Nantucket Five-Spot (2 page)

I didn't offer any of the obvious responses to this petulant tirade. I was more or less under orders not to gratuitously alienate people who were paying in excess of two thousand dollars a week to rent a vacation home, and spending twice that on jewelry and restaurants. I never got a chance to answer him anyway, because that was the moment when Chief Selectman Dan Taylor showed up.

I heard him first. “I'm seeing Chief Kennis right now and you can't stop me!”

I had arrested Dan's younger son Bruce the night before, at a rowdy beach party in Madaket, but that was no excuse for this confrontation. I had also saved his older son Mason from killing himself, but that was more than six months ago, and Dan's memory was short. One thing for sure—I needed to tighten up the security downstairs. It was turning into Grand Central station around here.

“Dan, come on in. Mr. Gibson here was just leaving.”

I brushed past Gibson, stepping out into the hall to greet the burly Selectman. Gibson lingered behind me. “You'll be hearing from my lawyer,” he said.

“I need you to go.”

I turned around. He was standing at my desk, looking for something actionable, no doubt—some memo about harassing summer visitors.

“Now,” I said.

“Fine.”

He strode past us. Dan hadn't even noticed him. He was glaring at me, a squat pugnacious troll, balding with a fringe of gray hair and a big square face designed for temper tantrums. He filled my office, incongruously sporty in Nantucket red shorts and a Lacoste t-shirt.

“What do you think you're doing, Kennis? What the hell kind of—”

“Sit down, Dan. Take a deep breath and—”

“I will not sit down! I have no intention of sitting down! How dare you patronize me! You threw an innocent boy in jail while real crimes were happening on this island—my lawyer will be checking the 911 logs! The only question is—who was paying you to do it?”

I spoke quietly, not so much to calm him as to underline the difference between my professional demeanor and his absurd hysterics. “Your son was caught performing a sexual act on a minor, Dan. There were roughly fifty witnesses. He had enough weed on him to get all of them high, and he took a swing at me when I pulled him off the girl. He's in serious trouble. You have to calm down and start dealing with the situation.”

“The situation? You want me to deal with the situation? I'll tell you the situation, Kennis. This nonsense is going away like it never happened. I'm taking Bruce out of this station with me. Right now. You're signing the necessary papers and clearing all the bureaucratic bullshit and walking us to the door with a big grin on your face and waving bye-bye as we drive away. Or I will make your life a living hell here. I will ruin you. I will destroy you in this town!”

It was a flimsy blizzard of words thrown like confetti at a wedding, filling the air for a second but falling immediately, bluster as litter, scattered on the floor.

“How's Mason doing? I saw one of his poems in
Literati
a couple of months ago.”

“I don't know what happened in that room, I don't know what you said to him, but—”

“He had a gun that should have been locked away in your gun safe, Dan. We could have prosecuted you for that. I wanted to, but you have important friends, and they went to bat for you. Nice lesson for your kids, by the way.”

“That's the way the world works Chief. That's how you get ahead. Not by writing fag poems for some socialist school magazine.”

“I don't know. He's dating the prettiest girl in school, and last I heard, he was planning to get an MBA. That doesn't sound like a socialist fag to me. Just the opposite. Not that I care either way. One of my best friends fits that definition. So do most of my favorite writers. I'm rereading Gore Vidal right now. Great stuff. You should check him out.”

I sat down, settled my feet on my desk and leaned back into a bar of dusty summer sunlight. “Let's cut to the chase, Dan. The bail hearing is set for one o'clock. Bring a lawyer. And be on your best behavior. Or I will happily throw you in jail right next to your son.”

Barnaby Toll stuck his head in the door, belatedly. He must have heard the shouting.

“Show Mr. Taylor to his car, Barnaby.”

“Yes, sir.”

In the quiet of my office after he led the fuming selectman away, I picked an envelope off the blotter and stared at my name scrawled across the front, under the unfamiliar riot of blue and green Irish stamps.

