Blackwater Sound

by James W. Hall

  “Thanks.”

  “I like ’em, mainly ’cause I can trust ’em not to give up their sources. I got a feeling about you, Charlie. A guy puts a gun to your head, you’re not going to let somebody’s name slip out. That’s real important to me, to stay the hell out of this thing.”

  “Okay, I’m a tenacious little prick. I don’t give up my sources. Yeah, you picked the right guy.”

  “Because what I haven’t told you yet, Charlie, I’m a member of the family.”

  “What? The Braswells?”

  “A. J. married my daughter. Her name was Darlene. She’s the one jumped off the chair with the rope around her neck. Not very creative.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”

  “Well, now you do.”

  “You’re Braswell’s father-in-law?”

  Arnold nodded solemnly.

  “I got an interest in this turning out right, Charlie. I want this exposed, but I don’t want you disemboweling these people. Is that clear?”

  Charlie searched Arnold’s eyes for a moment or two, then nodded. It was clear. He didn’t much like it, but yeah, it was clear.

  Brandy reappeared, crossing the room through the gauntlet of hungry eyes, and she eased back into her seat.

  “I miss anything?”

  Lawton leaned forward, inhaling deeply.

  “Nice perfume,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Like fresh-cut clover with a rainstorm approaching.”

  Lawton sat back, basking in Brandy’s smile.

  Charlie Harrison grumbled and pushed his beer bottle out of the way and stared at Arnold.

  “All right, Arnold. You gonna give me this or what?”

  Arnold took one more look at the young man, then nudged the envelope across the table. Charlie peeled back the tabs and pulled out the papers and started glancing through them.

  “So how you gonna make out on the story, Charlie?” Peretti gave Brandy a wink. “Gonna be a good payday, I bet.”

  Harrison was studying the blueprint.

  “Just my regular salary.” Mumbling, not even looking up.

  “Charlie doesn’t care about money,” Brandy said. “It’s one of his virtues.”

  “Whoa!” Arnold peered at the boy. “Say that again.”

  Charlie glanced up from the page. Gave Arnold a cute smile.

  “I get a weekly wage, Arnold. That’s how it works in the real world.”

  “You telling me you’re just going to give the story to this Miami Weekly?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’re you, crazy? Only reason anybody looks at that pissant rag is for those sleazy personal ads. Bunch of perverts trying to find each other.”

  “That pissant rag has been buying my groceries the last five years.”

  “What about Time, Newsweek, one of those big guys? This isn’t some little local story. It’s national. Bigger than that, even. You take this story, peddle it to one of the big guys, I bet they’d pay you more than your biweekly salary. Ten thousand, fifteen at least.”

  “Twenty-five,” Brandy said.

  Arnold blinked, then swiveled his head slowly and peered at her.

  “I have a friend.” Brandy smiled at Charlie. “Her name’s Julie Jamison, she’s an editor at Rolling Stone.”

  “You didn’t,” Charlie said. He let the blueprint flutter to the table.

  Brandy closed her eyes and opened them, trying to be patient with him.

  “I was very discreet. I told Julie about the story and she thought about it and called me back to say they’d probably do it as a three-parter, pay fifteen up front and ten more when the last section was printed.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Arnold said. “When’d you do this?”

  “A couple of days ago. Why?”

  “When?” Arnold said. “What day?”

  “I don’t know, Monday, Tuesday. Hey, it’s a big story. You said so yourself, Arnold, it should have major circulation. Charlie should get some financial benefit from it. A career boost.”

  Arnold took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes. Then he put them back on and peered around the bar as if these men had suddenly become dangerous.

  Lawton shifted in his seat. He lifted the lid of the box and looked inside, then dropped the lid back into place.

  “Can I press it now, Arnold?” he asked. “Can I press the button?”

  “No, Lawton. Just sit there, okay? Let me think.”

  “Christ, Arnold,” Charlie said. “Don’t get paranoid on me. Relax, everything’s cool.”

  Arnold leaned forward against the table, raised his hand and flagged their waitress, flicked his hand for the check. Then he looked across at Charlie and lowered his voice. “Is that what you think? It’s cool?”

