A Plunder by Pilgrims
A short story featuring Garrison Gage
Jack Nolte
|| Includes a sneak preview of The Gray and Guilty Sea,
the first mystery novel featuring Garrison Gage. ||
Smashwords Edition. Electronic edition published by Flying Raven Press, November 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Jack Nolte. All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This short story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. For more about Flying Raven Press, please visit our web site at http://www.flyingravenpress.com.
A Plunder by Pilgrims
Jack Nolte
IT WAS A KID, sixteen or seventeen by the looks of him, painfully thin and soaked to the bone. His short-cropped brown hair, made nearly black by the rain, was plastered against his forehead. His Stanford sweatshirt and acid wash jeans clung to his bony frame. The skin on his neck was cratered like a moonscape, the survival scars of a nasty bout with acne.
The pounding rain made tiny white explosions on the gravel driveway, and crackled on the overgrown ferns surrounding his house. "Well?" Gage said. "Candy bars for the track team? A subscription to Good Housekeeping so the band can go to Disneyland?"
"No, sir," the kid said.
"You look familiar."
"I'm your neighbor, sir. Marty Kleppington. I live — um, just on the other side of that hedge."
That explained it. The kid had just been a runt when Gage moved in five years earlier, hardly recognizable in the young man before him, but he remembered a few terse exchanges when the kid's basketball bounced through the arbor vitae. "Well, congratulations," Gage said. "Now if you'll excuse me—"
"I'd like to hire you, sir."
It was such a wholly unexpected thing to say that Gage actually froze — door cracked open, frigid air snaking past him into the house. "I think you're confused," Gage said.
He didn't open the door. He couldn't see the kid's face, but there was a long pause.
"I know what you do, sir," the kid said. "I know—I know you were once a great detective. Garrison Gage. That's you."
Gage bowed his head. "Go home, son. The person you're looking for doesn't live here anymore."
"It's my girlfriend," the kid said, sounding desperate. "Tammy. Tammy Levin. She's missing. Been almost two days. I—I need your help."
"Go to the police."
"I have. They—"
"Goodbye, son."
He closed the door. Gage was walking away, but the kid had saved the best for last. Even muffled by the door, Gage clearly heard him.
"I can pay you, sir," he said. "I have five thousand dollars saved for college, and I can pay you every penny."
* * * * *
He gave Marty a towel, his own mug of coffee, and seated him at the kitchen table. The kid's wet hair dribbled on Gage's crossword. The blooming watermarks smeared the black ink with the blue, ruining the morning's efforts. Above them, the pounding rain sounded like somebody dropping buckets of marbles on the roof.
"How did you know about me?" Gage asked.
Instead of looking at Gage, Marty stared straight ahead. His eyes were the same color as his coffee — a deep brown, nearly black. "A couple years back, I was hiding in the hedge. Heard you talking to that FBI agent."
Gage's shoulders sagged. He'd known that helping Alex from time to time with some of his more difficult problems had been a bad idea. "I really am retired," he said.
Marty looked down into his coffee. Tendrils of steam inched past his face like long nimble fingers. Gage sighed.
"Tell you what," he said, "why don't you tell me what happened. Maybe I'll have suggestions. That's all I do with my friend, by the way. Just listen and give suggestions."
The kid dug into his front pocket. "Should I pay now or—"
"Talk."
Marty nodded. He took a long, slow breath, then said, "I'm not sure how much I can tell you. I talked to her on Friday at school. We—we were going to go out on Saturday night to the movies. Then a little before six on Friday night, Tammy's Mom called and wanted to know if Tammy was with me. Her mom said she'd run to the store to pick up some stuff for dinner and she hadn't come home. We've scoured the entire town, all of us. We haven't found her car or anything."
"It hasn't been very long — not even a day."
Marty looked at him, and his eyes were much older than his years. "If you knew Tammy, you wouldn't think so. She's very responsible. She puts everything in her day timer — dates with me, the tutoring she does, study times, even down to exactly when she brushes her teeth at night. People make fun of her, but she doesn't care. She's planning on going to Stanford. I am too. I mean, if I get in. I'm not as smart as her."
"Did she act at all differently lately?"
"What do you mean?'
"I mean, did you notice anything out of the ordinary? Things she said? The way she acted?"
Marty hesitated.
"Look, kid, if you don't level with me, I can't—"
"I don't know," Marty said. "She was a bit moody.
"Her parents go to the police?"
"Yeah," Marty said. "Because she's already 18, they said they can't put out an Amber Alert, but they filed a missing persons report. They told Tammy's parents they could file the vehicle as stolen, which might help, but they didn't want her to get into trouble. I guess the police are real busy, though. They got the parade on Thursday."
Gage grimaced. The Barnacle Bluffs Thanksgiving Day Parade was a big deal on the Oregon coast, but to Gage it just meant thousands of tourists clogging up Highway 101. "How old are you?" he asked.
"Seventeen. Well, almost eighteen. I'll be eighteen on Saturday."
"How'd you two get a long?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, did you fight much?"
"No. We didn't fight at all."
But there was a slight pause there — barely a pause at all, really, just a slight hitch between the words didn't and fight. "Not even a little?" he pressed.
"We got along great," Marty insisted. The dull monotone was gone, his voice taking on a defensive edge. "I mean, we've been—we've been dating forever. Since fourth grade practically."
"But I take it her parents don't know you've proposed to her?"
The kid looked surprised. "Proposed? I haven't — I mean, we haven't . . . haven't decided—"
"Look, kid, if you're not completely honest with me, there's only so much I can do."
