Troubled Waters

by Carolyn Wheat

  It occurred to me that I’d never known a man about whom that could be said. From Ted Havlicek to Nathan Wasserstein to Matt Riordan, I’d been drawn to driven workaholics, to men who sacrificed for their ideals. If Rap had any ideals, which I doubted, they took a back seat to his own pleasures.

  I wondered what it would be like to spend a night as one of his pleasures. No strings, no commitments, no long talks about Life—just good honest sex, given and received.

  What was I thinking? Rap and honest in the same sentence?

  The coffee arrived. I stirred in creamer and sweetener, making a small production out of the task, as if it demanded all my concentration. I didn’t look at Rap, just lifted the cup and drank a healthy swallow. As if drinking it fast could restore me to sobriety and sanity, could wipe my mind free of thoughts involving Rap and a motel waterbed.

  He touched my hand. I jumped; a tarantula couldn’t have gotten more of a rise out of me.

  “Hey, take it easy, Little Sister,” he said, rearing back in the seat. “I promise, I don’t have designs on your virtue.”

  “Why the hell not?” The coffee mixed with the drinks in a very strange way that allowed me to feel far more in control than I was. “In the first place, I’m not a kid anymore, and in the second place, I doubt that would have stopped you if you’d wanted me. So,” I said, brushing hair off my sweating forehead, “why didn’t you?”

  “Why didn’t I what, Cassie? Lay you down and fuck you under the weeping beech?”

  I was not so far gone that this reference escaped me. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  His ugly-sexy face broke into a smile of pure mischief. “What do you think I mean by that?”

  He couldn’t know about that night with Wes.

  Or could he?

  And if he did—how had he found out?

  That thought was eclipsed by another, more important, one. More than sex had happened under the weeping beech that summer.

  “What do you know about Kenny’s death?” I slid over to the edge of the booth and turned to face him.

  “You’ve decided I didn’t poison the little twerp after all?”

  “Do you think he was poisoned?”

  “You’re the one asking the questions, Counselor. I don’t know if he inhaled the stuff on his own or if somebody murdered him. I didn’t care much then, and I care even less now. Poor kid’s been dead longer than he was alive.”

  “Do you think he ratted us out back in ’69?”

  His long sigh sounded like a sincere reaction to looking back at our younger selves. “I did at the time. Hell, we all did at the time. And then when that DEA guy was killed in 1982, I thought Jan might have been right about someone tipping off Koeppler. But when she split, I decided maybe she’d been the one who sold us out.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would the feds indict her if they—” I broke off. My own experience in criminal law told me how naive I sounded. “You think they set up the whole indictment thing as a cover? That they made it look as if they were after Jan, when she was really on their side? But then, when she ran away—”

  He interrupted me. “At the time, I didn’t believe she ran away. For one thing, she didn’t have the kind of connections that could have kept her hidden for so long if they’d really wanted her found. I figured the feds had her in the witness protection program.”

  “But if they’d done that,” I pointed out, “why wouldn’t they have gone to trial? The witness protection program is for witnesses, and Jan never testified against anybody.”

  “One of the many flaws in my reasoning,” Rap agreed cheerfully.

  Too cheerfully. A complacent Rap was a Rap I wasn’t getting to. I ran another idea up the flagpole. “Maybe they just wanted to shut down the operation. To strike fear into everybody’s heart so that the sanctuary runs would stop even if nobody went to jail.”

  No salute. “Could be.”

  “Or maybe they wanted a deal. Use the threat of prosecution to get somebody else to roll over, and then drop the case once they had what they want. But who,” I asked, my voice deliberately wondering, “would they possibly want more than they wanted the sanctuary movement? Could it be that the feds’ real target was the biggest drug trafficker in northwest Ohio?”

  Still no reaction. No hint that I was hitting a nerve. “If you mean me, then you’re wrong on two counts. One, I was never more than a low-level middleman. And two, I was never arrested.”

