Third Strike

by Philip R. Craig

  Our headlights picked up a deer that was ambling casually across the road and into the woods on the other side. A good reason for driving slowly on Martha’s Vineyard. Every year about two hundred deer are killed by island hunters, and about the same number by island drivers. Maybe the two search cars in front of us had been moving too fast to miss their deer. Maybe we’d find them wrecked beside the road and could stop and administer first aid.

  We didn’t.

  “I feel sort of like that deer,” said Brady. “In the headlights.”

  It was after midnight, not a good time to intrude upon people. On the other hand, serious skullduggery was afoot, and it was no time to be excessively civil.

  “I think we need to tell Dom Agganis about what just happened,” I said. “He won’t be happy to be rousted out of bed, but we just tangled with guys with assault weapons, and he’ll want to know about that. If he knows, and they know he knows, you’ll be off the hook.”

  “You know him better than I do,” said Brady. “This island isn’t my bailiwick.”

  “What would you do if this happened up your way, in America?”

  “I’d go right to the state police,” said Brady.

  Great minds.

  On either side of the starlit highway the dark trees came out of the night and passed behind us. Was the wind a torrent of darkness? Was Zee waiting, plaiting a dark red love knot into her long black hair?

  In West Tisbury we turned toward Edgartown, having seen no more of the two cars that had preceded us along South Road. We passed the old millpond and Cynthia Riggs’s bed-and-breakfast, where she catered to writers and artists because they’d understand when she disappeared to do her own writing. We passed Joshua Slocum’s last house and then the airport where, if he actually came, ex-President Joe Callahan would land in hopes of mediating the Steamship Authority strike to a happy conclusion.

  Beyond the airport we took a left, crossed the four-way stop at the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road, and drove into Oak Bluffs, where Sergeant Dom Agganis lived on a side street that led off Barnes Road down toward the lagoon.

  “I thought the state cops lived upstairs above the station on Temahigan Avenue,” said Brady, as I turned off Barnes.

  “Only the summer cops,” I said. “Dom has his own place.”

  His own place was a newish modified Cape with a farm porch stretching across the front. A breezeway hooked the house to his two-car garage, and his yard was neat, with a freshly mowed lawn and well-kept flower beds beside the walk that led from the driveway to the porch, and hydrangeas and azaleas in front of the porch. Behind the house, I knew from previous visits, was a veranda and another lawn that fell away down the slope to the water, where there was a short dock to which was tied a nice, twenty-five-foot fishing boat with a cuddy cabin. All in all, not the sort of place you’d associate with a guy as big and tough as Dom Agganis.

  I pulled into the driveway, and we got out and looked at the house. It was dark.

  “You knock,” said Brady, as we walked to the front door. “You know him better than I do.”

  A light came on when we stepped onto the porch, and I saw the motion sensor above the door. I used the bronze knocker, then stood back where I could be seen through the peephole in the door.

  By and by the door opened, and Dom, dark-jawed beneath the beginnings of a heavy beard, stared at me. “This better be good,” he growled.

  “I think it is,” I said. “I am fully aware that in these days of Homeland Security I’m taking a chance by waking up a possibly trigger-happy minion of the law in the middle of the night.”

  “Get inside before you wake up the neighbors and they call the cops.” Dom stood aside and we went in. “Sit,” he said, waving at chairs in the living room and taking one for himself. Archie Bunker’s chair. Every man has his Archie Bunker chair. “Now, what is it?” he asked. “Not even you would come here for no reason.”

  We sat and told him about our adventure, leaving out nothing.

  He listened in silence, his eyes weary but increasingly bright. When we were through, he looked at Brady. “Do you think you hit anybody with that Uzi?”

  Brady shook his head. “I aimed low, for the lights.”

  Dom nodded. “Okay. But it’s still against the law to possess an automatic weapon or to fire a gun close to a house. Where’s the Uzi?”

  “I tossed it.”

  “Great. If we had it here, it’d be evidence that you two aren’t crazy.” He narrowed his eyes. “Are you?”

  “Are we what?” I said.

  “Crazy.”

