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High Season

Page 14

by Jon Loomis


  “Bingo. I called the state police and told them to check it out, but they treated me like I was nuts.”

  “Assholes,” Coffin said, shaking his head.

  Sal climbed into the wrecker, cranked its big diesel engine, and then reached for something under the seat. “I figure they’re in on it, too, somehow,” he shouted, over the diesel’s clatter and growl. He held up a long-barreled revolver with a bore the size of a dime. “With all that’s going on, I don’t trust nobody but my wife, my dog, and Mr. Smith and Wesson here,” he shouted, dropping the truck into gear. “And I’m not so sure about my damn wife!”

  The Oyster Shack was slower even than usual. The jukebox was quiet. Two discouraged fishermen sat at the end of the bar, long noses in their glasses of beer.

  “He ain’t here,” Billy said when Coffin pushed the screen door open.

  “He who?” Coffin said.

  “Whoever you’re looking for.” Billy waved at the two fishermen. “Unless it’s one of these dumb-asses.”

  “Hey!” said the fisherman on the left. He was tall and lean, bald on top with long hair hanging down his back—a skullet. “We don’t come here for that kind of abuse, y’know.”

  “Sure we do,” the other fisherman said.

  Captain Nickerson climbed the slender bars of his cage: claw, claw, beak. “Show us your tits!” he said.

  “What makes you think I’m looking for somebody?” Coffin said.

  Billy grinned. “Investigating two murders, you better be looking for somebody.”

  Outside, the sky had turned green. The wind picked up, scattering bits of trash around Billy’s parking lot.

  “Right now I’m just looking for a drink,” Coffin said.

  “How about a little shot of the monster?” Billy said. He opened a small cabinet behind the bar and took out a dusty cloth bag, from which he extracted a brown bottle. A sea serpent swam across its peeling and faded label.

  Billy winked apishly at Coffin, took two rocks glasses down from the overhead rack, uncorked the bottle, and poured a small shot each for Coffin and himself.

  “To the seafaring Coffins,” Coffin said, toasting.

  “Roger that,” Billy said. They clinked glasses and sipped the whiskey. It tasted old and warm and enormously rich, like something that should have been illegal.

  “Hey, I’ll have a shot of that,” said the tall fisherman, waving a ten-dollar bill.

  “When monkeys fly out of your ass,” Billy said. “Put your damn money away.”

  “Jesus Christ,” the fisherman said. “Excuuuuse me.”

  “Why do you call it the monster?” the other fisherman asked.

  Billy grinned. “This here,” he said, holding the bottle up to the light, “is one of three remaining bottles of Old Loch Ness, a single malt scotch made by the Loch Ness distillery in 1928—right before it burned to the ground.” Billy pointed a thick finger at Coffin. “His granddad was a rumrunner during Prohibition days. This bottle is from his famous last run.”

  “Why famous?” said the tall fisherman.

  “Famous on account of his boat was rammed and sunk by the Coast Guard just twenty yards off of Herring Cove beach, and the old man drowned in eight feet of high tide, ’cause he couldn’t swim. A few cases survived, and this bottle, like I said, is almost the last of it.”

  “A fascinating tale,” said the tall fisherman. “Let’s shake this peanut stand.”

  “Okay, okay,” his friend said, downing his beer.

  “Eat me!” said Captain Nickerson. “Eat me!”

  Coffin sipped the monster, closed his eyes, swallowed. The whiskey burned pleasantly on the way down. He opened his eyes and leaned his elbows on the bar. The sky had grown dark. Lightning jittered in the western sky.

  “I’ve got a new theory about this whole murder deal,” Billy said.

  “Great,” Coffin said. “Another theory.” He lit a cigarette. It tasted good with the scotch.

  “I figure Merkin and Duarte were lovers. The wife found out and had them both whacked. What do you think?”

  Coffin reached for the monster, uncorked it, and poured himself another shot. “I think it makes as much sense as anything else that comes out of your mouth on a given day.” He pointed out the window. “Here it comes,” he said.

  The rain had finally started. A few fat drops pelted the parking lot; then the downpour began in earnest.

  Billy shrugged. “Okay, fine. Don’t take me seriously. But I’ll tell you, people are starting to get spooked. They’re locking their doors, loading their guns, and looking under the beds at night.”

