In memory of Mary and Bill Eidson
I would like to thank Richard Parks, Frank Robinson, Kate Mattes, Stephen Hull, Carmen Mitchell, Catherine Sinkys, Krisztina Holly, Jim McNeil, Amy Jacky, Nancy Childs, Sibylle Barrasso, and Richard Rabinowitz for their help with my career and this book.
Special thanks to Brad Ferguson for sharing stories and details of the marine repossession business.
And, as always, thanks to Donna and Nick.
PROLOGUE
He had been sailing in New England waters all his life. But he had spent relatively little time off the coast of Connecticut, and had never sailed into Prescient Cove before.
To add to it, the wind was howling, and he was being pelted with sporadic raindrops that promised a great deal more any minute. The barometer had been dropping steadily all night. Storm warnings over the radio.
It was just past 3:00 A.M.
Under sail, the boat sluiced along at better than seven knots.
The chart said the water was good all the way in. Better still, the GPS was glowing on a bracket attached to the binnacle. The GPS was programmed for this cove right down to each channel marker.
The monitor blinked and a small tone sounded. He was reaching a way point, and there should have been a can to his port side. He picked up the flashlight and played the beam across the port bow. Sure enough, the light picked up a reflective band across the top of a buoy not fifty yards away.
“Jesus,” he said, under his breath. He wished there were other devices along the way to help get them out of this mess.
He started the engine and swung the bow into the wind. For the next few minutes, he worked at securing the sails. But he was a good sailor, and his boat was set up well for single-handing, with lazy jacks for the main and a good roller furling system for the genoa. He went back to the helm and began motoring along the new course. He looked for visuals. It was so damn dark that he could pick out only the expected lights as outlined in the harbor guide. He flicked on his flashlight and reread the approach instructions:
When making a landfall at nighttime, look for the lit steeple of the First Methodist Church to line up with and then eclipse the clock tower of a factory approximately one mile back. Once the tower is eclipsed, proceed directly toward the steeple. Take care to maintain course within the channel as Langley Point to your port is shallow at low tide to as little as three feet, with a rocky bottom. Once past the point, and inside Prescient Cove, the Chalmer’s Marina should be visible directly off your port beam.
Both the GPS and the visual cues agreed—something for which he was blessedly thankful. The entire thing could fall apart right here if he ran the boat aground. And there was too much at stake for that: a thought that had been in his head for the past two days now. Too much at stake.
To his port, he passed a mass of darkness that blotted out the lights of the town entirely. He supposed that was Langley Point, hoped it was. And then, minutes later, he was past.
The glow of a single fluorescent light over the gas dock at Chalmer’s Marina was like a welcome beacon. He put the wheel over slowly and brought the boat around to an open space on the gas dock. He backed her down, crabbing the hull up to the dock gently.
Immediately out of the shadows, a shape appeared. He started, even though he was expecting her to be there.
She held onto the rail as he jumped off onto the dock and quickly tied the boat down. When he was finished, he put his arms around her. She was wearing a rain slicker too, and both of them were wet on the outside, insulated from one another.
“Thank God,” he said.
He leaned over her, their hoods meeting and hiding their faces for a moment. He kissed her, and he could feel the rain on her face and lips, and by the set of her mouth he knew she was scared or angry. Most likely both.
But she kissed him back, and then she pressed her head against his chest. “Thank God is right,” she said. “I’ve been here for an hour. You’re late.”
“I’ll tell you about it once we’re under way. Everything go all right?”
“No.”
“Why? What happened?”
She turned away from him and walked back into the shadows. When she returned, she was dragging the big plastic container. “I tried,” she said. “It just didn’t work. There was someone there. He saw me, and he asked questions. It wouldn’t have worked. I just left.”
“Ah, Christ. Now what?”
“Just what did you want me to do?”
He sighed. His wife was no baby. In truth, she was harder inside than he was, by a long shot. If she said it wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t work. It was just that they had been trying like crazy to throw this together, and neither knew what they were doing. Slapping this thing together, hour by hour. All with too little experience.
I wouldn’t invest in this company, he thought suddenly. Paul and Julie, Inc. He would have—did—every day of their previous life. The two of them had been a great bet. The thought made him smile. Not a happy smile, but a smile nonetheless.
“What?” she said.
“We don’t have a choice. And that simplifies things. So get onboard with me, and get into some dry clothes.”
She paused, silent. Thinking, thinking. And coming to the same conclusion he did. She smiled at him suddenly, still his girl inside this frightened woman. God, he wanted to take her where she could lose that scared look.
He heaved the plastic case into the cockpit, and then, on an impulse, he swept Julie up in his arms as if he were walking her across the threshold to their new home. As if they were just married, instead of eight years in.
She laughed, and that made him feel strong, in spite of being wet, cold, and scared himself. She said, “Are we going to be all right?”
“Sure,” he lied. “Everything’s going to be just fine. Let’s go pick up a mooring and spend the night.”
“I don’t want to stay here. I don’t think I was followed, but we can’t stay in case I was.”
He told her about the storm.
“We can’t stay,” she said. “We can’t.” The edge of panic in her voice.
He hesitated. “All right, then. We’ll go.” He placed her on the broad cockpit coaming, and he kissed her once more, gently on the lips. He felt her smile, and relax into the kiss, and in that moment, he really felt they could make everything work out.