  “No,” I said. “This has to be connected to what happened to Larry Bucyck. We were checking out his story, and it checked out.”

  Dom looked at Brady. “Dr. Mumford’s house, you say. You’re sure?”

  “That’s what Larry Bucyck told me,” said Brady.

  Dom tapped a sausage-sized finger on the arm of his chair, then stood up. “Wait here.” He went out of the room. He was gone for about twenty minutes. When he came back, he said, “You two can go home now. I suggest that you stay there.”

  I was tired, so his suggestion seemed like a good one. Still, I was curious. “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “None of your business,” growled Dom. “Thanks a lot, and good-bye.”

  I guessed that he was sending people up to Chilmark to find out what was going on. One man had already been killed there, and if our report of men wandering around with machine guns was correct, he had more trouble than he needed. The strike was causing enough problems by itself.

  He led us to the door and waved us out. As we passed him, he said, “You’re sure you’ve told me everything? You haven’t left anything out?”

  “You know it all,” I said.

  We drove away and were turning down my long sandy driveway when Brady said, “I just remembered one thing you didn’t tell him.”

  “What was that?”

  “You didn’t tell him about the places that interested the guy with the pointer.”

  Rats. It was true.

  “We’ll look at your map,” Brady said. “I’d like to see what he seemed to be pointing at.”

  “We’ll check it out,” I said, “and then we’ll have something more useful to tell Dom.”

  I love maps and charts. Besides, Zee and I needed good island maps to find yard sales on Saturday mornings. A lot of what I know about the Vineyard is the result of following roads I previously knew nothing about to yard sales. It’s surprising what you’ll sometimes find at the end of such roads—not only lone houses, but sometimes whole communities that you never knew existed.

  We stopped beside Zee’s little red Jeep and went into the house through the screened porch. The cats, Oliver Underfoot and Velcro, came out of the bedroom, stretched, and said hello. Seeing them, I felt even wearier, but I got the big Vineyard map and spread it out on the kitchen table. We bent over it.

  “Here’s one spot,” I said, putting a finger on it. “And here’s another.” I moved my finger from site to site, telling Brady of my failed real estate theory as I touched state forest lands.

  “You didn’t really think those guys were talking about real estate, did you?” asked Brady. “At midnight, surrounded by armed guards?”

  “No,” I said, “but nothing else made any sense to me, and it still doesn’t.”

  We were speaking quietly so as not to wake Zee and the children. The cats rubbed on our legs in a friendly fashion.

  “I don’t know the Vineyard well enough to know anything about these sites,” said Brady. “Do you?”

  “No. I’ve lived here for a long time, but I haven’t seen most of the island.” It was true. Martha’s Vineyard is only 20 miles long, but its land mass is somewhere around 130 square miles, and I don’t know anyone who’s seen all of it, or even most of it.

  “Why don’t you mark these places,” said Brady, “so I’ll know where they are in case you get run over by a truck?”

  I got a pen
and marked the spots as best I could remember them. They appeared to be totally random locations. My thinking, however, was fuzzy, and getting fuzzier by the minute.

  “There,” I said when I’d marked the last site. “Do you see anything I don’t see?”

  He stared down at the map and shook his head. “Nope. But there must be some significance to these places. They’re all more or less in the center part of the island. Nothing up in Aquinnah or on Chappy or next to any of the town centers.”

  “Mostly in West Tisbury and Edgartown,” I agreed, “and mostly away from the main roads.” I yawned.

  “Can you find these spots?” he asked.

  I studied the map. “I can get close to them, but I can’t guarantee that I can find them. The guy with the pointer just indicated the general areas. He wasn’t precise and it all happened fast, so I don’t know exactly what he was pointing at.”

  “I think we should try to find out.” Brady straightened and looked at me. “Don’t you think you should call Dom about this?”

  I told Brady I didn’t think Dom would be happy to hear from me again at this hour of the morning, but given the circumstances, I probably should try. I went to the phone.

  But no one answered. I left a message on his answering machine, then called the state-police station. He wasn’t there either, but a sleepy-sounding young summer cop was, so I told him about the map and the man with the pointer and asked him to get the information to his boss.

