“Tide fallin,” Dexter observed.
“Norman's a mutant,” Captain Snow said, kicking off her shoes, “but Deirdre's okay. Still, even if Deirdre was Our Lady of Fatima, I wouldn't take you out tonight if it wasn't for the money. And the fog.” We were well offshore by now, and she pointed a finger toward the southwest. I followed it and saw something that looked like a white sheet lowered from the sky into the water.
“Is that fog?” I asked, leaning against the railing to pull off my boots.
“Thick as linoleum,” she said. "The nautical asshole's best friend. Cuts off sight and sound. Give me enough fog, and I can steal Catalina." The engines beneath my feet leaped eagerly toward the fog.
“Like when we leave Vietnam,” Tran said, leaning into the breeze. “But colder.”
“I'll take Simon Legree here downstairs,” Dexter said. Twelve or not, he didn't look very happy about being afloat.
“Good idea.” I wasn't actually very happy myself. Dexter trotted Everett past Captain Snow and through the little door. A moment later, I heard Everett go Whoof.” He'd been pushed onto a bunk.
“He's with them, huh?” Captain Snow said, meaning Everett. She turned the wheel about ten degrees. The sheet of fog yawned before us, its lower edge absolutely sharp against the black water.
“And we're with us,” I said, eyeing the white curtain in front of us.
“Getting aboard isn't going to be easy,” she said, and the prow of the boat punched a hole in the curtain. I couldn't see anything. The sound of our engines suddenly sounded like something a mile away.
“Back there,” she said, “toward the stern, is a grappling hook. It's wrapped in rags to kill the noise.” I had to squint to make her out. “I'll throw it, unless your friend there is with the NBA. Can you climb a rope?”
“If I have to.” It didn't sound like fun.
“Gimme those boots. My feet are freezing. And when I say quiet, be quiet.”
“Quiet?” I said. “They're going to hear the engines.”
“Lots of engines out here, all night long.” Dexter came out of the cabin, wrapped in fog. “You guys throw those tires over the side.”
Right. Throw the tires over the side. Tran, Dexter, and I bumped into each other like a bunch of drunks as we pitched the tires over a railing that was much too low for my comfort. The tires had ropes attached to them, and they dangled just inches below the deck level. Like the grapple, they were wrapped in rags.
“You do a lot of this?” I asked, happy to be back behind the wheel. The wind was weaker there.
“Once in a while.” She was peering over the wheel, face wet with fog and the cigarette burning itself down between her teeth. “Can't tote dope anymore. The War on Drugs gets real about a year before an election. So it's the occasional stuff off a freighter—furniture, furs, car parts—whatever happens to fall into the water. Problem is, not much stuff falls into the water.”
And if it did," I ventured, it'd be all wet."
She grinned at me over the coal of the cigarette. “Give the man his weight in fish.”
“Still, it must be risky.”
“Not so bad. They don't guard them much because we don't take much. And we come in way below them, you know? They're all way up there on the upper decks. Gets real cold on a freighter anywhere near the waterline. And then, they're usually drunk.”
We motored through the fog, mostly southward as far as I could tell, for almost thirty minutes. Tran curled himself into a ball near the stern and closed his eyes, perhaps viewing private movies of the South China Sea. I watched Captain Snow take her bearings on a small green radar screen, with only occasional glances at the real world. Twenty-eight minutes out, Captain Snow pulled up on a lever I'd come to recognize as the throttle, and the engines died back.
There was nothing but fog. It condensed on our clothes, making little sparkles, and it sat like foam on the dark, oily water. We were running without lights, but Captain Snow seemed to know exactly where we were.
“We should be—” she said, sounding puzzled. And then she smiled. “They don't call me deadeye for nothing.”
A cliff loomed before us, maybe twenty yards away, maybe twenty feet high. Darker than the fog, darker than the night, it rose from the water like a rock wall. I suddenly heard music.
“Hang on,” Captain Snow said, cutting the wheel to put us on a course that would make us sideswipe the ship. “Sit down, for Chrissakes.” I sat, and the cliff got nearer and nearer, and then our little boat bounced like a walnut shell on the water, and the rags around the tires let out a wet, muffled little squeal.
