by David Daniel
“You didn’t go to the police, though. Or a hospital.”
“She didn’t want that. No. She was sick, and scared, so I let her stay a few days—we had those old cabins no one was using. I didn’t know then it was drugs making her so sick.”
“She overdosed?”
“I was so afraid. There were reports then that she was missing. She’d run away because her father was bad to her, she said. I gave her a place to stay. I … I didn’t know. She stayed out there awhile and I … I didn’t find her right away. I got very scared.”
He looked it now, too: capable of rash and unreasoned action. I was scared, as well. “If true,” I said, forcing myself to stay calm, “you’ve got nothing to worry about. Do you know who it was who picked her up?”
He shook his head.
“She didn’t describe the person? Or a car?”
He shook his head again, as though stubbornly resistant to the idea that he might know.
“What about where he took her?”
“It sounded like someplace … remote.”
“Out here?” I asked. “Perhaps as Ginny had been?”
He drew a harsh breath and seemed ready to explode, whether in tears or violent rage, I didn’t know. “All right,” I said. “All right. That’s past. We have to talk about now. About Michelle Nickerson.”
For a moment he didn’t move. My fear had begun to gather. Then he backed up slowly and stepped inside the door, drawing the dog with him. As he turned from me for an instant, I drew my gun. I had the idea that stopping him would take considerable force. I didn’t want to have to apply it—but I had to face the reality that I might be out of choices. I clutched the .38 by my side.
He left the dog inside. After just a moment, a young woman emerged, with Carvalho behind her, still holding his weapon. My heartbeat quickened. I knew who she was; not that she looked like any photograph I had of her—she looked haggard. She was older than the pictures, too. Her hair, once dyed black, was matted and showing its lighter roots. Her gothic garb had been exchanged for a pair of shapeless overalls and a Cape Cod sweatshirt that looked lived in.
“Michelle—it’s going to be okay,” I called, wanting it to be so.
Carvalho gripped her upper arm in one hand and pointed the Python at me with the other. It was as if the grand conspiracy he had feared in his soul, and thrilled to, had corroded the very structure of his world. Sweat was pouring off him. He glanced quickly skyward, then toward the light blinking feebly atop the Pilgrim nuclear plant across the bay to his right. He seemed disoriented.
“I’m not the Commission,” I said, hoping he was capable of discernment. “But if this goes bad, the Tri-Lateralists win.” I was talking to him in the terms of his delusions, but maybe it was the best chance any of us had of not ending up dead.
In the distance, a siren wailed. Carvalho glanced up in panic, and for an odd instant I was back in my office the day when Vito, the old pizza man, had come in holding a shotgun. A police car was coming out along the strand, not in sight yet, and there was time aplenty for this to go bad. Keeping the Python on me, Carvalho gave the girl a light shove. “Run!” She stumbled a few steps sideways, and stopped. She seemed to be coming out of a stupor. She blinked at him. “Go!” he croaked. She did, moving away from us in a run. I felt relief.
“You did right,” I told Carvalho.
He suddenly looked startled and lifted the gun.
“Don’t!” I yelled, though the word seemed to come like saltwater taffy, stretched out and torturously slow.
He paid me no attention, may not even have heard me over the distant hiss of surf. He started toward me, the weapon raised.
Growing up, I had watched Roy Rogers shoot the gun from an outlaw’s hand at twenty yards. It was easy in TV-Land, and no one ever had to die.
“Stop right there,” I shouted—another line for the textbook.
He lumbered forward. I lifted the .38 and fired. The shot went way wide, as I’d meant it to. Inside the house, the dog was barking furiously, throwing itself against a window. “Hands high!” I yelled at Carvalho (I was on a roll), but he didn’t obey me this time either. I fired wide again.
He got the idea finally. He got down on his knees and laid the Python on the sand.
“Good,” I said.