  He said he would.

  I hung up and looked at Brady. I was suddenly tired to the core. “I need some sleep,” I said. “My brain is mush. A couple of hours in bed are all I need, but I need them badly.”

  Brady was staring at the map. “Something’s happening fast,” he said. “I can feel it in my bones.” Then he looked up at me and said, “Go get some rest. I think you may need it before this day is out.”

  “Yes.”

  He was still looking at the map as I went to the bedroom where Zee was sleeping and, I hoped, dreaming sweeter dreams than mine.

  Chapter Ten

  Brady

  After J.W. trundled off to bed, I remained sitting there in the living room staring at his map of Martha’s Vineyard spread out on the coffee table. I knew I was supposed to be tired. It was two in the morning, and I’d been awake since sunrise. But I felt jittery and jangly and a bit light-headed. Adrenaline was still coursing through my veins, which is what happens when people chase you in a car and you shoot out their headlights with an Uzi.

  J.W. hadn’t seemed the least bit jangled. I suppose if you’ve been a soldier and a cop you handle things better than you would if all you’ve ever been is a lawyer and a trout fisherman. Anyway, he had Zee to play spoons with. Curling up with the woman you loved could unjangle a man pretty fast.

  I looked at J.W.’s map, trying to see some kind of pattern. I wished I’d sneaked up to the window in Dr. Mumford’s house so I could’ve seen the map on the wall and the men that J.W. had seen. As it was, I had only his descriptions.

  The circles J.W. had drawn on his map appeared utterly random. Some were close to the ocean, some were quite a distance inland. About the only logic I saw in the pattern was that all of the circles appeared more or less in the middle parts of the island, and none seemed to encompass a populated area. They did not include roads or neighborhoods or villages. A close look at J.W.’s map revealed that there were more unpopulated areas on Martha’s Vineyard than one might conclude by driving around.

  Well, it was no longer our problem. We’d done our duty. We’d rousted State Police Sergeant Dom Agganis in the middle of the night and dumped it all on him.

  J.W. still had his ongoing investigation of the death of the man who got blown up on a boat. But as for me, I’d come here to see what I could do for Larry Bucyck, and I guess I did a poor job of it, because now he was dead. I no longer had any reason to linger on the Vineyard, and I certainly had no desire ever again to shoot an Uzi at people who were chasing me. Maybe tomorrow Agganis would let me go home, and maybe I could talk J.W. into giving me a catboat ride back to Woods Hole.

  Maybe tomorrow night at this time I’d be playing spoons with Evie.

  I yawned. That was a good sign. Maybe I’d get some sleep after all.

  I turned off the lights in the living room, brushed my teeth and splashed water on my face in the bathroom, then went to the guest room, which doubled as J.W.’s office, and crawled into bed. Closed my eyes. Took a deep breath. Let it out slowly. Instructed my limbs to relax, one by one. Tried to blank my mind…

  No such luck. My brain whirred and jumped with images and memory flashes. Waking up at dawn in Larry Bucyck’s little house. Larry snoozing in his hammock out back. Taking Rocket, his mostly basset, on a coffee run. Back at Larry’s house, his hammock empty, looking and yelling, getting no answer. Then searching with J.W., finding Larry face-down in the pig muck, a bullet hole in the back of his head. Being interrogated, Dom Agganis and Olive Otero forcing me to tell and retell my story. Sedona Blaisdell getting the drop on me with her shotgun. Creeping around in the dark, peering through J.W.’s green-tinted night-vision binoculars. Smashing a rock down on a man’s head, picking up his Uzi. Being chased by a vehicle, running away, running faster than I thought I could run, but not fast enough. Turning, kneeling, and firing the Uzi at the car. Running some more, tossing the weapon in the bushes, then eluding capture in J.W.’s ancient Toyota Land Cruiser. Pounding on Dom Agganis’s door, then seeing the skepticism on his face…

  I looked at my watch. It was 2:35 A.M. I was wide awake.