It was a letter from Fiona Donovan, a woman I'd fallen in love with and then arrested the winter before. The envelope bulged with photographs, and part of me wanted badly to see them. But I knew that was pointless. She had been extradited, she was never coming back to this country, and I was never going there to visit her. It was over. Nothing she had to say could matter to me anymore.

I threw the envelope into the trash. Then plucked it out again. I turned it over, weighed it on my palm, still uncertain. But the decision was taken out of my hands.

The first bomb threat came two minutes later.

Ezekiel Beaumont: Ten Years Ago

Zeke Beaumont knew they were coming for him. They had been stupid enough to threaten him first. The big one, Tony his name was, had approached him when they were walking the outdoor chain link corridor that afternoon. At first what Tony said was drowned out by a formation of low-flying F-18s.

“We're gonna fuck you up,” Tony repeated, after the planes had vanished out over the Pacific. “You pushed Dooley.”

So that was it. Beaumont shrugged. “He pushed me first.”

“You don't fuck with Dooley, man.”

Tony had walked away after that.

The midday sun was hot and the starched pressed uniform all the inmates had to wear was sweltering. Beaumont's arms and legs were prickling, chafing against the heavy material. He kept walking. He had to look calm, but he was furious at himself. He always did this. He had to make trouble.

He had left a cigarette butt near Dooley's free-weight set-up in the yard this morning. You weren't supposed to use Dooley's barbells, and you definitely weren't supposed to leave a mess behind. Dooley had walked up to him a few minutes later with the crumpled Marlboro pinched between two massive stubby fingers.

“What's this?” he asked.

Beaumont had responded without even thinking. “A moron with a cigarette.”

Dooley had shoved him, and it had turned into a shoving match. Beaumont knew he should have apologized, but he couldn't.

He got to the end of the walkway and turned around. The F-18s were coming back. The thunder was growing in the air beyond the walls. No wonder the Iraqis hated the United States. Send those planes over a village a couple of times and you'd scare the crap out of them permanently.

Beaumont clapped his hands over his ears again, letting the roar of the big jets rumble through him like the IRT express subway through a local station. Finally, they were gone. He stuck his hands in his pockets and kept walking, easing around a group of tough Hispanics. They nodded to him without saying hello. He made a small salute in return. They hated Beaumont, but they had to put up with him. He used his job in the stockade commandant's office to get them cigarettes, Spanish language newspapers and occasionally more exotic items like pornographic playing cards, Caifanes and Maldita Vecindad tapes, or brass knuckles. They had no idea how he did it, so they regarded him as prison shaman. Beaumont was happy with that. Science always looked like magic to the barbarians.

He had gotten the office job in the first place because he had the highest tested IQ at Miramar. The Commandant's office gave him access to the facility's computer system, and he had been fucking with computer systems since he was in high school. It was easy to alter merchandise order manifests and stock supply lists. Covering his tracks was a little more difficult, but for the moment no one suspected anything and no one was looking.

His access to the brig computer system was his one advantage over Dooley's thugs. He certainly couldn't out-fight them. There was nothing on hand to blackmail them with. He had no particular standing in the stockade, no influence, no connections he could ask to intervene on his behalf. He had plenty of lackeys, though—helpless, lonely freaks who needed allies and craved the little treats Beaumont procured.

Enemies and lackeys, that summed things up. But he liked it that way. Friends were a liability. You trusted them and trust could be lethal. He had trusted his commanding officer in Kuwait. The CO had wanted to help and the deal he suggested seemed fair: if Beaumont turned in his supplier, he would walk away with a general discharge, no questions asked.

The trouble was, he didn't exactly know who the supplier was. They used no last names, no ranks, no serial numbers. It was always just Zeke and Eddie. They worked on a handshake and dealt in cash. But that wasn't a problem, the CO told him. All Beaumont had to do was let the MPs know when the next meeting was going down.

They had met in a dingy café off Fahd Al Salim Street and done all their subsequent business there over the joint's specialty Indian tea. It gave Beaumont heartburn and made him long for a shot of Johnny Walker. But there was strictly BYOB in Kuwait City, and you better not let them catch you. It was actually kind of funny—discussing hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal drug sales in an upright Muslim restaurant where they'd call the cops on you for drinking a glass of wine. Beaumont gave the MPs the address, ditched the meeting, and waited.

