Monica tore open a packet of pretzels, shook out a handful.
"The last few months," he said, "I've been setting things up. Sooner or later no matter how good I am, law of averages says they'll catch me. So I'm going to make one big score, disappear for a while. I've been using the cruises to plant my devices. Sneak around at night, three in the morning, I can go anywhere I want. That and dry dock."
The passenger in front of her, an older lady, reclined her seat all the way. Getting interested in the conversation.
"Devices?"
"I started out in the Coast Guard. Flew choppers for two years, spotting Cuban rafters in the Straits. I was studying electronics the whole time. After that I became an apprentice engineer for Fiesta. Lola got me the job but I worked hard. I earned my pay. I was about to make chief. I was on my way up, learning things, how the ship works. All its systems, its vulnerabilities. Every ship has them. No matter how many backup systems they have, there are always weak spots, entry points."
Butler turned his head and smiled at her.
"What happened? Why aren't you still with them?"
His smile collapsed. "I got screwed is what happened. I got screwed big time."
He pulled a magazine out of the seat flap, fanned through the pages. Fanned through them again, stuffed the magazine back.
He smoothed his hands over his face, until a faint smile appeared. He folded his hands into his lap.
"Sorry," he said. "Sorry."
"I've never been on a cruise," she said. "Daughter of the great Morton Sampson, but somehow I managed to avoid it. Never had the desire."
"Oh, it's fun, you'll like it."
"Fun," she said. "I'm not even sure what that is anymore."
"There's some disagreement. Could be Middle English for fonne, which means fool. Or Latin for cheat or hoax. Either way, fun is rebellion, breaking the rules."
"Not from fungus? You're sure?"
He looked over at her, nothing on his face. As though all the muscles below the tissue had dissolved. His lips moved like he was translating her words into a tongue he understood. The man was smart in flashes. Had a sexy streak. But there seemed to be dead spots too, air pockets.
"A joke," she said.
"I know that."
He raked his long hair away from his face. A striking man, but not handsome in any classic sense. A man who grew on you. The blue eyes, the sharp nose. Lips so perfectly formed they looked stenciled. Reminding her of some painting Monica had studied once in the foggy long-ago.
The businessman came out of the toilet, started chatting up the flight-attendant in her kitchen cubbyhole. Letting her know what a big-time traveler he was, knew all the frequent flyer lingo.
She looked back at Butler. His eyes were closed, cheek against the headrest, face turned her way. She remembered what painting it was. A course in religious art Monica's junior year. Dali's Tlje Sacrament of the Last Supper. An early Dali, before he got surreal. No clocks melting over branches. This was a simple blond Jesus with a cheap dye job. Beardless and fleshy. A man who'd clearly enjoyed his final meal and now had risen to give his after-dinner speech. Dark eyebrows that clashed with the orange-blond hair. A celestial light rising behind him. His right hand was lifted and his pointing finger was raised, the second finger uncurling as though he were listing a few things for his disciples to remember later on. Or perhaps he was about to make a V with those two fingers. Victory.
Maybe she had the details a little off, her memory fuzzy. But she clearly remembered the hair color. A cheap dye job, the powder-white skin, a bland, unworried look. Dali's Jesus. Half saint, half huckster. Some air pockets there too.
"Those organizations," she said. "Like the one you're sending your money to, they're famous for ripping people off. A dollar of every twenty might get to Lucy. The rest buys fancy houses, Mercedes for the administrators."
He opened his eyes. "You're cynical."
"I'm realistic."
"You have to believe in something," he said. "I believe my twenty dollars is getting through to Lucy."
"Believing it doesn't make it true."
He looked at her, smiled indulgently, patted her arm. "Sure it does, sweetness. Sure it does."
"Look," she said. "I haven't decided what I'm doing. I'm going along with you to Baltimore, but I haven't made up my mind what I'm doing next. I may just get out in Baltimore, start over from there. So don't get your hopes up."
"Fine," he said. "Take your time. No pressure."
She stared down at the hand resting on her arm, at the silver prongs on the tips of his first two fingers.
