Boondocks Fantasy

by Jean Rabe

  “OK,” Jeff said, frowning. An odd time to go fishing, but there were lots of strange characters in and around Dapper’s Hollow, and Frank MacAvoy was no more or less strange than anyone else. “Did he see you or something?”

  Tressla shook her head, her hair making little ripples in the water. “He dropped something into the water. Two things. This was the first.” She lifted her right hand out of the water.

  To reveal a small gun clutched in her fingers.

  “What in the world?” Jeff breathed, leaning over the dock for a closer look. It was a semiautomatic, smaller than the guns Sheriff Daniels and Deputy Stadler wore on their belts. It was made of a darker metal, too-- bluing. He vaguely recalled hearing something about it once.

  And fastened to its muzzle was a long, fat cylinder. A silencer. Jeff recognized the gadget from movies and TV cop shows.

  He tore his gaze away from the gun and looked at Tressla. She looked back at him, her expression even more taut than it had been before. “This was the second,” she said.

  And to Jeff’s stunned horror, she lifted the collar of a fancy suit jacket above the water’s surface.

  With the body of a dead man still wearing it.

  It was just as well, he reflected distantly, that he was already lying down. “What in the name of—?” He strangled back the curse. Tressla didn’t like it when he swore. “Who—what—?” With an effort, he broke off the useless question and clamped his mouth shut. If he wasn’t going to swear, he certainly wasn’t going to babble. “Do you know who he is?”

  “No,” Tressla said. “But I only know people who come to the lake.”

  “Right.” Jeff set his teeth firmly together. “Right. OK. Go ahead and turn him over.”

  Jeff didn’t socialize much with the people of Dapper’s Hollow and others who lived in the hills around the lake. But he knew most of them by sight, and the dead man was definitely not one of them. “I don’t suppose he had a wallet, did he?”

  “A what?”

  “One of these,” Jeff said, pulling out his own wallet and showing it to her. “Check his pants pockets. Actually, you should probably check all his pockets. The ones in his jacket, too.”

  “All right.” She held the gun up toward him.

  Gingerly, he took it. She slipped below the surface again, taking the body down with her.

  He shifted his attention to the gun, wondering why in the world Mac would even have something like this. The man liked to hunt even more than he liked to fish, but that was all rifle and shotgun stuff.

  And where in the world could he have gotten hold of a silencer? Jeff was no expert, but these things surely weren’t available just by walking into Crow’s Tackle and Hardware store. Not even by special order.

  There was a soft splash, and Tressla’s head appeared again above water. “This was all he carried,” she said, lifting her tail out of the water. Arrayed neatly across the dark gray of her flukes were a handkerchief, a few coins, a comb, a small flashlight, a wallet, and a thick envelope.

  Laying the gun on the fluke beside the coins, Jeff picked up the wallet. There was a grand total of fifty-five dollars in it, plus a driver’s license and credit card made out to a Jano Kostava. The address on the license, he noted, was in the city. Returning the wallet to Tressla’s fluke, he picked up the envelope and opened it.

  And nearly had a heart attack right there on the dock. The envelope contained money. A lot of money. Probably ten thousand dollars, he estimated as he thumbed through it.

  “What do you find?” Tressla asked.

  “Nothing useful,” Jeff said, carefully closing the envelope again and setting it beside the gun. “You said all this came from MacAvoy’s boat. Are you sure MacAvoy was the one driving it?”

  Tressla twitched her tail, the mermaid equivalent of a shrug. “It smelled like him.” Which meant that it definitely had been him. Tressla had an extraordinary sense of smell, both in and out of the water.

  “I guess I’m going to have to have a talk with him.”

  “Will that be safe?” Tressla asked anxiously.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine,” Jeff assured her. “Can you keep an eye on the sheep for me? They’ve been well fed, and I’ll get them into that little grassy pocket over there before I go. Just give them one of your eel-chaser screeches if they start to wander away—that ought to keep them there until I get back.”

  “I can try,” Tressla said, eyeing the sheep doubtfully. “You won’t be long, will you?”

