Buzz Cut

by James W. Hall

  While he had a minute free, he opened the leather pack on his belt and unplugged the nine-volt batteries. Five of them. Simple store-bought coppertops, impossible to trace.

  He tore open the wrappers on five new ones and snapped them into place. He rolled up the right sleeve of his shirt, checked the connections, blew a spray of dust off the voltage amplifier strapped to his wrist. Unbuttoned his shirt, followed the wires where they were taped to his flesh, running to his armpit, down his ribs, out a small incision through the shirt to the battery pack on his belt. He searched meticulously for any nicks in the coating of the two wires, one red, one black. But everything was fine. Everything tight and clean and fully charged. He rebuttoned his shirt, tucked it in, rolled down his sleeve, and settled back to wait. Feeling a flood of well-being. A radiance centered in his gut. He was moving down the master list. One through five were finished. The groundwork laid. Ready for number six, the big moment. Halfway there. The slow half done, the arduous half. Years in the making.

  It was two hours later when the Baby Boomers finally appeared, towering over the Filipino crew that was spilling out the gangway. The band members rolled their equipment down the ramp. Sugarman and Cruz were there. A little slumped over now. Losing their enthusiasm.

  The Boomers loaded the equipment into their Ford van. Butler watched them heave the speakers into the back with the other equipment.

  Out Truman Avenue Butler stayed a car or two behind, fell a little farther back as they headed up U.S. 1. The boys were careful drivers, so it was easy to keep a car or two between them up the narrow stretch of overseas highway through the endless ticky tack of Sugarloaf, Cudjoe and Big Pine, Marathon and Grassy Key, Layton and Long Key, Matecumbe and Tavernier.

  Two hours later, a hundred miles up the road from Key West, at the south end of the nineteen-mile stretch of asphalt that shot straight north through the southern Everglades back to mainland Florida, Butler took a position one car length off the bumper of the van. Bearing down. Saw the driver glance back in the outside mirror. Saw his eyes hold for a second, then let go.

  Butler leaned over, snapped open the glove compartment, and drew out the black plastic transmitter. He thumbed the switch, felt the unit hum in his hand. The sweet fizz of electrons. He raised the unit to the windshield, cocked the aerial toward the white van, leaned to his left, head out the window to check the oncoming lane. He waited till the road was clear for several miles, then drew his head back inside and pushed the red button.

  But the van continued to drive smoothly.

  Butler rattled the transmitter and pressed the button again. Still nothing. He tamped the plastic case against the dash, then aimed the aerial toward the van once more and mashed the button several times.

  And it worked. The circuit breaker he'd duct-taped to the Boomers' steering gear last week was activated by the radio impulse, the circuit switch flipped, released the small bolt holding the idler arm to the relay rod, the bolt fell free onto the highway, skittered away.

  A second later the van jerked hard to the right, then swerved left. Sixty miles an hour, a rudderless ship.

  The van veered into the oncoming lane, stayed there for a hundred yards, then swung back to the right shoulder. Two more erratic zigzags.

  "Shit!" His smile melting away. The thing taking longer than it should. The van slowing, fifty, forty-five.

  Butler leaned to his left, saw in the opposing lane a distant line of traffic caught behind two transfer trucks. Heard the wail of the truck's air horn as once again the van swung across the oncoming lane, bumping along the opposite shoulder.

  This time the front wheel slid over the lip of the drainage canal, caught. The van leaned, teetered on two wheels, then went over on its side, skidding along the embankment, hit the water and bounced across the surface like a skipping rock until it came to rest, heavy and dead, settling, the driver's side sinking four feet under water. No doors coming open.

  Messier than Butler had pictured, but still workable.

  The transfer trucks roared past. Cars screeched and slewed around him as Butler eased the Winnebago off the highway. A hundred yards behind him two cars collided, another plowed into the wreckage, spun twice around, and careened into the canal.

  Butler got out, jogged across the highway to the Boomers' van. Somebody was there already, a black man in bright pink shorts and an aqua tennis shirt, nice new deck shoes. The man hesitated a moment on the bank of the canal, then lunged forward, splashed up to his chest, and went for the driver's door.

