Black Tide (49 page)

At the rear of the house the force of the explosion had blasted away the beams that had been supporting the addition, and I realized why Felix and I had survived. Because of the way the foundation was set up, with a rear entry underneath the addition, the blast had been channeled away from the front of the house.

But the addition hadn't done so well. It had fallen upon itself in a confusing mix of floorboards, beams, draperies and broken chunks of glass. It was hard to figure out how the place had originally looked. I clambered up on one main floor beam, hearing Felix calling me again from the front of the house. I thought of those three Winslow Homer paintings, over a hundred years old and stolen away to this place, with their years of history and knowledge and skill wrapped up in the old oil paint, and I think tears came to my eyes at what I saw.

The three undamaged paintings, still hanging from the wooden framework, leaning against a broken wall, about a dozen feet or so away.

"There is a God," I whispered, and I moved again, and the beam gave way, almost dumping me into a chunk of wood that had a half dozen exposed spikes poking up, like a Viet Cong booby trap, waiting to impale me. I straddled the beam with both feet and tried again, and I got up a foot, the wood beneath me creaking and snapping. The paintings didn't seem any closer, and the dozen or so feet I had to navigate to get there were a treacherous mass of piping, wiring, broken plaster and wood strips.

I smelled smoke.

"Lewis!" came the call, and I grabbed at a length of something to haul myself up, and the sharp bite of broken glass made me fall back again. Damn. The smell of the smoke got stronger, and I could feel the warmth on my hands as I tried to climb again. Please, God. Just another minute or two. That's all I need.

There was now a smell of overcooked pork, of charred flesh. I didn't let my mind dwell on Cameron Briggs's final resting place.

I got up a couple of more feet, and then started inching my way across the ruins of the rear addition. My left foot slipped and was jammed into a pile of broken wood, and I started wind milling with my arms, trying not to fall on this awful mess. The paintings were getting harder to see through the tendrils of smoke coming up from the debris.

"Lewis!" Felix yelled again, closer, and I turned and shouted back, "Felix, shut up! I'm almost there."

But when I turned back, they were gone.

The flames from the burning paintings were bright enough so that I could see them char and curl up upon themselves, like old leaves in a campfire. I thought then of Winslow Homer and how his ghost must despise what was going on here. I turned away again and got down from the pile of trash that had once been a house. Felix was waiting for me, and he grabbed my arm.

"Let's go, you idiot," he hissed at me. "Do you want to explain to the York cops what the hell happened here?"

If I had been any brighter I might have said yes, but my mind was on something else.

Fog Warning
. The fisherman alone in his dory, heading to his schooner, trying to beat a storm, trying to save his life.

Gone.

Eight Bells.
Two sailors on the deck of a ship, wearing foul weather gear and holding navigation instruments in their hands, a portrait of survival.

Gone.

The Gulf Stream
. The lonely man, on the slippery slope of his damaged vessel, looking for help, but the broaching sharks in the foreground tell of another ending.

Gone.

All of them. Three historic and priceless paintings, right before my eyes, almost within reach of my hands, just seconds away from being rescued by me. Gone. Just before I stepped in the Lumina, I saw something metallic on the ground. It was my 9 mm Beretta, and for whatever good it was, I picked it up and returned it to my shoulder holster. As I closed the Lumina's door, I felt like bawling.

Felix drove up the driveway out to the street, and people were coming out of the houses, looking at us, the expression on their faces demanding to know what was going on, but Felix didn't stop. There was a crack in the windshield and scratches on the hood of the car from the falling debris.

I took a deep breath. "Where'd you find the keys?"

"In my rear pocket," Felix said. "Idiot never bothered to strip them off me. Guess you and I know why, hunh? He never thought I'd be driving again tonight, would even get near a car, except maybe in the trunk."

"Felix, the paintings---"

"I know, and it's over, Lewis," he said. "We can't do anything about them. There's other stuff going on. We've got a lot to do, and the first thing to do is to dump this car. People back there are going to tell the cops and firefighters that they saw a Lumina haul ass away from a house that just blew up. Your Rover around here?"

I gave him the directions, and in less than a handful of minutes, he had pulled up behind my Range Rover. Felix got out and said, "Get your handkerchief out and wipe down the door handle, anything else we touched. Good enough crime lab might find something eventually, but that'll still give us some time."

While I was doing just that, he went to the trunk of the car, opened it up, and pulled out a black gym bag and a larger black zippered duffel bag.

"Rented under fake ID, Felix?"

"Yeah," he said, slamming the trunk down. "One of the few bright things I've been doing here lately."

With the duffel bag slung over his back and gym bag in hand, he went back to the front seat of the car and inserted the keys into the ignition and shut the door. "With some luck, some kid will come by and take this baby for a joyride."

I looked around the quiet street and the suburban homes. "Unless the Crips are vacationing here this summer, you're dreaming. "

"Maybe so, but I'll still give it a try." Felix came up to the Rover just as I opened the door, and then he stopped, head cocked. Just a couple of streets over, the sound of sirens.

"Time to go?" I asked.

"Time to go," he said.

We got in and got the hell out.

As I drove, Felix zippered open the gym bag, pulled out his own automatic pistol and checked the magazine and action. As I headed south, toward New Hampshire, I said, "What happened, Felix? How did Roger ambush you?"

He reinserted the magazine, worked the pistol's action so a round was in the chamber.

"He pulled me over." I got stuck behind a dark green Saab that had a bumper sticker: "Think Globally, Act Locally." I wondered what the driver would have thought about the global and local actions that just happened up on Landing Lane. As I slowed down, I looked at my hands and wrists. They had stopped bleeding. Superficial cuts probably, though my knees still ached.

"He did what?"

