Flagg shook his head. “This place is built like a frigging vault,” he whispered.
We were huddled next to a stack of wooden pallets around eight feet high. I pointed toward the building’s roof. Half of it was taken up by a second story that had three windows in it. “I’ll climb up there. Maybe I can get in. You stand watch. If you don’t hear from me in fifteen minutes, I’ve run into trouble.”
I reached into my bag and pulled out a flashlight and the two portable radios I had used in Dougie’s Clam Shack caper. I gave one to Flagg. “I’ll call you if I need a hand,” I said.
I clipped the radio onto my belt and stuffed the light in my pocket. Still carrying the lead pipe, I climbed up the stack of pallets and onto the flat roof. I peered in each window. All was dark. I tried to open them, but they were locked. I punched a hole in one with the end of my all-purpose pipe, reached in, undid the latch, and slid the window open. Then I crawled through the opening and turned on the flash.
The beam showed stacks of cardboard cartons. I peeked into a few boxes. They were filled with computer paper and old files. I was in a storeroom for office supplies. A line of yellow light shone from under the door. I went over and tried the knob. The door was unlocked. It opened onto a narrow landing and a set of metal stairs leading to a well-lit area below. Moving slowly and quietly, I descended the stairs to a large concrete-floored space that ran the entire width of the plant. Even if I hadn’t recognized the filleting machinery, I would have known it was a fish-processing room by the smell.
I walked past the machinery into another section of the plant past carton-making machines, dollies, and rollers. This must be the shipping department. If I kept going, I would come to the unloading door on the street side. I started in that direction, but about halfway there, stopped at a steel door. I put my ear up against it and heard nothing. I tried the knob. The door was unlocked. I unclipped the walkie-talkie.
“I’m inside, Flagg. Mainly just fish-processing stuff so far. Haven’t seen anybody yet. I’m about to go through a door into another section of the building.”
“Okay,” he said. “Don’t forget to look over your shoulder.”
I opened the door slowly, poked my head in, then passed into a lighted hallway walled in brown fake wood paneling. The floor was covered with industrial carpeting. I was in the divide between the plant and its office section. Two doors led off the corridor. The one immediately opposite me was made of steel, and there was a wooden door at the end of the hallway. I tiptoed toward that one and pressed my ear against it. A mumble came through, the voices unintelligible.
I went back and tried the steel door, stepping through onto a railless balcony overlooking a large room. I looked around and gasped. Even if I’d taken a hundred guesses about what I had expected to find, all of them would have been wrong.
Chapter 30
The large windowless room was dominated by an oval pool around fifty feet in diameter. Jill sat in a wooden chair facing the water a couple of yards from the edge. She was trussed up like an Italian cheese.
Whoosh.
A shiny gray back broke the water, then another, gleaming under the rows of fluorescent lights. Dolphins! For a second I thought I was looking at Huff and Puff. But that didn’t make sense.
Jill saw me and wagged her head. I ran down the steps and across the room. I put the pipe down and used my Swiss army knife to cut her bindings, then unwound the gag from her mouth. It was like pulling a plug on a dam.
“That bastard, Livingston!” she said. I put my fingers to my lips and she nodded. She rubbed the circulation back into her wrists. She stood, as unsteady as a young foal, threw her skinny arms around my midsection, and hugged me tightly. “God, am I glad to see you.” It was cool in the room and she was shivering. I took my windbreaker off and wrapped it around her shoulders. “I thought it was all over back in Hyannis,” she whispered. “I guess you found the envelope in your locker.”
“I guess you put it in there.”
“I wanted insurance just in case something went wrong. I followed Livingston to the Hyannis house a couple of times before. That’s how I knew about it. I decided to snoop around. It was a stupid thing to do, going alone. I should have called in some help, but I thought I was being smart. The next thing I knew, his ugly friend is sticking a gun in my face and tying me up.”
My eyes scanned the room, taking in the dolphins and the heavyweight winches and large cloth slings hanging over the pool.
“What’s this all about, Jill? Is Livingston starting his own aquarium?”
The question started her off again. “He is a bastard,” she growled. “It’s worse than that.” She hugged me still tighter. “It’s much worse than anything you can imagine.”
“Tell me later,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of this place.”
The room had a large roll-up door. The only other exit was the way I came in. I grabbed Jill’s hand and pulled her toward the stairs. Things had gone way too easy for me. My winning streak was about to end. The door opened and Gordie stood at the top of the stairs. The grin on his face definitely didn’t go with the Magnum clutched in his hand.
“Hold it right there, kiddies.”
With Livingston following, Gordie leisurely descended the stairs and walked toward us. The muzzle of the gun pointed at my chest looked like the entrance to the Callahan Tunnel. Livingston was packing a Colt automatic. Given Livingston’s academic credentials, I would have expected him to look silly with a gun in his hand. But his donnish expression was gone and in its place was a fanatical intensity. He looked entirely capable of pulling the trigger. He had his mouth open, as if he were about to say something. I beat him to the punch.
“Dr. Livingston, I presume.” Okay, so it wasn’t cute, but it made Livingston chuckle, and that’s not a bad thing with a guy holding a gun on you.
