“Find some excuse for why the helicopter can’t take him wherever it is he wants to go,” Macovich replied. “I usually tell him there’s a maintenance problem or radar’s down.”
“You’ve got a four-thirty and you only fly in pretty weather?” Andy couldn’t believe it. “That thing was made to fly through clouds. Why do you think it’s got auto-pilot, IIDS, and EPHIS? Not to mention that smooth-as-silk rotor system. Hell, you could roll that bird like an F-sixteen. Not that I’m recommending it,” Andy was quick to add, since it was illegal to perform acrobatics in a helicopter. “But I have to admit, I did roll it on the simulator down in Fort Worth when I was at the Bell Training School. Slowed down to about a hundred knots, pointed the nose down at two thousand feet, pushed the cyclic all the way to the right, and around I went.”
The idea of being upside down in a helicopter gave Macovich a bad reaction and he inhaled as much smoke as he could to calm his nerves. “You one crazy ass,” he said. “No wonder you got suspended. Unless”—it suddenly occurred to Macovich—“you really wasn’t suspended but are up to something. On some secret project. Wooo!”
“Speaking of secrets,” Andy artfully dodged and deflected, “I wonder who Trooper Truth is.”
“Yeah, well, you ain’t the only one,” Macovich replied. “The governor wants to know something fierce, and he’s ordered me to figure it out. So if you got any ideas, I sure would ’preciate your passing them on.”
Andy didn’t reply.
“I’m curious, myself,” Macovich went on. “How’d he know about Tangier Island and what we was doing out there, huh? I read all about it in one of his columns on that web of his. It’s like he was there watching the whole thing.”
Andy said nothing, because he did not want to lie. Macovich turned his dark glasses on him as yet another suspicion hovered over his thoughts.
“You ain’t Trooper Truth, are you?” Macovich pressed him. “ ’Cause if you are, I promise to keep it a secret, long as you understand I got to tell the governor.”
“Listen, what makes you think I wouldn’t tell the governor myself if I knew who Trooper Truth was?” Andy sidestepped the question.
“Hmmm. I guess that’s a good point. If you knew, you would tell him and take all the credit,” Macovich considered.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Then who you think it is? I know it’s passed through my mind that maybe Major Trader’s doing it.”
“Not hardly,” Andy said. “Trader can’t tell the truth. So he couldn’t possibly be Trooper Truth, now could he?”
“You’re probably right.” Macovich blew out a cloud of smoke. “You also right about us being short of pilots.”
“Why do they keep quitting?” Andy wanted to know.
Macovich decided he had said enough. He was already in trouble with the First Family. No point in making matters worse, and he was worried that Andy might prove to be a threat to him. That white boy sure was smart—a lot smarter than Macovich. Andy didn’t even have to think hard about anything before he made a comment, and sometimes he used words that Macovich didn’t know.
“So, I bet when you was in school, you was one of those bookworms,” Macovich said as envy crept into his tone and compelled him to find a way to put Andy down. “Bet you lived in the library and all you did was study.”
“Hell no. I never studied,” Andy said, not adding that he had sailed through college in three years and loved learning so much that he never considered his schoolwork studying. “All I wanted to do was get out and get on with things.”
“Yeah, no shit.” The cloud of smoke nodded.
Macovich had suffered through one year of a technical college where he grew to strongly resent his father’s ambition that his oldest son would one day hold down a respectable job at Ethyl Corporation, making solvents. Macovich moved out of the house his freshman year and joined the Army, where he learned to fly helicopters, and then moved on to law enforcement. A couple months back, he gave his father a framed autographed picture of the First Family, just to rub it in a little bit. Mrs. Crimm had written a nice personal inscription on it that said, “First Lady Maude Crimm.”
A cigarette butt sailed in a perfect arc and landed on the pavement, where it glowered like an angry eye.
“All I gotta do is say one word to the guv about you flying as my co-pilot and he take care of you,” Macovich bragged without the slightest intention of facilitating helicopter flying or anything else for Andy—except trouble, maybe. “That’s assuming he don’t remember me. Now if that pool shark daughter decides to make a fuss, then I might be best off speaking to him another time. Wooo, I’d better light up quick before they come out.”
