Waiting

by Stephen Jones

  He could see Hewlitt’s gears turning. Maybe Ridley didn’t want to look like his partner—Dobbs with his slab of bohunk face, a gap between his front teeth for God’s sakes, a face made for snarling—but he didn’t necessarily see a problem with it either. Nothing wrong with looking like somebody the hoods and thugs should fear. Enough height, enough muscle, enough ugly . . . in their line of work, that wasn’t a bad set of qualities to bring to the table.

  “It’s Hoover. All Hoover,” Dobbs went on. “He’s got this vision. The Bureau did fine without him, then he waltzes in three years ago and he’s been making it over to suit his image ever since. He’s got it in for guys like me. We don’t fit in anymore. His words, not mine—if you look like the kind of lug who should be driving a truck or working a loading dock, he doesn’t want you.”

  Hewlitt looked incredulous. Because he still could. “You get the job done, though. Doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

  “It’s as much image as results now. And I don’t just look wrong, I’ve got the wrong pedigree too. You know how I got hired on with the Bureau?”

  Hewlitt shook his head no. “It’s never come up.”

  “My pop grew up with Senator O’Dwyer. He called in a favor or two, and that was it. I had the kind of war record that looked good to the right people, so I was in. The Volstead Act hadn’t passed yet . . . they didn’t farm us out helping Treasury chase down moonshiners . . . those were different days. It was a different job. But men who came on like that, Hoover wants them gone too. Him and his brown-nosers, they find their reasons.”

  Hewlitt looked embarrassed for him, staring out his window.

  “Just you wait. Prohibition can’t last. Everybody knows it was a mistake and nobody wants to be first to come out and say so. But it’ll fall. Trust me. And by the time it does, you won’t recognize the Bureau. It’ll be all guys like you, with your law and accounting degrees. That’s why Hoover keeps bringing you in.”

  Now Hewlitt looked as if something that never fit for him finally clicked into place. He laughed with the hesitation of someone who wasn’t sure he should. “That’s why you’ve been taking those night classes?” “Was. I quit this week. I don’t know what I was thinking. I thought if I showed them I knew how to read a ledger . . .”

  Dobbs glowered out the window as they trundled along. Lillian was glad he had more time at home again, but if he lost this job, his wife would see there was such a thing as too much time.

  “I don’t have the brain for it. I’m in a class with a bunch of Caspar Milquetoasts ten years younger than me, every one of them I could break in half, and they all cipher rings around me. But that’s how Hoover thinks he might take down Capone and Moran and Lansky and the rest. If he can’t get them on their actual rackets, he’s going to trip them up on their taxes. Sounds like a load of applesauce to me, but that’s what he’s got in his head. And he’s still doing it half-assed. He wants accountants but he doesn’t want Jews. Go figure that.”

  Hewlitt finally looked as if he got it. That nobody was safe. That anybody’s days could be numbered. As long as he remembered this, he might be okay.

  “I don’t know what to say, Arch. I’m sorry? That doesn’t cut the mustard.”

  Dobbs shook his head. “There’s nothing to say. If that’s my hand, I’ll play it ’til they take away my cards. Call me dumb, call me ugly, fine. Just don’t say I was ever half-assed about anything. Send me to the nuthouse, send me to Innsmouth, I don’t care. If something’s up here, I’ll find it.”

  They clattered into Innsmouth from the south, along the road up from Ipswich, the final leg of the journey cutting across desolate stretches of sandy ground that grew nothing taller than hearty clumps of sedge grass and wind-gnarled shrubs.

  When they crested the rise before the road made one final dip toward the town, Dobbs cut the throttle and coasted to an idling stop so they could take their time with the view. Even from this far, anyone could tell that Innsmouth must have been grand once, a jewel by the sea, fed by trade and fattened on the wealth of the world. A few streets held rows of legitimate mansions, and others weren’t far behind, roofs bristling with multiple chimneys and widow’s walks. But something had gone wrong here. The outside world had gone on without them, and what remained of their own was left to decay.

