Читать книгу Drago #3 - Art Spinella - Страница 6

One thing led to another and we never got to Forte’s office. Three uneventful days passed. Cycles of light rain came and went. Overflowing gutters had to be cleared. A sump pump in the toy shed digested a bearing and needed to be replaced. The radiator in the MG had been leaking for a few months and this was as good a time as any to pull and repair it.

Saturday afternoon. The wood stove crackled, radiating waves of heat into the den which had once been a third bedroom vacated by my second oldest son when he decided to take a swing at working in Portland. Sal was nestled down deep in a lounge chair, me in another. Staring at the fire through the glass window in the stove door.

Our respective side tables were littered with Dos Equis bottles, candy bar wrappers and those lunch-box sized bags of Doritos. Even though it was barely 3 p.m., a sudden storm darkened the sky to pewter, pelting the house with ice pebbles and shoving the outside temperature down to 40 degrees.

Sal yawned, eyes half closed, “Housing market is gonna come back this year.”

“Doubt it. Lots of existing homes still in inventory.”

Sal nodded, “Yeah, but many are unsellable. Rodent and bug infestations. Stripped of anything that can be resold as scrap.”

“Scrap prices are coming back.”

“Southeast Asia and China are gobbling up natural resources…”

“Putting price pressure on scrap,” I finished.

“Yup.”

“Do you think we really saw a ghost ship?”

“Nick, I was there. You were there. We have photos. Of course we did.”

“Why two, though? I mean, the legend says there was only one. The Pismo Bay.”

“But we couldn’t see the names on either of ours.”

“And they looked different.”

Sal scratched his beard, scrunched down further in his lounge. “One was like we were looking at it through a piece of gauze. The other looked like it was made of water vapor or smoke. Why would they be different?”

My cell phone buzzed.

“Drago.”

“Hey Nick. Forte. What are you guys up to?”

“Not much.”

“Mind if I join you?”

“Beer’s in the fridge. Bring a pizza.”

“Be there in half an hour.”

I flipped the cell phone closed. “Forte’s coming over.”

“Think he misses us.”

“That’s because we’re loveable.”

“Loveable.”

“Non-threatening.”

“Not a threatening bone in our bodies.”

“Just a pair of oversized teddy bears.”

“You calling me fat?” Sal growled.

“I would never entertain the thought.”

“I’m just big boned.”

“Biggest bones I’ve ever known.”

“Screw you, Drago.”

I chuckled. “Back to the ghost ships. What should we do about them?”

Sal moved his eyeballs in my direction. His head stayed straight ahead. “Call Ghostbusters?”

“Funny. Now really. What do we do? We’ve heard these rumors since we were in high school. Maybe before. Do we just say we’ve seen them, or it, and go happily on our way or do we try to capture one or both?”

“Capture a ghost ship.”

“Well, maybe not capture. Maybe get close enough to touch it. Or something. Not sure.”

“Nick, did you see the way that Captain looked at us?”

“The one on the second sternwheeler, sure. Scary dude.”

“No eyeballs, Nick. No freakin’ eyeballs. Why would you want to touch that guy?”

Good question. No answer.

I tipped my head back and let the first thought that came to me come out of my mouth. “How many fuel filters are there in a Corvette?”

“What?”

“You heard me. How many?”

Sal mulled it over. “Two.”

“One.”

“No, Nick. Two. Between the fuel tank and the fuel pump and another between the fuel pump and the fuel injection.”

“You’re wrong. One. Fuel tank and pump.”

I could hear the front door open and smell the pizza. Forte walked into the den.

“Gents.” He dropped the pizza box on the foot stool along with a roll of paper towels. He ambled out of the room, returned a minute later with three Dos Equis, tops already twisted off and passed one to me and Sal.

Pulling up a third lounge chair, he fell into it as if he had just finished a ten-mile foot race.

“Chief, settle a bet,” I said.

“There was no bet,” Sal responded.

“How many fuel filters in a Corvette?”

