by Ted Bell
Give her credit, she laughed.
“I sure hope to hell you know how to dance, mister,” she said. “Now get up and get with it, I mean it.”
He hauled himself manfully up out of the leather chair.
You do what you have to do, he reminded himself.
And he danced.
And danced some more.
CHAPTER FOUR
He was drenched in sweat and panting like an old bird dog. Even the sheets were wet. Somehow he’d managed to give her three Big Os, two traditional and, last, one utterly exhausting one. He’d never worked so hard in his life. “Outside the box,” she called it, that last one.
He managed a weak smile. “Wow, you are something else, aren’t you, girl? I need a cigarette.”
“No time. Back in the saddle, cowboy. You got me hot, now. This cowgirl’s itching to ride!”
“Crystal, seriously. I need a little breather here.”
“Don’t be a pussy, Harding. Momma’s waiting. Turn over.”
“Oh, Christ.”
He rolled over onto his back and stared at the ceiling. She took his wrists and tied them to the bedposts with two Hermès scarves she’d plucked from the bedside table.
He didn’t even bother trying to fight her.
“Are you trying to kill me, or what?”
“Don’t you worry yourself, baby. The Cialis will kick in any minute now.”
“I don’t take Cialis, Crystal.”
“You do now, stud. I put two in your drink down at the lobby bar. When you bent down to pat Rikki Nelson. Remember that?”
“What? Are you kidding me? F’crissakes, Crystal . . .”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you, hon. Big sex, remember? Okay, I’ll get on top this time. Oh, yes . . . somebody’s ready for Momma down there. That Cialis is a bitch, isn’t it? Just think, two pills, you might have an erection lasting eight hours . . .”
“Listen, Crystal, you’ve really got to stop this . . . untie me . . . I’ve got a pain in my chest . . . I mean it!”
“Pussy is always the best cure for whatever ails you, son. Hang on, Momma’s gonna ride this bucking bronco . . .”
“Damn it, get off! I’ve got a cardiac condition! Doc says I’m supposed to take it easy . . . Goddammit, I’m serious! Now my arm really hurts . . . call the doctor, Crystal. Now. They must have a house doctor on call and. . . . oh, Christ almighty, it hurts . . . do something!”
“Like what?”
“My pills! My nitro pills! They’re over there in my trouser pocket. . . .”
“Hold on a sec . . .”
She reached over and picked up the bedside phone, never breaking her rhythmic stride, and asked for the hotel operator.
He must have passed out from the pain. Everything was foggy, out of focus. The room was dark, the rain beating hard against the windowpanes. Just a single lamp light from a table over in the corner.
Crystal, still naked, was sitting at the foot of the bed, smoking a cigarette and talking to the doctor in hushed tones. Her head was resting on the doctor’s shoulder. He couldn’t make out what they were saying. He was bathed in a cold, clammy sweat and the pain had spread from behind his breastbone into and out along his left arm. Fucking hell. His wrists were still tied to the bedposts? Was she insane?
Then he noticed something that totally weirded him out. The fucking doctor? His savior?
He was naked.
He heard a sob escape his own lips, and then a cry of pain from the phantom elephant sitting atop his chest.
“Shhh,” the doctor said, getting to his feet and coming to the head of the bed to stand beside him. He put his finger to his lips and said, “Shhh,” again.
“You’ve gotta do CPR or something, Doc,” Harding croaked. “My pills! They’re in the right pocket of my trousers. Please. I feel like I’m going to die . . .”
“That’s because you are going to die, Harding,” the man said.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Wait. Who are you?” He squinted his eyes, but he couldn’t make out the physician’s features.
“Vengeance, sayeth the Lord, Harding. That’s who I am. Vengeance.”
“You’re not a doctor. . . . You’re . . .”
“Dr. Death will do for now.”
“Who . . . no, you’re not . . . you’re somebody else. You’re . . .”
“Don’t you recognize me anymore, Harding? I’ve had a little surgery recently. A bit of Botox. But, still, the eyes are always a dead giveaway. Look close.”
“Spider?”
“Bingo.”