  Its homes and shops marched toward the sea down hills and plateaus cut in half by the Manuxet River and a series of low waterfalls. A refinery, its chimneys smokeless, was perched on the north side of the final falls, where the river widened into the mouth that met the sea. The harbor’s surface was calm, the surging of the ocean held back by a spit of land and breakwater that speared down from the north and turned the bay into a loop of wharves and docks and warehouses. Out to sea, a mile or two, ran a forbidding black line of stone called Devil Reef.

  He saw more movement in the ocean than he saw in the streets below.

  “How many people are supposed to live here, is it?” Dobbs asked.

  “Three hundred or more, four hundred tops.”

  “That’s a lot of real estate for no more people than that. Even if most of it is falling to pieces.”

  “What are you thinking? Rumrunners coming down from Canada?”

  “It’d be a good place for it.” Dobbs pointed past the reef, where the clouds met the sea. “Looks like a place that gets a lot of fog.”

  He trained a pair of binoculars on the lighthouse at the tip of the breakwater. The tower had shed a lot of bricks, most of the glass in the lantern room was smashed out, and the lamp lens looked no better. It wasn’t going to be guiding anyone in safely.

  “If a captain knew what he was doing, he could use the fog to slip the Coast Guard, and be in the harbor and unloaded before the cutters caught up with him.”

  At eighty or ninety simoleons per case of the good stuff, it was a risk a lot of captains would be willing to take. If a smuggler’s boat was far enough offshore, the Coast Guard couldn’t touch it—officially, at least— even if everyone knew it was bringing all the Canadian Club in the world. Had to nab them while offloading it onshore. Sometimes the boats from both sides of their war sat on the open ocean for weeks at a time, playing cat and mouse games. The Coast Guard waited for the smugglers to make their move, and the smugglers waited for the chance to do it.

  Hewlitt took the binoculars for himself. “They could be bootlegging it themselves down there too. Like you said, that’s a lot of real estate for four hundred people. A lot of room to hide a barrel house somewhere.”

  They weren’t going to get a better read on the place up here. Dobbs drove on.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the stories Olmstead and Mayhew told about their encounters here; more that he couldn’t believe the conclusions they’d drawn. Both of them had experienced something. The tales they’d told were too similar, and the fear was real. But if two years of bullets, bayonets, and artillery had taught Dobbs anything, it was that the memories of frightened men couldn’t be trusted. They couldn’t help it. Fear bent the truth out of shape in a hurry.

  If the choice was between bootleggers and bogeymen, he figured he knew the real score around here.

  At the southwest edge of town, the country road turned to a thoroughfare called Eliot Street, according to a rusty sign that listed toward the intersection. It cut through Innsmouth’s grid on a diagonal until it brought them to the town square, a hub where several streets came together like spokes on a wheel. Things looked livelier here, a few residents shuffling along with their heads down, people with nowhere to go and all day to get there. The square was ringed with businesses—a drug store, a grocer, and off to the left was the five-story Gilman House, where Olmstead claimed the townsfolk had first come for him, trying to peel their way past his door while he slipped away through the connecting rooms and out onto the neighboring roof.

  From behind every window, Dobbs got the prickly sense of being watched. This town had a lot more eyes in it than it liked to let on.

  “The
place definitely gives me the heebie-jeebies,” said Hewlitt. “Do you think they know who we are?”

  “Count on it. They’ll be thinking revenuers. Close enough. We don’t stop.”

  Hewlitt already had his Roscoe out, resting on his thigh with his thumb on the hammer. Smart lad. Dobbs preferred the solid, comforting heft of the Colt automatic under his arm. If it was good enough for the army, it was good enough for him.

  They left the square by another street called Federal. It took them across the Manuxet, swollen with autumn rains, on a creaky bridge that had gone years too long between repairs. Another block later they came to an unkempt circular green, fronted by a pair of old New England churches that didn’t look to be saving many souls these days.

  Hewlitt pointed across the green to another building, better maintained despite the creepers and vines climbing its walls. It looked like a lesser temple from ancient Greece, more stone than wood, across the front a short row of columns holding up a triangular tympanum—not a church, but a lodge. Freemasons, he would’ve thought, until Hewlitt read the rough letters chiseled across the lintel.

