Dead Level (20 page)

Richard was still aiming the gun at Sam from the motel room doorway, looking very different from the guy who’d accidentally poked a hole in his own boat the day before.

Then he’d been genial, friendly, and fumbling, a fellow who was trying hard but who was clearly out of his element. Now with the gun in his hand, though, he seemed comfortable: angry but calm, as if maybe this wasn’t the first time he’d ever pointed a weapon at someone.

As if maybe he’d done it a lot. Sam turned to Carol, whose sweet, wholesome-appearing face was surprised but not nearly as shocked at the sudden turn of events as Sam would’ve liked. He put his hands up higher in what he hoped was a calming gesture.

“Look, Richard, I don’t know what’s going on here, but …”

Richard looked past him at Carol. “Get your stuff together.”

He twitched the gun barrel unpleasantly at Sam. “You. Go sit down over there.”

And when Sam didn’t move right away, “Hey,” he added, “you think I’m kidding?”

In three steps he was in the room with the gun’s barrel up under Sam’s chin. “I like you, Sam. I really do, you’re a good guy. But things haven’t gone well here. They just haven’t.”

Behind them, Carol was throwing things into a duffel bag. “And now,” Richard went on, “we have to leave in a hurry.”

The gun was a .38, the kind of weapon people had when they were in the habit of concealing the fact that they were carrying a gun at all. Sam knew that much from his stepfather, Wade, who was a firearms expert.

Also he knew that from where it was lodged right now, the gun would blow half his face off if Richard fired it, and the half face he’d have remaining would be useless to him because he would die of blood loss, in the unlikely event that the bullet hadn’t bounced around inside his skull a few times before exiting the back of it, pulverizing his brain in the process.

That part he’d learned from his biological father, the late Dr. Victor Tiptree.
Thanks, Dad
, he thought sardonically at the long-dead brain surgeon.
It was just great of you to let a little kid like I was listen in on your shoptalk
.

He put a hand on the dresser to steady himself. “Richard, put the goddamned gun down, for Christ’s sake.”

Because that was the other thing Victor had taught him. Sam could hear his father even now, all this time after the man’s death; all this time, too, after what seemed to Sam like a life on some other planet. Back then he’d been a surgeon’s son living in a fancy apartment in Manhattan, wealthy and privileged and so spoiled, hardly anything that anyone said to him ever sank in.

But one thing had. He heard it again now: Victor’s voice, explaining to his young son how he dared cut into a human being’s head:
Sam, you can do a whole lot more than you think you can if you just never lose your nerve
.

“Put the gun down,” he repeated, and Richard appeared to be thinking about it while Carol went on hurriedly packing.

Just don’t lose your nerve.…
At the time, he’d thought his father’s words were a license to drink and run wild in the big city, a nonstop search-and-destroy mission for a teenaged misfit.

But now … Slowly, Sam put a hand up to the weapon and pushed it away from his face. “Chill, buddy,” he said.

Richard let the gun be moved. But when Sam took a step toward the motel room door, the weapon jerked up sharply again.

“No. I’m sorry, Sam. You can’t leave yet. Over there.”

Richard waved Sam to one of the chairs by the table near the sliding glass door. The big freighter had long gone by, and now all Sam could see were the tiny lights in the houses across the bay, on Campobello Island.

“So, what’s all this about?” he asked. Carol hadn’t looked at him since Richard arrived. She didn’t now, either.

“Look, I just about got my head knocked off helping you with your boat yesterday.” He thought for a moment, then added, “And I spent today working with the guys trying to get
Courtesan
off the bottom,” he lied. “Which was a job that I notice you didn’t stick around for,” he added, hoping he was right and Richard hadn’t.

Nothing in Eastport was big enough to lift the vessel, full of water and heavy the way she was, and there was no way to seal her off well enough to pump her out, either, especially with all those ragged holes Richard had unwisely bashed in her. So the boatyard had called in a rig that specialized in bigger jobs.

Its crew hadn’t needed supervising—fortunately, since Sam had been on the Bangor errand. But now he figured he needed all the moral high ground he could get, and from Richard’s face he saw that he’d guessed right in the you-weren’t-there department.