  “I don’t blame them,” Coffin said. “I’m pretty spooked myself.”

  “Comforting words from your local police department,” Billy said.

  “Thar she blows!” shrieked Captain Nickerson.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Billy said.

  “Shut the fuck up,” said Captain Nickerson, fluffing his neck feathers.

  Coffin frowned. “Most of the time, murders are obvious. You show up at the scene and there’s a woman lying dead with a bunch of stab wounds, the knife still stuck in her chest. The boyfriend’s there, covered with blood. You ask him if he killed her, and he says no, he found her like that. You say, you mean you walked in and she was lying there dead and then she sprayed blood all over you? He says yeah, and you arrest him. Once in a while you get a planned killing, and those are always tougher. A lot of them go unsolved.”

  Billy’s eyebrows went up. “So you’re saying this guy might get away with it?”

  “Maybe,” Coffin said, drumming his fingers on the bar. “With Mancini running the investigation, I’d say his chances are pretty good.”

  Billy squinted. “You ever get pissed off enough that you wanted to kill somebody?” he asked.

  “Sure. Rolled up at a crime scene in Baltimore once, and a guy shot at us through the window. He was a terrible shot—all wiggy on crystal meth—but I was enraged.”

  “So?”

  “We had four uniforms there. We decided not to wait for the SWAT guys. We used garbage can lids as shields and stormed the place. Turned out the guy was out of ammo by then anyway.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He slipped and fell down a couple of flights of stairs. Broke his pelvis. Cops hate being shot at.”

  They said nothing for a while. Billy wiped the bar in slow, greasy circles.

  “How about you?” Coffin said. “Ever get mad enough to kill somebody?”

  “Me? I’ve got nothing to get mad about, Frank.” Billy grinned, tossed the sopping bar towel into a bucket on the floor, then spread his arms wide. “Look around—I’m building an empire.”

  The rain had stopped, and the clouds were slowly opening like enormous curtains. A ragged fog oozed off the bay, slowly wrapping the town in its gray tendrils. Coffin decided to walk home from Billy’s the back way, through the cemetery on its nameless gravel road. The night was warm, the moon off-kilter and egg shaped, three-quarters full. Little puffs of fog swirled around the gravestones. They looked like rows of bad nineteenth-century teeth, mossed and tilting. The narrow road curved between ornate mausoleums and monuments to sea captains, including his great-grandfather’s—a tall column topped by a carved marble globe. To Coffin’s right, down a rutted lane, squatted the granite crypt of three young girls, all dead of diphtheria in the 1860s. Their names were carved into the lintel: Temperance, Chastity, and Silence Bledsoe. They were the ghosts of Provincetown past.

  The cemetery was deserted, quiet; the small echoes of Coffin’s footsteps between the gravestones, like something scurrying among the markers, made his heart beat faster and the hair on the back of his neck prickle. He almost jumped out of his skin when a pair of dark, brush-tailed shapes emerged from a copse of trees a few yards away and regarded him for several moments, eyes gleaming orange in the fog-dimmed moonlight.

  “Hey!” he shouted, clapping his hands. The two coyotes trotted away, glancing at him over their fur
red shoulders before they disappeared into the mist.

  Coffin kept walking. Twin shafts of yellow light swept up slowly from his left; a car had turned into the cemetery from Shank Painter Road, its headlights throwing Coffin’s long-legged shadow on the grass in front of him—ambling along, gangly and monstrous.

  He could hear the low throb of the engine and the sound of the gravel under tires, like popcorn popping. The headlights seemed very bright; he turned to look and had to visor his eyes with his hand. It was a pickup truck, a big one. He could just make out the gold Chevy logo on the grille.

  “Rudy?” Coffin said.

  The truck stopped and the lights went out. A big hand beckoned from the window. “Got a second, Frankie?”

  “I don’t remember you being so theatrical, back in the old days,” Coffin said.

  “These are theatrical times,” Rudy said. “Shakespearean, almost.” The ropy tang of marijuana smoke drifted from the rolled-down window.

  “I thought you’d left town,” Coffin said.

  “I had a business matter to attend to,” Rudy said, shoving the lit joint at Coffin. “I’m heading out tomorrow. Gene-spliced, Key West mastuba nativa. Want a hit?”

  Coffin waved the joint away.

