Buzz Cut

by James W. Hall

  ***

  Thorn and Sugar worked on opposite sides of the wheel. Thorn crouched beneath the starboard side, pushing up, Sugar on the other side thrusting down, hanging, kicking his legs for more pull. The giant bicycle chain inched around, movement so fractional Sugar thought he might be imagining it. Wishful thinking. They had been unable to locate the shutoff valve for the hydraulics, so they were not only forcing the rudder by hand against the resisting pressure of the water, but also against the electronic messages being sent down from the autopilot, which pressurized the oil lines and rotated the gears, nudging the vast ship in the direction it had chosen.

  Sugar found himself wishing he had eaten more fatty foods in the last few weeks. He wished he'd bulked up, had more weight to throw against this frozen wheel. But it did seem to be yielding slightly, at least he thought so. Common brutish strength working against the force of science, against a hundred small devices and motors and gizmos and oil-filled lines. And the brutes were getting it around.

  Thorn groaned. His muscles trembling as if he were trying to lift the weight of the earth above his head. Sweat poured down Sugar's face, his heart was wild inside his shirt. They reset their feet, found better handholds, budged the chain around on its track, turned the sprocket, angled the rudder, feeling the ship resist. Inch by inch, moving it round.

  They were blind. No way to know their angle of turn. No way to know when they'd cleared land. No way to know when they should stop turning and head on out to sea, run out their fuel, wait for help. If they turned too short they'd crash ashore on one of the islands farther south; if they turned too far, they'd circle back and could easily run aground farther north. If they turned too hard, they'd tip the behemoth onto her side, sink her in a minute.

  There was a fairly good degree of error, a wide sea to steer back into, but down there in that small room, every link of chain a major victory, there was no way to tell, no way to count. Sugarman had lost touch with their relative position. Lost all touch with anything beyond the strain in his arms, the wriggling weight as he hauled down on the wheel. Hauled down and around. Thorn's eyes were unfocused as if he were conferring with his God.

  Sugarman put his mind somewhere else. He thought of Jeannie. He wondered where she was, what she was doing. It had been days since he'd thought of her, but now, as he strained every sinew against the pressure of the wheel, he imagined her white sleek body. He roamed it in his mind. The woman he had once loved so much. The woman who was trying to bear his child. Starting at her toes, running his finger in the damp seams between each one. They were small toes, curled downward. They fit together in the perfect mesh that toes often had. As if the foot had been molded from one piece of clay and the toes slit apart carefully by a paper-thin blade. He moved up her arch to her narrow ankles. He was massaging the ankle bones with his imagination when Thorn barked for him to stop.

  "What?"

  "Let go. Let go now."

  Sugar's heart was leaping. "You're sure?"

  Thorn looked him in the eye. Sugar uncurled his fingers from the wheel. They stood for a moment and listened to what sounded like the crunch of seabed beneath them. Then the jarring lurch that knocked them sideways into one another as the keel must have cut deeply through sand and shoal. And then sudden free movement across the surface of the water. Steaming clear.

  "How the hell did you do that?"

  "You got me," Thorn said. "But let's don't think about it. It might go away."

  "Man, I'm dead."

  "This is just the rest period," Thorn said.

  "What?"

  "The autopilot is going to swing us around, take us right back to where it wants us to go."

  "No. Tell me it isn't true."

  Thorn nodded.

  "We have to keep doing this?"

  Thorn nodded again.

  "Man, I'm out of gas already. I don't think I can heave this sucker around again."

  "We need to get Sampson to shut down the fuel lines," Thorn said. "It's either that, or wait till help comes. And who knows how long that might take."

  The Eclipse headed three miles out to sea before it began to circle back to shore. Twice more Thorn ran five flights up to take a sighting on the beach, then ran back. Twice more they wrestled the rudder, steering the ship away from the beach. While the two of them struggled with the wheel, Sampson shut off the fuel lines, bled them dry. It was ten-thirty on Tuesday morning before the big engines sputtered and died and the Eclipse fell silent, coming to rest just two miles off Miami Beach.

