Small Town

thirty-five

The Carpenter, wearing his yachting clothes, the cap perched jauntily on his head, sat on a shaded bench in Riverside Park. He waited while the shadows deepened and the last of the sunset’s glow faded from the darkening sky. He didn’t see anyone coming or going from the Boat Basin, and judged it safe to board the Nancy Dee.

He was doing just that when a voice said, “Hey, Shevlin.”

The gun was in the cabin, clipped to the top of the little chest of drawers. He had the key to the cabin in his hand. If he could just ignore the voice long enough to get into the cabin and get to the pistol...

“Isn’t that your name? That’s who he was askin’ for.”

So this person didn’t know Peter Shevlin, wouldn’t unmask him as an imposter. And his information might be important.

The Carpenter turned, smiled at a black-bearded mountain of a man, a Hell’s Angel costumed as a wharf rat. “We never met, but I seen you around,” the man said. “Don’t want to stick my nose in, it’s not my nature, but you had a visitor, and I figured you’d want to know about it.” And he told of a man who’d come aboard the Nancy Dee late that afternoon, a well-dressed middle-aged man who sounded like a cop.

“But he didn’t flash any tin, and he didn’t push it like a cop would. And he got off your boat when I called him on it.”

“There’s a lawsuit,” the Carpenter said. “They want me to appear as a witness, and it’s all very tiresome.”

“Figured it was something like that. Just thought you’d like to know about it.”

“That was thoughtful of you. I appreciate it.”

“Hey,” the man said, “we got to stick together, you know?” He grinned. “We’re all in the same boat.”

One look at the river told you it was a holiday weekend. Even at this hour there were still plenty of boats out. He loved the way they looked, small private craft enjoying the city’s great harbor. The little sailboats were especially attractive, and it looked like fun, sailing around as they did, pushed by the wind. It would be silent on a sailboat, too. You wouldn’t have the noise of the boat’s engine.

But you’d have to know what you were doing. He supposed it was the sort of thing a person could learn, and felt a momentary pang of regret that he never had. It was something one ought to have done earlier in life, and for a few minutes he allowed himself a fantasy of what might have been, pictured himself at the helm of a small sailboat, accompanied by his wife and children. He’d bark out orders — Mind the boom! Hoist the jib! — and they’d hasten to carry them out. He didn’t know what the words meant, but he’d have learned that whole vocabulary, and they’d sail away the hours, sail away the days.

Someone had put his feet on the deck of the Nancy Dee. Someone had come around snooping, asking questions, looking for Peter Shevlin.

This was not good at all.

He looked out over the water, considering the implications. It was possible, of course, that the intrusion had been as trivial as he’d explained it to the bearded man. Someone with business with Shevlin might have gone looking for him; failing to find him at his apartment, he could then have tried him at the Boat Basin. In that case he wouldn’t know that Shevlin had gone missing, and would either keep looking in a tentative way or drop the matter.

But it was more likely that someone realized that Peter Shevlin was missing, and that was why he’d had a visitor. Perhaps it would be best, for the next few days, if he came to the boat later and left it earlier. Should he avoid sailing altogether? That might not be necessary, if he took the proper precautions.

He owed a debt of gratitude to the man with the black beard, and wondered if a bullet might not be the best way to pay it. Because, for all that his warning was useful, his knowledge was dangerous. He had looked the Carpenter right in the face, and the Carpenter’s face had been made familiar to the entire city, and indeed to the world beyond.

On the plus side, whenever the man looked at him in the future he’d recognize him as Peter Shevlin. That was all to the good, until the moment the fellow spotted a newspaper photo or watched America’s Most Wanted and experienced the shock of recognition. Why, that’s Shevlin, he’d say. No wonder he looked familiar.

Invite him on board, sail out onto the middle of the river, far enough so that a shot from a small-caliber gun in a closed cabin wouldn’t reach another human ear. Wait until the man was distracted, because he was huge, he might be harder to kill than Rasputin. Then put a bullet into the back of his skull, into the base of his brain.

And then what? He didn’t have the boning saw, it was down there in Davy Jones’s locker, and it would be hell dismembering a man that size in the close quarters of the boat’s cabin. No, just get him overboard, but even that could not be done without difficulty.

All in all, he decided, killing him presented more and greater risks than letting him live.

Besides, the Carpenter thought, the man would die soon enough. They all would.

The marina was on the Jersey side of the river, a ways upstream from the Boat Basin. The boats moored there were several cuts above the ramshackle lot that were his neighbors, and the Nancy Dee looked like a poor relative in their company.

But that didn’t make the rawboned man with the bandage on his cheek disinclined to take his money and sell him a five-gallon can of gasoline.

“Oh, and a case of beer,” the Carpenter said as an afterthought. “In bottles, and make it whatever’s the cheapest.”

The man said he had Old Milwaukee at a real good price, but that’d be cans. Did it have to be bottles? The Carpenter said it had to be bottles. There was something about drinking out of a can, he said, and the rawboned man said he knew exactly what he meant.

He wound up with two cases of Bud Light. (“You know what? Make it two cases, I don’t want to run out in the middle of a holiday weekend.”) The bottles had twist-off caps, and he twisted them off one by one, pouring their contents overboard. He filled the two cases with the empty bottles and carried them into the cabin.

That made five cases, or sixty bottles. And ten gallons of gasoline, which was far more than he’d need. Sixty twelve-ounce bottles would hold 720 ounces, or a little more than twenty-two quarts, which was not much more than five gallons. Of course you had to allow for some spillage, the Carpenter thought. And anything left over would just add to the final sacrifice.

He wouldn’t fill the bottles yet. He had to store them in the cabin, where they wouldn’t be readily seen, and he knew his cloth wicks would not be airtight. In a closed space, the fumes could reach dangerous levels. He wouldn’t want that.

But he had his bottles empty and ready, his strips of cloth already torn, the gas on hand waiting to be poured. He was prepared.

He was back at his slip by three in the morning. He waited long enough for anyone who’d been disturbed by his engine to go back to sleep. Then, quietly, he changed his clothes, loaded the white pants and the cap into his backpack, and went ashore.