'I don't like what you're saying to me, Streak.'
'Too bad.'
'Remember the dude in New Iberia General? He got a hypodermic load of roach paste. Buchalter
I punched him on the shoulder with my finger.
'We need to understand something, Clete. You're not going to re-create the O.K. Corral out here.'
He twisted around on his haunches.
'What do you want to do?' he said. 'Go all the way back to land to notify the Coast Guard, then hope they're not a hundred miles away? The old man's on his own up there. We go in there and blow up their shit.'
I punched him with one finger, hard, on the shoulder again. He turned and slapped my hand away, his green eyes suddenly disturbed and dark, as though he were looking at someone he didn't know.
'This whole gig started with you tearing up the Calucci brothers,' I said. 'It's not going to end that way. We're putting Buchalter in a cage.'
'Tell it to the Rotary Club,' he said, and looked upward toward the closed hatch.
We could hear Zoot cutting back the gas now, the exhaust pipes throbbing at the waterline, echoing off the steel hull of the salvage ship. Then we heard Lucinda making her way forward, picking up the bowline off the deck, as though it were natural to tie onto the metal steps that zigzagged down the side of the ship.
Clete eased the hatch upward a half inch.
'We found an injured man on an oil platform! We need your radio!' Lucinda shouted.
There was no answer. We could hear the sounds of an air compressor, a winch grinding, chains rattling through pulleys, a diesel engine working hard.
'It's a boat hand who doesn't know what to do,' Clete said. 'He probably went for somebody else.' He looked back at me again. 'Lighten up. I figure no more than five of them, including the diver in the water. Easy odds, mon.'
But the creases in the back of his neck were bright with sweat, his knuckles white and ridged on the shotgun's stock.
'We're calling it in for you!' someone yelled down at Lucinda.
'I'm a nurse! I need to describe his condition! I think he's had a coronary!'
'We're radioing your message! You can't come onboard!'
The hull bumped against the rubber tires that were roped to the bottom of the steps.
'Repeat… You can't come onboard! No one but company personnel are allowed! Your message is being transmitted!'
'This man may die!'
Clete's eyes were level with the crack between the deck and the hatch.
'She's tying on. That broad's got ice water in her veins,' he whispered. 'That's it, Lucinda, get on the steps, do it, do it, do it, do it…'
'Mr. Dave, leave me something 'case I got to come after y'all.'
I turned around. It was Zoot, bent down below the level of the passageway in the cabin.
'If it goes sour, partner, you get help,' I said.
It was very fast after that.
'Party time,' Clete said, and charged out onto the bow with the shotgun at port arms.
Lucinda had already reached the top of the stairs and was on the deck of the salvage ship, her.357 pointed straight out in front of her with both hands, her hair whipping in the wind, while she shouted at two paralyzed deckhands, 'Police officer, motherfucker! Down on your face, hands laced behind your neck! Are you deaf? Down on your face! Now! Or I blow your fucking head off!'
I hit the stairs running, right behind Clete, my.45 flopping in the pocket of my field jacket. I had already chambered a round in the AR-15, and my hand was squeezed tight on the grip and inside the trigger guard, my thumb poised on the safety. I could hear waves bursting against the stern and hissing along the hull.
The salvage ship was old, covered with tack welds, the scuppers orange with corrosion, the paint blistered and soft and flaking under the hand, the glass in the pilothouse oxidized and dirty with oil. The hatch to the engine room was open, and from belowdecks I could smell electrical odors, diesel fuel, stagnant water in a sump, a salty, rotten stench like a rat that's been caught in machinery.
Lucinda was standing above the two deckhands, her weapon moving back and forth between them while she worked her cuffs off her belt. I took them from her hand, hooked up one man, pulled his arm through a rail on the gate to the steps, then snipped the loose cuff on the second man's wrist.
'Where's the old-timer?' I said.
One man was bald and wore a chin beard; the other had an empty eye socket that was puckered and sealed shut as though it had been touched with a hot instrument. The bald man twisted his head and looked indifferently toward the south, where lightning was pulsating amid muted thunder on the horizon.
'Look at me when I talk to you,' I said. 'Where's the old man?'
He slowly turned his head and let his eyes drift over both me and Lucinda.
'Fuck you, nigger lover,' he said.
Then I heard Clete's weight shift above me and looked up just as he threw the shotgun against his shoulder and aimed at a man in a canvas coat and rain hood who stood in silhouette by the stern with a blue-black automatic in his hand.
Clete fired twice. Part of the double-ought buckshot razored lines of paint off the bulkhead like dry confetti, then the man in the canvas coat was knocked backwards as though he had been jerked by an invisible cable wrapped around his chest.
Clete ejected the spent easing onto the deck, pumped a fresh round into the chamber, then pressed two more shells into the magazine with his thumb.
'Three down,' he said. 'Streak, you and Lucinda go around the bow. I'll come up the other side. Watch the bridge. Don't let 'em get behind you.'
He didn't wait for an answer. He moved toward the stern, bearlike, his shotgun back at port arms, his scalp showing white in the wind, his utilities stiff with salt.
Lucinda glanced down at the cabin cruiser, which was rolling in the swells while Zoot kept gunning the engines to keep the stern from swinging into the salvage ship's hull.
'He's all right,' I said. 'My dad used to always say, 'Don't ever treat brave people as less than what they are.''
'Cover your own ass,' she said.
We moved toward the bow. I could feel the deck vibrating under me from the machinery roaring on the other side of the ship. I paused at the steps that led onto the pilothouse, worked my way up them until I could see inside, then moved quickly through the open hatch.
I looked at the shape in the corner and lowered my rifle. I heard Lucinda behind me.
'Oh God,' she said.
'Check the starboard side,' I said, and knelt next to Brother Oswald. He lay on top of an oil-grimed tarp, his poached, round face filled with the empty, stunned, disbelieving expression that I had seen once in the faces of villagers who had been killed by airbursts in a rice field.
A switchblade knife, a made-in-Korea gut-ripper that you can buy for five dollars in Laredo, had been driven to the hilt just above his right lung. He had pressed a rag around the wound, and the rag had become sodden and congealed as though it had been dipped in red paint. I put my ear to his mouth and felt his breath touch my skin.
'We're going to medevac you out of here, partner,' I said. 'You hear me? We're going to secure the ship, then have you on a chopper in no time.'
His tongue stuck to his mouth when he tried to speak. I leaned down close to his face again. His breath smelled like dried flowers.
'… after the wrong one,' he whispered.
'I don't understand,' I said.
'Hit's the woman… She can speak in tongues… I heard her talk on the radio…'
'Who did this to you, Reverend?'
