The Catch (12 page)

The shed had no real function that she’d discerned from her two previous visits. It was big for its location, though, made of two rooms and an overhead loft. She’d only made it into the first room, however—what Bob had laughingly called his office—the first time.

As she drew nearer, she saw his shadow move across the tattered yellow cloth hanging before the one window she could see.

“Got movement inside,” she announced to Dave’s mike, having long overcome any awkwardness about feeling like she was talking to herself. Indeed, by now, she’d lost count of how many times she’d made similar drug buys, always invisibly escorted by her backup.

Crossing the last few yards warily, mentally switching over to her stage persona, she placed a hand on the battered brass doorknob only to have the door swing open before her.

“Whoa,”
she said, startled, taking a step backward.

A man stood before her, bearded, heavy, and nervous. “’Bout time you got here.”

Cathy gave him a wilting look. “What? You got a dentist’s appointment? I said tonight. It’s tonight.”

Bob stepped out onto the dock and looked past her into the darkness. “You said midnight. You’re late.”

She touched his shoulder calmingly, maintaining a hint of scorn in her voice. “Fine. Relax, Bob. I didn’t know you cared.”

“I don’t,” he said shortly, but he, too, reached out, took her elbow, and drew her into the shed before closing the door again.

Cathy looked around at the wooden walls, covered with fishing gear and a few tattered pinups of naked women.

“You fixed the place up. You shouldn’t have.”

Bob stood in the middle of the room, looking uncomfortable. Cathy sensed that something was off kilter. She glanced at the door separating the two rooms and noticed it was slightly ajar. In the past, it had been wide open.

“You okay?” she asked him, as much for Dave’s sake as out of any real concern. “You look a little tense.”

He frowned. “You bring money?”

She decided to go along, for the moment. “Depends. What d’you got? If it’s like the last batch, we might have to haggle. You ought to consider switching suppliers.”

But he shook his head. “Uh-uh. First things first. Stick your arms out.”

Her mouth dropped open. “Oh, for crying out loud, Bob. We’re
not
doing this. You really want me to smack you again?”

He moved in, and for the first time in their few interactions, Cathy saw a dangerous look in his eyes.

“You do that,” he said, “and you won’t like what happens.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” she said wearily, but she held both
arms out, as instructed, privately tensing against whatever might be coming.

She was surprised. Bob quickly and efficiently checked her over, without comment or lingering where he shouldn’t.

She smiled at him as he stepped back, risking opening the Pandora’s box she hated in order to keep in character. “You don’t like me anymore?” she asked.

He pressed his lips together in distaste. “You’re a crazy bitch.”

She laughed. “Maybe. That’s never been a problem before. You wanna do business?”

“Yeah. How much you want?”

“Two hundred,” she said.

That stopped him, as she’d hoped it would. “That’s a lot,” he said.

“You asked what I wanted.”

He chewed the inside of his mouth thoughtfully.

Cathy impatiently glanced at the cabin’s front door. “Fine. Bob, either bump me up the ladder or sell me the goods. You can do this or you can’t.” She paused and then added, “Who gives you your stuff? Maybe I should deal with him direct. I heard there’d been a shake-up anyhow. You drying up on me?”

Bob’s jaw muscles tightened under the abuse. “I’m not doing nothin’. I can get you the stuff. Just not right now.”

She looked down at the floor and shook her head. “Shit. That’s not how it works, Bob. Kmart doesn’t have it, Wal-Mart gets next shot—that’s the way it works. This is a capitalist country. Tell me who to go to, or take
me to him now, or do something that’ll stop me from walking out that door.”

“How ’bout I sell you what I got, and we get together later?”

“Bullshit. I don’t like you that much. Figure it out. Pull a rabbit out of your hat.”

Her words worked like a stage direction in a play: The door between the two rooms swung open, causing Bob to stiffen and Cathy to recoil against the wall in alarm.

“What the fuck’s going on, Bob? Who you got in there?”

A man appeared in the opening—short, of trim but muscular build, with black hair, a goatee, dark features, and the tattoo of a snake peering over the top of his T-shirt.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m with him.” He pointed at Bob.

Bob plainly wished this wasn’t so. “Yeah,” he said without conviction. “It’s okay. This is Luis. He’s cool.”

