Salty Sky

by Seth Coker

  He wished he had timed his visit for when Mr. Coleman’s family was in town. The brutal death of innocent family members was particularly useful in instilling fear into allies and enemies alike. In his life’s equation, scared allies and enemies saved his men’s lives. But Francisco had decided to focus on kings. The killing of more innocents was focusing on pawns. He would not spend the time tracking down the remaining family members unless he needed them to catch Mr. Coleman.

  Leaving the premises, Francisco decided that, at dawn, if Mr. Coleman was not there, they would wait in the house for him.

  23

  TONY DROVE HUNCHED forward to see through the rain, Ashley rode shotgun, and Cale sat at an angle in the backseat with his feet behind Tony and his body behind Ashley. There was a test of the emergency broadcast system that silenced their chatter for a moment. Funny that they went forward with this scheduled test even when an actual hurricane was in town. Ah, regulators. You had to love ’em.

  During the beep, Cale’s mind wandered to his abbreviated time in college. The best class he ever took was dance.

  It wasn’t dance theory. Or dance history. It was actual dancing. He signed up, thinking, rightfully, that it would fulfill his physical education requirement and that he’d meet chicks. He met Maggie there. In the class, it was fortunate that the guys didn’t wear leotards; it was unfortunate that the girls didn’t. The end of the acid wash and the start of the grunge era was the least optimal college clothing era for displaying young bodies in fifty years. OK, maybe the shoulder pad era was worse, but not by much. Of course, it was a class that started in January in the upper Midwest, so most of the students weren’t exactly in fighting shape. But if leotards were required, would he have shown his boys off? Would he have resorted to a confidence prop? Not that he needed a prop. Or help with his confidence.

  Thinking of props, an old joke ran through his mind. It was just the three of them, so he went ahead with it.

  “So two friends,” he said aloud, “a Frenchman and a Pole, visit the beach. The first day, the Frenchman puts on his Speedo and struts around the beach. He meets two girls and takes them back to the hotel. The Pole is very impressed. The next day, the Frenchman does the same thing again. So on the third day, the Pole asks, ‘My friend, how do you do it?’

  “The Frenchman replies, ‘Mon ami, after I put on my Speedo, I put a potato in it. The potato is what gets the ladies’ attention.’

  “The Pole thanks his friend for the advice. He goes and buys a Speedo. He goes and buys a potato. He puts the potato in his Speedo. He walks the beach. That afternoon, he walks up from the beach in his Speedo by himself and sees the Frenchman. The Pole is very upset.

  “‘My friend,’ he says, ‘why have you tricked me? I put the potato in my Speedo, and instead of meeting women, people have run away from me.’

  “The Frenchman looks at his friend and says, ‘Mon ami, do it again tomorrow. But this time put the potato in front.’”

  The joke received a polite laugh.

  Tony jumped in. “A Frenchman, an Englishman, and an Irishman walk into a bar, sit down, and order three beers. At the exact same moment, a fly drops into each of their beers. The Frenchman says not a word, but pushes the beer away with a look of disgust. The Englishman takes the fly out of the beer, tosses it to the side, and then takes a sip. The Irishman picks up the fly, holds it by its wings, and yells, ‘Spit it out, ya bastard!’”

  Cale laughed a little more than the joke warranted. It felt good, and the laugh came easy. They had become a comfortable group.

  Ashley started another. “So this guy and girl went parking. The guy looks at the girl and says, ‘Do you want to get in the backseat?’

  “She looks at him, a little puzzled, and says, ‘No. I’d rather stay up here with you.’”

  Cale laughed a lot more than the joke deserved. Well, it was cute, reminded him of one his kids said no less than a thousand times. Daddy, why didn’t the pony sing? Because it was a little horse. He left that one unsaid; they weren’t that comfortable a group.

  Cale’s thoughts returned to where they were before the jokes: Dance class. He learned shag, salsa, and the Electric Slide. How many times had he used that knowledge? Now that was a liberal arts education. How many times had he used what he learned in biology? So the mitochondria were the powerhouse of the cell, but what did that mean? Tonight, he was again pleased with that dance class. There was no salsa music, but the basics transferred; he’d held his own with Ashley.

