“Did you enjoy your voyage on the water near Lubec the other night?” he finally asked at an appropriate interval.
“The transfer?” Alan asked, smiling broadly. “You should’ve seen my brother’s expression. I might as well have put him on a rocket ship. He was blown away. It work okay from your end?”
Tatien nodded. In fact, he had been delighted with the arrangement. He’d often thought the water route had advantages the land-based border crossings lacked, but he’d never found an American importer so inclined.
“It was entirely satisfactory,” he said.
“Cool,” Alan responded. “Well, it was satisfactory for me, too, because it did the trick in pulling Pete in all the way. He can’t wait to get started. I now have a fleet of boats available to us, and I know for a fact that it won’t be restricted to Blackmore Harbor for long.” He leaned forward in his seat, his eyes shining. “And the kicker is that Pete’s carrying the ball. I told him how to break the group into cells, so that if anyone gets caught, he only knows about one or two other guys, and vice versa. For the cops to take this system apart, they’ll have to nail everybody in it.”
Tatien smiled back, less confident of his partner’s accuracy here but also not really caring. Alan, after all, still didn’t know Georges’s real name, and had never
seen him without some more or less subtle disguise. His whole operation could collapse without injury to Georges, and, soft spots notwithstanding, that part remained key. Georges knew how to be sentimental without being foolish.
Of course, he also didn’t know of Alan’s eventual fine tuning of this part of his operation—how he intended to sacrifice his brother and father while maintaining the integrity of the water route through the cell system. The irony that Pete would create the very system that would survive his own and Buddy’s arrest for smuggling was a catch only Alan planned to enjoy.
“And the finances?” Georges asked, mostly to be politely conversational.
“Nailed down tight,” Alan told him. “You know Bernie, right?”
“I do, yes.”
“Well, that’s about the only part of Roz’s setup I’m keeping. Bernie’s solid—solid and careful. So I’m keeping all that in place, which means you won’t have anything new to learn there. How ’bout Luis Grega? You ever hear of him?”
Tatien merely shook his head.
“Maybe you will and maybe you won’t,” Alan explained. “We’ll see. I’m bringing him in as my number two. He used to work for Roz, so he knows the ropes. I want as much distance from the street-level ops as I can get, and to restrict myself mostly to Bernie, you, and Grega, representing the three major branches of this setup. Roz was too high profile, got too easy to pick off. I’m gonna protect myself more.”
Tatien nodded with genuine fondness. “It is an
excellent thought,” he said, but only to be encouraging. In fact, he was thinking that his attraction to this young man’s energy and drive was largely because he was planning for it to be so short-lived.
The last time Joe had visited Gloucester he’d ended up investigating the death of a man he had been hoping to interview, mostly by hanging out at the Main Street bar the guy used to frequent. Not only had he picked up the lead that had finally led him to the killer, but the person providing it had been the barkeep, Lyn Silva.
Joe had fond memories of Gloucester.
This time, however, he was loitering along a different stretch of Main, west of where he’d been before, away from the fish packing plant and the grittier section of the harbor, surrounded by more genteel offerings—mostly brick-clad, upscale boutiques—without a workingman’s rooming house within view. Lyn had selected the venue—a trendy bakery offering the usual dozen types of coffee—and he suspected it was because she’d be less likely to encounter any of her old customers here.
He sympathized with her need for a little control. Despite her being a single mother who now owned her own bar, had several employees, and dealt with difficult, drunken, sometime lecherous customers during every shift, she remained by her own admission surprisingly
insecure. Who could blame her for being a little self protective? She’d been handed her fair share of emotional mishaps over the years, including the one she was bringing to meet him.
Joe thought back to a conversation with Lenny Chapman, Kevin Delaney, and Cathy Lawless about using Lyn’s brother to dig into Mroz’s old drug network. He’d been shy at first about broaching the subject, both because of his relationship with Lyn, and because of Steve’s admittedly slim credentials. But he’d been as struck by their ready acceptance as by what it had revealed of their desperation for any kind of breakthrough.
He saw Lyn enter the place before she caught sight of him, which allowed him to study her companion unimpeded, if only for a few seconds. Steve Silva was taller than expected and looked more battered by life than the family photos had revealed. For good reason, of course—those dated back to happier times, and Steve had put the interim to hard use.
