The Last Christmas: A Repairman Jack Novel

by F. Paul Wilson

  Oh, crap. Were they planning to hop the ferry to Connecticut?

  But Hess and Monaco turned off the road before the Cross Sound Ferry dock and parked in a marina lot.

  “I drive past and come back,” Nakale said.

  “Good thinking.”

  Nakale returned him to the lot in time to see Hess and Monaco ambling toward one of the docks. A thirty-foot cruiser bobbed on its moorings, as if waiting for them. They hopped on board and it took off. Jack spotted what looked like a boat owner standing on the dock.

  “Wait here,” he said. “Be right back.”

  The fellow had cultivated an Old Salt look, with a pea coat, a sailor hat, and a silver gray old-Dutch beard that spared his upper lip. Even had a pipe.

  Jack hurried up and put on a worried expression as he pointed to the retreating cruiser.

  “Was that the ferry to New London?”

  The man laughed. “No way. You’re at the wrong dock. But you’re close. It’s at the end of the road, maybe five hundred feet farther on.”

  “Thank God! Much appreciated!” Jack turned away, then turned back. “Just curious. Where’s that one go?”

  “Plum Island.”

  Jack couldn’t hide his surprise. “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  He’d heard stories about Plum Island, none of them good.

  When he returned to the cab he said, “Home, James, and don’t spare the horses.”

  “Excuse please. I am not James.”

  “Right. Back to the Big City, Nakale.”

  As soon as they were rolling, he called Abe.

  “What do you know about Plum Island?”

  “Better you should ask what I don’t know about Plum Island.”

  “Okay, what don’t you know about Plum Island?”

  “Nothing. Why you ask?”

  “I’m close to it—as in Orient Point—and I’m heading back to town. Wait for me. I want to talk.”

  “Orient Point? You’ve seen the Montauk Monster maybe?”

  “What—hello?”

  He’d hung up.

  Montauk Monster?

  7

  Jack ignored the CLOSED sign on the front door and entered the Isher Sports Shop. He locked the door behind him and headed for the rear, navigating a narrow aisle between precariously loaded shelves. Finally, he reached Abe who sat in his customary spot behind the counter, looking like Humpty Dumpty perched on a three-legged stool. Instead of the usual newspaper—he read every paper in town—he was peering at a laptop.

  “At last he arrives,” he said, looking at him over the top of his reading glasses.

  “Long trip in from Orient Point.” He placed a six of Yuengling and a white paper bag on the scarred counter. “Besides, I stopped at Basone’s first.”

  “Nu? Gifts he brings?”

  “I figured you’d be in need of sustenance by now.”

  Abe withdrew a foil-wrapped bundle from the bag.

  “Hot. Is this what I think it is?” He parted the foil just a crack and the odor of olive oil and garlic erupted, carried on a cloud of steam. “Yes!” He ripped open the foil to reveal a baker’s dozen garlic knots. “You didn’t!”

  “I did.”

  Jack twisted the top off one of the lagers and slid it across the counter, then opened one for himself.

  “But my diet.” Abe stared at the steaming array as Parabellum landed on his shoulder.

  Jack laughed. “Yeah, right. The See-Food diet.”

  “You denigrate my efforts to eschew culinary excess?”

  “You know damn well I waved the white flag months ago.”

  He loved the guy like an uncle, but officially he’d given up on reducing his oldest friend’s waistline. Years of trying had failed. Despite all Jack’s pleas and exhortations, Abe ate whatever was convenient and tasty.

  What he didn’t say was that while the knots were heavy on carbs, the olive oil had no saturated fats. And garlic was supposed to be good for you. Or so he’d heard.

  “And increased my guilt in the process.”

  “What guilt?”

  His hand went over his heart. “You say that to a Jew? We invented guilt!”

  “I thought the Irish did.”

  “The carefree Irish were running around their glens and moors in fur breeches while the Sanhedrin were laboring in Jerusalem to perfect the nuances of remorse and culpability.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for it. So, what are you guilty about?”