Marty swallowed. "Okay, I did propose. It was during Homecoming, and she said yes. Her parents wouldn't be happy if they knew — they think we're too young. But we didn't want to wait. We love each other, Mister Gage. There's nobody else I love more than her."
"All right, all right."
"How'd you know?"
Gage pointed at the kid's hands, currently clasped together on top of the now unsalvageable New York Times crossword. "Your ring finger. You've got a very slight indentation in it. Since you're not wearing it, I take it you only wear it when you're pretty sure Mr. and Mrs. Levin aren't around."
Marty nodded. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a nondescript gold band, the kind he could have gotten at any pawn shop for twenty bucks. "We got promise rings. I wanted to get her a real engagement ring, but she said I should save my money for college. She was always like that. Practical."
He looked like he was going to tear up. There were few things more off-putting to Gage than the naked display of emotion. He would have rather watched a dozen nail technicians test out the sound qualities of every known brand of chalkboard.
"How about her parents?" he said quickly. "She get along with them all right?"
"Oh yeah," Marty said. "They're the best. They have a big family — five kids, and they're always doing stuff. You should see them right now. You think I'm bad, they're practically going crazy with worry."
"And you didn't notice anything different about her, did you? She didn't act differently?"
"What do you mean?"
Gage hesitated, because he knew the kid wouldn't like this line of questioning, but there was no getting around it. "She didn't seem depressed at all? She didn't ever talk about . . . suicide?"
"What? She was a student counselor! She counseled other kids who were depressed." Marty shook his head. "In fact, the last few days she was the most happy and positive I'd ever seen her — and that's saying something. Most of the time, she's so positive it annoys people."
"But you said she was a bit moody lately."
"Well, yeah, but that's not saying she's suicidal. She was up and down a bit the last few weeks. I'm saying she just wasn't quite as perky as usual. Killing herself . . ." He shook his head. "That's just crazy.
Gage knew that was no guarantee that the girl didn't commit suicide. It was still the second leading cause of death among teenagers in Barnacle Bluffs—auto accidents being the first. The fact that she'd been more cheerful than usual actually was a bad sign. People who committed suicide often had that one last hurrah of happiness.
"And you don't know of anybody who had ill feelings toward her?" Gage said.
"No. She may have been a bit too perky for some people, but she didn't have any enemies."
"What do you think happened? You think she was abducted, I take it?"
"I don't know what else it could be."
Gage went on quizzing the kid for a while, probing, trying to find out more about the girl's life that could shed some light on the situation. But after a half hour of questioning, he was no closer to solving the mystery. The kid showed none of the signs of lying or evasion — the dilating pupils, nervous tics, conflicting details.
When he felt there was little more to be gained just questioning the kid, Gage took his coffee cup and limped to the sink, cleaned it with a bit of dish soap and a rag, and placed it on a drying rack. He leaned against the counter with both hands and peered out through the rain-streaked window at the gray skies and rhododendrons swaying in the wind.
"Anything you could tell me would really help, sir," Marty said.
Gage sighed. "I'm afraid I don't have anything to tell. "
"Oh."
The disappointment ringing in that one word was palpable. It irritated Gage. "Why don't you leave your phone number," he said. "If something occurs to me, I'll call you, okay?"
* * * * *
When the kid was gone, Gage's first intention was to put the whole thing out of his mind.
The wind picked up, the faint whistling against the window turning into a low moan. His furnace rumbled to life. A faucet in the bathroom dripped. Despite his best efforts, Gage's attention kept drifting to the phone number the kid had scrawled in the corner of the newspaper.
He ambled to the fridge, favoring his right leg. The limp was a vivid reminder of what happened when he got involved — a three-hundred pound Iranian ex-strong man in the circus smashes up your knee with a baseball bat, that's what, messes it up so bad you can't even walk for six months and even now can't go anywhere without a cane. Oh, and the kicker: the love of his life dead, drowned in Gage's own bathroom tub.
No, he was fine looking over a few case files for Alex, but getting involved personally? Out of the question.
He was happy with his quiet life. He didn't like dealing with people unless it was absolutely necessary. The most conversation he'd had lately involved saying "Paper" to the cashier at the supermarket.
And yet, it was just a local case. He could keep a low profile . . .
The internal wrangling went on for a good hour, until suddenly it came to Gage. He thought he knew the answer. It was the best feeling in the world, when a solution came to him out of the blue, as addictive as any drug. It was only a possibility, but of course now he had to know.
He reached for his phone.
* * * * *
Ten minutes later, the kid was back sitting at Gage's kitchen table, his cheeks pink from the cold. He'd changed from the wet sweatshirt and blue jeans he wore earlier to a purple sweater and black pants. There were green bits of arbor vitae stuck to his shoulders.
"Were you guys fighting about sex?" Gage asked, without preamble.
Marty's cheeks turned even pinker. "What?"
"You wanted to have sex, but she wanted to wait until after you were married."
"Who—who told you that?"
"Answer the question."
Marty swallowed hard. "We—we weren't fighting about it. Not really . . ."
"Look, I don't want to talk about this either, kid. But only a virgin would have blushed as much as you just did."
"What does this have to do with anything?"
"Were you fighting about it?"
Marty looked at Gage a moment, then sunk his head. "Yeah, I guess."
"Don't beat yourself up too much. You're no different than millions of other teenage boys."
"She—she wanted it to be special."
"Which is no different than millions of other teenage girls. That also brings me to my second question." Gage shifted in his seat. What was he, Doctor Phil? "Let's say she decided to have sex with you, okay? Let's say she decided she was going to do it on your birthday — because, you know, you'd both be 18. Let's say she went to check out this place on Friday night. It would be someplace not too far from the store, because she had only a few minutes. Any ideas?"
