A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  Because there’d always be one too few fingers on Robby’s left hand, always be that scar along the margin of Barbara’s nipple, always the vagrant thought, sneaking through the night, that Munir hadn’t done all he could, that if he’d only been a little more cooperative, Robby still would have ten fingers.

  Sure, they were together now, and they’d been hugging and crying and kissing, but later on Barbara would start asking questions: Couldn’t you have done more? Why didn’t you cut your finger off when he told you to?

  Even now, Barbara was suggesting that Munir could have been gentler when he’d fired Hollander. The natural progression from that was to: Maybe if you had, none of this would have happened.

  The individual members might still be alive, but Munir’s family was already dead. He just didn’t know it yet.

  And that saddened Jack. It mean that Hollander had won.

  Doc Hargus shuffled out of the back room. He had an aggressively wrinkled face and a Wilford Brimley mustache.

  “He’s sleeping,” Doc said. “Probably sleep through the night.”

  “But his hand,” Barbara said. “You couldn’t–?”

  “No way that finger could be reattached, not even at the Mayo Clinic. Not after spending a night in a Federal Express envelope. I sewed up the stump good and tight. You may want to get a more cosmetic repair in a few years, but it’ll do for now. He’s loaded up with antibiotics and painkillers at the moment.”

  “Thank you, doctor,” Munir said.

  “And how about you?” Doc said to Barbara. “How’re you feeling?”

  She cupped a hand over her breast. “Fine . . . I think.”

  “Good. Your sutures can come out in five days. We’ll leave Robby’s in for about ten.”

  “How can we ever repay you?” Munir said.

  “In cash,” Doc said. “You’ll get my bill.”

  As he shuffled back to where Robby was sleeping, Barbara pressed her head against her husband’s shoulder.

  “Oh, Munir. I can’t believe it’s over.”

  Jack watched them and knew he hadn’t completely earned his fee.

  Save my family . . .

  Not yet. Hollander hadn’t won yet.

  “It’s not over,” Jack said.

  They both turned to look at him.

  “We’ve still got Richard Hollander tied up in that loft. What do we do with him?”

  “I never want to see him again!” Barbara said.

  “So we let him go?”

  “No!” Munir spoke through his teeth. “I want him to hang! I want him to fry! He has to pay for what he did to Robby! To Barbara!”

  “You really think he’ll pay if we turn him in? I mean, how much faith do you have in the courts?”

  They looked at him. Their bleak stares told him they felt like everybody else: No faith. No faith at all.

  “So your only other option is to go back there and deal with him yourself.”

  Munir was nodding slowly, his mouth a tight line, his eyes angry slits. “Yes . . . I would like that.” He rose to his feet. “I will go back there. He has . . . things to answer for. I must be sure this will never happen again.”

  Barbara was on her feet too, a feral glint in her eyes.

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “But Robby—”

  “I’ll stay here,” Jack said. “He knows me now. If he wakes up, I’ll be here.”

  They hesitated.

  Save my family . . .

  If the Habibs were going to make it they were going to have to face Hollander together and resolve all those as-yet-unasked questions by settling their scores with him. All their scores.

  “Get going,” he said. “I never made it past Tenderfoot in the Boy Scouts. Who knows how long my knots will last?”

  Jack watched them hurry out, hand-in-hand. Maybe this would fix their marriage, maybe it wouldn’t. All he knew for sure was that he was glad he wasn’t Richard Hollander tonight.

  He got up and went looking for Doc Hargus. The doc was never without a stock of good beer in his fridge.

  OFFSHORE

  “Got a doozie comin’, Terr.”

  Ernie stood at the big picture window with his thumbs hooked in his belt on either side of the gut pouting over his buckle, and stared out at Upper Sugarloaf Sound.

  Terry Havens looked up from the bar where he’d been making a wet Olympics symbol with the bottom rim of his sweating Red Stripe.

  “Good. Maybe it’ll cool things off a little.”

  Terry had been expecting the storm, looking forward to it, in fact. But not because it would cool things off.

