The Narrows (2004) Read online

  "I understand."

  "This way the Zodiac will be back at the dock for Buddy to use if he shows up."

  "If?"

  "He isn't always that reliable. At least that is what Terry said."

  "And if he doesn't show up, what do I do?"

  "Oh, just flag down a water taxi. They come by about every fifteen minutes. You won't have a problem. You can just bill me. Which reminds me, we haven't talked about what I'll be paying you."

  It was something she had to bring up to make sure, but she knew and I knew that this wasn't a job for pay.

  "That won't be necessary," I said. "If I do this, there is only one thing I'd like in return."

  "What's that?"

  "Terry once told me about your daughter. He said you two named her Cielo Azul."

  "That's right. He picked the name."

  "Did he ever tell you why?"

  "He just said he liked it. He said he knew a girl named Cielo Azul once."

  I nodded.

  "What I would like for payment for doing this is to meet her someday-when this is all over, I mean."

  That gave Graciela a moment of pause. Then she nodded her agreement.

  "She's a sweetheart. You'll like meeting her."

  "I'm sure I will." "Harry, did you know her? The girl Terry named our daughter after?"

  I looked at her a moment and nodded.

  "Yes, you could say I knew her. Someday if you'd like I'll tell you about her."

  She nodded and started to push the Zodiac off the fantail. I helped with my foot.

  "The little key opens the salon door," she said. "The rest you should be able to figure out. I hope you find something that helps."

  I nodded and held up the keys as if they would open every door I would ever encounter. I watched her head back to the dock and then I climbed over the stern and into the cockpit.

  Some sort of sense of duty made me climb the ladder to the upper helm before I went inside the boat. I pulled the canvas cover off the control station and stood for a moment next to the wheel and the seat and envisioned the story Buddy Lockridge had told me of Terry collapsing here. It somehow seemed appropriate for him to collapse at the wheel, yet with what I now knew, it also seemed so wrong. I put my hand on the top of the chair as if resting it on someone's shoulder. I decided that I would find the answers to all of the questions before I finished here.

  The small chrome key on the ring Graciela had given me opened the mirrored sliding door that led inside the boat. I left it open to air out the interior. There was a briny, funky smell inside. I traced it to the rods and reels stored on ceiling racks, artificial baits still in place. I guessed that they had not been washed off and properly cared for after the last charter. There had not been time. There had not been a reason. I wanted to go down the steps to the stateroom in the bow where I knew Terry kept all his investigative files. But I decided to leave that place for last. I decided to begin in the salon and work my way down.

  The salon had a functional layout with a couch, chair and coffee table on the right side leading to a chart desk built behind the seat of the interior helm. On the opposite side was a restaurant-style booth with red leather padding. A television was locked down in a partition that separated the booth from the galley and then there was a short stairway I knew led down to the forward staterooms and a bathroom.

  The salon was neat and clean. I stood in the middle of the space and just observed it for a half minute before going to the chart station and opening drawers. McCaleb had kept the charter business files here. I found listings of customers and a calendar for charter reservations. There were also records dealing with his collection from Visa and MasterCard, which he evidently accepted from customers as payment. The charter business had a bank account and there was a checkbook in the drawer, too. I checked the register and saw that just about everything that came in went back out again to cover fuel and mooring charges as well as fishing and other charter supplies. There was no record of cash deposits so I concluded that if the business was profitable it was in the unrecorded cash payments from customers, depending on how many of these there were.

  In the bottom drawer there was a bad-check file. There were only a few and they were spread out over time, none so large that they could seriously damage the business. I noticed that in the checkbook and with most of the business records either Buddy Lockridge's or Graciela's name was listed as the operator of the charter business. I knew this was because, as Graciela had told me, Terry was seriously limited in what he could earn as official income. If he made over a certain level-which was shockingly low-he was not eligible to receive state and federal medical assistance. If he lost that, he would then end up paying medical expenses himself-a quick route to personal bankruptcy for a transplant recipient.

  In the bad-check file I also found a copy of a sheriff's report unrelated to bad paper. It was a two-month-old incident report stemming from an apparent burglary of The Following Sea. The complainant was Buddy Lock-ridge and the summary indicated that only one thing was taken from the boat, a handheld global positioning system reader. Its value was placed at $300 and the model was listed as a Gulliver 100, An added note said that the complainant could not provide the serial number of the missing device because he had won it in a poker game from a person he could not identify and he had never bothered to write the tracking number down.

