Dark Tiger (3 page)

“Hang on, there, Johnny,” Calhoun said to the man on the other end of the phone line. “I gotta put you on hold for just a minute.” He clicked the
HOLD
button, then put the phone on the counter. “What's up, honey?” he said to Kate.

“I'm meeting Annie at the Sea Urchin in fifteen minutes,” she said. “We're gonna drink some beer.”

“Annie gonna help you get this thing with Walter straightened out?”

“I don't know about that,” said Kate. “Mainly, we're going to drink beer.” She leaned across the counter and kissed Calhoun on the mouth. “I'll let you know if Annie comes up with something,” she said.

He nodded. “Be sure to get some food in your stomach while you're at it. Try the fish chowder. That's the Urchin's specialty.”

Kate ruffled Calhoun's hair. “Their specialty, as you know, is their selection of New England microbrews. Annie and I figure on sampling several of them.” She kissed his cheek and headed for the door.

Calhoun watched her go. He still hadn't told her about Noah Moulton's visit and the bad news about the lease on the shop. Kate was preoccupied with her problem with Walter, and the opportunity to talk about the future of their business just hadn't come up.

He'd have to do it. He didn't look forward to it.

 

 

 

 

By the time Calhoun had locked up the shop and he and Ralph had climbed into his truck to head home to his cabin in the woods, the wind had shifted and the sky had cleared, and suddenly it was a pretty late afternoon in the middle of May. Through the open window, the wet earth smelled fresh and fertile, and in the slanting sunlight, the young leaves on the maples and poplars and birches washed the hillsides in muted pastel shades of mint and blush and lemon.

As he drove, Calhoun tried to figure out what to do about the lease on the shop. Noah Moulton hadn't held out much hope that Mr. Eldon Camby would change his mind about selling the building, and the thought of trying to find a new place and moving all their stuff was close to overwhelming. If that wasn't bad enough, there was Walter, apparently having his insurance cut off and getting kicked out of his rehab facility, and with no place to go.

When problems came, Calhoun thought, they came in bunches, and he wasn't exactly bubbling with inspirational solutions.

“You got any thoughts?” he said to Ralph, who was riding shotgun with his nose sticking out of the half-open side window.

Ralph turned to look at Calhoun, and the way his tongue lolled from his mouth, it was pretty clear that as usual, the only significant thoughts the dog was having concerned food.

Well, maybe Annie Cass would have some useful advice for Kate. Annie was a lawyer. Lawyers never seemed to be at a loss for ideas, such as, when in doubt, sue somebody.

Calhoun lived in a cabin he'd built himself, with help from his friend Lyle McMahan, in the township of Dublin a little over half an hour's ride by pickup truck due west of the shop in Portland. They'd erected the place—it was more than a cabin, though less than a house—atop an old cellar hole that the Fire of '47 had leveled over sixty years earlier. It overlooked a little spring-fed stream named Bitch Creek, where native brook trout lived and reproduced.

Every time Calhoun pulled into his driveway, it reminded him of Lyle, who had cleared the roadway with a chain saw. Lyle had given Calhoun the Brittany pup he named Ralph, after Ralph Waldo Emerson, too. Lyle, just a kid in his twenties, had ended up murdered, facedown in a trout pond. Stoney Calhoun had found his body and then proceeded to track down his friend's killer.

The long dirt driveway wound through the woods and ended in a long gentle slope to the house. Calhoun turned off the road and proceeded no more than twenty feet before he stopped the truck. “Whoa,” he said to Ralph. “Looks like we got company.”

He turned off the ignition, got out, and squatted down to examine the fresh tire tracks in the wet driveway ruts. Judging by the tread and their depth and the distance between them,
they'd been made by an automobile, not a wider, heavier vehicle like a truck. Their edges were sharp, and the dampness they'd squeezed from the compressed earth was pooling in them, which told Calhoun that they'd been made within the past hour or so. There was one set of tracks going in and none coming out. Whoever had driven down to Calhoun's house was still there.

