by Archer Mayor
“Better hold here,” Alan cautioned Pete. “We don’t want to wander into Canadian waters.”
Pete was more than happy to comply, cutting back on the boat’s power before taking another swig from the bottle he had nestled among the racked charts to his right. They were in a narrow jurisdictional cul-de-sac, with Canadian waters both a mile dead ahead and barely two miles to their southeast. The Canadian border police didn’t spend all that much time out here, especially after dark, nor did the Maine Marine or the U.S. Border Patrols, especially since the old days of huge marijuana deliveries dropped from foreign freighters. Nevertheless, it remained nostalgic turf for law enforcement activity, as smugglers of liquor, cigarettes, and drugs had known for generations.
And despite the lack of a moon, the night sky was vibrant with stars, making Pete feel he might as well be standing in the open, under a sign reading, “Arrest this man—Drug Runner.” He glanced at his little brother’s profile as the latter continued scanning the horizon ahead. Pete had never known what to do with Alan. The kid was a troublemaker, as their dad had always insisted, but his enthusiasm was hard to resist. No matter how many times Buddy had whaled on the boy, or put him down, or worked to thwart his dreams, Alan had always bobbed back to the surface. Just like when he got out of prison—he didn’t run and hide from family and old friends. He came straight home to Blackmore Harbor, as if to shove his survival and his pure will to live right up the Old Man’s nose.
Pete’s wife, Sophie, shared Buddy’s distaste, which was saying something, since she also despised Buddy.
In fact, Pete sometimes wondered if part of the reason he ended up listening to Alan all the time was to simply display that he had a mind of his own, and maybe a bit of the rebel in him, as well.
Only that rebel was feeling a little insecure at the moment. He reached out and took another swig from his bottle—something he had to be a whole lot more discreet about when he acted as Buddy’s sternman during their daylight runs onto the water.
“There he is,” Alan said softly.
Pete squinted into the gloom, seeing the tiniest of lights, barely visible above the black void of the water. “How the hell do you know that?” he wondered aloud.
Alan stooped to retrieve a small canvas bag he’d brought on board, unzipped it, and pulled out what looked like a cross between a sniper scope and a broken pair of binoculars. He snapped a switch on its side and held it up to his right eye.
“Yeah. Definitely them.”
“What is that thing?” his brother asked.
Alan handed it over. “Night vision. I got it surplus. Probably better’n what the cops use.”
Pete peered through the device and instantly saw the vessel ahead, sized like their own, magnified and bathed in a surreal green glow, its navigation lights burning as brightly as search lamps. He saw a couple of shadowy figures moving around its deck. He put his right hand out and rested it on the controls.
“Just stay put,” Alan cautioned him.
“We’re not gonna meet up with ’em?” Pete asked.
“Nope. We’re not even here. I just wanted to check ’em out. Make sure they were solid.”
Pete stared at him, thinking back at the risks and hassles he’d gone through to be here—catching hell from Sophie and borrowing the boat while the Old Man was at an Elks convention in Augusta. “We’re not here?” he asked, his voice rising. “You told me we were gonna pick up a package. That I’d make more money tonight than I make in three months.”
Alan took back the night scope and returned to studying the other boat. “Relax,” he said dismissively. “We are. They just think we’ll be coming by to these coordinates later in the week. I wanted to see them in action, that’s all. The whole point of the exercise is that we never meet—never even know when one or the other of us is either dropping stuff off or picking it up. It’s the randomness of it that gives us security.”
Pete lapsed into silence, thinking that over. Alan hadn’t shared much with him, but Pete thought he’d gotten the gist of it. He’d better have, since that’s what he was going to be passing along to a select couple of others in his small group of disaffected younger Blackmore lobstermen, most of whom felt squeezed between their elders, who ruled over them like stubborn lords, and their significant others, who—in Pete’s instance, anyway—were less tolerant, less supportive, and a lot more expensive to maintain than the older harbor women. According to Buddy and his pals, this disintegrating dedication to both the fishing trade and a frugal lifestyle cut across the board—young men like Alan and Pete had become lazy and seduced by easy money, while women like Sophie had replaced support and sacrifice with impatience and greed. Buddy blamed moral turpitude, of course, but the fact was that the lobster trade’s very success had played a part. Many fishermen and their families had come to expect over a hundred thousand dollars a year and vacation time to boot—a blatant absurdity to any old salt with even a little knowledge of the Great Depression.