  “I think this mother might do more than cool things off. This’n looks mean.”

  Terry took a swig of the Red Stripe and carried the bottle to the big window. He stood beside Ernie and took in the view. Bartenders always need something to talk about. Not much happening during off-season in the Keys, so some heavy weather would keep Ernie going through the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening.

  And this looked pretty damn heavy. A cumulonimbus tower was building over the Gulf, dominating the western sky. Some big mother of a storm—a dark, bruise-purple underbelly crowding the entire span of the horizon while its fat, fluffy white upper body stretched a good ten miles straight up to where the shear winds flattened and sluiced its crown away to the north. Anvil-topped buggers like these could be downright mean.

  “Where you got those glasses hid?”

  Ernie limped back to the bar and brought out the battered field glasses he’d smuggled home from the Gulf War. Terry fitted them over his eyes and focused on the body of the storm. What looked like fluffy vanilla cotton candy to the naked eye became slowly boiling steam as violent updrafts and downdrafts roiled within.

  Damn. He’d been looking for a storm, but this thing might be more than he could handle. Like casting light tackle out on the flats and hooking something bigger than your boat.

  He lowered the glasses. He was going to have to risk it. He’d promised the Osler a delivery on this pass, and tonight was his last chance. The big boat would be out of range by tomorrow.

  Besides, the worse the storm, the better his chances of being alone out there on the water. Not even Henriques would be out on patrol in the belly of the beast growling on the horizon.

  Terry finished the rest of his Red Stripe. “One more of these before I get moving.”

  “Sure thing,” Ernie said.

  As Terry returned to his stool, he glanced across the horseshoe-shaped bar and saw two of the grizzled regulars poking into their wallets with nicotine-yellowed fingers. Reed-thin, wild-haired, leather-skinned, stubble-cheeked Conchs.

  “Betcha that storm’s good for at least five spouts,” Rick said.

  Boo flipped a sawbuck onto the bar. “Ten says you don’t see more’n three.”

  Rick slapped a bill down on top of Boo’s. “Yer on.”

  Terry smiled as he reached for the fresh bottle Ernie put in front of him. Those two bet on anything. He’d seen them wager on the number of times a fly would land on a piece of cheese, the number of trips someone would make to the head in an evening. Anything.

  “I guess that means you two’ll be spending most of the night here,” Terry said.

  “You betcha,” Rick said. “Watchin’ the storm.”

  Boo nodded. “And countin’ the spouts.”

  “Some guys sure know how to have fun.”

  Rick and Boo laughed and hoisted their Rolling Rocks in reply.

  They all quaffed together, then Terry glanced up at the TV monitor. The sight of a bunch of flak-jacketed federal marshals toting riot guns around a tandem tractor trailer shot a spasm through his stomach lining.

  “Turn the sound up, will you, Ern?”

  Ernie touched a button on the remote. The audio level display flashed on the screen, zipped to a preprogrammed volume, then disappeared as the announcer’s voice blared from the speakers bracketed on the ceiling.

  “—tain
ly put a crimp in the black market in medical contraband. This haul was most likely bound for one of the renegade floating hospitals that ply their illicit trade outside the twelve-mile limit in the Gulf of Mexico.”

  The screen cut to an interior of one of the trailers and panned its contents.

  “Syringes, sterile bandages, dialysis fluid, even gas sterilizers, all bound for the booming offshore medical centers. President Nathan has called on Congress to enact stiffer penalties for medical smuggling and to pass legislation to push the offshore hospitals to a hundred-mile limit. Insiders on the Hill think he is unlikely to find much support on extending the twelve-mile limit due to the complexities of maritime law, but say he might get action on the stiffer penalties.”

  The president’s intense, youthful face filled the screen.

  “We are talking here about trading in human misery. Every medical item that is smuggled offshore deprives law-abiding citizens, right here at home, of needed medical supplies. These racketeers are little better than terrorists, sabotaging America’s medical system and health security. We’ve got to hit these criminals hard, and hit them where it hurts!”

