Follow the Sharks Page 7

  I shrugged and slid over to an empty stool near the end of the bar. The men crowded around me, one sitting on the stool beside me and two standing close behind me. I had to keep my elbows close to my body to avoid contact with them. I cradled my drink and crooked my neck to watch the television.

  “Goddam splits,” one of the guys said loudly. “I’m in the pocket all night, nothin’ but splits.”

  “Ahh, it’s the damn lanes. You oughta move over maybe two boards. You’re comin’ in too high on the head pin.”

  “Nah. I tried that. Ball don’t feel right any more. Maybe get it redrilled.”

  “Hey, let’s go, Pete, willya? Miller Lites all around, okay?”

  The Red Sox had finally taken their turn at bat. The Baltimore right fielder made a nice over-the-shoulder catch sprinting toward the bullpen. I tried to peer around the men standing near me to see if the gray-haired lady was at her seat. She was gone, but the blonde and the big-breasted girl were there. I wondered how many gutter balls were rolled by the time the third string came along, the way these people consumed beer.

  I turned back to the bar. A long envelope lay on top of my napkin. Nothing was written on it. I tore it open. Inside was a greeting card, with a picture of Snoopy lying on his back atop his doghouse staring at the sky through big dark sunglasses. Snoopy was saying, “I’m not moving until you do.”

  Beneath that, printed in all capital letters with a black felt-tip pen, was written, “Go to the phone downstairs.”

  I caught the bartender’s eye, and he came over, prepared to wield his rag and take my order. “Ready for another two-olive special?”

  “No. Let me have my bill. And did you happen to see who left this?” I held up the envelope.

  “Nope. Hang on a minute, I’ll get you the bill.”

  I glanced around at the bowlers who were crowded against me. They were engaged in an animated debate on the relative merits of the four-step versus the five-step approach. They seemed to take their bowling nearly as seriously as their beer drinking. None of them met my eye. I hoped that the State Police person, whoever and wherever he or she was in the lounge, noticed where the envelope had come from.

  The bartender was pouring beer from the spigots. He seemed to have forgotten my bill. I extracted a five-dollar bill from my wallet, slid it under my glass, and elbowed my way out of the lounge. The racket outside assaulted me. It seemed to have been lubricated by all that beer I had seen consumed. The yells and laughter seemed pitched higher, the crash of colliding pins seemed to echo louder, and the whine of the machinery seemed to penetrate my brain deeper, than they had when I had entered the building.

  The downstairs alleys were rigged for candlepins, that bowling variation peculiar to New England. The balls are smaller, about the size of a softball, and the pins are tall and slender. When I reached the foot of the stairs I noticed that the pitch of the din was set an octave or so higher than that of the ten-pin lanes upstairs.

  The people were just as boisterous.

  The pay phone was set against the wall at the far end of the alleys. A woman with “Prime Time Players” stitched in script across the back of her bowling shirt was talking into it. I moved to stand near her. She glanced up at me, her black eyes crackling with what appeared to be anger. “Molly” was written on the pocket over her left breast.

  “Look,” she was saying into the phone, her eyes appealing to the ceiling for patience, “I really gotta go. That’s just your problem and you’re gonna hafta take care of it… There’s some guy standing here waiting for the phone, and I don’t wanna talk about it anyway. In case you forgot, I am married, you know?”

  She glowered at me, shifted her eyes to the receiver she held in her hand, then said softly, “Yeah, me too, honey. Yeah, it sounds nice. But I really do. I really gotta go.”

  She held the phone away from her ear and stared at it as if she might embrace it, then set it gently on its cradle. She cocked her head at me, showed me the pink tip of her tongue, and tossed her hair. I watched her walk away.

  The jangle of the telephone was almost lost in the general din of the place. I picked it up before it could ring a second time.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Mr. Coyne?” I could barely hear her, but I was certain it was the same female voice I had heard over my office phone the previous day.

  “Yes. You’ll have to speak louder.”

  She said something I didn’t catch. I felt an instant of panic. I could botch the whole thing up by misunderstanding the message.

