North Harbor

by Kennedy Hudner

  Jacob smirked. “When it happens, can I have your laptop?”

  Calvin ignored them. “A pod of seals swam with me all the way out to Sheep Island. They kept circling me and barking!” He laughed. “It was the coolest thing; they were so funny.”

  “They’d never seen an insane human before,” Jacob offered.

  “Or some poor mother seal was looking for her long-lost pup,” Danielle suggested.

  Finley glanced at his watch and shook his head. “Jacob, time to go. Bring it in the car. Let’s go.” He kissed his wife and went outside to warm up the car. Even though it was already late April, there was a touch of frost in the grass.

  After they left, Calvin sat in the kitchen, hunched over his hot cocoa. “Tease me all you want, but this sure as heck isn’t Philadelphia.”

  Danielle smiled at him. The boys had complained mightily when their father had given up his job in the Philadelphia Police Department to come to Maine, but once here Calvin had been astonished at the beauty of the Maine Coast and the ocean. Philadelphia may have been a major port city, but you never felt connected to the water living there. Here, the ocean was with you almost every minute of every day. The boys had learned to sail on one of their grandfather’s sailboats, had learned how to use a skiff, and Calvin had even started lobstering. Danielle was worried about the schools, but the boys seemed to be doing okay. Jacob graduated with solid marks, if not spectacular. Danielle wasn’t pleased to see him decline college, opting instead for a job on a lobster boat, and let him know it on more than one occasion. All in vain. Jacob stubbornly refused to even consider more education. You can lead a boy to water, she thought, but he might just stay there.

  Calvin was the stronger student, and Duke University was recruiting him for its swim team, but the pull of the ocean was strong and she wasn’t surprised to see him thinking about full-time lobstering for a year or two. Dismayed, but not surprised. Sometimes she wanted to grab his shoulders and shake some sense into him.

  Boys! she thought wryly. There were days she would have killed for one sensible, practical, future-minded daughter.

  ______________

  Finley pulled into a spot by the docks. Jacob wordlessly handed him the empty coffee mug and Finley put it into a brown paper bag to take back home at the end of the day. “Got everything?” he asked his son.

  “Guess so,” Jacob muttered. He pushed open the car door and walked over to the picnic bench where the crews for the LeBlanc boats were getting their assignments. He wasn’t the last one to show up, but he certainly wasn’t the first, either. There were six boats owned by the LeBlanc family, and crews were assigned to them at random each morning at 5:30 a.m. He dutifully stood in line, shuffling forward when it was his turn.

  A hard-faced man with broad shoulders and the clipboard looked up, nodding once. “Wondered if you were going to make it today,” he said.

  “I’m here,” Jacob said, trying to put a little defiance into his voice, despite the fact that this man scared the bejesus out of him. This guy radiated a “Don’t-fuck-with-me-or-I-will-kick-your-teeth-in” vibe that made Jacob very wary in his presence. But this guy also controlled the hiring for six lobster boats, so Jacob smiled and waited to see if he was working today.

  The big man studied his clipboard again. “Okay, Finley, you’re on the Petite Marie today, working the immediate coast. See Captain Marc.” The Petite Marie was the smallest lobster boat in the LeBlanc fleet and only worked the local waters. It wasn’t fast enough to work the deeper waters twenty miles out. It meant lots of stops and starts, hauling up one or two traps at a time instead of a trawl line of twenty or so. Jacob would be the only sternsman. It would be a hard day’s work.

  “Thank you,” he said and began walking down the pier to where the Petite Marie was tied up.

  Behind him, Jean-Philippe LeBlanc stared at the Finley boy for a long moment. Jacob Finley was the son of a cop. LeBlanc pursed his lips thoughtfully – that had so many risks…and such amazing possibilities.

  Chapter 3

  Six Months Earlier:

  The Director of Puzzles

  Wallace Charles Moore III was short, overweight, prematurely balding, sweated a lot and had few social graces.

  He walked like a duck.