  “What else? That I might die young and leave you without guidance—rudderless and adrift in a sea of uncertainty.”

  “You’re young?”

  “In my head—like a thirty-year old.”

  “And in your body? Never mind. They’re getting cold. And they aren’t so bad for you as they look.”

  His fingers waggled in the air above them, as if casting a spell. “Well, maybe just one.”

  As a knot disappeared whole into Abe’s mouth, Jack pointed to the laptop and said, “No newspapers? Switching to digital?”

  Abe shook his head, unable to speak around the hot, doughy mouthful. Jack took a bite of a knot and savored the oily rush of flavor. No question, Basone’s made the best garlic knots in the city.

  “The papers I’ve read already,” Abe said, wiping his hand on his shirt after a convulsive swallow. “This is to catch any breaking stories.”

  “And are any? Breaking, that is?”

  “The usual. The mayor’s got another bimbo eruption, lots of big contracts flowing to the governor’s big contributors, two middle schoolers have gone missing, a bicycle hit-and-run on an old lady just up the street here but she’s going to make it.”

  “No monster sightings in Queens?”

  Jack pulled a half dozen paper napkins from the bag and dropped them on the counter. Abe ignored them, preferring his shirt. He always preferred his shirt. By day’s end it served as his food diary.

  “No. Why? You’re expecting monsters?”

  No news was good news, he supposed.

  “Just making small talk while you fortify yourself before starting your dissertation on this Montauk Monster you mentioned.”

  “Well, maybe one more.”

  Abe tore off a tiny piece and offered it to Parabellum. The blue parakeet cocked his head as if considering, then grabbed it with his beak. The rest of the knot vanished into Abe’s beak.

  The remaining knots quickly disappeared, Jack washing down five with two beers, and Abe and Parabellum downing a total of eight along with half a bottle.

  “So,” Jack said as he packed up the detritus and Parabellum policed the counter of crumbs, “tell me about this Montauk Monster.”

  “To appreciate the Montauk Monster you must first know the secret of Plum Island. How much do you know?”

  Jack shrugged. “Germ warfare… animal experiments… anthrax… secret labs.”

  “So, you know the stories already.”

  “No, just the words. I never listened much to the stories.”

  Back in the aughts—2006 or thereabouts—he’d had a run-in with a guy who’d stolen a super-deadly toxin from Plum Island. Jack had come oh-so close to not walking away from that one. It also involved one of the most dangerous women he’d ever met. Or hoped to meet.

  “Plum Island,” Abe said, rubbing his pudgy hands together. “Such a tale. You’ll love it. First off, like a pork chop it’s shaped, and maybe the size of Central Park. Just ten miles off Orient Point. After World War Two, Fort Detrick—a name you of course recognize as our biological warfare research center down in Maryland—set up a satellite lab on Plum Island. Lab 257, as it was called, and headed by Erich Traub, a Nazi brought over by the Department of Defense.”

  “A Nazi?” Jack said, holding back a laugh. “This sounds like something for Bad Movie Night.”

  Abe’s expression remained grim. “I should joke about a Nazi? I don’t joke about Nazis.”

  “Sorry. It’s just that it sounds so ludicrous. I me
an, who’d bring a Nazi scientist over to the US and put him in charge of animal disease research?”

  He couldn’t help flashing on schlock films like Shock Waves and Red Snow and Frankenstein’s Army.

  “The United States government, that’s who. The program was called Operation Paperclip. It was most interested in the V2 rocket scientists, but it wasn’t saying no to bio-scientists either. Look him up. Erich Traub headed the Nazi bio-weapons lab on Insel Riems in the Baltic Sea. His immediate boss was a fellow named Himmler—of him you’ve heard maybe? Their aim was to find a way to infect the cattle and reindeer in the Soviet Union with foot-and-mouth disease, which would have devastated the herds. So, when the US decided it should know more about that particular virus, they turned to an expert—Traub.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Serious like a krenk. All sorts of diseases they research there, testing them on animals. They say no animal ever leaves the island, that every single one is eventually put down, but the place is beloved by birds who come and go as they please.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Yes. Uh-oh. How do Boy Scouts on Long Island, just a few miles from Plum Island, come down with malaria? What was the strange flu that swept through Block Island, also a few miles from Plum Island? Where do you think Lyme disease was developed?”

