The Lobster Kings (30 page)

“Just so you know, Cordelia, if you accidently shoot me, I’m
going to be pissed,” he said, but I heard him click off the safety on the pistol. He took a few steps over to another pile of traps and kicked at them.

I shuffled toward the stern and peeked in the engine compartment. “Whoa. Whoever owns this boat is either compensating for the smallest dick in existence, or is seriously concerned with going fast. No lobsterman needs this much horsepower.” I looked up at Kenny, but he was turned away from me, poking at the pile of traps, the gun in his hand hanging down at his side.

I heard Stephanie moving around on the
Kings’ Ransom
, a clink of something, maybe the thermos on a cup. If anything, the fog had settled thicker in the last few minutes, and I could barely see past Kenny’s back.

“What the fuck are these?” he said.

“Lobster traps.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” he said. “They’ve got packages inside them. Drugs?”

I went over to where he was standing. These traps, unlike the ones we’d first seen, were new, but there were no bait bags. They were kitted out with bricks so they’d sink right down, but inside two of them—the rest were empty, as far as I could tell—were duffel bags. “Got to be,” I said. “Doesn’t seem like the best place to stash your luggage. Open it up?”

Kenny stuffed the pistol into the pocket of his jacket and then popped open the trap. The bags were puffed out and lumpy, but clearly not stuffed completely full. Kenny tugged at one, but it wasn’t going anywhere. “They’ve got the bags rigged in there real good. Zip ties through the grommets and the handles.” I looked closer and saw what he was talking about. The zip ties were black, and blended clean with the bags. “Not going to be slipping out with the waves,” Kenny said. He unzipped one of the bags, and I could see that all that was inside was bubble wrap and torn plastic wrap. Kenny worked his hand through the mess and then shook his head. “Nothing in there. Just plastic. Old wrapping? What are we thinking? Pot, coke, meth?”

“James Harbor, right? So, meth.”

“You even know what meth looks like?”

“Nope. You?”

“Nope, but I’m assuming we’ll know it if we see it,” he said, and then he spun around and pulled the pistol out of his pocket, pointing it forward, into the fog.

I moved up beside him, the shotgun up at my shoulder, and kept my voice as low as I could. “What?”

He touched his lips with his finger, and then pointed to his ear. There were only the sounds I would have expected: the low hum of the motor on the
Kings’ Ransom
, the movement of the water, birds. Kenny looked over at me, but I shrugged.

He motioned with his head toward the
Kings’ Ransom
and mouthed the words,
Let’s get out of here
, but I shook my head. He stared at me and then shook his head, and mouthed something that I thought might have been,
Stubborn bitch
. I mouthed back,
You know you love it
.

I stepped past him, keeping the shotgun at the ready. I tried to keep my steps light as I walked forward, but even so, I heard the sound of my footstep change, turn hollow, and I looked down. Wasn’t obvious, but I was standing on some sort of a panel. Kenny looked down, too, and then picked up a rotted-out lobster trap that covered a ring-pull. I stepped off while Kenny moved the trap aside. Quietly as I could, I pulled up the hatch.

What was interesting to me wasn’t that there was a cargo space—every boat is fitted with nooks and crannies to stash gear, and as soon as I saw the duffel bags in the traps I figured this boat would be fitted out with something more hidden than most—but that there was nothing in the compartment space at all. Nothing. It was dead clean. There wasn’t a scrap of old net or a crapped-out pair of overalls, or anything that would hint that an honest-to-god fisherman used this boat. And there weren’t any suspicious packages in there, either.

“Transferring?” I whispered to Kenny. “Were they dropping off for somebody else to pick up, or were they picking up?”

Kenny took the hatch from my hand and shut it carefully. “Seems like an awfully complicated way to move drugs from one boat to the other.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “No Coastie would look twice at a boat hauling traps.”