  Rudy shrugged. “Your loss,” he said. He took a deep hit and held the smoke in his lungs before blowing it out in a thick blue stream. Then he licked the tips of his thumb and index finger, snuffed the joint, and put the scorched roach in his shirt pocket. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve got to tell you. I think you’re losing it.”

  “How’s that?” Coffin said.

  “You’re chasing your tail on this thing with the Moors,” Rudy said. “It’s killing me. I can’t stand to watch it anymore.”

  “So don’t watch,” Coffin said. “It’s not your problem, right?”

  “Look—what do Merkin and the Duarte kid have in common, besides the Moors complex?” Rudy took the roach from his pocket, waved it under Coffin’s nose. “It’s obvious.”

  “Drugs? That doesn’t make sense. There’s no evidence that Merkin was a habitual drug user.”

  “Don’t be a dope, Frankie,” Rudy said. “He was taking a trip down the K-hole, wasn’t he? I mean, the guy liked to dress himself up like the school librarian—who knows what else he was up to?”

  Coffin rubbed his chin. “Even if he was, I still don’t see the connection. Heroin and club drugs, those are whole different worlds.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Things change fast in the recreational pharma biz, Frankie. You know that as well as anyone. There’s a business cycle—diversification, then consolidation. We’re in a consolidation phase right now.”

  “We?”

  “The town, I mean. So I hear.”

  A long, quavering wail started up from the Catholic section of the graveyard, first one coyote, then two and three. Before long, all the dogs in the neighborhood had joined in.

  “We used to shoot those son-of-a-bitching coyotes when we saw them,” Rudy said. “Now they’re a damn protected species. Wait till they drag somebody’s kid off their front porch—we’ll see how protected they are then.”

  “I guess the drug angle’s a possibility,” Coffin said, lighting a cigarette. “In the Duarte killing, anyway. His old man said he owed a lot of money.”

  “There you go,” Rudy said. “There’s a good chance he was dealing. If his accounts payable situation got out of hand, he might have run into trouble with his suppliers. There are some rough Cape Verdean boys operating out of New Bedford, you know. And I hear some of the local Jamaicans are trying to move in.”

  “Dogfish would know about Duarte,” Coffin said.

  “Dogfish would know, you’re right,” Rudy said, relighting the joint with the truck’s dashboard lighter, the red glow filling the cab for a second or two. “If I was you, I’d saddle up the lesbo-cop and go roust his ass. Catch him first thing in the morning, when he’s asleep.”

  Coffin shivered a little. Dogfish lived on a houseboat that was almost always anchored in the harbor. He was a twenty-year junkie and small-time dealer who knew everything there was to know about Provincetown’s heroin trade. The police let him operate in exchange for information, though that was likely to change under Boyle’s clean-sweep regime.

  “One other thing,” Rudy said. “About your ma. I’ve made some arrangements.”

  “What kind of arrangements?” Coffin said.

  “She’s not as loopy as you think, you know,” Rudy said. “There are times she’s sharp as a tack.”

  “The doctors say she comes and goes. When you say ‘arrangements,’ what do you mean, exactly?”

  Rudy spat out the window, narrowly missing Coffin’s shoe. “Pah!” he said. “Doctors. What the fuck do they know? If you lived your life according to doctors, you’d do nothing but exercise and eat broccoli. I’d rather be dead.”

  “Rudy—”

  “Okay, okay. It’s a small investment. I can’t give you the details yet, but if it works out, it should be enough to keep her in style the rest of her life.”

  “Is it illegal?” Coffin said.

  Rudy started the truck. “God, she was gorgeous, back in the old days,” he said. “I had kind of a thing for her, I don’t mind telling you. A real spitfire, gave your old man all the hell he deserved, and then some—but Christ, the awe-inspiring rack on that woman.” He grinned and dropped the truck into gear. “Don’t let your meat loaf, Frankie,” he said, reaching a big paw out the window and waving the thumb-pinky “hang loose” sign at Coffin. The truck pulled away.

  “Rudy!” Coffin said, walking after it, watching it accelerate rapidly down the gravel road. “Hey—what kind of investment?”

  Chapter 16

  PPD 2 was a twenty-seven-foot Boston Whaler, powered by two big Mercury outboards. It was Provincetown’s only police boat—PPD 1 had been swamped and damaged beyond repair in Hurricane Charley, back in 1986.