“You presume correctly, Soc. You probably didn’t know a light goes on in the office when the door here is opened,” he said. “Gordie, would you check to see if Soc is carrying any firearms.”
The gorilla came over and frisked me. He didn’t find a gun because I don’t carry one, but he discovered the walkie-talkie. He brought it back to Livingston who looked at the radio with interest. “Gordie,” he said quietly, “please take a look around the grounds just in case Soc didn’t come here alone.”
Gordie nodded and left Livingston to cover us. I remembered Flagg’s parting warning and hoped he would remember to look over his shoulder.
Livingston glanced at the handcuff bracelet still dangling from my wrist.
“Well, Soc,” he said genially, “I give up. How did you get out of those handcuffs?”
“I once read a book on Houdini, Dr. Livingston.”
“If you won’t tell me that, maybe you can tell me how you found us.”
“I just got a great recipe for creamed haddock and stopped by to see if you had some.”
“You’ve come to the right place for haddock. We’re quite proud of our wholesale fish division.”
I jerked my head toward the pool. “What’s that, the special of the day?”
“This room has nothing to do with our fish company,” Livingston said. “It’s an entirely different operation.” The dolphins swam in close and gave us their friendly smiles. “It looks like the kids are hungry.” Keeping his gun trained on us, Livingston went over to an industrial cooler and scooped some fish into a plastic bucket. Then he walked to the edge of the pool and threw fish to the dolphins, who caught them in their mouths.
While he was doing this the door at the top of the stairs opened. From all appearances, Gordie’s hunting trip had been a success. Walking ahead of him, hands in the air, were Walden Schiller, his friend Ned, and the girl Sara. It was like being in a weirdly surrealistic episode of “This is Your Life.”
Gordie came over and showed Livingston a hunting knife with a blade about
a foot long. He pointed to Ned, who must have felt undressed without his pigsticker, because he glowered from under his bangs.
“The shiv belongs to this creep,” Gordie said, throwing the knife into a corner. He yanked a gun from his belt and gave it to Livingston. Pointing at Walden, he said, “The bearded guy was carrying this piece.” The pistol was a Glock, like Flagg’s.
Livingston hefted the Glock in his hand. “Who are you and why are you trespassing on private property?”
Walden shot a withering glance of contempt at Livingston. “My name is Schiller.”
“Hello, Walden,” I said. “I guess that was you following me from Hyannis.”
“That’s right, Soc. You didn’t know the Sentinels have a one-boat navy. It’s not very shiny or new, but it gets us where we’re going. We checked out the doctor’s home and didn’t see anyone there, so we were keeping an eye on the Hyannis house from the harbor. We saw his boat leave, then yours. We simply followed.” He turned to Livingston and said, “Your smuggling operation is finished.” I had to hand it to Schiller, he was a gutsy little elf.
Livingston didn’t agree. “Well, Walden Schiller. I’m honored to have the head of the SOS as a visitor, but I’m afraid you’re wrong about us, Mr. Schiller.” He pointed to the pool. “We’re holding this merchandise for an aquarium in Rhode Island. I expect it to be loaded into the holding tanks on our fishing boat and shipped out on schedule tonight.” Livingston turned to me like a lawyer arguing his case before a jury. “You can blame whale huggers like Mr. Schiller here for this. Thanks to them the price of marine mammals has gone up astronomically.”
“I never figured you for a guy who could get somebody a good price on a used dolphin, Dr. Livingston.”
“Dolphins are small change, Soc. We’ll find you a dolphin or a beluga in a way that avoids all the government permit folderol, but you can get them legally if you choose, so the price isn’t the greatest. Orcas are where the money is. They are virtually impossible to acquire. You can get from five hundred thousand to a million dollars for a killer whale.”
I let his answer sink in. “Rocky never did recover from his illness, did he, Dr. Livingston?”
“We tried every kind of antibiotic under the sun,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “But nothing worked. It would have simplified things a great deal if they had.”
“When did Rocky die?”
“About six months ago.”
“That’s when you brought in his replacement.”
“He came from a pod off British Columbia. We transported him by boat into the coast near Seattle. He spent some time in a facility similar to this on the West Cost getting used to humans, learning the basic tricks, then we moved him across country by truck. We didn’t know if he’d survive the trauma. It was quite a tribute to the efficiency of our organization.”
“With that kind of efficiency, couldn’t you get a whale whose dorsal fin had one notch in it?”
“This was a rush job,” he said, smiling. “We were more concerned with getting a male the same size and hoped nobody would notice the dorsal fin.” He looked at Jill and shrugged. “Nothing would have gone wrong if Eddy Byron’s death hadn’t focused the attention of our sharp-eyed little spy over there.”
“You had me fooled, too, doctor. I actually believed your soul-searching about keeping Rocky in captivity.”
“I was sincere about that, Soc. I do believe these animals have a right to be free. But we have to be able to study them.”
“That’s garbage,” Schiller said.
Livingston’s eyes hardened behind the thick glasses. I don’t know if he would have ordered Gordie to kill all five of us, but I wouldn’t have put it past him. A few seconds and we would no longer be obstacles. Nobody would hear the shots behind the concrete walls, and they could dump our bodies at sea. I pointed to the fish bucket. I had just seen something that made me want all the attention focused on me.