Joe rose and waved to Lyn, whose face broke into a broad smile. She took up her brother’s hand and led him across the room, kissing Joe as she drew near.
“Joe, this is Steve,” she said simply, looking from one of them to the other.
Steve appeared as if all his courage might drain away. He held out a limp, moist hand in greeting and muttered, “Hey.”
“I really appreciate your coming, Steve,” Joe immediately told him. “This must be tough.”
“Sure,” Steve said softly.
Joe gestured to the booth he’d been occupying.
“Would you like to sit? My treat; they have coffee here I’ve never heard of before.”
Steve didn’t answer, but Lyn touched Joe on the elbow. “We were actually talking about that on the way over,” she explained. “Thinking it might be easier to get right to it—get in the car and head north now.”
Joe immediately shifted gears, envisioning how much cajoling, massaging, pleading, and maneuvering she’d practiced to get even this far. He laid a ten-dollar bill on the table and pointed toward the door.
“I’m parked right outside, unless you want to drive your own car.”
Lyn smiled up at him gratefully. “That was the other thing—might make it easier for Steve to do the driving. We will use your car, though, if that’s okay.”
Joe handed Steve the keys and ushered them both outside.
On the road, the mood was careful and poised, all three of them acting as deliberately as eye surgeons. Steve drove slowly, staying to the right on the interstate through New Hampshire and into Maine, so that Joe was tempted to stretch out and stomp on the accelerator. The conversation, also, was stilted and cautious, each of them so watchful of what he or she said that silence finally became preferable.
Joe wasn’t too worried, since he quickly recognized that he was no part of the problem. The two siblings were new to each other’s company, and it was apparent that Lyn had gotten a little rusty with with the easy banter they’d once freely exchanged. Joe was less sure
about Steve, of course, not knowing him well enough to guess if he was uncomfortable or just naturally closemouthed. He finally assumed the former, from what Lyn had told him earlier, and at last decided to act on it.
As the “Welcome to Maine—worth a visit, worth a lifetime”—sign slipped by—a greeting Joe had always considered at best a little awkward—he’d progressed far enough beyond social niceties to ask, “So, how many other people avoid asking what you been up to recently?”
Through the corner of his eye, he saw Lyn actually wince in the backseat. Steve, however, barked out a startled laugh.
“A lot,” he answered. “Especially if they’ve never been inside themselves.”
“Like your sister?”
Lyn groaned. Smiling, Steve glanced quickly over his shoulder. “Nah. She’s trying her best. She was always the mom our mom couldn’t be. I never made that easy. Sorry ’bout that, sis.”
“It was worth it,” she said cheerfully. “We had our fun times, too.”
He nodded. “Yeah—that we did.”
“Until you got the shit kicked out of you emotionally,” Joe suggested, wanting to keep to the edgier side of any reminiscences.
“Yeah,” Steve repeated more quietly.
“Why react the way you did, though?” Joe asked almost aggressively. “With drugs and drinking? Lots of people suffer loss without going there.”
It was his tone of voice he was hoping Steve would
hear rather than the criticism it implied. Not that he wasn’t challenging him a bit. Joe needed information from this man, and needed it to be reliable. For that, he had to discover how much strength Steve had restored to his character. He also knew that most self-help programs in prison used soul searching and inner honesty as ladder rungs toward improvement. Steve should’ve been as habituated to such questions as Lyn was wary of them.
In fact, Steve was nodding thoughtfully.
“Self-esteem, I guess,” he answered. “Our dad was a pretty strong guy, and so was José. That can be big in Hispanic families.”
“Was José younger or older?” Joe asked.
“Older, meaning that when they died, I was both the only male left, and the one who’d never carried the ball, so to speak. Lyn was great, doing what she could,” he added, again casting a look at her over his shoulder, “but I couldn’t take the pressure, not with Mom falling apart like she did. She basically fell on me like a brick, like I was supposed to do it all, from the finances to the household repairs to being the Rock of Gibraltar like Dad.”
“She was the one who introduced the liquor,” Lyn said from the back.
That caught Joe by surprise, despite his years of experience.
“Really?” he asked stupidly.
