Black Swan (A Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery)

by Chris Knopf

  I drove around the big limb, crunching over several smaller branches, and turned right onto the street. I heard the pop-pop of a semi-automatic and saw little holes open up in the windshield. I yelled at the Feys to keep their heads down and tried to steer the station wagon with my eyes barely clearing the dashboard.

  After passing the yacht club and gas station, I followed the road around a corner and down into a slight dip. When I got there, the dip was full of seawater blown in from a breach in the shore line of the West Harbor.

  My cursing alerted the Feys, who sat up and looked at the whitecaps racing before the northerly wind.

  "Can we make it?" asked Fey.

  "I don't think so. The car will stall and we'll be stuck in the churn. The current is probably a lot worse than it looks."

  "What're we going to do?" said Anika.

  I didn't know, but before I could admit it, a pickup truck came around the corner and stopped behind the Mercedes, essentially pinning us in place. It was a big truck, modified to achieve unnaturally high road clearance, so when I looked in the rearview mirror, all I saw were headlights and a shimmering grill. I rolled down the left rear window and told Anika to push open the door while staying flat on the rear seat. I got out of the car and dropped to my knees behind the rear door, using the open window as a gun rest. I looked up at the driver of the truck, but saw nothing behind the glaring headlights.

  "Don't shoot, you dumb shit," yelled Anderson Track. "I'm here to help you."

  Anika and Fey climbed into the cab and I pulled the Mercedes off the road. After once again unhooking the cable from the solenoid, I heaved myself up and into the truck bed, now using the raised tailgate to support the .38. There was little likelihood the sheet metal would stop a bullet from one of the mercenary's high-powered weapons, but it was better than nothing.

  Track had hurriedly told me he'd seen us drive by and knew from previous storms that the road was probably cut off by the bay water.

  "I could ford Long Island Sound in this baby," he said, slapping the dashboard.

  He was as good as his word, plunging headlong into the stream, the engine roaring under low gear, a pair of wakes streaming out behind the rear wheels. Moments later, we were across and headed up the hill. I trained the gun on the bend in the road, the possibility of hitting anything rapidly receding. Right before I lost sight of the racing bay water, I thought I saw some movement on the opposite side of the breach, but it was hard to tell in the stormy darkness.

  I fell back down in the bed of the truck and looked up at the sky. There was nothing to see, but I didn't care. I just needed a moment when I wasn't filled with dread, to feel what it was like to be merely anxious and unnerved.

  Track stopped at a stop sign and slid open the rear window.

  "Where to?" he asked.

  "The state barracks," I told him. I wanted to check on Kinuei and be closer to potential communications and firepower. Though attacks on both Poole and Kinuei had been surreptitious, the attackers going unidentified, I couldn't ignore the possibility that Hammon would risk an all-out frontal assault on the police station, given his desperation and loosening hold on logic and reason.

  As we drove around the ferry harbor I could see by my little flashlight that Buchanan's boat was still tied to the dock where I'd left it. It was a relief that someone else hadn't boosted it. Giving the boat back to Buchanan was central to the defense I imagined putting together in the event I got caught.

  The harbor was a mass of whitecaps and waves were dashing against the breakwater, sending spumes ten feet into the air. Track took us past the ferry office and up the short hill to the barracks. I slumped deeper into the bed and tried to keep the salt spray out of my face.

  When we reached the barracks I jumped out of the truck and stuck my head in the door, telling Kinuei not to shoot me. I walked to the holding cell and into the bright beam of his Maglite.

  "How're you doing?" I asked.

  "Better now. The coast guard's bringing out a tech to open this thing up," he said, moving the light away from my face. He held the Glock against his thigh with his other hand. "Who's with you?"

  I told him, then asked how the coasties could get there in the storm.

  "They got a bigger boat."

  I went and retrieved Anika, Eloise and Fey, and asked Track if he wanted to hang with us through the rest of the storm. He shook his head.

