Authors: Ted Wood
Dead in the Water
Ted Wood
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No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the Author
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
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Copyright 1983 by Ted Wood
First e-reads publication 1999
www.e-reads.com
ISBN 0-7592-0400-4
Ted has been a flyer, a beat cop, a pinboy, soda-jerk, freight porter and advertising hot-shot. He has also written dozens of short stories, hundreds of magazine articles including two long-running humour columns, television plays and one musical comedy. He has had fourteen books, thirteen of them novels, publishing in Canada, the U.S., Britian, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Holland, Italy and Japan. He has been widowed and married Mary in 1975. He is the father of three, stepfather to another three and granddad to a total of nine, counting steps and one step-step. He now runs Whitby's Ezra Annes House bed and breakfast in partnership with his wife Mary.
Other works by Ted Wood also available in e-reads editions
When The Killing Starts
Corkscrew
Murder On Ice
Live Bait
Three of them were working on the girl. The biggest was zipping his fly and laughing while the other two took over, trying for the two-at-once trick.
I was off duty. My gun was locked in the safe at the station and I'd changed into plain clothes, so they didn't even know I was a policeman. It wouldn't have mattered to the big one, anyway. He went six four, maybe two eighty. He figured he was Superman. Until I stuck two fingers into his throat.
It could have ended there, with one dead, if the second one hadn't come at me. I pinned him but the third one didn't take the hint and so I had to break the arm on the one I was holding and put the third one down. He had a knife so I hurt him.
They arrested me. My own buddies from 52 Division. They apologized. "It's for your own protection. If we don't, the papers can tear you to shreds. This way they have to keep quiet."
That was Inspector Anderson, Superintendent Anderson now. "It's for your own good," he told me again when I didn't answer. "You'll be out on bail in an hour and you'll be acquitted. You have to understand, nobody likes a policeman who can kill people."
He was right. I was acquitted, after the defense explained that I had been a Canadian volunteer in Viet Nam and had been taught a lot of tricks you don't learn at the police academy in Aylmer, Ontario.
But the morning after, the media took it up and the phone ills started. Then the garbage against the door of the house. I couldn't understand at first what made the public take sides with a bunch of bikies working on a gang rape. But I worked out as the days passed. It was me they resented. I'd broken faith with the liberals who were slamming me now. When I'd volunteered for service in the States, gone to a war their own guys were running to Canada to avoid, I'd put myself on the other side of some fence. If I'd stayed in northern Ontario and rotted my lungs out in the smelter at the nickel mine, they would have treated me like a brother. Only I didn't, I chose violence, and now it was destroying me.
My wife took it for a week. I took it for three, going out every morning to see what new filth had been written on my car in spray paint, listening to the sneers of the drunks in my patrol area.
And then I gave them their badge back, and their gun, and looked for a different kind of work. Only it's not easy to place yourself when your only real skill is putting people down so they stay down. And that's why I ended up here, in Murphy's Harbour, a resort town just within range of the weekend commuters from Toronto. Nothing violent happens here.
I
let go of Linda and grabbed the phone. "Chief of Police."
"Still wide awake, eh?" Murphy gave his dry, old-man's chuckle. "Good, won't take you long to get dressed and down the station."
"Okay, Murph. What happened that you have to call me at…" I checked the alarm clock. "At three
A.M.
"
"Young Sullivan, Ken Sullivan's kid got himself cut up." I struggled upright. Linda was lying on my left arm. I pried it free. Ken Sullivan was a town councilor. Like it or not, I had to take notice.
"Knife cuts, or what?"
Murphy coughed once, a signal that things were not as bad as they sounded. "No. Outboard propeller. He hit something up by Indian Island, fell out of the boat, and the motor ran over him."
I swore softly and patted Linda's bare shoulder. Murphy went on in his infuriatingly slow, up-country way. "So the girl with him pulled him in."
Now it made sense. Murphy wanted me to talk to the girl. Other stuff he handled, out of the little Mickey Mouse switchboard in his house over on the point north of the Harbour. But this was an investigation. I could see his eyebrows raise in disgust at the word. It called for the police chief—the whole force in fact—of Murphy's Harbour to turn out of a warm and appealing bed to soothe the feathers of some flustered cottager.
"Couldn't this have waited until tomorrow?"
"It already is tomorrow." He sounded reasonable.
"Okay, so tell her to wait at the police station."
