"My old man had the poorest farm in Oklahoma," he says. "Our hog was so skinny, if you put a dime on its nose, its back feet would rise up off the ground."
Then there's Jesse Hatch, who used to drive a truck all over the country, one of those big semis; and Donny Flagler, who's like me, just out of college. Both of them are black guys. And there's Jim Jordan, who was in law school; his old man was a senator and still couldn't get him deferred. Jordan is one pissed-off guy. He's a short-timer, has two months to go, a first-class pain in the ass. Hatch is the M-60 man; he can really handle that mother. Flagler is our radio. None of us are regulars, but after a month out here, I feel like one.
The 42nd day: We get orders to take this knob for an LZ. Charlie is all over the place. He won't give it up. They have the high ground; they sit up there and lob mortars down on us all after-fuckin'-noon. Carmody gets on the radio and calls in the Hueys. He wants them to blitz the place so we can rush it, only it's raining and a little foggy, and they're giving him some standdown shit and he starts yelling:
"I want some air in here, now! Don't gimme any of that fog shit. Nobody's told us to go home because it's raining. Get me some goddamn air support fast!"
He slams the phone down.
"Listen, kid, if you can't get a chopper in when you fuckin' need one, forget it. That's the edge. You don't have the edge, you're in trouble. We can't beat these motherfuckers at this kind of game, for Christ sake, they been doing it for fifteen fuckin' years. When you need air, get nasty."
That's the way he was, always teaching me something.
About ten minutes later these two Hueys come over and really waste that knob. Carmody doesn't wait for shit, we're off up the hill while the Hueys are still chewing it up. Six or eight 50-millimeter and 20-millimeter cannons working. Good God, there were VC's flying all over the place in bits and pieces. A boot with a foot in it hit me in the shoulder and splashed blood down my side. I was getting sick. Then the gooks broke and ran and we took the knob and sat up there picking them off as they went down the other side. We must've shot ten, twelve of them in the back. After a while I stopped counting. It didn't seem right. Maybe I've seen too many cowboy movies, but shooting all those people in the back seemed to be pushing it. But then, I've only been on the line two months. I'm still learning.
The 56th day: Last night a bunch of sappers jumped this airstrip eight or nine kliks north of here and pillaged two cargo planes. They got ahold of some of our own Bouncing Bettys. What you got there is a daisy cutter, a 60-millimeter mortar round, and it's rigged so it jumps up about waist high when you trip it, and it goes off there, at groin level, cuts you in half.
We're always real careful about mines, but the motherfuckers have these Bettys all over the fucking place. A couple of places they rigged phony trip lines so you'd see the line and move out of the way and they'd have another trip line next to it and you'd nick that and it was all over.
I hear it go off. Nobody screams or anything, it just goes boomf! and shakes some leaves off the trees where I am. I run back. It's maybe a hundred meters. Flagler's laying there and he's blown in half. Two parts of him. I can't believe it. I start shaking. I sit down and shake all over. Then Doc comes up and gives me a downer.
Carmody is taking it the worst. He just keeps swearing over and over. Later in the day we catch up with a couple of VC. We don't know whether they rigged the Bouncing Bettys, but we tie the two of them to these two trees, side by side, and we set one of the mines between the trees and rig it and then we back off about a hundred feet and we keep shooting at the line and those two gooks are screaming bloody-fucking-murder. It was Jesse finally tripped it. We left them hanging in the trees.
Psychological warfare, that's what we call it.
39
DEAD MAN'S FLOAT
It took me twenty minutes to make the drive to Skidaway Island. Three blocks on the far side of the bridge I found Bayview, a deserted gravel lane, hardly two cars wide, that twisted through a living arch of oak trees with Spanish moss. Here and there, ruts led to cabins hidden away among trees, palmettos, and underbrush. I passed a roadhouse called Benny's Barbecue, which looked closed except for a gray Olds parked at the side of the place that looked suspiciously like the car Harry Nesbitt was driving when he followed me the night before. After that there was nothing but foliage for almost a mile before I came to O'Brian's shack.
