“Sonny boy, you’re so full of crap it’s spilling out your mouth,” he said, turning away from me and back to the bar. He lifted his glass over his shoulder in a small toast. “Thanks for the drink.”
Strike One. “Listen, Bud—”
“I am listening,” he said without turning around. “I appreciate creativity, Billy, and I know you’re not going to let me down.”
“We’re not cops,” I said.
He turned and gave me another half smile. “Oh, I’m sure of that. You by yourself might be, but no cop in the world would walk into a joint like this dragging along beauty and the beast over there.” He nodded towards Anna and Nicky. “So like I say, I’m really looking forward to hearing your story. As long as we both admit it’s a story and don’t get hung up trying to pretend that either one of us believes you even for a Detroit minute.”
There comes a time in the life of any lie when the paint peels off and you either tell the truth or make up a brand new lie and start all over. Bud was telling me that this lie was there.
“All right, Bud,” I said. “But sometimes the truth sounds pretty stupid.”
He smiled again, real amusement this time. “That’s how we know it’s the truth,” he said.
I had to decide how much to tell him, and decide right now. Part of being a cop is reading people. I’d always been good at it when I wore the badge.
So while I knew Bud might have a stake in either saying nothing or, worse, letting somebody know we were asking questions, I didn’t think he would. He looked hard as nails, sure, but he also looked straight.
I decided to go with my gut.
“What do you know about the Black Freighter?” I said.
A couple of things ran across Bud’s face. He clamped down on them pretty fast, but before he did I saw the first expression on his face that he hadn’t put there on purpose. It was so fast it was hard to read, but I caught it and it told me I was right. He knew, and he didn’t like it.
“What do you want with that?” he said in a suddenly flat voice.
“We want to stop it,” I said.
He cocked his head a quarter of an inch to one side. “You said you weren’t cops.”
“That’s right.”
He moved his lips in and out and squinted. “Reporters?”
“Nope.”
He looked at me for a long moment, flicked his eyes over to Anna and Nicky, then looked at me again. He shook his head and picked up his glass. “I don’t get it,” he said finally, taking a long pull on his drink.
“I’m not sure I do, either,” I said. “We’re just trying to find out enough to give somebody a starting place on digging in and stopping it.”
He looked at me with complete disbelief. “Concerned citizens?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Sorry it sounds like that.”
He drained his glass and put it down on the bar. Somebody had gouged a chunk out of the bar there and the tumbler stuck in the pothole, tilted at a crazy angle. “I’ll take another drink,” Bud said.
I got him his drink. But he didn’t take a sip from it, just stared at the ice cubes. “I came here in 1959,” he finally said. “You probably weren’t even born.”
“Probably not.”
He jerked his head at the huge dinosaur of a jukebox over in the corner. “There was Pat Boone and The Crewcuts on that thing first time I came in here. Most of the guys in here were veterans, got used to the sea during the war. Just looking to stay on the water, do a job, make a few bucks.”
Now he took a drink, draining off about half of his whiskey and water. “Started to change around 1965. New kind of cash cargo coming in.”
“Dope.”
“Dope,” he agreed. “Changed everything.” He sighed heavily and finished the drink, letting the glass hang from his hand, tilted so that one ice cube hung just inside the rim. “Changed… Everything,” he repeated, drawing out the vowels. “Used to be a pretty damn good life. Not curing cancer, maybe, but you could feel good about what you did. And then drugs started creeping in, until you never knew when you might have some stuck in your hold, hidden in something else. You accept it, you go along because either you can’t be sure or hell, everybody else is doing it, making that amazing money, why not. And once you’ve gone one step down that road, there’s no going back.”
He sighed again and looked in his glass, but it was still empty.
“Things have just gone from bad to worse since then. Maybe I should have seen something like this coming, the way things have just been turning bad, a little worse every year. Hijacking, piracy’s coming back, murder so common it doesn’t even make the papers anymore.”
He wound down and just stared at the floor for a minute. I didn’t want to interrupt him, but I didn’t want him to stop talking either. “Let me get you another drink,” I offered.
“Hell, I don’t need another drink, I’ll start crying.” He looked up at me with guarded intelligence. I’d seen him put down three drinks, and who knows how many before that, but there was no sign of the drinking in his eyes. “What do you know about the Black Freighter?” he said, turning it right back on me.
“I don’t even know if it’s real,” I told him.
“Then why in hell are you knocking around looking for it? Hellfire, boy, you have any idea at all what you might be sticking your nose into?”
“I was hoping you might tell me.”
“I’ll tell you this, I hope you swim mighty good.” He raised his glass halfway to his mouth, realized it was empty and put it down on the bar. “Listen, sonny, the professionals don’t want to touch this thing, that tell you anything?”
“It tells me it’s complicated.”
“Complicated. That’s very good, complicated. Sure, it’s as complicated as a thump on the head. Complicated as quick death.” He turned away, slid his glass down the bar and nodded at the bartender for another. “Go home, sonny boy. It’s dark out there and full of monsters.”
