Black Tide Read online

  Kindle edition Copyright 2013 by Brendan DuBois.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the authors' imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author or publisher, except where permitted by law.

  All Rights Reserved.

  BLACK TIDE

  A Lewis Cole Mystery

  By

  Brendan DuBois

  For Mona Pinette

  The successful completion of a book often depends on other people. For this one, the author wishes to express his deep thanks to the members of his family, Ernie Connor of the N.H. Port Authority, Dan Chartrand, Tom Raynor, Ron Sher, and special thanks to Michele Slung and Kate Stine of OPB, editors extraordinaire.

  Introduction

  The first book that an author publishes is often his or her most memorable, but in many ways --- at least for me --- the second novel can be more terrifying and difficult. And why’s that?

  A number of things. First and more importantly, all new authors face the possibility of a “sophomore slump,” where the second book does poorly compared to the second. Second --- especially in a detective series with continuing tales ---- there’s the challenge of coming up with a new story that not only is a satisfying story, but brings in the same characters from book number one. And more importantly, the third point: of actually plotting the damn thing soon after wrapping up book number one.

  That last point caused a humorous moment after my agent at the time, Jed Mattes, called me to let me know that he had concluded contract negotiations for two Lewis Cole novels. At the time, I had only finished “Dead Sand”, and I can still remember to this day the shocked statement I made in reply: “But I don’t have the idea for a second book!”

  To which he gave me very good agent advice: “That’s okay, don’t tell them that yet.”

  Which next meant I had to come up with an outline to satisfy my editor, down there in Manhattan, and that took some work. You see, all of my earlier novels --- including three that never got published --- meant that I never had to share my outline with everybody. But now, in working with a sharp editor who knew her way around publishing, made me re-do my outline three or four times before she was satisfied.

  That was one of the early signals I received that this writing gig was going to be a bit challenging.

  Anyway, once the outline was approved, off to work I went on, with “Black Tide,” and I hope you enjoy it, and I also hope you don’t mind traveling back in time, to a world of no cellphones, VCRs, answering machines, where a computer modem was considered hi-tech, and where the Internet was just beginning to make its appearance.

  But crime and mystery is timeless.

  Chapter One

  On this late July Sunday afternoon the great gray waters of the Atlantic Ocean were rolling gently onto the shores of Tyler, New Hampshire, not causing much surf or foam to break upon the rocks and sand. I was sitting on the rear deck of my two-story home, overlooking a private cove of mine that's probably one of the most inaccessible parts of the eighteen miles of this seacoast, which stretches from the Massachusetts border to the shores of Maine. The day was hot and the air was still, and to the north, beyond the woods of the Samson State Wildlife Preserve, a bank of thick gray and clouds was moving out to sea. Every now and then I would hear the distant rumble of the storm, sounding like some pile-driving machinery out there in the sky.

  It was a muggy day and all I wore was a tattered pair of gym shorts from the University of New Hampshire. At my elbow was a round wooden table and a pair of binoculars, and an empty bottle of Molson Golden Ale. Another bottle was sweating cold ice in my hands, and as I watched the waves roll in, I thought some about the passage of time and its odd little mileposts. More than three hundred and fifty years ago some Englishmen in two leaky wooden boats – the Beaver and the Resolute ---made their way from England to these shores, and the town and its beaches were named for their leader, the Reverend Bonus Tyler. Over a hundred years ago, fearful of a new Spanish Armada, the land on which I now lived was converted from a lifeboat station to a Coast Artillery installation, and the home in which I slept and drank and wrote once belonged to some junior officers in the US. Navy. Now the home is mine and the concrete bunkers to the near north are part of a wildlife preserve and belong to the woodchucks and rabbits.

  I rubbed the cold bottle of beer against my forehead and looked down to my left side. A month ago I was in a hospital bed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and now I was back in Tyler, and at my side, the angry red of the skin where the thirty-two stitches had gone in had now subsided to a bright pink. The healing of the flesh and the changing of its color was a process as dependable as the rising and setting of the sun, and it was a process I was intimately familiar with.

  But that didn't mean I was happy about it.

  I picked up my binoculars --- which were just slightly younger than my scar, its predecessor currently resting on the bottom of Tyler Harbor --- and I looked south, to Weymouth's Point and the narrow stretch of beach that was called North Beach. To the near south was a pile of broken rocks and rubble that discouraged most sightseers and blocked the view of all but a tiny portion of the sands of North Beach. The main beach of Tyler --- which on this Sunday was no doubt filled with tens of thousands of sunbathers, tourists and assorted (and sordid) hangers-on --- was a couple of miles further to the south, but from the number of tiny figures visible in my binoculars, it looked as if North Beach was holding its own. It didn't have the arcades or fried-dough stands or bars or pizza joints or T-shirt emporiums that were crammed into the main beach, but it did have reasonably clean sand, which was pretty good, considering all that had gone on some weeks ago.

