Blood in the Water

by Jack Flynn

  ‘Cormack, I need to talk to you,’ Buddy said. He filled his voice with confidence he didn’t feel.

  Cormack looked up at him the way he might look at a yipping little dog. ‘In a minute,’ he grunted. ‘I got that right?’ he asked Toby again.

  ‘That’s the schedule through the afternoon,’ Toby confirmed.

  ‘They know to have their radios on and tuned, right?’

  ‘They always do,’ Toby said.

  ‘OK.’ Cormack straightened up and let out a slight groan as he arched his back. ‘Gettin’ too old for this,’ he said to no one in particular. He looked at Toby. ‘You head on home,’ he said. ‘You need to get some rest.’

  ‘I’d rather stay here,’ Toby said. ‘I could be useful.’

  Cormack shook his head. ‘You’ve been doing eighteen hours a day for more than a week. And the next couple weeks may be even worse, depending on how all this shakes out. I need you sharp and running the shop while I’m dealing with … other things.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No buts,’ Cormack said. There was a hint of annoyance in his voice at having his directions questioned. ‘Go home. Come back tonight.’

  ‘OK,’ Toby said. He hobbled over to his desk and grabbed his heavy winter jacket. ‘You need me for anything …’ he said, pausing again.

  ‘I’ll let you know,’ Cormack barked. ‘Now go home!’ Still annoyed, Cormack turned on Buddy. ‘What do you want?’ he demanded.

  For a moment, Buddy was tempted to leave at that moment and not confront Cormack. He could be a dangerous man when pushed, and he seemed to be at his limit. He held his ground, though. ‘I need my phone back,’ he said. ‘I need to talk to Diamond.’

  Storm clouds gathered across Cormack’s face, but Buddy persisted.

  ‘I know you don’t like the fact that we fell for each other. I don’t blame you. But I love her, and even if you won’t let us be together, I still have to talk to her. I have to let her know that I know about the baby. You have to let me do that, at least.’

  Cormack exhaled heavily. ‘You can’t talk to her,’ he said.

  ‘I have to,’ Buddy responded. His resolve was unbreakable now. There was no going back.

  Cormack shook his head, and it looked like he might lose his temper. ‘You can’t,’ he repeated, and there was an incongruous note of anguish in his voice.

  ‘Why not?’

  It took a moment for Cormack to answer. He stared hard at Buddy, and it seemed as though he was trying to come to some judgment about the young man. ‘Soh has her,’ he said at last. The words seemed to deflate him slightly, but he stayed on his feet and it took him only a moment to regain a look of determination.

  The news hit Buddy like a sledgehammer in the chest. It took him a few seconds to breathe. ‘What do you mean Soh has her?’ he demanded at last.

  ‘He kidnapped her,’ Cormack said. ‘I assigned Joe Konicki to guard her, keep her at the house. Apparently she had to go the doctor’s office. Soh’s men must have been watching them. They took Joe out and grabbed Diamond. He has her now.’

  Buddy felt like he was going to pass out. He stumbled to a chair and sat down, and took a few seconds to absorb what he’d been told. His disorientation didn’t last long. ‘How do we get her back?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m working on it,’ Cormack said. ‘First I have to find out where they’re keeping her. I think I’ve got a way to do that.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘It depends on where she is. I’ll have to come up with a plan on the fly. One way or another, I’m going to go get her.’

  Buddy nodded, deep in thought. ‘I’m coming with you.’

  Cormack shook his head. ‘I’ve got people with more experience in this sort of thing.’

  ‘How many of them stand to lose what I have to lose.’

  ‘What, exactly, do you think you stand to lose?’ Cormack said pointedly.

  ‘I stand to lose Diamond and a baby I just found out about.’

  ‘And you’re going to be there for them? Not just in this, but afterwards? You’re not going to duck out – disappear when things get tough?’

  ‘Never,’ Buddy said. ‘She’s going to have to leave me, if it comes to that. I’ll never leave her.’

  As he said the words, Buddy truly believed them.