It wasn't much more than that, although it seemed a sturdy enough place. It was built on stilts about twenty yards off shore and was connected to land by a wooden bridge no more than three feet wide. The tide was in and the cabin, which looked about two rooms large with deck surrounding it and screened porch at one end, was perched barely three feet above the water. A small boat, tied to one end of the platform, rocked gently on the calm surface of the bay.
Nesbitt was right—there wasn't a blade of grass within twenty yards of the cabin.
The place was as still as a church at dawn.
A slate-gray Continental was parked under the trees near the water's edge. It had been there awhile; the hood was as cool as the rest of the car. I walked out to the edge of the clearing and held my hands out, prayer style, palms up.
"O'Brian? It's me, Kilmer."
A mockingbird cried back at me and darted off through the palmettos. Somewhere out near the shack a fish jumped in the water. Then, not a sound.
I waited a moment or two.
"It's Jake Kilmer," I yelled. "I'm coming on out."
Still nothing.
I tucked both sides of my jacket in the back of my belt to show him I wasn't wearing a gun and started walking out onto the platform, holding on to both railings so he could see my hands.
"O'Brian!"
A fish jumped underfoot and startled me. I could see why O'Brian had built his shack on this spot. He could drop a line out the window and fish without getting out of bed.
"O'Brian, it's Kilmer. You around?"
Still no answer.
I reached the cabin. The front door was locked, so I went around to the porch, held my face up against the screen, cupped my eyes, and peered inside. The place was as empty as a dead man's dream.
"O'Brian?"
Still no sounds, except the tie line of the boat, grinding against the wooden railing.
Worms began to nibble at my stomach.
"Hey, O'Brian, are you in there?" I yelled. I startled an old pelican setting on a corner of the deck and he lumbered away, squawking as he went. There was no answer.
I tried the screen door and it was open. The cabin was empty; nobody was under the bed or stuffed in the shower. But the radio was on with the volume turned all the way down, and the beginnings of a fishing lure dangled from a vise on the porch table.
The worms stopped nibbling and started gnawing at my insides.
I went back outside and started around the deck. The boat was empty.
I might have missed the two bullet holes except for the blood. It was splattered around two small nicks in the rear wall of the cabin; crimson, baked almost brown in the hot sunlight, yet still sticky to the touch.
The worms in my stomach grew to coiled snakes.
"Oh, shit!" I heard myself whisper.
I knelt down on the deck and peered cautiously under the cabin. The first thing I saw was a foot in a red sweat sock jammed in the juncture of two support posts. The foot belonged to Jigs O'Brian. The rest of him was floating face down, hands straight out at his sides, as if he were trying to embrace the bay.
Fish were nibbling at the thin red strands that leaked from his head like the tentacles of a jellyfish.
I didn't need a medical degree to tell he was DOA.
40
SKEELER'S JOINT
Dutch almost swallowed the phone when I got him on the line. He was on his way before I hung up. The coroner reacted in much the same way.
Dutch arrived fifteen minutes later with Salvatore at the wheel, followed by an ambulance with the coroner and his forensics team close behi
nd.
The big German lumbered out to the cabin with his hands in his pants pockets, an unlit Camel dangling from the corner of his mouth, and stared ruefully down at me through his thick glasses. Salvatore was behind him, glowering like a man looking for a fight.
"I take the full rap for this one," I said. "If you hadn't called Salvatore off, O'Brian might be alive now."
"I should have left Salvatore on his tail," Dutch said. "That was my mistake."
"You just did what I asked," I said. "I told O'Brian I'd be alone. Where are your pals from homicide?"
"On the way," he said with a roll of his eyes, adding, "What did it this time, a flamethrower?"
"Small caliber, very likely a submachine gun," I said.
"How do you figure that?"
"He's got a row of. 22's from his forehead to his chin so perfect the line could've been drawn with a straightedge. My guess is, the first couple of shots knocked his head back. The gun was firing so fast it just drew a line right down his face, zip, like that."