  It was after midnight and Cale was bone tired, but the night possessed unasked questions. Should he invite them in for a nightcap? Should he invite just Ashley? Would she say yes?

  Ashley beat him to the punch. When Tony pulled into the driveway, she read a text from her friends. They asked her to pick them up. No cabs were running tonight, and they needed a lift to the boat.

  Ashley said she’d call Cale tomorrow when Joe was free. Since he was without a car, Cale agreed to take the water route and meet them to celebrate the restoration of liberty. He was gambling that the wind and rain would slacken enough by then. What was the plan to get his car back? Oh yeah, Barry was driving back Friday and leaving it at the FBO. After tomorrow, he had a charter that would have him out of town until then anyway.

  Cale scuttled in the front door and rubbed Jimmy’s head. The two housemates walked through the quiet rooms to the back door. Cale flipped on the back porch light and froze.

  There were puddles of water. They tracked from the screen door to the back door. Someone there? He flipped the light off. From the volume of water, it looked like several pairs of shoes or multiple trips in and out.

  Nobody came inside. Jimmy would have demanded a fight. Cale checked him for injuries. He felt fine. Cale used his phone’s flashlight app to spotlight the kitchen floor. No water. He shined it around the doorframe. Two big paw prints were on the glass door. Good boy, Jimmy. Cale rubbed his head again.

  Who visited? Friends on boats used the back door. Friends in cars used the front. Nobody was on the water tonight, so this wasn’t a friend. A burglar not willing to mess with a 120-pound dog? A Colombian with a fillet knife?

  Cale left the house lights off. He unlocked his safe, withdrew the Beretta, nestled it in the small of his back, and pulled a fleece on to conceal the weapon and keep warm. He hit the head, brushed his teeth, gurgled Listerine.

  He sat on his bed to think. Jimmy laid across his feet, creating a less-than-optimal ready position. He envisioned trying to run with one foot asleep, dragging behind him. The more adrenaline Cale had running through his veins, the more he joked.

  He had killed three men while at the DEA. The agency’s psychologists said most folks were torn up by these incidents. A few accepted them and moved on. Most of those remaining were sociopaths. Cale was definitely in the second group and hoped not the third. Three kills was a huge number for any law enforcement official. For a soldier after a decade of war in the Middle East, maybe not so much, but it was unheard of in the DEA for someone who wasn’t actually an arresting agent. Most SWAT team snipers have never killed, much less pilots.

  The first kill was outside Tijuana, in a hamlet referred to by locals as San Diego. He was at an airport, at a small FBO. The agency normally operated from the commercial airport, but this was a clandestine operation, so the fewer eyes—even those of their own team—the better. For this operation, Cale was flying an agent posing as a buyer into Jalisco.

  The intent was to buy, load, and fly back a hundred kilos. He would have two hundred and fifty packets of one hundred-dollar bills in a gym bag behind his seat. They would turn the powder over when they landed back in the US. It would be tested, then burned.

  Cale was disgusted by the idea that $2.5 million dollars in tax money was paid to drug smugglers. Better to drop the cocaine on Iranian Revolutionary Guard military bases than burn it. But this $2.5 million was a small chip in a no-limit Texas Hold’em tournament for the brass.

  The transaction took
months to materialize. The buyer’s deep cover was as a dance club promoter; the poor guy spent eighteen months partying until four in the morning, Thursday to Saturday each week. He cultivated a reputation as someone with significant distribution ability for blow, constantly making it known that he needed larger supply sources. The demand, he maintained, outstripped the supply. He convinced the seller’s eyes and ears in San Diego and secured an introduction. They performed several domestic transactions. A kilo here, a kilo there.

  The buyer made the case to buy in Mexico, where the upfront cost would be lower, and he could transport it himself. This was the first international buy. It would build confidence and enhance the working relationship. They would then progress upstream to meet bigger fish. This was standard practice. It looked good on paper—if you played the long game of no-limit Hold’em. If you were flush with other people’s money.

