“Good,” she said, but her voice sounded strained.
“Staying off the liquor?”
“Yes, Phillip,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
“Good,” he said. “I hope you’re taking care of yourself.”
“Yeah,” she said. “My mom’s here.”
“Angela, a Mountie just came to see me,” he said. “Léger. Did she come see you?”
“No. MacPherson did, the day that they found Jimmy. I had to go in to Halifax to identify his body. Then he took a statement from me.”
“Well, Léger might come see you now. I went to see Doug Amos, to ask him why he wasn’t fishing with Jimmy that night. I told him that I was asking ’cause you wanted to know. Amos musta told Léger. So Léger asked me about you. I told her you came and asked me to talk to Amos. I told her about how you came to see me on Saturday afternoon, after I got out of jail, before you went and got yourself shit-faced.”
Angela was silent.
“Do you understand, Angela?” he said. “I told her about you visiting me on Saturday afternoon.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I came to see you before I went to the Anchor. Yeah.”
“OK,” he said. “I’m glad you’re doing OK. I’m glad your mom’s with you. I’ll come see you in a few days.”
“OK,” she said.
Monday, April 26
SCARNUM LEFT AT FIRST LIGHT for Halifax, to finish the delivery he’d started on Thursday. On his way out the bay, he steered the schooner into the fishing wharf at Blandford, just as the last of the lobster boats was steaming out to fish. Scarnum dropped his sails at the last minute and steered into the wind to slow the schooner down, then spun the wheel so it came alongside the wooden wharf nice and easy.
He tied up and climbed up onto the dock, leaned on a piling with his ankles crossed in front of him, and lit a smoke.
After a few minutes, an old fellow in green work clothes and rubber boots strolled down carrying a two-gallon plastic bucket full of fish guts. He wished Scarnum a good morning and dumped the bucket off the wharf.
“Feeding the lobster?” said Scarnum.
“Figure something’ll eat it,” he said.
“Mackerel aren’t running yet, are they?” said Scarnum and the old fellow turned his bucket over and sat on it.
“No,” he said and gave Scarnum a funny look. “Too early for mackerel. Caught a few pollock hand-lining yesterday.”
“Bit of a feed?” said Scarnum.
“Never et ’em in the old days,” said the old fellow. “But with the haddock so scarce, I developed a taste for ’em.”
“Reminds me a something a woman told me on Big Tancook one time,” said Scarnum. “Said the lobster was so plentiful when she was a girl they’d crawl out of the water to get at the fish guts if the boys was cleaning mackerel at low tide.”
“Yes,” said the old fellow. “I heard that too. There was lots of fish in them days. Mind you, them fellows didn’t get nothing for ’em and they had to work like devils to get ’em. Fellows used to row they dories out a mile and a half to the mouth of the bay ’fore they’d even put a line in the water.”
“They was tough, them fellows,” said Scarnum.
“You’re gol-darned right they was tough,” said the old fellow, and he looked irritated that Scarnum even had to point it out.
“You retired, are you?” said Scarnum.
“Yis,” said the old fellow. “And I should move inland, stop watching other fellows fishing.”
“When my father had to give it up, it was awful hard on ’im,” said Scarnum. “Used to sit in the window and watch the boats go out. Was tough on him ’cause he used to outfish ’em all.”
“Where’d he fish?”
“Port d’Agneau,” said Scarnum. “Across the bay, from where Jimmy Zinck grew up.”
The old fellow nodded then, looked out at the bay, and then looked at Scarnum. “Terrible thing,” he said.
“Yuh,” said Scarnum. “Terrible thing. His wife, Angela, is a friend of mine. She’s carrying Jimmy’s baby.”
“The little one used to come down here in them shorts?” said the old fellow.
“Yuh,” said Scarnum. “That would be her.”
“Poor thing,” said the old fellow. “Must be awful hard on her.”
“Yuh,” said Scarnum. “She’s a tough little thing, but it ain’t gonna be easy.”
They sat in silence for a minute.
“What kind of a fisherman was Jimmy?” said Scarnum.
