Dead in the Water (2 page)
Authors: Ted Wood
It was. She took about a minute to give me what I wanted, the fact that they had run into something just east of Indian Island. Young Sullivan had been standing up on the seat of a little Fiberglas runabout his dumb father had laid on him for his sixteenth birthday. They ran into something at high speed and he flew over the top. The boat ran over him, but she managed to circle back and pick him up. There was a spatter of blood on her sleeve, an arc of spots that indicated he'd suffered arterial cuts. I was glad she had been there to help. Accidental death occurrences are a pain.
Her father had crept back while we talked, inching across the grass in front of the office like a turtle, until he was close enough to shut her up again. I told the girl, "Thanks, Jane. I'll just go take a look at what you hit." If I'd been young enough to want to prove something I'd have stepped back onto her father's toes and then apologized. Instead I said, "You've got a very brave daughter. She did a great job of lifesaving."
He cleared that throat of his again, and I could see his next move before he made it. He stuck his hand out in a handshake and awkwardly laid a bill in my hand. A sawbuck, I guessed. He was too full of his own importance to lay a twenty on me. I imagine he thought any policeman should be proud to frame a ten given him by J. Bryant, Esquire.
I didn't look at it, just reached out and stuffed it into his shirt pocket. "No need for that. This is my job."
He was alarmed. It was one thing to try and buy a copper, another to be held in contempt by one. "But this is just an acknowledgment that we appreciate your turning out late at night," he said.
"It comes with the uniform," I replied, and walked back to the cruiser.
I drove down to the main street, to the boathouse at the end of the marina that held the police boat. We kept it locked to keep the vacationers from urinating in the gas tank or performing other antisocial acts that might prevent me from saving their necks when they fell out of their boats somewhere, as they did most weekends. I unlocked the door and climbed into the old eighteen-foot cedar strip. The boat was a joke, so far as patrolling went, but it was very forgiving; you could and on the thwart to fish, or to pull in some gray-faced corpse as I had done once already this summer. The motor as a 20 Mercury, not big, but enough to purr the boat along at around fifteen miles an hour. It was a utility rig, and I was a utility police department, cheap enough that the taxpayers couldn't have gotten protection from the Ontario Provincial Police for the amount they paid me and Murphy.
The motor started with a smoky little burble. I pushed the choke home and backed out of the boathouse, into the midst of the weekenders' cruisers. Perhaps at high noon when the captains sat on their decks drinking gin and tonic with their lean, long-legged women, I might have envied them. But now, an hour before dawn, with the Big Dipper upside down in the sky and the bullfrogs twanging away along the shoreline, I was glad to be out and about. It was almost worth having quit the City Department.
I turned the boat up-channel, above the lock, and moved out at full power, fanning my flashlight over the water. If the girl was accurate in her placement of the thing they'd hit, it as a mile and a half away, drifting on a current that went nowhere at this time of year.
The beam of my light flattened itself over the bare brown rocks of the shoreline, where no cottages had sprouted. I settled back, figuring five minutes would see me on target. The wind of the boat's movement pierced my shirt and made me shudder. I was filled with a sudden sympathy for young Sullivan with his back and legs hanging in slices like bacon. I didn't like the kid—he was too fast with his lip, too secure in daddy's money to take any notice of laws that weren't there to make life easy for him—but outboard cuts are ugly, spiral gashes all over the injured part. Then I grinned. If his back was cut, Fate might finally have gotten a piece of ass out of him for a change.
A mile upstream my light bounced back off something floating. It was a boat, as I'd thought. If it had stopped the Sullivan boat that quickly, it had to be big. And if he had gone over and then under his own boat, he had to have moved what he had hit. It was a fourteen-foot cedar strip, a workhorse fishing boat from one of the lodges or marinas along this stretch of the waterway.
I came alongside and grabbed the bowline, then cut my motor. I tied the bowline to my thwart and shone the light over the new boat. There were tackleboxes and two fishing rods in the bow. The rods were not set up. The boxes were closed. The side of the boat was sprung at the curve of the bow where something had hit it. There was no paint at the point of impact. That fit the facts. The Sullivan boat was Fiberglas.