His eyes found mine and brightened for a moment; then he lay down sideways. I waded through the sand to him. I could see a dark froth on his lips and a quick-spreading stain on the front of his shirt. What? I’d missed him both times. Then, slowly, his eyes dimmed—perhaps in peace, as though in witness of something radiant and true—or perhaps they were seeing the storied descent of a human soul through circle after circle of hell. I gaped. I’d purposely missed, and yet he was dead. In the house, the dog was leaping at the window.
41
I’d been right. I had missed Carvalho. As I’d missed whatever muffled sound Ted Rand’s gun had made behind me. He held a shiny automatic, the barrel lengthened by a suppressor. Carvalho’s Python had been ridiculous, too, but at least he’d had the mitt for it. This looked too big and powerful for Rand’s small hand. Still, he had been able to find the trigger just fine. He glanced at me and then walked over to Carvalho, who lay on his side, his lower legs bent, his face on the sand. “Poor deluded fool,” murmured Rand.
He could’ve been talking about me. I looked up at the approaching sounds of people. One of them was Michelle Nickerson. The other was the cop, Shanley—Mirror Shades. He had them on now. Otherwise, he was dressed for night, in dark civilian clothing, and he was holding on to Michelle’s arm. Her gaze went to the body sprawled on the sand, and her free hand came to her mouth, but she made no sound.
“I’ll take that,” Rand said to me, nodding at the .38. I hesitated and then handed it over.
“Are you all right?” I asked the girl.
She paid no attention. Her expression was one of dull horror.
“Leave her and go get the boat,” Rand told Shanley. “Hurry.”
Shanley glanced at us and then released the girl’s arm. When she didn’t move, he turned and jogged off over the dune.
Rand looked at Michelle Nickerson, but he didn’t seem interested in her. For her part, she was oblivious to both of us. In the distance, though closer now, came the rising, falling sounds of sirens. Covering us with his shiny gun, Rand said, “Come on. We’re taking a ride,” and ushered us in the direction Shanley had gone.
“I’ll go,” I said. “Let her stay. Her parents may be in one of those cars.”
Rand shook his head. “We all go.”
“Why?” I said. “You didn’t kidnap her.”
“Keep moving.”
“She’s got nothing to do with your plans. Carvalho took you, didn’t he, Michelle?” She glanced at me for the first time, but she didn’t speak. I said, “Maybe he heard a police dispatch that had you walking along the road at night, and he wanted to take you in. Did he hurt you?”
She blinked and shook her head slowly. “He … he said I’d be safe out here. He thought something had happened to my dad. I … want to go home.”
I looked at Rand. “Let her go.”
“Can’t. You’re right—I didn’t even know about her until you came to town asking questions. My business was with Ben. But she’s fallen into it now. So have you. Move.”
I was trying to find an approach to convince him it was useless to flee, that the gunrunning was out in the open now and he’d be tagged for it, and for killing Nickerson, and John Carvalho, too. But I wasn’t going to be able to persuade him. Rand wasn’t a person who spooked easily: he finagled and bought and soft-talked; he offered Faustian bargains, and when those weren’t enough, he rode roughshod over anything or anyone foolish enough to be in his way. He burned out resisters, as he had Chet Van Owen, only to turn around and give him a job. He drowned a girl and deeded her father a worthless motel. He ransacked Indian graves, then built a museum for the bones. He was tough and sweet and as remorseless as a great white
shark. He hadn’t had anything to do with Michelle’s disappearance, but that wasn’t important to him now.
We heard a boat approaching, and Rand ushered us down a slope to where we could see the skiff coming ashore. Shanley gunned it in close, tilted the outboard motor, and ran the bow onto the beach. Rand motioned us toward it. “Let her go,” I pleaded once more. “She can’t do anything to stop you.”
Rand pointed his gun at me. “Neither can you.”
