Salvage

by Stephen Maher

  Annabelle hugged him when he stepped up onto the Isenors’ porch, and pulled him into the house. Charlie was sitting at the kitchen table, with a disassembled gearbox spread out in front of him on newspapers.

  “There’s our jailbird!” he shouted. “They let you out of the big house, did they?”

  Scarnum smiled. “I told them before we left that it wasn’t cocaine,” he said. “I put a bit of baking soda in a pillbox to use cleaning a winch on the Cerebus. I told them it weren’t cocaine but they didn’t believe me until we were down at the detachment.”

  “I told them!” said Annabelle, hugging Scarnum’s lean body against her generous bosom.

  “I told that maudite Québécoise constable that you weren’t the type to mess around with drugs.”

  “She gave her a good going-over,” said Charlie, giggling. “I didn’t understand a word, but it didn’t sound good.”

  “I told her!” said Annabelle. “The idea that Phillip could be mixed up with something like that! I told her she should be out catching real criminals, not locking up an honest boy.”

  Scarnum looked out the window at the empty mooring where the Kelly Lynn had been.

  “They took her away, did they?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Charlie. “They brought in Steve Oikle to tow it away. Wouldn’t even let him on the deck. Took it down to the town wharf. Gerald told me they got a Mountie sitting watch on it.”

  Scarnum nodded. “Terrible thing that happened to Jimmy Zinck,” he said. “Makes my skin crawl to think he might have been killed on the boat not long before I went through the ledges.”

  Charlie nodded at that. “Terrible thing,” he said. “Now, we don’t know the whole story, what he might have been mixed up in, but whatever it was, it sure didn’t end up too good for him. I wouldn’t be surprised to find there was drugs behind this.”

  Scarnum nodded. “Awful business,” he said. He looked out the window.

  “Well,” he said. “I guess I’d better go down there and see what kind of mess they made aboard Orion.”

  “I’ll walk down with you,” said Charlie.

  Scarnum gave Annabelle a hug and a kiss and the two men walked down to Scarnum’s boat.

  It was a mess inside, with all Scarnum’s sailing gear and tools pulled out of the drawers and cupboards where he’d stowed them.

  “Holy Christ,” said Charlie, surveying the mess. “Hard to believe you have this much shit on the boat. Want a hand cleaning it up?”

  “No thanks,” said Scarnum. “You wouldn’t know where anything goes.”

  Charlie laughed at that and turned to leave.

  Scarnum stopped him. “Charlie,” he said. “You remember last night when I said I was going out to have a look at the Kelly Lynn?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “In the end, I decided not to bother and I went to bed,” he said.

  Charlie looked him up and down. “I kinda thought that you might of decided not to go out and have a look,” he said.

  Scarnum looked away.

  “I’ll tell you something, Phillip,” said Charlie, suddenly speaking with a serious voice that Scarnum had never heard him use. “I’ve lived here my whole life, and I’ve managed to do that without getting mixed up with the kind of fucking people who settle their arguments with machine guns. I’d just as soon it stayed that way. Whoever killed that jackass Zinck wasn’t funning. What you’re doing is your business, and I don’t mean to stick my nose in it, but I can tell you Annabelle would be upset if you were to turn up full of holes.”

  He locked eyes with Scarnum for a moment, and Scarnum nodded.

  “And I’d lose one of my paying customers here,” Charlie said, and giggled, and left.

  The digital clock next to Scarnum’s V-berth said that it was 2:30 a.m. when he was awoken by the sound of a car grinding to a stop in the gravel by the dock. By 2:32 he was on his feet in his underwear, on deck, holding a long hunting knife, hunched down behind the cabin of his boat, peeking at the car.

  When Angela Rodenhiser got out of the driver’s side, he slipped back down through the hatch on the deck before she saw him.

  He stowed the knife and watched her through a porthole as she marched toward the boat, with her purse over her shoulder and a bottle of vodka in her hand.

  She stood on the dock in her miniskirt and banged the bottle against the deck of his boat.

  “Phillip, you cocksucker,” she said. “I want some fucking answers. Come out here, you bastard. I want some fucking answers.”