  “Maybe there was a good reason for that,” I suggested. I let the idea roll around my mind. Rap as the informer. Rap as the agent provocateur—the guy who instigates crimes instead of just reporting crimes to the authorities. Hadn’t it been Rap who’d come up with the parathion idea in the first place? Hadn’t he always wanted to do the most radical, most out-there political action possible?

  If I’d been a recruiter for the FBI, I couldn’t have done better than Joel Alan Rapaport.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  July 17, 1982

  Pumped high, pumped for action. Ready to rock and roll, brothers and sisters. After midnight, we gonna let it all hang out. The sounds of Clapton’s guitar sang in Rap’s head. After midnight was his time, Coyote’s time.

  He sprayed sand with the tires of his Jeep as he pulled into the tiny parking area behind the makeshift dock. He jumped out almost before he stopped the car, his own engine racing. After midnight, and he was ready for action. Ready for the real thing, not the do-gooder shit he did with Dana.

  Night hung over the dune, yet the scene looked much as it had when he and Dana had waited for Jan to arrive with Miguel. The deserted lakefront, the hidden launching area. Moonlight instead of high summer sun glinting off the waves. Two broad-shouldered Spanish-speaking men in the back of the car instead of a refugee family. But the rest was the same; the Layla rocked in her homemade slip, eager to feel his hands along her smooth lines, ready to buck under his throttle like a fifty-dollar whore.

  God, he loved the midnight runs. This was the real action, the dance with danger he loved better than anything.

  The man Rap knew as La Culebra, the Snake, opened the passenger door. The second man he didn’t know by name or nickname; the Snake did all the talking for both. All the talking and all the paying.

  They all had nicknames. The sunlight refugees had families, had been dissenters, rebels, political activists back home. The midnight men had nicknames that told of their cruelty, their ruthlessness. La Culebra, Señor Muerto, El Capitán. The sunlight families fled terror; the moonlight men caused it. They were the oficiales, the torturers, the men with uniforms who came in the night and disappeared people.

  Now they were disappearing. Rap loved the irony of it. They who had disappeared so many others would themselves disappear over the horizon of Lake Erie, never to be seen again.

  La Culebra handed over the payoff, la mordida, the bite. A nice fat bundle that squished in his hand as he squeezed it. Rap opened the bag and stuck in a finger. It came out powdered with white crystals. He lifted the finger to his mouth and let the cold sting his tongue. Ice. Freeze. Like the stuff the dentist uses to numb your gums. This stuff would numb out a lot of noses up North. Primo. He nodded to the Snake and pointed at the boat. Passage paid in full. Now they could board.

  At first one or two of the moonlight brigade had tried to hand him a genuine diamond ring or a bar of gold instead of coke. But word got around, and now there was no bargaining, no attempt to substitute goods that might be traceable for the one commodity South America produced better than any other place on earth. One thing about the moonlight men, they were very good at following orders.

  In the bushes, behind a tree, Jan watched, binoculars held steady. If Rap had Coyote’s shape-changing trickster ways, she possessed the unrelenting gaze of the owl.

  She’d known Rap was up to something, something probably even Dana didn’t know about. So she’d followed him along Route 2 heading east until she was certain he was heading for Crane Creek, for
the boat. Then she’d hung back and entered the deserted dune road after giving him a long head start. She’d driven without lights, slowly and quietly, then parked behind tall reeds. Her little VW bug was easy to conceal.

  Rap took a taste. Coke passed from plastic bag to finger to nose.

  Jan knew a drug deal when she saw one. She’d been right. Rap was getting paid. Not in this to save the refugees, he did moonlight business on his own. Business that just might interest the feds enough to put an informer in the group.

  Business that he’d kill to protect.

  The question was, what was Jan going to do about it?

  Rap ordered the men onto the boat. They walked with heavy landlubbers’ steps across the powdery sand. Rap held the boat steady as one, then the other lumbered on board.

  She was a good boat, the Layla, a lithe craft with all the speed and unpredictability of a panther. She was small for the families, who had to crouch under the cabin roof on the daylight runs, but she was a perfect night boat.

