An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  The Pilatus PC-12 was indeed a beautiful aircraft, a long, sleek fuselage with wings mounted from its belly, the tips of the wings turned up like fins, the T-tail gaining extra support by a straight, sharp rib extending forward to the roof just behind the last of the eight port windows. Coming in from the Gulf and approaching the northwest-by-southeast runway, it looked like a sliver of ice falling into the lowering sun.

  Graver sat in the car in the shade of one of several hangars flanking the runway where Redden had just touched down. Bayfield, he observed, was one of those airstrips that looked like it had been built during the 1940s to serve what had then been a remote naval station or some other wartime installation and then had been quickly superseded after the war by better installations that grew up nearer the expanding city of Houston. But somehow Bayfield did not die. One by one the four Quonset huts were replaced by corrugated tin hangars that quickly looked as old as the huts they replaced. A variety of men hangared a variety of planes there off and on over the years, and a pilot manqué who wore glasses with Coke bottle lenses ran the “tower,” a two-room, cinder-block building with a radio and a picture window facing the strip. There were always a couple of guys hanging around working on old engines and to drive the fuel truck if someone dropped in and wanted to top off. Bayfield was almost deserted, but at the same time it was not unusual to see fancy planes parked there from time to time. They came and went. Nobody paid much attention.

  Graver watched Ledet fifty yards away ease the Alfa Romeo along the skirt of the tarmac and stop at the opened doors of the hangar where Redden kept the Pilatus. Inside the hangar, Neuman was backed against the wall, watching Ledet only seventy-five feet away. A hundred and thirty yards away, inside the main hangar where Graver had already presented his credentials and impressed upon the four employees there the importance of cooperation and silence, Remberto and Murray were slipping into the bright orange overalls of the two airport mechanics who normally drove the small tanker truck. Remberto kept his eyes on another employee who was on the other side of a glass wall wearing headphones. The man gave Remberto a thumbs-up.

  “There it is,” Remberto said, zipping up the coveralls. “He just radioed for the fuel truck.”

  Using his handset, Murray relayed this to Graver as Neuman listened in, and then the two men climbed into the high-seated fuel truck, Murray behind the wheel, and pulled out of the shade of the hangar. Behind them, well back from the door, a clutch of men—the two tanker drivers, a mechanic, and the dispatcher—watched the unfolding scenario as though it was a spectator event with more than a hint of serious danger about it.

  The sun glinted off the Pilatus as Redden turned at the end of the runway and began taxiing back toward the hangar, halfway up the tarmac.

  Wearing sunglasses, Ledet got out of the Alfa and leaned back against its front fender and watched as Redden approached at a ninety-degree angle from the hangar and then twitched the flaps to swing the plane around so that it was headed straight into the open doors. He taxied the Pilatus almost to the door, the whine of the turboprop growing louder inside the hangar as it drew near, the powerful engine reverberating against the corrugated sheet metal walls. Then he cut the engine, and the turbo began its long whining wind-down.

  Peering through a crack in the seams of the sheet metal, Neuman watched as Redden, his face unemotional behind dark aviator sunglasses, began gathering together miscellany from the cockpit, getting ready to open the door. Neuman shifted his eyes to Ledet who stood up from the car but didn’t move away from it, while on the other side of him, behind the plane, the tanker truck advanced on the plane.

  Neuman could see Redden crawling out of his cockpit seat into the center aisle, and then the full door behind the cockpit levered out and slid back against the body of the plane.

  “Hey, Rick,” Redden shouted, and jerked his head for Ledet to come over. Ledet hesitated. The fuel tanker was approaching the wing of the plane, and he didn’t want to be anywhere around Redden when the guns came out. Inexplicably, he just pointed to the fuel truck.