He untied the boat and shoved her away from the dock. He climbed onto the stern, and already she was at the wheel, slipping the idling engine into gear.
They motored off into the gathering storm.
1
JACK MERCHANT was drifting.
At the moment, he didn’t care.
The outboard to his inflatable raft was silent, but nothing else was. Around and above him, machinery roared. He was drifting just inside the Charles River Dam, in what he thought of as sort of an industrial lagoon underneath the construction of the Big Dig.
Around him, everyone was working hard at the fantastically expensive construction under way. Beneath the girders of the overpass, a half dozen bright yellow boxcar-size containers were stacked like building blocks. A battered aluminum powerboat—presumably used by the work crew—looked like a kid’s toy underneath all the construction. Billions of dollars were being poured into an enormous hole in the ground, the most expensive public works project in history. Or so Merchant thought he’d read.
It was early morning, and already the smell of diesel was in the air, the whine of car tires on the bridge. A construction worker was poised on the edge of a beam. He lifted both arms wide when signaling to the crane operator. For a moment, his body almost mirrored the shape of the new cable stay bridge behind him. Merchant raised his Nikon, got it. It was a digital camera, so he took a moment to look at the LCD on the back, cupping his hand around it so he could see the picture without the glare. “Yah,” he whispered.
It was a decent shot, the man being aped by the glittering tower of concrete and cable steel. His arms were a bit low, however.
Merchant had played the role of a photographer, so he knew the details mattered.
But Merchant wasn’t a photographer. Not a real one. Or not yet, anyhow.
If he had been a sniper, he would’ve had a hell of a shot, too.
But Merchant wasn’t a sniper, either. He’d known plenty during his time in the Drug Enforcement Administration, but that was over now.
His raft started to drift around in the wrong direction.
He let it. Didn’t matter really, not if drifting was your goal. He thought awhile about whether “drifting” and “goal” together constituted an oxymoron.
He decided not.
He put a wider lens on his camera and began to take some shots of the locks and pumping station. Two huge brick buildings connected by a glassed-in walkway over the three locks. The pumping station on the left, the State Police on the right. The three locks were closed now, the retractable pedestrian walkway continuing over each of the three massive gates.
He often walked to Boston from his marina over the locks. He’d go through the Paul Revere Park, over the pedestrian bridges into Boston. It wasn’t even a ten-minute walk—assuming the warning lights didn’t start swirling and one of the little bridges retract to let a boat into the lock. If it did, well, these days, Merchant was usually content to check out the boat or read the Plexiglas-encased facts posted along the walkway. By now, he pretty much had them memorized:
Six pump engines that can each displace 630,000 gallons of water per minute … alewife and blueback herring are attracted to the fish ladder by the flow of fresh water and make their way up the Charles to lay their eggs … the main purpose of the locks is to keep the Charles River at eight feet above low tide, and a haven for recreational boaters …
Merchant took another few shots, trying to ignore the fact that his inflatable raft was leaking again.
He looked down and swore softly. Pushing at the sides, feeling that they were soft. His boat was soft and his butt was wet. “Damn,” he said. “Damn, damn.”
He’d patched the inflatable with a bicycle tire repair kit, and he could see from the bubbles along the inside floorboard that the patch was worth about as much as the nickel or so he’d paid for it.
He looked over his shoulder and saw that the construction worker had moved. Merchant raised the camera again.
This time, the composition was even better. The construction worker’s arms were out completely now, waving to the crane operator, who was bringing in another I beam.
Merchant released the shutter, took several quick shots.
He stared at the LCD again, and scrolled through the pictures he’d taken that morning. None of the shots of the dam did it justice. He erased them. Of the construction worker shots, two were just OK, but two were pro quality.
He studied them both and decided one was perfect.
Merchant deleted all but the best shot. Figured someday he’d get around to printing it. But not now.
He had some skill, some talent. But not enough money to waste on a high-quality print that no one wanted to buy.
Definitely not a pro yet.
He knelt in the stern and started the outboard. It was awkward to do with the camera bag strap around his neck, trying to keep the bag balanced on his back. With all the water in the boat, he couldn’t just set it down.
He pulled the rope, and the small motor growled to life. He sounded his air horn, two long blasts and two short, and waited while the lock operator up in the glassed-in walkway opened the gate of the smallest lock. Smallest, maybe, but able to handle a yacht. Several of them, in fact.
Merchant twisted the throttle and his eight-foot dinghy entered. Water was bubbling up around his legs now, and he squirmed a bit, and put the camera bag on his lap.
The high cement walls rose on each side. He puttered slowly toward the second set of gates. Once the water level matched the harbor, the gates would open and he could head out into the harbor.
Big production for such a small craft. He felt a bit silly, sitting in a small waterlogged boat plinking pictures that no one wanted. But the lock operator up there presumably had nothing else to do. The way Merchant saw it, they were giving each other some reason for being.
At last, the gates swung open.
Merchant twisted the throttle and headed to his marina. Not a long journey, it was all of about two hundred yards away. He saw the yard owner out near the sliding doors of his office. Merchant kept looking straight ahead, hoping they could leave it like that.
But the owner came onto the deck outside the office, his hands on his hips. He had a face like a hawk, with a nose to match. Just staring.
Merchant had paid his dock fees every month on time, but the owner seemed to be reading how close it was all getting.