“Do you mind if I give the dolphins a fish?”
“They’ve already had plenty to eat,” Livingston said almost absentmindedly, as if he were pondering the next dangerous step. “But go ahead,” he said, in a tone that sounded too much like the warden granting the condemned his last wish. “Feed them if you want.”
Jill and the others were probably wondering why the hell I wanted to feed dolphins when our lives were in the balance. That’s because they had their backs to the door and hadn’t seen it open a crack, then wide enough for Flagg’s dark face to show through.
I picked up a couple of herring and threw a fish into the middle of the pool. It arced through the air with the dolphins in hot pursuit. I hoped the sound of their splashing would drown out Flagg’s entrance.
He was out on the platform, crawling on his hands and knees.
All eyes were on the pool. It’s hard for a human being to resist watching a dolphin show.
I threw another fish. Both dolphins exploded from the water.
Flagg was poised at the edge of the platform.
I tossed in more fish. Livingston had made up his mind. He stepped forward.
Flagg launched himself. He was in midair, halfway between the platform and Gordie the gorilla. He seemed to float for hours, like a Boeing 747 making a runway approach, before he crash-landed on Gordie with full landing gear deployed. Even a big boy like Gordie couldn’t survive an attack like that. He flew forward onto his stomach with Flagg on his back. The Magnum skittered across the concrete floor, eyes following it, and plopped into the dolphin pool.
Ned agilely scooped up his hunting knife like a Cheyenne looking for a scalp.
Livingston took the Glock from his belt.
I grabbed Uncle Constantine’s pipe from off the floor. We all moved in on him. Flagg and me, Walden, Jill and Sara.
I said, “You can’t shoot all of us, Dr. Livingston. Do you really want to make the jump from whale smuggling to murder?”
He stood there, biting his lower lip, weighing the possibilities.
“No,” he said with an ironic smile. He placed the pistol on the floor. Flagg picked it up and went over to check on Gordie, who was spread out like a pile of mush.
“He’s alive,” Flagg announced, almost ruefully. He came back and said, “Woulda been here sooner, but somebody snuck up, whacked me on the head, and stole my gun.”
Walden said, “We saw him outside and thought he was one of Livingston’s guys.”
Flagg stared dangerously at him. “You thought wrong. You didn’t know I had a hard head, either. I got up and went the same way you did over the roof, Soc. Came down here, found this party going on, so I thought I’d join in.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “You were magnificent, Flagg. I never knew you could imitate the Flying Nun.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me. I was making history, Soc.”
“History?”
“Sure,” he said. He was stony-faced, but there was a wicked gleam in his eye. “When was the last time the Indians rescued the cavalry?”
Chapter 31
It was early evening when I climbed the stairs to Dan Austin’s office and opened the door without knocking. Austin was seated at his desk working on some papers. He looked over the tops of his glasses and scrunched his mouth in an annoyed pucker.
“What can I do for you, Socarides?”
I tossed the glossy photographs onto the desk and sank into a chair.
Austin glanced at the eight-by-tens. “Look,” he said wearily, “I’m very busy.”
“Livingston talked,” was all I said.
“Dr. Livingston? Talked about what, Socarides?”
“He talked about you, for one thing.”
He placed his pen down on the blotter, making sure it was parallel to the side. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying Livingston’s smuggling operation was busted last
night. He’s in the New Bedford slammer, probably looking in the Yellow Pages for a lawyer familiar with the Marine Mammal Protection Act.”
He came out of his chair. “What the hell is this all about?”
“Sit down, Austin, I’m not through yet.”
Austin settled like someone on a slowly deflating air cushion. He leaned back, folded his hands across his stomach, and glared at me.
“Go ahead, but make it fast, because when you’re through, I’m going to call Simon Otis and tell him I want you out of Oceanus.”
“I’ll save you the trouble. Consider this my resignation. Before I turn in my blue jersey, let’s talk about these photos you’re trying so hard to avoid looking at.”
He picked up the top photo, glanced at it, and put it down. “This is a picture of a whale’s dorsal fin. So what?”
“It’s more than that, Dan. This is a photo-ID. It’s something the whale scientists came up with so they could tell one whale from another. You take pictures of the whale’s markings, or scars, barnacles, their flukes, fins, stuff like that. It works pretty well. You can track their migration, births, deaths, love affairs. It’s almost like fingerprints.”
He smiled a cold smile. “You’ve become quite an authority on whales, Socarides.”
“Dr. Livingston deserves the credit. We had a long talk today. I’m missing pieces of the puzzle because he saved some goodies for a plea bargain, but he told me all about photo-ID.” I tapped the photo with my forefinger. “For example, this is an old publicity shot of Rocky that Jill copied. You’ll have to excuse the grainy quality; it’s been enlarged considerably.” I ran my finger down the dorsal fin’s trailing edge. “The fin in this picture has one notch. Doc Livingston says it could have been made during a fight over a female. Whales aren’t too different from people that way, I guess.”
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