An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  Graver hit the fast forward again and went to the end with Alice gasping and squealing at the skittering acrobatics of her fellow tavern habitué. The next tape was more of the same, this time including Ledet and two women whom Alice, with visible disappointment, did not seem to know. The last tape was what Graver had thought he might find. This one included Ledet, and Redden again—and two more girls. But this time they were little girls, clearly underage, just on the borderline of puberty.

  Alice gasped again, but then clapped her hands over her opened mouth in a gesture of shock and, after a few minutes, with loathing on her face, she turned away. Graver turned off the tape.

  As if on cue, the telephone rang. It was the report from the ATF. All the guns were from a shipment stolen from a South Florida gun shop nearly two years earlier.

  Graver hung up the telephone and walked around the bed and sat down on the edge of it facing Ledet on the floor. He stared at him a moment.

  “If it was up to me,” he said, “I’d take you out back on the beach and shoot you in the head. I’ve never shot a man, but I don’t think—in this instance—it would bother me. Not more than a few minutes, anyway.” He paused. “But the truth of the matter is what ultimately happens to you isn’t going to be up to me. There will be a prosecutor, a judge, and a defense lawyer. You’ll get a lawyer who will do everything in his power to mitigate the circumstances here, the coke, the stolen guns, the little girls, but he won’t be able to do you any good if this is all he’s got to work with.”

  Graver looked over at the stack of guns, at the pile of tapes, taking his time to think about it.

  “I wish I didn’t need your help,” Graver went on, “but I do. And if you help us, you’ll also be helping yourself, though I regret this. Your lawyer will take what you do for us and milk it for all it’s worth. I personally don’t think you ought to benefit a scintilla—you know what a scintilla is, it’s about as little as your mind can imagine—I don’t think you should benefit even that much for helping us. I think you ought to be forced to do it by law. I think you ought to get the needle if you don’t help us, maybe life if you do. But your lawyer will do a lot better than that… unfortunately.”

  Alice was listening to this with her mouth dropped open slightly, as if she couldn’t believe this pretty sober thing she had gotten herself into when she agreed to this one-night stand.

  Graver stood up from the bed and walked around and got the maps and came back and stood in front of Ledet.

  “You want to try to make it a little easier on your lawyer?”

  According to Rick Ledet, Eddie Redden was one of three principal pilots for Panos Kalatis. Redden kept a pager with him at all times and was on call twenty-four hours a day. His instructions from Kalatis were delivered to him in a variety of ways, sometimes by telephone, sometimes by personal messenger, sometimes at the conclusion of one of his flights. Ledet himself went along as copilot or flunky assistant, whatever was needed.

  “What are the reasons for the flights?” Graver asked. They were sitting in the large main room again, at the rattan table, the flight maps spread out in front of them. Neuman was taking notes and Alice was in the back bedroom. Graver decided she had heard just about all she needed to hear of what was happening, so he asked her to stay in the bedroom while they finished talking. Now that she knew they were police, she was compliant and—after they removed the telephone and told her she could watch television—relatively content to wait it out and see what happened next. After all, this little ordeal was going to make good tavern talk when it was all over.

  “Just about everything and anything,” Ledet said. He was smoking, raising both cuffed hands every time he wanted a puff on his cigarette. “But about eighteen months ago Kalatis kind of reorganized the pilots and put me and Eddie exclusively on runs with people and money. That’s our main cargo. We take out a lot of cash. A lot of cash.”

  “From his drug operation?”

  “That’s what Eddie says some of it is. And some of it’s from other kinds of business. Kalatis and Faeber sold information of some sort.”

  “How much money, how often?”

  “I do a money haul with them about once a month. How much? Shit, Eddie said millions, and I guess it must be. They load these reinforced cardboard storage boxes into the plane, you know, the kind with handles cut into the ends, and a top that fits down over it I saw inside one of them one time, one of the guards let me look, and the bills were stacked in there nice and neat, banded and labeled. It’d already been counted, and they knew just exactly how much was in each box. Millions, like Eddie said. We have thirty or forty of these things stacked in the cabin. A box of cash is heavy, quite a load.”

