The Dark Tide

by Andrew Gross

  Except maybe, as he relaxed a bit on the accelerator, today, to his son.

  “C’mon, Pavel, let me see what you’re made of. Gun it now!”

  Laughing, they sped into the final straightaway, then did a lap around the massive fountain in the courtyard in front of the house. The T-Rexes’ superheated engines spurted like souped-up go-carts. They bounced over the Belgian cobblestones in a father-son race to the finish.

  “I’ve got you, Pavel!” Khodoshevsky called, pulling even.

  “Believe it, old man!” His determined son gunned the engine and grinned.

  In the final turn, they both went all out. Their wheels bumped together and scraped. Sparks flew, and Khodoshevsky lurched into the basin of the gigantic baroque fountain they had brought over from France. His T-Rex’s fiberglass chassis caved in like crepe paper. Pavel threw up his hands in victory as he raced by. “I win!”

  Stiffly, Khodoshevsky squeezed himself out of the mangled machine. A total loss, he noted glumly. Seventy thousand dollars down the drain.

  Pavel jumped out of his and ran over. “Father, are you all right?”

  “Am I all right?” He took off his helmet and patted himself around to make sure. He had a scrape on his elbow. “Nothing broken. A good pass, boy! That was fun, eh? You’ll make a race driver yet. Now, help me drag this piece of junk into the garage before your mother sees what we’ve done.” He mussed his boy’s hair. “Who else has toys like this, eh?”

  That was when his cell phone rang. The Russian reached in and pulled his BlackBerry out of his jeans. He recognized the number. “I’ll be with you in a second.” He waved to Pavel. “I’m afraid it’s business, boy.” He sat on the edge of the stone fountain and flipped open his phone. He ran a hand through his tousled black hair.

  “Khodo here.”

  “I just want you to know,” the caller, a private banker Khodoshevsky knew, began, “the assets we spoke of have been transferred. I’m bringing him the final shipment myself.”

  “That’s good.” Khodoshevsky snorted. “He must have pictures of you, my friend, for you to trust him after that mess he made of things last year. You just be sure you explain to him the price of doing business with us. This time you see to it he fully understands.”

  “You can be certain I will,” the German banker said. “I’ll remember to pass along your best regards.”

  Khodoshevsky hung up. It wouldn’t be the first time, he thought, he had gotten his hands dirty. Surely not the last. The man was a good friend. Khodoshevsky had shared many meals with him, and a lot of good wine. Not that it mattered. Khodoshevsky clenched his jaw. No one loses that kind of money of theirs and doesn’t feel it.

  No one.

  “Come, boy.” He got up and went over to pat Pavel on the back. “Help me drag this piece of shit into the garage. I have a brand-new one in there. What do you say, maybe you’d like to give your old man another turn?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “Mr. Raymond?”

  Hauck knocked at the small white, shingle-roofed home with a cheap green awning over the door in a middle-class section of Pensacola. There was a small patch of dry lawn in front, a black GMC pickup with an EVEN JESUS LOVED A GOOD BEER bumper sticker parked in the one-car garage.

  The door opened, and a dark, sun-flayed man peered back. “Who’re you?”

  “My name’s Hauck. I’m a lieutenant with the police department up in Greenwich, Connecticut. I handled your son’s case.”

  Raymond was strongly built, of medium height, with a rough gray stubble. Hauck figured him for around sixty. His gnarled, cedar-colored skin looked more like a hide of leather and offset his clear blue eyes. He had a faded blue and red military tattoo on his thick right arm.

  “Everyone knows me as Pappy,” he grunted, throwing open the door. “Only people who want money call me Mr. Raymond. That’s why I wasn’t sure.”

  Hauck stepped through the screen door into a cramped, sparely furnished living room. There was a couch that looked like it had been there for forty years, a wooden table with a couple of Budweiser cans on it. The TV was on—a CSI rerun. There were a couple of framed pictures arranged on the wall. Kids. In baseball and football uniforms.

  Hauck recognized one.