  He opened the hatch into the cockpit and called out to her in a whisper. “Angela, shh,” he said. “You’ll wake Annabelle.”

  It took her a minute to spy him in the darkness under the boom.

  She staggered back and fixed him with her bleary eyes and burst into tears. “Oh, Phillip, they killed Jimmy,” she said. “And you’re mixed up in it. Tell me you didn’t kill him.”

  Scarnum stepped onto the dock, took her in his arms, and told her that of course he had nothing to do with it. He brought her into the cabin and sat her down and got her a bottle of water, which she ignored. She took a drink of vodka from the bottle.

  Scarnum went into the forward cabin and pulled on a T-shirt and jeans.

  When he came back, Angela was leaning forward, shaking her head from side to side vigorously, and crying. “They killed him. They killed him.”

  Scarnum sat next to her and put his arm around her. Very slowly, repeating himself often, he told her how he had come across the boat on the rocks. He told her he didn’t know that Jimmy was on the boat until the cops told him he’d been killed. He told her the police had arrested him, thinking he had some cocaine, but that it was really baking soda in a pillbox.

  She pushed him away when he was finished and held him at arm’s length.

  “Tell me honestly,” she said, and suddenly she seemed almost sober. “You didn’t have anything to do with killing him. You’re not mixed up with those Mexicans.”

  He looked straight back at her. “Honestly,” he said, letting her look into his eyes, “on the soul of my dead mother, I had nothing to do with killing him. I have nothing to do with any Mexicans.”

  She didn’t let go. “And you didn’t kill him so that you could be with me,” she said. “Tell me that. You didn’t kill him so you could have me.”

  “Angela,” he said. “No. No. No. You know me. I don’t want a woman, not even you. If I’d a wanted to take you away from him, the first thing I’d a done is asked you.”

  She hugged him then and held him tight for a long time, crying. He stroked her tangled brown hair and told her she’d be all right.

  When she finished crying, she reached for her purse and pulled out a little Baggie full of cocaine.

  Scarnum watched her load up a finger full and snort it.

  Her eyes suddenly got wide and she looked at him as if for the first time that night. “Phillip,” she said. “I need you to fuck me now.”

  Before he could say anything she was taking off her top, then her skirt, so that she stood in front of him in her black bra and panties.

  He stuttered and tried to tell her she was too drunk.

  “Shut the fuck up,” she said and pulled off her bra. “I don’t want your fucking opinion. I want your cock,” and she grabbed him through his jeans.

  She picked up the cocaine and poured a pinch on her left nipple. She stood, careful not to spill, and put it under his nose.

  Scarnum snorted it, and when he was finished he sucked on her nipple. The coke made his head sing, and he felt the blood in his eyes throbbing in time with his heart. She pulled his head up and kissed him, and she took off his shirt. He snorted coke off her other nipple, then she undressed him, and did a line off his hard penis. Then she sucked it.

  She closed her eyes while he moved in her — stretched back naked below him on the settee, with her legs spread wide, her knees pulled up to her chest, and her arm covering her face. It was as if she was trying to hide
, Scarnum thought. She wanted an orgasm, but she was so full of vodka and cocaine that it was hard for her to get there. He moved urgently, and roughly rubbed at her, while she encouraged him with grunts. When she finished with a spasm, it came as a relief to him, and he let himself go and collapsed on top of her.

  When he regained his breath, he asked her, “What Mexicans?”

  She grunted.

  “You asked me if I was mixed up with the Mexicans,” he said. “What Mexicans? Was Jimmy involved with some Mexicans?”

  But she ignored his question and started crying again, and again covered her face with her arm.

  “Oh, Phillip,” she said. “I’m a bad person. Oh, oh, oh. A very bad person.”

  She made it into a little song. “I’m a very bad person.” And she started to cry again.

  He pulled her head onto his chest and cradled her again, comforting her. “You’re not a bad person, Angela,” he said. “You just needed to get fucked up, then you needed to get fucked, that’s all. It’s understandable. You just found out your man was murdered.”

