Hours of Gladness

by Thomas Fleming

  Mick would be doing himself an immensely larger favor. He would have Trai. Suong and Trai would become his responsibility. He would care for them, he would love them.

  For a fragment of this eternal moment, Mick thought of having Trai, night after night. Holding her small, tender body in his arms, feeling her breasts beneath his hands, her silky black hair against his mouth. Telling her he understood why she had betrayed him, telling her he forgave her. Telling her how many times when he was with another woman, he thought of her. Telling her so many things.

  But he couldn’t kill Phac. He couldn’t kill a man who had fought beside him in his hours of gladness, who had saved his life in the dark a dozen times. He couldn’t kill a man who had helped him redeem at least a piece of his shattered honor by helping him kill Le Quan Chien.

  He couldn’t kill Phac. Which meant he had to kill Billy Kilroy. The implications of this conclusion only brushed the edge of Mick’s mind for the moment. It was all instinct now, like those milliseconds in the dark in Binh Nghai where you waited for a VC in the bushes twenty yards away to move first, knowing he was trying to decide which way you were going to move, both hands on triggers, both minds balanced precisely on the edge of eternity.

  The difference here was a gun in Kilroy’s hand and no gun in Mick’s hand. But the rolling deck of the Enterprise, the darkness, tilted the odds the other way just enough to give Mick the sense that they were even. He remembered Kilroy’s dislike of shooting in the dark. Until they got to the freighter, Kilroy had stayed in the wheelhouse, which meant his night vision was not functioning. Out on deck, Mick’s night vision had been operating for an hour.

  With a swing of his left arm, Mick sent Phac sprawling toward the stern. Simultaneously he dove to the right, toward the bow, reaching for his gun as he went down. Billy blasted two shots from his Zastava into the empty darkness. Mick’s gun was in his hand by the time he hit the deck, and he came up shooting.

  He fired three shots. Each one hit Billy in the heart. He uttered a cry that sounded curiously like the call of a gull and toppled into the sea.

  “You no good son of a bitch bastard,” Bill O’Toole screamed.

  Would he have to kill him too? Mick wondered. Still in a crouch, he covered him and O’Gorman. Mick wanted to kill O’Gorman, but he did not want to shoot Uncle Bill. He would do it if necessary because he was no longer the tough, honest cop who had given him a chance to have a decent life after the dishonorable discharge. He was a mafioso stooge and Paradise Beach was mafioso property thanks to him. He deserved a bullet, but Mick did not want to fire it.

  “See if they’ve got any guns,” Mick said to Phac in Vietnamese.

  Phac frisked them. They were unarmed.

  “Check the other two,” Mick said.

  Phac frisked Leo McBride and his wife. “Get your slimy hands off me!” Melody shrilled.

  She pointed a finger at Mick. “No matter where you go, the IRA or some other freedom fighters will track you down for that vile murder.”

  The Professor came out on deck to find out what the noise was all about. He was a bit nonplused but not especially alarmed to find Mick pointing a gun at him. “Have you gone nuts?” he said.

  “Maybe,” Mick said. “Help Phac lower the boat.”

  “What the hell are you going to do?”

  “Put them in it,” Mick said.

  “Then what?”

  “We’re going into the cocaine business,” Mick said.

  “We’re gonna kill you, Mick. No bullshit, we’re gonna kill you,” O’Toole said.

  “I got a better idea. Let’s kill him,” Mick said, pointing to O’Gorman. “We’ve got the cocaine and we sell it to the Mob and tell them to get the hell out of Paradise Beach and forget those IOUs you made Desmond and Grandpa Monahan sign.”

  “No deal,” O’Toole said.

  Bill O’Toole’s soul had gone rotten. He liked the idea of working with Tommy Giordano. He looked forward to having a hundred thousand a year to bet in Atlantic City. He didn’t care whether the IRA took over Ireland.

  “Get in the boat,” Mick said.

  “Which way is land for God’s sake?” O’Gorman said as Phac and the Professor unlashed the lifeboat on the stern and lowered it into the water.

  “Row west when the sun comes up,” the Professor said.

  “Are you in on this too?” Bill O’Toole raged.