  He also had a job that paid him $700,000, his own hacienda overlooking the bay, a butler, two lithe Mexican girls at his beck and call and a BMW M6 Gran Coupe, with driver. Wallace knew his driver was also a bodyguard, but he didn’t know that the driver was under strict orders to kill him if it ever looked like he was going to be arrested.

  This was simple prudence: Wallace knew way too much about the Sinaloa Cartel to be left in the hands of the authorities.

  Just now, however, Wallace had a problem.

  All up and down U.S. Highway I-95, his client’s shipments of heroin and fentanyl were being intercepted at higher than usual rates. Much higher. And he didn’t know why.

  Wallace Charles Moore III came to the Sinaloa Cartel unconventionally. He wasn’t Mexican, or Columbian, or even Dominican, the usual nationalities involved in big-time drug smuggling into the US. He was American, born and bred. For a boy who was overweight and walked funny, high school was a living nightmare best left behind. He survived it, barely, and left for college with a sense of relief.

  In college he studied business operations and quickly realized that a company can have the best product in the world, but if it did not distribute it effectively into the marketplace, it was doomed. He focused on distribution systems: how they worked; what went wrong; who did it right and how. After college he first took a job with Fed Ex and stayed there for five years. It was a wonderful place to work and he learned something every day. He made some suggestions for improvements, most of which were implemented and worked. The bosses took note. He moved up fast, despite his woeful personality and physical appearance. Fed Ex respected talent, regardless of the package it came in.

  But five years was enough to know he had learned most of what he could get out of Fed Ex. Wallace then looked around to see who was the undisputed master at fast, efficient delivery, then called Amazon and told them he had a way to save them three percent on every shipment.

  Amazon respected talent, too. Within a week he had a job and within six months he got his first bonus, a ‘thank you’ from the employer who realized that Wallace had already saved it millions of dollars.

  It was all good, but at the end of the day, he was still Wallace.

  And he still walked like a duck.

  His co-workers were polite enough, but he heard the snickers behind his back, heard the jokes. None of them were friends. When he asked women for a date, they still declined. It was all very polite, but he still had to buy sex. That was easy enough to do in Seattle, where catering to the needs of Amazon employees was a major industry, but even the prostitutes looked at him with derision.

  Everything was okay, really. Except it wasn’t.

  He did not belong. He would never belong. Worse, he knew it.

  So, he began to look for a new employer. An employer who could…respect him in all the ways he needed respect. An employer who had a great product, but chronic difficulty getting it to market. And so the next time Wallace bought cocaine, he told his dealer that he had something important to tell the supplier. The dealer recoiled in horror at the idea of taking anyone to see his supplier, let alone this fat, obnoxious white boy who might be a narc for all he knew, and turned him down flat.

  Wallace was not put off; he had anticipated this. He wrote a succinct note, put it in an envelope and sealed it. “Give this to your supplier,” he told the dealer. “If you don’t, I’ll make sure the supplier finds out and you will be in deep shit.” The dealer didn’t know whether to beat him, shoot him or obey him. Truth be told, the fat boy sort of creeped him out.

  The following week, the dealer gave the note to his supplier.

  The supplier read the note and started to throw it away, but paused and reread it.

&n
bsp; “Who is this guy?” he asked the dealer.

  “Some white guy works at Amazon. Fat.”

  “He smart?” the supplier probed.

  The dealer shrugged, dipping into his very scant knowledge of the comparative pay rates offered by Seattle’s high-tech industry. “Guess so, they payin’ him good, far as I can see.”

  The supplier thought about it for another week, then flew to Los Angeles and gave the note to his supplier. This was the man who took the dope off the trucks, cars, boats and planes from Mexico. This was the man who dealt directly with the Sinaloa Cartel. The Big Boys.

  The Big Supplier looked at the note and frowned. He read it two or three times, then pursed his lips. “Okay,” he told the local supplier, “I’ll take it from here.”

  Five weeks later, as Wallace was leaving work on Friday night, a car pulled up beside him and the rear window rolled down. The man inside waved the note out the window. “You write this note, Mr. Moore?” he asked pleasantly.

