The Taken

4

Charter Anglers operated out of a shack on the shore of Gannon Lake. A couple of white wooden hulls with peeling paint lay on their sides in front of the shop, and below it, at the bottom of a short slope, was the Charter Angler dock with its sign on a post at the end of it. They had a single pontoon boat tied up, big enough for five adults. It was rigged for a trip, with three rods leaning against the back railing. “I thought they were expecting us,” said Hazel.

“I’ll go see what’s happening,” said Wingate. They parked the car on the grass halfway between the dock and the shack. Wingate knocked on the door and went in. A moment later, he was leading a man toward the car.

“This is Calvin Jellinek,” Wingate said, leaning in the driver’s side window. “He says Ms. Barlow called about an hour ago and is feeling too nauseous to come in.”

“You’re going to fuck up my ten a.m., aren’t you?” Jellinek said. The muscles on his arms stood out like cables. He was a strong-looking, squat man with a face ravaged by acne scars.

“Your partner was supposed to take us out.”

“She was, eh? Why do I think that honour’s going to fall to me?”

“Do you know where Ms. Barlow found the… um?”

“I know this lake,” he said. “I can take you anywhere. But why don’t you folks come back at noon? It’s the Saturday of the long weekend. I have customers. Look -” He waved behind Wingate, and Wingate turned to see a woman and two little boys coming down toward them. The boys were wearing one-piece, full-body swimsuits that looked like diving costumes. Overtop of these suits they wore enormous, blocky red life-jackets. “They drove up from Mayfair. It wouldn’t be right -”

“What we’re here for is a little more urgent than catching bass, I think.”

The woman and her kids were standing slightly behind him. The boys were excited. One of them said, “Can I kill them?”

“Be quiet, Tom. You can see Mr. Jellinek is busy.”

Jellinek leaned forward with a pleading look on his face. It was a mean look. “Come on, Officer. Three hours. It means a hundred and fifty in my pocket, and whatever it is you’re looking for, it’ll be there at lunchtime.” He turned to his customers. “You folks just head on down to the dock. I’ll be two minutes.”

“You’re going to have to cancel this expedition, Mr. Jellinek,” said Wingate. “I’m sorry. We’ve got a marine unit coming up from Mayfair – they’re going to be here in about an hour.”

“You going to reimburse me for my lost income?”

“I’m sure these folks’ll make it up to you. Those boys aren’t going to let their mother off the hook.” He immediately regretted his choice of words, thinking of what was lying out there in ten metres of water. “This is more important.”

“Jesus,” he said, shaking his head. He turned angrily and went down to join his customers. Wingate watched the boys’ faces fall in unison. The littler one started to cry and the mother looked up toward him where he stood on the gravel, her face set in an expression of profound disappointment. He hoped Jellinek wasn’t telling them why the police needed to go fishing. The family walked back up the slope, the boys both with slumped shoulders. The elder murmured “Thanks for nothing,” as he passed.

“I’ll be waiting in my shop,” said Jellinek. “I have another group at two. I hope to hell you’re not going to need more time than that.”

Wingate found a couple of vending machines a few hundred metres down the shore, standing outside a kind of corner store that was closed. He brought back two bags of tortilla chips and two bottles of water, and they sat in the car waiting for the Marine Unit. “My mother’s going to kill you for this,” Hazel said, crunching the chips. It hurt to lean back against the seat, so she was bending forward a little, as if she was expecting Wingate to put a pillow behind her. He had the radio dialled to a local classical music station and inoffensive orchestral music played quietly.

“She’s gotta catch me first,” he said.

“Oh, she’ll catch you,” said Hazel.

Wingate wagged a finger at the radio. “I played sax, you know. I played seriously. I was in my corps’ marching band.”

“I admire that. I don’t have any talents at all.”

“You don’t have musical talent, but that’s probably because you just don’t have room for it given your other talents.”

She looked over her shoulder at him, raising one eyebrow. “You don’t have to butter me up, James. You already have my job.”

“You can have it back, Skip,” he muttered. “Just tell me when.”

The Mayfair cops arrived at ten-fifteen. Jellinek was staring at his watch. One of the cops was wearing a wetsuit under his uniform and as he stripped down to it in the van, his partner, PC Tate, leaned over into Hazel’s window and got caught up. “Buddy’s going to take us out then?” he said.

