by Norman Green
“Are you the guy who ratted me out to the Russians?”
“You wanna talk to me,” he said, “you better come inside. I gotta finish packing.”
The inside of Hop’s trailer smelled a little funky, but I didn’t say anything about it. He had a big swollen suitcase on the floor by the front door, and another one open on a couch. He took a look back at me, dropped his pistol into the suitcase, went off for more shit. “Why did you rat me out, Hop?”
He was digging around in his kitchen cabinets.
“You were ruining my life, you ahshole! I had everything going for me before you came along. Then all of a sudden Bookman’s writing me up, my girlfriend won’t even let me smell it anymore, and my friends all laugh whenever they see me.” He gestured at his nose. “I’m never gonna look like I did before. Bookman said you was trying to stay away from the Russian Mafia, but he didn’t say why. I know a guy on the NYPD, and as soon as I said the word ‘Russian,’ he knew who I should call. I figured, I call these guys, they come up here, you get one sniff of them, and you’d be gone and out of my life forever.”
That answered that. “You know a guy named Rosario Colón?”
Hop came out of his kitchen with two more pistols and a box of shells. “He came heah to the house two nights ago. He told me that you and him took five million dollars from some Russian gangsters. Is that true?”
“Five million bucks? Are you kidding me?” I didn’t feel like explaining myself to this dickhead. “They had my kid. I took the kid back, and I stung them a little bit while I was at it, but it was nothing even close to five million.”
“Figures,” Hops said, turning and peering out his front window. “Another lying bahstid.”
“What did Rosario offer you?”
Hopkins looked back over at me. “Said he’d give me a million in cash if I gave him a place to hide, and if I helped him set you up. Then he changed it to half a million.”
I decided to play a hunch. “You never figured he was gonna grab Franklin instead of Nicky.”
“I nevah figured he’d take either one of ’em! It was you he said he wanted.” He looked out his front window again. “All I evah did was make one phone call, I nevah meant for any of this to happen. I didn’t even tell them wheyah you was, I didn’t give them yoah name or anything. Just said the guy they were looking for was around heah somewhere. I thought they’d come up heah looking for you, you’d get wind of it and take off, and that would be the end of it.” He looked down at the guns in his hands. “When Bookman finds out I was paht of this, he’ll kill me. I’m not shitting you a pound, mister, even if he gets Franklin back, I’m as good as dead. I’m leaving right now, this minute.”
The law of unintended consequences had bitten us both. “Rosario would never pay up, anyhow.”
“Maybe not.” Hopkins dumped the pistols and the ammo box into his suitcase and closed it up. “He didn’t tell me that he’d killed the Russian up in the hospital, I found that out after. And he didn’t tell me he was gonna grab Franklin and hold him hostage. I nevah signed on for that.”
“Where’s he keeping Franklin?”
“Why should I tell you anything? Fuck you. This shit is all yoah fault. I’m gonna have to start all over someplace with nothing, and you want me to help you? Fuck you, ahshole. I already did you a favah by not putting a bullet in yoah head. That’s all yoah getting outta me.”
God, you’re cutting me to the bone, here. “I think I got about eighty grand left. Tell me where Franklin is and it’s all yours.”
He looked out the front window again, torn. He shook his head. “You’ll never find him, not even if I tell you where he is, and I got no time to show you. I don’t even have time to wait for you to go get yoah money. I’m telling you, when Bookman catches up with me, I’m dead. Don’t you undahstand that?”
“Come on, Hopkins, do something good for once in your life. I’ll put Louis Avery on the phone, you can tell him where the place is. I got the money out in the car.” He looked at his suitcase, where his weapons were, but I had nothing to worry about. Hopkins was beaten, he would never go up against me again. I picked up his suitcase. “C’mon, grab that other bag. My phone’s in the car, too. You tell Louis, I give you the money, and we’re both outta here.”
“Go on, then. Go.”
