DR07 - Dixie City Jam (48 page)

'Who's
we
, Clete?'

'Brother Oswald.' His voice changed when he said the words.
His eyes looked away from me, then at Lucinda and Zoot. Then he looked
at the deck. He lifted the bottle to his mouth.

'Why didn't you wait?' I said.

'For what? The guy to blow the country?'

'You could have waited,' I said.

'Get real, Streak. You nail this guy under a black flag or
he'll live to piss on your grave.'

'What's a black flag?' Zoot said.

Clete started to raise the Scotch again, then the color
drained out of his face and he went through the hatchway and threw up
over the stern. He came back inside, wiping his mouth with a towel.

'Excuse me, I swallowed some oil out there,' he said. 'When
the boat turned over, I hung on to it. Brother Oswald had on a life
preserver. He was drifting right past that stairs I was talking about.
He didn't come out north of the ship, either.'

'You mean he's onboard with Buchalter?' Lucinda said.

'The tide was coming in real strong. He couldn't be anywhere
else,' Clete said. 'I would have seen him. I know I would have.'

'I'll give our position to the Coast Guard,' I said.

'The old guy kept talking about Gog and Magog. What's Gog and
Magog?' Clete said.

'It's a biblical prophesy about the war between good and
evil,' I said.

'I don't know about no black flags and Magogs, but there's
something I ain't mention yet,' Zoot said.

We all stared at him. In the silence a wave broke across the
bow and streaked the glass.

'The radio don't work,' he said.

I was crouched behind Clete on the
steps of the small
passageway that gave onto the bow. He had put on my raincoat and a red
wool shirt he found in a closet. His big hands were clenched on the
stock and pump of the twelve-gauge shotgun. I could hear him breathing
with expectation.

He glanced backwards at me and started to smile. Then stopped.

'Why the scowl, mon?'

'This is your fault.'

'I don't read it that way.'

'Why didn't you go take care of Martina? Why'd you have to go
out on the salt with a fanatical old man?'

'I don't like what you're saying to me, Streak.'

'Too bad.'

'Remember the dude in New Iberia General? He got a hypodermic
load of roach paste. Buchalter
ends
here.'

I punched him on the shoulder with my finger.

'We need to understand something, Clete. You're not going to
re-create the O.K. Corral out here.'

He twisted around on his haunches.

'What do you want to do?' he said. 'Go all the way back to
land to notify the Coast Guard, then hope they're not a hundred miles
away? The old man's on his own up there. We go in there and blow up
their shit.'

I punched him with one finger, hard, on the shoulder again. He
turned and slapped my hand away, his green eyes suddenly disturbed and
dark, as though he were looking at someone he didn't know.

'This whole gig started with you tearing up the Calucci
brothers,' I said. 'It's not going to end that way. We're putting
Buchalter in a cage.'

'Tell it to the Rotary Club,' he said, and looked upward
toward the closed hatch.

We could hear Zoot cutting back the gas now, the exhaust pipes
throbbing at the waterline, echoing off the steel hull of the salvage
ship. Then we heard Lucinda making her way forward, picking up the
bowline off the deck, as though it were natural to tie onto the metal
steps that zigzagged down the side of the ship.

Clete eased the hatch upward a half inch.

'We found an injured man on an oil platform! We need your
radio!' Lucinda shouted.

There was no answer. We could hear the sounds of an air
compressor, a winch grinding, chains rattling through pulleys, a diesel
engine working hard.

'It's a boat hand who doesn't know what to do,' Clete said.
'He probably went for somebody else.' He looked back at me again.
'Lighten up. I figure no more than five of them, including the diver in
the water. Easy odds, mon.'

But the creases in the back of his neck were bright with
sweat, his knuckles white and ridged on the shotgun's stock.

'We're calling it in for you!' someone yelled down at Lucinda.

'I'm a nurse! I need to describe his condition! I think he's
had a coronary!'

'We're radioing your message! You can't come onboard!'

The hull bumped against the rubber tires that were roped to
the bottom of the steps.

'Repeat… You can't come onboard! No one but company
personnel are allowed! Your message is being transmitted!'

'This man may die!'

Clete's eyes were level with the crack between the deck and
the hatch.

