now, telling the police anything about that plane was not an option.
I went for the worst case scenario: Grady Vetters had not killed his friend Teddy Gattle, or Ernie Scollay. He and his sister had been found by those who were seeking the plane, and Gattle and Scollay had been killed because they were in the way. Marielle and Grady had probably been forced to share whatever they knew, and then silenced. The decision not to kill them was odd: if someone was trying to frame Grady Vetters for murder, having him shoot his sister and then himself would have left the police with a tidy murder-suicide. Instead, according to gossip – and who knew how true that might be? – there were two potential witnesses still alive, but in comas. On the other hand, leaving them breathing but incapacitated would concentrate the focus of the investigation on the survivors, and muddy the waters for a while. If Marielle or Grady had revealed some new information about the location of the plane, whoever was responsible for what had just occurred in Falls End wouldn’t need to distract the police for long: just until the plane was found and the list secured.
‘What now?’ said Louis.
‘Find us a couple of rooms at a motel, and tell Jackie Garner where you’re at. I’ll be back here by evening.’
‘And where are you going?’ asked Angel, as they got out of my car.
I started the engine.
‘To ask an old friend why he lied to me.’
42
Ray Wray wasn’t happy.
He had arrived at Joe Dahl’s camp just south-west of Masardis knowing only that there was a job waiting for him, a job that would pay him a couple of grand for a couple of days’ work involving an airplane, which meant that the work was probably illegal. Illegal work in that part of Maine generally meant smuggling, and the only thing really worth smuggling was drugs. Hence Ray Wray had decided that what he and Joe Dahl were looking for in the Great North Woods was a crashed plane full of drugs.
Of course, Ray Wray had no trouble with drug smuggling. He’d done enough of it in the past to know how to limit the risk of getting caught, which was the main worry in that line of work. Getting caught caused all kinds of difficulty, and not only with the law: the individuals who paid folk to smuggle their drugs for them often took it amiss when the consignment didn’t reach its intended destination. Paying your debt to society was one thing; paying your debt to the bikers, or the Mexicans, or a piece of shit like Perry Reed was another thing entirely.
So the fact of smuggling wasn’t the issue for Ray, and neither was securing the plane and its cargo without getting caught. What he did have trouble with was the fact that a woman and a boy were sleeping like vampires in Joe Dahl’s place, the drapes drawn on the windows of the little cabin, the woman curled up on the camp bed and the boy sleeping beside her on the floor. Ray could see that the woman’s face was badly disfigured when he peered around the thick sheet that separated the sleeping area from the rest of the room, but he’d been troubled more by the kid, who had woken suddenly when Ray appeared and shown Ray the business end of a knife.
Now Ray was sitting on a roughhewn bench overlooking the Oxbow with a cup of coffee in his hand, Joe Dahl beside him, and Dahl was so jittery that he was giving Ray a case of the jitters too.
‘This plane?’ said Ray.
‘Yeah, what about it?’
‘When did it come down?’
‘Years ago.’
‘How many years ago?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How come nobody’s found it before now?’
‘They didn’t know where to look.’ Dahl pointed to the forest beyond with his own cup. ‘Come on, Ray, you could lose a jumbo jet in there, you know that. What we’re talking about is a small plane. Folk could have passed within feet of it and not have seen it if they weren’t already looking for it.’
‘What’s on it?’ asked Ray.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Drugs?’
‘I said I don’t know, Ray. Jesus.’
This wasn’t right. Joe Dahl was hard. Unlike Ray, he’d done some killing. Ray wasn’t the killing kind, but he was good in the woods, could hold up his end in a fight, and he knew how to keep his mouth shut. Dahl, on the other hand, had knocked heads with some