I got my telephone, called Louis, put Hopkins on the phone. “Louis,” he said. “Do you remember that camp my fathah used to have ovah on the Canadian side, on Deah Island? Well, that’s wheyah he is. I give him my boat to run back and foth.” A minute later he handed the phone back to me.
“Hi, Louis.”
“Hello. Sounds like you done okay.”
“Maybe. We’ll find out when we get Franklin back. Do you know this place? You know what he’s talking about?”
“Ayuh,” Louis said. “I’ll call Hobart, get him to give us a ride over there. You remember where he keeps his boat?”
“Yeah, I do, but this might get ugly, Louis. I’d feel a lot better if I knew Nicky was safe with you. Does Hobart know this place?”
“I undahstand,” he said. “Hobart used to play cahds ovah theyah with Hoppy’s old man. I’ll call him, get him to meet you at the boat. You sure you remembah where he keeps it?”
“I remember. I’ll call you when I know something.”
I opened the back of the van and fished out the paper bag with the money in it. Hopkins took it, peered inside. “You know,” he said, “I’d give this back if I could have my life back, the way it was. Now I’m nothin’ but another criminal.”
“No, you’re not. You’re half as smart as Bookman thinks you are, you can still be what you want to be.”
He stared at me, and for a second I thought I saw some of his old swagger in the set of his shoulders. “What do you know?” he said. “Move yoah goddam van.”
13
The fog came out of nowhere, or maybe it came straight down out of the sky. One minute we were okay, chugging across a gray ocean on a gray day, and the next minute I could no longer see the shore, the islands, or the birds. I could see the surface of the water for twenty-five or thirty yards through drifting eddies of gray smoke, and that was all.
I was up next to Hobart, watching him steer the boat. He did not seem to notice the fog. Hobart had always impressed me as a guy who was past giving a fuck, and right now that did not seem like a good thing.
“You know where the hell you’re going? How can you know we aren’t headed out to sea?”
He looked at me pityingly. “We’re in a bay, you idiot. There’s land all around.”
“Serious. How can you navigate in this soup?”
“Soup? This is nothing. This is a nice, friendly fog, give you plenty of wahning before you run into something. I seen it so thick, you’d think you had a gray wool sock pulled right down over your head.” He looked at me. “Don’t worry, Manny. I been out on this bay almost forty years. I can do this in my sleep.”
“All right.” I tried to relax and give in to it, but it’s hard for me to give up control. I’ve spent most of my life playing the underdog, and when the odds are against you, you survive through intensity. You pick up on things the other guys miss, you manipulate the data, you use every ounce of influence and control you can muster. And after years of that, how can you just get on a plane, sit down and trust blindly that the pilots, the mechanics, the air traffic controllers, and all the rest of them know what the hell they’re doing, and are paying attention? Hey, how much gas you got in this thing, buddy, did you check? You had a couple cups of coffee this morning, you feeling all right? After the plane is in the air, though, it’s too late for all that, all you can do is sit there in your seat like a cow in a boxcar, wondering if this was the misstep that’s finally going to bust you into steaks and hamburger. I watched Hobart driving his boat, cocking his head to listen to the bells and the foghorns making their mournful racket: “Don’t get too close, brother, there’s some shit over here that will eat you up.” I forced m
yself to turn away. Don’t stand there like a moron, I told myself, and don’t ask the guy a bunch of asshole questions. Don’t distract him, leave him alone. Worry about something else.
Hobart glanced at me, swung the boat over to his right. “Manny.”
“Yeah.”
“You got a watch?”
“No. I don’t wear one.”
“Too bad. You’ll have to count. Thirty seconds from right now, you’ll see Friar’s Rock on your right.”
“Oh, yeah?” I tried to trust him but I couldn’t do it, I counted, and twenty-eight seconds later it loomed out of the fog, a man in a granite robe at the foot of a cliff.
“Feel better?”
“Don’t take it personal,” I told him. “It’s my nature to sweat the details.”