It was a punky old aluminum skiff with a newish outboard motor, no running lights. I saw a life jacket and some cushions. “Put on the jacket,” I told Michelle as we sat on the middle seat. Rand didn’t object. With zombie movements, she drew it on, snapped the buckles. Rand shoved the boat back out and jumped in and sat facing us. Shanley got the motor going and came about. “Head for the channel,” Rand ordered. “That green light’s our bearing.”
Shanley gave the motor full throttle and we moved out quickly. I felt the skiff’s flimsiness as it began to bang against the small waves. The motor was newer, but I wondered if it was the boat that Red Dog and Teddy Rand had gone out in with whiskey and a gun all those years ago to weigh their futures. It was part of my need to put all the pieces into a whole, even when they were of small consequence by now. Away from the shelter that Shawmut afforded, the wind spanked at us and the swells grew.
“The person who picked up that runaway girl,” I said to Rand, “was it you?”
He looked at me with an expression of hatred. I had my answer. He waved the gun impatiently. “Keep quiet.” I was forced to grip the seat as we bounced over swells. Back on the land, the flicker of lights signaled the approach of several vehicles moving through the scrub oaks, heading for the point, like a small cortege. I hoped that Fran Carvalho wasn’t with them.
And with that thought, I realized how Rand and Shanley had come to be here. The cop had taken Fran’s call at the station and pumped her for details about her dad’s being gone. I turned slightly to look back at Shanley as he worked the outboard motor, gazing at me, through me. Who could tell with the glasses?
Rand crouched in the bow looking seaward, and I realized he had no intention of letting us go. Why would he? We were tools, possibly useful as bargaining chips, but ultimately he would kill us. Or get Shanley to do it, the way I figured he’d gotten the cop to secure Jillian Kearns’s silence.
Far out toward the horizon, I saw a boat. It was low and pale, and moving in our direction. Was that our destination? Was it coming for Rand? As it moved nearer, I recognized it as the boat that Van Owen and I had seen from the jetty, the boat from which someone had fired a warning shot at us. Rand shifted position, as if getting read to stand and hail it. Then, off to starboard, at the edge of my vision, something else caught my eye. A dark moving line. At first I thought it might be a second boat, but then I realized it was the churn of swift, rising water where the outflowing bay water and the cold incoming tide met. Where the blues feed, Red Dog had told me, and the stripers, and sometimes the sharks.
I realized the cruiser would spot us in a minute if it hadn’t already, and then, who knew? I glanced at Michelle Nickerson, and she seemed to be aware of the boat, too. Hoping the motion was imperceptible, I angled my body slightly toward the rear. We were just reaching the outer rim of the swift water. Shanley throttled down as we edged into the current. I glanced back at him and saw the green flicker of the channel marker in the lenses of his glasses. I lunged at him. He tried to avoid me, giving the throttle an unintended twist as he did. The motor roared, and the boat lurched. I hit him hard in the face with one hand and with the other grabbed for the control. In front, Rand half-rose and swung his gun around. Michelle threw herself to the floor. Rand fired, and I saw the mirror sunglasses shatter, blown apart by the round that hit Shanley in the face. He flopped back against the motor housing like a broken doll. Michelle screamed. I just managed to turn the motor, and swung the boat sharply. Rand stumbled to catch his balance. The skiff took a wave broadside.
I had hoped the rising water would just be enough to upset things, to shift the power ratio, but I underestimated the current. The wave flipped the skiff up into the air and capsized us. As I broke the surface, something crashed against my neck and shoulders, and I went down.
42
In the dark ocean I didn’t know which direction was up. Muted sounds came to me, and I kicked myself in their direction.
Michelle was already afloat when I came up ten feet away. The skiff was bottom up but going nose down. The shrilly whining motor chopped the air, burning itself out. I looked around for Rand, but I didn’t see him.
The water was rougher than it had looked from the boat. I glanced around again for Rand. He’d bested me last time, nearly drowned me, but I hoped that without the element of surprise working for him, I could hold my own. I needed to give the girl a chance to get to land. I yelled to her to swim hard for shore. To my relief, she started to.