  “Okay, Ern,” Terry said. “I’ve heard enough.”

  Poor President Nathan—thoroughly pissed that some folks were making an end run around the National Health Security Act.

  Nothing new in the trucker bust, other than somebody got careless. Or got turned in. Terry wondered who it was, wondered if he knew them. He’d tuned in too late to catch where the bust had gone down.

  “Excuse me,” said a voice to Terry’s right. “Is there a Mister Havens here?”

  Terry didn’t turn his head. Rick and Boo acquired a sudden intense interest in the “33” inside the labels on their Rolling Rocks.

  Ernie cleared his throat and said, “He comes in now and again. I can take a message for you.”

  “We wish to hire him for a boat trip,” the voice said.

  Terry swiveled on his barstool. He saw a moderately overweight golden-ager, white hair and a sunburned face, wearing cream slacks and a lime green golf shirt.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Are you Mr. Havens?” the guy said, eagerly stepping forward and thrusting out his hand.

  Terry hesitated, then said, “That’s me.” Hard to lie to a guy who’s offering you his hand.

  But the immediate relief in the guy’s eyes made him wish he hadn’t. Here was a man with a problem, and he seemed to think Terry was his solution. Terry was not in the problem-solving business.

  “Joe Kowalski, Mister Havens,” he said, squeezing Terry’s hand between both of his. “I’m so glad we found you.” He turned and called over his shoulder. “It’s him, Martha!”

  Terry looked past him at a rickety, silver-haired woman hobbling toward them, supporting herself on the bar with her right forearm and leaning on a four-footed cane clasped in her gnarled left hand. Her wrinkled face was pinched with pain. She couldn’t seem to straighten out her right leg, and winced every time she put weight on it.

  “Thank God!” she said.

  Terry was getting a bad feeling about this.

  “Uh, just where is it you folks want to go?”

  “Out to the Osler,” Joe said.

  “You missed her. She took on her patients this morning and she’s gone.”

  “I know. We missed the shuttle. Martha wanted to say good-bye to the kids before the surgery. You know, in case . . . you know. But our car broke down last night just as we were leaving and what they said would take an hour to fix wound up taking much longer. Damn car’s probably still up on the lift back there in Stewart. I finally rented a car and drove down here fast as I could. Collected two tickets along the way, but we still missed the boat. We’ve been driving up and down Route One all day trying to find someone to take us out. No one’s interested. I don’t understand. I don’t want a favor—I’m willing to pay a fair price. And it’s not like it’s a crime or anything.”

  Right. Not a crime or anything to ferry someone out past the twelve-mile limit to one of the hospital ships. But bad things tended to happen to good boaters who engaged in the trade if officialdom got wind of it. Bad things like a Coast Guard stop and search every time you took your boat out; or all sorts of lost applications and inexplicable computer glitches when you wanted to renew your boating tags, your fishing permits, even your driver’s license. Terry had heard talk that the good folks in question seemed to suffer a significantly greater incidence of having their 1040 audited by the IRS.

  No, not a crime, but lots of punishment.

  Which was why the hospital ships ran their own shuttles.

  “What excuse did they give?”

  “Most said they were too busy, but let me tell you, they didn’t look it. And as soon as those clouds started gathering, they used the storm as an excuse.”

  “Good excuse.”

  Terry glanced back at the western horizon. The afternoon sun had been swallowed whole by the storm and its white bulk had turned a threatening gray.

  “But I hear you’re not afraid of storms,” Joe said.

  Terry stared at him, feeling his anger rise. Shit. “Who told you that?”

  “Some fellow in a bar up on the next key—is it Cudjoe Key? Some cantina . . .”

  “Coco’s.”

  “That’s the place! Fellow with bleached hair and a fuzzy goatee.”

  Tommy Axler. Terry wanted to strangle the bigmouthed jerk. In fact, he might give it a try next time he saw him.

  “He must have thought you wanted to go fishing. Sometimes I take people fishing in the rain. I do lots of things, but I don’t ferry folks out to hospital ships.”

  That last part, at least, was true.