  Murray was pulling to a stop, and when he saw Ledet pointing at him he grabbed a clipboard off the dash of the truck and raised it and pointed to it Redden looked toward the truck and saw the driver waving the clipboard. He laid something in one of the passenger seats, lowered the steps, and stepped down out of the plane. He was sandy-haired with a light, sun-flushed complexion. Though he was not a heavy man, he had a well-developed beer gut which was hardly camouflaged by his loose-fitting guayabera, a common garment for convenient handgun concealment. He wore cowboy boots and faded blue jeans, one leg of which was caught on the top of his boot revealing the boot’s red leather top which served as the background for a hand-tooled Mexican eagle, its wings spread out on either side of the boot.

  Murray and Remberto got down out of the truck, slammed their doors, and came around the end of the wing as Murray again raised the clipboard.

  “They said you had paperwork to clear up before you could take on fuel,” Murray said.

  Redden looked around at Ledet “What’s this shit?”

  Ledet shrugged.

  Redden and Murray approached each other as Murray held out the clipboard, turning slightly as he did so to allow Remberto to approach Redden a few steps later than Murray and on Redden’s blind side.

  “I’m paid up. What the hell’s the matter?” Redden said, grabbing the clipboard.

  As soon as he jerked it out of Murray’s hand, Remberto’s arm went inside his bright orange overalls and came out with the Sig-Sauer, the muzzle of which went instantly into the fleshy reserve covering Redden’s left kidney. Redden flinched, and as he did so the muzzle of Murray’s .45 screwed into his stomach while at the same instant Remberto’s left hand gripped his left arm just above the elbow.

  “A forty-five and a nine-millimeter,” Murray said, his face right up in Redden’s. “And a Mac-10 right over there in the hangar.”

  As Redden rolled his eyes cautiously to look at Ledet, Neuman came out of the hangar with his gun leveled at Ledet who simply raised his hands in the air.

  “Son of a bitch,” Redden said. “Jeee-sus, I’m not believing this.”

  “Believe it,” Murray said and his thick hand went around behind Redden and relieved him of the gun he had jammed into the back of his waistband. “Nine-millimeter… Beretta,” Murray said before he had even brought it out in the open.

  The instant Remberto’s hand had gone into his overalls, Graver started the car and drove quickly across the tarmac, pulling up between Ledet’s Alfa and the plane. He got out and came around the front of the car to where Redden was still trying to absorb the past twenty seconds. Graver handed a pair of handcuffs to Murray who stepped around behind Redden and cuffed him.

  “Who the hell are you?” Redden demanded, leveling his dark lenses at Graver. His nose was hawk-beaked and raw from the sun. Graver guessed it didn’t take much sun to be too much sun for Redden.

  Graver reached out and took off Redden’s sunglasses to reveal pale blue eyes and an extraordinarily woolly pair of ginger eyebrows. Redden immediately grimaced in the bright light.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Chapter 73

  On the spur of the moment Graver decided not to take Eddie Redden back to his house in Seabrook for questioning. Instead he sat him down in the center of the empty hangar, his hands handcuffed behind his back, his legs crossed yoga fashion. He placed him so that he faced the hangar’s sliding doors that were pulled wide open so that he had a good view of his precious Pilatus PC-12 fifty feet away. Graver stood just to the side of the plane so that Redden just about had to look at both of them when he spoke to Graver. The sheet metal hangar was at its maximum heat level, having soaked up the coastal sun all day long. Even though the huge doors were wide open, the occasional breeze that slipped in was only a different way of feeling the heat, and caused the hangar to function very much like a convection oven.

  Everyone removed their coats and hung them
wherever they could find a place, on a nail or over the handle of an hydraulic jack, or on the hasp of a door latch. The empty hangar magnified their voices so that no one really had to talk above a conversational tone to be heard. Outside, the droning of cicadas and grasshoppers was interrupted occasionally by an airplane approaching or taking off. And occasionally, too, when there was a pause in the talk, you could hear the sheet metal walls of the hangar crackling and popping as they expanded in the heat.