  "I gotta go check on my house," he said. "And get some sleep."

  I tried to thank him for what he did, but like Two Trees, he wouldn't let me.

  "I still want all of you off my island," he said, before driving off into the night.

  Inside the barracks, we made ourselves as comfortable as we could. Those of us not in a cell took half-hour watches, alert for any sign of approach. Kinuei shared his provisions and questioned us on what happened. The Feys let me do the talking, so I told him with as much detail as I could, including the shot to Jock's elbow.

  "You held out on me," said Kinuei.

  "You asked me for your guns," I said. "Not all guns."

  For whatever reason, he didn't press me on that, though I had a feeling it was a discussion more deferred than abandoned.

  After the debriefing we sat silently, kept watch and listened to the storm slowly abate. Kinuei said it was predicted to move out of the area by daybreak, which it did, as if all natural forces were choreographed to achieve a total change in conditions.

  And then just to complete the transition, a two hundred foot coast guard cutter sailed into the mouth of the harbor and up to the breakwater below the barracks. Fey and I went outside and offered to grab lines, but they waved us off. With slow precision, the ship eased up against the pilings, which the crew lassoed with massive, braided ropes. A gangplank was deployed and a round civilian in a baseball cap and chartreuse slicker got off accompanied by two enlisted men wearing dark blue uniforms, orange life jackets and sidearms. One carried a little red generator, the other a gas can.

  An officer stood at the railing and watched the procession.

  "How is it out there?" I asked him.

  "Routine, sir," he said.

  I followed the three men into the barracks and watched with the Feys while the civilian opened a little hatch on the electronic combination lock, and jacked in a PC on which he tapped for less than a minute before the door snapped open. Kinuei thanked him as he walked out of the cell and the man nodded without looking up from the computer screen. Before he shut down the laptop he popped out a flash drive and handed it to Kinuei without comment. I wondered if he had vocal chords. Throughout all this the young coasties stood at near attention, wordlessly, allowing themselves only the briefest sidelong glances at Anika, who did the same.

  After the rescue team left, Kinuei wasted little time hooking up the generator, turning on lights and radios, and firing up his desktop computer. Once everything checked out he sat back and sighed with satisfaction.

  "Civilization, baby," he said. "Can't live without it."

  "That's debatable," said Anika.

  Kinuei turned in his chair to look at her.

  "You ready to take a ride, Miss Fey?" he asked.

  "Back to the Swan?"

  "Yup "

  "I've got nowhere else to go," she said.

  "You could stay here," he said, "but I can't protect you if I'm somewhere else."

  "What's your plan?" I asked.

  "We go to the Swan. People could be injured. I have a responsibility to assess the situation."

  I rode shotgun, literally, carrying the Remington in my lap. Anika and Fey sat in back behind a metal grill. For the first time since arriving on the island I felt completely safe. I didn't know if it was the shotgun or the grill. Kinuei took a southerly route, avoiding the washed-out section of road. It took us past Gwyneth's place, which still stood, though the front yard was full of tree debris and a branch had smashed down through a section of fence.

  The sun was now fully aloft and the sky gleamed blue,
the leaves still clinging to the trees looking as if washed by divinity. A breeze blew, still out of the north, but now an emasculated thing that could barely stir the hem of a skirt.

  The first thing we saw of the Swan approaching from this direction was the ruined SUV, and then the Town Car, not surprisingly where they'd been left behind the low hedge. Then we saw the facade of the hotel. Half the roof shingles were peeled away, and most of the shutters were gone, but otherwise the hotel looked straight and sure, provoking a "Thank God" from Christian Fey.

  Kinuei drove his cruiser into the parking lot and stopped next to the dead Fords. He asked me for the shotgun, which I promptly handed over.

  "You don't want to wait for reinforcements?" I asked.

  He looked at me with a mix of anger and resolve.

  "Would you?"

