One-Way Ticket

by William G. Tapply

  Another clunk, and she began to pull forward out of her slot.

  I braced myself against the console of the little boat and managed to stand up. Behind me in the parking area, there was a chaos of lights and voices and thumping car doors and squawking radios.

  Then a voice on a bullhorn called: “Michael Warner. Kimberly Warner. This is the FBI. Remain where you are.”

  I heard Mike mumble, “Fuck you:” He eased Dot Com forward until she’d cleared her mooring slot along the dock. Then he gunned her engines. She shot forward, headed for the channel that would take them through the harbor out to the ocean. The channel curved like an S and was marked by buoys: Along both sides of the channel were moored boats too large to park at the side of a dock—big sailboats and oceangoing sportfishing boats and luxury yachts mingled democratically with working lobster boats and commercial fishing craft.

  This channel, like all channels in harbors where there’s a lot of boat traffic, was marked with “No Wake” signs. Mike Warner was ignoring them. Dot Com’s engines were roaring, and she was throwing a lot of wake as she sped through the channel.

  Once they got outside the harbor, they could turn left or right and shut off their lights and dump Robert overboard. Within a few hours they could drop anchor in any one of a thousand rocky coves and hidden harbors all the way from Bar Harbor to Block Island. In a few days Mike and Kimmie Warner could be in Nova Scotia or Costa Rica.

  If the FBI was calling the Coast Guard right now, it was too late. Mike would be far beyond the reach of their helicopters and cutters by the time they got mobilized.

  I crawled up onto the dock. I crouched there on my hands and knees and shook off a wave of dizziness. Blood was gushing from my nose and dripping onto the planks. My head hurt and my hand throbbed.

  After a minute I pushed myself to my feet. As I watched, Mike and Kimmie Warner’s speeding boat started to turn toward the right. It was veering out of the narrow harbor channel. The big old Bertram inscribed a wide curve, and without slowing down, she plowed into the side of a chunky old steel-sided trawler. The hollow crash echoed over the water.

  A few minutes later the dock around me was swarming with people. There were uniformed cops and plainclothes cops and EMTs, local and state and federal cops, all talking into telephones and two-way radios and yelling at each other.

  Out in the harbor, Dot Com appeared to have bounced off the trawler. I could see that her bow was smashed, and she was slowly settling into the water.

  A uniformed cop grabbed my arm and turned me around. “Did you see what happened?” he said.

  I nodded. When I tried to speak, I realized that my mouth was full of blood. I turned my head and spat a big gob onto the deck. “There are three people on that boat,” I said. More blood trickled into the back of my throat. I hacked and spat again.

  The cop peered into my face. “What happened to you? Are you all right, sir?”

  “There’s a boy in the cabin of that boat,” I said. “He’s too sick to move. He won’t be able to get off by himself.”

  The cop touched my shoulder and pointed out at the water. A white runabout with its searchlights blazing was speeding into the harbor, heading toward the site of the collision. The letters USCG were painted on its side.

  “That was something, though, wasn’t it?” the cop said. “The guy driving that boat must be pretty drunk.”

  “It was something, all right,” I said. “I hope they get there before she explodes.”

  We watched as the Coast Guard boat pulled alongside Dot Com, which was listing on her side. Her bow was tilting low in the water. It looked like she was going to sink any minute.

  A hand gripped my biceps. I turned.

  It was Roger Horowitz. “Jesus,” he said. “Take a look at you. What the hell happened?”

  “I’m all right,” I said. “It took you long enough. Robert Lancaster is on that boat. He’s practically dead.”

  Horowitz nodded. “You got some explaining to do, Coyne.” He handed me a handkerchief. “Clean yourself up, why don’t you? You’re a mess.”

  Twenty-eight

  FIFTEEN OR TWENTY MINUTES later the Coast Guard boat pulled up beside the pier. As Roger Horowitz and I stood there watching, a waiting crew of EMTs lifted Robert Lancaster onto a gurney and wheeled him down the dock to an emergency wagon, which then peeled out of the parking area with lights flashing and sirens shrieking.

