by Jim Nisbet
Red had anticipated Tipsy’s keening Eureka; indeed, he’d been unable to devise a way around it. In the end, he came around to thinking it not such a bad idea. Get things started with a bang, what the hell.
So far, so good.
Now they could get down to business.
Anchor set and buoyed with one of the boat’s big green fenders, Red killed the engine and all lights in the wheelhouse except those on various instruments and the VHS radio. Almost straight north, beyond the bow roller of Kreutzer’s Revenge, the entire oil terminal at Richmond Long Wharf abruptly illuminated, as the maneuvers necessary to dock and petrosuction Hercules Perforce got underway. This was precisely the kind of operation Charley could have watched all night by way of amusing himself, Red reflected.
Maybe I’ll park his head up on the dashboard, here, let him enjoy an uninterrupted view.
Red’s smile revealed a missing tooth.
He stepped over the unconscious Quentin and reversed himself in order to back down the companionway, despite the fact that the vessel was not underway and no unpredictable sea tossed her. Gaining the saloon he nearly stepped on Tipsy, who lay whimpering on the carpeted sole.
He left her to it. He retrieved the carving knife, the beer bottle, and a lime from the deck and put them in the sink. Next to the sink stood Tipsy’s empty glass. Next to the drink yawned the open mouth of the top-loading refrigerator. Up out of the refrigerator beamed Charley’s severed head.
“You scared her good, Charley. Almost got me cut.” He lifted the head by its tonsure and raked a fistful of ice out from under it. “Sometimes I think you lack subtlety.”
He shared the handful of ice between two glasses, then paused as if to regard Charley by various angles of light. Wraiths of condensation trailed the head as he turned it. Only the ragged flesh of the severed neck showed signs of freezer burn. So far, so preserved. He considered the logo on the inside of the refrigerator door. He’d never heard of the brand, but it seemed to do the job. He replaced the head on the bag of ice and dropped the door, which latched itself. If I get my ass out of this fix, Red mused, one of these units might serve well in the tropics, where you can trade ice for anything. Anything at all.
“Okay, little sister.” He gripped Tipsy under her shoulders. “Sit up. Let’s get a little grog in us.”
Overcome by apathy, Tipsy made no effort to resist.
Red eased her onto the bench, the upholstered back of which was the refrigerator cabinet.
Red drew the cork from a bottle rum and sniffed it. “I know you’re not going to believe this.” He half filled each of the two glasses. “Not at first, anyway.” He nodded at her over one of the glasses. “But I had no choice in the matter.” He threw back the contents of the glass at one go, squeezed shut his eyes, and smacked his lips. “Damn,” he said, “that’s some trophy shit.” He poured three more fingers of rum in his own glass and offered her the second one. “Fact is, I liked your brother.”
After a long pause, Tipsy accepted the drink. She took a sip, paused, took a second sip. After a third pause she took a longer draught, and then the glass was empty. Gingerly, as if it were made of the thinnest crystal, she set the glass onto the table.
Red recharged it. He showed her a bottle of soda water. Tipsy shook her head. Red put his hand on the latch of the refrigerator. “More ice?”
Tipsy looked up from the glass, at which she had been staring, and refocused her eyes on some middle distance. The refrigerator compressor switched on. Tipsy winced.
“I guess not,” Red surmised.
Tipsy opened her mouth.
Red held up a hand. “Before you start casting about for someone to blame, I need to point out that I didn’t kill your brother, you have no idea what’s going on, and we need to talk. Because,” he smiled without mirth, “things are even weirder than you think they are.”
Tipsy put the glass to her lips, glanced down at its rim, then set it on the table. As the boat gently rocked, the liquor remained level in the glass, upon which was embossed a crossed pair of yacht club burgees, one blue, one red.
“Charley’s dead,” Tipsy finally said, her voice dull. Then: “What could possibly remain to discuss with a piece of shit such as yourself?”
“Since you bring it up,” Red raised an eyebrow, “wouldn’t you like to know how he died? On TV, they call it closure.”