  “Please,” I said loudly, cupping one ear with my hand and pressing the receiver against my other ear. “It’s deafening in here.”

  “I have your instructions,” I heard her say. “Can you hear me now?”

  “Barely. Yes.”

  “Okay. Get onto Route 2 heading west. In Lexington you’ll see a sign for Waltham Street. The first exit goes to Lexington Center. Pass that and stop on the overpass. Drop the parcel over the bridge. Do you understand?”

  “Drop it over the bridge to Waltham Street. Yes.”

  “What time do you have?”

  I looked at my watch. “Nine-eleven.”

  “You’re two minutes slow. All right. Drop the parcel off the bridge at exactly nine forty-three by your watch. Do you have that?”

  “Nine forty-three. Okay.”

  “Go, now, then.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Will—?”

  I heard a click on the other end. I replaced the telephone and glanced quickly around. The gray-haired lady was nowhere to be seen, nor did anybody else seem to be paying any attention to me. Outside, the only noise was the swish of the traffic on Route 2 and the distant grumble of thunder. I could see lightning playing across the western horizon.

  I unlocked my car and climbed in, resisting the temptation to open the trunk to check that the bag of money was still there. I wanted to proceed with total caution, and I didn’t want to keep anybody waiting. I was acutely aware that it was E.J. Donagan’s life riding in my car with me.

  I nosed into the traffic and merged with the left lane so I could negotiate the traffic circle and reverse my direction on the divided highway and get onto the west-bound lane. I took it carefully. I had no desire to scrape fenders with some drunken bowler on his way home after a bad night.

  My little BMW purred up a long hill. Traffic was sparse, and straight ahead of me the thunderclouds hung low over the highway where it bisected a residential section of Arlington. The lights of the homes clustered on both sides of the road blinked warm orange. Everyone safe and snug in their living rooms. Over in Winchester, I knew, E.J. Donagan’s family huddled with an assortment of FBI agents and other cops waiting for my report. I doubted that they were feeling snug and secure.

  A few minutes later I pulled over to the side and stopped on the overpass. I left the engine running and the lights on. The last thing I wanted was for some well-meaning citizen—or, worse yet, a policeman—to pull up behind me to offer assistance. I got out and went to the trunk before I remembered the keys were still in the ignition. I went back to fetch them. I left the parking lights on.

  The bag of money was heavy. I needed both arms to hoist it up onto the rail of the bridge. It occurred to me that I had heard the directions wrong. This was Waltham Street. Did she say the one after Waltham Street? She did say to drop it over the side. Didn’t she?

  I imagined a pedestrian or jogger or dog-walker hearing the thump of falling money. I imagined the kidnappers waiting somewhere else for it.

  I imagined myself screwing it all up and E.J. Donagan dying because of it.

  I looked at my watch. It read nine forty-one. Two minutes. I held the bag of money balanced on the rail. The drumroll of thunder sounded closer, and a freshening breeze carried with it the sharp smell of ozone. A few cars passed close by me. One slowed down as it went by, and I saw the brake lights flash on. I willed it not to stop. It took the exit over the bridge.

  Nine forty-two.
I leaned over the bridge to peer down. I could neither see nor hear a thing down there. I thought of the hundreds of ways the exchange could fail. Even if it wasn’t my fault, I feared that wouldn’t matter. E.J. Donagan’s life depended on my delivering that money.

  The two changed into a three on my digital watch.

  I stood there, alone on the dark highway, and with a little grunt pushed the bag over the edge. I heard it hit the ground below with a hollow plop, the same sound you get when you punch a half-inflated beach ball. I waited for a moment, peering over the rail, waiting for the beam of a flashlight, or the sudden glow of headlights cutting through the blackness, or the growl of a car’s engine starting up. Then I thought better of it. I climbed into my car and drove away as fast as I could safely go.

  I pulled into the first gas station I came to. There was a pay phone in an open stall outside. I deposited a quarter and punched out Sam Farina’s phone number.

  Sam answered on the first ring. “It’s done,” I said.

  “You gave them the money?”

  “I dropped it over a bridge. Who’s there?”