  “I’ll be as fast as I can,” Jeff promised. “It’s mostly woods between here and Mac’s house—I can wolf it over there in five minutes. Even if he’s not home and I have to go into town, I shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

  He gestured to the items still spread across her flukes. “Better put all this stuff back in the pockets where you found it. And whatever you do, don’t let anyone else see the body.”

  MacAvoy lived just off Highway 46 in an eighty-year-old stick-built house on three heavily wooded acres. Jeff loped around the edge of the lake in wolf form, noting with some relief as he reached Mac’s land that the other’s boat was still tied to the dock. At least he wasn’t out dumping any more bodies. He reached the homestead clearing, shifted back to human, and walked up to the house.

  There was no answer when he tried the bell, and a peek into the garage showed that Mac’s truck was gone. Returning to the woods, he shifted back to wolf and headed toward town.

  He stopped first at the feed shop where Mac worked, and learned that Mac had called in sick that day with a bad back. Wondering uneasily if Mac might have skipped town, he tried the final place on his mental list.

  Which was, naturally, where he should have started in the first place.

  Otto’s was just starting to fill up as men and women got off work and dropped in for a couple of drinks before heading home. Mac was sitting alone at one of the tables in back, staring moodily into the half-full whiskey glass in front of him.

  Jeff felt his pulse throbbing in his neck as he worked his way through the maze of tables. The bar wasn’t crowded, but there were enough witnesses to keep Mac from trying anything.

  Unless he’d gone completely insane, of course. In that case, Jeff could easily wind up in a position where he would have no choice but to shift to wolf and defend himself.

  At which point the long, dark Harfeld family secret would be blown open in about as spectacular a way as anyone could ever want.

  Mac looked up as Jeff sat down across from him. “Go away, Harfeld,” he growled.

  “In a minute,” Jeff said. “I came by to talk about your boat.”

  Mac’s forehead wrinkled. “My boat?”

  “And,” Jeff said, lowering his voice, “what you used it for last night.”

  For a couple of seconds Mac just stared at him, his face utterly expressionless. Jeff braced himself, wondering how fast he could shift if the man had another of those nasty little pistols tucked away under his jacket.

  Then, to his relief, Mac lowered his gaze. “So you saw,” he said, his voice dead.

  Jeff inclined his head, an ambiguous gesture that kept him from having to lie outright. Tressla hated lying even more than she hated swearing. “You want to tell me about it?”

  “What’s the point?” Mac muttered. “Sheriff’s going to bust in any second now and arrest me anyway, right?”

  “Actually, I haven’t told him about it yet,” Jeff said, watching the other closely.

  Mac looked up again, a spark of wary hope in his eyes. “You haven’t?” he asked. “Look, it was an accident—I swear to God. He was there, and he had that gun, and—”

  “Easy,” Jeff soothed, holding up a hand. He’d never seen Mac babble before, and it was unnerving. “Start at the beginning. Who was he?”

  Mac glanced furtively around the room. “It’s about my brother. You knew he moved to the city right after the Fourth, right?”

  “Yes,” Jeff said, trying to remember the details of
Billy MacAvoy’s move. “He was opening a restaurant, right?”

  “A coffee shop,” Mac corrected. “Anyway, he’s been working real hard, and it’s finally starting to pay off. Then, a week ago, a couple of guys came to see him.”

  “What kind of guys?”

  “The kind who wanted some of the money he was making,” Mac said contemptuously. “Or something bad was going to happen to the place.”

  Jeff grimaced. “A protection racket.”

  “Yeah,” Mac said grimly. “Damn them, anyway. A little hole-in-the-wall coffee shop, and these lousy—”

  “I get the picture,” Jeff said. “So what did he do?”

  “The only thing he could,” Mac said. “He stalled them, and when they left he went straight to the cops.”

  “Who said they couldn’t do anything without evidence?”

  “Yeah, they said that,” Mac confirmed. “Only he had evidence: a security camera videotape. Picture and sound, so it caught everything.”

  “Beautiful,” Jeff said. He’d never pegged the MacAvoys as being mental giants, but in this case Billy had definitely been thinking ahead. “I’ll bet the thugs weren’t happy about that.”

