The Detonators (27 page)

I said, “What you should be considering is the fact that if the time ever comes that I’m not good enough, others will be sent who are. There’s a man in Washington who doesn’t care for civilian interference in his operations, particularly if it costs him an agent. No matter how long it takes, it will be a losing game for you in the end, if you insist on keeping it going. If Mr. Velo didn’t warn you, he should have.”

“He warned me.” After a pause, Grieg spoke in a changed tone of voice: “What’s with you and a retired old syndicate character like Seppi?”

I said, “In the line of duty, I once arranged for the removal of a man Mr. Velo didn’t happen to like. Quite coincidental; but ever since he’s loved me like a son.”

“That would do it all right.” Connie frowned at me. “And what’s your interest in me?”

I said, “Hell, until your floating goon squad tried to kill me, I barely knew you existed, Mr. Grieg.”

“They weren’t after you.”’

“They weren’t going to give me a lollipop and turn me loose to talk afterward, no matter whom they were after,” I said. “Anyway, I don’t concern myself much with the goals and motives and life ambitions of people who wave guns at me. I simply assume their intentions are not peaceful and act accordingly. I’ve survived quite a long time that way.” I studied him thoughtfully. “Basically, I’m not interested in imports or exports, Mr. Grieg. Your business is really no business of mine. We don’t work for the Drug Enforcement Agency at all. Currently we’re getting some cooperation from the U.S. Coast Guard and, I presume, giving some in return; but if I know my chief, he’s not primarily concerned with illicit substances or whatever they’re called officially these days. But for some reason he’s ordered me to locate a certain little harbor or mooring basin in which you seem to have an interest… What’s the matter?”

He was scowling at me. “What are you trying to pull, Helm? Why play dumb? Your pretty partner knows all about Ring Cay; don’t try to tell me she hasn’t told you!”

I glanced at Gina, standing calm and handsome beside me. I said, “Take a good look at her. Does she look as if she’d tell anybody anything she didn’t want to? The fact that we’re sailing together doesn’t mean that our purposes are identical, Mr. Grieg. Maybe you’d better tell me what’s going on.”

When Grieg hesitated, the blond woman in the shiny pants spoke up in her high and rather unpleasant voice: “What’s going on is a goddamn hijacking, that’s what’s going on!”

“Shut up, Lorena!” Then Grieg shrugged massively. “Ah, to hell with it. That’s about it, Helm. That bitch beside you and her friends waved all the money in the world under Howie Brasso’s nose—he was one of my two top boys; Coyote is the other—and Howie sold me out.” There was sadness and wonder in the big man’s voice. “Hell, I loved the guy like a brother, and he sold me out!”

“I will kill very slowly,” Coyote said softly. “He will make a long die!”

“First we have to find him.” Grieg’s voice was grim. “He took the loot and ran. Mexico, South America, Europe, who knows? But sooner or later somebody’ll recognize him, wherever he is, and pass the word, and then he’ll make ‘a long die,’ as the man says.” He threw Gina an ugly glance. “In the meantime there are some others who aren’t going to get away with—”

“Sold out what?” I said.

“Ring Cay, for one thing. He arranged for this bitch’s friends—I don’t know if she was there or not, but she set it up—to sneak up on my boys at night and take them by surprise. The fucking people for nuclear fucking peace jumping my guards with their peaceful fucking machine pistols and sending them off in their boats and taking over
my
island and
my
installations like a bunch of Jolly Roger pirates!”

“Couldn’t your men fight back?”

“Hell, with Howie to tell the attacking bastards where everybody was posted, and give the right light signals as they went in, nobody suspected a thing. I’m told it was over in fifteen minutes, not a shot fired. Sure, I could bring in a bunch of hard guys, fix them up with guns and boats, and stage a fucking amphibious assault to retake the place, like Tarawa or something; and by the time the shooting was over everybody in the Bahamas would know about Ring Cay and the place would be as much use to me as a big saltwater swimming pool.”

“Anything else?” I asked when he stopped for breath. “Any other grievances?”

“Damn right there’s something else! The
Carmen Saiz
!”

“What’s a
Carmen Saiz
?”

