Fire Season (29 page)

“The guy in the brown suit?” Coffin said. “No thanks.”

“Funny,” Mancini said, stepping out into the hallway. “That's what everybody says.”

“That was weird,” Lola said, when Mancini was gone. “He was almost not a dick to you.”

“Maybe he got lucky last night,” Coffin said.

“Ew,” Lola said. “I was really happy not having that image in my head.”

Coffin stood. “Time to go see Dogfish.”

“He's the guy who lives on the houseboat, right?”

Coffin made a face. “Thanks for reminding me,” he said.

*   *   *

The Provincetown Police Department maintained an official police boat, awkwardly christened
PPD 2.
She was a twenty-seven-foot Boston Whaler, powered by two enormous Mercury outboards. Her predecessor,
PPD 1,
had been slammed into the wharf and partially sunk by Hurricane Charley, back in 1987.

The morning was still chilly and damp. MacMillan Pier jutted into the harbor like a long, concrete finger, pointing across the bay's gray chop to Branstool's house in Truro. Constellations of gulls orbited the fishing boats—shellfish draggers, mostly—that bobbed rusty and dispirited in their moorings.
PPD 2
was tethered to a large metal cleat about halfway out the west side of the pier, twin outboards rumbling.

“Mornin' Frank, Lola. Welcome aboard!” Teddy Goulet, the harbor cop, leaned in the wheelhouse, smoking a cigarette.

“Why is he always so fucking cheerful?” Coffin hissed.

“Not everybody hates boats as much as you, Frank,” Lola said, climbing aboard with an easy grace that made Coffin's vision swim.

Coffin sneezed, then sneezed again. “Just fucking shoot me, would you?” he said, under his breath. He clambered into Goulet's boat as best he could, momentarily catching his pants leg on a small metal cleat that was bolted into the gunwale.

“You all right there, Frank?” Goulet said, peering at Coffin as Lola helped cast off. “You don't look so good.”

“I have a cold,” Coffin said.

“He hates boats,” Lola said, looping the bowline neatly before dropping it onto the deck.

“Hates boats!” Teddy said, the engines burbling as he eased PPD 2 away from the pier. “Huh. I've loved being on the water my whole life. It's being ashore I ain't so crazy about.”

Goulet hit the gas and headed out toward the breakwater, where Dogfish's ramshackle pontoon boat was anchored. Coffin swallowed hard and clung to the frame of the wheelhouse as
PPD 2
's nose lifted a bit, and the bow cut a gray-green wake, unzipping the still harbor.

*   *   *

The houseboat was a crude affair, cobbled together from fifty-gallon drums and random bits of lumber Dogfish had salvaged or stolen from shipyards and construction sites. It was, Coffin thought, basically a platform floating on pontoons, with a small, leaky-looking shack more or less in the middle of its deck. The whole thing had been painted traffic-cone orange since the last time Coffin had paid a visit. The shack had no door—a tattered shower curtain fluttered in the door frame. Coffin stuck his head inside. “Knock knock,” he said.

A bed and a ramshackle table were bolted to the floor. There was a small potbellied stove, with a stovepipe that pierced the ceiling. Two mismatched lawn chairs squatted near the table. Several large plastic jugs of water stood in a row against the wall. A small, pop-eyed bulldog stared at Coffin from the bed, next to what appeared to be a pile of laundry. The bulldog growled, bared its teeth. The pile of laundry stirred.

“Fuck, man,” Dogfish said, sitting up. He was skinny and small. His eyes were bleary—it had been several days since he'd shaved. “A man's home is no longer his castle in this fucking state. The cops just walk right in.”

“It's a commonwealth,” Coffin said, “and the door was open.”

“What happened to your collection?” Lola said. The last time she and Coffin had visited, the houseboat had been decorated with flotsam and jetsam found over years of walking the town beach at dawn: plastic baby dolls, driftwood, sea-glass—anything that floated or washed ashore. Now the houseboat was plain, except for the bright orange paint inside and out.

“It sank,” Dogfish said. “
Dogfish I
is no more. This here is
Dogfish II
.”

“
Dogfish I
sank?” Coffin said. “When?”

“About a year ago—she got run down in the fog by some yahoo driving a big ol' motor yacht. That's why the orange paint—I figure it'll enhance my visibility.”