I didn't stop to check anything more. It was getting chill with the predawn damp. I hitched the bowline of the boat around the handle of my motor and started up, taking care to keep the line clear of my propeller. Then I motored back toward the bright white light at the marina, my lodestar.
The world was quiet and I traveled in a tunnel of darkness, watching low to the water so I would not do the same as Sullivan had done. If he'd been sitting down, instead of standing ere like a proud young rooster, he'd be in his own bed by now, and so would I. An old book title,
I Should Have Kissed Her More
, came to mind; if the little turd had been snuggling at girl he'd have been safe.
As I approached the dock I saw the man fishing. It looked like a Picasso painting, a harlequin figure of blacks and whites made up of lighted portions of his body against the blackness of the shadows. I watched as the figure lifted a shaft of light and fanned it out gently toward mid-stream. I should have known Murphy would have come down to see what was happening. He would claim to be fishing, but you couldn't expect him to stay away from trouble. Not an old soldier like him.
As I came in, he set down the rod and moved out to dockside to meet me, moving slow and wink on his metal leg. I cut the motor and tossed him my line. He pulled me in.
"Hi. Couldn't sleep, eh?"
Murphy spat into the water clear of the boat. "There's a goddamn pickerel out there, must be eight pounds. He feeds on the surface at night. I'm gonna get him."
"Sure," I said. I tied the stern line and got out of the boat. The second cedar strip bobbed up behind us, jackknifing gently as it hit.
Murphy reached down and grabbed it with his left hand, the one that's tied up into a knot from the same 88 shell that took his leg, on the Hitler Line in '44.
"Not too many cedar strips around anymore," he said.
"You know who owns it?"
He nodded. "Yeah."
I straightened up, shrugging my shoulders to try and get extra warmth from my thin shirt. "You gonna let me in on it?"
"Ross Winslow, from Ferry Beach Lodge."
I frowned. "It couldn't have floated into mid-channel from there. I wonder if somebody was out in it."
"What makes you think it was empty?"
I pointed at the fishing rods. "If a guy had gone fishing, the rods would have been set up. If he wasn't fishing, the rods wouldn't be in the boat."
Murphy did his old man thing with the dry throat. "Well, if they were coming in from fishing, the rods would be down."
I shook my head. "There's no flashlight in the boat that I can see. They couldn't have taken down their rods in the dark."
We stood rolling these chunks of wisdom around in our heads like cannon balls. Then I yawned. "Well, the hell with it. I'm for bed. I'll check Winslow's place in the morning. See any of his people were out late."
Murphy said, "Yeah, sure," and turned away.
I tied the Winslow boat and followed Murphy up the dock. "Come on, I'll drop you at the house."
He unsnapped his rod and folded it, then picked up his big old tackle box. "Thanks," he said bleakly. Both of us were tired.
I dropped him at the gate of his white-painted picture-book cottage with the honest-to-God roses around the door. Their scent was as heavy as sadness on the air. He said nothing, just nodded a thank you as I started back to my house. The bed was still fragrant from Linda's perfume, which was lighter and sweeter than those sad purple roses of Murphy's.
M
urphy rang me at seven. I was already awake, looking at the reflection of the sunlight on the walls of my room. It's not much of a room—the wallpaper was put up when Queen Victoria had her picture on the money and there are cracks in the ceiling—but the light patterns made me feel happy. Until Murphy called.
"I phoned Winslow and there's no answer."
I rolled my legs off the edge of the bed and stretched my back. "Listen, he's a big boy. He's also the randiest bachelor in the goddamn township. Dollars to doughnuts he's in the sack with one of his guests."
Murphy doesn't panic easily. But you can't shake his opinions either.
"I've known Ross ever since he joined my platoon as a reinforcement in Italy during the war. He's at work around the place by seven, gets up at six, no matter where he's been the night before."
I frowned into the phone. It wasn't usual for Murph to sound this upset. The only time I'd ever seen him lose his cool was when we pulled in the child that had drowned while the parents were drinking in their room. Other than that he would have made a good policeman. He wasn't, because of his injuries, but he ran the office and carried out more police work than most city coppers, so I usually went with his hunches.