I drew an invisible line from my forehead to my chin with a forefinger.
"Some gun," he said.
"Yeah," I said. "There's only one weapon I can think of that fits the bill."
"Well, don't keep us in suspense," said Dutch. Salvatore began to show signs of interest. He stopped staring into space long enough to give me the dead eye.
"The American 180. Fires thirty rounds a second. Sounds like a dentist's drill when it goes off."
"Like on the tape of the Tagliani job," Dutch said.
"Yeah, just like that. I figure whoever aced him came in by boat and whacked O'Brian when he came out of the cabin. Two of the slugs went through his head; they're in the back wall."
"So what does all that mean to us?" Dutch said.
While the coroner was studying the bloodstained holes in the back wall of the cabin, his men were shooting pictures of O'Brian's body from everywhere but underwater.
"Chevos owns boats," I said. "It's his thing. I've heard he lives at the Thunder Point Marina. Where would that be from here?"
Dutch pointed due east. Thunder Point was a mile away, a misty, low, white structure surrounded by miniature boats.
"You really want to pin this one on Nance, don't you?" Dutch asked.
"Maybe."
"Look, I got nothing against headhunting; sometimes it can get great results. You got something to settle with that sheiss kopf it's okay with me."
The coroner dug the two bullets out of the wall and went back across the bridge to shore.
"Maybe he's holed up on a boat," I said.
"That's assuming he knows we're looking for him."
"Well, hell, I make a lot of mistakes," I said.
Dutch put a paw on my shoulder. "Aw, don't we all," he said, putting that discussion to bed. He strolled up and down the deck of O'Brian's shack, berating himself, like an orator grading his own speech.
Salvatore stood in one place, staring back into space and grinding fist into palm, like a bomb looking for someplace to go off.
"We should've brought 'em all in, the whole damn bunch," Dutch said, "get it out in the open. I laid off because it's homicide's baby. Well, it's our baby too. The Red Sea'll turn kelly green before that bunch of pfutzlükers get their heads out far enough to see daylight. Ain't it just wonderful!" He stared off toward Thunder Point. "I'm gonna haul that bunch of ash lochers in and get some answers. If nothing else, maybe we can throw these killers off their stride."
His tirade brought only a grunt from Salvatore, who was glaring back into space.
Dutch sighed. "Okay, let's see who we got left."
He started counting them off on his fingers. "There's the Bobbsey Twins, Costello and Cohen. Then there's Stizano and the pasta king, Bronicata, and your pals, Chevos and Nance. I miss anybody?"
There wasn't anybody else. Like Christie's Ten Little Indians, the field was running out.
"One thing," I said. "If you start hauling these people in, you better have a lot of help. They come complete with pistoleros. And you'll also be dealing with Leo Costello. He's quick and a helluva lot smarter than you'd like him to be. The son of a bitch sleeps with a habeas corpus under his pillow."
"I'll keep that in mind," Dutch said.
Salvatore finally broke his silence. He looked at me and said, "What it is with me, see, I coulda followed that ugly fuckin' Mick into his bedroom and held his nuts while he balled his old lady and he still wouldn't know I was there. I got a talent for that kind of thing. Me and Zapata, we're the invisible men."
"I told him I'd be alone," I protested. "We took a chance, what can I tell you? Next time I'll know better."
He stared at me for a beat or two longer and suddenly said, "Ah, shit, let's forget it."
"What do you think O'Brian wanted?" Dutch asked.
"I don't know, but if anybody knows, Nesbitt does," I said. "Let's put him on the radio, find out his story."
"Done," said Dutch. "I'll add him to the list."
We walked back across the narrow pier to solid land, where the coroner flagged us down.
"Stoney Titan's on his way out," he said, and turned to me. "He says he wants a word or two with you."
"Looks like the old man's finally throwing his oar in," Dutch said.
I didn't feel up to my first round with Titan; I had something else on my mind. "I've got some things to do," I told Dutch. "You know as much about this mess as I do; you talk to the old man."