  “Oh, no…”

  “It’s not a coincidence that the first case was discovered in Lyme, Connecticut, a mere ten miles across the Long Island Sound from Plum Island. A nothing trip for a seagull.”

  Jack knew that Abe had never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, and the loopier, the better. He even had a bunker buried deep in the wilds of Pennsylvania for shelter during the inevitable apocalypse. He poo-pooed a zombie apocalypse, but he truly feared an economic meltdown. Jack was glad for him, because he knew something much worse than walking dead and runaway inflation was waiting in the wings.

  “Okay,” he said. “Scary as all get out, but you’ve been talking viruses and ticks and the like. I want to know about hideous mutations like this Montauk Monster.”

  “Why this sudden interest? A trip he makes to Orient Point and suddenly monsters fill his kopf.”

  Jack gave him a quick rundown of the scientists’ story and the results of birddogging them.

  “So, they lied to you,” Abe said. “Such a unique occurrence with your clientele.”

  Yeah, pretty much par for the course.

  “Tell me about it. From the pictures they showed me, I’ve got a bad feeling this beastie isn’t from the North Woods but Plum Island instead.”

  Which put a whole different spin on the tracking and tranquing involved in this fix.

  Abe’s eyebrows oscillated. “And related to the Montauk Monster, maybe?”

  “Well,” Jack said, letting his growing impatience snark his tone, “maybe I could answer that question if someone would stop dancing around the subject and get around to actually telling me about it like he promised.”

  “All right, already.” Abe fiddled with his laptop, then turned the screen toward Jack. “This is what they found on a Montauk beach in the summer of oh-eight.”

  “Holy crap.”

  A sharply focused image of a creature like Jack had never seen filled the screen. It lay on sand, well-lit by full sunlight.

  “What the hell is that? It looks like some mutant creature.”

  “You want the story spread by officialdom and its running-dog lackeys in the press?”

  “Might as well. I get the feeling I’m not going to be able to avoid it.”

  Abe subjected him to a long dramatic pause, then tapped the screen. “A raccoon.”

  “What?”

  Jack had grown up on the edge of the Jersey Pine Barrens where raccoons had been regular visitors to the neighborhood garbage cans. Many a night he’d come out with a garbage bag to find a ’coon had ripped the lid off a can and was sifting through the contents in search of goodies. Instead of running off it would sit there and stare at him through its Beagle Boy mask, as if to say, You looking at me? Or Move on, kid… nothing to see here. And besides, I got here first.

  Jack said, “I know raccoons and that’s no raccoon. Doesn’t look anything like a raccoon.”

  “They explain the differences as the result of decomposition and long immersion in salt water.”

  “‘They’?”

  “You know…the usual suspects. All connected one way or another to the government. Others, not so connected to the government, have maintained it’s a new species of cryptid.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “A creature whose existence is questionable.”

  Jack pointed to the screen. “Assuming lots of people saw it on the beach, that thing’s existence seems unquestionable. Was Plum Island ever mentioned?”

  “Immediately. It’s only a few miles north of that beach.”

  “Where’d the thing wind up? Some museum?”

  “The carcass disappeared.”

  Like an X-Files episode…jeez.

  “So, nobody actually got to examine it? How convenient.”

  Abe smiled. “Indeed. It is not at all beyond the realm of possibility that someone from Plum Island sneaked in and spirited it away.”

  Jack mulled all this. “So…you think these two scientist types have me chasing a cryptid or something?”

  Abe gave one of his shrugs. “I should know?”

  “In the photos they showed me it looked like a cross between a wolf and an ape. Can you cross a wolf and an ape?”

  “You’re asking me, a lowly shopkeeper?”

  “I’m asking someone who is privy to information that bypasses normal channels, and hears whispers that no one else hears.”