  “Julie won’t mention it to anyone,” Brandy said. “I told her to keep it on the q.t. The secret’s safe, Arnold.”

  Lawton opened the lid of the box and peeked down at the contraption inside. It was a wild tangle of wires and a stack of circuit boards connected to several cylinders filled with blue fluid. The contraption reminded him of something. He wasn’t sure what.

  “The q.t., huh? This Julie, she’s real tight-lipped, is she? Like maybe she got that figure, twenty-five thousand, it just came out of her head? She didn’t have to go to her boss, run it by anybody else. She’s not sitting around right now with the magazine’s lawyers, discussing the possible libel case? Maybe calling up Braswell, trying to confirm a few items of interest. Nothing like that.”

  Charlie leaned forward and laid a hand on Peretti’s.

  “Tranquilo, Arnold.”

  Arnold jerked his hand away.

  Lawton was staring down at the device. There was a blue button and a green one beside it. On one side of the contraption there was a small cone like a megaphone, or the speaker on an old Victrola, and behind the cone a bird’s nest of wires, and those tubes connected to the circuit boards.

  Lawton remembered what it reminded him of. The microwave oven he’d taken apart, trying to repair. There on his workbench in the garage, all those circuit boards and wires and transistors. He had no idea what any of it was. Never even got the thing put back together.

  Lawton snuck his right hand into the box and pressed the blue button but nothing happened.

  Beside him Arnold was staring out the window muttering to himself. Lawton tried pressing the green button and still nothing.

  “Look,” Brandy said. “I don’t know why you’re getting worked up. Julie’s a professional. They do big stories all the time without leaking anything.”

  She pouted at Arnold. Then turned the pout on Charlie.

  Lawton could feel the box humming on his lap. It hadn’t been humming before. So at least he’d gotten it started. Revving a little. Maybe what he should do now, he should press both buttons at once.

  “How about my name?” Arnold said. “You happen to let that slip?”

  Brandy pressed her lips together, fluttering her lashes. It was probably how she’d gotten out of trouble in the past. But it wasn’t working with Arnold.

  “You did, didn’t you? You told them my fucking name.”

  Brandy gave a guilty nod.

  “Jesus God,” Arnold said. “You fucking idiots.”

  Lawton slid his hand inside the box and pressed both buttons at once. The hum deepened. It sounded like a tuning fork held close to the ear. Lawton could feel his knee joints buzzing.

  Across the room the television made a pop and went black.

  At the bar, the two men with cell phones jerked them away from their ears. One man tapped his phone against his palm, then pressed it against his ear again. He shrugged and set the thing on the bar. The bartender was fiddling with the remote, trying to get the TV on again. The Christmas lights twinkling along the top shelf of liquor bottles had gone out.

  Arnold grabbed Lawton’s wrist and pulled his hand out of the box.

  “Aw, shit, Lawton, what’d you do?”

 
“Nothing.”

  Arnold looked across the room at the dead television.

  Then he snatched the blueprint off the table and slid it into the envelope. He prodded Lawton with his knee and the old man slid out of the booth, and Arnold got out after him.

  “Wait a minute,” the kid said. “Let’s talk about this like adults. Nothing’s changed. Not really.”

  “The fuck it hasn’t.”

  Brandy was looking at the blank television.

  “That’s what it does? It turns off televisions?”

  Arnold stood there a moment staring at the two of them.

  “Peretti, you’re overreacting, man.”

  Arnold headed for the door. Lawton padded behind him, lugging the box.

  Outside in the daylight, Arnold halted and took the box out of Lawton’s hands. Overhead a jetliner was roaring into a thin spray of clouds, lifting off, heading east out toward the Atlantic.

  Lawton said, “So what is this thing, some kind of ray gun?”

  Arnold looked at him for a second or two.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s what it is. Yeah, a ray gun.”

  “What’s the range on this baby?”

  “Now that’s the question, isn’t it? That’s the million-dollar question.”

  Lawton glanced up at the rumbling sky, then back at his friend.

  “All right,” Arnold said. “Come on, old buddy. I need to get you home.”

