The Edge

Chapter 56

Devine later drove to Putnam Harbor and looked around. The air was a little warmer today and the skies clear. The salt air smells filled his lungs as he watched men work on the few boats still docked here. And another man was taking a dinghy stacked with lobster traps out to one of the moored vessels.

He looked over when someone called out to him. It was the same man that Devine had falsely accused of being a government informant his first night here.

“Hey, dude, how’s it going?” said the man, walking over. “Name’s Phil Cooper, by the way, folks call me Coop.”

“Okay, Coop, I’m Travis. I saw you on a lobster boat leaving out of here a few mornings back.”

“You must’ve been up real early then,” said Cooper with a grin.

“I thought you would have been out to sea today,” noted Devine.

Cooper’s grin faded. “Damn motor on the boat burned out. I told the owner he needed to get the thing overhauled. He said that costs money. Well, so does having your boat sitting over there and not being able to catch lobster.”

“Can you get on with another boat while his is down?”

“Probably can, tomorrow at least. Thin crews these days. Not many guys want to take up the trade. Some captains go out by themselves now. Backbreaking work, and the money ain’t what it used to be.”

“Earl Palmer was telling me that, too.”

“Damn shame about Earl. Heard he hung himself. Shit. I mean, I know he was depressed about Bertie. But still, he had Annie. He had friends. Now I wish I had spent more time with him. Gone by to see him, shoot the shit about the old days. Drink some beers with him.”

“We all have regrets like that, Coop. Hey, got a question.”

“Okay, Travis, fire away.”

“That night outside the bar? Dak left before I did, and he passed you and your friends. I’d seen him give a high sign to an old guy to leave his stool so I could sit down. Did Dak by any chance give you boys the sign to come after me?”

This query wiped the smile right off Coop’s face. “Look, I don’t want to get in no trouble with a fed.”

“You won’t, because you just answered my question. Now I’ve got another one.”

“Okay,” said Cooper warily.

“What would a boat be doing out in the middle of the night with a smaller boat lowered off that, and heading to shore where it could beach and then offload something?”

“Where the hell did you see that?” asked a startled Cooper.

Devine told him the general location. The other man slowly shook his head. “I don’t know. Nothing to do with lobster fishing or oyster farming, I can tell you that. Maybe it was the government. Coast Guard?”

“I thought about that and looked it up. There’s a Coast Guard station at Boothbay Harbor, but they have a thousand-square-mile area of responsibility along the coast that ends far to the south of here.”

Cooper scratched his head. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“There’s another Coast Guard station in South Portland. It’s part of Sector Northern New England. It covers multiple states, works with Homeland Security, performs search and rescues, and helps keep the maritime lanes running smooth. My people can check in with them to see if they had an op in the area, but it really didn’t look like that to me.”

Cooper glanced out to the water. “You think somebody might be smuggling stuff in?”

“I don’t know. I guess it’s possible.” Devine looked out at the water, too, and a question occurred to him. “What can you tell me about Wilbur Kingman’s boat going down?”

“Really tragic. Hell, come to think, Earl was on that boat when it sank. He and Wilbur worked together for decades.”

“I know. How exactly did it happen?”

Cooper sat down on a bench and said, “It was a real foggy morning. Couldn’t see a foot in front of you. Most boats didn’t even head out, but Wilbur knew these waters like nobody else. At least we thought he did.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“There are rocky outcrops everywhere along the coast here, and some are farther out than you would think, just a quirk of Maine’s oceanic topography.” He grinned. “Didn’t expect those high-falutin’ words to come out my mouth, did you? Anyway, we all have sonar and depth finders and whatnot on our boats, so we don’t run into stuff we shouldn’t, including other boats. Well, apparently somehow Wilbur’s boat hit one of those rocks out there, hard enough to cave in the hull. Most commercial lobster boats range from around twenty-two feet on up to over forty. Wilbur’s boat, The Kingman, was a thirty-foot closed stern Beal, a nice size, and it handled real well on the water. But it didn’t have a hydraulic hauler, so they brought the traps up the old-fashioned way, with muscle.”

“How do you know it handled well in the water?”

“Whenever Earl was sick or couldn’t go out, I’d be the stern man for Wilbur. He ran a good operation, real safe.”

“Until he didn’t,” noted Devine.

“Right. Anyway, the thing was apparently loaded with lobsters in holding tanks full of water. It went down fast. Didn’t even get a distress signal or anything from them.”

“Weren’t they wearing life jackets?”

Cooper said, “You’re supposed to, sure. But you’re pulling up heavy traps all damn day, last thing you want is something restrictive like that on you. I just wear my orange overalls and heavy gloves. But all boats carry lifesaving gear. It’s required.”

“What did Earl say happened then?”

“He didn’t say much, which is very much like Earl. But he did say that in the collision he got thrown overboard and Wilbur got knocked out cold. He said he swam back to the boat and tried to get a life jacket on Wilbur, but the damn boat was sinking so fast, and stuff was sliding all around so much that he couldn’t. And Wilbur was a big man — hard to corral dead weight like that when you’re in the water. Earl barely had time to grab a floatable himself before it all went under and Wilbur was gone.”

“But with Wilbur knowing the waters so well, and all the nav gear you carry, how did he hit the rocks?”

Cooper shrugged. “Shouldn’t have happened, but it does. You lose focus, you don’t look at your screen consistently enough. Fog rolls in, you don’t know where the hell you are or what’s around you. It’s like that condition a pilot can get up in the air on a cloudy night, don’t know up from down and won’t believe his own instruments.”

“It’s called spatial disorientation,” said Devine. “It’s what probably caused the deaths of JFK Jr. and his wife and sister-in-law in the plane he was piloting.”

“Well, I think Wilbur got distracted and the fog didn’t help none, or his nav gear malfunctioned and bam, he hit the rock at speed. Hell, he really shouldn’t have gone out that morning, and he shouldn’t have been going that fast. But humans aren’t perfect. We make mistakes, particularly in situations like that. It’s not easy navigating in deep waters in the fog even with all the whiz-bang nav stuff they got. I’ve been on boats in real bad weather where I wasn’t sure the captain knew where the hell he was. And we’ve had some close calls. But we never wrecked. Just bad luck for Wilbur. Real bad.”

“How was Earl rescued?”

“Fog lifted and boats started going out. They saw him and picked him up. Poor man was in the water for hours. He’s lucky hypothermia didn’t get him. He was in shock, traumatized beyond all get out. They said he was still trying to find Wilbur. Didn’t want to get out of the water till he found his captain. Fought the folks trying to help him into the boat. Finally had to hog-tie the poor guy to save him. They recovered Wilbur’s body and he got a proper burial. Bing and Sons went all out for it, best of everything, and didn’t charge Ms. Kingman a dime for it.”

“That was good of them,” said Devine.

“Big loss for the town, for sure. But goes to show that no matter how much you think you know about what’s out there, the ocean always has surprises in store for you.”

Just like this damn town, thought Devine.