FIFTY
The media storm surrounding the sinking of The Manticore raged for more than a week and did more to boost Titanic Productions than any publicity stunt Larry Unger could have dreamed up. It had the added benefit for Larry of getting the producer out from under a cloud that had been threatening his very existence for the past five years. The drowning of James William Visconti III had severed Larry’s last connection to the porn industry he’d started out in and freed him to devote all his attention to the rising star of Titanic Productions, hero cop actor Alfonse Bayard.
Vince McNulty wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the press. That was entirely due to what had happened during the dying moments of The Manticore’s life.
The stern was completely under water. Alfonse brought blankets from the storage cupboard and wrapped them around the shivering girl. Suzanne was dressed in the clothes he’d scavenged but it was more shock than cold that had her shaking like a leaf. Alfonse draped her in blankets and rubbed her back and shoulders in an attempt to warm her up and calm her down. Neither of them mentioned the blood that was splattered all over McNulty’s arms.
The blue flashing lights were closing the gap and The Helen of Troy kept station just off the starboard quarter. Helen fired another flare and it lit the scene like an establishing shot from Titanic. The Manticore was down at the stern. The rescue boats were rushing to the scene. A coastguard helicopter was beating them to it. The pleasure boat from Marina Bay was holding off, ready to take the survivors who were huddled on the aft deck near the stateroom doors. Water lapped up onto the deck, hiding the shotgun blasts that had precipitated the crisis. The dinghy hanging from the derricks wasn’t hanging anymore; it was bobbing in the water, attached by slack ropes and pulleys.
McNulty joined Alfonse and Suzanne in the doorway.
“Okay, off you go.”
Alfonse looked at his mentor.
“Off we go?”
McNulty shook his head. “I was never here.”
He put a hand on Alfonse’s shoulder.
“Tell it like it was. But it was you, not me.” He leaned closer. “I was never here.”
McNulty looked at Suzanne.
“You got that straight?”
Suzanne nodded. Alfonse looked at the boat.
“There’s room enough for all of us.”
McNulty patted Alfonse’s back.
“You’re my diversion.”
Alfonse stared at McNulty.
“Diversion? This fucker’s going down. You need more than a diversion.”
It was the first time McNulty had heard Alfonse swear. The actor was toughening up. He patted Alfonse on the back one last time, then pointed at the release lever on the pulley.
“Disconnect. Helen will pick you up. Now go.”
He watched Alfonse help Suzanne into The Helen of Troy, then clambered to the port bow, the opposite quarter to the rescue boats—the farthest distance from The Helen of Troy and the sagging flare. Alfonse pulled the lever. McNulty jumped into cold the black water.
“We wrap tomorrow. You sure you won’t change your mind?”
Larry was sitting in the makeup chair. McNulty leaned against the counter with his back to the mirror, turning him into a double-edged figure, one facing Larry and the other turning his back on him. Forty-eight light bulbs around the mirror lit him like a halo. Amy had stepped out of the trailer to give them some privacy. McNulty blew out his cheeks with a chest-emptying sigh.
“I can’t stay.”
Larry looked up at his technical adviser.
“Families grow stronger in adversity.”
McNulty waved a hand to indicate everything around him.
“This isn’t my family.”
Larry didn’t feel as calm as he sounded.
“It could be. If you let me make it up to you.”
McNulty shook his head.
“It’s time to move on.”
There was a delicate knock on the door. Amy waited a suitable time before opening it but didn’t come in. She looked at McNulty with sad eyes, then turned to the producer. She nodded once then closed the door. Larry stood up. He wasn’t much taller than when he’d been sitting down. He let out a sigh and walked to the door, then turned for one last time.
“The publicity. It worked wonders you know.”
McNulty smiled a sad little smile.
“My parting gift to you then.”
Larry twirled a hand in the air.
“To everyone. This is family.”
