by Chris Knopf
I told him to get her ready while I regained consciousness and put together a vat of coffee. It was early enough to catch Amanda as she drove out in her little red pickup. Her pleasure in the plan to sail with Paul Hodges was tempered only by regret that she couldn’t go herself.
“I’ll be looking for that rain check, buddy,” she said, as she rolled away.
I fed Eddie his breakfast and watched him lope over to Amanda’s house where he’d been hanging out during the day. It’d be nice to think he was part of the protective unit, but the actual allure was Allison’s fawning attention and Amanda’s ready supply of Big Dog biscuits.
When I got to Hawk Pond, Hodges had all but two restraining lines off my boat and the inboard diesel burbling in anticipation. The day was a fair representation of the good weather we’d been having, with a steady northwesterly spinning the anemometer at the top of the mast and flapping the American Ensign I’d rigged on the backstay.
In a few minutes we were under way.
I let Hodges pilot the boat along the twisty channel while I put a dent in my oversized mug of coffee. Now that I was heading out to the bay, any sluggishness was replaced by the usual semieuphoria the experience provided, no matter how often it happened.
An osprey glided overhead, ignored by the cormorants diving for breakfast or drying their wings on the rigging of the half-dozen sailboats moored in the wider reaches of Hawk Pond. The gulls were out as well, though we couldn’t hear their indignant kvetching over the rumble of the motor beneath our feet.
There wasn’t any particular reason to converse until we left the channel for the open water and it was time to raise the mainsail. Hodges kept the bow in the wind while I did all the hard work, glad for the cleansing effects. When the mainsail was aloft, we killed the engine and unfurled the big genoa, and in moments the Carpe Mañana was shooting off across the Little Peconic at about six knots with a gentle heel and the barest rise and fall over the comely bay waves.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” said Hodges, and I knew what he was talking about.
The wind dictated our course, which it always did, sending us well to the northwest of the bay, where we decided to come about and head back toward Hawk Pond, though we had just enough angle to cut through to the Great Peconic Bay, a bigger body of water affording more sailing time before any bothersome tacking. With both of us slightly banged up and more than slightly lazy, this seemed an excellent strategy.
By then I’d relieved Hodges at the wheel and he occupied himself sprawling like a dead frog on the comfy cockpit cushion. It wasn’t until I felt the soothing balm of a sturdy sailboat engaged with wind and sea that I realized how much stress had built up over the events of recent weeks, beginning with Alfie Aldergreen’s ugly death, and most prominently, the attack on my daughter. Perhaps knowingly, Hodges avoided the subject, focusing instead on the Yankees’ chances of securing the pennant, if not actually winning the World Series. I’d missed most of the baseball season so the commentary was an ideal distraction.
When my cell phone rang, and the screen said it was Jackie Swaitkowski, I almost didn’t answer, so disappointed was I by the unwelcomed intrusion.
“What are you, in a wind tunnel?” she asked, when I hit the answer button.
“On the boat,” I said, handing the wheel off to Hodges and heading below to the cabin. “I tried to call you last night.”
“I know. I was with Harry. He said he’d only go out with me if I turned off my phone.”
“I have things to tell you,” I said.
“Oksana got into NYU under false pretenses.”
“That’s what I had to tell you.”
“Everything was fabricated,” she said. “Including her LSAT scores and transcripts from RISD and Brown.”
“Herschel Bergeron,” I said.
“Exactly. He worked in admissions. Quite a nice bit of forgery. He must have been motivated.”
“I’ll bet,” I said, remembering the soft caress of Oksana’s calf against mine. “What does this mean? Legally.”
“Legally, she’s a fraud. It doesn’t matter how well she did in law school, she cheated getting in. That wipes everything out. Disbarment for starters.”
I sat on the settee in the main cabin as if driven there by the jolt of revelation.
“Call Ross,” I said. “I know what’s going on.”
“You’re out on a boat.”
“I can be at Southampton HQ in less than two hours.”
“He’ll want a headline,” she said.
“Tell him he’s a good, honest man and scratch his tummy.”
“What?”
That was when Hodges yelled at me from topside.
“Sam, what the fuck.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I ran up the companionway and followed where he was pointing. A powerboat, low on the water but with a broad bow planing above the waves, was heading straight for us.
“What do I do?” Hodges yelled.
Sailors know it’s all too common for powerboats to wait until they were nearly upon you before turning to the side, leaving you to knock around in their wake. Though not intentionally malicious, they had little appreciation for the speed difference between a boat under power and one under sail.
“He’ll turn,” I said.
“I’m not so sure,” said Hodges.
As the boat continued to bear down on us, shifting course as we shifted, I had the bad feeling he was right. Six knots was a relatively decent speed for a sailboat. For a fast powerboat that was barely idling. It was an impossible contest for us to win, so all we could do was wait for the impact and hope for the best.
I asked Hodges for the wheel and turned the boat so our bow faced the speeding vessel, hoping to reduce the size of the exposure. The maneuver sent the Carpe Mañana directly into the wind, where it immediately stalled.
“He’s going to hit us,” said Hodges. “What do we do?”
“Prepare to jump,” I said.
