by Jack Tunney
“Hey.” Lou looked embarrassed. “She’s helping support her family.”
“I went over to pull the guy off Lou, and the next thing I know, there’s another guy jumps into the mix.”
The cap’n frowned at that. “To defend his buddy’s honor or something?”
“Don’t know.” Sandbag lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “He took a slice outta the middle. Caught me in the ear before I knew he was there.”
“You get this guy’s name?” The cap’n tugged at one ear and squinted a bit, and I knew he was thinking pretty hard.
I was too. A fella that let his girl dance in one of them places like The Blue Light ain’t got no kick coming on how she made her money. Or who gave it to her. The girls I knew that worked in those places knew that. If they had a fella, they kept business and pleasure separate.
“No, cap’n. There wasn’t no business card in his fist, and we never got around to properly introducing ourselves.”
The cap’n looked at me. “You get a look at these guys?”
“Yeah.” And as I stood there I got to thinking about them men. “They wasn’t your usual riff-raff. They come at us like they knew what they was doing. And there was plenty of them.”
A curse ripped from the cap’n’s lips. He pulled his cap down on his head and clomped up the gangplank to Wide Bertha. We followed, but I suspicioned I knew what he had on his mind. And my guts was turned cold by it.
When we reached the top of the gangplank, me and the cap’n saw Eddie Doughtry lying on the deck with blood pooling under his head.
ROUND 14
The cap’n stomped over to Eddie fast as he could go, but me having two good feet instead of one, I beat him by plenty. Gently, I rolled Eddie over and checked him. He looked like he was breathing okay, but somebody had rapped him pretty good on the forehead. He had a gash there that was gonna need stitches. That was where all the blood was coming from.
Eddie was one of the ship’s favorites, a redheaded Irishman from Galway who had him a temper, but also a singing voice that was an amazing thing. He didn’t like singing in front of nobody, but when you worked a dogwatch with him, sometimes you could hear him singing. He could break your heart. Nobody knew why he’d signed on with us, but we all suspected it was from some kind of trouble. He went back to see his wife and three kids on leave whenever he could, and we all knew he missed them.
Gingerly, the cap’n got down on one knee and inspected Eddie alongside me. “He hurt anywhere besides his head?” he asked.
“Not that I can see. Mouth’s cut up and his cheeks are bruised. Looks like he got slapped around some.”
Leaning down, the cap’n slapped Eddie gently on the cheek. “Hey. Hey. Can you hear me, Irish?”
“Aye, cap’n.” Eddie answered while blinking his eyes like he was doing Morse code. But even though he was speaking, I knew he wasn’t all together yet. He’d had his bell rung pretty good.
“What happened?”
With some effort, Eddie focused on the cap’n. Flailing an arm out, Eddie tried to sit up but couldn’t manage on his own. I helped him sit up, so he could tell it.
“I was watching the ship like you told me, Cap’n. Keeping an eye on things. Wasn’t long after you left, these guys got aboard and surprised me.”
“Got aboard how?”
Eddie shook his head and regretted it. His eyeballs swam in their sockets for a second. “Don’t know. All I know is they were there. Couldn’t have been more’n a couple minutes after you left.”
Well, I got me a bad feeling then, and I was rarely wrong when it came to bad feelings. The cap’n did too. I saw it in the way he grimaced a little.
About that time, Sandbag stuck his head out of the wheelhouse. “Cap’n, we been robbed. The petty cash we keep on hand for harbor fees is missing.”
And that wasn’t all.
***
Finding out how bad things was only took a matter of minutes. The crew went belowdecks to their quarters and found the rooms had been tossed. Since Wide Bertha was a cargo ship, every square inch of her was space we could sell, so we didn’t take much of that space up. Not even the cap’n.
That meant whoever come aboard hadn’t had to do much searching. They just had to be crafty and know what they was doing. The boys who cracked Eddie on the noggin evidently knew that because we was cleaned out.