“Luis who?” Cathy asked, her features set but her mind in a turmoil. She was sure she’d seen this face before, if only a printed version. “I like to know who I’m dealing with. This your supplier?”

The newcomer smiled slightly, his eyes very watchful. “I think you’re right,” he said suggestively. “You like to know a lot. That makes me suspicious.”

“What?” Cathy protested, still mentally racing through a catalog of mug shots and police bulletins, groping for an answer. “I just got here. You don’t know shit about me.” She narrowed her eyes, as if struck by a sudden
thought. “Hold it. Are you a cop?” She shifted to Bob. “You son of a bitch. You set me up?”

Bob held up both his hands, but Luis cut him off before he could utter a word.

“I don’t think he’s the one setting people up,” Luis said. “He’s not that smart. You are, though.”

He took three steps toward her, so that they were now only inches apart. “Aren’t you?” he finished.

Cathy held her arms out to her sides again and smiled at him. “I get it. You want a feel, too. Fine. Knock your socks off.” She spoke to Bob over Luis’s shoulder. “Pretty lame, Bob—getting your faggy friends free feel-ups. I don’t think we’ll be doing business anymore.”

Now that Luis was standing virtually face-to-face with her, Cathy was all but certain that she knew who he was, finally prodded by his threatening demeanor. He’d surfaced recently in a Be-On-the-Lookout as the suspected shooter in a Vermont police killing.

“You’re sweating,” Luis Grega commented quietly, still not touching her.

“Wouldn’t you be?” she countered. “Slimy little guy pops out of nowhere. What the fuck do you want, anyhow?”

Grega’s right hand reached behind him and reappeared holding a small semiautomatic.

Cathy didn’t let him get any farther. Whatever he was planning, her chances of surviving it were about to vanish. As he began to speak, she struck upward with her fist, striking the gun and sending it, still in his hand, against his mouth. He shouted in pain as she then threw him off balance by shouldering him in the chest, before bolting for the exit, screaming,
“Gun, Dave. Gun.”

Outside, Dave had already placed the receiver on top of a nearby lobster trap and was reaching for his own gun when he heard his partner’s shout.

Ripping his earpiece away and throwing it wide, Dave took a shooter’s stance in the middle of the dock and aimed at the small building’s door. Behind him, in the distance, he heard the backup’s van squealing to reach them quickly, along with several bursts from their siren.

Cathy was the first to appear, running fast and low, heading directly toward him with her eyes wide and her mouth open. Not moving a muscle, Dave stayed as he was.

Behind Cathy, another shape appeared in the doorway, staggering slightly, lighted only from behind. He brought the gun in his hand to bear on Cathy’s retreating back.

Dave shot once, apparently missing.

The man’s shadow shifted. There was a flash from his gun, an explosion, and a piece of wood went flying from the crate to Dave’s left.

As Dave fired back, Cathy dove headlong into the water beside her, vanishing into the darkness.

With Cathy now out of the line of fire, Dave ducked behind the same crate for protection and tried to take better aim.

But the man by the shed merely stepped back inside.

“Dave—you okay?”

He quickly glanced down and to his side, into the black water. Cathy’s pale face floated there like an expressive lily.

“Yeah,” he answered. “You?”

“Fine. Where is he?”

“Back in the shed. Who was that?”

“The cop killer from Vermont.”

“Luis Grega?” Dave asked immediately.

She should have guessed he’d know that. “I’m freezing down here.”

Keeping his gun aimed at the shed, he reached down with his other hand and helped her up onto the dock behind the crate, just as the others came pounding up to join them. They all heard an outboard engine come alive in the distance.

“Damn,” Dave said.

It was eloquent enough. With two men known in the building, and possibly more, there was no way the cops could safely break cover, charge to the end of the dock, and hope to stop whoever it was from leaving.

“Hey,” Cathy said hopefully, her teeth already chattering. “Maybe he left Bob behind.”

“Right,” her terse partner said doubtfully, which, as usual, was all he really needed to say.

Joe watched Lyn as she sat before the mirror in her bedroom, deftly applying a touch of mascara to her right eyelashes. She was naked, as was he, and the lamp beside her—the only light in the room—caught the contours of her body just right.

