by Bill Eidson
“Nothing to talk about,” Cheever said. But after a moment’s hesitation, he poured the shot.
McGuire said, “Take the wheel, Teri. I’m going to put out the fenders and then we’ll show the senator some of the work we’ve already done together. We’re a more solid team than he thinks.”
“What?” Cheever had downed the first shot and was already pouring himself another. His hands were shaking.
As McGuire headed down the ladder, he heard Cheever say, “Jesus, Teri, you cut me. I’m bleeding.”
She said, quietly, “Shut up, Bobby.”
Alone in the cabin, McGuire took out his cell phone and made a call.
CHAPTER 40
BEN AND SARAH SAW THEM DOCKING THE BOAT.
“What’s this?” Ben said. He raised his night vision binoculars and watched them. The view was greenish and well defined enough so he could recognize the different figures by their relative sizes.
McGuire was walking in front of Cheever. It looked as if he was pointing out different parts of the bridge construction: his body language was cheerful, as if he were giving a tour. Teri came up alongside Cheever and she apparently tried to link her arm in his, but he shook her off.
“Is McGuire holding a gun on him?” Sarah asked.
“No.”
“Can you get us in there?” Ben asked.
“Maybe.” Sarah had kept the running lights off all the time she was following McGuire, and now she brought the engines down to idle speed as they passed the dock where McGuire’s boat had landed. They came upon a barge a few minutes later—a huge, black hulk. Sarah brought the cabin cruiser before the bow of the barge and Ben hopped off and cleated a line to the dock. She backed the boat down, landing it gently. After she shut off the engines they both waited, becoming accustomed to the silence.
“You’d think there would be a security guard here by now asking us what the hell we were doing,” she whispered.
“Let’s move before that happens.” Ben hurried down into the cabin to grab his tripod and camera. He mounted a shorter, faster lens.
“Let’s go,” he whispered. They made their way along the shore back toward McGuire’s sportfisherman, picking their way carefully through the construction debris. The moon was bright enough for them to see the construction equipment, piles of sand and dirt, stacks of corrugated metal, and bundles of rebar. Ben paused alongside a crane, looking up at the light playing over the metal lattice of the big boom. The shadow of the bridge threw half of it into virtually total darkness. The latter portion again became visible past the shadow of the bridge.
From above, the sound of traffic made it difficult to hear anything else.
Ben and Sarah kept moving forward until, closer than they expected, they heard the rattle of rocks, and the faint sound of voices ahead.
They found them underneath one of the massive bridge supports. Sarah and Ben hid alongside a bulldozer. Sarah looked through the night vision binoculars. “It looks like they’re still talking. They’re just standing there, can you see them?”
Ben finished setting up the tripod and peered through the camera. The three of them were under the shadow of the bridge, silhouetted against the Charlestown skyline. Unless they moved forward or back, virtually no details could be made out in the shadows. Not for the first time, he wished he owned a starlight scope that he could mount on his camera. Amplify the light some 85,000 times and make night look like day. But he didn’t, so he’d have to do it the old-fashioned way. He threaded a cable to the shutter release so he could keep the camera shake to a minimum and snapped off a few fast frames of their silhouettes. Then he waited. The silhouettes would prove useful only if he captured identifying shots to go along with them.
Ben’s mouth was sour from tasting all those lies he’d been fed in the past few days.
He had believed the senator.
“Come on, you bastard,” Ben muttered. “Just step a little forward.”
Because just in front of them was all the light Ben would need. If they stepped out of the shadow, he would have the three of them together in the construction site. The moonlight was enough with the 3200 ISO film he was shooting.
But they didn’t move out of the shadow.
Ben decided to take another shot. This time with enough depth of field to capture the skyline in focus as well as their silhouettes. So he stopped down the aperture and set the shutter to open two seconds. He stood straight and had just put the binoculars to his eyes when McGuire raised his right arm.
“Damn,” Ben said.
And a gun went off.
A part of Ben kept cold.