As the big sails luffed crazily overhead, I held the boat into the wind and tried to judge if we should leap to starboard or port. It didn’t seem possible that anyone would deliberately ram us at high speed, though I’d often mused over the possibility of a helmsman asleep, or dead, at the wheel, with bad luck guiding his course.
Remembering a distant safety instruction, I threw the cockpit seat cushions overboard and was about to shove Hodges in the same direction when the bow of the powerboat shot up as it suddenly throttled down from planing speed. It banked hard, coming within a few feet of our starboard side and throwing up a wave that nearly knocked me off my feet.
Close in, I could see it was Joey Wentworth’s picnic boat. With Jaybo Flynn standing in the stern section holding a shotgun pointing at our heads. So instead of throwing Hodges overboard, I pulled him down the companionway and into the cabin.
The sound of gunshot ripping through the mainsail accompanied the muffled boom. Hodges was cursing like the old sea dog he was, so I had to yell at him to shut up and get in the head that served the quarter berth directly behind the companionway stairs.
He didn’t like the idea, but did it anyway. I dropped to my knees and dug a flare gun out of the bottom drawer below the nav table, along with a portable horn, powered by a can of pressurized air, and a roll of duct tape.
The Carpe Mañana shuddered as the picnic boat banged into the starboard side once, twice, three times. I heard Jaybo yell to his helmsman to ease back on the throttle. In my mind’s eye I saw lines being tossed over the gunnels and secured to our cleats.
I moved to the V berth at the front of my boat and peered out the open hatch overhead. The guy who’d been with Jaybo when he hit me with the fish van was trying to lasso a line to our midship cleat with one hand while steering the picnic boat with the other. Jaybo leaped from his stern to ours, shotgun in hand. He also had a line, which he presumably tied off, though I couldn’t see around the raised hatch.
As Jaybo’s man managed to s
nag the cleat, the squeal of our rub rail against the hull of the other boat took the place of the jarring thuds. I dropped down from the hatch and sat on the bed, trying to think through a series of complicated maneuvers a few moments before they had to be accomplished.
I ripped off a length of duct tape and kept my eyes on the companionway, gifted with a clear view from the V berth’s open door. Two legs and a shotgun started down the stairs. I waited until he was all the way below, then stuck the horn out the hatch, taped the button open and tossed the blaring thing through the standing rigging and into the cockpit.
Jaybo spun the shotgun back up the companionway and fired off a blast. I stepped out of the V berth, and when he spun back in my direction, shot him in the face with the flare gun.
He screamed and got off another shot that punched a hole in the cabin top above my head, but I was able to rush forward and grab the barrel with my left hand and get my right fist into the game.
They weren’t elegant punches, more like a brawler’s, but they managed to stagger Jaybo back against the companionway stairs. Smoke and blinding light from the flare filled the salon. The burning ball, after bouncing off Jaybo’s face, was busy drilling a hole in the galley’s Corian counter.
The hard right jabs finally weakened Jaybo enough for me to wrench the shotgun out of his hands, and I used the stock to plant the deciding blow into his forehead.
Hodges picked that moment to burst out of the head. In the cramped quarters he nearly bowled me over trying to get his hands around Jaybo’s neck.
“Don’t kill him,” I said, gripping Hodges’s jacket at the shoulders and dragging him with Jaybo in tow back into the salon.
I was happy to see Hodges let go of Jaybo’s neck until I realized he just wanted his hands free to pummel the kid’s mangled face. I tried to hold his right arm back, but he just dragged me along with the punch.
“Hodges, knock it off,” I yelled at him. “We need this guy alive.”
What got him to stop wasn’t my entreaties, but the sight of Jaybo’s buddy jumping into the cockpit. Hodges shoved past Jaybo and clambered up the companionway stairs with the speed and agility of an orangutan.
I followed with the shotgun, but when I got topsides Hodges had already slammed the guy across the cockpit and was in the process of wrestling him into a headlock. The guy managed to squirt out of Hodges’s arms, but before he could get his footing, Hodges landed a cowboy-style haymaker that nearly sent the guy over the safety lines.
“Don’t kill him either,” I yelled, this time managing to drag Hodges off the guy’s limp body after only a few earnest socks to the head.
“Motherfuckers,” Hodges shouted, his face toward the heavens, as if blaming the divine.
“Agreed. But right now we need to get them into shore. I’ve got to go check on Jaybo. Can I trust you not to heave this one overboard?”
He said I could, though reluctantly.
I went below and doused the flare with the faucet from the galley sink. Then I tugged Jaybo’s dead weight up onto the salon settee. I checked his pulse and felt a faint patter. I rolled him over onto his stomach and secured his hands and feet with heavy-duty zip ties. Then I went up to the cockpit and repeated the procedure with Jaybo’s sidekick while explaining my plan to Hodges.
“Help me toss these assholes onto the picnic boat,” I said. “I’ll take it to Hawk Pond while you follow in the Carpe Mañana. Can you handle that?”
He looked disdainful.
“I’ve handled boats twice this size, not even drunk at the time,” he said.
“Good,” I said, then added, “Glad we fucked them up?”