  “Me, Jan, Josie. Stern and Basile.”

  “Eddie?”

  “He’s here. Not saying much, but he’s here.”

  “Okay. I better talk to Stern.”

  A moment later the FBI man came onto the line. I recounted for him what had happened. He said, “Damn!”

  “What?”

  “We missed whoever gave you that envelope.”

  “There was someone there?”

  “Yeah. Travers’ man. State cop. I should have put one of my own guys there. He called after you left. He didn’t see anything.”

  “Did somebody follow me in the car?”

  “Yes. Had to keep going when you stopped on the bridge.”

  “So we’re no better off than we were.”

  “So far they’ve had it all their way. Hopefully now we’ll hear from them and get the boy back. You think the woman who called was the same one?”

  “Couldn’t swear to it, but, yes, I think so.” A raindrop about the size of a grapefruit landed on my hand. “It’s starting to rain,” I said to Stern. “I’m at an outside phone. What do you want me to do now?”

  “Go home. Stick close to your phone. They seem to want to deal with you. Maybe they’ll call you at home, maybe in your office. About all we can do now is wait. They’ve got what they wanted.”

  “We wait for them to call.”

  “Yes. We hope they’ll call.”

  “What about the phone call at the alleys? Can you trace it?”

  “Sure. It was from a booth somewhere, no doubt. We’ll have it recorded, too, though not much chance that’ll help us. You still have that note, I hope.”

  I patted my pocket. “Yes. It’s right here, in my pocket.”

  “We’ll want it.”

  “Fingerprints and so forth.”

  Stern’s laugh was ironic. “Sure. All the up-to-the-minute technology of the Bureau’s at our disposal. We’ve got buildings full of computers. Scientists hunched over test tubes and electron microscopes.” His voice was low and conspiratorial. “Listen. We hope to hell they call again, okay? We hope they decide to give us back the boy. Because so far they’ve done everything right, you know? And we’re sitting around with our thumbs up our fannies while they call all the shots. So don’t get too optimistic, okay?”

  “That’s really encouraging,” I said.

  “You’re a big boy. You should know how it is.” He paused. “Hang on a minute, will you?” he said. I could hear Stern talking with somebody. A sudden gust of wind blew a cool mist on my face. Then Sam Farina’s voice came on the phone.

  “Hey, Brady?”

  “Yes, Sam?”

  “Look, thanks, huh? For what you’ve done.”

  “What I did was easy. You’ve got the hard part.”

  “Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah. This is hard. Still, thanks.”

  “Gotta go,” I said. “It’s raining. We’ll be in touch.”

  “Jan needs you, my friend.”

  “Right.”

  I replaced the phone and dashed for my car. The wind was bouncing the branches of the big oak trees behind the gas station, and fat raindrops rattled off the hood of my BMW. When I pulled out into the eastbound lane of Route 2, the rain came driving in hard, angled sheets, and even with the wipers on high speed the headlights barely cut twenty feet through the downpour.

  I wondered if E.J. Donagan, wherever he was, was afraid of the thunder.

  When I got back to my apartment, I kicked my shoes into a corner, dropped my jacket and tie onto the sofa, and found a can of Molson’s in the refrigerator. I padded over to the glass doors that overlook the harbor and slid them open to let in the clean smell of ocean and rain. I stood out on my balcony for a few minutes, sipping my ale and breathing deeply. I waited for the knot in my solar plexus to unravel.

  I couldn’t get E.J. Donagan’s freckled smile out of my mind. I remembered the bright July day the previous summer when I had taken E.J. and Jan with me for a day on the ocean. Charlie McDevitt, my old Yale Law School chum, kept a boat moored in Gloucester. Charlie navigated and E.J. and I trolled for bluefish while Jan stripped to her bikini and sunned herself on the forward bulkhead. Charlie chased the humpback and finback whales that basked near the surface eight miles out on Stellwagen, and out there where the sky formed a big bowl over the ocean we circled the Moonie tuna fleet that lay at anchor. Clouds of gulls swirled and darted in their chumline. E.J. climbed up into the tower and played at being a pirate. “Land, ho!” he called out, and Charlie yelled back, “Avast, me hearty.” “Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum,” laughed the boy.

