Vineyard Prey

by Philip R. Craig

  At home, our outdoor pipes had been drained for the winter, so I used a bucket of water from the kitchen to rinse out the barrel before leaving it upside down to drain beside the shed.

  Then I returned to the house. Already the sun was low in the western sky, and Joshua and Diana would soon be home from the second grade and kindergarten. I wanted to talk with Zee before they arrived.

  Zee had the last of the scallops in the fridge and was working on supper. Scallops, of course. Her plan, I saw, was to fry them up with garlic butter and serve them over rice with broccoli on the side. A winning meal, for sure.

  I washed up and prepared the broc for the microwave. We were becoming very twenty-first-centuryish, what with our microwave, our cell phone, and our computer. The next thing you know we’ll be getting a color TV.

  While I worked, Zee told me we’d gotten a call from Professor Buford Oakland, who wanted me to open up his Oak Bluffs house for family members who would be making a pre-Christmas trip to the island. I added his house to the list of several others I also had to open for the holidays, and told her about Joe Begay’s visit to the shed.

  She frowned. “He said that he sent Toni and the children away? I called her yesterday and got her answering machine. I was wondering why she never called back. What do you suppose is going on?”

  “I’ll tell you when I know.”

  “I don’t like it so far. I wonder where Toni is.”

  “I don’t like it either,” I said, “but maybe there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Where are Joshua and Diana?” asked Zee, glancing at the wall clock. “They should be home by now.”

  “The bus doesn’t get them here for another ten or fifteen minutes,” I said in my soothing voice.

  “Are you sure Joe had a pistol in his pocket?”

  “It looked that way to me.”

  “I don’t like it. Should we call the police?”

  “If Joe wanted the police I think he’d have called them.”

  The cats, Oliver Underfoot and Velcro, came into the room and suggested that it was time for their afternoon snack. I gave it to them. A quarter of an hour later Joshua and Diana strolled down our long sandy driveway right on schedule.

  Everything at the Jackson house seemed normal, but to Zee and me everything had changed.

  2

  I took our mainland shopping list with me when I went over to Cape Cod the next morning, because normal life doesn’t stop in abnormal times and when you live on Martha’s Vineyard, you never come home from America with an empty car. You fill it full of stuff that you can buy for a fraction of what it would cost on the island, and you always fill your tank with mainland gasoline before catching the ferry home.

  Since most Cape Cod stores are open at nine and it can take an hour to drive from the Woods Hole ferry terminal to Hyannis, I’d reserved an early-morning trip from Vineyard Haven so I’d have a couple of hours to shop before meeting Joe Begay at the mall at noon. I drove Zee’s little Jeep since it was less conspicuous than my antique Land Cruiser.

  On the way to the ferry, though, I stopped at two of the houses I look after during the winter. Since I have no regular job, I stretch out my meager disability money by fishing, doing odd jobs, and care-taking several houses. I close them in the fall, check on them during the winter, and open them again in the spring or whenever their owners want them opened.

  In this case, both of my stops were to open houses for Christmas. This included turning up the thermostats and making sure that all windows and doors were locked and that there were no signs of illegal entry or other problems. In the Oakland house I lingered awhile in the library, which was a room I loved.

  Professor Buford Oakland was a friend of my friend Professor John Skye, who had recommended me for the job with the Oaklands. John was a medieval lit man at Weststock College, up north of Boston, and Oakland was a historian with a focus on the Civil War. He taught somewhere in Virginia and was, I guessed by his name, a Southerner himself, since no one but a Southerner would be named Buford. He was a Yale man, which perhaps explained how he ended up with a summer place on the Vineyard, although a surprising number of Southerners have island houses.

