Connor O'Kane sat motionless on the gunwale of the 65-foot steel ketch Second Chance and watched the September sun melt a five-gallon bucket of Rocky Road ice cream.
He had once thought Second Chance an apt name. That was back when he finally got out of the hospital after all the months of painful physical rehab. When he naively believed someone like him could start a new life once the flesh mended. That was before he discovered you can't build a second life without bulldozing flat the ruins of the first, something he was either unwilling or incapable of doing.
The heavy white plastic ice cream container lay on its side, leaking creamy chocolate and marshmallows. The lid had partially opened when it slipped from his hands as he was stowing it below along with the other supplies for a week-long charter.
Water lapped at the pilings. Mooring lines groaned. Halyards slapped at masts. Gulls gathered to help O'Kane watch the ice cream melt. The timid ones perched on the sailboat's lifelines. The bolder ones walked up to inspect the ice cream container then hopefully pecked at the other packages O'Kane had left scattered on the concrete dock.
He took a sip from a bottle of Harp -- not really tasting it -- then sighed as he propped the bottle against a life-line stanchion. He looked back at the dock. The Rocky Road could still be salvaged, if stowed away in the freezer. Now. It was the favorite of his best charter client, a lawyer who treated O'Kane like a trusted old-school buddy rather than a hired hand.
O'Kane urged himself to get up; he wanted this cruise to go right. Winter was coming, when bookings fell off drastically. His charter clients didn't know their fees were irrelevant. He didn't need the money, but he sorely needed the cruises. The activity, the company, filled up minute after minute, leaving only fitful nights into which the past crept. The preparations could do that, too. He found emotional safety in action, solace in movement -- once he got moving. But sometimes, like this evening, he sat, enervated by the let-down that always followed a killing.
The cold pulverizing emptiness in his heart sucked at him like a vacuum. The void filled with old memories, and they stung him sharp and clear. It was like walking barefoot on scorpions. In the three months since he had killed el-Nouty, the memories had struck new, higher chords of pain.
The agency shrinks he no longer visted had told him he needed to fill his new life with new memories to keep the old ones out. In fuzzy psychobabblings that sounded like they came straight from the same book of shrink homilies, they told him there could never be a future until he stopped re-living the past.
His head knew they were right. But that meant crowding out Andy. And Anne. His heart couldn't do that now, not until he got the hooded woman. The last one, the one responsible for it all. In his heart, he knew that only then -- maybe -- could he look into his mind's eye, see their faces and tell them that he was sorry he hadn't been fast enough, that he had now done all he could and that he'd love them forever. Maybe then he could say good-bye.
"Shit," he told a bold seagull who walked up almost close enough for him to touch. "Just shit." The gull cocked its head and gave O'Kane a curious stare.
Surf-like traffic noises drifted over from the Southwest Freeway. O'Kane looked north, in the direction of the traffic, but saw mostly trees and beyond them, glimpses of the Jefferson Memorial, the very tip of the Washington Monument and the early evening sky.
He took a deep pull from the Harp bottle and made a long face. It had gotten warm, but he swallowed it anyway.
Motion caught his eye. Up near the restrooms and showers some fifty yards away, just to the left of the locked gate that was supposed to keep D.C.'s famous crime away, the shrubbery danced.
"Oh hell. Not again," O'Kane muttered.
As it always did, O'Kane's sense of self preservation overcame the lethargy. He got to his feet and dashed into the ketch's cockpit mentally ticking off his options; almost without thinking he rejected the .505 Gibbs and other heavy caliber protection in favor of a 12-gauge flare pistol which he pulled from under the helmsman's seat.
In its wisdom, the D.C. city council had outlawed guns for honest people, leaving weapons mostly in the hands of criminals. Honest people needed to be careful not to leave bodies lying about; those attracted questions and frequently resulted in criminal charges, though not against the criminals. No, honest people needed to be discreet, not to mention creative.
O'Kane's creative choice for D.C. self-defense had been to make changes to an emergency flare pistol, changes undetectable to the naked eye but that allowed it to fire a specially-loaded 12-gauge shotgun shell with a dramatically lighter power and shot load. It made a big noise like the real thing, but was lethal only at very short ranges.
O'Kane grabbed a handful of extra shells, shoved them into the cargo pockets of his khaki shorts, checked to make sure a round was chambered. He raced back to the dock just in time to see what he expected. Three men emerged from the shrubbery. One man carried what looked like an Uzi; the other two carried pry bars and a bolt cutter and had weapons tucked in their belts.
Crouching in the shelter of a tall concrete piling, O'Kane watched. They always came from the same place. A dense tangle of shrubs and brush on the other side of the chain link fence gave them cover to clip through the wire without being seen. A parking area less than fifty yards away, allegedly constructed for the convenience of tourists but usually appropriated by drug dealers and petty thieves ready for some one-stop shopping at the marina, made for quick, convenient getaways. If this were like the other times, O'Kane knew there would be stolen supermarket shopping carts to haul the loot back to the parking lot just on the other side of the fence.
