The Man With No Time sg-5

by Timothy Hallinan

  Toting the phone outside, I first called Dexter. He sounded bleary and whiskey-bogged, but he brightened marginally when I gave him Tiffle's address.

  “The white guy?”

  “The very man.”

  “And do what?”

  “Watch,” I said. “Take notes. I want to know especially about young Chinese women going in and out.”

  “Follow them?”

  “No. Just stay there and keep track. I want descriptions, okay?”

  “I the guy,” he said again before he hung up.

  I needed a boat, and I knew only one boat jock. Before I called him, I tiptoed inside, started some coffee, and went into the living room to kiss the smooth skin of Eleanor's wrist. She emitted a sound that was an entirely new combination of consonants, heavy on h and s, and I headed back outside, trailing the phone, and called Norman Stillman at home.

  I’d worked for Stillman once. He produced the kinds of shows that gave American television a bad name throughout the first, second, and third worlds and used the proceeds from the shows to buy yachts, no less, but he had one redeeming quality: He was greedy.

  “Norman,” I said, after giving him a moment to pant into the phone while he got his bearings. Norman was rich. Norman got up when Norman wanted to get up. “Norman, this is Simeon Grist. I need a boat.”

  “The Queen Mary,” he said grumpily. “She's just sitting there.”

  “I need it tonight,” I said.

  “Something in it for me?”

  “Um, the grunion,” I said. Norman didn't believe in anything he got easily. “They'll make a great show. Why do they run when they're scheduled to run? I mean, how do fish-fish, Norman, develop such a keen sense of time? Not to mention-are you listening, Norman-how do fish run?”

  “Fuck you,” Norman Stillman grumbled. “The grunion won't run for weeks.”

  “You got me, Norman. Okay, so it's not the grunion. How do you feel about slavery?”

  “Great,” Norman said, sitting up and going mumph with the effort. “Always a hot topic. You mean, white slavery?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Aaahh,” he said, losing interest. Norman still thought everybody was white.

  “And millions of dollar,” I added.

  “Better,” he said. “But I don't know.”

  “Prostitutes,” I said.

  “This is exclusive, right?”

  'I’ll have to tell the cops," I said. “And maybe the radio guys.” They could get on the air immediately. Norman's daily show, a national confessional for the sins of the middle class, taped a week in advance of its air date.

  “Radio,” Norman said scornfully. “Who cares? But no TV, right?”

  “The boat.”

  He figured for a long moment, probably doing subtraction on his bedsheet. “It's not going to get bullet holes in it or anything, is it?”

  “Not a chance,” I said with wholly spurious conviction. “It's a milk run.”

  “Pick me up a quart,” Norman said, and then wheezed into the phone. “Nobody delivers these days.” He wheezed again, and I recognized it as a laugh. I'd never heard Norman make a joke before, and it made me wonder briefly whether I'd misjudged him. Maybe he was human.

  “I'll need a driver for the boat,” I said.

  A new wheeze. “A skipper, not a driver. Boats got skippers. Gonna cost a thousand. Who pays?”

  “If you decide you don't want the story, I do.”

  “What if you get killed?”

  “For Christ's sake, Norman, take a chance.” He didn't leap at it. “Would I be doing this if I were going to get killed?”

  “You get killed,” Norman said, “the thousand'll be on your conscience.”

  “How do I get the boat?”

  He thought about it. “Around two or three, call my girl.”

  He hung up. I went back inside and kissed Eleanor awake.

  For the next four hours Eleanor and I scoured Chinatown looking for Horace while Tran sat home and baby-sat Everett. We checked all of Horace's favorite restaurants, Eleanor using her Cantonese on the owners, and both of us dropping in on his friends. No Horace. One of the friends, a shopkeeper, thought Horace might have narrowly missed running him over on Hill Street the previous night, but when he'd jumped out of the car's way and shouted Horace's name, the driver had accelerated away.

  “He was looking for Lo,” I said to Eleanor when we left the shop.