Marty eyes widened, and he looked at Gage suddenly. "The Granger cabin!"
"What?"
"It's—it's this tiny two-room cabin up in the woods near Hair Trigger Creek," Marty said excitedly. He stood abruptly, turning first right, then left, as if he wanted to run but wasn't sure which direction. "We saw it when we went hiking this summer. It's not too far off the highway. When we were walking by, this old guy came out, and we thought, oh no, he's going to come after us for trespassing, but he was real nice. He said he and his wife used it all the time during the summer, but she'd just passed away so he was boxing up stuff. He said he couldn't bear to keep it, because all the memories. I even joked to Tammy as we were walking away that we should ask him if he'd let us use it as a honeymoon suite."
"What did Tammy think?"
"Oh, she blushed bright red like she always does when I even come close to talking about — well, you know."
"Yes, even a recluse like me knows."
Marty looked aghast. "That's not—that's not what I—"
"Save it," Gage said, reaching for his cane. "Let's go for a drive."
* * * * *
They rode in silence along Highway 101, the tires whispering over wet asphalt. It had stopped raining. The turn-off would have been easy to miss in broad daylight, and in the murky soup that passed for night, the kid passed it twice before finally turning his Toyota Tercel onto the dirt into the woods. They passed one little house surrounded by trees, then another, the trees encroaching, the road getting bumpier, the mist on the windshield thickening until Marty finally turned on the windshield wipers.
When they were a quarter mile from the house — according to Marty's best guess — Gage had him pull the car to the side. Anybody passing would see it, but it couldn't be avoided. He didn't know what he was expecting to find out there — maybe the girl had just taken a bad spill — but experience had taught him to be careful. Marty had wanted to call the police, but there was still a good chance this was a wild good chase, and then he would have blown his anonymity for nothing.
When Marty killed the ignition, they were sitting in utter darkness. It was silent except for the ticking of the engine.
"You sure you want to walk?" Marty said.
"What, because I'm a cripple?" Gage said.
"No, that's not—"
"You got that flashlight?"
"Yeah."
Gage adjusted his fedora and stepped into the moist darkness. Marty clicked on his flashlight. It was a feeble thing, a penlight he'd fished out of his glove compartment. The darkness pressed in on all sides. There were no crickets or hooting owls — just the sound of the day's rain pattering on leaves, limbs, and pine needles. He felt the faint brush of a few droplets on his cheek.
"How's the cell phone?" Gage said.
Marty pulled it out of his jacket pocket and flipped it open, the bluish light illuminating his face. "One bar," he said.
"It'll have to do."
There was a slight incline he hadn't noticed when they were driving but was immediately aware of when they were on foot. His knees ached after only a few steps. It was slow going, the ground dappled with shadows that were sometimes holes and sometimes just shadows. More than once he stumbled and would have fallen if the kid hadn't grabbed his arm. Maybe he was a cripple, for god's sake.
"It's just around this next bend," Marty said.
"Okay, turn the light off."
"But we won't be able to see!"
"Do it."
They crept up the road like two blind turtles. Gage stumbled again and kid grabbed his arm and kept it there. A yellow light blinked at them through the trees. They stopped at the last Douglas fir before the open dirt area around the house and peered around it.
The cabin was hardly bigger than the outhouse next to it — log siding, a sagging, metal roof, pine needles blanketing everything. There were two windows, one with the shades drawn, rimmed with light; the other was open and revealed two men playing cards at a folding table. One was big and bulky, the other as thin as Marty. Both were dressed in black leather jackets, though the thin one was bald and had a thick, handlebar mustache where the fat one was clean-shaven and wore a red baseball cap. The kerosene lantern between them provided a soft bubble of light. There were cardboard boxes stacked up on the wall behind them.
There was no girl, but on the table next to the lantern was a candle far too pink and feminine for a couple guys to have brought.
"I don't see her!" Marty said. "And her car's not here either."
"For Christ's sake, keep your voice down. She's in there."
"How do you know?"
"Look on the table."
When Marty saw the candle, he started forward, and Gage grabbed his arm. "Are you nuts? That one there on the left has a pretty distinctive bulge under his jacket."
"Oh."
"Yeah, oh. So let's call in the cavalry. Get out your cell phone."
"But what are they doing there?"
Gage thought about it. "I'm not sure yet, but they didn't walk here. At least one more person will be driving up in a few minutes, so I'd make that call now if I was you. Who knows what their buddy is going to think when he sees our car parked on the side of the road."
Marty took out his cell phone, fumbled and nearly dropped it, and finally flipped it open. When the bluish light illuminated his face, Gage saw the stark fear — the wide eyes, the sweat drops as big as boils.
"No bars!" Marty exclaimed.
"Shh! It's all right. Here's what you're going to do. I want you to walk down the road until you get reception. If you hear anyone coming, duck into the trees. I'll wait for the police to arrive, and if they go anywhere, hopefully I'll hear where."
"But—"
"Just go!"
Gage watched until the kid's shape merged with the rest of the darkness, then he returned his attention to the cabin. The skinny man threw down his cards in disgust, and the fat man started laughing. What were they up to? A bunch of hunters who interrupted the girl and decided to have fun with her? What kind of hunter packed a handgun instead of a rifle? Something else was going on. Gage didn't want to say anything to the boy, but he knew there was a good chance the girl was already dead.
There was only one way to know for certain, and that was to creep up to the cabin and peer through the crack in the curtains. He didn't want to do it, but he couldn't wait for the police. If the girl was alive, who knew what the men in there would do when the police came roaring up the road?