  ***

  Butler watched it with growing horror. Those bastards. They'd sailed right up to the beach, two hundred, three hundred yards, sending the onlookers running, the Coast Guard ships blowing their horns, blowing them and blowing. Then roaring off, out of the path of the enormous ship.

  The Eclipse curved in toward the beach and did a slow turn back out. It made two more passes before its engines gave out.

  Butler trudged back to the Winnebago. He pushed by a woman on the sidewalk and she snarled at him, and he pressed the stunning voltage to her neck. Put her to sleep for an hour or so.

  He walked back to the Winnebago in a gray haze. He might have zapped a few more people. He wasn't sure. He wasn't sure of much of anything at the moment. He didn't know when he would ever be sure again.

  CHAPTER 37

  The lawyers' twelve-year-old son warned Thorn if he touched either him or his sister, both of them would damn well litigate his ass off. The girl said she was one quarter away from the all-time record score on her machine and her brother was maybe three quarters away. Thorn watched them work their joysticks for a half minute then he stooped down and yanked the plugs on both machines. They all watched the numbers fade from the scoreboard like stars against a dawn sky.

  He hooked each of them under an arm, scooped them up, and carried them, squirming and cursing, down the gangplank onto the Port of Miami docks. Handling the kids with that miraculous restraint he'd acquired in his months of passive arts training.

  Sugar and Thorn spent most of Tuesday afternoon in an interrogation room in the Coast Guard's central office along the Miami River. Thorn giving the young lady who questioned them Butler's name, which she already knew from the reports of dozens of passengers who'd disembarked in Nassau. Beyond that he played dumb. Sugar did as well. The Coast Guard woman was replaced by an FBI woman in a dark suit. She went through the same list of questions but didn't seem terribly interested in prying more from them. Her eyes kept straying to the door as if the good stuff was happening in the next room and she was irritated to be stuck with these minor players.

  Afterward Sugar drove them to a limousine rental service on Biscayne Boulevard where they secured a 1969 Rolls Silver Cloud with deeply tinted windows for twelve hundred a week. Sugar took a deep breath and wrote a check, and while they stood in the limo office waiting for the car to be brought around, Sugar flipped a quarter to see who got to wear the chauffeur's uniform. Thorn won.

  "You sure we need this thing?"

  "You ever been to Star Island?"

  Thorn said no, he hadn't.

  "Well, people out there, their gardeners wear tuxedos."

  Sugar sat in back and directed Thorn across the causeway to one of the luxury islands on the way over to Miami Beach. He called Thorn Jeeves and said "Home, James," several times, but it wasn't funny. Nothing was.

  Thorn drew up to the guard house and Sugarman climbed out and spoke for a while to the young security man. For the last forty-eight hours Sugar had been wearing the same pair of khaki slacks and teal shirt and he smelled like he'd been marinating in ammonia. Even in the freshly laundered chauffeur's uniform Thorn wasn't much better, although after one experimental whiff of his shoulder, he seemed to have deadened his olfactory nerves sufficiently to survive. Sugar's odor didn't seem to offend the uniformed guard. All smiles, the young man accompanied Sugarman back to the car, opened the door for him, and gave him a salute as they drove onto the island.

 
"What the hell did you tell him?"

  "We're government agents. NOSA. Guarding Sampson's property till this Middle East terrorist scare blows over. Nobody's supposed to know we're out here, not even Sampson. National security."

  "NOSA?"

  "It just popped out."

  "He didn't want to see some ID?"

  "Hey, Thorn. Not everybody is as untrusting as you."

  There were two red Jaguar XJ-6s parked out front in the Sampsons' circular drive, both convertibles. Their estate was a Mediterranean affair, fountains and walkways, red tile and thick stucco. An acre of tightly pruned fruit trees. The Sampsons had two or three hundred feet on the bay and a view east toward Miami Beach. There was a dock out back but no yacht.

  They found a small playground a block away. From the northern edge of the park, Thorn could see the front gates of the Sampson estate, and he could also monitor the one road leading past the guard house off the island to the causeway.

