High Season (32 page)

Lola's shoulders felt as though they might pop out of their sockets. She bit her lip against the pain. She curled her torso forward, flexed her shoulders down, and tried again, wiggling her butt and straining, and that did it—her hands were behind her knees. She pulled her feet through—her hands were in front!—and tugged at her pants leg. The .38 was gone. Billy had taken her gun.

“We got to do this the right way, Frankie,” Billy said, raising his voice to make himself heard over the wind. “It's not just a matter of feeding your ass to the freakin' crustaceans. It's got to be aesthetically correct. We got to have a little ceremony. Somebody's got to say a few words, for Christ's sake.” He bent over, hooking the winch line to the rope that connected Coffin to the concrete blocks. He worked the lever and the take-up wheel reversed, pulling the cable taut, slowly raising Coffin and the two blocks from the deck, letting him swing out on the winch's arm until he hung head down over the water, arms dangling.

“I dedicate the body of this man to the bottom of the sea,” Billy shouted into the wind. “He's a good boy, and his old man was the salt of the freaking earth. There's worse fates than having lobsters eat your liver, although I'm fucked if I can think of any.”

Lola scrambled to her feet, trying to stay out of Billy's peripheral
vision. She kept low and directly behind him, moving slowly across the deck until she got within nine or ten feet. She could use both of her fists as a club, she thought, or jump on his back and use the cuffs as a crude garrote.

Billy spun around. “Mornin', honey pie!” he shouted. “Sleep well?”

Lola advanced another yard. Her vision was blurred, and she felt as though she were moving in slow motion, walking through a lake of glue.

Billy spread his arms as if he meant to embrace her. “You comin' to play with Uncle Billy, sweet cheeks? A little dance before you go swimming?” His hand dipped into his jacket pocket and came out with Lola's pistol. He grinned. “Why don't you sit down and keep still, like a good girl?”

Lola stepped on something and almost stumbled. She looked down. It was a four-foot gaff with a beautiful, gleaming hook. As she bent to pick it up, the gun cracked and a bullet whistled past her ear, punching into the bulkhead behind her. She grabbed the hook and dove to the right, sliding on her belly across the slick deck as the gun cracked again—Billy's second shot missing high, pinging off a broken lobster pot. She rolled onto her back and swung the gaff with both hands, cracking the top bone in Billy's forearm with the long handle. The gun squirted out of his hand and bounced off the gunwale, into the dark water.

“Now, God damn it,” Billy said, shuffling backward a few steps, holding his forearm. “What you just did was extremely fucking impolite. Good thing I'm pumped full of hillbilly heroin, or that might have hurt old Uncle Billy.”

“Let him down,” Lola said, on her feet now, brandishing the hook.

“Let's see,” Billy said, taking a few limping steps to his right. “Let Frankie down and go to jail, or chuck you both in the drink
and go free. It's a tough one, I have to admit.” He fished in his pocket with his left hand, pulled out the Buck knife, and flicked it open with a quick wrist snap. “But I think I'll take door number two, sweet cheeks.”

Lola charged and swung the gaff hook at Billy's head. He ducked under its arc and slashed with the big knife. Lola stepped back. There was a long, diagonal slice in her T-shirt and a burning line of pain across her belly, from the point of her left hipbone almost to her right breast.

Billy laughed. “You may have the reach advantage,” he said, “but old Uncle Billy's trouble in close.”

I'm not gutted,
Lola thought, touching her belly, feeling the shallow gash in her flesh. The pain was a rising, metallic taste in her mouth.
But next time, I might be.

“Am I on a boat? I fucking hate boats!” Coffin shouted, swinging from the winch.

Billy turned, and Lola swung the gaff hook.

Billy's hands twitched. “That's no way to treat your old Uncle Billy,” he said, his voice coming out watery and strange. The four-inch hook was buried in the back of his neck. The long handle wagged obscenely.

He took a step back, clawing at the gaff hook. He stumbled and fell against the winch, bumping the lever forward with his hip. The winch hiccupped and whirred, and Coffin plunged headfirst into the black water, the line paying out fast as he sank, a flurry of bubbles breaking the surface.