Steve chuckled sadly. “Yeah. Figure that one. Well, she wanted company, and my gender helped, even if I was a kid. I was amazed, of course—still a teenager, all my friends getting in trouble for doing what I did
with my mom every night. We even started sneaking around on Lyn, ’cause she was telling us to knock it off, which only made the bond tighter.”
This time, Joe looked at Lyn, who merely shrugged.
“We’d go to bars,” Steve went on, “where Mom would know the bartender, or she’d buy us stuff from the store and we’d go drink in the park or in the car or wherever. It was pretty pathetic.”
“Meanwhile,” Lyn said, “I’d be going all over town, looking for them, hoping to keep it quiet at the same time.”
“Yeah,” Steve chimed in. “And, of course, she was having her own problems at home, taking care of Coryn and trying to hold her marriage together. She basically had two households full of juvenile delinquents to handle. Doomed from the start. Come to think of it, Coryn was probably the most adult of the bunch.”
“It wasn’t
that
bad,” Lyn said weakly.
For the first time, Steve showed a little emotion, swinging around and rebuking her,
“Sure
it was that bad, Lyn. Don’t deny it.”
She held up a hand and sat back. “Okay, okay.”
“It was a fucking disaster,” he reiterated. “I’m not blaming Mom. I milked it all the way, and when she got so bad that she didn’t need or want my company, I went out on my own and started in on the drugs. I liked being zoned out, and I couldn’t have cared less about keeping everything together. I didn’t see the point, especially when I saw how bad things had gotten for Lyn, who was supposed to be the one with her shit together.”
There was no comment from behind them.
“How’s your mom doing now?” Joe asked.
“Still in the house,” Steve said, “living with me. I’m trying to do now what I should’ve done all along.”
“You were a kid,” his sister remonstrated.
Steve jerked a thumb at Joe. “Like the man said, sis—lots of people got it rough. Doesn’t mean they give up like I did.”
Steve actually entered the passing lane to get around a slow-moving truck, his inhibitions apparently loosening at last.
“Mom’s not doing well,” he answered Joe. “She’s a recluse, basically, and can’t really take care of herself anymore. It was either I moved back in or she went into a home, and I think that would’ve been too tough on her, with her thing about other people. So, that’s what I’ve done—just recently—meaning I don’t really know if it’s going to work. We’re sort of circling each other right now, getting a routine worked out.”
“I didn’t know about all this,” Lyn said. “Most of it happened over the past week or two. Up to then, Mrs. Garcia had been taking care of her, checking in and buying groceries and making sure she took her pills. But Mrs. G. was running out of patience, so Steve showing up’s been a godsend.”
“Jesus,” Joe murmured. “I wish you well. Doesn’t sound easy.”
“It’ll be okay,” Steve said.
“You’re not worried about sliding back?” Joe asked him.
He laughed again. “Every day. All the time. That’s one of the reasons I finally told Lyn I’d agree to help you out.”
“How so?”
Steve glanced at him and raised his eyebrows. “’Cause I need to confront my demons, keep pushing myself. Part of what’s working for me is going back in time and shaking hands with what I did.”
Joe thought about that for a moment, impressed by its eloquence—even if the language was reminiscent of therapy. His trust in their tour guide was improving.
“Lyn tells me you never actually met Matthew Mroz.”
Steve shook his head. “No. He was Mr. Big—a ‘Tony Montana,’ as they used to call the heavies. I think that was old hat even then, but I kind of liked it. You see that movie?”
“Scarface?”
Joe responded. “Yeah—hated it. Walked out.”
Steve smiled. “Guess that figures. Anyhow, Roz wasn’t available to the likes of me, but his organization was very appealing.”
“Why?”
“Not as scary as what’s in Boston, mostly. Plus, the people I was hanging out with were more connected to the Maine scene than the Boston one. You sort of go with who you know, right?”
“You ever know somebody named Luis Grega?”
“No—Lyn told me that’s who you’re after. Sounds like one of the types I was avoiding—the Dot Ave crowd.”
“How ’bout James Marano?” Joe asked.
“Nope—him neither. That doesn’t mean much, though. People change a lot, and names do, too, even if they’re on the same faces, sometimes. That’s why I hope you’re not expecting much from this trip. Lyn did warn you, right?”