  On the way in E.J. hooked a blue. The powerful fish threatened to drag the skinny little kid over the side, but he hung on stubbornly while I clung to his belt. Charlie threw the twin motors into neutral, and we rolled and pitched on the deep swells. E.J. pumped the rod, reeling when he could and giving line when the fish insisted, gaining more than he lost. When he finally had the fish alongside, I said, “Oh, he’s a beauty. Twelve pounds easy.” I reached for the gaff.

  “No, don’t,” said E.J.

  “It’s the only way,” I answered. “You can’t bring them aboard any other way. Likely to throw the plug into your face. They have teeth that’ll slice your finger right off.”

  “I want to let him go.”

  By now Jan was standing with us. She leaned close against me, one arm thrown carelessly around my waist, looking into the water at the fish. Her skin felt warm and moist against my arm.

  “We can bring him home for your grandmother to cook,” she said to her son.

  “No. Let him go.”

  “Okay,” I said. I leaned over the side, holding the line in my left hand, and I cut it free with my pocketknife. The bluefish lay motionless beside the boat for a moment. Then with a sudden movement it was gone.

  “He was a brave fish,” E.J. said.

  “You were a brave fisherman.”

  When I dropped E.J. and Jan off at Sam’s house that afternoon, E.J. shook my hand solemnly at the front door. “Thank you, Uncle Brady,” he said.

  “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown,” I told him.

  He darted into the house. Jan touched my arm. “Come in for a beer?”

  “Nope. Thanks.”

  “It was a nice day.”

  I nodded.

  “I haven’t seen E.J. so happy since…”

  “Since Eddie left?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll do it again some time.”

  We exchanged self-consciously chaste kisses on the cheek and I retreated to my car. As I started it up I glanced back. Jan was still standing by the door watching me, her hand raised in a motionless wave. I could only read sadness on her face.

  That was a year earlier. Since that time E.J. and Jan and I climbed Mount Monadnock, watched the Celtics beat the Chicago Bulls, and celebrated E.J.’s tenth birthday at Ma
ma Maria’s in the North End. I remained uncomfortable in the role of surrogate father which Jan seemed eager to thrust upon me. I felt that I had to struggle to keep my relationship with her on a casually friendly basis. I was committed to George Washington’s precept: no entangling alliances.

  But I also found myself growing fond of both of them. E.J. was a shy, enthusiastic kid, a lot like my own son Joey had been at that age. Jan was warm and sexy.

  But they were Eddie’s family. Not mine.

  I went back into my apartment, leaving the sliders open. I tossed the empty Molson’s can into the basket, decided against cracking another, and went to the phone. I dialled Eddie’s number. I let it ring twelve times before I hung up.

  I found an FM station that was playing Oscar Peterson. I smoked a cigarette. I found myself pacing aimlessly around my living room. Then I went back to the telephone and dialled a familiar number.

  It rang only once before I heard the phone lifted from the receiver. I knew Gloria kept it beside the bed. “Hello?” she mumbled in a blurry voice, the same voice she used to use when one of the boys would wake her up with their crying when we were all younger.

  I cleared my throat. “It’s me.”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. Then she said, “What time is it, anyway?”

  “Eleven-thirty. A little after. I’m sorry…”

  “It’s okay. What’s the matter?” I pictured her hitching herself into a sitting position in her bed, her hair tangled and loose around her face and those little frown lines etched between her eyebrows.

  “Nothing’s the matter. I was just wondering. How are the boys?”

  “You called me at this hour just to see how the boys are?” Her voice lost its fuzziness. “Brady, what is it?”

  “It’s—nothing. Really. I was just thinking of Billy and Joey. And you. Are they okay?”

  Her sigh hissed in the telephone. “Of course they’re all right. Do you want to talk to them? I think they’re both asleep. They’ve both got summer jobs, you know. They have to get up early. We were all asleep.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “No, let them sleep.” I fumbled for a cigarette. “Remember how we used to go in and check on them when they were sleeping? To make sure they were still breathing?”