by Lisa Sandlin
He got out and tried it. Dial tone, all right. Hung it up and leaned against the wall, waited. The breeze mild, pleasant. Clouds on the moon. The station’s orange security lamp stained the leafy underside of the nearest tree an orangey-brown. Weird effect. When the pay phone rang, he went for it.
“Tom?”
“Yeah, what you got?”
“Oh God,” she said in a strained voice, “High Island.”
A cloud sailed past the moon, and it shone out.
“All right. Good job.”
“Keep him outa jail, OK?”
Phelan hung up, dialed E. E.’s number again, but his uncle was no longer at home. He told his Aunt Maryann to get word to E.E. that it was High Island. “Okey doke,” she said. She did not ask what “it” was.
Phelan cruised down Figg Street, parked on the street behind a white pickup with an over-the-cab camper, pressed himself into the door to keep an eye on Frank’s house. In an hour and twenty-seven minutes, a tall man dressed in dark clothes a lot like Phelan’s came out the front door, pair of gloves tucked in his belt. Dome-light hit his profile as he opened the truck’s door and stopped there a second to lift a lighter to his cigarette. Whoa. Far as Phelan could tell, the guy with the layers of sun-kissed blond hair and the long mustache was the Sundance Kid.
Frank lit his smoke. Then pivoted and cast a glance back at the house. Closed the truck’s door. Slid behind the wheel of the Mustang.
Really?
Well, the guy was an upholsterer, liked his leather seats. Had probably never put asset and forfeiture together. Unlike Phelan, he had not acquired and studied government information sheets disseminated to the local police. Frank had probably not paid attention to the roger-dodgers of Congress who had just signed in a new department called the Drug Enforcement Agency. Given they were the federal government, though, those guys were probably still sitting around, tipped back in their chairs, arguing over a logo.
Damn, he’d counted on tailing the slow old pickup.
Look at that. Tan car in his rearview, pulling out way back at the end of the street. Maybe a woman going out for diapers. Or it could be an unmarked car. A half-second horror movie flickered: Tom Phelan walking into the station house after having gotten lost on his way to a bust he himself had called in.
He nailed his eyes to the red of Frank’s three-part taillights. If he lost this Mustang, he might as well keep on traveling down to Mexico.
XXXII
THREE A.M. AND he was not in Mexico. He was mashed down behind tall, scrubby grass and a bunch of discarded crates, observing bales of marijuana transferred from a trawler.
Every black stitch Phelan had on was sogged by his proximity to spray and lapping water, and the watery wind had blown straight through his bone marrow. Calf threatening another cramp, he had to shift position again. He lowered himself onto his butt, pulled up his legs, and rubbed one. He assumed that E.E.’s men were out there somewhere. If they’d found the right place, they were. So as far as he could tell, his plan had to be: wait till the cops swarmed in, then talk himself into possession of Frank, either here on the makeshift dock or down at the station. Wouldn’t be so copacetic for Frank if his fellow smugglers were to witness that. If E.E. was here, maybe Phelan could get the nod and just siphon Frank away in the general roundup. If the cops didn’t swarm in, he’d follow his man home, confront him in his driveway, and recommend retirement in the strongest possible terms.
Why wouldn’t they swarm in? How would he know?
Maybe they’d just wait like a big old spider, seize the dope-packed vehicles like stupid buzzy flies, one at a time, bind up the trawler in yellow crime tape. Which, as far as he could see through the binoculars, looked to be tied by only one bowline. Occurred to Phelan that it would have been good to talk all this over with E.E. before tonight. He liked to think he’d have done that, had it not been for their recent standoff. There could have been a concerted plan, in which, of course, Tom Phelan would have been an extremely peripheral cog, but…Tom Phelan would have known what the plan was.
He frowned in the dark.
He needed to get closer if he was going to nab Frank when the time came, but there was a spotter pacing around, his post twenty yards or so past where vans were parked beside the back end of an 18-wheeler. The big truck was sticking out of an improbably large door to a portable building, just parked there, taking on dope. Phelan changed position again and watched the endless loading.
