One-Way Ticket

by William G. Tapply

  He narrowed his eyes at me, then got up and walked back into my den.

  I’d have to make it up to him. He’d been abandoned quite a bit since Evie left.

  I followed Henry into the den. I changed into a pair of my most faded and threadbare blue jeans, a green work shirt, an old pair of sneakers, and a blue windbreaker.

  I threaded the leather holster for my big Leatherman multipurpose tool onto my belt. It unfolded into a sharp three-inch blade, or a Phillips or flat-head screwdriver, or pliers and wire cutters, or can and bottle openers, or a saw blade, or a file, or an awl. I put a cigarette lighter and a Mini Mag flashlight into a pocket in the windbreaker. I set my cell phone to vibrate and slipped it into my pants pocket. I draped my binoculars around my neck. From the vast hat collection on my closet shelf I found a faded and fish-blood-stained cap with the picture of a big oceangoing sportfishing boat on it.

  I didn’t know if this outfit would enable me to pass myself off as a marine-engine mechanic. For one thing, aside from the Leatherman, I didn’t have any tools. Nor did I have a business card, not to mention the fact that I drove a four-year-old green BMW instead of a panel truck with the Danvers Marine logo on the side.

  I figured there’d be some more social engineering and pretexting in my future before I managed to get a look into the cabin of the old thirty-eight-foot Bertram called Dot Com that was owned by Mike Warner and moored in slip G-9 in the Kettle Cove Marina in Gloucester.

  Twenty-five

  THURSDAY-AFTERNOON COMMUTER TRAFFIC was what I expected—bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go all the way from Mt. Vernon Street to Cambridge Street, then on Charles out past the North Station in Boston, over the bridge on Route 93, and all the way to Beverly. When I picked up 128 east, a straight shot out to Cape Ann, the traffic seemed to thin out a little.

  The rain had been just a misty drizzle in the city, but as I traveled north and east it became a steady, hard summer rain under a low oatmeal-colored sky.

  I guessed I was ten or fifteen minutes from Gloucester when something vibrated against my thigh. It felt like an angry bee had bumbled into my pants pocket, and it took me a second to realize it was my cell phone.

  Adrienne? Dalt? Teresa?

  The kidnappers?

  I remembered that I’d called Becca Quinlan in the morning. She hadn’t called back. Maybe it was her.

  I pulled over to the side of the road, turned on my emergency flashers, fished the phone from my pocket, flipped it open, and said, “Yes?”

  “Hey. It’s me. Your wayward girlfriend.” Evie.

  My throat got tight, just hearing her voice. “You’re hardly wayward, honey.” I paused. “I can’t even begin to tell you how good it is to hear your voice.”

  “You, too,” she said. “You doing anything?”

  “Nothing important,” I said. “Nothing as important as talking to you.”

  “I called your office. Julie said you’d taken the day off. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “A mental health day, you know?”

  “You’re not home, either,” Evie said. “I tried our house. I thought you’d be home.”

  “Nope,” I said. Her next question would be: Where was I on this rainy evening, then, if not home? I surfed my mind frantically for a believable lie. Everything I came up with sounded false. “I’m not home yet, no,” I said lamely, a lie itself, of sorts, implying that I was on my way home from somewhere instead of on the road trying to track down a kidnapper. “So do you have some news?”

  I waited. She didn’t say anything, didn’t follow up on the where-are-you question.

  “Talk to me, babe,” I said finally.

  “Ah, shit,” she said. “I’m trying to be all upbeat and brave and sweet for you, and it’s not working.”

  “You don’t have to pretend anything for me,” I said. “Tell me what you know.”

  “It’s bad,” she said. “Bad, bad. I expected it, you know? But still, when you hear it…”

  “I’m sorry” was all I could think of to say.

