Spiral (20 page)

"Uhmmm." Rubio's tone was skeptical.

Bias took a deep breath, the stench of creosote and bad mud.

They watched the docks, and were looking in the wrong direction when an inboard launch emerged from under Sherman Bridge, its powerful engines grumbling in the heavy water as it steered into the center of the channel. When it was a hundred yards away it turned slightly toward them, approaching at a shallow angle, throttling back its engines until they finally stopped as the launch drifted into the overhanging weeds in front of them. Then silence.

It was too dark at the margin of weeds and water for Bias to see what was happening. He could see the far side of the launch sitting quietly, bobbing in the ripples of its own wake. He saw no movement on board.

Rubio moved the safety on his Mac-10 and concentrated hard on the weeds above the launch. They heard footsteps on the fiberglass hull, and then someone jumped. They could hear one man breaking dry weeds as he climbed the bank.

"Fuckin' weeds," the man said, his head breaking the plane of tangled undergrowth, and then the whole man stepped out onto the caliche. He was wearing a port authority uniform and a gimme cap with an NRA patch. "Hey, boys," he grunted in a low voice, looking at them. He was stocky, his stomach straining the buttons of the uniform, and his sleeves were rolled up tight over lumpy muscles. "Ya'll sure you're in the right place? I was expectin' a particular friend. You boys sure ain't him."

"We are with the Teco Corporation," Bias said, using the prearranged wording. "Ireno Lopez spoke for us."

The man looked at them a moment, sizing them up. Then said, "Oh. Well, I guess you know what you're doin'."

Bias relaxed a little, but not too much. He was afraid if the man didn't do everything in exactly the right, magical way prefigured in Rubio's psyche, the Indian would blow him back into the launch.

"Just the two of you?" the man asked.

"Yes."

"Good," he said. "I'm Tucky Waite." He extended his hand and shook with Bias, and then with Rubio, who almost didn't go along with it. "You boys got names? I like to know names."

"My name is Bias, this is Rubio." Goddam Texans, he thought. How he hated their familiarity. It was as if it never entered their heads that someone might not like them. Bias caught the smell, the salty stink of beer and old sweat.

"I'm by myself in that boat there," Waite volunteered, hitching up his pants. "Took me a second to get it tied up, too." He grinned at them. He was in his late thirties. When he reached up to tilt back the bill of his cap and scratch a sweat-plastered hairline, Bias saw the black image of a tattoo on his thick forearm. "Nobody follered you on the island far as we could tell," he said. "Everythang seem okay to you?"

Bias nodded. As a matter of fact, it did, but who was "we"?

"Okay. Lissen, back there at Shanghai Red's there's a black-'n'- silver '85 Chevy pickup truck in the parkin' lot. You go back in there and foller that boy out. We gonna have to get to a little better place to do our rat killin'." He looked at Rubio's Mac-10. "Nice little guns." He sucked at a tooth thoughtfully. "But you ain't gonna need it, I don't thank. Tell you the truth, those thangs make me kinda nervous." He gave Rubio a slow grin, and winked. He threw a look at Bias as he turned and started back into the weeds. "Just foller the truck. I'll meetcha there."

"How far is it?" Bias asked.

"Not far," Waite said from the darkness. They heard him crashing through the weeds, and then the hollow thunk as he hit the fiberglass hull of the launch.

When they got back to the parking lot, the pickup was already pulling out of one of the aisles. It was jacked up on mud wheels, and a whip antenna mounted on the side of the bed behind the driver was bent over and snapped into a catch beside the rain gutter. Two chrome fog lights were mounted on top of the cab.

Bias stayed a short distance behind the truck, leaving enough space to avoid being pinned in if someone cut them off from behind. The cross streets and trees grew sparse, then disappeared altogether and gave way to flat, grassy stretches littered with occasional abandoned sheds and shacks, and pieces of rusting machinery. They crossed two rail spurs and moved into the tinted glow of a chemical plant and oil company terminal whose tower lights reflected off the clouds of their own effluent.

