The Prince Of Deadly Weapons

by Boston Teran

  * * *

  WHEN CHARLES Gill walked into The Point he asked the bartender right off if Roy Pinter had gotten there yet. As this was one of Roy's regular haunts it took less than a cursory look to see he hadn't.

  Charles sat at the bar and ordered a drink. He looked out onto the vast sweep of the lower Sacramento. The dotting of lights had begun and the first hints of fog could be seen drifting across the tops of the office buildings.

  He nursed his cocktail and picked from a cup of peanuts the bartender had put down. He tried to maintain an air of casual calm knowing full well the resolve tonight would demand.

  * * *

  DANE CROSSED the blue waters of evening and looked back at the house on Disappointment Slough hidden there among the trees. The river beacon had just gone on. The light was soft and misty above a world still not dark enough.

  With the wind the trees along the slough islands bristled like the chatting tongues of crickets, like the wooden sticks of men, like the whispering breath of gods. The air was filled with the scent of water and freshly turned earth.

  It was quiet where he sat in the boat, in all directions, and he could see headlights flitter far, far away. Tiny as lanterns moving through the darkening grottoes of that countryside.

  From that place of undiscovered self he felt a sudden surge of loss and he was not yet even gone from there. As much as it hurt, as much as it tore at all those puzzled pieces of the human provenance, it wrote something beautiful and heartbreaking on the paper of his days that could never be forgotten, even after he was no longer.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  I'M WALKIN' AROUND in the fuckin' blind here."

  The Burrow fuse box was in a storage closet off the kitchen. Paul was trying to feel his way up and down the fuses when he heard the alley door open. "Maria, I'm at the fuse box."

  "It's not Maria."

  Caruso came from the storage closet and crossed the darkened kitchen to where Dane was feeling his way toward him. In Paul's hand was a flashlight. He shook it. "Batteries are dead, the power is out. You know how many flashlights I bought for this place that end up missing? People must be putting them up their assholes. Let's wait in the bar for the old lady. I'm tired of bumping into shit back here."

  A pale shore of moonlight through the windows fought back the dark, and all those paintings and prints on The Burrow walls made it look like some cavern where the dream pictures of the ancients were kept for all of memory to see.

  "Get us a couple of beers," said Paul, "while I sit my ass right down here at the bar and wait for a flashlight that fuckin' works."

  Caruso clunked the flashlight down on the bar. Dane brought one beer from the cooler and served his friend. All this had been done without a word and Paul realized—

  "There's trouble," said Dane.

  Caruso had not even gotten to his first sip. "Why doesn't that surprise me?"

  Dane laid out for him what he'd been told was to happen tonight and the why of it. Paul listened grimly, without drinking, and when Dane had finished all Paul said was "Jesus Christ."

  "Nathan is supposed to know tonight, so will I. I intend to turn everything over tomorrow. Finished. Otherwise, whatever else may happen, I'm telling you, like I'm telling Essie. You're free to tell what you know. Everything."

  Caruso had covered too much world not to know what was about to come. He stood up. He followed the hard pitch of his face, taking in the bar and what was beyond the windows. He leaned with his back against the wall.

  "We love this place very much," he said. "Maria and I know we are not ever gonna be rich. That we are overworked and overlooked. And it's perfectly all right. Sometimes, after the close, we sit at a booth in the dark, like this now, and… take in the silence.

  "We feel safe here, protected here. Even if it's only in our heads. It's a good way to live."

  "We leave from Antioch in about two hours," said Dane.

  Caruso moved back to the bar. He sat. "When Gill flew back in yesterday he and the Rocket Boyz spent some pretty hard hours at their hangar."

  "I don't know if we'll be taken back into the Delta, or out to sea."

  Through the open door to the kitchen there was a shift in the darkness Paul noticed. If it was Maria, listening, how much of this had she heard?

  "Somebody could get killed tonight."

  "Yes," said Dane.

  "How can you begin to protect yourself?"

  Dane slid the gun from his coat pocket and held it in his palm for Paul to see.

