by Boyle, Gerry
“None of my business,” Doc said. “Hey, not like I don’t trust the guy. Anybody that can sail around the Cape of Good Hope can sail to Boston in a little drizzle.
So what’s up with Nova Scotia?”
“Showed up on your GPS,” Brandon said.
“Playing with the thing, figuring it out.”
“Right,” Brandon said.
“I don’t think Lucky knew how to use it. Said he sticks to chart and compass.”
“Irina, then. Maybe just passing the time.”
“I don’t feel like I know much about her,” Brandon said. “Lucky does all the talking.”
“Hey, I’d go with her to Nova Scotia. On the ferry, in a first-class cabin. She’s definitely a first-class babe. I mean, you better go to the top of the wine list, a woman like that.”
“You think so?”
“Oh, yeah,” Doc said. “I mean, nothing against Lucky. He’s an interesting, successful guy. But I can picture her with some Italian count or some Russian mafia guy. She’s got this coolness, you know? Knows what she wants and she’s gonna get it.”
“An odd match-up,” Brandon said. “Lucky seems pretty laid back.”
“And she seems like she wants to go to directly to the top. Guess they have one thing in common.”
“What’s that?” Brandon said.
“Money,” Doc said. “Some people like having a lot of it. Some docs I’ve known have been like that. It’s just really important to them. She’s that way and so is he. I could see it when he whipped out that roll of bills. You could tell he really got off on being able to do that.”
They stood on the deck, Doc leaning on the side deck, Brandon against the stern. For a moment, two, he saw the photo of the group on the deck of Black Magic. A little ragtag band, beards, and sun-burnished faces, Nikki lanky and tanned. And Lucky had looked, well, happy go lucky. When had the money drive kicked in? Or had it been there all along, sleeping like a dormant virus?
“Money,” Doc said. “For some people it’s a drug.”
CHAPTER 41
Fuller and Kelvin spent most of the afternoon at Jolly’s, at a table in the back corner. They were familiar enough to the regulars that they didn’t stand out, not so well known that their presence would be noted.
“Maybe we could sign on with a fishing boat,” Kelvin said, eating kernels from what had been a bowl of popcorn.
“What do you know about fishing?” Fuller said.
“I could learn,” Kelvin said. “And if we put in at some other place, away from Maine, we could disappear.”
“You wouldn’t last a day. How you gonna hang onto some boat bouncing around in the middle of the friggin’ ocean? Can’t even pave driveways and they stand still.”
“Don’t rag on me. You never had no job at all.”
“I’m thinking for the both of us. That’s my job.”
“You shoulda thought before you did it. That’s when you shoulda thought.”
“Just shut up,” Fuller said, then he did think—that it was Kelvin’s car, it was Kelvin who could testify against him. “Dude,” he said. “You gotta understand I’m just kinda stressed.”
He poured the last of the pitcher of Budweiser into Kelvin’s glass. The beer was warm and flat because they’d been nursing it so they could stay in the bar but not get drunk. Kelvin sipped. Poured some of the flat beer into Fuller’s glass. Fuller swallowed it in one gulp.
“We ain’t gonna be able to work Blake like we wanted,” he said.
“I guess,” Kelvin said. “He sees us, he’s just gotta call 911.”
“So we work him another way.”
“Take his boat, go south?”
“And dump him overboard?” Fuller said.
“I was thinking more like leave him on some island.”
“Good luck with that, Coast Guard on your ass so fast you wouldn’t know what hit you. No, I’m thinking we tail him to his buddies. The rich dude and the Russian lady got more than enough cash to set us up where we’re going.”
“Florida?”
“No, everybody runs to Florida,” Fuller said.
“You know a lot of people in this situation, huh?”
“I know how people think. Get in a jam in Maine, first thing they do is take off for friggin’ Florida. Cops just sit on the Kittery bridge, wait for the car to go by.”
“So where you want to go?”
“Chicago,” Fuller said.
“Chicago? What the hell for?”
