Crow's Landing

by Brad Smith

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  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Acknowledgments

  ONE

  The boat was moored out near the middle of the river, a few miles north of the town of Athens, at a point where the stream swept around a wide bend, the channel flowing southeastward for a half mile or so before swinging back to the south. They had anchored just before dark, having made a hundred and twenty miles that day.

  Parson had been watching the sonar for the last hour and when they came to a drop-off that read sixty-one feet, he cut the engines and lowered the anchors, fore and aft. The sun was fading fast, slipping down into the pine forest to the west, and the light that remained filtered through the tree line, casting the surface of the water in orange and red hues. The banks on both sides of the river were largely deserted along that stretch. There were a couple of ramshackle cabins visible on the east shore, and a farmhouse on a hill set farther back. A herd of Holsteins grazed on the slope beside the house, the white on their hides also colored an odd hue of orange by the descending sun.

  A man in an aluminum boat was trolling along the western bank, moving south with the current. The man wore a fedora and was smoking a pipe. He had one hand on the tiller and when Parson waved to him, he lifted the pipe briefly above his head in reply. He continued downriver, the outboard putt-putting quietly across the heavy night air, and soon disappeared around the bend.

  Parson fired the barbecue and cooked steaks that they’d bought earlier that day while fueling up at a marina in Peekskill. The woman had been reading in the cabin all afternoon, some novel she’d picked up in Charleston when they’d stopped there for a day on their way north. The book was about a slave woman who’d escaped from her owner in the middle of the Civil War and made her way north to Boston. Parson knew what the book was about because she kept telling him about it, insisting that he should read it when she was finished. She told him that she thought it would resonate with him, even more than it had with her. She’d actually used the word resonate. Parson didn’t much care about his history, how his ancestors had gotten from wherever they had been to where he was now. It didn’t matter to him, and even if it did it wouldn’t make any difference, not to somebody living in the present. In all probability his ancestors had been slaves, but what did that have to do with him? Besides, Parson didn’t read much, and when he did, he didn’t read fiction. What did he care about some story some writer made up?

  She came up from the cabin while the steaks were sizzling, smoking a joint and carrying a bottle of Chardonnay she’d just opened. She handed the joint to Parson and poured wine for both of them before sitting down on the padded bench on the rear deck of the Chris-Craft. She wore a bikini top and a bloodred sarong, her blond hair tucked beneath a cotton baseball cap. She was deeply tanned, both from the trip and the two weeks earlier in the Bahamas.

  She’d made a salad earlier and they ate that and the steaks, sitting at the pull-out table on the deck, finishing in near darkness. It was very quiet on the river; from time to time they would hear a gull, and once a pair of mallards flew directly overheard, quacking in that anxious manner that ducks seemed to possess. They finished the wine with the meal and afterward she took the dishes down to the galley to wash them.

  They had been on the water since seven that morning and at ten o’clock she announced she was going to bed. Parson followed shortly after, first checking the bilge pump and the marker lights. He would have preferred to leave the lights off, but then they would run the risk of a tugboat or trawler ramming them in the dark. The sky was clouding over as he went below, huge puffy clouds pushing in from the west, floating in front of the rising moon like ships at sea.

  When he woke, it was five minutes to two. The wind was up and the boat was riding the waves, the bow making soft slapping noises on the water. Parson wondered if that was what had awakened him. He lay there quietly for a time. Beside him, the woman was sound asleep, naked beneath the cotton sheets. Faint light showed through the window beside her. Parson could see the panther inked on her shoulder, and it looked as if the cat too was asleep, its head resting on her upper arm, its body tucked into the covers below.

  After a while he rose, pulled on his pants, and went up top. The moon was still visible, but smudged now beneath gray cloud cover. Looking at the outline of the riverbank to the east, it seemed to Parson that they had drifted with the current. He checked the sonar; it still read sixty-one feet so it must have been his imagination. The anchor ropes were tight and secure.

  He walked to the side of the boat to take a leak before going back below and that’s when he heard the sound. It was very faint, a soft splash on the surface like someone skipping a stone, and he thought at first it might have been a fish jumping. Then the clouds shifted and the moon shone through for a few moments. There was a boat maybe two hundred yards away, coming silently toward him, as if adrift.

  But it wasn’t adrift. There were men in the boat, and the noise he’d heard was an oar hitting the water.

  Parson made for the bench at the rear of the Chris-Craft, pulled the cushions from it, and opened the lid. Inside there was a false bottom of stained plywood. He pulled it out and tossed it aside. The stainless steel cylinder was underneath, wrapped in blankets to keep it from rolling around. Parson grabbed one of the handles and, heaving the heavy cylinder out of the hiding place, dragged it to the transom and threw it overboard.

  He turned back and once again caught a glimpse of the approaching boat before the cloud cover returned, this time obscuring the moon completely. Parson walked quickly to the bow and dove into the cold water. He stayed beneath the surface as long as his breath would allow, came up for air, and went under again. When he was certain he couldn’t be seen from the boat, he settled into a breast stroke and swam for shore.

