Gray Ghost

by William G. Tapply

  “Aren’t you supposed have a radio aboard?”

  Calhoun shrugged. “Antenna’s busted.” He didn’t bother telling his client that he never brought a radio on board. He couldn’t think of a reason why he’d want to talk to somebody while he was fishing, and he certainly didn’t want anybody trying to talk to him.

  He snapped his fingers at Ralph and headed back to the boat.

  With all of the Honda motor’s forty horses galloping full speed, it took about twenty minutes to cross the bay to the boat landing in Portland. Judging by the angle of the sun, Calhoun figured it was a little after seven thirty. They’d been on the water about three hours, caught some fish, and now they’d found a dead body. An eventful morning.

  He wondered if Paul Vecchio would write a story about it.

  There were some other fishermen and a few guides launching their boats, and Calhoun had to wait a few minutes before there was a spot where he could pull up and tie off.

  “Go fetch your cell phone for me,” Calhoun told Vecchio.

  Vecchio nodded, hopped out of the boat, and set off at a jog for the parking lot.

  One of the other guides, an older guy they called Beaney, came over and squatted beside Calhoun’s boat. “You packin’ it in already, Stoney?”

  “My sport forgot something in his car,” Calhoun said.

  “You catch the tide this mornin’?”

  Calhoun nodded.

  “How was it?”

  “Damn good on the incoming. Pretty quiet when she went slack. You’re gettin’ here kinda late, Beaney, you want to put your clients into some fish.”

  “I got city folks in my boat today,” said Beaney. He smiled con-spiratorially, guide to guide, showing Calhoun his stumpy black teeth. “They didn’t want to miss out on their beauty sleep. I told ‘em no later than five, but you know how it is. So where was you finding emr

  Calhoun waved his arm, including the whole of Casco Bay. “Oh, out around them islands, mostly. But I reckon they’ve moved by now.”

  Beaney frowned and stood up. “There ain’t many secrets out there, Stoney.”

  That’s what you think, thought Calhoun.

  Paul Vecchio came trotting back. He handed his cell phone down to Calhoun, who was still sitting in his boat with Ralph.

  Calhoun skimmed down through the list of phone numbers in his memory, found Sheriff Dickman’s home phone under S, pecked out the numbers, and hit the Send button.

  It rang three times and a woman’s voice answered.

  “Hey, Jane,” said Calhoun, “that you?”

  “Stoney Calhoun,” she said. “Trouble, no doubt.”

  “Yep. It’s me. I got to talk to your old man.”

  “He’s in the John,” she said. “Can’t it wait?”

  “Nope. This is pretty important.”

  “Okay. If you say so. I’ll take you to him. He ain’t gonna like it. You doing okay ?”

  “Doing good,” he said. “You?”

  “Aside from having to put up with that crabby old husband of mine, I’m just fine. Okay, here we are. Hang on a minute.”

  Calhoun heard Jane say something, and then the sheriff said, “Jesus Christ, Stoney. What’s so damn important you’ve got to interrupt a man in the middle of an important business transaction?”

  Calhoun chuckled and said, “Damn sorry about this.” He turned his head away. He didn’t want any of the other guides and fishermen who were bustling around on the dock to hear what he had to say. “We got us a dead body, Sheriff,” he said softly. “Ralph and my client found it out on Quarantine Island, and it’s burned way the hell beyond recognition. It don’t look to me like he died of natural causes, though I suppose he could’ve got zapped by lightning. I think you better come take a look.”

  Sheriff Dickman was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “You sure about this, Stoney?”

  “Hell, yes, I’m sure.”

  “Sometimes you imagine things, you know. Remember that time when Lyle—”

  “I know what I saw, Sheriff.”

  Dickman sighed. “I suppose you do. You tell anybody else?”

  “Just you,” said Calhoun.

  “Where are you now?”

  “The East End boat ramp. Meet me here. I’ll run you over there, you can see for yourself.”

  “A dead body, huh? I s—pose I ought to give the Portland police a heads-up.”

  “How about you wait on that,” said Calhoun. “I don’t think this poor soul’s gonna be going anywhere for a while.”