A week after the bust he was still waiting for his papers to be processed when he picked up the new issue of
Stars and Stripes.
There was a front page profile of Major General Edward Claymore, 3rd Corps Support Command.

Eddie.

It made perfect sense. No one in that godforsaken desert was better setup to get his hands on any item he wanted, from fan belts to ceiling fans, emery boards to MREs. 3rd COSCOM supplied food, water, and clothing to more than a hundred thousand troops. It kept their vehicles rolling and their guns loaded. It brought everything an army could possibly need into the country and shipped it out in the trucks it serviced, over the thousands of miles of roads it maintained, all over the theatre from Mishref to Baghdad. COSCOM was the lifeline, the supply line.

And, it turned out, in the case of Eddie Claymore's illicit drug business, the pipeline.

Staff Sergeant Beaumont closed the paper with a sickly chill. Nothing was going to happen to Claymore. If Beaumont's CO went up against the command structure of COSCOM, they'd crush him. He wouldn't even try. No one ever really helped anyone else. People didn't risk anything for each other. They didn't even inconvenience themselves. They turned away. The CO was no different, for all his chummy talk.

Beaumont had seen the CO one more time outside his office and offered enough evidence to make an airtight case against the Major General, talking fast as they walked through the parking lot, flop sweat evaporating in the furnace heat. The CO wasn't listening. He wasn't interested. Beaumont could tell it was over. He considered running, but there was nowhere to go—just a thousand miles of desert, a ring of crumbling Arab towns where he'd stick out like a Ken doll in a dumpster. Fleeing was useless. He'd just get the crap kicked out of him and add a few years to his sentence.

In the end he went quietly. The CO never even showed up at the court-martial. Major General Edward Claymore was quoted in the newspaper when the verdict was announced, something about not letting “a few rotten apples spoil the barrel.”

Sanctimonious prick.

He was still making a fortune out there, probably close to twenty thousand dollars a day after expenses, while Zeke Beaumont was doing hard time in Miramar. Well, no one said life was fair. Actually his Dad had told him something much more to the point—life was plenty fair, if you made it that way. “Don't let things happen to you,” he said, “Make things happen to other people.”

Good advice. Today he was going to make something happen to Dooley and his friends, something bad. They'd get caught kicking the shit out of another inmate, and that would mean an extended sentence and a transfer to Leavenworth, where they'd never be heard from again. It meant taking a beating, but hopefully not much of one. Timing was everything here. No margin for error. Once those boys started it wouldn't take them long to do permanent damage.

Zeke looked at his watch—a few minutes before noon. They'd be hustling him inside for lunch soon. You never had a moment to yourself at Miramar. Or at least, you weren't supposed to. Dooley and his pals shouldn't have been able to jump him, but they had obviously worked something out, which meant they had to have at least two or three guards on the payroll. The most likely prospect was Boatswain's Mate 2nd Class Brad Liddell, a thin balding kid from Jersey with acne scars and giant teeth. Rumor was the originals had been knocked out and the Navy had fitted him with dentures a size too big. Liddell walked Beaumont from the brig commander's office to his cell every night, after he was finished with the inventory spreadsheets on the computer, or the requisitions or the payroll…whatever busy work they had loaded him up with that day. Of course he did his own work, too.

He was on the List of Users—someone had changed it to Lusers in the old days. The old ITS system was a Smithsonian exhibit now, but the jargon remained. It suited him. He was a loser—and a cracker. That was the hacking term for crooks. Beaumont was born in South Carolina, but he had only been a real cracker, the kind people respected, since high school, when he'd used that crude system's buffer overflow to launch his first format string attack—one simple code injection and he was a straight A student.

The brig system incorporated a program that attempted to track private computer use, a Jedgar they called them at school, after the FBI director. But the Navy was using the same Unisys MCP he had played with in the old days. The tracking program was easy to dike, just two lines of code.

He changed the schedules and posted two additional guards in the last long stretch of corridor that led to his cell. He posted their duty call for 8:15, just as the attack should be starting.