  * * * * *

  Diamond’s mind worked furiously. She was in a tiny bathroom down a short passageway from the room where she’d been kept. She couldn’t figure out where they were. The entire place was cement – the walls, the ceiling, the floors. It looked as though the building had been deserted. There were trash and debris littering the passageways, and graffiti on many of the walls. The bathroom was disgusting. The toilet was steel and no longer functional. There was no toilet seat, and the waste from previous visitors covered the sides and bottom of the bowl. The stench was almost too terrible to end endure.

  She squatted, hovering over the receptacle, careful not to touch the metal. She looked around for anything that might help her. There was a matching metal sink that was also disgusting. It appeared that men had begun treating it as a urinal. Looking closely at the edge of the sink, she saw words etched into the steel. They were faint, and covered in dirt. She pulled the sleeve of her sweater over her hand and rubbed the metal until she could see the words.

  United States War Department.

  She frowned. Abandoned military forts dotted the Harbor Islands – relics from the days when the United States worried about an impending German invasion. Perhaps she was being held in one of them. If so, escape would be almost impossible. Even if she could escape from whatever building they were in, she would still need to find a way to get back to the mainland. The water was too cold to think of swimming, even if she’d been a better swimmer. She would have to hope to find some sort of a small rowboat, and even that seemed untenable. Her captors had large boats, and would undoubtedly track her down on the water before she could get to safety. Still, she had to try something. She knew in her heart that if she didn’t escape, she would be killed.

  The floor was covered with scraps of toilet paper and trash. After she’d finished relieving herself, she got down on her knees to search the floor for anything that could be useful to her in any way. There was nothing that seemed worthwhile. There were little empty nip bottles of cheap booze, some empty cigarette packs, and paper bags.

  She looked more closely at one of the paper bags in the corner of the cramped space. It wasn’t empty. There was a bottle in it. She pulled the bottle out and looked at it. It was empty. It had been a cheap brand of sweet whisky, the kind she’d seen young derelicts drinking on street corners for as long as she could remember. It had a thin neck and a wide, flat body. She held it by the neck and swung it like a mini club. It wasn’t much, but it might be something.

  She slid the bottle into the inside pocket of her jacket. She stood in front of the sink, and started to reach in to wash her hands before she remembered where she was. She looked at her reflection in the steel mirror behind the sink. Her face and hair were a mess, and she looked older than her nineteen years.

  ‘Stay alive,’ she said quietly to her reflection. ‘Stay alive and keep your head, and you’ll be OK.’ The sound of her voice made her feel better, but only slightly. She knew that the odds were still against her survival.

  Forty-Six

  Tuesday 5 February

  FBI Agent Roger Damon hated the water. He was born in Kansas, where the only water he saw as a child came out of the ground, up through a well. The closest lake was several hours’ drive away. He didn’t even envy the few people he knew growing up whose families had pools. To him, they were just wide wells in which to drown.

  As a result, he was miserable in his current assignment. He was sitting in the hold of a large tug boat that was docked in East Boston, awaiting an overhaul that was scheduled for later in the month. The ship was awful as far as Damon was concerned. It was old and decaying, and the galley, where he was situated, smel
led of stale spam and tuna. Every time the ship lurched with the tide, his stomach lurched with it.

  The only good thing about the tug was its location. It was tied up to a pier across a shallow inlet from the warehouse that T’phong Soh and his MS-13 crew had used as their headquarters for more than a year. It was the only place from which he could conduct surveillance and not be detected. The area on land around the warehouse was too congested for a surveillance van to go unnoticed. The roads were so narrow that any vehicle parked for more than an hour would become an obstruction that could not be overlooked.

  From the tug, though, he had a clear view of the western side of the warehouse, which faced the harbor, as well as the southern side that faced the inlet. The only other side that had any doors was the eastern side, which bordered the alleyway from which vehicles accessed the place. He could only see part of the way around the corner there, but it was enough for him to at least know when a truck entered or exited. He had a camera with a telephoto lens that fit perfectly in the porthole window, and a long-range microphone that connected to his headphones had been fitted to the tug’s navigation array topside, angled to catch as much sound from the outside of the warehouse as possible. The audio had proved relatively useless, though, so he only kept one of the headphones looped on his ear.

