Third Strike

by Philip R. Craig

  Then he grabbed my arm and hauled me onto my feet.

  “Who are you?” said the cop with the shotgun. I’d never seen him before. He looked like he should still be in high school.

  “My name is Brady Coyne,” I said. I pointed up the path. “There’s a dead man up there. I killed him. He was going to shoot down the president’s airplane.”

  The two cops looked at each other. Then one of them went jogging up the path.

  He came back a minute later. “There’s a dead guy up there, all right,” he said to his partner. “And there’s an Uzi and some kind of missile launcher, too.”

  The other cop walked over to the edge of the clearing and spoke into his cell phone. Then they led me down the path and put me in the backseat of the cruiser that was parked a little way down the dirt roadway.

  About ten minutes later another vehicle, this one an unmarked SUV of some kind, nosed its way up the road and pulled to a stop beside the cruiser. Dom Agganis got out of the front seat. Two men in chino pants and golf shirts stepped out of the back. They both had close-cropped hair and smooth faces and cold eyes. One was blond. The other looked Hispanic. They had broad chests and narrow waists and big biceps. FBI or Secret Service, I guessed.

  They talked to the two uniformed cops for a minute. Agganis stood off to the side, apparently deferring to them. Then one of the cops opened the cruiser door, grabbed my arm, helped me out, and stood me there facing Agganis and the two guys in plain clothes.

  Both of them flashed a badge at me and mumbled their names. All I caught was the title “Agent” before each name.

  “You’re Coyne?” said the light-haired one.

  “Yes. Brady Coyne.”

  “You’re Jackson’s pal.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you kill that man?” He pointed his chin up in the direction of Harry Doyle.

  “Yes.”

  “Did he fire upon you?”

  “No, not exactly. He—”

  “Hang on a minute,” he said. He cleared his throat, told me I was being held on suspicion of murder, then recited the Miranda warning. “Do you understand?”

  “I studied it in law school,” I said. “But, listen—”

  “Do you understand?” he repeated.

  “I understand. Yes. You’re not arresting me, are you?”

  “We’re holding you for questioning. Obviously you are in jeopardy.”

  “Obviously I did a good and necessary thing.”

  “A man has been murdered,” he said.

  “It wasn’t murder.”

  “So do you want a lawyer?”

  “I am a lawyer.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “I don’t need a lawyer,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “I ask you again. Did you shoot and kill that man?”

  “I did, yes. You’d hardly call it murder, though.”

  He almost smiled. “Tell me about it.”

  “I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Begin at the beginning.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure where the beginning is. When Larry Bucyck called me, I guess.”

  “Larry Bucyck, who was murdered yesterday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said. “Begin there.”

  So I did. I began with Larry’s phone call and concluded with our discovery of the crates that held the shoulder-mounted Stinger surface-to-air missile launchers.

  “We’d heard Joe Callahan was coming to the island to mediate the strike,” I said. “We guessed those Stingers were intended to shoot down his plane. We told the Edgartown chief of police about it, showed him the circles on our map, and he went off to cover the northeastern approaches to the airport, but then the wind shifted. So J.W. and I figured we better try to cover the southwestern approaches. I left him off and came here. Whacked the guy with the Uzi on the head, snuck up on the other guy up there with the Stinger, Harry Doyle’s his name, and when we heard the plane overhead, he pointed that thing up into the sky. So I shot him with the Uzi.”

  When I finished my recitation, the two agents looked at me for a long minute without blinking. Then the Hispanic one turned to Agganis. “This make any sense to you?”

  Agganis shrugged. “I knew about part of it. The rest of it fits, yes.”

  “Okay,” said the blond agent, “except this man here killed that guy.” He turned to one of the uniformed officers. “I want you to take him to the station and hold him until we get there. We’re going to have to talk to him some more.”

  “I told you everything,” I said.

  “You’re a lawyer,” he said. “You know how it works.”

  I shrugged, and they loaded me into the cruiser.

  When we’d backed down to the road, the cop in the passenger seat turned around, pointed at J.W.’s old Land Cruiser that was still parked on the shoulder where I’d left it, and said, “That yours?”

  “It’s J.W. Jackson’s. I was driving it.”

  “Gimme the keys.”

  I fished the keys from my pocket and handed them to him through the wire mesh that separated us. He slipped out of the cruiser, got into the Land Cruiser, and we all headed back to Edgartown.

  They stuck me in an interrogation room, gave me a mug of coffee, and left me there to watch the hands on the wall clock creep around the dial. It reminded me of waiting for the end of the school day in one particularly boring last-period junior high school history class.

  Finally the two agents showed up. They asked me to tell my story all over again, this time into a tape recorder. They interrupted me frequently for clarification and detail and chronology. They wanted to know everything.

  I assumed some state and local cops, and some Secret Service agents, too, maybe, were watching and listening through the one-way glass.

  After a while, their questions convinced me that they weren’t going to prosecute me. They didn’t seem very interested in what I’d done out there in the woods that afternoon. It was the assassination plot that they wanted to know about.