  The lake was quiet; miniature whitecaps lapped the shore. Beach grass grew on the dunes; marshy areas ringed the clearing where Rap had built his short pier. The water was fresh, not salt, so trees hid the beach from the road. It was a perfect launching area for illicit operations.

  The nameless man stumbled as the boat lurched. He fell heavily against the side, cursing in gutter Spanish. Rap smiled under cover of night, ducking his head under the hull. He loved it when these macho monsters acted like sissies, cowering as each wave slapped the sides of the boat.

  He gunned the motor softly, muffling the sound as best he could. Noise during daylight was okay, a pleasure boater’s shout of pride. At night it called too much attention. Rap’s wake was as low and his engine as quiet as even Dana could have wanted as he guided the boat out of the inlet onto the lake.

  She glided over the wavecrests like a paper plane held aloft by wind eddies. A sweet craft, the Layla, the best money he’d ever spent. Rap let the spray of lake water hit his face, tasting its musk. There was an undertone of corruption in Lake Erie’s depths; pollution halted but not erased. It smelled of industry, of dead fish, of rotten weeds, of nature dying without hope of rebirth.

  Rap let the flavor linger on his lips, then licked it off. He loved the stink of the lake, loved its corrupt depths, savored its taste. He was one with its dirty, silvery, sweet-sour essence.

  A clear night. Rap preferred fog, even rain. Not a storm; that might bring the Coast Guard. But this limpid evening when the moon was bright as a streetlamp had its own dangers. He shrugged; at least he’d see an approaching craft in advance.

  Plenty of smugglers had made this trip. Prohibition was a prosperous time for the small boat owners of Port Clinton and Put-In-Bay. A quick trip to Canada, and you came home with hundreds of dollars’ worth of good booze. No grain alcohol—name brands from England. And who could patrol an entire Great Lake? Only the main docks were watched, and those sporadically. Even now, marijuana made its way across the lake, into Canada from the United States. Rap had done a couple of those runs himself, until he’d come to see that grass was kid stuff compared to the Spanish gold he carried now.

  After twenty minutes of wave-bumping, spray-in-the-face motorboating, the Snake leaned over the side and threw up his dinner. He said nothing, not even to his companion, just slid his cookies into Lake Erie and sat up straight, as though nothing had happened. His face was green in the pale moonlight, but there was no expression on it.

  Rap had deliberately done the number with the boat; these Latinos were inlanders, not used to the water, and he liked to take the starch out of them by showing them what he could handle that they couldn’t. It equalized the fact that he’d never put electrodes on a guy’s balls—and they had.

  Jan waited till the boat was out of sight of land before she turned on her flashlight. Even with Rap far away, on the boat, she hadn’t dared risk a light he might glimpse and remember. She had no illusions about her safety if Rap knew she’d spied on him.

  She let the flashlight make a tiny second moon on the path, following its erratic course back to her car. She’d hidden it in deep reeds, where it wasn’t visible from the main drive. As she walked toward it, her feet sloshed into marshland. She hoped the car was all right; she hadn’t realized the tide was rising.

  By the time she reached the car, panic had set in. The wheels were deep in mud. What if she couldn’t get the car out before Rap came back? What if he caught her? God, it would be so easy to dump a body out here in the reeds.

  She opened the car door with sweaty hands that shook as she put her key in the ignition. What if the noise of the car starting carried across the lake? What if—

  No, that was stupid. The Layla would be making her own engine noise. Rap couldn’t hear or see her car, if she got it out before he came back. If she didn’t get stuck in eight inches of merciless Lake Erie mud.

  The engine started with a grinding sound. “Okay, here goes,” she said to herself. “The acid test.” She shifted from park into reverse and found herself literally spinning her wheels. Mud flew from under the rear tires; she felt the car sink deeper into black ooze.

  Rap could come back any time; he wasn’t necessarily meeting the Esmeralda at the daylight rendezvous point. If he came back and found her, what would he—

  She knew all too well what he’d do, what he’d have to do. She had to get the hell out—and fast.

  She stepped out of the car and turned on her flashlight, aiming the beam at the rear tires.

