Charlie-316

by Colin Conway

  “Like what?”

  “You’ll have to ask Rachel. But evidently it was enough to convince her that the chick really has made contact. At the end of that first session she tells Rachel she can only continue if Rachel can come up with some dough.”

  “Big surprise.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How much?”

  “Like twenty-five grand.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “I wish I was.”

  “For what?”

  Goldblatt, the man of a thousand faces, made one of them. “You’re gonna love this one. It’s for a fucking ‘time machine.’”

  I couldn’t help myself. I laughed. But Goldblatt, dead serious and not too happy about the situation, wasn’t laughing with me.

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Like a heart attack. You and I know it was for that trip around the world and a Rolex watch and maybe a diamond pendant but Rachel, by this time she’s under some kind of spell. She’s bought everything this gypsy woman told her, hook, line, and sinker.”

  “Didn’t she question the money thing?”

  “Nope. She rationalizes. Tells herself, ‘everyone has to make a living.’ Me, I look at it as a killing, not a living.”

  “And Rachel was able to come up with the dough?”

  “She was. And a lot more. Because you know the drill. Once you’re on the line, they’re not about to let you off the hook.”

  “Where was she getting the money?”

  “Inheritance from her father. He was some kind of big-shot lawyer. He died before I met her. That’s probably why she married me. You know, what with me being a lawyer and all. Maybe she connected me with her dead father.”

  The idea that Goldblatt could remind anyone of their father struck me as odd at best, but women are a strange lot. As Freud said, “women, what do they want?” In this case, at least for a few months, I guess it was Goldblatt.

  “What was this so-called time machine supposed to do?”

  “It wasn’t an actual time machine. You know, one of those H.G. Wells thingies that’s supposed to send you back in time. It was some kind of otherworldly apparatus that was supposed to make a clear connection between them while he’s in this other ‘room.’ I’m sure you know what comes next.”

  “The time machine isn’t quite enough, right?”

  “Bingo. She asks Rachel for another twenty-five grand.”

  “For?”

  “Now that she’s made contact, she needs to build what she calls a ‘golden bridge’ across the dimensions, so Rachel can ‘visit’ the ‘room’ where this guy is parked, probably for eternity.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “Yeah, real Twilight Zone stuff. But Rachel bought it. She believed she could actually communicate with the dead guy.”

  “So, she came up with the dough?”

  “Yeah. But now when she sees nothing’s happening, she starts getting a little suspicious.”

  “About time.”

  “You’re telling me. So, she tells me the whole story and wants to know if I think maybe something’s fishy. I practically have a fucking heart attack…I mean, that’s a shitload of dough.”

  “And here I would’ve bet it was food that was gonna get you.”

  “Very funny. Anyway, she starts crying, because in her heart she knew all this was just a load of bullshit. But the poor kid was lonely and she wasn’t thinking straight. She feels worse now that she was taken for such a sucker so she makes me promise to get her money back.”

  “Which is where I come in.”

  “Right. I could probably do it myself but if I found this quack I’d probably kill her.”

  “What do you mean, ‘find her’?”

  “You don’t think after taking Rachel for all that dough she’s gonna stick around, do you? Rachel goes back to the storefront to confront her to try to get her money back and abracadabra,” he snapped his fingers, “she’s gone.”

  “Storefront?”

  “Yeah. She worked out of one over on First Avenue, near the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, or whatever they’re calling it now. Only it’s not there anymore.”

  “What do you mean it’s not there anymore?”

  “It’s a Subway sandwich shop now. So, partner, you gotta help me out by helping Rachel out.”

  My gut response was to say no. I didn’t want to get involved in Goldblatt’s life any more than I had to. Besides, this sounded like a no-win situation. The chances of finding this woman were pretty slim, the chances of getting the dough back even slimmer. But I knew I couldn’t say no to Goldblatt. It wasn’t just that we were partners, even though the idea of that turned my stomach, it was that he’d helped me out in the past and although I would never admit it to him, I did owe him something. And it might give me a unique opportunity to find out more about Goldblatt, My Man of Mystery.