  He could hear voices behind him, floating across the water. Excited voices, shouting, cursing. Looking back, he saw lights on the Chris-Craft, and on the smaller boat now tied to the big vessel.

  The last thing he heard was the woman calling his name.

  TWO

  Seven years later—

  On Friday afternoon, Virgil delivered a couple of yearling steers to the abattoir outside of Saugerties and on the way home he stopped at Slim’s Roadhouse for a pitcher of beer and an order of chicken wings. It had been sweltering the past few days and the stockyard at the slaughterhouse was like an oven; the place was in a hollow where there was no breeze at all, just a couple dozen steers standing in the steaming lot, the manure almost liquid in the air, flies hov
ering by the thousands. Virgil had released his steers into the lot and headed for town.

  He was at a table near the front windows, working on the beer while he waited for his order, when Mudcat McClusky came through the kitchen and into the bar carrying a large Styrofoam cooler, which he propped on the counter and opened to reveal a half dozen striped bass inside. The fish were still alive, flopping in the tepid water, gasping for breath. They were of a nice size for eating, five- and six-pounders, the colors bright, eyes clear. Mudcat said he caught them out in the Hudson, off Kimball’s Point, a village just north of Athens. If there were two truths to be known about Mudcat, one was that he was as lazy as a pet coon and the other was that he was full of shit. Nobody in the bar believed that he’d caught the fish now on display in the Styrofoam cooler. He may have bought them from whoever did catch them (unlikely, as Mudcat was both cheap and chronically broke), or he may have stolen them out of somebody’s boat, or he may even have just borrowed the fish for half an hour for the sole purpose of bringing them into the bar to brag. The latter scenario grew more plausible; when the cook from Slim’s came out of the kitchen, sharpening a filleting knife, Mudcat quickly put the top on the cooler and headed out the front door.

  It didn’t matter to Virgil whether it was Mudcat or somebody else who caught the stripers. The fact remained that somebody had caught them and by the time Virgil finished his beer and his wings, he’d decided he would play hooky the next day and head out to try his own luck. He hadn’t been out in his boat much since earlier in the spring, when the striped bass began their run, despite promising himself he would use it regularly. But by April the new calves were coming, and May was planting time and most of June was spent haying. Now it was nearly July and his wheat was just about ready for harvest, but according to Mudcat McClusky, the stripers were biting again off Kimball’s Point. Virgil could use a day off.

  He usually launched at Brownie’s Marina, in a cove just north of the town. The place was a local hangout, he’d discovered. There was the boat dock, and the marina, which sold bait and angling gear and a few things like soda and chips and sandwiches. Adjacent to the marina parking lot was a roadhouse called Scallywags, the standard dockside venue, a beer and wings joint that sold better than average food and had two pool tables in the back. Virgil usually stopped in at Scallywags for a cold draft or two after he’d been out on the boat. He got to know some of the locals, including Mudcat McClusky, and occasionally he played some eight ball with them.

  The “Brownie” who owned the marina was a fat slug named Gordon Brown. Virgil learned that he’d been a cop in Albany for thirty years, a sergeant for the last ten, before cashing in his pension and buying the marina. Virgil knew Brownie as well as he wanted to. The man was a barely functioning drunk and a gossip who appeared friendly on the surface until it became obvious that he didn’t have a good word to say about anybody who wasn’t within earshot. Virgil had never been a fan of cops in general—the luscious Claire Marchand notwithstanding—and he had no trouble disliking Brownie at first sight.

  The next morning he was up before the sun. He’d over-watered the stock the night before, and he threw the horses some feed and had a quick look at the cattle in the back pasture before heading out. He reached the marina at dawn. It was warm already; the temperature had been routinely hitting the midnineties every day and today would be no exception. There was a cash box by the launch for anyone docking a boat before the tackle shop itself opened. It operated on the honor system and Virgil used it whenever the shop was closed, and even when the shop was open. It was quicker to slip a fin in the box, and it saved him from feigning small talk with Brownie, or Mudcat, who sometimes ran the shop when Brownie was gone for the day or was too hungover to open.

  Virgil launched the cedar strip and tied it off to the dock while he parked the truck and trailer in the large paved lot between the marina and Scallywags. By the time he fired the old Johnson up and chugged away from the dock, heading for the channel, there were three other boats in the lot, lined up and waiting to launch.

  Virgil idled out past the pier, watching an elderly Vietnamese man casting off the rocks with a silver spinner, reeling in slowly. When the man nodded to Virgil, he nodded back and then, past the pier, pulled down the peak of his Mud Hens cap, opened up the outboard and aimed the bow of the boat into the current, the front of the cedar strip rearing up in the water for a hundred yards or so before planing out. The wind was slight, but it was out of the east and Virgil angled straight into it, thinking that the fishing was likely to be poor. Anybody who fished knew that the fish didn’t bite much when the wind was from the east. It was one of those things that people knew to be true, even if nobody seemed to know why.

  To Virgil, it didn’t matter all that much if the fish were biting or not. He’d be more than happy to take home a couple of stripers for his supper, but if he didn’t there was good beef in the freezer and potatoes in the root cellar. He’d eat well that night either way. He liked being on the river, alone in the sixty-year-old boat. As a rule he drifted with the current, rather than trolling, because he enjoyed the quiet of that, the only sound the soft slap of the waves against the cedar hull of the boat.

