Third Rail by Rory Flynn

carpenter does.
    Harkness points at the crowd. “All of you. In your cars, now.” They trudge away.
    A car drives up behind him and Harkness turns to see the brown sedan with the green TOWN OF NAGOG seal on the side. Hank Steadman, the town’s gruff, incompetent animal control officer, walks toward Harkness, holding a tranquilizer gun sloppily at his side.
    Behind him, Harkness hears a fleshy smash and then another. When he turns, the carpenter is swinging his hammer at the buck’s head like it’s a reluctant two-by-four. There’s a crack when he hits the buck’s skull and the deer shudders once, legs trying to run one last time. Then the buck goes still.
    â€œThere’s your fucking
animal control
.” He wipes the sledge on the grass and stalks back toward his truck, shaking his head.
    Hank ambles closer. “Looks like you got a dead deer here, Eddy.”
    Harkness nods. The buck’s black eyes are open and staring, his crushed skull oozing dark blood.
    â€œGrab a leg and we’ll get him off the road.”

8
    H ARKNESS PULLS INTO THE EMPTY PARKING LOT of Nagog Regional Hospital. There’s a banner announcing a blood drive, an empty guard shack, and a couple of old men in tan raincoats shuffling outside the Pavilion, the town’s elder care facility. Harkness calls the familiar number.
    â€œSir!”
    â€œPatrick, it’s me.”
    â€œThanks for that information, sir!”
    â€œSomeone’s in your office, right?” Harkness isn’t supposed to call Narco-Intel.
    â€œThat’s correct.”
    â€œCall back when you can.”
    Harkness clicks his phone off and sits in the quiet squad car for a moment. Through the rain-speckled windshield, he can see the semicircle drive that leads to the emergency room—a longtime Harkness family haunt. He remembers going there at seven when his brother George pushed him out of a tree. When they were twelve, they walked deep into the Nagog Woods and shot each other at fifty yards to see if the pellets would break skin. They did. At sixteen, he and George both ended up in the ER when they smashed their father’s BMW into a cement wall to see if the airbags would inflate. They didn’t. In high school, George taught his punk brother how to make a pipe bomb in the basement. They learned to make do without eyebrows.
    Their father, Edward “Red” Harkness, took a perverse pride in his rough sons, their fights, and the trips to the emergency room. Red had a few visits of his own, stabbing himself in the thigh while drinking Scotch and opening Wellfleet oysters with a barlow knife, an anxiety attack triggered by a market drop, and a holiday overdose of Demerol that left him sprawled on the living room floor, pale and unresponsive as a birch log.
    It’s only funny when someone gets hurt.
Like many a truth, the Harkness family motto makes more sense in retrospect. Eddy and George, with encouragement from their father, fought until blood flowed from somewhere—nose, mouth, scalp. They carried violence inside them like a banked fire. They still do.
    His phone rings.
    â€œHarky?”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œGot some news for you.”
    â€œGood or bad?”
    Patrick says nothing.
    â€œOut with it.”
    â€œWell, that check I ran on Thalia Havoc came up completely clean. But when I ran Thalia Prochazka, I found out your girl’s been busy.”
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œDrug busts. Junk twice. Blow once. All under a gram. Assault with a deadly weapon.”
    â€œWhat kind of weapon?”
    â€œDinner plate. Threw it at someone at some Chinatown dump. And breaking and entering. Broke into the Public Garden at night and took a Swan Boat for a spin back when she was in art school.”
    Harkness has to smile at that one.
    â€œGirl’s a pistol.”
    â€œRoger that,” Harkness says. “What about the call from Pauley Fitz?”
    â€œSomeone’s got