"She's there now," he said, and beat me to the hang-up by a microsecond.
I turned back to Linda, warm, Chanel-scented, every-Friday-come-rain-or-shine Linda. "Where were we?" She showed me and very soon I was up and getting dressed. She watched as I buttoned the pants and tucked in the shirt.
"What a lousy thing to happen on a Friday night." I nodded, concentrating on buckling the Sam Browne with the handcuffs pouch and the .38 Colt Police Special. She sat up, dangling her head to one side. She was a brown-eyed blonde, slim and pale from too much book work. She worked north of Murphy's Harbour and came through every Friday, stopping by like a swallow on her way south. Where she went before or after she never told me. At thirty-five and back on my own I knew better than to ask.
She stepped out of bed and reached for her clothes. Even standing still she looked like a dancer. She said, "I'll head for home, Reid."
"Sure." I bent and kissed her nose. I was fond of her, mysteries notwithstanding. She had helped me feel more like a person and less like a function, a computer print-out, ex-soldier, ex-detective on a city department, ex-husband, paid an impossibly small amount of money to keep law and order in Murphy's Harbour. The "Chief" was a joke. I was the entire force. Me, and Murphy, and Sam, my German shepherd.
I went downstairs and outside onto the cool predawn grass. Sam was on the prod, but he stopped very still as I spoke to him. "Okay, Sam, cool it. This is talking work, you can take it easy." He gave a low whine and fell flat, coiling down like an abandoned rope. I bumped the wire of the cage with the heel of my hand and went out to the car.
I passed what little there is to see in Murphy's Harbour on my way to the station. There's one main street with buildings one side, water the other. The buildings include the real estate office and the beer store and the boardinghouses with their hand-lettered signs. There's a hardware and bait store and a grocery where they'll cook you a breakfast if you happen to be police chief. That's it. On the water side there's the Lakeshore tavern and the marina. Tonight the docks of the marina were crowded, about normal for mid-August.
The police office is a quarter mile out of town, on a swampy lot some councilor sold the township in the fifties. It's a concrete block building that looks too much like a bunker. There was a Mercedes out front with its headlights on. I drove up nose to nose, keeping my own lights on to check the occupants. Mr. Cottager and daughter. Him pale, her red-faced. He was a commuter and the family stayed here all summer.
He opened his door as I opened mine, and he cleared his throat as if it were all stuffed up with money. "Chief of Police?"
"Yeah."
"I hope this won't take long, it's late."
"I noticed." I walked by to the passenger side of the Mercedes. His daughter was sitting there, staring ahead like a hypnotized chicken. I broke the spell.
"Hi. I'm the police chief. I hear you did some lifesaving." Her father was fussing at my elbow. He was tense and it didn't take any working out. Young Sullivan, the fellow she'd pulled back into the boat, was the junior-grade stickman of the entire area. Papa wasn't happy that his daughter had been in that boat, or worse, ashore on some island with Sullivan. He wanted this over, wiped off the record.
"Officer…" he said, and when I ignored him, "Chief…"
I said "yeah" again, starting to feel like Gary Cooper.
He did his throat-clearing bit again. "I can explain what happened."
"Great. You were in the boat as well?"
"Well no…"
I turned away. Murphy's Harbour is a tiny patch, but it's all mine and I don't have to put up with the kind of guys who run your life in a big department. I crouched a little and looked in at the kid who was watching us as if we were on television.
"Hi again. What's your name, please."
"Jane Bryant." There. She could talk as well as pull people into motorboats.
"Thank you, Jane. Can you tell me what happened?"
She looked past me quickly at her father, but his face was in shadow. She spoke up, nervously.
"We were in the boat, see."
Her father let up with the throat and started grinding his teeth. I felt for him. The kid was pretty and she must be smart. Maybe next year, when she was over sixteen, it wouldn't matter. Tonight it did.
She had to gather up her strength to talk over the tension he was generating. I turned to him and said, "You're making your daughter nervous, Mr. Bryant. Could you please stand back."
He backed off, as if he were pacing off the distance for a duel. The kid relaxed with every step he took. It didn't take police work to know that she and young Sullivan had been playing something a bit more strenuous than spin the bottle, and she figured her old man was going to lock up Sullivan for doing what comes naturally. I said, "The only thing I'm interested in is what happened that made him fall out of the boat. Cool?"