Work Done for Hire (22 page)

I
t was not quite six in the morning when the squeal of the bus brakes woke me up at the bus station in Bangor. There wasn't an actual station; it was just a Greyhound sign outside a coffee shop. It said 24 HOUR SERVICE, but didn't look open; to be on the safe side I went to the back of the bus and used the noisome toilet there.

Good thing. The diner was locked, but when a church bell started tolling at six, a cab pulled up. He had a card on his dash that said BAR HARBOR AIRPORT $25. The window went down as another man and I approached.

It didn't look like an actual cab. It didn't have a meter that I could see.

“How much to Bass Harbor?” I said. That was where the ferry left for Swan's Island. The other man said he had to be at the Bar Harbor airport
right now
and would pay fifty bucks.

The cabdriver, who looked like a sleepy high-school boy with a fake beard, said to the other guy, “Get in.” He checked a laminated card and said if I went along, he could drive me from the airport to the Bass Harbor ferry for $100.

I decided not to tell him that I'd have to pay with a dodgy credit card. We could work that out later. He read the other man's credit card with an iPod attachment.

The ride alternated between quaint New England hamlets and beautiful dense pine forest, with some neatly planted potato fields and a few random acres of inexplicable desolation. Like a war had happened, but only went for a block or two.

I tried to ignore how my left hand felt. It was throbbing, baking under the foil cover—closer to braising, I suppose, than actual baking. Cooking with moisture. But I was too close to Kit and her captors to take it off and broadcast my presence.

The last record they would have of my little beeper would be when I had checked into the Washington Marriott. Of course, by now they might assume I was on the run and could be anywhere.

We got to the airport, a low brick building with a pretty tall hotel, in about twenty minutes. I got out and stretched while the other passenger collected his bags and ran for the plane.

“Mind if I sit up front?” I asked. “I'm about to die back there.” The backseat was broken and came forward at a little more than a right angle. That gave me an excuse.

“Come on up,” he said, and took my card as I got in.

The iPod read it and beeped. He frowned and tried it again, and it beeped again. “Mister . . .”

“Be calm,” I said, the .38 pointed at his midsection. “This is serious business. Government business.”

“I won't . . . look . . . don't . . .”

“I won't pull the trigger unless you make me do it. I'll give you a thousand dollars to take me to Bass Harbor, and across to Swan's Island. A thousand dollars in cash, but I can't pay you until tomorrow.”

“What . . . government business?”

“Homeland Security,” I improvised.

“Do you have . . . let me see an ID?”

“Not undercover.”

He looked at me, and then out the windshield, and then back and forth again. “This is crazy.”

“Just drive,” I said. “I'll tell you the whole story. But you have to promise not to tell anyone.”

“Okay,” he said slowly, and pulled away from the airport loading zone.

By the time we were back in the potato fields I had told him all about what I'd done to the Polish embassy and about the international espionage ring that had sent a hit man after me when they couldn't get to me “through channels” in Washington and Krakow. I said I'd give him the whole story once it all came down, in maybe a week. The poop was going to hit the pulverizer, I told him, using authentic spy euphemisms.

It was forty-six miles from the airport to the ferry boat. I wrote him an IOU for a thousand dollars and signed it, and used a felt-tip marker to put a thumbprint next to the signature. I gave him my Iowa phone number and e-mail address.

I actually did plan to pay him. And even tell him the real story, eventually. But when he pleaded, “Do y'have to keep pointin' that gun at me?” I said that in fact I did. Just accept it as a condition of employment.

We were pretty much in the middle of nowhere when we saw a sign that said five miles to the ferry. Just beyond the sign was a dirt road to the right; I told him to turn down it.

It was a forest fire road, arrow-straight most of the way. No sign of habitation; a state or federal forest reserve, perhaps. We went a couple of miles and then the road just stopped. Ran out of funds or hit a county line or something. “Back up and turn around,” I said.