Merchant kept the outboard puttering along, trying to look like a guy who could pay his bills. Shouldn’t have been hard: he’d paid his way all his life without a problem.
But with the water sloshing around the boat bottom, the outboard overdue for a tune-up and coughing up a small cloud of blue smoke, he didn’t look the part. He nodded to the owner, and the owner nodded back and went into the office.
Merchant brought the inflatable up to the dinghy dock and killed the engine. He put the camera bag on the dock and tied the boat off. He was relieved that the marina owner didn’t come out to talk with him.
The lawyer had pretty much wiped out his savings. Even so, Merchant had thought he’d be all right when he came back to Boston. He had taken on some boatyard work just to pay the bills. Mindless stuff, scraping hulls and docks and painting. But it was summer now, and the regular crews had everything under control. And Merchant hadn’t yet figured out a new career. Not even close.
He slung his camera bag over his shoulder and started for his boat, the Lila. She was a forty-foot sloop, bought during his very different life, which had pretty much ended about three months ago. He loved having her, but she consumed money, digested bales of it. Just last month, a minor engine repair had turned out to be a major overhaul. Nevertheless, Merchant wanted to keep her. He wanted that very much.
He thought quite a bit these days about how the boat was a gift from his past. A gift from a different person, almost. He wondered if maybe everyone’s life was like that, full of pieces and tools that could be taken and reshaped for something new.
The photography maybe. There might be something there. He had the equipment, and it seemed like he might actually have some talent for it. Maybe a pro photographer with an emphasis on marine life? Highly competitive field. Every yahoo with a nice camera thought he could do it. And that was all he was at the moment, a yahoo with a nice camera.
He wondered what gift he’d find in Boston.
Charlestown, actually. The marina was a stone’s throw from Boston proper and yet so insulated and clannish it might as well have been a thousand miles away. A place where a lot of very dangerous people had good reason to hate him.
Early in his career with the DEA, Merchant had spent a year undercover in Charlestown chasing down a major cocaine and PCP distribution ring. People were being killed, and yet no one dared speak. With his black hair and weather-burned skin, Merchant could pass for Black Irish. He had thrown himself entirely into his role, making trafficking-weight buys and sells to small-timers until he could bust them and turn them out. That done, he’d send them in wired. On a few occasions, he got in himself. He was able to bring down a half dozen men, who each found time during their defense to meet his eyes across the courtroom, to let him know that he had made an enemy for life.
Back then, he didn’t care. It was worth a promotion and a new assignment in the Virgin Islands.
Now it gave him reason to look over his shoulder.
He couldn’t even explain to himself why he’d decided this would be his new home; maybe it was a perverse sense of entitlement that, even if he had been drummed out of the DEA, at least he could go wherever the hell he wanted to go.
A perverse sense of entitlement.
He liked the sound of that.
He was busy with the steady mental debate about what he should do with himself now that he was flat out of a career when he saw through one of Lila’s cabin portholes something move.
There was someone on his boat.
His overwhelming feeling at the moment was sadness. Even as he started back to get behind another boat on a finger dock. Sadness. Even as he was checking to see if there was other movement, if he was already surrounded.
Sadness that some aspects of the life would never change, no matter how much he wanted them to.
Automatically, he reached into his camera bag for his handgun. It was always there, a nine-millimeter SIG-Sauer.
He came up empty.
This was a change, another gift from his recent past—he no longer carried a gun.
It almost made him laugh.
Almost.
2
MERCHANT WAITED and listened.
He heard a thin, whistling tune from whoever was onboard. The tune sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it. And a few moments after that, he smelled bacon frying.
Merchant boarded his boat, picking up a winch handle as he stepped into the cockpit.
Sarah Ballard was standing in the galley, the fry pan filled with bacon. The galley was a mess of flour and open cupboards. Sarah looked up and saw Merchant standing there, the heavy chrome metal glinting in his hand. She said, “You want bunny ears on your pancakes, or plain?”
“Sarah girl,” he said, letting out his breath. He slipped the handle back into the winch and said, “Bunny ears.”
He stepped down into the cabin. “I thought I had a lock on the cabin. Saving my bacon and such.”
“Oh, shut up and kiss me.”
He did, and they both kept it no more than friendly.
“What’re you doing here?” Merchant said. He liked Sarah. Once upon a time, he had even hoped she’d be more than a friend. But considering what she did for a living, now he felt more than a little wary.
She moved back to the stove. “Cooking you breakfast. Now sit down.”
“The big boss,” he said. “I forgot.”
“Shame on you, then.” She slid the spatula under the bacon and dropped a half dozen strips onto a plate covered with paper towels. She drained most of the fat into an empty coffee can in the sink, and then ladled the pancake batter into the pan. She nodded to the coffeepot. “Left you a cup.”
“Uh-huh.”
Merchant poured the coffee, noting the dribble of egg whites, flour, and cooking oil on the countertop. Her cooking skills hadn’t improved over time, he could see.
“Only way to keep sane living aboard is to keep everything in its place,” he said. “Thought you’d know that by now.”
“Yeah, right.” She waved the spatula at the small pile of tools, sawdust, and wood strips on the floor of the main cabin. “Give me a lecture, Merchant.”
He looked forward. She had a point. He said, “By tomorrow I’ll be done. Got a little rot along the edge of the sole there.”
“Handy these days, are you?”