“Maine?” she asked, leaning forward to better focus. “When do you leave?”

He admired her arched back as the shadows played across her shoulder blades.

“Soon,” he told her. “We’re putting the last details together with ICE in Boston, formalizing the task force.”

She shifted to the other eye. She was getting ready for work. It was her night to run the bar, and they’d spent half the afternoon making love, “in preparation,” as she put it. He hadn’t asked what she’d meant, in deference to the very dirty laugh she’d used to accompany it.

“Seems a shame,” she said, “to go there for that reason. I have such nice memories of Maine.”

Joe thought back to when he’d first visited this apartment, on the second floor of a Victorian showpiece on Oak Street. Lyn hadn’t fully moved in yet—there were boxes still piled around, along with a sense that even
the items on display hadn’t yet found their final niches. But he had discovered some family pictures lining the baseboard of the living room and from those—and her subsequent explanations—had learned a bit of her history.

The keystone there, not surprisingly, had been the loss of her father and brother at sea. Her life, as he’d come to see it through her eyes, had essentially fallen to both sides of that watershed, split like a thin piece of wood across the knee.

The allusion to Maine was a nod to the earlier times, when her lobsterman father, Abílo Silva, would take a little time off, usually around late May—when lobsters lie low to shed their outer carapaces and grow larger ones—and escort the family for trips along the Maine coast. None of them had been deceived by the choice of destination—Lyn’s father was thinking competitively as he’d toured the harbors, fleets, lobster pounds, and markets—but they’d still made vacations of these jaunts, and her tales of kinship and humor and familial love had made the subsequent loss and sorrow all the harder. The abrupt and simple vanishing of both Abílo and José Silva, following a standard Atlantic storm, had been as traumatic for its impact as it had been for its lack of closure. As Lyn had once explained it to Joe, “One day the boat was there, the next it wasn’t, and our life was over.”

Subsequent to this upheaval, slowly but inexorably, Lyn’s other brother, Steve, had slipped into drug abuse, dealing, and prison—from which he’d just recently been released, while her mother had become a virtual recluse, living in a tiny apartment in Gloucester. Lyn
herself had taken a more traditional route, marrying briefly and unsuccessfully, while producing a daughter named Coryn, who was now in her early twenties and working happily in Boston.

Not an end-of-the-world saga, as Joe knew from his own eventful life. Nevertheless, the very familiarity of Lyn’s intimacy with grief heightened its poignancy for him. Perhaps, he thought, all joy had to be laced with darkness, simply to have a contrasting validity.

A cliché, he realized. But one he couldn’t avoid, knowing how happy this woman had made him feel.

He rose from the bed and crossed over to her, carefully kissing the nape of her neck so that she wouldn’t miss her target with the mascara. Nevertheless, she twisted her head and caught his lips with her own. He reached up with one hand and cradled one of her breasts with his palm.

“God,” she murmured through the kiss, “I wish I didn’t have to go to work tonight.”

“Me, too,” he agreed, breaking away slightly. “But, then, I have to head off, too, so I guess we’d still be in the same boat.”

She looked up at him, surprised. “That’s what you meant by ‘soon’? I thought Maine was a day or so away.”

He laughed. “It is. But I have to get with my crew in an hour—figure out who’s doing what while I’m off gallivanting around Down East.”

She returned to studying herself in the mirror. “Where are you headed? We used to go way up there in the old days—Machias, Jonesport, Lubec. Boy, there was a dump. Even Dad thought so, and he liked most disaster areas.”

Joe nodded. “Machias came up earlier today—or at least right next door to it. Last night, one of the Maine drug cops accidentally ran into the guy we’re after. He got away, so I’m thinking our first stop’ll probably be Rockland. A drug bigwig got himself killed there a while back, which apparently shook up the marketplace. We’re wondering if there’s any connection to our case.”

Lyn put the mascara brush down carefully and looked up at him, her expression serious. “What was the bigwig’s name?”

Joe raised his eyebrows slightly, caught off guard. “Matthew Mroz, nicknamed ‘Roz,’ of course. Why?”

She dropped her gaze to the floor and muttered, “I just wondered.”

Joe crouched down so he could better see her face. “What’s up?” he asked, although he now suspected the source of her mood change. “Is it about Steve?” he guessed.