Shit, shit, shit. Len looked frantically over his shoulder and saw a small boat approaching rapidly from behind him. Should he try to outrun them? No, their boat was much faster than his. Besides, maybe they were just looking for lost tourists or something. No, no, they’d just radio and ask if that was it. Shit. He was screwed.
He slowed the fishing boat to a stop as directed, then ran to the hold while the Coast Guard ship was still easing up alongside. He couldn’t risk them finding the heroin, he thought in a panic, sweat dripping down the back of his wool sweater. He’d never make it in jail. Frantically, he rooted around under the pile of slimy fish until he finally found the handle of the duffle bag. It pulled loose with a plop and he raced to the aft side and dropped it overboard. It sank below the waves without a sound. There. Safe.
Len sauntered around the end of the boat to meet the two Coast Guard men on the port side, hoping that the perspiration on his face would be taken for spray.
“Morning, gentlemen,” he said with a smile. “What can I do for you?”
“Sorry to bother you,” the larger man said. “We had a tip about a ship about this size bringing in illegal aliens. But we got a call just now telling us it has been found near Provincetown. Thank you for your cooperation.”
He and his companion headed back toward their boat. The smaller man tipped his cap. “You have a nice day, now.”
A nice day? A nice day? Len watched them go with stunned disbelief. He’d just dumped two million dollars worth of the Russian mafia’s heroin overboard for no reason. Unless he could figure out a way come up with the money to replace it, he was never going to have a nice day again. Of course, that might be a challenge, since if he’d had that kind of money, he wouldn’t have been smuggling for the mob in the first place!
*
Nothing. Nothing. Len tossed the contents of another box over his shoulder and continued rooting around in the attic of what had been the family home, now occupied only by him and the occasional disappointed rat. (Len didn’t keep much food in the house, mostly preferring to subsist on diner meals and beer.)
He knew it was up here somewhere. Along with the rest of the crap that he and his brothers had accumulated over the years. In theory, his brothers had taken their stuff with them when they’d moved out to get married, but so far Len had found a stack of his older brother Cal’s yearbooks and high school trophies - useless - and a box of his younger brother Phil’s old Playboys. Marginally less useless. Still, Len wasn’t any closer to finding the object he sought.
Not that it was likely to do him that much good; it certainly wasn’t worth any two million dollars, or he would have dug it out and sold it already. But in his desperation, it was the only thing he could think of that might have any value. Or that maybe he could convince someone else it had value, even if it didn’t. Len didn’t much care which.
Another box went flying, creating an even bigger mess than the one he’d found up here when he’d pulled down the folding stairs that led to the small room at the top of the house. The sides of the space sloped down on either side, so he had to do part of his search bent over like an old lady. His back hurt and his calves ached from crouching, and his nose was stuffy and dripping from all the dust. Bah.
Len wiped his sleeve across his face and pushed open the lid of an old steamer trunk. The thing promptly snapped shut again, almost taking his fingers with it. His cursing scared the dust motes away as he propped it open with an old umbrella that was missing half its ribs, then leaned forward to root through the chest. He’d hidden it so long ago, he had no idea where he’d put it and only the vaguest idea of what it looked like, beyond being ugly and kind of odd.
His grandfather had called it a talisman, whatever that meant. Family legend said that the old man was descended from a pirate, and the gnarly taciturn seaman swore he’d inherited the strange piece from his own father, who had stolen it from some more famous pirate. Len’s grandfather said he’d used the talisman to help the Nazis sink boats during World War Two, but Len had always dismissed that as the rambling bragging of a crazy old man. Just like he’d dismissed the talk of a lost treasure ship off the coast of Cape Cod, which was how his grandfather had supposedly wound up there, chasing after mythical gold. The man was a drunk in his later years, so no one took him very seriously.
But right at this moment, Len was desperate enough to try anything, even a wild family legend.
The talisman had actually been left to Cal as the eldest grandson, their father having been lost to the sea many years before their grandfather finally made his own journey to the briny depths. But it looked like it might have been valuable, so Len had taken it when they’d cleaned out his grandfather’s house. As far as Len knew, Cal never missed it. Len had tried to hock it off island, but no one had been interested in it except as an oddity, and its dull yellow metal turned out to be brass and not gold.
He finally found it under a faded framed photograph of his parents’ wedding, his brother Cal already making an appearance in the slight bulge of his mother’s second-hand dress. A dusty black leather pouch, only slightly gnawed around the edges. It didn’t look like much, but Len clutched it close and took it back down to the first floor, heaving the stairs back into place and leaving the mess behind for another day.
At the grimy kitchen table, he finally loosened the leather thong that held the pouch closed and spilled the talisman out into his hand. It wasn’t any more impressive than when he’d first seen it, and if anything, even odder than he’d remembered. Still, there was something about it that set his blood humming in his veins.
Slightly larger than his palm, the gold-colored metal was still shiny, although the brass should have tarnished over the years. A large stone was set in the center, with detailed metal tentacles writhing all around it, suckers and all. The medallion hung off a thick metal chain. Truth be told, the thing was ugly and not a little creepy, but it must have had some value, or the men of his family wouldn’t have kept it all this time. Not a sentimental one in the bunch, Len included.
The couple of pawnbrokers he’d taken it to had poked at the stone in the center and shrugged. Some kind of rock, they’d said, but nothing they could identify. And if they couldn’t identify it, they couldn’t put a price on it. Len had shrugged back, tucked the talisman into its bag, and gone home. Even then, he hadn’t really wanted to sell it, and was almost relieved to discover there wasn’t any point. Now, well, now he was just desperate enough to see if there was anything to the family legends.
*