After a while she turned the radio off. Kerrivan turned around to face her. Tricklets of perspiration ran between her breasts. Kerrivan kept his hands in his pockets so she wouldn’t see them shaking.
“I’m also a good sailor,” she said. “I’ve raced ten-meter yachts, and I don’t get seasick. That should make you happy.”
She turned and walked to the bathroom, to the shower. At the door, she glanced around at him. “I also like cocaine and sex. Separate or together.”
Kerrivan, melting, a failed Mr. Cool, constructed a crooked grin with parched lips.
“Relax, Peter, I’m not going to eat you,” she said, disappearing. “Not this morning, anyway.”
***
Kerrivan was able to put some things together with some dealers from Toronto. He found out that the New England Dealers Association was meeting in convention at Nantucket, and Kerrivan and Larochelle flew there on the weekend.
Kerrivan walked into the resort hotel like a celebrity, and was treated by the dealers as one. He recognized faces from past business, and there were some newcomers, green and learning. He made tentative contracts with some of the old professionals working out of Boston and Providence, who promised big buys.
Kerrivan suggested to Larochelle that courtesy required they stay the night at the resort and enjoy the party that had been laid on. The best deals, he said, are struck when everyone is relaxing over a smoke or a drink.
“My flight leaves Montreal Sunday noon,” she said. “Tomorrow. I’ve got to be back in plenty of time to pack.”
“We’ll get up early,” Kerrivan said. “I brought an alarm clock.”
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll borrow it and keep it in my room.”
Kerrivan raised his eyes over his glasses. “Your room? Why waste money on separate rooms? I thought we were partners in this operation.”
“Business partners,” she said.
Kerrivan felt like a limp balloon for the rest of the day.
In the party suite, at night, he sulked in a corner while Larochelle collected admirers, bears hanging around a honey pot. She was wearing a white jump suit and shone as brilliantly as a freshly cut diamond in the center of the room.
Kerrivan engaged in desultory conversation with friends, knocking back straight hits of Johnny Walker Black, growing mopish as he got drunk. He was not used to being treated this way. Business partners, she had said. Crap. After a while, he took the bottle and a glass and joined the high-stakes game of lowball stud that was raging at a table in the corner. Kerrivan bet furiously, snarling at the other players, intimidating them. He refused to turn his head to look at Larochelle, but from time to time his eyes shifted and he caught a glimpse of her, grasshopping from group to group.
By one-thirty a.m. he was up three thousand dollars. His bottle of scotch was down a pint.
By three o’clock he was down two thousand five hundred dollars. The bottle was empty.
By four o’clock, the party burned out. Larochelle had long since left for her room, and the game had ended. Kerrivan had lost another thousand dollars.
He got to his feet, clutching at walls for support. His courage was up. It was time to break the ice.
He stood at her door for five minutes, focusing on the number, trying to read it.
She opened it before he could knock.
“I could hear you breathing,” she said. “Look, Pete, some time, but not tonight, okay? I’ve got to get back home tomorrow. Anyway, you’re in no condition.”
Kerrivan stumbled inside, found his way to a chair, and spent a ten-minute eternity trying to take his boots off.
“I’ll show you what condition,” he said.
He stumbled towards the bed, collapsed at the foot of it, and passed out.
***
Kerrivan’s last business before going to South America took him back to St. John’s, and from there he drove in Johnny Nighthawk’s old Ford pickup out on the highway to St. Alban’s on the Newfoundland south coast. He borrowed a boat and headed out Bay D’Espoir, past the Goblins, to a little cove known to local fishermen as Judas Bight — so named because of its treacherous reefs and rocks.
Kerrivan had spent his boyhood around here, learning the smuggler’s trade on an old jackboat schooner on the rum-and-brandy run from the French islands. He had done weekend trips into Fortune Bay and Hermitage Bay with old Captain Pike, motoring in without lights at night or gliding in with sails when they had a wind. By the age of twelve, Kerrivan had learned the rocks and reefs and sunkers of the south coast, each inlet, island, tickle, and harbor mouth.
