in the morning, with the first hint of light at the horizon. Out beyond the boat, the waters rolled dark and relentless.
He got on the radio in the wheelhouse, and quickly had the Coast Guard. He already knew it was going to be a search for a body, and likely a useless one. They weren’t wearing life jackets, as they hindered the work. Off the radio, he unfolded the paperwork on the chart table, and looked at the handwriting. Botelho was the guy’s last name. He hadn’t remembered that. The Coast Guard radio man said there was a boat not far away, and coming at him full throttle.
Under the bunk were the bags of cocaine. His bank; his assurance of unbroken chemical relief. He was frantic with what to do with it. The prospects of a double withdrawal were just too daunting. He was expecting the Coast Guard ship to be coming up on him imminently, somewhere in the rising dawn. Quinn opened the first bag, went in with his finger, and snorted hard. He was thinking at that moment to just hide them away. There would be no pretense for a vessel search. He immediately knew he was fooling himself, of course. But he needed the powder that badly.
He tends to find himself back out there a lot, the engines cut and the wind gusting and the rains coming down. The young guy, afraid to let go of the rail and crying to go home. It was only when that white Coast Guard ship was in sight with the gray light of a shrouded rising sun that he panicked fully. Abruptly, he went underneath, pulled out the bags, and began to dump them on the lee side, hoping no one was on him with their binoculars. Which, of course, they were.
And, as always, he brings his head up now, surprised to find himself not back on that boat’s deck but in the ongoing present.
When Botelho disappeared from the deck of Quinn’s boat, it had changed Quinn’s life in ways that were probably for the better, but felt much worse. Prison time allowed him to fight through withdrawal, a state-funded version of a rehab getaway. Had he instead come back from that run with an intact crew and a hold full of bugs, he’d have surely succumbed to the needle by nightfall: maybe, finally, too much. There was always going to be that time.
In the county jail in those next days, they could have begun to wean him with methadone and let him sweat through the days in an infirmary bed, had he ever asked. But he told no one. He still stubbornly held that this was a personal battle. By the time he went to court with his plea bargain signed, he had the strange thought he might live to forty after all.
“Guilty,” he’d said, almost stepping on the judge’s words in the rush to get it out.
Federal prison bit wasn’t so bad, either; he was surrounded pretty much by guys like he worked with every day in the lobster business. He went to a medium-security facility in upstate New York. Ray Brook. It was mainly just uneventful for him. The first few nights, at “orientation,” he’d been in a cell three down from a guy coming off something; the guy kept screaming into the night that he needed his fix. Then, one night, the noise stopped. At chow, someone said, “He hanged himself.” Someone else said, “Bullshit, he got taken to rehab.” Either way, things got quiet then. There were occasional fights, but nobody came near him. The work had made him too big to mess with. He didn’t make conversation, didn’t take exceptions, felt no need to pose or preen, and quietly counted down the weeks. Some guys, they were still trying to prove something, or maybe disprove something. Quinn took it only as a quiet recusal from many things.
He goes back to that at moments like this, lying sober on his small bed in the middle of the night. Quinn has awakened again after sleeping through the day and then the evening; it’s closing time for the bars as he awakens from his stretch, and he has nothing to do. Below his window he can hear the hoots of the drunks coming out to the street; he misses none of it. Instead he lies here and fights the urge to think about things he’d rather not. The way he did in that silent interlude of prison, although that interlude is what invades his thoughts.
His public defender told him that if he pleaded guilty to straight possession they’d drop the distribution charge.
“But I wasn’t distributing,” Quinn said. In conference, the defender wondered aloud if, given the amount of powder found, and the amount estimated to have been dumped, if he had the constitution of a plow horse. Yes, Quinn apparently did. The defender waited until he was sure that wasn’t an effort at humor, then began talking about a one-year probation and mandatory drug counseling. The defender didn’t know he was coming off heroin. The anxiety and down moods that came with it, and Quinn’s struggles to keep it together while voluntarily off smack and forcibly off coke, led to certain conclusions in town. Mainly, that he had killed Botelho. He was, to most, visibly stewing in his own guilt. The theory was relentlessly peddled by Botelho’s woman. The key piece of evidence seemed to be, at the moment Botelho evaporated, the convenient absence of the kid who had crewed with them. The new guy had truthfully noted that Quinn and Botelho had been at odds before the man disappeared. About pay.
Fact was, Quinn still had no idea what had happened. The traps were all in the water, so he wasn’t pulled over by an outgoing line; the sea was moderate that night, so he wasn’t taken by a rogue wave. How he could have gone over was something Quinn rolled over in his head, constantly. He must have just slipped, which no one was ever going to believe. He must have had an absent moment, when he took that one step where nothing firm rose up to meet his boot.
The search for the body, working on a too-generous 900-square-mile grid, had been the usual pointless exercise. Botelho was not a dolphin, and the currents didn’t move that fast, and his life vest was still on the nail in the wheelhouse. Quinn sat in his small cell before bail, and waited for someone to tell him what was going on, which no one did. In those first days back on land, he stalked the small space as an animal would, and slept without realizing it. He’d lie on the bunk staring at the ceiling, and in a blink he was in a dark room. The mere notion of any drug-running was a joke. You didn’t buy product on land and take it that far out to sea. But that much presumed powder (the primary evidence was the size of the bags from which it had been dumped) and a vanished man (and the imprecise claims he must have just fallen off the backside) meant something had to be made to stick.
Quinn understood that. He wanted it done fast. They’d already seized his crumbling boat as part of the initial distribution charge; he was ready to let it go, and try for a new boat and new escape, back Out There. On a Monday morning, he was driven by Robbie to the federal courthouse in Providence. There seemed now a distance from the matter of Botelho’s disappearance, for which no evidence existed. He went into federal court and blurted his guilty plea on possession. The judge, a middle-aged woman, looked at him narrowly over the tops of her reading glasses. His clothes were soaked through with flop sweat, and he was long unshaven. She seemed to come to certain conclusions. Thirty-six months in federal prison, twelve months to serve, is what had turned out to be on her mind.
“Jesus,” Robbie said aloud from the back of the courtroom. They remanded Quinn right then, another surprise. As the handcuffs and shackles went on him, he said to Robbie, “Winters are slow anyway. Three years means a year, and twelve months means six. I’ll be ready to work by next spring.” It didn’t even bother Quinn that much. It was no better or worse than anything else, he thought.
5.
SHE’D SAID HELLO AS HE SAT UPON HIS STOOL, MINDLESSLY watching a women’s college basketball game on the big TV over the bar. She was sidling up for drinks for herself and her girlfriends, over in the corner. And in the way it happens when there’s some attraction, she’s now sitting here while her girlfriends keep a wary eye from their table. Jean seems okay, as far as he can tell. She’s tall, with blond hair that may be holding off the gray with some chemical intervention. Fortyish, he guesses. The talk has been tame enough, and he’s made that mistake that happens when you’re starting to like someone, which is to foolishly confide one’s most assailable opinions.
“When