  “They wheeled him into the operating room at seven this morning. Ed. My daddy. It was supposed to be what they call exploratory, meaning they didn’t know what the hell they were going to find. All the wonders of modern fucking medicine, and half the time diagnosis is still a mystery. He was in there all morning. Nobody told me anything. Me, a big-time hospital administrator, and they made me feel like a bag lady who’d snuck in for the crappy coffee. I finally got to see him in recovery just a few minutes ago. He’s still unconscious. All pale and thin and hollowed out and hooked up to machines.” She sucked in a breath, let it out. “I’m sorry. I’m kind of a mess. It’s been a long day. You gear yourself up for the worst thing, but deep down inside you believe that it’s going to be something better than that, as if you can fend off the really bad things by inventing worst-case scenarios. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s like, if you can make yourself imagine it, it won’t happen that way.”

  “Yeah,” Evie said. “Well, I’m here to tell you, sometimes it does.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Worst-case scenario,” she said. “They didn’t know what they’d find. Or at least, so they said. Maybe they knew all along. A lot of the time they just don’t tell you what they think. I’ve been around doctors enough. I asked all the right questions, and I got all the predictable evasions.” She paused and blew out a long breath. I could hear that she was smoking a cigarette. “It’s a stage four pancreatic cancer. That’s the worst stage. It means that it’s spread all over the place. Lymph nodes. Other organs. He’s going to die. The doctor said he couldn’t operate. Only about one in five of these things is operable anyway, he said, as if that would make me feel better. He might want to do chemotherapy or something. He wanted me to thank him, I think. Funny thing was, I almost did. Your father’s going to die, lady. Oh, thank you so fucking much, kind doctor.”

  “I wish I was there with you,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “It wouldn’t do any good. You can’t help me. I’m sorry. That sounded shitty. Do you understand?”

  “Sure,” I said, although I didn’t.

  “I’m going to stay here. With him. Until…”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “It might be six months. Maybe a little more, but probably less. They can’t tell me.”

  I was sitting there in my car on the shoulder off Route 128 on the way to Gloucester. My headlights were on, and the windshield wipers were swishing back and forth. Raindrops were pattering down on the roof and dancing on the hood. When the cars and trucks went slamming past me, my little BMW rocked in their wet backdraft.

  I didn’t know what to say to Evie. She was my love, and I couldn’t think of anything to say to her.

  “Brady?” she said after a minute. “Are you there?”

  “I’m here, honey.”

  “I do miss you, you know.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  “And Henry,” she said. “You’ll give him a hug for me, okay? Tell him I love him.”

  “I will.”

  “Hey?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Please don’t think about coming out here.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I understand.”

  “No,” she said, “I mean really. It would be just like you to show up sometime.”

  “I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

  She was quiet for a while. Then she said, “What’s going to become of us?”

  “We’re solid,” I said. “We’ll be good.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t think about us right now. I’m sorry.”

  “I want you to do what you have to do,” I said. “Don’t worry about me. We’ll worry about afterwards when the time comes.”

  “That’s the thing,” she said. “I’m not. Not worried about you, I mean. I’m worried about my daddy. And about me. I can’t even think about afterwards.” She p
aused. “I’ve got to go. I want to get back with him. I just stepped out to the parking lot for a minute. I needed a cigarette. I didn’t want the damn doctor to know he made me cry. And I wanted to call you. I wanted you to know what’s going on.”

  “I’m sorry it’s bad news.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Me, too. You be good, okay?”

  “Of course. Always.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m doing what I need to be doing.”

  “Okay.”

  A pause. “Hey, Brady?”

  “What, honey?”

  “Look,” she said. “If you want to… I mean, this is going to be a long time.”

  “If I want to what?”

  I heard her blow out a breath. “Have a life. Jesus, Brady. I want you to live your life. Go out, have fun. Life is too short. If you don’t believe me, ask my father.” She hesitated. “You know what I’m talking about. I know you do. Do I have to say it?”

  I laughed softly. “You want me to see other people? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “It sounds kind of high-schoolish, doesn’t it?” she said. “But, yeah, I guess that’s what I’m saying. Really. If we’re—what did you say? solid?—if we’re solid, it won’t make any difference.”

