So he followed his good ole friend Buddy Johnson home from work that evening. Buddy liked his pleasures and spent the first hour of his night in a bar. Then he went out back to smoke a joint. It was dark and Buddy jumped a foot when McKenna shined the flashlight straight into his eyes.
“Gee, that cigarette sure smells funny.”
“What? Who you?”
“The glare must be too much for you. Can’t you recognize my voice?”
“What the—Look, I—”
McKenna slipped behind him, dropping the flashlight to distract him, and got the cuffs on. “We’re gonna take a little ride.”
McKenna took him in cuffs down a scruffy side alley and got him into Buddy’s own convertible. Puffing, feeling great, he strapped Buddy in with the seat belt, passenger side. Then McKenna drove two quick miles and turned into a car wash. The staff was out front finishing up and when they came out McKenna showed them the badge and they turned white. All illegals, of course, no English. But they knew the badge. They vanished like the dew after the dawn.
Game time, down south.
Even with cuffs behind his back, Buddy kept trying to say something.
“Remember letting the air out of my tires?” McKenna hit him hard in the nose, popped some blood loose and Buddy shut up. McKenna drove the convertible onto the ratchet conveyor and went back to the control panel. It was in English and the buttons were well-thumbed, some of the words gone in the worn plastic. McKenna ran up a SUPER CLEAN and HOT WAX and LIGHT BUFF. Then he gave a little laugh and sent Buddy on his way.
Hissing pressure hoses came alive. Big black brushes lowered into the open seats and whirred up to speed. They ripped Buddy full on. He started yelling and the slapping black plastic sheets slammed into him hard and he stopped screaming. McKenna hit the override and the brushes lifted away. Silence, only the dripping water on the convertible’s leather seats.
McKenna shouted a question and waited. No answer. He could see the head lolling back and wondered if the man was conscious.
McKenna thought about the two drowned men and hit the buttons again.
The brushes hardly got started before a shrill cry came echoing back. McKenna stopped the machine. The brushes rose. He walked forward into the puddles, splashing and taking his time.
“You’re nearly clean for the first time in your life, Buddy. Now I’m gonna give you a chance to come full clean with me.”
“I … They ain’t gonna like …” His mouth opened expectantly, rimmed with drool. The eyes flickered, much too white.
“Just tell me.”
“They really ain’t gonna like—”
McKenna turned and started back toward the control board. The thin, plaintive sobbing told him to turn around again. You could always tell when a man was broke clean through.
“Where’d they go?”
“Nearly to Chandeleur.”
“The islands?”
“Yeah … long way out … takes near all night. Oil rigs … the wrecked ones.”
“What’d you take out?”
“Centauris. Usually one, sometimes two.”
“The same one?”
“Who can tell? They all look alike to me. Pitscomb, he bowed and scraped to the Centauri and the Feds with him, but he don’t know them apart either.”
“Pitscomb have anything to do with Ethan’s death?”
“Man, I weren’t workin’ that night.”
“Damn. What’d the rest of the crew say about it?”
“Nothin’. All I know is that Ethan was on the boat one night and he didn’t come back to work next day.”
“Who else was with the Centauri?”
“Just Feds.”
“What was the point of going out?”
“I dunno. We carried stuff in big plastic bags. Crew went inside for ’bout an hour while we circled round the messed-up oil rigs. FBI and Centauri were out there. Dunno what they did. Then we come back.”
McKenna took the cuffs off Buddy and helped him out of the car. To his surprise, Buddy could walk just fine. “You know Jorge?”
“Huh? Yeah, that wetback?”
“Yeah. You’re a wetback too now.”
“Huh? Oh.” Buddy got the joke and to his credit, grinned. “Look, you don’t nail me on the dope, it’s even, okay?”
“You’re a gentleman and a scholar, Buddy.”
“Huh?”
“It’s fine. Keep your nose clean from here on out or I’ll bring you back here to clean it myself.”
He hung his head. “Y’know, you’re right. I got to straighten up.”