  Coffin felt nauseous and dizzy, even though the harbor was almost dead flat and he was standing on the Coast Guard wharf, where PPD 2 was secured by a stout line. The Mercuries rumbled to life. There was a sickening whiff of gasoline in the air.

  Teddy Goulet, the harbor cop, stood in PPD 2’s pilot house and pointed at his watch. “You coming, Frank?”

  Coffin swallowed hard. “Sure,” he said. “No problem.”

  “Just undo the bow line there and hop aboard,” Goulet said. “Chop chop—haven’t got all day.”

  Coffin unlooped the line from the big brass cleat and tossed it onto PPD 2’s deck, then scrambled awkwardly aboard. He felt light-headed, out of breath. His forehead was sheened with cold sweat.

  “You all right, Frank?” Lola said.

  “I’m not that crazy about boats,” Coffin said. PPD 2 eased away from the wharf, and he grabbed the rail hard. His mouth tasted sour.

  “Really?” Lola said. “I love boats. My folks had a lake house when I was a kid, up in northern Wisconsin. We had a little Sunfish, and we’d go sailing every day. I got pretty good—my dad used to call me Captain Ahab, because I was kind of obsessed.”

  “That’s great,” Coffin said. “Ha ha.”

  “Let’s blow the carbon out, what do you say?” Goulet shouted, one hand on the wheel, the other holding a travel mug full of coffee.

  “Go for it!” Lola shouted back.

  “Do we have to?” Coffin said.

  Goulet pushed the throttles up, and the big outboards roared happily.

  Coffin almost fell over as the bow lifted and PPD 2 surged forward, cutting a foaming wake across the harbor.

  Dogfish lived on a ramshackle pontoon boat, anchored just inside the breakwater. He’d built it himself, out of scrap lumber and fifty-gallon drums. He appeared to be in the process of painting it Di-Gel green but had evidently run out of paint halfway through; the old paint was chipped and peeling, and had faded to nondescript gray.

  Coffin stood on the pontoon boat’s deck as it rocked sickeningly in PPD 2’s wake. He too
k a deep breath and knocked on the door, which had been discarded or stolen from a home renovation project. Its veneer was warped and peeling.

  “Dogfish?” he called. He knocked again, then tried the door. It was unlocked. He motioned to Lola, who took the big flashlight from her equipment belt. Coffin pushed the door open, and Lola aimed the flashlight beam into the cabin.

  “Holy crap,” Lola said. The cabin was small and dim, lit only by daylight filtering in through two dusty, curtained windows. She swept the flashlight beam slowly around the cabin’s interior. Every inch of wall and ceiling space was occupied by some bit of flotsam found on the beach: broken lobster pots, gull feathers, brightly painted wooden buoys, skulls of seals and fish and birds, hairless plastic baby dolls in various sizes and degrees of dismemberment, hundreds of luminous shards of beach glass, the washed-out flags of several nations, pennants of inscrutable nautical significance, chunks of driftwood shaped like animals or human body parts, and an almost infinite variety of faded plastic toys, including an Etch A Sketch, two model airplanes, and a large purple dildo. A table and two chairs—painted highway-cone orange—stood bolted to the floor. A small potbellied stove crouched in the corner. A twin bed, shoved up against the far wall, appeared to be occupied by a pile of dirty laundry. The pile sat up and rubbed its eyes.

  “Jesus,” it said. “What fucking time is it?”

  Coffin looked at his watch. “Quarter to seven,” he said. “We wanted to make sure we caught you at home. Rough night?”

  “The usual.” Dogfish pushed the covers aside. He was naked—skinny and hairy, with dark, bruised-looking veins in his arms and legs. His right hand was wrapped in an ace bandage. The outline of a shark was tattooed on his left forearm, with the word DOGFISH stenciled below it in wavery blue script. “Excuse me,” he said, pulling on a pair of shorts, “while I go outside and take a piss.”

  “Would you look at this place,” Lola said, peering at the forest of junk bristling from the walls. “It’s incredible.”

  “He goes out every day just after high tide and combs the beach,” Coffin said. “If you wonder why you never find any good stuff when you’re out on a walk, it’s because Dogfish already got it and tacked it up on his wall.”

 

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