“Wharf rats. That has to be who done it.” Sandbag tossed his hammock against the wall. Whoever had taken our stuff had cut the hammocks free too, causing as much damage as they could.
Every port had its version of wharf rats, kids and men who lived off what they could steal from untended ships lying at anchorage. While we was in town, we laid off hands in shifts, always keeping somebody back at the ship. That was usually the cap’n because he didn’t go ashore much. Eddie had been took sick yesterday, hungover from the night before.
I didn’t buy the wharf rats answer. Not completely. “Them boys got awful lucky coming when they did in daylight.”
Sandbag caught my tack then. Port thieves usually worked at night, when ships was mostly vacant of hands and all they had to outwit was security people. He folded his arms and cussed. “You’re saying it wasn’t luck. They planned on being here.”
“Yeah. They knew we was in jail, and they just waited for the cap’n to come fetch us.” I felt like the world’s biggest fool, and I didn’t like that feeling one bit.
***
As it turned out, things was worse than I thought. In steerage, I knocked on the door of the cap’n’s private quarters. I was plenty riled up and fit to be tied.
“Come in.” The cap’n sounded like a bear in a cave, and he didn’t sound like himself.
Me and Sandbag crowded the door when I opened it.
The cap’n sat on his bed and held a whiskey bottle in one hand. He had a bleak look on his face. “Well, we got problems, boys.”
Slowly, me and Sandbag entered the room. The cap’n lived simple, had a few knickknacks he’d picked up from all around the world, each one of ’em with a special story if you ever got him to tell you about it. He kept that space clean and neat. His logbook lay on a small desk along one wall and shelf of pigeonholes was filled with bills of lading, contracts, and permits.
I hunkered down and let my hands hang, waiting because I knew the cap’n wasn’t gonna tell it till he was ready.
He took a big swig off that whiskey bottle and looked at me and Sandbag. “They found my stash, boys. Plumb cleaned me out. Took every nickel I had stashed back to see us outta port.”
ROUND 15
When the Havana police arrived, I was still trying to wrap my head around being broke. Not me personally. I been broke plenty of times. Me and cash money always seemed to find each other, then we’d hang out for a while and end up going our separate ways.
But ever since I come away from Korea, Wide Bertha had been there for me, as sturdy and as sure as anything I’d ever known in my life. Maybe she was sitting fine at anchorage, but I swear I felt her spinning and uneasy beneath my boots. For the first time, I heard how hollow she sounded as I walked across her deck. Like she was as brittle as early morning frost.
The cap’n dealt with them police. Me and the crew had had a bellyful of them after last night. We occupied ourselves with shifting cargo, but our hearts wasn’t in it. We was all waiting for the other shoe to drop, and all of knew what was going on because the cap’n wasn’t one to hide things from us. That was what made us as tight as we was.
***
We was down in the hold, sweating like all the devils in Hell, when the cap’n finished up with the police and came down to speak to us. He stood on the ladder so we could all see him, and he looked under the weather.
“Boys, I ain’t gonna lie to you. We’re in a hard spot.” The cap’n jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I talked to them coppers till I was blue, and they ain’t got much sympathy for us. If they find whoever done this, it’s gonna be a miracle. And I ain’t never bee
n no big believer in miracles.”
“We know who done it.” Sandbag’s words was hot, and ever’ manjack in that cargo hold agreed with him. “It was Falcone and his buddies. What we ought to do is grab our guns and go after him.”
A lot of the men agreed with Sandbag, but I didn’t. I’d learned my fighting in Korea. If I decided to punch Falcone’s ticket, and the verdict was out on that at the moment, I’d do it where I could get it done instead of just dying confronting some of them lowlifes that followed him like clownfish around a jellyfish.
“Well, that’d do a lot of good, wouldn’t it?” The cap’s sounded all snarly and nasty, and I couldn’t blame him. “Just jump up and go charging after Falcone, so we can get mowed down?”
The crew thought about that for a moment, and I figured some of them had seen the error of their ways. Them boys was brave in their own way, taking on whatever the sea and storms would throw at them, but they wasn’t in the same weight class as Falcone’s torpedoes.