  “So they take money out of the country about once a month…”

  “No, I said I do money hauls about once a month,” Ledet corrected Graver, mashing out a cigarette into an ashtray sitting on the table in front of him. “Eddie does it all the time. I only go when they’re going to Panama or the Caymans or Colombia. They want a copilot who can speak pretty good Spanish on those jumps in case something happened to the pilot. They don’t want to risk losing a load.”

  “Then where does Eddie take it when he’s by himself?”

  “Offshore. He runs loads to cruisers sitting out in the Gulf, past U.S. jurisdictional waters. Once every week he does that, a regular milk run.” He looked down and tapped the maps. “That’s what these are. The cruisers never wait at the same place. Keep shifting around. The coordinates change every week, every run.”

  “How do you get around filing flight plans?”

  Ledet gave Graver a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look. “Come on, man, flight plans?” He snorted. “Look, flying is one of the last great freedoms in this life. They’ve got all these rules, sure, but, shit, do you have any concept of how goddamn big ‘airspace’ is? The volume?” He gestured with a tilted bob of his head toward the hazy heat out the back door of the house. “The sky out there is full of planes that nobody knows shit about, not the DEA, not the Border Patrol, not any of the branches of the military, not NSA… ‘Airspace,’ man, it’s just too damn big to know what’s going on up there all the time. They can monitor some corridors some of the time, but that’s about it That leaves about ninety-nine percent of the airspace unaccounted for. It’s a smuggler’s paradise. Like the high seas two hundred years ago. You read in the paper where the DEA says they figure they interdict only about five percent, seven percent of the shit coming through? They’re not lying about that Poor bastards are just pissing into the wind, and they know it And pound for pound there’s probably more cash going out than dope coming in.” He grinned and gave his head a little shake. “It’s a ‘free-flowing stream,’ just like the old church song says.”

  When you heard a man like this talk you understood why so many law enforcement officers were getting out of the business. After a few years the futility of it was a persuasive deterrent to a career. Or, on the other hand, the temptation to skim a little off for yourself became too great. When there was so much cash that you had to talk about it in terms of its weight rather than its unit value, it began to lose its meaning.

  “Then you think Redden is making a money haul now?”

  Ledet looked a little uneasy at the question, though he had shown no uneasiness earlier when he gave up the information. He reached for a cigarette and lit it with a throwaway plastic lighter.

  “I guess,” he said.

  “He’s not on a charter to Mexico.”

  Ledet shook his head.

  “Spell it out for me,” Graver said impatiently.

  “When Eddie called me he said something big was up with Kalatis. He, Eddie, needed me for a long-distance run.”

  “As copilot.”

  “Right. But I copiloted on other kinds of things, too, not just cash runs. Kalatis has people brought to his place, people he does business with. He always wants copilots on those.”

  “What people?”

  “Eddie said t
hey’re ‘clients,’ people the Greek needs to talk to. I’m not sure about what kind of dealings. But I do know they’re more cash customers of some sort, having to do with either the information business or the dope business.”

  “Then you think you’re here for taxiing services, to take people to Kalatis for meetings?”

  “Yeah. My understanding is tonight’s going to be hectic. I think all the pilots are on duty tonight.”

  This was what Graver wanted to hear. He wanted to hear something about Kalatis. He wanted to hear the details of a plan of which Kalatis was an integral, necessary participant.

  “Each pilot has a copilot as well?” he asked.

  “Right. There’re six of us.”

  “Three aircraft.”

  “Right. We’ve done something like this before, when he was closing deals, a big program with everything coming together in one tight time frame. All three planes, carrying people, money, dope. That’s kind of Kalatis’s strong suit Organization. These big operations, men and schedules coordinated real close, planes and boats on the move, everything clicking like clockwork. And that’s the way it happens too”—he snapped his fingers in a quick, measured cadence, snap, snap, snap, snap—”just like that.”