For a brief instant, the smoke cleared enough for Andy to remember that Thorlo Macovich was the biggest black male he had ever met.
“Now, it ain’t the guv who mind people smoking.” Macovich lit another menthol cigarette. “But the First Lady—wooo.” The smoke shook its head. “ ’Member that interview she did in the paper the other Sunday on tertiary smoke? I mean, how?” The cloud of smoke went on and on. “What? I inhale, then I blow it in your mouth, then you hurry and locate a third party and blow it in their mouth?”
“You’d better blow it somewhere quick,” Andy said as he worked out a plan. “Here they come.”
Ten
The most malignant smoke in Virginia was not generated by Salem Lights but by a highway pirate named Smoke, who had been consummately evil from birth. His lengthy rap sheet of crimes as a juvenile ranged from truancy to setting cats on fire to malicious wounding and homicide. Although he had finally been brought to justice in Virginia several years earlier, he had managed to break out of a maximum-security prison by forming a noose of sheets and pretending to hang himself from his stainless steel bed.
When prison guard A.P. Pinn noticed Smoke slumped over on the floor, a noose around his neck, bug-eyed with his tongue protruding, Pinn threw open the cell door and rushed inside to see if the inmate might still be alive. Smoke was, and he jumped up and smashed a food tray against Pinn’s head. Then Smoke quickly dressed in Pinn’s uniform and sunglasses and walked out of the penitentiary without detection. Pinn had gone on to write a book about his ordeal and published it himself. Betrayed had not sold very well, and Pinn turned to hosting a local cable show called Head to Head with Pinn.
Smoke watched Pinn Head, as he called the show, every week to make sure there were no leads on his disappearance or any suspicion that he was the leader of a pack of road dogs. In a way, it disappointed him that Pinn had never so much as alluded to him except to mention that being trayed had traumatized Pinn and no one can relate to what it’s like to be smacked in the head with meat loaf and instant potatoes until they have had it happen at least once.
Pinn’s show had gotten under way and Smoke and his road dogs were gathered in their stolen Winnebago, which was parked behind pine trees on a vacant lot in the north side of the city. Smoke pointed the remote control and turned up the sound as Pinn smiled into the camera and talked with Reverend Pontius Justice about the Neighborhood Watch program the reverend had just kicked off in Shockhoe Bottom, near the Farmers’ Market.
“Look at that motherfucker,” Smoke said as he gulped down an Old Milwaukee. “He thinks he’s something.”
Pinn was dressed in a double-breasted shiny black suit, a black shirt and black tie and obviously had bleached his big teeth. When Smoke had known Pinn in the pen, the guard had worn thick tinted glasses. Now he must have contact lenses that caused him to squint a lot.
“What does he think this is? The Academy Awards? I can still see the knot on his head from where I hit him with the tray.” Smoke pointed.
“He always had that bump on the back of his head,” said Cat, the most senior road dog. “See, he didn’t use to shave his head and put wax on it like he does now. So the bump shows up. Man, he got one shiny head. Need to wear sunglasses to even look at it.” Cat squinted through cigarette smoke and tapped an a
sh into a beer can.
“What kinda wax you think he use?” asked another road dog named Possum, who was puny and unhealthy-looking and tended to stay in his room during the day, watching TV with the lights out. “Bee wax, you think? Hey, maybe he use Bed Head. ’Member that dude I bought the gun from? I ask him how he got his head so shiny and he say he use Bed Head that he got in New York in one of them Cosmetic Centers, and it cost like twenty bucks. It’s in a little stick you gotta push up from the bottom and then rub it on your hand like dod’rant . . .”
“That fucker putting dod’rant on his head?” said a third road dog, Cuda, which was short for Barracuda. He stared blearily at Pinn’s polished scalp.
“Shut up!” Smoke turned up the volume again.
He was getting excited because Pinn was warming up to the very subject Smoke had been waiting to hear about.