  "At least leave the Feys in the car. Doors locked, engine running. It'll be one less distraction."

  He did me one better, telling them to drive back up the hill and park somewhere out of the way. He switched on the two-way radio and synchronized the channel with his handheld.

  "If I say run, run," he said to Anika as she took the driver's seat. Fey got in next to her. "If you see anything remotely funny, call."

  She nodded and drove off. We stood at the end of the walkway to the front door and looked up at the hotel.

  "What're the odds these people are stupid enough to fire on a state trooper?" he asked me.

  "Anything's possible. This is the Black Swan, home to rampant anomalies."

  "You got that little peashooter handy?" he asked.

  "I do."

  "Okay, I don't know about that. Officially."

  "Okay."

  He led us down the path and through the door into the lobby, calling out, "Police. Come out with your hands where I can see them." He checked the office behind the registration counter, repeating the same line. Which he did several more times as we worked our way through the first floor, finally arriving at the hallway that once connected the kitchen and bar with the restaurant, which had mostly disappeared.

  There were a few sticks of lumber, a small pile of bricks, some broken bottles and a tangled mess of sodden draperies. And that was about it. Beyond the wreckage the narrow patio lay intact, and beyond that stood the docks. Two heavy wooden lounge chairs, apparently salvaged from the storage shed, were on the first dock off the central passageway. Sitting there, facing the Inner Harbor, were Del Rey and Bernard 't Hooft.

  I guided Kinuei back through the hotel and around the west side along the brick path and out to the docks. The Harbor Yacht Club was also still standing, though what looked like a piece of wall from the restaurant lay over one of their floating docks.

  "Good morning," said Trooper Kinuei as we approached the sitting couple. "How're you folks doing?"

  Del Rey shaded her eyes when she looked up at him.

  "Pretty good shape for the shape we're in," she said.

  't Hooft looked at Kinuei's shotgun, then up at Kinuei.

  "You won't be needing that," he said.

  "Where are the others?" Kinuei asked.

  "Where exactly? I have no idea. The last I saw Derrick he was sliding with a piece of wreckage across the patio toward the water and Pierre was sliding along with him, trying to catch Derrick before they reached the water's edge. I lost track of them as my focus was on Del Rey, who I was able to carry to the relative safety of the hotel."

  "He's not kidding when he says carry," said Del Rey. "The man's a bull."

  't Hooft enjoyed that, celebrating with a show of clenched fists and bunched-up shoulder muscles. Del Rey swatted at him as if embarrassed.

  "What about Jock?" I asked.

  't Hooft shook his head.

  "We found him in the bar sewing up a wound in his arm. I offered to help but he told me he was fine. He said it like he was changing a tire or shining his shoes. Jock is one tough son-of-a-bitch, but a little this," he said, twirling a finger around his ear in the universal sign language for nuts.

  Kinuei had more questions to ask, so I excused myself and walked back on to solid ground, over to the pathway that connected the Black Swan with the yacht club.

  The blocky little club building looked mostly undamaged, with windows unbroken and roofing only slightly scarred. But for an overturned picnic table and ravaged message board, the club had come out nearly unscathed. I looked around the grounds for a few moments, then went out on the docks.

  With no boats to be hurtled through the air, or into each other, there was little evidence of the storm, except for the huge slab of devastated building from the restaurant next door, lying like a stricken whale astride one of the docks. I walked out there, mindful of the awkward pitch underfoot, with the dock bent under the weight of the rubble.

  I didn't know why I knew he'd be there, but I did. Face up, arm trapped inside a tangle of framing materials, his head shifting with the gentle wave action, Derrick Hammon looked less like a titan of high technology than the tragic recipient of random bad luck. Tragic but for his role in putting himself there.

  I went back to the Swan to break the news.

  The electricity came back on in the early afternoon. I stayed with Del Rey and the Feys while Kinuei and 't Hooft, later joined by Anderson Track, extricated Hammon's body and wrapped him up in plastic. They finished just in time to greet an ambulance sent over from the mainland, the ferry now up and running again.