With excruciating slowness, taking great care to find good, solid ground to place his cane, he limped to the side of the house. There, he leaned against the wall, getting his breath back, trying to slow his heart.
He started to round the corner, and that's when he heard a vehicle rumbling up the road. A pair of headlights appeared in the gloom, and just before the light fell on the cabin, he ducked back into darkness. The vehicle, a van or truck by the sound of the engine, pulled into the drive. The engine wheezed and sputtered and finally fell silent. The door creaked opened. Safely out of the driver's line of sight, Gage didn't dare peer around the corner.
"Come on, inside," a gruff voice said.
Gage felt a chill prickling up his neck. Then, when a voice responded, his fear was realized.
"What—what are you going to do?" It was Marty.
"That ain't your concern," the man said.
"Look, mister, I—I told you, I was just looking for my dog. He—he ran off and —"
"Without your leash?"
"Well, I was, well, I wasn't going to—wasn't, you see—"
There was a slap, a groan, and then the sound of Marty being dragged from the van. The door to the cabin banged open.
"What the hell is this, Al?" a man demanded. His voice was high and reedy.
"Found this kid skulking around in the woods," the man named Al said.
"And you thought it was a good idea to bring him back here?" the reedy-voiced one replied. "Are you out of your mind?"
"If you closed your damn trap a minute," Al said, "I'd explain. Take a look at what I found in his wallet."
There was a moment of silence, and then another voice, also high but more nasally, replied.
"Hollllll-eeee," the nasally one said. "That's a weird incidence."
The reedy-voiced one snorted. "That's coincidence, you moron. The kid obviously came up here looking for her. Damn."
"You got that right," Al said. "Now we got two of 'em. And the parade still four days away."
"I think we gotta do something about this soon," the reedy-voiced one said.
"What, Rick?" the nasally-voiced one said. "What we gotta do? You said we'd let her go on Wednesday. You want to let 'em go now. You think—"
"Will you shut up, Eugene!" the reedy-voiced one, Rick, thundered at him. "A man can't think with you around. Here, do something useful — take the kid inside and tie him up with duct tape next to the girl." There was the sound of Marty stumbling, feet sliding on the dirt. "Think you can handle that without screwing it up? Make sure you put the gag in his mouth."
"Okay, Rick," the one called Eugene said. "Okay, I'll do that."
There were footsteps on the deck. The door banged shut. After a moment, Rick let out a long, agonizing sigh.
"We didn't need this," he said.
"What're you thinking?" Al said.
"I'm thinking we should have off'd that girl soon as she showed up on Friday, no matter Eugene would have freaked out or not. I mean, we got lucky. What if you hadn't seen him on your way up here? Obviously he was going to sneak up to see if she was here, then go call the police on us." There was a pause. "Hell! He could have done it already! There's no cell coverage here, so maybe he was on his way down."
"He didn't have no cell phone," Al said.
"So? He could have thrown it in the woods when you stopped."
"We could beat it out of him."
Rick sighed. "It don't change what we gotta do. We have to kill them. Now."
"Now? Aw, man."
"It can't be helped," Rick said. "Police could be coming up here, you never know. Right now they'd just get us for B and E. Kidnapping — now that's a whole 'nother ball of wax. We gotta get 'em killed and buried lickety-split — at least in shallow graves."
"Man," Al said, "I haven't killed nobody since 'Nam."
"What, you going to go all jelly-kneed on me now?"
"Naw. I just didn't sign up for this."
"Look," Rick said, "I'll do the actual thing. You just have to help."
"What about Eugene?"
"What about him?"
"He's going to go nuts," Al said. "Remember what he did when you killed that mouse? He practically started foaming at the mouth."
Rick took a few steps on the dirt. "I'll tell him . . . I'll tell him we're going to take the kids into the woods and let 'em go. I'll tell him he's got to stay and watch the van. Stand guard."
"Well, he's your brother," Al said. There were more footsteps.
"Where you going?"
"To take a dump," Al said.
"But the police could be—"
"Nature can't be helped."
Rick sighed. "Fine, I'll go tell Eugene we're letting the kids go." The boards of the deck creaked. "All this for a lousy bank job," he muttered.
The front door opened and shut. There were footsteps through the dirt, then the outhouse door let loose with a ghastly creak and boomed like a drum when it banged shut.
Gage heard the murmur of voices inside the cabin. If he was going to act, it had to be now. The same thought that had been spoken aloud moments ago ran through his mind: I didn't sign up for this.
But then Gage was moving — staggering toward the outhouse, as quietly as his decrepit body would take him. It was always this way with him — propelled by some unseen force, despite his best protests. He could move three thousand miles, buy a house in a town he'd never even visited, and get an unlisted phone number, but it didn't matter. The world might go to hell, but in the end, Gage would go to hell right along with it. Somebody had to, for God's sake. Those were just kids in there.
He finally got a clear view of the Dodge van, the light from the bay window shining on the side. The words Three Point Bait and Tackle Shop were written on the side, decorated with an ocean scene of tropical fish. Three Point was one of the smaller towns a few miles south of Barnacle Bluffs. All at once it made sense to Gage what was inside the cardboard boxes stacked inside — decorations. They were going to decorate the van for the parade, then the bank robbers would load up the van with their loot and drive it out of town under the police's noses. A perfect plunder by some scheming pilgrims.
The stench from the outhouse was awful. He heard shuffling of feet inside and the clink of a belt buckle. Crouched on the side of it, Gage was still deciding what to do when the door swung open. There were footsteps on the dirt. Gage followed the closing door, the creaking of the hinges masking his footsteps. The man's silhouette was framed by the lighted window.