  Butler waded slowly into the warm water, inched through the thick custard at the bottom. Water rose to his waist, then a few inches higher. He closed in on the van, peered inside the back doors, saw the jumble of equipment and the bodies lying akimbo. No one stirring.

  While rubberneckers moved slowly past on the roadway, Butler hauled open the van's rear door. The lead singer's body was draped around the Panasonic speaker, his ear pressed against its cloth mesh as though some echo of music were whispering to him, consoling him in his pain. The man drooled blood, a flap of skin dangled near his chin. Everybody groaning, starting to come alive. Butler shoved the lead singer aside and scraped the speaker back across the floor to the rear doors.

  He pried open the backing and took a good breath. The plastic wrap hadn't torn. The chips were still locked neatly in their slots. He drew the two trays out and stacked them, tucked them under his arm.

  When he turned, a young man was standing in his way, waist deep in the water. Hawaiian shirt, no tan. Kinky blond hair, Nordic features. A few hours off the plane, taking his Minnesota flesh down to Key West to blister it. Giving Butler a cold glare.

  "What the hell you doing, man?"

  Butler sloshed forward through the canal but the man dodged to the right and blocked his way. He reached a hand out as if halting traffic.

  "You're staying right there, buddy, till we get this sorted out. You look like a looter to me."

  Butler smiled.

  "Loot," Butler said. "Good choice."

  The young man kept his arm stiff, hand out.

  "Loot's from the Hindu lut, and the Sanskrit loptram, lotram, which means plunder. I'm sure you didn't realize it, but it's a very aptly chosen word in this context. An ancient military term. Originally it referred to spoils of war stolen from a captured city. Back in the sweet long ago. It's important to know the words, to know what you're saying."

  The young man eyed Butler uneasily but stood his ground.

  Butler shifted the trays of chips and lifted his right hand into view. Showed the helpful young man with the pale Yankee flesh the two steel prongs protruding from thick rubber tips on his pointing finger and the middle one. He spread the fingers into a V and made a careful fist to activate the charge.

  Between the two prongs a blue spark sputtered.

  One of Butler Jack's most useful creations. Parts recycled from three stun guns, the DC thyrister capacitor set at 25 pulses a second, the whole thing rewired, voltage doubled. Could put a three-hundred-pound mountain gorilla on its ass for half an hour. Take it anywhere. Zap them and they drop. Sometimes they dropped just looking at him, a hiss of current between his fingers. Like he'd risen from the underworld.

  The blond hero stared at the crackling spark and sucked in a breath. As Butler stepped forward, the young man stumbled to his side, went down on one knee. Water to his chin.

  Butler released the button, then pressed it again, gunning his engine for effect. One more time showing the good Samaritan the snap and sizzle of voltage writhing between his fingertips.

  The man stayed knee-deep in the canal watching Butler as he approached. Butler stretched out his hand, brought the sputtering current to within a foot of the man's face.

  "Come on, man." The young man's voice broke into a nervous yodel. "I didn't mean anything. Really. I had it all wrong."

  Butler jabbed his fingers against the man's forehead and the current hammered him backward into the dark canal. With his mouth still open,
the young man slid below the surface, a few listless bubbles rising from his lips. Eyes wide, their shine dulling quickly.

  Butler felt the death. Felt the flutter of it in the air as if a hummingbird had whisked past his face. Standing there above the miracle of death, Butler invoked the image of the girl. The girl in the white dress. Pink and blue embroidery on her lacy collar. The girl in the white dress, on her swing on the wide porch. The angel girl. His uranium, his glowing core. The girl who powered him through all the desperate moments. Butler pictured her and once again she rescued him as she had rescued him for years. Her cool smile, the sprinkle of golden hairs on her arms, the delicate bones in her wrist. Her perfect blue eyes. Urging him forward. Urging him away from the dead canal water, back to the Winnebago. Back to his seat behind the wheel. The girl he would see soon. Number six on the list. When everything was in place. Almost there. His angel. His glowing core.