  “Horace always drives that way,” Eleanor said. “All Chinese do. They've usually got a grandmother in the backseat, and all they care about is finding a parking space so the ancestor shouldn't have to walk. Chinese people hit fire hydrants all the time. Anyway, even if it was Horace, what good does that do us now?”

  We picked up a sandwich for Dexter, who'd been watching Tiffle's cottage from his big Lincoln.

  “People in and out,” he said, chewing. “Mostly Orientals, mostly girls. How you doin, Eleanor?”

  “Why is a better question,” Eleanor said. “Sense of family, I suppose.”

  “They's family,” Dexter said comfortably, picking a tomato slice out of the sandwich and dropping it out the window, “and then they's everybody else.”

  “Keeping score, Dexter?” I asked.

  “All in the little black book,” he said, waving something at me. It actually was a little black book.

  “I thought those went out with Hugh Hefner,” I said.

  Dexter gave me the big eyes. “Somethin happen to Hugh Hefner?”

  Back home at three I called Norman's “girl,” whose name was Deirdre and who was older than Norman, and was told that the boat and skipper were in place.

  “Two little things,” I said. I'd always liked Deirdre. Like thousands of low-paid women in Hollywood, she did the work that the men put their names on.

  “Only two?”

  “I want to be picked up in Santa Monica, not in San Pedro. And the skipper has to know how to find a specific boat in the harbor.”

  “Where in Santa Monica?” That was one of the things I liked about Deirdre; she didn't say, “Can't do.” She said, “Where?”

  “Someplace we can wade.”

  “Skip it,” she said. “Too much attention. Get the boat in Marina Del Rey; that's where it docks anyway.”

  “Where? I mean, do boats have an address?”

  Papers got rifled through. “Pier, um, three, slip twenty-nine.”

  I'd been to Marina Del Rey before, and it was security-happy. “Is someone going to ask me what I'm doing there?”

  “You're looking for Pat Snow's boat.”

  “Pat Snow.”

  “Captain Pat Snow, if you want to sound nautical. What ship are you after?”

  I paused. “I don't want you to tell Norman,” I said.

  “Welllll,” Deirdre offered.

  “This is dangerous.”

  “Norman doesn't want to know,” she said promptly, “until you bring the boat back. And Captain Snow used to run dope. That's how Norman knows about the boat. Did you see the show? High Seas it was called.”

  “Loved it,” I lied. “Investigative journalism at its best. The boat-pardon me, the ship, I mean-is called Caroline B.”

  “I'll get on the horn with Captain Snow,” she said. “Nine o'clock okay?”

  “Nine is fine,” I said. The line went dead.

  The rest of the day was just waiting. Tran and I re-blindfolded Everett while Eleanor looked at the fork hole in his thigh and pronounced it nothing to worry about.

  “Didn't happen to you,” Everett said sulkily.

  “Do you get seasick?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. Then he said, “Why? I mean, why?”

  “High seas,” I said. “The Caroline B.”

  We closed the bedroom door on his wails of panic and drank more coffee while the sun fought its way through the afternoon fog. When it got strong enough to warm the skin, we went out onto the roof of the room downstairs and drank more coffee and watched hawks cut slic
es out of the sky. A few fat and dirty seagulls, disoriented and driven inland by the fog, landed on the deck and cast nervous glances at the hawks.

  “Squab with lettuce,” Tran said, eyeing them. He began to make little cooing noises, and the birds checked the deck for an attractive bird of the opposite sex,

  'I’ll fix you a burger," I said.

  “Wait,” Eleanor said, fascinated. “Can you actually catch one?”

  “Stupid, them,” Tran said. “Sure.”

  “Burgers,” I said firmly.

  “I want to see,” Eleanor said.

  Tran lay down on the edge of the deck and summoned sounds from his throat that sounded like muffled yodels. His shoulder blades stuck up through my shirt. “No moving,” he said to us.

  “Still as stones,” Eleanor commanded me.

  There were four gulls clustered on the deck now, facing each other as though they were waiting for one of them to come up with an interesting conversational gambit. Tran cooed his little yodels, and the birds gradually drifted in his direction, heads bobbing forward and back with every step. I developed an itch in the middle of my back.