I know the sound of a door slamming when I hear it. I also know a few ways to pry them back open. I could try to scare Bud, maybe grab him and lift him straight into the air and shake him a little. That didn’t seem like a good idea, since I was surrounded by his friends, and they were all guys who thought losing a tooth in a fight was like putting a quarter into a jukebox; a small price to pay for so much fun. Besides, I wasn’t sure this guy would scare.
So I tried something that wasn’t quite as subtle. “Sure, Bud. I understand. You don’t want to get involved, that’s fine. If I was retired I’d probably be a little scared, too.”
He sighed and shook his head without turning around. “That’s very funny, Billy. Kick him again, he’s still moving.” The bartender put a new drink in front of Bud and he swirled it once. The ice cubes rattled. “A little scared doesn’t cover it. This is major league terror, and if you don’t understand that, you’re sticking your head in the lion’s mouth with your eyes closed.”
“My eyes are open, Bud.”
He spun around and looked at me. “You think so, don’t you? You think you’re tough enough, got all the moves and know all the tricks. You think you’re ready for this, but let me tell you something, sonny boy. You’re not this tough. You’re not ready for this.”
“Maybe I’m not, Bud. Maybe nobody is. Is that your decision?”
He looked at me hard, just looked. Then he slumped back onto the bar, leaning on one elbow. “How much money you got, Billy?” he finally asked me.
“How much do you need?”
He turned and looked at me with a little bit of anger on his face. “I don’t need a thing. But I have a friend I want you to meet, and he needs money or he won’t talk.” He gave me a very small smile. “His name is Otoniel. He used to think he was a hard case.”
“What does he think now?”
Bud shook his head. “He doesn’t think at all. Something scared the shit out of him.”
“The Black Freighter?”
He shrugged. “Oto was m
aking a lot of dough recently, too much for a normal run. Then he started getting nightmares. Got the shakes so bad he had to stay on shore. Now he drinks so he can sleep. And this was a guy who liked to hurt people.”
“He was working on the Black Freighter?”
Bud shook his head. He didn’t mean no, he just meant the question was out of place. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?” He turned back to the bar, cradling his drink. “Be here tomorrow night. Bring him maybe a hundred bucks.” He sipped. “Don’t come too late or he’ll be passed out already.”
Chapter Seventeen
“What else did he say? He must have said something else.”
Nicky was frantic, practically clawing at me for details. I had refused to say anything in the bar, except, “Let’s go.” Nicky and Anna were so intimidated by the place that they had followed quietly.
But Nicky has always been one of those terrier-like people, filled with frenzied energy clawing to get out. And when we got to the car, he couldn’t hold it in any longer.
“Come on, mate, this is inhuman! What’d he say? Where are we going? Give it up, there’s a boy!”
“I know you’re upset,” I told him calmly. “All that work on your South African accent, and you didn’t get to use it.”
“It’s a grayte eksent, too,” he said, shifting slightly from his usual super-charged Australian.
“What is now happening? Are you giving out?” Anna said, speaking for the first time since we’d gone into the place.
“Giving up, love,” Nicky corrected her. “Can’t be, lookit ’im, he’s too happy-lookin’. So what’s up? Come on, eh? Who was that man?”
“His name was Bud,” I said, taking some pity on him, but not too much. I started the car. Nicky scrabbled at the seat belt, too excited to fasten it.
“Oh, well, we know his name, great, problem solved,” Nicky moaned. He finally snapped his seat belt shut. “For the love of God, what the bloody fucking hell did you and Bud talk about?”
“Bud knows somebody who maybe can tell us something,” I said. “For a price. We’re supposed to meet him here tomorrow night.”
“How much is price?” Anna asked.
“He thought $100 would do it.”
“This is very much money for maybe,” she said. “Does he tell the truth, or does he want money only?”
“I won’t know until I talk to him,” I said. I filled them in on the details; the tough sailor named Otoniel who made too much money and now was drinking too much.
“I got the idea from Bud that something scared the hell out of this guy. And I think the fact that it scares Oto scares the hell out of Bud.”
“And so what is it we are now doing with this tough man?” Anna wanted to know.
I shook my head. “We’ll talk to him. Find out what he knows. If he knows anything.”
“You think this Bud fella might be having a skite?”
I looked at Nicky. His brow was knotted together. He was clearly looking for all the angles and not sure what they might look like if he saw them.
Every now and then Nicky forgets what country he’s in. Or maybe he figures Australian is, or should be, universal speech, like Esperanto. Whatever it was, he would slide out some strange turn of speech and expect me to answer him.
“What does that mean?”
He looked at me, blinked. “Eh?”
“What’s a skite?”
“Aw, come on.”
“That’s not American. It’s not even English.”
“Pull the other one.”
“Really.”
“You’re having me on.”
“Scout’s honor.”
“Having a skite, you know. It’s, it’s… Look,” he finally said. “Here’s the thing. Do you trust this Bud fella?”
It was odd, but I hadn’t really thought about that yet. I thought I knew what he wanted. He wanted to keep his position in the River community, but even more he wanted to see this thing stopped. He couldn’t stop it himself, and he couldn’t rat out anybody, but he couldn’t allow it to go on without changing his picture of who he was, changing it in a big bad way. If I could take care of it for him, that would be all right with him.