  The distant sound of generators was replaced by chain saws and the roads were filled with service vans and pickups stuffed with fresh firewood.

  Two more state troopers came over to relieve Kinuei, who did little to hide his pleasure at their arrival. We gave them descriptions of Jock and Pierre, though it was a little difficult to come up with an offense for which they could be apprehended. By any objective reckoning, the only provable violations of the law since I hit the island were all committed by me. I'd broken into a house, assaulted Derrick Hammon and two security guards, stolen a boat and a revolver, and vandalized two motor vehicles. And shot Jock in the arm, though for that I had a decent defense.

  There was also the matter of Trooper Poole's attack, and Myron Sanderfreud's death, though both had occurred before the mercenaries arrived. They were probably the ones who locked Kinuei up in his own jail, but proving that would be next to impossible. Anyway, the odds were good that Jock and Pierre were already off the island, if not out of the country. Kinuei put out an alert to hospitals within a hundred miles of the island for a young male Caucasian with a bullet wound to the elbow, but had little hope that anything would come of it.

  The Feys had spent the morning assessing the damage to the Swan, most of which was concentrated along the rear wall facing the docks as a result of the restaurant blowing off. This came as no surprise to me, since I'd seen where the sill was heavily reinforced back in the thirties when the Swan got a new foundation. The restaurant, added much later when the hurricane of '38 was a distant memory, was built of far weaker stuff. It was a rough calculation that included wind speed and direction, shoddy joinery and the effects of the wind pressure pushing up under the crawl space, but I had the hope that at least a big diversion had been in the offing.

  What I got was a bit more than that.

  It wasn't until the power was back on and the cops had left that I found myself alone again with Anika. She asked me to help her roll up a carpet in one of the back bedrooms that had seen some water damage. Her father had left to buy lumber and other building materials to begin repairs. After some more questioning by Trooper Kinuei, Del Rey and 't Hooft had left with Hammon's body. Kinuei hadn't asked my opinion, but if he had, I would have told him that 't Hooft wasn't in the game for Hammon, he was in it for Del Rey. That he might be a thug, but he wasn't the one who beat up Trooper Poole. It was Hammon himself, a man whose ambition and self-regard had leached out whatever meager humanity he might have once possessed.

  Anika and I brought the carpet out to the docks where we hung it over a clothe
sline strung between the piers.

  "I haven't been up to the attic yet," she said. We both looked up at the roof, which had lost a lot of shingles, though the old tongue and grove roofers were all still attached. "I'd like it if you came with me."

  "I'd like that, too," I said.

  I followed her back inside and up to the second floor. She opened the door to the attic and I let her hold my hand as we walked up the steep stairwell. She snapped on the lights and we walked over to the painting. It was dry to the touch, unaffected by the water that had seeped in between the roofers. Anika nearly cooed with relief. I was glad the thing had survived, and told her so.

  "That's 'cause you're an art lover," she said. "Or is it because you love me?" she added, turning toward me.

  "I admit you've made an impression," I said.

  "I got to you. I knew I would." She took my hand again and led me over to the bed. "Don't you wonder what it would be like?"

  "I do," I said. "I admit that, too."

  "We've got the place to ourselves," she said.

  "I noticed." She started to pull me down toward the bed, but I stopped her and had her stand in front of me. I put my arms on her shoulders, dug my hands into her luxuriant black hair and drew her face close to mine. "I just want to know one thing."

  "What?" she whispered.

  "Why did you ditch your father the first time I tried to get you out of the Swan?" I whispered back.

  She pulled her face back, and I pulled away my arms, bringing with me the flash drive that had been hung around her neck, having snipped the string with my miniature Swiss Army knife.

  She clutched at her throat, as if the gesture would restore the drive to its former place.

  "What are you talking about?" she asked.