Stuart Woods - Under the Lake

“How’d you like Sutherland’s party?” he asked, casually, as he strolled past her desk.

“Not bad. He was, really pretty nice.”

“Stay late?”

“No, I went back to John’s for a steak.”

“Stay long?”

She looked at him sideways. “None of your business.”

He laughed and went into his office.

In her mind, Scotty ran through what she had just done, just to be sure. She’d replaced the ledger sheets at exactly the place in the file where’d they’d come from; She’d put the file in exactly the same place in the drawer; and, this time, she’d made sure the lock was firmly engaged. Then she stopped in the middle of a sigh of relief. There was something wrong, something out of order, something she hadn’t done properly. The copying machine. In order to make copies, she placed the originals, one at a time, under a flap on top of the machine. The machine drew a sheet of blank paper from a stack on one side, and spat out a copy on the other. She had, she now realized, made the first five copies in the ordinary way, placing an original under the flap, pushing the button, then replacing the original with the next page. She had her own copies, now of all six pages. But, she knew in her bones, she had left the last original under the flap. It was still there.

Bo came out of his office, a letter in his hand, and headed for the copying machine.

“No!” Scotty practically shouted.

Bo stopped and turned. “Huh?”

It was hard to talk with her heart in her throat. “Uh, don’t use that just yet. The paper isn’t feeding properly, and I haven’t had a chance to get at it.”

“Well, I’ll take a look at it. I need this right away.”

Bo never liked to wait for anything, she knew that. She walked over and muscled between him and the machine. “Get out of the way, Bo,” she said, playfully. “You’ll just screw it up. You know you can’t fix anything.” She popped open the side of the machine and removed the stack of blank paper.

“It looks all right to me,” Bo said, impatiently.

“It would look all right to you if it were upside down.” She rapped the stack sharply against the side of the machine, squaring the corners. “Give me that,” she said, snatching the letter from his hands, “I’ll do it.”

“Jesus Christ, Scotty, you’re beginning to act like nobody else around here can work any of this stuff but you.”

“That’s exactly right,” she said. Scotty lifted the flap on the machine slightly and slid Bo’s copy underneath, at the same time, flicking the green ledger sheet already under the flap with her fingernail. It slid across the glass surface, under the back edge of the flap and down between the machine and the wall. She pressed the button, gave Bo his copy and original and went back to her desk, hoping against hope he had not seen what she had done.

“You know, Mike,” Bo said to the radio operator as he strolled back to his office, “I don’t know why we have all these service contracts with the office machine people when we’ve got our own mechanical genius right here.”

Scotty put her hands on her desk and pressed, so that no one could see them shaking. She had pulled that off all right, but now Bo’s files were missing a sheet, and it was stuck behind a machine that weighed a ton.

Howell huddled over the ledger sheets and studied them for some minutes. “Look at this,” he said to Scotty.

“You bastard. How could you leave my credit card there for Eric Sutherland to find?”

“Listen, Scotty, if you’d stayed with the boat like I told you to, it never would have happened. But no, you had to sneak up behind me and scare the shit out of me and make me drop the card. I might also add that if you’d done what I told you to, we’d have saved ourselves a cold swim in the wee hours.”

Scotty pouted. “You know, I think it’s extremely rude of you to point out a person’s little mistakes and make a big thing of them. That’s all in the past.”

“Good, now look at this.” He rattled the pages.

“Except my credit card isn’t in the past, it’s in Bo Scully’s pocket, and my charge account application is on its way to him!”

“Well, just intercept the goddamned letter, all right? Don’t you handle the mail around there?”

“Usually.”

“Well, just make sure you handle it every day until the letter comes. Now, for Christ’s sake, come here and look at these pages, and help me figure this thing out.”

Scotty heaved herself off the sofa and came to the desk. “What, then?”

“Okay, look. The letters LSCA and a number are written here alongside a date in the margin. There’s a long list of them. The dates go back for just over three years, and they’re numbered one through twenty-eight. Then, out here in the margin, there is another number opposite each LSCA. Now, I don’t think this is any sort of a code. I think it’s a schedule.”

“And the numbers in the right margin?” Scotty asked, pointing to a matching column.

“Well, they’re two-digit numbers, varying from fifteen to sixty, but always increasing or decreasing in increments of five.”

“Could be money. Add some zeros, and it would be a lot of money.”

“Good thought. So what have we got here? A schedule of deliveries and payments, maybe?“

“Sounds good to me. Deliveries of drugs.”

“We’ve nothing to indicate that, unless the right margin numbers are money. If he’s either paying or receiving sums from fifteen to sixty thousand dollars per shipment, it’s drugs.”

“That doesn’t seem so much. I thought drug deals went into millions.”

“Sure, but what if these numbers represent commissions?”

Scotty ran a finger down the pages, pointing out another series of letters and numbers. “What about these? They’re interspersed after every four or five of the LSCA dates.”

“I don’t know,” Howell said. “We’ve got an A and a number, an F and a number, Z, number, F, number, A, number. The numbers are all seven digits, group of three, group of four. There’s a date next to each letter, too. Probably some other sort of schedule, but not as frequent as the other one.”

“Could be. But a schedule for what?”

“Who knows? But it’s important enough for him to hide it very carefully. Tell me about your original tip, the one that put you onto Bo.”

“Not much to tell. Let’s just say that it was somebody in state law enforcement, who would be in a position to pick up some scuttlebutt.”

“Is somebody running an investigation on Bo, then?”

“Nope. That was his point. Somebody should be running an investigation, but nobody is.” She smiled. “Except me.”

“Somebody’s protecting him, then? Heading off any investigation?”

“My source didn’t say exactly that, but that was my impression. You think there’s some sort of organization?”

Howell shrugged. “We don’t know for sure whether there’s even a crime, let alone a conspiracy. But if you’re right, and there are drugs involved, then there would have to be. It’s a long way from South America to north Georgia, and to move anything in quantity would take all sorts of help.”

Long after Scotty had gone to bed and left him trying to work, Howell woke with his head on the desk. He had an awful headache. It was pitch dark, and only the glow from the word processor’s monitor screen lit the room. There was a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s next to the machine, and an empty glass. Howell poured himself a stiff drink.

Maybe it would dull the headache. He could not bear to look at the blank screen any more, so he walked out onto the cabin’s deck, taking his drink with him.