“But we would,” Kenny said. “This a James Harbor boat. We see them dropping or hauling in our waters, and it’s a different matter. Why are they carrying the same buoys that we’ve been cutting? This doesn’t make any sense. Are they carrying drugs or are they working the water?”

“They’re drug smugglers. That’s for sure. Not the smartest boys on the sea,” I whispered. Then I shrugged. “Maybe they’re working part-time as lobstermen, part-time selling drugs. Whatever. Let’s worry about that later and check the rest of the boat first.”

I moved forward two more steps, and the cabin wavered in front of me, but once I was under the roof the fog seemed lighter, and it was obvious there wasn’t much to see in the cabin: the key was still in the ignition, the gas tank showed they had plenty to keep moving.

I opened one of the lockers. Slickers, boots, a sweatshirt, a fire extinguisher. Next locker had fishing gear, some line, a water-stained porn magazine. I could feel Kenny’s side against mine, and I glanced back at him. He still kept the pistol up, scanning around, though I didn’t think he’d be able to see anything in the whiteness.

I reached out to the last locker and was about to open it when I noticed that my boot pulled sticky from the deck. I looked down and saw that the wetness I was standing in wasn’t a puddle of water.

“Kenny,” I whispered. I tried to keep the stress out of my voice, tried to keep from screaming, but I had the shotgun up and pointed at the locker.

In retrospect, I realize how silly it was to be pointing at the locker. The blood was clearly pooling from it, and by the amount
of blood on the deck, it seemed obvious that whatever I had to worry about, it wasn’t in there.

“Kenny,” I whispered again. “I could use a hand over here.”

I didn’t want to look away from the locker to see what Kenny was doing: I kept the barrel of the shotgun pointed up and in front of me, could see the way it was trembling in my hands.

“Easy, now, Cordelia,” Kenny said in a whisper. I could feel his breath on my ear, something that at any other moment would have thrilled me. “I’m going to move past you and open that locker, but I want you to back up a spell, take your finger off that trigger. Don’t want you shooting me.”

I backed up. My feet pulled sticky from the deck again, and I could smell the blood. I took my finger off the trigger, but kept it close. Kenny shuffled forward gingerly, each step making a ripping sound as his feet moved through the puddle. He reached out to the latch and then looked at me and gave a nod. I nodded back. And then he opened the locker.

T
he body in the locker hadn’t spent any time in the water, but it might as well have; whoever had shot him had put a couple of bullets through the back of his head, and when the bullets exited, they ripped his face to shreds.

When Kenny opened the locker, the body fell out sideways on the deck with a heavy thud, his head almost landing against Kenny’s boots, and I barely stopped myself from pulling the trigger on the shotgun. Kenny started puking right away, and I must have let out some sort of a yell, because at the same time that Kenny was bent over and vomiting, I heard Stephanie calling out to me.

Instead of answering, I stepped around the body. His hands were pinned behind him, tied together with plastic zip ties. It was the same kind that held the duffel bags in the traps, the sort that electricians used and that most of the guys I knew kept handy around their boat and in their garage for odd jobs. I could see where the band dug into his skin, and then I realized something that made me even more uneasy, though I would have thought the fact that he was zip-tied and had a couple of bullets through
the back of his head would have been enough: three of his fingers had been cut off. The skin was raw and crusted with blood, and I could see the ragged tip of bone. That was enough, and I started vomiting, too.

I heard Stephanie calling out again, and this time, after wiping my mouth with my forearm, I called back and told her to stay put. There wasn’t any sense in having her see this, too, and all I could think about was that whoever did this might be slinking around through the fog with their gun out, waiting to put a bullet in the back of my head or Kenny’s, and that we could just as easily be lying in a puddle of our own blood as this poor son of a bitch was.

“What the fuck, Cordelia?” Kenny hissed. He pushed at the man’s back with his boot, his toes coming up near the plastic-tied wrists, the missing fingers. He turned and then poked his boot in the locker the man had fallen out of. “Holy shit. Cordelia, check this out.”

