Killer Waves Page 10

  "I intend to."

  "Good," he said, slapping me gently on the shoulder, which is about as expressive as Felix gets. "I'd hate to think of the conscience of Tyler Beach getting into trouble."

  "Too late for that," I said, and went back to my own vehicle, thinking of him and Diane giving me direction, giving me clues. I sat in my Ford for a moment, watching Felix drive away, confident and sure in his skills and his future. He had been shot at, knifed and beaten up on several occasions, and no doubt his name existed in several law enforcement agency files, but right now I envied him.

  For he wasn't afraid.

  I started up the Explorer and went home.

  Chapter Eight

  When I got home the lights were on downstairs, and somebody was waiting for me as I walked through my new door, still smelling fresh and alive from its recent arrival from the hardware store. Laura Reeves was on my couch, wearing a white turtleneck and a short black skirt this time, her black stocking-enclosed legs tucked underneath her. She had a Sunday New York Times Magazine in her hands and she nodded at me as I took off my coat.

  "Thought you'd be home eventually," she said. "How was your day?"

  "Gee, dear, it was swell," I said, walking into the living room. A fire was burning its way in the fireplace, and I looked around. "All by your lonesome tonight?"

  "Rest of the crew's working," she said. "Out there doing the nation's business, which is why I'm here. To see what kind of business you've been up to. For example, how's that pager working that I gave you?"

  "It's not."

  She nodded, as if she had already figured it out. "I see. And how's your phone working?'"

  “Phone’s working fine. I guess my phone answering skills ain’t what they used to be.”

  Another crisp nod, and she unfolded her long legs and sat up. "I see. Tell me, do you think this whole thing is a joke, something put together for your amusement?"

  I went over to the fireplace, tossed in a chunk of wood. "Oh yeah, it's been a barrel of laughs."

  "Well, think about this before you start laughing," she said, standing up. "We took several things away from you --- from your house to your funds --- to get you on board. Now that you're on board, we're expecting results. And results don't mean goofing around, hoping we'll lose attention or move on to something else. And if I think you're not serious about providing results, we can be right back where we started from. Understood?"

  I looked at the sharp look on her face, her self-assurance, the way she held herself I stood up and held my hands behind me.

  "Understood," I said. "Care to stay for dinner?"

  There. I think I disturbed her, just for a moment, for her eyes moved away from mine. "No, I would not." A slight smile. "Thanks for asking, but I must be going."

  Reeves went past me to the door, and as she stood on the stone steps she said, "Whenever you next leave your house, please advise me. And one more thing, Lewis. Please answer your phone, all right? We're not the enemy."

  "Sure," I said. "I understand."

  And I waited until she was a distance away before I said, "You may not be the enemy, but I'll be damned if I know what you are."

  Then I closed the door.

  It was 2 A.M. I was wide awake, staring up at the ceiling. Sometime earlier I had spent a couple of hours on my new computer, surfing the Net, enjoying the fast modem I had with my new machine. I had gone to a lot of different places on the Web, one of' which was responsible for my getting up at this hour.

  Still, I had thirty minutes. I rested, listening to the ever-present sound of the ocean. During the day when I’m out and about in the daylight, the noise of the waves rolling in is like a low humming, a background noise that I can hardly make out. But at night, with the lights out, with nothing else demanding my attention, the waves always take center, always demand attention.

  Just like this little adventure I had signed up for. From the way Reeves and her boys had roared in, to the reaction of the North Tyler chief to the way they had shanghaied me to play in their little world, not a lick of it had made sense. And Felix and Diane had also told me as much. I continued staring up at the ceiling. Be careful, Felix had said, be careful.

  I checked the clock. Time to get up. I yawned and got dressed in the dark and then went downstairs, where I put on a heavy coat and stepped outside. It was a clear and moonless night, and even being in one of the most heavily populated parts of New England, I could make out the faint veil of the Milky Way spanning overhead. In the dim light I went up my driveway, stopping only when I reached the parking area of the Lafayette House. I then walked across the silent parking lot, sitting on one of the boulders that marked the eastern boundary of the lot. I sat and let my legs dangle, the waves of the Atlantic just yards away. I had seen winter storms where waves would reach the rocks I was sitting on, but not tonight. It was too calm for such anger.

