An Absence of Light (65 page)

“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.”

Redden blanched and his facial muscles went slack. “Blew up?”

“You know Colin Faeber?”

“Yeah.”

“He was hit this afternoon.”

“‘Hit? Killed?”

“Gilbert Hormann?”

Redden nodded, already seeing it coming.

“He was hit last night.”

Redden swallowed. His eyes looked like they would never blink again. He swallowed again.

“And three of my intelligence officers who were working on the case,” Graver added without explanation.

Redden’s stare dropped to the tarmac outside the doors of the hangar. “Sheck was goddamned right… the Greek’s cutting himself loose. He’s going to run.”

“And where do you think his pilots fall into this scheme of things, Eddie? You think he’s just going to let you go—with all you know about him?”

“Son… of… a… bitch.” Redden seemed almost catatonic.

“This might have been your last day of flying anyway,” Graver said.

Redden said nothing. He just stared at the tarmac that was dancing in the heat waves beyond his plane.

“Tonight,” Graver said, bringing Redden back to the conversation at hand, “if you’re going to be picking up the clients here, taking them on a two-hour ‘diversionary’ and then going into Las Copas, they’ll be boarding pontoon planes there to hop over Chocolate Bay, right?”

Redden nodded. His rate and volume of perspiration seemed to have accelerated.

“How does that work? Does the pontoon plane pull up in the bayou there? There’s a bayou nearby, isn’t there?”

Redden nodded. “About seventy-five yards from the strip.”

Neuman had rolled a car tire over and was sitting on the edge of it behind Redden. Murray and Remberto had pulled over a sawhorse and were sharing opposite ends of it. All of them sweating, all of them riveted to the conversation as they listened to Graver methodically extract every logistical detail.

“Anything different about the routine at this point?”

Redden nodded again, as if something was just now dawning on him, as if another piece of the Kalatis puzzle was falling into place.

“Yeah.” He swallowed once more. “Yeah, normally the cash and the client are loaded onto the ‘tooner and jumped over Chocolate Bay. When we get to Kalatis’s pier, the client goes up to the house for his meet with Kalatis, and the cash is off-loaded onto a cruiser.”

‘Then what?”

“Cruiser takes the cash out to the Gulf rendezvous instead of the ‘tooner. The ‘tooner and pilot have to wait to jump the client back over the bay.”

“You said ‘when we get to Kalatis’s pier.’ You fly the pontoon plane too? There weren’t other pilots for the pontoon plane?”

“No, we fly it. There’s only one ‘tooner. First pilot drops down on Las Copas, everything’s loaded onto ‘tooner, jump over Chocolate, jump back over Chocolate when client is through, pick up the regular plane and leave the ‘tooner in the bayou for the next pilot and client. He does the same thing. The copilot on the last plane takes the ‘tooner away. It’s kept in a small Gulf-side hangar in Kemah.”

“I assume someone stays with whatever plane is paused at Las Copas?”

“Oh, yeah, three of Kalatis’s guards go to Las Copas by boat ahead of time. They take an electric generator and string lights along the strip. It’s quite a job. The lights just come on momentarily during the landing, and then they’re shut down again. The guards—they call them security—stay during the whole operation, just that one night, and help off-load the cash from one plane to the other and then ‘secure’ the plane that’s not being used.”

“Three guards, you said. Are there always three?”

“That’s right. That’s where Kalatis is different from your average, run-of-the-mill smuggler or bad guy. There’ll be six armed guards, not fifteen or twenty. Just six. Three at Las Copas, three at his own dock. They’re low-key kind of guys. In fact, every weapon they’ll be carrying will be fitted with a silencer. The Uzi’s, the Mac-10s, whatever they’re carrying. Silencers. It’s only common sense when you think about it. All those other cowboys like the sound of the blasting. Shit, with silencers you can do a lotta death before anybody even knows you’re there. So they don’t mind using them. I don’t mean they’re trigger-happy; I’ve never seen that But they’re not afraid of using them either.”

Redden thought about that for a second and then he looked at Graver again. “Look, can I have another cigarette?”

Again Neuman took a cigarette from Ledet. When Redden had lit it, Graver went on.

“Okay, now, you said this time was going to be different.”

“Yeah. This afternoon we had a meeting with Kalatis. The normal routine was suspended. Each one of us is going to have a slightly different schedule. Wade’s first up. No diversionary—straight to Las Copas. Same routine at Las Copas, transfer client and cash to the ‘tooner. But when he gets to Kalatis’s, he drops off the money and the client and flies back to Las Copas without the client.”

“Did Kalatis explain that?”

“He said the client’s going into Galveston by cruiser, and then back to Houston by car.”

“But what about the hoax of making them believe they were in Mexico?”

“Yeah, I asked about that. Kalatis said he’d hired me to fly planes, not to run his business.” Redden grinned, the way a man grinned about a death threat instead of allowing himself to panic. “Anyway, so Maricio’s next Same thing, straight to Las Copas—”

“How long is that flight?” Graver interrupted.

“Half an hour. Maricio’s ‘tooner trip is the same as Wade’s, drop off the cash and the client and back to Las Copas. I’m doing anchor. Same routine as the others.”

A small plane that had landed on an opposite runway came wheezing by the hangar. It was the first one that had come close since they had been there, and they all turned and looked at it. Graver turned back to Redden. The pilot was staring at the nose gear of his plane. Graver guessed he was reworking what he had just told them about the night’s schedule. He imagined that in light of what he had learned from Graver about the other deaths, Redden was having second thoughts about the implications of the new schedule.

“Let’s get back to the guards,” Graver said. “When the client comes to the airport and gets on the plane with his money, does he have guards who go along to guarantee the delivery?”

“No, huh-uh. That’s not part of the deal. Kalatis hates high profile, hates all those guys strutting around carrying automatic shit. Deal is, when you bring your money on board Kalatis’s planes Kalatis is responsible from there on. If you don’t trust him by this time, don’t give him your money.”

“But what about traveling to the airport?”

“Kalatis allows the client to have two guards travel to the airport from the hotel. One of Kalatis’s men is with them. The plane is inside the hangar. We open the door, the car drives in. All the loading is done in here out of sight. The client’s heavies have to leave before we’ll take off.”

“Then there is one guard who makes the actual trip with the money.”

“Right.”

“Then Kalatis actually will have four guards at Las Copas.”

“Yeah, I guess that’d be right Three on the ground, one in the plane. But that one guard always stays with ‘his’ load. He goes on to Kalatis’s pier. That poor bastard’s life is tied to each box of money. If he loses one, he loses the other—sooner or later.”

“You don’t think there will be changes in the guards’ routines too, like there were in yours?”

“I can’t say about that I just know it wasn’t mentioned when we were going over the plans.”