  Then two uniformed police officers took Mike and Kimmie Warner off the boat. Their hands were cuffed behind their backs.

  Horowitz touched my arm. “I’ll catch up with you,” he said. “You better get your face looked at, see if it’s salvageable.” He turned and headed down the dock to the parking area.

  I blew some globs of clotted blood out of my nose into Horowitz’s handkerchief, then went over to the Coast Guard boat. One of the officers was standing there on the pier.

  “Is he all right?” I said to him.

  He turned to look at me. “Which one?”

  “The boy. Robert Lancaster.”

  “He’s alive,” he said. “Barely, by the looks of him. He was unconscious. The hull of that Bertram was half filled with water, and he was kind of sloshing around in it.”

  “Where are they taking him?”

  “Addison Gilbert here in Gloucester. It’s the nearest hospital.”

  “What about the Warners?”

  “They’re okay. Their boat looks like it’s a goner, though.”

  “Thanks for saving them.”

  “We get hurricanes, missing fishing boats, kids swept out to sea by the undertow. This was pretty tame.” He looked out over the harbor and smiled. “Damnedest thing, though, the way that guy suddenly veered out of the channel and plowed right into that old trawler, wasn’t it?”

  I smiled. “Damnedest thing.”

  I wandered up to the parking area, found a private rock to sit on, fished out my cell phone, and called Dalt. When he answered, I told him that Robert had been rescued and was en route to the Addison Gilbert Hospital in Gloucester. I told him he’d probably want to get there as soon as he could.

  “Are you saying…?”

  “He’s in pretty bad shape,” I said. “But they’re taking care of him. I’m sure he’s going to be fine.”

  I heard him exhale. “What can you tell me?”

  “Not now, Dalt. It’s a long story. I’ll meet you at the hospital. Why don’t you call Teresa. I’ll fill all of you in when I see you.”

  I was heading to my car when Horowitz caught up to me. “So you’re a hero, huh?”

  I laughed. “Yeah. Look at me.”

  “You’re a disaster, all right.”

  I showed him my left hand. Blood was seeping from the smile-shaped wound made by Kimmie Warner’s teeth. “She bit me. I probably need a tetanus shot.”

  “What I noticed about that woman,” said Horowitz, “maybe it should be a rabies shot. Listen. We gotta have your story.”

  “You will.”

  “No time like the present, Coyne.”

  I nodded. “Mike and Kimmie Warner kidnapped Robert Lancaster and extorted a quarter of a million dollars from his family in ransom money. They were holding him hostage on their boat.”

  “That’s a start,” he said. “I got a feeling there’s way more to it than that.”

  “Of course there is. I’ve got to talk to my clients first.”

  “Your clients being?”

  “Robert Lancaster,” I said. “The victim. And his family.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me, then nodded. “The sooner the better, okay?”

  “What about the Warners?” I said.

  “We got them in custody. We’re holding both of them. Not sure how cooperative they’re gonna be. We got a lot of questions. We need to know what you know, Coyne.”

  “Not now,” I said.

  I drove to the Addison Gilbert Hospital, and when I went into the emergency room, a nurse—she was quite tall and very pretty and about
seven months pregnant—told me that Robert Lancaster had been taken to intensive care. When I asked her how to find the ICU, she narrowed her eyes at me and said I wasn’t going anywhere until somebody examined me.

  Now my head and my left hand were both throbbing with every beat of my heart, and I’d begun to feel dizzy and nauseated. So I allowed the nurse—she told me her name was Brooke—to steer me to a curtained cubicle. I lay back on a narrow bed on wheels. She said she’d be right back, and she was. She had a clipboard. She asked me a lot of questions. Her interest seemed to center on my health insurance.

  After I signed the form, my pregnant nurse washed the dried blood off my face and hand. She said a doctor would be with me shortly, patted my shoulder, and left.

  I guess I dozed off, because the next thing I knew a gray-haired woman with glasses down on the tip of her nose was shining a light in my eyes. “Mr. Coyne,” she said. “How do you feel?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Fine.”