Even though his heart was pounding. Even though he knew the senator had just been killed.
The gun flash would make the exposure, he knew. The gun flash would provide the detail, give light to the faces of all three: the astonished Senator Cheever, his hands barely up to his chest as he tried to ward off the bullet; Teri Wheeler, falling back on one leg, distancing herself. The grim satisfaction evident on McGuire’s face as he held his arm out straight. As he shot the senator in the face.
Sarah cried out. She caught herself immediately. Hand to her mouth.
Ben heard the faint clack as the camera’s mirror fell into place; the motor drive advanced another frame.
He knelt to the camera and peered through at once. Cheever had fallen out of the shadow. A dark spot on his forehead was running black in the moonlight. Ben saw no movement, nothing to suggest the man was still alive.
Ben immediately refocused and set a faster shutter speed as Teri and McGuire stepped into the moonlight. Ben pressed the cable release and captured the three of them: Teri kneeling over Cheever’s body, McGuire standing above her.
The young man was peering in the darkness in the direction of Ben and Sarah. The gun glinted in his hand.
“What a mess,” Teri said. “We better start doing something right, or we’re as dead as he is.”
“They never found Pratt, they’ll never find him.”
Teri said, “This is a U.S. senator, Jimbo—”
“Shut up. I heard something.”
“Come on!” Sarah whispered in Ben’s ear.
Ben scooped the camera and tripod in his arms and then they were moving.
“Hey!” he heard McGuire call from behind them, and then the gun cracked again and there was a whine as the bullet ricocheted off the bulldozer.
Ben did the calculations as they ran. Not only did they have to outrun McGuire to the boat, but they had to get the dock lines off. Get the engines started. Spin the boat around.
There was no way.
No way they were going to make it out on that boat as close as McGuire was on them.
Ben thought of Cindy. Little girl sitting by herself in the living room. Picture of her dead father on the mantelpiece.
Then Ben stumbled, and cried out at the blazing pain in his left ankle. Tearing pain. Goddamn pile of rebar.
“Come on!” Sarah said, grabbing at him. “Let’s go.”
He shoved the tripod and camera into her arms. “Get those lines off and get the boat going. If I’m not there in time to jump on, go to the police—no, to the FBI. Call Ludlow, then Parker.”
“No!”
“Move!” He rasped in a harsh whisper.
“Ben?”
He pushed her. “Do it. Please do it.”
She hesitated, looking past him. “You come running,” she said. “I’m not leaving without you.” She took off for the boat.
Ben could hear McGuire and Teri. “C’mon,” McGuire was saying. “There’s another dock down this way.”
Ben eased a steel rod out from the stack. It was a good ten or twelve feet long. Heavy. Ben had a hard time handling it while kneeling. He laid it out across the path they had been following, and wedged the end furthest from him inside a cinder block. He felt along the ground for something else, some other kind of weapon. First, he found a brick. Then another piece of rod, separate from the stack … and only fou
r feet long or so.
He hefted the weight of it.
Impressive, but not too much to handle. Not likely he was going to do much better.
He threw the brick in the direction that Sarah had run, making a soft clatter among the rocks and weeds. Ben could see her now, in the faint light of the dock, untying the lines.
And then McGuire was upon him, moving faster than Ben had expected. Ben grasped for the long bar, came up with dirt, and then found it as McGuire came around the stack of metal. Ben lifted the bar and caught McGuire in mid-stride, caught him on the back leg.
It was enough.
McGuire went down, but he tucked and rolled and was on his feet almost immediately, the gun extended.
Ben swung the short bar, making it whistle.
He connected solidly with McGuire’s forearm. The guy swore as the gun flickered in the light and fell into the weeds.
Ben wheeled around fast, raising the bar to Teri.
And then spun back around to face McGuire. She had no weapon.
“You,” McGuire said, his voice raising in amazement. “The fucking photographer?” He stood up, holding his right arm.