  Wallace felt torn. This could be a cop. Or a Fed. Or…

  Or this could be the chance of a lifetime.

  He nodded.

  The back door opened. “Get in, Mr. Moore, I am to take you to your job interview.”

  Wallace climbed into the car and his new life. Three hours later he flew out of the United States on a private plane to Mexico. After some lengthy interviews, three lie detector tests and four months of demonstrating what he could do, a tall, distinguished looking man with thick black hair walked into his office one day.

  The man studied him curiously. “Do you know who I am?” he asked softly.

  Wallace shook his head. “No, sir. I mean no offense, but I don’t know who you are.”

  The man, one of the most powerful and feared men in Mexico, nodded, his face crinkling with amusement. The reports were right – this American was a lunatic. Brilliant, but a lunatic. “You have a job, Mr. Moore,” he said warmly. “I think you will like the terms. We have only one rule that must be obeyed: Never, ever discuss our affairs with anyone outside of the organization, or you will be subject to…harsh penalties. Do you understand?”

  Wallace nodded. Of course he understood. Did they think he was an idiot?

  “Welcome to Sinaloa, Mr. Moore,” the man said, shaking Wallace’s moist hand. “I look forward to a mutually beneficial relationship.” Then he left. Wallace eventually learned the man was Ismael Zambada García, the last surviving member of the original Sinaloa Cartel, a fugitive from every police agency in North and South America. His new boss.

  Mexico was now his home. Forever. But there were compensations. That night, when he was taken to his new hacienda with a view of the bay, there was a slender, beautiful nineteen-year-old woman named Maria Elena waiting for him in his bed.

  Wallace never looked back.

  ______________

  Smuggling drugs was traditionally a matter of flooding the smuggling route with as many couriers as possible and accepting there would be some losses. Bribing customs officials and local police helped, but still some five to seven percent of all the drugs smuggled across the border would be seized before they could reach the streets. That was just the cost of doing business.

  Wallace took a more systematic, data-driven approach. He analyzed the data, identified the weakest methods of transport – big trucks carrying machine tools and other bulky items – and eliminated them. In their place he organized a series of hundreds of couriers carrying small amounts of heroin and, increasingly, fentanyl. Tourists returning from Mexico, Mexican-Americans traveling to Mexico to see family, businessmen, just about anyone with a good reason to travel from Mexico into the United States. He even arranged for the Cartel to intercept auto carriers bringing new cars into the U.S., but instead of hiding drugs in the cars, they hid it inside the tires of the auto carrier itself. In the first nine months, he reduced the amount of seizures from the customary five to seven percent down to three percent. This translated into tens of millions of additional dollars flowing into the Cartel’s coffers.

  There were problems, of course. Using the approach of many small shipments meant that instead of a few dozen people involved, there were hundreds, and in some years, thousands. People made mistakes. People got greedy, or stupid, or afraid. People got arrested, sometimes for something not at all related to drug smuggling. Once arrested, they often made deals and disappeared into witness protection programs. Then the Feds watched one of their networks and traced it from the drop point in, say, Maine, all the way down the line to the Mexican border.

  Then, when the Feds were good and ready, the raids came and the Cartel lost hundreds of kilos of product. And, of course, the network, itself.

  Wallace helped the Cartel stay one or two jumps ahead of the Feds and the State Police. First, he bribed a lot of people: drug enforcement agents at airports, TSA agents, State Police, freight handlers, pilots and local cops. Lots of local cops. Wallace thought of himself as an unofficial 401k for many a small-town police department. A Good Samaritan, as it were, helping underpaid government officials achieve financial security.

  Second, he constantly investigated new routes. He even did trial runs. Often, he would not ship the real product at first. He would test the waters, so to speak. In one case, this saved him from immense embarrassment, and perhaps worse. When the Feds seized one of his trial shipments, they discovered that they had just confiscated one hundred and seventy-five pounds of Grade A pure…baking powder.

  True to form, Wallace dropped that smuggling route and moved on.