  “You don’t seem to have a concussion,” she said. “I want to take a couple of stitches in that gash on your nose. When did you have your last tetanus shot?”

  I shook my head. “I have no idea.”

  She stitched up my nose and slapped a Band-Aid over it. She washed out the wound on my hand and bandaged it. Then she stuck a needle into my arm, wrote out a prescription, and handed it to me. “You might not need this,” she said, “but if the pain gets too bad, it’ll help. It’s got codeine in it, so don’t drive.” She put her arms under my shoulders and helped me to sit up. “How’re you doing?”

  I took a couple of deep breaths. “I’m okay. Little headache.”

  “Is there somebody who can drive you home?”

  “I’ll be all right,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I found my way up to the intensive care unit. It was marked by a closed door and a sign suggesting that the only way to talk to anybody was by ringing a doorbell.

  I rang the bell, and after a while a nurse opened the door.

  “Robert Lancaster is in there,” I said. “I’m his lawyer.”

  “Only immediate family is allowed in here without the patient’s permission.”

  “So ask Robert,” I said.

  “We can’t do that right now,” she said. “Sorry.” And she closed the door.

  I found a little waiting area, and Dalt and Teresa and Jess arrived about a half hour later. The ICU nurse let Teresa and Dalt in to see Robert.

  Jess stayed in the waiting room with me. “What happened to you?” she said.

  “I fell down.”

  She rolled her eyes. “That’s what my husband told me the night those thugs beat him up. He said he tripped on some stairs.”

  “We men don’t like to admit that anybody could beat us up,” I said.

  A few minutes later Teresa came out with tears welling in her eyes. Dalt’s jaw was clenched. They sat down with Jess and me. Teresa said that Robert looked like death. He was unconscious and riddled with plastic tubes, she said, and hooked up to about a dozen machines. He was dehydrated and he’d been drugged.

  Dalt didn’t say anything. I wondered what he knew, or had figured out, about Mike and Kimmie Warner.

  I asked them to release me from my commitment to confidentiality so I could talk frankly and fully with the police and get to the bottom of what had happened.

  Dalt and Teresa both nodded and said, “Sure. Of course.”

  “They’ll want to talk to both of you, too,” I said. “You, too, Jess. Just tell them everything.”

  Jess decided to go looking for a coffee vending machine. Teresa stood up and said she’d go, too, and I was left alone with Dalt.

  “Mike and Kimmie,” he said after a minute. “I can’t believe it. So those thugs who beat me up weren’t the ones who took Robert after all.”

  “Nope. It was your brother-in-law.”

  “Son of a bitch. Guy pretends to be your best old buddy and all the time he’s holding your son hostage, extorting money out of your mother. I don’t get it.” He arched his eyebrows, asking me to explain.

  I said nothing.

  “He’s been a strange man since… what happened to Jimmy,” said Dalt slowly. “There’s an emptiness about him. He’s hollowed out. You wouldn’t notice it unless you knew him before, when Jimmy was alive. It’s like his soul is gone.” He looked up at me. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t really know, Dalt,” I said. “I could only speculate.”

  “This was Mike’s way of evening things up between us,” he said. “Between him and me. He lost a son, so it’s only fair that I should. See, he’s always blamed me for what happened to Jimmy. He’s jealous that I’ve still got my son. He thinks Jimmy got into gambling because of me.”

  I looked at him. “What about you? What do you think?”

  He shook his head. “You can be a prick sometimes, you know that?”

  I shrugged.

  He turned his face away and gazed off into the distance for a minute. Then, without looking at me, he said, “It’s complicated, isn’t it? Who knows what makes people the way they are? I guess the only way Mike could live with Jimmy being gone was to have somebody to blame. I understand that. Do I blame myself?” He turned and looked at me. “Sure. I think all of us who were close to Jimmy have found ways to blame ourselves. You think, if I’d only said or done something at one time or another, if I’d listened to him more closely, asked him the right question at the right time… you think maybe this wouldn’t have happened. You could have prevented it. You can’t help second-guessing yourself, you know?”