He wasn't an experienced driver. It took him six or seven sloppy tries. “Okay, stop. Give me the keys. And your cell phone.”

He looked at me on the verge of tears, mouth trembling. I gave him my water bottle. “Don't drink this all at once. It will take you a while to get back to the road. I'll leave the car at the ferry station with the keys and the cell under the floor mat.”

“What?”

“Even if you don't get a ride, you should reach the ferry before dark. That thousand bucks is yours, plus another thousand, if you don't say anything to anybody. Did you ever make two thousand dollars in a day before?”

“I don't, but I don't get it.”

“Spy stuff, man. Don't try to make any sense of it.” I motioned with the gun and he got out. I slid over, and he handed me the cell phone. Gave him a little wave as I drove off and, in the rearview mirror, he waved back weakly.

How many state and federal laws had I just broken? Steal a car at gunpoint, kidnap the poor schlub who owned it, and abandon him in the woods after threatening murder? Maybe I could write it up as a TV show and use the royalties to hire the best lawyer on the planet.

The clock was ticking, but I had no faintest idea of how long I had. How likely was it that the kid would take me at my word and become my accomplice? More likely that some forest ranger or farmer would find him out there on that dirt road and he'd spill everything.

Which might not be bad if the timing was just right. Have a boatload or chopper full of cops coming to back me up at the cabin. But not so soon that they would arrest me instead.

I got to the main road and pulled over to the shoulder to think. I looked at the boy's cell phone. Damn, the battery light was blinking yellow. Kids nowadays.

Why not just call the cops?

Well, they might arrest the wrong person. Me.
Yes, I took the kid's cell phone at gunpoint and stole his cab, but you have to understand—

Even if they did go along with it, a large force converging on that cabin might endanger Kit.

Or no. If the Enemy hurt her, they would have nothing to bargain with.

Which presupposed the Enemy would think rationally under stress.

What about me? Could
I
think straight? Was I?

My plan: go to Swan's Island and sneak up on these desperados with five rounds in a .38 Special peashooter. Brandish the gun and snatch Kit and take her back to safety?

If that's the question, the answer is “You and what army?”

I didn't have an army, but I did have certain resources, chief among them the ironic one of being a fugitive. And thus perhaps a lure. But again, who would I be luring?

What I really needed was a pissed-off Sara Underwood, mad enough to rain some serious shit on me, focusing on a tiny island off the coast of Maine. Unfortunately, the phone with her number in its memory was in shards in a dumpster in Louisiana. That had been a smart move.

I didn't even know what state her office was in.

But I did have one name and one place. I started driving and, throwing caution to the winds, picked up the phone and punched 4-1-1. I asked some guy with an Indian accent to put me through to an operator in Springfield, Missouri.

“That will not be necessary, sir. I have all those numbers right here.”

“I don't need a number. I need a human being on the line.”

“I am a human being, sir.” He did not sound like a friendly one.

“I need one in Springfield, Missouri.”

“That will not be possible, sir. If you give me a name in Springfield, Missouri, I will connect you to his phone.”

“Okay. James Blackstone. Homeland Security. Springfield, Missouri.”

“Thank you, sir. One moment.” After about a hundred moments he came back. “Sir, the operator says that party is deceased.”

A sign said one mile to the ferry.

“Call them back and ask them if they want to know how he died.”

“Sir, I am not allowed to elicit or transmit information to or from a third party. And it is not yet eight o'clock in the morning in the state of Missouri.”

“I'm calling from the state of Maine. Listen to me. It's a murder. James Blackstone was killed.”

“Yes, sir.” The phone went dead. Perhaps life is cheap in New Delhi.

No, it was probably the battery. The light on the top of the phone had stopped blinking yellow; it turned red and dimmed.

I went over a hill and there was the sea, or at least the bay. I parked the boy's car by the ferry office and put the key under the mat. Kept the cell phone. Maybe if I didn't use it, the battery would come back for one bleat.

