My only chance was the water. I bucked, Baker atop me, thumbs trying to crush my windpipe. I wrenched again, found my head and shoulders over the water. I bucked a final time, sucking as much air as my lungs could capture.

We plunged into the murky, deep-dredged channel. Instead of trying to break free of Baker, I hugged him as tight as a lover, kicking for the bottom.

Hold on.

He pushed, pummeled, wrenched. Hands and legs flailed and grabbed. Blows rained into my sides, thankfully slowed by water. My ears filled with the sound of my heart and lungs screaming for air. Hold on. Baker gave up fighting me to fight for the surface. I felt his terror. Hold on. I heard his scream turn to bubbles. I felt his chest expand as his lungs sucked in water. Baker drew another breath of water. I felt him shudder and the weight in my hands went slack.

I slid upwards over the body and broke the surface, gasping; the oily, fuel-laden air was as sweet as honey. I looked around. Harry was a dozen feet away on the prow of the boat. He let out a long breath. There were no sounds of gunfire.

“Baker?” Harry asked.

“I’m standing on him.”

I dog-paddled to the boat, moss or seaweed on my face. I pushed it away. It kept sticking. No, not seaweed, I noted in the light from the pier lamps. Hundred-dollar bills.

Harry pulled me from the water. Meltzer lay crumpled against a piling, regaining consciousness. I saw the satchel, upside-down, beside it dozens of blocks of banded money, some of which had broken open and tumbled into the water. I also saw several kilo-sized bricks of plastic-encased white powder.

My heart fell. “It wasn’t Noelle.”

Harry shook his head. Meltzer was fully conscious now, cowering on the pier.

“D-d-don’t hurt m-me,” the pink lips said. “Puh-puh-please.”

Harry made a big deal of slamming a new clip in his weapon, racking the slide. He knelt beside Meltzer and pointed the muzzle at his temple.

“Where’s the kid, Arnold? I’ll kill you if you don’t tell me.”

“I d-d-don’t know. I suh-swear. Puh-please don’t k-k-k-k-k- –”

“TELL ME!”

Meltzer pissed himself and began to weep. Hunched shapes moved through the shadowed back yard. A bullhorn voice broke the silence.

“Drop your weapons and lock your fingers behind your necks.”

“We’re cops!” I yelled back. “Detectives Carson Ryder and Harry Nautilus, Mobile Police. All is secure.”

The shapes moved closer. One of them was wearing a cowboy hat.

“Holy mother of God,” Sheriff Briscoe said. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I believe that’s our question,” Harry said.

Briscoe scowled at the cowering Arnold Meltzer, then saw the stash Harry’d dumped from the satchel.

“Got the dope and money,” Briscoe yelled over his shoulder as a tall black man in a suit walked up. The suit had sand along one side, like he’d been firing from the ground.

The black man knelt, pulled a pen from his pocket, poked a hole in one of the bags of white powder. He wet a forefinger, tapped it to the hole, brought it to his lips.

He grinned like tasting the mother lode of Beluga caviar.

Chapter 49

I stood in the front of Baker’s yard and watched three medic vans haul off the causalities: three dead bikers and four gunshot injuries. Five bikers had surrendered. A police boat was in the channel with grappling hooks, fishing for Baker’s body.

I spoke to the cops on the scene and discovered Harry and I had stumbled into a joint jurisdictional action: DEA, ICE, Staties and county force. The lesser players were driving away as the forensics types moved in to document the event.

I found the remaining cast sitting around a table on the patio. Someone had thoughtfully supplied a couple of six-packs of Sam Adams beer.

“So it was all an act for Baker’s benefit?” Harry was saying to Briscoe. “You’re not a cracker asshole.”

The sheriff sighed, took a suck of brew, and pushed back his hat. “I probably am. That’s what my college-girl daughter thinks, anyway. She’s at Radcliffe – scholarship, thank God; I could never afford that shit.” He looked at Harry. “You asked about a kid?”

“I thought it was what Meltzer was carrying.”

“We been watching the little Aryan prick for months, with special emphasis on the last two weeks. We got tipped he was going to get stressed. Maybe enough to move his stash. We knew Meltzer figured big in the H and meth trade – him and his biker yahoos – but he stayed insulated. Turned out our tipster was dead-on and we got Meltzer side by side with about a million bucks of pure smack. But in all that watching we never once saw a baby, Detective Nautilus, I’m sorry to say.”

“This tip was anonymous?” I asked.

Briscoe nodded. “But it had to be someone who really knew Meltzer’s ways.”

“The tip was in future tense?” I asked. “Meltzer was going to get stressed.”

“For sure. I could gauge Meltzer’s activity by Baker’s comings and goings, running off every time his real boss called, the miniature Fuhrer. Baker’d started spending half his time away lately, being Meltzer’s private SS guard-boy.”

“Did you know about Baker before you hired him?”

The tall black federal agent had been leaning against the wall a dozen feet away, hands in his pockets. He stepped forward.

“Yes he did. And I asked Elvin to hire Baker. Sheriff Briscoe and I have worked together before. He was the only guy I knew with the smarts to gain Baker’s trust, allowing Baker just enough leash that, when we pulled, it might drag Meltzer along.”

“And some perceived threat put Meltzer together with the dope?” I asked.

“We knew the stash wasn’t near his house. Turns out dope in Meltzer’s possession gets parked in the basement of a low-life ex-doctor named Fossie. His main clientele is –”

“Whoa up,” I said, startled. “Fossie was a doctor?”

“Not in years. He lost his license for dispensing controlled substances without proper prescriptions. Plus he’d started concocting his own goofy stuff to take people up, down, in between, every which way – a real Dr Feelgood type. The past few years he’s sold himself as a nutrition expert, got an online degree for fifty bucks or whatever. I think he needs to see himself as a doctor type, an authority.”

“He was Patricia Scaler’s buddy,” I said. “He made up herbal concoctions for her.”

“Nice friend to have around if you’ve got a taste for head travel. Fossie would have gladly zoomed the lady wherever she wanted to go. Fossie’s got a grubby little office out on Hodkins Road that’s big with the white-supremacist bikers and similar low-lifes. The asshole’s waiting room looks like a casting call for contract killers. Think he’s handing out nutritional supplements? Plus he runs a kinda Red Cross station at white-power rallies.”

I shook my head. I’d seen Fossie’s back while he stitched up the hapless Spider. It hit me that Fossie’s “nutrition clinic” was two miles from the ambush, probably where the biker I’d shot had shown up. And with all the pure heroin around, it would have been no problem to load a couple of syringes with hotshots for Tut and Chinese Red, then laying a few bags of pure H into the hands of local junkies, making Red’s death one of several OD’s, no big deal. The conspirators dappled a pair of Red’s pants with Scaler’s blood and the seamy headlines were under way.

Fossie also made a perfect fit elsewhere.

“How about Fossie for a case of pancreatic cancer?” I said to Harry. “Picture Fossie – still a real doctor to a poor, dumb SOB like Bailes – putting his hand on Bailes’s shoulder: ‘I hate to have to tell you this, son, but in a few weeks you’re gonna die like flames are eating out your insides. Here’s a few pills, Terry. Go forth and do something to make your mama proud.’”