One-Way Ticket (25 page)

“I’m sorry it’s bad news.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Me, too. You be good, okay?”

“Of course. Always.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m doing what I need to be doing.”

“Okay.”

A pause. “Hey, Brady?”

“What, honey?”

“Look,” she said. “If you want to… I mean, this is going to be a long time.”

“If I want to
what
?”

I heard her blow out a breath. “Have a life. Jesus, Brady. I want you to live your life. Go out, have fun. Life is too short. If you don’t believe me, ask my father.” She hesitated. “You know what I’m talking about. I know you do. Do I have to say it?”

I laughed softly. “You want me to see other people? Is that what you’re saying?”

“It sounds kind of high-schoolish, doesn’t it?” she said. “But, yeah, I guess that’s what I’m saying. Really. If we’re—what did you say? solid?—if we’re solid, it won’t make any difference.”

“I don’t want to see other people,” I said.

“Listen,” she said. “Here’s the reason I’m calling. I’m here with my daddy and he’s dying and he’s full of regrets for the time he’s wasted, the things he didn’t get to do, the possibilities he didn’t pursue, the life he didn’t live. I have made this choice. To be here with him. Because I know I’d regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t. I want you to make your choices, too. I don’t want you to have any regrets. I don’t want to be responsible for your life. I don’t want to have to worry about you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

The rain seemed to have softened. It sounded like mice scampering around on the roof of my car. “I understand, honey,” I said. “I appreciate what you’re saying. I’ll do what I want to do, okay?”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

“Except,” she said, “no matter how much you might think you want to come out here, don’t. Please.”

“Okay.”

There was a long pause. “Love you,” she said.

“I love you, too.”

After Evie disconnected, I sat there holding my cell phone in my lap, as if she might call right back to tell me she’d changed her mind, that she was coming home.

Or at least to say, “
I
love you.” When she said it without the personal pronoun, a sentence with no subject, it sounded… impersonal. Glib and insincere.

Right about then I wished I had a cigarette of my own to smoke.

B
Y THE TIME I
turned onto the road leading to the Kettle Cove Marina, the premature gray gloom of a sunless evening had begun to settle over the damp landscape. It pretty much mirrored my mood.

Evie didn’t want to have to worry about me. She didn’t know when she’d be coming home. She wasn’t thinking about me. She didn’t want to see me.

I found myself resenting a dying man. I was jealous of the attention poor Ed Banyon was getting from his daughter.

Get over it, Coyne. Be a man.

A weatherbeaten wooden sign reading “Kettle Cove Marina” marked the entrance. I stopped there on a rise of land to survey the layout. There was no gate at the entrance, no guardhouse, no security camera. You could just drive right in on a gravel driveway that sloped down to a big sandy parking area along the curving edge of the water. A ten-foot chain-link fence ran along the entire outer edge of the lot, separating it from the water and the maze of docks where the boats were moored. There was a barred steel gate at the entrance to the long wooden pier that reached out into the cove. Evenly spaced at right angles off both sides of the pier were narrower wooden docks. The boats were tied up in their slips against these docks. If I’d done my math right, seven wharves, twenty slips per wharf—when the marina was full, it could handle 140 boats. Now it appeared to be a little more than half full. I assumed that this time of year a lot of people would be out fishing or otherwise enjoying a ride on the sea, if they didn’t mind a little rain.

From the crest of the slope where I was stopped, I could see out past the end of Kettle Cove to the mist-shrouded ocean. It looked black and choppy and cold.

Off to the left of the parking area was a low-slung shingled building. I guessed it housed the office where Sandy, my unwitting accomplice, worked, and probably a coffee shop and a bar and rest rooms. Behind it was a larger hangar-like building for dry-docking and working on boats.

Right now, a little after six on this rainy Thursday afternoon, it all looked deserted. There were about two dozen vehicles parked randomly in the lot. I saw no people getting into or out of any of them, nobody walking on the docks, no boats pulling in or pulling out. The floodlights atop the tall poles around the rim of the parking area had not yet come on. The only sign of life was the glow of lights from the shingled building.