  I looked at my watch and then looked over to the southeast.

  Right on time. A bright dot of light that appeared to be moving slowly, and then gaining speed the longer I looked at it. The space shuttle Endeavour, once again circling the globe from more than 160 miles up. I crossed my arms and just stared at that little dot, signifying more than a spaceship, signifying a little bubble of air and pressure and light where seven people were living up there for a week. Impressive, but yet, when I was a child, we had the energy and will to send similar little bubbles of humanity more than a quarter million miles to another world.

  A similar trip wasn't on the agenda tonight. Tonight we were just busy orbiting the blue planet, and I kept on watching, paying tribute in my own little way, as the bright dot descended to the northwest and then faded from view. I sighed and got up and rubbed my face, and then started walking.

  But not home. I walked across the street, to the bright lights of the Lafayette House.

  I was lucky, for the main lobby doors to the Lafayette House were open, and there was no security on duty this early in the morning. Maybe in a couple of months, when the thousands of tourists and the assorted hangers-on showed up, those few who try to take advantage of the tourists and their money, then would security be an issue. But at this early hour on this April morning, I took the elevator to the fifth floor without any problem, any challenge.

  At room 5121 started pounding on the door, and when no one came to answer in a minute or so, I resorted to using my feet.

  Then the door popped open and one of the musclemen --- Clem, I think his name was ---- stood there, barefoot, wearing a white terry-cloth robe with the Lafayette House crest over the breast. Quite a cheerful sight, if you overlooked the black automatic pistol clutched in his large right fist.

  "You ... Jesus, what the fuck are you doing here?" he asked.

  I stepped in, trying to act confident, trying to look like I belonged. "I need to see Laura Reeves. Right now."

  He rubbed at his eyes, stepped back. "Christ, do you know what time it is?"

  "The time doesn't matter," I said. "The fact that I need to see Reeves does. Take care of it, will you?"

  "She's next door, you jerk," he said. "Why did you come here?"

  "Made a mistake, I guess," I said, as I stood by one of the tables set up in the room. I looked about. A bedroom door was open, which probably belonged to Clem, who was now on the phone, a grumpy look on his unshaven face. I looked down at the table. Writing pads, more photos of Romero, and a pile of badly photocopied documents. They were upside down but still, looking at them, I could see that they weren't in English.

  But they weren't in Spanish, either. Clem hung up the phone, yawned. "She'll be right here, you moron, and it better be good."

  “It’ll be better than you expect,” I said, and then the adjoining door to the other room opened up, and Reeves was there. She also had on a white terry-cloth robe but she looked awake and alert, as if she didn't need sleep at all, just a dusting and an oil change every ten thousand miles.

  "Yes?" she asked, her arms folded.

  I
smiled. "When last we spoke, you told me to inform you whenever I left my house."

  "And?"

  "I wanted to let you know that I left my house about fifteen minutes ago."

  She slowly nodded. "I see. And where did you go?"

  "In the parking lot across the street. To see the space shuttle go overhead."

  Clem started muttering some curses involving me and my intelligence, ancestry and sexual habits, but Reeves just nodded again. "Very good. Is that all?"

  "For now," I said.

  "Then I'm going back to bed. Clem, be so kind as to show Mr. Cole the door."

  So now I was back to being Mr. Cole. Oh well. "Don't bother," I said. "I know the way. Talk to you soon."

  But I was talking to a closed door. Clem was also getting up, and I managed to sneak one more look at the documents on the table as I left the room. I whistled softly as I went back down on the elevator and out into the cool April night, thinking about what I had seen in the room. Besides seeing two grumpy and sleepy federal agents, I had also figured out the language on those documents.

  German. Not really the language of choice for drug cartels from Colombia.