“God, was he taking pictures?” Teri said. “Did this son-of-a-bitch see you shoot him?”
“How about it, sport?”
“Shut up,” Ben said. “Toss me that phone on your belt.”
“Fuck, no.”
Ben drew the bar back. “Now.”
McGuire shook his head. Grinning. The guy really didn’t look scared. Which was troublesome, because Ben couldn’t see leading him all the way to the cops with just a length of steel.
“Take another swing.” McGuire shook his right hand. “Go ahead—shit, I guess I’ve got to give you one hand behind my back.”
In the distance, Ben could hear the engines on the cabin cruiser come to life.
McGuire used that distraction and moved faster than Ben could have imagined. Glided up and snapped a kick that Ben was able to block from his face only at the last second. The kick threw him off balance. McGuire feinted at doing it again, and laughed when Ben shuffled away. “C’mon, take your shot.”
McGuire’s eyes were sparkling in the moonlight. “You chicken-shit photographer, do something instead of spying from the bushes.”
Ben noticed McGuire had raised his voice. He was also glancing to Ben’s left. Ben told himself that it could be a fake, but his gut told him to look. The fact that no night watchmen had shown up yet still lacked an explanation.
So Ben risked a glance over his shoulder.
And saw two men coming up behind the woman. Both with guns in their hands, both moving along quietly.
Ben turned and heaved the bar at them with all his strength. All three of them ducked, Teri and the two men.
Ben was already running when he heard the satisfying sound of one of the men crying out.
McGuire tried to get in his way, and probably would’ve taken him down if he had both hands. But Ben swung his elbow into the younger man’s face and put him back onto the ground. From behind, gunshots rang out, the rounds whisking through the tall weeds at his side. Ben saw the boat ahead. Sarah had turned it around so it was stern on. He risked a glance back, saw one of the men kneeling to draw a bead, and he threw himself to the ground as a shot rang out again. Then he was on his feet, making for the dock, cutting hard to the left and right, trying to throw them off. He hit the wooden dock fairly flying, his shoulders blades itching for the bullets he expected.
The rear-facing cabin porthole shattered as he dove over the transom. “Go, go, go!” he called to Sarah and she hit both throttles.
The engines roared. As the bow rose, Ben rolled down to the transom and ducked as bullets pocked the cockpit floor. Then the gunmen apparently aimed at Sarah, trying to stop the boat before she got them around the barge.
Ben lay on his back watching her spin the wheel around. She laid the boat over on its side and remained at the wheel even as the Plexiglas windscreen on the flybridge cracked and splintered with two gunshots.
She swung them around the barge.
She looked back at him. “You all right?”
He gave her the thumbs-up and she grinned.
Ben lay back, regaining his breath. His camera lay in the cockpit where she dropped it. He pulled it over. Rewound the film. Put the roll in his pocket. He disengaged the tripod and put the camera strap around his neck before climbing the ladder to the flybridge.
She had been watching him. “You get the shots?”
“Sure did.” He patted his pocket. “We’ve got them.”
CHAPTER 41
SARAH KEPT THE RUNNING LIGHTS OFF AND THEY LOOPED PAST THE bridge and ran parallel to the shoreline of Boston. Speed Dreams was gaining in the distance, a dark shape against the lights of Charlestown.
The wind whipped Sarah’s hair about her face as she looked over her shoulder. She pushed the throttles, but there was nothing left to give. “We’re not going to last long on the water.”
Ben swept the shoreline with the binoculars. “Right there, then. There’s an open dock at the Charthouse.”
She put the wheel over. “This is going to be rough.”
She headed straight in and spun the wheel at the last minute, banging the boat hard against the dock. The two of them slid down the flybridge ladder and were jumping off the boat just as Speed Dreams roared up behind them, huge in the glow of dock lights. Ben looked back to see a tall, bony-looking man bracing a pistol on the rail.
He fired and the bow of the motorsailer beside Ben suddenly grew a hole about the size of a dime.
Ben pushed Sarah’s head down and they ran hunched over.
