“My point stands. What happens when you find him?”
“Kill him,” said the mayor.
Chief gave her a despairing look. She continued: “your intelligence looks good. Find him and kill him, and retrieve whatever information you can. Ideally you’d bring him back but it will likely be too dangerous. Do what you have to.”
We all stared at her. The calmness with which she spoke was only betrayed by the slightest shake in her hands. She was enraged, but she didn’t want to show it.
Chief sighed. “Ok, do it. Take whatever supplies you need. Just don’t get caught. I’ve already lost one detective this year, I can’t afford to lose another. Do you hear me McGill? I need both of you to come back alive.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The plan didn’t amount to much; just me and Irene rowing across the lake in a dinghy under the cover of darkness. We could have taken the ferry, but the Empire State Militia subjected ferry traffic to random inspection. We traveled light, but I still had my gun, and Irene had her kit, with god-knows what in it.
Rowing across the lake in the dark was the easy part. Figuring out what to do once we got there was going to be more difficult. Plattsburgh was a rat’s nest of smugglers, lowlifes and criminals. And then there was the Empire State Militia, who kept nominal order in the place, which really meant a kind of cultivated disorder. And we were going to have to hang out in the grimiest, most fetid parts of it, waiting around with the lowlifes for some indication of the presence of the Empire State security services. If Leffert was like spymasters everywhere else, he kept more than a few informants down among the scummier parts of the community.
“We’re going to have to do our best to blend in,” Irene said as she sat in the prow of the boat while it was my turn to row. She whispered, wary of giving away our position.
We were going to pretend to be down-on-our-luck merchants, traveling up from New York City up the Hudson and the New York side of Lake Champlain, trying to sell a duffle bag full of cheap sewing needles. It was as likely a story as any; hundreds of similarly lost souls passed through town weekly, if not daily, looking for the next deal, or trying to break even on the last one. No one would give us a second look, for a while at least. If we hung around too long, we were bound to attract the wrong kind of attention. I hoped it wouldn’t take that long. We both wore dirty ponchos and scuffed leather boots.
It took a few hours to get across the lake. We had to stop rowing a few times, hearing the sounds of oars in the dark, smugglers out to deliver secret cargos. You always knew this was happening. It was part of your job as police to at least be aware of it, but it was a funny feeling to witness it and not be able to do anything about it.
The lights of Plattsburgh eventually came up to our right. We ran aground in a bog somewhere near Valcour, about seven miles south of the town, and got out of the boat, taking our bags, filled with sewing needles, thread, and under false bottoms a disassembled rifle each and Irene’s survival gear. We trudged through knee-high water to solid land. Irene took out a cloth.
“Wipe the sand and dirt off your feet with this,” she said, handing me a rag. “The police around here sometimes identify smugglers by looking at their ankles. If they’re wet, they’ll think you came over like we just did.”
The walk through the night into town was a long one, and was necessitated by the need to land the boat somewhere far away from any settlements. We walked swiftly at first, past sleeping farmhouses and hollowed-out old towns. An aura of despair and decay hung over these places. There was no moon, and no traffic on the old lakeside Route 9.
Finally, after more than two hours of walking we came to the outskirts of Plattsburgh. The built up area started slowly, with bombed out old gas stations, and then a diner, with the earliest of morning patrons sitting down to eat the usual vegetable mash and hot chicory water these kinds of places served. We walked past an ancient sign by the road that proclaimed the Skyway Shopping Centre, which now of course was a warren workshops and huddled shanties, the sound of early risers faintly audible over the early morning singing of birds. A few fires burned here and there. These were the ordinary people of Plattsburgh. It was a sad, mean place. Life in Burlington was hard, but this place looked desolate in a way that shocked me every time I saw it.