“Yeah.” He looked at her sharply. “Really, why are you here?”
Sarah flipped a pancake. Gave him a Cheshire cat smile. She said, “You look soaked. Why don’t you change?”
She was probably just under thirty now, Merchant figured. Tall, rich black hair, long legs. Heart-stopping body. More fit than he remembered her. Much more fit, actually. High cheekbones more defined, muscle definition in her arms, the way she held herself.
“I’ll be right back.” He made his way into the forward cabin. He changed into dry shorts and a T-shirt, and then came back to the galley.
He said, “What’ve you been doing to yourself?”
“The bod? I like to work out.”
“I’d say so.”
She looked at him critically. “Wish I could say the same of you.”
He laughed. “Nice.”
“Just look like you could use more sleep, is all. Maybe a shave every once in a while.”
Sarah was wearing jeans, boat shoes, a black T-shirt. The shirt was old and faded. A gift from her brother, Merchant knew. It was emblazoned with a promo for the old cult movie Repo Man. A car floated on her back, a greenish light glowing from the trunk. Joel had hand-painted the letters wo in the middle of the title, changing it to REPO WOMAN.
That was what Sarah was, a repo woman. Only for boats, not cars.
“So are you here to take my boat or what?” Merchant said.
“All right,” she said. “I wish you’d just shut up and let me feed you some breakfast. But yes, I’ve got paper on your boat.”
“Ah, for Christ’s sakes,” Merchant said.
She put her hand up. “Please. I think I can help out.”
“How?”
“I’ll get to that.”
“You’ll get to that?”
“Yep. Meanwhile, I want to know why you haven’t called me. You’ve been here how long?”
Merchant paused. Wanting to know exactly how she intended to help out with towing his boat away and leaving him on the dock.
He was only one payment behind.
He said, “You’re just going to take it?”
God, was he whining? Sounded damned close to his own ears.
“Shush,” she said. “C’mon, why haven’t I heard from you?”
He sighed. “I’ve been here about three months. Believe me, you haven’t missed anything. I’ve been lousy company. You’re just going to take the boat?”
She ignored the last. “Yeah, like I ever looked to you for laughs.” She flipped a pancake onto a plate. “Here, the first one’s always the greasiest. You eat it.” She put another ladle of batter into the pan.
Merchant cut the right ear off the bunny, tasted it, found it was indeed greasy on the outside, but light on the inside. He told Sarah where to find the syrup, and she passed it to him.
She said, “Been what, almost five years?”
“About right.”
She was silent for a moment.
He said, “I should have been in better touch. But I was undercover a lot of that time. You tend to get cut off.” He looked at her hand. No ring. “So, you’re not married.”
She looked at him quickly with something going through her eyes. Hurt, anger, he couldn’t tell. “My, you have been out of touch,” she said.
“What’s that mean?”
“Later.” She flipped a pancake onto her plate and sat down across from him. She looked at him straight on. Dark green eyes with gold flecks. “I missed you.”
Merchant smiled at her. He was surprised that he could under the circumstances. But he did like her. Always had. He said, “How you been standing up with it all?”
“I miss the kid.”
“Yeah, I’d expect.”
“Doesn’t seem to make a hell of a lot of difference, the time.”
Merchant could imagine. He had a younger sister living up in New Hampshire, just divorced her idiot of a husband.
He loved her like crazy, so he could imagine.
He said, “So the first you heard I was here was the bank paper on Lila?”
“No. Last week, I heard. Henriques.”
“You’re kidding. Where’d you see him?”
“The Stateroom.”
Merchant remembered the place. A cinder-block dive right on New Bedford’s waterfront without even a window opened to take in the sea breeze. But surprisingly good seafood and barbecued ribs, frosted mugs of cold beer. A big hangout for fishermen.
“You’re still being seen in all the right places, huh?”
“Not a glamorous life I lead. The sleazebag tried to hit on me. He didn’t get far, and then went on to tell me he’d heard that you were back. Made him happy to tell me you’d done some incredibly screwed up thing. Said I should call you, we were both a couple of misfits.”
“Can’t argue with him there.”
“Uh-huh. He said you should find some landlocked hole, get some dirt, and pull it over your head. Not that I like to agree with Henriques, but I’ve got to wonder why you’d come back to Charlestown. You got more enemies per capita here than any place on earth.”
“I like the view of the Boston skyline.”
“Liar. You make an art form of it.”
“Besides,” Merchant said. “You’re behind the times. I’ve made myself a whole batch of new enemies.”
“That I do believe.”
“Most of them have got southern accents, so it’s easier to pick them out up here.”
“Long’s they talk to you before pulling the trigger.” Sarah hesitated, looking Merchant in the eye.
“Say it.”
“Henriques tells me you panicked down in Miami.”
“He did, huh?”
“Uh-huh. Said he still has friends with the DEA and the story is another agent got killed and it was your fault.”
“That’s true,” Merchant said. “It is my fault he’s dead. But I didn’t panic, it was a decision.”
“So what happened?”
He sighed. He liked Sarah, had once liked her a lot. But now he didn’t know if he was talking to a friend or not. “Look, let’s move this along. I’d like to know if I’m going be sleeping in my boat or on the dock tonight.”
She withdrew slightly. “Well, let’s see. Can you make your payment?”
“I will,” he said. “Got my camera up for sale and I have work lined up.” Lying about both, but still.
