O’Doull took the phone. “Inspector, there’s some bad business going on here. I think I had better fill you in.”
“I’ll fill you in if you don’t get your fucking ass up here by tomorrow morning.”
“Inspector, things have kind of blown up —”
“We’ll discuss it here! Get back or you’re under suspension for insubordination. That’s all, Theo.” He clicked off.
Meyers’s smile was especially frigid. He showed O’Doull to the door.
Chapter Thirty-Six
There was a late flight to Montreal on Air Canada. O’Doull rushed back to the motel and began sticking his things into his suitcase, as Larochelle leaned against the window ledge, her arms folded. She was wearing only bikini panties. A Ravel piano composition was coming loud from a radio turned to an fm station.
“I’m liable to get kicked off the goddamn force if they don’t believe you!” he shouted.
“What do you mean?” She moved away from the window and did a few balletlike twirls.
“He’s very neatly changed his story. He says he was in the hotel before the killings. Just before. You’re coming to St. John’s with me. I’m going to get you to talk to Mitchell.”
“Are you kidding?” She went to the radio and turned the sound down. “I’m not walking into that wasp’s nest. If I go in there, The Bullet will grab me. For something, I don’t know what, but he’s ruthless. Everybody tells me that.”
It was hard for O’Doull to look at her. His eyes kept wanting to slide down to her chest, to follow the trickles of sweat that ran down it.
“There’s nothing they can charge you with,” he said. “You were already cleared down here. The judge wasn’t involved in that charade in court, so the dismissal order is valid. You can’t be convicted twice of the same offense. Double jeopardy.”
All this came back to him from a course on the law that had been a part of his training.
“Anyway, you stopped short of breaking any law in Canada. You’ve got nothing to worry about. If you come with me, you may indirectly help the guys on the boat. Mitchell has to scrap the operation, it’s too badly tainted. The newspapers would create havoc for us.”
“I’m not so sure, Theo. I’m cynical. I trust you, Theo, but I don’t trust them.”
“I know something about how these things work, Marianne. Nobody’s going to think of hassling a C.I., a cooperating individual.”
“Cooperating?” She shook her head firmly. “Darling, just because I make love to a policeman doesn’t mean I’m one of your ‘cooperating individuals.’ There is absolutely no way I am going to assist in your Operation Potship. Mitchell will try to get me to say where and when the ship is coming in. God, you’re innocent for a cop.”
“We know when the ship is coming in. Or we will.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m just telling you that you’ve got to come with me. I . . . can’t arrest you.”
“I suppose you would! God, I thought you were different, but down inside, you’re just pure cop. I guess you have to have that attitude if you’re going to be a cop. Duty before feelings.”
“That’s kind of a low blow. You have alternatives — you can come with me, or you can stay here.” He was speaking more coldly than he intended. “I told Meyers you were my primary witness.”
“Jesus! Did you also tell him where he could find me after you’ve gone? You’re a ruthless kind of bastard!”
“You said you wanted to come back up with me.”
“Home to friends, not to bloody Inspector Mitchell.” She bit her lip. “Oh, God, what have I got myself into?”
She seemed suddenly very fragile and haunted. O’Doull walked over to her, touched her face, and she came to him, burying her head in his chest. He placed his hands on her back, and it felt damp and cool. “We have forty minutes before the plane,” he said.
“Okay.”
***
It was after midnight when they landed at Mirabel. They had gotten slightly drunk on daiquiris. Larochelle had been playful, pretending she was a prisoner, asking his permission to visit the washroom, answering questions only with name, rank, and serial number. She threatened to go to the cockpit and have the plane redirected to Cuba.
O’Doull felt woozy at the customs counter. The customs officer, smelling the booze on his breath, started going through their bags, so O’Doull showed him his badge and the man apologized and waved him and Larochelle through.
He stood with her at the taxi line, uncertain about what to do next, where to go. He looked at Larochelle and she smiled at him.
“I know a nice little hotel,” she said.