  “Not me,” the Professor said.

  “Maybe you better get in the boat, Prof,” Mick said. “Maybe that’ll convince them I’m doing this on my own.”

  “Thanks, Mick.” Oxenford climbed into the lifeboat. He had no pretensions to being a hero.

  “You too,” Mick said, gesturing to Leo McBride and Melody.

  “Five people can’t fit into that little boat!” Melody cried.

  “Give it a try. You’ve got ten seconds. Then I’m throwing you and Leo over the side.”

  Leo seized Melody’s hand and dragged her to the railing. In another sixty seconds they were huddled on the boat’s rear seat.

  “If I can work it out, I’ll make a deal with your mafioso friends before you bozos get back on dry land,” Mick said.

  “You’re out of your skull. The deal’s with me, not with a two-bit punk like you,” O’Toole said.

  “Then I’m headin’ for the Pines with the stuff and I’ll sell it on my own.”

  “You better have an army with you,” Bill O’Toole said.

  “I got two marines. That’s better than an army.”

  Mick was thinking of Joe Turner. He was pretty sure he could talk him into helping them out. He would use the Oxenfords as go-betweens. He would sell the stuff in Philadelphia or New York and give Joe enough money to buy his cranberry bog and Phac enough to buy his boat. He would give the rest of the money to his mother and Desmond McBride. They would pay off Giordano and Mick would vanish. Maybe live in the Pines like Joe. Or head west to California.

  Mick gunned the engines and the Enterprise headed for Paradise Beach, leaving O’Toole and O’Gorman, the Professor and Leo McBride and Melody Faithorne bobbing in the darkness twenty-five miles from shore. They would probably get picked up by a fishing boat in the morning. He had about eight hours to pull off the deal.

  “What are we going to do, Mick?” Phac asked in Vietnamese.

  Mick told Phac they were going to sell the cocaine and go to California, where Phac would have enough money to buy a boat twice as big as the Enterprise. They would take Trai and Suong with them. Mick was improvising the future. Phac was dubious. He had learned the hard way not to trust American promises.

  “Isn’t this against the law?”

  “Sure,” Mick said. “What the hell isn’t these days?”

  “I must think of Suong. We mustn’t endanger his future.”

  “He’ll be safe, I personally guarantee it.”

  “It is not safety that is the point. It is his reputation. He cannot be involved in this.”

  “He’s a minor. No one’s going to charge him with anything. He can stay with my mother. He and Trai can both stay there.”

  “They will be safe?”

  “Sure. Uncle Bill may want to shoot us. But he won’t go after a woman or a kid.”

  It was 2 A.M. when Mick eased the Enterprise into the inlet on a moderate swell and chugged down the channel to the Star of the Sea Marina. In the parking lot, someone flashed his lights. Mick didn’t know the answer, but he decided it was probably simple. He flashed the Enterprise’s running lights. While Phac was tying up the boat, Mick jumped onto the dock and trotted to the parking lot. Nick Perella and two other men were getting out of their car. One was carrying a small black doctor’s bag. He was tall and thin. The other guy, taller and twice as wide, was the bodyguard.

  “Listen,” Mick said, stopping about ten feet away. “The deal’s changed. You can have the dope but you give me the dough. We’re splittin’ with the IRA. They’re a bunch of lousy communists.”

  “What the hell do
you mean? Where’s O’Toole?” Nick Perella said.

  “He’s a couple of miles offshore, feeding the IRA to the fishes.”

  “You’re full of shit. Without him there’s no deal.”

  There it was again. They wanted the deal more than the dope, just like Bill O’Toole. They wanted to own Paradise Beach. The dope was incidental. Even the million and a half dollars was incidental. They could make twice that selling cocaine here during the summer.

  “Then get the hell out of here. I got the dope and I’m sellin’ it to some other guys.”

  “The fuck you are,” Nick Perella snarled.

  Nick and the bodyguard went for their guns. Mick shot them both before their hands touched metal. It was not even a contest. He shot the bodyguard between the eyes and Nick Perella in the shoulder, figuring it was better not to kill him.

  Whimpering, the cocaine expert fell to his knees begging for mercy. “I’m only a pharmacist,” he wailed.