“One of my ships. Five hundred and fifty tons gross. A hundred and sixty feet. Thirteen-foot draft, loaded; she can just make it into the dredged basin when the tide is high. Takes a good ship-handler, and some pushing and hauling with the little boats, but it can be done.”

“What about the
Carmen Saiz
?”

Grieg threw another wicked look at Gina. “This dame and her airy-fairy society friends took all that money they seem to have lying around and bought the
Saiz
out from under me. They took her over in spite of my charter agreement with her owners. Well, those greedy bastards are already wishing they hadn’t dreamed of becoming instant
ricos
off one lousy five-hundred-ton rustbucket. Coyote woke them up a little, right,
amigo
?”

“No double-cross more, I don’t think,” Coyote said.

I shrugged. “I should think little coastal freighters like that would be a dime a dozen.”

“With the trade booming like it is, anything that floats is made of gold. But the thing is, when they took this one, my cargo was already on board.”

“I can see how that might hurt a little,” I said. “Where’s the MV
Carmen Saiz
now?”

Grieg shrugged his enormous shoulders. “How the hell would I know? Ask her!” He glared at the woman beside me. “And ask her where my cargo is while you’re at it.”

I turned to Gina. “Well?”

Her face was expressionless. “Well, what?”

“You heard the man. He expressed a desire to know where his cargo is. Quite a natural desire, it seems to me.”

Gina licked her lips. “Do you know
what
cargo that ship was carrying?”

I said irritably, “What is this, a guessing game? I assume it isn’t lumber and it isn’t coal and it isn’t oil but it burns pretty good anyway. What the hell do I care what it is? Why the hell do you care what it is? I told you before, keep your eye on the ball, honeybunch. You’ve got something important to do, right? At least you seem to consider it important. You haven’t let me know exactly what it is, yet, but I don’t believe it involves saving the world from evil organic compounds. So why confuse the issue by stealing a load of pot?”

“Stealing!” she gasped. “How can anybody steal something that’s totally illegal? All we did was prevent several tons of poison from being distributed to thousands of innocent victims…”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

I stared at her, baffled. As I’d told her, I am not and have never been a user of anything but booze, in what I consider to be reasonably modest quantities. But there wasn’t a chance in the world that Mrs. Georgina Williston, in the social circles in which she moved, hadn’t smoked her share of marijuana, the stuff she was now referring to as poison. Hell, she’d undoubtedly sniffed her share of cocaine as well, not to mention experimenting with more dangerous and exotic substances.

For her now to go into self-righteous convulsions about a shipload of grass, not even heroin, was disturbing, to say the least. It indicated that she must have undergone a rather extensive personality change somewhere along the line. I remembered that she’d mentioned getting religion, as she’d called it, after a rather traumatic experience, exact nature unspecified…

I said, “Give your righteous indignation a rest and tell us about the
Carmen Saiz
.”

She shrugged in an ugly way. “All right! We wanted to take her over before she sailed for Colombia, but the owners were slow and the paperwork took longer than we’d expected. She slipped away from us. But then, coming back loaded, she had a breakdown and put in at… Well, never mind where, let’s just say a small, tolerant harbor not too far off her course. We’d been keeping track of her. In fact we had a man on board who was reporting to us. We had her picked up there, with the aid of her officers and the port authorities. They were, shall we say, amenable to reason.”

“Negotiable reason,” I said.

Gina smiled cynically. “Most people are amenable to negotiable reason, my dear, if the amount is large enough.”

“What the hell do you need a ship for? Come to that, what the hell do you need an island for?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

Behind us, the man called Coyote said, “I can make to tell.”

I saw that Gina didn’t flinch at the threat. I said, “Never mind that right now. Mr. Grieg isn’t interested in that. He wants to know about his cargo.”

Gina licked her lips, facing me. She spoke carefully: “The cargo space was needed for… for other things. And we couldn’t in good conscience let the lousy stuff loose on the market, could we? Even if there had been some practical way of returning it to its owner. The question was referred to me. I gave the order to jettison Mr. Grieg’s cargo at sea.” She gave us a tight little smile. “It’s happened before, when smuggling ships ran into legal or mechanical trouble. Hell, there are so many burlap-wrapped bales floating around out there that the fisherman have a name for them: square grouper.”