  She laughed bitterly. “Phillip, I’m pregnant. I’m three months pregnant and I’m drunk and coked up, and I don’t even know if the baby is Jimmy’s or yours, and Jimmy’s fucking dead and I just came over here to fuck you.”

  Scarnum absorbed that for a minute. “Yuh,” he finally said. “I guess you are a bad person.”

  She laughed then, and looked at him through all her tears. She had cried so much and so hard that the heavy mascara around her beautiful green eyes was smeared like a raccoon’s mask, and mucous dripped from the end of her perfect ski-slope nose. He wiped her face and she hugged him and he told her it would be all right, and this time she seemed to believe him.

  He lit smokes for them and asked her again about the Mexicans.

  “I don’t really know,” she said. “Just after Christmas Jimmy started to have a lot more money. I mean, he always made pretty good money from the fishing, but he spent it as fast as he earned it. You know what he was like. Always had to have a new truck, new TV, new clothes, coke, liquor. He’d go in to town and blow a few grand on the strippers. Then he suddenly had a lot more money, and a lot more coke. He wouldn’t tell me where he got it.

  “One night when he come home drunk, I went at him, asking him over and over again. Drunk as he was, he wouldn’t say nothing. Finally, I asked him why he wouldn’t tell me. He said, ‘I tell anyone and the Mexicans find out, I’ll be fucking dead as a doughnut.’ When he realized what he’d said, he got right scared-looking and made me promise I’d keep my mouth shut. I never told nobody until tonight.”

  Scarnum asked her how come he was fishing alone on the night he was killed.

  “I’ve been wondering that,” she said. “It’s weird, isn’t it? He never fished alone. It’s not safe.”

  She told Scarnum that Jimmy usually fished with a guy named Doug Amos, who lived in a trailer in the woods behind Western Shore.

  Scarnum cut up two thin lines of Angela’s coke, and they each snorted one, and they each took a drink of vodka.

  “Angela,” said Scarnum. “If you want, I’ll try to find out who killed Jimmy. I’ll do that for you, but I want you to do something for me. I want you to stop drinking and snorting coke until you have the baby.”

  She started crying then and called him a fucking jerk, and said of course she wasn’t going to drink or get coked up while she was pregnant, but not because he said so.

  “And you can’t come around here anymore,” he said. “So far as I know, nobody knows that you and I have been fucking. The cops already think I might have had something to do with Jimmy getting killed. If they knew I was fucking you, they might just lock me up. So you got to stay away from me until I figure this shit out. Find someone else to fuck if you have to.”

  She cried again and slapped him and called him a prick.

  “I’m sorry,” he said and hugged her again. “But that’s the situation we’re in. If you really need to see me, call Charlie and leave a message.”

  He made her get dressed then and leave, so nobody would see her car parked next to his boat in the morning.

  He kissed her and hugged her and told her that he loved her, and told her everything was going to be OK.

  As she walked to the car, he called to her from the deck of his boat. “Angela,” he said.

  She stopped to look at him. Her beautiful face was in the darkness, but the light from a street lamp shone through her dark curls.

  “Do you think the baby’s Jimmy’s?”

  She laughed at him. “Phillip, I don’t have a fucking clue.”

  And she got in her car and drove away, tires spinning gravel.

  Sunday, April 25

  DOUG AMOS’S TRAILER WAS the nicest one on the dirt road that ran from Gold River into the pine and hardwoods inland.

  It had a built-on porch covered with vinyl siding, a big painted deck with the footings hidden behind a trellis. There was a big new Ford truck and a rusted Hyundai sedan in the driveway. A little pink bicycle lay on its side next to the driveway. Between the trailer and the woods behind, there was a vegetable garden.

  A clothesline ran from the trailer to a post near the garden. A chain was attached to the clothesline, and a big German shepherd was attached to the chain. It barked at Scarnum’s truck and lunged, yanking the clothesline so it rattled.

  Scarnum sat in the truck and waited. He saw a curtain move and a woman’s face peek out. Then a man’s face came to the window.

  Doug Amos didn’t look too friendly when he eventually came out. He had a black moustache and was wearing a red and black lumberjack coat, track pants, rubber boots, a plastic ball cap, and a scowl.