***
Larochelle pushed him gently onto the bed and slowly undressed him. He felt her lips touch his belly, and felt the tip of her tongue slide along it, down through his hair, to the base of his penis.
“Are you married?” she whispered.
“No.”
“That’s nice.”
She nibbled at the head of his cock, then brought her mouth wet over it. He felt explosions.
Later, as he was thrusting inside her, her voice began to rise urgently. “Oh yes, oh yes, oh God, don’t stop. Oh my God!” She shrieked it. He felt her nails biting into his shoulders. “Oh, Theo, what have you done to me? I feel strange. It’s never been like this before. God, I think I’m falling in love. Hold me, stay inside me!”
When he woke up, she was gone.
PART FOUR
How Brain Damage Is Caused
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Johnny Nighthawk
Jimmy Buffet’s voice sounds as wrecked as we feel. We left the speakers on the deck one night, and it rained. Now all the music we play sounds rasping and hollow.
We are three strangers on a ship, human machinery, oiled and greasy, stained by sweat and bile and lubricant, stinking like dead animals, fueled by Spam and beans, unwarmed.
The romantic life of a sea smuggler.
We are strangers in that we do not speak to one another, or even make polite sounds. We pass each other by noiselessly, not daring to look into one another’s eyes for fear of seeing truth in them.
The truth being, perhaps, that Kevin Kelly’s urgent radio message of many days ago has been too easily dismissed. “Jettison the cargo,” he had said. “Deep-six the ship.”
“Aw, it is Kevin freaking out again,” said Pete, and we all wisely agreed.
“Stoned out of his tree, he was,” said Pete. And we nodded our heads. “He must have fallen down loaded and dead to the world when we tried to phone him back.” Billy Lee and I solemnly agreed that this was the fact.
But we didn’t dare look at one another in case we might recognize the doubts that we each felt — and still feel.
And the worst of us is Billy Lee who is smoking fifteen J’s a day, to the point that he has built himself up to peak tolerance level, where life is a stoned blur, where you are at a point that you never really get off anymore. He goes at it like a junkie, his face is gray and sad, and the dope is bringing him down, and never, never does he look at Pete or me. . . .
***
“Sir, it’s the Prime Minister’s office. I . . . think it’s the pm himself. Unless someone’s playing a joke.”
O’Doull tucked the phone between his jaw and collarbone as he continued typing his report. He planned to release it to the media that evening, and a fifteen-minute slot had been arranged for him on CBC “Newsmagazine.”
“Yeah?” he said.
It was no joke. “Sergeant O’Doull, I am personally directing you to lay off, do you understand?”
O’Doull swore softly as he misspelled a word, and corrected it.
“There are sensitive interests involved. Very serious international implications. I am not at liberty to discuss them with you, Sergeant.”
&nb
sp; “I’m sorry, sir, I have issued warrants for the arrest of two members of the Cabinet and five high-level members of the RCMP.”
“Look, you jerkwater twerp, if you say one more thing to the press, I’ll have you charged. With treason.”
“When I joined the force, sir, I swore an oath of allegiance to my country. I am acting because I believe in my country —”
O’Doull’s door crashed in, and three uniformed members of the assault team started to come towards him. . . .
O’Doull unashamedly luxuriated in thoughts of his own imaginary heroism, then yawned and stretched to clear his head, and returned to his typing. He had finished thirty-five pages, and was nearing the end of the Epic of Operation Potship. He intended to have it on the desk of the Solicitor General of Canada on the following morning.
Nothing else had seemed to work.
***
Three days later Superintendent Edwards was alone in the bullring with a raging minister of the Crown and gingerly sidestepping.
“O’Doull! O’Doull!” the Solicitor General was shouting. “Who is this crazy man? Is he trying to destroy us? What is he, a malcontent? A subversive? Get rid of him.”
“We can’t. He’ll go to the newspapers.”