The standing woman started to say something indignant, but the seated man grasped her wrist hard enough to make her wince, and she was silent. I heard Coyote shift position behind me. Constantine Grieg regarded me bleakly, his eyes very narrow. He was obviously exerting considerable effort to control himself.

“Do you know what that shit was worth that the bitch ordered thrown overboard?”

I said, “If the Coast Guard or the shoreside authorities had grabbed it, I’m sure it would have been worth several million dollars in the newspapers. They like to call it street value; a better name would be publicity value. But you didn’t pay several million for it down in Colombia. And you wouldn’t have made that from it.”

“I paid plenty, friend! And I would have made plenty! And I’ve taken plenty from her and her fancy friends because I had a good thing going here and who wants to rock the boat? But if this high-and-mighty dame thinks she can get away with taking over my harbor, taking over my ship, and dumping my property in the ocean, and then coming here and snooting me because my business isn’t exactly legal… Shit, what’s legal about what she’s doing, waving machine guns around and bribing folks and breaking ironclad ship leases? What’s she got to be so fucking proud about?” He drew a long, ragged breath and spoke in a totally different tone, almost gently, “Okay, Helm. Seppi Velo says you’re smart. Be smart.”

I said carefully, watching him, “It would seem that reparations are in order. Is that what you had in mind?”

He sighed. “It would gripe my soul, but it would do my bank account a lot of good; and I’m not in business for my soul. Yes, that’s smart. But will she play?”

Gina spoke angrily: “Matt, if you think for a moment I’m going to pay—”

I said, “Don’t go off half-cocked now, Mrs. W. You were willing to buy Brasso and the ship and its officers and the port authorities in that place, wherever it is. Willing and obviously able. So why not pay your way all the way? Why jeopardize your whole project, whatever it may be, by making people mad unnecessarily?”

She said hotly, “I wouldn’t put one red cent into the bank account of a man who’s gotten rich off other people’s misery!”

I said, “Hell, you got to destroy a whole shipload of other people’s misery, didn’t you? Didn’t that make you feel great? Why expect your fun to be free?”

“Matt, I—”

I said, “
Listen
to me! You went at Mr. Grieg, here, with your weapon, money. Now he’s coming back at you with his weapons, guns. How are you planning to fight him? Thousand-dollar bills are nice, and I’m sure you’ve got a lot of them, but they aren’t bulletproof.” When she hesitated and gave me a searching glance, I said quickly, “Oh, no, you don’t! I bailed you out once because there are too many people around who don’t like me, strange as it may seem, for me to let a bunch of armed, unidentified thugs get the drop on me. But if you won’t be reasonable, to hell with you. You’re on your own, and I don’t think you can handle Mr. Coyote, there, even if I give you back the toy pistol you swiped from me.” I shook my head. “Don’t be stupid, Gina, just because you happen to feel so strongly about drugs. All the man wants is to be paid for the damage you’ve done him, am I right, Mr. Grieg?” Connie nodded heavily. “That’s not all I want, not by a long shot! But I’m a businessman and I’ll settle for that.”

I spoke to Gina: “You’ve been throwing your dough around—your organization’s dough—all over the Caribbean, apparently. Now throw a little his way, and he’ll be off your neck, and you can get on with your great work, whatever it may be.”

There was a long silence. At last Gina cleared her throat and asked stiffly, “How much dough is a little dough? And how do I throw it? I don’t suppose he’ll take my check…”

Just as we were about to go out the front door under escort, business completed, a rather pretty young black girl in a maid’s uniform came running and said breathlessly that Mr. Grieg would like to see the gentleman again for a moment; the lady should wait with Coyote, please. I went back into the study/office to find the picture unchanged. He was still sitting at his desk and she was still standing behind him. Or again. As I came up, he shoved a piece of paper toward me. I picked it up. It was the paper I’d given him; but the position I’d written had been scratched, out and a new latitude and longitude inserted. I looked at him across the desk.

“Ring Cay,” he said. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

“To hell with your thanks. I just hope it helps you screw the lousy bitch but good,” Connie said.

The standing woman said, “Hell, they’re already screwing, can’t you tell?”

“That wasn’t the kind of screwing I had in mind,” Connie said.