Coffin felt a little queasy. He folded himself into one of the lawn chairs. “Were you on board at the time?”

Dogfish shook his head. “Nope. Me and Pants here had rowed ashore in the skiff, to take care of a little business. When we got back there was nothing left but a lot of floating junk. We're only in about ten feet of water at low tide, so I salvaged a lot—but I haven't had the heart to redecorate. Losing
Dogfish I
was a serious blow to my morale. I've been self-medicating ever since.”

“You've been self-medicating for fifteen years,” Coffin said.

“Yeah, but now I've got a good reason.”

“Your dog's name is Pants?” Lola said.

“Yeah,” Dogfish said. “I rowed out here one night and there was some guy in the shanty, going through my stuff. Looking for my stash, probably. Pants jumps out of the skiff and latches onto the guy's crotch—damn near castrated him. I couldn't really call him Balls, so I went with Pants. Besides, he pants. Get it?”

Coffin looked at Lola. She raised an eyebrow. “Let's talk about smack,” Coffin said.

“So you require my expertise,” Dogfish said, standing up, digging in the pile of laundry for a pair of jeans. “What's in it for me?”

He was naked. He looked, Coffin thought, like a plucked chicken with a few crudely drawn tattoos. “How about,” Coffin said, “we continue not to arrest you for dealing heroin?”

“What, that's it? No cash?”

“If you got busted again, how many offenses would that make?”

“Three.”

“So,” Lola said. “Fifteen to twenty? Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.”

“Okay,” Dogfish said. “Done.”

“You drive a hard bargain,” Coffin said. “What do you know about a guy named Branstool?”

Dogfish grinned. His teeth were snaggled, his gums receding. “I know he was over his head. Get it?”

Coffin looked at Lola again. “It doesn't really make sense,” he said. “As a joke, I mean.”

“Over his head how?” Lola said.

Dogfish pulled on a stained yellow T-shirt, knelt in front of the potbellied stove. “He was dealing with some very bad boys,” Dogfish said, expertly laying a small fire. “And completely fucking up the local heroin economy in the process. I mean, I assume you've noticed that the whole town's
awash
in smack, right?”

Coffin nodded. “We're starting to catch on. We've had a couple of overdoses in the last few months, a few more possession charges than usual. Seems to be hitting the Eastern Europeans, mostly.”

“Your guy was bringing in very high quality Afghani by the kilo,” Dogfish said. “Red stamp, right?”

“Right,” Lola said. “A red stamp with a mosque and Arabic writing.”

“Most of it was going off-Cape,” Dogfish said, striking a match. “But he was also skimming and distributing to a few local dealers. Not me, though.”

“Why not you?” Coffin said.

Dogfish raised an eyebrow. “'Cause I didn't want to get my fuckin' head cut off,” he said. “Duh.”

The fire crackled to life. Satisfied, Dogfish shut the little door in the stove's belly and filled a kettle with water from one of his plastic jugs. “Anybody for tea?” he said, holding up a chipped mug with a picture of Big Bird on one side.

“No, thanks,” Coffin and Lola said, almost in unison.

“So who are we talking about here?” Coffin said. “I've heard everything from MS 13 to Ukrainians.”

Dogfish snorted and put the kettle on the stove. “Ukrainians. Somebody's been messin' with you, man.”

“Okay. Who, then?”

Dogfish stared at Coffin for a long minute, eyes narrowed, wary. “We never had this conversation, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay.” Dogfish sat on the edge of the bed, and Pants jumped into his lap. “This is a very unusual operation as I understand it. I don't know everything, though—all I got is bits and pieces.”

“Fine.”

“Okay, you know where heroin comes from, right?”

“Afghanistan?”

Dogfish closed his eyes, shook his head. “Well, of course, Afghanistan, originally. I mean before it gets here.”

“Germany?”

“Okay—not bad. This stuff with the red stamps gets flown out of Afghanistan in bulk, hundreds of pounds at a time. It's partly a CIA thing—it's basically the deal we cut with the Afghani warlords to keep them from rejoining the Taliban and overthrowing the central government. They grow the poppies and process the heroin. It's a multibillion-dollar business at their end. The CIA offers protection and gets a cut. From there it gets a little murky.”