  The sheriff hesitated, then said, “Okay, Stoney. We’ll do it your way. Just sit tight. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Now let me finish what I started here.”

  Calhoun disconnected with the sheriff and handed the phone back to Paul Vecchio. “I brought sandwiches,” he said. “Ham and cheese.”

  Vecchio shook his head. “I’m not hungry. I could use some more coffee, though.”

  Calhoun poured each of them a mugful from his Stanley Thermos, and they waited there at the landing sipping coffee and watching the other boats set off.

  “So I guess we’re done fishing for today, huh?” said Vecchio.

  “I don’t know,” said Calhoun. “Depends on how long it takes with the sheriff. You can hang around if you want. Soon as we’re done out there, we can fish some more.”

  Vecchio shook his head. “It’s my own fault for insisting we take a break. If we hadn’t stopped at Quarantine Island …”

  Calhoun shrugged. “We had the best of it. Would’ve spent the rest of the day workin’ hard for ‘em. You’d’ve had to cast your arm off for a few more fish.”

  “You trying to make me feel better?”

  Calhoun shook his head. “Nope. I’d never try to do that. You can go ahead, feel however you want to feel.”

  Vecchio smiled. “Why don’t I pay you now. What do I owe you?” He took his wallet out of his hip pocket.

  Calhoun noticed that the man’s wallet was thick with bills. He shook his head. “You owe me nothing. We’ll go again, have ourselves a full trip. We weren’t out there long enough this morning to pay me for anything.”

  “Hell,” said Vecchio, “that was about the best fishing I ever had.”

  “We’ll do it again,” said Calhoun. “You can pay me then.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Well,” said Vecchio, “thank you.”

  Sheriff Dickman’s green Ford Explorer with the county sheriff’s department logo on the side pulled into the lot about ten minutes later. Calhoun got out of his boat and walked up the ramp to meet him.

  The sheriff was a short, solid man with a barrel chest and a bald head and pale blue eyes that always seemed to be laughing at something. He was wearing his tan-colored uniform with his holster on his hip and his flat-brimmed Smokey the Bear hat, and when he came across the parking lot with Ralph trotting along beside him, all the guides and fishermen turned and watched him.

  Calhoun shook hands with him.

  “Let’s keep this quiet, Stoney,” said the sheriff. “Last thing we need is everybody with a boat swarming all over Quarantine Island.”

  “Keeping things quiet comes naturally to me,” said Calhoun. He turned, and he and the sheriff went down the ramp to his boat.

  He introduced the sheriff to Paul Vecchio, who was sitting on the front seat of the boat sipping his coffee. The sheriff shook Vec-chio’s hand, then said, “You’re in my seat.”

  Vecchio looked at Calhoun. “I was hoping I could tag along.”

  Calhoun shrugged. “Up to the sheriff.”

  Dickman shook his head. “Sorry.”

  Vecchio smiled at the sheriff. “I’d really like to go. I’ll stay out from underfoot, I promise.”

  “You’ve got to stay here,” Dickman said.

  Vecchio arched his eyebrows at Calhoun.

  “He’s the boss,” said Calhoun, nodding at the sheriff.

  “Yeah, but you’re the captain of the ship.” Vecchi
o was smiling, but he sounded pissed to Calhoun.

  “Okay, then,” said Calhoun. “Put it this way. The captain orders you to go ashore.”

  Vecchio shrugged. “Well, shit, anyway.” He climbed out of the boat, then held it steady while first the sheriff and then Calhoun climbed in. “We’ll go out again, I hope,” he said to Calhoun.

  “I owe you one,” said Calhoun. He started up the motor. “Give me a call.” He waved at Vecchio, then backed away from the landing, turned the bow to the bay, and headed for Quarantine Island. When he looked back, Paul Vecchio was standing there with his hands on his hips watching them go. Calhoun lifted his hand, but Vecchio just turned around and trudged up the ramp to the parking lot.

  He drove the boat full-bore, following the chart in his head, sticking to the channels between the islands, avoiding the submerged rocks and sandbars.

  Ralph sat on the bottom of the boat, his ears perked up and his nose lifted to the wind, and Sheriff Dickman sat up front facing forward. He held his hat in his hand so it wouldn’t blow away, and the low-angled morning sun ricocheted off his bald head.