Buddy, too, owned some of the blame, though. The claims of turpitude he wielded like a bludgeon were the sore point that Alan was using to sway Pete and his friends. Drug and alcohol use on board had been on the increase, and while fishermen were traditionally famous for their onshore antics and barroom excesses, rarely had they been foolish enough to bring such behavior onto the water. No longer—or, at least, not as often. Nowadays, it was common to hear of drug use at sea. It was still far from the norm—fishing remained too complex and dangerous to tackle with a muddled brain. But the exceptions were growing. And those exceptions were precisely whom Alan was targeting through his alcohol-dependent brother.
Indeed, this trip was supposed to show Pete just how easy it would be to kickstart a stalled income—which insight he could then use to enlist a miniature navy of like-minded clandestine importers. As Alan had put it to Pete at the end of the pier, on the night of the family Sunday supper, lobster boats were as common as seagulls off the Maine coast—so taken for granted they were virtually invisible. And even when the Marine Patrol did board a boat, what were they looking for? Short lobsters, by and large, or other violations of the fishing rules. Using fishing boats for drug running was a virtual birthright, according to Alan—steeped in historical tradition, and a piece of cake, as well.
At least that was his pitch. In fact, Alan had no intention of making this operation a centerpiece of his grand plan. This was all personal, and all about payback. Once Pete was on the hook—using Buddy’s boat—Alan would have them where he’d always wanted them—especially Buddy—and his revenge against the King of Blackmore Harbor would be his to take with a simple anonymous phone call to the cops.
“Okay,” Alan said, breaking away from his meditation. “Our turn. Move ahead slowly.”
Pete blinked, the effects of the alcohol playing tag with a growing adrenaline.
“What about the border?” he asked.
“We’re barely going over and we’re not even stopping. If they do have us on radar, they won’t know what we’re doing and they won’t have enough time to react. Besides, it’ll look like a simple mistake. I worked this out, Pete. I got a lot more riding on this than just this one run, trust me.”
Pete pushed on the throttle, underwhelmed by Alan’s argument. The boat’s rumble deepened under their feet as the propeller began pushing more water. Alan had the night scope virtually glued to his eye now, as he scanned the horizon before them.
“See anyone?” Pete asked nervously. “Where’d they go?”
“They left. As planned.”
Pete made a face but no comment and glanced at the bottle among the charts, longing for another pull. But he kept both hands on the wheel.
“Okay,” Alan told him after five minutes. “Let her drift for a second.” He reached back into his zippered bag and pulled out another device, slightly larger than a deck of cards. This, too, he turned on, illuminating a small screen. He hunched over, staring at the screen and entering commands. After a couple of minutes, wi
th Pete staring at him, he moved to the more familiar onboard GPS and studied its larger display. Their own boat was featured as a small red arrow amid blotches of various shades of blue and a dense scattering of yellow numerals, denoting the depths of the water around them. In contrast to a standard road map, the two bordering land masses of Maine and Grand Manan were simply dark and featureless. This was the tool that Pete used most commonly when piloting on his own, so he was startled to suddenly see a tiny white blip pulsating very near the icon of their boat.
“What the hell’s that? What did you do?”
Alan laughed, as much at his brother’s comment as at his own success. “Like I said,” he explained, “I’m testing the system here. They sank a buoy with our package, with a GPS and a wireless release attached to it. When I enter one code, the release lets go of the weight and the buoy takes the package to the top; a second code, and the GPS tells us where the goods are.” He pointed ahead and slightly off the starboard bow. “Right there.”
Pete followed the direction with his eyes to a small, sharp LED, blinking on the water’s surface like a desperate, crash-landed firefly.