“. . . In your book Betrayed,” Reverend Justice was saying from his overstuffed chair next to a plyboard wall painted to look like a bookcase next to a cheery fireplace, “you went on at great length about how neighbors got to be neighbors instead of just living in the neighborhood. I believe I’m quoting correctly.”
“Uh-huh, I said that.”
“So if we love our brothers and sisters and keep an eye on them coming and going, the neighborhood will change.”
“Uh-huh. Yeah, I might have said that.”
“Did you have this philosophy before you got banged in the head?”
“I don’t recall. Might have.” Pinn sat straighter in his chair and stared into the camera as he fondled the satin tie he had bought at S&K for nine-ninety-five. “I do know I was being neighborly when I checked on that dead inmate, and next thing I know, I’m unconscience on that hard cement floor. He took my uniform and everything in it.” Pinn was getting riled by the memory and it was becoming difficult for him to look serene and wise. “You ’magine that? How would you”—he pointed his finger at his TV audience—“like it someone smack you aside the head and left you naked, implying to the prison population and other guards that maybe you had a male honey who done something to you, ’cause you was found face-down with nothing on!”
The reverend was turning pale and beginning to sweat under the hot lights. “That’s what forgiveness . . .” He tried to cut Pinn off.
“Forgiveness my ass! I ain’t forgiving that punk. Hell, no. I find him one of these days and then we see who smacks who.” He glared into the camera, staring straight at Smoke. “And let me tell you, someone knows where that snake in the weed is. You seen him, you call this toll-free number at the bottom of the screen and we send you a reward.” He repeated the number several times. “He go by the street name of Smoke and is a plain-looking white boy with dreadlocks and what he calls a beard that got about as much hair as a possum tail.”
“Hey!” Possum objected, tossing an empty beer can at the TV.
Smoke pushed Possum off the ottoman and ordered him to shut up. “You bust that TV and I’m going to bust your head!”
“Now I don’t know what Smoke is wearing these days ’cause last time I seen him he was in an orange jumpsuit, but he’s a young white male ’bout twenty-one or -two and mean as a snake,” Pinn went on. “I guarantee he ain’t doing nothing to help the neighborhood. Not hardly no way! Now you listen up.” He searched the faceless audience behind the camera. “You want some snake in the weed slithering around your neighborhood?”
“We will absolutely keep an eye out in the neighborhood,” Reverend Justice promised with a nod as he mopped his face with a handkerchief. “Sure is a lot of meanness out there. Just look at this most recent awful case of Moses Custer getting beat on and his Peterbilt being hijacked right there next to the pumpkin stand.”
“He take the reefer or just the cab?” Pinn was momentarily distracted by the terrible story.
“I didn’t take no reefer.” Smoke made a pun to the TV. “Wish it had been full of reefer, though, instead of fucking pumpkins. What you want to bet Pinn Head’s this Trooper Truth dude? Maybe he’s the idiot writing all that shit on the Internet.”
“Yeah, he did,” the reverend said, nodding. “A Great Dane reefer,” which was trade talk for the top-of-the-line freight van that had been filled with pumpkins and hitched to the Peterbilt eighteen-wheeler truck. “I visited Moses in the hospital.” The reverend shook his head sadly. “That poor man look like a pit bull got hold of him.”
“What he say they did to him?” Pinn was getting edgy. He didn’t like it when a guest was better informed than he was.
“What make you think he Trooper Truth?” asked Possum, who was computer literate and responsible for checking out the Trooper Truth website every morning to see if there was anything on it that Smoke ought to know about.
Possum also handled all Internet transactions, which included searches for eighteen-wheelers that might be parked somewhere with a FOR SALE sign, and news stories about truck shows, truck rodeos, truck accessories and parts, farmers’ markets, piracy, smuggling, Canada, and a few of Possum’s own special interests such as the Bonanza Fan Club and any related conventions that he would, undoubtedly, never get to attend. There was a large volume of e-mail, too, of course, from Smoke’s criminal contacts, most of whom remained anonymous.
“Moses was sleeping in the Peterbilt,” Reverend Justice was saying, “when all a sudden this angel came to give him a unique experience, then next thing he knows, all these demons are throwing him down on the pavement, where they start kicking and beating on him and cutting him up.”