  Scarnum rolled down his window. The dog kept barking and lunging.

  “What can I do for you?” the man called from the deck.

  Scarnum got out of the truck. “I come to talk to you about Jimmy,” he said. “Angela sent me.”

  Amos just stared at him for a minute, then turned to the dog and yelled, “King! Shut the fuck up.”

  He lifted a broken hockey stick from the porch and walked toward the dog, raising it in the air over his head. “King! Shut the fuck up!”

  Seeing the stick, the dog whimpered and its tail went down. It slunk away toward the garden, looking back over its shoulder.

  Amos walked down off the porch, still holding the hockey stick. Scarnum didn’t reach out to shake his hand.

  “My name’s Phillip Scarnum,” he said. “I’m a friend of Angela’s. She’s awful upset about Jimmy.”

  He stopped there, and the two men stood silently in the driveway, each looking in different directions.

  “Terrible thing,” said Amos.

  “Yuh,” said Scarnum, and he waited a minute. “She’s carrying his baby,” he said and he looked at Amos full-on. “Kid’s going to grow up without a daddy.”

  Amos kept looking away, off down the dirt road, as if he was expecting someone. “Yuh,” he said. “Terrible thing.”

  “What Angela wants to know,” said Scarnum. “Is why Jimmy was out on that goddamned boat by himself. She wants to know why you weren’t with him. You two usually fished together.”

  Amos turned to him and Scarnum could see he was very angry.

  “Well,” he said. “You can tell her he was alone because that’s the way he goddamn well wanted it. Tell her he asked me to call in sick so’s he could go out alone.”

  The dog sat up and started barking again, tentatively this time. Amos turned and brandished the stick. “King! I told you to shut the fuck up!”

  The dog fell silent.

  Scarnum said, “Why’d you suppose he wanted to go out alone? Who wants to go out fishing alone?”

  Amos shook his head. “I didn’t ask him,” he said. “Wasn’t my business to ask him, I thought.”

  Scarnum looked at him. “Did he pay you to call in sick?”

  Amos nodded his head. “Said he’d pay me like normal if I stayed home,”
he said and smiled. “I laughed at him. Told him I’d be glad to stay home and make the same money I’d make on the boat. Told me to keep my mouth shut about it, tell anyone who asked that I called in sick. I did. Wasn’t my business. Anyone would take that deal.”

  Amos’s smile went away as quickly as it had appeared. “You can tell Angela I wouldn’t mind paying the money back,” he said. “Seeing as how things ended up. It would take me a while to get it together, though. I got another one of my own on the way, but we could work it out. I don’t feel too good about the money now.”

  Scarnum shook his head. “I’ll tell Angela what you said, but I don’t think she’d want that. I guess you held up your end of the deal. It’s not your fault that Jimmy … was the way he was. Angela don’t blame you for nothing. She knows he must have been in some kind of trouble. She just wants to know what happened, and the cops aren’t saying nothing.”

  “Well, I don’t know any more than what I told you,” said Amos. “He wanted me to call in sick, so I did.”

  “How many times?” said Scarnum.

  Amos looked at him. “Five times, I think. First time was just before Christmas.”

  “Did he ever give you any kind of clue what he was doing out there on his own?” asked Scarnum.

  “Nope,” said Amos, and he looked down at his feet. “They say some fellows, I won’t say who, now, but they say there are some fellows who steal lobsters from other fellows’ traps. Coulda been something like that, I suppose. I didn’t think it was any of my business.”

  Scarnum held out his hand now and Amos shook it.

  “You got no cause to blame yourself for this,” said Scarnum. “I don’t know what Jimmy was into but whatever it was, you didn’t tell him to do it.”

  When Scarnum got in the truck, Amos said, “I want you to tell Angela that if she wants for anything — some wood for the winter, some groceries, whatever — we’d be proud to help out.”

  Scarnum put the truck in reverse. “I’ll tell her,” he said. “Thank you.”

  On the way down the dirt road, a Mountie car passed him going the other way. Léger was behind the wheel. Scarnum looked out the passenger window as he drove by, but he was pretty sure the Mountie saw him.