Forte looked at both of us, grabbed a piece of pizza, took a fist-sized bite, groaned.

“Who the hell gives a rat’s patute?”

“He has a point,” Sal said through bites of pizza.

We sat in silence for the next few minutes devouring the first slices and starting on seconds. I went to my desk and returned with the two photos of the ghost ships, dropping them in Forte’s lap before retaking my chair.

Forte looked at the two pictures. “Why didn’t you clean the camera lens first? What are these?”

“Ghost paddle wheelers.”

“Oh, Christ, are we gonna go through that again?” Thumbing the prints, “Where? I see two white blurs.” He squinted and held the photos at arm’s length, “Okay, maybe the one in front could be – and I stress could be – a boat of some sort. The blob in back looks like a cotton ball someone sneezed on.”

He passed the photos back to me.

“Oh, wait!” he said, making a grab for his wallet. “I think I have a picture of a UFO mother ship somewhere in my billfold! Give me a sec!”

“Funny.”

He leaned back in his chair and laughed. “Sorry, guys, but this is the reason I had to come over. I needed a break from reality.”

I guess my face telegraphed what I was thinking.

“You’re serious, aren’t you Nick?”

“As the plague.”

“You really think you and Sal saw a couple of ghost ships.”

“Really do,” Sal answered.

Forte ran a hand through his sandy going gray hair. “Okay, I’ll make a deal. I’ll help you with the ghost paddle wheelers and you help me with the abandoned yacht at the boat basin.”

“What kind of help?”

“It’s been three days and no one has returned to the Hatteras. No one in town has run across a tourist or visitor who could be the boat’s owner. If someone looks new to town, we’ve got the Chamber of Commerce and merchants putting on their Happy to See Ya face and asking how they like our little city and if they’re enjoying their stay. Then we’re asking flat out if they are the owners of the yacht. Real friendly like.”

“And?” Sal asked, licking tomato sauce off his fingers looking deep into the soul of another pepperoni slice.

“Nada. No one fesses up to being the boat’s owner.”

“Small town, winter, can’t be that many unfamiliar faces,” I said. “Now, for the big question, why did the name Vector Atlas Partners, LLC bother you so much?”

Forte’s face went pale, then his eyes squinted. “How’d you know it bothered me?”

“Easy deduction. From the time you called us til the time we found the weapons only one new fact came to light. The name of the boat’s owner. Your demeanor went from its usual perky, self-assured, in-charge cop self to downright edgy. Snarly, almost. And you suddenly wanted to call in the Feds. Not like you, Chief. I repeat, why did Vector Atlas Partners, LLC bother you?”

Sal snorted. “Does anything get past you, Nick?”

I just looked at the Chief whose face slumped like a 10-year-old kid whose father just caught him smoking a nickel cigar behind the barn. He straightened up in his chair, took a long pull of Dos Equis and sighed.

“If they’re who I think they could be, they are very bad hombres.” He cleared his throat. “I was on a homicide task force for 19 months before leaving LAPD. Someone was killing off the entire membership of small street gangs. Not just the thugs in the gangs but mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, nephews, nieces, grandparents, cousins three times removed. In all, a dozen start-up gangs and all their relatives were wiped from the streets without a trace.”

“Why’d we never hear about it?” Sal asked.

“The powers that be in Los Angeles had enough trouble with the homicide rate climbing. But this was multiple times bigger. It had public panic written all over it. Everyone from the mayor to the police chief to the precinct commanders and even the cops on the street knew that if someone broke the word that scores of gangsters and their families were being slaughtered there’d be hell to pay and everyone’s head would roll.

“So 50 of us were put on a task force to find who was behind the killings. We spent millions of dollars on snitches, thousands upon thousands of man hours undercover, turned over every last rock in L.A. County and came up with almost nothing.”

“Except…”

“Except three initials. VAP. We went through every data base in the country looking for people, places and businesses with those initials. Ventura Auto Parts. Venezuela Audio Products, Valhalla Actors Playhouse. The list was endless. And the number of people with these initials was staggering.”

