Beach Wedding(56)
Just as it got dark, there was a roar off to my right, and a couple of tatted-up muscle head jackasses in a go-fast boat went by, hooting and hollering.
After they left, I powered up and headed back west, and ten minutes later, I powered the outboards down again as I drew in ten miles north of Point O’Woods next to Fire Island’s Sailors Haven.
Across from Sayville, Sailors Haven was a state park for boaters with a beach, a protected botanical garden–like forest for tourists, a snack bar, and a visitors’ center manned with park rangers during the day.
It was coming on night now, and there was only one vessel along the two docks, a small beat-up sailboat. I pulled in along the other empty dock as far away from it as I could, cut the engine, got out, and tied up.
Instead of fulfilling a desire to do some nocturnal botanical gardening, my presence at the beach park was purely tactical.
Because Point O’Woods’ private neighborhood of about a hundred exclusive homes actually exerted its exclusivity none too subtly with a guard booth and a barbed wire–topped fence that separated it from the more blue-collar Ocean Bay Park community on its eastern side, there was no getting in that way. That’s why I was here to the west. Sailors Haven Park bordered the western side of Point O’Woods, where there was no fence. It was my way in.
The lone sailboat at the other dock actually grumbled on and pulled out somewhere around eleven. When it left, I started gearing up by pulling on some black nylon hiking pants and a black long-sleeve shirt to keep Fire Island’s notorious poison ivy off of me. Then I coated myself with bug spray and pulled on the knapsack I’d brought and exited the boat.
A minute later, I passed the Sailors Haven closed visitors’ center and stepped onto a boardwalk path through the park’s main attraction, the maritime holly forest.
The boardwalk meandered its way through a thick stand of holly trees and sassafras and pines and oaks and tons of shrubs before it let out on a sandy bike path.
This path, called Fire Island Boulevard, I knew, ran the entire length of the island, and I made a right on it in the dark and started walking. After about ten minutes, I slowed as I started to see some gray-shingled rooftops along the ridge of a dune on my right.
About a football field away, there was a set of stairs heading up from the bike path, and I quickly went up it. Most of the Point O’Woods homes I slipped past looked pretty identical, small salt-weathered wood vacation houses with rusty bikes and wagons and flipped-over kayaks on the sandy lawns in front of them.
I didn’t see a soul as I finally came to the bayside cul-de-sac where Tapley’s house was. I went off into the pine woods to its right and came around in a wide loop, moving slowly to keep my footsteps as quiet as possible in the snagging underbrush.
On a little rising slope far back in the gnarly vine-covered trees behind Tapley’s backyard, I crouched and took out a prepaid cell I’d brought. Happily, I saw it actually got some service, which could be a little spotty on Fire Island, and I called Tapley’s house number that Marvin had written along the bottom of the map.
The phone started ringing inside the house a moment later. It was funny being able to hear it as I crouched there in the dark. Not funny ha ha either. More like are-you-sure-you-haven’t-lost-your-mind-and-turned-into-an-actual-psycho sort of funny.
It rang again and then again. Tapley didn’t seem to have an answering machine.
I hung up the phone and slipped it back into my bag and sat there in the pitch-black woods. On the descending slope to the right, you could see the dark bay through the dwarf pine trees. The lights of boats in the distance skimming by. The lights of fireflies in the marsh cordgrass.
As I sat feeling more and more nervous about what I was going to do, I heard a rumble overhead then a ghostly moan and looked up to see the red blinking eye of a jumbo jet from JFK heading east out over the water for Europe. I watched it, wondering if it wouldn’t be better if I was now up there instead.
77
Then there was no more stalling. I reached into my knapsack and took out the balaclava and night-vision goggles I had brought and pulled them on.
The dark forest around me lit up green as I thumbed on the goggles, and I went down the little wooded slope and across the backyard and climbed silently up the stairs onto Tapley’s back deck.
When I tried the door, it was not that surprisingly unlocked, and I slid it open and stepped inside into the small living room. I stood there still for a full minute, listening. My nerves in knots, the bottom of my stomach gone.
As I stood there, sweat began pouring down my face. I had a moment of pure panic, fully realizing just how nuts this was. I suddenly wondered how much time I could get for breaking and entering. And how life in a New York state prison was probably worse than a death sentence for a cop.
But there was only one way left to figure out what had happened.
I closed the sliding door behind me and then turned and headed for the green glow of the stairs. At the top of them and to the left was the master bedroom. I peeked through the open door at the empty unmade bed.
I found the gun safe in its closet ten seconds later.
Yes! I thought as I saw in the greenish light that it was an electronic keypad, one just as Tapley’s scorned girlfriend had described in Xavier Kelsey’s tape.
I knelt before it and reached into my bag of cop tricks again and pulled out the last and best one of all.
What I removed looked like a large hockey puck inside of a sock. It was actually a heavy-duty, rare-earth magnet that was about a thousand times more powerful than the horseshoe-shaped ones you played with in grammar school science class.