CHAPTER 11
In Baltimore they got a cab, sailed north for half an hour, then five miles from the Bethlehem Shipyard at Sparrow Point, the highway gridlocked behind a three-car pileup. Giving Butler a chance to study the countryside as the car crept along. Little squat houses of red brick smudged with coal dust, duplexes and triplexes and octoplexes. Graveyards and junkyards and thrifty gas stations. A half-assed Penney's Mall, Fabric Warehouses, National Guard Armory, lumbermills, more junkyards, a couple of chemical plants.
The cold air smelled like mineral spirits, a chemical fog hovering over the dismal marshes, not a bird in sight. A raw wind out of the northwest, rust-colored sunlight. They'd shipped all the industry to Mexico and Taiwan, and this was all that was left behind, that wretched air. Probably some twenty-dollar-a-month kids around there. A lot of them. He decided he would have to look into it.
By the time the cab pulled into the Bethlehem Shipyards it was almost two in the afternoon, and they'd run up a fifty-dollar fare. He told the old black driver to wait. Might take as much as an hour, but if things went smoothly, he'd be back in half that. Told Monica she'd have to stay there too. She was too damn attractive for this place, people would notice. Remember later.
"What kind of business you in," the taxi driver said, "you don't mind my asking?"
In the rearview mirror Butler Jack stared into the man's eyes. Then he turned to Monica and extended his right hand toward her, displayed the silver prongs, the rubber cups attaching them to his fingertips. Rotated his hand, let her examine the Velcro cuff holding the wires in place, the small button in the palm of his hand, like that practical joke buzzer. Shake hands, get a buzz. Slowly he curled his thumb and two fingers into a fist, kept the two fingers spread. Pressed the buzzer and activated the sputtering charge. A little exhibition. Just so she knew.
"Never mind," the old man said. "You go do your business, whatever it may be, I'll be sitting right here when you come back. You can count on that."
Butler lilted his hand and pressed the sizzle of voltage to the old man's neck. Monica gasped and watched the man stiffen and slump forward against the wheel.
"Jesus Christ!"
"It's all right," Butler said. "He'll be fine. Sleep for an hour. By then I'll be back."
"You didn't need to do that. Holy shit."
"You shouldn't curse. It doesn't reflect well on you."
Butler got out, unzipped his gym bag, drew out the blue jumpsuit. He slipped into it, put on his baseball cap. Leaned back into the cab and told her good-bye.
Carrying the gym bag, Butler headed down the broken asphalt drive past twenty or so Indonesians huddled in coats too thin for the weather. They were waiting by the employment shed, day laborers, prepared to lick the grease off a hot griddle if that's what it took to get their dollar.
The Indonesians eyed him as he walked past the checkpoint, the guard looking up from his desk inside the little hut, seeing Butler was a white man in a blue jumpsuit and a baseball cap, waving him on through. Weren't many places on earth you couldn't walk into with that uniform, a tool kit in hand.
Butler ambled past three warehouses with high-up windows, most of them broken. Past the machine shops, the welding pit, around a curvy lane and out into a patch of dreary sunlight.
The five ships were sitting side by side, each one settled onto enormous wooden chocks. An oil tanker, and four cru
ise ships. Cost over a hundred thousand to haul a ship that big out of the water. Add in another million lost from taking it out of service for a few days, and that's why the shipyards operated twenty-four hours a day, always crawling with workmen.
Picking his way across the power cables and water hoses, under the spotlight scaffolding, the dock slick with oil and mud, Butler didn't draw a look from any of the other workers. Passed through gangs of them smoking, worked his way out to the last two docks where the Statendam, a midsize cruise ship, was perched. Beside it was a monster ship, twice its size. The Juggernaut, a Liberian-registered supertanker, one of the half-dozen largest crude oil carriers sailing the earth. Longer than two aircraft carriers end to end, four hundred thousand tons of steel, every spare inch of the ship was hollowed out so it could carry more oil.