  Just as I was about to reach back and scratch, one of the seagulls spread its wings and puffed up its breast, and took another step toward Tran. I didn't even see his arm move, just heard an astonished squawk and a beating of wings as the birds took off. Three of them, anyway. The fourth flapped its wings frantically, its legs imprisoned in Tran's fist.

  “Oh, my gosh,” Eleanor said.

  The bird in Tran's hand stretched its entire body skyward, wings pumping madly. It squealed and snapped its head down to sink its beak into Tran's wrist. A bead of blood appeared, and the head came up and then down again.

  “Let it go,” Eleanor said over a sound I didn't recognize as I watched the beak sink into skin again, and then I did recognize it: Tran was laughing.

  “Squab,” he said, grinning, impervious to the bird's repeated strikes against his wrist.

  “Let it go,” Eleanor said again, and Tran looked from her to me and opened his hand, and the bird soared skyward, emitting indignant yawks. Little globes of blood dotted Tran's brown arm.

  “No problem,” he said. “Catch two or three.”

  I got up. “Burgers,” I said.

  At seven, Dexter called. “Everybody gone. Everybody except the fat guy.”

  “Tiffle's fat?”

  “Make some little country a fine dinner.” Dexter said. “And one teensy Chinese snack, real pretty, arrived about two minutes ago. You want me to wait?”

  They deliver them like pizza, Lau had said.

  “No. Meet us at Topanga and the Pacific Coast Highway. Eight-fifteen, okay?”

  “More people than I figured,” Captain Pat Snow said, looking at Tran, Dexter, Everett, and me. Captain Snow looked surprised at the fact that Everett was handcuffed, but not as surprised as I was.

  Captain Pat Snow was a black woman.

  She caught my stare and lifted an affronted eyebrow. She was about thirty-five, with extremely curly black hair fluffing out beneath a dark cap, mocha-colored skin, and a vulnerable-looking pug nose, but there was nothing vulnerable about her hazel eyes. They flayed and filleted me and tossed the waste to the gulls.

  “You're younger than I expected,” I said lamely.

  “Yeah, right,” she said. Then she chuckled, but the eyes didn't forgive me any. “Get laddie there on board if you don't want no one to see the cuffs.” We obeyed, the boat sagging alarmingly beneath our weight. It was a small cruiser, maybe twenty feet long, with a cabin belowdecks, reached by a small door to the left of the wheel. The decks were littered with automobile tires.

  “Nobody going to get killed, right? And I mean him in the handcuffs. You're a big one, aren't you?” she asked Dexter. She was up on the dock now, unwinding the rope that moored the boat to the pier. “Cause I'm not going to be no kind of accessory-”

  “Nobody's going to get killed,” I assured her, hoping it was true. “We're all going out and we're all coming back.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Catch.” She threw the rope at me, too fast, and Tran stepped in front of me and caught it. Okay, so he had fast hands. Captain Pat Snow stepped back onto the boat and pushed it away from the pier. “This a pickup or a delivery?”

  “Maybe neither,” I said. “We're going out to look. If we bring anything back, it'll be a person.”

  “Caroline B., right?” She negotiated the rocking deck toward the wheel.

  “That's it.”

  “Bad ship,” she said, turning a key. Engines coughed beneath the deck. “Class B freighter, draws maybe thirty feet, so they got to keep it out a ways. Seen it before.”

  She did something to the controls, and the boat began to back up through the greasy water. “Why bad?” I asked.

  “Folks, right? Delivering folks.”

  I'd been looking out to sea, but now I turned to her. “How would you know that?”

  “Girl's got to keep her eyes open. Hold on a minute.”

  She glanced left and right, guiding the boat out between fragile-looking hulls. “Out here, probably lots of people know,” she said, eyeing the nearer boat. “Caroline B. comes in every few months. First they unload her out there, then they bring her up the channel and unload her official.”

  “Anyway, she's empty now.”

  “I don't think so,” she said.

  Everett looked very apprehensive.

  “Or maybe we've been lied to,” I said, glaring at him.