McNulty didn’t speak. Larry opened the door and went down the stairs to the parking lot. He didn’t close the door and McNulty half expected Amy Moore to come in and try to persuade him to stay. She didn’t. Late afternoon sunshine glared off the tarmac as life in the movie circus went on. Stagehands moved equipment. Background extras moved to the next location. A familiar figure walked past, then backtracked to stand at the bottom of the stairs.
Alfonse Bayard wasn’t walking like a duck anymore. He was standing tall and looking every inch the cop he was portraying—the cop that McNulty used to be. Neither of them spoke. There was just the barest of nods. A voice in a megaphone called for positions and Alfonse turned away. The doorway was empty. The future was set.
McNulty pushed off from the counter and went to the door. He got halfway there when a woman came up the stairs. She looked uncertain about what to do next and stood with one hand on the doorframe. After a moment a small face peered round the side of her. A young girl clung to the woman’s skirt. The woman patted her on the head, then looked at McNulty. Her voice was soft with only a hint of an American accent.
“Are you really my brother?”
McNulty looked at his sister for a very long time. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
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Ex-army, retired cop and former scenes-of-crime officer, COLIN CAMPBELL served with the West Yorkshire police for thirty years. He is the author of the UK crime novels Blue Knight White Cross and Northern Ex, and the U.S. thrillers featuring rogue Yorkshire Cop Jim Grant.
CampbellFiction.com
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BOOKS BY COLIN CAMPBELL
The Jim Grant Thrillers
Jamaica Plain
Montecito Heights
Adobe Flats
Snake Pass
Beacon Hill
Shelter Cove
Catawba Point
A Vince McNulty Thriller
Northern Ex
Final Cut
The UK Crime Series
Blue Knight White Cross
Ballad of the One Legged Man
Through the Ruins of Midnight
Short Story Collection
Permission Granted
Children
Gargoyles—Skylights and Roofscapes
Horror
Darkwater Towers
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Here is a preview from Below the Line, a crime thriller by Steven Jankowski.
Click here for a complete catalog of titles available from Down & Out Books and its divisions and imprints.
Prologue
I was down on my hands and knees feeling around in the dark, searching for the gun. When I couldn’t find it, I decided to make a run for it. I got back up to my feet and was about to run when he tackled me from behind. We rolled around in the dirt, wrestling, gouging, and trying to land punches on each other. He overpowered me as he got atop, straddling me, and got me in a chokehold. I tried to wriggle away and punch my way out of it to no use—he was not letting go. I tried prying his hands off, but they were like vices, locked in a death grip. Gasping for breath, I felt myself going. My vision was fading and as a last ditch effort I reached around, feeling the ground. I felt a good size rock, grabbed it and conjured up my last bit of strength. I crashed it into his temple with all my might, or at least what was left of it. He fell off me and I gasped for air, struggling to get to my feet. I went for
the pickaxe, but he came up with the gun. He fired, hitting my hand as I reached for the handle. I spun around in pain, grabbing the pickaxe in my other hand and in a feeble attempt, threw it at him. It was enough for him to duck out of its way as I took off down the rocky, dirt hill. I heard the crack of another gunshot and felt the bullet whiz by my ear as I ran.
My bare feet were on fire as I ran and my hand was bleeding badly, but I knew I couldn’t stop. I ran up to the ranger station and banged loudly on the door with my good hand. I saw a light come on inside and heard another gunshot. The bullet hit the building exploding with a loud report, splintering the wooden siding. I called out to whoever was inside to call the sheriff, and took off running again. I heard a couple more shots but kept running as fast as my bare feet could down the road.
I was all the way down near the golf course when I finally saw the deputy sheriff’s car come racing up the canyon road with the lights flashing.