Empty out the crude that ship carried, you could coat every beach in Florida an inch deep, you'd still have enough black sludge left over to fill all the swimming pools in Miami.
Once a week the Juggernaut loaded up at an offshore facility near Freeport, sailed around the tip of Florida to the Galveston refineries. Butler had her schedule, a printout of her weekly course chart. Knew the route she'd sail back down the East Coast from Baltimore to the Bahamas. Had the mile-by-mile global positioning bearings, Loran coordinates, everything.
A ship as big as that, you'd think it would take a hundred men to keep it operating. But nine was all it carried. Four of them on duty at any given moment. The others doing sack time, playing gin rummy, their dicks in their fists.
Because the Juggernaut sailed the same short hop every week, they could get by with a very low tech bridge. Magnetic compass, speed log, position reference system, all fed through a digital autopilot. Ten years behind the techno-curve. A four-hundred-thousand-ton, single-hull floating tar pit operated by poorly paid Chinamen, only a couple with any piloting skills. The whole operation guided by a navigational system only slightly more sophisticated than the one on the Pinta, the Nina, the Santa Maria. Everybody raised hell about the damage off-shore drilling could do; well, they should get load of the Juggernaut, seven days a week cruising a couple of miles offshore, a hull that would rip like paper if it brushed a reef.
Butler Jack took the gangway down to the floor of the dry dock. A dozen men in heavy coats standing around looking up at a welder on a crane showering sparks around the enormous props. The welder in his late teens, early twenties.
Butler stood next to a man in a bomber jacket.
Guy took a look at Butler but didn't say anything. Sparks flying all around them. Man was in his late fifties, baggy eyes, a day's beard.
"The shield around the propeller shaft spring another leak?"
"That's right," the man said.
"Third time it's been in for that," Butler said. "Maybe this time they'll get it right."
"Don't count on it," the man said.
The man kept looking up into the shower of sparks. "What job you on today?"
"Little soldering is all," said Butler. "How 'bout you?"
"Backing up the kid. He scrapes a knuckle, they send me into the game."
The man rubbed his palm across the gray bristle on his cheek. Then looked back up into the bright rain coming from the welder's torch. "When that kid finishes the one spot weld on the shaft shield, they're dropping this piece of shit back in the water. You got some work to do onboard, you better quit your gawking, shake a fucking leg."
Butler went up the gangway, flashed his badge at the Chinese man up there who was playing security guard, and blew on past. All the regular seamen were probably down on the Block trying to find some hooker to take their money. Butler worked his way to the bridge, no bigger than the closet in a cheap hotel room.
He was ten minutes into swapping out the units when the security guard walked onto the bridge.
"You not on list. I look, not see name."
"Look again," Butler said.
He set the old circuit board aside and slid the new one into the narrow slot, had to tap it into its notch with the butt of a screwdriver.
The Chinese man moved behind him. "You follow me down the stair, we wait in crew cabin. Talk chief later."
"Go suck on a won ton, Charlie Chan."
Butler set the clamps on the ends of the board, blew some lint away from the contact points. Goddamn ship was a disaster. Dirt and grime everywhere you looked. A wonder it made it back and forth the few hundred miles it had to travel every week.
The Chinese guard got his bony arm under Butler's chin and popped him up straight. He switched into Chinese, laying into Butler with a string of weird warbles as he dragged him backward.
Butler twisted his head to the side just enough to see an inch or two of naked flesh exposed at the guy's cuff. He reached up and pressed the prongs to the skin and triggered the voltage and the man was flung sideways against the chart box. Took a bad gash on the forehead.
Butler turned back to the console, spent another ten minutes wrapping up his work. Even with the interruption he'd be on and off, back at the cab in less than half an hour.
He took the inside stairway, dragging the Chinaman down fourteen flights to the bottom deck. It took him a couple of minutes to locate the water treatment plant just forward of the engine room. Like the rest of the Juggernaut's equipment, this was ten years out of date. Evaporative filtration system working off the heat from the turbines. Butler had read about the units but this was the first one he'd seen.