We came to the Saranac river, along a row of nicer houses that sat behind a high barbed wire fence. One the other side was the river bank, with trees, and a few tents scattered here and there, belonging to those not even respectable enough to own five pieces of corrugated sheet metal. Finally we came to a bridge that led over into the town, and next to it a line of old industrial buildings that sat along the riverbank as it wended its way to the lakefront. These were the casinos, the main attraction for any souls unfortunate enough to want to come to Plattsburgh as tourists. Mostly it drew in traveling merchants and sailors, though a goodly number of locals and people from the surrounding towns certainly haunted the place. There were blackjack tables, roulette tables, slot machines. These last ones were the basis of a healthy trade in slot machine repairs, and there were always jobs to be had fixing touch screens and the machines’ mechanical insides.
It was early morning, and the casinos were deathly quiet, but on any given night, this would be where the action was, and just beyond the casinos, where Bridge Street and Margaret Street crossed, there were dive bars, unregulated gaming dens, brothels and restaurants. There was enough in this four-block corner of the world for a lonely sailor to squander his pay in short order, and probably feel all the better for it. I’d been to Plattsburgh maybe three, four times in my life, but it was enough to know that it was best to stay away. If we walked through the town, we were bound to find a rooming house or an old motel soon enough. It was just a question of finding one that was open, so we kept walking. Eventually we came to a motel on Court Street. A light was on in the office, a squat little building with attached to a row of rooms and a parking lot. We walked in.
A little old lady was sitting at the desk, eating a sandwich, and leafing through an old romance novel with a taped up spine and a torn cover. She looked up at us glumly, her mouth settling into a disgusted pout.
“We don’t do short term rentals,” she said.
“Sorry, what was that?” I asked. She looked me in the eye, annoyed.
“No short term rentals, no hourly, no daily. It’s monthly. I can do bi-weekly if you can convince me it’s in my interest to. People live here. I can’t have transients coming in and out all the time. It would bother my tenants.”
“How would I do that?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“How do I convince you that you should let us stay here.”
“What are you doing in town? Let’s start with that.”
“Trying to sell some wares. We’re up from Albany.” This was what people said when they didn’t want people to know they were from New York City.
“You walk all the way here?”
“We took the boat as far as Glens Falls, and then we walked,” Irene said, following the agreed-upon story.
“Well if you think you’re going to do any better here than in Glens Falls you’re in for a hard landing. You willing to pay up front for two weeks? It’ll be seven thousand dollars.”
“Yes, we are,” I said, and Irene pulled out a wad of Empire State Dollars, from a stash she had kept at the library for ‘covert operations’, and counted it.
The woman stood up and grabbed the money, wetting her thumb and counting each bill again. Satisfied the money was all there, she dug around in her till for the keys. Finding them, she stepped out from behind the desk, and grabbing her cane, walked past us and out the door, bidding us to follow her. She walked us to the end of the row of rooms, to room number fourteen–there was no thirteen–and unlocked the door. The space she let us in to was dusty, and in the wan light of morning, the interior took on a cold, desolate look. She turned on the light, which helped things somewhat, and started wiping the dust off the two tw
in beds with her hands, filling the room with even more particulate matter.
“Hasn’t been used in a while, but the sheets are clean. If you want to wash ‘em there’s a basin and a tap out back. I can loan you some wash soap. There’s a bar of soap in the bathroom too. It ain’t the Ritz, but was is these days?”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“The fridge doesn’t work. You can keep things in my fridge at the office, but make sure your name is on it or someone’s liable to eat it. And stay out of the vegetable crisper. That’s my area. Anyways, I’ll leave you to it.”
She doddered out, closing the door behind her.
Irene took the bed next to the window, and I took the other. The bathroom had no hot water. Presumably the hot water heater had died and our landlord hadn’t seen fit to fix it. Not that anyone would complain. There was a TV that still worked, and turning it on and flipping through the channels, we could faintly pick up some sort of broadcast. There were enough of the old units still around, and still working, that lone weirdos all over the northeast broadcast all manner of strangeness, but the old transmitters required so much power that none of these broadcasts went more than a few miles in any direction, if the weather was good.