A shadow passed over Tipsy’s face. “My brother …” she repeated softly.
“… Was a friend of mine,” Red said.
Tipsy exhaled. Her disgust, if unqualified and profane, had never been long-suffering. “He was your gofer. That’s all. Your errand boy.”
“I prefer the term contract employee. But after what—sixteen years?” Red shook his head. “We were friends.”
Tipsy made an ineffectual gesture toward the refrigerator. “Where’s the rest of him?”
“The sharks got the rest of him,” Red replied truthfully. “It wasn’t pretty.”
Tipsy looked up. “You were there?”
Red nodded.
“He’s aged,” Tipsy said after a pause.
“Decapitation will do that to a man.” Red shot up a hand. “So will twenty years,” he added, by way of a kindly correction.
“Twenty-five,” she corrected him. “Fifteen since I’ve seen him.” Tipsy continued, as if talking to herself. “He never told me about the earring.”
“He got the ear pierced in Brazil,” Red supplied helpfully. “A long time ago.”
“Brazil,” Tipsy repeated with little inflection.
“These days, it’s a fad for men to wear earrings,” Red told her. “A hundred years ago, a sailor got his ear pierced for a reason.”
“Do tell,” Tipsy said.
“You rounded the horn under sail? Cape Horn? Down there at the bottom of South America?”
Tipsy made no response.
“You got your ear pierced. West around? The right ear. East around? The left ear.” Red pinched his left earlobe with the fingers of his left hand. “I never made that passage. But your brother did.”
“Really?” Tipsy showed a little curiosity. “Charley rounded Cape Horn? Under sail?”
“East around. That he did. That’s why the earring is on his left ear.”
“Wow …”
“Aboard a thirty-four-foot gaff-rigged ketch.” Red sipped his drink. “Wow, indeed.”
Tipsy showed more interest. “By himself?”
Red shook his head. “Just one other guy, but he was a very experienced skipper. Charley was his crew.”
After a long pause, she sighed again. “What’s … what’s with …” She moved her thumb over her shoulder.
Red opened the palm of his left hand, lifted it, and let it fall onto his thigh. “I need to prove it.”
“Prove what?”
“That he’s dead.”
“To me?”
Red shrugged. “For starters.”
“Consider it proved.”
“Yeah.” Red nodded.
“What’s wrong with a simple death certificate?” Tipsy asked.
Red shook his head. “Too easy to forge.”
“And you didn’t do it?”
Red shook his head.
“Promise?” Her voice sounded very small.
Red nodded.
“Okay.” Tipsy collected herself and sat up straight. After a moment she sighed deeply. “So where did this … evidence … get collected?”
“In the Straits of Florida. About halfway between Havana and Key West. He was damn near home free. At least,” Red added darkly, “it looked that way.”
Tipsy sat up a little straighter. “What stopped him?”
“His boat hit something. Could have been a balk of timber torn off a dock by a storm, could have been a palm tree or a shipping container, it could even have been another wreck. It was bad luck, pure and simple.”
“Charley had bad luck? Surely not.”
“Yeah, well …” Red managed a smi
le. “He was on an uptick. A couple of years worth of uptick, I’d say.”
“And then he signs on to work for you again. Brilliant.”
Red considered her. “What do you know about it?”
Tipsy blinked. “You sent your note in one of his envelopes.”
“How do you think I found you?”
Tipsy answered the question with another. “Aside from his head and some envelopes, what else did you take off his boat?”
“Not nearly enough.”
“Couldn’t you have left him alone?”
“Going back to work was Charley’s idea.”
“Couldn’t you have told him no? Why Charley, of all people? Hadn’t he suffered enough? Don’t you have any number of idiots hanging around, looking to make a quick buck?”
“I wasn’t picking on—. Besides, Charley was good. He—” Red held up both hands. “I don’t want to get into a pissing match with you, Tipsy. You’ve had a bad shock. Besides which, you took a shot to the head.”
“Two.”
“I’m surprised you can remember that.”
“I’d be more surprised if I forgot it.”