  It was almost nine in the evening when they finally let me go. I told them I planned to head back to Boston the next day, that I’d be staying with the Jacksons that night, and gave them a card with my home and office numbers on it.

  They gave me the keys to the Land Cruiser and told me it was parked in the side lot. Then they both shook my hand.

  “Thank you,” said the blond agent. “Your country owes you.”

  “You did good work,” said the Hispanic agent. “You and Jackson.”

  “I’ll be sure to tell him,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, “but, um, don’t talk to the media about any of this, okay?”

  I looked at him. “Why?”

  It was his turn to look at me. “It’s…sensitive.”

  “You mean embarrassing?”

  He gave his hand a little flip, as if to say it was obvious. “National security.”

  I smiled. “I do believe in a free press.”

  He opened his mouth to say something.

  “And please don’t threaten me,” I said.

  He gave me a cold-eyed smile. “Oh, we never threaten, Mr. Coyne. We don’t need to.” He pattted my shoulder. “Again, many thanks for your help today. You were heroic. Drive carefully, okay?”

  When I pulled into the Jacksons’ driveway, I saw J.W. sitting on his front steps under his porch light.

  He got up and came to the car. When I stepped out, he said, “You’re all right.”

  “I am. Yes. I’m fine.”

  “I tried to call you,” he said. “Several times. I was worried.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “My phone died. I tried to call you, too.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Why don’t you get me a beer? Then we can exchange stories.”

  “Excellent plan,” he said. We walked toward the house. “They didn’t throw you in the clink?” he said.

  “Nope. They considered it, then decided that
I’m a hero. So are you.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I got that line, too. By way of convincing us not to talk to the media.”

  “I’ll tell anybody who asks that you’re a hero,” I said.

  Zee was in the kitchen. When I walked in, she came over and hugged me and kissed both of my cheeks. “You’re all right,” she said.

  I smiled and nodded. “I sure am.”

  She returned my smile. “I’m glad,” she said.

  J.W. fetched beers from the refrigerator. We took them up to the balcony, where we sat and looked out at the starless Vineyard night. He told me about his encounter with Father Zapata. He’d managed to take control of the situation without killing anybody, which I thought was especially heroic of him. I told him about my confrontation with Harry Doyle, and how I hadn’t been able to avoid killing him.

  J.W. sympathized. He figured it would bother me for a long time, and I sensed that he was right.

  Somewhere in the midst of our recitations, he went down and got more beer for us, and when our storytelling wound down and those bottles were empty, he said he was sure I must be hungry and there was plenty of food left over from their supper.

  I told him that I hadn’t noticed, but now that he mentioned it, I was famished. “I better call Evie first,” I said. “Can I use your phone?”

  “Grab another beer from the fridge if you want,” he said. “Use the phone on the desk in your bedroom.”

  “Can you ferry me back to America tomorrow?”

  “If you can stand another wet ride on the catboat, absolutely. Maybe we’ll get up early, go fishing before we leave. You up for it? Tide’ll be perfect at first light.”

  “Irresistible,” I said.

  I found another Samuel Adams lager in the refrigerator, took it into the guest room, and sat at J.W.’s desk. I drained half of the bottle before I pecked out my home number on the phone.

  When Evie answered, I said, “It’s your wayward roommate, reporting in.”

  “Oh, jeez, hi,” she said softly.

  “Hi, yourself,” I said.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I worry, that’s all. Last time I talked to you, you told me your friend Larry had been killed. So it should come as no surprise that I imagine things.”

  “I’m fine, babe. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you.”

  “All about what? What do you mean?”

  “Larry. What happened. That’s all.”

  I heard her blow out a breath. “The Vineyard is all over the news, you know,” she said. “President Callahan flew in to settle the strike, they’re saying, like God coming down in a machine to tie up the loose ends in a Greek tragedy, restore order out of chaos, and both sides have agreed to sit down with him. The place must be crawling with Secret Service.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I suppose it is.”

  “Coincidence,” she said. “Larry getting killed right before the ex-president arrives.”

  “I guess so.”

  She paused. I figured she expected me to say more, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to talk about it. Not yet. Not to Evie, at least not on the telephone.

  “Well,” she said after a minute, “I hope you and J.W. managed to do some fishing, anyway.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “We’ve been kind of tied up with the whole Larry thing. We might sneak out at first light tomorrow.”

  “They figure out who did it? Larry Bucyck, I mean.”

  “I think they’ve got a good idea,” I said. “They don’t tell me anything.”

  “So when are you coming home?”

  “Tomorrow. After fishing. J.W.’s gonna sail me to Woods Hole, assuming Callahan hasn’t gotten the ferries up and running by then.”

  “Be careful, Brady. I do worry.”

  “I’m always careful,” I said, trying to keep all irony out of my voice.

  Chapter Seventeen

  J.W.

  I have a friend who’s traveled more than I have and who, when the world is too much with him and time is out of joint, catches a plane to Albuquerque, rents a car, and drives toward Colorado until he finds some lonesome dirt road leading away from the highway into the desert. He drives along that dry, barren track deep into the gigantic, indifferent wilderness, then parks and walks away, across the empty, burning land, for an hour or more before turning back to his car. When he gets there, thirsty and tired, all of his self-pity and all of his notions that things should be different than they are have been burned out of him, and he’s ready to return to the real world and be content in spite of its cruelties. He calls it Desert Therapy.

