Reprisal

by Mitchell Smith

  Joanna kicked her foot free of the sill, let go of the gutter's edge, and fell down the wall. ... Almost past the canted window, she reached with both hands, gripped the sill, and caught herself with a grunt. Her wrists wrenched at the leverage; her hips and legs swung hard into the wall.

  She had the sill, but not its inside edge. She held with her right hand, scrabbled at brick with her boot toes ... then reached in farther with her left, found the sill's inner edge, and had her hold.

  Joanna hauled herself up and against the window, and tried to pull the bottom of the sash frame out and open. It didn't budge. The vent must have been left ajar for years ... been painted open just this far. There was a steady slight draft blowing out, stinking richly of fish.

  She was getting tired ... tired of clinging to the wall. She held with her left arm jammed under the window, hand gripping the inner sill--and with her right hand reached behind her for her pack, tugged the Velcro open, and dug into it for the multitool.

  Opening the Leatherman with only one hand and her teeth was a chore ... to open it, and fold out the serrated knife blade.--When she had the blade out and locked, Joanna began to work on the paint plastered in brittle layers along the upper side edges of the vent window's frame, where their angles narrowed to the hinged top sash above.

  It was hard work, hard to do clinging to the wall almost forty feet up. ...

  Difficult to do one-handed, and in darkness only a little relieved by lamplight from Strand Street. If she dared to use her helmet lamp, it would have been so much easier ... so much easier.

  She worked and worked the blade along one side of the window, and then the other--sawing, slicing through old paint down the window frame's edges. Then she paused, tucked the tool into her coverall pocket, and tried the window again, heaving at it, trying to force it up and wide enough to crawl through.

  Her left hand, deep under the window, was growing numb from holding.

  She took the tool out and went to work again ... carving into the painted-over joins, prying thick strips and chips of old paint away. It was becoming very difficult. ... After a while, she stopped and hung at the window, getting her breath. There was no feeling in her left hand and forearm.

  She braced her boots against the brick below, tucked the tool into her pocket again, and hauled up on the window's bottom edge, yanked it. She struck the sash frame with her fist, then hauled and heaved again. ... The window moaned softly, and swung up and out two or three inches.

  "You son of a bitch," Joanna said, and wrenched at it again. The vent window made another soft noise, then something split or splintered slightly along its frame's left edge, and the window swung up and open all the way.

  She reached in with her right hand to relieve her left from holding ... then crawled under the open window frame and inside, to straddle the wide sill and crouch there in darkness, safe from falling.

  Chapter Eleven

  Joanna rested for a while, head and shoulders bent under the canted window frame. She exercised her fingers, easing their soreness and cramp. ...

  Then she leaned out over the well of darkness to her right, reached up and switched on her helmet lamp.

  This was the warehouse's main processing space. Wide, deep, and two stories high. She'd seen it before, from the side passage, when she'd come in to talk with Mr. Manning. ... The huge room below her was filled with machines, tubs, and parked forklifts. And there was a complex stepped pavement of wide conveyor belts down the length of the space, supported on series of huge rollers above steel frames, drive chains, and shafts.

  Joanna lifted the rope coil off her right shoulder, and passed the working end of the line through the narrow slot between the hinges at the top of the window. She fed a short length of line through, brought it around under the window, tied a bowline and backed it up with an overhand knot. Then she let the rest of the rope fall free down the warehouse's inside wall.

  She dug her gloves out of the pack, put them on--bare hands to climb, gloves to rappel--then wound the rope's slack between her legs and around her right thigh ... then up and over her left shoulder and down her back to be held firm in her right hand. She switched off her helmet lamp to keep its beam from the open window, swung off the sill, set her boot soles against the room's wall

  ... and leaning against her rope, backed slowly down into darkness. ...

  More than thirty feet lower, her boot soles hit the floor. She stepped out of the rope ... a trespasser who'd listened to a poor alcoholic's mumbling. If she was caught, the handsome old constable would come down on her, jail her in a minute.