Felix kept his head down, as if he was trying to hide his humiliation. "He pulled me over, Lewis. Easiest trick in the book and I fell for it. Same trick that killed those guys in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago, except this time it wasn't a fake cop. It was a real one. Roger Krohn. I'm sorry to say, Lewis, he must have had your house under surveillance, because he caught up with me about twenty minutes after I dropped you off after our Boston trip. He pulled me over with his own car, which has blue lights in the radiator's grill, flashing headlights and siren. Being a well-mannered citizen --- and not wanting to screw anything up the day of the exchange --- I pulled over. I thought I had been speeding."

Then he looked up, his face haunted. "He opened the passenger's-side door and nailed me with a Taser, and when I was flailing around with thousands of volts going through me, he got me wrapped up. Then he got his black box working. The man likes his electricity, Lewis, and he made me drive to Maine, made me give up the house and made me call you."

"Felix, I ---"

His voice got stronger. "I don't want to talk about that anymore, Lewis. All right? Not now and not ever. It's over. I just want to talk about now."

"What do you mean, now?"

"I mean we're going to hunt him down tonight and kill him." I looked at the expression on his face and then I slowly pulled over and kept the engine running as we stopped by the side of the road. We had just crossed into Kittery.

"Say again?"

"You heard me." Felix pulled out a leather hip holster, and with his pistol in place, slid the pair into the side of his shorts.

"Felix, this has gone above and beyond anything that we can handle. We've got four dead bodies in the past couple of weeks ---- including your cousin --- and we just saw millions of dollars of art go up in smoke. In case you've forgotten, your ass was about one minute from getting blown away by Roger Krohn, and both our asses got tossed out of a house by a firebomb. Now you want to keep on hunting? Forget it."

He rummaged around in the duffel bag, his face still dark and puffy. "Don't you think Krohn might come back for a visit when he finds out we made it out of the house? You got a better idea?"

"Yeah. Call the cops. That's what they get paid for."

Felix started rubbing his temples with his fingers, his voice low and even. "Lewis, I don't have time for this, and if you don't agree with what I'm about to say, then I'm stepping out of here and renting or stealing a fucking car and then I'm going to go off on my own, much as I owe you for what you did back at the house. Got that?"

"It's gotten."

"Great." Felix raised his head, looked at me, and I stared right back at him. "Lewis, we don't have time. The man's a cop, and cops stick together. You start spinning a story about what Roger Krohn's been up to, and the cops are going to take time to check the facts. They're not going to rush out to pick up a brother officer. And by the time they look at the records and figure out, yeah, the guy is dirty, he'll be working on a tan somewhere in the Caribbean. Right now, he's about fifteen, twenty minutes ahead of us, and each minute you and I have this discussion means he can be another mile away. We've got a window of opportunity here to take care of business --- right this moment --- and I'm going to get going before the window is closed."

I thought furiously for a moment and said, "One phone call. To Diane Woods."

For the first time in a long time, I thought Felix was going to strike me. It came to me that he wouldn't have to steal another car, he would just have to punch out my lights and take the Rover. Easy enough, and I don't know why I hadn't thought of it earlier.

But he surprised me. ''All right. One phone call. But only if a phone booth's on the way. And you don't take more than a minute."

''Agreed,'' I said, and we were off, and I pulled over again after another mile, for I found my phone booth, in a Cumberland Farms parking lot. As I got out of the Rover, Felix said, "One minute," but I didn't answer and went to the booth and started dialing. The first call, to the police dispatcher, was a bust. Diane Woods was not on duty that night. I dialed her home number, and the ringing began.

"C'mon, c'mon," I whispered, but my demands went unmet. There was no answer at Diane Woods's. I looked over at Felix and his gaze was steady. I slammed the phone down, stalked back to the Rover and got in. Felix took out a blue Kevlar bulletproof vest and started undoing his shirt, and he said quietly, "You can let me borrow your Rover, and that'll be it."

"Really?"

"Yeah. I've got to do it, Lewis. I can't let Roger Krohn keep on breathing after what he did to me today. I wouldn't be… I wouldn't be me anymore, and I will not allow that to happen. But you don't have to come along, Lewis. You've done enough for tonight. "

I held on to the Rover's steering wheel and heard myself say, "I've saved your butt once tonight, Felix. Don't be so eager to turn down my help."

I started the Rover up and we continued south. I looked up at the sky. It had become overcast, and it looked like rain.

We got to the condominium development where Roger Krohn lived about a half hour after that last stop at Cumberland Farms. Along the way, and with Felix's help, I had put on a second Kevlar vest that Felix had stored in his duffel bag. The vest was heavy and constricting under my shirt, and I felt leaden, like I was moving through thick syrup. At the condominium lot I cruised around for a minute or two, and I said, "It's not here."

"What? "

"Cameron Briggs's Audi. The one that Roger Krohn stole. It's not here."

Felix looked stubborn. "He could have ditched the car, or parked somewhere else. We're going in, Lewis."

I didn't argue. It was now 8 P.M. and the parking lot was fairly full. People were streaming away from the cooling sands of Tyler Beach, which were just across the street from Roger's condominium. A light mist had begun to fall and I knew from experience that in a few short minutes the beaches would be as empty as they were hundreds of years ago.

The condominium building was concrete and balconies with iron railings, and the roof was flat shingles.  After parking in the rear we went through a back entrance, Felix leading the way, his automatic in his right hand, close to his side. I guess I was more shy, since my own pistol was still in my shoulder holster. We took the concrete steps two at a time, and heard rock music from a couple of the units as we went up to the third floor. Just before the third-floor landing Felix raised a hand and looked back at me. The expression on his face was one that I would almost pay money not to see again.