“You know where the key to the cuffs is?”
The boat was moving from the dock; I could tell by the sound of the exhaust.
“Yeah, it’s on the goddamn boat that’s halfway across the harbor by now.”
“Huh,” Flagg said. He reached inside his windbreaker, pulled out a Glock 9mm and pointed the muzzle inches from the chain between the cuffs. “Turn your head the other way,” he said. I did as I was told, covering my left ear with a cushion that could only cut off half the explosion that followed. Fragments of flying steel from the shattered chain bit into my hand, and my ears were ringing. I didn’t care. I was free. Flagg helped me up.
“I can call the cops or the Coast Guard on my car radio.”
I shook my head. “They’ve got a girl on board. Someone starts shooting, she could get dead real fast.”
“You got any better ideas?”
“No,” I said. I thought about it a second. “Yeah, I’ve got an idea.” I grabbed his arm. “C’mon, I’ll fill you in on the way.”
Chapter 29
Flagg’s blue Ford Fairlane was parked about a hundred yards from the house. He had the car in low gear and moving fast while I was still closing the passenger door.
“Where to, skipper?” he said, as if in afterthought.
“You know where the Lewis Bay Marina is?”
“You got it,” he spun the steering wheel like a telephone dial and the Ford squealed around a corner. Coming out of the turn, Flagg stomped the gas and the car leaped forward in a tire-squealing, neck-wrenching surge of power.
He pulled onto Main Street, cut off an Isuzu Scout and ran a slalom course between the summer slowpokes. He hooked a left and less than a quarter mile from Main Street the Ford shot into the marina parking lot and screamed to a stop in a banshee screech of brakes.
Grabbing my pack, I hit the pavement running and yelled at Flagg to follow. I pounded along the dock and climbed onto the Artemis.
“Uncle Constantine!” I shouted down the hatch. “Wake up. I need you.”
There was a stirring below and a sound between a sigh and a groan. A light went on, and Uncle Constantine’s gnomelike face peered up at me.
“Holy Mother of God, Aristotle,” he croaked, “what—”
I cut him off. “No time to talk, Uncle. I’ve got to borrow your boat. I’ll explain after we get under way.”
“Okay, nephew, okay. Lemme get dressed.” He pulled on his clothes, muttering under his breath in Greek.
“I’ll get the engine going.”
I dashed into the pilothouse just as Flagg climbed aboard. Flagg is built more like a pro football defenseman than a sprinter, and he was puffing with exertion. But I had my own problems. The Artemis refused to start. I coaxed, wheedled, whined, threatened, and implored. Uncle Constantine came in, still muttering, tucking his white shirt into his black worn pants. He squinted curiously at Flagg.
I said, “This is a friend of mine, Uncle. I’ll make a formal introduction once we get moving.”
Uncle Constantine nodded and stepped up to the helm. “You’re too rough,” he said, gently patting the wheel. “The Artemis is a woman, Aristotle. You’ve got to handle her easy, but you have to show her who is the boss.”
He ran his fingers over the controls. After a couple of false starts the engine coughed into life and the hull vibrated as power took hold. We gave the engine a few minutes to warm up, then cast off the mooring lines and headed into Lewis Bay. Livingston’s boat was probably fifteen minutes ahead of us. His broad-beamed vessel was no wave-busting cigarette boat, but neither was the Artemis, despite her goddess-of-the-hunt namesake.
Uncle Constantine extracted a bent cigarette from a crushed pack of Luckies and stuck it in his mouth.
“Now maybe you tell me where you want to go.”
I pointed ahead. “There’s a boat I want to follow. She just pulled into Hyannis harbor.”
He lit up. “Okay, Aristotle. We go like the wind.”
He leaned forward against the wheel and increased power on the throttle. The Artemis shuddered and jerked slushily forward, gaining a knot or two as we rounded the point with the miniature lighthouse on it. I grabbed a pair of binoculars and scanned the bay. The bright half-moon cast the harbor in a leaden sheen, but a mist hanging over the water cut down visibility.
