Dark Hollow

I was about to tell him what little I had learned when he interrupted.

"There's something else. You got a visitor here, arrived this morning,"

"Who is it?"

"Lee Cole."

I was surprised, given the deterioration of my friendship with her husband. Maybe she had hopes of rebuilding bridges between Walter and me, but that didn't seem a good enough reason to track me down in Maine.

"Did she say what she wanted?"

There was a hesitation in Angel's voice, and I immediately felt my stomach turn. "Kinda. Bird, her daughter Ellen is missing."

I drove back immediately, doing a steady eighty as soon as I hit I-95. I was almost on the outskirts of Portland when the cell phone rang. I picked it up, half expecting it to be Angel again. It wasn't.

"Parker?" I recognized the voice almost immediately.

"Billy? Where are you?"

Billy Purdue's voice was panicky and scared. "I'm in trouble, man. My wife, she trusted you, and now I'm trusting you too. I didn't kill them, Parker. I wouldn't do that. I couldn't kill her. I couldn't kill my little boy."

"I know, Billy, I know." As we spoke, I kept repeating his name in an effort to calm him and develop whatever tentative trust he might have toward me. I tried to put Ellen Cole out of my mind, at least for the present. I would deal with that as soon as I could.

"The cops are after me. They think I killed 'em. I loved 'em. I'd never have hurt 'em. I just wanted to keep 'em." His voice bubbled on the edge of hysteria.

"Okay, Billy," I said. "Look, tell me where you are and I'll come and get you. We'll take you somewhere safe and we can talk this thing through."

"There was an old guy at their place, Parker. I saw him watching it, that night the cops picked me up. I was trying to look out for them, but I couldn't." I wasn't even sure that he had heard my offer of help, but I let him talk as I drove past the Falmouth exit about three miles from the city.

"Did you recognize him, Billy?"

"No, I never seen him before, but I'd know him if I saw him again."

"Okay, Billy, that's good. Now tell me where you are and I'll come and get you."

"I'm at a phone box on Commercial, but I can't stay here. There's people, cars. I've been hiding out in the Portland Company complex at Fore Street, down by the locomotive museum. There's a vacant building just inside the main entrance. You know it?"

"Yeah, I know it. Go back inside. I'll be there as soon as I can."

I called Angel again and told him to meet me, with Louis, at the corner of India and Commercial. Lee Cole was to be left at Java Joe's. I didn't want her at the house in case Tony Celli, or anyone else, decided to pay a visit.

There was no one else around when I arrived at the corner of India and Commercial. I pulled into the parking lot of the old India Street Terminal at One India, the car nestling in the shadow of the old three-story building. As I stepped from the car, the first drops of rain began to fall, a heavy, skin-soaking volley that exploded dramatically on the hood of the car and left splashes the size of quarters on the windshield. I walked around the terminal, past a picnic table and a single-story office building, painted red, until I was on the harbor side, looking out over the dark waters. Thunder rumbled, and on Casco Bay, a ship was frozen in a flash of lightning. Ahead of me, on a restored stretch of line used to give tourists a taste of a narrow-gauge railway, stood a flatbed car with a storage tank on top, marking the start of the line. A row of locked cargo containers was ranged behind the car. To my right was the Casco Bay ferry terminal, the dinosaur body of a blue eighteen-ton crane standing above it on four spindly legs like a mutilated bug.

I was about to turn back to my car when, from behind me, I heard a noise on the gravel and a familiar voice said: "Bad weather for birds. You should be curled up in your coop." The voice was accompanied by the cocking of a hammer on a pistol.

I slowly raised my hands from my coat and turned to see Mifflin, Tony Celli's harelipped enforcer, smiling crookedly at me. He held a Ruger Speed Six in his hand, the rounded butt gripped hard in his stubby fist.

"It's like déjà vu all over again," I said. "I'll have to park someplace else in the future."

"I think your parking problem is about to be solved. Permanently. How's your head feel?" The smile was still fixed in place.

"Pretty good. Hope I didn't hurt your foot too badly."

"I get the soles made special to absorb impact. I didn't feel a thing." He was close to me, maybe only six or seven feet away. I didn't know where he had come from; maybe he had been waiting in the shadows behind One India all along, or had followed me to the meeting place, although I couldn't figure out how he might have known about it. Behind me, the rain made cracking noises as it hit the water.

Mifflin nodded in the direction of the lot. "See you got your Mustang fixed."

"Accidents will happen. That's why I have insurance."

"You should have saved your money, spent it on dames. You ain't go

He raised the gun and his finger tightened on the trigger. "Bet your insurance doesn't cover you for this."

"Bet it does," I said, as Louis appeared from behind the red office building, his dark hand gripping Mifflin's gun arm tightly as I moved quickly to my left. Louis's right hand pressed the barrel of a SIG into the soft jowl of the would-be assassin.

"Gently," said Louis. "Wouldn't want that thing to go off and scare somebody, make them loose off a shot into someone else's fat jaw."

Mifflin carefully removed his finger from within the guard and slowly eased the hammer down. Angel joined Louis and took the Ruger from the gunman's hand.

"Hi, gorgeous," he said, pointing it at Mifflin's head. "That's a big gun for a little guy."

Mifflin said nothing as Louis eased the SIG away from his mouth and slipped it into the side pocket of his dark overcoat, his hand still gripping the gunman's arm. Louis made a sudden, swift movement and there was a hard, sharp crack as he broke Mifflin's right arm at the elbow, then struck the smaller man's head twice against the side of the building. The gunman folded to the ground. Angel disappeared and returned a minute later driving the Mercury. He flipped the trunk and Louis dumped Mifflin's prone form inside. Then we followed the car as Angel drove to the end of the Island parking lot, close by a gap in the fencing that led to the edge of the dock. When we had stopped, Louis took Mifflin's body from the trunk, dragged him to the edge, and threw him into the sea. There was a loud splash as he hit the water, the noise quickly drowned by the steady sound of the rain.

Louis would have regarded me as weak, I think, if I had said it, but I regretted the death of Mifflin. Certainly, the fact that he had been about to kill me indicated that Tony Celli felt my limited usefulness was now at an end. If we had let him live, he would have come back and tried again, probably with more guns to back him up. But the finality of that soft splash made me weary.

"His car's parked a block away," said Angel. "We found this on the floor." In his hand was a mobile VHF three-cha

"They bugged the house," I said. "Probably while I was in Celli's room. I should have known, when they didn't kill me."

Angel shrugged, and tossed the receiver into the sea. "If he was here, then his friends are already on their way to the complex," he said. To my left, Fore Street wound north, parallel to the harbor, and I could see the silhouettes of the Portland Company buildings in the distance.