Читать книгу Andrew Gross 3-Book Thriller Collection 1: The Dark Tide, Don’t Look Twice, Relentless - Andrew Gross, Andrew Gross - Страница 46

Pappy Raymond was holding back. Why else would he push Hauck away so completely? Hauck also knew the old guy would be a tough one to crack.

He went back to the Harbor Inn hotel overlooking Pensacola Bay, where he was staying, stopped in the gift shop to buy a T-shirt for Jess that said PENSACOLA ROCKS, then fished out a Seminole beer from the minibar and threw himself onto the bed, turning on CNN.

Something had happened. An explosion at an oil refinery in Lagos, Nigeria. Over a hundred people killed. It had spiked the price of oil all day.

He reached over and fished out the number of AJ Raymond’s brother, Pete, who had come up to Greenwich after the accident to take possession of his things.

Hauck called him. Pete said he would meet him at a bar after his shift the next day.

The Bow Line was down near the port, where Pete, who had come out of the Coast Guard two years before, was a harbor pilot like his father.

“It was like something just turned off in Pop,” Pete said, drawing from a bottle of Bud. “AJ was killed. No one ever called my dad a teddy bear, but one day he went to work, wanting to do everything he could about what happened. The next day it was like it was all in the past. Off-limits to even bring it up. He never shared what he was feeling.”

“You think part of it’s guilt?”

“Guilt?”

Hauck took a swig of beer. “I’ve interviewed my share of people, Pete. I think he’s holding something back.”

“About AJ?” Pete shrugged, pushed back his hair under a Jacksonville Jaguars cap. “Something was going on…. People who he talked to tell me he had this thing—this cover-up he’d stumbled into. Some ships he thought were falsifying their cargo. Like some big national-security thing. He was all worked up.

“Then the thing with AJ happened. And that was it. It was over for him.” He snapped his finger. “Lights out. Whatever it was, I never heard squat about it ever again. It was as if the whole thing just got buried the next day.”

“I don’t mean to push it,” Hauck said, tilting his beer. “All I want to do is find your brother’s killer, which is precisely what I believe it was. Anyone you know who can tell me any more on this?”

Pete thought a moment. “I could give you a few names. His old pals. I’m not sure what makes you think it’s all related, though.”

Hauck tossed a couple of bills on the counter. “That would be a big help.”

“Thirty years …” Pete got up and drained the last of his beer. “Pop was like a god down there in the harbor. There was nothing went on he didn’t know about or hadn’t done. Now look at him. He was always a hard man, but I would never call him bitter. He took it rough, what happened to my brother. Rougher than I would expect. Given that they never saw eye to eye for a goddamned second while AJ was alive.”

The following day Hauck made the rounds at the docks. A couple of large freighters had come in early that morning. Huge unloading trestles and hydraulic lifts were hissing, off-loading massive containers.

He found Mack Tyler, a sunburned, broad-chested tug’s mate at the pilots’ station. He had just come in from a launch.

Tyler was a bit guarded at first. People protected their own down there, and here was this cop from up north asking all kinds of questions. It took a little finesse for Hauck to get him to open up.

“I remember I was out with him one day,” Tyler said. He leaned against a retaining wall and lit up a cigarette. “He was about to board some oil tanker we were bringing in. Pappy was always going on about these ships he’d seen before, making false declarations. How they were riding so high in the water, no way they could possibly be full, like their papers said. I think he even snuck down into the holds of one once.

“Anyway”—Tyler blew out smoke—“this one time we had pulled up alongside and the gangway was lowered to us, and Pappy was getting ready to go aboard. And he gets this cellphone call. Five in the fucking A.M. He takes it, and all of a sudden his legs just give out and his face gets all pale and pasty—it was like he was having some kind of heart attack. We called in another launch. I had to bring the old man in. He wouldn’t take any medical attention. Just a panic attack, he claimed. Why, he wouldn’t say. Panic attack, my ass.”

“You remember when that was?” asked Hauck.

“Sure, I remember.” The big sailor exhaled another plume of smoke. “It wasn’t too long after the death of his boy up there.”

Later, Hauck met with Ray Dubose, one of the other harbor pilots, at a coffee stand near the navy yard.

“It was getting crazy,” said Dubose, a big man with curly gray hair, scratching the bald spot on his head. “Pappy was going around making all kinds of claims that some oil company was falsifying its cargo. About how these ships were riding so high in the water. How he’d seen them before. The same company. Same logo—some kind of a whale or shark, maybe. Can’t recall.”

“What happened then?”

“The harbormaster told him to back off.” Dubose took a sip of coffee. “That’s what happened! That this was one for customs, not us. ‘We just pull ’em in, Pappy.’ He’d pass it along. But Pappy, God bless, he just kept on pushing. Raised a big stink with the customs people. Tried to contact some business reporter he knew from the bar, like it was some big national-security story he was uncovering and Pappy was Bruce Willis or someone.”

“Go on.”

Dubose shrugged. “Everyone kept telling him just to back off, that’s all. But Pappy was never one to listen. Stubborn old fool. You know the type? Came out of the womb that way. I miss the son of a bitch, though. Pretty soon after his boy died up there, he packed it in with his thirty years and called it quits. Took it hard.

“Funny thing, though …” Dubose crumpled his cup and tossed it into a trash bin against a wall. “After that happened, I never heard another peep out of him about those stupid tankers again.”

Hauck thanked him and drove back to the hotel. For the rest of the afternoon, he sat around on the small balcony overlooking the beautiful Gulf blue of Pensacola Bay.

The old man was hiding something. Hauck felt it for sure. He’d seen that haunted face a hundred times before. There’s nothing you can do that’s gonna help me now….

It might only be guilt, that he had pushed his youngest son away. And what happened afterward.

Or it could be more. That the hit-and-run up north hadn’t been so accidental after all. That that was why they were unable to ever find anything resembling the SUV the witnesses had described. Why no one else ever saw it. Maybe someone had deliberately killed Pappy Raymond’s son.

And Hauck felt sure those tankers were connected.

He nursed a beer. He thought about placing a call to Karen to see what she had found.

But he kept coming back to the hardened look in the old sailor’s eyes.