  I was still whistling when I got home, and before I went to bed I disconnected my telephone, just in case Reeves or her boys had an idea of getting me up with the sun.

  Maybe I wasn't playing fair, but who were they to complain?

  Some hours after my nocturnal visit to Reeves and her crew I was at the police department in Porter, New Hampshire, one of the few cities in our state and also the state's only major port to the Atlantic. The police station is on a hill near the center of town, in a former hospital that had been closed some years earlier. The city hall and the police department and a few other city agencies shared the large quarters, and I knew that Diane and other police officers up and down the seacoast could barely hide their envy at the relatively luxurious quarters the Porter police enjoyed.

  While Diane and other local departments had to make do with concrete buildings that flooded out in the spring, or the basement of the town hall where the ceilings leaked, the Porter police had a building large enough to contain an exercise room, a shooting range in the basement, and private offices for their detectives.

  The detective I was meeting today was Joe Stevens, who looked to be in his late twenties. He was a bit shorter than I but his dress shirt and pants barely concealed a well-muscled young man who seemed confident in being a detective in what passed for a big city in the region. His black hair already sprinkled with gray was cut short, about a quarter inch away from being a crew cut, and his nose was a slight pug, as if it had been broken at an early age.

  Unlike Diane's office, with its files stored in cardboard boxes and the concrete walls painted a Sickly green, this one had neat file cabinets and wide windows that overlooked the old brick buildings of Porter. I took a seat next to his desk as he sat back, a coffee cup in his hand. On the wall behind him was a monthly calendar from Smith & Wesson, a few photos of him in SWAT gear, and one of him with an attractive brown-haired woman who looked to be his wife.

  "So," Joe said. "Diane Woods gave me a ring yesterday, asking me to give you some time, Mr. Cole. Since I owe her a couple of favors, ask away. What can I do for you?"

  “I’m a writer for Shoreline magazine, out of Boston," I said. “I’m considering doing a story about the local drug activity on the seacoast.”

  "Shoreline, eh? Not a bad magazine. I gave a subscription last year to my mom. What kind of articles do you write?"

  "I do a monthly column about New Hampshire, called 'Granite Shores.'''

  He shrugged. "Sorry. Can't say that I've ever seen it. Mom likes the magazine, but I don't have time to read it."

  "I hear that a lot," I said, my reporter's notebook unopened in my hands.

  "So, a column about drug activity. Anything in particular?"

  "I was thinking of starting my way north here in Porter and working my way south, comparing and contrasting what's going on in the different communities."

  "And you want to start in Porter, is that it?"

  "Actually," I said, "I wanted to start a bit farther north, but Diane wasn't able to set something up for me. At the shipyard."

  The Porter detective looked incredulous. "Our shipyard?

  The Porter Naval Shipyard?"

  "That's right."

  He laughed, took a sip from his coffee, put the cup down. It was black with red lettering, the red letters spelling out D.A.R.E. "No offense, Mr. Cole, but in the day-to-day business, that shipyard is in its own little universe. We have no jurisdiction over there, the good people in Kittery, Maine, think it belongs to them anyway, and I think I've been to the shipyard maybe twice in my career. And both times it was because the shipyard had some surplus blankets and office equipment to donate to us, and both times I met a shipyard official in a parking lot to transfer the gear. The shipyard's not a place we deal with that much."

  "Why's that?"

  "Because it belongs to the Department of Defense and the Navy, that's why, and they like running things their own way. Look, for a time that place built a hell of a lot of submarines, subs that sank a lot of Jap freight back during World War Two. Do you know what they do now?"

  “Overhauls and refits,” I said. “Mostly of Los Angeles-class attack submarines.”

  “Right you are,” he said, smiling. “Most people have their heads up their butts when it comes to the shipyard. Okay. That's their job, overhauling and refitting attack submarines. You seem to be an intelligent guy for a reporter, and you come recommended from Diane. Anything special about those subs?"

  "Besides the fact they're powered by nuclear reactors, and no doubt most of them carry nuclear warheads of one kind or another?"

