Backflash p-18 Page 4

  From the county road, Hanzen told Parker to take the left onto a dirt road between a crumbled barn and a recently plowed field with some green bits coming up. “Corn later,” he said, nodding at the field; his only bit of tour guiding.

  This dirt road twisted downward around the end of the cornfield and through scrubby trees and undergrowth where the land was too steep for ready plowing. Then it leveled, and they bumped across railroad tracks, and Parker said, “Amtrak?”

  “They always yell when they’re comin,” Hanzen said.

  Just beyond the tracks, the road widened into an oval dirt area where a lot of cars had parked at one time or another and a number of fires had been laid. Low ailanthus and tall maples crowded in on the sides, and the river was right there, at the far end of the dirt oval. Its bottom was mud and stone, quickly dropping off. To the left, downstream, three decayed and destroyed small boats lay half in and half out of the water. One of them was partly burned. About ten feet from the bank a gray outboard motorboat pulled at its mooring in the downriver current. A rough-made low windowless cabin painted dark blue covered the front half of the boat.

  Parker and Hanzen got out of the car. Hanzen took off his shoes, socks and pants, rolled them in a bundle and put them on the ground. He wore white jockey shorts that bagged on him, as though they’d been washed too many times. He waded out into the water, grabbed the anchor line, and pulled the boat close, then untied the line from the float and used the line to tow the boat to shore, saying as he came in, “I got to keep it out there or the kids come and shoot up in it.” Pointing, “Set it on fire, like that one.”

  “Nothing’s easy,” Parker said.

  “Amen,” Hanzen said. He waded out of the water, pulling the boat after him until the prow scraped on dry land, then pulled on the side of the boat until it came around far enough that the deck behind the cabin was reachable from the bank. “Climb aboard,” he said.

  Parker stepped over the gunwale. The interior was recently painted, gray, and very neat. Two solid wood doors were closed over the cabin, with a padlock.

  “Take this stuff, will you?” Hanzen said, holding out the roll of his clothes, and Parker took them and put them on the deck next to the cabin door, while Hanzen pushed the boat off again from shore until it floated, then climbed over the side. “Give me a minute,” he said.

  “Go ahead.”

  Hanzen unrolled his pants, found a ring of keys, and unlocked the padlock on the cabin. He pulled the doors open, and Parker got a look at a narrow lumpy bunk under a dark brown blanket, some wooden boxes and cardboard cartons used as shelves and storage, and Playboy bunnies on the inside of the cabin doors. Then Hanzen stooped inside, found a towel, dried his legs, tossed the towel in on the bunk, shut but didn’t lock the doors, and dressed himself. Only then did he go to the wheel beside the cabin doors, put the key in the ignition, and start the motor.

  By then they’d drifted a ways south and out into the stream. There was no place to sit, so Parker stood on the other side of the cabin doors from Hanzen and the wheel, put one forearm on the cabin top, and looked at the bank. As they floated farther from shore, he could see other landings north and south, a few old structures, some small boats at anchorage. There was no apparent commerce, and he didn’t see anything that looked like vacation settlements or estates.

  Hanzen said, “It’s north you care about, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Hanzen turned the wheel, and goosed the motor, and their slow drift backward became a steadily increasing push forward. Wake hissed along the sides. “We’ll go up this bank, down the other,” Hanzen said. He had to speak a little louder now.

  They rode in silence for about five minutes. There were no boats around at all, though Parker knew there was still some barge traffic sometimes along here, and in summer there would be the pleasure boaters, both sail and motor. But off-season the river wasn’t used much.

  They were keeping close to the east bank, and it stayed pretty much the same until they passed another river town, smaller than Hudson, and looking poorer, its clapboard houses climbing above one another back up the hill from the water. Hanzen steered farther away from shore at that point, out closer to the middle of the river, which was very wide here, the other bank visible but not clear, just a blur of green and the colors of structures.