“Oh, he was a fish killer, that boy,” said the old fellow. “Oh my Jesus, that boy loved to fish. From the first day of the season to the end he’d smell like lobster bait.”
“Did he sell his lobsters to the buyer here on the wharf?” asked Scarnum.
“Well, SeaWater owned his boat,” said the old fellow. “Own a few of the boats that fish out of here. They’d send the truck down once a week, weigh ’em up.”
Scarnum stubbed out his cigarette on the dock. “He never took them to town hi’self?”
The old fellow thought for a minute. “Funny thing,” he said. “I seen ’im do it a few times. Load some lobster boxes in the back of the truck and drive off to SeaWater’s office in Chester. Seemed funny to me, since the truck come out once a week.”
“Huh,” said Scarnum. “Why do you think he mighta did that?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said the old fellow. “Never asked ’im. We minds our own business down here.”
The wind was steady from the west, so Scarnum had an easy run through the ledges. He dropped the sails and anchored off Sandy Cove, not far from where he’d anchored on Thursday. The broad green waves smashed on the rocks offshore with all the power in the world, and huge sheets of foaming spray shot up in the air.
Scarnum got into the inflatable and rode a tide rip in to the little kelp-stinking beach and walked back and forth, kicking through the seaweed, peering into the shallows where the waves were dark with roiling sand. He found a dead cormorant, some fishbones and driftwood, but nothing that made him any wiser, and he regretted the trip as he struggled to row the inflatable through the heavy waves back to the schooner.
It was mid-afternoon by the time he tied Cerebus to the floating dock in front of Dr. Greely’s house on the Northwest Arm of Halifax Harbour, where stately wooden and brick mansions overlook the long, sheltered cove, and sailboats tack up and down all day.
There was nobody home, and it seemed to Scarnum that it would be a nice surprise for the doctor to come home and find his schooner waiting for him at the dock, so he set about tidying up, packing his little sea bag and deflating the inflatable.
He had just locked the boat when two men came around the side of Greely’s big brick house and walked down the lawn to the dock.
They were dark-skinned men, one about fifty and the other in his twenties. The older man had a bushy salt and pepper moustache. He wore a blue golf shirt, a yellow windbreaker, and a blue sailing hat. The younger man had longer hair, parted in the middle, and a thin moustache. He was darker, and his face had an Indian look. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and a blue windbreaker.
As soon as they saw Scarnum, they headed straight for him. Scarnum smiled at them. “Hi,” he said. “Is Dr. Greely around?”
The older man smiled back but the younger man didn’t. He stood a few paces behind the older man and to one side. He kept his right hand in his jacket pocket.
Scarnum noticed that the older man had an old, deep scar on the side of his face, running from his jaw up to his forehead.
“We don’t know Dr. Greely,” he said. “We’re friends of Jimmy Zinck.” The man had a Spanish accent.
Scarnum licked his lips and laughed nervously. He looked back and forth at the two men. Now neither of them was smiling. He noticed then that their windbreakers, hats, and golf shirts all had the same logo: Murphy’s on the Water, a tourist operation on the Halifax waterfront.
“I don’t know anything abou
t Jimmy’s business,” said Scarnum. “I just found his boat on the rocks and towed it into town.”
The older man looked at him with cold black eyes. “Jimmy had something that belongs to us,” he said. “Somebody killed him before he could give it to us. We want it back before anybody else gets killed.”
Scarnum laughed nervously again. “I don’t know nothing about that,” he said. “Jesus. I don’t know nothing. If I did, I’d tell you. Believe me.”
The older man suddenly had a long black combat knife in his hand. Scarnum didn’t see where it came from.
“You’re lying,” he said, and he lifted the knife to show it to Scarnum. “And you not a good liar. You took our coca and we gonna get it back.”
The Mexican stepped toward the schooner, moving the knife in a lazy loop in front of him. “Maybe you think you are a tough guy,” he said. “Maybe you are a tough guy. I dunno. But you are not tougher than us. You are going to give us our coca and then we are going to leave you alone.”