  The odor of fish lay like fog along the room. Fish and machine oil. It was a big space, silent, its tons of hulking machinery bearing down on a floor of heavy splintered planking. There was only a dim night-light far across the processing room, a small red bulb above a door to the passage beyond.

  Joanna switched on her helmet lamp, ducked under the conveyor belt, and worked her way beneath it, snaking through the complex of gears and rollers. The floor planking was wet under the wide belts, soaked from hosing down and the workday's melting ice. The wood was wet, and slippery with slime the hose had missed.

  Joanna climbed and crawled through the maze of machinery by the light of her helmet lamp ... a questing hunter, searching for whatever might be strange, wrong, and out of place.

  She traveled the length of the room, from a wide brick fireplace in the west-end wall to the office along the east--weaving under the machinery, then climbing up onto the belts and load trays to check the work surfaces.

  It took time ... a long time to search the machinery, the loaders, the floor and corners of the warehouse space.--And there was nothing there. Nothing but fish smell, and fish-transporting machinery, and fish-processing machinery.

  Joanna tried the small front office. She searched through the desks by helmet light--used the Leatherman to pry two locked drawers open-then went through the file cabinets. ... Bills of lading, receipts and requests for receipts, utility bills, payment slips, and canceled checks. Shipping journals, waybills, and mainland truck drivers' mileage records and delivery schedules.

  Two cabinet drawers of tax forms, tax records--federal, county, and state.

  It took her more than an hour just to skim through it. And she found nothing to suggest any business but the fish business. Preliminary processing, icing, small-lot freezing, and shipping. ...

  Joanna tried to leave everything in the office as she'd found it, but couldn't fix the broken drawer locks. ... She remembered Mr. Manning's great bulk, his round flat face oddly set with handsome green eyes.

  She went down the hall passage to the back of the warehouse, opened the machine-room door, and searched through the equipment there, the tool racks and heavy rubber hoses, the battered cooler cabinets and their ducting, dented and taped.

  There seemed to be nothing at Manning's that shouldn't be there ... except for a very foolish woman.

  Joanna went through a thick heavy door across the hall from the machine room--and walked into hard winter. The freezer space was smaller than the processing room, and packed floor to ceiling with icy crates of frozen whole fish, gutted and headless fish, small boxes of fish roughly filleted.

  It was very cold--colder than any cave. Joanna shivered in her coveralls, sorting at random through a few of the smaller boxes ... several crates.

  Frozen fish.

  Weary, fingers aching from the cold, she left the freezer room, made sure the heavy door was closed behind her, and went on down the passage. There was a small bathroom on the left--very dirty, smelling of fish and urine--and beyond that, a door with a heavy padlock on it.

  She took the multitool from her pack, unscrewed the Phillips-heads holding the lock plate, and when that came free of the jamb, swung the door open with its lock assembly dangling, still attached.

  ... Burglary was if you took something. Otherwise, it was breaking and entering. That seemed right; that seemed to make sense.

  Her h
elmet light wavering before her, she went through the doorway and down a narrow flight of stairs--very old, worn, and creaking--to a small landing, then down the next flight, descending into a terrific odor of rotted fish ...

  almost unbearable.

  An open barrel stood against the wall past the bottom of the stairs, a big rusting steel drum resting on concrete blocks ... and there was apparently garbage, a slurry of fish heads, fish guts rotting in there.

  Bile rose in Joanna's throat--she turned aside, bent and retched, trying not to vomit. She pinched her nostrils shut, breathed through her mouth ... and that helped a little.

  There was a door to the left of the barrel, and she opened it and walked into a low ceilinged corridor, its walls hung with various machine parts, drive chains, tools, oil cans, rags, and long-handled scrub brooms. ... Her helmet lamp cast odd, moving shadows as she went through that space, and down seven or eight steps to a small dirt-floored basement room. Deep-a story and a half, at least, below the building's main floor.

  There was an ancient furnace crouched there, bulky as a hibernating bear. It had been converted to oil-burning; a big plank-sided coal bin, empty, flanked it.

