by Fred Galvin
The Seventh Wave
A novel by
Fred Galvin
2019
For Margaret Jane … my Seventh Wave.
You swept me away!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1: “The better question is … ”
Chapter 2: Retirement
Chapter 3: Ronnie Deveaux
Chapter 4: Jen, Libby, Ken, and Stoopball
Chapter 5: My cell vibrated
Chapter 6: Frankie Finacci, Made Man
Chapter 7: I felt very small
Chapter 8: Seven words
Chapter 9: Bookies For Dummies
Chapter 10: St. Augie’s
Chapter 11: “As comfortable as possible.”
Chapter 12: “Numbers, no names. Get me?”
Chapter 13: … everywhere and nowhere.
Chapter 14: The Shoemaker Holly
Chapter 15: “Because it’s the seventh wave, I mean, the seventh deal.”
Chapter 16: The late Louie Calzone
Chapter 17: “ … greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”
Chapter 18: What happened next wasn’t pretty
Chapter 19: Her ebony-black eyes looked possessed
Chapter 20: F.F.F.
Chapter 21: WITSEC Squad
Chapter 22: Frankie’s dark and stormy night - Part 1
Chapter 23: Frankie’s dark and stormy night - Part 2
Chapter 24: And the sea gave up the dead …
Chapter 25: I truly had no idea.
Chapter 26: Case No. 19-218
Chapter 27: “It just doesn’t smell right … ”
Chapter 28: Snap
Chapter 29: Tall orders
Chapter 30: The Bad Demon vs. The Good Fairy
Chapter 31: … over 8,000 CCTV cameras
Chapter 32: “Lawyer.”
Chapter 33: Epiphany
Chapter 34: Connecting the dots
Chapter 35: Nonpaying customer
Chapter 36: Personal and Confidential
Chapter 37: “Dear DD” - Part 1
Chapter 38: “Dear DD” - Part 2
Chapter 39: Nothing
Epilogue
About the author, cover artist, and editor
Foreword
“It was the wrong wave. They come in a series of seven and the seventh is big enough to take
us both out to beyond the point of return”
-- Papillon
Surf’s up, bro but why?
Maybe you heard it from a beach bum with a physics hobby,
maybe you heard it from an ancient mariner having a moment of clarity on shore leave,
or maybe you heard it from your dad on vacation.
In all cases, the claim usually goes something like this:
Ocean waves travel in groups of seven,
and the seventh wave is the biggest of the bunch.
-- Live Science
“A group will ‘modulate’ the wave amplitude; it’s like another long wave on top.
So the first wave in a group is tiny, the next one is bigger and so on
until you get the biggest one in the middle of the group.
Then they get smaller again.
The last one is tiny, so the biggest wave in the group is in the middle,
and if there are 14 waves in a group, the seventh wave is the biggest.”
-- Fabrice Vernon, University of Delaware
“There is nothing softer and weaker than water, and yet there is nothing better
for attacking hard and strong things.”
-- Lao Tzu, Chinese sage
There is a deeper wave than this
Rising in the land
There is a deeper wave than this
Nothing will withstand
I say love is the seventh wave
I say love is the seventh wave
-- Sting
Introduction
It was a dark and stormy night.
I’ve always wanted to start off a story with that phrase but I guess that’s been done before. So I better clarify before I get accused of that P-word every storyteller dreads …
Plagiarism.
My defense is that it actually was a dark and stormy night. The vessel pitched and rolled with the huge Atlantic swells as they lumbered northeast toward Long Island’s south shore barrier islands where they eventually would crest and expire on the beaches. It was windy and raining steadily. Lightning lit up the clouds. Occasionally the lightning and its deafening thunder crack were almost simultaneous, indicating the bolt was very close.
The boat was chugging along without any running lights as its mission on this dark and stormy night required stealth. While the possibility of detection was extremely slight, the vessel’s captain and the lone crew member were taking no chances.
The captain had to yell over the sounds of wind, rain, and thunder. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” came the shouted reply. “Besides, it’s too late to turn back now, isn’t it? Even if we did, what would we do with him?” The crew member jerked a thumb down toward the form rolled up in sheets on the deck. It was fairly obvious that a corpse was inside with ropes tied around the sheet where the neck and ankles logically would be.
“Okay then. Let’s be done with it. This storm’s getting worse by the minute. This is a hardy boat but she won’t stand up to a tropical storm. We need to start heading in. Come on.”
Together they hefted the corpse off the deck by head and foot. The dead weight—literally—which was not only the body within but also an old anchor chain to help sink it, combined with the slickness of the deck and pitching of the boat to cause them to drop it twice onto the deck. Grunting, they both lifted once again and momentarily balanced it on the rail until gravity did the rest as the boat rolled with the swells of the Atlantic Ocean. Over the side it went. They could barely hear the splash. Breathing heavily, they both looked down from the rail into the ink-black water, which was frothy with whitecaps.