  But if I took this on, I had to set firm ground rules because if I didn’t, he’d be hovering over me like a helicopter mom, second-guessing my every move. Getting all up in my face.

  “When can I meet with Rachel?”

  “I’ll give her a call and set it up.”

  “Just give me her number and I’ll take care of it.”

  “And you’ll let me know so I can be there, right?”

  “You’ll just get in the way.”

  “She’ll be much more comfortable with me in the room. Otherwise, she’ll clam up and you won’t get anything from her.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that. I’m pretty good at getting people to give me what I need.”

  “She don’t know you, Swann. She’s skittish.”

  “Look, Goldblatt, this is nonnegotiable. Either I meet Rachel alone or you can find someone else to help her.”

  “You’re threatening me?”

  “It’s not a threat. It’s how I conduct business. You want me to do my best, don’t you?”

  “And your best means I don’t tag along?”

  “Exactly.”

  He was thinking it over. I knew this because he grabbed for the last roll in the basket, split it in half, buttered it generously, and took a couple bites. This is what he does when he thinks. Eat.

  “Okay. I get it. I don’t like it but I get it. But let me talk to her first so she doesn’t get spooked.”

  “Fine by me,” I said, trying to remain calm as I imagined the fun that might be in store for me in meeting the former Mrs. Goldblatt.

  Click here to learn more about Swann’s Down by Charles Salzberg.

  Back to TOC

  Here is a preview from No Salvation, a military thriller by Jeffery Hess.

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  CHAPTER 1

  USS Salvation (CV-44)—Yankee Station—Tonkin Gulf—October 31, 1972

  Of all the ways Commander Robert Porter had witnessed death, he never expected this. It was 0200. All lights aboard ship had been switched to red following taps four hours earlier. Porter double-timed it along passageways and down ladders and sprinted aft, all through the dim red glow that radiated off every pipe and cable run. Breath came easy and deep despite his heightened alertness. With each urgent step the odors of wet iron and jet fuel made his mouth hot with the taste of rust. He slowed along the starboard passageway on the second deck, where broken glass crunched beneath his boots. Shadows in the red light played tricks. He stopped and leaned forward. Lengths of inch-and-a-half fire hose lay unspooled, their nozzles missing, as were various dogging wrenches—except for one sticking out of a fuel transfer gauge attached to the portside bulkhead. He cleared his throat of the rising heat.

  This main thoroughfare should’ve been wide open with less than a third of the ship’s crew awake to get in his way.

  “Make a hole,” he called out, intent on resuming his pace.

  No one moved.

  Farth
er down the passageway, through the red glow, those crewmen were not milling about, but rather slumped along the deck, many motionless with open wounds leaking blood. Porter’s stomach felt like it had been kicked and his nervous eye twitched.

  There had been no alarm or missile impact, not even heavy seas, yet dozens of casualties surrounded him. Those who were able applied direct pressure or tourniquets.

  As he stepped over Seaman Runyan, a young striker from postal, his boot slipped in a puddle of blood. Gravity almost dragged Porter to the deck with his wounded crewmen. The kid looked nearly unconscious sprawled on the deck.

  “Someone apply direct pressure to the postal clerk’s head,” Porter called out. “Now!”

  Despite blood pouring like hydraulic fluid from his scalp, Runyan’s eyes opened in time to focus on Porter. The blood covering the kid’s pale face made his skin look as dark as Porter’s. Runyan waved an arm, as if weakly mocking semaphore performed topside—on the flight deck and signal bridge. Blood and confusion filled his face.

  “Mr. Porter, please,” he called out. His head wound percolated into his mouth. “They ran aft.”

  The way he said the word “they” made Porter’s windpipe grow tight. He looked past the multitude of injuries, contusions, and smeared blood and wished it wasn’t true. The red light obscured colors, but the contrast was plain enough.