  “I don’t want to see other people,” I said.

  “Listen,” she said. “Here’s the reason I’m calling. I’m here with my daddy and he’s dying and he’s full of regrets for the time he’s wasted, the things he didn’t get to do, the possibilities he didn’t pursue, the life he didn’t live. I have made this choice. To be here with him. Because I know I’d regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t. I want you to make your choices, too. I don’t want you to have any regrets. I don’t want to be responsible for your life. I don’t want to have to worry about you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  The rain seemed to have softened. It sounded like mice scampering around on the roof of my car. “I understand, honey,” I said. “I appreciate what you’re saying. I’ll do what I want to do, okay?”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Except,” she said, “no matter how much you might think you want to come out here, don’t. Please.”

  “Okay.”

  There was a long pause. “Love you,” she said.

  “I love you, too.”

  After Evie disconnected, I sat there holding my cell phone in my lap, as if she might call right back to tell me she’d changed her mind, that she was coming home.

  Or at least to say, “I love you.” When she said it without the personal pronoun, a sentence with no subject, it sounded… impersonal. Glib and insincere.

  Right about then I wished I had a cigarette of my own to smoke.

  Twenty-six

  BY THE TIME I turned onto the road leading to the Kettle Cove Marina, the premature gray gloom of a sunless evening had begun to settle over the damp landscape. It pretty much mirrored my mood.

  Evie didn’t want to have to worry about me. She didn’t know when she’d be coming home. She wasn’t thinking about me. She didn’t want to see me.

  I found myself resenting a dying man. I was jealous of the attention poor Ed Banyon was getting from his daughter.

  Get over it, Coyne. Be a man.

  A weatherbeaten wooden sign reading “Kettle Cove Marina” marked the entrance. I stopped there on a rise of land to survey the layout. There was no gate at the entrance, no guardhouse, no security camera. You could just drive right in on a gravel driveway that sloped down to a big sandy parking area along the curving edge of the water. A ten-foot chain-link fence ran along the entire outer edge of the lot, separating it from the water and the maze of docks where the boats were moored. There was a barred steel gate at the entrance to the long wooden pier that reached out into the cove. Evenly spaced at right angles off both sides of the pier were narrower wooden docks. The boats were tied up in their slips against these docks. If I’d done my math right, seven wharves, twenty slips per wharf—when the marina was full, it could handle 140 boats. Now it appeared to be a little more than half full. I assumed that this time of year a lot of people would be out fishing or otherwise enjoying a ride on the sea, if they didn’t mind a little rain.

  From the crest of the slope where I was stopped, I could see out past the end of Kettle Cove to the mist-shrouded ocean. It looked black and choppy and cold.

  Off to the left of the parking area was a low-slung shingled building. I guessed it housed the office where Sandy, my unwitting accomplice, worked, and probably a coffee shop and a bar and rest rooms. Behind it was a larger hangar-like building for dry-docking and working on boats.

  Right now, a little after six on this rainy Thursday afternoon, it all looked deserted. There were about two dozen vehicles parked randomly in the lot. I saw no people getting into or out of any of them, nobody walking on the docks, no boats pulling in or pulling out. The floodlights atop the tall poles around the rim of the parking area had not yet come on. The only sign of life was the glow of lights from the shingled building.

  From where I had stopped in my car at the top of the slope by the entrance to the parking lot, I lifted my binoculars and scanned the boats that were moored there. Rebecca said that Mike Warner’s Bertram was in slip G-9, on the outside of the outermost dock on the right.

  I focused on the most distant row of boats and located her. Through my binoculars past the swish of the wipers on my windshield I could make out her name—Dot Com—in blue block letters on her stern. She had a wide, open deck, a sleek, curving bow, and round portholes on the side of the cabin. White, trimmed in pale blue. She looked solid and well cared for and seaworthy. She was a thirty-eight-footer, Sandy had said. Bigger than most of the other boats moored here.