“No, can’t be . . . You’re Spider, f’crissakes,” the dying man croaked.
“Right. Spider Payne. Your old buddy. Come rain or come shine. Tonight, it’s rain. Look out the window, Harding. It’s goddamn pouring out there. Ever see it rain so hard?”
“Gimme a break here, Spider. What are you doing . . .”
“It’s called poetic justice. A little twist of fate shall we say?”
Pain scorched Torrance’s body and he arched upward, straining against his bonds, coming almost completely off the bed. He didn’t think anything could hurt this much.
His old nemesis knelt on the floor by the bed and started gently stroking his hair. When he spoke, it was barely above a whisper.
“You fucked me royally, Harding. Remember that? When I needed you most? When the French government, whom you always claimed to have in your pocket, nailed my balls to the wall? Kidnapping and suspicion of murder. Thirty years to life? Ring a bell?”
“That wasn’t my fault, f’crissakes! Please! You gotta help me!”
“That’s my line. Help me. You don’t get to use it. Way too late for that, I’m afraid, old soldier. You’re catching the next train, partner.”
“I can’t . . . I can’t breathe . . . I can’t catch my . . .”
“This is how it works, Harding. You fucked with the wrong honchos in Moscow, buddy. Really wrong. Ever heard of a dude goes by the name of Uncle Joe? A dead ringer for Joe Stalin. You pissed off Putin’s number one henchman in the Kremlin, compadre. He’s the reason I’m here. Your ass is mine, pal.”
“Who—”
“Doesn’t matter now. It’s so simple, isn’t it? Judgment Day. How it all works out in the end? In that dark hour when no treason, no treachery, no bad deed goes unpunished.”
“I can’t . . . can’t . . .”
Harding Torrance opened his eyes wide in fear and pain. And as the blackness creeped in around him, and his life ran away from him like a man fleeing a burning building, he heard Spider Payne utter the last words his brain would ever register.
“You fucked me, right? But, in the end, Crystal Meth and the old Spider, well, I guess they fucked you.”
“Who’s Uncle Joe?” Harding Torrance whispered with the last breath left in his body.
CHAPTER FIVE
North Haven, Maine
The bright blue waters of Penobscot Bay beckoned. Cam Hooker, buttoning up a light blue and freshly laundered Brooks Brothers shirt, paused to throw open his dressing room window. Glorious morning, all right. Sunlight sparkled on the bay, white seabirds flashed and dove above. He leaned out the window, took a deep breath of pine-scented Maine air, and assessed the morning’s weather.
Fresh breeze out of the east, and a moderate chop, fifteen knots sustained, maybe gusting to thirty. Barometer falling, increased cloudiness, possible thunderheads moving in from the west by midmorning. Chance of rain showers later on, oh, sixty to seventy percent, give or take.
Perfect.
Certainly nothing an old salt like Cameron Hooker couldn’t handle.
It was Sunday, praise the Lord, his favorite day of the week. The day he got to take himself, his New York Times, and whatever tattered paperback spy n
ovel he was currently headlong into reading for the third time (an old Alastair MacLean) out on his boat for a few tranquil hours of peace and quiet and bliss.
Hooker had sailed her, his black ketch Maracaya, every single Sunday morning of his life, for nigh on forty years now, rain or shine, sleet, hail or snow.
Man alone. A singleton. Solitary.
It was high summer again, and summer meant grandchildren by the dozen. Toddlers, rug rats, and various ragamuffins running roughshod throughout his rambling old seaside cottage on North Haven Island. Haven? Hah! Up and down the back stairs they rumbled, tearing roughshod through the rose gardens, dashing inside and out, darting through his vegetable patches and into his library, all the while shouting at peak decibels some mysterious new battle cry, “Huzzah! Huzzah!” picked up God knows where.
It was the victory cheer accorded to General George Washington, he knew that, but this intellectually impoverished gizmo generation had not a clue who George Washington was! Of that much, at least, he was certain.
You knew you were down in the deep severe when not a single young soul in your entire family had the remotest clue who the hell the Father of Our Country was!
