Grey Lady

by Paul Kemprecos

  He raised a brow. “Bravo, Mr. Socarides. Revenge is something I can understand. Obviously, the possibility of extracting payment from me has mitigated your desire for vengeance.”

  I shrugged. “Obviously.”

  “You could have picked up the information on Malloy’s research from a number of other sources. Why should I believe you actually talked to him?”

  “Because he told me about the live test you’re planning.”

  That tidbit convinced him because he said, “What’s this going to cost me?”

  I tossed out a figure that seemed like a fortune to me, but he didn’t blink. It was either small change to him, or he had no plans to pay it because he said, “That would be no problem. How do you propose to close the deal?”

  “I’ll give you the number of a bank account into which you’ll deposit the money. It will take time to arrange. Say forty-eight hours from now.”

  He gave me a bull-dog frown. “I can’t wait that long. I need Malloy tonight.”

  “Then I’ll require payment in cash, upon delivery.”

  “That’s better. I’ll be sailing at ten o’clock. I want him on board the Volga before that.”

  “Malloy won’t come willingly.” I looked around. “We couldn’t cause a scene in a public place.”

  “That won’t be necessary. I’ll order the Volga moved to an anchorage in the harbor and send a boat ashore to pick up the package.”

  “And deliver payment, too.”

  “Yes, payment will be delivered at that time.”

  “It will be tough to find a place private enough for the exchange,” I pointed to the harbor island. “Let’s do the deal there. Boat to boat.”

  “Agreed. Do you need help handling Malloy?”

  “My large friend on the dock is very capable.”

  “Nine o’clock then.” He rose from his chair. “I believe our business is done for now.”

  I stood to leave, but I knew our business was only beginning. Chernko would renege on the deal as soon as he had Malloy. The art of the double-cross was part of his DNA. He’d get rid of Tanya because it was the smart thing to do and kill me in revenge for making him look bad. I thought of offering Malloy in exchange for Tanya, but discarded the idea. Chernko would see my connection to Tanya as a weakness to be exploited. I wondered if Lisa might be swept up in my feud with Ivan. Possibly, I thought, but Ramsey liked Lisa and might run interference. Ultimately, the one certain way to stop worrying about the threat Chernko posed was to eliminate him as a threat.

  “One more question,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said impatiently.

  “You seem like a careful man. Why did you have someone take a shot at me in the fog the other day?”

  He stared at me with wariness in his eyes, then said, “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, Socarides.”

  With that, he spun on his heel and headed off at a brisk pace along the deck.

  No one tried to block my way when I left the yacht. I took Flagg up on his offer for an ice cream cone and he bought a second one for himself. As Flagg and I walked back toward the center of town, I filled him in on my tete-a-tete with Chernko.

  “What do you want to do next?” he said.

  “I want to get on the yacht.”

  “You were just on board.”

  “Yes, but this time I want to visit the Volga without being seen. I’m worried about Tanya.”

  He thought about it for a moment. “You can slip into the water where no one will see you and sneak aboard.”

  “Chernko told me he’s moving the yacht out into the harbor. That’s a long swim.”

  “No problem. We use a boat to get in close to the yacht. We get on board and find Tanya.”

  “A distraction would help.”

  “That’s easy. We time it for when we’re supposed to give up Malloy. I’ll drop a dime, call the cops and Coast Guard, and say there’s a drug deal going on at the island. By the time the Ruskies explain what they’re doing, we get us on and Tanya off.”

  “That may work,” I said. “Take me back to the house and we can start things rolling.”

  We finished our ice cream and walked to the rental car. Flagg dropped me off at the Daggett house and went to line up a boat. There was an antique Ford beach wagon in the driveway, the same car I had seen on my visit to Lillian Mayhew’s house. The Ford’s owner was standing on the porch, talking to Lisa, who smiled and waved when I got out of the car. I saw Lillian watching Flagg as he drove off. She must have been curious about who he was, but her Yankee reserve wouldn’t allow her to ask questions.

