SILENT GUNS

by Bob Neir

  “Your pills. Where are they?” Trent demanded.

  “Lost them yesterday chasing those guys. I couldn’t find them,” his voice weak.

  “I’ll go find them right now!” Trent moved to pull away.

  Maxie held tight. “Don’t leave, Tony. Around my neck: a key. Take it. See that Flora gets it.” He caught Trent’s wrists with feeble hands.

  “Nonsense, give it to her yourself.”

  Maxie’s eyes pleaded, “And my share too. See she gets it.”

  “I’ll call the Navy. They’ll come and get you. We’ll get you to a hospital.” Slowly, with great gentleness, he started to unbutton his shirt.

  “No. Tony, I’m a loser. This is the best way. I’m going down fighting, it’s the way I want it. We had great times together, didn’t we? Make sure Flora gets the money. Promise.” Maxie’s grip turned powerful with renewed strength.

  “I will.”

  Maxie let go of his hold. Trent tried to say he was sorry; but the apology caught in his throat. As he held him tight, he felt the man slip away. Maxie died in his arms. The men fell silent. Graves slipped off his cap. Newby shoved his hands in his pockets; his head stared at the deck. Madden stood uneasy and shuffled his foot. Awkward glances passed between them.

  “He was my friend, too, Commander,” Graves said, his voice muffled. Trent asked, “What time is it?” Madden flashed a light on his wrist watch… “0410.”

  “Let’s fire this one for Maxie,” Trent cried out.

  “No, let’s not,” the men turned to Madden.

  * * *

  The men stood solemnly and watched the sun bring new life and color to the Inlet. The clouds were powdered in a pink glow. Patches of light blue scattered across the surface of the water. The surface so smooth that glancing over the side, you could view your own reflection. The Missouri swung calmly at anchor three miles offshore. It was Saturday and the Friday night party was over. Trent smiled when he thought of Haury’s. A mile off, he watched a racing tide burble around a point of land, churning white over rocks hidden just beneath the surface. Upland, dark green firs and spruces peppered the sides of the Olympic Mountains until they nudged the tree line. Snowcapped peaks reached into low-lying clouds.

  Trent had the men gather around Maxie’s body. He stood before them, removed his cap and then waited until the men followed. Trent said a prayer then, together they repeated the Lord’s Prayer. The circumstances offered little choice. It was temporary, Trent assured them. They lifted Maxie into the turret, his body zipped up in a sleeping bag. Placing him head first on the loading tray, Harper opened the breech of the number one gun. Trent nodded and Maxie was slid forward into the ice-cold, mausoleum-like steel gun barrel. They closed the heavy breech and locked it home. “A proper burial for a seaman was at sea,” Newby offered.

  Trent demurred: a lonely burial at sea, he thought, confined to the sharks and crustaceans of the deep, was not for his friend Maxie. Maxie loved his Flora. A small headstone, a marker for his grave ashore, where he and Flora would rest together in eternity, seemed the wiser choice.

  ~ * * * ~

  CHAPTER 23

  Chairs scraped across the bare wood floor of the Operations Center as the men shifted about uneasily. Their eyes distant, faces heavy and deeply lined with fatigue. Tobacco smoke lazily curled upward, a rasp of a cigarette lighter cut the silence. Discarded butts piled up in nondescript tin cans. Commander Conover stood scanning the luminous dial of his watch. It was Saturday morning, 0843. The hour had come too quickly for him. The model of the Missouri was still firmly wedged onto the mudflats of Sinclair Inlet…except, it wasn’t.

  “It should have worked.” Commander Conover stood hunched over staring at the model.

  “Trent was tipped off,” Major Hartwell’s shoulders moved stiffly. He waved his hand in a half-hearted feint to ease Conover’s pain. “Christ! The man’s not blind, he saw us coming,” Lt. Rankin cut in and stared at him for several seconds. CPO Wilson swung around, his face unsympathetic.

  “Get real! You just don’t snap your fingers and drop anchors, they were warned.”

  “How come nobody thought of it?”

  “Drop anchors with that rag-tag crew. Impossible!”

  “Sure! But, they did it.”

  “Aw! Shut up.”

