Free Bad Men (2003) by John Connolly Page A

you want to know?”
    “What’s he like?” asked Macy.
    “Who?”
    “You know, Dupree.”
    Barron clicked his tongue in disgust. “Melancholy Joe? He’s a freak.”
    “They say he’s a giant. I mean, a real giant. Like in the circus, or like that wrestler guy, the one who died.”
    “Andre the Giant. No, Joe ain’t as big as Andre. Still a big son of a bitch, though. Strong, too. Nobody fucks with Melancholy Joe.”
    “Why do they call him that?”
    “Because he’s a miserable bastard, that’s why. Doesn’t say much, keeps to himself. You better take some books out to Dutch Island, because you sure ain’t going to be kept up nights talking to Joe.”
    “You spend time out there?”
    “Just once, when flu took out half of the regular guys. Didn’t care much for it. Didn’t care much for Joe Dupree, either.”
    I bet it was mutual, thought Macy.
    “I suppose nothing much happens out there.”
    “Not a whole lot. Bored kids stealing cars, breaking into summer houses. The occasional DUI. It’s community policing, mainly.”
    “But not always?”
    “What do you know?” asked Barron.
    “Someone said—”
    “Who?”
    “Just someone. He said Joe Dupree once killed a man out on the island.”
    Barron made that clicking sound again. “Yeah, he killed one of the Lubey brothers. Ronnie Lubey. If he’d been a little faster, then maybe his partner might not have taken a load of buckshot in the leg. Lubey was drunk, Dupree and Snowman arrived—”
    “Snowman?”
    “Yeah, dumb fucking name for a dumb guy. If he’d taken the buckshot in the head, it probably would have done him less damage. Anyway, Dupree and him arrive, Snowman gets shot, and Dupree kills Ronnie Lubey. He was taken off duty for a while, but the investigation cleared him. That’s it. Nobody shed too many tears for old Ronnie. He was a bad one. His brother still lives out on Dutch. He hates Joe Dupree like wood hates fire.”
    Barron paused. He felt dumb saying what he was about to say, as if Macy was going to laugh at him or call him a liar, but when he’d joined the force, his first partner, Tom Huyler, had sat him down over a beer and told him pretty much what he was about to tell Macy, and old Huyler wasn’t the type to joke around. He was Dutch Protestant, and when those people cracked a smile, it was like watching Arctic ice break, but Huyler knew his history. After all, they were some of his people that went out there in the beginning.
    His people who were slaughtered.
    Because, sure, Dutch Island was quiet, most of the time. There was the odd domestic dispute, the occasional drunk that tried to drive up a tree. But he recalled Huyler telling him the story of the first settlers on the island, how they’d retreated out there after skirmishes with the local Indians in the late 1600s.
    Then, according to the history books, there was some internal dispute among the islanders, and somebody had been banished. He’d come back, though, and he brought others with him. The entire population—ten, twelve families, all with children—had been slaughtered. It was only in the last hundred, hundred and fifty years that people had started returning to Dutch in numbers, and now the community was large enough to need full-time cops out there.
    And sometimes, people went missing. They were the bad ones, mostly. That was the odd thing about it. They were the ones that were no use to anybody, not even to their own families. They were the fighters, the abusers, the wife beaters. True, not all of them went that way, and Dutch still had its share of bad sorts, but they tended to be pretty careful about where they walked and what they did. They didn’t stray too far from their homes and they stayed away from the woods at the center of the island, and far away from what was known as the Site, the burial place of the original settlers.
    Huyler was dead now, died of a heart attack two years before, but Barron could still see him sitting there, a glass of