  “Happier than you think,” Mac said coldly, his grin fading. “The tape Billy gave the cops disappeared.”

  Jeff stared. “You mean the cops were in on it?”

  “Well, one of them was, anyway,” Mac said heavily. “The guy I—the guy you saw—he was one of the gang.”

  “And he came all the way out here?” Jeff asked, frowning. “What in the world for?”

  “Because it turns out there were two cameras,” Mac said, smiling coldly. “Billy’s still got the other tape.”

  Jeff glanced over his shoulder. “And he’s here?”

  “Naw, he’s off in hiding somewhere,” Mac said. “He’s trying to find someone in the FBI to talk to about this. You know, with that cop involved. But I guess the thugs did their homework and figured out this was where he came from. So they sent this guy to find Billy or the tape.”

  “Only he found you instead.”

  Mac leaned over the table, his expression suddenly intense. “I swear to God it was an accident, Harfeld,” he said tightly. “He was threatening me, pointing that damn gun in my face. I just . . . I don’t even know how I did it, but I got to the gun and . . . I swear to God, I was just trying to take it away from him and not get shot.” He swallowed hard. “And it just went off.”

  “And he happened to be in the way,” Jeff said, a trickle of relief rippling over him. He should have guessed it would be something like that. The MacAvoys had gotten into more than their fair share of fistfights over the years, but he’d never heard of either Mac or Billy taking a gun to anyone. “So why didn’t you just call Sheriff Daniel?”

  “’Cause I—” Mac broke off, lowering his gaze to the table again. “’Cause I was scared,” he said, almost too quietly for Jeff to hear. “And I . . . I panicked.”

  “Yeah,” Jeff said, momentarily at a loss for words. This was a side of Frank MacAvoy most people never saw. Jeff certainly never had. “It happens, I guess.”

  “Not to me it doesn’t,” Mac growled. He looked up suddenly. “And if you ever tell anyone what I just said—” He broke off, rubbing his hand nervously across his mouth. “What am I saying?” he muttered. “Forget that. Just forget it. Anyway, I saw that he was . . . that calling a doctor wouldn’t do any good. So I took him down to my boat, tied his feet to one of those big paving stones that Dad bought twenty years ago and never put in and . . . well, you know the rest.”

  “Right,” Jeff said, nodding. “So when, in all of that time, did he try to buy you off?”

  Mac’s eyes narrowed suddenly. “How did you know about that? Damn it, Harfeld, were you outside my house?”

  “No, no,” Jeff said hastily, wincing. He’d forgotten he wasn’t supposed to have actually seen the body up close. “I just assumed he’d try to buy his way out of this mess before he started making threats.”

  “Yeah, he did that, all right,” Mac said, subsiding again. “Said he could give me ten grand now and another twenty when I gave him the tape. I told him to go to hell. That’s when he pulled the gun.” He seemed to brace himself. “Are you going to tell Sheriff Daniels?”

  “There’s a dead body in the lake,” Jeff reminded him. “Eventually, we’ll have to tell someone.”

  Mac hissed between his teeth. “Yeah, I know.”

  “But that doesn’t mean we have to tell anyone right away,” Jeff went on, an odd thought suddenly striking him. The one thing Jano Kostava should have been carrying, but hadn’t, was a cell phone. “Did he happen to leave you a contact number for his boss?” he asked. “I mean, when he was trying to bribe you?”

  “Not really,” Mac said sourly. “But it wouldn’t be hard to find one. I’ve got the guy’s phone—took it before I dumped him. I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. Anyway, the damn thing’s been ringing every two hours since breakfast.”

  “What are you telling him?”

  “Nothing,” Mac said with a snort. “You think I’m answering the damn thing?”

  “No, of course not,” Jeff said, drumming his fingers gently on the table. The beginning of an idea was starting to pull together in the back of his mind. The kind of gang that would target a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop probably wouldn’t be very big . . . “Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. No one saw you shoot the guy.”