"He's not gonna like that even a little bit," the big man growled.
"Tough shit," I said, and drove off toward Benny's Barbecue. I was anxious to see if the gray Olds was still there. It wasn't, but as I turned into the place, Stonewall Titan's black limo passed me, going like he was late for the policemen's ball.
I pulled around to the back of Benny's, oyster shells crunching under my tires, and found a tallish, deeply tanned man with dishwater-blond hair that had seen too much sun and surf loading soft-drink crates through the back door of the place. He was wearing black denim shorts and dirty sneakers, no shirt, and could have been thirty, fifty, or anything between.
"We don't open until five," he said as I got out of the car.
"I'm looking for a pal of mine," I said, following him inside. The place was dark and there was the leftover chill of last night's air conditioning lingering in the air, which smelled of stale beer and shrimp. He looked at me over his shoulder.
"I don't know anybody," he said flatly. "Half the time I can't remember my kids' names."
"I saw his car here a little earlier," I said.
"No kidding. Maybe he had a flat."
"He wasn't around."
"Probably ran outta gas. Maybe he had to walk up to the boulevard, pick up a can."
"Could be. I kind of felt he was in here."
"Hmm," he said, stacking the soft drinks in the corner. "You know how long I been here in this spot?"
"No, but I bet you're going to tell me."
He drew two beers from the spigot behind the bar and slid one across the bar to me. It was colder than Christmas in the Yukon.
"Thirty-three years. Be thirty-four in September."
I sipped the beer and stared at him.
"You know why I been here this long?" he went on.
"You mind your own business," I said.
"Right on the button."
"This guy's name is Nesbitt. Little squirt with roving eyeballs."
"You ain't been listening to me," he said.
"Sure I have," I said, sipping my beer. "If a fellow looks like that should come back by, tell him Kilmer says we need to have a talk. Real bad."
"That you? Kilmer?"
"Uh-huh:"
"A guy I knew once had a mark on him, thought he was safe in downtown Pittsburgh. Then a wheelbarrow full of cement fell off a six-story building right on his head."
The metaphor seemed a little vague to me, but I took a stab at retorting.
"Tell him I won't drop any cement on his h
ead."
The bartender chuckled and held out a hand. "Ben Skeeler," he said. "The place used to be called Skeeler's but everybody kept sayin' 'Let's go to Benny's so I finally changed the sign."
He shook hands like he meant it.
"Long as we're being so formal, maybe I could see some ID," the cautious man said.
"That's fair enough," I said, and showed him my buzzer.
He looked at it and nodded. "I hope you're straight. The way I get it, you're straight, but this town can bend an evangelist faster than he can say amen."
I waited for more.
"Tough, too. I heard you was tough."
"I talk a good game," I said finally.
"These days, you know, you never can be too sure."
"Uh-huh."
"County ambulance just went by actin' real serious," he said. "You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"
"Man named O'Brian just got himself killed out on the bay," I said.
His eyes got startled for a moment and then he looked down into his beer glass. "That so" was all he said. He pulled on his ear, then took a folded-up paper napkin out of his pocket and handed it to me.
"Dab your lips," he said. "I gotta get back to work."
He went outside and I unfolded the napkin. The message was written hurriedly in ballpoint that had torn through the napkin in a couple of places and left several inkblots at the end of words. It said: "Uncle Jolly's Fillup, route 14 south about 18 miles. Tonight, 9 p.m. Come alone."
No signature. Skeeler came back with another crate of soft drinks.
"You know a place called Jolly's Fillup, route 14 south of town?"
"Sounds like a filling station, don't it?" he said.
"Now that you mention it."
"You'll know it when you get there," he said, and went back outside. I finished my beer and followed him.
"Thanks for the beer. Maybe I'll come back and try the shrimp," I said as I got into the car.
"You do that, hear?" he said. "Be sure to introduce yourself again. I'm bad on names." And he vanished back inside.