  In moving around my fake-redwood chair, I took a deep breath, and the tug at my side was not as painful as it was last week. I was doing all right, just like the beaches. In taking that deep breath, I caught the faint stench of petroleum. Lifting up my binoculars again, I remembered how the beaches had muddled through that disastrous night a month ago, when I was flat on my back in another state and was wondering why hospital dietitians couldn't design a better way of serving scrambled eggs than from a scoop fashioned from an ice-cream spoon.

  I scanned the ocean and stopped for a moment at the rocky islands of the Isles of Shoals, about eleven or so miles out on the ocean. On a moonless evening last month a small tanker carrying tens of thousands of gallons of home heating oil had run aground on a ledge near Star Island, one of the nine rocky outcroppings making up the Isles of Shoals. Despite the White Island lighthouse, the well-marked charts and the size of the islands themselves, the crew of the Petro Star --- those few who weren't sleeping or who weren't getting ready for a night ashore at Porter or who weren't drunk --- had put the tanker aground. And in the fine tradition of those ship captains who are ruled by budgeters rather than common sense, the master of the Petro Star had tried for a half hour to pull the vessel free before contacting the Foss Island Coast Guard station. In the space of those thirty minutes, he had torn out the hull of his ship.

  Thousands of gallons of oil began washing ashore the next day on the beaches of Falconer, Tyler and North Tyler, New Hampshire, and there was I, far from home, watching the news on the television in my hospital room with my hands twisting the sheets in disgust and fury. In a while I stopped with the sheets and I scribbled some thoughts on a notepad a friendly nurse had given me. A couple of weeks ago, I had come home. By then the bulk of the Petro Star's cargo had been pumped into another tanker, and the vessel had been taken to Portland,
Maine, while the inquiries had begun. And in my fine Puritan tradition ---- one I'm sure would have impressed the Reverend Bonus Tyler ---- I began work the day after I got home.

  First I walked along my stretch of shoreline. Volunteer cleanup crews had been up and down the coast, no doubt ignoring my homemade and quite illegal "No Trespassing" signs, but the stink and remnants of what one writer has called "the devil's excrement" were still there on the rocks and the sand. I walked slowly, for the stitches were still in my side, covered by a gauze bandage. I used an oak walking stick to help me move along the rocks and boulders, and wore thigh-high rubber boots over my trembling and weak legs. And though the volunteers had done their best, there was still the stench of the oil, so thick that I could actually taste it, and I was slipping and sliding on the rocks as I walked, trying to convince myself that the tears in my eyes were from the smell.

  In just a day I went through a half dozen trash bags, picking up dead seagulls, cormorants, plovers and terns, as well as cod and bluefish and perch, and oil-sopped masses of seaweed and chunks of driftwood. When I was through for the day the clothes and boots and gloves I wore went into another trash bag, and I washed myself down with a sponge, not wanting to get the bandage soaked by taking a shower.

  In a few days I stopped the cleanup, since I had done about as much as I could. It was up to the waves and the storms and the weather to finish the job. And I went to work on other things, by using my phone, my computer and my modem. Some years ago I had been trained by people who received light green US. Treasury checks each pay period and who were the very best in ferreting out bits and pieces of information for the Department of Defense, and now I was using those wonderful skills to find some answers, about who owned the Petro Star and who had sent it out that evening to Porter, the state's only major port. It was a hunt that I knew was going to be long and difficult, and so far, my predictions had been painfully accurate.

  Other work and other cleanups continued, done by other people, and the news media blitz began to drift away. And in what was politely called the "global view," Tyler and its neighboring beaches had done fairly well. The oil had at least been refined, and wasn't the sticky crude horror that Exxon had so thoughtfully deposited in Alaska's Prince William Sound some years back. Only a few weekends were lost to the tourist season, and a long stretch of hot weather had brought them back. They had to be careful, though. While some beaches were littered with tampon dispensers or hypodermic needles, these sands were soiled on occasion by the smell of oil. Still, the tourists came. Just the price to pay for living in our wonderful modern society.

  So I had been busy these past weeks. But on this July Sabbath day, no work was to be done. The hours were hot and I was tired, and the beer tasted just fine, thank you. From the north came another rumble of thunder. I turned and looked and saw a flash of lightning flare through the dark clouds. Rain this afternoon, maybe in less than a half hour. I scanned the waters again and saw a couple of sailboats and a charter fishing boat, out from Tyler Harbor. Near the shore I made out a dark lump just under the surface of the ocean, washing in to the beach. In the binoculars it looked like another lump of seaweed, or maybe a petroleum souvenir from the Petro Star, jostled free from the sandy bottom near North Beach. Marvelous. Something else for the tourists to take pictures of, and something that I was sure wouldn't make it in the Chamber of Commerce's advertising campaign for next year.

  The binoculars came down and the bottle of Molson came up, and as I took another swallow I kept an ear open for the telephone. For the past few weeks I had screened all of my calls through my answering machine, for while I was in the mood to sit in my office or on the deck, I wasn't in the mood for playing Mr. Conversationalist. There had been a couple of calls from Diane Woods, detective in the Tyler police department, and I had returned one of those and had lied about wanting to have lunch with her soon. There had also been about a half dozen from Felix Tinios, a resident of North Tyler and a former resident of the North End in Boston, and one whose job was listed on his tax forms --- or so he told me --- as a "security consultant." I had returned a few of those, and made similar promises about noontime meals sometime in the future.