  Once I had made a quick check through all of the drawers in the chart station I went back to the client files and started going through them more thoroughly, looking carefully at each customer McCaleb and Lockridge had taken on board in the six weeks before Terry's death. None of the names struck me as curious or suspicious and there were no notations by Terry or Buddy in the file that raised any of those feelings either. Nevertheless, I took a notebook from the back pocket of my blue jeans and wrote a list that showed the name of each client, the number in the party and the date of the charter. Once I had this I was able to see that the charters were by no means regular. A good week for the business was three or four half-day charters. There was one week in which there were no charters at all and another in which there was only one. I was beginning to see Buddy's point about the need to move the business to the mainland in order to increase the frequency and length of charter bookings. McCaleb was running the charter business as a hobby and that wasn't the way to make it thrive.

  Of course, I knew why he was running it that way. He had another hobby-if you want to call it that-and he needed time to devote to that as well. I was putting the records back into the chart station drawer, with the intention of heading down to the bow to explore Terry's other hobby, when I heard the salon door roll open behind me.

  It was Buddy Lockridge. He had come up on the boat without my hearing the Zodiac's little engine or feeling its nudge against the fantail. I also hadn't felt Buddy's considerable weight as he climbed onto the boat.

  "Morning," he said. "Sorry I'm late."

  "That's okay. I've got a lot to look through here."

  "Find anything interesting yet?"

  "Not really. I'm about to go below, check out his files."

  "Cool. I'll help."

  "Actually, Buddy, where you can help is if maybe you called the man who was the last charter."

  I looked at the last name written on the page in my notebook.

  "Otto Woodall. Could you call him and vouch for me and see if I could come by this afternoon to see him?" "That's it? You wanted me to come all the way over to make a phone call?"

  "No, I have questions for you. I need you here. I just don't think you should be going through the files down there. Not yet, at least."

  I had a feeling that Buddy Lockridge had probably already perused every file in the bow. But I was playing him this way on purpose. I had to keep him close but distant at the same time. Until I had cleared him to my satisfaction. Yes, he was McCaleb's partner and had received credit for his efforts to save his fallen friend, but I had seen stranger things in my time. At the moment I h
ad no suspects and that meant I had to suspect everybody.

  "Make the call and then come downstairs to see me."

  I left him there and headed down the short set of steps to the lower part of the boat. I had been here before and knew the layout. The two doors on the left side of the hallway led to the head and a storage closet Straight ahead was a door to the small stateroom in the bow. The door on the right led to the master stateroom, the place where I would have been killed four years before if Terry McCaleb had not leveled a gun and fired on a man about to ambush me. This had occurred moments after I had saved McCaleb from a similar end.

  I checked the paneling in the hallway where I remembered two of McCaleb's shots had splintered the wood. The surface was heavily varnished but I could tell it was newer wood.

  The shelves in the storage closet were empty and the bathroom was clean, the overhead vent popped open on the forward deck above. I opened the master stateroom door and looked in but decided to leave it for later. I went to the forward room and had to use a key from the ring Graciela had given me to open the door.

  The room was as I had remembered it. Two sets of V-bunks on each side, following the line of the bow. The bunks on the left still functioned as sleeping compartments, their thin mattresses rolled up and held by bungee cords. But on the right the lower bunk had no mattress and had been converted into a desk. The bunk above was where four long cardboard file boxes sat side by side.

  McCaleb's cases. I looked at them for a long and solemn moment. If someone had murdered him, I believed I would find the suspect in there.

  "Anytime today."

  I almost jumped. It was Lockridge standing behind me. Once again I had not heard or felt his approach. He was smiling because he liked sneaking up on me.

  "Good," I said. "Maybe after lunch we can head over there. I'll need a break from this by then anyway."

  I looked down at the desk and saw the white laptop with the recognizable symbol of an apple with a bite out of it in silhouette. I reached down and opened it, unsure of how to proceed.

  "Last time I was here, he had a different one."

  "Yeah," Lockridge said. "He got that one on account of the graphics. He was getting into digital photography and stuff."

  Without my bidding or approval Lockridge reached over and depressed a white button on the computer. It started to hum and then the black screen filled with light.

  "What kind of photography?" I asked.

  "Oh, you know, amateur stuff mostly. His kids and sunsets and shit. It started with the clients. We started taking their pictures with their trophy fish, you know? And Terry could just come down here and print out eight-by-ten glossies on the spot. There's a box of cheap-ass frames in here someplace. The client catches a fish, he gets a framed photo. Part of the deal. It worked pretty good. Our gratuities went way up with that."

  The computer finished booting up. The screen was a sky of light blue that made me think of McCaleb's daughter. Several icons were spread across the field. Right away I noticed one that was a miniature file folder. Underneath it the word profiles was printed. I knew that was a folder I wanted to open. Scanning across the bottom of the screen I saw an icon that looked like a camera set in front of a photo of a palm tree. Since the subject had just been photography I pointed to it. "Is that where the photos are?" "Yup," Lockridge said.