“That jinx of yours is a bitch, Frankie,” Billy said, leaning heavily on the winch's steel frame, one hand reaching back, fingering the base of the steel hook that protruded from his neck. “Fuckin'-A—who knew a gaff hook in the neck would make you feel so weird? Talk about pins and needles—”

Lola kicked him hard in the ribs, then charged him, using her
weight and the strength of her legs to deliver a mammoth shove. He toppled over the gunwale and into the ocean.

“Hang on, Frank,” she said, grabbing at the winch's control lever. “Jesus Christ—hang on!”

 

The water glowed a deep, electric blue. It pressed Coffin's eardrums, streamed past his face. It was so cold it shut his mouth and stopped his lungs, so dense he couldn't see beyond the trail of magenta bubbles coming from his nose. There was still the bright universe of color, too, though it seemed less intense, his brain toggling back and forth between realities a thousand times a second. He felt he was being reborn, squirting through a watery birth canal. He saw his father—sinking, too, in his red armchair, hair waving like seaweed, crabs clambering one after another out of his mouth. Coffin's lungs ached. He could hear his heartbeat slowing in his chest.

Something tugged his ankles. The water stopped, then began to stream the other way, as though he were rising through it, or it was falling past him—up and down were meaningless, there was only space, darkness, the sensation of motion. He took a breath of water, and the colors dimmed—the glowing entities were long gone, taking their love and reassurance with them. He was alone and about to die. The water streamed through his clothes, his hair. And then the ocean spat him out, squeezed him from its womb and hung him, puking, in the world of air.

“God damn,” Lola said, pulling Coffin into the boat. “Thought I'd lost you, Frank.”

 

“You can't
do
this,” said Brandon Phipps. A cold rain had begun to fall, and he was shivering. His right hand was cuffed to the handle of the Pilgrim Monument's locked steel door. A small Vuitton
bag, embossed with the initials brp and stuffed with cash—mostly tens and twenties—lay at his feet.

“The hell I can't,” Rudy said. He was holding a very large pistol. A somewhat larger suitcase, similarly embossed and stacked to the brim with neatly wrapped bricks of hundred-dollar bills, lay in the bed of his pickup truck. “Now give me those pants.”

Phipps unbelted his pants with one hand, let them drop, and stepped out of them. He bent awkwardly to pick them up. “Here,” he said, holding them out.

Rudy took them, wadded them into a ball, and threw them as far as he could down High Pole Hill. The rain fell slow and cool. The Pilgrim Monument reared above them, its crenellated peak lost in fog.

“Nice underwear,” Rudy said, waving the gun at Phipps's crotch. “What are those—boxer briefs?”

Phipps nodded miserably. “Calvin Klein,” he said.

“Underpants for men who can't make up their minds,” Rudy said. “I've always been most comfortable with boxers, myself.” He put the gun in his jacket pocket and lit a cigarette. Then he walked across the monument's wide stone veranda, climbed into his blue Chevy pickup truck, and drove away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

C
offin woke up from a long, troubled sleep and realized he was lying in a hospital bed, covered with blankets. He wasn't sure, at first, how he'd gotten there. He closed his eyes and remembered the ride to MacMillan Wharf on the lobster boat, Lola's T-shirt soaked in blood. He pressed the call button and asked the nurse for water, which she brought, then coffee, which she also brought, then a cigarette.

The nurse was a tall, pretty black woman named Estelle. She wagged a finger at Coffin. “You should quit, Mr. Coffin,” she said.

“I have,” Coffin said. “Lots of times.” He asked if Lola was okay.

“She's fine. A bunch of stitches and a tetanus shot. We sent her home last night with some Vicodin.”

“Why am I still here?”

“You were hypothermic. Plus, you had a
lot
of ketamine in your system. The ER doc wanted to keep an eye on you.”

“What about Billy?”

“He's upstairs in the ICU,” she said. “He's got some numbness
on the right side of his body. Might have been the gaff hook, might have been a small stroke. We're treating him for both.”

“I want to see him,” Coffin said.

“You're supposed to stay in bed,” Estelle said. “Until the doctor says you can get up.”