  Buford Oakland had a couple of grown children I’d never met, and like John Skye, he had a large library that I admired; but whereas the only weaponry on display in John’s library was a triangulation of foil, épée, and saber on a wall, a token of John’s athletic career as a collegiate three-weapon man, Oakland had a private collection of Civil War memorabilia including bayonets, pistols, and rifles on a wall and in a glass-covered case below it. Among these was a LeMat revolver that sported a short shotgun barrel below the cylinder, in case you missed nine times with the regular bullets, and a Type II 1863 rifle-musket made by the Springfield Armory that was, according to the little card beside it, the last regulation U.S. muzzle-loader. Firearms had changed quite a bit since the Blue and the Gray went at it, and I marveled, as always, at the amount of human ingenuity that went into developing ways of killing and maiming other humans.

  Dr. Oakland also had battlefield maps and shelves of books about the war, including some he had written himself. It was clear that he loved his subject, and I guessed that that love probably made him an exciting teacher. One of the Vineyard’s charms is that it has more than its share of interesting residents, and you never know when you’re going to encounter one of them. Before leaving the room, I laid paper, kindling, and wood in the fireplace. Whoever was coming might enjoy a good book in front of a fire on a cold December night.

  Hearing a lone shot off in the woods to my right as I left the house, I remembered my father once telling me that if you heard a single shot, the chances were good that the hunter got his deer; that if you heard two shots the chances were not so good; and that if you heard three shots the deer was still running. In muzzle-loader days, you only got one chance, which was part of the charm for modern-day black-powder hunters, who liked the link to their ancestral shooters. The thrill of the hunt must be buried deep in our genetic codes.

  After I drove off the ferry in Woods Hole, I hit most of the stores in Falmouth where Vineyarders traditionally shop: Kappy’s for booze, the Christmas Tree Shop and the Oceanstate Job Lot for dolmas and serendipitous discoveries, Wal-Mart for birdseed, toilet paper, paper towels, and a few other items on Zee’s list, and the office-supply place for computer paper and ink. I also got a late breakfast at McDonald’s because there are no McDonald’s on Martha’s Vineyard and I always pig out at Mac’s when I go off-island.

  At the Cape Cod Mall in Hyannis I had another McDonald’s meal for lunch in the food court: a double cheeseburger, tall fries, and a medium Coke. Two Mac meals in a single day. Heaven.

  Joe Begay didn’t join me. Instead, as he walked by my table he said, sotto voce, “Drive by the door at the far end of the mall in half an hour. I’ll be there.” He walked on and I kept eating. When I was through, I went out to the Jeep and drove to the other end of the mall. As I eased past the entrance there, Joe Begay appeared. I stopped and he slid into the seat beside me.

  “Drive,” he said, looking back toward the entrance.

  I did that, glancing into the rearview mirror and seeing no one who appeared to be interested in us.

  “Home, James,” said Begay, sliding his big body down as far as it would go, which was not enough to get his head below the level of the windows.

  I drove out onto Route 28 and headed for Woods Hole. “When we get down the road a way,” I said, “we’ll pull off and fix you a nest in the backseat. You can hide in the toilet paper.”

  “Fine.” Begay sat back up in the seat. “I feel like somebody in a Hitchcock film.”

  “Me, too. Where’s your truck?”

  “At the airport.”

  The Hyannis airport is almost across the street from the mall.

  “That may cause some confusion among the heathen,” I said.

  “I hope so,” said Begay. “When’s your reservation back t
o the island?”

  “Middle of the afternoon. You need some time to do something first?”

  “No. Just get me back to the Vineyard. When we get there, can you take me up to the house? Toni’s car’s there.”

  “Sure.”

  We drove on.

  “You’re not asking many questions,” said Begay.

  “Not because I don’t have them. You want to bunk out with us for a while?”

  “No need. I may be imagining things but if I’m right, I don’t want to get you any more involved.”

  “I’m already involved. I just don’t know in what.”

  “You’re not involved yet. I’m sure nobody trailed me out of the mall, so you’re clear if you get me back to the house without anyone seeing me with you.”