  There had been no phone calls from the Tyler Chronicle, the town's daily newspaper, or its best reporter, Paula Quinn. And though I knew Paula's home and work numbers by heart, I had made no moves to punch out those numbers on my phone.

  Instead, I sat. Here on my deck and upstairs in my office.

  I checked the moving blob again. It was getting closer, and seemed to be more defined. Not like a lump of seaweed.

  The binoculars felt heavy for a moment and I put them down, and then I lifted up the Molson and finished it off. I eyed the empty green bottle for a moment. This afternoon there were many things, which could be done, from continuing my Petro Star project to thinking about writing my next monthly column for Shoreline magazine to emptying the trash. But emptying the trash meant a drive to the town landfill (read: dump) and I was at a momentary dead end on the Petro Star. The column was due in a few days, and although the terms of my employment were quite secret and quite liberal, I would hate to miss that deadline. I had never done it before, and I didn't want to start a trend.

  Or so I hoped. While the column should be worked on, another beer did sound pretty good. I replaced the empty with the binoculars and looked south again, to the outcropping of land that was Weymouth's Point and where an old friend had once lived, and out to the ocean. The object was about fifty or so feet from shore, and as I was getting up the energy level to go inside for another Molson Golden Ale, the dark shape was caught in a rolling swell that was heading to the sands, and a fin popped up.

  In a second or two I was standing at the south end of the deck's railing, resting my elbows against the stained wood. The fin was and distinct, a triangular shape, and I was thinking: A shark, a shark attack at North Beach? And were there lifeguards there at the beach, to sound the alarm? And did those swimmers to the north and south of the shape see that it was even there?

  Those thoughts and others tumbled through my head as another rolling swell came by, tossing the shape, and a pair of fins popped up, and I realized two things at once: that the fins were made of rubber, and that they were attached to a pair of legs.

  Chapter Two

  Within a few minutes I had parked my dark green Range Rover illegally on Atlantic Avenue, having stopped in front of a fire hydrant, and I went across the street and through a stairwell built into the shoulder-high concrete seawall and down to the sands of North Beach, with binoculars in hand and a coil of rope around my shoulders. I had expected the beachgoers to be curious about what was going on, about why a tall thin man with brown hair was scanning the waters with binoculars while muttering to himself, but no one paid me any attention. In a small way I was almost disappointed. There were families and couples and groups of young men and women, lying on blankets and chairs, drinking and eating and reading, and many of them were lined up like a grove of sunflowers, all facing the sun to the southwest, their eyes and thoughts hidden by dark glasses, and all listening to metal noise from their radios and tape decks. No one seemed to see what I saw, and no one seemed to care about the darkening clouds and the sound of thunder to the north. For a moment it made me wonder if the shapes were even human.

  As I looked across the waters I made out the twin fins poking up again through the swells, and I recalled the quick phone call I had made to the Tyler police dispatch. Even with sirens and lights blaring and lighting the way, it would take ten or so minutes for the first cruiser or fire truck to fight its way through the Sunday beach traffic to get here. And what might be here when they arrived? He might disappear by then, be tossed back under the waves or caught in a fast-moving current, and that was not acceptable.

  Having gotten dressed a few minutes ago back home, I now got undressed, dropping my worn topsiders on the sand, placing the binoculars on top of them and covering it all with a T-shirt that said NASA in red an
d blue letters. I started running into the ocean and grimaced as my feet went into the cold salt water. I tried not to groan as the water splashed up my legs. This is one of my deepest and darkest secrets: though I love living by the ocean, and love the sights and sounds of the seacoast and the ever-changing weather, I can count on the fingers of a half hand the number of times I've actually gone swimming here. The water is too damn cold, and today was no exception. Within seconds the nerve endings in my feet there had gone to sleep, and it was as if I were walking on two granite blocks. Even in the shallow stretch, it was hard going, for the bottom was littered with rocks and stretches of gravel, and I stumbled a couple of times, the weight of the 3/8-inch rope on my shoulders not helping one bit.

  I think I yelled three times as I plowed into the water. The first time was when the cold water reached that nether area above the knees and below the waist. The second time was when a wave broke upon me and the cold salt water soaked the healing wound on my side. And the third time was when I immersed myself and began swimming awkwardly to the black shape.

  There were strands of seaweed floating about me and I smelled something thick and pungent as I approached the dark shape. The flippers rose up again from another passing swell, and I saw that the legs were enclosed in a wet suit. A diver, no doubt, who was out here drunk or alone or inexperienced, and who had drowned less than a hundred yards from shore. A not too uncommon story, and even as I swam toward the diver, puffing and cursing at the weight of the rope on my shoulders and the weakness of my legs and the sharp pain in my side-the old phrase "rubbing salt in a wound" seemed appropriate at that moment I thought that this might end up as a column in Shoreline.