Free Nantucket Sawbuck by Steven Axelrod Page A

serious.”
    â€œOkay, Eminem, what did you say to him?”
    â€œI don’t exactly remember…a lot of black-white trash talk.”
    Haden grinned. “I have to hear this. Come on, you must remember a little of it.”
    â€œWell…let’s see—the last part went, ‘Yeah I’m cool, I went to high school, and I graduated, fool, that’s why I rule your black ass now, check it out how, Mr. Fish Belly, Mr. Ofay, Mr. Pig, and you’re the jig, bingo nigger I know the lingo, too, and I’m bigger than you, I’m not frontin while you hunting for a word, drop back and punt runt, them drugs is stunting your ass, you flunk this class you been tested and bested now your ass is arrested.’ Something like that.”
    Haden was laughing.
    â€œHey, it worked. Like my old captain used to say: bullshit baffles brains. The kid was working on his response, you know? Figuring out what he was going to say against me. And before he knew what was happening someone had a gun at his temple and they were taking the nine out of his hands. On the way out he said. “I would have whipped your ass you wigger motherfucker.” Wigger—that’s a white boy trying to be black. Hey, whatever works.”
    Haden patted my shoulder. “No wonder you were a legend in the department.”
    â€œYeah, right—a legendary fuck up. But not that day.”
    We got into our separate cars and drove back to the cop shop. I was hoping Mason would get the girl, and thinking about poetry in general. Of course, I hardly ever used it directly in my police work, but the type of thinking poetry requires, that willingness to follow an idea when you don’t get where it’s going, or trust a connection that occurs to you out of nowhere, that odd giddy sense of being not quite in control of your own thoughts, had always been essential for me when I confronted the aftermath of unexplained violence or the mystery of a crime scene. Haden would demand examples and I couldn’t think of any offhand. It didn’t matter, though. The most sensational murder in Nantucket’s history was about to make my case for me—if I could find some way to solve it.

Chapter Six
    Tanya Kriel
    Tanya Kriel hated Nantucket. She had sworn never to come back, but here she was, struggling through another winter on the rock. Well, at least she had a good reason, the best possible reason: revenge.
    She wasn’t one of those people with an “It used to be nice on Nantucket” bumper sticker. It was easy to imagine Nantucket with fewer SUVs, more open land, no ugly trophy houses, all of that. It was easy to imagine it with no electricity, too, but so what? It was probably worse in the old days, before the Irish and the Jamaicans and the eastern Europeans arrived: all white bread old money wasps, adding up their stock portfolios and drinking martinis in those hideous pink pants. The island had obviously been a haven for rich people at least since the twenties. They might have changed, but they didn’t change much. Tanya actually preferred the ostentatious new millionaires. She found the moneyed biddies who insisted on driving rusty Hondas and getting their clothes at the dump even more pretentious, more insidiously smug, than the red-cheeked dot com scavengers in their Humvees.
    Her own ’92 Ford Ranger had a homemade bumper sticker. It said:
    Consider Privilege.
    Checking her rearview mirror, she was pleased to note that it made the occasional tiny woman in a massive gas-guzzling truck suitable for industrial towing or wartime troop transport, wince uncomfortably. Maybe she was making them think, but probably not.
    She was happy to make them nervous for a few seconds. She picked her battles carefully.
    She had returned to the island with a mission and it was easier to concentrate on that mission in the winter. Apart from a brief flurry of conspicuous consumption in December, the place was fairly