  J.W.’s computer sat right there on his desk. I was tempted to turn it on and join an online game of Texas Hold’em, except getting out of bed felt like too much of an effort.

  I thought about calling Evie. It would’ve been nice to hear her sleepy, sexy voice. She’d tell me she loved me. She could talk me down from this adrenaline high. Her voice would relax me and soothe me and enable me to drift off to sleep. She wouldn’t mind if I awakened her in the middle of the night. She liked it when I needed her.

  I imagined her in our bed in our townhouse on Beacon Hill in Boston, hugging her pillow, sleeping on her belly, snoring softly, with Henry, our Brittany, curled against her hip, snoring, too. I imagined me, sneaking into our dark bedroom, slipping out of my clothes and creeping under the covers, where Evie kept it warm and fragrant, and Evie groaning and twitching, rolling onto her side, hooking her long smooth leg over my hip, slithering her arm around my chest, sliding her body on top of me, the whole bare length of her covering the naked length of me, moving on me, her mouth pressing against the side of my neck murmuring, “You’re back. Mm. I’m glad you’re back…”

  A thumping noise dragged me up from the depths of a dreamless sleep. It was J.W. pounding on my door. “Hey, wake up, Brady,” he was saying. “Rise and shine. Greet the day.”

  “What the hell time is it?” I mumbled.

  “Little after seven. Olive Otero’s here. Let’s go. The coffee’s all made.”

  I moaned and stretched and forced myself to crawl out of bed. I went into the bathroom and took a long steamy shower. It didn’t help much. I still felt groggy and hungover. An overdose of adrenaline will do that as surely as a couple of martinis.

  I got dressed, staggered out to the kitchen, poured myself a mugful of black coffee, and took it into the living room. Olive Otero was sitting on the sofa sipping from her own mug of coffee. J.W. was sitting in his favorite easy chair across from her. They appeared to be glaring at each other.

  I sat on the sofa beside Olive. “What’s going on?” I said.

  “We got a little problem,” said J.W.

  “Not so little,” said Olive.

  “It’s Dr. Mumford,” said J.W.

  “It’s not Dr. Mumford,” said Olive. “That’s the problem. There is no Dr. Mumford.”

  “Except,” said J.W., “I saw him. Dr. Mumford.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Slow down. I have no idea what
you’re talking about.”

  “Well,” said J.W. “It’s—”

  “No, listen,” said Olive. “I don’t know what you guys are trying to pull, but you wake up Dom Agganis in the middle of the night with some crazy story about Uzis and suspicious characters and sneaky midnight meetings, and you tell him it’s at some house on Menemsha Pond owned by some nonexistent doctor named Mumford, I call that a big problem. Dom is furious. He stayed up half the night trying to figure out who the hell this Dr. Mumford is and where he lives so he could do his duty and check out your yarn, and finally he figured out that there was no such person. He was ready to come pounding on your door at four this morning, and if you hadn’t had young kids and an innocent wife living here, that’s what he would’ve done. Instead, he waited till seven and sent me.” She turned to me and fixed me with a glare that could have frozen the Indian Ocean. “And you,” she said. “Every time you show up on our island something happens. Something bad. If I had my way, you would be declared persona non grata. You’d be banned for life.”

  I blinked at her, then turned to J.W. “That guy with the pointer. Wasn’t he…?”

  He shrugged. “I saw a white-haired man in that house last night. He was in charge of the meeting, pointing a red laser light at a map. He looked sort of kindly and intelligent, like he might be a doctor. It was you, actually, who said his name was Dr. Mumford.”

  “Actually,” I said, “it was Larry Bucyck who told me that the house belonged to somebody named Mumford. A doctor, Larry said. A summer person. That’s what he told me.”

  “Point is,” said J.W. to Olive, “whatever his name is, we saw what we saw. The house, the midnight meeting, the men with guns, the map…”

  “So you guys are sticking to your story?” said Olive.

  J.W. looked at me, and then we both looked at her. “It’s not a story,” he said.

  “We can show you the house,” I said. “There’ll be a vehicle there with bullet holes in it. We’ll find that Uzi. I can show you where I threw it into the bushes.”