  “‘Esoteric Order of Dagon’ . . .?” he said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means keep out and keep moving, you gullible suckers.”

  A block later they turned east, facing the harbor that every prickly instinct Dobbs had told him wasn’t nearly as tranquil as it looked from up here. They cruised as far down as they could, hooking a right at Water Street so they could backtrack across the river and make their way south again.

  Between them and the harbor’s waters sat a long row of warehouses being pried apart by time and the slow predations of the sea air. Dobbs cranked down his window and had Hewlitt do the same, so the breezes might blow through and tell him what they could.

  This was a vile place.

  Dobbs had been in fishing villages and harbor towns before, on both sides of the Atlantic. Over here and over there, they all smelled more or less the same. Their air, their very essence, was saturated with the ancient scents of fish and briny water, and the boreal forest smell of wood so wet it might never be truly dry. All of that was here . . . but underneath was something else, something foul, a sour, living odor, like the musk of some predator that hid itself in the trees or tall grass until it was time to pounce.

  So now they knew.

  They wouldn’t get far by day here.

  They’d have to come back by night.

  It took a month to secure the go-ahead.

  Dobbs’s recommendation: if they were to get to the bottom of what was going on in Innsmouth, they needed someone who knew how to come in quiet, poke around, and slip out with the goods before anyone knew he was there . . . and he was the right man for the job. For obvious reasons.

  Simple enough, but the SAC of the Boston office refused to proceed without express approval from Director Hoover, and was slow to seek it. He disliked Dobbs’s idea from the get-go. It could spiral wrong in too many ways. They were investigators, not infiltrators.

  Sit tight and watch and wait—that was SAC Swindlehurst’s idea of caution. He wasted weeks liaising with local law enforcement, trading favors to get prowl cars to lay low and keep eyes on the roads between Innsmouth and the nearest towns: Newburyport and Kingsport Head, Ipswich and Rowley and Arkham. If they noticed trucks, or those fast, roomy Lincolns that rumrunners liked, that would reveal a lot.

  Surveillance turned up one big fat goose egg. The only vehicle observed that could’ve hauled any sort of load was the rattletrap daily bus to Newburyport, and that was typically light even on passengers. Nothing going in, nothing coming out. Add in what the Coast Guard had sighted, and all they had was a bigger, fatter egg.

  Clearly, in Innsmouth, they were smarter than most of them looked.

  “If you wait much longer,” Dobbs warned Swindlehurst, “we’ll have to hold off until spring, unless you’re willing to belly crawl through miles of snow with me.”

  Which finally jarred things loose.

  The challenge was how to get in silent and unseen, yet have the means for a speedy retreat if things went bad. Innsmouth was nothing if not isolated, inconvenient from anywhere. Forget driving, and even walking the roads was a bad idea, in case they stationed lookouts. Neither was Dobbs keen on hoofing it over miles of open ground, against the hostilities of a northeastern November. He’d be half-sapped by the time he got there, maybe no good when it counted most.

  In the end, it was Hewlitt to the rescue, suggesting the abandoned railway between Innsmouth and Rowley. If Olmstead had used it to escape from town while staying clear of the roads, why couldn’t they do the same, in the opposite direction?

  It was a sound idea. The rails were still in place, rusty but not impassable. The terrain was mostly sandy grassland and scrub. No trees to fall across the tracks, no roots to buckle them from below. If they requisitioned a handcar from the Boston and Providence Railroad in Rowley, they could cover the distance down to Innsmouth at ten or twelve miles an hour—faster than walking, stealthier than driving.

  Now, finally, they were hitting on all six.

  But if planning was on their side, the weather was not. Wait too late to decide, and this was what you risked. Things never changed—it was never the man holding things up with his fat ass parked behind a desk who paid the price. No, that fell to the men in the field.

  For days, their team was stuck operating out of a Rowley hotel room, nothing to do but smoke and wait out the rains that were too stubborn to clear. When the report came in that the season’s first snow was on the way, it was move now or postpone everything until next year. Conditions wouldn’t likely get any better for months, only worse. This was their shot.