  The playground had two teeter-totters and a curved slide and a swing set. No one seemed to use the park except a couple of black poodles whose owner, a white-haired woman in a Madras golf skirt and a garish red top, came around suppertime and steered her dogs to the deep sand beneath the swing set where they deposited their delicacies. Normally Thorn might've made a joke about the lady, her dogs, the size of their turds, something to force a chuckle out of Sugarman. But he didn't feel much like conversation. Breathing was labor enough.

  On the Rolls' TV, they watched the evening news. Brandy Wong's interview with Morton Sampson, her worldwide exclusive. Morton giving his own sanitized version of the frightful events on the Eclipse. He reduced the body count by five and Brandy didn't contradict him. Morton said he considered Dale Jenkins' untimely death a national tragedy. Under Brandy's rapid-fire questions, Morton was brave and appropriately angry and humble. He swore he would do whatever he could to assist the FBI in their investigation. This was an appalling act, a terrorist attack on one of America's finest family-owned companies, and it only went to show that no one was safe anywhere these days. If you couldn't go away on a cruise ship vacation and expect absolute safety, then where could you go?

  "When I die," Sugarman said, "I damn well want my death to be timely."

  Sugarman used the car phone to call the Coast Guard office downtown. It was after hours, but everyone was still working. He asked to speak to the lead investigator on the Eclipse case. When the person came on the line, Sugarman deepened his voice, sped up his delivery, and gave his name as one of their fishing friends from Key Largo, saying he was a field agent with the FBI and was doing an ancillary background check on this Mr. Butler Jack. Did they perhaps have Mr. Jack's Coast Guard service record available?

  Sugarman covered the receiver.

  "She's going to check," he said.

  "Ancillary?" Thorn said.

  Sugarman shrugged. "A good vocabulary opens doors."

  "So they say."

  Sugarman ducked his head and focused on the voice in his ear.

  "Yes, good," he said. "What I need to know, Lizzie, did Mr. Jack receive any kind of flight training while he served with the Coast Guard?"

  Sugarman made some noises in his throat, nodded, and told Lizzie she'd been a great help and he hoped she had a wonderful turkey day. He hung up the phone and crossed his arms over his chest and sat back in the seat.

  "Well? Did he?"

  "No, he didn't," Sugar said. "He didn't need the Coast Guard's help. He entered the service with a goddamn pilot's license already. For most of the two years he was with them, he flew a Bell Jet Ranger chopper, plucking refugees out of the Gulf Stream."

  "Good."

  "Good but insufficient," Sugarman said.

  Sugar went through long-distance information, tracked down the number to the New York office of Lola Live. He asked to speak to a woman called Kyra, had to bullshit a couple of people on the way, using his FBI alias again, but finally he got her home number.

  He spoke to Kyra like they were old pals. Been through the wars. Apparently she was thrilled with the surge in the program's ratings. Even though they'd had to cancel the rest of the week's shows, they expected next Monday, when Lola returned to the air, to be their all-time best day. Sugarman repeating it for Thorn's benefit.

  "So, Kyra. Reason I called was to ask you about the chopper pilot for the show. Yeah, yeah, the helicopter pilot. Danny Bond, yeah, that's right. You heard anything from old Danny?"

  Thorn could hear Kyra's voice peeping from the headpiece. Sugar registered it all impassively, thanked her immensely for her help and hoped he'd see her next time he ventured up to the Shiny Red Apple. Sugar cradled the phone, turned to Thorn, smiled seriously, and said, "Voila."

  "The Lola Live chopper pilot is nowhere to be found," Thorn said.

  "Exactly. The last anybody saw him, Danny was racing off to the airport to fly the money out to the Eclipse."

  "And the chopper?"

  "Landed late last night in Miami, down the road from here at Chalk's Field. So they think Danny flew his mission, landed in Miami, went off on a bender or something."

  "Bet me. A week or two from now, old Danny boy will come washing up onto the beach in Nassau. Spine here, jawbone there."

  Sugar nodded. He stared out at the teeter-totters.

  They slept in shifts; the front seat of the Rolls was every bit as comfortable as Thorn's bed at home. When he woke in the half-light Wednesday morning, the poodle lady was back. In her housecoat this time, once more guiding her dogs to the sandy pit below the swings.