“It was an automatic reaction,” Red said defensively. “Like taking—” He failed to arrest a gesture toward the refrigerator. “Come to think about it, you may have a concussion. You shouldn’t be drinking.”
Tipsy wasn’t missing much. “Cutting off my brother’s head was an automatic reaction?”
“I had to do it,” Red insisted. “I need to demonstrate that things have gone … awry.”
“Awry?” Tipsy shook her head as if trying to wake up. “Awry, you say?” She spoke through clenched teeth. “What things went … awry?”
“It’s going to be all I can do to get my ass out of this sling.”
“What—? You mean your proof didn’t … work?”
“I haven’t tried it.” Red chewed his lip. “Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“Things have indeed gone awry, and that’s a fact. But they may not have gone permanently south. Not yet anyway.”
“Unless your name is Charley Powell.”
“But not if your name is Tipsy.” Red blew air through pursed lips. “Can we get on with this? I would like,” and here he smiled, “not to be shouldering the blame for wiping out the entire family. You hear what I’m saying?”
“Oh? And how do I fit into this mess?”
Red brightened the smile. “Reluctantly?”
“You can say that again.”
“You’re already in it,” Red told her, “up to your neck.”
“And how do you figure that? I don’t even know what mess you’re talking about. Are we dealing in dope or shrunken heads? Even if Charley got himself decapitated over a lousy boatload of dope, what the hell, and I repeat”—she pointed a finger at Red—“other than the fact that I no longer have a brother, what in the hell does it have to do with me?” She frowned. “Does somebody think that I somehow have this boatload of dope? Is that the deal?” She glared at him warily. “Do you think I have it?”
Red put down his drink opened the door of the top-loading refrigerator. When he plucked Charley’s head up out of it by the hair, Tipsy yipped. Holding the head to one side, Red used his free hand to remove the bag of ice, which he dropped unceremoniously onto the countertop. The free hand then produced a package wrapped in black plastic and sealed with gray duct tape, which he pitched onto the saloon table.
“Would that it were that simple.” He gestured toward the counter. “More ice?”
“No!”
Red dropped the bag of ice into the mouth of the refrigerator, punched it twice with the fist of his free hand, lowered the severed head onto the divot, and let the door fall with a bang.
Then, with silent courtesy, he poured Tipsy another drink.
About a minute passed.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“I don’t know.” Red raked a few shards of ice off the counter and dropped them into his drink. “Do you think it’s one kilogram of pink Peruvian flake?”
“It really does look like a brick,” Tipsy marveled ingenuously. Then she lied. “I’ve never seen one before.”
Red just shrugged. “Some people don’t get around like other people do.”
“So now what’s the hassle?” Tipsy asked. “Shouldn’t you be celebrating while I make funeral arrangements?”
Red solemnly shook his head. “We got nothing to celebrate, and the funeral’s going to have to wait.”
Tipsy toyed with her drink. Finally, just to make conversation, she inquired after the value of the brick.
Red responded as if he were bored. “Wholesale, forty-four thousand bucks. Retail by the ounce, maybe seventy thousand. Gram-wise on the street it could go to ninety thousand.” He closed his eyes and massaged the wrinkles in his forehead. “Ordinary cops would exaggerate the price, but the feds would double it to the media, to 170 thousand, say. If you asked them again they’d round up to two hundred thousand.” He smiled wanly. “The feds got a lot of overhead.”
Tipsy’s face hardened. “You killed Charley for—”
“I did not kill Charley, Tipsy,” Red reiterated patiently. “For reasons I don’t entirely understand, Charley got himself into a pickle, and for reasons I more or less have come to terms with, he took the permanent way out.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? My brother cut off his own head?”
“It’s effectively true,” Red affirmed grimly. “Your brother might just as well have gone ahead, as it were, and committed suicide.”
“After all he’d been through,” Tipsy responded incredulously, “Charley committed suicide?”
“I saw it with my own eyes.”
“I don’t believe it.”
Red made no response.
“How?” she asked softly.
“He chained himself to the mast of his sinking ship in shark-infested waters.”