“I don’t understand why you wanted a boat at all,” Sam went on,
thinking
Keep him talking
, “if you’re not interested enough to stick around for that.”

Carol glanced pityingly at Sam. “You really don’t get it, do you?” Then Richard spoke up again, impatiently.

“Hey, I bought it, okay? I didn’t adopt the thing.” He made a face as if Sam’s question had been obtuse. “I wanted to see what it was like. We were here, there’s plenty of water, I wanted to try it.”

And now I don’t anymore
, his shrug added.
Easy come, easy go
. As if Sam had been stupid ever to think otherwise, which was what caused him to push his luck, to tweak Richard a little bit.

“Yeah, well, I hope you left your credit card on file at the boatyard. That salvage crew doesn’t come cheap.”

But then he saw instantly that he’d made a mistake; at the mention of a credit card, Richard’s look darkened.
So that’s what this is all about
, Sam thought.
The card, someone’s already after them about it
.

Richard stuck his hand out; Carol took a roll of silvery duct tape from her duffel and tossed it to him without comment, as if they had done all this before, to someone else.

Maybe a few times, Sam thought. Or things like it. Richard himself looked different to Sam, too, his confidence more like impulsiveness, his energy a kind of jumpiness, an inability to be still. Richard had bashed those holes in
Courtesan
, Sam thought now, not to save her but because in his frustration, he couldn’t stand
not
hitting something.

The one thing Richard did seem calm about was the gun, holding it in an easy, competent-looking way with his right hand as with his left he began wrapping the duct tape around Sam, securing him to the chair.

“You and your great ideas,” Richard told Carol. “You had to go get a crush on Mr. Country Boy here.” He wound more tape. “ ‘Ooh, he’s cute, let’s get him to come with us,’ ” Richard mimicked nastily.

In answer, Carol only huffed out a breath. When he finished wrapping the duct tape a dozen or so more times, Richard tucked the gun away, sliding it into the nylon shoulder holster that he wore under his jacket.

Sam let out a sigh of relief. In response Richard ripped off another piece of tape and slapped it over Sam’s mouth. “Sorry.”

Yeah, but not sorry enough. Sam wished intensely that his hands were free so he could show Richard just how very sorry a person could get. The clearest thought in his head at the moment, though, was gratitude: that somehow, he hadn’t sunk so low as to have a drink with these people.

Or a drink at all.
Thank you
, he thought to whichever god had been in charge of granting him this bit of undeserved luck; he’d done everything but lie down openmouthed under a beer keg’s spigot, he knew, to ensure having a slip.

“Last night at the restaurant, there was a wedding dinner,” said Richard, apropos of nothing. “And do you know who’s always at a wedding dinner, Sam?”

He turned slowly. “A photographer, that’s who. And to get the candle glow in the pictures, the
atmosphere
,” Richard grated the word out, “he used available light. Which means no flash, and that means I didn’t know
pictures
were being taken.”

He turned to Carol. “Pictures of us. There’s one taped in the window of the Rusty Rudder right now. So, are you ready?”

Hoisting the duffel, Carol indicated that she was. “Go on, get in the car, then,” he told her. “Silver Saab,” he added. “I found it with the keys in it, can you believe that?”

But when she’d gone, he paused once more. “Look, you seem like a nice guy,” he told Sam, and then at the look Sam gave him in reply, added, “Yeah, and I’m not. But that’s the thing, see.”

Sam shook his head, to indicate that he didn’t give a flying Fig Newton what Richard had to say. But Richard kept on talking:

“The thing about you is, you live in a fairy-tale world.”

Yeah, yeah. The only thing Sam wanted out of Richard’s mouth was his teeth, knocked out by Sam’s fist.

“But out in the real world, it’s not like here,” Richard said. “So take this as a lesson, you know? You’re too trusting. People here in Eastport seem decent, from what I can tell—”

Yeah? And how would you know?
Sam thought viciously at him.
All you did here was sink a boat
.

And what that had been all about, Sam couldn’t imagine; just a whim, probably, something to pass the time. Another adventure, as Carol had put it, combined with another way to put something over on someone. Some guy somewhere was almost certainly counting stolen money at the moment, Sam realized, or trying to cash a bad check.