  Thorn had been Sugarman's friend for almost four decades, but in all those years, he'd never known what a great tolerance Sugar had for radio. He could listen to it all day. News and talk shows. By nine that morning he'd settled on a station with a hate-mongering host who insulted his callers, most of whom seemed to have no idea they were being mocked. All morning they listened to endless dissections of the Dolphins' upcoming game and hours of blather about the never-ending invasion of Cubans and Canadians and Haitians and all the other English-deficient idiots. The irritating guy was interrupted only by news, weather, and sports every fifteen minutes. By noon Thorn was so caught up on national events, politics and wars, the NFL, the Hollywood scene, the most recent twists in the latest national murder trial, he wouldn't need to check in again for another five years.

  From the security guard, they got the name of an Italian restaurant that delivered. Ate subs with big kosher dills. When it grew dark, Thorn drove past the estate, and they saw lights on throughout the house. On another pass they caught Morton standing on a balcony holding a phone to his ear, staring out at the glittering water. Later they saw Lola walk out to the front gate to retrieve yesterday's newspaper.

  "They're hunkered down in there."

  "Their own little five-million-dollar bunker."

  At eight they had a pizza delivered to their car, extra Cokes, extra ice. Thorn started to feel the chauffeur's suit pinching at his waist. They took turns using the meticulously clean men's room on the north perimeter of the playground. That night they stayed awake in shifts. Though Thorn had little interest in sleep. Sugarman turned the radio low, tuned to the syndicated preachers and the political philosophers who spewed their gibberish to insomniacs nationwide.

  Thursday was the same. Thorn doing some stretches and leg lifts and sit-ups in the grass beside the car. Lying out in the sun, as stiff and empty as a month-old corpse. Both of them took sponge baths in the men's room using the rough brown paper towels and pink squirt soap. The weather was in the sixties, the sky clear. A steady breeze rattled the royal palms that lined the main thoroughfare. People in the neighborhood came and went, scrupulously ignoring the Rolls parked beside the playground. The Sampsons stayed at home.

  On the radio news there was no further mention of the Eclipse and her troubles. Dale Jenkins was laid to rest in Evansville, Indiana. Most of the stars of the American media made the ceremony. Notably absent were Lola and Morton Sampson. But the really
big story was the upcoming game. The local university football team was to play its upstate rival on Saturday afternoon. Fans calling in on both sides to say loathsome things about the other team, the other city.

  The poodles came and went.

  Early on Friday morning, a convoy of catering trucks passed by and were admitted to the Sampson estate. A while later Thorn took a stroll down that way and watched the crews erecting long tables and a canopied field kitchen. Just after noon, cars began to arrive by the dozen. Old Fords and Chevies and pickups and vans parked up and down the street outside the Sampson estate. Thorn walked down to the guard house and asked the young man what was going on.

  It was Fiesta's annual employee picnic. A last-minute switch, according to the cop. The company vice president had been scheduled to host the event because the Eclipse was supposed to be at sea, but Morton apparently thought it important to put on his best public face. Run the show himself. In fact, the guard said, even Wally Bergson was attending. Did he know Wally Bergson?

  "What? Do I look like I live on the moon?" Thorn said.

  Later on that Saturday afternoon, Thorn drove the Rolls by Sampson's front gates. Out on the wide lawn the dozen long tables were covered with food. Frisbees were flying, a couple of kites fluttered high over the bay. Kids and parents lounging around in the sun. On the center of every table were large ice sculptures melting on silver trays.

  "This isn't getting us anywhere," Thorn said. "Maybe we should just crash the party, take Morton and Lola for a ride somewhere, have a serious talk."

  "Relax, this is a stakeout. This is what happens. Nothing."

  "Maybe we got this all wrong. You ever think about that?"

  "Every minute for the last three days."

  "They aren't that stupid. They aren't going to get in their red Jaguars, drive off and meet him somewhere. It won't happen like that. This is a waste."

  Thorn drove back to the park and found some shade under a black olive tree. Sugarman let his seat back, closed his eyes. He heaved out a major groan.