“Heard you totaled out the Subaru,” he said.
“Yeah, I did. What do you figure it’s worth?”
“Ahh,” he said, waving his hand. “We can settle up later.” He didn’t care about it, you could hear that in his voice. Maybe he just figured he was too close to the finish line to worry about things like that.
The wind picked up after we passed Friar’s Rock, and when we got into the wide space of the bay between Eastport and Lubec, visibility improved. I could see a harbor seal in our wake, looked like a man’s head floating in the water. I could see the dark shadow of land through the gray mist, and I could see the public wharf in Eastport. A small boat came zooming out around from behind the wharf, it looked a little shorter than Hobart’s boat, and a whole lot faster. It was open, it had no cabin, just a little seat with a console that held a steering wheel. It had an outboard in the back that threw up a rooster tail. There was just one guy in the boat, but he was coming fast.
“Oh, shit,” Hobart said. He gunned his engine, for whatever that was worth, and he spun the wheel and turned us north, toward the fogbank that still covered the water on the Canadian side.
“What?” I said.
“You think we’ll make it?” he asked. There was no emotion in his voice. He might have been asking for change of a quarter.
“Think we’ll make what?” I had been daydreaming, watching the water, mooning about being out of here, my troubles finally over. I wasn’t thinking.
“That fogbank up ahead,” Louis said. “We gotta get up in theyah before whoevah that is in Hop’s boat catches up to us.”
“Are you kidding me?”
Just then I heard it, sounded like a supersonic insect going past, up over our heads, made a vvvvvvvvvv sound. There was no bang to go with it. “What’s he got?” Hobart asked calmly. “My eyes ain’t what they used to be. Can you see it?”
I tried to pull myself back into the present. “Not really,” I said, squinting. It was Rosey, all right. “Semiautomatic with a long barrel, target pistol, I think. And I didn’t hear any noise, so I’d guess it’s probably a twenty-two with a suppressor on it.”
I heard that noise again, only this time it ended with an impact sound, and the bullet blew a hole in Hobart’s windshield between him and me. “Damn good shot, too,” Hobart said, still in that calm voice. He looked at me. “Wise man might set down, make himself a bit smaller.”
“He won’t shoot me. If he kills me, he’ll never get what he’s after. He’ll shoot you, though. Do it in a second. Why don’t you let me steer? Scootch down on the floor there, so he can’t see you.”
Hobart shrugged. “Fuck it,” he said.
“No, no way. Get on down, there.”
“All right, all right,” he said. “Ain’t a floor, anyhow. It’s a deck. You bring any ordnance?” He moved aside so I could take the wheel, grunted as he sat down.
“Yeah,” I said. “I picked up this forty-five a while ago, but I won’t be any good with it until he gets within about an arm’s length. I shoulda got some ammo to go with it. I think there’s six or seven rounds in here. You ever shoot a pistol?”
“Been a while,” Hobart said. A few more of those high-speed bees went on past, but to our left this time. I figured Rosario was just firing out of frustration. He wouldn’t hit me, but he had the pistol there in his hand, and he had to shoot at something. The fog was closing in on us, and a minute later I could not see Hopkins’s boat anymore, or much of anything else, either, only this time I was glad for it. Hobart had me go straight on for a few more minutes while he watched the currents sweep past the side. It seemed that we passed over some kind of nautical dividing line, and suddenly the current that had been rolling up into the bay reversed course. The water began carrying us back the way we’d come. “We’ll see how bright the boy is,” he said to me. “Pull back on the throttle, there.” I did, and the engine faded to a low rumble.
I could hear the son of a bitch, but it was hard to tell where the sound was coming from. We drifted in the gray dampness for about five minutes. Hobart looked at his watch and then peered out over the nose of the boat. “We gotta crank up here,” he said. “We don’t wanna run into them salmon pens back there. Now the question is, do we wanna make a run for home or do we wanna get where we’re going? Yoah boy, he’s got the speed on us, plus, we turn back, he knows wheyah we’re headed. Probably got a fayah chance to cut us off before we get theyah. We go on like this, he might find us, and he might not. Or we might try to beach this thing, make a run for it. What do you wanna do?”
