Free The Frumious Bandersnatch by Ed McBain

lieutenant j.g. named Carlyle Apted.”
    â€œYes, sir. Sir, would you know who the singer…?”
    But the captain had already hung up, and Cotton Hawes was just walking into the squadroom.
    â€œCotton,” he said, “don’t get comfortable. We’re up.”
    Â 
    COTTON HAWES felt right at home on the Coast Guard’s little 38-foot DPB. This was the kind of boat he’d commanded during his little war. Everybody in America had his own little war, and everybody in that war did his own little thing. Carella had trudged through mud as a grunt in the infantry. Hawes had stood on the bridge of a boat not unlike this one, grinning into flying bullets, spray and spume. Everybody in America who’d ever fought or merely served in any of the country’s innumerable little wars would never forget his own particular war, although sometimes he would like to. But there would always be more little wars and even some big ones, and therefore many more opportunities to remember. Or perhaps forget.
    Cotton Hawes stood on the bridge of the cutter alongside Lieutenant Carlyle Apted, a man in his late twenties, he guessed, who had been summoned to the scene the moment Sergeant McIntosh realized he was dealing with a kidnapping here.
    â€œGuess he figured this would get Federal sooner or later,” Apted said.
    Then what are we ding here? Carella wondered. Let the Feebs have it now, and welcome to it.
    â€œWhat you’re on now,” Apted told Hawes, perhaps suspecting that Carella didn’t really care to know, “is a Deployable Pursuit Boat, what we call a DPB. She’s a thirty-eight footer, designed to give the Coast Guard a new capability in the war against drugs.”
    Another little war, Carella thought.
    â€œWhat it is, you see, most of your illegal narcotics are smuggled in on these ‘go-fasts,’ we call ’em. They’re these small, high-speed boats that can carry up to two thousand keys of cocaine. But they can’t outrun our DPBs. Means we can intercept and board and make a sizable dent in the traffic.”
    Carella hated boats. He hated anything that moved on water. Especially DPBs, which seemed to move faster than any damn thing he’d ever seen on water. When he used to bathe his infant twins—lo, those many years ago—even the floating rubber duck in the bathtub made him seasick. Well, perhaps that was an exaggeration. But he was feeling a bit queasy now, and he was also fearful that all that dark greasy water splashing over the bow might be polluted. His face wet, his hair flying in the wind, he wondered what a nice boy like himself was doing on a swiftly moving vehicle in the middle of a deep river on a shift that had just barely begun.
    Tonight, Carella felt—and therefore looked—more like a beloved professor of economics at a municipal college than a detective. Hatless, dark-haired and brown-eyed, the eyes slanting downward to give his face a somewhat Oriental appearance, he was wearing an orange-colored life vest over dark brown slacks and matching loafers and socks, a blue button-down shirt, a brown tie, and a tweed jacket that was, in truth, a bit too heavy for the mild weather and a bit too shabby for the sort of party that had been interrupted out there on the River Princess. He was frowning. Well, he was more than frowning. In fact, he looked as if he might throw up. Unamused, he stood on the deck of a tossing peanut-shell vessel, braving the raging briny while two old sea-faring types chatted it up and grinned into the wind.
    Hawes, on the other hand, was in his element.
    Dressed somewhat casually, even for the midnight-to-eight A.M. shift, he was wearing his life jacket over blue jeans, a crew neck green sweater, a zippered brown leather jacket, and ankle high brown boots. He had not expected to be pulled out onto the River Harb tonight—in fact, he’d been planning to do a field follow-up on some bikers he suspected