  We shook hands. “Nice to see you again, Ms. Mayhew.”

  “You too, Mr. Socarides. Lisa has told me how helpful you’ve been in bringing Henry back to the present.”

  “He wants to come back,” I said. “I gave him a compass heading to show him the way.”

  “How appropriate,” she said with a smile. “Starbuck was intensely loyal to Ahab even though he thought the captain was dangerously obsessed.” She turned to Lisa and said, “Well. Let’s see if Henry remembers me.”

  She went into the house. Lisa lingered for a minute and said, “Did everything go well with Mr. Malloy this morning?”

  “He’s fine. He left the island on his way for a reunion with his daughter.”

  “Have you and John found out what this is all about?”

  “We’ll have it wrapped up within twenty-four hours.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  She gave me a hug and we were still embracing when Lillian stuck her head out the doorway. She smiled approvingly.

  “Come, Lisa. It’s a long voyage to the 19th century.”

  Lisa hurried into the house and I headed to my apartment, ticking off a mental list of preparations for Operation Tanya. The phone was ringing when I stepped through the door. I picked it up, said hello and heard the hushed voice of my cousin say, “Soc. I’ve got a problem!”

  Another voice came on the phone. It was low and gravelly, and it had been years since I last heard it, but I recognized Chili, the cocaine dealer who had crawled out from under a rock to drag Alex back into drug world.

  “Your little cousin has got it wrong, Socarides,” he growled, “You’re the one with the problem.”

  CHAPTER 34

  The first time I met Chili, he was running a cocaine operation out of a rented beach house on Cape Cod. He was aiming for the big time in the hard drug trade, but what he got was hard time in the Big House. He took up residency at Cedar Junction, the one-star hotel for unlucky felons south of Boston, after being nailed in a drug bust. Alex had been sucked into Chili’s drug business, but I snatched my cousin from the clutches of the law seconds before the narcs moved in.

  “Guess what, Socarides,” he said, slowly pronouncing each syllable so it sounded like Sock-Ah-Ree-Dees. His voice was deeper and more gravelly than I remembered and it had a slyness that had replaced the coke-addled mumblings of his youth. “I’ve got your pretty-boy cousin sitting here in front of me. He’s looking down the barrel of an AK-47. I’m trying to decide what to do with him. You got any suggestions, Socko?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I suggest you put Alex back on the phone. Pronto.”

  Chili laughed. It was a nasty laugh. There were mirthful echoes in the background which told me that Chili wasn’t the only one with Alex. “Still playing the hard-ass private cop, old man. What are you going to do if I refuse? You going to drop a load in your Depends?”

  Old man? First Flagg with his geezer wisecracks. Now Chili had me wearing adult diapers for incontinence.

  “Nope,” I said. “I am going to hang up at the count of three.”

  I wasn’t indifferent to my cousin’s predicament. Chili was stupid and viole
nt, and after schooling by his fellow inmates, he would have graduated from Cedar Junction with a degree in criminal methodology and a resolve not to go back to jail. He’d be a lot more dangerous than on our first encounter. At the same time, I knew that any sign of weakness on my part would doom Alex. I kept counting and got as far as two. Alex’s voice came on the phone.

  “Soc, I’m sorry about this.” He sounded more contrite than scared.

  “Skip the apologies for now, cousin. Tell me what happened.”

  “Chili said he wanted to make a deal. I couldn’t reach you, so I came to Nantucket.”

  Alex acting out his private eye yearnings again. Chili and his pals were waiting to escort Alex when he got off the boat. I felt a triple-hitter of guilt. For being the bad role model Alex aspired to emulate. For not being around when he tried to reach me. And for failing the promise to my mother to protect my cousin.

  “Are you okay, Alex?” I asked.

  “Yeah. For now.”

  There was a pause and Alex’s voice was replaced by Chili’s guttural one.

  “Alex is a smart boy. He knows that he’s a dead man unless his cousin Aristotle comes through.” He pronounced my given name in that annoying, slow way. Ah-Ree-Sto-Tol.