“You’re straight with me right now.”
They even shook hands.
A take-charge raccoon was working the trash when he hauled in on the oyster shell road. He shooed it away and then tossed it a watermelon that had gone old anyway.
Then he sat on the porch and sipped a Cabernet and worked himself over about the car wash stunt. His wife had once told him, after he had worked up through being a uniform, then Vice and then bunko and finally Homicide, that the process had condensed him into a hard man. He had never said to her that maybe it was her long illness that had made him quiet around the house, wary and suspicious … but in the end maybe it was both. He had never been interested in small talk but had picked up the skill for getting witnesses to open up.
Now he felt very little after working Buddy over. He had done it with a vague intuition that the kid needed a wake-up call, sure, but mostly because he was blocked in this case. And he couldn’t let it go. Maybe it helped fill the emptiness in him, one he felt without shame or loss, as not a lack but as a blank space—an openness that made him hear the wind sigh and waves slosh not as mere background but as life passing while most people ignored it, talked over it, trying to pin life down with their words. He listened at nightfall, sitting out here on the warped planking of his wharf, to the planet breathing in its sleep. A world never fully revealed, a planet with strangeness at its core.
The next day he and LeBouc worked some ordinary gang-related cases. And planned. LeBouc was a fisherman and would go out for just about any reason. Not a hard sell. And neither of them could think of anything else to do. The FBI had called up their supervisor and bad-mouthed McKenna, of course. But they wouldn’t reveal anything more and tried to pry loose what McKenna knew. The supe stonewalled. A Mexican standoff.
Just before twilight McKenna sprayed on exercise shorts plus shirt. This was a semi-new techie product, snug and light, and he wanted to try them. The shorts were black, the cheapest spray-on, with spaced breather holes to respire sweat through. His belly was a bit thick and his calves stringy, but nobody was going to see him anyway if he could help it. The smart fibers itched as they linked up to form the hems, contouring to his body, the warmth from their combining getting him in the mood. He drove to the boat ramp just west of Bayou La Batre, huffing the salty sunset breeze into his lungs with a liberating zest.
LeBouc was there with an aluminum boat and electric motor and extra batteries, rented from a Mobile fishing company. Great for quiet night work, spotlights and radiophone, the works. LeBouc was pumped, grinning and stowing gear.
“Thought I’d do some line trawling on the way,” he said, bringing on a big pole and a tackle box. He carried a whole kit of cleaning knives and an ice chest. “Never know when you might bag a big one.”
McKenna’s shoes grated on the concrete boat ramp as the water lapped against the pilings. The boat rose on the slow, lumbering tide. A dead nutria floated by, glassy-eyed and with a blue crab gouging at it. Business as usual at the Darwin Café.
They used a gas outboard to reach the estimated rendezvous point, to save on the batteries. McKenna had planted a directional beeper on the Busted Flush in late afternoon, using a black guy he hired in Bayou La Batre to pretend to be looking for work. Right away they picked up the microwave beeper, using their tracking gear. With GPS geared into the tracker they could hang back a mile away and follow them easily. LeBouc was a t
otal non-tech type and had never once called McKenna “the Perfesser.”
LeBouc flipped on the Raytheon acoustic radar and saw the sandy bottom sliding away into deeper vaults of mud. Velvet air slid by. The night swallowed them.
It was exciting at first, but as they plowed through the slapping swells the rhythm got to McKenna. He hadn’t been sleeping all that well lately, so LeBouc took the first watch, checking his trailing line eagerly. LeBouc had spent his vacation deep-sea fishing off Fort Lauderdale and was happy to be back on the water again.
LeBouc shook McKenna awake three hours later. “Thought you were gonna wake me for a watch,” McKenna mumbled.
“Nemmine, I was watchin’ my line. Almost got one too.”
“What’s up?”
“They hove to, looks like from the tracker.”
They quietly approached the Busted Flush using the electric motor. The tracker picked up a fixed warning beacon. “Maybe an oil platform,” McKenna said. LeBouc diverted slightly toward it.
