Fires of Midnight (4 page)

Authors: Jon Land

BOOK: Fires of Midnight

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“I can’t. Not yet, anyway.”

“I’m more interested in your organism, Doctor,” General Starr said. “Have you been able to identify it yet?”

“Only in terms of its baffling behavioral traits. No trace of it has been found in any of the bodies, meaning the organism likely dies when it is denied sustenance, in this case blood. A remarkably short and deadly life span, as borne out by the fact that the mall was actually clean, or safe, when I first entered.”

“But you’ve maintained a limited quarantine anyway,” from Clare Benedict.

“Standard procedure when dealing with any Biosafety Level Four hot agent. We don’t know all the rules it plays by, and until we do we like to err on the side of caution.”

“Then you can’t rule out entry by hostile action,” persisted General Starr.

“But I can’t rule it in, either. At this point it’s just one of the possibilities we’re considering. Equally likely is the fact that we’re facing a microbreak of unparalleled dimensions.”

“Hostile action, microbreak, or whatever,” Starr continued, “just how was this agent, organism, or whatever you want to call it introduced into the mall? And what stopped it from getting out?”

“Precisely what I’ve got to find out next, sir.”

THREE

“Y
ou’re late,” said Harry Lime, his face caught in the dull glow of the video game’s screen. “I was running out of quarters.” McCracken checked his watch. Lime had asked to meet him at Captain Hornblower’s on Front Street in Key West’s Old Town section at nine P.M. Located a few blocks off Duval Street at the foot of Mallory Square, the bar was a bit shabby, not as trendy as its neighbors and therefore not as crowded. At this early hour, the outside tables were filled, but inside there was plenty of seating in the booths as well as stools set before the bar. A badly painted sign near the entrance advertised live jazz for the weekend just ended. The building’s facade was painted white but much of it had peeled away to reveal the previous gray color.

Blaine had entered unobtrusively through the open front and found Harry focused on the bar’s lone video game. Harry tilted the joystick hard to the right and Blaine saw his digital watch read nine-thirty, running thirty minutes fast, a holdover from his old flying days to make sure he was never late.

Air America had been set up back in the sixties to win the good graces of Laotian, Cambodian and Vietnamese warlords so they might aid in the war effort. Air America pilots flew drugs, guns, just about anything anywhere out of Ton Sun Nyut Airbase to keep the warlords happy. These pilots also doubled as ferrymen for the Phoenix teams’ impossible missions.
If men like McCracken were crazy enough to try, the saying went, then Air America was crazy enough to fly.

But none were as crazy as Harry Lime. Another pilot who’d been stateside long enough to know
Star Trek
christened him the man who went where no man had gone before. By Southeast Asian standards it was true, never more so than when he was working with the team led by Blaine McCracken and Johnny Wareagle, the giant mystical Indian who to this day remained only a phone call away for Blaine and sometimes even closer.

The game flashed GAME OVER and Lime whacked it in frustration.

“I got the record on this thing. Wanna see my initials?”

“Later maybe.”

“You get to type them in when you set it. There, I think if we wait a few more seconds you’ll see them. I got three of the top five scores ever.” Harry seemed to finally register Blaine’s answer. “Later, then.”

He collected the rest of his neatly stacked quarters and led Blaine away to a table in the rear. As near as McCracken could tell, Harry was wearing the same Hawaiian shirt he’d had on that afternoon. Only the lei was missing.

“Careful when you sit down,” he cautioned when they reached the table squeezed between the bar and a counter that opened into the kitchen. Blaine saw on the table an incredibly intricate one-story house Harry had fashioned by stacking cigarettes in symmetrical layers. He’d just started work on a surrounding fence when the video game had captured his attention. Five empty beer bottles littered the table as well.

“How long have you been here, Harry?”

“I don’t know. Came straight here after we landed at Turnbull. Didn’t want to be late.”

That would make almost three hours, Blaine calculated. He slid into his chair, careful not to disturb Harry’s house of Marlboros. The bar was old-fashioned, Key West-style enough to make Hemingway proud, featuring typical island fare such as Key lime pie, fish specialties and an assortment of tropical drinks, attractions that were lost on the other patrons who were in the bar when McCracken entered. He’d felt their eyes upon him, tightening either with recognition or concern as he approached Harry. He knew the kind of men they were from those eyes and stares, at least the kind of men they used to be.