  “Get yourself and them the hell out of here.”

  Mick wrestled the bodyguard into the backseat and shoved the groaning Nick Perella into the front seat. The pharmacist cowered behind the wheel and the limousine roared out of the parking lot, spinning up a shower of gravel.

  Mick ran down the dock and helped Phac hoist the cocaine out of the Enterprise’s hold. They carried the steamer trunk up the dock to Mick’s car and drove into town.

  To Phac’s horror, Mick stopped at police headquarters. “What are you doing now?” he whispered.

  “Getting ready to fight a war.”

  Mick strolled up to Tom Brannigan, the night sergeant. “Give me the keys to the armory. We got some problems down in the marina.”

  “What the hell’s going on?”

  “It looks like the Mafia’s trying to move in. Send both cars down there, fast.”

  Brannigan handed Mick the keys and he rushed to the armory. There, waiting silently on racks, were a half dozen M16 automatic rifles. Chief O’Toole had bought them in the early seventies, when it looked as if summer at Paradise Beach might turn into a replay of the Tet Offensive almost any night. A lot of local police chiefs had gone for heavy weapons in those days. Mick took three of the rifles and threw in forty or fifty clips in ammo pouches hanging beside them. He sprinted past the openmouthed Brannigan to his car.

  “I’ve got some bad news,” Mick told Phac as they roared over the causeway. “I had to shoot the Italians. They’re going to come after us now. We’ve got to take Suong and Trai with us. Those guys are like the VC. They’ll shoot anybody.”

  “Mick, you will destroy us all. Finally you will destroy us all!” Phac wailed.

  “No. I swear to you, Phac, we’re going to win this war.”

  Did he believe it? Yes. In a corner of his soul Mick believed you could not lose everything if you tried to play it straight. He was no longer playing it straight but he was playing it that way from the inside. He was trying to cleanse himself, his mother, Phac, Trai, of the putrefaction that was oozing into Paradise Beach.

  If he knew how difficult that was, would he have tried it anyway? Probably. Beneath and beyond and around that noble dream rose the fierce joy of the warrior, the lure, the love of battle.

  THE OPEN BOAT

  Suddenly Bill O’Toole was in a twelve-foot rowboat with Melody Faithorne and Leo McBride sitting only inches away from him. Since O’Toole had learned about the bearer bonds, he had made a point of distancing himself from both of them—especially from Melody. Proximity for more than a few minutes led to thoughts of slaughter.

  Now he had to listen to Melody unstrung. She swore like a longshoreman at her hunched, cowering husband. “Jesus Christ, why did I ever get involved with you and your fucking relatives? You’re nothing but a tribe of motherless assholes. I’m beginning to think that term covers the entire Irish race.”

  “Shut up,” Leo whined.

  Did he sense what she was doing? Did he by some sort of radar of the blood pick up the rage building in Bill O’Toole’s soul?

  “I think your husband is giving you good advice,” O’Gorman said.

  “Shut your fucking Irish mouth too. When I get back to Washington, I’m going to make sure the senator never lifts another finger for you and your pea-brained movement. Why couldn’t you stop that little twerp? I thought you were in charge of this operation.”

  “So did I.”

  “Why didn’t you stop him anyway?”

  “Because he had a gun and I didn’t.”

  “Shut up, please,” Leo McBride screamed. “If you say one more word—”

  “You’re gonna tell Uncle Bill about the bearer bonds,” Bill O’Toole said. “How you and she squealed to the feds and walked off with ten percent—a half million bucks.”

  The silence in the boat was almost as thunderous as the quiet in Nora McGinty’s house after the bomb went off.

  “How did you know?” Leo quavered.

  “I know a lot of things. That’s a policeman’s job.”

  “You knew all along?”

  “If I did, you’d’ve both been dead a long time ago.”

  “You told him,” Melody screamed. “You miserable piece of cowardly lying slime.”

  “He didn’t tell me,” O’Toole said. “He didn’t have to tell me. I let you both tell me. I know what you’ve been sayin’ to each other in your bedroom for the last week.”

  “It was her idea, Uncle Bill. I didn’t want to do it. I couldn’t stop her,” Leo McBride cried.