  The sea plays that role for me and probably explains why I live on an island. Like the desert and the mountains out west, the ocean is huge and powerful and dangerous and beautiful and totally indifferent to the desires of man. When I walk its beaches or sail over its mysterious waters, my illusions about how things should be are washed away, and I’m purified. It promises me nothing, and though it is always awesome and can be violent, it is never evil and is often unimaginably beautiful.

  Fishing is also purification. You cast your line and you either catch fish or you don’t, and you have to accept your fate or be a fool. If you’re the sort of person who has to catch fish to be happy, you should do something else.

  Both Brady and I liked to catch fish, but we didn’t have to catch them to be content. Early the next morning, on South Beach, we offered our lures to the bluefish we knew were out there and watched the eastern sky brighten as the earth turned until, like a great orange ball, the sun rose into the sky. We caught no fish, but it made no difference, because our fishing had, for a while, made us one with the universe. We had not said much, because we didn’t need to.

  We were home in time to join Zee and the kids for breakfast.

  “I notice that my car is still missing,” said Zee, as I piled more pancakes onto her plate. She poured maple syrup over them and licked her lickable lips. Zee, to the amused annoyance of her women friends, can eat like a horse and never show it.

  “I’ll get the car,” I said, “and then I’m going to sail Brady back to America. You can all come along if you don’t have anything better to do.”

  “Yay!” said the children in unison, mouths full of pancakes. They liked to sail and would, I suspected, eventually become better at it than I was.

  “Well, I’m certainly not going to stay home alone,” said Zee. “While you guys go get the Jeep, I’ll fix us all some lunch.”

  So two hours later we were all in the Shirley J. easing out past the town dock in front of a small southwest breeze that overnight had replaced the northeast wind that had so affected us the previous day. The dock was lined with people fishing and watching the alternating On Time ferries pass back and forth across the channel between the village and Chappaquiddick carrying cars and trucks, three at a time, to the far Chappy beaches. Some people waved, and we waved back.

  Behind us, the harbor was full of summer boats, some already running up sails. Above us, the new sky arched high and blue. We passed between the ferry-boats, then jibed to the right and went out past the lighthouse. There, as we approached the large yachts anchored in the outer harbor, we jibed again and on a broad reach headed out into the sound. It was a perfect day for sailing a small boat such as ours.

  I gave the tiller to Brady and watched Zee adjust the sheet until the big mainsail was pulling perfectly. The Oak Bluffs bluffs slowly grew closer, and the thin line on the northeastern horizon that was Cape Cod became clearer as the morning mists burned away.

  “Sing us a sailing song, Uncle Brady,” said Diana.

  The rest of the crew thought that was a splendid idea, so Brady gave us a rendition of “High Barbaree” and then an encore of “The Golden Vanity,” and he got a round of cheers and applause.

  “Now it’s someone else’s turn,” he said, after blowing kisses to his fans.

  So I sang “Lowlands,” and the kids sang “Barn
acle Bill the Sailor,” and Zee sang “Henry Martin,” and we all sang “Across the Wide Missouri,” and we ended up singing ourselves all the way to East Chop.

  The wind came up a bit, and there were occasional whitecaps around us, but the tide was running west and helped carry us smoothly into Woods Hole, where we made fast and said our good-byes to Brady.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him after he’d gotten kisses from Zee and the children and a farewell hug from me.

  “I’m fine,” he said, “but it’ll be good to get home to Evie.”

  “Put it behind you,” I said. “You did what you had to do.”

  “I know that in my head,” he said, “but my feelings aren’t so sure.”

  “That’s because you’re a good man, and not a cold-blooded killer.”

  He gave my shoulder a gentle slap and walked away.

  We Jacksons climbed back into the Shirley J. and cast off. The wind was now in front of us, and the tide, though it was easing, was there as well. I put the wind on the starboard bow and the tide on the port bow and thus managed slow progress, close hauled, back toward the island. Zee went below and came up with her lunch basket. Sandwiches and soft drinks for all hands. When we finally got off West Chop, the tide was flat and we made better progress. The children took turns on the tiller, with me helping them out when it got too much for them, because a catboat can demand a pretty strong hand at the helm.

  We sailed past the entrance to Oak Bluffs harbor and down along the state beach between O.B. and Edgartown. The beach was filled with people and bright umbrellas. All around us sailboats and power-boats were making white wakes in the blue water.

  We were back at the stake by mid-afternoon and home again in time for snacks and drinks—martinis for Zee and me, lemonade for Joshua and Diana—and smoked bluefish pâté on crackers for all. The big people sat on the balcony, and the little people sat in the tree house.

  “Pa?”

  I looked across to where Diana was perched in the big beech tree. “What?”

  “Can we sit with you and Mom in the balcony?”

  “No. The balcony is only for big people.”

  “Can we someday?” she said.