From where I had stopped in my car at the top of the slope by the entrance to the parking lot, I lifted my binoculars and scanned the boats that were moored there. Rebecca said that Mike Warner’s Bertram was in slip G-9, on the outside of the outermost dock on the right.

I focused on the most distant row of boats and located her. Through my binoculars past the swish of the wipers on my windshield I could make out her name—
Dot Com
—in blue block letters on her stern. She had a wide, open deck, a sleek, curving bow, and round portholes on the side of the cabin. White, trimmed in pale blue. She looked solid and well cared for and seaworthy. She was a thirty-eight-footer, Sandy had said. Bigger than most of the other boats moored here.

I drove down the driveway and tucked my car between a pickup and an SUV at the corner of the lot farthest from the office, where I hoped it wouldn’t be noticed.

I got out, locked up, and patted my hip and my pockets. Leatherman, flashlight, cell phone. My binoculars hung from my neck. I tucked them inside my windbreaker to keep them dry.

I skulked along the chain-link fence in the shadows, keeping the parked cars between myself and the office building.

When I got to the gate leading out onto the main pier, I tried the latch. Locked, as expected. There was a keypad on the post beside the gate. Sandy had mentioned a code. Those who paid to moor their boats here would know it. I didn’t.

I walked slowly back along the fence, looking for a way to get under, through, or around it. It seemed to go on and on, and I was beginning to get that hopeless feeling of having come so far only to be thwarted at the end, when I heard a car door slam and then some loud male voices from the opposite side of the parking lot.

A big SUV had driven in. Its dome light was on. Three men had climbed out, and they were standing there unloading the back of their vehicle. There were a couple of coolers, some tackle boxes and bait buckets, a tangle of fishing rods.

The three guys were laughing and talking loudly, as if they were happy for an evening away from their wives and had already made a start on the beer in their coolers.

I headed in their direction, moving slowly, trying to time it. I let them finish unloading, lock up their SUV, and start lugging their gear to the locked gate, and then I fell in behind them.

One of the guys put down the cooler he was carrying, pecked at the keypad, and pushed the gate open. He held it for his two companions.

I came along right behind them, and he held it for me, too. “Hey, thanks,” I said as I walked in through the gate.

“No problem,” said the guy.

“Gonna try the stripers?” I said.

“A little fishin’,” he said, “a lot of beer.”

His buddies laughed.

“What could be better?” I said.

And I was in, just as easy as that, no soshing or pretexting required.

I followed the three fishermen down the wooden pier. They turned onto the fourth dock on the left.

“Well, good luck,” I said to them.

“Yeah,” said the guy who was lugging the rods. “Good luck yourself.”

I kept going toward the end of the central pier, then went out onto the fifth pier on the right, pier E, which was two down from pier G, where Mike Warner’s Bertram was moored. I found an angle between the moored boats where I could see
Dot Com.
She looked deserted. No lights lit her deck or glowed from her portholes. I scanned her with my binoculars and detected no movement except her gentle rocking in the swells that rolled in from the ocean.

Well, if this excursion to Cape Ann was going to be a big fat wild goose chase, I wanted to find out sooner rather than later.

I glanced back toward the gate, then walked quickly to
Dot Com’s
mooring.

Up close, she was an impressive craft. Thirty-eight feet is a lot of boat. She had a spacious wheelhouse over a big forward cabin and a wide rear deck with a fighting chair for big-game fishing.

I slipped my little hand-sized Maglite from the pocket of my windbreaker and shone it around the deck. There were a few coiled lines and some bumper buoys and a big fish locker. About a dozen rods were racked in the ceiling of the wheel-house. Everything was clean and neat and bare. Mike Warner kept his boat shipshape.

I glanced around again, feeling furtive and sneaky. Then I hopped aboard, which made me an instant trespasser.

The wheelhouse was a couple of steps up, over the cabin where the galley and the berths and the head would be. It was surrounded by glass and gave a high, wide view of the ocean. There were a lot of shiny chrome knobs and levers and switches and buttons and beer-can holders. There were lights and radios and microphones, radar and sonar and fish-finder screens.