Almost dead ahead, maybe a quarter mile separating them, were two sets of moving lights. I watched them for a few minutes, shifting my view from one to the other.
One boat was moving southeasterly to the left, toward Monomoy Island off Chatham. The other was veering to the right on a southwesterly course that would take it near Martha’s vineyard. I lowered the binoculars. My brain was in turmoil. If we followed the wrong boat, Jill could be lost forever.
Something came to me. Back at the house, when his goon was handcuffing me to the radiator, Livingston said he wanted to catch the ebb current. He was very specific. Not high tide or low, but the ebb.
“Uncle,” I said, “do you have an Eldridge tide and pilot book?”
“Sure, Aristotle.” He opened a drawer and pulled out a yellow paperbound book covered with grease smudges.
Eldridge’s has been the Bible for sailors around the Cape and islands for more than a hundred years. I pawed through the pages and found the reference to a “curious phenomenon” off the Cape that vessels can use to get a little shove under their hull from Mother Nature. In Nantucket and Vineyard sounds, the ebb current flows west.
The charts in the book indicated the tide was on the ebb in the sound. We were coming abreast of the Hyannisport breakwater. I had to make a decision. I pointed off to the right. “I think that’s the one we want, Uncle.”
He nodded, moved the throttle up another notch, and aimed the bow on a westerly heading. Flagg, who’d been hanging back, leaned over my shoulder.
“Are you sure?”
“No,” I admitted, “but there’s a good chance I might be right.” I explained my tide theory.
“Huh,” he said, in Flagg’s version of a compliment. “You’re not so dumb as you look.”
I turned to my uncle. “This is a friend of mine. His name is John Flagg and he works for the government. We’re trying to catch up with some bad people on that boat. I think they have a girl on board. We’re afraid to call the police in because she might get hurt.”
A grave expression came into my uncle’s blue eyes. He shook Flagg’s hand and offered him a Lucky, which Flagg declined.
Fifteen minutes passed. The Artemis slogged through the rolling seas. The fog had thinned out and we seemed to be staying right on Livingston’s trail, but I wondered how long the Artemis could stay cranked at top speed before every rusty nail was shaken loose from its hull.
Flagg borrowed the binoculars and stepped out on the deck. A few minutes later, he came back into the pilothouse.
“Don’t know if this is a coincidence or not, but I think someone’s on our tail.” He handed the glasses to me. “Take a looksee.”
I went out on the deck and pointed the binoculars sternward. It was tough to keep the focus in one place, because the deck pitched and yawned. I braced my back against the pilothouse and propped my elbows against my chest. Flagg was right. There was a craft behind us, maybe a half mile back, moving like a caboose in the boat train formed by Livingston’s boat and the Artemis.
I stepped back inside. “Doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “Lots of traffic in the sound this time of year. Look, there are a few other lights around us. It could be a big cabin cruiser or a fishing boat.”
“Could be,” Flagg said without enthusiasm.
I caught the doubt in his tone. Remembering his fine-tuned intuition, I decided not to ignore it.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re probably right, we’re being followed.”
He showed me his teeth in a lazy smile. “Now you
going to tell me what this is all about?”
As the Artemis plunged into Nantucket Sound with the lights of Cape Cod’s southerly shore sparkling off to our right, I gave Flagg a guided tour through the twists and turns that had been added to this crazy maze since I last talked to him. I told him about Hanley’s wife, Jill’s disappearance, my finding her again, the contact sheets that didn’t make sense, and Livingston’s mysterious hint that Jill and I had stumbled into something major.
Flagg asked a question now and then. Mostly he listened impassively during the monologue. When I was through, he grunted. “I’ve felt in my bones there was something else going on here, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.”
“While you try I’m going below to make some coffee. We could be in for a long night.”
It was a cloudless evening, and in spite of the competition from the bright light of the moon, the stars seemed ready to pop out of the black sky. The breeze on the deck was cool and damp. I glanced behind us, past the white frothy wake to the yellow pinpoint off our stern, and wondered whose eyes were looking at me. I had the feeling we would know before long. I went below to make a pot of coffee. When it was ready, I poured three mugs full and took them to the pilothouse. Flagg and Uncle Constantine were chatting like old buddies.