  Eddie Redden was harder to deal with than Richard Ledet For one thing, he was not the sort of man who let his imagination play tricks on him. He was long on common sense. You didn’t convince him of anything by trying to work on his anxieties—he didn’t have any. He seemed to face life with an unadorned philosophy of acceptance, a kind of West Texas stoicism that had no use for breast-beating and wailing. Sometimes life pissed on you, and sometimes it didn’t. When it did, you were unlucky. When it didn’t, you were lucky. There wasn’t anything you could do about it one way or the other. That could have been his credo. And in light of that, he had become adept at making the best of a bad situation. Life might piss on Eddie Redden, but he didn’t moan about it. What he did was, he took a long soapy shower during which he gave some serious thought to how to stay the hell out of the way next time.

  And that’s what he was doing now, sitting cross-legged like an Indian—probably the first time he had done that since he was fifteen—trying to figure out how not to get pissed on any more than he already had.

  Graver had laid it all out as methodically and dispassionately as he could, guessing that Redden would appreciate a right-to-the-bone explanation of his situation. Graver stated the facts like an accountant. The porno film with the little girls, the cocaine, the stolen ordnance, his employment by Kalatis, the weekly money jumps to the cruisers in the Gulf—Graver had the maps for documentation—the monthly money jumps to points south… for starters… enough right there to assure Redden that when he had taxied up to the hangar a few minutes ago he probably had piloted an airplane for the last time in his life.

  Now Redden was thinking it over, breathing heavily—it wasn’t easy to sit on a hot concrete floor with your legs crossed and your arms cuffed behind you while the too-tight waist of your blue jeans cut into your beer-induced and doughy overhang. He was sweating profusely, so much so that dribbles of it rolled down his forehead and clung to his ginger eyebrows like drops of salty rain. He had sweated through his guayabera which clung to his back and stomach, and the strain of his position was giving him something like a charley horse in his side, causing him to tilt slightly to try to ease it.

  Redden was grunting softly with each breath. He looked up at his Pilatus PC-12. He shook his head. He grinned a little.

  “Hey, Ricky,” he said, speaking to Ledet who was sitting directly behind him in the same position, but out of his sight “You cut a deal with these boys, didja?”

  Neuman shook his head at Ledet.

  When he didn’t answer Redden grinned and said, “Shee-it.”

  Since they had walked into the hangar no one had said a word except Graver and Redden.

  “Well,” Redden said, shifting on his buttocks, trying to relieve the catch in his side. Sweat dripped off the end of his nose onto the concrete floor where it soaked up immediately. “The thing about cutting a deal is… the thing about this quid pro crow is… that I got to watch my back for the rest of my life.”

  “That’s right,” Graver said, wiping his face with his handkerchief. “But if you don’t want to bother with that you can just spend the rest of your life in a cage.”

  Redden snorted. “Well, shit, we know where this is going, don’t we? If I can help it I’m not about to spend the rest of my life in a cage.” He grunted. “You sure it’s really necessary to keep me cuffed up like this? Goddamn.”

  Graver stepped over in front of him and squatted down. He looked at him. “You smoke?”

  Redden frowned. “Yeah, I smoke.”

  “Want a cigarette?”

  “Yeah, I want a cigarette.”

  Graver looked at Neuman who went over to Ledet and took his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, along with the disposable lighter.

  “Take off one cuff,” Graver said to Neuman who got the key from Murray and unlocked one cuff. As he did, Remberto loudly cocked the slide on his Sig-Sauer.

  Redden flinched and then slowly turned his head toward the sound as he took the cigarette from Neuman and lit it He looked at Remberto.

  “You guys sure don’t act like the law,” he said. He didn’t try to get up, but stretched his waist and shoulders, twisting this way and that.

  “Okay,” Graver said, still squatting in front of Redden, “tell me what’s supposed to be happening tonight.”

  Redden was not given to dramatics, but his long pause before responding to Graver’s question clearly reflected the pressure he was feeling from what he was about to do. It seemed that no one talked about Kalatis without behaving as though they were about to open the doors of hell. You just didn’t do it unless you had no other choice.