“Do you have the cash now?”
“No.”
“See?” she said. “The old ‘Give me some time, lady.”’
“Uh-huh. So I’m a deadbeat. Isn’t a month short notice to repo a boat?”
“Depends on the bank.” Sarah looked around the boat appraisingly. “Even though you’re a slob, I see she’s got potential. Forty feet right? Custom sloop. Looks like hand-laid glass, got some nice joinery work down here. Your loan on her isn’t that big, you’d get at least thirty for her now. She couldn’t have been in this shape when you bought her.”
“She wasn’t. You’re looking at a labor of love. Got her down in St. Thomas. She’d been in charter for ten years.”
“How’d you pick her?”
“More like she chose me. One morning I was at the mouth of the harbor on Jost Van Dyke taking pictures after a hard blow. I saw her washing up. One thing led to another, and I found myself wading out and getting her dinghy off and rowing her anchor out, and winching like crazy while the tide rose.”
“Lot to do for someone else’s boat.”
“That’s what I thought. She was beat long before she ground up on that beach. Hull and decks were sound, everything else pretty much trashed. So the charter company wrote her off as a loss. I told the job she would help my cover, and bought her from the salvage yard myself. They thought I was nuts, but they went for it. I wore a beard and a ponytail back then. I took my gear and posed as a pro photographer with a boat that needed a lot of work who was willing to buy and sell coke to make ends meet.”
“Uh-huh. And now you’re really out of work and my, my the money sure does fly, doesn’t it?”
“So I’ve noticed.”
Sarah said, “Some people look at net worth. I look at dock and boat payments. At any given time I know how many months I’ve got before someone comes with repo paper on me.”
“You still living on your dad’s trawler?”
“Yeah. Someday I’ll get rid of it, but it’s so comfortable.”
“So how many months before you’re on the dock right now?”
“Four. That’s assuming I could sell off the assets of the business at a reasonable price. If I got screwed there, maybe I’m already out of a boat. So the trick is for me to stay in business.”
She looked around his boat again. “You could sell her, pay off your loan, and maybe even make a little profit. So why don’t you?”
“I don’t want to.”
Sarah laughed. “Good enough then. So we have something to talk about.”
He waited.
She said, “You’d make enough to keep you going at least a few months.”
“Let’s have it.”
She said, “You haven’t actually sold your camera, right? I might need you to do a little surveillance.”
“I’ve got a couple of them.”
“Good. Mainly, the job is to help me find a boat and then deliver it back.”
“From where?”
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t need you.”
Merchant thought about the idea of a paid voyage, even on someone else’s boat. He balanced that with putting a lot of time in with Sarah. He liked her, but there were warnings going off in his head about her. He didn’t know why. The way she was pumped up physically, her nails bitten raw. That edgy look about her eyes. She seemed to be burning too fast.
And he had enough trouble to spare. Of course, being broke was part of that.
He said, “So you’d really tow my boat away?”
“Bet your ass. Leave you on the dock, crying for Mama.”
But then she reached out and put her hands on his. Long slim fingers, sun browned and strong. “Truth is, I’d look the other way. Never done that before, but for what you did for me and Joel, I’d look the other way—long enough for you to sail away. I just hope I don’t have to.”
He thought about his own troubles. About the Randalls. And about his neighbors right here in Charlestown.
He balanced that against the past three months. He’d been looking over his shoulder, but nothing had happened. Far as he could tell, no one was even thinking about him these days.
He turned his palms up, took her hands in his, and squeezed. “So what’s the job?”
3
SARAH TOOK A SMALL DAYPACK from the floor, and pulled out a file. “Here she is, the Fresh Air. A lot like yours, a custom forty-foot sloop. Owners overdue on payments one month now.”
Merchant already felt sorry for the deadbeats.
She laid out an eight-by-ten photo of a single-masted sailboat at dock. A couple was posed in front of it. They looked to be in their early thirties, the man with his arm draped around the woman’s shoulders. He was tall and rangy. Craggy features, good smile. Maybe a little geeky. She was a petite woman with short blond hair and nice features. He had to stoop to put his arm around her, but didn’t look like he minded. Both of them were sunburned.
“Nice looking couple.”
“A lot of deadbeats are.”
Merchant looked past them at the boat. “Looks fast.”
“If you say so,” Sarah said. “I prefer my boats with a couple of big engines and a Jacuzzi.”
“What’s the deal?”
“Got the paper on this from MassBank a week back. The owners, Julie and Paul Baylor. Been making all my calls, doing my usual bit, and I’m getting nowhere. Here’s a twist. MassBank is also Paul Baylor’s employer. This whole thing is an embarrassment to them. They want Paul Baylor back because he’s got some serious explaining to do.”
“You know him?”
“No. He was a VP. Not the sort of guy I’d ever run into.”
“No idea where the boat is?”
“Turned up nothing around here. Like I said, I did my usual bit, the credit reports, and I’ve been calling marinas from the Boaters Almanac. It’s going to take some time. So far, I’ve got diddly.”
“So you think the Baylors are running.”