  Joanna, very tired now--wishing she hadn't come into this place at all--climbed up the furnace-room steps and walked the narrow aisle between racked and hanging equipment ... back to the foot of the stairs.

  The smell coming from the garbage barrel seemed even stronger. ... Her helmet lamp printed a hollow frame of shadow above the steel drum.

  She stood still, then slowly turned her head ... and the lamp threw the shadow again, outlining a framed panel over two feet square. She went closer, despite the stench ... and saw there was a shallow box frame set into the wall above the barrel--inch-thick wooden framing.

  Joanna stretched to reach over the rusting drum, shoved the panel, and felt it move. An old framed-in access trap. An access likely to nowhere, now.

  ... She'd been in this place for at least two hours. Two hours of criminal activity and wasted effort. It was time, and past time, to go.

  "Oh, Jesus Christ. ..." Joanna climbed up onto the open barrel's rim on all fours, bracing herself with her hands ... the steel edges digging into her knees. She didn't look down at what was waiting beneath her, waiting for her to slip.

  "Frank, you son of a bitch." His fault in some way, no matter what. ...

  She pushed against the framed woodwork-definitely had been an access hatchway of some sort. It moved a little, then caught. She reached down behind the back of the steel drum's rim ... feeling for whatever was holding the trapdoor closed.--She felt a hook down there, swiveled into an eye on the door's frame to hold it shut.

  Her knees were in agony, the drum's rim cutting into them. ... Joanna tried to unlatch the hook, wedge her hand down behind the barrel to get to it. Goddamn thing. ...

  She got a two-finger grip on the hook, and tugged it. It resisted ... then snapped free. She straightened with a grunt of relief, shoved at the access door--and it swung open away from her so suddenly, she lost her balance. Her right knee slipped off the edge of the barrel, and she fell half into it.

  Right leg plunged down into it.

  "SHIT!" Joanna kicked and wrestled her way up and out of the stuff ... and stood away from the drum, stomping to get the soup of garbage off her leg. Wet

  ... soaked to her thigh. "Oh, my God. ..."

  The odor, the thought of what the stuff was-nasty rotting crap--was nauseating. And now there was a new smell with it, a draft of air along with the fish stink. A draft smelling of new-mown hay.

  Joanna forced herself to lean over the garbage barrel, her helmet light shining through the half-open hatchway behind it. ... Breathing through her mouth, she still smelled that odd medley of fish rot and sunny summer pasture.

  The cut-hay odor was breezing through the trap.

  She climbed up onto the steel drum again, balanced there, shoved the small square door wide open, and crawled straddling over the barrel's open top to look through. There was a sort of chute ... a narrow wooden chute crusted with white. White crystals glittering in her helmet's light.

  Joanna rubbed a gloved finger across the white ... carefully tasted with the tip of her tongue.-Salt. Before ice-making ... mechanical coolers, they must have used the access hatch and chute to send salt down into a basement storage area. Packed the new-cleaned fish with it.

  She worked her way into the chute, slid down it headfirst for ten, twelve feet

  ... and ended on her hands and knees in damp dirt. The farm smell, country smell, was very strong. Pastures ... hay.

  Joanna stood, and slowly turned her head-sweeping with her helmet lamp as she'd done countless times in deeper places, darker than any basement. ...

  This was a big rectangular space, high-ceilinged, beneath the warehouse's long processing room. A wide brick fireplace was set into the cellar's west wall.

  When Joanna looked up, her lamp picked out massive old wooden beams--each almost two feet square--crossing the ceiling. Heavy timber uprights marched away down the basement in long ranks.

  The only storage in this nineteenth-century space was modern--several long rows of nearly yard-square bales stacked side to side and three or four bales high--each neatly bundled in thick shining black plastic marked with a few scribbled white Cyrillic letters, and double-bound with wide silver strapping tape.