Right when the door banged shut, Gage swung his cane and hit Al on the side of the head. The man didn't even cry out — just a short, sharp grunt, and then he was toppling to the dirt.
Gage stumbled forward, catching himself before he fell. He was deathly afraid the man was going to spring right back up, but he lay completely still. Painful as it was, Gage got down on his knees and checked the man's pulse. Faint but steady.
Heart roaring, sweat sticking his shirt to his back, Gage fished around in the man's jacket until he found what he was looking for — a Smith and Wesson .45, heavy and cold in his hand. He checked the chamber; it was fully loaded.
He unlocked the safety and stuffed it in his jacket pocket. He started for the cabin, thinking he'd use the element of surprise to his advantage, hoping that would be enough, but the front door of the cabin swung open before he'd even taken two steps.
It was the fat one, the one they'd called Eugene. He had the dumb, vacant look of a mule. He turned in Gage's direction and the two of them locked eyes. The front door banged shut and both of them flinched.
"Get down on the ground," Gage said.
Eugene blinked.
"Do it or I shoot!" Gage cried.
He still didn't move, and then there was a flurry of sound from the cabin — a chair banging against the floor, a yelp, and then the front door swung open.
Gage swung his weapon in that direction. Two figures emerged — Marty in the front, pale, hands raised, and directly behind him, Rick pointing a handgun at the back of Marty's head. He leaned out just a little so he could peer around Marty's head at Gage.
"Who the hell are you?" he said.
"Santa Claus," Gage said.
"Put down that piece or I'm blowing this kid's brains out."
"Oh, that's not very nice. I'm afraid that this year you'll be getting coal in your stocking."
"I'm serious. Put it down. Now."
Gage knew if he put down that gun, they were all dead. Gage was a good shot, but it'd been years since he'd fired a gun of any kind. He also knew that the kid was Rick's only leverage. Once Marty was dead, he'd have no shield.
"No," Gage said.
He couldn't see Rick's face, but Marty looked like he was going to faint.
"Excuse me?" Rick said.
"I'm not putting it down."
"All right, wise guy, I'm going to count to three . . ."
"Surely you can make it all the way to ten."
"Bastard! Fine, I'm taking you out first."
It was what Gage was hoping for. As soon as the barrel of the Magnum came into view, Rick leaning just a little to the right to get a shot off, Gage leapt to his left, keeping his gun arm firm, the revolver trained on Rick's emerging shoulder. With his weak knee, it was more like falling down, but it did give him a slightly better angle — not much, still dicey, but it was improving the odds. The important thing was that Rick's weapon was no longer pointed at the back of Marty's head, so if there was a reflex shot it wouldn't make mince meat of the kid's brains. It was also putting Gage directly in Rick's line of fire, but he had no choice about that.
He pulled the trigger. The boom made the world go silent, and in the same instant two things happened: There was a flash cloud of blood around Marty and Rick, and he felt searing, white-hot pain above his right ear.
Then he smashed into the ground. There was pain everywhere — his head, his shoulders, his hips, everything on fire. The gun went flying. He heard screaming — more than one, more than two, by the sound of it. There was blood in his mouth. The next thing he heard was Eugene yelling.
"You shot him! You shot my brother!"
There was a stampede of footsteps. Gage managed to get his bearings just as he saw the elephant charging him — eyes full of madness, face contorted into utter rage. No gun. He saw his cane and he grabbed for it. Eugene lunged, and Gage managed to get the cane up just in time.
The big man took it in the gut, and the force of his falling body made the cane bow, then splinter. But he fell away from Gage — spasming, gasping, and crumpling like a building hit by a wrecking ball.
There was blood trickling down Gage's cheek, he could feel it. He'd been shot? There was still one person screaming. He rolled over and rose painfully onto all fours. There was the .45 — he snatched it up. He blinked through a world made blurry by sweat and saw two forms ahead — one on the ground, the other standing over him.
When his vision cleared a bit more, he saw that standing one was Marty. He had the gun pointed at Rick, face a mask of terror. Rick's screams had changed to a series of high-pitched squeals and he was flopping around on the ground like a trout off the hook.
The skin above Gage's right ear felt as if it had been scalded it with a branding iron. He touched it and felt the warm blood, but was relived that it was hardly more than a scratch. Leaving Eugene still moaning and doubled over, Gage picked up what remained of his cane — it was hardly more than a toothpick — and lurched his way to Marty. Even though he carried the cane like a baton, it was still strangely comforting.
Marty kept staring at Rick. The kid had a bruise on one of his cheeks, but otherwise looked unhurt. Rick was no longer screaming. His eyes were two full moons, and he wasn't moving. Blood soaked the right half of his body.
Gage looked at the kid. The fear made him look different. It was like he was wearing a catatonic mask.
"Hey," he said.
Marty kept staring.
"Hey," Gage said again. "Hey, Marty. You know I had to do it, right? You know it was the only way out of here alive?"
Marty went on staring at the man who might have killed him. Gage wondered if the kid would ever be the same — it did happen that way sometimes. Some people broke. They'd go to therapy, of course, and talk about their childhoods, about how it felt to look death in the face, what it sounded like when the gunshot killed the guy next to you and not you, the particular flavor of their nightmares. They'd do all this, and some people would come out okay, or if not okay, at least enough to convince the people around them. Other people could sit in wood-paneled rooms with soft lighting, comfortable furniture, and soothing fish tanks all their lives after a night like this and never find the person they were before the night began. Some vases could be glued back together, others couldn't.
"Marty?"
