Way Past Legal

by Norman Green

  “Crank up, son, crank up. Turn us hard to starboard. That’s the Old Sow, Manny, and we’ve got just about close enough.” We began to make some progress against the current, but I could feel the English imparted by the whirlpool, unseen in the water behind us. Up ahead, I could see Hop’s boat cutting through the diminishing gray smoke. He was farther up Indian Road than we were. Rosario, behind the wheel, turned and looked in our direction. It was probably my imagination, he was probably too far off for me to say for sure, but I swear I saw him grinning. I think he loved this kind of shit, I think he loved shoving all of his chips up to the line and going for it. Hop’s boat heeled sharply and headed back in our direction.

  “Stay down, now. He shoots you, I’ll never find my way back.” I veered off just a touch, cocked the revolver, took aim, and fired. The recoil pushed the barrel upward. The boom the gun made seemed loud enough, but the sound was swallowed up in that vast space. I reaimed and fired again. I doubt if I hit anything, but he turned away briefly. Wanted to think it over, I guess.

  Hobart had me throttle his engine back until we were just holding our own against the current. He looked at the pistol in my hand, evaluating. “You any good with that thing?”

  I shook my head. “If I hit anything, it’ll be by accident.”

  “Hmm.” He looked out at Hop’s boat again. “Well,” he said. “You feeling lucky?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Hobart looked at me, shook his head. “Well, they tell me I’m a rash old bahstid,” he said dryly. “How about you? How’s your luck been running lately?”

  I realized then what he meant, and I looked out at the swirling currents behind us. “Flood tide, am I right? You wanna play chicken? Sure. Let’s find out how bad he wants it.”

  “Better let me take the wheel, son.” He clambered to his feet, and I stood directly behind him so that Rosario could not hit him without hitting me. Hobart grinned.

  “You are a rash old bastard. You love this shit, don’t you?”

  “Don’t it make you feel just a little bit more alive than you was?” he said.

  “No.” I still had Nicky to worry about, and I was finding that I didn’t like taking chances as much as I had in the past. Rosey fired again, we heard the round go by overhead. Hobart spun the boat around again, but he didn’t point us exactly in the direction of the current, he headed about ten minutes on a clock face across the flow, farther out into the bay. The discrepancy cost us some headway, and Rosey gained ground on us quickly. Two more rounds went buzzing past. I was careful to stay between Hobart and Rosey.

  “Give him another one,” Hobart said. “Give him something to think about.” I aimed as best I could and fired off another round, but Hobart’s boat had taken on an odd, sideslipping kind of motion, sort of like a car losing traction on an icy road. Rosario changed direction, though. I guess he intended to pull up on a parallel course. I had no doubt that he would kill Hobart and Franklin, but he couldn’t kill me until he got his money. That was the theory, anyhow, but Rosario could be irrational at times. “Save the last couple rounds,” Hobart said.

  “You want to try?”

  He shook his head. “No need. Just give her a few minutes here.”

  “All right.” Rosario was much closer now, maybe eighty feet to our right and roughly beside us, heading west. Behind him I could see Deer Island, cool and green, now with just a hint of gray in the air over the treetops. Rosey cut his speed down to almost nothing. Where he was, the current was running up the river, and where we were, it ran the opposite direction. Hobart had the boat nose into the current, and we were fighting to make progress. There was a streak of foam in the water going past Hop’s boat, marking the division between the two opposing currents. I looked at Hobart. “Looks like he’s using your trick against you.”

  Hobart smiled again. “Maybe,” he said. “We were nevah gonna outrun him anyhow. I told you, when yoah slow, you have to be smaht.”

  Rosey was bellowing across the space between us. “Mohammed,” he yelled. “I just want whass mine. You come with me, and he can go pick up that retard and take him home.”

  I looked at Hobart. “We been smart enough?”

  “Ayuh,” Hobart said. I noticed then what he had been waiting for.

  The water between the two boats was churning insanely, and a big mound of water boiled up behind Hop’s boat, swelling up about the height of a man above the surface of the bay, and about ten or twelve feet across. Rosey, startled, gunned his boat away from it, closer to us, and it was suddenly plain that that had been the wrong thing to do. The current seized him, spun him around, and pushed him into a long arc that would bring him within about twenty feet of us. In the center of that arc, the water disappeared, I mean it just fell away, there was suddenly a hole in the water. In the space of ten seconds, the hole grew to be thirty-five or forty feet across. I could hear that grinding roar, too damn close this time, and the insectile whine of Hop’s outboard was barely audible over it. By the time Rosey got the nose of the boat pointed outward, he was sliding down over the lip. “Holy shit,” Hobart said.