It was hard to tell what the show was about. Two figures sat in swivel chairs, talking to each other. The sound was garbled so I couldn’t make out what they were saying. There was text running along the bottom of the screen, but it was too washed out to be legible. Both of the figures in the chairs seemed to be wearing capes.
We’d traveled for almost nine hours. The room was a hole, but it was warm, and it was private, and we slept away most of the morning before I awoke to the sound of metal being torn from metal, and of gunshots, and a man gently whimpering somewhere in the distance.
I rushed outside, grabbing my gun from the bedside table and holding it close to my body. A man lay on his back out in the road, his arms outstretched. Next to him was a car, the fender smashed in. Another car was peeling away down the highway away from town. The other residents of the motel didn’t seem to be bothered much. An older man sat on a folding chair, watching the scene.
“They crashed. That one started yelling at the other, he shot ‘im, and he drove off.”
“Thanks,” I said. Irene was up now, and standing in the doorway, looking down the line of apartments, taking everything in, scanning for danger. A gang of children burst out of the room at the far end, followed by two women. The children whooped with excitement, but then the women herded them back into the room and closed the door, as the man lay bleeding in the road.
I walked over to him. He lay there on the pavement, and looked up at me.
“Help me, I’ve been shot.”
“I can see that.” The door to his car was open. There was a sweater on the seat, and I grabbed it and used it to apply pressure to the wound in his chest.
“Not my sweater,” he said. “It was a present.”
Blood was all over the pavement now. He looked pale and disoriented.
“We need to get his shirt off, maybe we can stop the bleeding,” Irene said, standing over my shoulder.
The man looked up at her, uncomprehending, and then his eyes went blank. He was dead. I stood up and looked at Irene, who shrugged. There was nothing to do but leave him there, and go back to our room.
“Best you not get involved in these kinds of things,” the old man said, as we walked back to our room. “Never know what you might be stepping in.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
There was a restaurant a ten minute walk away. The old woman who ran the motel–her name was Wanda, she owned the place, which had once belonged to her estranged husband, a story for another time, she said–told us about it, but cautioned not to expect much.
It was little more than a corrugated lean-to, with windows cut into the sheet metal and fitted with a motley assortment of windows. It was well past lunch time, but the room was still full, with rows of farmers, blacksmiths, working men and women sitting at long plastic tables, in folding chairs and office chairs, shovelling what looked like grey slop into their mouths.
“Menu’s lentils. We got water and chicory to drink, sound good?” A woman said, approaching us.
“That’ll be fine,” Irene said, and the woman, in her forties, with bright red hair, led us to two free spots at a long table. She brought us over two bowls of the stuff, along with two wedges of bread, and asked us what we wanted to drink. We both asked for water and dug in.
The slop tasted much better than it looked. The flavor was somewhat nondescript. Not boring, but I couldn’t tell exactly what it tasted like. It was a bit spicy. The bread was fresh, sourdough, and was satisfyingly chewy. I didn’t realize how hungry I was until I started eating, and then I felt like I never wanted to stop. Irene finished before I did, and we both ordered seconds. The waitress gave us a funny look, but didn’t seem to mind either way, and brought us two more bowls, and more bread and water.
At last sated, I looked around the room. Everyone had their heads buried in their food. What conversation there was was muted and furtive. I had thought that maybe we had made ourselves conspicuous in some way, but no one gave us a second glance. The room had started to empty out. We paid our bill and left.
“We should go take a look at the waterfront, the casinos,” Irene said. “We’ll need to get the lay of the land during daylight hours, so that when we come back at night, we can orient ourselves more easily.”
“You always think this tactically?” I said, earnestly enough, I thought, but she gave me a look that suggested maybe I’d offended her. I’d spent a month out in the woods with her and her ex-friends the Rangers, and she’d been the town librarian for more than six months, but she was still a bit of a mystery. I knew about her training as a State Trooper. I also knew about her training as a librarian. It wasn’t that I couldn’t reconcile the two; no, it was more that I didn’t know what she wanted, what moved her.
“It’s what I’m trained to do, so yes, I always think this way.”