  An hour later Butler Jack exited the Palmetto Expressway onto the Tamiami Trail, drove a few blocks east, and stopped at a Cuban market. Butler went inside, walked straight back to the storage room. There he traded the two trays of casino chips to a smartly dressed young woman for fifty-one thousand dollars in used twenties.

  Loaves and fishes. Water to wine.

  CHAPTER 2

  "Cruise ships?"

  "Yeah, you know, those big white things, like Love Boat. Gopher and the gang."

  "Gopher?" Thorn said.

  "Love Boat. It was a TV show. People always falling in love on this big white cruise ship." Sugarman looked out at the glassy flats. Cast his lure thirty feet out, the six-pound line melting against the still water with barely a trace. "Jeez, never mind. I forgot for a second who I was with. Only guy in America never heard of Love Boat. Mr. Pop Culture himself."

  "Hey, I try to keep up. But it's hard."

  "Yeah, without a TV, a radio, newspapers, I expect it is."

  "I read books," Thorn said.

  "Like I said, totally out of it."

  Thorn picked up his paddle, realigned the canoe so they were facing away from the early afternoon sun.

  For most of August and September Thorn had puttered in his downstairs workshop, trying to construct the canoe without benefit of blueprint or model. Just a vague image in his mind. The canoe had emerged after a month of trial and error. Bending the water-soaked slats of birch until they bowed. Stretching the canvas across the birch. Twice he'd misaligned the keel, cut the canvas short, snapped innumerable ribs. But finally it came together, everything flush, riveted tight, ready for its shakedown cruise.

  Neither he nor Sugarman had fished from a canoe before, but they were getting the hang of it. No leaks. Well balanced. Of course, later on this afternoon would be the real test, returning to the docks at Flamingo. Five miles of open water.

  Thorn's back muscles were burning already, a blister had broken open on his right thumb from the trip out. Sugarman soaked through his khaki shirt in the first ten minutes as they'd paddled through the cool dawn.

  But they didn't complain. It was worth the effort to fish those southern Everglades flats, a place no powerboat could reach, not even the shallowest draft skiff poling with its engine tilted up. On those secluded shoals there were large areas with barely enough water at high tide to dampen the sand, closer to a beach than a bay. But some of the finger channels that webbed the sand were chocked with fish. Grouper and trout, redfish and snapper. Even a few tarpon were laid up back there.

  "How the hell you get hooked up with a cruise ship company?"

  "Out of the blue," Sugar said as he drew in line. "Last month the head of security for Fiesta Cruises calls up, wanted to know if I'd hire on for a month or two, work undercover. I asked him how he picked me, he wouldn't say. Just that my name wound up on his desk."

  "You got a mysterious benefactor."

  "Appears that way."

  Thorn watched his lab puppy sleeping under the center seat of the canoe. Leaning forward, Thorn waved away a mosquito that had settled on the dog's nose. Add that to the list of good reasons for having a dog around—mosquitoes preferred their blood to humans'.

  "Fiesta Cruise Lines," Thorn said. "That's Morton Sampson's company."

  Sugarman swung his head around, peered at Thorn. "Jesus! How the hell . . ."

  "Hey, I know a few things. He's famous. Morton Sampson, the guy with the missing daughter. Monica."

  "You never heard of Gopher, Love Boat, but you know Morton Sampson."

  "Handbills," Thorn said. "You remember. Someone dumped a stack of them in the ditch out by the highway. Back when they were looking for the girl, couple, three years ago. I used those posters to light the evening cook fire for about six months. Pretty girl. They ever find her?"

  "No. Her old man must've spent a million dollars on posters, private eyes, TV ads."

  "Damn good-looking young lady. It bothered me to light her up every night. But I couldn't just throw those things away."

  Thorn watched a hawk strafe the mangroves to their east warding off some interloper.

  "This new job," Sugarman said, "I get all the free cruises I want. Except it's wasted on me. I never had any aspirations to cruise. Big ship like that, it's like some skyscraper's fallen into the bay and floated off. And, man, the ships smell like damn Greyhound buses. Too many people been there, the upholstery, the rooms, everything reeks of body odor. Smell you can't get out. Every week the boat docks, passengers get off, cleaning crew comes aboard, dusts and waxes the floors, an hour later more passengers are lined up to get on. Thing never has a chance to air out."

