Dead in the Water (21 page)
Authors: Ted Wood
"It was gone by then," I explained. "When we were coming back in from wrecking that float plane I took the diskette from Murphy and gave it to the Masters girl. She threw it over the side."
She had told me what was on it, later. We became friendly during the trial. She was there as a witness. So was Pardoe, with his wife. He had come out of his coma loaded with guilt at leaving her. So Angela had been at loose ends. And I guess she figured she owed me. It turned out that the guys on the boat hadn't started on her when I got there. They'd been about to, just to pass the time. Blue Shirt was telling her how he liked it when I lumbered in. Fortunately for her he hadn't gotten past the advertising stage.
So we had a brief thing. And she told me about the diskette. Lying in my bed one morning with the light bouncing off the water onto my ceiling.
"Derek had isolated a way of synthesizing cocaine," she said. She was lying up on one elbow, stroking my chest, tracing the scar I have there from an argument I'd had that was settled with bayonets.
"I thought there was synthetic cocaine already, novocaine, stuff like that," I said.
She shook her head. "No. Those are derivatives. Cocaine has always been grown. And then Derek came across a way of cooking it as simply as you can cook up amphetamines."
"And the people at the computer time-sharing place realized what he was doing?"
She flopped down, laying her ear flat over the scar as if some message would come up out of that line of whitened hide and pass directly to her. I stroked her hair. "They knew what he was on to. And then when he got the answer and didn't feed it into the computer's memory, just put it on a diskette and kept it, they came after him."
"So he ran up here to find his boss. And the mob knew that Winslow was one of their boys, so they primed him to wait for Pardoe and deliver him to them aboard a cruiser they'd hired."
She nodded, a comforting scrubbing motion of her hair over the roughness of my chest. "They really are organized in organized crime," she said.
I told Fullwell the clinical bits. He may have guessed about Angela, but he was too old a policeman to say anything. He just asked, "And she fired that diskette overboard, just like that?"
"Just like that. But I'm not looking to have a bunch of guys snorkeling up here looking for it, so treat it as confidential, okay?"
He shrugged, turning his head to let me know he felt the way I did. We drank in silence for a minute or so and then he asked, "And how about you and Sam. You gonna stay here?"
"It's a living." I bent down and tickled Sam's good ear. He squirmed pleasurably.
"How about the fink kid who sprayed 'Killer' on the side of the station?" Fullwell asked.
"I caught him," I said. "I made him an offer he couldn't refuse: paint the whole of the station the same color, or have Sam bite his ass out."
Fullwell laughed. "I saw the station was painted white. Now who painted 'Killer' on the side wall in black?"
"I'm working on that."
He got serious. It made him do a couple of stagy little things like actors do on TV. He took out his sunglasses and polished them with a Kleenex. Then he pulled a couple of faces and said, "We can give you work. Better work than this."
"I like this."
He made a fresh face. "It may not like you. People don't like policemen who kill people. You're a menace."
"So how do security companies feel?"
"About ten grand a year better. Pick your assignments."
I guess I looked surprised. He cranked up the pressure.
"No more dawn-to-dusk crap, regular holidays." He let it dangle like a frog with a hook through its lip, waiting for a smallmouth bass to take it.
I thought about it for a long time before speaking. "I'll let you know. I want to see a whole year come and go in this place. After that, it could get repetitious."
He drained his cup and put it down on the counter. "Well. The job will wait for you. But I can't. I'm on my way back to Toronto tonight."
We shook hands and he left and after a while I got up and went over to the shelf under the counter where I had put the jig George had made for me. It didn't look very convincing, just a tuft of black and white horsehair on a weighted hook. But then I'm not a pickerel.
Sam watched me as I opened my notebook and put it inside the cover for safety. I nodded to him. "Come on, fellah. Let's see if we're smarter than those walleyes."
He trotted after me and I went out of the door and headed for home to pick up my fishing rod. I was surprised to find I was whistling.
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