  But now DEA raids along Interstate 95, the Sinaloa Cartel’s primary land route for smuggling drugs to New England, were having a disastrous effect. Losses were running fifteen percent and were rising each month. The Dominicans in Lawrence and Lowell were screaming for more product, and warning the Cartel that if they couldn’t deliver, it was only a question of time before some other cartel moved in to fill the void. Wallace thought there must be an informer within the organization, but the Cartel’s very efficient and ruthless counterintelligence guys couldn’t find him.

  The land route was compromised. Nothing lasts forever.

  But, Wallace mused, if not by land, then perhaps by sea.

  Wallace had never been to Maine, but he knew how to read a map. Now he stood in front of a large map of Maine and pondered. There were forty-four ports in Maine, but of those, only three were major cargo ports and Homeland Security infested every one of them like guard rats. Wallace was already smuggling dope by freighter up to Canada, but to get more dope into Maine, he needed something else. He tapped his finger against his lips and thought. Finally, he sat down at his computer and activated Google. Three minutes later he sat back. Maine had two hundred and twenty-eight miles of coastline, but that was measuring linearly from top to bottom. If you measured the actual shoreline, with all of its inlets, harbors, ports, bays and crenellations, it measured a whopping 3,478 miles.

  In other words, a smuggler’s paradise.

  Wallace Moore smiled. He had already used lobster boats to smuggle small amounts of heroin and fentanyl into the state, just to see if it was viable. The total number of people involved had been less than a dozen and the report from the Dominicans had been favorable. Now all he had to do was scale it up.

  It was just fitting together the pieces of a puzzle, and he was good at puzzles.

  Chapter 4

  Rumi in Arabic

  Frank Finley had barely sat down before the Chief opened his door and bellowed for him. Finley suppressed a sigh and went into the Chief’s office. Michael Corcoran eyed him balefully. Chief Corcoran had not been enthusiastic about hiring Finley, but the Town Manager had insisted. During the two years Finley had been on the force, Corcoran had quietly retaliated by making his life as miserable as possible. He was constantly assigned to the weekend and evening shifts and generally got as many of the shit assignments as Corcoran could muster.

  “I’ve got a missing person complaint that I want you to look into,” he t
old Finley without preamble. He pushed a thin file across the table. “And this afternoon I want you to transfer a prisoner down to Portland PD. He should be ready about 3 p.m.”

  Which really meant he would be ready around 4 p.m. It was a three-hour drive to Portland, which meant he wouldn’t get home until 11 p.m. or so, if nothing went wrong.

  “Who am I taking?” Finley asked.

  There was the faintest hint of a smirk on Corcoran’s face. “Ralph Harkins.”

  Inwardly, Finley groaned. Harkins was a nasty, mean thug, a member of one of the motorcycle gangs that sold heroin and cocaine up and down the coast. He was mean when he was drunk, and he was drunk most of the time. A big man – six-three or so – and surprisingly fast, he liked to beat up people just for the hell of it. He had been arrested last night after a brawl at a local bar where he’d beaten the tar out of one of the local high school jocks. Finley frowned. Normally, two officers would be assigned the task of transporting a prisoner as violent as Harkins.

  “Who’s going with me?” he asked.

  Corcoran looked up from his desk, as if surprised to see him still there. “Nobody. Everybody’s busy, Finley. But, hey, you’re the big-shot cop from Philadelphia, are you tellin’ me you can’t handle a shackled prisoner?”

  Finley stood up. Nothing more to say. He walked out.

  “Get me a report on that missing person! Soon!” Corcoran called after him.

  ______________

  The missing person was one Henry Mitchell, a lobsterman out of North Harbor and one of a dozen or so Mitchell family members who made their living from the sea. He had gone out at 4 a.m. three days ago and hadn’t come back. His wife had filed the report – Finley frowned – two days ago. Now that he thought about it, he vaguely recalled hearing that someone was missing, but hadn’t paid much attention to it. From Portland up the coast to Bar Harbor, it was a rare week when some fisherman didn’t go missing. Most turned up, but not all.