Without remorse - Tom Clancy [311]
Ritter looked up. 'It's supposed to be.'
Another long day. Oreza found himself envying the first-class who was tending Cove Point Light. At least he had his family with him all the time. Here Oreza was with the brightest little girl in kindergarten and he hardly ever saw her. Maybe he'd take that teaching job at New London after all, Portagee thought, just so that he could have a family life for a year or two. It meant hanging out with children who would someday be officers, but at least they'd learn seamanship the right way.
Mainly he was lonely with his thoughts. His crew was bedding down now in the bunkroom that he should have gone to, but the images haunted him. The crab-man and the three bird-feeders would deny him sleep for hours unless he got it off his conscience ... and he had an excuse, didn't he? Oreza rummaged around his desk, finding the card.
'Hello?'
'Lieutenant Charon? This is Quartermaster First Class Oreza, down at Thomas Point.'
'It's kinda late, you know,' Charon pointed out. He'd been caught on his way to bed.
'Remember back in May, looking for that sailboat?'
'Yeah, why?'
'I think maybe we found your man, sir.' Oreza thought he could hear eyeballs click.
'Tell me about it?'
Portagee did, leaving nothing out, and he could feel the horror leaving him, almost as though he were transmitting it over the phone wire. He didn't know that was precisely what he was doing.
'Who's the captain running the case for the troopers?'
'Name's Joy, sir. Somerset County. Know him?'
'No, I don't.'
'Oh, yeah, something else,' Oreza remembered.
'Yeah?' Charon was taking lots of notes.
'You know a Lieutenant Ryan?'
'Yeah, he works downtown, too.'
'He wanted me to check up a guy for him, fellow named Kelly. Oh, yeah! You've seen him, remember?'
'What do you mean?'
'The night we were out after the day-sailer, the guy in the cruiser we saw just before dawn. Lives on an island, not far from Bloodsworth. Anyway, this Ryan guy wanted me to find him for him, okay? He's back, sir, probably up in Baltimore right now. I tried calling, sir, but he was out, and I've been running my ass off all day. Could you pass that one along, please?'
'Sure,' Charon replied, and his brain was working very quickly indeed now.
CHAPTER 35
Rite of Passage
Mark Charon found himself in rather a difficult position. That he was a corrupted cop did not make him a stupid one. In fact, his was a careful and thoroughly analytical mind, and while he made mistakes, he was not blind to them. That was precisely the case as he lay alone in bed, hanging up the phone after his conversation with the Coast Guard. The first order of business was that Henry would not be pleased to learn that his lab was gone, and three of his people with it. Worse still, it sounded as though a vast quantity of drugs had been lost, and even Henry's supply was finite. Worst of all, the person or persons who had accomplished that feat was unknown, at large, and doing - what?
He knew who Kelly was. He'd even reconstructed matters to the rather stunning coincidence that Kelly had been the one who'd picked Pam Madden off the street quite by accident the day Angelo Vorano had been eliminated, and that she'd actually been aboard his boat, not twenty feet from the Coast Guard cutter after that stormy and vomitous night. Now Em Ryan and Tom Douglas wanted to know about him, and had taken the extraordinary step of having the Coast Guard check up on him. Why? A follow-up interview with an out-of-town witness was something for the telephone more often than not. Em and Tom were working the Fountain Case, along with all the other ones that had started a few weeks later. 'Rich beach bum' was what he'd told Henry, but the department's number-one homicide team was interested in him, and he'd been directly involved with one of the detectors from Henry's organization, and he had a boat, and he lived not too far from the processing lab that Henry was still foolish enough to use. That was a singularly long and unlikely string of coincidences made