“I don’t want to get either of us killed, but I’d love to get this over with. What are our chances of getting by him?”
“Well, let’s see what we can do,” Hobart said. “If we can sneak past him up to Indian Road there, we’ll probably make it.”
I saw square shapes in the water behind us, a symmetrical grid of lines in the water that marked off spaces that were about twenty by thirty feet, with nets rigged over the top, a couple of feet off the water. You couldn’t see the cages, which were sunk below the surface. There were silvery shapes jumping inside, they looked to be about ten inches long. “Damn,” I said. “If I was a seagull, I would sit right there and drool.”
“Seagull is smahter than you,” Hobart said. “He won’t sit mooning about what he can’t have. He knows he can’t get his breakfast heah, so he’ll go somewheyahs else. Turn us to port, and crank her up. No, port, goddammit, left. Your other left. That’s better. Now shove the throttle back up.” The fading buzz of the outboard motor on Hopkins’s boat changed tone and began getting louder.
“I think he hears us.”
“Well, I didn’t think he was deaf,” Hobart said. We held course away from the salmon pens. I was beginning to lose my sense of direction, but Hobart seemed to know where he was going. We passed another one of those invisible dividers in the water, and suddenly we were caught in a current that was ripping in the opposite direction. “Shut her down,” Hobart said. I pulled the throttle back and we drifted again.
“You’re using the currents,” I said. “You know where they are and where they’re going, and he doesn’t.”
He gave me the ghost of a smile. “If you have to be slow, you better be smaht.”
I listened to the sound of Hopkins’s outboard as it gained strength, faded, then gained strength again as Rosario zigzagged over the water looking for us. We passed through a stretch of water where a cloud of seabirds sat on the surface, feeding. Even with a nutcase like Rosey flying around the bay after my ass, that old curiosity itched at me. “What are they eating?”
Hobart looked over the side. “Eyeballs,” he said.
“Say what?”
“Eyeball herrings.” He held a thumb and forefinger about an inch and a half apart. “’Bout so big. Usually, what we get up in here are bricks, seven or eight inches long.”
I looked over and I could see them, just quick specks of moonlight in the cold water. “These ones are baby herrings.”
“Yeah.” He cocked his head, listened to the outboard. “Stand by that pistol, son.” We didn’t see the boat, though—apparently Rosario changed direction just a little bit too soon, and the sound faded again.<
br />
“Pretty slick,” I said to Hobart.
“Oh,” he said, “this’ll do for now. We get to Indian Road, though, we’re gonna have to turn her back on. We don’t lose him by then, might be a different story.”
“What about finding a place to hole up, wait until he gets tired of this, or else has to go get gas?”
“Well,” Hobart said, and he put a world of doubt into that short syllable. He peered up into the sky. “This fog here ain’t sticky enough. She’s gonna burn off soon.”
“Oh, shit.”
“‘Oh, shit’ is right. Looks like yoah boy means to have it out with us right now. Guess you ain’t the only one tiyed of the suspense.”
We drifted like that for another twenty minutes. Hobart had me start up the engine once to reposition us in the current, and we both sat and listened to Rosey’s mad search. The sky overhead was beginning to get perceptibly lighter, with patches of sun reaching us now and then, and a breeze began to tear at the fog’s subtle fabric. “Well,” Hobart said. “We gotta turn heah to get up Indian Road. It’s now or nevah.”
Suddenly, just in front of us, I heard something unlike anything I’d ever heard before. I guess it was sort of like a cross between a waterfall and a cement mixer, a kind of watery grinding roar but with a timbre that you wouldn’t associate with a fluid substance. “What the hell is that?”