Even sitting, I fell sideways, toward the ship, and Tran landed on top of me. Dexter rode it out, looking grim. We began to float away from it.
“Grapple,” Captain Snow whispered. “Quick.”
I extricated myself from beneath Tran and grabbed it. She had it out of my hand before I could even reach up, and I concentrated on the coils of rope below it, making sure they weren't fouled.
“Duck,” Captain Snow snapped, and whirled the grapple around her head. It whistled through the air in larger and larger circles as she paid out rope, and then she bent her knees, looked up, and let it go.
The grapple arched up through the fog, trailing rope behind it, hung for a heart-stopping moment at the top of its arc, and then fell. It touched the top of the iron cliff, twisted, and dropped like a stone.
“Shit,” Dexter hissed. The grapple plummeted to the water between us and the freighter, and hit with a deafening splash.
“Don't move,” Captain Snow whispered. “Not a sound.”
We all froze, bobbing up and down in the shadow of the freighter's sides, and the music resolved itself into Taiwanese pop, a squeaky-voiced girl singer and an all-string orchestra doing a Chinese version of “Feelings.”
We listened to an entire verse before Captain Snow said, “Bring it in.”
I was closest to the rope, so I pulled it in, cold and wet, hand over hand. It seemed like I'd brought a mile's worth aboard before the grapple bumped against the side of the boat, and I reached down and grasped it and pulled it onto the deck. My hands were cold enough to be getting numb. I flexed my fingers, thinking about climbing the rope.
Captain Snow took the grapple and held up an index finger. One more time is what it said. She did the grapple-twirl arc again and threw it, a lot harder this time, grunting with the effort of tossing the extra weight of the wet rope, and it streaked upward, splashing us all with clammy seawater, turned two or three times at the top of its parabola, and started to come down.
And then it stopped, snagged itself against the side of the freighter with a soft thump, and hung there.
“Jesus,” Dexter said, blinking fast.
“We don't know yet.” Captain Snow put both hands around the rope and tugged. It held. “Grab my legs,” she said, and I did. She lifted both feet from the deck. She immediately began to swing toward the ship. I threw both arms around her calves, and our boat drifted toward the freighter until her feet touched down again.
“It's fast,” she said, sounding pleased with herself. “You can let go now.” I did, and she went back to the wheel. “There's a knife in the center of the rope coil. Cut it if anyone comes to the railing.” I picked it up with dead fingers.
We waited again, staring upward. “Feelings" ended and turned into a Chinese duet of "Sounds of Silence.” No silhouette appeared above us.
“Okay.” Captain Snow wiped her hands on her jeans. “You got fifteen minutes. You guys go up the rope, check things out, and come down again. Anything happens, shots or anything, I'm outta here, you got that?”
Dexter and I nodded.
“And one of you has to jump off.”
“Say what?” That was Dexter.
“Can't leave the grapple,” she said. “One of you comes down the rope, and the other one gets the grapple free and jumps off, feet first, not too much splash. We'll pull you aboard with the grapple rope.”
&n
bsp; “Who gives a fuck about the grapple?” Dexter whispered. “Buy you a new one.”
“They'll know we were here,” I said.
“Be my guest,” Dexter said to me. “Water don't look too cold.”
“No,” Captain Snow said. “You.”
“Why's that?” Dexter demanded.
She smiled at him. “He's wearing my shoes. I don't want them to get wet.”
“We change, then,” Dexter said to me.
“You're way too big,” Captain Snow said, batting her lashes.
“This a fix,” Dexter muttered. Tran made a little whisk-broom sound that could have been a snicker. “Okay, shit,” Dexter said. He pulled off his high-tops and then his jacket, shirt, and pants, and stood before us in a pair of baggy boxer shorts covered with something that looked like lipstick imprints. “One word,” he said, glowering at me. Then he took the rope in his big hands, tugged on it once, and said, “Here goes.”