“Yeah,” I said. “I trust him. At least as far as getting the guy there tomorrow night, and not setting us up to get whacked on the head.”
“Oh. All right,” Nicky said, and from the way he said it I knew he had been worried more about getting ripped off for the hundred bucks than he had been about getting killed.
We drove the rest of the way back to the motel in silence. I think Nicky was starting to realize what he was into. It was no longer truth, justice and the American way. It had turned into something very real and very scary.
At the motel, Nicky went into his room and turned the TV on and started making telephone calls. I don’t know who he talked to. He had his whole New Age support network. I’d never met most of them. Judging from the one or two I had met, that was a blessing.
I kicked my shoes off and lay back on the bed, trying to figure out how to keep us all safe tomorrow night.
I had to watch three backs. For that matter, the fronts weren’t all that secure. Nicky didn’t have a clue how to handle anything we might run into. He still thought carrying a gun was protection.
As for Anna, I couldn’t be sure what she knew. She had escaped from an inhuman war zone. She had seen things and gone through things that put her outside my experience. Maybe she was being quiet because she realized what we might be facing. And maybe she just didn’t have anything to say.
A lot could go wrong tomorrow night. There were too many variables, too many different ways it could turn sour. Somebody who’s talking to you for money can’t be trusted. Sometimes they figure out they can get more money by playing double. And sometimes they figure they’re so tough they’ll just take your money for nothing, or lever more cash out of you, or—
The silence got a little deeper and I looked up. Anna had closed and locked the interconnecting door between Nicky’s room and ours.
She was standing with one hand on the door, watching me. As I looked she turned her head away quickly and ran one hand through her short blond hair. It occurred to me that this was the first time I’d seen her look nervous, unsure of herself. Like so many very physical people she almost always had a strong sense of confidence.
That was gone now, and she looked strange without it. She met my eyes again and took one step towards me. “Billy—” she said with a small catch in her voice.
I sat up.
She took another step towards me.
“Billy,” she said again. She half-raised a hand. It was shaking. She stepped to the bed on unsteady feet. The hand went to her throat and toyed with a button on her shirt. She tried to say something else but it wouldn’t come out.
I stood up and put an arm on her shoulder. “Relax,” I said. I sat her down on the bed and sat beside her. Her muscles tightened and stood out like she was an anatomy drawing. “Anna,” I said. “You don’t have to make yourself do anything you don’t want to do.”
She unbuttoned the top button of her shirt. “But I want to,” she said.
“And I want you to,” I said with a mouth that was suddenly very dry. “But if you do this before you’re ready it won’t be right. You’ll regret it, and sooner or later so will I.”
She undid another button. “But how can I know when I am ready,” she said. “Perhaps only by doing am I then ready.”
It would have been hard enough to follow her slightly twisted English under the best conditions. But sitting on the edge of a bed in a cheap hotel with my heart pounding hard enough to wake the neighbors and all my concentration on the next button, I really had to work at understanding her. She got another button undone before I figured out what she had said.
“Anna, listen,” I said.
She undid one more button and put her lips on my ear. “I do listen,” she whispered.
Her breath slipped over my neck a
nd onto my face and shoulder and it felt like a live wire dragging across my skin. I could feel all the little hairs on my arms stand up and all the blood rushed from my brain straight down.
I put my arm around her and held her close. Her arms went around me, too, and we fell gently backwards on the bed. Her shirt came open. She had nothing on under it and I could feel her nipples rising, hardening as they rubbed against me. I slid a hand across them and Anna gasped softly.
Anna shrugged her shirt off the rest of the way and unbuttoned mine. She put her hands inside, on my chest, and rubbed them up, across my shoulders, pushing the shirt aside until it whispered off and fell next to hers.
She locked her hands behind my neck and pulled herself forward until our foreheads touched and our eyes were so close that when she blinked I felt the movement of her eyelashes. Then she rubbed her breasts sideways across my chest and pressed them against me hard enough to bruise me.
I ran my hands along the incredible satin smoothness of Anna’s back and up onto her shoulders. Her hands paused and she shivered. She pressed her face against my neck and shoulder and I could feel her breath coming faster. I moved my hands lightly up her spine and then down again, sliding one hand under the waistband of her jeans and onto the ripe swell of her bottom.
And as I did she caught her breath, stiffened, and pushed slightly away from me.
“No,” she said, in a half-strangled voice.
I paused. I could feel the muscles in her lower back tighten.
She gasped. It was not the sound of pleasure. “Please, no,” she said again.
I took a very deep breath and let it out. “All right,” I said. I lifted my hands away from her and dropped them down onto the bed. “Okay.”
For a long moment she didn’t move at all. Then I heard her breath catch again and felt a tear run across my shoulder. “I am sorry,” she said. “I am not as ready as I am thinking to be.”
“That’s all right,” I said, putting a hand back on her shoulder, her bare, smooth shoulder. “It’s all right.”