Black Tide

by Brendan DuBois

  I didn't, and I haven't. A day or so later, after searching through the Washington Post, the Washington Times and the New York Times, I found two little stories of interest. One was that some U.S. Navy units were just concluding an exercise in the Caribbean Sea near the Colombian coast. And the other was a piece about a prominent Colombian senator who had died in an auto accident on the coast near Cartagena. From that day forward, I stopped trusting anything I read in the newspapers, and I gained a very healthy respect for the power of a single phone call.

  A single phone call. I thought about that as I waited at a traffic light in Kennebunk, on my way home to New Hampshire. One phone call. I had been busy these past weeks, working hard on the telephone, and I knew I had better stop it. Things were getting too crazy, and I didn't want to set off an invisible electronic trip wire with one phone call too many.

  Though I never saw Grayson again, I always remembered what he had said. One phone call could mean a lot, especially if the listeners were out there. Waiting at the traffic light, I thought over the scenario of how it could happen. There could be a caller ID trace on any incoming calls to the Justice Department's switchboard. I had talked only briefly with Jack Carney, but with the latest upswings in technology, well, it wouldn't take much. There was a good chance that when I hung up on him at lunchtime today, some security section could have told Jack Carney that the strange phone call had originated from a pay phone on Commercial Street in Portland.

  The light changed and I advanced, following two burly men on Harley-Davidsons, the mufflers on the motorcycles rumbling loudly in the afternoon weather. Then what? Then a flash call to the FBI office in Portland, and in a matter of minutes that place would have been flooded. The pay phone would be isolated and sniffed over, and agents would start canvassing the neighborhood. Who had been there? Who had been using that phone? Do you know what kind of vehicle he had been driving?

  Some grunt work and a little luck. That's all it would take, and I would have polite men in suits and correct haircuts knocking at my door within the week, asking me why I had been harassing a Deputy Assistant Attorney General.

  One phone call.

  When I reached Ogunquit I left the main road and parked in a large lot near the beach and the main town area. Unlike Tyler Beach, there's no distinct strip in Ogunquit, just a real downtown with buildings and a lot of restaurants and craft shops, and a beautiful beach, as always.

  There was a fair-sized crowd of mostly families. As I walked around, I noticed there wasn't the edge, the sharpness that I always felt when I was at Tyler Beach, and it only took me a few minutes to figure it out. Ogunquit is far enough up the coast from Massachusetts so that the young men and women from the urban sprawl in that state who enjoy raising hell would never think of coming up here. Too far to drive, and too many tolls to pay.

  It made me think, only for a moment, about someday pulling up stakes in Tyler Beach if that urban colonization from Massachusetts ever got too far north. After being there for only a few minutes, I had an early dinner, which consisted of two lobster rolls and two ears of corn, sold by a sidewalk vendor. I ate my dinner and drank an iced tea while sitting on a bench, looking at the ocean battering itself against the breakwater. This town was used as a setting once in a bestselling novel by Stephen King, about a killer flu virus that slaughtered nearly everyone in the world. I had read the book before encountering my own special virus. One of the main characters had come from this town, and thinking about her and the book and the survivors --- who lived only to fight another evil --- made me stop eating for a while. In King's book, the virus had come from a secret government installation out West, and that was striking a bit too close to home.

  I then decided I didn't want to eat any more, and I threw out an ear of corn and a half-eaten lobster roll, and I kept on walking. At a place in the downtown there was a store that made saltwater taffy, and there were wide windows in the building where people stopped on the sidewalk to see how it was made. Diane Woods had told me about this place, and she said it made the best saltwater taffy in the world.

  From what I saw, it involved old machinery that looked as if it was installed around the turn of the century, with lots of cranks and gears and flywheels. The workers had on white smocks and paper hats, and through either boredom or long practice, they ignored the crowd that had stopped by the window. A phrase came to me "feeding time at the zoo” and in looking around, it wasn't clear who was on the outside looking in.