  All the casualties were white.

  “Mr. Porter,” Runyan called out in a voice that might not live through the night. “Please, sir. Make the other blacks stop.”

  Porter’s neck shivered beneath the weight of the kid’s words. To keep himself upright, he reached out a hand to the yellow casing of an emergency light fixture.

  As an airdale with a broken arm pulled his T-shirt over his head and used his good hand to staunch the blood flowing from his buddy’s face, synapses in Porter’s brain fired with the message to keep moving. First aid and mass casualties had procedures, but there was no script for being attacked from within. Nothing of the kind had been part of Porter’s crises-at-sea training. He had to keep going, despite the wet puzzlement on that postal clerk’s face.

  Nervous energy propelled Porter faster despite the heaviness threatening to drag him to his knees. With each step, his stomach churned more. He wondered if the color of his own skin would help or hurt his efforts to restore calm aboard the ship. A dozen frames down the passageway, red lights made a tunnel leading to white lights.

  His eyes adjusted to the brightness the closer he got to the mess deck. The smell of blood mixed in the air with fumes of jet fuel, old coffee, BO, pot smoke, and bad breath. Instead of the empty tables and chairs where twelve thousand meals were eaten daily, Porter arrived in time to see a firefighting nozzle swung as a weapon from its brass handle. It shined in the light of fluorescent bulbs overhead as it spun midair toward a blond kid’s head.

  “No!” Porter called out.

  The crowd buzzed with cheers and rage. Bulkheads vibrated with animosity.

  The kid had kneeled on the deck beside an ammo elevator, surrounded not by missiles or bombs but by a hundred fifty black men—one hundred fifty-one counting Porter. They were in various degrees of uniform, some bare chested with blood smeared on their faces; some with dilated pupils from smoking, snorting, or shooting smack; many others high from the fog of marijuana in the air. Their fists were still clenched. The blond kid’s face bore wounds pounded and kicked into it earlier. As Porter noticed the hula girl tattoo on the kid’s forearm and the anguish in his young eyes, that ten-pound nozzle struck the side of his blond head—ruptured skin, shattered bone across the eyes and the bridge of his nose—opened up his skull like a can of dog food.

  Porter gagged low in his gut and covered his mouth with his fist.

  The kid’s body slumped and his shoulder hit the deck without sound. His opened head thudded wet upon impact. Porter’s first instinct was to call for a corpsman, but it was already too late. During his career Porter had dropped ordnance on villages, so death was nothing new to him. He’d made his peace with it so he could have a chance of sleeping at night. But seeing something so senseless, so violent, up close and personal made him want to vomit.

  No one spoke. The only sound was heavy breathing and an icemaker along the far bulkhead as it pulled water and coughed a handful of cubes into its gray storage bin. Halfway between that icemaker and Porter stood Rufus Applewhite, a pissed-off brother all of twenty years old, in a blood-stained T-shirt and faded dungarees with a monkey fist key chain hanging out of his pocket. He dropped the nozzle. The brass thunked hard onto the deck. He walked toward Porter, his stare full of defiance.

  The black sailors shifted side to side, opened and closed their fists like athletes preparing to compete. They stood in random packs like wolves among the tables and chairs where they’d eaten every meal for the past two hundred seventy-four days. Only a couple of them tried to conceal weapons improvised from firefighting equipment, dogging wrenches, and aircraft tie-down chains. Porter recognized a few faces, but every one of them knew who he was and what he might be worth to their cause. He watched the dead kid’s blood puddle widen beneath his head. The men stared at Porter as Applewhite ambled up slow and cocky.

  Pressure built in Porter’s chest where wise words should have been.

  Applewhite walked the long way, going around the group instead of cutting through it. The ball of the monkey fist bounced with each step.