Around four a.m., the truck fired up and was backed out, driver working hard on the maneuvering on this narrow dirt road. Once the truck was out, the bare warehouse with its two huge entrances looked like a kid’s out-of-scale drawing. No signs identified it, placed smack-up against the water, or the crude dock next to it. The trawler tied up to the dock had a name; he just couldn’t read it in the dark, even with binoculars.
Truck driver revved and pulled off, waving from the window.
Phelan’d gotten as close as he had, maybe fifteen yards farther away, by advancing little by little whenever the spotter paced off into the opposite direction. Felt like Wile E. Coyote. If they’d hired a calmer lookout or let the guy load up on product before clocking in, the spotter might have stuck to his post, and Phelan would still be out in the boonies. In his car parked half on a reedy shoulder and smeared with mud.
He brought up the binoculars again.
Men were climbing in and out of the boat, hefting burlap-covered bales off the shrimper’s deck, shoving them into two vans, a pickup with a gooseneck trailer, and some kind of delivery truck with writing on the side. Running the bale a short ways down the dock to the vehicles, trotting back to the boat for another bale. Most guys hefted a bale at a time onto their straining shoulders, one sometimes hauled two. The one that wore no hat, no bandanna over his crowning glory. What’d the bales weigh—forty pounds? Fifty? Frank was showing them, wasn’t he?
Tons were coming off that boat. Couldn’t judge just how many because, after the truck, the arithmetic-machine in Phelan’s head had run out of tape. Didn’t matter. What was the harm in pot anyway? Wasn’t heroin. Wouldn’t make you grab up your grandma’s Motorola, pawn your sister’s wedding dress off the hanger.
Pot made guys he’d known keep humping their gear, mile after mile of paddy or trailside. It minded your mind for you. Installed a sense of humor over previously un-noted trifles. Could be a time-out, a tiny party for one. Or two. It being illegal was helpful in that sense. Grunts got behind that—middle finger to the Army. Wouldn’t be the same charge if you could hit up a vending machine for Marlboro MJ Filters.
Wouldn’t be bad, though.
Phelan dragged the back of his hand over his wet forehead. Rubbed his cheeks and nose to warm them. The spotter had gone down to talk to somebody near the trawler.
What had he thought, as a kid, swimming out to that skyscraper ship in the turning basin? That he’d climb on, land in Italy or Spain, Greece or Africa, walk down a gangplank into a city plastered with the banners of a strange world. He’d’ve been screwed, blued, and tattooed, he knew now, but as a boy he’d pictured a brotherly fantasy: he’d pick up their language, eat stew with the sailors, swab the decks or tend the boilers, whatever sailors did. Be one of them. Was that how these Texas pirates were thinking, heroes of their own brotherhood & bucks movie? Or were they figuring to be businessmen with guns?
By quarter to six, the vans had sped off, and the haulers, not speedy now, were packing bales into the gooseneck trailer. Phelan felt like the Navy had used his body for knot practice. Water was still slapping the dock down there. Wind was dying. Birds were chittering in the trees, diving in the graying sky.
A hum.
Phelan sat up on his numb wet ass.
Definite hum.
The hum picked up, became an engine, became many engines. The end of the dirt road morphed into a pulsing wall of red lights, screeching brakes, and cops flying out of cars. The haulers scattered. Somebody jumped onto the boat’s deck. The trawler eng
ine coughed and caught. Down the channel bee-lined a Marine Safety speedboat with blaring white lights. Look at those sons of guns cut the water. Soon as they got close to the trawler, a crew member with a megaphone issued garbled commands.
Phelan knocked away bushy branches and crawled from his hideout. He thought it best not to get arrested and to that end walked stiffly to a cop who was stationed at one of the many cruisers. Police Department. Sheriff’s Department. Texas Department of Public Safety. Jesus, everybody out here but the ushers at the Jefferson Theatre. Any wife-whackers, carjackers, ransackers, or safecrackers back in Beaumont that picked tonight to clock in, they’d be killing it. Phelan let himself be nabbed and frisked by an excited cop who’d been left to guard the horses. He told the officer who he was, throwing in his relation to the Chief of Police, and eventually convinced him to check his ID and let him keep his gun.
“One guy,” he said, “I get one guy. The chief agreed.”
“Man, if that’s what happens, it happens, but don’t look at me.”
“Y’all get the vans?”