  The thing was pulling at us, too. Hobart had changed direction while I was watching Hop’s boat, he had his throttle jammed forward, but we seemed to be going backward in the water. Rosario passed close by us once, close enough, anyhow, for me to see his face, white with fear. He was gaining ground, though, the Old Sow looked like she might let him go. “He might make it,” Hobart said. “He gets clear of that, we’re in trouble.”

  “Maybe so.” When he passed us again, he was pointing the gun straight at me. I guess he wanted my company on the way to hell. He fired, but the Old Sow was pulling at Hop’s boat, spoiling his aim, and I heard the bullet whisper past my head. I pointed the .45, cursing myself for not ever having learned how to shoot. I fired off two more rounds. I don’t know if I hit the outboard or not, it was what I was aiming at, but I didn’t see pieces fly off it the way they would have in the movies. I must have gotten lucky after all, though, because Hop’s engine coughed and died, and the boat slid slowly backward over the lip.

  The Old Sow was drifting lazily downriver. I saw Rosey pitch off the front of Hop’s boat, I saw his face, contorted, his mouth open wide, but I couldn’t hear him screaming, all I could hear was the Old Sow grinding. A minute passed, and Hobart’s boat began to move away toward the far shore. The sound tapered off as the whirlpool moved downstream, and then the hole in the water seemed to shrink, and it was gone. The noise started up again, though, as the Old Sow re-formed about a hundred feet behind us. Rosario and the boat were both gone, swallowed up as if they had never been there. The bay went on doing what she’d done for millennia.

  “She ain’t done yet,” Hobart said. “Jesus. That was the biggest one I ever seen. Let’s get the hell away from here.”

  “Good idea.” I wiped the Russian’s gun off with my shirt and pitched it over the back.

  14

  I guess everything looks beautiful after the bullet with your name on it has gone past your ear without hitting you. The sun came out and burned off the rest of the fog as Hobart piloted his boat up Indian Road. I didn’t know what I was looking at, islands, mainland, river, bay, ocean, whatever, it didn’t matter. I even quit trying to identify birds, I just watched. The noise of my breath echoed inside my empty skull, I had no words for questions or opinions. There were a few small houses, cabins really, on the shore of whatever landmasses we were passing. Each one looked more painfully beautiful than the last. How could anybody who lived in a place like this ever be unhappy? For that moment, the land, trees, rocks, water, birds, fish, even Hobart’s lobster boat with the hole in its windshield, seemed like a painting in a museum or maybe like something out of a dream. How could anything in real life be so perfect?

  Hobart steered us up into a narrow rock-lined finger of ocean. An A-frame cottage sat high on a ledge, up near the tree line. A short wooden pier stood on what looked like a collection of old telephone poles, rott
ed black and covered with seaweed and barnacles. A herring gull sat on top of one of the poles. I think he was a herring gull, I wasn’t really sure, but he pointed his head at the sky and called when he saw us coming. “Go away,” I guess he was saying. “Go away and leave us alone.” We kept coming, though. The gull spread his wings, lifted his feet, and the wind raised him up. He wheeled and soared away without ever once flapping his wings.

  Hobart tied up next to a wooden ladder nailed into one of the poles. “You think you need a hand?” he said. Bullets and whirlpools didn’t scare him, but he didn’t look like he wanted to climb up onto that pier.

  “If I need you, I’ll yell.”

  Walking from the pier up to the cabin, I actually wondered what it would cost to buy the place. I even stopped and looked out behind me, over the water. Why is it that you can never seem to hang on to something like this? You just get a moment, now and then, and then that moment passes on and you’re left with just that ache, just that hunger. What would get done, a voice in my head asked, what would ever get done if everyone found a place like this, and never left it?

  Yeah, but what would need to get done?

  Franklin was tied to a chair in the middle of the floor in the A-frame. He squirmed in discomfort when he saw me. “Holy shit, Franklin, am I glad to see you.”

  “Don’t cuss, Manny,” he said, not surprised at all to see me. “Cussing isn’t nice. Hurry, I gotta go pee.”

  Franklin didn’t seem to like the boat ride, he sat down and held on grimly the whole trip back. It was a trip, too, getting him down that goddam ladder into Hobart’s boat. “How are you feeling, Franklin?” I asked him. “Are you okay?”

  He glanced at me for about a half a second. “Headache,” he said. “Let me see,” I told him. “Let me see where he hit you.” Franklin held his chin up for inspection. “I don’t even think you’re going to have a bruise, Franklin.”