Lessard, behind his desk, looked like a cornered bear. He riffled through O’Doull’s forty-page typewritten report, then opened it at a random page, hoping to discover that he had misread it the first time.
His voice came in a hiss. “Five hundred thousand dollars? For what? An informer? An agent provocateur?” His eyes seemed to recede behind the bush of his eyebrows, and when he spoke again his voice was quiet. “I saw no such number on a budget.”
“It wasn’t spelled out in black and white, Mister Minister. As I recall, you didn’t want to get into specifics.” Edwards pointed to the marble monkey paperweight. “Hear no evil, you said.” Edwards was determined he was not going to carry the can alone on this one. The budget for Potship had been approved by the minister. In general form.
“No, Milt,” Lessard said. His voice was strained but steady. “There was no five-hundred-thousand-dollar fee for an undercover agent on the budget you showed me. I saw no reference to a contract with this man Meyers. Don’t try to pull that old game on me. Pass no bucks to Jean-Louis Lessard, my friend.”
“You remember the meeting, sir. You approved the budget. You chewed the ass off Mitchell.”
Suddenly Lessard turned red with rage. “Mitchell! That son of a bitch! Don’t mention his name! I’d like to kick his ass right into Hudson Bay!” He seemed to subside, and he spoke with a quieter voice. “O’Doull says this agent, this man that you and Mitchell hired — not me, nobody mentioned his name to me — has murdered people, Milt. To protect a contract that you and Mitchell made with him. If this comes out, they won’t vote me in as county chicken inspector.”
“Ah, it’s bull,” Edwards said. “We’re checking it out. It’s bull. Meyers is innocent.” But there was uncertainty in his voice.
“O’Doull doesn’t think it’s bull, Milt. He’s made a credible case. I’d convict on it.”
“It’s all bull.”
“It is bull such as this that causes ministers of the Crown to suddenly lose their jobs. Now, you are going to have to shut up this man O’Doull. And I mean shut him up.” He laid emphasis on the last three words.
“It’s not going to be easy. He is a very strange bird. And he is hot about this.”
“It stinks,” Lessard said. “The whole Potship thing. It stinks.” He leaned forward on his desk, clasping his hands and leaning his chin on them. “Edwards, you are going to do a job on this one. I want the clamps on. Everything is going to be tight and buttoned. Do you understand that?”
Edwards puffed his cheeks and blew out slowly. “Mister Minister, let me lay out for you the whole Greek tragedy. Right now these smugglers are sitting two miles off the Canadian limits waiting for the night to fall.” He checked some numbers on a piece of paper. “Forty-six degrees, thirty-one minutes latitude, fifty-five degrees, eight minutes longitude. In their holds they are carrying three hundred million dollars’ worth of narcotic. Now these fellows are going to get arrested. And they are going to get a lawyer. And that lawyer is going to get the whole story. And he is going to scream to the press. ‘RCMP Agent Kills For His Fee, Lawyer Charges.’ In court, this lawyer is going to make high-camp melodrama out of this thing.”
The minister shook his head firmly. “We can’t have a trial, Milt.”
“What do we do? We can’t just sit on our rears and let them land the dope. What do you think the media would say if they learned we turned a blind eye to the biggest drug operation in the history of the oceans? We’re damned either way.”
His head clasped between his hands, Lessard let out a long, low moan. “Jesus, son of Mary,” he said, and then repeated it three more times. After a while, he looked up. “Okay, get Knowlton Bishop.”
Edwards felt a release of tension.
“I don’t care what he has on his plate,” Lessard said. “I don’t care if you have to yard him out of the middle of a ten-day argument in the Supreme Court of Canada. Get him.”
“Can I turn the whole thing over to him?” Edwards asked, a note of eager desperation in his voice.
“The whole thing. The whole can and all the worms in it. Tell him no publicity. None. He can quote his fee, any fee, we won’t argue. And, Milt, if no publicity means no trial, then no trial. Arrest these guys, seize and burn the drugs, but no trial. And if it involves letting somebody go, that’s the way it will have to be. And it’s got to be fast, before anyone has a chance to think. When is this ship coming in?”