  A man near me spoke to his companion. "Hank, I couldn't work there. I'd eat up all the profits."

  His friend said, "Hah, that's what everybody thinks. They don't mind if you eat while you're working, Gil. In fact, they encourage it. You know why? Because in a few days, they'll get sick of it, and then they'll stop. Simple psychology. Don't make it forbidden and it loses its attraction."

  I looked over. Both were dressed comfortably in designer jeans and bright-colored polo shirts, and each had a shoulder bag over his arm. The man called Hank leaned over and whispered something in Gil's ear, and they both laughed and then walked off. I watched for a moment as they patted each other on the back, and for a minute they held hands as they walked up the street.

  It gave me an odd feeling, a sense of loss, and I knew why. This place and those men reminded me of Diane Woods, of who she was and what she hid and the great lengths she went to try to be true to her own self. Earlier, in driving down to Ogunquit, I had thought of going to her and asking for her help in tracking down Operation Harpoon. With the news from Jack Carney of the extent of the operation, I'm sure Diane would be able to find something out for me. But seeing that PDA --- public display of affection --- brought something to me, and I knew I couldn't ask Diane for a favor. If anything, I owed her a lot, and after a moment or two of indecision, I went in and bought her two boxes of saltwater taffy.

  Later that day, I was almost back home in New Hampshire. I started to slow down when I entered the town of York, home a lot of Maine history, and also home to a secret safe house that belonged to a long-dead Mafioso, which now was storing three Homer Winslow paintings worth millions of dollars. I'm not too sure what prompted me --- it certainly wasn't common sense --- but I drove into the neighborhood of Landing Lane and stopped near the driveway of the safe house. If Felix Tinios was here, I'm sure he'd be furious at my breach of security, but I was confident that no one had followed me down.

  I parked the Rover, letting the engine run, knowing I wouldn't stay here long. Through the trees and brush, I could just make out the large white-vinyl-sided Cape with dormer windows on the second floor. Somewhere in this state was a secret agreement with a law firm, probably, that paid another business that paid another business that ended up paying the taxes and utilities for this quiet and empty house. It didn't seem possible that this house could be kept secret for years, but it could happen. This was a small Maine town, and neighbors usually minded their own business. Oh, there were probably rumors about what went on here --- maybe a secret hideaway for a rich eccentric, or a hidden bomb shelter in case the nukes ever came back --- but I'm sure those rumors never reached the ears of anyone who would care that much. That's not how small towns worked.

  All that, for this address and this empty house.

  Nothing seemed to be going on. It was quiet. The house was fulfilling its purpose, its role. It was being successful.

  While the house was showing off its success, I wasn't too sure about myself. I got into the Rover, and in sixteen minutes I was back in the Granite State, home and with a lot ahead of me.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Though it was early evening I didn't go straight home. I decided that the saltwater taffy in my Rover wouldn't wait. In Porter I got on Route 1A --- Atlantic Avenue, the ocean route --- and I followed the twists and turns of the coastline as I headed south. Out toward the east the long gray march of the Atlantic's waves came to the coast, and I spent a few minutes thinking of how many waves went by in a second, and I tried to figure h
ow many would strike the coast in a day, a week or a month, and by then I was up to one hell of a number.

  The radio was on WEVO-FM out of Concord, the state's capital, and I was listening to a classical music selection. The lights of the Isles of Shoals glowed steadily at me as I went farther south, through North Tyler and then across the town line into Tyler. I kept on moving, slowing down some as the traffic began to build up heading into Tyler Beach. With the sound of the music and the smell of the salt air and the feel of the cool evening wind in my face, I wished I could drive forever, and only stop when I reached the terminus of Route 1 in Key West, so many hundreds of miles away.

  That was my wish, but reality was pressing me that evening, and I stopped only after another ten minutes or so of driving, going to a condominium built near the waters of Tyler Harbor.