  "Put that fuckin' thing away, right now. Right now, I say."

  Dane did as he was asked.

  "You know, Paul, you're the most honest man I ever met. You don't hedge your bet, you don't hide your feelings. You don't fake yourself. You even wear what you came from on a T-shirt for anyone with eyes to see."

  Paul stared at the coat pocket with the gun.

  "I'm going to ask you something terrible, Paul."

  Caruso's arms, which rested on the bar, made two fists.

  "If things go bad in the Delta, we'd be near or on land, I might have a chance in the dark. But in a small boat, at sea…"

  Caruso's head bowed and his fists came up and he pressed them into the bones above his eyes. "Why," he pleaded, "why?"

  Dane placed his hands on the bar. His eyes drifted painfully, searching for how to say what to say. Those pictures on the wall were but glyphs of color and tone, black and white shadow moments that talked with a frightening accuracy. To walk every step of why was to take the unmarked voyage toward that terrifying mystery imprisoned in our stony past. And where, in the end, there waits a god, or a beast, or that vast human reservoir for good and ill that bears and fills our name.

  "Just being in the world doesn't make it better, Paul. Not for the world, not for yourself. I know this from having been the Fenns, and Charles Gill and Nathan and so on and so forth."

  Dane put his hand around Paul's fist and told him in a voice naked and hushed, "I'm sorry if I hurt you by asking. I'm sorry. I just don't seem to do living well."

  Dane turned to leave. Maria was at the kitchen door. He stopped when he saw her. Caruso's head rose as Maria stepped forward. She switched on a flashlight and stood it upright on the bar so its powdery beam underscored their faces.

  "You heard," said Paul.

  "I heard," said Sancho Maria.

  She looked at the boy, her eyes under all that shadow. They were large, and black as a locomotive. She said nothing. She went and sat in a booth by the window. She folded her hands while she wrestled with her thoughts. Paul and Dane remained as they were, with that run of light moving up toward the ceiling between them.

  Everything that was this woman could be felt when she spoke. "You hope and you hope… and you hope some more. Then, when it's all done, you must let all that hope go on to someone else." Staring at what was before her, Sancho Maria told her husband, "Help him."

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  CHARLES MADE A real show of looking at his watch when the bartender brought him a second drink. The Point was packing up and Charles had to speak above the noise. "Roy Pinter was supposed to be here half an hour ago. I don't understand."

  The bartender shrugged, moving on to the next order of business. Charles took out his cellular phone, flipped it open, and dialed Roy's office working a mood of deep concern.

  * * *

  WHEN THE phone rang Essie jumped to answer it. "Where are you? Did you get my messages?"

  "Yes," said Dane. "I… listen, there's something you need to see. Out at the house. It's on the desk."

  "Sure. Where are you?"

  He didn't answer.

  "Dane, are you in your truck?"

  The phone blurred, it scratched. She walked out onto her balcony. A damp mist was coming. "Dane?"

  "Yes."

  "Where are you?"

  "I'm… on my way to Antioch."

  Antioch was not far from Oakley and the Big Break Marina, she knew. "What's in Antioch? Dane… what's
in Antioch?"

  "Nathan."

  You get to know someone by their silences, their breathing. It is that other language, what they mean to tell you no matter what they say. It is the liquid contact we have with each other. How we talked before we talked, in a time when life was less well known but better understood.

  She had taken him into her very self, with all his fire and sleep, his tenderness and lightwire mind, his honesty and lies, his loneliness.

  He wanted to be asked no more, she knew. That small creek of strength she'd felt in the dusk of the slough she had to call upon, she knew.

  "All right," Essie said. "I'll go there now."

  She touched the phone wanting him to sense, feel, know, if all that had been between them was slight as a kite string it would be strong enough to bind the universe.

  A whispering came through the phone line. "I heard you the other night."

  "I felt you did," she whispered back.

  * * *

  DANE HAD crossed the Sacramento and was driving south through Sherman Island. When he reached the tip of May berry Slough he pulled off the road and got out of the car.