“Aristotle,” my uncle said. “Your friend here says he knows you from long ago in the war.”
“That’s right, Uncle. Flagg was in the paratroops and I was in the marines.” I passed the steaming mugs around. “Now that we’re on the subject of Vietnam, Flagg, tell me about Eddy Byron. Unless there’s a problem with security.”
“I just gave you security clearance,” he said. He sipped on his coffee. “Eddy was in ’Nam about the same time we were. He was in the navy, started off as a SEAL, but he flunked basic training. SEALs that wash out get a chance to go into demolition or the navy marine-mammal program. Eddy decided dolphins were a lot safer than demo, so he ended up at the research center in San Diego. When the war got hot, he shipped out and trained the animals to do stuff like guarding bases and taking out enemy frogmen. He came back from Vietnam and got a job as an assistant trainer in an aquarium in California. Worked his way up to head trainer, but got fired.”
“What for?”
“He was a little too tough on the animals. He thought he was still in Vietnam, I guess. The Navy trainers treated the animals like they were grunts going through boot camp. He carried over the same techniques. The aquarium just wanted the dolphins to jump through hoops. They didn’t care if they got up at reveille and saluted.”
“How did he end up at Oceanus?”
“He worked at a couple more marine parks and got busted each time. He started to get a reputation as a hard-ass trainer. He got results, but the wear and tear on the animals and staff wasn’t worth it to most places. Then Oceanus hired him this year.”
“I don’t understand it. Austin must have known about his reputation.”
“Almost certain, Soc, but he went and did it anyhow. You tell me why.”
I thought about it. “We’re looking at it the wrong way, Flagg. You know how you’re always lecturing me about white man’s thinking. Cause and effect, instead of stepping back and letting your feelings talk to you. Well, maybe Oceanus hired Byron not in spite of his reputation as a tough trainer, but because of it.”
“Like I say, you may be crazy but you’re not dumb,” Flagg said.
Uncle Constantine had been studying a chart while Flagg and I talked. He had penciled in a series of connected Xs to show our course. “I think we are here.” He tapped the chart off Falmouth where the southerly shore of the Cape bulged into the sound.
“We’ll be passing the Vineyard to the south before long,” I said. “They can go either way, to the mainland or the island, or straight ahead to Point Judith, Rhode Island. There are lots of little harbors they can duck into, so we’ll have to keep a close eye on them.”
Flagg went over to the door and peered into the darkness behind us.
“Yeah,” he said, “just like those guys are keeping a close eye on us.”
Livingston followed a southwesterly course between Martha’s Vineyard and the Elizabeth Islands chain. He cut through Quick’s Hole between Pasque and Nashawena islands and stayed on a straight line northerly across Buzzard’s Bay to New Bedford.
Uncle Constantine hadn’t moved from the helm. He peered into the darkness, looking for buoys. Occasionally, he tapped the compass glass. I offered to take the wheel, but he shooed me away.
About two and a half hours after leaving Hyannis, we approached the lighthouse that stands on a manmade island in the middle of New Bedford Harbor. Beyond the lighthouse, long breakwaters stretched from either shore, channeling passage between two massive hurricane gates that can be closed to protect the harbor from the storm surge. We passed through the gates and into the Acushnet River. Livingston’s boat had slowed. I urged my uncle to keep full steam.
New Bedford has the biggest fishing fleet in New England. The waterfront is a warren of fish companies, plants, warehouses, trailer-truck parking lots, docks, steel-hulled Georges Bank draggers tied up three deep, and finally the suppliers and outfitters for the fleet, the metal workers and welders and hydraulics experts. The fishery complex stretches for three or four miles along the waterfront. If we weren’t careful, Livingston could dart in and lose us.
Rising on a low hill behind the waterfront was the old city. New Bedford was once the busiest whaling port in the world. You can still see the huge mansions of the canny old Quakers who made their fortunes off whale oil and bone corset stays. A hundred and fifty years ago, I would have been looking at a thick forest of masts.