The cap’n waved at them. “Meaning no disrespect, boys, but I think I can come up with a better play than that.”
Sandbag shook his head. “Then what are we gonna do?”
“We’re gonna prepare to ship outta here just like we planned.”
“Port authority ain’t gonna let us sail until we settle up with the harbormaster.”
“So, we’ll have to come up with a little scratch before we do.” The cap’n stroked his beard. “We can do it. We done it before when times got hard and we lost cargoes or ended up eating a shipment of perishables.”
That was how the shipping business was at times. Always risky. But I never knew nothing in my life that wasn’t.
“I want you boys to continue your work here.”
Hank Plaster groaned. “C’mon, cap’n. Ain’t none of us got no sleep last night.”
“You can sleep tonight, and not till then. I pay you a day’s wages, I expect a day’s work. And I’m docking you for them fines I paid this morning.”
Hank hung his head, and all of us knew that was how it was gonna be.
The cap’n turned to me. “Mick, me and you got some business to tend to. Go grab a quick shower and a change of clothes, then meet me up on deck.”
***
Less than ten minutes later, I was up on deck. Truth to tell, the shower and change of clothes had done wonders for my mood, and I was almighty curious about what the cap’n had in mind. I found him in the wheelhouse, putting the last few stitches in Eddie Doughtry’s forehead.
I leaned over the cap’n’s shoulder and watched him tying off a knot. Cap’n Slidell made fishing lures in his spare time, and he had a steady hand with knots. Eddie’s forehead looked like it had been run through a sewing machine, all the stitches neat and close-set.
“How do I look?” Eddie grinned up at him. His eyes was glassy from the cap’n’s hootch.
“Like you’re drunk.”
Eddie grinned bigger. “Almost there. Cap’n’s giving me the rest of the day off. I’ll get the rest of the way drunk before I’m done.”
“I reckon you will. Stitches look good.”
“The cap’n always sews us up nice.”
Stepping back, the cap’n eyed his handiwork, then took the bottle back from Eddie and took a sip of his own. He handed me the bottle and I took a drink as well.
The cap’n took the bottle back when I offered it. “You ready to go?”
I nodded.
After another swig, the cap’n handed the bottle back to Eddie and told him to hit the rack. Eddie stumbled off like he was in a gale force wind.
Without a word, the cap’n went to our hidey-hole and removed two pistols, a .45 semi-auto and a .38 Chiefs. He handed me the .45 and kept the wheel gun for himself.
I looked at him. “I thought you said guns was a bad idea.”
“No, going after Falcone with a gun is a bad idea. We ain’t doing that.” The cap’n shoved the .38 in front pocket of his khakis.
I tucked the .45 in the back of my waistband. “You wanna tell me what we’re gonna do?”
“Yeah, stay alive. Go see what we can do about rectifying this situation.” The cap’n tugged at his beard. “Guys like Falcone that stoop to something like this, they ain’t nearly as smart as they think they are. We’re gonna figure out a way to let him know that, and get us a payday outta this bad bit of business at the same time.”
He headed for the deck and I followed, mighty curious.
ROUND 16
We went to four bars, all of ’em dives, before we found one the cap’n seemed happy with. He looked around, sniffed the air, then headed toward a table in the back where he took a chair that allowed him to look out over the bar.
I sat to his right at nine o’clock, covering the rest of the bar and everything behind the cap’n. I shifted around so I knew I could get to the .45 quick if I needed to.
A waitress came by and the cap’n ordered two beers and two ham sandwiches with chips. When the food and drinks came at the same time, the cap’n blew the foam off his beer and pushed his sandwich over to me. “I already ate.”
I didn’t hesitate. I hadn’t had anything to eat since last night, and I hadn’t had a chance to grab any grub on Wide Bertha. I hadn’t said anything about it because I knew the cap’n had his mind full. But he hadn’t forgotten about me.
