Buzz Cut (14 page)

"Those kids, they're an addiction for me now," Butler said. "You know that word? Addiction?"

She sighed. "Spare me, okay."

The black woman went into the bathroom and a businessman in a crisp white shirt and red tie took her place. He smiled at her and Monica gave him back a stinger look.

"Addiction is from the Latin
addiccrc
,
dicere.
Means to sentence. To adjudge. In Roman law it meant you were bound over to judicial review. Eventually the word went off another way. Started to mean attached to, or devoted like an adherent, a disciple. Amazing how many words have God hidden in them. God or Christ. Religion.

"So anyway, addiction is the right word for it. These kids are my sentence. They're my devotion, my punishment. Helping feed all those kids. Like the children out in your father's yard, the workers' kids, families barely scraping by. I'm giving them the silver dollars in that ice turkey, no tricks, no humiliation. Twenty bucks a month, do with it what they will."

The businessman caught enough of Butler's spiel to roll his eyes at Monica. You wanna come sit with me, honey, shake loose from the wacko, you're more than welcome.

She leaned toward Butler, keeping her voice low. "Fifty thousand a month?"

"Been at it for seven months now. Over three hundred and fifty thousand so far. Your daddy knows I'm out here. He's got people looking for me full time."

"But they haven't caught you?"

"I'm smarter than they are. And I know the M.S.
Eclipse
inside and out. It's a carbon copy of the ship I worked on for years. I know every cranny. One cruise a month, I walk on just like any other passenger. Nobody recognizes me because they don't know who they're looking for. Every five days the ship takes on two thousand new passengers. What're they going to do, memorize every face? Check for repeaters? Anyway, I use different names, wear a disguise, keep to myself. Don't wander the decks unless I have to. It's not hard."

The businessman shook his head, giving up on her. He stepped aside for the black woman, then slipped into the toilet. Butler had a taste of his apple juice. Patted his lips.

"There's violence involved," he said. "You should know that."

She was silent.

"Just so you know," Butler said. "I do whatever it takes. I have no compunctions."

"Well," she said. "I'm not big on compunctions myself."

"The Latin stem of
compitiijjcrc
means prick sharply or sting. It's where we get pungent. So compunction literally means a pricking of the conscience. That feeling when you've done something wrong. That's how you know what you're doing is right. You don't get pricked."

Monica tore open a packet of pretzels, shook out a handful.

"The last few months," he said, "I've been setting things up. Sooner or later no matter how good I am, law of averages says they'll catch me. So I'm going to make one big score, disappear for a while. I've been using the cruises to plant my devices. Sneak around at night, three in the morning, I can go anywhere I want. That and dry dock."

The passenger in front of her, an older lady, reclined her seat all the way. Getting interested in the conversation.

"Devices?"

"I started out in the Coast Guard. Flew choppers for two years, spotting Cuban rafters in the Straits. I was studying electronics the whole time. After that I became an apprentice engineer for Fiesta. Lola got me the job but I worked hard. I earned my pay. I was about to make chief. I was on my way up, learning things, how the ship works. All its systems, its vulnerabilities. Every ship has them. No matter how many backup systems they have, there are always weak spots, entry points."

Butler turned his head and smiled at her.

"What happened? Why aren't you still with them?"

His smile collapsed. "I got screwed is what happened. I got screwed big time."

He pulled a magazine out of the seat flap, fanned through the pages. Fanned through them again, stuffed the magazine back.

He smoothed his hands over his face, until a faint smile appeared. He folded his hands into his lap.

"Sorry," he said. "Sorry."

"I've never been on a cruise," she said. "Daughter of the great Morton Sampson, but somehow I managed to avoid it. Never had the desire."

"Oh, it's fun, you'll like it."

"Fun," she said. "I'm not even sure what that is anymore."

"There's some disagreement. Could be Middle English for
fonne,
which means fool. Or Latin for cheat or hoax. Either way, fun is rebellion, breaking the rules."

"Not from fungus? You're sure?"