  “All of you taking people and money down to Mexico, to Kalatis’s place.”

  “To Kalatis’s place, yeah,” Ledet confirmed, but his eyes slid away from Graver as he said it.

  Graver and Neuman exchanged looks.

  “You realize,” Graver reminded Ledet, “that the point of all this is still the first thing I said to you. I want to know how to get to Kalatis.”

  Ledet nodded and dragged on his cigarette. His hands were resting on the rattan next to the ashtray. The one holding the cigarette was trembling. He seemed to be coming to some crucial decision, a personal Rubicon.

  “I want to be in one of those special wings of a maximum security prison,” Ledet said abruptly. “Where they put you if they think your life’s in danger in there. I’m not saying anything about where Kalatis lives without that I’ll tell you that right now. I don’t care how much you threaten me with this lifer shit.”

  Ledet was looking at Graver now, straight at him, his face pinched with the seriousness of his situation.

  “This guy’s not just any bad-ass out there,” Ledet said. “He’s quiet and methodical and never forgets anything anybody ever did to him. If you wrong him, he’ll get you.” He smoked his cigarette. “The man’s got incredible reach. You could be half a world away from him and then wake up some night and realize he’s got you by the balls… squeezing. I’d never tell you if I thought he’d outlive my prison sentence.”

  “Okay,” Graver said. “It’s a deal. The special section of maximum security.”

  He had no authority to say that. He wasn’t even the right person to be discussing it Nor did Ledet’s almost pitiful, animal fear move him in the least He just wanted Kalatis and would have agreed to any absurdity, would have promised this man any lie, to get him.

  Ledet studied him a moment as if the readiness with which Graver had agreed had made him suspicious. He seemed to suspect that promised easy time was going to be a lot like promised easy money—it never was. But the weight around his eyes also betrayed his realization that he really didn’t have much of a choice anyway.

  “Kalatis doesn’t live in Mexico,” Ledet said. “Every time we take somebody to him we do a two-hour decoy flight Tell them we’re headed to Mexico when in fact we’re actually riding around out in the Gulf or cruising down the coast to Florida. Kalatis’s place is in Galveston.”

  “Galveston?” Graver was incredulous.

  Ledet nodded. “Yeah. About thirty miles as the crow flies”—he tapped the top of the table with his middle finger—”from right here.”

  Chapter 71

  2:40 P.M.

  Graver leaned against a pillar of the porch and stared out across the bay, watching two freighters moving dead into Pelican Spit Soon they would tack sharply to the southeast and steam between the peninsula of Port Bolivar and the eastern tip of Galveston Island and head out into the open Gulf. The hazy heat of late June made it seem as though he was seeing them through a mirage or a daydream, ghost ships, sea-bound for ports unknown.

  The diversion lasted less than a minute, and then Neuman was coming out the battered screen door that Ledet had bashed through.

  Graver turned. “He can’t go anywhere?”

  Neuman shook his head. “No.” He squinted out to the bright haze over the bay. “Now what?”

  Graver looked at his watch. He stepped away from the edge of the porch and sat down in a rattan armchair. Both he and Neuman had shed their coats and rolled up their sleeves, and Graver’s gun, hugging his waist, had rubbed a raw spot on his side that was beginning to itch because of the sweat He wasn’t used to wearing the Sig-Sauer that much. It was too big to be comfortable.

  “We’ve got enough evidence,” he said, watching the two ships. They were like the hour and minute hands of a clock, you could see that they were moving, but you couldn’t see them doing it “But I don’t think we’ve got enough time.”

  Before Neuman could say anything, Graver went on. He spoke quickly, thinking out loud, his mind almost tripping over itself as he tried to work out the best course of action.

  “Enough evidence to justify a tactical intervention, to go out to Kalatis’s and sweep up everything and everybody, and let it all get sorted out in the days and weeks to follow. I don’t have any doubt that what we have in the computers from Tisler and Burtell will justify it That and all the other crap, what we know, what we can substantiate, even keeping Arnette out of it… we have more than enough, enough even to spin this off into a dozen other directions and investigations.