  As they cleared Great Chebeague, the sheriff pointed off to the left where a swarm of birds were working a patch of water. Calhoun had taken the sheriff fishing a couple of times, not as guide and client but just as a couple of friends, and he knew that Dickman was a skilled and enthusiastic fisherman, though his bum shoulder made fly casting so painful that he usually used a spinning rod.

  When Quarantine Island appeared ahead, Calhoun throttled down so he and the sheriff could hear each other. “That’s it, up ahead,” he said. “Where that body is.”

  The sheriff turned and looked at Calhoun. “Go past it,” he said, “then circle around, come back.”

  Calhoun shrugged. “Whatever you say.”

  “I just want to be sure nobody’s following us,” he said. “If there’s some dead body here—”

  “There is a body,” said Calhoun.

  The sheriff smiled. “Right. I meant, since we got this here dead body, I don’t want a bunch of nosy people leaving footprints and Big Mac wrappers at our crime scene.”

  Calhoun scanned the ocean. “I don’t see any boats tailing us.”

  “Just to be safe,” said Dickman, “circle around it.”

  So Calhoun did it the sheriff’s way. He putted around the island, watching for other boats, and when he saw none, he nosed the boat ashore on the same patch of sand where he’d landed with Paul Vecchio an hour earlier.

  The sheriff climbed out and pulled up the boat. Ralph hopped out and headed for where he remembered the body was.

  Calhoun got out, tied the boat onto a rock, and said, “It’s over this way.”

  They pushed through the underbrush and climbed over the rocks, and then Calhoun was pointing at the crusty blackened body leaning against the old concrete foundation.

  Dickman went over, bent close to the body, and studied it for a minute. Then he straightened up, blew out a breath, and went back to where Calhoun was standing. “Well,” he said, “we got ourselves a dead body, all right.”

  Calhoun smiled.

  “Sorry for doubting you, Stoney.”

  “I guess you got a right to.”

  The sheriff shrugged. “I better secure the area and tell the Portland cops what we’ve got. Assuming we’ve got a crime and this is the scene of it.”

  “Oh, it’s a crime scene, all right,” said Calhoun. “But you ain’t going to find anything.”

  The sheriff looked sideways at Calhoun, then took out a cell phone and made a call.

  Calhoun sat on a rock. Ralph came over and lay on the ground beside him.

  When the sheriff was done with his call, he came over and sat beside Calhoun. “You looked around for evidence already? That what you’re saying?”

  Calhoun shrugged. “I wasn’t actually looking. I just noticed, without thinkin’ about it. There are no footprints that don’t belong to me or Mr. Vecchio. You’re not going to find any cigarette butts, or shreds of fabric, or paint scrapings on the rocks. Whatever didn’t get burned, the rain washed away. I admit I kind of avoided lookin’ too closely at that body. You observe anything about it?”

  The sheriff shook his head. “It’s hard to look at, all right. Judging by the smell, it’s been dead for quite a few days.”

  Calhoun nodded. “More like a couple weeks.”

  “You figure that by the smell ?”

  Calhoun shrugged.

  “This is not a case of self-immolation,” said the sheriff. “We got ourselves a murder.”

  “Looks that way,” said Calhoun.

  “Because?”

  “Because this man didn’t come out here alone,” said Calhoun. “There’s no boat pulled up anywhere, and we’d’ve heard at the shop if somebody found an empty boat drifting on Casco Bay in the past couple weeks. Quarantine is too far from any other island for a person to swim to, never mind swimming while carrying a five-gallon jug of gasoline with you. No empty gas can lying around, either. So I assume somebody drove him out here, and whoever it was, they at least helped him do this and took the can back with them. More likely, they drove him out here against his will and set the poor soul afire.” Calhoun paused. “Which means there were two other people with him.”

  The sheriff nodded. “Two,” he said.

  “You see?” said Calhoun.

  “I’m listening.”

  “One to drive the boat,” said Calhoun, “and one to keep this poor fella under control.”

  “Assuming our dead man did not want to be turned into a marshmallow on a stick,” said the sheriff.

  “Assuming he was murdered, you mean,” said Calhoun. “I don’t assume it. I know it.”

