“Uh-huh,” Ricci said. “When you’re talking about a stake that’s worth serious cash, and men who are having a hard time feeding their families, it’s a volatile combination. There are resentments toward people from away that go back a long, long time and are maybe even a little justified. Back around the turn of the century, rich out-of-towners started buying up acres and acres of bay-front land around their summer mansions as privacy buffers against the fishermen and clam diggers they thought of as white trash. Stuck ‘No Trespassing’ signs up everywhere, restricting their access to the water that was their livelihood.”
“Somebody twist the locals’ arms to sell?” Megan said.
Ricci gave her a sharp look.
“Either you’ve never been poor, or you’ve forgotten what that can be like,” he said brusquely. “Watch your kids starve through a Maine winter, and you won’t need any other kind of arm-twisting.”
She sat there in the brittle silence that followed, wondering if his reaction had made her feel guiltier about her remark than she should have.
“Dex and the warden cut some kind of deal?” Nimec said. The last thing he wanted was to get sidetracked.
Ricci turned his coffee cup in his hands, seeming to concentrate on the steam wisping up from it.
“Let’s get back to whether it’s usually me who drives the catch to market,” he said at last. “I’ve been working with Dex for over a year and never went there without him before today. Guy likes wheeling and dealing, likes to get the wholesalers bidding. The whole thing from soup to nuts, you know?” He paused. “He also looks forward to having his cash in hand. But this morning he tells me something about needing to rush home to watch his kids after school. Said his wife had to work late and there was nobody else. The minute we pull the boat in, he’s up and away.”
“Happens when you’re a parent,” Nimec said, thinking he could have cited any number of comparable situations from when his own children were young and his wife was not yet his
Ricci shook his head.
“You don’t know Dex,” he said. “Ask him to recommend a local bar, he’ll rattle off the names of two dozen watering holes from here to New Brunswick and tell you every kind of beer they have on tap. Ask him his kids’ birthdays, he’d be stumped.”
“So you think he arranged for you to be driving by yourself when you got stopped,” Nimec said.
Ricci turned his coffee cup but said nothing.
Nimec sighed. “Was it the warden who pulled you over?”
“Yeah. Cobbs is one of those down-easters I told you about resents outsiders… and just about everybody and everything else besides, but that’s just his endearing personality. I move here from Boston, earn a decent buck, it’s like I’m taking something away from him. Add that I’m a cop… an ex-cop… and he gets even more bothered.”
“He feels intimidated and threatened by you, and that translates into a sort of competitive hostility,” Nimec said. “Common equation in places where they don’t get much new blood. Especially when it’s coming from the big city.”
Ricci shrugged.
“There’s all that, and with Cobbs it goes even further,” he said. “He’s a weasel and he’s dirty. I’d heard stories about him from divers as well as lobstermen. Give him a skim of your profits, he’ll let you operate without a license or outside your zone, even look the other way if you row out at night and raid somebody’s lobster traps. Up until now, you didn’t play along, he’d hassle you for the slightest infraction of the rules, but wouldn’t actually squeeze anybody outright. The stunt he tried to pull on me takes him to a new level.”
“Claiming he’d seen you dive outside your zone so he could confiscate your entire catch,” Nimec said. “That it?”
Ricci snapped his pointer finger out at him and nodded.
“Like you said, times are rough,” Nimec said. He exhaled, deciding to take another stab at a question Ricci had already angled past twice.“I want to try this with you again… you think Dex and Cobbs have something going?”
Ricci stared at his cup, still turning and turning it in his hands. It was no longer steaming.
“Been trying to work that out in my own mind,” he said in a hesitant tone. “Cobbs and his deputy dog were waiting for me on the road, and I doubt it’s a coincidence that they knew exactly when I’d be driving out to the market, and what route I’d take. Also bothers me that the day they chose to pull me over happened to be the one and only day Dex wasn’t around to keep me company.”
“Wouldn’t it have been better for him if he came along for the ride?” Nimec said. “To act surprised, I mean. The way it went down just makes him look suspicious.”
Ricci moved his shoulders. “Dex is no genius. Assuming the worst about him, could be that he was only worried having to look me in the eye when I drove into their little setup. Or maybe he doesn’t care what I suspect. Maybe with Cobbs he gets a better than even slice of the action, and all that matters to him is running me out of it.”
“And out of town in the process,” Nimec said.
Ricci nodded. “Like I said, assuming the worst-case scenario. But right now that’s all just for argument’s sake.”
They sat in silence for a while. Megan watched them, feeling strangely like an observer. She sensed the easy intersection of their thoughts, the unspoken communication of men who had done police work for much of their lives, and all at once thought she had an inkling why Nimec wanted Ricci for Max’s position.
“Let’s stick to Cobbs for the moment,” Nimec said finally. “He’s not going to just leave things as they are. You know his type. The way you embarrassed him, he’ll be twisting like a corkscrew until he can get back at you. And that’s probably going to happen sooner than later. He’ll lick his wounds, convince himself you got lucky today.”
“I know,” Ricci said.
“Being hooked into the sheriff’s office, he’ll think he can get away with whatever he wants. Your warning about getting in touch with outside agencies won’t stop him. Far as he’s concerned, they’re a world away.”
“I know.”
Nimec looked at him.
“What are you planning to do?” he said.
Ricci grunted indeterminately. He took a drink of coffee, frowned, and set the cup down on the table.
“Flat,” he said, and pushed it away from him.
More silence.
Megan’s gaze wandered briefly down to the bay. The sunlight was fading, and white patches of sea smoke had begun rising from the water as dusk’s cold breezes slipped over its warmer surface. The birds had returned with the eagle’s departure, bearing out Ricci’s prediction. She could see rafts of ducks near the shoreline almost straight below, and further off, gulls descending through the mist to alight on shoals exposed by the receding tide. Broad-chested and gray-patched, they seemed instantly to enter a state of repose, puffing out their feathers against the dropping temperature.
Suddenly it seemed very late in the day.
“We should talk about why Pete and I came to see you,” she said. “You still haven’t given us your feelings about it.”
Ricci looked at her. “Now that you mention it, why did the two of you come?”
Megan blinked.
“You don’t know,” she said. It was a statement rather than a question.
He shook his head.
She turned to Nimec. “You didn’t tell him?”
Nimec shook his head. “I thought we’d wait until we got here,” he said without explanation. “Discuss it face- to-face.”
She rubbed her eyebrows with her thumb and forefinger, shook her head a little, and sighed resignedly.
“We’d better go inside after all,” she said. “Seems this is going to take longer than I expected.”
A little past five-thirty in the afternoon P.D.T., two urgent calls were placed from the Brazilian space station facility to UpLink’s corporate headquarters in San Jose.