  “I don’t have time to play games, Chili. What do you want?”

  “I spent ten years in the can because of you.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with your arrest. You got sloppy and thought you were smarter than the cops. You were wrong.”

  “Don’t give me that. You were there, watching the whole thing! You knew the cops were onto us. You made sure you got your cousin out. You could have tipped me off about the bust. You didn’t, which makes you just as guilty.”

  “Like they say, Chili, if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. If you’d been dealing in grass instead of coke you’d have gotten a slap on the wrist instead of ten years.”

  “You should be glad I didn’t do twenty, Socarides. I want a hundred thousand from you for every year I served, and a pain and suffering bonus for the guy who tried to cut my throat.”

  That explained the guttural voice. “Too bad he botched the job.”

  “He botched more than that. The pain and suffering was his when I had him clipped.”

  “You’re really scaring me with that tough talk, Chili, but I wouldn’t give you that kind of money even if I had it.”

  “Tell you what, Socarides. You’re not dealing with a kid snorting the profits up his nose. I know all about your family’s business. A million would be chump change to them.”

  Chili had done his homework. Parthenon Frozen Pizza made lots of money. They might even part with it to save the life of a family member, although I wasn’t sure about that. I knew this wasn’t all about the money. Even if I paid the ransom, Chili would kill us as soon as he had the cash clutched in his grubby fingers. I dug into my fertile imagination, trying to come up with something that would work. But my thoughts got tangled up with the threads of Chernko’s scheme. I did the only thing I could do. I stalled.

  “I’ll have to talk to the family,” I said. “In person. They’re not going to do it over the phone. I’ll have to leave the island. I can have the money in forty-eight hours.”

  “Make that twenty-four hours or the lawyer boy is dead.”

  I swallowed hard. “Okay. Twenty-four hours. How do I get in touch with you?”

  “You don’t. Make sure you’re by the phone tomorrow at this time waiting for the call.” He hung up.

  I slammed the phone back into the cradle. I didn’t like putting Alex at risk, but there wasn’t much choice. Chernko was testing the swarmbots tonight, endangering an unknown number of people. Alex was one person, and I still had some breathing room to bail him out. I had one thing going for me. Chili didn’t know I had followed him to his cottage and that I knew where he lived.

  I borrowed the bird-spotting scope from my apartment and carried it down to the MG. The Ford beach wagon and the Jeep were still in the driveway. Lisa and Lillian were off sailing aboard the Pequod with Captain Ahab. I wondered how the voyage was going, but I’d find out later. There was a family matter to take care of.

  I drove to the Madaket end of the island and turned onto a sand road not far from the driveway to Chili’s cottage. I parked off to the side of the road and hiked through a scrub pine forest. After about five minutes, I emerged from the trees onto a grass-covered expanse between the woods and the cottage a few hundred yards in the distance.

  The offshore islands were crawling with wood ticks and some carry Lyme disease, but I took a deep breath, got down on my hands and knees and went about fifty yards, skirting patches of poison ivy. When I came to a ridge behind the cottage I parted the grass and squinted into the eye-piece of the birding scope.

  Four vehicles were parked next to the cottage. A black Tahoe SUV had a license plate with the words CHILI on it. There were also two other SUVs and a pick-up, all new. I lowered the scope and pulled the baseball cap visor down to keep the hot sun out of my eyes. I moved the lens from window to window. The shades were down so I couldn’t see inside the cottage.

  Half an hour passed with no activity. I would have to leave soon to hook up with Flagg. I decided to give it fifteen minutes. Only ten had gone by before the front door opened and five men emerged. Two were Chernko’s goons, Sergie and Pitir, which explained why I hadn’t seen them on the boat. Two were the big Jamaicans I’d seen behind the restaurant kitchen in town. And the fifth was Chili. He had been stocky when I met him, and probably lost weight in prison, but he’d developed a beer belly living the good life.