I let my eye drift up to the lights on the cobblestone streets of Johnny Cake Hill and the spire of the old whaleman’s bethel. The little chapel hasn’t changed much since Herman Melville wrote about it in Moby Dick. The pulpit is still shaped like the prow of a whaleship and the walls are lined with the names of New Bedford men who lost their lives hunting whales.
Uncle Constantine jerked me back into the present.
“He goes in, there,” he pointed.
Livingston’s boat was heading to shore. I told my uncle to slow down and to cruise by as if we were a fishing boat returning to port. Livingston was about two hundred yards away. I looked through the binoculars. The boat was headed toward a floodlit concrete dock. Behind it was a whitewashed cinder-block building. We kept going, moving at a couple of knots, looking for a place to stop.
Two fishing draggers were tied up side-by-side at the entrance to a narrow channel leading inland from the river. I told Uncle Constantine to turn into the channel and use the fishing boats as a screen. I stood by, ready to throw in the anchor. He maneuvered the Artemis in next to a dragger nearly twice our size, where we dropped the hook and killed the engine.
Flagg and I hoisted a wooden pram over the side and prepared to get in. Uncle Constantine came over. He was carrying a two-foot length of pipe.
“I’m ready,” he said, whacking the pipe into his hand. “I give those bad guys a big headache. Teach them not to hurt a little girl.”
Uncle Constantine’s old-fashioned chivalry didn’t surprise me, but I was in terror of my mother’s reaction if anything happened.
“Look, Uncle,” I said quickly, “somebody has to stay with the boat in case we have to call the cops.”
He frowned in disappointment, but didn’t put up a fight. “Okay, Aristotle, but they give you any trouble, call in Constantine.” He handed me the pipe.
I was about to put it aside but thought better of it. Flagg, who usually carries more firearms than Frank and Jesse James did, checked the load in his Glock and stuffed it into the shoulder pack. He looked at the pipe.
“You going to do some plumbing?” he said.
“You heard of somebody getting the shaft?”
“Yeh,” he said.
“Well, this is it.”
That shut him up. I hugged Uncle Constantine and told him if we didn’t report back in an hour to call on the Coast Guard for help. I slung my daypack over my shoulder and we climbed into the skiff, set the oars in the oarlocks, and rowed into the channel. About fifty feet from the Artemis, we shipped oars and let the skiff bump into the stone rip-rap lining the channel.
“There were only two guys I know of, Livingston and his gorilla,” I said, “but there could be more. The gorilla is packing a gun. I don’t know about Livingston. I figure we sneak up and reconnoiter. If we think we can get Jill away without any harm, we do it. If not, we call in the troops. Okay?”
“Sounds good, Soc.” There was a glint in Flagg’s eye. He was spoiling for a fight.
We secured the boat with its small Danforth anchor, mucked through the grasping mud and dirty straggles of marsh grass, and climbed up the rip-rap boulders. At the top of the incline was a high chain-link fence topped with rusty barbed wire that bordered the channel.
Flagg and I split up and looked for openings, but found none. We would have to make our own. Flagg reached into his pack and pulled out a pair of wire cutters and leather work gloves. He scaled the fence, snipped the barbed wire, and pushed it out of the way, then climbed over. I followed. We were in a large, unlit parking lot with about a dozen tractor trailers in it.
We trotted across the lot to another fence. Flagg cut more barbed wire, and we climbed into still another parking area. One more fence and we were on the street side of the white cinder-block building. The loading platform and work yard were lit with two powerful floodlights. Using the shelter of a trailer truck parked next to the fence, we darted in closer and crouched in the shadow of the loading platform. All was quiet except for the constant hum of a refrigeration unit.
With Flagg keeping a lookout, I climbed onto the platform and checked the big lift-up metal door and a smaller, separate entryway next to it. Both were locked. We split up again. Flagg took one side of the building and I went around the other. We rendezvoused on the river side. There were a couple more unloading platforms, but no way to get in. We paused at a corner of the building, away from the light cast by the floods. Livingston’s boat was moored alongside a concrete dock. Nobody was in sight.
Death in Deep Water Page 29