“Sure looks that way. They took off about a month and a half ago. Supposed to be a two-week vacation up in Maine. Two weeks comes and goes, nobody’s heard from them. After a couple of days, both their employers get nervous, make some calls. No sign of them. Bank gets worried, calls the Coast Guard. They start checking around for family. Turns out she’s got a sister in Philadelphia. He’s got nobody. Her sister’s here in Boston now, has been coming up a couple days a week since they were reported missing. I’m supposed to meet with her this evening. Any case, when the company called her last month, she flew up to Bar Harbor right away. She poked around a couple days, tried to stir up the cops. She couldn’t find any sign of the Baylors.”
“Maine’s a rocky coast. Maybe they ran into more trouble than not paying their bills.”
“Maybe. But no wreckage, no report of a Mayday, nothing. Coast Guard and Maine State Police looked into it, and in their opinion, these folks took off on their own.”
“Based on what?”
“Couple of things. The lack of a Mayday. Decent weather while they were out. Some pretty good winds from a storm further down the coast, but it was basically quite decent from Boston up through Maine.”
“Doesn’t mean a thing. A good gust at the wrong time can do a lot of damage.”
“True. But how about an ATM hit on their account from Manhattan?” Sarah tapped the manila envelope.
“Ah.”
“Yeah. Strange way to Maine, isn’t it?”
“Got a picture?”
“Sure. The ATM is on the same network as MassBank, so they had no trouble getting hold of it.” She took out another photo. This one was murky, blown up from an ATM camera. There was a black teenage boy looking over his shoulder, most likely purposely hiding his face. Other than the Rangers jacket he was wearing, there was nothing distinguishing about him.
“How’d he get the code?”
“He didn’t. Tried a bunch of wrong ones, didn’t get anything. The attempted transaction was recorded.”
“Where was this taken?”
“Around the hundredth block on Broadway. Also far from the lobster tails of Maine.”
“Any credit card charges?”
“Yep. Shelly—he’s my contact at MassBank—he tells me there are a couple of restaurant bills. Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Portland, Maine. Which makes sense—these were supposed to be stops along the way up to Bar Harbor. Julie Baylor told her coworkers they were going to Acadia. She said she was looking forward to renting bikes and making their way to the top of Cadillac Mountain for the sunrise.”
“How much cash did they take?”
“You ask the right questions, Jack. They withdrew just under twenty thousand dollars. Nine-eight the day before they left, and nine-seven the day they left.”
“Jesus. That’s a lot of mad money for a couple weeks in Maine. How about the rest of their accounts?”
“Just under a hundred thousand transferred to a Cayman account the day before they left.”
“Under,” Merchant repeated. “They’re paying attention to the drug warning flags.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Was that everything?”
“Hardly. That left about six hundred thousand in assets. Stocks, mutual funds, bonds, 401k.”
“Lot to leave behind.”
“True. But they left about a million two in debt on their home and boat.”
“Not exactly responsible banker behavior.”
“People like the Baylors are usually the kind who keep me in business,” Sarah said. “Speaking of numbers, what do you say to three hundred and fifty a day, plus expenses? Twenty-five percent of what I make when we bring her back, and the sale goes through. Total, you’d be walking away with somewhere around three to four thousand for going sailing, and the pleasure of my company. I’ll advance you enough right now to cover your current boat payment and your dock fees. Sound fair?”
“Sounds like a gift from heaven. Why?”
Sarah shrugged. “Trying to help you out here.”
“And what else?”
Merchant waited.
The silence lengthened between them, and finally Sarah gave in. “OK. Truth is, I’m getting my ass kicked. Normally, the banks don’t get freaked about a repo. It’s business as usual. I find the boat, bring it back, recondition it, and sell it. I take my cut every step of the way, and the bank takes the balance. They go after the owner for the difference.”
“And this case?”
“Being it’s a senior bank employee, my contact at MassBank, Shelly, tells me there’s a lot of heat. The company president has assigned a VP over him to get it done. And Shelly’s sweating it, so he’s making me sweat it. I got competition now …”
“No kidding?”
“Couple of new ones in it now, guy working out of Narragansett Bay and someone in Connecticut. All the time my dad had the business and up until two years ago, there were fifteen East Coast banks on our client list. Now it’s down to eight. And MassBank is worth four of them put together. I’ve got to find this boat and I’m getting the attitude that they can’t leave this job to a girl.”
“So you need a token guy.”
“No, I need the real deal,” she said. “A guy who can help me find the boat. A guy who can help me sail it back. Most of all, a guy I can trust.”
“OK,” Merchant said.
“A guy who can understand that I’ve got to draw the line between business and pleasure. You’d be my employee. And friend, I hope. But nothing more.”
“Ah, shucks,” he said. “I thought this was a package deal.”
“People have,” she said, and didn’t smile.
The hurt, the anger right there. Merchant said, “OK, Sarah. Just playing with you.”
She nodded. “I know. It’s just … well, just so we understand each other.”
They sat there, trying to get past the awkwardness.
Then Sarah nodded toward the camera bag. “Shelly says Radoccia is hot on surveillance. And I promised I could bring someone who could do that.”
“Who’s Radoccia?”
“The VP leaning over Shelly’s desk saying ‘Can’t you get anybody to find this frigging boat?’”
“Why the photos? Why don’t you just slap the chains on the boat and let the courts go after the people?”
“Good question. But that’s up for him to explain.”
“And when’s he supposed to do that?”
Sarah looked at her watch. “About two hours from now.”
Merchant thought about it, looked at her directly, and said, “What else?”