  “Kalatis has been working on some kind of a big business deal,” Redden began. “I don’t know anything about what the negotiations are over—drugs or information or arms, I just don’t know—but the thing’s going to be wrapped up tonight.” He pulled on his cigarette. “Now, when something like this happens, these people he’s dealing with are brought in to see Kalatis for the deal-maker meet They bring their last cash payment with them. And usually, and this is just a peculiarity with the Greek, usually all this happens after midnight, early hours of the morning. That’s just the way he likes to do it.

  “The way it works is, these people, if they’re from out of town, are put up in a hotel in Houston, and Kalatis’s people pick them up and take them to whatever airstrip we’re using.”

  “Do you always use the same ones?”

  “Yeah”—Redden nodded—”all of them. On a kind of rotating basis, nothing regular. He keeps it random. But we’ll use most of them sooner or later, West, Southwest, Clover Field, here, Gulf, Andrau, Hull, Ellington, Hobby, Intercontinental, Hooks, Midwest, Weiser—all of them.

  “Anyway, these people and their cash are transported by Kalatis’s security people from their hotel to the airport They get in, the money’s loaded, and we take off. Now, all these people think we’re going to Mexico, somewhere down in there. But what we do is we take a two-hour diversionary. We keep them occupied in the cabin so they don’t hear transmissions or see anything, even though it’s at night, then we land at Kalatis’s place if we’re in a ‘tooner—”

  “A ‘tooner?”

  “Plane with pontoons—or we land at a little transfer strip, transfer to a ‘tooner, and take it in.”

  “But you always go to Kalatis’s in a plane with pontoons.”

  Redden gave a single nod. “Got to. He won’t let that kind of stuff come in by car. Besides, it’s part of the scam, them thinking they’re in Mexico.”

  “Is there just one transfer strip or several?”

  “One, just one. A place called Las Copas.”

  “But tonight is different?” Graver asked.

  “Yeah, tonight is different,” Redden said, nodding hugely, taking one last drag off the cigarette which he had smoked down to the filter. He mashed it out on the concrete beside him. He used the thumb of his right hand to squeegee the sweat off his forehead, the one loose handcuff making a jangling sound like Paula’s bracelets.

  “When there’s several in one night like this, they all take off from the same airport That way Kalatis’s security people have to check out only one hangar. The timing is worked out so that the clients arrive one hour apart so there’s plenty of time in between connections. None of the clients even know that Kalatis has met with anyone else that night. That’s the way he does it.”

  Redden rocked on his buttocks again. “This is a hell of a place to sit down,” he said. He shot a look of disgust at Remberto. “Shit. Okay.” He
used his thumb on his sweating forehead again. “Tonight all three are coming in at different airstrips.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Wade from Andrau. Maricio from Clover. I’m leaving from Hobby.”

  “And this will be after midnight?”

  “Nope, not this time,” Redden corrected. “That’s another thing that’s changed. First client will be here at ten-fifteen. Second one at eleven thirty-five. Third one, twelve fifty-five.”

  “That’s”—Graver paused to calculate—”an hour and twenty minutes between each client arriving here.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why the change?”

  Redden stared at the concrete in front of him for a moment, and then looked up at Graver.

  “Well, actually, to tell you the truth,” he said, “we were just a little worried about that point ourselves.”

  “We?”

  “Me and Wade and Maricio… the three pilots. We’ve, uh, been watching all this, and it looks to us like Kalatis may be going to drop out of sight after tonight.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “There’s a guy name of Sheck who used to fly with us,” Redden said. “He’s been with Kalatis a lot longer than the rest of us, and we kind of get together with him pretty regular and talk about Kalatis. Ol’ Sheck’s got some pretty good insights into the guy. He still works for Kalatis on some kind of secret shit they got going. Sheck seems to think he’s winding down a lot of his operations here and that he’s getting ready to do some kind of super scam and then just disappear. After these changes that have been developing today—first one thing, then another—me and the boys are getting a little skittish. I’ve been trying to get in touch with Sheck for the last four or five hours to run these last developments by him, but I can’t find him.”

  “Did you read the paper this morning?”

  Redden looked at Graver. “Yeah.”

  “Bruce Sheck blew up in one of those boats in South Shore Marina.”