  The flashlight startled Dale Krepke. Who else was out here? And how had anyone managed to get so close without him seeing? He left his dirt bike and crept through the brush toward the source of the light.

  The sound of a car starting guided him closer to the spot. He grinned as the unmistakable whine of wheels spinning in mud greeted his ears. Whoever was out here was stuck like a fly in a spiderweb. And he was going to be the spider.

  “How long?” The Snake’s accent turned the h into a j. It was an accent Rap could, and did, mimic with comic effect. But the voice was a harsh rasp, used to being obeyed. Nothing funny about the voice; it had all the cold-blooded menace of the man’s nickname.

  Rap shrugged, then shouted above the motor’s roar. “Not long. We should see the Esmeralda in five or ten minutes.” Abruptly he cut the engine and sat back on the lake-soaked seat.

  “Why we stop?”

  “We wait,” Rap answered. He pulled a pack of soggy cigarettes from his pocket. “Smoke?”

  They all smoked. Rap didn’t inhale anymore, just lit the thing and held it in his hand to show how friendly he was. An act of solidarity. First the henchman, then the Snake lit up. The moonlight and the boat lights were joined by three tiny red circles in the silvery darkness.

  When he’d had five puffs, Rap tossed his butt into the lake. It hissed as the lit end hit cool water. Then he pulled the Luger from under the control panel, savoring the hard swish of metal on metal as he pulled back the clip. The sound echoed across the water; the passengers jumped at a noise they knew as well as the babble of their own children.

  Rap had one second to enjoy the stark terror in the Snake’s eyes before he pulled the trigger. The man fell backwards into the lake. That was the beauty of a thin boat like the Layla; there was only one place to fall and that was off. Over the side. Man overboard.

  The henchman jumped up and rushed Rap, huge ham fists making for Rap’s neck. Two shots this time, both in the heart. Blood to spare, some of it on the seats, some on Rap’s wind-breaker. Shit! He liked things neat, but sometimes a mess couldn’t be helped.

  Rap hefted the man’s bulk over the side and watched him float next to his boss.

  He swabbed fresh blood from the deck with a mop and pail, turned the engine back on, and headed for the Ohio shore.

  Jan was up to her rear bumper in mud; the only good news was that it was fairly wet. She needed something to put under her wheels, something to give a little traction. She rea
ched into the back seat and stared down at a towel exactly like the one that had been wrapped around Ron’s legs during the ride to Crane Creek. Exactly like the one she’d held against Miguel’s bleeding stomach.

  She couldn’t think about that. She couldn’t think about the fact that what she’d done to help people could also result in death.

  She lifted the towel and placed it under her right front tire. Wedged it under, so the wheel would have purchase when she next turned the engine over. She had to get out before Rap came back.

  As she squished her way back to the driver’s seat, the sound of a boat engine cut across the night sounds of bird and wave.

  Was it the Layla returning, so soon?

  How could Rap have met the Esmeralda in such a short time? It wasn’t possible—or did Rap have another rendezvous point, a second contact in Canada? Her thoughts tumbled over one another and she fumbled with the ignition key, her fingers messy with Lake Erie mud.

  I have got to get out of here.

  Rap pulled the throttle back and let her roar like a lion. He opened his mouth wide, eating lake water, howling like Coyote. His cargo was dead. He was alive. He had a hard-on the size of Michigan between his legs. Before he took the boat into her slip, he cut the engine, unzipped his jeans, and jerked off, his come shooting into the lake, mingling its musk with the smell of corruption.

  The car bounced backwards, fell into the hole again. Jan put the gear into drive and rocked forward, then gunned back into reverse.

  One towel wasn’t enough. The rear wheels dug deeper into the mud. Jan turned off the motor and rested her head on the steering wheel. What the hell was she going to do?

  Rap buttoned his fly hastily, the car noise jolting him into sobriety after his danger high. The cops? Feds? Who was out here in the middle of nowhere? Whoever it was could only be after one thing.

  Him.

  He jumped off the boat and stumbled through the weeds until he found a break in the bushes.