He was glad to see she didn’t dodge it for a second. Whatever it was, he could feel it on her. Something she wasn’t telling. Or hadn’t said yet.
“You know, it’s been a long time since we saw each other,” she said. “It can be a lifetime, everything that can happen in five years. I do have something to tell you, and if you don’t want to work with me after that, I’ll understand. I truly will.”
“I’m listening,” Merchant said, “But I know you pretty well. The pressure on you, the way you handled it. I know the kind of person you are.”
“No.” She pushed her plate away. Crossed her arms. Protecting herself.
She said, “You knew the kind of person I was.”
4
SARAH HAD MET MERCHANT those five years ago under the worst possible circumstances. And the first time she saw him, he didn’t even register. He was just another man in a suit. Some sort of cop. DEA, it would turn out, but, again, he didn’t really register. Just another plainclothes cop among the uniformed cops, homicide cops, and the crime scene techs.
Lou Grasso, a New Bedford cop she knew, had picked her up at the office. He’d stood in the doorway, fumbling with his hat. The light from the marina behind him. “It’s bad, Sarah. It’s Joel. Come with me.”
He told her on the front stoop all that really mattered: that Joel was dead.
Grasso drove her over to the warehouse. She walked through the big hangar doors shaking inside. All she really saw was Joel, her little brother, face down on the concrete. There were five other men, hands bound behind their backs with wire, clothesline around their necks.
But Joel was all she saw.
Her nineteen-year-old little brother.
With Joel gone, that was it for her family. Mom dead for years. Dad gone seven months before. Prostate cancer.
“Oh, Joel,” Sarah said. She knelt down to stroke his hair, and George Henriques yelled at her to get away from him, that she was in the middle of a crime scene.
Go fuck yourself, she said, and didn’t look up. George Henriques she knew. A New Bedford local, he’d been a senior when she was a freshman in high school. Jorge Henriques, then. It was big news when years passed and he was revealed to have been not only the worst head in high school but a narc. And now he was back in town with the DEA, his hair short, his anglicized first name, and a reputation for letting people know the depths he’d seen. Her mind had latched on to Henriques at the time, wanting to let loose on him.
But what she was feeling was too big.
The tears blurred her eyes, and maybe she noticed it then or maybe she just remembered it later, but when Henriques started to tell her again to take her hands off her brother, a quiet voice said, “Shut up, George.”
That was Merchant.
Two days later, she went to the New Bedford branch of the DEA, and that was the first time she actually met Merchant. He was the quiet guy in the room who listened as Henriques told her Joel was tied in to the smuggling.
“Bullshit,” she said.
“It’d be easier to see him as a vic,” Henriques said. A phony sympathy on his face, the curls of his black hair combed straight and frozen with some kind of gel. A Portuguese man trying to look like Ken of Ken and Barbie fame.
He said, “From our perspective, Ms. Ballard, it looks like your brother was involved.”
She’d tried to keep it together then. Ms. Ballard, as if he didn’t know her, hadn’t tried to hit on her all through high school. She said, “No, George. Joel wasn’t like that. He’s … he was sort of an innocent. Besides, we had paper on the Melissa.”
“Did you send him out to repo a fishing boat with crew by himself?”
She hesitated, but shook her head.
“OK, was he the kind of guy to just go out on his own and try it without your say-so?”
Again, she had to shake her head. Joel did very little without her direction. It was the way he was; worse, the way she was.
Henriques lifted his shoulders slightly. “Then, as far as I can see, he looks like he tried to cut into some drug money and got it around the neck. Literally.”
He actually smiled for a moment, his little joke, and then the phony professional mask was back up.
Sarah tried hard, very hard to hold herself back. Henriques hadn’t been the biggest or toughest kid at school, but if you were a girl or smaller than he was you learned to avoid being alone around him. Someone you didn’t turn your back on, ever.
“Ms. Ballard …”
“You know my name.”
He smiled quickly. “Yes. Well, Sarah …” he said. Looking her in the eye. Hitting on her even then, for Christ’s sakes. “Just what would you like me to do?”
“Do your job,” she said. “That’s all I’m asking.”
Henriques pulled back a bit. Knowing a slammed door when he heard it.
“Let me ask you this: If Joel was such an innocent, then why did you have him doing repo work? Kind of sleazebags you run into, it was only a matter of time before a guy like that gets caught in it. You must’ve known that.”
That took her breath away.
“George,” she said, her voice rising. “Just do your damn job. If you do that, you’ll find Joel wasn’t involved … not the way you’re saying, anyhow.”
He lifted his eyebrow, and then spoke, as much for Merchant’s benefit as for hers. “We’ll do our investigation despite your hysteria.”
“I’m not hysterical.”
“Whatever.”
“And you’ll let me know what you find out?”
“Of course we will. But I wouldn’t go off and start a scholarship fund in Joel’s name just yet.”
It took just about everything Sarah had not to crack Henriques across the face.
So she looked at Merchant. He had seemed to be listening the entire time, but was offering nothing. She tried to think of something that could make him see Joel the way she had seen him. Joel had been sweet, he’d been a decent kid. But she also knew that he wasn’t that smart, that he was easily impressionable, that he wanted money to buy a red five-year-old Camaro IROC-Z. She didn’t know what he was doing with the crew of the Melissa. He usually did what she told him. She ran the business, she was the boss. That was the way it had always been between the two of them.