The long ascent of the Sherman Bridge on Loop 610 rose in front of them, and they passed under it, coming once again into streets and trees and houses, a shabby district of shotgun shacks, a few bars and cafes and vacant lots surrounded by a shallow loop of the ship channel, wharves, a rail terminal, and Sims Bayou.

An arm came out of the driver's window of the pickup and indicated a left turn. Bias followed, but dropped farther back.

"Why didn't he use his blinker?" Rubio asked warily.

Bias shook his head. He was wondering too. He had carefully watched the side streets, waiting for the tail that never appeared.

Again the arm came out of the pickup window, this time a right turn. They were entering the wharves now, rows of sheds, and alleyways and beyond that the mammoth cylindrical profiles of oil storage tanks. They passed the warehouses and slowed to an idling crawl as they came into a long corridor of tanks. In the crossaisles Bias could see an occasional small pier on the channel, less than a hundred yards away.

When the pickup turned into one of the aisles, Bias and Rubio lowered their windows. The car filled with the sour air from the petrochemical plants and refineries farther down the channel toward Pasadena. They stopped at the last storage tank on the aisle. In front of them a small road, white with crushed shell, ran along the edge of the channel where a short wooden pier jutted into the water. At the end of the pier Bias saw a tin shed, and the rear of the launch peeping out of the shed.

The pickup door opened and a gangly young man stepped down out of the cab and looked back at them. He also wore the ubiquitous gimme cap, and a dark T-shirt tucked into jeans which were themselves tucked into high-topped cowboy boots. His jeans were cinched to his thin hips by a western belt that sported a buckle half as big as a hubcap. As he looked at them, he reached into his hip pocket, took out a round tin of Skol, and put a pinch into his bottom lip. Then he started toward them.

Bias opened the door and got out before the young man reached the front of the car.

"Ya'll ready?" the kid asked.

"Yes."

"Okay. Tucky's down there in that shed. He's got what you're lookin' for."

"Is he alone?"

The kid nodded. "Your man goin' with us?" He looked at Rubio in the car.

"No." Bias motioned for Rubio to get out and said, "I think the two of you need to stay here. I'll go alone."

"That's not how Tucky said we was gonna do it," the kid said solemnly. His bottom lip was stretched tight, holding in the Skol.

"I can't leave the car alone," Bias explained.

The kid looked at him with an uncertain frown, and gave a flashing glance at the rental car. The jaundiced reflected light that filled the sky rippled across his face as the clouds from the chemical plant drifted like a foul fog above them. "I see what you mean," he said.

Bias was sure he didn't, but it was a good sign that he wasn't going to make it a point of protest. Then in the sky-glow Bias saw the wire, and the plug in the kid's ear. He was sure, too, that he was hiding a transmitter as well. These people were careful.

Rubio leaned against the fender of the car and laid the Mac-10 across the hood. The kid looked at it, looked at Rubio, then at Bias.

"When you get out there on the pier, stick to the right side," he said. "They's some shaky boards about halfway to the shed." He looked Bias over. "You ain't takin' a Mac," he said. It wasn't a question.

Bias didn't respond, knowing the kid had said it for the benefit of Waite on the receiving end of his wire. He looked at Rubio and then started toward the crushed-shell road. As he crossed, he looked both ways. To his left, the city; to his right, a weedy stretch of flat bayou bottom, and a little farther down scattered freight cars on the edge of a rail terminal.

He had no doubt there were others out there, not just the redneck and the skinny youth. He kept to the right as instructed, and approached the dark opening of the shed. As he got closer he made out the green glow of a kerosene lantern shimmering off the water onto the shed ceiling. He paused ten feet from the opening.

"Come on in," he heard Waite say. "It's all right."

There were moments in every operation when you openly subjected yourself to blind risk. There was no other way to do it, if it was going to be done. You put your trust in something senseless, and you had no right to expect what you hoped you would get. These were the moments he used to live for, but now he only feared them. His mouth filled with the dreaded and familiar taste of iodine as the image of Teodoro, firing and falling under the roaring limousine, played across the green haze that filled the doorway.