He looked over at her, nothing on his face. As though all the muscles below the tissue had dissolved. His lips moved like he was translating her words into a tongue he understood. The man was smart in flashes. Had a sexy streak. But there seemed to be dead spots too, air pockets.

"A joke," she said.

"I know that."

He raked his long hair away from his face. A striking man, but not handsome in any classic sense. A man who grew on you. The blue eyes, the sharp nose. Lips so perfectly formed they looked stenciled. Reminding her of some painting Monica had studied once in the foggy long-ago.

The businessman came out of the toilet, started chatting up the flight-attendant in her kitchen cubbyhole. Letting her know what a big-time traveler he was, knew all the frequent flyer lingo.

She looked back at Butler. His eyes were closed, cheek against the headrest, face turned her way. She remembered what painting it was. A course in religious art Monica's junior year. Dali's
Tlje Sacrament of the Last Supper.
An early Dali, before he got surreal. No clocks melting over branches. This was a simple blond Jesus with a cheap dye job. Beardless and fleshy. A man who'd clearly enjoyed his final meal and now had risen to give his after-dinner speech. Dark eyebrows that clashed with the orange-blond hair. A celestial light rising behind him. His right hand was lifted and his pointing finger was raised, the second finger uncurling as though he were listing a few things for his disciples to remember later on. Or perhaps he was about to make a V with those two fingers. Victory.

Maybe she had the details a little off, her memory fuzzy. But she clearly remembered the hair color. A cheap dye job, the powder-white skin, a bland, unworried look. Dali's Jesus. Half saint, half huckster. Some air pockets there too.

"Those organizations," she said. "Like the one you're sending your money to, they're famous for ripping people off. A dollar of every twenty might get to Lucy. The rest buys fancy houses, Mercedes for the administrators."

He opened his eyes. "You're cynical."

"I'm realistic."

"You have to believe in something," he said. "I believe my twenty dollars is getting through to Lucy."

"Believing it doesn't make it true."

He looked at her, smiled indulgently, patted her arm. "Sure it does, sweetness. Sure it does."

"Look," she said. "I haven't decided what I'm doing. I'm going along with you to Baltimore, but I haven't made up my mind what I'm doing next. I may just get out in Baltimore, start over from there. So don't get your hopes up."

"Fine," he said. "Take your time. No pressure."

She stared down at the hand resting on her arm, at the silver prongs on the tips of his first two fingers.

In Baltimore they got a cab, sailed north for half an hour, then five miles from the Bethlehem Shipyard at Sparrow Point, the highway gridlocked behind a three-car pileup. Giving Butler a chance to study the countryside as the car crept along. Little squat houses of red brick smudged with coal dust, duplexes and triplexes and octoplexes. Graveyards and junkyards and thrifty gas stations. A half-assed Penney's Mall, Fabric Warehouses, National Guard Armory, lumbermills, more junkyards, a couple of chemical plants.

The cold air smelled like mineral spirits, a chemical fog hovering over the dismal marshes, not a bird in sight. A raw wind out of the northwest, rust-colored sunlight. They'd shipped all the industry to Mexico and Taiwan, and this was all that was left behind, that wretched air. Probably some twenty-dollar-a-month kids around there. A lot of them. He decided he would have to look into it.

By the time the cab pulled into the Bethlehem Shipyards it was almost two in the afternoon, and they'd run up a fifty-dollar fare. He told the old black driver to wait. Might take as much as an hour, but if things went smoothly, he'd be back in half that. Told Monica she'd have to stay there too. She was too damn attractive for this place, people would notice. Remember later.

"What kind of business you in," the taxi driver said, "you don't mind my asking?"

In the rearview mirror Butler Jack stared into the man's eyes. Then he turned to Monica and extended his right hand toward her, displayed the silver prongs, the rubber cups attaching them to his fingertips. Rotated his hand, let her examine the Velcro cuff holding the wires in place, the small button in the palm of his hand, like that practical joke buzzer. Shake hands, get a buzz. Slowly he curled his thumb and two fingers into a fist, kept the two fingers spread. Pressed the buzzer and activated the sputtering charge. A little exhibition. Just so she knew.

