'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 all the more troubling by the realization that Charon was no longer a policeman investigating a crime, but rather a criminal himself who was part of the crimes being checked out.
That realization struck surprisingly hard at the Lieutenant lying in his bed. Somehow he didn't think of himself in those terms. Charon actually had believed himself above it all, watching, taking an occasional part, but not being part of what unfolded below him. After all, he had the longest string of successes in the history of the narcotics unit, capped off with his personal elimination of Eddie Morello, perhaps the most artful action of his professional life - doubly so in that he had eliminated a genuine dealer by premeditated murder in front of no less than six other officers, then had it pronounced a clean shooting on the spot, which had given him a paid vacation in addition to what Henry had paid him for the event. Somehow it had seemed like a particularly entertaining game, and one not too far distanced from the job the citizens of his city paid him to do. Men live by their illusions, and Charon was no different from the rest. It wasn't so much that he'd told himself what he'd been doing was all right as that he'd simply allowed himself to concentrate on the breaks that Henry had been feeding him, thus taking off the street every supplier who'd threatened the man's market standing. Able to control which of his detectives investigated what, he'd actually, been able to give the entire local market to the one supplier about whom he had no real information in his files. That had enabled Henry to expand his own operation, attracting the attention of Tony Piaggi and his own East Coast connections. Soon, and he'd told Henry this, he would be forced to allow his people to nibble at the edges of the operation. Henry had understood, doubtless after counseling from Piaggi, who was sophisticated enough to grasp the finer points of the game.
But someone had tossed a match into this highly volatile mixture. The information he had led only in one direction, but not far enough. So he had to get more, didn't he? Charon thought for a moment and lifted his phone. He needed three calls to get the right number.
'State Police.'
'Trying to get Captain Joy. This is Lieutenant Charon, Baltimore City Police.'
'You're in luck, sir. He just got back in. Please hold.' The next voice that came on was a tired one.
'Captain Joy.'
'Hello, this is Lieutenant Charon, Mark Charon, City Police. I work narcotics. I hear you just took down something big.'
'You might say that.' Charon could hear the man settling into his chair with a combination of satisfaction and fatigue.
'Could you give me a quick sketch? I may have some information on this one myself.'
'Who told you about this anyway?'
'That Coast Guard sailor who drove you around - Oreza. I've worked with him on a couple cases. Remember the big marijuana bust, the Talbot County farm?'
'Was that you? I thought the Coasties took credit for that.'
'I had to let them, to protect my informant. Look, you can call them if you want to confirm that. I'll give you the phone number, the boss of the station is Paul English.'
'Okay, Charon, you sold me.'
'Back in May I spent a day and a night out with them looking for a guy who just disappeared on us. We never found him, never found his boat. Oreza says -'
'The crab-man,' Joy breathed. 'Somebody got dumped in the water, looks like he's been there a while. Anything you can tell me about him?'
'His name is probably Angelo Vorano. Lived here in town, small-time dealer who was looking to make it into the bigs.' Charon gave a description.
'Height's about right. We'll have to check dental records for a positive ID, though. Okay, that ought to help, Lieutenant. What do you need from me?'
'What can you tell me?' Charon took several minutes of notes. 'What are you doing with Xantha?'
'Holding her as a material witness, with her lawyer's approval by the way. We want to take care of this girl. Looks like we're dealing with some pretty nasty folks here.'
'I believe it,' Charon replied. 'Okay, let me see what I can shake loose for you at this end.'
'Thanks for the assist.'
'Jesus,' Charon said after hanging up. White boy... big white boat. Burt and the two people Tony had evidently seconded to the operation, back of the head,.45s. Execution-style killings were not yet the vogue in the drug business, and the sheer coldness of it gave Charon a chill. But it wasn't so much coldness as efficiency, was it? Like