“No shit,” Pete murmured wonderingly.
“No shit,” his brother echoed, adding, “Grab a gaff and get ready to be a rich man.”
Alan took over the wheel as Pete stepped back, between the snatch block and the bait barrel, and readied himself to snag the buoy’s line. It only took one pass, given both men’s familiarity with the maneuver, and Pete effortlessly swung the heavily wrapped package onto the deck.
Alan set their course back toward where they’d come from and locked the wheel before joining Pete, who was already slicing into the package.
“Carefully, bro,” he cautioned. “Carefully. Don’t cut too deep.”
He helped Pete undress what became a waterproof canvas bag, which he then undid to reveal two dozen large plastic bottles. Alan unscrewed one and showed his brother its contents with the help of a flashlight.
“What do you think?”
“What are they?” Pete asked, extracting a single tablet and holding it daintily between his discolored, calloused fingertips.
“Oxys, Pete,” Alan chided him. “Where have you been? This is what I been talking about.”
Pete dropped it back into the bottle. “I guess I’m mostly a Scotch man.”
Alan shook his head. “Look at it this way: What do you think it’s all worth?”
Pete sat back on his haunches. “Shit. I don’t know. Five hundred bucks?”
“Try about twenty thousand.”
There was no need for a flashlight to see the whites of Pete’s eyes. “Twenty thou? Holy Fucking Christ, Alan. For this little pissant package? You gotta be kidding.”
Alan closed the bag back up, threw the wrapping overboard, and returned to the wheel. “That’s my point, Pete. You gettin’ it now?”
Pete ran his hands over his skull, as if recovering from a nightmare. “Jesus, Alan. Jesus.”
Alan merely smiled and returned to the wheel, watching the GPS display and the radar beside it. This was not the time to get sloppy. Twenty minutes later, safely out of the Canadian cul-de-sac and abreast of the Cutler radar towers, he cut back the power again, ducked through the hatchway into the forward cabin, and reappeared almost immediately with a metal plate and some meshing attached to a large metal disk, twice the size of a hockey puck.
“What’s that?” Pete asked.
“The crucial piece,” Alan explained. He slipped the bag of drugs into the meshing, attached the disk—which turned out to be a powerful magnet—to the metal plate, and finally tied the plate with a short rope to one of the boat’s mooring bits. He then threw the whole bundle into the water, where it instantly sank.
“Shit, Alan. What now?” Pete virtually whined.
Alan showed him a small plastic box, a single button mounted prominently to its faceplate.
“This,” he explained, “controls the magnet connecting the mesh bag to the metal plate I just threw over. If the Coasties or the Marine Patrol or the goddamn Seventh Cavalry starts breathing down our necks, all we do is hit this one button, and every piece of incriminating evidence disappears into the deep.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”
For one of the first times in his life, Alan saw his older brother stare at him in open admiration.
“You really got this figured out, don’t you?”
Alan seized the moment. He laid a hand on Pete’s muscular shoulder and looked him straight in the eyes. “All but the last part, where you get the others on board with this. If we’re gonna make a killing, we need to do this a lot, and we need to do it with people we can trust with our lives. Your buddies think I’m a flake, or a turncoat, or whatever the fuck. But they respect you. You’re the sternman of the King of Blackmore Harbor, and his son, to boot. You’re also the one who puts up with his shit, just like they put up with the shit from their Old Men—the Keepers of Tradition who think you have nothing to offer except cheap labor.”
“Yeah,” murmured Pete, as if he were warming up for the “Amen” refrain at a revival meeting.
“I can’t do this without you, Pete,” Alan kept on, stoking the mood. “You seen what I can do—set up the action, line up the players, anticipate every possibility. But I need you to carry the ball across the line. I always saw this as a team thing, in my mind, when I was working this out in prison. But to have you—my family—actually helping to make the most crucial part happen … That, I only dreamed about.”
Pete was nodding rhythmically, his gaze fixed on some middle distance, no doubt consisting of a misty future where he had his own boat and was free of their father.