  My rearview mirror was empty. “I can do that,” I said, “but you’re wrong about me not being involved. I’ve been involved with you since you saved my bacon in ’Nam.”

  “I’m the one whose bacon got saved by you,” said Begay. “Are we ever going to get this story straight?”

  I glanced at him and saw a small smile on his craggy face. “Probably not,” I said.

  When the Vietnam mortarman had dropped his rounds on us, blinded Sergeant Begay had picked up shrapnel-crippled me and become my legs while I had become his eyes. Two half-men had become one whole man long enough to call in the gunships and the medics and to save what was left of our patrol. The argument about who had saved whom had gone on ever since and had become a joke.

  Now, after Begay said nothing for a while, I asked, “Where are Toni and the kids?”

  “I sent them out to Arizona to spend some time with my people. I told Toni to take the children out of school for a couple of weeks and show them where their daddy grew up. She didn’t want to go, but she went. They should be fine. The Easter Bunny has never been there.”

  I drove for a while before I said, “The Easter Bunny. It’s the wrong time of year for the Easter Bunny. It’s almost time for Rudolph.”

  “It’s not Rudolph,” said Begay. “We got Rudolph. And we got the Scarecrow, too, but we don’t think we got the Easter Bunny.”

  Most of the souvenir shops along Route 28 were closed for the winter. I saw one such and pulled around behind it. We repacked the backseat with Begay snuggled between a large pack of toilet paper and an even larger pack of paper towels. All he had to do to be invisible was to hold a fifty-pound sack of oiled sunflower seeds in his lap. I found the case of Sam Adams I’d gotten earlier at Kappy’s and gave us each one before we started on down the road again.

  “If you don’t want to tell me what this is about,” I said, “I won’t push it. I’ll ask Jake Spitz.”

  “I deserve this,” said Begay. “I’d forgotten how nosy you can be.”

  That wasn’t true, of course. Joe Begay didn’t forget things. He thought he might need someone and that he could trust me if push came to shove. He was right about the trust, but I was more than two decades past soldiering so I hoped he wouldn’t need any honed combat skills.

  “I’ll go to Jake if I have to,” I said, “but it might save some time if you came right out with it.”

  “Jake is FBI,” said Begay. “This involves other people.”

  “If you say so. Okay, let’s talk about something else. How about them Patriots? They gonna make it to the Super Bowl this year?”

  There was a silence, then Joe said, “All right, here’s what I know. In the last few months three people I worked with on a job have been killed. The odds of those three people dying in one year seem pretty long, especially since the last two died Stateside. There are two of us left.”

  “Overseas work,” I said, taking note of the Stateside reference.

  “Unofficially, yes; officially, no comment. Last year five of us were on a trade mission abroad to drum up business for some American corporations. We courted officials and businesspeople and tried to open some closed doors. The State Department worked with us because they agree with old Cal that the business of America is business.”

  “What was your real job?”

  “That actually was one of our real jobs, and we managed to make some progress. We were so good that our cover seemed perfect.” He paused. “Of course we had another job, and we made progress on that one, too. Ever read about the hashshashin, back in Crusader days?”

  “Yes. The killers who did their work high on hash and religion. The original assassins.”

  “Well, the modern equivalents are still around. Some of them are the suicide bombers you read so much about. Nowadays, though, the top guys are more interested in money than religion, and they never die for the cause if they can get somebody else to do it for them. They hang out in safe countries and usually do their jobs somewhere else.

  “The world being what it is, there’s plenty of work for them and they do it well, and when they go home afterwards they live in fine houses and are very law-abiding and generous. They build schools and sewer systems and hospitals, and the local people love them at least as much as they fear them.”

  “Sounds like life in parts of South America.”

  “There and other places, too. They pay local officials and police to leave them alone and since they have more money than God and do their killing in other countries, most of them die peacefully in bed, surrounded by grieving wives and children. They’re hard to find and harder to stop because their security and intelligence systems are so good and because the authorities mostly turn a blind eye on them.”