With my fear growing by the moment, I scanned the dark hills of water around me. I did a three-sixty. Rand wasn’t there. Had he swum farther out, toward the powerboat? I no longer even heard the other boat. A thought grabbed me with an icy jaw. He’d gone after Michelle. He was a strong, quick swimmer; he could have already reached her. I bobbed on the next rising crest, and this time I saw no one.
I labored in the direction where I’d last seen Michelle, my heart hammering at my ribs, my head woozy with panic. But soon I could see her: she was alone, moving slowly shoreward.
I didn’t waste precious breath trying to call to her. I followed.
After a very long time, I felt my feet touch bottom. Michelle was already wading ashore. There were cops on the beach, and Paula and Ross Jensen, too. Paula ran splashing right into the shallows to Michelle, and then Ross did, too, and the three of them hugged each other in a tight circle. I could hear both women sobbing with relief. I angled away and let them be. I waded ashore farther down and stood by, dripping on the sand, scanning the dark water for whatever might be there. In no time at all I was ringed by cops.
43
One morning on my way to my office I stopped by the city library and picked up a volume of Matthew Arnold’s poems. I found “Dover Beach” easily enough. Ted Rand had known it by heart, all right, but when he’d talked about that dreamworld that lay before him, he hadn’t recited the final lines. Arnold wrote that it:
Hath really neither joy, nor love, not light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
I read the poem through a couple times.
“Is this what you do up here all day? No wonder you stay so pale.”
I looked up from the volume. I didn’t need to see the dazzle of parrots and tropical flowers on his shirt to recognize the speaker. Red Dog Van Owen stood in the doorway looking weathered and salted and reasonably happy. “I wanted to see if this place really exists,” he said.
“Satisfied?”
“Just as ratty as I’d imagined. I like it.”
I rose to shake his hand, but he grabbed me in a grizzly hug and thudded my back. He smelled of the ocean and cigarettes. I got him seated in the client chair.
“You heard about them finding Ben?”
I had. His body had turned up under the golf course.
“What do you think happened to Rand?” he asked. “Think he got away?”
“I don’t know. The water was pretty rough that night. On the other hand, he was a swimmer. Though I have to imagine that if he did get ashore, people are going to find him.”
He nodded. “I visited Iva. She didn’t want to see me at first, accused me of wanting to drink her booze, but I told her I wasn’t taking any shit. We got to it. I let her know how it was from my angle, said I’d always thought she was a good mom to TJ. She ended up hugging me and crying.”
“She’s a toug
h shell over a tender lady.”
“Yeah. She’s not too sorry about Rand. She’s been going over to the hospital to visit TJ. She said she’d reach me if there’s any change.”
“Is that likely?”
He chewed it a moment. “I guess I still think of him running a football on October afternoons.”
“It’s a good thing to remember.”
He went over to the window and peered out onto brick walls and flat rooftops and chimneys. He watched a flock of pigeons wheel past. “How can you live so far from the water?”
“We’ve got six miles of canals and a big river two hundred yards out that window. You couldn’t toss a rock across it on your best day. Supposedly it’s got Atlantic salmon in it, and it empties into the ocean a day’s walk east of here. That’s water enough for me.”
“I guess people can get used to anything.”
“I guess, but there’s a difference between choosing and just settling. This is a choice.”
He turned, nodding. “I used to think Standish was, but it got too small … has been for a long time; I just didn’t see it. Or maybe I did and I didn’t have the nerve to do anything about it.”
“A hermit crab moves when it’s time. Standish seems as good a place as any.”
“Life goes on. They’re looking for a new police chief.” He raised his eyebrows.
“I don’t look good in a blue baseball cap. A fedora’s more my style.”
“Yeah. I saw Mitzi Dineen running around like crazy doing her thing. And the high school looks like it’ll have a decent football team for the first time in years.”
“How’s Fran Albright doing?”