  “But,” he said, wiping his sweaty forehead on the shoulder of his shirt, “there’s not enough time to present all of this in the way it needs to be presented to convince the people who have to be convinced in order to get the raid authorized. And then there’s the matter of the tactical preparation. If this thing isn’t planned right…”

  “If Kalatis is moving that kind of money,” Neuman said, “he’s going to have a lot of firepower. He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy to move around underprotected.”

  “No, you’re right,” Graver agreed. “And it’s going to take time to prepare a tactical action against something like that It’s probably even irresponsible of me to ask our tactical people to try an operation on this scale on only four or five hours notice. To do it right, it ought to involve boats, helicopters, cars”—he shook his head—”who knows how many men.”

  “And we don’t have any idea of the layout at Kalatis’s place, do we?”

  “No, we don’t,” Graver said. “It would be a nightmare. Frankly, I doubt if the tactical commanders would even consider it under the circumstances.”

  He stood impatiently and shifted the gun at his waist. “Shit,” he said, and leaned again on the porch post The freighters were at another angle now, headed into the strait.

  The telephone in the house rang, and Graver whirled around and burst past the broken screen door, through the kitchen and into the main room where Ledet sat bound on the floor, looking at the telephone on the rattan table as though it were a cobra.

  “If this is Redden… be careful,” Graver said, putting his hand on the telephone. “If you screw this up, by God, I promise you I’ll make sure you die of old age in a cage.”

  Ledet looked as if he were being confronted by Satan. The telephone kept ringing. Ledet nodded, and Neuman was on his knees unlocking Ledet’s handcuffs. Then Neuman stood and rushed back to the bedroom as Graver took the telephone off the rattan table and put it on the floor with Ledet.

  “Okay!” Neuman yelled.

  Ledet picked up the telephone on the sixth ring.

  “Hello.” He tried to make his voice sound normal, whatever the hell that was. The past two hours had caused him to completely lose sight of it.

 
“Hey, Rick.”

  “Eddie, what’s happenin’?”

  “When did you get in?”

  “About five-thirty yesterday. What happened to you?”

  “Well, there’s a lot of shit going down with our friend here. When I called you we had a routine job. We still have a job, but now there’s nothing routine about it.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “No, not wrong, just… serious.”

  “We going to clock some hours, then?”

  “Yeah, a lot Look, I need you to come out to Las Copas, okay?”

  “When?”

  “Right about dusk. Eight-thirty would be good.”

  “Can’t do it.” Ledet looked at Graver.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I came in with oil line problems, Eddie. I haven’t fixed it yet.”

  “Why the hell not? You had time yesterday, didn’t you? You’ve had all day.” He hesitated. “You picked something up, didn’t you.”

  “Well, yeah, I did…”

  “Shit… is she still there?”

  “Yeah,” Ledet said tentatively, as though he expected to be reprimanded for it.

  “Christ,” Redden said. “Well, get the hell rid of her, Rick. Jesus, man, that was stupid.”

  “How was I to know this was going to be something special,” Ledet said, looking at Graver. “Okay, I’ll get her out of here. What about Las Copas? Why don’t you just swing by and pick me up on the way?”

  “I don’t know,” Redden said, sounding worried.

  “What?” He raised his eyebrows to Graver, surprised. “What do you mean you don’t know? What’s the deal?”

  “I told you this is serious, Rick. I’ve got a schedule, and it doesn’t include stopping by to pick you up, know what I mean?”

  Graver grabbed his notepad, jotted something, and shoved it in front of Ledet.

  “Where are you now? Can’t you just come get me now?”

  “Forget it,” Redden said. “Look, Rick, can’t you patch up the oil problem? How bad could it be, for Christ’s sake? Rick, listen to me, trust me, just by-God get there. We’re going to pull in some big money on this one. Something’s going on here. I’ll tell you about it when you get there. Just believe me when I tell you you can’t miss this, okay? Besides that, I can’t go flying in there without a copilot. I don’t know what he’d do.”