“I feel fine,” Coffin said. He felt a wave of nausea and dizziness as he swung his legs out from under the covers. “Fuck the doctor.”

Estelle clucked her tongue. “Let me get a wheelchair. You can go, but you're not walking.”

 

Billy lay handcuffed to his bed. He looked old and a little frail in his pale blue gown. Coffin knew better. A uniformed trooper sat in a hospital armchair beside the bed, reading a magazine.

“Detective Coffin to see the patient,” Estelle said, pushing Coffin into the room.

The trooper stood up and shook Coffin's hand. “Nice work on the collar, Detective,” he said.

“I had nothing to do with it,” Coffin said. “Officer Winters had to save me from drowning.”

“That's right,” Billy said. “Frankie here was incapacitated.”

“Mind waiting outside for a minute?” Coffin said.

The trooper frowned, thought for a minute. “The door stays open.”

“Don't you get out of that wheelchair,” Estelle said. “I mean it.”

“Damn,” Billy said when Estelle and the trooper had gone into the hallway. “Is that your nurse? Mine looks like a drill instructor.”

“Is that you or the Viagra talking?”

Billy grinned. Then he looked down at his blanket. “I feel kind of bad about almost killing you, Frankie.”

“You should,” Coffin said.

“You gotta do what you gotta do. Once those dumb-asses arrested Kotowski, I was in the clear. Except for you.”

“There's something I don't get,” Coffin said.

“Just the one thing?”

“How'd you know about the Project? How'd you know about Merkin and Serena Hench?”

“Phipps. He came into my place about a month ago—wanted to buy it. I told him to go pound sand. Next thing I know, I've got the health inspector and the building inspector and the men's room inspector and every other goddamn inspector breathing down my neck—fining me for this, citing me for that, threatening to shut me down. So, not being a complete moron, I put one and one together.”

“You went to see Mr. Phipps.”

“I did. In private. Unlike our friend Kotowski.”

“He told you everything.”

“I was holding a very large knife to his throat at the time.”

“Then he offered you a deal. He wanted to get rid of the other partners.”

Billy nodded. “A big old bag of cash. He helped me set them up. He had it all figured out. Thought he did, anyway—I had a little list of my own, with his name at the bottom. The funny thing about all this is, you and the lesbo-cop saved his life. Got a cigarette?”

“They won't let me have any,” Coffin said. “So you did it for the money? Killed four people?”

“Yes and no. It was a shitload of dough, and God knows they all deserved to die. What they were planning was morally offensive—legalized robbery, if you ask me. The way I see it, I'm a freakin' hero. I mean, I saved the damn town from those assholes—not that anybody around here would ever thank me, the worthless cocksuckers.”

“It was a crackpot scheme,” Coffin said. “It never would have worked.”

“The hell it wouldn't,” Billy said. “It's working all over the country. They were going to turn Provincetown into one big gated community—everything fake and tarted up like some kind of overpriced Disney World for rich queers. People like you and me wouldn't be welcome there. We couldn't afford it.”

 

“That's one crazy white man,” Estelle said, wheeling Coffin back to his room.

Coffin rubbed his chin. It was bristly and itched a little. “You were listening?”

“Of course.”

“He's crazy,” Coffin said, “but it's true—they were going to sell the whole town out from under us.”

Estelle opened the door to Coffin's room and parked the wheelchair beside the narrow bed. “Must be something in the water out there in P'town,” she said. “Now let's get your butt back up in that bed.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

J
amie stood in the bedroom door, holding a breakfast tray. She wore cutoffs, a faded orange T-shirt, and an anklet made of red coral beads from Ecuador. “Look,” she said. “Soup. Chicken noodle from a can—your favorite.”

“And Jell-O,” Coffin said. “Green, with the little oranges. Gee, thanks, honey.”

“Wholesome, delicious hooves,” Jamie said, smiling brightly. She put the tray over Coffin's lap and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Delightful,” Coffin said.

“This is me being nurturing,” Jamie said as she spread a white linen napkin across his chest. “What do you think?”

Coffin slurped soup. “You're doing a fine job,” he said. “Very June Cleaver.”