  I nodded. “I know. It’s what they call having a conscience.”

  “The money, too,” Dalt said. “Mike and Kimmie have spent everything they had trying to find Jimmy. I don’t know how many trips to Nevada they’ve taken, how many investigators they’ve hired…” He shook his head. “When Jess understands all this, she’ll be devastated. Her own sister. Jesus.”

  I went to the nurses’ station and rang the bell. One of the nurses told me that a doctor was with Robert. She promised to remind him to talk with Dalt and Teresa afterwards.

  Roger Horowitz was sitting in the waiting room with Dalt when I got back. He had a magazine opened on his lap. Dalt was turned away from him.

  When Horowitz saw me, he stood up, grabbed my arm, and steered me into the corridor. “Let’s talk,” he said.

  “I don’t want to do this a million times,” I said. “We can talk now, or we can go to some police station where they have oneway mirrors and video recorders and a good cop to offset you.”

  “Now is fine,” he said. “We got those two in custody. Warner and his wife. They’re the ones who’ll get the one-way-mirror treatment. And, of course, I’ll have to get our victim’s story.”

  “You’re not talking to Robert without me.”

  He cocked his head at me. “Why the hell not?”

  I smiled. “Nice try, Roger.”

  He shrugged. “We found a trash bag full of cash stashed in a forward locker on that boat,” he said. “Looks like a couple hundred thousand dollars. I bet you know something about that.”

  I nodded. “I bet I do.”

  Just then Jess and Teresa came back. Jess was carrying a tray that held some Styrofoam cups. She gave one to me. “Black, right?”

  I took it from her. “Right. Thanks.” I turned to Horowitz. “This is Teresa Samborski. Robert’s mother. And this is Jessica Lancaster. Dalt’s wife. Robert’s stepmother.”

  Horowitz nodded and smiled at them. “We’ll want to talk with both of you.”

  “Who are you?” Jess said.

  “Horowitz,” he said. “State cops.”

  Jess pointed her chin at the waiting room. “I’ll be in there with my husband.”

  Horowitz and I found a little alcove off the corridor where we could sit, and I told him the whole story—how Robert Lancaster’s addiction to high-stakes poker had dug him a deep hole of debt with Paulie Russo, how
Russo sent his thugs to beat up Robert, how when Robert couldn’t come up with the money, they beat up Dalt, Robert’s father. I told him I’d made Robert promise to lay his cards on the table, so to speak, with his parents, and soon after that he disappeared. I told him about Dalt finding the CD and the cell phone inside his Sunday Globe, about his mother, Judge Adrienne Lancaster, putting up the quarter-million-dollar ransom, about me stuffing it into a trash bag and dropping it off a bridge into the Merrimack River. I told him how I’d connected some clues from the CD with my discovery that Mike Warner owned a boat, and how that led me to the Kettle Cove Marina, where I found Robert unconscious and wrapped in duct tape in the cabin of Warner’s Bertram.

  “That’s about it,” I said. “You know the rest.”

  “Why’d Warner do it?” said Horowitz. “Besides the money.”

  I told him about what had happened to Jimmy Warner, how he’d disappeared in Las Vegas after he and some of his college friends had succeeded in scamming the casinos.

  “So it’s some kind of sick vengeance,” said Horowitz. “An eye for an eye, a son for a son.”

  I shrugged. “Something like that, I guess. That and the money.”

  “Snazzy detecting, Coyne,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I thought so.”

  “There’s a lot you’re not telling me,” he said.

  “Not all that much, actually.”

  “About Robert,” he said. “Our victim.”

  I shrugged.

  “So now I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions.”

  “I assumed you would,” I said. “I’ll probably refuse to answer many of them.”

  “You being a slimy shyster lawyer.”

  “But a snazzy detective,” I said.

  It was close to two o’clock in the morning when I got home. Henry was happy to see me. He whined and barked and wagged his entire hind end, and I knelt down so he could lick my face and I could hug him and scratch his ears.