  A pitch dark ran for flat miles and the only thing rising up out of that bending tule grass, maybe fifty yards from the road, was the rotting hull of a huge paddle wheeler grounded there over a half century before.

  Dane listened for the plane. There was only the faint wind. He reached into his pocket for the airband transceiver Caruso had given him. When he got the small hand held device working he asked, "Paul, can you hear me?"

  Dane listened, he waited. He looked up at the sky. There was silence and the forsaken creakings where the wind moved through that black dried coffin of history.

  Dane saw too a mist was coming. Pale, dim wisps of it were finding their way across the marsh, finding their way through the gapings of rot from the hurricane deck of that river boat right down to its hull.

  And for a few seconds there in the pitch dark, alone, watching those trails of dim gray cross the empty shrouded decks it looked to Dane as if that ghostly artifact rent with time had begun to move, as if some blind will of the past had taken hold of that labored old wheel and given it life.

  "Can you hear me… Dane?"

  It was a weak and grainy signal. Dane pressed the monitor button on the keypad to keep the squelch down.

  "Paul—"

  "Dane, can you—"

  "Paul, it's rough but—"

  "Where are you?"

  The static got worse, the signal wavered.

  "At the wreck along—"

  "Where are you?"

  "At the wreck along May berry Slough."

  Dane began to hear the plane coming out of the edges of the horizon.

  "I pulled over to see how this works!"

  "What—"

  Dane shouted, "To see how this works!"

  "This is it. If you can get on board with—"

  "Yeah—"

  Paul's voice couldn't get through the static.

  "What?"

  "A fog. You can probably fuckin' see it. Not good, not good."

  * * *

  ESSIE SAW the letter right off as the only light in the house was the desk lamp shining down on it. Out of breath and taut-eyed her long fingers tore at the envelope and when it didn't come apart fast enough she cursed the paper.

  * * *

  NATHAN WAITED by the dock railing where he had met Dane earlier that day. He felt as if the dark eyes of the world were upon him. The backs of his hands hurt, his coat collar was up against the chill.

  Dane came up beside him smoking. "Another night, another boat," he said.

  Nathan answered with an unspoken nod.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  NATHAN WAS ALONE when he saw a man in a blue windbreaker and baseball cap approach along the shoreline walk. He was heavyset and when he passed a strolling couple he kept his eyes to the ground. As he came alongside Nathan he said, "Mr. Greene. Nathan Greene?"

  Nathan turned. "Mr. Carter."

  "Yes."

  Mr. Carter put out his hand to shake, but the motion had a spurious feel to it. As they shook Nathan waved Dane over. Mr. Carter turned to see Dane rise from a bench and approach them.

  "This is a friend of mine," said Nathan. "He'll be coming along."

  Mr. Carter looked the boy over, concerned. "It was my understanding that I was bringing you."

  "I don't know if I can handle this emotionally," Nathan answered.

  Mr. Carter took off his baseball cap and scratched his narrow balding skull. It was nothing more than a time-consuming gesture. Dane heard a prop engine somewhere out above the San Joaquin. It was flying low and seemed, from what Dane heard, to be maneuvering a long, slow arc. Dane did his best not to look.

  "He's just here for support, Mr. Carter."

  "Yes, I'm sure."

  "See it from my perspective, Mr. Carter. How difficult this is going to be for me."

  Mr. Carter put on an understanding expression as he looked from man to man. His thin moustache had been dyed black in an attempt to down play his age and he had the empty smile of a lifelong pitchman. It could be him, thought Dane. The man on the boat that first day with Damon Romero and Shane Fenn. It could be the man Essie saw at the Boyz.' Merton, it might be Merton.

  "I don't want any trouble," said Mr. Carter.

  "You'll take us to meet the gentleman," said Nathan. "We'll listen, we'll leave. And my friend"— this was said with deferential seriousness—"will take care of all the details."

  Mr. Carter reiterated, "I just don't want any trouble."

  "You want to strip-search us?" said Nathan.

  "Jesus Christ." Mr. Carter appeared stunned by the suggestion. Nervously he looked around to see if there had been anyone nearby enough to have heard. "I just don't want any trouble."