Tears tried to fill her eyes, but she stopped them by sheer force of will. She said to Merchant, “And what are you going to do about it?” Her voice sounded harsh to her own ears, and that was not what she wanted. What she wanted to say was that Joel was her brother, her kid brother, and she desperately wanted to believe that he wasn’t involved, and couldn’t Merchant just be a human being and help her?
But she didn’t know how to ask this stranger. Not in front of Henriques, anyhow.
Merchant said, “I’m going to look into it and let you know.”
She stared at him, realizing that he meant it, and that maybe she had some help after all. Then the tears came. Without a word, she turned for the door so Henriques couldn’t see them.
As she went out, she heard Henriques say, “She always was a stuck-up bitch.”
She would like to think she heard Merchant say, “Shut up, George,” but she couldn’t be sure that she had.
Almost a week passed before Merchant came to her boat.
She’d just woken up. She could hear the soft clink of metal on metal, and she knew Owen was in the main cabin lifting weights. The hatches were all open, and the sea breeze was fresh in the boat. He’d put coffee on.
Momentarily, it was all very pleasant, until it hit her fresh that Joel was gone, and the pain took a swipe at her insides with sharp claws and she curled onto herself.
She heard Owen talking to someone and saying, “Yeah, come on in.”
Owen came back to the aft cabin. “DEA. Get yourself together, babe.”
“Henriques?” she said.
“No. The other one.”
She slumped back and stared at the cabin roof. Now that he was here, she didn’t want to see him. What if he had proof that Joel was in it up to his ears? What was she going to tell herself after that?
Owen drew a T-shirt on. His chest was matted with sweat, and he looked pumped up from the weights. He laid his hand on her cheek. “C’mon, babe. Let’s hear what he has to say. I’ll be right with you.”
He was so good at that. Making her feel loved and supported.
And why not? He was a skillful man.
Merchant had looked skinny next to Owen. Not that he was, exactly. He had what Sarah had always considered a farmer’s build: angular, not exactly bulging with muscles but strong looking anyhow. Big hands. He was dressed in jeans himself, cotton shirt with rolled back sleeves, baseball cap. He looked different than he had in the office, not just the clothes.
“Hey,” she said. Her voice was shaky. “You’ve got some news for me?”
“Are you all right, Sarah?” he said.
“Just took something a while back.”
“Valium,” Owen said. “She was having trouble sleeping so I gave her a Valium around three o’clock.”
“OK,” Merchant said. “I just wanted to talk with her.”
Owen had taken a protective position between her and Merchant. “Go ahead,” he said.
Merchant smiled. “I’m sorry, I need to speak privately with Ms. Ballard.”
“No, you don’t,” Owen said. “We’re together.”
Owen was an ex-Marine, and back then she had not yet begun to resent what he called his natural leadership abilities. Especially since he seemed to listen to her.
So, at the time, she fully expected Merchant to acquiesce, as everyone did with Owen. It was simply easier.
Merchant was still smiling. It wasn’t an apologetic smile. He took out a business card, reached past Owen, and handed it to her. “When you’re ready.”
He turned to leave.
“Oh, for Christ’s sakes,” Owen said, and started after him.
Sarah grabbed his arm. “Please. Honey, go to the office and open up, all right?” Owen had been one of her dad’s freelance skippers for years, and since her father passed away, he’d been there for her every step of the way.
“I’m staying with you,” he said.
“That’s OK, really.”
He hesitated and then touched her check gently. “If that’s what you need.” Just like turning on the sunshine.
Joel had thought the world of him. Big brother he’d never had, all that crap.
Owen looked over at Merchant. “She’ll tell me the whole deal, anyhow.”
“That’s her decision.”
“Simple enough,” Owen said. And then he left.
If only it could’ve been that easy later.
Merchant and Sarah went up on deck and stood blinking in the sun. “So. What’s the big secret?”
“I’m going to be asking you for some help, and I suspect he’s the type of guy who would say no for you.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But I tend to do what I say.”
“Good. Look, I found out about your brother. He was being played. They were using him to buy a week or two.”
“So it had to do with the repo?”
“The repo and the drugs. The captain’s wife told me that he found out Joel wanted to own a boat. Wanted to be a fisherman, right?”
A little energy sparked inside her. Relief, but anger, too. “Like he didn’t learn enough repossessing those boats, what a crapshoot it is.”
“Well, they needed the boat. They’d been approached by the Colombians about a doing a pickup, and were desperate enough to take it. They were almost four months overdue on their payments. So they figured if they could stall your repo even a week, they could make their pickup. Then they’d have enough to catch up. She said her husband hated doing it, figured this was going to be a one-time deal. She said her husband was going to invite Joel on for a day, talk to him about getting a share on the boat out of sweat equity. That he’d give him a berth, he could work his way up—assuming he could arrange it so that you held off on the repo a few weeks. I guess the captain gave him a line about this catch of tuna they’d been finding and he was sure he’d make enough in the next haul to put off the bank another few months. In any case, Joel was on the boat that night to discuss it. And from what we hear, they were all escorted off the boat into a white van, and taken to the warehouse.”
“So he didn’t know about the drugs?” Sarah needed to hear the words.
“The captain’s wife says no.”
“Why were they killed?”
“What I hear is that her husband got to drinking and talked too much in a bar. I guess the Colombians decided to make an example.”
Sarah covered her face with her hands.