Out of the murk rose a twisted skeleton. Above the waterline the main platform canted at an angle on its four pylons. A smashed carcass of a drilling housing lay scattered across its steel plates. Three forlorn rotating beacons winked into the seethe of the sea.
LeBouc asked, “How far’s the shrimper?”
McKenna studied the tracker screen, checked the scale. “About three hundred yards. Not moving.”
LeBouc said, “Let’s tuck in under that platform. Make us hard to see.”
“Don’t know if I can see much in IR at this range.”
“Try now.”
The IR goggles LeBouc had wangled out of Special Operations Stores fit on McKenna’s head like a fat parasite. In them he could see small dots moving, the infrared signature blobs of people on the shrimper deck. “Barely,” McKenna said.
“Lemme try it.”
They carefully slid in under the steel twenty feet above. LeBouc secured them with two lines to the pylon cleats and the boat did not rock with the swell so much. McKenna could make out the Busted Flush better here in the deeper dark. He studied it and said, “They’re moving this way. Slow, though.”
“Good we’re under here. Wonder why they chose a platform area.”
Many of the steel bones had wrenched away down on the shoreward side of the platform and now hung down beneath the waves. The enviros made the best of it, calling these wrecks fish breeders, and maybe they were.
“Fish like it here, maybe.”
“Too far offshore to fish reg’lar.”
McKenna looked up at the ripped and rusted steel plates above, underpinned by skewed girders. His father had died on one of these twelve years back, in the first onslaught of a hurricane. When oil derricks got raked in a big storm and started to get worked, you hooked your belt to a Geronimo wire and bailed out from the top—straight into the dark sea, sliding into hope and kersplash. He had tried to envision it, to see what his father had confronted.
When you hit the deck of the relief hauler it was awash. Your steel-toed boots hammered down while you pitched forward, face down, with your hard hat to save the day, or at least some memories. But his father’s relief hauler had caught a big one broadside and the composite line had snapped and his father went into the chop. They tried to get to him but somehow he didn’t have his life jacket on and they lost him.
With his inheritance from his father McKenna bought their house on the water. He recalled how it felt getting the news, the strange sensation that he had dropped away into an abyss. How his father had always hated life jackets and didn’t wear them to do serious work.
McKenna realized abruptly that he didn’t have his own life jacket on. Maybe it was genetic. He found some in the rear locker and pulled one on, tossing another to LeBouc, who was fooling with his tackle and rod.
LeBouc said, “You watch, I’ll try a bait line.”
McKenna opened his mouth and heard a faint rumble in the distance. The boat shuttled back and forth on its cleat lines. Waves smacked against steel and shed a faint luminous glow. He could see nothing in the distance though and sat to pull down the IR goggles. A hazy shimmer image. The Busted Flush was coming closer, on a course that angled to the left. “They’re moving.”
There was a lot of splashing nearby as currents stirred among the pylons. The three figures on the deck of the shrimper were easier to see now.
The IR blobs were right at the edge of definition. Then one of them turned into the illumination cone of a pale running light, making a jabbing gesture to another blob. He couldn’t quite resolve the face, but McKenna recognized the man instantly.
Dark Glasses stood out like a clown at a funeral.
The man next to him must be Pitscomb, McKenna figured. The third form was fainter and taller and with a jolt McKenna knew it was a Centauri. It moved more gracefully at sea than on land as it walked along the railing. Its sliding gait rocked with the ship, better than the men. It held a big dark lump and seemed to be throwing something from the lump over the side.
McKenna focused to make sense of the image. The Centauri had a bag, yes—
A grunt from nearby told him LeBouc was casting and an odd splash came and then thumping. The boat shifted and jerked as he tried to focus on the IR images and another big splash came.
He jerked off the goggles. His eyes took a few seconds to adjust. There was fitful radiance from the surf. LeBouc was not in the boat.
