George put on his sweatshirt and jacket and headed toward the deck to rig the heavy rode and storm anchor. As he was leaving the wheelhouse I asked him to do me a favor and place the Chunky soup in the hot tank that ran off the engine. Lobstermen used the hot tank or dip tank to clean their rope and buoys. I didn’t lobster so I used mine mostly for mooring work, cleaning recovered artifacts from the bottom, and occasionally warming my feet and hands and heating up canned soup.
“Sure thing, Cap,” he said, as he opened the port side door. “I’ll dig out the sandwiches and start some coffee, too.”
“Good idea,” I said. “Thanks. I’m getting hungry.”
“What else is new?” he said. “Oh, and by the way. Anything you tell me I’ll take to the grave. But you show up at my house with a goat in a bag and I’m gonna fucking shoot you on the spot.”
11
We had lunch in the lee of Little Green Island while the tide flooded and seas abated. It was ten thirty in the morning, which meant we would be diving after dark. These weren’t ideal conditions for investigating a wreck site but we had George’s two underwater scooters with us and plenty of artificial light. The plan was to take the scooter to the edge of the shoal area of Hammond Ledge and zigzag our way back to the boat, see if we could pick up anything that was left behind after the salvage of Tanner’s boat, the Renegade.
When the tide shifted we re-anchored on the edge of Hammond Ledge. I had the bow pointed South, toward the advancing swells. It was as solid a mooring as I could expect in these conditions and on a rocky, uneven seabed. To be on the safe side, and before the actual dive, I figured on running the scooter North and setting a stern anchor.
As we readied our gear I told him George about my meeting with Mrs. Bowers and Zeke, the visit to the Coast Guard Marine Safety Office, my trip to Weston and then up to Exeter, and my somewhat less than revealing talk with Tanner. He asked me what I thought about Mrs. Bowers, if I trusted her, and if I thought the deadly fire in Weston and what happened to Allen Bowers and his youngest son, and then his older son, Aaron, twenty years later, were related. I told him I thought it curious that she had lost her family in a suspicious accident and was now traveling with an imposing black limousine driver who looked like he could rip the front end off a Peterbuilt with his bare hands.
“A professional body guard?” George said.
“That would be my guess.”
“Something else is weird.”
‘What’s that?” I said.
“Dude! It’s your first case. Your client is a woman who was and maybe still is protected by a man who just might become the next President of the United States.”
“Yeah,” I said. “There’s that.”
George shook his head from side to side and let out a whistle. Then he started taking off all his piercings and placing them in his ball cap.
At about three thirty in the afternoon, under a setting sun and darkening sky, George and I finished final prep for our dive. We winched the two scooters up and overboard with the boom and tied the bitter end of their painters to the stern cleats, then, while the scooters waited for us, tugging gently at their tethers a few feet away from Scara, we helped each into our gear. I was using an inexpensive black neoprene dry suit I had bought in Alaska and customized myself with DUI valves. I had an old but functional BC and a heavy salvage diver’s harness for my equipment. I also used slotted jet fins, a steel one hundred and thirty cubic foot SCUBA tank and quarter-inch wet suit gloves and hood. George had a Viking dry suit, a custom BC and harness, twin aluminum eighties and fins that made him look like Donald Duck from the knees down. We both carried bailout bottles, strobes and back-up regulators.
Before we spit into our masks and donned them I looked at George and asked him what he thought of this place as a scallop diver’s hot spot.
“Tricky,” he said.
“I agree,” I said. “We’ve been waiting here for a dive window for five hours. It’s now almost dark.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m just trying to understand why someone would come all the way out here and dive for scallops in a near gale of wind.”
“Sounds a little nuts to me,” George said. “Maybe they were just hungry for the mother lode.”
“Maybe,” I said, and spit into my mask. “See you in the water.”
I pulled the mask over my head and pulled the straps tight. I shot a bubble of air into my BC and squirted the purge valve on my regulator, then I walked to the rail, bit down on the mouthpiece and rolled into the water.
I always have the same series of thoughts when I enter the North Atlantic in December. I think about getting back into the boat, then I wonder why I’m here. The second thought usually fades about the time my head and hands stop hurting from the cold.
George and I didn’t waste any time. We took bearings, unhooked our scooters from their tethers, lit them up and headed for the shoal. The scooters had positive and negative buoyancy controls that allowed you to flood them and purge them at will. The idea was to get them as near neutral at your working depth as possible. I always had a little trouble with this unless I was below sixty feet; today we weren’t going to get below forty, which meant I would be struggling with buoyancy the whole dive. George was much better at these things than I, probably because he owned the company that built them, and probably because he helped in their design.
We worked our way to the base of the ledge that Tanner claimed was his boat’s undoing. No evidence of grounding could be found here, but that was no surprise. After nearly a year, all signs of wreckage at this depth would have long ago been swept clean by the rejuvenating force of the sea. It was at the lower depths, in between rocky crags and crevasses, in areas where eddies and backwashes would occur, that I’d hoped to find something . . . anything.