At first I couldn’t figure out what Kenny was looking at, but it was the wedding ring that helped me figure out it was a finger. The dead man on the deck was white, but this finger was black, and big enough that it was clear that it belonged to a man. The stump end wasn’t scabbed up yet. Maybe I should have been wondering how recently it had happened, but all I was thinking about was, where the hell was the black guy with a missing finger?

“We’re in way over our head here,” Kenny said. “I think it’s time we called the cops.”

The fog seemed to come in sheets, heavy and dark and then a misty trail of lightness that gave hope that everything would be normal again, that this would be just another day of hauling pots, measuring lobsters, making a living off the coast of Loosewood Island. When I’d been worried about drugs coming to the island I was being naïve. They were already here.

Kenny started to lift his hands up, but he sort of awkwardly clasped them together for an instant and then shoved them into the front of his bib. “Please, Cordelia. Let’s get out of here while we still can.”

I couldn’t stop myself from stepping toward him, from putting my hand on his shoulder and then letting it slide down until it was resting somewhere between his shoulder and his breastbone. His hair had fallen forward, and I wanted to reach up and brush it back, but I wasn’t sure that I could stand it. I wanted Kenny to reassure me, to tell me everything was going to be okay. All I could let myself do was close my hand, clenching the fabric of Kenny’s shirt. He opened his mouth and started to speak at the same time that I did, and we both stopped, hesitated, and tried again, cutting each other off and falling into silence. Whatever it was he was going to say, his not saying it cleared some of the dizziness away. I shook my head, and even as I did so, I was not sure if I was trying to clean out the rest of the cobwebs or trying to send Kenny a message, but my mouth seemed to have a mind of its own. “Timmy,” I said.

“What?”

“Oh, my god.” I stepped away from Kenny and scooped up the finger in the locker. I expected it to be warm, but it was cool in my hand. I don’t know what I expected it to feel like, but all it felt like was a finger. I held it up. “Timmy.”

I held it out to him. He took it gingerly and then he looked up at me. “Oh,” he said. “Timmy.”

I was up and over the rail before Kenny moved. Later, when we had a chance to sit down with a beer and talk about it, he said that by the time he got his ass in gear, I had already disappeared into the fog, leaving a trail of bloody boot prints for him to follow.

When I landed on the deck of the
Kings’ Ransom
I almost bowled Stephanie over, pushing her aside to get to the radio.

“Timmy? Hey, there,
Green Machine
, you out on the water this morning?”

This early in the morning I didn’t expect much chatter. Anybody out early was usually busy with the start of the day, getting bait ready, hauling traps, doing something more routine than finding dead bodies stuffed into the lockers of floating ghost ships. With the fog, however, there was almost nobody on the water,
and a dead silence ruled the radio. I keyed it again. “Timmy. It’s Cordelia. You out there?”

The voice that came back wasn’t the one I expected.

“You better be pulling my traps, honey.” Daddy’s voice came through easy, like he was standing next to me. “They’re full up with keepers. I can feel it.”

Kenny put his hand on my arm and then took the shotgun away from me. I hadn’t even realized I was still holding it. I saw Stephanie staring at Kenny, and realized that what she was staring at was his free hand: he was still holding the finger. “Is that …” She trailed off, unsure of what she was even asking.

“Daddy?” I said, clicking the mic.

“Anybody else out on the sea have the same dulcet voice as me, Cordelia?”

I leaned against the console and then let my head drop down against my arm. I wanted to sit down, but I wasn’t sure that if I backed up into the captain’s chair I’d be able to stand up again. “Thought you weren’t coming back until tomorrow,” I said.

And then Timmy’s voice came through the radio, and I didn’t care why Daddy had come home early. “You looking to take Etsuko and me to dinner again, Cordelia?” he said. That was enough. That small sentence, the tone of his voice, for me to know that he was okay.