The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(7)

Go ahead. It’s hot.

All right.

I didnt see any damage at all.

Yeah. It looked like it just left the factory.

Who makes it? The what, JetStar?

JetStar, yeah. Lockheed.

Well. It’s a hell of a plane. Four jet engines? How fast will that thing go Bobby?

Western shook out the leaves and screwed the cap back onto his thermos. I think right at six hundred miles an hour.

Damn.

Oiler took a last draw on his cigarette and flipped it spinning into the dark. You’ve never brought up bodies, have you?

No. I just figured anything that you didnt want to do I’m probably not going to like either.

You bring em up with a rope and harness but you still got to get them out of the plane. They keep wantin to put their arms around you. We brought fifty-three up out of a Douglas airliner off the coast of Florida one time and that did it for me. That was before I went to work for Taylor. They’d been down there a few days and you damn sure didnt want to get any of that water in your mouth. They were all swollen in their clothes and you had to cut them out of their seatbelts. Quick as you did they’d start to rise up with their arms out. Sort of like circus balloons.

These dont look like corporation guys.

Yeah? They got on suits.

I know. But they’re not the right kind of suits. Their shoes look European.

Well. I wouldnt know. I aint had on a pair of regular shoes in ten years.

What do you want to do?

Get the hell out of here. We need to take showers.

All right.

What time is it?

Four twenty-six.

Time flies when you’re havin fun.

We can hose off on the dock when we get back. Hose out our suits.

I’m goin to be hard to find, Bobby. I aint comin back out here.

All right.

You think there’s already been somebody down there, dont you?

I dont know.

Yeah. But that aint an answer. How would they get in the plane? They’d of had to cut their way in the same way we done.

Maybe somebody let them in.

Oiler shook his head. Damn, Western. I dont know why I even talk to you. All you ever do is spook the shit out of me. Gary, you want to fire this thing up?

You got it.

Western tucked his thermos into his divebag. What else? he said.

I’ll tell you what else. I think that my desire to remain totally fucking ignorant about shit that will only get me in trouble is both deep and abiding. I’m going to say that it is just damn near a religion.

Gary had gone to the back of the inflatable. Western and Oiler raised the two anchors and Gary stood with one foot on the transom and hauled on the starter rope. The big Johnson outboard started immediately and they burbled along till they were well clear of the orange float and Gary cranked the throttle open and they set out across the dark water toward Pass Christian.



* * *





Coming downriver an antique schooner running under bare poles. Black hull, gold plimsoll. Passing under the bridge and down along the gray riverfront. Phantom of grace. Past warehouse and pier, the tall gantry cranes. The rusty Liberian freighters bollarded along the docks on the Algiers shore. A few people along the walkway had stopped to look. Something out of another time. He crossed the tracks and went up Decatur Street to St Louis and walked up Chartres Street. At the Napoleon House the old crowd hailed him from the small tables set out before the door. Familiars out of another life. How many tales begin just so?

Squire Western, called Long John. Up from the murky deeps is it? Come join us for a libation. The sun’s over the yardarm if I’m not cruelly mistaken.

He pulled up one of the small bentwood chairs and set his green divebag on the tiles. Bianca Pharaoh leaned and smiled. What have you got in the bag, Precious?

He’s off on a trip, said Darling Dave.

Nonsense. The Squire wont abandon us. Waiter.

It’s just my gear.

It’s just his gear, said Brat to the table at large.

Count Seals turned sleepily. It’s his diving gear, he said. He’s a diver.

Ooh, said Bianca. I like that so much. Let me see inside. Anything kinky?

The man goes to work in rubber apparel, what do you expect? Here my good fellow. A flagon of your stoutest for my friend.

The waiter moved away. The tourists passed along the walk. Threads of their empty conversation hanging in the air like bits of code. Underfoot the slow periodic thud of a piledriver from somewhere along the riverfront. Western regarded his host. How have you been, John?

I’m well, Squire. I was away for a while. A slight contretemps with the authorities regarding the legitimacy of some medical prescriptions.

He detailed his adventures in an offhand way. Pads of forged prescriptions from a printshop in Morristown Tennessee. Real doctors, but their phone numbers replaced with numbers from payphones in supermarket parkinglots. Girlfriend a few feet away in a parked car. Yes. That’s correct. His mother is terminal. Yes. Dilaudids. One hundred sixteenths. Three weeks of this in the small towns of the Appalachian south and then pacing up and back in a room at the Hilltop Motel on Kingston Pike in Knoxville. The room paid for with a stolen credit card. Waiting for the connection. Half a shoebox full of Schedule II narcotics with a street value of over a hundred thousand dollars. He’d stripped out of his clothes in the heat and was pacing naked save for a pair of ostrichskin boots and a widebrimmed black Borsalino. Smoking his last Montecristo. Five oclock came. Then six. Finally a knock at the door. He snatched it open. Where in the hell have you all been? he said. But he was staring down the barrel of a .38 caliber service revolver and there was a backup man off to the side with a pump shotgun. The TBI agent was holding up his badge. Looking up at this tall and totally naked felon. Old buddy, he said, we got here just as quick as we could.