  “No truth in this world,” Captain Snow said, twirling the wheel and making the boat spin around. I sat down without planning to. The lights on shore swam away behind us and reemerged on our left, so we were headed south. “You know anything about ships?”

  “Nothing at all. They, um, seem to move a lot.”

  “And you think you're going aboard?”

  “We both are,” Dexter said, surprising me.

  She zipped up her black windbreaker and gave him a skeptical grin. “Hope you can climb a rope.” She angled the boat toward the right, in the general direction of the open sea, and the wind was wet and cold. “Shoes?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “High-tops,” Dexter said, lifting a large white-clad foot.

  “Boots,” I said.

  “With leather soles,” Captain Snow said, sounding irritated. “What size?”

  “Um, nine and a half,” I said.

  She cast me a glance. “What're you, six feet? Little for such a big guy.”

  “You know what they say bout the size of the foot,” Dexter contributed. “Little feet, little dong.”

  “And you're what?” Captain Snow asked him.

  “Twelve.”

  “In your dreams.” She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her dark windbreaker and shook the pack over her mouth. One dropped out, and she caught it between her teeth.

  “Wo,” Dexter said.

  “You and me,” she said to me, flipping open an old military Zippo. “We change shoes. I got big feet.” She crinkled her eyes at Dexter over the flame. “You got anything to say?”

  “Tide fallin,” Dexter observed.

  “Norman's a mutant,” Captain Snow said, kicking off her shoes, “but Deirdre's okay. Still, even if Deirdre was Our Lady of Fatima, I wouldn't take you out tonight if it wasn't for the money. And the fog.” We were well offshore by now, and she pointed a finger toward the southwest. I followed it and saw something that looked like a white sheet lowered from the sky into the water.

  “Is that fog?” I asked, leaning against the railing to pull off my boots.

  “Thick as linoleum,” she said. "The nautical asshole's best friend. Cuts off sight and sound. Give me enough fog, and I can steal Catalina." The engines beneath my feet leaped eagerly toward the fog.

  “Like when we leave Vietnam,” Tran said, leaning into the breeze. “But colder.”

  “I'll take Simon Legree here downstairs,” Dexter said. Twelve or not, he didn't look very happy
about being afloat.

  “Good idea.” I wasn't actually very happy myself. Dexter trotted Everett past Captain Snow and through the little door. A moment later, I heard Everett go Whoof.” He'd been pushed onto a bunk.

  “He's with them, huh?” Captain Snow said, meaning Everett. She turned the wheel about ten degrees. The sheet of fog yawned before us, its lower edge absolutely sharp against the black water.

  “And we're with us,” I said, eyeing the white curtain in front of us.

  “Getting aboard isn't going to be easy,” she said, and the prow of the boat punched a hole in the curtain. I couldn't see anything. The sound of our engines suddenly sounded like something a mile away.

  “Back there,” she said, “toward the stern, is a grappling hook. It's wrapped in rags to kill the noise.” I had to squint to make her out. “I'll throw it, unless your friend there is with the NBA. Can you climb a rope?”

  “If I have to.” It didn't sound like fun.

  “Gimme those boots. My feet are freezing. And when I say quiet, be quiet.”

  “Quiet?” I said. “They're going to hear the engines.”

  “Lots of engines out here, all night long.” Dexter came out of the cabin, wrapped in fog. “You guys throw those tires over the side.”

  Right. Throw the tires over the side. Tran, Dexter, and I bumped into each other like a bunch of drunks as we pitched the tires over a railing that was much too low for my comfort. The tires had ropes attached to them, and they dangled just inches below the deck level. Like the grapple, they were wrapped in rags.

  “You do a lot of this?” I asked, happy to be back behind the wheel. The wind was weaker there.

  “Once in a while.” She was peering over the wheel, face wet with fog and the cigarette burning itself down between her teeth. “Can't tote dope anymore. The War on Drugs gets real about a year before an election. So it's the occasional stuff off a freighter-furniture, furs, car parts-whatever happens to fall into the water. Problem is, not much stuff falls into the water.”

  And if it did," I ventured, it'd be all wet."