'She's tying on. That broad's got ice water in her veins,' he
whispered. 'That's it, Lucinda, get on the steps, do it, do it, do it,
do it…'

'Mr. Dave, leave me something 'case I got to come after y'all.'

I turned around. It was Zoot, bent down below the level of the
passageway in the cabin.

'If it goes sour, partner, you get help,' I said.

It was very fast after that.

'Party time,' Clete said, and charged out onto the bow with
the shotgun at port arms.

Lucinda had already reached the top of the stairs and was on
the deck of the salvage ship, her .357 pointed straight out in front of
her with both hands, her hair whipping in the wind, while she shouted
at two paralyzed deckhands, 'Police officer, motherfucker! Down on your
face, hands laced behind your neck! Are you deaf? Down on your face!
Now! Or I blow your fucking head off!'

I hit the stairs running, right behind Clete, my .45 flopping
in the pocket of my field jacket. I had already chambered a round in
the AR-15, and my hand was squeezed tight on the grip and inside the
trigger guard, my thumb poised on the safety. I could hear waves
bursting against the stern and hissing along the hull.

The salvage ship was old, covered with tack welds, the
scuppers orange with corrosion, the paint blistered and soft and
flaking under the hand, the glass in the pilothouse oxidized and dirty
with oil. The hatch to the engine room was open, and from belowdecks I
could smell electrical odors, diesel fuel, stagnant water in a sump, a
salty, rotten stench like a rat that's been caught in machinery.

Lucinda was standing above the two deckhands, her weapon
moving back and forth between them while she worked her cuffs off her
belt. I took them from her hand, hooked up one man, pulled his arm
through a rail on the gate to the steps, then snipped the loose cuff on
the second man's wrist.

'Where's the old-timer?' I said.

One man was bald and wore a chin beard; the other had an empty
eye socket that was puckered and sealed shut as though it had been
touched with a hot instrument. The bald man twisted his head and looked
indifferently toward the south, where lightning was pulsating amid
muted thunder on the horizon.

'Look at me when I talk to you,' I said. 'Where's the old man?'

He slowly turned his head and let his eyes drift over both me
and Lucinda.

'Fuck you, nigger lover,' he said.

Then I heard Clete's weight shift above me and looked up just
as he threw the shotgun against his shoulder and aimed at a man in a
canvas coat and rain hood who stood in silhouette by the stern with a
blue-black automatic in his hand.

Clete fired twice. Part of the double-ought buckshot razored
lines of paint off the bulkhead like dry confetti, then the man in the
canvas coat was knocked backwards as though he had been jerked by an
invisible cable wrapped around his chest.

Clete ejected the spent easing onto the deck, pumped a fresh
round into the chamber, then pressed two more shells into the magazine
with his thumb.

'Three down,' he said. 'Streak, you and Lucinda go around the
bow. I'll come up the other side. Watch the bridge. Don't let 'em get
behind you.'

He didn't wait for an answer. He moved toward the stern,
bearlike, his shotgun back at port arms, his scalp showing white in the
wind, his utilities stiff with salt.

Lucinda glanced down at the cabin cruiser, which was rolling
in the swells while Zoot kept gunning the engines to keep the stern
from swinging into the salvage ship's hull.

'He's all right,' I said. 'My dad used to always say, "Don't
ever treat brave people as less than what they are."'

'Cover your own ass,' she said.

We moved toward the bow. I could feel the deck vibrating under
me from the machinery roaring on the other side of the ship. I paused
at the steps that led onto the pilothouse, worked my way up them until
I could see inside, then moved quickly through the open hatch.

I looked at the shape in the corner and lowered my rifle. I
heard Lucinda behind me.

'Oh God,' she said.

'Check the starboard side,' I said, and knelt next to Brother
Oswald. He lay on top of an oil-grimed tarp, his poached, round face
filled with the empty, stunned, disbelieving expression that I had seen
once in the faces of villagers who had been killed by airbursts in a
rice field.

A switchblade knife, a made-in-Korea gut-ripper that you can
buy for five dollars in Laredo, had been driven to the hilt just above
his right lung. He had pressed a rag around the wound, and the rag had
become sodden and congealed as though it had been dipped in red paint.
I put my ear to his mouth and felt his breath touch my skin.