“No reason. That’s what’s good about it. Nobody could guess it ahead of time, ’cause we couldn’t have guessed it either.”
“I’ve never been to Chicago.”
“You never been anywhere. We stick to places you been we’ll be sitting in goddamn Old Orchard Beach.”
Kelvin didn’t like that, got up to pee. Fuller looked around the bar. Guys off a fishing boat, a different one from last time, were playing pool. Big blonde babe was having some heavy discussion with a flabby guy in a red sweater. Fuller figured he was her boss in some office, been bonking her and now he was trying to dump her without her going ballistic, calling his wife. Kidding himself, Fuller thought. Unless he had something on her, like she was married with a bunch of kids. Then it was a stalemate.
The blonde woman dabbed her eyes with a napkin. The guy was talking without looking at her.
Fuller looked away, trying to plan the takedown, keeping in mind that the Russian lady had poked Kelvin with an ice pick, so she probably wasn’t gonna go easy. And if she carried an ice pick, the rich guy had probably been around, too. Now Blake and blondie, they weren’t tough, but they were a little weird and unpredictable, living on a boat, Blake riding around with cops, the blonde always writing stuff down. A wannabe cop might wannabe a hero, too.
Kelvin came back from the john, sat down at the table. He had a speech planned, had gone over it in his head standing at the urinal. He began, “Joel, I don’t think I can—”
“You don’t have to go,” Fuller said. “I know you got a kid, all this shit. Just help me get some dinero so I can get outta here. Then they pick you up, you say, ‘I don’t know where he went. What do I look like? His babysitter?’ Let’s go.”
He was out of his chair, halfway across the room. Kelvin trailed after him, pissed that he never got to say his speech, which was about how he didn’t want to mess with the ice pick lady ’cause he was afraid the only way you’d win with her, and probably the other guy, too, was to kill them and he wasn’t a murderer.
But he followed Fuller down the block to where the Caprice, painted primer black in the woods that morning with a bunch of spray cans, was parked in a closed-up service station. It fit in there with the rest of the junks and Kelvin got in, waited while Fuller slipped between the cars, came back in a couple of minutes with two more license plates with valid registration stickers.
“It’s like the Boy Scouts say,” he said, slipping the plates under the passenger seat, next to the Ruger and Griffin’s Glock. “Be prepared. Now drive up by the bridge. We need a spot where we can see.”
Kelvin drove, his speech fading as he was drawn into the next phase of this craziness. He considered Chicago, had a déjà vu back to when the ice-pick babe had said she was from Poland. Thinking of Chicago he went blank again, then thought of some story in elementary school about a fire and a cow. But maybe he had that wrong. Why the hell would they have cows in the middle of a city?
They circled the block twice, finally picked the lot of an Irish bar. They parked at the far end, away from the building, backed in so they could see the road that came off the bridge.
“It’s like Florida and Kittery,” Fuller said. “He comes over the bridge and into the city, he’s gotta come by here.”
“What if he goes to the mall?” Kelvin said.
“It’s percentages,” Fuller said. “The girl lives in the Old Port.”
“I think she’s shacking up with him now.”
“So they go back to her place so
she can get some clothes. Or she says they should go have drinks.”
“Because his buddy gets killed?”
“To console himself,” Fuller said. “Drown his sorrow. Sometimes I wonder where you’ve been.”
“Last few days, I’ve been with you,” Kelvin said. “It’s been a goddamn blast, too.”
“Hey, you don’t want a few thousand in cash, I’ll do it myself.”
“How you gonna get there? Call a taxi?”
Kelvin had him on that one, so Fuller just changed the subject, said, “A black Ford pickup or a red Saab with out-of-state plates. You look at the trucks, I’ll take the red cars.”
They settled in. Cars and trucks whizzed by. Kelvin wished he had a beer, a cold one. He was about to take a break, go into the Irish bar and chug a draft, when Fuller said, “There it is.”
“What?”
“Her car.”
It passed them, in the left lane, swung onto State Street, and started up the hill. The girl was driving; Brandon was in the passenger seat.