Sal asked, “Did Vector Atlas Partners make the hit parade?”

“Not that I recall, quite honestly. But hearing the name yesterday clicked a part of my brain back to the VAP initials. Let’s just say that during my task force days I’d seen the result of this pogrom. Dead children, as young as infants. Bludgeoned grandmothers. Assassinated adults who were killed holding hands. We found mass graves in Nevada, California and even in Baja.”

“And it all went unreported?” I was incredulous. How could it be so well hidden? There’s always a leak to a friendly journalist.

“Like I said, no one wanted his head on the chopping block. And, quite honestly, these guys were so vicious, no one wanted their families put in danger. Believe me, these were thugs with no heart or soul. As for reporters, a couple sniffed around, but the wall of silence was built of fear. Our fear.”

Beads of sweat trickled down Forte’s forehead.

“And then it all stopped. The streets of L.A. returned to their jolly old selves. The task force eventually disbanded, but each of us was scarred for life. Many of my friends who were part of the investigation took early retirement and moved off to Idaho or Montana or some desert island. I snapped up the job here.”

The room went quiet except for the popping of burning logs in the wood stove. “Crackling like the laughter of devils,” someone once wrote.

I eventually broke the silence. “Chief, do you still have contacts who were on the task force? Could you get the list of VAP names and see if Vector is on it?”

“Tried that yesterday. Even my old boss is gone. And the files are so classified that only God could get to them.”

Sal cleared his throat. “I know God. Let me try.”

________________________________________________

Over the next 24 hours Sal burned through a couple dozen government contacts and called in as many favors, finally being told he would be hearing something “soon.”

The storm passed, the temperature rose into the 50s under slate skies. Sal and I rode the Harleys up to Lakeside, north of Coos Bay, and had lunch at the 8^th Street Grille.

We walked down to the water’s edge and parked on the boat ramp dock taking in the peace and quiet Tenmile Lake is known for. It’s nestled in the hillocks and once had the largest inland salmon fleet in Oregon.

Long ago, in the 1920s and ‘30s, it was a popular place for Hollywood stars and starlets to have vacation homes. Plenty big for power boats, skiing, pontoon-boat parties and the annual drag-boat races.

Until the late 1990s, most of the cabins around the lake were just that – cabins. Some were dry without running water. Others were “uptown” and actually had electricity and septic systems.

In the early 2000s, new homes were constructed. Large, multiple stories. As close to mansions as anything on the southern Oregon coast. In the summer, jet boats and cruisers were tied up to docks or filled the boat houses. Watercraft buzzed down each of the lake’s broad, deep arms.

Cookie and I have a place on Shutters Arm. Boat access only and we like it that way. Two big bedrooms and a supersized living room-kitchen behind floor to ceiling A-frame windows.

Fourth of July fireworks are a family gathering time. We all pile onto the pontoon boat and anchor in the lake near the county boat docks. A couple hundred boats do the same, laughter, the sound of beer cans being popped, friendly jibes from boat to boat. And fireworks. Lots of them. And loud because of the hills, sounding like Civil War cannon fire echoing across Shenandoah.

Sal and I rode back to Willow Weep at the tail end of the day as storm clouds gathered to the north and set up for an all-out assault on the coast.

Storm or not, we had planned for our own assault, this time on the ghost paddle wheelers.

I pulled my 17-foot Smokercraft out of the toy shed and hitched it to the back of the Ford pickup. (You don’t live in this part of Oregon without at least one pickup in the family.) Sal and I buzzed down to Rocky Point and launched the aluminum boat then tied it to the dock. I’d put all of the clear vinyl curtains up and had an ice chest filled with appropriate snacks and beer. Sal brought his Nikon SLR digital camera with a dozen different lens filters.

A small propane space heater bungee’d to a cleat kept us comfortable.

We waited.