  The last time he’d had the boat out on the river, Claire Marchand had been with him. The stripers were finished with their spring run, and they were really just out for a cruise, although they did stop and cast for pike in a weed bed for half an hour. But mostly they’d just idled down the river toward Rondout Creek, where they had docked for a couple of hours and had lunch in Kingston before heading back north. It was a warm May afternoon. Virgil had finished planting just a couple of days earlier, and they talked about that. After a while the conversation shifted to a case Claire had been working on, a kidnapping of a ten-year-old girl from a schoolyard in Troy, which had, untypically, turned out well when the girl’s stepfather was arrested and the girl recovered unharmed. After the talk of the farm, and of Claire’s job, was finished, Claire broached the subject of Virgil himself. Specifically she wanted to know why Virgil couldn’t give more of himself up, why he was so unavailable on certain emotional levels. Virgil thought about it for a while and then replied that he couldn’t answer that question, and if he could, then probably Claire wouldn’t have needed to ask it.

  The rest of the trip had been pretty quiet. Virgil felt as if he’d disappointed her somehow but wasn’t at all sure what to do about it. They didn’t see each other much over the next couple of weeks and then Claire flew to London for some security conference, and then on to France to visit some long-lost relatives. She was still there. She had called a couple of nights earlier to say that she was having a fine time, learning about her roots. Virgil had a feeling that her newly discovered kinfolk were not emotionally unavailable.

  Virgil was alone again, and he didn’t mind it, as much as he genuinely enjoyed time spent with Claire. Still, he was more comfortable than most people with solitude, he suspected. For one thing, a man was less likely to find trouble when he was on his own. Since he was a kid, he had possessed a propensity for getting into trouble, some of it of his own accord and some of it purely by accident. Just last year, for instance, he’d been arrested for murder, escaped jail, fell under suspicion for a second murder, and was finally shot in the earlobe by the woman responsible for both. If that couldn’t be categorized as a propensity for getting into trouble, Virgil didn’t know what could.

  But a man couldn’t find trouble out on the Hudson River, all alone with his thoughts and his fishing pole and a half dozen cold beers in an ancient Pepsi cooler. After all, what could possibly happen this far from everything?

  * * *

  By noon, Virgil had given up on the stripers and was anchored in the main channel straight out from Kimball’s Point, using a walleye rig baited with minnows. He had no luck with the walleye but he did catch a half dozen good-size perch, as well as a sheepshead that had to weigh fifteen pounds or more. He kept the perch for his supper and released the sheepshead.
It was shortly after one o’clock when he reeled in his line and stepped to the bow to pull up the anchor.

  But the anchor didn’t come. It was stuck fast to something on the bottom, trapped in some rocks, he assumed. He jerked the rope quickly back and forth, hoping the action might dislodge the anchor, and pulled on it again. When it didn’t yield, he started the boat and maneuvered it around for a better angle. Still it wouldn’t budge.

  Virgil sat down on the bench seat, the rope in his hands. The anchor was new, a galvanized triple hook that had cost him twenty-eight bucks. He bought it from Brownie his first time at the marina, before he realized he wanted nothing to do with the ex-cop. He didn’t feel like cutting the line and leaving the anchor on the bottom.

  So he took the rope in hand again and pulled, this time propping his heels against the transom and putting his back into it. And the anchor moved. Not much more than an inch or so, but it moved. Which probably meant that whatever it was caught on would be coming up with the anchor. It took Virgil ten minutes, alternately pulling and resting, then pulling again, the rope burning the spar varnish from the top edge of the transom, to bring it to the surface, and when he did he was finally able to see what he had hooked. But seeing it and knowing what it was were two different things.

  It took an effort to pull the thing over the gunwale and into the boat, where he carefully rolled it onto the slats of the floor. It was a cylinder, seaweed covered and green, about four feet long and maybe sixteen inches in diameter. It had steel loops welded to it, one on each side, like handles, and was completely sealed; there was no cap, no valve, nothing that would allow access to the contents. Virgil scrubbed away some of the grime with his hand and saw that the metal was gray underneath and, as it wasn’t rusted, he assumed it was made of either aluminum or, more likely—given the weight of the thing—stainless steel. The cylinder weighed probably a hundred and fifty pounds.

  When Virgil got back to the launch at the marina, he had no intention of telling anyone about what he’d found attached to his anchor. Those intentions didn’t matter one way or the other, though, with Mudcat McClusky standing on the pier, waiting for him to dock. Mudcat spent most days hanging around the tackle shop, playing gofer to Brownie, and every time a fisherman came in off the river, he hurried down to the launch to see what they’d caught. By the time Virgil had the cedar strip winched onto the trailer behind his pickup truck, Mudcat had spread the word and there were half a dozen people standing around, looking at the cylinder. Nobody had a ready opinion as to what exactly the thing was, except for Mudcat, who was an expert on nearly everything, although this expertise was somewhat tempered by the fact that he was basically an imbecile.