'We're going to medevac you out of here, partner,' I said.
'You hear me? We're going to secure the ship, then have you on a
chopper in no time.'

His tongue stuck to his mouth when he tried to speak. I leaned
down close to his face again. His breath smelled like dried flowers.

'… after the wrong one,' he whispered.

'I don't understand,' I said.

'Hit's the woman… She can speak in
tongues… I heard her talk on the radio…'

'Who did this to you, Reverend?'

His lips moved, but no sound came out. His pale eyes looked
like they were drowning.

'I can't see anybody on the starboard side,' Lucinda said.

I raised Brother Oswald's head with my palm, bunched up the
tarp like a pillow, then turned his head sideways so his mouth could
drain. I picked up the AR-15. The plastic stock felt cold and light and
smooth in my hands.

'You know how to get the Coast Guard on the radio?' I said to
Lucinda.

'Yes.'

'Tell them we're thirty miles south of Grand Isle. Describe
the two oil platforms, and they'll know where to go.'

She nodded toward Brother Oswald, the question in her face.

I
don't know
, I said with my lips.

A moment later I crossed the deck in front of the pilothouse.
I stepped out into the open, the iron sights of the AR-15 aimed at
whoever might be standing between me and the stern.

But there was no one, except Clete Purcel, who was on one
knee, his back toward me, amid a tangle of hoses, ropes, scuba and
acetylene tanks, and salvage nets in pools of water. Two giant side
booms towered above him, their cables almost bursting with the great
weight anchored to them. Then beneath the sliding waves, the foam
curling off the stern, the clouds of seaweed in the swells, glowing
dimly under a bank of underwater lamps, I saw the long, tapered outline
of the U-boat. It looked like the top of an enormous sand shark that
had been torn out of the silt. I could see the forward deck gun shaggy
with moss and crustaceans, air bubbles stringing from the torpedo tubes
in the bow, the crushed steel flanges at the top of the conning tower,
and the indistinct and dull glimmer of a swastika painted on the plates.

Clete's right arm was working furiously at a task that his
body concealed from view. Then I saw the gasoline-powered generator and
the air compressor just beyond where he was crouched on the deck, and I
realized what he was doing.

I ran toward him, the rifle hanging loosely from my hand. With
his single-bladed Case knife he had already sawed halfway through the
air hose and the safety rope attached to it. The escaping pressure had
blown a bare spot on the deck like a clean burn.

'Don't do it, Clete!'

'Too late, mon. Buchalter is about to do the big gargle.' He
stood erect, ripped his knife through the remainder of the hose, and
flung it like a severed snake into the water.

I stared over the side. Framed in silhouette against the bank
of underwater lights, just aft of the conning tower, was a steel-mesh
diver's platform, held aloft by a cable. In the middle of the platform,
a diver in canvas suit, weighted boots, and hard hat was looking upward
frantically, while a forgotten acetylene torch bounced like a sparkler
across the sub's deck and the severed air hose spun limply downward
into the darkness.

I dropped the rifle to the deck and tried to work the levers
on the winch and spool that controlled the cable to the platform. I
pushed the levers the wrong way, then corrected them and felt the
engine buck into gear and start to retrieve the diver from below.

'Sorry, Dave, but this is one time you're wrong,' Clete said,
pulling a fire ax from the wall above me. He tore all the connecting
wires out of the winch's engine. Suddenly the spool locked in place,
and the cable squeaked and oscillated slightly from side to side at the
tip of the boom and trembled rigidly at the waterline. Then he swung
the ax overhand into the spool and sheared the cable as neatly as you
would coat hanger wire. It whipped free from the pulley on the boom and
disappeared beneath the waves.

'It's homicide, Clete.'

'The hell it is. There's still at least one guy loose. All I
did was keep a player off the board.'

But the story under the waves wasn't over. The platform had
tipped sideways before it plummeted to the bottom, and the diver had
managed to land on the deck, just behind the conning tower. I could see
the brass helmet, the face glass, and the white hands waving in the
tidal current, like a cartoon figure struggling at the bottom of a well.