  “You know.”

  “I know.”

  “That damn sixth sense of yours?”

  Calhoun shrugged. “It’s the only thing that makes sense, when you think about it. You want to commit suicide, you don’t pour gasoline on yourself, light a match, and not even tell anybody or leave a note. People who set themselves on fire, they’re making a statement. You want to make some kind of statement, you don’t do it on a deserted island. And if all you want to do is just end your life, you shoot yourself or swallow some pills or jump off a bridge.”

  Now the sheriff was smiling. “What else, Stoney? You know who did it? You got this crime solved for me?”

  Calhoun shook his head. “Not me, Sheriff.”

  “You think like a cop. You know that?”

  “I guess I do. I guess I used to be some kind of cop.”

  “Before …”

  “You mean before I got hit by lightning and had everything zapped out of my brain?” Calhoun waved the subject away with the back of his hand. “All I can tell you for sure is, I’m not a cop anymore, and I don’t want to be. I just want to hang out with my dog, sleep in my cabin in the woods, listen to the birds sing and my brook gurgle, split and stack firewood, and maybe go fishing once in a while.”

  “So what’s it like, Stoney? Having your memory only go back five or six years?”

  Calhoun shrugged. “It’s all right, I guess. I got nothing to compare it to. I don’t feel much like talking about it. It’s not very interesting to talk about.”

  Dickman nodded. “Sorry. I don’t mean to get nosy.” He stood up. “Let’s go down to the boat. The Portland police should be here pretty soon.”

  Within half an hour, Quarantine Island was swarming with boats and local cops and state cops and photographers and forensics experts. The local medical examiner, a young female doctor wearing chino pants and a blue T-shirt and white sneakers, was there toting an old-fashioned black bag and looking amused by the whole thing. She was tall and gangly with a disorganized tangle of red hair and a cynical smile. Her name was Dr. Surry. Calhoun heard people calling her Sam.

  Calhoun made sure Sheriff Dickman had a ride back, and then he and Ralph got in his boat and returned to the landing, where he trailered the boat and then drove over to K
ate’s shop.

  He still thought of the shop as Kate’s, even though they had gone fifty-fifty partners a year earlier. They weren’t doing much better than breaking even. Calhoun didn’t care about making a pile of money, but he wanted the shop to succeed because it was important to Kate.

  When he walked in, she was behind the counter talking with a couple of customers, a white-haired man and a younger woman who seemed to be interested in some shirts. Calhoun caught Kate’s eye. She looked up, glanced at the clock on the wall, gave him a frown, then resumed her conversation with the customers.

  As always happened when he saw Kate, Calhoun felt a tightening in his throat that made it hard to swallow. He guessed Kate Bal-aban was the most beautiful and desirable and downright sexiest woman he’d ever seen, and he couldn’t look at her without feeling a twinge of fear and anxiety. He knew he didn’t deserve to have a woman like her love him, and he figured one of these days she was going to tell him that she didn’t anymore.

  Calhoun went back outside and sat in one of the rockers on the porch. Ralph found a patch of sun, sprawled beside him, and went to sleep.

  Pretty soon the customers left carrying plastic bags. A minute later Kate came out. She was wearing shorts and a sleeveless shirt and sandals. Her black hair hung in a braid nearly to her waist. It was tied with a pink ribbon.

  Kate Balaban was half Penobscot Indian. She had a square jaw and black eyes and high cheekbones, and by September, her long legs and muscular arms and shoulders and smooth-skinned face were burnished to a deep coppery color.

  She just about took his breath away.

  She flopped into the rocker beside Calhoun and handed him a can of Coke. She had a Diet Coke for herself. “Didn’t know that was a half-day trip you had with Mr. Vecchio this morning,” she said. “I thought you planned to fish the whole tide. This another case of you crapping out early because you got sick of spending time in the boat with some client who wasn’t quite up to your standards?”

  Calhoun took a swig of Coke. “I liked Mr. Vecchio just fine,” he said. “He’s a nice guy. We had a good time.”

  Kate turned to look at him. “Well, dammit, anyway, Stoney. You can’t just do things like that. How in hell are we gonna stay in business if you aren’t nice to the clients?”