I ducked off the road and collapsed onto the soft fairway grass, heaving to catch my breath as the patrol car flew by. I lay in the wet grass, unable to move from pain and exhaustion. I was bleeding badly, struggling to catch my breath as my hand screamed in pain. The bullet had gone right through it between my thumb and forefinger. I held my hand to my chest, rolling in my wet T-shirt. I closed my eyes and tried to gather some strength for my next move. My torn, raw feet were burning, and the soft wet grass felt good beneath them. I wanted to get up and go but felt as if I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed and just wanted to lie there and go to sleep. I knew this was not a good sign but was unable to shake it. As my breathing calmed and the adrenaline started to fade, the cool night air and dewy grass sent a shiver down my spine, jolting me back to reality. When I finally opened my eyes, he was there, standing over me with the gun pointed at my head. His face was bloodied from where I’d hit him with the rock.
“I going to fucking kill you, and then I’m going back to your boat, and I’m going to kill your fucking girlfriend.”
At that moment I knew I was going to die and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. “Fuck you!” I said defiantly. It was all I could come up with to say.
But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.
It all started about two weeks ago…
Chapter 1
There’s a saying that the two best days of a boater owner’s life are the day you buy your boat and the day you sell it. So here I was, hoping for best day number two, waiting for a potential buyer to show up for a test sail on my boat that I was now trying to sell. My broker, Corey, made the appointment for 2:00 p.m., and it was already twenty after. Corey was no doubt showing the potential buyer some more expensive “bikini buckets,” trying to maximize his commission. My boat, a long keel, cutter-rigged ocean cruiser is not really the fashionable de rigueur of Southern California sailing that most people are looking for. It’s a serious ocean cruiser for making serious voyages. It may not win many regattas, but it will get you to your distant destination in relative safety with all that Neptune throws at you. Not everyone’s cup of tea for the weekend day-sailor. As I sat in the cockpit at my dock in Marina del Rey waiting, I started contemplating my life here in Southern California and how I got to where I was.
I came out to L.A. for a week and stayed for twenty-six years. So far, that is. It was one of those brutally cold winters in New York—snow, rain, sleet, and never-ending gray-sky weather that seemed to go on for months on end. I was still living in The Bronx, and I vividly remember scurrying across White Plains Road under the El train, trying to beat the traffic. I absently stomped into an ankle-deep, freezing slush-puddle in my Nike sneakers, soaking my foot. As I looked down, stamping my feet and cursing, the number 2 train roared overhead sending an icy-cold droplet down from the tracks above. It nailed me right between my scarf and my jacket collar, down the back of my neck, sending a shiver down my spine that chilled me to the bone. I decided right then and there that as soon as I got back to my shitty little basement apartment I was going to call my best friend Rudy, who was already living in L.A.
“When are you coming out, Mike?” was Rudy’s usual question.
“As soon as I can,” was my typical reply.
Except this time I called the airline as soon as I hung up the phone. That was twenty-six years ago.
I hadn’t seen Rudy in almost two years but the day he took me sailing out on the Santa Monica Bay in the middle of January was the deciding factor. It was seventeen degrees, gray and miserable in New York when I left, and here we were, out on the Pacific with clear blue skies, soaking up the sun in T-shirts and shorts, kicking back, sipping Coronas. I cashed in my return ticket home and never looked back.
It wasn’t like I was giving up some big, great career or anything. Hell, at the time I was driving a cab. I hadn’t been doing it long, but long enough to know I didn’t want to do it any longer. I’d bounced around a number of odd jobs since dropping out of Lehman College in my freshman year. Restaurant supply delivery, security guard, painter, tow truck dispatcher, I didn’t take anything too seriously.
I wanted to keep my summers free so I could continue to spend them up in Maine as a sailing bum. I had been crewing on luxury sailing yachts and racing sailboats of the east coast elite since junior high. I kind of lucked into it through Rudy, whose whole family had a sort of a seafaring lifestyle and history. His dad was a boat builder—a shipwright—from Maine who moved down to City Island in the fifties to work in the Minneford Yacht Yard. Rudy’s dad always sent him, his sister, and his mom up to Maine for the summer to stay with relatives, and I got lucky enough to be invited along one summer when I was thirteen years old. It didn’t take anything to get my parents’ permission. They must have seen it as a way to get me out of their hair for the summer. I could have told them I was going to Timbuktu and, as long as it didn’t cost them anything, they were fine with it.