  Applewhite stepped up, toe-to-toe—so close Porter smelled pot on his breath and felt the rage radiating from the angry crowd and into the deck plates and up the bulkheads. It made Porter feel like he was plummeting through the air. He spread his feet to give himself a stronger base, digging in, intent on manufacturing the power to calm his black crew.

  Ten weeks earlier, a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter flew a dozen miles off the Vietnam coast. It was near noontime. The sun radiated across the cool blue water of the South China Sea and bounced off the haze-gray paint of two US ships. At that distance, the helo’s only passenger, Commander Robert Porter, guessed the ships out there were a carrier and maybe an oiler from the battle group. Without binoculars he couldn’t be sure. At distances like that, he’d always had a hard time distinguishing between smaller and farther away. That had gotten worse over the years the less he flew. Blame might rest on the aging process, but he was only forty-one and not ready to admit that to himself. It seemed like only a couple of years ago he had flown across the same water in an F-8 as one of the Navy’s only black pilots. Now he was being chauffeured.

  “Are you comfortable back there, Commander?” the lieutenant flying the helo asked over the headset built into Porter’s helmet.

  “It’s not a limousine, if that’s what you mean,” Porter said, “but it’s a hell of a lot more comfortable than the jump seat of the AC-47 I rode all the way to Singapore one time.”

  Laughter filled his headphones. “That’s a good one, sir,” one of them said.

  During his nineteen-year career he’d been on the receiving end of a lot of admiring and flattering attention—more than he would guess white men of the same rank might get. Before his commission, most white people treated him like everybody else. That’s how he grew up. That’s what he was used to. Some kids in class had called him names, but by the third grade there were a hundred black kids in his school.

  This new assignment, this role of executive officer, carried the weight of four thousand men and officers who would demand his full attention. It didn’t worry him though. His confidence was rooted in rising to the occasion every time. He never understood where that trait came from. He damn sure didn’t have an example of that growing up.

  As they got closer to the ships, the carrier’s superstructure, what they called the “island” and civilians called the “tower,” came into focus, but the array of RADAR antennas and glass around both bridges and the flight control tower remained too far to see clearly.

  The Sea Knight passed over a supply
ship sailing away from the carrier and within seconds the carrier went from looking as small as a shoebox to being the real deal. A dozen F-8s lined the port side of the flight deck, with a squad of F-4s grouped in pairs along the starboard side, aft of the island. The center of the flight deck stood crowded with pallets of food, ammunition, replacement parts, and sundry supplies following replenishment at sea.

  The Navy had been good to Porter, the progeny of a janitor and a librarian’s assistant, who’d given him the gift of reading, which led to his interest in college and traveling the globe. Because his father worked at Sacramento Municipal Airport, where young Porter had spent every summer between the third grade and being commissioned as an ensign in the Navy, he’d begun flying planes at fourteen years old.

  Catching sight of the familiar hull number painted on the flight deck transported his mind to the last time he’d landed on the Salvation—wing a little shot up—back in sixty-eight. This was a different kind of happiness now, but no less powerful. This was also the first time he’d flown onto a carrier without his hands on the controls. He felt everything in him clench. He trusted this lieutenant because he trusted all Navy pilots. And he was excited to get back aboard that ship.

  And that ship was a workhorse—from all the reports he’d read, she was consistent and expert, exceeding goals every day during this deployment. The thought of being in charge of a crew with high morale made him anxious to get aboard. He leaned forward, tried to hide any display of unease. If anybody accused him of being nervous, he’d deny feeling anything but honored to assume his position as second in command of that beautiful ship. This was an opportunity of a lifetime, and just one step away from being captain of such a ship himself someday.

  The Sea Knight carried a crew of three highly trained Marines and came equipped with machine guns mounted on each side for self-defense. They were loaded, but unmanned. The cargo bay was empty and the internal winch in the forward cabin had nothing attached. The helo’s sole mission on this day was delivering the Salvation’s new executive officer—the first black man to attain this position on an aircraft carrier. They circled in anticipation of clearance to land.