  * * *

  THEY FOLLOWED Mr. Carter back down the shoreline walk. They could hear music coming through the open door of one of the bars; alongside a berthed trawler men were laughing and drinking beer. Every time they passed someone Mr. Carter averted his eyes.

  The boat had been docked by Humphrey's Restaurant, which was on pylons out over the river. You could see from the lights strung along the outdoor patio that the wind was starting to gust inland.

  When they reached the day cruiser, Dane knew. Painted on the transom it read— THE PLYMOUTH ROC.

  * * *

  BEFORE ESSIE'S Futura had gotten from the dock site up that gravel incline to the road she was on her cellular. The hand that held the steering wheel also held the diamonds. As the phone rang her eyes wouldn't let go of the rearview mirror as the little island and house on Disappointment Slough disappeared into darkness but for the beacon light and that obelisk of a windmill. But when that was gone, she felt a piece of her heart just tear.

  * * *

  WHEN CHARLES' cell phone rang it surprised him. He looked at his watch. Could it all have happened this fast? The bar was two deep with drinking traffic when he answered.

  "Mr. Gill?"

  "Who is this?"

  "It's Essie."

  "Essie…. didn't recognize your voice." People were leaning over his shoulder trying to get the bartender's attention. "I'm surprised to get a call from you on my cellular. Is everything all right?" He waited for an answer that did not come. "Essie? Can you hear me?" Again no answer.

  He looked at the phone's screen, the line was still open. Confused, he got up and excused his way through the drinking and bar talk till he found a vacant crease of wall space. "Essie? Is everything all right? Has something happened to Nathan?"

  He wondered if she might think it odd later that he so quickly asked if something—

  "We know what you've done," she said.

  Charles' expression changed slightly, as if he had stumbled upon some oddity of behavior he did not quite understand. "Essie?"

  "You are a money launderer and a murderer." Essie had made her voice emotionally merciless. "And we can prove it and I'm goi
ng to expose you right now. You're fucking finished! Do you hear me!?"

  * * *

  THE DAYCRUISER powered its way up Broad Slough. Mr. Carter was at the helm, Nathan sat across from him at the tiny dinette. Dane stood just outside the open cabin holding onto the ladder that led up to the flying bridge. He was listening for the plane, and watching the sky.

  The wind was carrying the mist inland more quickly now, and from Birds Landing to the graveyard of Collinsville the sky had all but disappeared.

  Where Broad Slough met the Sacramento Mr. Carter took the port engine out of gear and that boat started to turn down river. They were moving away from the Delta and toward the bays or the ocean beyond.

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  THE BOAT KEPT making headway west through Suisun Bay. Off their port side Dane could just see bits of ebonied shore and the flickering dome lights of an Amtrak as it sped through the low misty hills of Contra Costa. Flashpoints of light were there then gone, there then gone, there then gone.

  Nathan looked back at Dane, his stare reflected some conflict. When he turned away Dane took a chance and eased the transceiver from his coat pocket and turning sideways to use his body as a shield managed to set it on the cabin roof where it was only inches from his face.

  He yelled to Mr. Carter, "How much farther?"

  * * *

  IT WAS the first thing Paul had managed to pick up on his headset since Dane had pulled off the road back on Sherman Island.

  The crackling was terrible. Caruso held down the squelch button on his keypad. He heard the boy again. The voice was distant and rough, but he heard him say "How much farther?"

  "Jesus, shit." Paul was still circling above Antioch. He hadn't even known they'd left the marina.

  * * *

  THE WIND was making steering difficult and Mr. Carter had not answered Dane. Nathan got up and leaned over his shoulder and more bluntly and loudly asked the same question.

  "Just a few more miles," said Mr. Carter. "On a houseboat."

  Nathan sat back down. He was growing more and more anxious.

  Mr. Carter had been following the channel markers when off the starboard bow Roe Island appeared as a shadowy night flat expanse whose trees looked like burnt hands of bone reaching up out of the marsh land.