He tried three hatches before he found the one he wanted. A reservoir bin that probably held a thousand gallons of freshly filtered water. Butler took hold of the Chinaman's ears, straightened him up, and slammed his skull backward against the bulkhead. Once, twice, three times, another time till there was a bloody print. Butler wiped the bulkhead clean with the sleeve of his jumpsuit, then heaved the guard onto his shoulder and crammed him through the hatch door.
He leaned in, watched him float. Reached out, turned him facedown. Then Butler shut the reservoir door. Cranked it tight. Nobody would check on the reservoir bin, not in a hundred years. At least not until they got a whiff of something rotten trickling out their faucets. By then it'd be a week too late.
At the bottom of the gangway, back on the docks, he pulled the Juggernaut's old circuit board out of his gym bag, dumped it into a trash bin, then nodded to the welder in the leather jacket as he passed by. The welder looked away, staring up into the shadowy underbelly of that gigantic ship, into that cold fire raining down.
When he got back to the cab, Monica was staring out at the dreary day. The cabbie was still sleeping.
He opened the back door and sat down beside her. "You could've run."
"I know."
"Why didn't you?"
"Should I have? You planning to zap me with that thing?"
"Not if you're good."
He smiled at her and she gave him one right back.
God Almighty, it was turning out better than he'd ever imagined. That was the way it always went. Imagination was never as good as the real thing. In your head the imagined thing was always fuzzy and vague, but the real thing, when it came along, it was always full of gristle and bone and the stench of fact.
"Well?" she said. "I believe you mentioned something about a cruise."
Butler held her eyes for a moment more, then lifted his right hand, held his fingers in a V and let the current flash.
***
Monica was riding this out. In the cab with Butler Jack driving. Back to the Baltimore airport, the unconscious cabbie slumping against the passenger door.
They stopped at lights. A half-dozen times she could've thrown open a door, run. Exits everywhere. But she was there. She was riding this. Doing something, causing it to happen. Thinking of her father. Of the fish he gutted while her mother watched. The blood on the deck of the rental boat. Her mother's blood. The ice turkey, the silver dollars dropping.
Going to sting him, make the bastard squirm. If the opportunity presented itself,
she might even let him know it was his daughter doing it, give him a glimpse. All she wanted was her four hundred eighty-seven dollars back, her nest egg; the rest of it could go to Lucy and her starving sisters.
After it was done, head west. See what was beyond the horizon. Start over, get it right. Santa Fe, El Paso. Whatever looked good from the bus window. Find a motel that needed its sheets changed. Maybe get out her pen, draw some cacti, some iguanas. See what she could do with sand.
***
They were back in Miami by seven that Saturday evening. Butler drove the short hop over the Dolphin Expressway downtown, parked the Winnebago at the Bayside Market, and handed Monica a roll of fifties, told her to have fun, shop till she dropped. He said he had a couple of last-minute things to do, he'd meet her at Sammy's later, then ducked away, a hip hop in his step. A man in overdrive.
Monica wandered into the flashy mall. For a half hour she window-shopped, feeling disoriented, a mild whirl behind her eyes. Finally, she pushed open the door of a shop and stepped inside. She began to shop.
"Can I help you?" they said.
"Can I help you find anything?"
"Anything I can do, let me know."
In her years as Irma Slater, Monica had forgotten the hollow thrill of shopping. She stood before three-way mirrors for the first time in three years, the clerks assuring her she was utterly gorgeous in that green silk sheath, the turtleneck tunic, that long cotton sweater with a soft, jacquard texture, she felt lost. A three-year time warp. Even if she'd wanted to stay up with changing styles, living in the Keys prevented it. People seemed to leave behind on the mainland whatever fashion sense they had. Keys chic was little more than grunge in the sun.
Finally, two hours into it, so weary of the exercise, so out of shape as a consumer, Monica wound up snatching this and that, plunking it all down on the counter, a handful of bras, a half-dozen panties, three pairs of shorts, some deck shoes, trying nothing on. An orgy of impulse shopping.
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