It was a cheery day, with the sun burning away the mists, as Kerrivan putted into Judas Bight, up the dock leading to the old man’s rambling boat shed and his square and squat little house. Captain Pike still did a little business there, repairing dories and old wooden seiners.
He was there now, running a paint scraper along the hull of a fish boat, cleaning off the barnacles. As he saw Kerrivan, his lined, bronzed face broke open into a rich smile.
“My son,” he said, “y’er a won’erful grand soight.”
With the old man, Kerrivan let his speech relax, and he talked with the bouncing brogue he had grown up with.
“Sure and I giss ye know we bate out the charge, uncle,” he said.
“I was afear’d you was off an’ gone to the penitent’ry for sartin,” said the old man. He was nearing eighty.
He grasped Kerrivan by the shoulders with hands that were like steel clamps and squinted hard at him. “A skinamalink, y’are,” he said. “All rames and nary a muscle on ye. Come and I’ll bile a bittle and we’ll have a drap a tay and somet’in’ hot.”
“We’ll finish this first, Uncle Pike,” said Kerrivan, taking up a scraper. “I feels like a little honest work for a change.”
They finished cleaning the hull, then sat around Captain Pike’s warm kitchen stove for a couple of hours, telling stories and drinking tea and sipping cognac from the bottle Kerrivan had brought as a gift. To the old man, old brandy was an addiction, a legacy of the trade. Finally, they discussed business.
“Ye’ll be wantin’ to borry the old boat shed,” Pike said.
“I’m hopin’ to bring in a few ton, uncle,” said Kerrivan. “We’ll come in at night, as we did afore, and we’ll be quiet as mice about it.”
“Yiss, y’er welcome to it. The neighbors is off an’ moved to Sin Jan’s.” He sighed. “It’s wearyin’ here alone, but it’ll be a Jasus long day in hell afore I’ll go to the city to live. But it’s a hard loif alone here, fadgin’ for yisself. They gives we old folks a few dollars’ pension, an’ I gets a bit o’work, as ye see. Now, this here marrywonna you fellers are sellin’, I hear she’s goin’ about five hunnert dollar a pound.”
There would be a hard bargain driven with Captain Pike, Kerrivan knew. Age had little dulled the old man’s brain for business.
Chapter Eleven
The rumble at early twilight stirred the cocks on their roosts in the chicken houses, and they awakened and complained. The distant sound of engines, uneven, ragged, thrummed into the scrubby hills to the north towards the Jackson Company farm, and the plane drifted down to the humpy narrow strip that had been bulldozed there.
Billy Lee Tinker had corrected just east of Pensacola, then had searched for the Conecuh River in southern Alabama. He had corrected twelve degrees to port by the burn-off tower of the new Mobil refinery, adjusted again near the Shell station, then crossed the highway north of Turkey Neck Creek.
Sun’s rays now touched the tips of the hills, and Tinker squinted down into the grayness, looking for the row of headlights that should have been lined up along the margin of the landing field. The Jacksons had gotten his call, and they should have been there, along with some of the other old boys, and their pickups should have been arrayed at right angles to the strip.
B
ut there was only one pair of headlights. They were at the near end of the strip, where they should not have been.
An uncomfortable shiver tickled up along Billy Lee Tinker’s ribs. He had empty gas tanks and twenty-eight forty-pound bags of Santa Marta gold. His options were limited to one, so he came down, nearly skimming the top of the vehicle, a four-by-four that did not belong to anyone he knew. Then his wheels touched, bumped, rose, held, dug in, the B-26 rattling like a Mexican bus. Tinker’s teeth gritted as he brought it to a grinding stop. He U-turned, then taxied slowly, almost languidly, back up the strip.
The headlights were moving in his direction. He braked. The four-by-four braked.
Tinker swung the door open and dropped the ladder.
“Douse your cabin lights,” a voice called. “No guns.”
Tinker recognized the Virginia drawl.
“I see you’re still flying missions, Billy Lee.”
“Missions of mercy,” Tinker said. “Not like Nam.”
There was a thin, bright slit of a smile on the pink moon-face of Rudy Meyers. Tinker remembered that it was a smile that was there always, a smile that became leaner and sharper when Meyers was about to do something. Usually to someone. He still had a brushcut. There was a camera slung around his neck.