There were people on the dock, and although some turned at the sound of the gunshot, no one seemed to recognize it for what it was. “Please slow down, sir,” a dock boy said as Ben and Sarah ran around him to the ramp.
Ben risked a look back to see McGuire wheeling the big boat around, momentarily flummoxed by the drifting cabin cruiser.
Sarah grabbed Ben’s hand. “Come on.”
They hurried to the taxi circle in front of the Marriott Long Wharf and slid into the backseat of the first cab. “Let’s go, let’s go,” Sarah said.
The driver looked at the camera still clutched in Ben’s hand and then turned to slip the cab into gear. “Tourists,” he said.
The two of them leaned back a moment after the cab pulled into traffic. No one was following them so far. Ben gave the cabby the address of Insider.
Ben saw Sarah still had her cell phone clipped to her belt. “Good going.”
She handed it to him.
Ben stared at the phone for a few seconds, thinking. It was certainly time to bring the cops in, but he still didn’t trust Brace or Randall. Parker, he trusted. And Ludlow was Parker’s man.
After sliding the window shut between them and the cabby, he found Ludlow’s card in his wallet and dialed the number.
Ben looked at his watch as the phone rang. Almost nine.
He gave Ludlow’s extension. After the phone rang four times, he was about to hang up when Ludlow himself answered.
Ben gave his name and said, “Sit down and get a pen and paper. You’re going to want this.” And he told Ludlow what they had seen.
“Jesus Christ,” Ludlow said. “Senator Cheever? Are you sure?”
“Positive. And I’ve got it on film. We’re heading to Insider to print the shots right now. You coordinate with the cops, all right? I’ve heard stuff about Brace and Randall, but I don’t know if it’s true.”
“I’ve heard shit, too,” Ludlow said. “After they blew the thing with Lee Sands, I started asking around. What I hear is incompetence more than corruption. But I’ll get my own team on this, and we’ll coordinate with them later.”
“Better get them going right now. I’d guess that McGuire is on his way back there on his boat to collect the body, dump it at sea.”
“Tell me again where to find Cheever’s body.”
Ben gave Ludlow detailed directions. He could hear the scratch of pencil on paper over the phone.
“What’s the name of McGuire’s boat?”
Ben told him, and gave him a description. “Of course, the guys that showed up to help out McGuire could’ve taken Cheever somewhere by car.’’
“Jesus,” Ludlow said. “Why’d McGuire do it?”
“The way I see it, he and Cheever had some sort of falling out and McGuire must’ve called his guys from the boat and told them to meet him.”
“If you thought that, we sure could’ve used this call back then,” Ludlow said. “Maybe the senator would still be alive.”
“I know,” Ben said, tiredly. “I thought we were watching a payoff. We never saw the gun until the moment he killed him.”
“Explain that to his widow and kids.”
“I will,” Ben snapped. “And I’ll explain how if the FBI kept their investigations open on McGuire, you’d have been there yourself.”
There was silence on the end of the line.
Ben took a deep breath, and then started again. “I think McGuire was going to dump Cheever at the site itself. There was some new construction underway and he could’ve been buried and left to be covered with cement the next day.”
“I suppose,” Ludlow said. “Yeah, I guess there’s not much chance they’d stick with that plan now.”
“Look, the film is the evidence,” Ben said. “You go look for McGuire and I’ll get that ready. Meet us at Insider. Also, we’re going to need protection on my family and on Sarah’s daughter.”
“Sure.” Ludlow took their addresses down and Sarah’s cell phone number. When he was done, he said, “I’ll say this, Harris—you and Taylor got yourselves a hell of a story.”
Ben thought of Cheever, sitting drunk and defiant in Ben’s studio. Talking about his honor and how he still loved his wife and two boys. Ben had believed him then. Now, even with the evidence to the contrary encapsulated in the little black canister in his pocket, Ben realized he still believed the man. At least about the wife and kids.
Ben said, “Lucky us.”