  The gift of saltwater taffy was a perfect one, one that was readily accepted. Then Diane Woods and I went out to the boat dock of her condominium. Diane brought along two lawn chairs, and I carried two wine coolers that she had pulled from her refrigerator. Most wine coolers taste like sugary fruit juice gone bad, but on this evening, to be with Diane, I would have drunk almost anything she had set before me.

  We sat at the end of the dock, looking out to the twilight glow of the harbor's lights, and the brighter lights of the Falconer nuclear power plant, out near the marshes by the southwest end of the harbor. There were fishing boats and charter craft out there, swaying gently at their moorings. Diane's sailboat, the Miranda, was also there, sails furled and put away. Diane drank most of her wine cooler in a couple of swallows, and I sat and smiled and daintily sipped at mine.

  "So what brings you here tonight, Lewis?" she asked, sitting back in her lawn chair. Her feet were bare and she had on khaki shorts and a T-shirt from the New Hampshire Police Academy, and her brown hair was getting too long. She spent a lot of time pulling it away from her eyes.

  "Oh, something else I have for you, Diane," I said, looking out at the harbor. "Many's the time that you've had something for me, and tonight I just wanted to repay the favor."

  "What are you giving me, then?"

  ''An apology, for pushing you when I didn't have a right to."

  She nodded, looking at her hands. "I know. I felt bad about we left things the last time you were here. I don't like fighting with you, Lewis."

  "Me neither. And I also feel bad about what you went through at Roger's, playing that pretend game. I got the feeling at the end you weren't enjoying yourself."

  There was some silence after that, and I watched some seagulls dive around a fishing boat grumbling in from the harbor after a hard day out on the ocean. Diane sighed and said, "You've not told me much about what you did before you came here, Lewis, but I know it was something quiet and unusual. Then every now and then you do something that makes me think you were a goddamn spy, or a goddamn mind reader, and I'm not too sure which is worse."

  "They both seem about equal," I said.

  "Yeah, they do at that." She drank from her cooler and said, her voice strained, "It's all part of the Great Act, of trying to pretend you're something that you're not, of knowing that if you want to keep your job, keep your position in this town, you have to lie every day about who you are and who you love. Maybe I'm a coward. Maybe I should just come out and take the heat, and get my ass fired and get my name in the papers while I sue the morons who run this town. And then try to get my job back, and move from my condo because of death threats and all that shit. Maybe I'll do that, one of these days, but not this week."

  She sighed and sank deeper into the chair, crossing her bare legs. "No, not this week. I'm too damn busy, and I'm too damn tired."

  "You're also too damn hard on yourself." Diane smiled a bit. "Maybe so. Ever hear of a quaint expression called outing?"

  "It's when a man or woman has his or her homosexuality made known, usually without their knowledge or consent. Sometimes by a vocal minority in their community who say outing is a political act, an act of self-defense. A way of publicizing influential and powerful gays who don't use their power for their brothers and sisters."

  She shifted some and said, "Yeah, well, I'm sure those senators who were busily sticking knives into Julius Caesar would have called that a political act, too, Lewis, but you still end up with blood on the floor. No, outing's a scary thing, and that's something that troubles me. That one of these days, some crumb I've arrested will learn who I am. All it would take would be someone seeing me in Ogunquit or Provincetown one certain day, and then a few anonymous phone calls to the town manager and the selectmen. Maybe even letters with photographs. Then, as they say, the fun would begin."

  She looked up at me. "Hell of a thing, isn't it? You get depressed and angry when you keep a secret, and you get depressed and angry when you wonder if that secret will ever be made public by someone with a grudge against you."

  "Then somebody like Roger Krohn comes along and asks you out, and you get put on the spot. Especially if it looks like he might end up being your boss."

  Diane shook her head, tossing her too long hair to one side. "Yep, put on the spot. And most times I can laugh it off, but not that night. Too much going on."

  "It's been a hell of a summer for you." Diane held up her bottle in a salute and I clinked my own against hers. "For both of us. Friends?"