  “This mythical person you mention has heard nothing about crossing a wolf and an ape. So, from him, the answer is no. But for someone on Plum Island, the answer is maybe yes.”

  If that was the case, Jack could understand Hess and Monaco’s need for secrecy. Nobody wanted to think hybrid monsters were being created just a few miles offshore.

  Jack shook his head, annoyed. “They could have leveled with me. It wouldn’t have scared me off.”

  “Not scared of an ape crossed with a wolf?”

  “Okay. Maybe a little. Maybe more than a little. But I still wouldn’t blab it. Not like I run a blog or a podcast or anything.”

  “They don’t know you’re not one for shmei drei, that the Sphinx is a loudmouthed yenta compared to you. Especially where your customers are concerned.”

  “Still, I’m curious about what they did to this cryptid I’m chasing before it got loose.”

  Abe said, “For all we know, Plum Island could be the Island of Doctor Moreau.”

  Swell.

  On the ride in from Orient Point he’d been half ready to call those two and tell them to make a suppository out of their money and their tracker. But now… now he was intrigued.

  And something dormant within was stirring.

  8

  The gal in the third-floor apartment had her door open and must have spotted Tier on his way upstairs. Slim, pretty, with long dark hair, her name was Laurie, or maybe Lori—he’d never seen it spelled.

  “Hey,” she said, smiling as she stepped out onto the landing. “I’ve got some people over. You’re welcome to hang out if you want.”

  Another invitation. She must like him or something.

  “Why, thank you, Laurie. I appreciate it but it’s been a long day and I just need to crash.”

  Her smile faltered just a little. “Yeah, well, okay. But if you change your mind, the door’s open.”

  “I’ll remember. Thanks again.”

  He was sure she was a nice person. They’d spoken in bits and pieces in passing, and he knew she’d acquired her rent-controlled apartment just like he had: inherited it. She from her mother, he from Dad. So, they had that in common, but not much else. Not that he had anything against her, but he didn’t want to get friendly with a neighbor, male or female
. Get familiar and they started thinking they could drop in whenever the mood struck them just to hang out and shoot the breeze. Tier could think of few things he liked less than hanging out and shooting the breeze. He cherished his solitude.

  As for romance with a neighbor? Never.

  Inside his apartment he shucked his coat and the holster with the snub-nose Chief Special .38 and hung them by the door.

  Dad had found the place back in 1965. The Upper West Side had been pretty crummy back in its pre-gentrification days, with lots of rent-controlled apartments. He’d moved into this West Seventy-fifth Street one-bedroom, fourth-floor walkup west of Broadway and stayed four nights a week while he worked the high steel, then he’d train up to Kahnawake Friday nights with his fellow skywalkers to spend the weekend with his family—Tier was living with his grandparents then. Early Monday mornings he’d be heading south again to NYC.

  When Dad learned he had cancer, he stopped coming home. Tier moved in and lived with him the last couple years of his life, sleeping on the couch and ferrying him back and forth across town to Sloan Kettering for his chemo and radiation treatments. Toward the end, Tier built up a lot of muscle working the old guy’s almost dead weight up and down those seemingly endless flights of stairs.

  When Dad finally passed on, Tier learned that, as his son, he qualified to take over the apartment. The place was cramped, the building old and decrepit, the plumbing and electricity antiquated, but the rent was such a bargain, and the location so perfect, he couldn’t say no.

  Before Dad became incapacitated, Tier would accompany him to the Beacon Theatre—an easy walk from the apartment—to catch the Allman Brothers Band whenever they were in town. How he loved the Allman Brothers. Duane and Greg were gone but, wherever they were, Tier bet his father had found a way to hang out with them.

  He pulled his bottle of Patron Silver from the freezer and poured himself a couple of fingers, then dropped into Dad’s old La-Z-Boy and grabbed the remote.

  Surprise, surprise, the NFL was running a game on a Saturday night. Probably because Thursday was Christmas. Giants vs the Redskins. Who cared?