  I drove down the driveway and tucked my car between a pickup and an SUV at the corner of the lot farthest from the office, where I hoped it wouldn’t be noticed.

  I got out, locked up, and patted my hip and my pockets. Leatherman, flashlight, cell phone. My binoculars hung from my neck. I tucked them inside my windbreaker to keep them dry.

  I skulked along the chain-link fence in the shadows, keeping the parked cars between myself and the office building.

  When I got to the gate leading out onto the main pier, I tried the latch. Locked, as expected. There was a keypad on the post beside the gate. Sandy had mentioned a code. Those who paid to moor their boats here would know it. I didn’t.

  I walked slowly back along the fence, looking for a way to get under, through, or around it. It seemed to go on and on, and I was beginning to get that hopeless feeling of having come so far only to be thwarted at the end, when I heard a car door slam and then some loud male voices from the opposite side of the parking lot.

  A big SUV had driven in. Its dome light was on. Three men had climbed out, and they were standing there unloading the back of their vehicle. There were a couple of coolers, some tackle boxes and bait buckets, a tangle of fishing rods.

  The three guys were laughing and talking loudly, as if they were happy for an evening away from their wives and had already made a start on the beer in their coolers.

  I headed in their direction, moving slowly, trying to time it. I let them finish unloading, lock up their SUV, and start lugging their gear to the locked gate, and then I fell in behind them.

  One of the guys put down the cooler he was carrying, pecked at the keypad, and pushed the gate open. He held it for his two companions.

  I came along right behind them, and he held it for me, too. “Hey, thanks,” I said as I walked in through the gate.

  “No problem,” said the guy.

  “Gonna try the stripers?” I said.

  “A little fishin’,” he said, “a lot of beer.”

  His buddies laughed.

  “What could be better?” I said.

  And I was in, just as easy as that, no soshing or pretexting required.

  I followed the three fishermen down the wooden pier.
They turned onto the fourth dock on the left.

  “Well, good luck,” I said to them.

  “Yeah,” said the guy who was lugging the rods. “Good luck yourself.”

  I kept going toward the end of the central pier, then went out onto the fifth pier on the right, pier E, which was two down from pier G, where Mike Warner’s Bertram was moored. I found an angle between the moored boats where I could see Dot Com. She looked deserted. No lights lit her deck or glowed from her portholes. I scanned her with my binoculars and detected no movement except her gentle rocking in the swells that rolled in from the ocean.

  Well, if this excursion to Cape Ann was going to be a big fat wild goose chase, I wanted to find out sooner rather than later.

  I glanced back toward the gate, then walked quickly to Dot Com’s mooring.

  Up close, she was an impressive craft. Thirty-eight feet is a lot of boat. She had a spacious wheelhouse over a big forward cabin and a wide rear deck with a fighting chair for big-game fishing.

  I slipped my little hand-sized Maglite from the pocket of my windbreaker and shone it around the deck. There were a few coiled lines and some bumper buoys and a big fish locker. About a dozen rods were racked in the ceiling of the wheel-house. Everything was clean and neat and bare. Mike Warner kept his boat shipshape.

  I glanced around again, feeling furtive and sneaky. Then I hopped aboard, which made me an instant trespasser.

  The wheelhouse was a couple of steps up, over the cabin where the galley and the berths and the head would be. It was surrounded by glass and gave a high, wide view of the ocean. There were a lot of shiny chrome knobs and levers and switches and buttons and beer-can holders. There were lights and radios and microphones, radar and sonar and fish-finder screens.

  The steering wheel was the only mechanism I was pretty sure I knew how to operate. The watercraft I was most comfortable in were propelled by oars and paddles.

  The distant, muffled roar of a marine engine echoed through the misty rain from somewhere out beyond the marina, and a minute or two later the wake hit Dot Com and slapped against her hull. That sound reminded me of why I was there.