  Again he moved without my request. He moved his finger on a small square in front of the keyboard, which in turn moved the arrow on the screen to the camera icon. He used his thumb to depress a button below the square and the screen quickly took on a new image. Lockridge seemed at ease with the computer and it begged the questions why and how. Did Terry McCaleb allow him access to the computer-after all, they were in business together-or was this something Lockridge became efficient at without his partner's knowledge?

  On the screen a frame opened under the heading iPhoto. There were several folders listed. Most were listed by dates, usually a few weeks or a month. There was one folder simply titled mail call. "Here we go," Lockridge said. "You want to see some of this stuff? It's clients and fish."

  "Yeah, show me the most recent photos."

  Lockridge clicked on a folder that was labeled with dates ending just a week before McCaleb's death. The folder opened and there were several dozen photos listed by individual date. Lockridge clicked on the most recent date. A few seconds went by and a photo opened on the screen. It showed a man and woman, both badly sunburned and smiling as they held up a horribly ugly brown fish.

  "Santa Monica Bay halibut," Buddy said. "That was a good one."

  "Who are they?"

  "Um, they were from ... Minnesota, I think. Yeah, St Paul. And I don't think they were married. I mean, they were married but just not to each other. They were staving on the island. Shacking up. They were the last charter before the trip down to Baja. Pictures from that trip are probably still on the camera."

  "Where is the camera?"

  "It should be here. If not, then Graciela probably has it."

  He clicked on a left arrow above the photo. Soon another photo appeared, the same couple and same fish. Lockridge kept clicking and eventually he came to a new customer and his trophy fish, a pinkish white creature about fourteen inches long.

  "White sea bass," Lockridge said. "Nice fish."

  He kept clicking, showing me a procession of fishermen and their catches. Everybody seemed happy, some even had the obvious glaze of alcohol in their eyes. Lockridge named all the fish but not all the clients. He didn't remember them all by name. Some of them he simply classified as good or bad tippers and that was it.

  Eventually, he came to a man with a delighted smile on his face as he held up a small white sea bass. Lockridge cursed.

  "What's wrong?" I asked.

  "He's the prick who walked off with my goddamn fish box."

  "What fish box?"

  "My GPS. He's the guy who took it."

  CHAPTER 7

  Backus stayed at least a hundred feet behind her. Even in the crowded Chicago airport he knew she would be on what they always called "Six Alert" when he had been with the bureau. Watching her back-her six-and always checking for a trailer. It had been tricky enough traveling with her so far. The plane from South Dakota had been small and fewer than forty people had been on board. The random assignment of seats had put him only two rows from her. So close he thought he could actually smell her scent-the one beneath the perfume and the makeup. The one the dogs could pick up.

  It was intoxicating to be so close and still such a long distance apart. He wanted the whole time to turn and look back at her, maybe catch a glimpse of her face between the seats, see what she was doing. But he didn't dare. He had to bide his time. He knew that good things come to those who plan carefully and then wait. That was the thing, the secret. Darkness waits. All things come to the dark.

  He followed her through half of the American Airlines terminal until she took a seat at gate K9. It was empty. No travelers were waiting here. No American employees were behind the gate counter waiting and ready to work the computers and check tickets. But Backus knew that this was only because she was early. They both were early. The flight to Las Vegas would not leave from gate K9 for another two hours. He knew this because he was on the Vegas flight as well. In a way he was Rachel Walling's guardian angel, a silent escort who would be with her until she reached her final destination.

  He walked on by the gate, careful not to be obvious about glancing at her but curious to see how she was going to pass the time waiting for the next flight. He hooked the strap of his large cowhide carry-on bag over his right shoulder so that if she happened to look up, her eyes might be drawn to it instead of his face. He wasn't worried about her recognizing him for who he was. All the pain and the surgeries had taken care of that. But she might recognize him from the flight from Rapid City. And he didn't want that. He didn't want her to get suspicious.

  His heart jumped in his chest like a baby kicking under a blanket as he made t
he one furtive glance while passing by. She had her head down and was reading a book. It was old and worn from many readings. There was a profusion of yellow Post-its poking out from its pages. But he recognized the cover design and the title. The Poet. She was reading about him!

  He hurried on by before she could sense she had a watcher and look up. He went down two more gates and into the restroom. He went into a stall and carefully locked the door. He hung his bag on the door hook and quickly went to work. Off came the cowboy hat and the vest. He sat down on the toilet and took off the boots, too.

  In five minutes Backus transformed himself from a South Dakota cowboy to a Las Vegas gambler. He put on the silk clothes. He put on the gold. He put on the earring and the shades. He clipped the gaudy chrome cell phone to his belt, even though there was no one who would call him and no one he would call. From the bag he took out another bag, much smaller and with the figure of the MGM lion emblazoned on it.