cotton ball someone sneezed on.”
He passed the photos back to me.
“Oh, wait!” he said, making a grab for his wallet. “I think I have a picture of a UFO mother ship somewhere in my billfold! Give me a sec!”
“Funny.”
He leaned back in his chair and laughed. “Sorry, guys, but this is the reason I had to come over. I needed a break from reality.”
I guess my face telegraphed what I was thinking.
“You’re serious, aren’t you Nick?”
“As the plague.”
“You really think you and Sal saw a couple of ghost ships.”
“Really do,” Sal answered.
Forte ran a hand through his sandy going gray hair. “Okay, I’ll make a deal. I’ll help you with the ghost paddle wheelers and you help me with the abandoned yacht at the boat basin.”
“What kind of help?”
“It’s been three days and no one has returned to the Hatteras. No one in town has run across a tourist or visitor who could be the boat’s owner. If someone looks new to town, we’ve got the Chamber of Commerce and merchants putting on their Happy to See Ya face and asking how they like our little city and if they’re enjoying their stay. Then we’re asking flat out if they are the owners of the yacht. Real friendly like.”
“And?” Sal asked, licking tomato sauce off his fingers looking deep into the soul of another pepperoni slice.
“Nada. No one fesses up to being the boat’s owner.”
“Small town, winter, can’t be that many unfamiliar faces,” I said. “Now, for the big question, why did the name Vector Atlas Partners, LLC bother you so much?”
Forte’s face went pale, then his eyes squinted. “How’d you know it bothered me?”
“Easy deduction. From the time you called us til the time we found the weapons only one new fact came to light. The name of the boat’s owner. Your demeanor went from its usual perky, self-assured, in-charge cop self to downright edgy. Snarly, almost. And you suddenly wanted to call in the Feds. Not like you, Chief. I repeat, why did Vector Atlas Partners, LLC bother you?”
Sal snorted. “Does anything get past you, Nick?”
I just looked at the Chief whose face slumped like a 10-year-old kid whose father just caught him smoking a nickel cigar behind the barn. He straightened up in his chair, took a long pull of Dos Equis and sighed.
“If they’re who I think they could be, they are very bad hombres.” He cleared his throat. “I was on a homicide task force for 19 months before leaving LAPD. Someone was killing off the entire membership of small street gangs. Not just the thugs in the gangs but mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, nephews, nieces, grandparents, cousins three times removed. In all, a dozen start-up gangs and all their relatives were wiped from the streets without a trace.”
“Why’d we never hear about it?” Sal asked.
“The powers that be in Los Angeles had enough trouble with the homicide rate climbing. But this was multiple times bigger. It had public panic written all over it. Everyone from the mayor to the police chief to the precinct commanders and even the cops on the street knew that if someone broke the word that scores of gangsters and their families were being slaughtered there’d be hell to pay and everyone’s head would roll.
“So 50 of us were put on a task force to find who was behind the killings. We spent millions of dollars on snitches, thousands upon thousands of man hours undercover, turned over every last rock in L.A. County and came up with almost nothing.”
“Except…”
“Except three initials. VAP. We went through every data base in the country looking for people, places and businesses with those initials. Ventura Auto Parts. Venezuela Audio Products, Valhalla Actors Playhouse. The list was endless. And the number of people with these initials was staggering.”
Sal asked, “Did Vector Atlas Partners make the hit parade?”
“Not that I recall, quite honestly. But hearing the name yesterday clicked a part of my brain back to the VAP initials. Let’s just say that during my task force days I’d seen the result of this pogrom. Dead children, as young as infants. Bludgeoned grandmothers. Assassinated adults who were killed holding hands. We found mass graves in Nevada, California and even in Baja.”
“And it all went unreported?” I was incredulous. How could it be so well hidden? There’s always a leak to a friendly journalist.
“Like I said, no one wanted his head on the chopping block. And, quite honestly, these guys were so vicious, no one wanted their families put in danger. Believe me, these were thugs with no heart or soul. As for reporters, a couple sniffed around, but the wall of silence was built of fear. Our fear.”
Beads of sweat trickled down Forte’s forehead.
“And then it all stopped. The streets of L.A. returned to their jolly old selves. The task force eventually disbanded, but each of us was scarred for life. Many of my friends who were part of the investigation took early retirement and moved off to Idaho or Montana or some desert island. I snapped up the job here.”
The room went quiet except for the popping of burning logs in the wood stove. “Crackling like the laughter of devils,” someone once wrote.
I eventually broke the silence. “Chief, do you still have contacts who were on the task force? Could you get the list of VAP names and see if Vector is on it?”
“Tried that yesterday. Even my old boss is gone. And the files are so classified that only God could get to them.”
Sal cleared his throat. “I know God. Let me try.”
________________________________________________
Over the next 24 hours Sal burned through a couple dozen government contacts and called in as many favors, finally being told he would be hearing something “soon.”
The storm passed, the temperature rose into the 50s under slate skies. Sal and I rode the Harleys up to Lakeside, north of Coos Bay, and had lunch at the 8th Street Grille.
We walked down to the water’s edge and parked on the boat ramp dock taking in the peace and quiet Tenmile Lake is known for. It’s nestled in the hillocks and once had the largest inland salmon fleet in Oregon.
Long ago, in the 1920s and ‘30s, it was a popular place for Hollywood stars and starlets to have vacation homes. Plenty big for power boats, skiing, pontoon-boat parties and the annual drag-boat races.
Until the late 1990s, most of the cabins around the lake were just that – cabins. Some were dry without running water. Others were “uptown” and actually had electricity and septic systems.
In the early 2000s, new homes were constructed. Large, multiple stories. As close to mansions as anything on the southern Oregon coast. In the summer, jet boats and cruisers were tied up to docks or filled the boat houses. Watercraft