  “Right,” Mac said. “Probably didn’t hear it, either—it had one of those silencers you see on cop shows. Lot louder than it sounds on TV, though. But no one came running, so I guess no one figured out it was a shot.”

  “And no one—except me—saw you dump the body,” Jeff continued. “So the guy’s boss doesn’t know what happened to him.”

  “Yeah, well, that won’t last long,” Mac said grimly. “I’ve been wondering if I should make a run for it.”

  “Not with a dead body in the lake,” Jeff said. “But you shouldn’t go back to your house, either. Let me think . . . how about O’Reilly’s fishing shack? It’s vacant right now, and the only way to get there is Old Rillside Road. You’d see anyone coming a mile away.”

  “I suppose I could do that,” Mac said thoughtfully. “You think I should do that?”

  “Definitely,” Jeff said, holding out his hand. “Let me have that phone first.”

  Mac’s face suddenly darkened. “Why?” he asked suspiciously. “You going to call him?”

  “Text him, actually,” Jeff said calmly. “I’m pretty sure he’d recognize that my voice wasn’t that guy’s.”

  “Harfeld—”

  “And we don’t have time to argue,” Jeff interrupted. “You’ve basically got three choices here: turn yourself in to Sheriff Daniels, wait for the guy’s boss to show up on his own, or trust me.”

  For a moment Mac continued to glare. Then his lip twitched, and he dug into his side jacket pocket and pulled out a small phone. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he muttered as he pushed it across the table.

  “Don’t worry,” Jeff said, wishing those didn’t sound so much like famous last words. “Now get going—I need you inside that shack and out of sight before it gets dark. Oh, and I’ll need to borrow your boat, too.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Mac said, standing up. “You’ll let me know what happens, right?

  “You’ll be the first,” Jeff promised. “Go on.”

  With a final grimace, Mac strode across the bar and out into the late afternoon sunlight.

  Jeff watched until he was gone, then turned his attention to the cell phone. It was one of those cheap, prepaid jobs that criminals on cop shows always used. A check of the call history gave him the number that Mac had been ducking all day, and a search through the menu gave him the text options.

  And as for the message itself . . .

  This really was crazy, Jeff knew as he laboriously thumbed out his message to Kostava’s distant boss. Crazy, dange
rous, and probably extremely stupid.

  But still, even as his pulse continued its low-level pounding, one fact overrode the fear and uncertainty.

  The fact that this beat the heck out of herding sheep.

  * * *

  His first task was to get Mac’s boat away from his private dock and move it to Perkins Pier.

  Tressla was waiting when he arrived, her head half above water, her eyes on the sheep Jeff had left under her care. The sheep themselves, to Jeff’s mild surprise, were also waiting. Even Maizie, who by all past history should be halfway down the gravel road by now. Apparently, Tressla’s eel-chaser screech, designed to startle back underwater predators, was effective on land herbivores, too.

  Nevertheless, the mermaid was clearly relieved to have Jeff back.

  Her relief vanished as he laid out the plan he’d concocted.

  But the alternative was for Mac to go to prison, or worse, and some bad people to get away with their badness. Jeff kept at her, and in the end she reluctantly agreed.

  It was just after sunset by the time Jeff got back to Mac’s house. Pulling Mac’s ladder out of the tool shed, he propped it up against the side of the house and climbed to the second-floor eaves. He didn’t know if Kostava’s people would be coming tonight or whether they would wait until tomorrow, but he needed to be ready.

  It was just as well that he was. He’d barely begun scooping handfuls of leaves and twigs out of Mac’s gutters when a fancy car came smoothly up the drive and stopped a few feet from the foot of the ladder. The car windows were heavily tinted, but Jeff could make out four shadowy figures inside.

  The front passenger door opened and a clean-shaven man in a dark suit stepped out. “Evening,” he said politely. “Are you Frank MacAvoy?”

  “No, Mac’s gone fishing,” Jeff told him, putting on his most innocent country-boy expression as he looked down from the ladder. “Can I help you?”

  “My name’s Bronson,” the man said. “I’m a lawyer from the city. I don’t know if you knew, but Mr. MacAvoy’s uncle Charles passed away three months ago.”