  Cale prepared the unmarked chopper for departure. Its black bottom and dark gray sides made it a tough bird to see from the ground at night. Cale stowed the money bag and proceeded with his preflight exterior inspection.

  Two men in suits approached the bird next to him. They pulled wheeled luggage, which jostled on the pavement as if it were empty. They raised their voices enough to be overheard. One of the men was loud and indignant while the other man nodded in support. The first ranted about their upcoming flight, their pilot’s tardiness. How they now had thirty minutes to kill on the tarmac.

  This didn’t fit, but maybe it was an innocent mistake. Did they walk to the wrong bird? This area had been closed off to civilians; the only door keys to the helicopters in this section jingled in Cale’s pocket. That helicopter wasn’t going anywhere. His internal radar pinged. He tugged the back hem of his nylon jacket. His hand grazed the hidden Ruger.

  He continued the preflight inspection, never turning his back on the two men. When he wasn’t battling through the booze, Cale’s survival instincts were highly developed—so developed it bordered on cowardice. He constantly envisioned the possible outcomes of so many events that never materialized. Half his life was spent on mental exercises for events that never happened. This was why, in a confrontation, he was disproportionately brutal.

  Eventually, the animated man initiated a conversation with Cale. “Excuse me, partner, are you the pilot for that helicopter?”

  Underneath the colloquial use of “partner,” he heard a faint accent. He replied simply, “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you looking to take on extra charter work?”

  “No, sir.”

  “That’s too bad. Between you and me, partner, we are having an issue with our pilot. I think I’m going to need to interview backups. How do you like flying this helicopter? Do you have the range to reach Las Vegas from here?”

  “It’s a good job. With the right conditions, this helicopter can make it to Las Vegas.”

  The men used the opportunity to approach. Their bags bounced behind them—definitely empty. The same man continued, “Let me give you a business card, in case you change your mind or know of someone.” Cale realized he’d never heard the other man speak. Perhaps because he only spoke Spanish?

  They were too close now. The Ruger was inaccessible. But Cale knew he still had an opportunity. If he was right—and not shit-can crazy paranoid because he was getting ready to fly to Mexico to buy two and a half million dollars’ worth of coke on the side of a dirt road from ten guys with machine guns—these guys needed silence and would come with a knife or a rope.

  The one talking extended a card and gave a formal introduction with a made-up gringo name. The silent one approached to Cale’s right. Cale changed his footing to reach for the card with his left hand. The adjustment created a brief pause, then the silent one went for it anyway, a knife in hand.

  He lunged for Cale’s throat. Cale pushed the man’s arm up with his right hand while his left fist broke the man’s exposed ribs. The man buckled slightly. Cale dragged the man between him and the speaker while his right arm slid to the man’s hand. He twisted the thumb up until the wrist cracked. The man released the knife, and the falling blade got caught between his belt and pants. Cale grabbed the hilt and brought the blade tip swiftly up into the soft part of the man’s chin, driving the blade through the tongue and into the top of the mouth. Cale pulled it back out and drove it through the man’s trachea and into his spine. He pushed the corpse into the speaker.

  The speaker dodged his dead partner, now holding his own knife. He sized Cale up then turned and ran. Cale caught and tackled him violently, whipping the man’s head face-first into the asphalt. Cale braced his forearm on the base of the man’s skull, pushing his face into the tarmac. Cale hit the man’s half-exposed face with his free hand until well after the man was unconscious.

  When internal affairs released him from questioning, he and Maggie stayed up talking all night. He’d heard so many stories of tough men breaking apart after a kill that he expected awful emotional waves. After a few weeks without any mental tsunamis, he tried to encourage them to come on so he could hurry up and deal with them. He humanized the victim, opined maybe the guy had a bad childhood, delivered Meals on Wheels to elderly shut-ins, or was, at a minimum, somebody’s son. He tried to make himself believe he’d enjoyed the feel of the knife entering the body. But the attempts at guilt didn’t stick. Reality was too clear. The victim was trying to kill him. Cale hadn’t enjoyed killing him instead, but he had too much to live for not to fight. It happened and was done with. He lost only that one night of sleep with Maggie.