  "That what they hired you for? A body odor detective. Catch who's stinking up the place."

  Sugarman looked up at the empty sky.

  "I'm after a thief," he said.

  Rover woke and began to whimper. Thorn reached over, lifted him up and suspended him over the side of the canoe, and a moment or two later the dog let go of a stream of pee. Damn good boat dog. When he was done, Thorn set him back on his pillow.

  "This guy, he's been hitting this one ship for around fifty thousand dollars every month for the last seven months. The M.S. Eclipse. Uses a different approach every time. They think it's somebody in the crew, so they brought me in. Want to keep it all hush-hush. Bad for business otherwise."

  "High adventure on the high seas."

  "High seas is right," Sugar said. "Couple weeks ago I'm prowling the casino all night. Boat's tossing and pitching in that tropical storm Edgar. Twelve-foot swells. But does that stop the goddamn gamblers? No, nuh-uh. Room is full. They're pulling the slot machine arms like one set of robots making love to another set. They can barely stand up, but they're keeping at it. Place is smoky as hell. That's the worst part. Gamblers gotta have their cigarettes."

  Thorn leaned forward and scratched Rover's ears. The puppy groaned with pleasure.

  "Middle of that tropical storm, I notice this guy. I don't know why. He's dressed like everybody else, with his plastic cup full of coins, same as all the rest. But there's something about him. Way he moved, I don't know."

  "Furtive gestures," Thorn said.

  "Yeah, something like that. Guy had sneaky eyes. He wasn't looking around, glancing over his shoulder or anything. In fact, maybe that's what caught my attention. Just kept his eyes down. Dark glasses, baseball cap. He'd work one machine for a long time, a half hour or so, he'd move on to the next one. Going like that all night, one machine to the next."

  "Yeah?"

  "It was an accident I caught on. He left a quarter in the payout tray. I picked it up, and bingo bongo, I know he was pulling something."

  "He was using slugs."

  "No," Sugarman said. "Much better."

  "I'm supposed to guess?"

  "You'd never get it. Even after I had the thing in my hand, it was a few more days before I figured out how he was working the scam. By then the cruise was over, the guy had disembarked, long gone."

  Thorn picked up his paddle, sculled them away from the small island they were drift
ing toward.

  "Don't you want to know what it was? The scam."

  "I'm all atwitter."

  Sugarman said, "He milled the edges off the quarters."

  Thorn looked over at him.

  "The rough, serrated edges, you know. Smoothed them off."

  "And what the hell would that accomplish?"

  "Exactly," Sugar said. "What difference does it make, grinding the edges off the quarters? The casino people had no idea, so they fly in one of their hotshot engineers, he meets us in Nassau, one of the stops. This kid, he looks like a movie usher, long greasy hair, some loser you'd find hanging around a video game room, but no, he's their resident electronic genius. Smug little bastard.

  "So anyway, we sat around, dropping that quarter into machines. It registered like any other quarter. No difference. Bing, bing, pull the arm, you get two cherries and an apple. Nothing. Open up the machine, take it out, try it again on another machine. Same thing."

  Thorn watched the puppy sleep. His paws jerked as he chased a rabbit through the tall grass of his dream.

  "The video kid, he gets out his laptop computer, starts banging away, doing computations, analyzing the specs. The cruise people are yammering among themselves. So, I get up, walk around looking at the slots. I've been mulling this thing over for days, coming up with nothing, but then out of nowhere it hits me. I don't know diddly about the mechanics, except the little I just overheard as these guys were talking. But what I do know is the win rate is four percent on slots, but on that particular cruise the win rate went up to seven percent. Either a lot of people got real lucky, or somebody was rigging things.

  "So without completely understanding it, I go back over and announce that I know how the guy pulled it off. They all look up. And I hear myself, I'm off to the races but hell if I know how I know any of this.

  "I say, look, what if the milled quarter goes in, registers like the real quarter. But its weight is just enough different from a real quarter that maybe, for some reason, it doesn't register when it comes out."