Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,32

compatriots corner them and demand, wild-eyed, to know where Sean and James are.

The girls shrug and tilt their beer cans to their lips, then call over two more fifteen-year-old au pairs. Eventually, it emerges that the McDonnell brothers have their boss’s Jeep for the weekend, and are on their way to Southie.

Zonk, or somebody acting on Zonk’s behalf, calls the Vineyard Haven cops and tells them a red Laredo containing two Irishmen and fifty pounds of marijuana is either boarding the last Woods Hole–bound ferry or has recently reached the mainland and is currently headed north on Route 24.

The cops call the Steamship Authority, learn the ship has left the port. The man who answers the on-board phone, a ferry worker whose name is lost to history or bullshit, is appraised of the situation, asked to confirm the presence of a red Laredo registered to the Tisbury Landscaping & Construction Co., and told to sit tight; the Woods Hole PD will meet the boat and take it from there.

Sensing an opportunity for heroism or grand larceny, the ferry worker unlocks the safebox in the crew quarters, removes and loads the handgun stored there, and makes his way to the cargo bay. There, he finds the Laredo. And the McDonnell brothers, slumped down in the front bucket seats, passing a pint of whiskey.

The ferry worker’s approach lacks artifice. Glancing behind him in the driver’s-side mirror, Sean sees a man snaking through the narrow aisle between vehicles with a gun held low at his side. The McDonnell brothers jump from the doorless Jeep and rush him. No shots are fired; whatever the ferry worker has in mind, he does not have in body. It is also possible that the gun jammed.

Either way, Sean and James McDonnell beat the nameless ferry worker within a yard of his life, and then they either do or do not throw him off the boat into the blue-black moonlit or not-moonlit Atlantic. There is no record of a ferry worker dying, so if they throw him off, he swims. It is even possible, if slightly romantic, to imagine Sean and James providing him with a life vest or an instantly inflating raft, both of which are in ample and accessible supply.

Regardless of how the McDonnell brothers dispense with the ferry worker, it does not solve the problem they now understand themselves to be confronting: namely, that the authorities know what is in the Jeep, and Sean and James are trapped in the middle of the ocean.

Thinking quickly, the brothers do one of three things.

They decide to cut their losses, easy come easy go, and heave the contraband into the water. This possibility is attractive in that it returns the bale of weed to the ocean from whence it came, setting the stage for rediscovery and further adventures. It is even conceivable that the ferry worker, if he too is in the drink, finds the bale and paddles it to shore.

Or else, the McDonnell brothers figure in for a dime, in for a dollar, steal a lifeboat, and load the bale. Then one of them rows home and stashes the shit, denying the limp-dick accusations of Zonk and his weirdo-beardo islander pals, while the other stays with the Jeep, drives it off the docks, and sits placidly on the nearest curb in handcuffs as the WHPD search it to no avail, eventually accepting the baffled officers’ apologies and heading up to Southie.

Or perhaps, and most ingeniously, Sean and James transfer the bale to another vehicle—the flatbed of a truck, perhaps—and one of the brothers stows away there also, with the ferry worker’s gun. WHPD surround the disembarking Jeep and find nothing; meanwhile, some working stiff drives the bale and the hidden McDonnell brother onto the mainland, then is ordered at gunpoint to deliver both to a prearranged rendezvous point, such as the parking lot of the International House of Pancakes just before the Bourne Bridge.

Another equally apocryphal story takes place in the late 1960s. The swimmer—let’s call him Timothy—is a staid, respectable type in his mid-thirties. He and his wife, both professors at a small liberal arts college somewhere in northern New England, have been renting the same Vineyard Haven house each summer for six or seven years.

Timothy is no drug dealer, but he’s no fool, either. Sitting in his basement, staring at this absurd quantity of marijuana, he knows the only sensible thing to do is sell it all at once, as quickly as possible and at