"Listen. I'll grab some breakfast and head over there to chase him up. Okay?"
"Okay," he said grudgingly, and hung up.
I slipped on an old pair of swim trunks and went downstairs. Sam was lying at the door of his pen. As always, he'd been ready five minutes before I showed.
I let him out and rolled him over to pat his stomach. He's a big black and tan German shepherd, a show dog with brains. He's half my police strength and all the family I've got, so we get on well.
I let him run for a minute or two, then I went down to the dock. He trotted after me. I gave a short whistle and he sat.
I dived in. The water was cold and I squeezed tighter into my skin as I dived, hoarding my warmth while the light grew gray and dim. When I came to the end of my breath I surfaced. Sam was still sitting, like a statue. I gave another whistle, of a different length this time. Instantly he bounded in after me and paddled out. I dived under him and came up on the far side. He turned in the water and followed. I dived again.
When our game tired me out I swam to the shore and walked out. Sam came charging out after me, barreling up the beach and shaking himself with delight. I patted him again and went and took his dish from the dog run. He tailed me as I padded into the kitchen and mixed his breakfast, dog meal and an egg and some oil. He sat when I put the dish down and waited until I gave him the okay.
I dressed in uniform pants and a clean shirt, ate my own breakfast, then fastened my gun belt and went out toward the car. Sam followed. I opened the rear door for him and he leaped inside, then coiled down on the seat.
When we parked outside the station I indicated to Sam with a flick of my head that he should follow. He came over the front seat like smoke and waited beside me as I shut the door. Murphy was already in the office, at his desk with its tall stool that was made specially to keep his bad leg straight. He frowned at me over the report he was typing as we entered. I looked around at my empire. It's small. Aside from the typewriter that Murphy was clip-clopping at with his good hand, there are a couple of desks and file cabinets, a teletype machine, and a gun rack with a Winchester pump and a Remington .308 rifle chained into it. The front of the office has a counter at belly height. At the back of the room is another door that leads out to our cells, two of them, and the corridor where we make out the arrest reports when I bring someone in, which is rarely.
Murphy nodded, not speaking.
"Did you phone your old buddy again?" I asked him.
He nodded again.
"Listen, don't talk my ear off, eh. I'll take his boat back and ask him what happened, all right?"
"Yeah. Makes sense," he said. He had hardly looked up from his report and I knew it wasn't that important, nothing in Murphy's Harbour was that important. Except perhaps a missing friend who had been against the Hitler Line with you when you were both young and whole and full of courage.
I went over to the teletype. It's tied into the Ontario Provincial Police circuit. We get anything the OPP broadcasts province-wide. Aside from that we wait for phone calls for anything special such as a wide load coming down our section the Trans-Canada. "Anything new?"
"Not on that." Murphy sniffed. "Could be trouble, though. I was listening to the weather on the radio. They said it's a good weekend. Everyone's heading north."
"Standard for August."
"Yeah, but they reported from their chopper that the Devil's Disciples are coming up, a big knot of the hairy bastards on their motorbikes."
"They probably won't stop here," I said.
"Not with you around they won't." His envy was in his voice. He didn't condemn me. He understood about bullies. He understood about killing as well, killing that happens reflexively when a man has been trained to do it instinctively if presented with the proper stimuli.
"They don't know I'm working here," I said.
"What if they do, and they pull in here when you're out?" He was serious about it. He looked at me straight now, out of deep blue Irish eyes, only they seldom smiled.
"You use the necessary amount of force to stop them wrecking the place," I said, taking out my key ring and unlocking the chain on the guns. I took down the pump and worked the action. A fat brass-butted shell presented itself. Now I had to unload it to prevent a shell from being in the chamber. I pumped it five times, catching the heavy shells as they flew.
"There. Five shots of SSG makes you the equal of a whole herd of rounders."
I started stuffing the purple shells back into the magazine. Each one held eight lead balls capable of bringing down a deer, or a man. Murphy was safe. And so was Murphy's Harbour.