  “Take yourself a seat,” Pappy Raymond said. “I’d offer you something, but my wife’s at her sister over in Destin, so there’s nothing here but week-old casserole and warm beer. What brings you all the way down here, Lieutenant Hauck?”

  “Your son.”

  “My son?” Raymond reached for the remote and flicked off the TV. “My son’s been dead over a year now. Hit-and-run. Never solved. I understood the case was closed.”

  “Some information’s come out,” Hauck said, stepping over a pile of newspapers, “that might shed some new light on it.”

  “New light…” The old man bunched his lips together and mocked being impressed. “Just in fucking time.”

  Hauck stared at him. He pointed to the wall. “That’s AJ over there, isn’t it?”

  “That’s Abel.” Raymond nodded and released a breath.

  “He played defensive backfield, huh?”

  Raymond took a long time before saying, “Listen, son, I know you came a long way down here and that somehow you’re just trying to help my boy—” He stopped, looked at Hauck with hooded eyes. “But just why in hell are you here?”

  “Charles Friedman,” Hauck answered. He moved a stack of local sports pages off the chair and sat down across from Raymond. “Any chance you know that name?”

  “Friedman. Nope. Never heard it before.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Said it, didn’t I? My right hand’s got a bit of a tremor in it, but not my brain.”

  Hauck smiled. “Any chance AJ…Abel ever mentioned it?”

  “Not to me. ’Course, we weren’t exactly in regular conversation over the past year after he moved up north.” He rubbed his face. “I don’t know if you know, but I worked thirty years down at the port.”

  “I was told that, sir. By your other son when he came to claim AJ’s things.”

  “Rough life.” Pappy Raymond exhaled. “Just look at me.” He picked up a photo of himself at the wheel of what appeared to be like a tug and handed it to Hauck. “Still, it provided some. Abel got what I never got—meaning a little school, not that he ever had cause to do much with it. He chose to go his own way…. We all make our choices, don’t we, Lieutenant Hauck?” He put the photo down. “Anyway, no, I don’t think he ever mentioned the name Charles Friedman to me. Why?”

  “He had a connection to AJ.”

  “That so?”

  Hauck nodded. “He was a hedge-fund manager. He was thought to have been killed at the bombing at Grand Central Station in New York last April. But that wasn’t the case. Afterward, I believe he found a ride up to Greenwich and contacted your son.”

  “Contacted Abel? Why?”

  “That’s why I’m here. To find out.”

  The father’s eyes narrowed, circumspect, a look Hauck knew. He laughed. “Now, that’s a pickle. One dead man going to meet another.”

  “AJ never mentioned being involved in anything before he was killed? Drugs, gambling—maybe even some kind of blackmail?”

  Raymond brought back his legs off the table and sat up. “I know you came down here a long way, Lieutenant, but I don’t see how you can go implying things about my boy.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Hauck said. “I apologize. I’m not interested in whatever he may have done, except if it sheds any light on who killed him. But what I am interested in is why a man who’s just gone through a life-threatening situation and whose life is a world apart from your son’s finds his way up to Greenwich and gets in touch with your boy directly after.”

  Pappy Raymond shrugged. “I’m not a cop. I expect the normal course would be to ask him.”

  “I wish I could,” Hauck said. “But he’s gone. For over a year. Disappeared.”

  “Then
that’s where I’d be putting my best efforts, son, if I were you. You’re wasting your time here.”

  Hauck handed Pappy Raymond back the photo. Stood up.

  “You think that man killed Abel?” Pappy Raymond said. “This Charles Friedman? Ran him down.”

  “I don’t know. I think he knows what happened.”

  “He was a good boy.” Raymond blew out air. A gleam showed in his clear blue eyes. “Headstrong. Did things his own way. Like you-know-who. I wish we’d had more time.” He drew in a breath. “But I’ll tell you this: That boy wouldn’t have harmed the wings on a goddamn fly, Lieutenant. No reason…” He shook his head. “No reason he had to die like that.”

  “Maybe there’s someone else I could ask,” Hauck pressed. “Who might know. I’d like to help you.”

  “Help me?”

