he puts it with more than a hint of menace: “It would not be good to be curious about Slava”.Where it Hurts is a beautifully plotted, action-packed novel, whose twists and turns are executed by a host of multidimensional characters. One of the best is Father Bill Kilkenny, the chaplain the union sent to comfort the family after John’s death. Father Bill was the glue that held the family together when the center would not hold. He also knows more than he is telling Gus about certain aspects of the investigation that are linked to his own past. But it is Gus Murphy, the striking and haunted protagonist, who is unequivocally one of genre veteran Coleman’s most fully realized characters. As Coleman put it in an interview, “Gus is remaking himself and he doesn’t know where his journey will take him or what it will make of him.” That’s okay. We’re willing to go along with him whatever his choices, good and bad.Author Reed Farrel Coleman has been called a “hard boiled poet” and a “noir poet laureate” encomiums well earned by his edgy lyrical prose that flies tautly off the page. This is the riveting debut of a new series I hope has many sequels to come.
He could feel the white static fizz and pop at the base of his skull. That was his name for the fine-grained sensation he lived with now, the white static. A vague crackling unease, a dissonant noise at the edge of hearing. It wasn’t quite uncomfortable, not yet. The static was just reminding him that it didn’t want him to go indoors.
It’s the reason he’s been living out of a backpack in the North Cascades, sleeping under the stars with only the mountains for company. Then his comrade-in-arms Jimmy Johnson kills himself. The informal sergeants’ network with a long reach eventually gets to Peter’s campsite with the news of Jimmy’s death. He packs up and heads for Jimmy’s hometown of Milwaukee. The house his widow Dinah lives in with their two sons is on the edge of a battered neighborhood that, like the house, had seen better days. From Jimmy’s description of the house, Peter knew there would be no shortage of projects. From Jimmy’s description of his wife, an ER nurse, he knew she wouldn’t take help easily. So when he calls her, less than a week after he hears the news, he invents a Marine Corps program that provides home repairs for the families of veterans. Dinah is the only client and funding comes from Peter’s back pay. And he likes fixing old houses.Arriving while Dinah’s at work, he is greeted by Jimmy’s twelve-year-old son, Charlie. Under the rotting porch that he told Charlie’s mother he would fix, sits a huge smelly dog, at least a hundred and fifty pounds of “unsurpassed hideousness.” Necessity, that old mother, has Peter, all two hundred pounds of him, moving at lightning speed with a stick of oak and some rope. With more than a little spur-of-the-moment ingenuity Peter manages to control the dog:
“Sweet holy Jesus,” said Charlie, dancing backward in his polished shoes as Peter and the snarling hog-tied animal emerged from the crawl space and into the light…. Peter felt the open air and high blue sky like a balm.
After a trip to the lumberyard, he assembles all he needs for repairs, and sets about clearing the mass of detritus that has accumulated under the dilapidated old porch. But the cleanup yields more than he bargained for, a suitcase full of cash, $400,000 to be exact, and bars of plastic explosives. Peter stashes the bars in his truck and waits on Dinah’s back stoop with the suitcase for her to come home. Charlie and his little brother Miles are playing inside the house.
Early November in Wisconsin, Veterans Day next week. It was dark before suppertime, and getting colder. Frost on the windshield at night. Charlie had already offered Peter hot chocolate twice. He was a good kid. Both concerned and a little relieved that Lieutenant Ash the crazy dog tamer wouldn’t come inside.
Dinah turns out to be a cool, unflappable lady who settles Peter at the big kitchen table “where the static prickled at the base of his brain.” She claims to know nothing about the money and she doesn’t care if it was Jimmy’s, she doesn’t want any part of it. She insists on feeding him and he eats while the static rises and he has to go outside. She joins him with two mugs of coffee. She asks no questions and, as they sit quietly, she finally admits that she thinks someone is watching the house. She also shares a hunch she has about the origins of the money:
“Leave the money here tonight,” she said. ”I believe I know where it came from. Tomorrow we’ll go make certain….I work an early shift tomorrow, I’ll be home about three. We’ll go then.”
Next day, while Peter is working alone, he is accosted by an armed, scarred man driving a black SUV. In a priceless scene, the man underestimates the dog and winds up fleeing. One thing is certain, if the man knows about the money and the explosives, he doesn’t know where they might be.Dinah’s hunch turns into a false lead. The action escalates as they follow the money trail and attempt to track down whoever is behind this illegal cache. It’s a complicated mission that grows more perilous at each unexpected turn. And the ending is dynamite! Oh, and by the way, the dog turns out to be named Mingus, after the jazz musician, and he is every inch a star.Nicholas Petrie’s The Drifter is not just a gripping thriller, it is also a trenchant exploration of the shattered lives of returning veterans. Peter Ash’s penetrating, perceptive voice strikes just the right note for an honest exploration of the challenges men and women face returning from war. This is a heartfelt debut.____Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.