“Does Satan vomit pea soup? Step back and let me work here.”
Phelan stayed out of the way. The back seats of cop cars began to be populated with sweat-drenched, handcuffed men whose faces he squinted at.
Nope, not Frank.
The boat police, meanwhile, were not scaling the trawler—why not? They had it needle-nosed-nailed to the dock, drowned in white light, and were bullhorn-lecturing it.
A black silhouette on the trawler’s deck appeared to be lecturing back to the Boat Police.
What.
Whatever he was saying was lost under the Marine Safety Unit’s superior decibels. But not his gestures. The guy had one arm over his eyes to ward off the spotlight, but with his other hand he kept pointing downward and then sweeping up his palm and pushing it at them as though he meant to say, Stay there. Or Wait a minute. Or Stop in the Name of Love. What was down there?
Phelan recognized a couple short patrolmen, one black and one white. They’d apparently locked up their prisoners and returned to watch this numbnuts holding off the water cops. He gave them Frank’s description, but they shrugged. Phelan scanned the scene for Frank then exchanged a OK-what-are-we-seeing-here glance with the two and raised his binoculars.
The smuggler ranted into the water-cop’s face and shoved a hand toward the deck. One of the Marine Safety Patrols passed off the bullhorn and jumped on, backed up by two guys who had their service revolvers aimed. Another, hefting a scoped rifle, was moving up beside them. The man aboard the trawler held up both his hands. High.
The water-cop thundered at the pirate and pointed his gun straight down.
The pirate’s “Noooo” could have been heard by cruisers already on their way to the station. The man straight-armed the cop backward, causing him to drop his gun and then scramble after it.
A few weak rays of pre-dawn caught the smuggler, man with a ponytail. He’d bent down and now rose back up hugging a colossal, fat, whitish shield with speckled protrusions, flaps of some kind. He staggered toward the stern. The cop had caught up to the pirate and was hollering, smacking him on the back of the neck. The pirate hunched his shoulders and tucked his head down, managed to keep waddling forward. Whatever booty he was lugging, it exceeded his own personal maximum.
The cop kneed the guy in the tailbone, knocking him farther along, and the guy screamed back.
The shield’s flaps paddled.
The Marine Safety Unit might have had a clear target if their compadre hadn’t been dead-set on thumping the shit out of the pirate. Thanks to that, the pirate reached the stern and twisted himself and his leaden load. He contracted then heaved the shield out from himself, giving a mighty grunt that turned into a roar from the bottom of his belly. The shield flipped and flew, momentarily, above the water. Its wings, four of them—two long and two short—were speckled like a giraffe, as was its…head. A head. As it descended, dawn light lit up the shell, a mound of brown and verdigris green.
Phelan had been alternately watching for Frank and following the drama on the trawler. Now he stared. He’d never seen a turtle that size, nor seen a sea turtle fly, and he was dumbstruck watching it take to the air. The turtle splashed then rose for a micro-second, a darker shadow within the water. The tops of both curved flippers spread like hawk-wings before they plunged the great animal below the surface.
Spinning around, Phelan looked toward the trawler. The smuggler—goddamn, Ticker, it was him—thrust both arms into the victorious dawn. Then two water cops smashed into him and all three men fell, disappearing from sight. For good measure, the sniper on the speedboat let loose, firing high. The M-16 rounds were galvanizing to Phelan, home-sickening.
He turned away. Peered then lunged forward and intercepted a cop dragging along an offloader who looked like a tall, dirty, handsome, miserable bale of hay. Phelan hustled the cop aside, flashed his P.I. license, and started to confirm the deal he’d made with his uncle.
“Keep on steppin’,” the cop said, waving him off. He whacked Frank on the back, barked, “Mine.”
Frank’s jaw was clenched but trembling. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.
Phelan told him to shut the fuck up and offered a facesaver to the cop. “Lotta noise out here,” he said and finished telling the man who his uncle was. To Frank he said, “Private investigator. You led us to the party. In exchange for that, I get you.”
Frank’s captor lifted up his hands, made an irked face at Phelan, and salaamed. Phelan took possession.
