‘Where to?’ he asked over the intercom.
‘Bloodsworth Island,’ Captain Joy told him.
‘Roger that,’ the pilot replied as he thought an aviator ought, turning southeast and lowering the nose. It didn’t take long.
The world looks different from above, and the first time people go up in helicopters the reaction is always the same. The takeoff, rather like jerking aloft in an amusement-park cable-car ride, is initially startling, but then the fascination begins. The world transformed itself before the eyes of both officers, and it was as though it all suddenly made sense. They could see the roads and the forms all laid out like a map. Freeland grasped it first. Knowing his territory as he did, he instantly saw that his mental picture of it was flawed; his idea of how things really were was not quite right. He was only a thousand feet above it, a linear distance his car traversed in seconds, but this perspective was new, and he immediately started learning from it.
‘That’s where I found her,’ he told the Captain over the intercom.
‘Long way from where we’re going. Yoa think she walked that far?’
‘No, sir.’ But it wasn’t that far from the water, was it? Perhaps two miles away, they saw the old dock of a farm up for sale, and that was less than five miles from where they were heading, scarcely two minutes’ flying time. The Chesapeake Bay was a wide blue band now, under the morning haze. To the northwest was the large expanse of Patuxent River Naval Air Test Center, and they could both see aircraft flying there – a matter of concern to the pilot, who kept a wary eye out for low-flying aircraft. The Navy jocks liked to smoke in low.
‘Straight ahead,’ he said. The paramedic pointed so that the passengers would know where straight-ahead was.
‘Sure looks different from up here,’ Freeland said, a boy’s wonder in his voice. ‘I fish around there. From the surface it just looks like marshes.’
But it didn’t now. From a thousand feet it looked like islands at first, connected by site and grass, but islands for all that. As they got closer, the islands took on regular shapes, lozengelike at first, and then with the fine lines of ships, grown over, surrounded by grass and reeds.
‘Jeez, there’s a bunch of ’em,’ the pilot observed. He’d rarely flown down here, and then mostly at night with accident cases.
‘World War One,’ the Captain said. ‘My father said they’re leftovers from the war; the ones the Germans didn’t get.’
‘What exactly are we looking for?’
‘Not sure, maybe a boat. We picked up a druggie yesterday,’ the Captain explained. ‘Said there was a lab in there, and three dead people.’
‘No shit? A drug lab in there?’
‘That’s what the lady said,’ Freeland confirmed, learning something else. As forbidding as it looked from the surface, there were channels in here. Probably a hell of a good place to go crabbing. From the deck of his fishing boat, it looked like one massive island, but not from up here. Wasn’t that interesting?
‘Got a flash down this way.’ The paramedic pointed the pilot over to the right. ‘Off glass or something.’
‘Let’s check it out.’ The stick went right and down a little as he brought the Jet Ranger down. ‘Yeah, I got a boat by those three.’
‘Check it out,’ the paramedic ordered with a grin.
‘You got it.’ It would be a chance to do some real flying. A former Huey driver from the 1st Air Cav, he loved being able to play with his aircraft. Anyone could fly straight and level, after all. He circled the place first, checking winds, then lowered his collective a little, easing the chopper down to about two hundred feet.
‘Call it an eighteen-footer,’ Freeland said, and they could see the white nylon line that held it fast to the remains of the ship.
‘Lower,’ the Captain commanded. In a few seconds they were fifty feet over the deck of the derelict. The boat was empty. There was a beer cooler, and some other stuff piled up in the back, but nothing else. The aircraft jerked as a couple of birds flew out of the ruined superstructure of the ship. The pilot instinctively maneuvered to avoid them. One crow sucked into his engine intake could make them a permanent part of this man-made swamp.
‘Whoever owns that boat sure isn’t real interested in us,’ he said over the intercom. In the back, Freeland mimed three shots with his hand. The Captain nodded.
‘I think you may be right, Ben.’ To the pilot: ‘Can you mark the exact position on a map?’
‘Right.’ He considered the possibility of going into a low hover and dropping them off on the deck. Simple enough if they had been back in the Cav, it looked too dangerous for this situation. The paramedic pulled out a chart and made the appropriate notations. ‘Seen what you need?’
‘Yeah, head back.’
Twenty minutes later, Captain Joy was on the phone.
‘Coast Guard, Thomas Point.’
‘This is Captain Joy, State Police. We need a little help,’ He explained on for a few minutes.
‘Take about ninety minutes,’ Warrant Officer English told him.
‘That’d be fine.’
Kelly called a Yellow Cab, which picked him up at the marina entrance. Hie first stop of the day was a rather disreputable business establishment called Kolonel Klunker, where he rented a 1959 Volkswagen, prepaying it for a month, with no mileage charge.
‘Tnank you, Mr Aiello,’ the man said to a smiling Kelly, who was using the ID from a man who no longer needed it. He drove the car back to the marina and started unloading the things he needed. Nobody paid much attention, and in fifteen minutes the Beetle was gone.
Kelly took the opportunity to drive through the area he’d be hunting, checking traffic patterns. It was agreeably vacant, a part of the city he’d never visited before, off a bleak industrial thoroughfare called O’Donnell Street, a place where nobody lived and few would want to. The air was laden with the smells of various chemicals, few of them pleasant. Not as busy as it once had been, many of the buildings in the district looked unused. More to the point, there was much open ground here, many buildings separated from one another by flat areas of bare dirt which trucks used for a convenient place to reverse direction. No kids playing sandlot ball, not a single house in sight, and because of that, not a single police car to be seen. Rather a clever ploy on the part of his enemies, Kelly thought, at least from one perspective. The place he was interested in was a single freestanding building with a half-destroyed sign over the entrance. The back of it was just a blank wall. There were only three doors, and though they were on two different walls, all could be observed from a single point, and to Kelly’s rear was another vacant building, a tall concrete structure with plenty of broken windows. His initial reconnaissance complete, Kelly headed north.
Oreza was heading south. He’d already been partway there, conducting a routine patrol and wondering why the hell the Coast Guard didn’t start up a ministration farther down on the Eastern Shore, or maybe by Cove Point Light, where there was an existing station for the guys who spent their waking hours, if any, making sure the light bulb at the top of the tower worked. That wasn’t especially demanding duty to Oreza’s mind, though it was probably all right for the kid who ran the place. His wife had just delivered twins, after all, and the Coast Guard was a family-oriented branch of the military.
He was letting one of his junior seamen do the driving, enjoying the morning, standing outside the cramped wheelhouse, drinking some of his home-brewed coffee.
‘Radio,’one of the crewmen said.
Oreza went inside and took the microphone. ‘Four-One Alfa here.’
‘Four-One Alfa, this is English at Thomas Base. Your pickup is at a dock at Dame’s Choice. You’ll see cop car there. Got an ETA?’
‘Call it twenty or twenty-five, Mr E.’
‘Roger that. Out.’
‘Come left,’ Oreza said, looking at his chart. The water looked plenty deep. ‘One-six-five.’
‘One-six-five, aye.’
Xantha was more or less sober, though weak. Her dark skin had a gray pallor to it, and she complained of a splitting headache that analgesics had scarcely touched. She was aware that she was under arrest now, and that her rap sheet had arrived on teletype. She was also canny enough to have requested the presence of a lawyer. Strangely, this had not bothered the police very much.
‘My client,’ the attorney said, ‘is willing to cooperate.’ The agreement had taken all of ten minutes to strike. If she was telling the truth, and if she was not involved in a major felony, the possession charge against her would be dropped, subject to her enrollment in a treatment program. It was as good a deal as anyone had offered Xantha Matthews in some years. It was immediately appearent why this was true.