“We’ve intercepted a radio message,” Edwards said. “Tonight at midnight. Where they’re planning to land, we don’t know, but they’re coming in” — he checked his watch — “in fourteen hours.”
“There’s no chance we might lose them?” Lessard said. His tone suggested he hoped they might.
“No. We have the little magic box. And if that fails, we have something else. Double coverage.”
“Get hold of Bishop.”
Johnny Nighthawk
I am a prisoner of the machines, shackled to them. I work a fifteen-hour watch. I nap and Pete takes over. I work another fifteen hours. I come up for air and it is night. I come up again and it is day. I settle into a drifting state of semiconsciousness.
I am a doctor and nurse to these engines, lover and mother and stern, demanding friend to them. I cajole. I threaten. I whisper words of charity and caring, and tell sly untruths to encourage them, to make them believe they are healthy and have many years to live.
Through it all — and there have been crises — the screw turns and the propeller bites the water, and the Alta Mar carries north into the gray, cooling ocean.
It is day twelve of the run to Judas Bight. I think it is day twelve. I keep no time or engine log.
The crises:
Number one. The freshwater pump for the starboard plant broke down, and we shut the engine before it cooked itself, and we drifted dead in the water, picking it apart and finding, to great dismay, that the shaft had stripped some splines. We have jerry-rigged the toilet pump to run the engine cooling system, and now we cannot use the head. So we swing teetering from the rail and hang moons over the side of the ship in the lee of the wind.
Number two. A water hose broke and flooded one of the main generators with salt water, shorting out a major terminal block. The gyro nearly exploded before we could lock it. All the fancy gear on the bridge lost their reference points. For hours we drifted, drying out.
Day twelve, and we are well within the two-hundred-mile fishing zone and worrying about the fisheries patrols. Marine radio gives us the best news of the last two weeks — clouds to hide the moon and fog to hide the Alta Mar.
Yesterday we patched a coded message th
rough to Bill Stutely in Newfoundland with aid of a cb operator, and we let Stutely know — he will let Kevin Kelly and the other boys know — that we are coming in tonight.
“We’re bringing the baby to town for the birthday party, Uncle Bill. Arriving late, midnight. Over.”
“Ten-four Eleanor,” said Stutely. “Over and out.”
Now we are waiting nervously for the evening to settle in. The radar flicks with shadows of distant boats coming in from the Banks. A drone of aircraft fades away into the distance.
Eight o’clock. I am with my engines. We have slowed to about three knots, and the engines chug softly and hiss, like a diesel train at rest.
I am sagging, bent by the burden of tired flesh, and I feel aged. A pair of pressure gauges stare malevolently at me from the control board.
Crisis number three. The bells clang. It is Pete from the bridge.
“Yeah?”
“Johnny, you better come right up here. Billy Lee is holding a gun on me.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
O’Doull sat hunched, nervous, studying the man in the armchair who was studying him. They were in the Hotel Newfoundland, in the suite of Knowlton Ogilvy Bishop, Q.C., a tall, confident man with a rich and vibrant voice, a great burden of white hair, and smiling, shrewd eyes.
O’Doull knew the old man’s reputation: a courtroom magician, a smooth gunslinger, adviser to Her Majesty’s government on matters that involved the application of the laws. At a retainer of five hundred dollars an hour. He sat regarding O’Doull with the relaxed assurance of a man with easy access to power brokers.
But in truth Bishop was masking his fatigue this evening. He had met with Edwards at noon; they had been taken to the airport armed with O’Doull’s and Mitchell’s reports and had been flown to St. John’s on a Department of Transport jet. Bishop had excused himself to Edwards, had dinner in his room, and spent the early evening organizing this mess in his mind, trying to put together a strategy. Every such crisis seemed to slow his body more, and with every crisis he renewed a promise to quit the hard business of the law, and always the promise was broken.
High Crimes Page 24