“Recognize any of them?” Harry asked, realizing Blaine’s gaze had strayed toward his friends again.

“Should I?”

“The Nam was a bigger country than people realize.” Harry gestured at a Hemingway look-alike sitting at the bar next to a pitcher of Cuba Libre. “That’s Papa. Can’t tell you his real name. He was in White Star
out of Cambodia.” He turned his gaze on three men seated at a table waiting for their dinners to come, all their chairs cocked so they could watch McCracken. “Them there are Jim Beam, Captain Jack and Johnny Walker—we call him Red for short. Traded in their real names for what they drink.”

Only then did Blaine notice that each had a bottle of his namesake waiting expectantly near the glasses they were cradling. He’d known lots of men who had drowned themselves in booze since the war, but these were swimming in it. He hoped they knew how far they could venture out before they went under.

“And that guy,” Harry continued, eyeing a man in a bathrobe standing against one of the exposed beams as if he were part of the structure, “we call him the Sandman.”

“Because of the bathrobe?”

“Because that’s what he did in the Nam, Captain: put people to sleep. Something like you. Only he crashed a little harder. Six of us, the original Key West Irregulars. That’s what the locals call us, anyway. We take care of each other, look out for one another. Sometimes that means making sure a man’s got his booze.” Harry’s voice started to drift. “Sometimes it means a lot more. I told ’em you were coming. They thought I was making it up.

“And don’t let the fancy menu worry you,” Harry continued, noticing Blaine’s eyes straying to the blackboard listing tonight’s specials. “This place is all right. Serve good food, pour a good drink and leave you alone. So do the tourists, ’cept in the real busy season.” Harry pushed his chair in a little closer to the table. “Thing is, any place worth drinking in’s gotta cater a little to tourists or they can forget about making the rent.”

“How have you been making the rent?”

“Got my commercial pilot’s license—you believe that?”

McCracken tried not to let the shock show through on his features. The thought of Crazy Harry flying a plane full of people was enough to chill his blood.

“Don’t worry, Captain.” Harry smiled, reading his mind. “I don’t carry no passengers. Zantop Airlines has an exclusive contract with me.”

“Oh,” Blaine said.

Zantop might have been duly registered as a commercial airline, but it had never carried a single passenger. Instead it functioned as the offspring of the old Air America, ferrying drugs and weapons from Florida’s Patrick Airforce Base to various locations in Central and South America. Once again there were important people to be won over. Certain countries in that area were powder kegs waiting to burn and the right people in the United States wanted the right people on their side when the matches lit. The argument went, according to those of the old school, that these countries were a hell of a lot closer to home than Southeast Asia.

“Lucky for you I was laid over today. Got the word you were down there and hauled ass,” Harry said, and plucked a Marlboro off the top of his cigarette house’s roof. He stuck it in his mouth and began working it from side to side. “Was like old times today, wasn’t it, Captain?”

“It was at that, Harry.”

“You and me, we been there and back, ain’t we? Wasn’t for me hearing you needed a pickup, you’d still be wasting away in that shithole of a country.”

“That’s for sure.”

Lime was playing with his house, not sure how to proceed. He fidgeted and twitched, turning about suddenly as if he’d forgotten where he was. Relaxed when he remembered and sat back.

“Hey, you want something to drink? I got a tab here.”

“Let’s talk first.”

“Sure.”

“On the plane you said something had happened.”

Harry’s face was blank. “I told you …”

“Yes.”

“I shouldn’t have. It’s my problem.”

“We’re friends. That makes it mine, too.”

“You mean that?”

“I mean it.”

“What did I tell you?” Harry asked, with his head angled slightly to the side.

“Not much else. Just that something had happened. I got the idea you needed my help.”

Lime shook his head and looked down, chin cradled on his chest. When he looked up again, his eyes were watery.

“It’s a sad thing. And wrong. What they done.”

“What’d they do? What was wrong?”