The Marine Safety Unit guys led their prisoner off the shrimper, zigzagging around bales, coolers, crates, somebody’s guitar case, and turned him over. Phelan, with a handcuffed Frank clamped by the elbow, stood back on a muddy strip of road as Ticker was escorted by without a sideways glance. He’d be looking at drug trafficking, possession with intent to distribute, resisting arrest. No credit for rescuing a sea turtle. Phelan told himself he could’ve been watching a body bag pass by, but that didn’t help a lot.
Ticker bellowed Wait, Cocksuckers as they reached a cruiser. His pony-tailed head angled upward at the morning sky’s white-gold spokes shining up the water world. He gazed until they mashed him into the car.
Phelan tugged his client’s husband toward his Chevelle, parked ahead off the road.
Frank’s fair hair was plastered with sweat. Straws of weed stuck to his neck and t-shirt.
“Wait, I gotta get my Mustang. Could you, you know, take off these cuffs so I can drive? So it’ll be there when I get—”
“You don’t have a Mustang.” Frank smelled like a six-foot two-inch joint with end-stage B.O.
“Sure do. I’m parked right—”
“Yeah. See it anywhere around here?”
Phelan let go of him, so he could flail one direction, then the other, then all the way around.
“C’mon.” Phelan walked him farther, put him in the Chevelle’s back seat.
Frank leaned to the window, turning his head right then left, his forehead bumping the glass as they rolled over some ruts. “Where is it?” His voice was now higher.
“Impounded for eternity. Ever so often the police have these auctions. Ever been to one? Man, there’s some bargains.”
“They can’t take my car! It’s my wife’s. I’m makin’ the payments. I don’t care if they’re the cops, they can’t just steal my car!”
Phelan explained why they could. In addition, educated Frank about the agency that would be clamping down on dope activities using methods nobody knew about yet, but Phelan was betting might be harshed-up from current penalties. Why? Simple. Nixon had signed the order. And new uniforms, new offices, letterhead, Selectrics, badges, cars, that shit had to be paid for. People had to have shit to do. They had to reconnaissance, liaison, reconnoiter, and rendezvous. Whole shebang had to sanctify itself, the dope cops, the DC imps, Nixon. Frank should cheer up. He’d only been caught by the Beaumont Police Department, not the United States o
f America rolling out a brand new beef. And unless he was even dimmer than he acted, he should notice that he was headed back to his own house.
Grumbling emanated from the back seat. Every so often, Phelan checked the rearview. Frank’s shoulders poked forward, the handcuffs preventing him from sitting back against the seat easily. His movie-star features squeezed or spread into different configurations as his brain processed his predicament. Only about five or six blocks to go when he spit out, “You didn’t tell me why the cops picked me to follow. I didn’t rat to nobody. I didn’t even tell my…”
“First, clue me in, I’m curious. How much were you gonna make for the night?”
“Nine grand.”
“Whoa. Tough paycheck to lose. Could be worse, though.”
Phelan told him how he was picked. His freedom was courtesy of his wife, and if he wasn’t grateful to Phelan Investigations, he should sure as hell be grateful to Cheryl Sweeney.
He pulled up next to the old pickup with the good tires, helped Frank out, and at the door, where Cheryl was waiting, unlocked the handcuffs and pocketed the small key. Nodded at Cheryl, who mouthed Thank you.
The upholsterer must’ve been planning his move, even as Phelan slipped the key into his pocket. Once Phelan turned away, Frank kicked him in the back of the knees. Phelan grunted loudly and collapsed, crashing down into some resistant, stickery bushes. Cheryl yelled at Frank. Phelan pushed out of the stickers and maneuvered himself up. As he hobbled menacingly toward the Sweeney’s front door, Frank kicked it shut with nuclear force. There was a sharp click. From inside, soprano and tenor shouting.
Phelan finally relaxed his fists. He executed a turn and hop-limped to his car, lowered himself in. He stopped at a Fertitta’s store for an Ace bandage and a bag of ice. Fantasized flattening Frank Sweeney’s fine bone structure with the five-pound icebag and strangling him with the bandage. Instead, he limped into the duplex and dropped his night’s wardrobe on the bathroom floor. Seeing it was a little after eight, he called Delpha at the office. Gave her a fast account of the bust and the bagging of Frank Sweeney, leaving out the parts about the turtle and the sticker bushes.