  “The Frenchies didn’t expect a German “end-run” around the Maginot Line, either.” Hartwell volunteered, “But the Huns pulled it off.”

  CPO Wilson added, “Do we get an “A” for effort?”

  “Big deal. We got chased off by a bunch of guys with popguns.”

  “It wasn’t pretty to watch, either.”

  “Hot coffee, you guys?” Bennie Lightfoot appeared.

  “It’s hot enough in here,” CPO Wilson snarled.

  “What are you so upset about? You didn’t get shot up like I did. The #41 got off easy. The deck of the #22 is a shambles. The bastards popped rifle grenades right over my head,” CPO Mauro Martinez said.

  “I was only saying what I thought.”

  “This whole caper was screwed up from the start.”

  “Look who is talking?”

  “Calm down, the brass plain underestimated Trent.”

  Lt. Rankin sniffed, “That’s how you lose wars.”

  Conover sat down heavily. The main impression was of utter failure: the second of helplessness. Inner anguish turned to self-pity. The phone buzzed. Lt. Rankin picked it up. “Commander! The Admiral wants to see you.” He hung up the phone. Conover stiffened, his face paled.

  Rankin assumed he had not heard. “Commander!”

  “I heard. I heard!”

  Conover got up slowly, his knuckles showing white as he bunched his fingers into fists. He kicked his chair into a corner and stormed out, mumbling, “Why me? Why should I take the blame?” The Admiral’s words stormed back: No more failures, Conover.

  “He’s a strange one,” said Martinez. “He keeps coming up with these crazy plans. He figures Trent’s going to lie down and let him take back the Missouri. Conover will get us all killed, you can be sure. He’s got a screw loose somewhere.”

  “Hell. He’s an officer.” They laughed.

  “I hear he’s here because he cracked up his destroyer. They say he’s been permanently beached. That’s probably why he’s pissed-off all the time. He and the Admiral don’t hit it off, either, I hear tell, “ Rankin mused.

  “He’s ridin’ for a fall,” predicted Wilson

  “Ten bucks he doesn’t come back.”

  “You’re on.”

  “Easy pickin’s.”

  “Count me in.”

  “We did one good thing, though,”

  “What?”

  “That second shell didn’t get fired off.”

  * * *

  Sam Simons brusquely flipped through a pile of mail stacked on his desk. He shook his head and then shoved the whole pile into the round-file. He eased back and glanced at the wall clock: it read 1546. It was Friday. No appointments were noted on his calendar pad. He reached inside his jacket pocket. “Shoot!” he said, patting himself down. He leaned over and rummaged about in his lower desk draw. Empty: he viciously kicked it shut. “Let me bum a cigarette, will you Jim?” Slipping a pack out of his pocket, Jim Frances tossed it too him.

  “How about this headline for a real grabber?” Frances said, reading from the afternoon Seattle Times.

  “TOMORROW IS DOOMSDAY FOR CITY,” and they quote the Mayor, “terrorists have threatened the City with another shell from the battleship Missouri tomorrow, Saturday, at five a.m. The target is the Bartell Drug Store on the corner of Fourth and Pine. The Navy is very close to having the terrorists routed out…Stay home… listen to your radio…”

  “Is the City going to pay?” Frances asked.

  “Beats me,” Simons shrugged, snapping a match. “The politicians insist on playing chicken while the shells keep falling.”

  “Trent’s dossier is on your desk, I stuck it under Division Report
s.”

  “Good thing you told me; it could have died there.” Simons drew, blew smoke and stared at the glowing red tip. “I never could get much out of these things.”

  “Then why smoke them?”

  “They save my fingernails. What else is in the paper?”

  “Pictures of the Missouri. More pictures covering the Smith Tower and an interview with Conover. Nothing you don’t know about.”

  “What’s in the dossier?”

  “Not too enlightening. Trent was born at Eastside Hospital, Manhattan. Good family. Smart kid. Wrong neighborhood. No police record, but they knew him. Not much money in the family. Got into Annapolis. The Navy marked him an up and comer.”

  “Well, he made Lt. Commander, didn’t he?”

  “No signs of mental aberrations,” Frances shook his head, “I don’t get it.”