  Hobart chuckled. “’Bout like punching a piece of wood,” he said. We stopped and picked up Nicky and Louis on the way. I wanted Nicky to see with his own eyes that Franklin was all right, I didn’t want to have to keep reassuring him about it for the next ten years. I don’t know what their bond was, they didn’t talk too much, they just sat side by side in the back of the van. Nicky asked Franklin questions in a voice pitched too low for me to hear, and Franklin patted him on the shoulder and gave him one-word answers. Nicky still seemed a little shook, but maybe that was because he knew that we were leaving. That was the plan, anyhow. I didn’t know what Bookman was going to think of it.

  I called his office from my cell phone, left a message that I had Franklin and was headed for his house. He got there before we did, and he and his wife were both standing out by the rear of the cruiser. Their stupid dog started running around, barking, when he saw me pull into the driveway.

  Bookman’s wife came out and hustled over, she hugged Franklin and cried on his shoulder, while he looked embarrassed. “Ma,” he said. “I’m okay.” She let go of him then, and came over to give me and Nicky both a hug.

  “That’s twice you brought my son back to me,” she said. “Thank you so much. Thank you.” She smelled really nice. I couldn’t remember anyone ever hugging me like that before.

  Bookman ambled over. “Do you know where the two of you are going now?”

  “Not really. Canada, I guess.”

  “That’s probably smaht,” he said. “Don’t cross in Calais, though. There’s another place to cross, just beyond there. It’s a quiet place, nobody uses it, just the locals. The customs guy won’t even get up out of his chair, he’ll just wave you through. Hold on for one minute, I’ll write out the directions for you.” He looked at me for a couple of seconds then, with those bland eyes in that still face. Then he turned away and went off to get a pen and a piece of paper.

  I said good-bye to Louis while Bookman was inside his house. It hurt me as much as anything I could remember. I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t even know if I could talk. Louis took my hand in both of his, the same way he’d done when I gave him the money. He squeezed, hard. “Yoah gonna be all right, Manny,” he said. “You take good care of that boy.”

  “Say good-bye to Eleanor for me.” I didn’t recognize the sound of my own voice. “Tell her, I don’t know . . . Tell her Nicky and I are gonna miss her. Tell her, we get where we’re going, we’ll write. Okay?” I had to swallow. “Tell her we all came out all right.”

  He nodded and turned away, and I wiped my face on my shirt.

  Bookman was right, the guy waved us through. I stopped in St. Stephen, the town on the Canadian side, and bought a map. It looked like a long drive to Montreal, and a longer one to Vancouver, but I had plenty of time. My ATM card still worked, too, so we had gas money. I got to thinking about that, so I turned around and went back to St. Stephen and used the computer in the library to check a few things. I had an e-mail from Buchanan, and I saw in the news that the FDA had approved a new boner drug. I watched my stock soar over the next week, I kept stopping every time I saw a place that had Internet service. Nicky didn’t seem to mind. Once, I found a motel with an indoor pool, and Nicky thought he had died and gone to heaven. All of his troubles seemed forgotten then, and he did his best to drown the both of us.

  I guess I won, after all. Rosario lost, that’s for damn sure. It wasn’t because I was smarter than he was, though. If I won, it was because a few people had taken pity on me, taken me in and looked out for me. Louis and Eleanor, Bookman, Mrs. Johnson, Hobart . . . Rosario had linked up with only one guy, Hopkins, and all they had shared was trouble. Maybe, in that part of the world, you can’t make it on your own. Maybe you’ve got to have help.

  I’ve never been able to get that cabin out of my head, though, that A-frame on the coast of Deer Island. There was something there, man, I felt something in that place that I’ve never felt since. Maybe it was just the moment, I don’t know. That’s the way it goes in paradise, I guess. You don’t appreciate it when you’re in it, you don’t understand that you’re going to have to leave someday, and you don’t know the price of admission until after they’ve thrown you out.

  About the Author

  NORMAN GREEN is the author of five crime novels, most recently The Last Gig. Born in Massachusetts, he now lives in New Jersey with his wife.

  www.normgreenwriter.com

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  Also by Norman Green

  SICK LIKE THAT

  THE LAST GIG

  DEAD CAT BOUNCE

  WAY PAST LEGAL

  THE ANGEL OF MONTAGUE STREET

  SHOOTING DR. JACK

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  WAY PAST LEGAL. Copyright © 2004 by Norman Green. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition MAY 2016 ISBN: 9780061755569

  Print Edition ISBN: 9780060565664

  WITNESS™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

  HarperCollins® is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

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