We paid the bill and left, walking towards the centre of town. As we approached the riverside and the lakefront, the buildings were getting bigger and taller, older, and there were more people about. They looked different from Burlington people. Angrier, tougher.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” I said. We hadn’t spoken much since the restaurant. “I’m a cop. We aren’t as delicate in our sensibilities,” I said.
“Or as agile,” she said, smiling.
This was true, I thought. Police procedure is something you memorize. It’s rote, doesn’t change. People say ’it’s always the person you least suspect’, but it isn’t usually the person you least suspect. It’s almost always the person you most suspect, and reflecting on the path that had taken me here, into hostile territory, undercover, and risking my life, it seemed fitting that the one case in a thousand that didn’t work out like the others was the one that led us here.
Downtown Plattsburgh is an area of about ten blocks, small, comparatively, but densely packed, with people from all over the northeast who’ve come to make their fortune, or forget their troubles. The casino trade is the primary motor of the economy, but of course as is always the case with these kinds of things, the tourists who flock to the casinos bring a whole slew of secondary commerce, and an underworld of crime, prostitution, and drugs. Around the casinos and the nightclubs between Bridge Street and Broad Street, a sucker and his money, if he has any, are pretty safe. But step outside of that area, and things get dicier. There are gambling dens, bars and brothels on Brinkenhoff, Couch and Division Streets, all of which do a brisk trade, but it isn’t safe for a well-healed tourist, a Canadian, say, or a Bostonian to linger there at night. And it was there that we were going to wait for some sign of our quarry.
We started on Durkee Street, where the three bigger casinos sit wedged between the street and the Saranac River. There was the Golden Calf, a converted parking garage, with four floors of gaming tables an
d a showroom and rooftop bar. There was the Pleasure Dome next to that, a purpose-built edifice that looked like it was made of whatever they had around–brick, concrete, plexiglass. Finally there was the Ship, a converted office building with nautical touches added; a false prow, wooden hoardings, and faux sails sticking out the top. It was as ugly as it was incongruous.
Street vendors operated on the broken pavement, selling food and souvenirs, often just little statuettes made of repurposed trash. For the most part the only people around looked like townsfolk. Tourists didn’t look this peeved, or hungry and dirty. Nonetheless there were a few around. Tall, well-dressed men and women, often accompanied by one or more rent-a-cops, or security consultants as they liked to call themselves–big, aggressive men with ugly tattoos on their necks and faces–walked around here and there. It was a particular kind of person who wanted to vacation here. In the years since the New York Civil War, when the state broke apart, New York City essentially abandoning the hinterland, and the subsequent secession of the western half of the state as the Confederation of the Finger Lakes, centred around its dual capitals of Ithaca and Buffalo, the rest of the state reorganized itself, and laid claim to the state’s original name. The capital, Albany, was a much more staid place than Plattsburgh, or indeed most of the rest of the Hudson Valley. It was nonetheless financed by the arms dealing and gambling the state had become known for in the intervening years. The people who came here on vacation were of a certain type, and not the kind I would have wanted to run into in a dark alley, no matter how genteel they looked. Behind every panama hat was an ocean of blood and a trail of tears. Either that or they were slobs who wanted to feel like they were part of the action. Those were the ones you really needed to watch out for. You never knew how a manure salesman from Utica might react if he found himself in a sticky situation.
And then there were the militiamen, The Empire State Militia. They were a discrete presence, but you knew they could arrive in numbers if they needed to. There were a few of them stationed here and there on the pavement in front of the casinos. They maintained a guard post a few blocks north, and surely they had agents in the crowd. The uniformed officers looked just like the Minutemen back home. It made sense, when you thought about it. Illiterate backwoods boys with authoritarian tendencies didn’t have anywhere else to go. The militias, the Empire State Militia in New York, the Minutemen in the Free Republic, the Tom Hancock Boys in the Massachusetts Commonwealth, they were all the same. I didn’t love the Rangers, but at least they were different, had set themselves up with a different purpose.
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