“Jackpot,” Fuller said. “Follow them. Don’t just sit there.”
Kelvin started the motor, pulled out and across traffic. The red car was a block ahead and he raced after it, settling in three cars back.
“They’re not going to the Old Port,” Kelvin said, thinking, so much for your friggin’ theories.
“I got a good feeling about this one,” Fuller said as they crossed Congress Street, started down the hill, headed for Forest Avenue, the highway ramps.
“They get on the interstate, we’re golden,” he said.
“Why’s that?” Kelvin said.
“Because we know all the places they go in the city, down by the water there, the boatyard. We haven’t seen ’em go anywhere else.”
“So?”
“So the players here, we know where they all live except the rich guy and the Russian lady.”
“Polish.”
“Same difference.”
“They live at the hotel.”
“Not anymore. I called. Lady at the desk said they checked out last week.”
“So where are they living now?”
Fuller was watching the Saab. It slowed, the blinker came on. It swung right onto the ramp for the highway, northbound.
“We’re about to find out,” he said.
Kelvin turned onto the ramp, too, smelled the fresh paint on the car as he accelerated. He merged onto the highway, settled into the middle lane, four cars behind Mia.
“Five people, Joel,” Kelvin said. “This is starting to get serious.”
“It’s been serious all along, dude,” Fuller said. “You’re just starting to notice.”
CHAPTER 42
The detectives were very pleasant, Nessa thought. The man, O’Flaherty or some such Irish name—so police were still all Irish—had gone out and gotten a bottle of a very nice Riesling. He poured her a glass and then went upstairs, left her with the woman detective, who had asked Nessa to call her Jackie. Jackie had thick red hair, a long, narrow face, and looked a little grim until she sat down at the dining room table with a cup of coffee.
Jackie said Brandon seemed like a nice guy. “Tell me more about him, Mrs. Blake,” she said.
Nessa said her grandson was very nice, sort of quiet, maybe even a little withdrawn. But he’d always been a bit of a loner, not unhappy, not some crazy person out in a log cabin in the woods, like you hear about. Just content with his books and his boats. A wooden rowboat when he was eight or nine. Then a beat-up dinghy with a leak and a sail.
Jackie knew Nessa had raised Brandon, but didn’t know why. Nessa told her. Sipping the wine, Nessa started with the sinking, the policeman coming to the door, the look on his face that said it all. She finished the story a glass of wine later with Lucky coming back to Portland.
“Really,” Jackie said. “So he wasn’t dead?”
“It was just presumed,” Nessa said. “Because he’d been with them.”
“He never reported in?”
“Brandon told me he said, Lucky I mean, he had some sort of a breakdown and just took off.”
“It must be so hard,” Jackie said.
“It is,” Nessa said, looking at Jackie. She had deep blue eyes that told Nessa she was a person who cared, she was not your ordinary detective. A woman understood.
“You’ve been through so much,” Jackie said.
“It’s been a long row to hoe,” Nessa said, the wine bringing up that expression. “Not what I expected.”
“What did you expect, Mrs. Blake?”
Nessa looked at the caring eyes, the crow’s feet that crinkled up reassuringly on the detective’s cheekbones.
“I thought I was going to live happily ever after,” Nessa said. “Married a handsome doctor. We had Nikki, beautiful little girl. This big house on the ocean.”
“It sounds so perfect,” Jackie said.
“To the neighbors, yes.”
Nessa took a long sip, not sure whether to get into it. But this woman was so nice, so calming.
“Lots of women thought Luther was handsome, if you know what I mean. Young nurses, they’re always out to snag a doctor. But even the wife of one of his partners. Well, come to find out—I’m not sure how to say this—well, I guess you could say he thought they were pretty darn nifty, too.”
Jackie looked sympathetic. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Blake.”
“All the trips, the conferences, the seminars. They weren’t conferences at all, unless you call two people staying at a five-star hotel with a king-size bed and champagne from room service a conference. Nikki and I, we stayed home. Waited for him. ‘Daddy!’ Nikki would say. And I’d say, ‘How was it, honey?’ Give him a hug. And he’d say he was tired, jet-lagged, go right to bed, sleep for twelve hours. All that hard ‘conferencing.’”