  “Solve AJ’s killing, Mr. Raymond, ’cause that’s what I damn well feel it was.”

  The old man chuckled, a wheezy laugh escaping. “You seem like a good man, Lieutenant, and you’ve come a long way. What’d you say your name was?”

  “Hauck.”

  “Hauck.” Pappy Raymond flicked on the TV. “You go on back, Luh-tenant Hauck. Back to wherever you’re from. Connecticut. ’Cause there ain’t no way in hell, whatever ‘new light’ you may have turned up, sir, that it’s ever gonna be of any help to me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Pappy Raymond was holding back. Why else would he push Hauck away so completely? Hauck also knew the old guy would be a tough one to crack.

  He went back to the Harbor Inn hotel overlooking Pensacola Bay, where he was staying, stopped in the gift shop to buy a T-shirt for Jess that said PENSACOLA ROCKS, then fished out a Seminole beer from the minibar and threw himself onto the bed, turning on CNN.

  Something had happened. An explosion at an oil refinery in Lagos, Nigeria. Over a hundred people killed. It had spiked the price of oil all day.

  He reached over and fished out the number of AJ Raymond’s brother, Pete, who had come up to Greenwich after the accident to take possession of his things.

  Hauck called him. Pete said he would meet him at a bar after his shift the next day.

  The Bow Line was down near the port, where Pete, who had come out of the Coast Guard two years before, was a harbor pilot like his father.

  “It was like something just turned off in Pop,” Pete said, drawing from a bottle of Bud. “AJ was killed. No one ever called my dad a teddy bear, but one day he went to work, wanting to do everything he could about what happened. The next day it was like it was all in the past. Off-limits to even bring it up. He never shared what he was feeling.”

  “You think part of it’s guilt?”

  “Guilt?”

  Hauck took a swig of beer. “I’ve interviewed my share of people, Pete. I think he’s holding something back.”

  “About AJ?” Pete shrugged, pushed back his hair under a Jacksonville Jaguars cap. “Something was going on…. People who he talked to tell me he had this thing—this cover-up he’d stumbled into. Some ships he thought were falsifying their cargo. Like some big national-security thing. He was all worked up.

  “Then the thing with AJ happened. And that was it. It was over for him.” He snapped his finger. “Lights out. Whatever it was, I never heard squat about it ever again. It was as if the whole thing just got buried the next day.”

  “I don’t mean to push it,” Hauck said, tilting his beer. “All I want to do is find your brother’s killer, which is precisely what I believe it was. Anyone you know who can tell me any more on this?”

  Pete thought a moment. “I could give you a few names. His old pals. I’m not sure what makes you think it’s all related, though.”

  Hauck tossed a couple of bills on the counter. “That would be a big help.”

  “Thirty years…” Pete got up and drained the last of his beer. “Pop was like a god down there in the harbor. There was nothing went on he didn’t know about or hadn’t done. Now look at him. He was always a hard man, but I would never call him bitter. He took it rough, what happened to my brother. Rougher than I would expect. Given that they never saw eye to eye for a goddamned second while AJ was alive.”

  THE FOLLOWING DAY Hauck made the rounds at the docks. A couple of large freighters had come in early that morning. Huge unloading trestles and hydraulic lifts were hissing, off-loading massive containers.

  He found Mack Tyler, a sunburned, broad-chested tug’s mate at the pilots’ station. He had just come in from a launch.

  Tyler was a bit guarded at first. People protected their own down there, and here was this cop from up north asking all kinds of questions. It took a little finesse for Hauck to get him to open up.

  “I remember I was out with him one day,” Tyler said. He leaned against a retaining wall and lit up a cigarette. “He was about to board some oil tanker we were bringing in. Pappy was always going on about these ships he’d seen before, making false declarations. How they were riding so high in the water, no way they could possibly be full, like their papers said. I think he even snuck down into the holds of one once.