“Not willingly from the sounds of it. But you take whatever time you need out there.”

“Water’s going to be cold.”

She looked out toward the van where the other cop was transforming himself into a diver. He looked like a larger version of one of the kids who’d come down with their mother. “You guys get much call?”

“Not this time of year,” said Tate. “Mostly it’s going down to hook up a Sea-Doo or a smashed-up motorboat, but that’s in June or July. Over-exuberance, you know, summer arrives and every idiot’s out there gunning it. Once in a while, it’s sad, you know, there’s a real accident, and we get called out to recuperate. But rarely in May.” He lowered himself to see Wingate. “I got a handtruck in the van, but I’m going to need some help getting the winch on it.”

“Sure,” said Wingate. He got out of the car and the two men walked to the white OPS van parked down by the dock. Jellinek was watching from the front door of his shack, and when he saw the big equipment come out, he came down and helped them get it onto the boat. Hazel watched them from the car. The one called Calberson hauled his tank and flippers out of the van, and then Jellinek tied off. Wingate dashed back to the car. “You going to be okay?”

“I hate the water, James.”

“You picked a good place to be born then.”

“I can get seasick looking at the back of a dime.”

He laughed. “What’s your best guess about what’s out there?”

“Guess or hope?” she said.

“Yeah.” He pushed off the side of the car. “We’ll know soon enough.”

“Too bad you guys aren’t paying customers,” Jellinek said from the wheel. “I’m drifting over keepers here.”

Wingate looked over the side of the boat, but the water was black and he couldn’t see anything. “How do you know that?”

Jellinek indicated what looked like a miniature computer monitor attached to the boat’s dash. “I can see them here.”

Wingate looked at the screen. It was a console with a black and green display and it showed cartoony images of fish drifting past with numbers attached to them. Jellinek explained the size of the images correlated to the size of the fish, and the numbers told how far down they were. “Fish-finder’s the best cheat there is,” he said. “When you got three hours and you’ve made your clients a promise, you can’t dick around casting into the dark.”

Tate was looking over their shoulders. “Obviously you’ve never been on an OPS investigation. Can you get that thing to scan the bottom for us?”

“It won’t be much use. It can’t pick out something lying against the lakebed.”

“What if it’s floating slightly off the bottom?”

“Maybe,” said Jellinek. “But it can tell a fish from a log and it’s not going to find you a log, you know. It’s not a log-finder.”

“Do it anyway,” said Tate, tilting a black handheld device back and forth in his palm. “Start over there” – he pointed at a spot five hundred metres to the right from where they were – “and crisscross back and forth.”

“You’re the boss,” he said.

“No, he’s the boss,” said Tate, gesturing at Wingate. “Right, Boss?”

“I’m acting boss,” he said. “The real boss is in the car.”

“You’re the acting CO for an acting CO, right? You guys have commitment issues?” “Funding issues, Officer.”

“Ah. Not your commitment issues then, eh?” He squinted into the thing he was holding. “Okay, here we go. Can you write this down, Detective?”

“What is that?”

“GPS. Write this down: latitude 44.9483, longitude 79.4380.”

Wingate wrote down the coordinates, and Jellinek reversed the boat to the point Tate had told him to start. Calberson had sat the whole time at the back of the boat staring off at one of the islands. Wingate imagined he wasn’t a guy whose little tasks had a lot of happy endings. His thick goggles hung against his chest.

The boat moved slowly across the surface of the water. They kept their eyes on the fish-finder. “Goddamn waste,” said Jellinek as what appeared to be a school of ten or more fish drifted across the screen. “Bass. Four-pounders.”

“They’ll be bigger tomorrow,” said Tate.

“They’ll be gone tomorrow.”

They made three crossings and saw nothing the finder didn’t image as a something you’d roll in breadcrumbs and fry in butter. Behind the boat, some of the fish were hitting the surface, making rings in the water.

“Stop there,” said Tate. Jellinek cut the motor. There was something in the finder at nine metres. It was massive compared to the bass they’d been watching get off scot-free. Wingate’s stomach flipped. He’d been hoping all along it would turn out to be a goose chase.

“Well,” said Jellinek, “either this lake is sprouting tuna, or there’s your man.”