  Stevens smiled. "This is the most fun I've ever had on an interview. Most reporters I know couldn't find their ass with both hands and a road map. Yep, nuclear materials, all around. So you're the Department of the Defense and you're the Navy. Care to think how much tolerance you'd have for drug dealing and drug use around nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons?"

  "None," I said.

  A quick nod. "A number of companies around here now have programs to counteract drug abuse. Random searches of offices, urine-sample analyses, that sort of thing. Well, that's kindergarten compared to what I hear they do over at the shipyard. Not to piss all over your story idea, Mr. Cole, but if you're planning to do an article on drug use in the seacoast and you're going to start with the shipyard, it'll be a mighty small part of the story."

  I turned the notebook over in my hands a couple of times.

  About what I had expected, but still, I had to go to the best source I could and find that out firsthand. "One more thing, and then I'll be out of your hair," I said.

  "Go ahead."

  "This might be a bit delicate, but in the course of my research, a name came up of someone that might be playing a key part in the drug trade around here. Somebody who's connected with the shipyard."

  His voice seemed a bit flat. "And you'd like me to check out his name?"

  “Purely on background,” I said. “Not for attribution or for use. Just to help me in my research. And, I’m sorry to say, it’s not a full name. Just a nickname. Whizzer.”

  “Whizzer?” he asked.

  "Whizzer," I said.

  He smiled and wrote something down on a scrap of paper.

  "Okay, I'll give it a shot, but don't hold your breath."

  "I don't intend to hold anything right now," I said, standing up. I held out my hand and he shook it, and I said, "This favor that Diane Woods did for you, it must have been a good one."

  'That it was," he said, his voice now quiet. "Last year one of our senior patrolmen found out he had cancer. Incurable and inoperable. He decided to end it all, and did it in a motel room at Tyler Beach. Diane helped us a lot, helped us keep it out of the papers. We still owe her big."

  "So do I," I said. "So do I."

  When I saw her later t
hat day, Paula Quinn was not having a good time of it. I had parked my Ford in the rear lot of the newspaper as always, and as I started heading toward the rear entrance of the newspaper, I stopped, looking at the closed door that led into the circulation department and from there into the newsroom. Some battles are worth fighting for, every minute of the day, and others deserved to wait. I decided to wait, and swung around and went to the front of the paper.

  The receptionist was a young woman with dyed-blond hair and an earring through her left eyebrow --- I was wondering if they were now called brow rings, if that's where they were placed --- and she was studiously working on a crossword-puzzle book It took her two tries with the phone system before she contacted Paula, and then she smiled up at me and said, "You can go right in. Do you need to know where her desk is?"

  ''I'll make a wild guess and stop at the one where she's sitting at," I said, giving her my best Chronicle customer smile and walking into the newsroom. The place was empty save for Paula, who was at her desk, which looked as if it had been attacked by a roving gang of junk dealers. She had on a light gray UNH sweatshirt and blue jeans, and her hair had been pulled back from around her face by a thin black bandana. The two chairs near her desk was piled high with folders and newspaper clippings, but I found a spare chair and dragged it over. The desk of her editor, Rollie Grandmaison, was empty, as was the desk of the new guy, Rupert Holman. The front pages from the Chronicle's competition still hung from the ceiling, complete with fake blood and plastic dagger.

  "It looks like you're the one who got left behind at the junior prom," I said, and she looked up at me, her eyes sharp like crystal, and said, "It's been a sucky day, so please don't start."

  "All right, apologies," I said, looking around the place.

  "Where the hell is everybody?"

  "Out having a lengthy victory lunch, that's where," she said.

  "Latest circulation report came in and we exceeded our new weekly goal by three. Can you believe that? Three newspapers purchased at a newsstand, and we beat quota. Rupert was so thrilled that he took the whole cast and crew of this little adventure out to a nice long lunch to celebrate. Three strangers within five miles of this newspaper office, they decide to buy a Tyler Chronicle because of a story or a photo on the front page, or because they need something to wrap their dead fish in, and because of those three strangers, here I am, alone in the newsroom."