In his day, portraits of the great man beamed benevolence down on students from every wall of every classroom. He was our Father, the Father of our country. Your country! Why, if someone had told young Cam back then that in just one or two generations, the general himself would have been scrubbed clean from our—why, he would have—
“What are you thinking about, dear?” his wife, Gillian, said, interrupting Cam’s dark reverie at the breakfast table later that morning. She was perusing what he’d always referred to as the “Women’s Sports Section.” Also sometimes known as the bridal pages in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. Apparently, the definitive weekly “Who’s Who” of who’d married whom last week. For all those out there who, like his wife of sixty years, were still keeping score, he supposed.
“You’re frowning, dear,” she said.
“Hmm.”
He scratched his grizzled chin and sighed, gazing out at the tall forests of green trees marching down to the bright harbor. Even now, a mud-caked munchkin wielding a blue Frisbee bat advanced stealthily up the hill, stalking Cam’s old chocolate Lab, Captain, sleeping in the foreground.
“Will you look at that?” he mused.
Gillian put the paper down and peered at him over the toaster.
“What is it, dear?”
“Oh, nothing. It’s July, you know,” he said, rapping sharply on the window to alert his dog and scare the munchkin away.
“July? What about it?”
“It is the cruelest month,” he said, not looking up from the Book Review. “Not April. July. That’s all.”
“Oh, good heavens,” she said, and snatched away her section of the paper.
Dismissed, he stood and leaned across the table to kiss his wife’s proffered cheek.
“It’s your own damn fault, Cam Hooker,” she said, stroking his rosy cheek. “If you’d relent for once in your life, if you’d only let them have a television to watch, just one! That black-and-white set gathering dust up in the attic would do, the one you watched the Watergate thing on. Or even one of those handheld computer thingies, whatever they’re called; silence would reign supreme in this house once more. But no. Not you.”
“A television? In this house?” he said. “Oh, no. Not in this house. Never! I’ll buy more books if I have to!”
“There’s no room for more books, Cam!”
Grabbing his newspapers, book, and canvas sail bag and swinging out into the backyard, slamming the screen door behind him, he headed down the sloping green lawn to his dock. The old Hooker property, some fifteen acres of it, was right at the tip of Crabtree Point, with magnificent views of the Fox Islands Thorofare inlet and the Camden Hills to the west. Cameron was the fifth-generation Hooker to summer on this island, not that anyone cared a whit about such things anymore. Traditions, history, common sense, and common courtesy, things like that, all gone to hell or by the wayside. Hell, they were trying to get rid of Christmas! Some goddamn school district in Ohio had banned the singing of “Silent Night.” “Silent Night”?
Next thing you knew they’d be banning Old Glory in the goddamn schools.
He could see the old girl out there at the far end of the dock when he crested the hill. Just the sight of her never failed to move him. His heart skipped a beat, literally, every time she hove into view.
Maracaya.
She was an old Alden-design ketch, and he’d owned her for longer than time. Forty feet on the waterline, wooden hull, gleaming black Awlgrip, with a gold cove stripe running along her flank beneath the gunwales. Her decks were teak, her spars were Sitka spruce, and she was about as yar as any damn boat currently plying the waters of coastal Maine, in his not-so-humble, humble opinion.
Making his way down the hill to the sun-dappled water, Cam couldn’t take his eyes off her.
She’d never looked better.
He had a young kid this summer, sophomore at Yale, living down here in the boathouse. The boy helped him keep Maracaya in proper Bristol fashion. She was a looker, all right, but she was a goer, too. He’d won the Block Island Race on her back in ’87, and then the Nantucket Opera Cup the year after that. Now, barely memories, just dusty trophies on the mantel in some peoples’ goddamn not-so-humble opinion.
“Morning, Skipper,” the crew-cut blond kid said, popping his head up from the companionway. “Coffee’s on below, sir. You’re good to go.”
“Thanks, Ben, good on ya, mate.”