A leg jerked up in the water, arms flailed in a white churn. Long swift things like ropes whipped around the leg. McKenna reached for the oars secured along the boatline. A sudden pain lurched up in his right calf and he looked down. A furred cord was swiftly wrapping itself up his leg, over his knee, starting on his calf. Needles of pain shot into his leg. The sting of it ran up his spine and provoked a shudder through his torso. His leg twitched, out of his control.
The wrapping rope stopped at his thigh and yanked. He fell over and his knee slammed hard on the bottom of the boat. Another cord came over and hit his shoulder. It clung tight and snarled around him. The shoulder muscles thrashed wildly as the thing bit through his plastic all-weather jacket and his shirt. Pain jabbed into his chest.
Other wriggling strands came snaking across the bowed deck. He wrenched around and hit his head on LeBouc’s tackle box. He thought one of the things had grabbed his ear but it was the latch on the box, caught in his hair. A hollering came and he realized it was his own ragged voice.
His hands beat at the cord but prickly spines jutting out of it stung him. That jolted him badly and he tried to pull himself up to get a tool. The tackle box. He grabbed a gutting knife. With both hands he forced it under the edge of the cord across his chest. The ropy thing was strong and fought against the blade. He got some leverage and pulled up and the blade bit. The pink cord suddenly gave way. It flailed around and the main body lashed back at him. He caught it on the point of the knife and drove it into the side of the boat. That gave him a cutting surface and he worked the knife down the length of the thing. He sawed with all his strength. It split into two splices that went still. Stroking along it he sliced it in two, clear up to the housing at the stern.
The shooting pain in his calf he had made himself ignore and now he turned to it. The cord had sunk into his jeans. He pried it up as before and turned the blade. This one popped open and drooled milky fluid. He hacked away at it, free of the lancing pain. It took a moment to cut away chunks. They writhed on the boat bottom. With stinging hands he reached into the tackle box and found the workman’s gloves. That made it easier to pick up and toss the long strands into the sea. They struggled weakly.
Numbness crept up his leg and across his chest. He felt elated and sleepy and wanted to rest. His eyes flickered and he realized that his face was numb too. Everything was moving too fast. He needed a rest. Then he could think about this. Figure it out.
Then another pink rope came sliding over the gunnel. It felt around and snaked toward him as if it could sense his heat or smell. H
e felt the tip of it touch his deck shoe. Sharp fear cleared his mind.
The knife came down on it and he pounded the point along its length.
Without cutting it into pieces he lurched toward the gunwale. With a swipe the tie line popped away from its cleat. He leaped over a section of pink rope and cut the second line. He could barely see. With hands he felt along the stern and found the starter button and helm. The outboard caught right away. With a strum the engines turned over and he slid the throttles forward to rev the engines into a quick-start warmup.
He veered among the pylons. With a click the flashlight glare made the scene jump out at him. There were pink strands in the water.
No sign at all of LeBouc.
He hit the throttle and shot out into open water and reached for the radiophone.
The worst of it was the wait.
He stung in running sheets of fire all over the right leg and chest. The thing had wrapped around his calf like a bracelet. He wondered why the ME never said anything about the corpses being pumped full of venom and only then realized that he had felt electrical shocks, not stings. His leg and arm had been jerking on their own. He fingered the trembling muscles, remembering through a fog.
He got away from there into the darkness, not caring any more about the Busted Flush. Eventually he thought that they might be following the sound of the outboard. He shut it off and drifted. Then he called the shore and said he was headed in on the electric. By then he was flopping on the deck as debilitating cramps swept through him. Breath came hard and he passed out several times.
Then a chopper came out of the murk. It hovered over him like an angel with spotlights and an unfurling ladder. Men in wet suits dropped onto the deck. They harnessed him up and he spun away into the black sky. On the hard floor of the chopper a woman stood over him with a big needle of epinephrine, her face lined with concern. He could not get his thick tongue to tell her that this case was something else. She shot him full of it and his heart pounded. That did clear his sluggish mind but it did not stop the shooting jolts that would come up suddenly in his leg and chest and in other places he had no memory of the pink rope being at all.
The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 106