He ascended hand over hand, bare feet bouncing off the steel side of the freighter, while I tucked my hands under my armpits to try to get some feeling into them.
“Up, him,” Tran said, as though I didn't know.
“Keep an eye on Everett,” I said. I took the sopping rope in my hands and leaped toward the side of the ship, trying to remember how Dexter had done it. Bounce, climb, bounce, climb, pull the rope toward me, hit the ship with my heels, pull again, arm over arm, don't think about the water below, hit the ship again and throw the next arm up, my hands warming and my heart pumping, and then I was eye to eye with Dexter, and he put his hands under my arms and pulled me over and we collapsed onto a very cold metal deck.
“You owe me,” Dexter panted. He looked truly ridiculous.
“Nobody?” I gasped. I was seeing little yellow flares, retinal fireworks from the nervous system.
“Not so far.”
The music was louder here. The duo had gone phonetic. And the people bowed and prayed, they sang, to the neon god they'd made. The deck of the ship was longer than I'd expected, seventy feet or so, and lousy with features: a tower here, a radar dish there, a few inverted lifeboats, a big pile of angular metal in the center with windows at the top of it, probably the place the captain hung out and watched for icebergs or whatever the captain watched out for. There was only a dim light up there, but a door at the bottom of the pile had a brightly illuminated window.
“Thass the main cabin,” Dexter said, following my gaze. “Crew gone to be there.”
“And the others?” Dexter had at least been on a few ships, the ones that had glided over the briny deep to take him to Grenada and Panama.
“They gone to be below. If they still there.”
“And where's below?”
He gave me a pitying gaze. “Where you think?”
“I mean, how do we get there?”
“Down the stairs.” He waved a hand. The thing I'd been squinting past to see the brightly lighted window turned into a railing surrounding a rectangular hole in the deck. I got up and saw stairs leading down.
“I hate this,” I said.
“You gone to stay dry,” he said meaningfully.
“How about I give you these shoes, and you go down?”
He put a hand on my back. “How about you take your dainty little feet down them stairs and I stay here and keep a eye out?”
“Okay,” I said, “okay. I hope the water's cold.”
He hit my butt with a bony knee. I headed for the stairs.
They were steep, and I kept a hand on the rail as I descended. Once down, I was in a metal corridor that was narrower and darker than I would have liked it to be, and the only light I could see came from a single window nine or ten miles in front of me. Keeping my hand against the icy outer hull of the ship, I moved toward it.
The window was in a door, about chin level. I wasn't crazy about the idea of putting my big fat face in front of the window, but there wasn't any choice that I could see. I stepped back, as far from the window as the wall of the corridor would let me, and edged toward the door, hoping the light wouldn't hit my face.
It was milky light, bluish, from cheap fluorescents, and the little window looked onto a very big room. The pane was plastic, scoured with thousands of tiny scratches and smears, and I practically had to put my nose against it before I could see anything. A flicker of motion caught my eye, and I fixed on it and identified it as a television set before I swept the room and saw all the people.
There were lots of them, maybe hundreds, and they all seemed to be men. They sat, packed against one another, watching the Masters of the Shaolin Temple kick the stuffings out of the imperial guard. A fat, bare-stomached guy in baggy black trousers got bounced into a tree, and they all laughed.
Everett was going to hear about this.
I was starting up the stairs when I heard someone on the deck above me. There was a dark space under the stairs, and I was beneath them in about the time it took to unbuckle my belt. I pulled it through the loops in what was beginning to be a practiced gesture, and a foot hit the stairs and stopped. The foot was bare.
“Yo,” Dexter whispered.
He was waiting for me at the top of the stairs, rubbing his arms against the cold and looking past me toward the crew's cabin. “Six guys in there,” he said. “They dancing to the music.”
“I have to look,” I said. "See if Charlie's there. Cargo's downstairs. "
“Wo, Everett. Look fast. I too old for this shit.”