“He not have the doors locked?” Pinn said with a hint of judgment, for it was his habit to find fault with the victim whenever possible, and he was already reaching a verdict that Moses Custer might never have been attacked by demons, pirates, or anything else had he bothered to lock his doors.
“I guess not, but that don’t mean he’s to blame.” The reverend gave Pinn a severe look.
“Hey,” Cuda piped, “maybe he say what hospital he in and we go finish him off!”
“Naw, I don’t think Pinn Head’s Trooper Truth,” Possum voiced his opinion. “Not unless he write a lot better than he talk. I think Trooper Truth the police just like his name say he is. ’Cause he always talking about pirates and DNA and shit, and we better watch out he don’t come after us ’cause he sure do have a way of finding out things and you already been locked up before.” He looked at Smoke. “And there’s a ’scription of you going around, so maybe we be better off just quittin’ being pirates and maybe go get jobs at the Foot Locker or Bojangles or something . . .”
“Shut up!” Smoke screamed at him as the RV’s aluminum door opened and Unique walked in carrying something in a plastic trash bag.
“I need some money,” she said to Smoke. “You still owe me.”
“Listen here, you concerned viewers out there.” Pinn was pointing his finger at the camera again, once more fixated on his own ordeal. The hell with Moses Custer or anyone else. “You see a plain-looking white boy with dreadlocks, you call me right now.”
“See, I told you there’s a ’scription!” Possum exclaimed.
“He say anything about that queer girl who just got killed on Belle Island?” Unique asked as she stared at the TV.
“What queer girl?” Smoke asked with a yawn.
“No, but Trooper Truth did on his web, but he didn’t say nothing about her being queer,” Possum volunteered. “He’s asking the public for tips.”
Unique thought this was very funny. There were no tips. She had been invisible when she left the bar with T.T., so it wasn’t possible that anybody had seen Unique and could offer tips to Trooper Truth or anyone else. Of course, becoming invisible was not without its downside. Unique had finally realized that rearranging her molecules when she pursued her Purpose was probably the reason she didn’t remember much after the fact. And reliving her cruelties was the best part.
“Pick up the phone right this minute.” Pinn repeated the telephone number at the bottom of the screen. “Yo
u tell the truth and we get him, I send you five hundred dollars. This is A. P. Pinn for Head to Head with Pinn. Good night.” He beamed.
“Maybe we should go out and see what’s around,” Cat suggested, thoroughly bored by the TV show and the local news that followed. “I get the car out from under the tarp and we can go huntin’.”
“Yeah,” grunted Cuda. “We’re almost out of beer and I got one smoke left. Man.” He got up, stretching and strutting. “Maybe we find that Custer son of a bitch and kill him in the hospital before he keep snitching on us.”
“He doesn’t know anything more about us,” Smoke snapped at Cuda. “And if you’d killed him to begin with,” he added to Possum, “we wouldn’t have to worry about it.”
Possum had drunk too many beers while they were out cruising for a prize the other night, and his aim had been a little off, much to his secret relief, and as best he knew, the bullet he had fired had struck Moses in the foot and knocked his boot off. “I still think we should find him,” he agreed, contrary to his true feelings. “I’ll get him smack in the head this time.” He pretended to be as cold-blooded as Smoke by pulling a nine-millimeter pistol out of the back of his relaxed-leg jeans and pointing it at the TV, as if it were a hospital bed.
“You shoot the TV, you little shit, and you’re next.” Smoke jumped up and grabbed the gun and pointed it at Possum’s head, snapping back the slide.
Possum swallowed hard, his eyes wide with terror as he begged, “Smoke, don’t. Please! I was just kidding, you know?”
“I need my money,” Unique said in her quiet, soft voice as her eyes began to blaze and her Purpose began to create that unbearable tension inside her Darkness.
Smoke ignored her, laughing as he shot a hole in the floor. The ejected shell pinged against a lamp and he tossed the pistol back to Possum. “Or maybe I’ll shoot the damn dog, since you seem to like her so much. In fact, bring her in here.”
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