Calhoun leaned into his truck, pulled his .30-30 Winchester deer rifle from behind the seat, cranked the lever to jack a cartridge into the chamber, and snapped his fingers at Ralph. “Let's go,” he said. “You heel.”

They slid into the woods and eased their way through the underbrush parallel to the driveway, Ralph trotting along behind Calhoun's left side, until they came to the crest of the slope that looked down on the house. In the open area in front was parked a new-looking Audi sedan.

Ralph growled in the back of his throat.

Calhoun touched the dog's forehead, andhe stopped. “It's your old buddy,” Calhoun whispered, “come to pay us a visit. Somehow, I ain't surprised.”

He stepped into the driveway with the .30-30 tucked under his arm, and he and Ralph strolled down the driveway to the house.

The Man in the Suit was sitting in one of the wooden Adirondack chairs on the deck sipping from a can of Coke that, Calhoun assumed, he'd helped himself to from the refrigerator inside.

The Man in the Suit—all the times this man had come to the house to pick Calhoun's brain, he'd never mentioned his name—lifted his hand. “Welcome home, Stoney,” he called. “Turned out to be a nice day after all, huh?”

Calhoun climbed up onto the deck and stood directly in
front of the man, who was, as usual, wearing a gray suit with a blue-and-red striped necktie. The Man in the Suit had first appeared shortly after Calhoun settled here in Maine after being released from the VA hospital in Virginia. He didn't trust the Man in the Suit. He didn't trust the government agency that the Man worked for.

Well, he'd been told repeatedly that paranoia was a common side effect of getting zapped by lightning, if it was lightning. He did have a big jagged scar on his shoulder and no other explanation for it, but even so, it did occur to him that important secrets might still reside in the inaccessible recesses of his brain—secrets important enough to kill to protect, or at least important enough to obliterate a man's memory to keep secret.

The Man in the Suit, who drove an Audi sedan and always wore a suit, kept showing up at unpredictable times to check on what memories Calhoun might have recovered. It was pretty clear that Calhoun had once known important secrets. It didn't take a genius to figure out that now, if he ever did happen to remember one of them, it would be prudent to pretend he didn't.

The Man in the Suit tried to bribe Calhoun with information about his past life. Calhoun pretended he didn't care about that. He was a lucky man, he said, getting to start over again with a clean slate.

There were times, though, when Stonewall Jackson Calhoun ached to know something about his parents, or if he'd been married, or, especially, if he had any children.

Calhoun looked down at the Man in the Suit. “It all makes sense now,” he said. “Why're you doing these things to us? What the hell do you want?”

The Man in the Suit cocked his head and smiled. “What're you talking about, Stoney?”

Calhoun jacked the cartridge out of the .30-30 onto the deck, picked it up and stuck it in his pocket, and leaned the rifle against the wall. Then he sat in the other Adirondack chair. “Losing the lease on the shop,” he said. “The rehab place saying they're going to kick Walter out. You didn't need to do that. You want something out of me, why don't you just ask?”

The Man in the Suit lifted his Coke can to his mouth. His throat clenched like a fist. Then he put the can on the table. “
Me
ask
you
for a favor?” he said. “You know the answer to that one.”

“You might've tried before bringing all this bad luck into my life,” said Calhoun, “and it ain't right, making Kate part of it.”

The Man in the Suit shrugged. “I could've asked,” he said, “and you, of course, would've told me to go to hell, and if I then proceeded to threaten you, you'd've just laughed at me, and so then I'd've had to show you that we were serious about needing your help, so time being of the essence here, we figured we'd streamline the process and show you we were serious before asking you.” He gave Calhoun a quick flash of his gray, humorless smile. “So now you know how serious we are about this. You want to lose your shop, and you want Kate's husband out on the sidewalk in his wheelchair, all you've got to do is say no to me.”

“What if I say yes?” said Calhoun.

“Mr. Eldon Camby's buyer changes his mind,” said the Man in the Suit, “and the shop's lease comes up for renewal. Meanwhile, a vice president in the insurance company's corporate headquarters in New York overrules the folks in the Maine office, and Walter's place in that nice rehab facility in Scarborough is secured for the rest of his life.”