  “You won’t find the answer to Trent in a folder.” Simons pulled open a desk draw and lifted his foot to the lip. He extracted a can of black shoe polish and applied a waxy paste to his shoe. Brushing vigorously, he asked, “What else?”

  “He was the XO of the Missouri when she collided with and sank the Duluth. The incident made big headlines seven years ago. He took the blame. His ex, Myrna says his insides turned upside down after the incident. He went South after his court-martial. He was never the same after that, real upset, just couldn’t get over it. There are clippings in the dossier. Names. She told me Trent figured he was set up and hung out to dry. After the trial, some Navy appointed lawyer made a fuss, claimed he had some incriminating evidence on some of the witnesses, but nothing ever came of it. The Navy’s brass stonewalled the whole incident, closed ranks. His lawyer was discharged two years later. Trent’s career lay in ruins, that’s for sure.”

  Sam Simons rubbed his hands, “Real upset. Eh!”

  “Another fag?” Frances held out his pack.

  “Naw! Forget it!”

  “His ex contends his hatred festered. Revenge consumed him, correcting a wrong, he would say. He became obsessed, harder and harder to live with. Separation was just a matter of time; he didn’t fight the divorce. I thought he might have feared for his job, but that didn’t figure. I checked. He just got a big promotion. You never know what’s buried deep inside a guy, do you?”

  “People do strange things for even stranger reasons,” Simons added.

  “So what about Graves, Hirsch and the rest of them?” Simons raised his head, his black eyebrows erect like quills on a porcupines’ back. He pondered a full minute.

  “I figured they’d crack by now. Infighting. Split up. It hasn’t happened. Something powerful is holding them together.”

  “Money?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What then? Loyalty to Trent? Never got the Navy out of their systems? Recapture old times, maybe?”

  Sam Simons clasped his hands behind his head and thrust out his chin as he sucked in his lower lip and sighed pensively, “Who knows. It could be they’re pissed off, too.”

  “Christ! You mean the Missouri is a publicity stunt?” Frances exclaimed.

  “If it were, I’d know what to do. Could be they’re just trying to prove something.”

  “What the hell do you do with that?”

  “Nothing. Either way, just pay them off and hope they go away.”

  The phone rang. Simons listened then hung up.

  “They brought in Trent’s girlfriend.”

  * * *

  The SPD interrogation room was meant to be intimidating. And it was. It barely had room for three jammed-in chairs and a small, scarred wooden table. Dark green linoleum floor squares irritated the artistic senses. A one-way window, cut into the far wall, fooled the eye as it made the room appear distorted. Lisa Mallory leaned against the table, her pointed breasts pressed hard against the edge. Her long, elegant hands were relaxed and casually folded. She stared impassively at Officers Frances and Gleese seated across from her. Chief Simons, meanwhile, had settled comfortably into a soft chair behind the one-way glass. He listened half-heartedly with one ear. He dismissed routine questions asked hundreds, no thousands of times before, patiently waiting for that one slip up. He was transfixed by the fascinating sternness about this woman. Her demeanor was of stone and telegraphed icy contempt. Her attitude was in total contrast to her appearance: someone had chiseled Lisa Mallory’s out of creamy, soft Italian marble.

  “Miss Mallory, do you know why you are here?”

  Defiance flashed in her eyes, “No. And I’m ticked off. So you read me my rights. Big deal. You got no cause to haul me down here.”

  “What do you do for a living?”

  “Collections. People don’t always pay their bills.”

  “Do you always carry a .32 in your purse?”

  “A girl needs it for safety. I wouldn’t have to carry one, if you cops spent more time rounding up real criminals,” She said with a smirk.

  “You work for the NARDO AGENCY, don’t you?” Lisa flashed a quizzical look.

  “I’ve done collections for them. Yeah! So!”

  “Do you know an Anthony Trent?” Lisa’s eyes narrowed.

  “So, what if I do?”

  “You’re his contact, aren’t you?”

  “For what?”

  “Extortion!”

  “What! You’re crazy!!”

  “Haven’t you read the papers?”

  “No. I’ve been out of town.”