  “You said we were going fishing.”

  “Plans’ve changed,” Arnold said. “You and I, we’re going to have to keep our heads down for a while, Lawton. Not have any contact.”

  Lawton followed Arnold over to the Bertram. Printed in gold letters across the stern was the boat’s name: You Bet Your Ass.

  Arnold climbed aboard and Lawton loosened the lines from the dock cleats and tossed them over the rail to Arnold. Arnold grabbed them and let them fall at his feet. He didn’t coil them like he usually did. He just let them lie there, in a mad tangle on the deck.

  Six

  Arnold slipped the box into the cockpit storage locker. He dug out the ignition keys and handed them to Lawton, then turned and lifted his eyes and watched the laughing gulls spinning over Neon Leon’s, a few of them diving down at the roof shrieking as though whatever had turned off the television had also driven them insane.

  “I got to use the head, get rid of this beer. I’ll be up top in a minute.”

  “It’s true, isn’t it, Arnold? I used to arrest you?”

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  “Why was that? You a dope peddler?”

  “No, it wasn’t dope, Lawton. I never dabbled in dope.”

  He turned and gave Arnold a long look. “Don’t tell me you were a professional killer.”

  Arnold patted him on the shoulder. “You get us a little downstream, I’ll be right up.”

  “We going fishing, catch some dolphin?”

  “Not today, Lawton. I need to get you back, safe and sound. I’ll stick around till Alexandra gets home, then I got a couple of things I gotta attend to. We’ll go fishing soon as this thing gets cleared up. I promise.”

  “Don’t worry about your boat. Go on, take a piss. You can trust me.”

  “I know I can.”

  “Hey, Arnold, is this guy Braswell trying to kill us?”

  “No, Lawton. Braswell went over to the Bahamas. He’s hanging out in Marsh Harbor, trying to locate a blue marlin. No, we’re fine. We’re just dandy.”

  “He’s after that fish you told me about? One with the transmitter on it? Looks like a cigar?”

  “That’s right, Lawton. He’s chasing that fish. He doesn’t have time for a couple of old farts like us.”

  Arnold gave his shoulder another pat, then headed for the cabin.

  Lawton climbed the ladder to the flybridge and started the big engines. Nudging the right throttle, then the left, twisting the wheel, he eased the Bertram away from the dock and out into the dark, oily center of the Miami River.

  A hundred yards away, a squat, thick-necked tugboat was chugging toward them like some kind of irritable bulldog, so Lawton edged Arnold’s sleek white yacht over to the right half of the river.

  He kept the Bertram idling forward, two knots, three, inhaling the river scents, industrial smells of kerosene and turpentine and a burnt coffee odor, all of it riding the sugary breeze.

  Lawton Collins always had an easy hand with boats. As close to a natural gift as he could claim. He wasn’t a certified captain, hadn’t taken the Coast Guard courses, and he didn’t know all the niceties of radar and GPS and Loran, and he knew next to nothing about the big turbo-charged diesels belowdecks, but Lawton could still handle a boat with charmed certainty. Didn’t matter how big or small the craft was. Give him a target on a nautical chart, set him behind the controls, and he’d roll through fifteen-foot seas or search out the twisting channels through treacherous shallows and get to his destination every time. It was one of the few skills he still possessed. Almost the only talent that hadn’t deserted him these last years as his limbs were crabbed by arthritis and his brain hollowed out.

  Soon as his hands were on the controls of a boat, he was rejuvenated. Muscles springy, heart alert. Mind of a twenty-year-old.