“So I can see how you might get the idea that most everyone is on the up-and-up,” the man standing in the doorway said. “But away from here, out in the real world …”

Richard’s voice took on a patronizing, let-this-be-a-lesson-to-you tone that Sam somehow found more infuriating than anything else so far. He hoped what showed of his face conveyed to this lying piece of scum that there were two men in this motel room at the moment, and the wrong one had duct tape over his mouth.

“… in the real world—and it’s important that you remember this, Sam—in the real world, there are real bad guys. Like me.”

Richard walked out, closing the motel room door behind him.

Half a block away in his office in the old Frontier Bank building, Bob Arnold settled his duty belt loaded with his gear around his middle, which he noted ruefully was expanding again. He’d been living on Hungry Man frozen dinners and takeout since six weeks earlier, when his wife and daughter had gone to stay with his in-laws in Boston so the child could get treatment for her asthma.

The wheezing had been getting worse, despite everything that Maine doctors had been able to do for her. Bob was afraid the Boston specialists would end up recommending a warm, dry climate, someplace where the ice crystals didn’t freeze in your nose hairs in late November and stay there until May.

Arizona, maybe, or the Southern California desert. All new crimes, all new criminals and informants, after a long career of being
so familiar with all the crooks around here that if one so much as sniffled at one end of town, Bob reached for a tissue at the other.

Not that he wouldn’t have moved to Mars if it would help, but he didn’t know how to make a living there, either. Policing, he reflected as he buckled his weapon into its holster, was like being a salesman; you had to know the territory.

Sighing, he pushed open the big glass front door of the old bank. By next week he’d be in the department’s new quarters.

The thought, he admitted to himself as he stepped out into the night, depressed him. New facilities, new equipment … it all seemed to be shoving him toward an unwelcome realization: that he was up against new crimes and new, much more technology-savvy criminals, too.

More and more—with identity theft, electronic stalking, email scams, and who knew what other varieties of illegal stuff he didn’t even know about yet—just rounding up the usual suspects was a thing of the past. Even this latest situation with the two credit card criminals proved it: nothing, not even Eastport, was as far off the beaten track as it used to be, and ready or not, criminal behaviors he’d never had to worry about before were now coming soon to a crime scene near him.

He inhaled a deep breath of the night air, smelling of the storm that was coming, the breeze laden with seaweed, creosote, and the french fryer bubbling in the kitchen of the Happy Crab sports bar, across the street. A plate of fried haddock would go good for dinner later, he decided; better than chef’s salad with “lite” dressing out of a packet, that was for sure.

But for now, he’d take a spin around town before packing it in for the night. Calories must be what the Almighty put in food to make it taste good, he reflected as he got into the squad car, noting with sorrow the way his belly nearly touched the steering wheel; if his wife, Clarissa, were at home now, he’d be on his way to having dinner with his family.

Instead it would be another solitary evening of sports on the TV
with the scanner on low on the coffee table, just in case. Thinking this, he drove up Washington Street past the post office and, straight across from it, the remodeled A&P building where his own new professional quarters would be, once he’d moved in.

As he drove he watched for young Sam Tiptree, who’d been at work today according to the boatyard guys but hadn’t shown up here in town yet. Not that Sam was at the top of their worry list at the boatyard; as if Bob didn’t have enough to concern him tonight, there’d been a break-in at the yard’s office just a few hours ago, and a whole lot of money was missing along with a customer’s car.

Bob hoped Sam hadn’t fallen off the wagon too hard; the kid had been sober for quite a while, and Bob would’ve bet by now that he wasn’t going to fall off at all. So in the gloomy back of his mind he was beginning to wonder what else might’ve happened, and whether or not recent events—Sam’s slip, the credit card thing, and the boatyard break-in—were somehow all connected.

That being another of the chronic side effects of small-town policing: actually caring about what happened to the people whose welfare you’d sworn to guard. Turning left onto High Street past the old wood-frame city hall building with the flags—American, Canadian, and State of Maine—flapping in the floodlights in front of it, Bob wondered if he would feel the same way about the people of Phoenix or San Diego, once he had gotten to know them.