Tipsy opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She closed her mouth. After another moment she said, “That’s redundant.”
“That it was.”
“I don’t understand. Was he sick?”
“No.”
“Was he about to get caught?”
Red hesitated, then shook his head. “Not till his boat got stove.”
“Well why, then?”
“At the time, I had no idea.”
“About what?”
Red nodded severely. “It took me a long time to believe it. Weeks, in fact.”
“Believe what? That he would he kill himself?”
Red balled his left hand into a fist. He stood still but he shivered, the very picture of inarticulateness. The ice in his drink rattled. He set it down. The he leaned across the table. His shadow fell over her. His face, reddening as if from its own power source, hovered inches from hers. She could see every detail of his sun-blasted complexion, the purpling veins in the flesh of his nose, flecks of dead skin on his chapped lips, the gap where his lateral incisor had been, and the pink fractals in the whites around his startling blue eyes. His breath enveloped her, an intimacy sweetened by rum. His hair and clothing reeked of fish and diesel and exhaustion. The welt of a scar on the cheek beneath his left eye whitened visibly. His unkempt hair virtually writhed with energy. Tipsy shrank away from this visage until her shoulders came firmly against the upholstered side of the refrigerator behind her.
“Your goddamned beloved brother double-crossed me.” Red spoke almost tenderly, but his rage was barely contained.
His anger charged the air around him, but Tipsy could see that Red was confused, too. He was also amazed, confounded, frustrated, even hurt, and he was having trouble admitting to himself the truth of his own assertion. Perhaps this was the first time he’d said as much aloud. His eyes bore into hers, questing, searching, unrequited. Tipsy, inexplicably and to her surprise, realized that she felt some kind of sympathy for the man.
“What are you saying?” she asked softly, so softly
that she might have been asking the question of herself.
Red blinked the blonde lashes that sparsely tenanted his translucent eyelids. “Sixteen years,” he growled in wonder, “and Charley decides to go it alone. Why?” He straightened up and downed his drink. “He was the best at what he did. And suddenly he decides to become the best at what I do? What possessed him? It’s like he took leave of his senses.” Red regarded the black package. “And of all the deals to screw me on, he has to screw me on this deal? Well,” he nodded, “that part I understand. That part is pure, shit-bird Charley. Perfect bone-head timing. The exact wrong deal at the exact wrong time. But that he did it at all?” Red shook his head. “I’ve thought about it for almost three months. It makes no sense. An entire lifetime.” He blew air between his lips. “Forfeited. I just don’t get it.”
“What about the first time?” Tipsy asked quietly.
Red frowned. “You mean the prison thing?” He shook his head. “That wasn’t a mistake. That was the luck of the draw. Could have happened to anybody. Charley knew that. And Charley did the right thing. He didn’t squeal. Took his medicine. He knew he’d be taken care of when he got out. And he was. Sure it cost him. But he knew the risks. We all know the risks. Everybody does his part. Everybody takes his lumps.”
Tipsy cleared her throat. “So what was different about this time?”
Red’s eyes refocused on a picture only he could see. “This time, it was a mistake. This time it was just the one deal. One lousy deal, but it was a big one. The biggest. That’s why I let Charley do it! Hell.” He looked at her. “I was glad he turned up. I’d been sitting dockside and thinking I’d take a pass on the job because I didn’t have the right guy for it.” Red shook his head. “Charley should not have tried to think for himself. Out of all the deals, it was the wrong one. He wouldn’t have gotten away with it. And it’s the one deal that could get us both killed. Not incarcerated, mind you, but killed. That’s the alternative to success. Charley must have known. So—why?” Red’s eyes showed no remorse or guilt or evil or beatitude—on the contrary, his eyes were as neutral as a pair of marbles in the blank visage of a limestone faun. “You too, Tipsy, you could die because of Charley. Even you.” Red looked at the refrigerator, at the drinks, at the melting fragments of ice on the countertop, at the black package wrapped in duct tape. “You gotta understand this part. You and—” He pointed at the companionway. “—and that guy,” Red said. “Your friend could die, too.”