  As the big boat grumbled ahead, Lawton’s mind whisked back to the days when he used to steer his small wood skiff with the forty-horse Evinrude through the chaotic chop outside of Key West Harbor, into the rush of open water and the sloppy convergence of tides and currents across the reefs, on and on, south by southwest, finally into the blue-green sand flats of the Marquesa Islands, volcanic and remote and crackling with fish, the Marquesas where he and his buddies built a little fishing shack tucked among the mangroves, a place to camp under the unsullied heavens, far from the dogs barking, the guns cocking and brakes squealing on dark, bloody streets, just him and his buddies lying on the wood planks he’d nailed into place, lying on a blanket or a nylon sleeping bag, shutting off the kerosene lantern, and gazing up at the dense speckle of stars and the dark birds circling against the moon, all that splendor to feast on, simply because he could handle a boat, wasn’t afraid of the markerless waters, could guide his way through the shoals and the narrow limestone channels, following a simple compass heading, reading the stars, or else doing it by a blind man’s intuition, and even to this day he had all those same skills, even though his brain was as leaky as the spongy earth beneath the Florida topsoil, and he damn well could still recall every patch of water he’d ever crossed, had a freeze-frame of each acre of blue water in crystal-sharp focus, just like the day he’d crossed them the first time, as if every boat he’d ever steered, every wake he’d ever thrown was still there, white foamy trails across the transparent surface of the world, all the pathways he’d taken to get to this day, to this narrow, greasy river, to this boat, You Bet Your Ass.

  Lawton eased back on the throttle. The tug still hogged the middle of the river, a freighter looming behind it, big rusty-red hull, deckhands scurrying about on the foredeck, chattering, full of bustle. And other boats were strung out farther back, a fishing trawler, a small open fisherman, a Hatteras yacht. A regular parade coming up the river for repairs or gas or to deliver their loads.

  As Lawton steered the boat, a scene from long ago flashed before him. A night in the Marquesas when the mosquitoes were so bad Alex and her mother and Lawton had to climb down the wooden ladder and submerge themselves in the water for a little relief. He saw that moment. Black water, glossy with moonlight. Alexandra’s mother in her bathing suit with the flowered skirt. What was her name? The woman he’d married. The woman he’d lived with for nearly forty years. He remembered the swimsuit she’d worn that night. It had flowers. Pink flowers. He remembered that. Hibiscus.

  Arnold Peretti took one step into the Bertram’s main salon and stopped. Sitting in a leather chair was Johnny Braswell. He had his elbows on the dining table, a sheet of paper lying in front of him. Johnny looked up from the paper and smiled at Arnold. The
kid wore the same straw hat he always wore when he was out fishing, wide-brimmed sombrero with the top cut out like he was letting his skull breathe. Dark blue shorts and a white polo shirt with ByteMe embroidered over the left breast. The name of the Braswells’ yacht.

  Arnold stayed in the doorway, one foot in the cabin, the other still on the rear deck.

  “Hey, Johnny.”

  “Hey, Arnold, What it is, man?”

  Johnny Braswell had a chirpy voice, smiled too much. Lying on the table beside the sheet of paper was one of Johnny’s knives, blade open. The kid loved knives, always had.

  “Come on in, Arnold, shut the door, relax, man. I need to talk to you. Pick your brains a little.”

  Arnold held his ground, trying to keep cool but running a quick movie in his head: slam the door, take two quick steps, throw himself over the gunwale into the river. Workable, except for one minor detail. He didn’t swim a stroke.

  Still, as he took another look at that knife, today might be the day to learn.

  “You like this blade, Arnold? It’s an AK 430. Customized version of one the Special Forces used in Desert Storm. Slices through solid bone like it was mayonnaise. Lot better than packing iron. Don’t you think? I mean, sure, there’s a higher spatter factor, but then what’s a little gore, right? Just the cost of doing business.”

  Arnold looked at the knife with its glittery blade, some kind of pygmy machete, a sugarcane cutter or something.

  Johnny was thick-waisted, with a bulky chest and a baby face. Always flushed from the sun, and squinting, even when he was indoors. Arnold had seen the kid work the wire on a few giant marlin and knew the blubber under Johnny’s shirt wasn’t blubber at all.

  “I believe I invited you inside, Grandpa. Didn’t I?”

  Arnold took a step backwards onto the deck. The door still open. If he was going to get cut, he wanted witnesses.

  Johnny grinned at the old man’s cockiness.

  “Okay, sure, Arnold, outside’s cool. Wherever you want.”

  Johnny got up from the table. He came across the cabin and stepped onto the aft deck, holding his knife down by his leg. He took a perch on the starboard gunwale and watched Arnold grip the back of the fighting chair.