“When?”

“Just as soon as I've got your word, Stoney. Tomorrow. This weekend at the latest. We haven't got a lot of time. It's up to you.”

“I don't know what you want from me.”

“No,” said the Man in the Suit, “you don't, and you're not getting it from me. I don't have any details anyway, nor would I be authorized to share them with you if I did. I just need you to agree to do it. I guess you've got to trust me. All I can say is that it's something you're uniquely suited to do. In fact, there's nobody else we know of with the combination of skills and knowledge and personality required by this job. Only you. If there were somebody else, I probably wouldn't be here talking to a hostile man with no memory who doesn't like me. On the other hand, Stoney, we've been taking good care of you all these years because we figured the day would come when you'd want to say thank you, make things even, and I bet you've understood that all along.”

“You saying I owe this to you?” said Calhoun.

The Man in the Suit nodded. “Absolutely. Well, not me personally. You might say, your country is calling you. It needs you, and here's your chance to pay back your country for all it's done for you. It'll take maybe a month—six weeks at the outside—of your life.”

“Six weeks away from the shop,” said Calhoun, “right at the height of the fishing season. Our busiest time.”

“That's right. Too bad. Can't be helped.” The Man in the Suit looked hard at Calhoun. “You must not tell Kate—or your friend the sheriff, or anybody else, for that matter—what you're doing or where you're going. Not even a hint. You understand that, right?”

Calhoun shrugged. “So if I agree to do this—before you even tell me what it is—you'll take care of the lease on the shop
and guarantee that Walter will always have a spot in that rehab place?”

“You've got my word on it,” said the Man in the Suit. “Tomorrow. If you agree to do this right now, I'll see that both matters are resolved tomorrow.”

Calhoun cocked his head and smiled. “Your word.”

“I've never lied to you, Stoney. I've always been absolutely straight with you. You might not like me or what I do, but you've got to admit, I've always been a man of my word.”

“I was going to shoot you the first time you trespassed on my property,” Calhoun said. “I still sometimes think it was a mistake not to.”

“If not me,” said the Man in the Suit, “it just would've been somebody else. No matter how deep in the Maine woods you go, we'll always have you in our sights.”

“So okay,” said Calhoun. “I obviously got no choice. So I'll do it, whatever it is. What happens next?”

“Next,” said the Man in the Suit, “you'll get a call from a man who calls himself Mr. Brescia.”

“Brescia,” said Calhoun.

“He goes by Mister,” he said. “
Mr.
Brescia. He'll give you the details.”

“When?”

“Pretty soon, I'd expect,” said the Man in the Suit. “We've got something pretty urgent going on, Stoney. Your country needs you.”

 

 

 

 

A little before noontime the next morning Calhoun was sitting in one of the wooden rocking chairs on the front porch of the shop sipping coffee with the Orvis sales rep, who said he wanted to talk about their new line of waders and wading boots, but who seemed even more interested in telling Calhoun about his recent bonefishing trip to the Bahamas.

Calhoun had never fished for bonefish. He had a lot of questions. He figured one of these winters he and Kate would shut down the shop for the month of February or March and go someplace equatorial and fish for tarpon and bonefish and permit and snook. Venezeula, maybe. Or Belize. As much as he loved the coming of springtime, Calhoun didn't think he'd ever get used to those damn New England winters.

The Orvis guy's name was Rumley, and everybody called him Rummie. He was a young guy—barely thirty, Calhoun guessed—and he seemed way more interested in fishing than in selling waders, although with all of his stories and his general enthusiasm for fishing, he was actually a very effective salesman. Calhoun was all set to stock some of the new Orvis stuff, just
because he liked talking with Rummie and always looked forward to his visits.

He heard the phone ring inside the shop, and a minute later Kate, who'd been at the counter, poked her head out. She gave Rummie a quick smile, then looked at Calhoun. “I got an important call I want to take in my office,” she said. “Could you watch the front of the store?”

He nodded. “Sure.” He stood up. “You want to come in, talk some more, add to my discontent because I've never waded a bonefish flat?” he said to Rummie.