Scarnum took a step back on the deck of the boat and lifted up the heavy oak boathook and held it in both hands, like a staff. He was scared.
“I don’t know a fucking thing about Jimmy’s business and I didn’t take anything off that boat,” he said. His knuckles were white where he held the boathook, and he had to grip it tightly to keep his hands from shaking. “I don’t want anything to do with you fellows. I’d tell you if I knew anything.”
The older man looked at the younger man, and he pulled a pistol out of his pocket and aimed it at Scarnum.
“Are you a stupid man, Mr. Scarnum?” the older man asked. “Do you know what happened to Jimmy? It was sad. I liked Jimmy. I was sorry for him. I don’t like to hear about people getting shot.”
He stepped onto the boat now, holding the knife in front of him. He spoke in Spanish to the man on the dock.
“I just told him to shoot you if you hit me with that stick,” he said.
He reached out with his left hand and took hold of the boathook between Scarnum’s hands and yanked on it. Scarnum let go of it and the man rapped him sharply on the forehead with the end of the gaff. Scarnum grabbed the wire sidestay beside him to keep from falling in the water behind him. His forehead hurt. He could smell the man’s sour breath. He noticed his long nose hairs and bushy eyebrows.
“Where’s the coca, Mr. Scarnum?” the man asked, and he put the end of the boathook against Scarnum’s nose, so the steel hook pushed against his skin. He held the knife like a pencil, with the tip inches from Scarnum’s eye. Scarnum twisted his head away to the side to try to keep the man from putting the boathook up his nose.
“Now you will tell me and then we will leave. I don’t want to stab you in the fucking eye, but I am sure that you will tell me where it is if I do. Do you want me to stab you in the eye?”
Scarnum opened his mouth, then closed it. “No,” he said. “Jesus. Don’t fucking stab me.”
When the Mexican laid the knife blade against his cheek, Scarnum pushed himself backwards off the boat and dropped into the water.
It was so shockingly cold that it took his breath away, but he fought to stay under and swam to the stern, pushing himself along the underside of the hull until he was able to surface out of sight of the two men under the schooner’s overhang. He pressed his face against the smooth wood and shivered. He could hear the men moving around on the boat and speaking in Spanish, their voices angry.
“You are a stupid man,” said the older man. “You should tell us where the coca is now, and we won’t have to shoot you.”
Scarnum shouted back up at him. “I don’t know anything about any cocaine,” he said. “But I wasn’t going to let you stab me in the fucking eye.”
He held his breath and ducked under the water again and dove below, pushing himself along the underside of the hull to the bow. He tried hard to be quiet when he broke the surface of the water. The men on the boat were silent now, and he couldn’t see them.
Scarnum kicked off his seaboots and shook off his pea jacket. He dove again and swam underwater as far as he could toward the mouth of the Arm. It wasn’t very far. He came to the surface, took a big breath, and dove again. He couldn’t get very deep and he couldn’t stay down for long. When he surfaced again, he dove again and started swimming underwater across the Arm, toward the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron on the other side.
When he was about fifty yards out, beyond pistol range, he looked back. He could see the two Mexicans standing on the deck of the boat, watching him.
“I don’t know anything,” he called back to them. They didn’t say anything, so he turned and swam toward the yacht club on the opposite shore. His clothes weighed him down, and the water was cold, so he was freezing and exhausted by the time he finally pulled himself from the water on a dock in front of the big clubhouse. When he looked back, the Mexicans were gone.
Scarnum was glad he didn’t know the middle-aged sailor on the dock who had watched him swim up to the dock and pull himself out.
“Fell off a boat,” he said to the man, who stood, mouth agape, staring at him. “Jesus it’s cold. I got to get warm.”
He ran, in his sock feet, down the dock, behind the yacht club building, through the parking lot, across Purcells Cove Road, and into the woods on the other side. He walked through the woods, wet and shivering and footsore, until he came to the backyard of a bungalow. He walked out onto the road and headed inland to Spryfield. He was terribly cold as he walked down Herring Cove Road to the Spryfield Shopping Mall, soaking wet and shoeless. In a store in the mall, he bought some cheap clothes with some wet twenties, changed into them in the bathroom, and called Angela, collect, from a pay phone.