  North of that town, Hanzen steered closer to the bank again and said, “You don’t mind, I got some stuff of my own to look at along here.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “First we see if my alarm’s okay,” Hanzen said, and steered abruptly leftward, toward the middle of the river, so that Parker had to press his forearm down on the cabin top to keep his balance. Hanzen drove out a ways, then swung around in a wide half-circle, looking toward the shore, and smiled in satisfaction. “There it is,” he said. “You see the big branch bent down?”

  Parker shook his head. “Just so you do,” he said.

  Hanzen grinned at him. “That’s right, I guess. We know what we have to know, and we see what we have to see.”

  Parker said, “What is this branch?”

  “I’ve got some stuff in there,” Hanzen said. “Nobody’s gonna bother it except law. If the law finds it, they’re gonna touch it, probably pull it outa there. The minute they do, the minute they touch it at all or come at it the wrong way, that big tree branch I got tied so it bends down, it’ll release and go right back up. I come here, I don’t see my branch bent down, I just drive on by. Happened to me once, three years ago. Not here, another place.”

  What Hanzen was doing here, Parker knew, was showing his credentials, his qualifications, should it be that Parker might have further use for him and want to know what sort of man he was. Because all they had between them so far was that Parker would give him three hundred dollars for a tour of the river north of Hudson up toward Albany, and more money if he was needed for anything else later. The subject of this trip was not for Hanzen to worry about, and the trip was not for him to talk about with anybody else. But of course he had to know something was being planned here, and wonder if maybe they could use a trustworthy river man later on.

  Maybe. Time would tell.

  As they neared shore, Hanzen slowed the boat to an easy glide, so the prow was no longer lifted and they left barely a ripple of wake. Ahead of them was a stretch of undeveloped bank, tangled with undergrowth. Large tree branches reached out over the water. It would be almost impossible to get to the bank anywhere along here, and probably just as tough to get to the water from the other side. Whatever Hanzen was hiding, he’d picked a good spot for it.

  “There they are. My babies.” Hanzen grinned with fatherly pride. “See?”

  There were about a dozen of them, widely spaced along the shoreline, under the overhanging branches, and it took Parker a minute to figure out what they were. Fifty-pound sacks of peat moss. Facing upward, they hung just barely above the water, suspended from strong-test fishing line fastened to all four corners of each bag and to strong tree limbs above. In each bag, two long slits had been cut along the upper side, and marijuana planted in the peat moss through the slits. The young leaves were bright acrylic green, hardy and healthy. The bags and their crop received filtered sunlight through the trees, but would be invisible from just about anywhere, including low-flying aircraft. You’d have to steer in here from the river to see them, and even then you pretty well had to already know they existed or you probably wouldn’t notice.

  “We’re a long way from the ocean,” Hanzen said, steering slowly along beside his babies, looking them over, “but we still get the tidal effect. Twice a day, they get a good long drink of water.”

  “Nice setup,” Parker agreed.

  “My only problem is, if somebody steals a boat,” Hanzen said. “Then you got deputies in their launch, poking in places like this, looking for the goddam boat, and finding all this. Happened once, could happen again. In the fall, maybe, a fisherman might anchor in here, do some fly-casting out into the curren
t, but by then I’m harvested and out of here.”

  “You got much of this?”

  “Sixty bags, up and down the river. Little farther on, there’s one more batch I want to check, that’s all in this direction.” Hanzen smiled out at the empty river. “You can really be alone out here, if you want,” he said. “If you know what you’re doing out here, the world’s your oyster.”

  “I suppose so.”

  Hanzen studied Parker. “You don’t like rivers,” he decided. “Water, whatever. But you’re doing something, and right now you need the river, so I guess what you’re looking for’s a place to go out from the bank, or come ashore, or both. I’d be happier if you didn’t use my place down there.”

  “I need to be farther north,” Parker told him.

  “Closer to Albany,” Hanzen suggested, “but not all the way to Albany.”

  “Right.”