“You still military?” Tinker asked. “Still with intelligence? Or are y’all workin’ as a bounty hunter, man?”
“I’m not looking for deserters, Billy Lee. I’m not looking for narcotics, either. As for the Army, I gave up my commission. I quit before we pulled out. I didn’t want to be a part of it. Rolling over for the Reds.”
“Yeah,” said Tinker. “Where’s my boys?”
Meyers ignored the question. “I was too embarrassed to stay in. After Saigon, it was Iran. Then Nicaragua. We sold it cheap, Billy Lee. Afghanistan. It used to be we kicked ass; now we kiss ass. Some of us are tired of smelling Fidel’s excretions, although the President can’t get enough of his crap up his nose. Our conservative president. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“Yeah, well, I never did follow politics, man. What did you do to my friends?”
“I sent them away, Billy Lee. I flashed some tin at them and they ran. You have cowards for friends. I have their names and license numbers, and a full roll of film. Those Jackson boys are out on bail, aren’t they? They could do a very long shake in the federal prison.”
“Are you working for the DEA, man? If you are, you can blow it up your epiglottis.”
“I do a little job for them once in a while, Billy Lee. Once in a while. But not today.”
That, for some reason, scared Tinker even more. He leaned back against the wing, pulled some papers from his shirt pocket, wet his thumb to pull one loose, then poured a line of Matador tobacco, licked the paper, and twirled it up — almost in one motion. He decided to let Meyers do the talking.
“I have my own business, Billy Lee. Yes, I heard you went hippie overseas. Too much drugs, Billy Lee. Too bad. You had medals coming. You should have stuck around for your last tour.”
The crest of the sun sent darts of light across the field. Tinker had déjà vu. Billowing balls of fire.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I’ll let you keep the plane, Billy Lee. And your boys can come and get the marijuana. I’ll keep a sample, just a sample. I don’t wish to turn you in to the police. Or to the military. Unless I have to.”
“What’s the gig, Major? What do you want?”
“Peter Kerrivan. Just an introduction.”
Johnny Nighthawk
Tape Three. I am not so conceited as to think you are interested in me, but if you will allow a digression, I will tell you how I found myself a continent away from home, upon a different ocean.
I was a child of the Pacific, at the age of six a proud fisherboy upon my stepfather’s old gill netter. I graduated early to the queens of the fishing fleets, the halibut trawlers, and spent many seasons in the Bering Sea. I was a good engineer, if I may say so. I have never had any kind of ticket, but I have known people with all sorts of paper who cannot keep a thirty-horse outboard running.
I have never had any formal schooling, either. But I am not ashamed of that. I am a voracious reader of books — everything: Conrad to Kipling to Arthur Conan Doyle. The result of all this reading and no schooling is that there is a long list of words that I am sure I pronounce wrong. You have already had a laugh about some of them, I am sure. But many fishermen are readers like me. There are no televisions on deep-sea trawlers. When I was in jail, I was made assistant librarian. Kind of proud of that.
We were of the Chinook nation, my family. Before the white man came, ours was a nation of great traders, rich in art, rich in myth and culture, travelers of renown. The tribes of the Plains bought the charms and dentalium shells of my forebears and taught us the joys of tobacco in return.
So it is not surprising that ultimately I became a trader, an importer of tobaccos, a traveler between nations and continents.
Colombia became my second home, but it was in Jamaica that I first met Pete Kerrivan. We were down there doing different ends of the same deal. We hung around Montego Bay for several days, had an excellent time. Pete said to look him up in Newfoundland. It was not until two years later that I was able to accept the invitation; I got made by the Bureau of Dangerous Drugs and spent a term in the Florida State Prison. After that, I did look Pete up, which is how I came to be in Newfoundland.
I made my home awhile in St. John’s, a beautiful city, especially when you are stoned. (The locals claim it is the oldest city in North America, but I suspect that is a lie.)
And here I am in St. John’s, about to travel south again. Because the ever-watchful eye of the law peeps about the airport and peers into every vehicle that boards the ferry at Port-aux-Basques, we decide to leave the island by Bill Stutely’s old Cape Islander, a boat he uses for lobstering when he isn’t working for Pete.