“Angela,” he said. “You know that place you told me about where Jimmy told the waitress she was a stupid cunt? Don’t say the name.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Can you meet me there in two hours?” he asked.
“I guess so,” she said. She sounded confused and tired.
“OK,” he said. “Bring an overnight bag, will you?”
“OK,” she said. “Is everything OK?”
“Yeah, more or less,” he said. “I’ll tell you when I see you. But tell your mother that you’re, um, I don’t know. Tell her you’re going somewhere other than where you’re going. Is that OK?”
“OK,” she said. “I’ll tell her that Darlene called and I’m going over to stay with her for a while.”
“That sounds good,” said Scarnum. “Drive carefully. I’ll see you soon.”
Then Scarnum called Charlie. “How’s everything, Chief?” he asked.
“Good,” said Charlie. “Where’d you get to?”
“I brought the boat in to Dr. Greely,” he said.
“That’s what I figured,” said Charlie. “Greely called, once this morning, once about twenty minutes ago. He told me the boat was there but said there was no sign of you.”
“He wasn’t home so I just tied it up there,” said Scarnum.
“Greely said it looked like beautiful work,” said Charlie.
“Well, what’s he know?” said Scarnum, and they both laughed.
“That French Mountie came by today,” said Charlie. “Told her I didn’t know where you were, which was true.”
“She say anything?”
“No. Just wanted to talk to you.”
“Uh, Charlie, something I want to say.”
“Go ahead.”
“I might not be around for a few days,” he said. “If anybody comes looking for me, just tell them you don’t know where I am.”
“That’ll be easy,” said Charlie.
“But if you see a couple of dark-looking guys, look like they might be Mexicans, call 9-1-1 and tell them you’re afraid you’re gonna get robbed.”
“I don’t like the sound of that, Phillip,” said Charlie. “This something to do with Jimmy?”
“No,” said Scarnum. “Not really. Maybe. I don’t know. They’re just some fellows I come
across that I don’t like the look of.”
“All right,” said Charlie.
Then Scarnum walked to the Spryfield branch of the Halifax library, carrying his wet clothes in a plastic bag, and sat down at a computer. For an hour and a half he read articles about Mexican drug cartels.
Gangs based in northern Mexico, he learned, had taken over the cocaine transshipment business from the Columbians. The biggest gangs were doing billions of dollars’ worth of business a year, and they kept private armies and were so powerful that the Mexican government was powerless to interfere with them. One of the cartels — Los Zetas — was made up of former elite Mexican Army commandos.
In the past decade, the cartels had killed dozens of judges, lawyers, and journalists, hundreds of police, and thousands of soldiers of rival gangs. They owned trucking lines, airlines, even submarines.
After his research, Scarnum took a cab from the library to the Armview, a little restaurant at the head of the Northwest Arm.
He read the paper and drank a coffee and waited for Angela.
Angela looked pale and tired. She was wearing low-rise jeans, a small pink T-shirt that said SPOILED on it, and an oversized pair of sunglasses. Scarnum could see her smooth belly between the T-shirt and her jeans.
She sat down in the booth opposite him.
“You hungry?” he asked.
She shook her head and looked at him, chewing gum. “What did you do to your forehead?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you in the car,” he said.
He paid for his coffee and they went and got in her car. In the parking lot, Scarnum noticed that her pink thong was sticking out the back of her jeans. It looked like it was supposed to do that. She gave him the keys to her car.
On the way back to Highway 103 — the road to Chester — he started to tell her what he knew.
“I think Jimmy was mixed up with some badass Mexicans,” he said. “I think they think I have some cocaine belongs to them, which I don’t.
“They come to see me today, met me on the dock when I was dropping off a boat here in Halifax. They offered to cut me up. One of them hit me in the head with a gaff. I got out of there and called you.”
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