The tide was just about slack and yet a substantial current still pulled at us. I led the way while George followed. If I missed anything on our crisscrossing pattern back to the boat, hopefully he would find it. Normally I would conduct a search or survey by setting up a grid or using a working line or tether from the boat, but we were racing the clock. In another couple of hours, the strength of the tide would make it nearly impossible to continue. The other problem was the bottom, a boulder-strewn mess, with large jutting, jagged rocks and dark, shallow caves.
It was in among these rocks and shallow caves George and I each found items of interest. Scattered with evidence of Renegade’s sinking, including pieces of worn fiberglass, a torn window frame, and stainless steel tubing from what appeared to be the remains of a trap rack, we found two bent sheets of shiny metal and what looked like part of a solid shaft or strut.
12
I brought the roughly six inch square sheets of metal and the much larger shaft piece to my winter berth in Rockland. The latter we kept hidden under a tarp on deck, the former we placed in the back of my truck, which we had spotted at the marina earlier that morning.
We drove back toward my house and George’s vehicle and talked about what we had found. We really had no idea what it meant or if it meant anything at all. Whether you’re a professional salvage diver or a recreational treasure hunter, you grab what interests you and what also looks out of place underwater. Both of these things seemed very out of place on a rocky ledge in Maine’s Penobscot Bay.
“Very light,” George said, staring at one of the metal fragments. “Looks expensive.”
“Aluminum,” I said.
“Yeah, but what kind?”
“Good question.”
“You think it’s marine?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“I wonder how old it is,” George said, staring at one of the fragments and turning it over and over in his lap.
“It’s either not very old and very corroded and worn,” I said, “or very old and it’s held up remarkably well.”
“Great,” George said. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“I bet you kno
w someone who can tell us which for little or no money,” I said.
“You could take it to the physics lab at UMO, what’s-his-face, see if he’ll run a sample through the Quadrupole.”
“Great idea,” I said. “Thanks. What’s a Quadrupole?”
“It’s a metal detector for physics dorks.”
“You’re talking about a mass spectrometer,” I said.
“So you know.”
“Just never heard it called a Quadrupole before.”
George shrugged.
“It’s a type of spectrometer that uses a series of parallel metal rods for faster and more accurate filtering. I think they’re up to triple quadrupoles now.”
“What do you do all day?” I said, shooting him a quizzical look. “Sit up in your castle and search the Internet?”
“Sure, I do some of that. Mostly, though, the Internet’s only good for one thing.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“Porn.”
We pulled into my driveway and parked. George unloaded his gear and placed it in the back of his Honda Ridgeline, an amalgamation of van and pickup truck that looked like both and worked like neither. I took my gear into the house and dropped it in the tub, where I would give it a thorough rinse and leave it to dry. On the way back out to say goodbye to George I noticed I had several messages on my answering machine.
George had his truck running with the heater and defroster on. He was busy scraping ice off the windshield with his fingernails. “Are you going to head up to UMO tomorrow?” he said.
“Not sure,” I said. “I haven’t checked my messages yet.”
“Well, if you do, let me know what happens.”
“I will,” I said.
“I don’t get it. What makes you think this metal has anything to do with Bowers?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“So why bother? Could be a complete waste of time.”
“Have to rule it out,” I said.
“Oh, I get it. Private dick stuff, huh?”
“Voice of experience,” I said.
He was wiping frost off the driver’s side mirror with his elbow. When he had finished you couldn’t really tell he had accomplished anything.
“You need to get rid of that nostalgic piece of crap vehicle of yours and buy something comfortable.” He was stretching with his hands locked behind the small of his back. “Ever time I get out of that thing my spine hurts and my feet are cold.”
“I don’t like to be comfortable,” I said. “Makes a person soft.”
“Here’s an idea, Cap. I’ll sell you this thing, give you a good price. I want the new model anyway.”
“That thing?” I said. “It’s like a Turducken with wheels. Why would I want that?”
“Turducken?”
“You know, a hen stuffed in a duck stuffed in a turkey.”
George opened his door and stepped into the driver’s seat. He lowered the window before closing the door to be polite. The window powered down like it was turbocharged.
“This Turducken, as you call it, has computerized four wheel drive. It will cruise at one hundred miles per hour on the highway without batting an eye. It has a six-CD changer, a Bose stereo system with Surround Sound, power everything, GPS-navigation, On-Star, and leather seats that feel like butter on your ass. Shall I go on? I think I will. It gets over twenty miles per gallon, and it starts whenever I turn the key. Lastly, and Cap, you’re just not going to believe this, it has this thing called a heater that blows real heat at your feet when you drive. It’s amazing.”
“I paid three thousand for mine,” I said. “What about you?”
“All that proves is you get what you pay for. See you later, Cap.”
He backed out the driveway, shifted into forward, laid a double patch of rubber on the blacktop, and screeched his tires thirty feet down the road. I went back inside to check my messages. There were five, all from Pete Tanner, and all about the same thing. He was letting me know that if I continued to poke around his personal life he was going to kill me.
Amazing, I thought, I’d been a Private Detective working on my first case for only three days, and already two people had threatened to kill me. Zeke and Tanner.