“Let’s get down there then.” Calberson was up at Tate’s signal, shrugging the tank onto his back and shoving the mouthpiece between his teeth. He pulled the goggles down over his eyes. He hadn’t said a word yet. “You good to go?” asked Tate.

Calberson gave him a thumbs-up and sat on the edge of the boat with his back to the water. Tate smacked his tank hard, some kind of superstition between the two men. “Go,” he said.

Calberson pushed himself backwards off the boat and hit the water with a heavy splash. Wingate saw Jellinek shake his head ruefully. Then Calberson was gone and the surface was still again. They returned their attention to the finder, which showed Calberson as a kind of shark under the boat. It gave him a sleek missile-like form and translated his flippers as a long, forked tail. The number on his body grew as he descended. Five, seven, nine metres. His sharkform tracked slowly toward the tunaform, and finally obscured it. “Let’s get the claw over the side,” said Tate, and he handed a hook attached to a thick cable to Wingate, who dropped it into the water as Tate turned the winch on. The hook vanished into the black. On the finder, Calberson’s body and the object in the water appeared to be dancing around each other. And then, suddenly, Calberson’s form vanished. They stared at the screen in silence. Tate said, “What just happened?”

“I don’t know.” Jellinek fiddled with the controls, but only the smaller, unmoving object at ten metres registered.

Tate looked over the side, then quickly crabstepped a circuit of the railing, scanning the water. “Go aft, Detective! Forward!” he shouted from the rear of the boat. “Look for his air!”

Wingate went to the front of the boat and looked down, but the surface was undisturbed. “You see him?” he shouted over his shoulder to Jellinek.

“Nothing!” Tate was in a full-fledged panic and ran to the console, his eyes wild. He smacked the finder once with the flat of his palm. “Hey!” shouted Jellinek.

“Where the hell is he? Move this fucking barge! Find him!” The tone of Tate’s voice seemed to wake Jellinek up to the seriousness of the situation and he put the boat in reverse, but as he did, the thing on the finder began to rise. “Is that him?” Tate said, pressing his finger to the screen.

“Not unless he lost half his body weight down there.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Tate. The depth measurements on the object were declining. It was coming up slowly. Nine metres, seven metres. “Where the fuck is he?” The object was at four metres. Jellinek said it was surfacing starboard. “English,” said Wingate.

“To your right,” said Tate. He unhooked his walkie from his belt and called his dispatch. “Come in Eighty-one, Eighty-one come in.”

“Eighty-one,” said the walkie, “go ahead.”

“10-78 Marine Unit 1, silent diver, repeat, I have a 10-78 -” Wingate stood over the railing, his heart hammering against the steel bar. He could see something rising through the dark water. It looked like a body, but why was it rising on its own? He unsnapped the clasp on his holster. “Two metres,” said Jellinek. Dispatch was getting the boat’s coordinates off Tate’s GPS. The thing was almost at the surface. Wingate saw it was human. Somehow greeny-beige. Then he saw the green was a small-gauge nylon netting wrapping the body, two or three layers of it, and the fishing rod Barlow had said she’d let go of was still hooked to it. It reeked of mud and rot, and Wingate felt the back of his throat opening. Tate was staring at his walkie as if his vanished partner’s voice might issue from it. And then it seemed to.

“Motherfucker was weighted to the lakebed,” came Calberson’s voice from the back of the boat. “I had to swim along the bottom and cut it loose.” He was treading water behind them. “Someone want to give me a hand?”

Tate leapt to the rear of the boat, shouting “10-22! 10-22!” into his walkie, the code for disregard. Jellinek handed Wingate a short grappling hook, and he latched the netting with the end of it and pulled it in. What he drew over the side of the boat weighed no more than fifty pounds. But how could it? Calberson was tumbling back over the rear, and Tate was slapping him repeatedly on his upper arm as if to assure himself his partner was really alive. “You okay, Calberson? You okay?”

The man had his forearms up to deflect the blows. “Jesus, Vic, I’m fine, stop pounding me.”

“Holy frig, I thought you were dead, I thought you were a fucking dead man.”

“I’m not! Okay? Now what is that thing?”

Wingate was kneeling over it, disentangling the end of the grappling hook from the netting. The three other men gathered behind.

It was a mannequin.