There were indeed three male Chinese couples practicing 1970s disco moves to a Cantonese rendition of “Stayin' Alive.” A table was littered with bottles of cognac. None of the six dancers was Charlie, but I recognized one of them from the merry band who had barged into that alley in Chinatown only—what?—two nights before. Working my belt back into place, I ran to the grapple and climbed over, clutching the rope for dear life.
“Remember,” I said to Dexter. “Small splash.”
With gravity on my side, going down was easier. Hands grasped my pants and guided me on deck, and I turned to see Tran. “Push off,” he said. “Quick.”
I joined him and Captain Snow in shoving against the side of the tanker, and when we were an arm's length apart she picked up a long gaff, put its business end against the ship, and we all shoved on it. We drifted away, six, then eight, feet, and the rope hanging from the ship's side suddenly began to whip from side to side, and the grapple and Dexter hit the water at about the same time. I hauled in on the rope, scanning the water for Dexter. He surfaced a moment later, spitting water, and grabbed the end of the gaff we held out to him.
Thirty seconds later the engines had been cut in and Dexter was toweling himself dry on a sheet Tran had fetched from the cabin. Then, at a word from Dexter, he went back in and brought Everett.
“You lied to us,” I said to him. The freighter was well behind us now, and I didn't have to whisper. “You brought us out here hoping we'd get caught. You wasted our time. You got my friend here wet, and, what's worst of all, you forced him to reveal his taste in underwear.”
“They just kisses,” Dexter grumbled, buttoning his shirt.
“I thought Charlie was there,” Everett said. He couldn't keep his eyes on me; they kept shifting to Dexter.
“You're not taking us seriously,” I said. “That's a mistake.” I reached down and picked up the knife from its resting place in the coil of rope.
“Wait.” Everett ran the tip of his tongue over his lips. “I was wrong.”
“You were indeed.” I cut the grapple off the rope. “And you were wrong to be wrong. Get his shoulders, Dexter. Tran, hold on to his legs.”
The two of them moved into position, and I wound the rope around his waist, making three coils for safety's sake. I was fumbling with the knot when Captain Snow pushed my hands aside and said, “Allow me. You couldn't tie a granny around your granny.” She tugged the rope upward until it was beneath his arms, tied something large and complicated over his sternum, tugged it hard enough to make
Everett gasp, and went back to the wheel.
“Not over the stern, over the side,” she said. "Avoid the propellers. "
Everett screamed something that sounded like the gull Tran had caught, and he kept screaming as Dexter and I hoisted him sideways and tossed him into the water. He bounced once, like a skipping stone, and then sank, and I ran to the rope and paid out a few yards' worth and watched him bob up, still screaming, three or four yards behind the boat. He trailed behind us like living chum, fighting to keep his head above water as he zigzagged from one of the churning trails of our wake to the other.
“Not too long,” the captain said, working the steel Zippo again. “Hypothermia. Guy's got no fat.”
We left him out there for five minutes, until we burst through the fogbank and the lights of shore blinked their welcome. He'd stopped screaming by then, although he hadn't stopped struggling for air.
Captain Snow cut the motors and we pulled Everett in, accompanied by a castanet orchestra that I identified as his teeth. When he was flat on his back on the deck, she punched the engines in, hard this time, and the front end of the boat lifted itself out of the water as we surged forward.
“No more bullshit,” I said, kneeling next to him.
He shook his head, trying to press his jaws together before he fractured his molars.
“Take him below,” I said to Tran. “Warm him up a little.” Tran cut the rope and got Everett to his feet, but he stumbled twice before he reached the doorway.
As we pulled into the dock at Marina Del Rey, Captain Snow lighted another cigarette and gave Dexter a grin. “Satisfied with the service?”
“You do bar mitzvahs?” He gave her the grin back with interest, the kind of interest I hadn't seen since Carter was president.
“Your friend here knows how to reach me.” She took off the cap and fluffed out the frizzy dark hair, and Tran came out of the cabin propelling a soaking Everett in front of him. “If you want to, I mean. There's a phone on the boat.”
“My,” Dexter said, making two sweet syllables out of it. “All the comforts.”
The Man With No Time Page 20