To their horror, the corpse did not immediately go under and they both noticed the rope around the neck had come loose such that the sheets had opened and the corpse’s head was exposed. Eerily, it appeared as though it was staring mockingly up at them both as if to say, “You haven’t seen the last of me!”
The crew member screamed, “Shit! Sink, Frankie, you worthless fucker, sink!”
After an agonizing minute that seemed like an eternity, the corpse started down feet first, then stopped and bobbed like a mocking middle finger with the head still looking at them. Finally, it slowly vanished into the murky depths to join the denizens of the deep.
The crew member yelled over the sound of the waves hitting the boat’s hull, vehemently spitting out the words. “Your fast talk won’t do you any good now, Frankie! Nobody’s going to hear you but the whales and sharks. You ain’t so fast any more are ya, asshole.” It wasn’t a question. Then, turning to the captain, “Let’s get out of here.”
The captain stepped forward, took the helm, and pushed the throttle to full forward. The GPS displayed the required heading. The engine roared in competition with the wind, rain, and waves and began accelerating west–northwest toward Brooklyn.
Shaken by the ordeal, the crew member sat down in the cabin breathing heavily and poured two coffees, handing one up to the captain as a toast. “To a job well done. That’s the last we’ll see of Fast Frankie Finacci.”
Well, not exactly.
Fast Frankie Finacci’s lifeless eyes were still staring up at the hull as he slowly sank and then stopped, suspended in the underwater swells.
~~~
Tropical Storm Anne spun around cyclonically about one hun
dred miles south–southeast of Long Island, New York, and was the reason why it was such a dark and stormy night. Unusually warm waters in the south-central Atlantic had led to Anne’s formation very early in the hurricane season. She had slowly progressed from a strong low-pressure area of thunderstorms and heavy rains into an organized tropical depression. Two days earlier when her sustained winds reached forty miles per hour she was officially upgraded to tropical storm status and became Anne, the first named storm of the season. She was so proud.
However, as she slowly moved slightly northward, cooler water temperatures were beginning to weaken her and upper-level winds were steering her farther out to the east and away from any possible impact with land, with the possible exception of Nantucket Shoals in four or five days. By that time, she likely will have lost her name identity and declined to not much more than “the remnants of Tropical Storm Anne” characterized by a few days of heavy rain, moderately strong winds, and thunderstorms. Yet, while she still had the opportunity, Anne was determined to at least churn up the waters enough to send some significant swells toward the barrier islands of Long Island’s south shore.
Contrary to popular belief, waves don’t actually “travel.” Waves transmit energy, not water. If unobstructed, their effects can be felt across an entire ocean. In Anne’s case, her wave energies were only moderately intense, at least for a tropical storm of her size. When they finally struck land, they were unlikely to cause any significant damage beyond some minor beach erosion.
Ultimately, when they would meet their demise as cresting shore-breaking waves, they would also deposit anything they happened to pick up along their journeys. Such flotsam could range from miscellaneous droppings from seagoing vessels, renegade loose buoys, old tires, or wooden crates, to hundreds of rubber ducks from a container which had sprung open on a ship. Some of these items have been documented to have traveled thousands of miles.
Seldom, but often enough to warrant mentioning, even a corpse would wash up on a shore, much to the horror of the unfortunate persons who happened to be on the beach that day.
~~~
A mere twelve hours and thirty-seven minutes earlier, Fast Frankie was alive and well and had no idea his demise was imminent.
Explanation …
You see, Fast Frankie Finacci was one of the most successful bookies in the Mariucci crime family. I’ll provide more detail on bookies and their trade later in this story. But for now, suffice it to say that the basics of a bookie’s business involve facilitating gambling; specifically, taking bets on almost anything.
A bookie’s clientele, especially a crime family’s bookie’s clientele, is usually not made up of the most well-heeled members of society, not that there aren’t any at all, of course. So, many times the bookie would take bets beyond a client’s immediate liquidity, if you know what I mean, with the agreement that the client’s winnings would cover the shortfall. However, if the client did not win, which was far more likely (and more frequent), you can imagine where it went from there. Let’s just say that the shortfall escalated rather rapidly and the terms of repayment became more urgent and less palatable for the client.
Given the volume of action handled, it’s easy to imagine that bookies kept meticulous records containing the who, what, when, how much, results, and running balance plus vig, which in layman’s terms is “interest.” Vig will be explained in more detail later.
Add to all that the fact that many of a bookie’s clients preferred, indeed required, a degree of anonymity. Thus, the bookie’s records were meticulously kept in code in the Book (hence the name “bookie”). The code’s format was unique to each bookie and its key was kept only in the bookie’s head. Of course the bookie’s clients, as a rule, were not aware of the coded Book’s existence, at least not officially. But how else could he do business?