  “And you’d like to mark it, and not tell me which spot you picked.” Hanzen grinned. “That’s okay, I understand. Only it won’t work.”

  “No?”

  “Things look different from the land,” Hanzen explained. “From out here, you could pick the spot you want, but when you get on shore you’ll never find it.”

  “Not without you, you mean,” Parker said.

  “Not without somebody knows the river,” Hanzen said.

  “Somebody I trust,” Parker said.

  Hanzen grinned again; things didn’t bother him much. “You’re already trusting me,” he said, “out here on my boat, even though that’s a little .22 under your shirt. Come on, let’s head upriver, and you sing out when you see something you like.”

  10

  They spent three hours on the river, and there were four spots along the way that Parker thought he might be interested in, three on the east shore and one on the west. Hanzen had road maps in his cabin that showed this part of the river, and he pointed out to Parker where each potential spot was, so he could see what road access he’d have, and what towns were nearby.

  From time to time, as they moved, long low barges went slowly past, upriver or down, piled with boxed cargo or with trash. The crews waved, and Hanzen waved back, and each time their smaller boat rocked from side to side in the long slow undulations of the barge’s wake, no matter how far off to the side they were.

  They also saw, at one point on the way back, as they hugged the more thickly settled western shore, a fast speedboat, white with blue trim, heading downriver across the way, close to the opposite bank. A police launch. “Stay away from my babies, now,” Hanzen told it.

  Parker said, “They patrol much?”

  “Not at all,” Hanzen said. “Not enough activity on the river to keep them out here regular. They’ll come out for the fun of it, sometimes, in the daylight, but at night they only come out if there’s a problem.” Nodding at Parker, he said, “You can count on it, though, if there’s a problem, they will come out.”

  “All right,” Parker said.

  A while later, Hanzen said, “Seen enough?”

  Parker looked around. “We’re back?”

  “That’s my mooring,” Hanzen said, pointing across the river, where nothing specific could be seen. “I don’t think you care about anything south of this.”

  “No, you’re right.”

  “You might as well pay me now.”

  Parker took the envelope out of his hip pocket and handed it over. Hanzen squeezed it enough so the slit opened and he could see the edges of the twenties. Satisfied, he pulled open one cabin door long enough to toss the envelope onto the bunk. “Nice doing business with you, Mr. Lynch,” he said. “Maybe we’ll do it again sometime.”

  “Maybe,” Parker agreed.

  As Hanzen steered them across the wide river, Parker held the map down on the cabin top and studied the possibilities. If it seemed like the job would work out, Mike Carlow would come here and look over the routes, see which one he liked best, which one fitted in with whatever way they decided to work it.

  When they were more than halfway across, with the current slapping hard at the left side of the boat, Parker could begin to see the dark red color of the Subaru straight ahead, parked just up from the water. He could see people, too, three of them, in dark clothing. And two or three motorcycles. “You’ve got visitors,” he said.

  Hanzen nodded. “Friends of mine. And you’re just Mr. Lynch, a man looking for a place to put a restaurant with a river view.”

  “Here’s your map,” Parker said.

  “Put it in the cabin,” Hanzen told him, so Parker opened a cabin door and dropped the map in onto the bunk next to the envelope of twenties, then shut the door again.

  Hanzen slowed as they neared the shore, and Parker looked over at the three of them waiting there. Bikers. Two were heavyset middle-aged men with heavy beards and mean eyes and round beerguts; the third was younger, thinner, cleanshaven. All were in leather jackets and jeans. The two older ones sat on the ground, backs against their motorcycles, while the third, jittery, hopped-up, kept walking this way and that in the little clearing, watching the approaching boat, talking to the other two, looking back up the road they’d all come down. Finally one of the older men spoke to the young one, who agreed and came down to the water’s edge to wait for the boat.

  Hanzen steered carefully forward, and the young biker leaned way out over the water to grab the prow. As he pulled the boat partway up onto the bank, Hanzen again stripped out of shoes and socks and pants, and rolled them in a ball. “Ernie!” he called, and the young biker, who had a face like a white crow with smallpox, looked alert. “Catch!”