The trio stood still, surveying the marina, looking for a starting point. As usual, he saw their gazes settle on the biggest and closest boat. As usual, the Second Chance.
As they headed for the dock leading toward him, O'Kane looked about the deserted marina for Sumter Jones, to make sure he wasn't likely to get caught in a crossfire or to come rushing out with that antique revolver he had picked up off a field in France fifty some years before.
The wizened old Black man ran the fuel pumps and collected the monthly slip rental checks for the rich men who owned the facility. When his arthritis was not bad, he also did odd jobs for the boaters in exchange for a regular monthly cash payment, he took special care to look after the Second Chance. Jones further supplemented that income by regularly beating O'Kane at one card game or another and by occasionally serving as cook for O'Kane's charters.
Jones was nowhere to be seen. O'Kane remembered then that Jones had mumbled something early that morning about having to go visit his newest grandson in Arlington.
So much the better.
The thugs reached the head of the dock and started to turn toward the Second Chance.
"Freeze assholes!" O'Kane held up the flare pistol, pulled the trigger, ducked back into the shelter of the concrete pillar to re-load.
The 12-gauge sounded like a cannon. The intruder with the Uzi loosed a clip at full automatic, spraying the docks. O'Kane heard lead smash into Fiberglas; it wasn't the first time.
Peeking around the base of the pillar, O'Kane smiled as he saw the trio looking frantically about for the source of the shot. The Uzi man expertly slammed in a fresh clip, hosed down the area for good measure, then disappeared into the shrubs followed by his friends.
O'Kane waited several minutes, until he heard the police sirens, then calmly picked up the tub of Rocky Road and carried it down below.
From below decks, O'Kane heard the muffled sounds of the sirens grow loud and then fade as the cars arrived. Doors slammed.
He hid the flare pistol with certainty it would not be discovered, a certainty that could be achieved only by a former-smuggler-turned-customs-agent. No one knew the locations or accesses to his secret caches. O'Kane had used welding torches, industrial grinders and drills and his intimate knowledge of the boat's construction to build them in private. He borrowed from his own experience as well as from the hundreds of smugglers he had helped bust. His water-tight caches were undetectable by any means other than x-rays or the dismantling of the entire craft.
He locked the companionway hatch and climbed down into the engine compartment. From one of his caches, he removed a thick watertight pouch. From the pouch, he retrieved a leather-bound scrapbook, which he set on the compartment's tiny workbench next to a stack of newspaper and magazine clippings.
"Persian Playboy Missing After Sex Cruise," read one clipping from the New York Post, which had interviewed the waitress and several other well-built women. "Iranian Ex-Patriate, Close Associate of Shah Missing, Presumed Dead," read the more staid New York Times. O'Kane then opened the scrapbook skipped over the first half and scanned the headlines from newspapers from two dozen countries. The clippings already pasted in read: "Iranian Embassy Employee Dies In Freak Auto Accident," "Faulty Heater Fumes Kill Iranian Shipping Clerk," "Tehran Businessman Suffers Fatal Heart Attack In Hotel Hot Tub," "Light Plane Crash Fatal For Iranian Military Attache."
Only O'Kane and an elite circle at Customs knew that none of the deaths were accidents. Those who had killed O'Kane's family and his life had become an unlucky lot.
Carefully avoiding any glance at the first half of the scrapbook, O'Kane taped the new clippings onto a blank page. He looked at the clippings for several more moments, then closed the covers and replaced the scrapbook in the watertight pouch.
His hands went tentatively to a stack of envelopes bound with a thick rubber band. He took the stack and held it in both hands, looked at it. He slipped off the rubber band and took the first envelope off the stack. It was sealed, the stamp uncanceled. Like all the others, it was addressed simply to "Anne O'Kane."
Address unknown.
Five years of letters. Tears came to his eyes as he thought of all the empty lonely nights when he had sat down to write these letters to Anne. Letters of love, letters of sorrow, always asking her to give his love to little Andy, never mailing a single one.
Address unknown.
He had re-bound the letters with the rubber band and was replacing it in the cache when he heard footsteps on the dock. There was more than one set of footsteps. O'Kane assumed it was the police canvassing the dock. Moments later, there was a knock on his hull. "Police," called a barely audible voice.
O'Kane made no move to answer the call. He heard a knock at the companionway, and muffled conversation. After less than a minute, the footsteps receded. Only then did he remove from the cache a small waterproof plastic box. He dumped the contents, the residue of el-Nouty's life, on the bench and rummaged through it. Most of it was self-explanatory: Piaget watch, keys, credit cards, details of el-Nouty's numbered Swiss accounts; the straight razor (O'Kane's forehead throbbed everytime he looked at it). The sole enigma was the patch of skin with the multicolored tattoo.
He picked up the business card and stared at the tattoo it for perhaps the tenth time since the night off the Mexican Coast. The skin had shrunk slightly as it dried out and puckered at the edges.
It reminded him of the blood type tattoos that Hitler's SS troops carried. He wondered what it meant, if it was important.