  Joe’s eyes got this imploring look. “I’ll pay you twice your regular charter fee.”

  Terry shook his head. “Sorry.”

  His face fell. He turned to his wife. “He won’t do it, Martha.”

  She halted her labored forward progress as if she’d run into a wall.

  “Oh,” she said softly, and leaned against one of the barstools. She stared at the floor and said no more.

  “But let me buy you folks a drink.” Terry pointed to his Red Stripe. “You want one of these?”

  “No,” Joe said through a sigh, then shrugged. “Aaah, why not? Martha? You want something?”

  Still staring at the floor, Martha only shook her head.

  Ernie set the bottle in front of Joe who immediately chugged about a third of it.

  He stifled a burp, then said, “You won’t reconsider, even if I triple your usual fee?”

  Terry shook his head. “Look, the Osler’ll probably be shuttling patients in and out of St. Petersburg in a day or two. Hop in your car and—”

  “Martha’s got an appointment for a total hip replacement tomorrow. If she’s not on board the Osler today they’ll give her appointment to someone on the waiting list.”

  “So reschedule.”

  “It took us six months to get this appointment, and we were lucky. The fellow who had the original appointment died. Might be another ten months to a year before Martha can get rescheduled.”

  “That’s as bad as the regular government wait lists.”

  “No,” he said with a slow shake of his head. “There is no government wait list for Martha. Not anymore. She’s too old. HRAA passed a regulation barring anyone over age seventy-five from certain surgical procedures. Total hip replacement is on the list. And Martha’s seventy-seven.”

  Martha’s head snapped up. “Don’t you be blabbing my age for all the world to hear!”

  “Sorry, dear.”

  Terry looked at him. “I thought the cutoff was eighty.”

  “Right: was. They lowered it last year.”

  Terry had assumed that most of the hospital ship patrons were well-heeled folks who didn’t want to wait in the long queues for elective surgery in the government-run hospitals. And since all the hospitals in America were now government run, they
had to go elsewhere. But cutting people off from procedures . . .

  The Health Resources Allocation Agency strikes again.

  “I didn’t know they could do that.”

  Joe sighed. “Neither did I. It wasn’t part of the regulations when the Health Security Act became law, but apparently the HRAA has the power to make new regs. So when they found out how far their Health Security Act was running over projections, they started making cuts. What really galls me is I supported the damn law.”

  “So did I.”

  “Yeah, we all thought we were getting a bargain. Ten years later we find out we got the shaft.”

  “Welcome to the twenty-first century, Pops. Believe in the future but always read the fine print.”

  “Tell me about it.” He slugged down some more beer and stared at the bottle in his hand. “It’s not fair, you know. We busted our butts since we got married—fifty years come next July—to make a good life for our family. We educated our kids, got them married and settled, then we retired. And now we’d like to enjoy the years we’ve got left. Nothing fancy. No trips around the world. Just hang out, play golf once in a while. But with Martha’s hip, we can’t even go for a walk after dinner.”

  Terry said nothing as Joe polished off his beer. He was trying not to listen. He wasn’t going to get sucked into this.

  Joe banged his bottle down on the bar. “You know what really bugs my ass? We’ve got the money to pay for the surgery. We don’t need the government to pay for it. Fuck ’em! We’ll pay. Gladly. But they won’t let her have the surgery—period. Their letter said total hip surgery at her age is ‘an inefficient utilization of valuable medical resources.’ I mean, what the hell did we work and skimp and save for if we can’t spend it on our health?”

  “Wish I had an answer for you,” Terry said.

  “Yeah.” He pushed away from the bar. “Thanks for the beer. Come on, Martha. We’ll keep looking.”

  He took his wife gently by the arm and began helping her toward the door. Terry stared across the bar at Rick and Boo so he wouldn’t have to watch the Kowalskis. He saw a grinning Rick accepting a ten from a grumpy-looking Boo. He wondered what the bet had been this time.

  He looked out the window at the towering storm, black as a hearse now, picking up speed and power. If he was going to head out, he’d better get moving.