Read Online The Leviathan Effect by James Lilliefors - Free Book Online Page A

devil’s work. To understand the enemy, you needed to think like the enemy; to defeat the enemy, sometimes you needed to become the enemy. Here, though, there was no enemy.
    He pulled up in front of the store, parking next to two pickups he recognized as Clement Caldwell’s and Harvey Spellman’s.
    The wooden screen door squeaked and Spellman came outcarrying a twelve-pack of Natural Light. The two men exchanged familiar greetings.
    Mallory’s store sold a little of everything—milk, beer, soda, toothpaste, chips, bread, used books, local art, bait, ball caps. He called it Harbor Store because that was how people named things here. There was a Harbor Tackle, Harbor Inn, Harbor Books, Harbor Fish Market, and Harbor Real Estate.
    He’d run the store himself for most of the first year. Then one day Clem had walked in, asking for a job. Mallory hired him to work the register three nights a week. But Clem had his own ideas and began taking on extra hours whether he was paid for them or not. Before long, he was calling himself the store “manager.” It seemed to give him an identity and Mallory didn’t mind the free time.
    Clement was seated behind the counter as he came in, wearing his knit cap and dark, tattered flannel jacket. He only shaved every few days; this wasn’t one of them.
    “Don’t tell me you’ve been swimming again.”
    Mallory suppressed a smile. The store smelled of old pinewood and microwave popcorn. He stood in front of the space heater, watching the brightening harbor lights.
    Clement had come from elsewhere, too, but he didn’t talk about it. Occasionally, he mentioned a wife, Adele, who had died some years ago. But he preferred to talk on other topics, the weather and fishing, mostly.
    “What’s it looking like?” Mallory asked.
    “She’s coming. See how the birds’re flying? When the birds fly that low, the pressure’s down, she’s coming. See the rainclouds? They’re swollen with tomorrow already.”
    “How long?”
    “Oh, I’d say we’re good for another twelve, fourteen.”
    “Then what?”
    “Then she’ll come in hard. You can see it in the way the sky’s bending.” He pointed out the window. “Way out there to the northeast.”
    “How bad?”
    “Hard to tell. You can see her already in the outer squibs. See that out there?”
    Mallory looked and nodded. Clem had an instinctive understanding of coastal weather patterns and he had taught Mallory a fewthings about pressure systems and reading the clouds. Clem had spent much of his life on the water as a lobsterman, observing the sky and the sea for days on end. He had learned by looking, as Mallory had learned by watching people’s behaviors. Clem had developed his own vocabulary along the way, using words like “bends” and “squibs” as if they were real terms.
    “You better get out in that shower now, you’re going to catch pneumonia, freeze yourself to death. We’re not in summer any more, young man.”
    Mallory came out from the shower minutes later wearing faded jeans, a flannel shirt, and work boots, no longer shivering. Clement handed him a bottle of local-brewed beer, and they sat out back on rusty metal chairs watching the water breeze up and the last of the daylight fade, smelling the brine, the char-grilled seafood and the gasoline. Lights in windows were brightening on the small hillsides around the harbor.
    “Oh, I almost forgot. Your girlfriend come in, asking for you.”
    “I don’t have a girlfriend anymore, Clem.”
    “
She
thinks you do.”
    She being Monica Tinsley, the woman who ran the historical museum. She’d become solicitous toward Mallory in recent days—ever since Anna left—and apparently Clement didn’t see anything wrong with playing cupid, although Mallory wasn’t interested.
    “I’m serious,” Clem said.
    “Don’t be.” Mallory took a pull on his beer.
    “You’re chomping a little bit again, aren’t you?” Clem finally said.
    “Maybe.”
    “I can