It was the girl. They both turned and saw her on the porch — tiny and boyish in her jean jacket and jeans, a mop of blond hair half-covering her face, wrists still bound by duct tape. When she saw Marty, she started crying. It was the only sound other than the quiet moans coming from Eugene.
Marty handed the gun to Gage and went to her. He took her in his arms and held her, shaking, against him. He tossed a quick glance at Gage, just a split second shared between them, and it was enough. Gage knew it would be a rough, but in the end, the kid would still be himself. He'd just lost whatever remained of his childhood.
It had to happen eventually.
* * * * *
On Thanksgiving, it was raining so hard that even with the windshield wipers thrumming at full throttle, Gage could hardly see through the windshield. He passed the Levin house three times, looking for it. He passed it twice more, debating.
Even when he finally parked — two houses down, because there were plenty of cars parked in front of their house — he sat in the dark for ten minutes.
After the police had arrived, after they'd recovered Tammy's car in the woods hidden by pine branches, and after the breathless, tear-filled thank you phone calls from the girl's parents, Gage had tried hard to settle back into his routine. Coffee with Irish Whiskey. The Times crossword in the morning, and at least two books in the afternoon. But it wasn't the same.
With a sigh, he adjusted his fedora and grabbed his new cane — a hand-carved one made by a local artist, a gift from Marty. Even wearing his fedora, his face was instantly drenched. It was like walking through an ocean. He sloshed along the gravel road and up the walk to the Levin's door.
The curtains were open, and he saw them eating there — a dozen people, all laughter and smiles. There was Tammy, laughing. There was Marty, gazing fondly at her. The parents. Lots of kids. God, so many people. The glazed turkey graced the center of the table like a trophy, and every square inch of the green tablecloth was filled — sweet potatoes and stuffing and cranberry sauce and bottles of wine.
There was also an empty chair.
It was right there, next to Marty. Gage stared at it a long time, the rain soaking his clothes, dribbling down his fedora. In the bleary darkness, they couldn't see him. He was a ghost. Could he see himself sitting in that chair? Could he see himself inside, all laughter and smiles?
Some vases could be put back together and others couldn't.
At least not now. Net yet.
He turned and walked away — a slumped figure in the rain, limping into the darkness.
|| A sneak preview of The Gray and Guilty Sea,
the first mystery novel featuring Garrison Gage. ||
The Gray and Guilty Sea
Jack Nolte
Smashwords Edition. Electronic edition published by Flying Raven Press, November 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Jack Nolte.
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For more about Flying Raven Press, please visit our web site at http://www.flyingravenpress.com.
Chapter 1
THE WOMAN WASHED UP ON THE BEACH at sunset—a girl, really, eighteen or nineteen by the looks of her, dressed in black lace panties and a white tank-top. No doubt she was dead. Gage had seen enough dead bodies to know.
A fierce wind blew back his hair. His bare hand, gripping his cane, was numb from the cold. The approaching storm stretched along the horizon like an old metal coil, the hint of orange like rust in the dark, tightly-wound clouds. Above the clouds, the sky was flat and sterile like dull silver; beneath the clouds, only the white-capped swells broke up the gray monotony of the ocean. It would be dark in twenty minutes. Gage, groggy from an early bourbon, had almost skipped his evening walk. How different his life would have been if he had.
The girl had the look of an exhausted swimmer, body half out of the surf, half on the sand, head resting on one outstretched arm. But one ankle was tangled in sea kelp, sand and mud streaked her milky skin like paint splatters on white porcelain, and both eyes were wide and unblinking. Even from twenty paces, he could see her eyes—two slashes of white in all that gray.
The beach was deserted. Far to his right, two miles away, Gage could make out the twinkling lights of the Golden Eagle Casino. To his left were the beginnings of the many cliffs that gave the city of Barnacle Bluffs its name. Gage hesitated, watching the girl, hoping for some sign of movement even when he knew there would be none, then ambled toward her.
His right knee throbbed. It was always worse in the winter, when the damp air seeped into all those cracks in his surgically repaired knee. It never got that cold on the Oregon coast, which was one of the reasons he'd moved there after Janet died, but it got cold enough. It didn't take much for Gage to feel cold. Not anymore.
When he reached the girl, his heart was pounding, and he knew it had nothing to do with physical exertion. He'd thought he was past all this.
It was only up close that he saw the lacerations on her wrists and ankles, the bruise-marks on her thighs, the sunken eye sockets that made her face look like a skull. Her dark blond hair tangled around her face and neck like seaweed. Her mouth was open in a silent scream. She was maybe five-two, ninety pounds at most. He doubted she'd been dead more than twenty-four hours. She didn't smell like death yet. She just smelled like salt water.
"Where did you come from?" he said.
There was no answer.
* * * * *
It was raining by the time the police arrived. Gage didn't own a cell phone, or any phone for that matter, but there was a pay phone at the gas station across the street, just on the other side of Highway 101. Gage could have made the call from Mattie's house, up the hill behind the station, but that was another ten minutes of painful walking and he'd wanted to be back at the beach by the time the police arrived. He didn't know why. It wasn't like he wanted to be involved. It was more that he felt obligated by finding her.
That had been his second mistake.
There was still enough light to see, though barely. Two police cars arrived, sirens blaring, the threads of rain visible in the beams lancing over the beach. The parking lot was up ten feet on the bluff, behind the metal barricade. Seconds later two officers charged down the grassy dune. Both ran with their right hands over their holsters. One of the officers was much heavier than the other.
Gage's leather jacket had no hood, and the rain quickly soaked his hair. Cold water dribbled down his forehead. The thin cop, a kid with a Brad Pitt face, continued to the body while the larger one charged up to Gage. He had a doughy face, a thick brown mustache, and no hair but a fine brown ring around his scalp. The brass badge on his navy blue coat shimmered in the rain.