  The guys hugged each other, high-fived and fist-bumped in a druggie love-fest. The Jamaicans left and the others went back inside the cottage. I watched for another quarter of an hour. There was no further activity. I made my way back to the car, checked myself for ticks and was happy to see that I was clean.

  When I arrived back at the Daggett estate, I found a note from Lisa tacked to the door of my apartment. She said she was going out to dinner with Lillian. She added: “Good session with Gramps. See you soon.”

  I went into the apartment and took a shower to wash away any hidden ticks and maybe as a ritual cleansing, warrior style. I’d take any edge I could get. I got back into shorts, T-shirt and sandals, packed my Ninja outfit in a bag and followed the winding sand path that led to Daggett’s beach cottage. The breeze had freshened and it carried the smell of food cooking. The scent was coming from the barbecue on the porch. I opened the barbecue lid and saw sweet potatoes cooking on the grill. As I lowered the lid, I felt hard pressure at the back of my head.

  “Bang, you’re dead!” a quiet voice said in my ear.

  The wind was churning up the surf, but Flagg could have ambushed me in the quiet of a church. I turned to see a boyish grin on his wide face. He was holding the spatula whose handle he had pressed to my skull.

  “Hello, Flagg. You’re starting to remind me of the valet who jumps out at Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies.”

  “Kato was an amateur. We Indians have got sneaking-around genes that allow us to creep up on the bad guys.” He hefted the pan in his other hand. “Picked up a couple of steaks on the way in. Grab some plates and implements of destruction while I warm up the rib-eyes. I like them burnt and bloody. That okay?”

  I nodded and went inside the beach shack. I found some mismatched plates and a couple of steak knives. After a while, Flagg came in with a platter of rare steaks which we attacked and quickly demolished. In between bites, I told him about Alex and the deadline with Chili.

  He kept eating without comment until he had finished the last morsel, which is when he said, “You did right putting him off. We’ll have plenty of time to deal with Mr. Chili after we wrap things up tonight.”

  “Speaking of tonight, it occ
urred to me while we were devouring a whole steer that we hadn’t pinned down our plans.”

  “Hell, Soc, you know I hate too many details. You over-plan, something’s bound to go wrong, so I like to build in a lot of improvisation. You know that.”

  “Indeed I do, pal, and I have the scars to show it. But for the sake of argument, if we did have a plan, what would it be?”

  “Plan the prep and prep the plan,” he said, which in Flagg-talk, could mean almost anything.

  In my experience, Flagg liked to build a plan around the available firepower. He got up and went over to his bag of tricks on the cot and began to pull out enough weaponry to outfit the overthrow of a small country. He laid out a couple of handguns, a short-barreled shotgun and a compact machine pistol with a sound suppressor on the barrel. Then he extracted a short black tube around a foot-and-a-half long and three inches in diameter.

  “Real cute,” he said. “Just developed. It’s a personal rocket launcher.”

  I laughed and said, “I told Chernko you might have something like this, but I was making stuff up.” I took the weapon, unfolded the pistol grip and squinted through the sight. “Didn’t know they made Patriot missiles this small.”

  Flagg chuckled, and pulled a narrow, pointed projectile around a foot long from the bag. “This little baby’s got more punch than the Patriot. We can sink a whole ship with one shot.”

  I thought about the Volga. “You talking about Chernko’s yacht?”

  “If we have to. Matter of life or death.”

  I nodded. “I think you’ve brought along sufficient hardware. Now let’s go over the operational details.”

  Despite Flagg’s preference for improv, we needed an action timeline if we wanted to accomplish a mission as delicate as the job we had in mind. Flagg said he had hired a sixteen-foot inflatable Zodiac with a hundred-fifty-horsepower, four-stroke motor. We studied the harbor chart that Flagg had picked up at the boat lease shop. Before starting for the Volga, we’d call the Coast Guard with an anonymous tip that a boatload of armed men could be found doing a drug deal off the harbor island. Taking advantage of the distraction, we’d sidle up to the yacht and climb aboard using a grapnel and rope ladder. We’d look for Tanya, and when we found her, would leave the same way we came.