He grinned his homely, too-wide grin.
“Yeah. We fucked them up good.”
JOE SULLIVAN, two patrol cops, and an ambulance met me at the dock. I’d called him on the way in, and assured him he could leave his post long enough to make the collars. It was hard to tell him much more than the basics, but there’d be time for that.
I also placed a call to Ross Semple, with whom I had a more detailed conversation. He told me he could fulfill my request, provided the players were available on such short notice. I thanked him and ended the call without further conversation. I had other calls to make.
Jackie told me she could get to Southampton Town Police Headquarters well ahead of me. I asked her to hold her fire until I got there, and she agreed, difficult as that was for her. Then I called Amanda and told her I was feeling overwhelming love for her and my daughter, Allison, though I didn’t have time to explain how having a shotgun fired at you can ignite this sort of sentimental response. She was happy to hear the words anyway, and even conceded similar feelings, something it wasn’t in Amanda’s nature to easily do. So we got off the phone abruptly after that, though not unhappily.
Ross met me in the reception area, so I didn’t have to go through Officer Orlovsky. I felt like royalty. He walked me through the squad room, and no one looked up, so radio silence had been honored. We went into the interrogation room and sat at the table after he scrounged up an ashtray and immediately started stinking up the place with nearly irresistible cigarette smoke.
“Are they coming?” I asked him.
“They are. Edith and Oksana. Veckstrom’s off today, out there firing up the masses, so we’ll have to wait for that.”
“You knew all along,” I said.
He pointed at me with the end of his burning cigarette.
“Suspected. Big difference.”
He tilted back in his chair and rubbed his blossoming gut.
“You were in a tight spot,” I said. “You trusted Sullivan and could have used his help, but he was in a bad way after his wife left him, and didn’t need extra trouble. Better to get him out of the way, which explains why he so easily got the leave to help me in New York and on Oak Point. There was no one else on the force you could trust the same way, not here and not in the city, so you thought, what the hell, get Sam and Jackie involved. Can’t hurt, and they might turn up something.”
Everyone has little tics and petty habits that you barely notice, though often recall when describing the person, which become more prominent the longer you know them, and if you’re their spouse, are usually featured in divorce proceedings.
These things are often most apparent when stress is building, and Ross had a larger than average repertoire. Which probably explained why the cigarette twirling, face rubbing, ear probing, perilous chair leaning, and eye twitching seemed far more conspicuous than usual.
“I’ve made worse decisions,” he said, his grin not completely devoid of humor.
“You suggested Edith Madison do the same. You’re the trusted advisor.”
“Is that what she called me?” he asked.
“She had suspicions of her own. But both of you were constrained by the politics. You were vulnerable to accusations of using police and prosecutorial powers to further her agenda. A resolution had to come from outside the usual channels, the standard process.”
As usual, Ross kept his thoughts close to his vest as I spoke. It might have come naturally, though years investigating homicides and running a police department had undoubtedly honed the skill.
“Don’t forget about your friend Aldergreen,” he said. “You were motivated.”
Sergeant Lausanne opened the door and told Ross that Attorney Swaitkowski was still waiting in another interrogation room. Ross said she could join the party.
“What did I miss,” she asked, dumping her flour-sack purse on the table, “and why did I miss it?”
I brought her up to date as well as I could without giving advantage over to Ross in the cat-and-mouse game we were playing, still not knowing if I was the cat or the mouse.
“Can we be in the interview?” Jackie asked.
Ross put out both hands in an exaggerated display of equanimity.
“Why the hell not,” he said.
So we sat killing time, which for me and Ross involved allusions in half-forgotten Latin, and
for Jackie nervous pecking on her smartphone, until Miss Lausanne poked her head in again to announce the arrival of Edith Madison and Oksana Quan. Ross left and Jackie and I waited in silence for about ten minutes, after which the door opened again and Oksana walked in, escorted by Ross Semple, whose hand on her back looked less tender than assertive.
Oksana dropped her leather briefcase on the table and sat across from Jackie and me. She let out a bored huff, ignoring Jackie, but looking at me through half-lidded eyes. Even in the unfriendly fluorescent light, they looked like brilliant, tiny blue worlds.
Ross sat at the head of the table, giving him distance and perspective on all three of us. He took the pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, then seemed to have second thoughts, and put them back.
“Miss Quan,” he said, “we know you were admitted to New York University law school based on a manufactured undergraduate record. As soon as we provide the New York State Justice Department with incontrovertible evidence of this fraud, you will be relieved of your responsibilities as assistant district attorney. You understand that.”
Her eyes let go of mine and drifted over in his direction.
“Bully for you,” she said, and started to stand up.
“There’s more,” said Ross, his voice a low rumble. “Sit down.”
She sat back down, a tinge of alarm breaking through the icy cast of her face.
“This is your one opportunity to avoid the most serious charges by showing a willingness to cooperate,” he said. “You’ve had plenty of these conversations yourself, so you know where we’re going.”
“Does Edith know about this?” she asked.
“I guess she does,” said Ross. “She brought it to me in the first place.”
Oksana shrank a few inches into her chair after gathering up her briefcase and squeezing it to her chest.