As he stepped inside, he saw the stocky hulk of Waite sitting on the prow of the launch, one foot on the pier. He quickly surveyed the layout of the shed. There wasn't much, only the pier and the launch. Unless someone was hiding in there, they were alone. The only sounds were the soft lapping of water against the fiberglass hull and the hissing of the lantern which hung by a wire from one of the rafters.

"This is the sticky part." Waite grinned.

"I need to see what you've got, first," Bias said. He saw the wire coming out of Waite's shirt pocket and snaking up to his ear.

"At's what I mean." Waite laughed. "I wanta see what
you
got."

Bias began unbuttoning his shirt and pulled it open to reveal the money belt.

"Well, I'll be goddamned," Waite said, genuinely surprised. "Just like that." He stood and stepped over to one of the stubby pilings. Grabbing a cotton cord, he hoisted up a crab basket and plopped it up on the pier. He squatted down over the basket and took out a brick-shaped package wrapped in black polyethylene. From a scabbard on his belt he took a single-blade K-Bar knife and flipped it open. With a delicate flick of the blade, he made a clean three-inch hole in the plastic. He stood and stepped back, grinning at Bias.

Bias knelt and pinched off a pea-sized piece of the gray putty-textured block. He tasted it, then took a small vial from his pocket and dabbed some of its contents on the sample.

"There's thirteen point seven five pounds in that cake," Waite said. "There's three more cakes in the water here. Fifty-five point one one five pounds. Twenty-five kilos of RDX, on the nose."

Bias stood, took off the money belt, and handed it to Waite. "You count," he said.

While Waite emptied the money onto the prow of the launch, Bias hauled up the other three cakes and tested them, laying them in a row on the boards of the pier. When he was satisfied he rewrapped them and started buttoning his shirt, tucking it into his pants.

Waite finished, and swung around on the launch.

"I'm satisfied," he said. "How about you?"

"Not quite. The primer."

Waite looked slyly at Bias and produced his slow grin. "That's right," he said. "That was in the deal." Taking the money with him, he crawled into the back of the launch and rummaged in a wooden crate until he came up with a coffee can with a plastic lid. "Catch," he said, and tossed it to Bias.

"PETN," Waite said. "The best."

Bias checked the contents of the can and nodded. They were good products, fresh and stable. Sometimes the fabled "arms merchants" of the underworld could come up with some garage-sale- quality materiel.

"I brought somethin' for us to haul your shit in, too," Waite grunted, picking up a small blue ice chest. He jumped onto the pier with it and took out a sack of crushed ice and a six-pack of beer. He put the four cakes of RDX in the bottom of the chest and covered them with the ice, then took the cans of beer out of the cardboard container and put them on top. "You better carry the detonators," he said. "Wait a second." He took one of the beers off the ice and popped the tab. "You want one?"

Bias shook his head. Jesus Christ.

Each of them took one end of the ice chest, and they started out of the shed. They walked the length of the pier, taking it slow around the loose boards in the center, and then crossed the road to the pickup.

"Bueno
," Bias said to Rubio as they approached the car.

Rubio backed around the car, opened the trunk, and held the lid while Bias and Waite set the ice chest inside. After he slammed the lid, the three of them walked around to the front of the car.

"Well, it was sure good doin' business with you boys," Waite said, summing up the deal as he sipped the beer, one hand resting casually in his uniform pocket. He acted as if they had just come in from running their trotlines together. "Now I'm goin' to tell my folks to let you out. We had us a little backup," he explained almost apologetically, nodding at the tops of two of the storage tanks that flanked the road. "Cissy, Ruby," he said, speaking into his shirt pocket. "Ya'll let 'em out. We got ourselves a deal down here." Then to Bias, grinning, "Those gals got infrared scopes. Couldn't do shit without the little ladies." A loud suck at the beer. "Can ya'll find your way back?"

Bias nodded. "We'll be all right." If this man was for real, they had made a discovery. He and Rubio turned and got into the car.