  Hanzen tossed his bundle of clothes, and Ernie caught it like a football, with both forearms and belly. The other two bikers laughed, and Ernie turned around, jumpy, with a twitchy grin, to pretend to throw a forward pass. One shoe fell out of the bundle onto the ground, near the water.

  Hanzen, sounding more bored than irritated, called, “Don’t fuck around, Ernie, you don’t want to get my shoe wet. Pull the boat round sideways so Mr. Lynch can get off.”

  Ernie hustled to pick up the shoe, carry it and the bundle farther from the water, put them down, and hurry back to pull the boat around at an angle to the bank.

  Parker said, “See you around.”

  “Anytime,” Hanzen said. “You know where I am.” He stuck out his hand and Parker shook it, then climbed over the side onto the bank.

  The older bikers watched with slow interest as Parker walked toward the Subaru. Behind him, at Hanzen’s continuing orders, Ernie pushed the boat free of the shore, apparently getting his own feet wet in the process, and that was good for a general laugh.

  Parker got into the Subaru. Offshore, Hanzen was tying the anchor line to the float. Parker started the Subaru, backed in a half-circle, shifted into drive, and saw that one of the bikes, with its owner seated leaning against it, was in his way. He drove forward and put his foot on the brake, and the biker pretended not to see him, to be interested in watching Hanzen wade ashore.

  Parker leaned his head out the Subaru window: “You care about that bike?”

  The biker turned his head. He contemplated Parker for a long minute, unmoving, and just as Parker took his foot off the brake he grunted and struggled to his feet and wheeled the bike out of the way.

  Hanzen was on shore now, drying his legs with a towel Ernie had brought him from his own bike’s saddlebag. Parker completed his turn to the dirt road and jounced over the railroad track.

  They all watched him go.

  11

  Claire had her own car, a gray Lexus, legitimately registered in her name at the Colliver Pond address. She’d driven off in it three days ago, to look into Hilliard Cathman’s private life, so when Parker heard the garage door opener switch on at three that afternoon it was probably Claire coming back. But it didn’t have to be Claire coming back.

  Parker had been seated in the living room, looking at maps of New York State, and now he reached under the sofa to close his hand on the S
&W .32 revolver stored there. He tugged, and the clip holding the revolver gave a small metallic click, and the .32 nestled into his hand.

  He rose, crossed the living room and hall and the kitchen, looked through the hole he’d drilled a long time ago at eye level in the door between kitchen and garage, and saw the Lexus drive in, this side of the Subaru already parked in there. Claire was alone in the car, and didn’t seem troubled by anything. He watched her reach up to the visor to lower the garage door behind her.

  When Claire walked into the living room, Parker was again studying the maps. The revolver wasn’t in sight. He looked up and said, “Welcome back.”

  She nodded at the maps. “Planning a trip?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Ah.” She smiled and nodded. “You can keep them open, I guess. After I shower and you bring me a drink, I’ll tell you all about it.”

  It was nearly six when they got around to talking, the long spring twilight just starting to stretch its fingers outside the house. Claire sat up in bed, back against the headboard, a sheet partly over her. Her drink, the ice cubes long gone, she held on her up-bent knee, the tan skin looking browner against the clear glass. Parker, in black trousers, paced as he listened.

  She said, “Cathman’s a widower, his wife died of cancer seven years ago. No girlfriends. Three grown daughters, all married, living in different parts of the northeast. Everybody gets along all right, but they’re not a close-type family. At Christmas he’ll go to a daughter’s house, that’s about it.”

  “He’s alone?”

  “He lives alone. In the two-room office he’s got for his consulting business, he has a secretary, an older woman named Rosemary Shields, she worked with him for years when he was with state government, she retired when he did, kept working for him. She’s one of those devoted secretaries where there’s never been sex but she’d kill for him and he wouldn’t know how to live without her.”