“Who flies it out of the country?” Coffin said.

“Like I say, it's all very covert. You hear different things. Did you know there are as many private contractors operating in Afghanistan as American military, almost? There's over fifty thousand of them, and they've got a lot of the same equipment and training as the army and marines and whatnot, but basically no oversight, and almost complete legal immunity.”

“My uncle's going to be jealous when he hears this,” Coffin said.

“Look, don't take my word for it. It's all over the Internet,” Dogfish said.

“He's actually pretty close,” Lola said. “I'm not scared of much, but when I was in the service those guys scared the hell out of me. Mercenaries, is what they are. Hard-core hired killers.”

“Great,” Coffin said. “So the mercenaries fly it out?”

“Probably. Usually the route is Afghanistan—which is totally landlocked—to Turkey, over Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan and some other little shithole countries nobody ever heard of, because you can't fly through Iranian airspace or Pakistani airspace without starting frickin' World War Three. From Turkey it's flown or goes overland to Germany, Holland, or—old school—France. From there it's on a boat to the U.S., although it might switch boats a couple of times midocean. GPS makes that shit easy now.”

“This is all fascinating,” Coffin said, stomach lurching a bit as
Dogfish II
rocked gently on the harbor swell. “But could we cut to the chase?”

“You don't look so good,” Dogfish said. “You okay?”

“He hates boats,” Lola said.

“Huh,” Dogfish said. “Is that, like, a phobia? Is there a name for that?”

“Thalassophobia is fear of the sea,” Lola said. “I don't know if there's one just for boats.”

Coffin looked at his watch, tapped the crystal, looked at Dogfish.

“Sorry. Okay, here's where it gets a little fuzzy, like I say. What I've heard is, Branstool was meeting his shipments right down on the beach below his house. Now, ordinarily you'd have a larger ship offshore and send a Zodiac or whatever in to make the drop. Pretty simple—the guy on the beach lights a signal at a specific time, and the guys in the Zodiac aim for it.”

“How much would you drop at a given time?”

Dogfish scratched Pants behind the ears. Pants panted. “Depends,” he said. “Maybe a couple kilos. Maybe a lot more.”

“And money changes hands?”

“Maybe. Or it might all be set up beforehand—bank transfers, numbered accounts, the whole deal. Did you know Branstool? Before he got killed, I mean?”

“Yeah,” Coffin said. “I knew him.”

“So you know what a zero he was, right? I mean, most of the people you meet in this business are lowlifes, but at least they have some initiative, right? A little entrepreneurial spirit.”

“But not Branstool?”

“No, man. Are you kidding? Dude was just a flunky—somebody's little paid clerk. The last fucking guy on the planet you'd think was distributing smack all over the country, that's for sure.”

“You said ‘ordinarily,'” Lola said. “Ordinarily there'd be a larger ship offshore, and a Zodiac would make the run to shore.”

“Oh, right,” Dogfish said. He dropped a teabag into a chipped blue mug and poured boiling water from the kettle. Then he sat down at the table and lit a cigarette. Pants jumped into his lap and stared up at him adoringly. “Yeah, well, that's the freaky part. This was a big money operation. What I've heard is that they flew the stuff in on a helicopter.”

“So the mother ship would have to be big enough to land a chopper on,” Coffin said.

“Right,” Dogfish said, exhaling smoke from his nose. “A big motherfucker of a yacht, probably parked outside the territorial limit, where the Coasties can't get 'em. Small chopper—runs in low and fast. They've got all this stealth shit now that makes 'em pretty quiet. Make the drop in the dunes or on the beach—you don't even have to land, just throw the merchandise out the door and boom, you're gone. Nothing but a streak of light in the night sky.”

Coffin nodded. “That would explain Tony's UFOs, maybe.”

Dogfish pointed, cigarette between his fingers. “The UFOs!” he said. “Over Pilgrim Lake. I never thought of that.” He laughed, a dry cackle. “All this time it was choppers full of smack.”

“You've seen them?”

“No, but my buddy Leroy has. He thought he was losing his mind. Wait 'til I tell him.” Pants had fallen asleep in Dogfish's lap, and was snoring loudly.

Lola pursed her lips. “You said Branstool was just a clerk. How did you know him?”