The ferry was approaching. I bought a twenty-dollar ticket and watched the heavy craft ease into its berth, escorted by a cloud of seagulls. Did they think it was a fishing boat? Maybe there was nothing else for a bird to do.

The weather was about to change, and not for the better. A band of golden light to the east was fading as charcoal clouds boiled in from the west. I went back into the ticket office and bought a two-dollar plastic slicker from a box by the cash register.

The first drops began to fall as I walked down the ramp to the
Captain Henry Lee
, which smelled of new paint and old fish.

There was an enclosed waiting room that added the smell of diesel exhaust and a whiff from the head. I stood outside after a couple of minutes and enjoyed the rain after I struggled into the slicker.

That would make a fast draw even more problematical.
Would you mind putting that gun away while I untangle mine?

This would be one time in my life, however much of it was left, when I could justify smoking a cigarette. Looking for a machine gave me something to do for a few minutes. But the boat was disgustingly healthy in that regard. I was sure that I could bum one off some old Mainer standing in the rain puffing away, but he must have had an oncology appointment.

Would the Enemy be waiting for me? Could be. They had shown me the picture of Kit, but would they suspect that I could deduce from that where they were?

It was placid and pretty, the light rain sprinkling down on the green islands that bulked out of the mist. Then a sudden stab of lightning and thunder blast, just to keep me from getting too relaxed.

The ferry backed and filled into its place at the dock, and I followed the one car out onto the road that sloped up into the woods. No passengers waiting, which I supposed was good.

I checked the map. Go to the left and walk about a mile and a half down Ring Road. The cabin was at the end of the fourth dirt driveway.

The rain made a constant rattle on the plastic as I walked along. Feeling conspicuous as a bug on a plate.

But none of the cabins were visible from the road. And the bad guys wouldn't be looking for me yet, I hoped.

They might be. Presumably they knew I'd made it to Washington, but wasn't in the hotel room. Maybe they'd figured out that I could turn the signal generator in my hand on and off. They probably had seen the sling by now, and might deduce that it was hiding something.

They knew I was armed, assuming the guy with the camera in the cowfield had been one of them. That might not be an advantage; not if it made them nervous.

With the revolver in its holster, there was nothing I really needed in the Amtrak bag. Two candy bars that I transferred to jacket pockets. The Heinlein book and a litter of receipts. All tax-deductible if I wrote it into a book.

A lot of good books had been written in prison; I could become the Camus of my generation. If I could learn to like cheap red wine and boys.

I decided Heinlein could wait, and stuffed the bag with his book into an RFD box, which surely broke another federal law. Perhaps they would put me in a cell with other hardened postal offenders.

The house before the turn-off looked deserted, storm shutters over the windows and no cars. So I walked down the dirt road as if I belonged, and passed behind the house to the rocky beach. The rain started coming down in buckets, for which I should have been grateful. Surely they couldn't expect anyone to come sneaking up through this weather.

Unless they actually were experienced criminals, with criminal minds. I've had two bikes stolen in my life, both of them in weather like this. Criminals assuming that nice people would not go out into the driving rain.

I struggled to keep my footing on the slippery rocks. Slick seaweed brought me down twice, hard enough the second time to cut my knee.

The leg stiffened up. I studied the terrain and picked my way carefully but clumsily from rock to rock. Clattering.

I had almost made it to the grass when a yellow light gleamed. The cabin's back door.

A man came out with a rifle or shotgun. I stumbled the last few yards with my hands up.

He waited for me, the weapon pointed in my general direction. It was a large double-barreled shotgun. So if I untangled myself and drew on him, he would only have two tries to blow me in half. And then reload.

He yelled over his shoulder, “It's the guy!” A woman came running out, pulling on a raincoat. She and the man approached me together.

“Watch out,” she said. “He's got to have a gun.” So much for surprise.

“It is him, ain't it?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. To me: “Out for a walk?”

I shrugged, an odd gesture with your hands up. She frisked me and took the pistol. “Nice holster,” she said, and wagged the pistol in the direction of the cottage.