“Good day for it, sir,” the boy said, looking up at the big blue sky with his big white smile. He was a good kid, this Ben Sparhawk. Sixth-generation North Haven—his dad and granddad were both hardworking lobstermen. Came from solid Maine stock too. Men from another time, men who could toil at being a fisherman, a farmer, a sailor, a lumberman, a shipwright, and a quarryman, all rolled into one. And master of all.
Ben was a history major at New Haven, on a full scholarship. He had a head on his shoulders, he did, and he used it. He came up from the galley below and quickly moved to the port-side bow, freeing the forward, spring, and aft mooring lines before leaping easily from the deck down onto the dock.
“Prettiest boat in the harbor, sir,” Ben said, looking at her gleaming mahogany topsides with some pride.
“Absofuckinlutely, son,” Cam said, laughing out loud at his good fortune, another golden day awaiting him out there on the water. He was one of the lucky ones and he knew it. A man in good health, of sound mind, and looking forward to the precious balance of his time here on earth, specifically in the great state of Maine.
Cam Hooker threaded his way, tacking smartly through the teeming Thorofare. It was crowded as hell, always was this time of year, especially this Fourth of July weekend. Boats and yachts of every description hove into view: the Vinalhaven ferry steaming stolidly across, knockabouts and dinghies, a lovely old Nat Herreshoff gaff-headed Bar Harbor 30; and here came one of the original Internationals built in Norway, sparring with a Luders; and even a big Palmer Johnson stinkpot anchored just off Foy Brown’s Yard, over a hundred feet long he’d guess, with New York Yacht Club burgees emblazoned on her smokestack. Pretty damn fancy for these parts, if you asked him.
As was his custom, once he was in open water, Cam had put her hard over, one mile from shore and headed for the pretty little harbor over on the mainland at Rockport. Blowing like stink out here now. Clouding up. Front moving in for damn sure. He stood to windward at the helm, both hands on the big wheel, his feet planted wide, and sang a few bars of his favorite sailor’s ditty, sung to the tune of the old English ballad “Robin on the Moor”:
“It was a young captain on Cranberry Isles did dwell;
He took the schooner Arnold, one you all know well.
She was
a tops’l schooner and hailed from Calais, Maine;
They took a load from Boston to cross the raging main—”
The words caught in his throat.
He’d seen movement down in the galley below. Not believing his eyes, he looked again. Nothing. Perhaps just a light shadow from a porthole sliding across the floor as he fell off the wind a bit? Nothing at all; and yet it had spooked him there for a second but he—
“Hello, Cam,” a strange-looking man said, suddenly making himself visible at the foot of the steps down in the galley. And then he was climbing up into the cockpit.
“What the hell?” Cam said, startled.
“Relax. I don’t bite.”
“Who the hell are you? And what the hell are you doing aboard my boat?”
Cam eased the main a bit to reduce the amount of heel and moved higher to the windward side of the helm station. He planted himself and bent his knees, ready for any false move from years of habit in the military and later as a special agent out in the field. The stranger made no move other than to plop himself down on a faded red cushion on the leeward side of the boat and cross his long legs.
“You don’t recognize me? I’m hurt. Maybe it’s the long hair and the beard. Here, I know. Look at the eyes, Cam, you can always remember the eyes.”
Cam looked.
Was that Spider, for God’s sake?
It couldn’t be. But it was. Spider Payne, for crissakes. A guy who’d worked for him at CIA briefly the year before Cam had retired. Good agent, a guy on the way up. He’d lost track of him long ago . . . and now?
“Spider, sure, sure, I recognize you,” Cam said, keeping his voice as even as he could manage. His right hand had started twitching involuntarily and he stuck it in the pocket of his jeans. His mind was ramped up, searching wildly for some kind of explanation as to how the hell this man came to be here. It just didn’t make any damn sense at all.
“What in God’s name is going on?”
“See? I knew this might freak you out. You know, if I just showed up on the boat like this. Sorry. I drove all night from Boston, then came over to the island on the ferry from Rockland last night. Parked my truck at Foy Brown’s boatyard and went up to that little inn, the Nebo Lodge. Fully booked, not a bed to be had, wouldn’t you know. Forgot it was the Fourth weekend. Stupid, I guess.”