Alan stopped long enough to cup his brother’s cheeks in both his hands, holding his face so that their eyes were a foot apart.
“Will you help me, Pete? Will you help me make a life we never had?”
Pete reached out and mussed Alan’s hair. He was laughing when he said, “You bet your ass I will.”
Georges Tatien watched Alan Budney appreciatively. This time, the meeting was taking place in a motel room, again not far from the border. But Tatien had been the second one to arrive, if solely because Budney had booked the room. Now, Alan was sitting in the only armchair, by the curtained window, expounding on his progress in rebuilding Matt Mroz’s empire. It was a well-organized speech, set out in logical steps. In a nutshell, Alan had opted to restrict the diversity of Roz’s old holdings in exchange for increasing its most profitable and least risky aspects, most particularly Tatien’s specialty, prescription drugs.
There was more to it, of course—a verbally descriptive flow chart of supply and distribution. But it was more Alan’s style than his plan that caught Tatien’s imagination. Alan was suffused with nervous confidence and high hopes, like a young athlete on the verge of his first major competition. He had the arrogance and strut that Georges had once seen in himself and that he suspected he still aspired to by staying in a business usually reserved for far younger men.
His soft spot for Alan had little to do with the latter’s grand plan anyway, despite it being well designed. Georges had enough money already, and several other businesses, and knew that success depended as much on luck as on organizational savviness. This particular deal, in fact, was comparatively straightforward—shy of being mundane only because of its illegal nature.
Maybe it was that Georges was getting older and finally feeling it; maybe it was that, despite their different backgrounds, he felt a kinship with the younger man. But whatever the cause, Georges simply liked Alan, which was virtually a first for him.
“Did you enjoy your voyage on the water near Lubec the other night?” he finally asked at an appropriate interval.
“The transfer?” Alan asked, smiling broadly. “You should’ve seen my brother’s expression. I might as well have put him on a rocket ship. He was blown away. It work okay from your end?”
Tatien nodded. In fact, he had been delighted with the
arrangement. He’d often thought the water route had advantages the land-based border crossings lacked, but he’d never found an American importer so inclined.
“It was entirely satisfactory,” he said.
“Cool,” Alan responded. “Well, it was satisfactory for me, too, because it did the trick in pulling Pete in all the way. He can’t wait to get started. I now have a fleet of boats available to us, and I know for a fact that it won’t be restricted to Blackmore Harbor for long.” He leaned forward in his seat, his eyes shining. “And the kicker is that Pete’s carrying the ball. I told him how to break the group into cells, so that if anyone gets caught, he only knows about one or two other guys, and vice versa. For the cops to take this system apart, they’ll have to nail everybody in it.”
Tatien smiled back, less confident of his partner’s accuracy here but also not really caring. Alan, after all, still didn’t know Georges’s real name, and had never seen him without some more or less subtle disguise. His whole operation could collapse without injury to Georges, and, soft spots notwithstanding, that part remained key. Georges knew how to be sentimental without being foolish.
Of course, he also didn’t know of Alan’s eventual fine tuning of this part of his operation—how he intended to sacrifice his brother and father while maintaining the integrity of the water route through the cell system. The irony that Pete would create the very system that would survive his own and Buddy’s arrest for smuggling was a catch only Alan planned to enjoy.
“And the finances?” Georges asked, mostly to be politely conversational.
“Nailed down tight,” Alan told him. “You know Bernie, right?”
“I do, yes.”
“Well, that’s about the only part of Roz’s setup I’m keeping. Bernie’s solid—solid and careful. So I’m keeping all that in place, which means you won’t have anything new to learn there. How ’bout Luis Grega? You ever hear of him?”
Tatien merely shook his head.
“Maybe you will and maybe you won’t,” Alan explained. “We’ll see. I’m bringing him in as my number two. He used to work for Roz, so he knows the ropes. I want as much distance from the street-level ops as I can get, and to restrict myself mostly to Bernie, you, and Grega, representing the three major branches of this setup. Roz was too high profile, got too easy to pick off. I’m gonna protect myself more.”