  His other two kills were in Colombia—another clandestine operation; he couldn’t understand now why he’d agreed to so many of those. The first guy was a bodyguard that ran his vehicle through Cale’s chopper. Cale killed him as the man was setting up to shoot one of Cale’s teammates. The last was the prodigal nephew in the Escobar drug cartel. Cale shot him with his bodyguard’s pistol.

  That mission, specifically that shot, was why he sat thinking while Jimmy put his feet to sleep. He made his decision, stood up, armed the alarm, and walked into the rain. There were no “protected by” signs at his house. Except when his grandchildren visited, he never set the alarm. Theft wasn’t a concern, nor were local hooligans. The house’s physical boundaries were a deterrent. Jimmy was a deterrent. The small armory of weapons he owned was a deterrent. Cale, himself, was a deterrent. So he never used the alarm.

  Oliver North had convinced Cale to install the alarm. Not personally, of course. Cale was a teenager listening to the Iran–Contra hearings, where Ollie testified on why his $200,000 house needed a $100,000 alarm system. If memory served, it was because of some guys in the Middle East—guys eventually called jihadists. Nobody believed him. Here? Thousands of miles from the bad guys in the mud huts? Impossible! Go figure. In Cale’s possibly faulty memory, North even mentioned bin Laden by name, who was waist deep in US-provided Stinger antiaircraft missiles at the time.

  Cale worked with the alarm company to customize the install; if the alarm was set, he needed to count on it not being outsmarted. The alarm’s door contacts were on the hinge side, rather than the usual placement on the top. Casually checking for contacts, nobody would notice them near the hinges. The alarm sound was a loud recording of Jimmy barking at a bobcat in a tree. It scared Cale hearing him bark that way; for anyone who had seen the dog, it was deeply unsettling. In addition, the good folks from the alarm company would call in, projecting from the alarm’s speaker system, forcefully demanding that the intruders identify themselves. He had never given them camera access, which felt a little too creepy, but he currently wondered whether he’d been shortsighted.

  Cale crossed the yard and pulled a sleeping bag and hammock out of the dock locker, which banged open when it caught the wind. He pulled the lid back shut and took his gear into the shed, out of the elements. He rearranged the surfboards to make room, hung the hammock inside, gathered his compound bow and spear gun. He laid them under the hammock. He wished he hadn’t gifted his rifles t
o his sons-in-law. Cale then prayed that he was going a little insane from paranoia, but then wondered if being hunted might actually be better than being insane.

  He hadn’t engaged an Escobar in twenty years. Cale felt their family was being a bit petty singling him out for their grievances. Given the arc of violence in their lives, this wasn’t much different from holding a grudge against the guy who kissed your prom date after you’d gotten married and raised a family. Cale thought that by his thirtieth-year reunion, he’d definitely be able to talk to that guy or—at a minimum—hit on his wife.

  Cale lowered the Whaler to the water, trimmed the engine, and set the key in the ignition. He looped the line such that only one knot needed to be undone to cast off. Hopefully, the worst of the wind was gone; this was not the way they taught you to secure your vessel in a storm. He went back into the shed, taking Jimmy with him, laid in the hammock, and slipped into the unzipped sleeping bag’s fold, keeping his shoes on. He found himself thinking about Ashley before holding a brief good-night conversation with Maggie and then falling asleep.

  24

  TOO EARLY, A low growl woke him. Cale hushed Jimmy with a gentle hand placed on the dog’s massive head and rolled out of the sleeping bag. The rain seemed over, and the wind was gone. Brake lights flickered on and off as a large vehicle backed down the driveway. Cale couldn’t make out the license plate. The vehicle stopped halfway up the drive. The gear light changed to park.

  Three men exited the vehicle. They left it running. Not very environmentally friendly, señores. Cale didn’t recognize the men, but he knew them. As they approached the house, each slipped on a pair of goggles. Cale recalculated the odds with his opponents having night vision. He mentally realized he was down on numbers, sight, and most likely weaponry.