  “Crime pays pretty well sometimes.”

  “But not all the time. The sword of Damocles hangs over every crowned head, and there are always people who lose when the hashshashin win and they get mad and try to get even. Some of those people live in the U.S.A.”

  I could imagine who some of them might be: bigwigs in the alphabet-soup intelligence and military organizations in Washington who are after the heads of people they perceive as opposed to American interests. The more violent the opposition, the greater the anger and desire for vengeance.

  “Terrorists,” I said. It was the currently favored term for such enemies, although, of course, one man’s terrorist is another man’s hero just as one man’s traitor is another’s patriot. Benedict Arnold, Major André, and Nathan Hale had been three of the latter during the American Revolution. What sort of men they were depended on whom you asked.

  “Whatever,” said Begay. “What happened was that two of three people who interested us came to bad ends during that particular trade mission. The third one got away.”

  “The Easter Bunny.”

  “Yes. The current Washington wisdom is that it’s taken the Bunny a while to figure out what happened to his friends and to do something about it.

  He probably figures we’re the terrorists and he’s the heroic avenger.”

  “How’d he get that code name?”

  “The three of them specialized in blowing people up during religious holidays. Christmas, Easter, Passover, Ramadan, and so forth. The one we called the Scarecrow had his biggest success on All Hallows’ Eve in London, Rudolph set off a bomb in Bethlehem on Christmas morning, and the Easter Bunny did the same in a cathedral in Bosnia on Good Friday. It’s a good way to attract people’s attention.”

  “Why is he after your group? I didn’t know there was much loyalty among people in that business.”

  “Revenge is always popular. In any case, the Bunny has done the right thing for himself. He’s showed the world that his intelligence is as good as anybody’s and that he can kill you no matter where you live. It’s good for his business.”

  I thought about that, then said, “Most accidents happen in the home. He may not live where he used to live, but he must live somewhere.”

  “We think we know where, but in this case he lives in a country that likes his work and isn’t about to let anyone get at him. We have assets inside the borders, of course, and we’re spreading money around to get local people on our side, but so far no luc
k. Meanwhile, the Bunny can come and go as he pleases, provided he avoids the national airports, where he might be spotted by our people.”

  “And you think he’s here in the States right now.”

  “That’s the theory.”

  As we came into Falmouth, Joe arranged the bag of birdseed in front of him. You have to arrive at the ferry dock a half hour before the boat leaves, so he was going to have to sit there quietly for quite a while if he was to be unobserved.

  I got into the parking lot line and turned on the Cape’s classical station. It plays fine instrumental music but never any opera arias or choral music because, I was told when I asked why, studies show that audiences of classical music decline significantly when vocal music is offered. Since I consider the human voice to be the finest of musical instruments, I find this inexplicable, and I split my radio time between the classical station and the country-and-western station in Rhode Island. C-and-W fans like human voices, even nasal ones.

  “Do you have a plan for the Bunny?” I asked Joe.

  “I do,” he replied in a muffled voice from beneath the birdseed. “I plan to kill him.”

  3

  There were not many leaves on the trees, so as I drove to Aquinnah I could see farther into the woods than I can in the summer. Narrow, sandy driveways led to houses and barns and stone fences that for half the year were invisible from the road, the property of people who like their privacy.

  Today there were many hunters out there somewhere, seeking deer, and maybe one hunter seeking Joe Begay. Joe had removed the bag of birdseed from his lap when we’d passed Lake Tashmoo, and in my rearview mirror I could see him looking thoughtfully out the window.

  “What can you tell me about this guy?” I asked. “What does he look like? Where does he come from?”

  “Remember Carlos the Jackal?”

  Who could forget the world’s most wanted hired assassin? I said, “I think he was from South America someplace. He had a very long run, but they finally got him and put him in jail. Are you telling me that the Easter Bunny looks like Carlos?”