He was setting up a print run for the immediate distribution protocol when Angela said, “What are you doing?”

He looked up. She was smiling.

“Just checking on the bed linen inventories.”

“And I thought my job was boring.”

Was she flirting with him? “I'm sure there are lots of things you're good at, Angela. I bet you have some hidden talents. And quite a few that are…right there in plain sight.”

She actually blushed. “Zeke!”

“For instance—I bet you knitted that sweater yourself.”

“How did you know that?”

“Well, you don't see that kind of workmanship in store-bought clothes. And my sisters knit—I know a homemade grafting stitch when I see one.”

She pushed her hair back from her forehead, stood up a little straighter. “My, my. You are full of surprises.”

She had no idea how accurate that comment was. Startling people into a vulnerable moment of contact, an intimacy he could exploit—that was Zeke's real talent, his most valuable one, and it didn't show up on the IQ tests. He absorbed facts and details and archived them and used them for leverage. He had overheard two women talking about knitting on a cross-country bus. Ten years later he could convince a prison secretary of a whole fictional family full of handcraft minded siblings with one telling detail.

He could teach a class in the technique if he wanted to give away his trade secrets. He even had a name for it—the tip of the iceberg theory. If you could construct a plausible jagged three-foot chunk of ice and float it in the right spot, people would naturally assume there was a whole iceberg underneath. You couldn't sink a ship with your little decoy, but you could get it to change course, and that was all Zeke ever wanted. That was the real fun. But dangerous—you could easily wind up in a military brig scamming for your life. Even now, even here with imminent danger pressing like a hand at his throat, it still gave him a rush.

It wasn't that much different with computers, except that machines were much easier to fool than people. You just had to know the language and he knew them all, including C++, the core language of the Unix machine he was manipulating right now.

He finished up and Angela ambled back to her desk. Nice girl.

She might come in handy some day.

***

The corridor was empty. Liddell slammed the big door behind them. It had all seemed so easy in the office, sitting at the terminal. But so much could have gone wrong. The orders might not have been delivered. His tampering might have been discovered.

Zeke took a deep breath as Liddell griped on about missing his Toronto Blue Jays. He had season tickets, but they did him no good stuck in the smog on the other side of the country. He was sure the Jays were going to win the World Series this year. Zeke agreed. He could feel the blood pounding behind his eyes. The far door opened. Dooley and Tony and two others started rolling toward Zeke and Liddell like a phalanx of Bradleys. They filled the whole corridor. Zeke tilted his wrist so he could see his watch. The digital read out said 8:13. He had two minutes.

If the orders had gone through.

If his tricks were undetected.

He let his breath out through his teeth in a low hiss. His body was already flinching, trying to draw into itself. This was going to hurt, which was part of the plan.

The group stopped. Liddell faded back.

“Hey, Beaumont.” Dooley grinned.

“I suppose it's too late for an apology.”

Dooley snickered. “Oh no. You're gonna say you're sorry, Beaumont. But you're gonna do it with a shattered knee, and a collapsed lung and a ruptured kidney. And that's for starters. Every time you try to piss or walk upstairs for the rest of your life you're gonna say you're sorry. We're gonna break you so you can't be fixed.”

Zeke risked another glance at his watch, 8:15 exactly.

“Expecting somebody?” Dooley asked.

“The cavalry.”

“Right. The cavalry. Like in those old movies. But in real life there ain't no cavalry. The Indians just massacre everybody. Nobody shows up to help. Nobody gives a shit.”

“You may have a point there, Dooley.” Zeke admitted. “You're not as stupid as you look. On the other hand—how could you be?”

Dooley's face hardened. “Grab him.”

Tony took one arm and an even bigger guy grabbed the other. Dooley took a step forward and the first punch hit Zeke's stomach like a police battering ram blasting through a cheesy motel-room door. He was wide open and Dooley charged in, knocking Zeke's head left and right with two roundhouse punches. Agony exploded behind his eyes, he could feel his sinuses rupture and his jaw break. He sagged forward and Dooley grabbed a handful of his hair, yanking him up face to face.