“You poor thing,” the detective said.
Nessa knew Jackie understood.
“Oh, but that was just the beginning. Luther was forty-two, he had a heart attack in the hospital parking lot. They said he was dead before he hit the ground. Nikki was in junior high. I had to go get her. I’ll never forget it. She was in gym class, playing some game with a ball and a broom. They called her out and I was standing there and she saw my face and somehow she knew. Fell to the floor like she’d been shot. She loved her father.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Blake.”
Nessa poured a half glass, just one more. The bubbles settled and the surface of the wine was flat, a still, golden pond. She drank.
My, this is a nice wine, she thought. Sterling.
“That’s not the sorry part. The sorry part was that he’d spent most of our savings, cashed out one of our life insurances. Spent it living like some Arab sheik bedding his harem. Had one of them in a condo.”
She smiled, still bitter.
“So you had no money?”
“Oh, not no money. Just not what I thought I had. I had enough to stay in the house. And then I sold some things. Jewelry he gave me. A hide-away cottage in the White Mountains. Luther said it was an investment. Love nest, is what it was. So that kept me in the house a few more years. Paid the back taxes. Put oil in the furnace. Kept up appearances. I sold the boat, a Chris-Craft like Brandon’s, except it was bigger. I’d been on it twice. Always so cold on the ocean in Maine. I hated it. Oh, and I sold Luther’s precious Porsche. And the lot we’d bought next door. Always one step ahead.”
She took a quick sip, her eyes started to well.
“You okay?” Jackie said.
Nessa nodded, wiped her eyes.
“Then there was Nikki with the baby—this was later on—no father she’d admit to, working in the bars. I got little jobs here and there, tried catering because I cooked then.”
Another swallow, the glass empty now.
“It didn’t work out,” Nessa said. “And then—” She bit her lip, swallowed. Wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Swallowed hard again.
“And then the boat went down?” the detect
ive said.
Nessa was trying to focus, like the detective had roused her from a dream.
“No,” Nessa said. “That was later.”
“What happened before that, Mrs. Blake?” Jackie asked. But Nessa looked like she had drifted off, like she had wandered through a door to another place.
“Oh, Nikki,” she said, more to herself than to the detective. “Oh, Nikki. I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry, Mrs. Blake?” Jackie said. “But it was an accident.”
“But I put her there,” Nessa said. “I put her in harm’s way.”
“How? How did you do that?”
But Nessa had reached for the bottle and was pouring another glass. This time she filled it to the brim. She drank and looked away and stopped talking. The detective waited, but for this time Nessa was done.
CHAPTER 43
Lucky was down on the shore, Irina said, leading the way through the foyer, into a spacious study with leather couches, a billiard table, a stone fireplace, and a view of the bay through diamond-paned Tudor windows. From there, they walked a long hallway, the walls studded with photographs of someone’s family: a man in a Navy uniform, solemn and dignified; a woman in a long dress sitting on a porch swing and holding a white cat.
“The estate’s selling it,” Irina said. “Seems a bit strange to be in some-body’s house with all their things.”
“Are you considering buying it?” Mia said, wondering how many millions this place would cost. Three? Four?
“Right now, we don’t know,” Irina said, opening the door to the garden. “We told them we’d stay through October. We do like it here, and Lucky has really enjoyed the boating.”
“Maine is a sailor’s paradise,” Brandon said.
“Lucky keeps telling me that,” Irina said, smiling back over her shoulder as she skipped down the stairs. “I tell him, if only it would get warm. He said, ‘Irina, for Maine, this is warm.’”
“In August it may warm up more,” Mia said.
“Well, our last sailing, the only time I’ve really done it before this, it was out of St. Maarten, the Dutch side,” Irina said. “The West Indies, all those beautiful little islands. So warm and the white sand, the blue water, it’s so clear.”