  “Anyway”—Tyler blew out smoke—“this one time we had pulled up alongside and the gangway was lowered to us, and Pappy was getting ready to go aboard. And he gets this cell-phone call. Five in the fucking A.M. He takes it, and all of a sudden his legs just give out and his face gets all pale and pasty—it was like he was having some kind of heart attack. We called in another launch. I had to bring the old man in. He wouldn’t take any medical attention. Just a panic attack, he claimed. Why, he wouldn’t say. Panic attack, my ass.”

  “You remember when that was?” asked Hauck.

  “Sure, I remember.” The big sailor exhaled another plume of smoke. “It wasn’t too long after the death of his boy up there.”

  Later, Hauck met with Ray Dubose, one of the other harbor pilots, at a coffee stand near the navy yard.

  “It was getting crazy,” said Dubose, a big man with curly gray hair, scratching the bald spot on his head. “Pappy was going around making all kinds of claims that some oil company was falsifying its cargo. About how these ships were riding so high in the water. How he’d seen them before. The same company. Same logo—some kind of a whale or shark, maybe. Can’t recall.”

  “What happened then?”

  “The harbormaster told him to back off.” Dubose took a sip of coffee. “That’s what happened! That this was one for customs, not us. ‘We just pull ’em in, Pappy.’ He’d pass it along. But Pappy, God bless, he just kept on pushing. Raised a big stink with the customs people. Tried to contact some business reporter he knew from the bar, like it was some big national-security story he was uncovering and Pappy was Bruce Willis or someone.”

  “Go on.”

  Dubose shrugged. “Everyone kept telling him just to back off, that’s all. But Pappy was never one to listen. Stubborn old fool. You know the type? Came out of the womb that way. I miss the son of a bitch, though. Pretty soon after his boy died up there, he packed it in with his thirty years and called it quits. Took it hard.

  “Funny thing, though…” Dubose crumpled his cup and tossed it into a trash bin against a wall. “After that happened, I never heard another peep out of him about those stupid tankers again.”

  Hauck thanked him and drove back to the hotel. For the rest of the afternoon, he sat around on the small balcony overlooking the beautiful Gulf blue of Pensacola Bay.

  The old man was hiding something. Hauck felt it for sure. He’d seen that haunted face a hundred times before. There’s nothing you can do that’s gonna help me now….

  It might only be guilt, that he had pushed his youngest son away. And what happened afterward.

  Or it could be more. That the hit-and-run up north hadn’t been so accidental after all. That that was why they were unable to ever find anything resembling the SUV the witnesses had described. Why no one else ever saw it. Maybe someone had deliberately killed Pappy Raymond’s son.

  And H
auck felt sure those tankers were connected.

  He nursed a beer. He thought about placing a call to Karen to see what she had found.

  But he kept coming back to the hardened look in the old sailor’s eyes.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Karen went back through all of Charlie’s things as Hauck had asked her. She opened the cartons she had kept piled in the basement, doing her best to avoid the attention of the kids. Heavy, boxed-up files that Heather, his secretary, had sent with a note: You never know what’s in them. Maybe something you’ll want to keep. Brochures for trips they had taken as a family. The ski house they rented one year at Whistler. Letters. A kazillion letters. A bunch of things on the Mustang, which Charlie had asked her in the will he left not to sell.

  Basically, the sum of their lives together. Stuff Karen had never had the heart to go through. But nothing that helped. At some point she sat in frustration with her back against the concrete basement wall and silently swore at him. Charlie, why the hell did you do this to us?

  Then she went through the computer that was still sitting at his desk. She turned it on for the first time since the incident. It felt weird, invasive—as if she were prying into him. His signature was everywhere. In a million years she would never have done this when he was alive. Charlie never kept a password. Karen was able to get right in. What on earth had there ever been to hide?

  She scrolled through his stored Word documents. Mostly they were letters he’d written from home—to industry people, trade publications. The draft of a speech or two he’d given. She went on his AOL account. Any e-mails he might’ve written before he disappeared had probably long since been wiped away.

  It felt futile. And dirty, going through his things. She sat there at his desk, in the messy study, much of it still just as he’d left it a year before, where he’d paid the bills and read over his trade journals and checked his positions, the desk still piled with trade sheets and prospectuses.