  Joanna walked down a narrow aisle between two of the stacked long rows, her helmet light shining right, then left, as she turned her head. The big bales were set on wooden pallets, off the cellar's dirt. At a rough count, perhaps five ... six hundred bales.

  She stood beside a wall of them, took off a glove, and reached out to touch, stroke smooth heavy black-plastic wrapping ... run her fingers along the strapping tape to be certain all this was real, and not imagined.

  The saturated odor of cut grass was overwhelming. Down here, there was hardly any smell of fish. And that, of course, had been the reason for the garbage barrel above, the rotting offal meant to cover any odor rising from this stored cargo.

  What was the street price of say eighty- or ninety-pound bales of marijuana leaf and seed, grown in dark Russian earth? What was the price of a huge basement full of it, all neatly wrapped? Wrapped for transfer at sea, of course. ...

  Joanna walked down to the end of the cellar, and found a very wide iron double door, rust-streaked over peeling red-lead paint. The loading door. She supposed the cargo must come in over one of those second, lower docks, directly beneath the main warehouse piers--built originally so fish could be unloaded from a boat into a warehouse's first floor and basement at the same time, for quicker turnaround, less spoilage.

  Old construction, the lower dock not really secret ... not perfectly hidden from view, but still handy for unloading under cover and into the basement, particularly at night--particularly while fish were being unloaded on the pier above it. And must have been a very useful arrangement during Prohibition, when whiskey was smuggled down from Canada.

  A different contraband today. ... What was the price of a cellar full of it, ferried to the mainland in fish trucks--then delivered direct to Portland, Providence, and Boston? A near and handy New England source ... with none of the hassles of long and complicated transshipments from the South and far West.

  What was its price these days? The value of so many big unprocessed bales? A million dollars? Much more than a million dollars. ... Part of the cost, of course, having been the life of a man out sailing his summer boat--and the life of an old man who'd gone with him, fishing.

  ... Frank and Louis must have sailed too early one misty morning, sailed by bad luck too far or in the wrong direction, and seen the transfer ... seen something and perhaps not even understood it. And their lives, thereafter, had become part of the cost of doing business, of ensuring Asconsett's secrets.

  Joanna, smelling--under a climate of marijuana--the stench of rotting fish soaked into her coverall leg, paced the basement aisles behind the bright circle
of her helmet's light. She said, "Oh, Frank, I know it now," and began to cry, weeping with relief at finding the reason, something less frightening than chance. And the foolish widow not, after all, a fool.

  Reason, and then the bittersweet satisfaction of being proved right.--Now everything was explained, and was bearable. Even if the constable, if the fishing captains, caught and killed her--if all the island rose to silence her and keep its secret-she would die almost satisfied. She wept a little longer, returning to the chute through corridors of bales, wiping her eyes with her glove's coarse leather.

  ... Getting back up the chute was easy-climbing through the hinged trapdoor and over the fish-gut barrel was hard. Joanna didn't try to fasten the hatchway shut behind her. She crawled over the open steel drum, dropped to her feet, and started up the cellar stairs.

  They wouldn't hold the shipment long; in a few days the basement would be empty. But if she left tomorrow on the morning ferry, she'd be in Post Port by noon. No phone calls, sounding improbable ... and no more talking to old Carl Early and his island deputies--who must know, must at least have suspected.

  The Coast Guard commander's office was at the Port, and the state police. And if they didn't move, she'd call the federal drug people.--Then they would all come out; they would come out and begin to destroy the island fishermen. ...

  Revenge only a sad substitute for Frank and her father --but much, much better than nothing.

  Joanna opened the door at the top of the basement stairs--and saw bright light shining at the far end of the building, shining through the glass-paned door and office windows from the pier outside. A big fishing boat just come in. ...

  Breathless, suddenly weary, she went to the left, weaving her way through the machinery toward the north wall, toward the length of hanging rope.

  The light from outside was very bright. The boat's searchlight beam threw streams of white-gold along the plant's floor. Joanna snaked under the conveyor belt, working her way over to the wall. --There was noise. Noise outside.