Arrow's Rest by Joel Scott (best books to read all time .TXT) 📗

behind them. A mile out into the bay, the brothers were waiting with the Chris-Craft, and the two men climbed aboard, tied the little inflatable behind, and planed off into the night. By the time they arrived back at Rainbow and helped Clint and Travis winch the tender aboard, it was midnight. Lacey was sitting in the saloon, watching the late news on TV with a drink in his hand. He didn’t turn around to greet them.

“I can smell the gas and smoke on you from here,” he said. “Stay on the outside mat, you’re not coming inside.”

“Yeah, well, she went up like a Roman candle. Whoosh! Fourth of fucking July. Lit up the whole marina. Job done. Omelettes and eggs, old chap.” There was a faint mincing sneer in the man’s voice. Like many misguided people, he associated being gay with being weak.

Queer Bill swivelled around and regarded him.

“Yes. About that,” he said. “Old chap. I’ve just been watching the late-night news. They covered your ‘boat arson.’” He made mocking quotations marks in the air with his fingers, and then spoke briefly.

The arsonists hung their heads.

A long silence ensued.

“How are we fixed for spare anchor chain?” Clint finally asked.

Chapter 30

Danny looked up as his brothers walked into the room. Erin and Jaimie had stopped by Annie’s for a late breakfast after dropping some gear off at their boat in the commercial basin for the final trip of the season.

“There was a fire in the marina last night,” Erin said. He went to the stove and poured coffee for himself and his brother. “Looked like arson, they found some old war surplus jerry cans lying on the deck of the boat.”

“Insurance?” Danny asked. It wasn’t entirely unknown in the fishing industry. It had been a poor season, and a lot of people were hurting.

Jaimie said, “Probably not. It was a fifty-foot steel Waterline sailboat. Just completed last month and on her maiden cruise. She’ll need new sails and a paint job, likely a new boom and furling, too, but that’s about it. Owned by a tech guy out of Silicon Valley who’s stupid rich by all accounts.”

“So what are they saying then? Somebody he pissed off?”

“Guess what slip it was in,” Jaimie said.

Jared and Danny huddled far forward in Arrow’s cockpit, sheltering under the dodger and drinking mildly doctored coffee. The weather had turned bad, with intermittent rain and a blustery southeaster. It wasn’t expected to last very long, but for the time being it was miserable.

“You talk to Clarke about it?” Danny asked.

“Yes. He told his squad that it was likely an attempt on Arrow. They’ve spoken to everybody who was around the docks last night, and nobody saw or heard anything before the fire started. With the crappy weather there weren’t many people around.”

“Well, they can rule out sailors, we know that much for certain. How could anyone confuse a gorgeous new million-dollar steel sloop with an old wooden ketch?” Danny shook his head in disbelief.

Jared said, “Well, it was raining pretty hard at the time.”

“Yes, okay, but my God, even so. They would have to be complete and total idiots. Jaimie said the boat is stunning, beautiful lines, swept back house, all gleaming steel and stainless, a real state-of-the-art modern showpiece, whereas Arrow is a dated, old—”

“Careful now,” Jared interrupted.

“Yeah. Well, you know what I mean.”

They sat and thought about it for a while. They finished their coffee and Jared reached down and took two cans from the box of beer that lay at their feet and popped the tabs. He handed one across.

“We don’t have a single damned thing,” he said finally.

Danny said, “We have the house in the Properties where Newcombe ran to. The same place they took Annie. So there is definitely something there.”

Jared shook his head. “Clarke says they went over the place with a fine-tooth comb. Checked all the cameras and found the pictures of the guys coming in and out with the van, but that’s it. They dusted the whole place for fingerprints and did find some in the house that didn’t belong to the cleaners, but no hits came up when they checked them out in their databases. There were no prints in the van or garage apart from the three dead guys. Bert, Ernie, and Louie were all small-time criminals, street-level drug dealers well down the chain, so no joy there either.”

“All right. So that might be a dead end. So to speak. What else?”

“There’s Rainbow and Bill Lacey. We saw that picture of him with Newcombe. That could just be a coincidence; they do belong to the same yacht club after all. But he also owns an old wooden launch like the one the caretaker saw those two guys in. There could be similar boats in the Queens Own, but what are the odds of two coincidences like that? Lacey is definitely in the picture.”

“I think we should pay him a visit,” Danny said. “Maybe we could take him out for a sail and swing him from the boom like you did with Jaeger that time. Weather is perfect right now for that sort of thing. I’ve always regretted missing the chance of seeing that little snitch flying back and forth over the deck on the quick tacks. Speaking of Jaeger, you don’t suppose he knows anything about any of this, do you?”

“He might. Although I doubt that he’d tell us if he did.”

They sat in comfortable silence for a while, leaning back tight against the cabin house, sipping their beer and enjoying the sound of the wind and rain in the rigging and the slight hesitant motions of Arrow as she chafed at her mooring.

“There is the slip down from Legalese where Merlynn ran into the two guys with the hats that shooed her off,” Danny finally said. “The one owned by the political party.”

“That’s a little out of the ordinary, perhaps, but we don’t have any other connections. Nowhere to go