“My son,” said Harry. “Josh.”

Blaine looked up at that.

“He’s gone. They took him.”

Blaine just sat there, listening.

“Tough thing raising a kid by yourself. You remember when Maggie died. You came to the funeral.”

“Funeral …”

“Yeah.”

“Sad day.”

“The worst. Kid needed me, so I came out of it. What the fuck you gonna do, right, Captain? You go on. You get over it, least past it, and you go on.”

“That’s all you can do.”

A smile flirted with Harry’s lips but tears continued to shadow his expression. “Everyone came to the funeral, all the old guard. It was like fucking goddamn Ton Sun Nyut all over again. A regular reunion. Coulda served Khe Sanh pie instead of Key lime. Was a better occasion, we woulda had a ass-kicking shithouse of a time.”

“The kid,” Blaine said.

“Smart bastard, lot smarter than his old dad, lemme tell ya.” His eyes shook suddenly, mind veering. “I need another beer.” A waitress saw Harry’s upraised hand and came over. He ordered two Rolling Rocks. “I like the color of the bottle,” he explained to McCracken. “Green. Drink the beer out of it and you can think it’s green, too.”

“Sure.” Blaine uneasy now.

“I miss Maggie, Captain, but I was used to that. I’m not used to missing Josh.”

“What happened?”

“They came and took him. Stole him. Happened a few months back, ’fore I came down here.”

McCracken took a deep breath, steeling himself. “Look, Harry, I, I …” His voice trailed off.

“What is it, Captain?” asked Lime, looking hopeful.

Blaine sighed. “Who took him, the kid, I mean?”

“Don’t know. He was just … gone. You should come to my house, see his room. I taught him video games. Then he kicks my ass ’til I start getting pissed off. Then he lets me win and I get more pissed off. You never got married?”

“No.”

“You missed out.” Harry’s expression was changing every second now, like he couldn’t decide how he wanted to feel. “Not too late. Gotta help me find Josh first, though. Gotta help me get him back.”

Blaine nodded enough to reassure his old friend. “I’ll make some calls, ask some questions.”

“You will?”

“Just said I would.”

“When?”

“Tonight. Soon as I can get to a phone.”

The tears in Harry’s eyes were happy ones now. He could barely contain his smile. “You’re the man, Captain. You always were the man. You’ll meet me tomorrow, first thing. Let me know what you find out.”

“Sure.”

“Did I give you my address? I don’t remember if I did.”

“Not yet.”

“I’ll write it down.” Lime felt his pockets for a pen, his mind drifting. “Hey, be something if we got the old gang together to go after him, wouldn’t it? You, me, your giant Indian friend … er …”

“Johnny Wareagle,” Blaine completed for him.

“Right. Johnny.” Lime looked agitated now. “I can get us a plane.”

“Hopefully it won’t come to that.”

“Yeah, times is different.”

Harry struck the table hard enough to collapse the walls of his Marlboro house. He spit the cigarette in his mouth onto the pile.

“You can have the shirt off my back and the balls from my sack, Captain. Harry Lime goes where no man has gone before and you’re gonna go there one more time with me.”

“That’s a fact,” Blaine said, hoping Harry didn’t pick up the uneasy edge in his voice.

“W
hat the fuck you want?”

“Nice greeting, Sal,” Blaine said to Sal Belamo.

“That you, Boss?”

“Good to hear your voice, too.”

“Hey, boss, it goes like this. Got four movie stations on my cable box now and access to those pay movies, too. You ask me,
that’s
fucking progress. Trouble is I haven’t been able to watch one all the way through yet, ’cause the fucking phone keeps ringing. I had more time to kill when I was inside the fucking loop. What am I paying—maybe fifty bucks a month for all this shit?—and I ain’t seen a flick from beginning to end.”

“Don’t want to spoil your average tonight, now, do you?”

“Try me.”

“Need you to run something down.”

“What the fuck … shoot.”

“Ever hear me talk about Harry Lime?”

“Sure. Old Air America pilot saved your ass more times than even I have.”

“He just saved it again today. Get the file on him, much as you can and as recent as they got it.”

“Anything specific in mind, boss?”