  The door to the crew’s compartment opened and slammed shut, and Damon’s partner, Daniel Shift, climbed up the stairs into the galley. ‘Head’s busted,’ he said.

  ‘What’s busted?’

  ‘The head.’

  ‘Your head?’ Damon pressed.

  ‘The head,’ Shift responded. ‘Downstairs in the bathroom.’ It was clear that Damon still wasn’t comprehending. ‘A toilet on a boat is called a head.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘How the fuck should I know?’ Shift said. ‘But that’s what it’s called.’

  ‘That’s stupid.’ Damon said.

  ‘Maybe, but it’s the reality. The more important reality is that this one is broken.’

  ‘Can you plunge it?’ Damon asked.

  Shift shook his head. ‘It doesn’t work that way.’

  Damon paused. ‘Did you discover this before or after you went?’

  ‘After.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Bingo.’ Shift scratched his chin. It had been more than a week since he’d shaved. He and Damon were both dressed as longshoremen, and they had adopted a casual approach to grooming in order to fit in better with their surroundings. ‘Anything going on?’

  ‘Not out there,’ Damon replied. ‘Been all quiet for hours. We got a ping from Steele, though.’

  ‘Yeah? What’d she say?’

  ‘She says she wants us to pay really close attention to what’s going on over there. She wants us to let her know if anything happens.’

  Shift scratched his beard a little faster. ‘Isn’t that why we’re here?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Damon said. ‘But she wants to know as soon as anything happens, like immediately.’

  ‘Weird. She say why?’

  Damon shook his head. ‘But I wouldn’t want to get in her shithouse. She’s a real ballbuster.’

  ‘Speaking of shithouses,’ Shift said, ‘I’m going to put in a call about the head. Then I’m going to go grab a coffee. You want one?’

  Damon thought about it for a moment. ‘Better get the head fixed first.’

  * * * * *

  Cormack sat at his desk, looking out of the great window toward the harbor. He could feel his stomach turning with each minute. If there was something he could do, he would feel better. The waiting was the worst.

  His cell rang and he looked at the caller ID. It was Kit. He answered it and held it up to his ear. ‘Yeah?’ he said.

  ‘What’s our timing?’

  ‘Suarez is in a car. I told Soh he was on the way and he would be dropped off at the warehouse.’

  ‘Did Soh say anything?’

  ‘He said that if anything happened to Suarez, or if he saw any of my men near the warehouse, he would kill my daughter.’

  ‘So keep your men away. I’ve got my men there.’

  ‘Do you trust them, and do they trust you?’

  ‘Better. They’re scared of me.’

  Cormack considered that for a moment. ‘Fear is a powerful management tool. Use it wisely.’

  ‘Will do. Did Soh say anything else?’ Steele asked.

  ‘He wanted to know whether I had submitted my resignation to the union yet.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said I was still drafting it. That seemed to confuse him, but he made clear that he wasn’t going to release Diamond until I was gone, both from the job and from the city.’ Cormack took a deep breath. ‘Reading between the lines, he really just wants me separated from my people so he can take me out.’

  ‘That’s logical.’

  ‘Call me as soon as your men see anything. If they’re taking him to where Diamond is, they’ll go by boat. I need to know what boat they’re on so I can track them.’

  ‘How will you do that?’

  ‘I have my ways.’ Cormack clicked off the phone. He’d sounded confident on the phone. That was something he’d always been good at – feigning confidence when he had little of it.

  * * * * *

  The call came a half hour later. ‘He was dropped off twenty minutes ago,’ Steele said. ‘He was inside the warehouse for around fifteen, then a boat pulled up out back and he got on it. They headed out into the harbor.’

  ‘What was the name of the boat?’ Cormack asked.

  ‘It was the Lucy Dunovan III.’

  ‘A trawler,’ Cormack said. He knew almost all the boats that spent any significant time on the harbor. ‘It’s owned by an outfit out of Gloucester.’

  ‘MS-13 is making inroads up there. Maybe they’ve got a connection.’