"Never mind," the old man said. "You go do your business, whatever it may be, I'll be sitting right here when you come back. You can count on that."

Butler lilted his hand and pressed the sizzle of voltage to the old man's neck. Monica gasped and watched the man stiffen and slump forward against the wheel.

"Jesus Christ!"

"It's all right," Butler said. "He'll be fine. Sleep for an hour. By then I'll be back."

"You didn't need to do that. Holy shit."

"You shouldn't curse. It doesn't reflect well on you."

Butler got out, unzipped his gym bag, drew out the blue jumpsuit. He slipped into it, put on his baseball cap. Leaned back into the cab and told her good-bye.

Carrying the gym bag, Butler headed down the broken asphalt drive past twenty or so Indonesians huddled in coats too thin for the weather. They were waiting by the employment shed, day laborers, prepared to lick the grease off a hot griddle if that's what it took to get their dollar.

The Indonesians eyed him as he walked past the checkpoint, the guard looking up from his desk inside the little hut, seeing Butler was a white man in a blue jumpsuit and a baseball cap, waving him on through. Weren't many places on earth you couldn't walk into with that uniform, a tool kit in hand.

Butler ambled past three warehouses with high-up windows, most of them broken. Past the machine shops, the welding pit, around a curvy lane and out into a patch of dreary sunlight.

The five ships were sitting side by side, each one settled onto enormous wooden chocks. An oil tanker, and four cruise ships. Cost over a hundred thousand to haul a ship that big out of the water. Add in another million lost from taking it out of service for a few days, and that's why the shipyards operated twenty-four hours a day, always crawling with workmen.

Picking his way across the power cables and water hoses, under the spotlight scaffolding, the dock slick with oil and mud, Butler didn't draw a look from any of the other workers. Passed through gangs of them smoking, worked his way out to the last two docks where the
Statendam,
a midsize cruise ship, was perched. Beside it was a monster ship, twice its size. The
Juggernaut,
a Liberian-registered supertanker, one of the half-dozen largest crude oil carriers sailing the earth. Longer than two aircraft carriers end to end, four hundred thousand tons of steel, every spare inch of the ship was hollowed out so it could carry more oil.

Empty out the crude that ship carried, you could coat every beach in Florida an inch deep, you'd still have enough black sludge left over to fill all the swimming pools in Miami.

Once a week the
Juggernaut
loaded up at an offshore facility near Freeport, sailed around the tip of Florida to the Galveston refineries. Butler had her schedule, a printout of her weekly course chart. Knew the route she'd sail back down the East Coast from Baltimore to the Bahamas. Had the mile-by-mile global positioning bearings, Loran coordinates, everything.

A ship as big as that, you'd think it would take a hundred men to keep it operating. But nine was all it carried. Four of them on duty at any given moment. The others doing sack time, playing gin rummy, their dicks in their fists.

Because the
Juggernaut
sailed the same short hop every week, they could get by with a very low tech bridge. Magnetic compass, speed log, position reference system, all fed through a digital autopilot. Ten years behind the techno-curve. A four-hundred-thousand-ton, single-hull floating tar pit operated by poorly paid Chinamen, only a couple with any piloting skills. The whole operation guided by a navigational system only slightly more sophisticated than the one on the
Pinta,
the
Nina,
the
Santa Maria.
Everybody raised hell about the damage off-shore drilling could do; well, they should get load of the
Juggernaut,
seven days a week cruising a couple of miles offshore, a hull that would rip like paper if it brushed a reef.

Butler Jack took the gangway down to the floor of the dry dock. A dozen men in heavy coats standing around looking up at a welder on a crane showering sparks around the enormous props. The welder in his late teens, early twenties.

Butler stood next to a man in a bomber jacket.

Guy took a look at Butler but didn't say anything. Sparks flying all around them. Man was in his late fifties, baggy eyes, a day's beard.

"The shield around the propeller shaft spring another leak?"

"That's right," the man said.

"Third time it's been in for that," Butler said. "Maybe this time they'll get it right."