  “We figure Trent has spent a quarter-million setting up an extortion caper. Thirty million is a damn good return for NARDO, don’t you think?”

  “What are you talking about?” she glared.

  “Don’t play games with us. Trent is out on the Missouri and he’s threatening to blow up the City.”

  Lisa stared at Frances, disbelieving. “He’s out there getting her ready to tow to Long Beach!”

  “Then, explain your contacts with Trent? What about your meeting with Maxie Hirsch? And Hank Graves? Trent works for NARDO, too, doesn’t he? You’re here to protect NARDO’s investment. Right! You’re the funnel! You’re the go-between! We want answers,” Jim Frances jumped up and shouted, his voice rising in intensity. A battered Lisa recoiled at the onslaught, her eyes widened and lower lip trembled, and her mouth fell open in bewilderment.

  “Tell us about Trent’s plans.” Annette cajoled deftly, her voice cooed in soothing mellowness. Lisa’s eyes formed narrow slits.

  “It’s all lies! All of it lies!” she snarled, her marble facade shattered. “Why are you doing this to me?” Her face twisted up with fury. Her voice charged with emotion: words poured out as a high-pitched screech. Lisa’s shoulders caved, she lowered her head and slumped forward, sobbing. Sobs were of sadness, abandonment, not the sharp edge of contempt.

  Lisa whimpered, softly. “Oh! My God. That bastard. That bastard. I don’t know anything. I swear!” She looked at Annette beseechingly, lowered her voice and fell silent again. She raised her arm in a limp gesture. “Tony deserted me, I just know it,” her whisper almost inaudible. “I love him. He was coming back to me, he promised.” Her facial muscles quivered in disbelief. To hide her pain, she covered her face with her hands.

  Simons leaned forward. He regarded Lisa with a flicker of sadness. For a lady used to turning up the heat, she did not measure up well, he mused. Clicking footsteps halted as Detective Jim Frances joined him. “Think she’s telling the truth, Chief?”

  “I don’t know. If she’s lying, she’s damn good.”

  “She could have known this was coming and rehearsed,” Frances said. “Anybody in her racket has got to be tough. They pester people to make them feel guilty, pay up; but criminal conduct, it’s not their style.”

  Simons observed, “Collections is a perfect cover. She’s a professional and experienced. She might risk it. Especially if it’s for the big kill.”

  “She might turn against Trent or NARDO?”

  “If she turns on NARDO, she’s dead. Maybe on Trent, but if he really means something to
her…”

  “They’ve been shacking up. It could be serious.”

  “Could be,” Simons agreed. “I think she’ll talk.”

  “I’ll go talk to Annette,” Frances left.

  Lisa sat alone, disturbed in her own thoughts. Simons knew Lisa knew nothing.

  Sam Simons, too, sat alone with his thoughts. His face held no expression; he hid his behind a death mask. He suffered in his knowledge and it proved a terrible burden, he sighed. Only he knew Trent’s true motives. That the money was an absolute must, but of minor importance. Did he dare confide in his boss, the Mayor, in the truth? The truth would not stop the shelling, of that he was certain. Would a miss-step trigger Trent to greater violence? Most likely not! To Trent, it was not the violence itself, but the threat of violence that held the key. And, Trent had confided all this in him. Why? He sat back and stuck an unlit cigar in his mouth. It reasoned the Navy was the target of Trent’s strategy from the very start, the city a mere bystander, a pawn in the game. And, yet, the city would be made to suffer and nothing could be done to derail the carnage. Simons recalled Trent’s words: I want my pound of flesh: the men who sentenced me to a living hell. But, how did Trent expect to flush out Kindler, Denton, Proust, and Burns, if they were the true targets of his vendetta. No connection had been made, and none surfaced: only Trent knew there existed a connection, a deep, hidden one. He tossed the dilemma around in his mind and then exploded. “Damn his hide, he expects me to uncover the connection. That’s his price.” Simons angrily threw down his cigar, tromped on it, and stomped out.

  * * *

  “Where’s Security? Keep that damn door locked,” Mayor Grille struggled to restrain his irritation. Intense wrangling, shouting and a great deal of commotion filled the hallway outside his office.