  ‘They do,’ Cormack said. ‘It’s a boat they use to run drugs.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I get a tribute,’ he said matter-of-factly.

  ‘Right,’ she said. She should have realized. ‘So what now?’

  ‘I’ll take it from here.’

  ‘Is there anything else I can do?’

  ‘You’ve done more than you should have. I appreciate it.’ He started to click the phone off.

  ‘Cormack,’ he heard her say.

  ‘Yeah?’

  There was silence on the line. ‘Let me know when you get back, OK?’

  ‘You’ll be the first.’

  * * * * *

  When she hung up the phone, Kit Steele felt ill. She wondered whether she would ever see Cormack again, and figured it was even odds that she wouldn’t. She recalled how she’d felt less than a week before, when she thought she’d lost him in the attack on the Mariner. She’d been surprised by the depths of her sorrow at the time. She’d believed before that moment that he was merely a part of her plan – a functionary in her quest to gather and use information that might help combat the likes of Vincente Carpio. It was a worthy mission, she believed, and one that at times justified questionable tactics. Cormack played an important role in her being able to carry out that mission.

  But somewhere along the way the lines got blurred without her even realizing it. Somehow he had touched something in her that had been dead for more than a half a decade. Letting someone back in that way made her uncomfortable. It scared her. She didn’t know whether she could survive another loss.

  Forty-Seven

  Juan Suarez stood on the bridge of the Lucy Dunovan III, looking out at Boston Harbor as the boat pulled away from the pier behind the East Boston warehouse where he’d been dropped off by Cormack O’Connell’s lackey. His head ached. His chest ached. He had so many contusions that every movement caused pain. He was alive, though, and that was no small miracle. He had assumed as O’Connell’s men were beating him that his life was over. His only goal was not to break – not to give them any information. It was a point of pride for him. He’d had a strict code of
loyalty beaten into him from a tender age, and he was determined to live up to that code until someone put a bullet in his head.

  The bullet had never come, though. Without explanation, the beatings had stopped and he was left alone. Someone had come to look at him, apparently to make sure that none of his wounds were life-threatening. He was left alone for close to a day, and then he was put in a car, driven to the warehouse, and left at the entrance. He had no idea why he was still alive until he spoke to one of the MS-13 soldiers in the warehouse.

  ‘We took a girl,’ was all he’d said, but that was enough. Suarez knew that O’Connell had a daughter. It would make sense for Soh to go after her – having control over her would create a weakness in O’Connell and give them a strategic advantage. It was what Suarez would have done. It was what he’d learned over time: threaten a man’s life, and he will often comply; threaten a man’s family, and he will always comply.

  ‘How long?’ he asked the man driving the boat.

  ‘Fifteen minutes,’ the man responded. ‘Maybe twenty.’

  Suarez nodded. As the boat pitched, his body rocked in pain. He welcomed the pain, though. Reveled in it, even. From the time that he was young, he’d been taught that there was only one certainty he could count on … dead men don’t feel pain.

  * * * * *

  Tommy Breslin ran a tug out of Chelsea, and that morning he was piloting a barge full of scrap metal from the South Shore up to Everett. He was headed north past the airport when he passed the Lucy Dunovan III. He gave a tip of his cap to the skipper of the other boat, as was the custom. Then he picked up the handset to the radio.

  ‘Cormack, you on?’

  ‘Yeah, Tommy,’ the voice came back.

  ‘I just passed them. Headed south just off Logan.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘I could see two in the pilot house. There could be more, but that’s all I saw.’

  ‘OK, thanks Tommy.’

  ‘Let me know if there’s anything else you need,’ Tommy said. The line went dead. Tommy gave a look in his mirror at the Lucy Dunovan, powering in the other direction. He wondered what Cormack’s interest in the boat was, but quickly put the question out of his head. Whatever the interest was, it was none of his business. Cormack had radioed earlier and asked him to keep an eye out for the vessel, but beyond that, he had no desire to be mixed up in anything that might be illegal or dangerous. He was aware of a lot of the illicit activity that went on around the harbor, but he kept his nose clean and did his work. He had two kids in college, and he was focused on paying for their education. He didn’t want any trouble.