Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 137, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 835 & 836, March/April 2011
A Penny for the Boatman
by Doug Allyn
Multiple EQMM Readers Award winner Doug Allyn has displayed an amazing array of talents in his work for us in recent months. When we asked him to read a story by Clark Howard for our podcast series, we never expected the tale to be rendered with a theatricality worthy of a professional actor, nor did we realize that he would not only perform the music for the podcast but create his own arrangement. Now he’s completed an original musical composition for a podcast of one of his own stories. Don’t miss it; it’s coming up soon!
Raising her grizzled head, the black Labrador growled a warning, low in her throat. Luke Falk paused a moment, listening, then went back to his work, sanding the rounded keel of the pontoon in the open double doorway of his boat shop. His grandfather, fishing from his lawn chair on the lakeside deck of Falk Boatworks, paid no mind to the dog, either. Echoes roll for miles along the lakeshore and the Lab could hear visitors long before she saw them. On the isolated cove north of Point Amalie, the only sounds the men could hear were the waves gently lapping and the lonely cries of the gulls.
Annoyed, the Lab rose stiffly to her feet, stalked to the edge of the deck, and barked, a single whuff. This time her warning was answered by the roar of two vehicles speeding along the Point’s narrow access road.
Luke kept on working, shaving a twenty-foot pontoon down a final sixteenth of an inch. He barely glanced up as the two vehicles pulled out of the forest into his yard. Twin black Lincoln Navigators. Identical. The four men who piled out of the first car were also nearly identical. Hard black men in matching dark suits and sunglasses, they quickly established a defensive perimeter around the second Navigator, scanning every inch of the boatyard.
Their leader was nearly seven feet tall, with a shaved head, black suit, snow-white shirt with a red bow tie. His thin, hawkish face was highlighted by tribal tattoos on both cheeks. The oval lenses of his custom-framed sunglasses gave him an alien, praying-mantis look. He took a moment to look over the clearing, then stalked to the open shop door.
“Excuse me, I’m looking for the owner, Mr. Lucas Falk?” the African said politely. His accent was crisp and British.
“That would be me,” Luke said, straightening. He was dressed for work, sleeveless T-shirt, jeans, and cork boots, dark, shaggy hair hanging in his eyes.
“My name’s Deacon, Mr. Falk. I’m chief of security for Miss Aliana Markovic. Do you mind if my people take a quick look around the grounds?”
“Help yourself.” The question was academic anyway. The four dark-suited security types were already prowling through the yard. The search didn’t take long. The only buildings in the clearing were two open drying sheds with their tall stacks of curing lumber, a cabin, and the boat works itself, which extended out over the water on pilings. The buildings were rustic, but carefully crafted, hand built, using timbers taken from the surrounding forest.
As his men scouted the grounds, Deacon walked around the deck that circled the workshop. At the rear of the boathouse, at lakeside, an elderly man was sitting in a lawn chair, fishing off the dock. He was dressed in faded denims, with a seamed face the color of golden oak, his thick, silvered mane hanging loosely to his shoulders. The grizzled Labrador Retriever resting beside his chair growled a warning, her dark eyes locked on Deacon.
“Easy, Razz. Howdy. I’m Gus, Luke’s grandfather,” the old-timer said cheerfully, as though seven-foot Africans stepping onto his deck were an everyday occurrence. “I got cold Coors in the cooler if you’d care for one, Mr...?”
“Deacon,” the African said. “Thank you, but no. I’m working.”
“Relax, son, you’re safe as houses out here. Nobody lives on the Point but us, and this old dog can hear folks coming five miles away. She heard you twenty minutes ago.”
“We weren’t trying to be quiet, Mr. Gus.”
“She hears the quiet ones even quicker,” Gus said. “Are you sure you don’t want—?” But the tall man had already moved on.
Two bodyguards took posts outside as Deacon ducked through the boat-shed doorway. Luke kept working as the tall African moved warily through the building, occasionally picking up a hand tool for a closer look, a chisel here, a hatchet there.
The air in the workshop was rich with the sweet scent of wood shavings and spar varnish. A half-dozen cigar-shaped wooden hulls were laid out on trestles in various states of completion, their seams invisibly joined with pegs and wood glue. But for the bare light bulbs dangling from the ceiling beams, the workshop could have time-traveled from the last century. Or even the one before that.
Deacon made no comment until he opened a cabinet, revealing a couple of Winchester ’94 lever-action carbines plus an ’03 military Springfield bolt-action with a telescopic sight.
“What are these?”
“Hunting guns,” Luke replied without looking up.
“The Springfield was a sophisticated weapon for its time. What do you hunt with such a rifle, Mr. Falk?”
“I don’t hunt, my grandfather does. Me, I build boats. Would you like to see a boat, Mr. Deacon? If not, collect your little army, get back in your cars, and hit the road.”
For a moment, Luke thought the African might do just that.
Instead, he took out a cell phone, flipped it open, and pressed a tab. “All clear here,” he said.
The sparrow of a woman who stepped out of the second Navigator seemed much too small to merit all the drama. She was dressed in a simple black skirt and blouse. Her dark hair was covered with a black silk scarf, her eyes hidden by sunglasses.
If she was dismayed by the rough conditions in the shop, she gave no sign of it. Instead, she eyed the pontoon Falk was working on curiously, running her fingers over the wood. She gave Deacon a curt nod, and he stepped outside onto the deck.
“Are you famous, miss?” Luke asked, continuing to plane the long plank, filling the air with the sharp tang of raw pine.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You travel with quite an entourage. Are you a celebrity?”
“No, just a potential customer. I read about your boats in the Hammacher-Schlemmer catalog. They looked unique and quite lovely. Though at the prices they listed, I was expecting your establishment to be...”
“A bit less rustic?” Luke offered. “It’s a wood shop, miss. I build handcrafted boats. A shiny new factory would be a contradiction in terms.”
“Perhaps,” she said, sizing him up. Luke was slender as a railroad tie and looked just as hard, with a strong jaw, thick, dark hair, and a Semper Fidelis tattoo on his bicep.
“Do you know anything about boats, miss?”
“I grew up in Dubrovnik, Mr. Falk. I was sailing solo on the Adriatic at ten. Later, we lived in Venice, where even the taxis are watercraft.”
“Excellent,” Luke said, laying the hand plane aside. “Then suppose we skip the sales pitch. I’m lousy at it anyway. C’mon out back, let me show you a boat.”
From the back deck, a pier extended forty feet out into the bay. The sailboat moored at the end was unlike anything Aliana had ever seen. The wooden vessel was poised so lightly atop the water she scarcely seemed to be floating at all. Arched wings connected the central hull to the twin outriggers, giving her the look of a prehistoric bird. She looked more like a mobile sculpture than a sailboat.