  "Always," I said. Then I pretended to take another sip and the two of us just talked for a while, as the sky became darker. When I thought Diane wasn't looking I held the bottle in my left hand and let its contents dribble into the salt water beneath me. Diane talked some about Kara and how the two of them were going to play hooky later this week, maybe take a day off and just go driving south, and I said that sounded like fun. Then a few mosquitoes started buzzing around our heads and Diane suggested that we call it a night, which I agreed to do. I said I had one last remark to make before going.

  "Which is what?" I shrugged. "Nothing major. I want to talk to Roger Krohn, I need to know when he's going to be in tomorrow. I'm thinking of taking him out to lunch or something."

  "Really? Well, I suppose I could leave him a message." She hesitated for a moment, and then said, "You're up to something, aren't you?" At any other time, I might have tossed off that remark with a joke or a quip, but not on this night. Diane and I had just reaffirmed something dear to me, and I didn't want to jeopardize that.

  "Yes," I said simply. "I am up to something."

  I listened to her breathe for a moment or two. Diane has always been mostly realistic about what I do sometimes as part of who I am. I often go into her territory, and as long as I'm polite and don't do anything exceptionally illegal, she has allowed me some maneuvering room. On a few occasions I've helped her put away some particularly nasty people, people who belong away from the rest of us, no matter the opinion of some columnists for the Boston Globe or the New York Times. On other occasions, she has come forth with some necessary information that has cleared up a puzzle or two.

  Tonight she said, "What does it involve? Anything I need to know about?"

  I mulled that over for a second or two, thinking about Felix Tinios and his poor dead cousin, mutilated and dumped into the ocean like a bad piece of fish. Diane deserved to know about that at least, but for now, Sal was still dead and there wasn't much more that Diane could do.

  "There's a thing or two I'll talk to you about, Diane, in a couple of days. As to what it involves, well, I guess you could say helping a friend."

  "Somebody I know."

  "Yes," I agreed. "Somebody you know." "

  Then I'd guess it might be Felix Tinios."

  ''And then you would have guessed right."

  Diane stood up, but from the manner of her standing I could tell she wasn't upset. It was just a casual motion, a comfortable one, and I thought I could sense her smile.

  "Then you be careful, very careful," Diane said. "Seeing you and Felix being buddies reminds me of the story about the lamb who lies down with the lion, but always keep in m
ind the real truth behind that story: the Iamb is always the one who's in danger. Felix can hurt you badly, Lewis, and don't be offended, but I don't think he's that particularly frightened of you."

  I put a hurt tone in my voice as I got up and followed her back to her condominium, carrying a lawn chair in my hand. "You mean, the pen really isn't mightier than the sword?"

  She laughed. "Maybe so, but I doubt the pen is mightier than a nine-millimeter bullet to the forehead."

  At the doorway to her condo, she took the lawn chair I had been carrying and said, "I'll tell Roger that you'll be buying him lunch tomorrow. Is that all right?"

  "Perfect," I said. "And, Diane-"

  "I know, I know," she interrupted. "You owe me one. Get out of here and go home, will you?"

  "I'm always one to take the orders of cops seriously," and with that, I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. "Thanks for the truce."

  "Fool," she said, kissing me back on the lips. "You still don't know how to kiss a woman right." I shot back with, "So I should learn from the expert?" and we both laughed and she went into her condo.

  I got back to the Rover and drove home, and the light feeling around my shoulders, where a heavy weight once rested, was wonderful.

  At home the green light on my answering machine was blinking at me, indicating a call had come in: "Lewis Cole, this is Craig Dummer. What do you mean by coming around and harassing me? I tell you, you're in deep shit, man. I've got friends out there, friends who owe me favors, friends who'll take care of you hard."

  The machine clicked and beeped, and there was another: “Cole, this is Dummer again. I think I've figured out who you really work for, and if you and your buddies don't cut the crap, I'm giving it all up. You got that? Listen, I've done some heavy shit before, back when it counts, and it don't scare me. So back off. You got that?"