"What time did you find her?" he asked.
"What time did I call it in?" Gage said.
"Are you trying to be a smart alec?"
"No, I just don't wear a watch."
More sirens, more headlights appearing up on the bluff. The young cop dropped to his knees and felt for a pulse on her wrist. He looked at them.
"She's dead," he said.
"Well of course," Gage said. "Isn't that what I told you on the phone?"
The heavier one blinked a few times at this, then looked back at Gage. There were more cops barreling down the dune, and two paramedics carrying a stretcher. The heavy cop in front of Gage flipped open a little black notebook. Water speckled the white paper.
"Your name, sir?" he said.
Gage shivered; the water dribbling down his back was ice cold. There was commotion all around them now—the paramedics trying to revive her, the cops conferring. Up on the bluff, a few looky-loos had come of the houses lining the beach and peered down at the spectacle from their decks. The heavy cop slipped the little pen from the side of the notebook. When he noticed Gage hadn't answered, he glanced up with a questioning look.
"Problem?" he said.
"Oh, no," Gage said. It was a lie. He hadn't planned on giving his name, and now he saw how stupid it had been to wait around. An anonymous call would have been fine. But what could he do now? "Gage. Garrison Gage. I live just on the other side of the highway."
"And you've never seen this girl before in your life?"
"No."
"Why do you think she was here?"
"How the hell should I know?"
The cop grimaced. "What's your phone number?"
"I don't have a phone."
"You don't have a phone?"
"No."
The cop sighed. "What about an address, Gary? Do you have one of those?"
"Don't call me Gary."
"Okay. What should I call you?"
"Don't call me anything."
The cop narrowed his already narrow eyes. Gage felt his frustration rise, creeping into him like the coldness in his knee. He'd forgotten what most cops were like. One of the other cops was taking digital pictures of the girl, the flash strobing the body. The paramedics were readying their stretcher for her.
"Are you trying to be a problem?" the cop said.
"No. I'm not trying to be anything at all."
Then he gave the cop his address. He answered the rest of their questions. And when they said he could, he went home.
Chapter 2
A LITTLE AFTER NINE THE NEXT MORNING, someone knocked on his door. Gage was nearly finished with the crossword in the latest Oregonian. The first knocks were tentative, three gentle raps that he could barely hear over the whistling wind. But when Gage ignored these, the next knocks were more forceful.
He put down his pen. Looking beyond his dining room table, piled with enough books and magazines that someone might have mistaken it for a library rummage sale, he saw the wide expanse of the ocean through his bay window, above the rooftops of the houses on the slope below. The clouds had cleared overnight, the sky a bright cobalt blue. It might as well have been summer. But it was a deceiving sky, because he knew from when he'd stepped out to get the paper how cold it had been, how brittle and strong the breeze.
When he'd moved to the coast, he'd disabled the doorbell and put up both No Solicitation and Beware of Dog signs. That had mostly done the trick. But there were always a few people who knocked anyway. Illiterate fools.
He limped to the foyer, the peeling linoleum like ice against his bare feet. The smell of burnt toast hung in the air; he could never get that damn toaster working right. He tied his bathrobe and flung open the door.
"What is it, then?" he said.
He expected a vacuum salesman or a kid hocking magazine subscriptions, a frivolous interruption. Instead a sober-faced man in a gray trench coat stood on his concrete stoop; he wore a narrow blue tie, a white shirt. He had thinning gray hair and bushy black eyebrows, his face long and gaunt. He made Gage think of a slightly heavier version of Mister Rogers. Still, there was no denying he was a cop. Gage had seen thousands of cops over the years and they all had the same look about them—a wary earnestness.
The arbor vitae at the back of Gage's property swayed in the breeze. The cool air penetrated his thin cotton robe, making him shiver.
"More questions?" Gage said.
The man smiled kindly. He had yellow teeth, and one of his incisors was capped with gold. "Garrison Gage?" he said.
"That's right."
"I'm Percy Quinn. Chief of Police in Barnacle Bluffs."
It was a small town, and deaths like the girl on the beach were rare, but he was still surprised that the Chief himself was paying a visit. "Well, thank heavens," he said. "You're a few months late, but the kids playing the loud music live just down at the end of the drive."
Quinn chuckled. He had that look about him of a patient grandfather. "Can I have a few minutes of your time?"
"Why?"
The man's smile stayed the same, but his eyes changed; it was like watching water freeze. "Humor me," he said.
Gage shrugged and stepped back so Quinn could enter. Standing close, Gage caught the whiff of cigarette smoke, and he could just make out the outline of the revolver holster beneath Quinn's coat.
Without a word, Gage limped to his table and settled into his chair. He took a drink from his coffee, which had grown cold; it was black, except for just a splash of Irish cream, just the way he liked it. A log in the stove crackled. Quinn stood behind one of the other chairs, hands gripping the walnut frame. He glanced at the coffee cup as if waiting for Gage to offer. Gage didn't.
"I don't want to take much of your time — " Quinn began.
"Well, that's good," Gage said.
The man looked a bit pained. It really was like insulting Mister Rogers. "I'm hoping we can be friends."
"Hope can be a dangerous thing."
"Man, you're not going to make this easy for me, are you?"
"Make what easy?"
Quinn pulled out the chair. He turned it around backwards and straddled it. "You see the news this morning?"
"I don't have a television," Gage said.
"No television. No phone. You're quite the character."
"Thank you. I mean that sincerely."