  “I know. She sucked you into it. I heard all about it.”

  More silence, broken only by the sea’s sigh and Leo McBride’s terrified breathing. Bill O’Toole loomed over him and Melody, hunched on the rear seat.

  “How much life insurance has she got?” Bill O’Toole asked.

  “What?” Leo quavered. “I don’t know. About a hundred thousand dollars, I think. It’s a government policy.”

  “You’re gonna take that money and give it all to Wilbur Gargan. You’re gonna sell your beautiful little country estate in Virginia and give the proceeds to my wife. Or I’ll come to Washington and kill you too.”

  “You lay a finger on me and the senator will move heaven and earth to find out what happened,” Melody screamed.

  “I’m more inclined to think the senator goes to bed each night hopin’ one or two of you Chappy girls are drivin’ too fast or drinkin’ too hard and maybe your number is up like Mary Jo Kopechne. You really think he cares enough to get his tit caught in this wringer? Smugglin’ cocaine, shippin’ ground-to-air missiles to the IRA? The senator may be a lot of things, but he ain’t that stupid.”

  “O’Gorman. You won’t let him do this. You owe me too much!” Melody cried.

  “Give it to her straight. You know about the bearer bonds,” O’Toole said. “What do you think, one Irishman to another?”

  “She should unquestionably die,” O’Gorman said.

  “You’ll have a witness. Are you going to kill Oxenford too?’ Melody said.

  O’Toole laughed. “He’s a Piney. He ain’t got the conscience of a ground squirrel. Just for the hell of it, we’ll give him a vote. What do you say, Prof?”

  Like everyone else in Paradise Beach, Oxenford had heard about the bearer bonds. He had grieved for Mick. The money would have given him a fresh start somewhere.

  “Whatever you do, it’s much too dark for me to see it,” he said.

  “Fucking bastards,” Melody screamed. “If I’m going to die, you’re all going with me.”

  She sprang past Leo McBride and clawed at Bill O’Toole’s eyes. As he lunged sideways to escape her attack, his weight flipped the boat, throwing them all into the sea. O’Toole tried to hang on to Melody as they went over, but she slithered out of his flailing grasp. Blood streamed from his eyes. He could barely see. He floundered over to the boat. Leo McBride, O’Gorman, and Oxenford were clinging to it.

  Something large and heavy zoomed past Bill O’Toole. He felt a ripping pain in his right leg. A
shark. “Get in the boat,” he roared. With two sets of hands on each side, they lifted it out of the water, flipped it rightside up, and scrambled aboard.

  “You’ve finished her?” O’Gorman said.

  “No, but I think we got some help,” O’Toole said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Whump. The shark bumped the boat. O’Toole tied a tourniquet around his bleeding leg. Whump. The shark hit them again. “He’ll find her any minute,” O’Toole said.

  He shouted into the darkness. “Any minute you’re gonna meet somebody you’ll like even less than an Irishman.”

  “It’s a shark!” Melody screamed, thrashing the water around her.

  “About twelve feet long,” O’Toole said. “A man-eater, just like you. Maybe God knows what he’s doing, after all.”

  Melody swam toward the boat. “You can’t do it. You can’t leave me here to die. Stop them, Leo.”

  Leo said nothing. Melody screamed in terrible agony. The shark had struck. She screamed and screamed and screamed and thrashed the water. Through Leo McBride’s tormented soul swirled a chaotic mingling of horror and terror. Whatever shred of manhood he had left after ten years as Melody’s husband was being annihilated here. He gazed down a tunnel of gruesome future years.

  Suddenly there was a brutally simple choice. A choice that declared his independence from the Monahan tribe and its tangled heritage of loyalty and greed and simultaneously confessed his unforgivable sin and performed his contrition. All his life, Leo had lived in a maze of words and ideas. Suddenly there was this act that simplified, purified, everything.

  He sprang into the cold dark water. “I’m coming, Melody,” he cried. “I love you!”

  In some corner of Leo’s ruined soul, those words still rang true, a compound of febrile memory and doomed desire. It did not matter that they were as futile as the rest of Leo’s intellectualized life. He had said those fatal words one last time.