13
I woke up at four thirty in the morning and brewed some dark roast, sipping it from a chipped National Fisherman mug while standing in my sweats and listening to the furnace battle the nip in the air. The temperature outside was eighteen degrees Fahrenheit and it looked as if this would turn out to be one of the coldest Decembers on record. Across the flats, beyond the second bight of the cove, moonlight reflected off white caps in the narrows. Past the narrows, on the Cushing side of the river, the glow of Christmas lights reminded me how close we were to the holiday, and how little I cared.
This time of year was always a mixed bag of trouble for me. I had three ex-wives and one kid with each of them, two boys and a girl, and although I got along great with all of them, the pressure to be jolly and participate in all the usual holiday festivities was occasionally too much to bear. It would have been different had my ex-wives remarried or latched onto steady boyfriends. Unfortunately, I was the guy on the speed dial, and at this time of year, with St. Nick nippin’ at everyone’s heels, the speed dial worked overtime.
It was why I never immediately reacted to the blinking light on my answering machine. Call it psychological prerogative. Rule the machine. Don’t be ruled by it. Last night, along with the maleficent calls from Tanner, each one proving angrier than the one preceding it, I had calls from my ex-wives. Lori wanted help putting up the tree and wrapping presents. Sam wanted a stump removed in front of her deck before the twenty-fourth, and Karen needed one of her horses delivered to the trainer.
I finished my second cup of coffee and cooked up some eggs with onions and leftover sockeye salmon. Along with two pieces of sourdough bread, a quart of orange juice, a third cup of coffee, topped by a yogurt and banana for desert, I figured I’d last a few hours before getting hungry again.
By zero six hundred I was underway for the University of Maine at Orono, UMO for short. I took Route-17 to the Appleton Ridge Road and wound my way over the back roads to Waterville, an old mill town on the Kennebec River and home to Maine’s renowned Colby College. Back in the day, Waterville had been the northernmost terminus for shipping goods and cargo up and down the river. The Ticonic Falls above the town made navigation further North practically impossible. Wood, grain, commercial fishing, had all been important industries for the town back then. They even built a few ships, including a two hundred ninety-ton schooner, the Francis and Sarah.
Having done some recreational fishing on the Kennebec North of Bath, and having also ferried passengers and tourists to Gardiner, it was hard to imagine a ship that large making it down the river all the way from Waterville. They did it, though, floating them down on the freshets. People seemed more resolute back in the eighteen hundreds.
I had a stop to make in Waterville before continuing on to UMO. An old friend and revolutionary war enactor named Stanley Jones ran a used gun shop there. He specialized in the esoteric type of firearm and was usually an early riser.
I went over the bridge and turned right onto Front Street, then took College Street to Bacon. Stanley was waiting for me with coffee and donuts when I got there. I declined the latter.
“Well, well, well,” he said. “Haven’t seen you since you bought that Colt Elite from me two years ago. You still have that gun?”
“Of course,” I said. “Don’t shoot it much.”
“I’ll buy it back from you anytime you want to sell,” he said.
“No thanks,” I said. “Think I’ll hang onto it.” I had a thing about buying guns. If I bought one, I bought it for life.
“You looking for something else?” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
Stanley had been seventy-nine for the last six years. He had evenly spaced, ultra-thin white hairs on his head usually hidden under a John Deer ball ca
p, deep smile lines on his face, wrinkled hands and arms, and liver spots the size of silver dollars. He smelled like Turkish tobacco and gun oil and walked so slowly from one place to another you prayed to God he was already behind the counter when you came into the shop. He didn’t know his real age but I guessed it to be in the middle to late eighties.
“I need a quick draw carry piece, Stanley,” I said. “Something comfortable but with stopping power. Absolutely nothing smaller than a three-eighty.”
“Three-eighty too small for a man like you. Gun that size would look like a toy in that mitt you calls a hand. Double or single action?”
“Single,” I said.
“Revolver or semi-auto?”
“If the accuracy is there it doesn’t much matter.”
“Range?”
“I have plenty of long range handguns. I need a good carry piece.”
“Hmm,” he said. “I think I have something for you.” He headed for his counter and the large one hundred-year-old safe against the wall. At his current rate of advance I figured I had enough time to go back to my Rover and do an oil and filter change, maybe even replace the points and condenser. Instead, I ate a donut, gazed at the rifles on the racks and waited for him to open the safe.
“It’s a Para USA Warthog single action semi-auto,” he said. “Short barrel. Ten plus one in the pipe. The thing about this gun, makes it unusual, it’s got itself a bobbed hammer, smooth as silk Tritium sights, and she’s the blue steel instead of stainless.”
He pulled it out of the safe and handed it to me.
“It’s a little heavy,” I said.
“It’s a forty-five, Bubba. Same caliber as your nineteen eleven. But it carries more ammo and it’s smaller. You ain’t gettin’ the best of both worlds.”
I pulled the hammer back, not an easy task with the spur-less hammer. You couldn’t do it if you were wearing gloves. Sights looked good, enough to get off a twenty yarder at night, and yet nothing to catch on a pocket lining.
Calamity (Captain Grande Angil Mysteries) Page 6
