Thorazine Beach by Bradley Harris

gold-tipped, expensive as all get-out. She offered me one but I stuck with my own. Her lighter, I saw, was a Dunhill, antique, gold. I flicked my own yellow BiC. The way she let me was, in its way, revealing. As if she’d
learned
it, learned it in some kind of calculated, dress-for-success way, from the kind of women who know how to impress men in cocktail lounges.
Touch the man’s hand lightly as he lights it…that’s it
…
just a gentle brush
. That, and a warm, smoky smile. “I’m a late starter,” she said. “But I’ve learned, it calms me. And I do like…” She smiled again. “…a certain style.”
    Two grand in cash and an hour later—yes, I did wonder where the cash came from, but I didn’t ask—I’d agreed to a bunch of stuff I shouldn’t have.
Strict
confidentiality.
No
police.
Daily
reports—in person, never by phone. I was to keep working whatever jobs Eileen gave me—and I tucked MacDonald in there, too, though we never mentioned him. That, she said, would be part of the cover.
No one
, she said, could know I was working for her. In return for this: two grand a week, just like today, till I was done.
    “Well, Jack,” she said. “I am
so
grateful. And—look at the time…you’ll want to be getting started, I expect.”
    Nikki came out the door, a melmac plate in her left hand, spoon in her right, mouth full, plopped herself down at our table. “Hell of a casserole, BJ,” she said, and turned to me. “Jack, I’ll give you the dish out of the fridge, coupla days, when I’m done and run it through the diswasher, and you can take it back to BJ.”

16.
22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31 July
Night Out Back in the Yard,
Birdwatching
    “Come on, MacDonald. It rained all last night. Third night in a row it’s—”
    “Jack I need you to…”
    I need I need I need
.
    “You are cashing stamps like crazy, here, MacDonald.”
    “I know, I know, I know.”
    We’d both cashed a hundred, a thousand, between the two of us, all those years. And had still more to go, I hoped. Bitching was just part of the deal.
    “I saved your ass, MacDonald.”
    “I saved
your
ass, Chubby Checker.”
    True, both counts, and more than once. Without all that saving, there’d be two less asses in town, no doubt.
    I’d stopped asking why and what for. The best I’d squeezed out of MacDonald was some cockamamie thing about him working with the feds on “one of those importing-pelts, illegal-poaching, take-no-whales, save-the-tiger things.
You
know, Jack—you go for that shit, you get the Greenpeace calendar.”
    He’d been speaking for a few months, now, in terms like
commission, task force
. It was mostly here-and-there stuff. Mentions, allusions. It was all fuzzy—annoyingly vague, at times. Crap. I’d begun to wonder which it really was—whether he wanted to tell me, not tell me, or half-tell me. I’d settled on the last, and tried not to prod or poke. I’d filed a few snippets away.
Wildlife
, he’d said a couple of times. Even, once, the World Wildlife Federation. Then:
Smuggling
.
    His story was a steaming pile of Bravo Sierra—a lot of it, anyway. That much I knew. But the one part I bought, straight-up, was what I got when I asked him why
he
wasn’t the one out here suffering. All that patent-leather MacDonald bravado drained from his face. “All I can tell you is, there’s something dirty, Jack. Inside.
Very
dirty. Very…
threatening
. I think they’re…watching me.” That pulled me halfway in. Then that one word, his word,
scared
, made up the rest. Tough bastard. Patrol car. Burglary. Narcotics. Vice. Homicide, even, for a little stretch. I’d
never
heard him say that word.
Scared
. What could I do?
    And so it came to pass. One more night. Half-hot air, cold rain, rattling on my old Canadian Forces poncho. Days before, I’d rigged a little lean-to, one I could set up and take down each night, tucked in between the big dirt pile and a bush. A little brush for cammo, break up the