The steering wheel was the only mechanism I was pretty sure I knew how to operate. The watercraft I was most comfortable in were propelled by oars and paddles.

The distant, muffled roar of a marine engine echoed through the misty rain from somewhere out beyond the marina, and a minute or two later the wake hit
Dot Com
and slapped against her hull. That sound reminded me of why I was there.

I crawled out on the narrow walkway that curved along the starboard side of the cabin to the bow. I crouched awkwardly by one of the portholes and shone my flashlight inside through the thick glass. The cabin featured a lot of blond wood paneling and shiny chrome fixtures and red vinyl upholstery. Against the opposite wall I could see what I guessed was the narrow door to the head, a folding table, and part of a berth.

A big piece of cloth was balled up on the berth. It looked like a pale blue bedsheet.

The porthole gave me a narrow angle. I could only see a small section of the cabin through it. I moved to a different one, which enabled me to see the other end of the berth where the boat narrowed at the bow. A small bookshelf and a locker were built into the wall at the head of the berth.

I crept around to the port side of the cabin and again shone my little light inside. From this side I could see part of the other berth on the opposite side of the cabin. It was covered with a lumpy brown blanket. The lumps got my attention.

I moved down one porthole. Through that one I could see clearly that the lumps under the thin blanket were what I. suspected—the outline of the lower half of a person’s body. Hips, thighs, knees, calves, and feet.

The next porthole gave me an angle to see Robert Lancaster’s shoulders and head. His body was covered up to his chin with the brown blanket. The bottom half of his face was plastered with silver duct tape. His eyes were closed. He appeared utterly motionless.

I focused my light on his blanket-covered chest. I could not see it rise and fall. If he was breathing, I couldn’t detect it.

I tapped on the porthole with the end of my steel flashlight. The sound would ring loudly inside the cabin.

Robert didn’t even twitch.

I scrambled back to the deck. A hatch with double doors led down to the cabin. I yanked on the latch. It was locked, of course.

I looked quickly around the marina, mindful of the fact that I didn’t belong here. The boat with the fishermen was pulling away from its slip. Its engines roared. Otherwise, the place seemed deserted.

I pounded on one of the doors with the heel of my fist. “Hey, Robert,” I said as loudly as I dared. “It’s Brady. Are you okay?”

I put my ear to the door. I heard no response.

The latch on the double doors opened by a key. The lock looked like the one on my front door back home. I took my Leatherman off my hip, pried open the knife blade, wedged it into the crack between the two doors, and tried to force the lock.

It wouldn’t budge. I pounded and pried and levered at it, with no luck. The hatch doors remained stubbornly and solidly closed and locked.

My friend J. W. Jackson, a retired cop, once found a set of lock picks at a Martha’s Vineyard yard sale and used them to teach himself how to pick locks. But he hadn’t taught me.

Where was J. W. when I needed him?

Panic and fear clenched at my chest. Robert was lying in there. I didn’t know if he was alive or dead or somewhere in between, but it felt as if every second I wasted was a tick off his young life.

I prowled around, looking for some kind of pry bar, which I realized was an unlikely tool to find on a boat. A battering ram would do. Anything to get that hatch open.

I found something that might do the job in a locker in the stern. It was a small anchor such as you might use with a dory or a much smaller powerboat—too small for a thirty-eight-foot Bertram, but just right for me. It had long curving tines.

I untied it from its line, took it over to the hatch that opened into the cabin, forced one of the anchor tines into the crack between the two doors, curled it around behind one of the doors, and levered it.

The door creaked and groaned. I put all my weight into it, and the wood around the lock cracked and splintered and broke away, and the doors popped open.

I put down the anchor, ducked my head, and went down the three steps into the cabin.

The wet heat and the sour stench of sweat and rot and urine came blasting out at me from inside the cabin and staggered me back a step. I guessed that Robert had been locked down there all day—maybe for several days—with virtually no ventilation, while the sun’s heat blasted the exposed boat and the ocean’s humidity filtered in through the cracks. It was an oven in there.