Bill Stutely is one of Pete’s good and faithful boys, one of the original fellows in his band. He is to take us to the Maine coast, then organize the landing party at Captain Pike’s in Judas Bight and have a bunch of the boys there ready for our return.
Before we go to Stutely’s boat, just as a little diversion, Pete wires a couple of thousand dollars to a bank in San Francisco. He figures it will disperse the heat, send some of it to the wrong ocean.
Also before we go to Stutely’s boat, we arrange to meet with Kevin Kelly for a last drink at the Blue Boar Lounge. Pete is coming to pick me up there in a taxi, and he is late, and I am comforting Kelly over a Dominion Ale or two. He is wistful. He is torn. He has not missed a trip with Pete for five years.
Pete has cajoled and begged him to come. He has played slyly and I think unfairly upon Kelly’s tortured sense of loyalty. But Kelly remains unbending, immovable. He has paid his back union dues, and this summer he will be working freighters in the St. Lawrence Seaway.
In the bar, he brings me down, predicting calamity. “You’ll be going to law with the devil and holding court in hell,” he says. He has been visited by sailors’ bad omens. “I seen a cat glaring right hard into my eyes the other day,” he says. And worse, a lone flying crow passing overhead towards the sea.
Kelly grasps me by the wrist, very tight. “Johnny, don’t go,” he says. “Tell Pete — don’t go. Ah, God, I woke up with a dream, boy, that you all drownt in the sea. I see Pete’s face in the water.” Then he looks long and mournfully into his glass of beer. “Ah, Jesus, Johnny, I sure would like to go.” He says this very soft.
Then he is back on the attack. He tells me about his tarot readings, which are full of gloom. He often reads his fortune from these cards. Perhaps he unconsciously manipulates the readings and finds danger where another would find good fortune.
Now occurs an awkward episode with a plain-clothes Mountie, whom Kelly spies sitting at a table
by himself. His name is O’Doull, I eventually find out. (I had no idea that Kelly and Pete have a friend from the past who has taken such a strange turn in life.) This fellow looks like a refugee from a New Wave band. On O’Doull’s surface his twinkle of eyes tells me that there is a subtle sense of humor about him.
(I have reason to suspect that this man is your Deep Throat. But I do not pry.)
Anyway, Kelly calls him over, which he should not have done because I fear that this Mountie, who is, after all, a cop, will compromise Pete’s and my departure from the island.
“Theo, you old cock,” says Kelly. “I heard you got yourself a cushy job in Ottawa, figurin’ out new ways to defate the criminal elements.” (I am trying to imitate his brogue.) “It’s a joy to see grand b’y loik yerself foindin’ the straight path and not laydin’ a loose and discarded loif loik some o’yer old buddies went through St. Joseph’s High.”
O’Doull explains that he is — and I find this hard to believe — a sergeant and a scientist in the Ottawa crime lab.
“Only foive years, and a sergeant in the Mounties,” says Kelly, sounding delighted.
“I heard you had some minor fling with the law yourself,” O’Doull says.
“A case of mistaken identity, to be sure. I was as innocent as a spring lamb.”
“The way I heard it,” says O’Doull, “you were about as innocent as a ferret in a chicken coop.” And he looks very hard at Kelly. “I hope you’ll stay out of trouble, Kev. For Merrie’s sake, as well as yours.”
There is some joshing, a little uncomfortable, and Kelly carries on about his kids. O’Doull seems a little too nervous, and looks at the door from time to time. I begin to wonder if he is in fact part of the operation that is watching us.
You have to know Kelly. As far as he is concerned, cops, deadbeats, nuts, it doesn’t matter — they are all friends if Kevin knows them from long ago, part of the old gang. So he asks O’Doull home for dinner. He says, “I got to tell you, though, I thinks me house is bugged. Your boys, the local horsemen, is gunning for me and Pete as if we was a gang of baby snatchers or virgin rapers.” Kelly plays the clown with a pantomime face, showing fangs, making claws with his hands. “The Yorkshire Ripper and the Son of Sam, running on the loose with terror on the streets! Ah, there is evil afoot.”
High Crimes Page 9