I wolfed down the sandwiches and chips and made the beer last the same as the cap’n did. After an hour or so of sitting there, a man came in that the cap’n recognized.
The guy, a little Chinese man, recognized the cap’n at about the same time. They swapped looks, then the cap’n waved him over. Looking a little cautious, the Chinese man wandered over to us.
Then the cap’n surprised me, speaking Mandarin like he was a native. I had a few words of the lingo myself, but I couldn’t speak it like the cap’n could. Words flew between the two of them, then the man joined us at our table and knocked an unfiltered cigarette out of a pack and lit up. A blue-gray fog eddied around his head.
The Chinese man looked older than the cap’n, but that didn’t mean anything, because I knew them people was always older than most people thought. Which mean this guy had to have been ancient. His face was thin and narrow like a cat’s, and his eyes was cold and hard.
I couldn’t say that I warmed up to him too much. I’d killed plenty of men who looked like him over in Korea. Some guys I knew said they could see the difference between Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese, but I never could.
“Mick, this here’s a buddy of mine. Tu Li. Li, this is one of my crew, Mickey Flynn.”
I started to offer my hand, then remembered the Chinese wasn’t overly fond of that tradition, and nodded instead. Li nodded back.
Li took a drag off his cigarette and eyed me through the smoke. “You big man.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“You fighter?”
I didn’t know what he was asking and wondered if he wanted to know if I’d been a soldier.
“You fighter?” This time he touched his right eye and I knew he was talking about the bruise I had there. In case there was any confusion, he doubled up his fists and shadow-boxed. Ash fell from his cigarette.
“Some. I fight some.”
Li nodded. “You good fighter?”
“Yeah. I’m a good fighter.”
He took one of my hands. I let him only because the cap’n gave me the nod. The old man traced the calluses and scar tissue on my knuckles and felt the muscles of my palm. Without a word, he gave me my hand back.
Then Li swiveled his attention from me to the cap’n again and they talked some more among themselves. I didn’t have nothing to do and I was still hungry, so I flagged the waitress down for another sandwich. She brought it and some more chips before the cap’n and Li was through palavering.
Li watched me eat while he listened to the cap’n. Then, after I’d finished and was thinking about how good a nap woulda been about then, Li pushed up from the chai
r. He gave me a little bow and said goodbye. I told him goodbye and watched him leave.
I looked at the cap’n, who had signaled the waitress for another round of drinks. “You wanna tell me what that was about?”
“Li’s part of the Chinese mob.”
“That old guy?” I couldn’t believe it.
“Yeah, and if he decides he doesn’t like you, he’ll slit your throat so quick you won’t know it till you’re standing in your own blood. He’s got moves you ain’t ever seen before.”
I didn’t say anything to that. Over in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Malaysia, I seen some fighters. They got their own kind of boxing, and them boys was plenty tough. They got guys that beat on each other with small sticks, and I thought that wasn’t nothing till I saw one of them fighters empty a whole bar with them sticks.
“So we came here to see him?”
The cap’n nodded. “Somebody like him. We needed information and I knew I couldn’t go talk to them Italians. So, I figured we’d have better luck with the Chinese.”
“Did we? Because I don’t speak the language so good.” I was more than a little irritated and I guess it sounded in my voice.
“Yeah, we had better luck.” The cap’n took a sip of his fresh beer. “Li’s gonna do some snooping around for us. Find out if Falcone was the one that hit Bertha.”
“How’s Li gonna do that?”
The cap’n smiled. “The Italians may run the casinos, the clubs, and the hotels, but the Chinese have got people cleaning tables, cooking, and making beds in all of those places. We’ll find out. All we gotta do is sit tight here.”
ROUND 17
“Wake up.” The cap’n tapped me on the back of my head.
I woke still sitting in the chair I’d dozed off in at the bar. I came awake immediately. Korea had trained me to go from sleeping to alert in a heartbeat, and living aboard Wide Bertha and dealing with the sea and storms had kept me sharp. I had my fist on the .45 at my back and gazed around the bar.