However, Fast Frankie Finacci’s final boat ride on the Sea Nymph while wrapped in sheets on that dark and stormy night lends support to a couple of theories.
First, someone in the mob had found a reason to dispose of him. This could be either by members of his own Mariucci Family—if he had been stupid enough to have violated one of the sacred codes of the Mafia—or it may have been the act of a rival family meting out revenge for an intolerable act he may have committed (maybe the deflowering of the sister or daughter of a boss?). This rival family scenario was unlikely as it would have the potential of starting a mob war. This would not be popular within the overall brotherhood, especially over a midlevel bookie like Frankie. Most likely, Frankie had screwed the pooch and pissed off someone higher up in his own family to the point of bringing about his demise.
The second theory was that at least one or more of Frankie’s clients was in over his head and was desperate. Perhaps he had somehow discovered that the entries in Frankie’s Book were all in code and that Fast Frankie, and only Fast Frankie, had the tools necessary to decode those entries. So if Frankie “went away,” so would the client’s problems. They would undoubtedly believe that those decoding tools would reside for eternity at the bottom of the Atlantic along with Frankie’s corpse, thus guaranteeing the client’s anonymity and essentially wiping the debt slate clean. This would require quite a few dominoes to fall in sequence, which would have been quite a chore for an amateur.
In either case, the prime movers in Frankie’s demise did not count on the propensity of the sea to cough up its dead and the relentless power of the seventh wave.
Chapter 1: “The better question is … ”
It was a bright and beautiful day in early June (no plagiarism there, I trust), a Long Island spring gem. It was sunny, seventy-eight degrees, and a steady offshore late afternoon breeze from the north was blowing across the dunes behind me as I sat facing the Atlantic. The wind was just strong enough to stand up the waves rolling toward the white sands of Garbage Cove, a small surfing spot a little over six miles out the causeway east of the Jones Beach Tower.
The Tower has been there since 1930, modeled after its famous campanile ancestor in St. Mark’s in Venice, Italy. However, Garbage Cove came to be, at least as a surfing spot, in the early 1960s. It was so named because of the remnants of various nocturnal beach parties.
On this day, I sat on the dunes watching a handful of local surfers, equally split between male and female. The guys still wore the baggy shorts popular with the surfing crowd for decades and the girls were all bikini-clad, actually more like semi-clad, much to my delight. While it was not yet summer, the water was warm enough so that it wasn’t necessary to wear the wetsuits that were usually required for early spring surfing of the potentially bigger storm-fueled waves.
It was evident that the kids were grateful for the offshore airflow, especially with the tide coming in. That combination resulted in surfable crested waves rather than the rounded rollers they had to endure when the wind was onshore from the south. Regardless of the tide, a south onshore wind tended to flatten out most of the waves, making for short uneventful rides that offered little challenge, even to surfing neophytes.
However, this day’s offerings were significantly bigger than usual, some reaching ten to twelve feet—not huge by any means, but fairly large by Long Island’s standards. I recalled that a tropical storm had rumbled by out at sea east of the Island a day or so prior, an early-season tempest. These waves were most likely its soldiers sent out to announce its presence.
The kids were being treated to a continuous series of decent rides, as long as they were patient and experienced enough to know which waves to catch. They sat straddling their boards looking over their shoulders assessing the incoming waves for favorable formation. It seemed most all of them knew just when to flop down on their bellies and start paddling until the chosen wave raised the backs of their boards and they could stand up and head down the wave’s face. They would ride a wave nearly to shore and then kick out by simply moving to the back of the board, raising the nose so that they could exit the wave. They then would immediately turn to paddle bac
k out to wait for the next opportunity. Those who didn’t choose a good wave would paddle frantically only to have the wave roll underneath them as they slid down the back. Turning dejectedly, they would paddle back out and wait for another.
One rider took a beauty for a long ride, finally kicking out almost right in front of me. He looked my way and I gave him a thumbs up. He raised his arm high and yelled, “Cowabunga!” before turning to paddle back out to catch another wave. It was refreshing to hear the same exclamation we used to scream over fifty years earlier after an epic ride. Yes, Garbage Cove had lived on and was in good hands.
You may ask, how was I so wise in the ways of surfing?
Well, in my previous life, I was one of a handful of early-sixties school kids who found and named Garbage Cove. Back then, Tobay Beach and Gilgo Beach, both farther west on the shore, had been the popular and more formally recognized surfing spots. They still were.
The problem, at least from the perspective of our small group, was that they were too crowded and had too many “hodads.” A hodad was a blond-haired (usually bleached from a bottle) and tanned (usually sprayed from a bottle) surfer wannabe. They would hang around the real surfers on the beach (with real sun-bleached hair and real tans, like us) but seldom would actually venture into the water to catch waves.