Rudy’s uncle had a classic old Hinckley, and that first summer in Camden, they taught me the ropes. I was sort of a confused, wayward street kid at that time in my life and sailing gave me something I never got from anybody or anything else: confidence. Sailing, crewing, and maintaining sailboats was work, but it was fun work. And I worked my butt off. I was invited back the following summers, and together with Rudy, we became the “Merry Midshipmen from Morris Park.” We started hiring ourselves out, first as boat cleaners—swabbies—then as sailing crew.
I was more than happy to take advantage of this life on the water. Yacht owners, particularly rich yacht owners who could afford to pay crew, weren’t around all the time. So as Rudy and I got older and more experienced, we got to cruise the Penobscot Bay on some of the finest Down East sailing yachts, sometimes with their lonely wives or their hot Ivy League daughters, plus all the beer we could drink. And it was all on the captain’s dime, even the beer. For a young city punk from The Bronx like myself, it was the life. I was getting paid to do something I would have gladly done for free. Rudy and I used joke around and sing the lyrics of the Dire Straits song, “Money for nothing, and the chicks for free.”
After we graduated high school, we would stay on later into the Fall. We’d end the season by delivering some magnificent yacht down to the Bahamas or the Virgin Islands so their owners could spend a couple of winter weekends on them. One year we even got to stay and crew on a classic sixty-five foot Herreshoff schooner for the entire winter season in the Caribbean, then sailed it back up to Rockport the following spring. I was living the dream, getting paid and getting laid in the Caribbean in the middle of the winter while everyone else I knew was freezing their nuts off back in New York.
Rudy helped me get into the sailing life after I moved to L.A. It seems like wherever there are people with money and a body of water nearby, there are people with boats. And in L.A., there are plenty of people with money. It’s always struck me as funny that people with money will always buy the most expensive boat they can get without the slightest idea of how to use it. And they sure as hell
don’t want to be bothered taking care of it. But they’re willing to pay, and, luckily, I know how to do both. I have found that rich people are generally pretty cheap—which is probably how they got rich—but not when it comes to their boat. I’ve seen people who would argue over a questionable charge at a restaurant then stiff the waiter out of a tip because of it, even if they had enough money to buy the whole damn restaurant. But when you tell them they need some four-hundred-dollar fitting or some eight-hundred-dollar rigging work done on their boat, they don’t even blink an eye. The checkbook comes right out.
“You ever think of getting your own boat?” I once asked Rudy as we were delivering a fifty-three foot Hallberg-Rassy up from the BVIs.
“What for? I’d only be disappointed. I’m already sailing the best boats I’d never be able to afford,” was his wise response as he poured himself another margarita from the blender down below.
I, on the other hand, always dreamed of having my own boat. Because no matter how much you sail on somebody else’s boat, it’s always going to be somebody else’s boat. And the more I sailed on somebody else’s boat, the more I wanted to make it my own. Now, I didn’t need some big-ass expensive yacht, with way too many electronic gadgets, bells, and whistles to break down and take care of, like my rich armchair “captains.” A nice seaworthy second-hander would suit my needs perfectly—small enough to single-hand, yet big enough to cross an ocean. A K.I.S.S. boat: Keep It Simple Stupid. I had my ideas of what I wanted for my ideal boat—a full keel, shorter single-spreader mast, cutter rig, and lighter displacement. I lucked into Stella, my 1989 Cabo Rico 34. I had worked and cared for her on and off for a number of years, and I knew her inside and out. I got her from the original owner, Gus, who sailed her all over the South Pacific with his wife and filled my head with dreams of doing the same. Gus owed me for a bunch of work I had done, so when his wife passed away and he realized he was getting too old to sail her alone anymore, he let me have her for a song.
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