  An hour after a wet, gray dusk, on the night before Thanksgiving, Dobbs and Hewlitt set off from the Rowley train station on their rolling platform of wood and iron. In oilskin ponchos and fisherman’s hoods, each pumped one end of the lever mounted in the middle of the railcar, a seesaw action that propelled them across the countryside, under a drizzle of rain that turned to a slap whenever a gust of wind blew through.

  They got a rhythm going, and for the first miles allowed themselves the luxury of a carbide trainman’s lantern at the front end, to warn of blockages. They were a quarter-hour out before the going felt smooth enough to start talking again.

  “You were wondering where I went yesterday. I didn’t just slip out because I was getting itchy in the hotel,” Hewlitt said over the spatter of rain and grind of wheels on the rails. “The name on that lodge, the first day we were up here . . . the Esoteric Order of Dagon . . . that wouldn’t let me go. So before we left Beantown, I went to a couple libraries to see if I could dig something up on it. They weren’t much help, but one librarian, she said if I wanted to know bad enough that I didn’t mind some driving, I should head up to Arkham and check with the library at Miskatonic U. If anybody could help me, that would be the place. So that’s where I went yesterday.”

  Dobbs pumped the lever a couple times and kept his eyes on the lantern’s cone of light. He was facing forward, Hewlitt was making the trip backward. Up to him to make sure they didn’t collide with the unexpected.

  “Somebody there knew something?”

  “And how. They’ve got all kinds of creaky old books there. The order . . . it’s a genuine cult. It goes back at least ninety years . . . maybe even longer. It’s what the people turned to when the fishing went bad for them. This Dagon, he’s some sort of fish-god. With a consort called Mother Hydra. But they’re not worshipped for themselves. They’re the go-betweens to other powers . . . more remote gods.”

  Dobbs had to snort. “Fish-gods, huh? Guess I should’ve brought a filleting knife, instead.”

  “I know how it sounds. That’s not the point.” Hewlitt peeked over his shoulder as if having second thoughts about where they were headed. “I know what’s going on in Innsmouth is probably bootleggers who cooked up a new way to scare off outsiders. But jeepers creepers, Arc
h, if you chisel a name into a building, it’s not just for show. I think we might want to consider that whatever else these rumrunners may be up to, this is something they actually believe in.”

  Impulse wanted to keep scoffing, but Hewlitt was right. Fanatics could turn to bootlegging the same as plain old greedy sons of bitches, and the zeal of true believers could be a lot more dangerous than pure self-interest.

  “Good work,” Dobbs said instead.

  By the time they neared the coastline, the lights of Innsmouth a dim glow ahead, it was raining pitchforks. They backed off the lever and coasted to a stop, then reversed the railcar’s direction and set the brake to hold it in place. Dobbs shucked his poncho and hood, his clothing soaking through as he stashed the foul-weather gear beneath the cart.

  “If I come back yelling bloody murder,” he told Hewlitt, “you have this heap moving before I even get to it.”

  With that, he was off. He was dressed for movement, not for keeping dry—a snug pullover sweater, pants just loose enough to maneuver, and lace-up boots fit for the trenches. Sheathed at his waist was the biggest pigsticker he’d been able to drum up since he’d known this night was coming. No gun. He didn’t need the bulk, and firing it would only give away his position to more of them than he could shoot.

  He jogged beside the tracks to the outskirts of town, then slipped along the north side, pressing toward the curl of land that enclosed the harbor while keeping the houses to his right. It was questionable whether anyone lived in them, or would want to. Even through the rain they appeared unkempt, perhaps last tended to before his lifetime.

  He could be quick and nimble for such a big man, at first glance unlikely to have amassed the kind of kills he had a decade ago. He still couldn’t say why he’d done it. He hadn’t hated the Hun any worse than the other doughboys sent to France. Crazy from the shelling, maybe, but rather than dropping fetal and trembling to the bottom of a trench, he’d made a savage game of leaving its safety entirely.