Darkness came at a little after 5 p.m. The storm came at 5:15 and blasted us with a deluge of rain, turning the river into a cauldron. The Smokercraft rocked, and rocked some more, listing hard to port then hard to starboard. Tugging the tie-up lines almost to the breaking point.

Sal and I had done this before. Many times, in fact, ever since being teenagers. For no real reason other than the rush of a roller coaster ride without buying a ticket.

The boat has high gunnels so the interior remained dry. But rain poured off of the canvas in sheets making it impossible to see out.

By 7:30, the storm passed and all that was left were winds from the north at 30 miles per hour. They howled through the tall timber and churned the river white, letting us know we weren’t welcome. Threatening to beat us to a pulp and demanding we return to our landlubbing homes.

By 10:30 the winds died, but the river continued to throw up steep chop. The sky turned blue-black from its gun-metal gray and stars began speckling the night in ones and twos and then by the bucket load.

“That was interesting,” Sal said, popping the top of a Bud Light. We never took good beer on these little adventures, afraid the bottles could be washed overboard which would be a horrible waste of first-class hops and grains.

“Indeed.”

We almost missed the blip with the sudden appearance of the ghost paddle wheeler. The one we had seen on the first day and the forward ship on our second viewing.

It slowly passed, about mid-channel, the gauzy visage churning water with its 15 or 16 foot stern-mounted paddle. No one was aboard, but the crates, barrels and other freight appeared to be the same we saw previously.

I jumped into the pilot seat, turned the key and the 50 horsepower Yamaha caught with a healthy growl. Sal unzipped the canvas and untied the stern line while I leaned out of the side curtain and did the same with the bow.

The sternwheeler had moved a few hundred yards down river toward Bandon when we finally pulled away from the dock.

The chop slammed the hull of the Smokercraft forcing me to keep the throttle no more than a third open. The bow dipped into the river and tossed up mini-mountains of water. Cold, winter water.

But we slowly gained on the ghost ship.

The paddle wheeler sparkled in the post-storm mist. Shards of reflection deflecting the edges of the ship into smears of silver. At about a hundred yards to its stern, we could see the wake, a trail of white bubbles breaking the river’s surface.

Each attempt at closing the gap was met with an increase in the speed of the paddle wheeler which seemed to shrug off the river’s chop while my boat rose and slammed back to the Coquille’s surface with thunderous bangs.

Under the Coquille River Bridge, the paddle wheeler flickered in the dark night as if someone was rapidly flipping a light switch on and off. The river was running even faster and with higher chop the closer we approached the outflow to the ocean. Past Bandon, we were never able to successfully close the gap.

“Damn! Damn! Damn!” I yelled at the ghost ship as I watched it slip out of the river and into the Pacific. I spun the wheel and dropped down to just above idle. Enough to hold my place. No way was I going out into the Pacific or crossing the bar at this time of night in this kind of weather with the surf running high, hot and wide.

“I hope you got lots of pictures,” I said to Sal.

“Dozens.”

We motored upriver, against a strong current, and loaded the boat on its trailer.

Parking the rig back in its carport, Sal and I made way to the kitchen, poured some Colombian and fell into chairs at the dining room table. Rummaging through the Kenmore I found some frozen donuts which I nuked and slid onto a plate.

Sal took a bite of one, “This is terrible.”

“What do you expect in the middle of the night?”

Sal took another bit and shuddered. “Do I need to call my friends in D.C. and have some Krispy Kremes sent over by chopper?”

“You can do that?”

“No.”

“You ol’ heartbreaker you.”

I linked up his camera to my laptop and proceeded to download the photos.

The Nikon had done its duty for God and Country.

The images on the computer screen were sharp. The sternwheeler was clearly defined. Well, as clearly as gauze can be defined. Fuzzy, spackled edges, dark smoke from the single stack evaporating into the night air.

“This is all well and good, but we never got close enough to actually touch it,” I lamented.

“And the second ghost ship never appeared.”

“We’re going to have to do that again, only with a different plan.”

“And you know what that plan is, I gather?”

“Most certainly, Ollie, I do.”