"Look," Quinn said, "this is really just a courtesy call, that's all. I want you to know that we didn't give your name to the media. We just told them a homeless man stumbled upon the girl."
"Well, that's an upgrade for me," Gage said.
"I thought you'd appreciate it. You see, I . . . I know who you are, Gage. I know all that business you were involved with before. All that work you did with the FBI. I . . . know what happened back in New York. I am sorry about your wife. About what they did to you. Everything."
Gage said nothing. He looked at his crossword. Ironically, the theme was the ocean. The clue was broken boat. Eleven letters, and it ended with a "d."
"Shipwrecked," Gage said.
"Huh?"
Gage wrote it in.
"Oh, right," Quinn said. "My wife's into those too. Though she's more into that other thing—what's it called? The thing with numbers."
"Sudoku," Gage said.
"Right. Look, here's the deal. You kind of slipped into Barnacle Bluffs under the radar. That's fine. I can see why you're here. Lots of folks come here for the same reason. To get away. To forget. Whatever."
"I just like the view," Gage said.
"But here's the thing," Quinn went on, "we're a small town. We might seem big because of all the tourists, especially in the summer, but when you get down to it this place is just a village. This thing with the girl, it's already all over the news. A Portland crew showed up here this morning. It'll be front page in tomorrow's Oregonian. That's more than enough attention. We don't need your name getting mixed up in this. It'll turn this place into a circus."
"Who doesn't like the circus?" Gage said.
"Can't you be serious? Even stupid reporters can type your name into Google. Then they'll be swarming this place, getting the wrong idea, wondering how you're all mixed up in the girl's death when we both know you got nothing to do with it. I'm just asking you to lie low, that's all. I don't mind you living here — "
"That's very generous of you."
" — but if you could just, well, stay retired, I'd appreciate it. And we'll keep you out of it."
Finally, Gage looked up. "Do you know who she is?"
"What?"
"The girl. Who is she?"
Quinn's brow furrowed, his enormous eyebrows like mirrored checkmarks. "Why?"
"Just curious."
"Well, we don't know yet. No ID on her, obviously. And nothing came up in the databases on her fingerprints. They're doing an autopsy on her now, so maybe we can find out more."
"They know the cause of death?" Gage said. "Was it drowning, or did she die beforehand?"
Quinn hesitated. "I'm getting a bit uncomfortable with these questions, Mister."
"I'm a bit uncomfortable when a girl washes up on a beach below my house—especially one like that with marks on her wrists and ankles."
Quinn offered up a tight-lipped smile. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you were opening up an investigation."
"Well, it's good that you know better."
"Gage, I wish you wouldn't make this hard. We got this thing covered, all right? Right now she's a Jane Doe. Maybe she was a runaway. Maybe she was abducted. Maybe she's even a local, but nobody's come forward. It'll come out in time, trust me. We have a deal?"
Gage looked at his crossword. He'd stopped trusting cops a long time ago. He'd stopped trusting pretty much everyone—not that he ever really did. There was a faint flicker of curiosity in the back of his mind, but he wasn't going to let it turn into anything. Not now. Not after so much time. How long had it been? Five years? He wouldn't even know where to begin.
"I don't see any reason to get involved," he said. "I'm not a private investigator any more. I'm just a guy who does crosswords. That's my whole purpose in life—doing crosswords. I've probably done thousands of them. I'll probably do thousands more."
Quinn laughed. Gage, not smiling, looked at him.
"I wasn't joking," he said.
Chapter 3
THAT NIGHT, GAGE DREAMED he was lost at sea. It was a wild and churning sea, a bubbling gray broth with no land in sight. It was not cold at all, but hot—scalding, as if he'd been dumped into a boiling cauldron. Clouds as wild as the sea streaked the sky like the hurried brushstrokes of a mad painter. Thunder rumbled, and hot rain pelted his face. He struggled to keep his head above the surface, thrashing about, taking in great mouthfuls of warm, salty water. Something was wrong with his arms—they weren't working the way they should.
When he got them up in front of his face, he saw that he had no hands. There were only stumps.
Then something floated into view—a buoy of some kind, two adjoining logs jutting out of the waves. Kelp tangled around the logs, fastening them together. He paddled toward them and wrapped his stump-arms around them. The logs were cold, but strangely soft. It was only then that he realized what it was.
It was the girl from the beach.
She was upside down, her bare, lacerated legs sticking out of the water—and that's what he was holding.
Gage finally woke, heart pounding, face drenched in sweat, the sheets tangled around his legs like the sea kelp tangled around that girl.
"Christ," he said to the darkness.
* * * * *
A couple days passed. It rained one of the days, a brief shower, but otherwise remained cool and bright. Except for checking on Mattie once, his ailing housekeeper who lived in a cottage down the hill that Gage owned, he spent the time reading or doing crosswords at his kitchen table. In the Oregonian, news about the girl's death went from garish, front page headlines, to equally garish headlines on page 8, to not even warranting a mention at all.
It was the way of things. Gage had seen it lots of times. People lost interest quickly. They lost interest even faster when there was no story to keep them hooked. She was just a dead girl on the beach. She could have been anybody, and if she wasn't anybody, then she was a nobody. It was hard to care about a nobody. It was like trying to hang a picture on an invisible wall.
Still, the more Gage tried to forget her, the more she crept into his thoughts. He was still thinking about her when he went for a walk Thursday night, exactly one week since he'd found the body.
He trudged north along Highway 101, the night air crisp, the moon full and resplendent. Cars and trucks roared past, headlights piercing the darkness; the big semis and their moving walls of wind forced him to stop and clutch his fedora with one hand and lean on his cane with the other.
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