Still no comment. Sloan sighed and looked up at the ceiling. He was getting annoyed. ‘You’ve changed, Hatcher. You were always good for an argument — about anything. You used to be quite the talker.’
Hatcher stood up suddenly, took three long steps across the room and hit Sloan with a fast, hard jab straight to the corner of the jaw. The big man flew backward out of his chair, landed on his neck and rolled over against the bulkhead.
‘God damn,’ he snapped. He wiped blood from the corner of his mouth and looked up sharply as Hatcher leaned over him.
‘I have this thing about wasting words,’ Hatcher whispered.
‘Jesus,’ Sloan cracked, ‘what happened to your voice?’
Hatcher didn’t answer. He rinsed out his wineglass, slid it into an overhead wine rack and locked it down. Then he went topside. Sloan got up slowly, massaging his jaw. He went to the refrigerator, opened it and took out a light beer. He popped the top off, took a deep drink and then held the cold can against his jaw. Then the four big engines coughed to life and the boat began to move. Sloan rushed to the top. Hatcher was backing the 48-footer away from the dock.
‘What the hell’re you doing?’ he demanded, but Hatcher didn’t answer. He swung the boat around in a tight arc and headed back out to sea, cruising slowly through the sound, and then as the boat broke out into the open sea he eased the throttles forward and the engines changed their voices, their basso tones keeping rhythm to the slap of the ocean as the small yacht picked up speed and began bounding from whitecap to whitecap.
Sloan caressed his jaw with the cold beer can. ‘You didn’t forget how to hit,’ he said. His smile slowly returned. ‘What the hell, I guess I had it coming.’
Hatcher turned around and stood nose to nose with Sloan.
‘Is this a shakedown, Harry?’ his harsh voice asked. Sloan looked shocked. ‘C’mon!’
‘Then what’re you doing here? Don’t tell me you came to apologize, I’ll deck you again.’
‘You know me, Hatch. I, uh, tuck info away for a rainy day. I always figure sooner or later . . .‘ He let the sentence dangle.
‘Yeah?’
‘So now is later.’
‘You set me up, you son of a bitch.’
Sloan shrugged. ‘You do what you have to do.’
‘To protect a drunken bum.’
‘Shit, it was all politics there. We were just trying to save the country is all.’
‘From what — rats and cockroaches?’ Hatcher rasped.
Sloan shrugged with a grin. ‘From the Commies, who else?’
‘And I happened to be expendable.’
‘The whole thing went sour,’ Sloan went on in his sincere voice. ‘You were supposed to be in the prison in Madrango. Then the country blew up before I could get back to get you. Next thing I know, they moved you to Los Boxes. So it was a bad call, I’ll give you that,’ Sloan said.
‘A bad call!’ the ruined voice whispered.
‘I brought you in when I could, laddie,’ Sloan said.
Hatcher moved the throttles forward a little more. The engines got throatier, the bow lifted a little more.
‘What happened to the little fat guy?’ Hatcher said finally.
‘Pratt? Ah, the rebels held him for a couple of months. He lost forty pounds and quit the State Department.’
‘I wonder who’s better off.’
‘He got you out, didn’t he?’
Hatcher growled between clenched teeth: ‘Our beloved ambassador, Craig, murders a woman and child with his Mercedes, I take the fall, go to Los Boxes, and two months later the government goes down the toilet and Craig is out on his ass anyway. Beautiful.’
‘Hatch, you’ve been in the business long enough to know how fast things change. What the hell, I didn’t forget you. Did I forget you?’
‘Three years?’
‘The timing wasn’t right.’
Hatcher shook his head. ‘When they passed out heart, Harry, you were in the asshole line. What the hell do you want?’ Hatcher’s voice rasped.
‘I’ve got a job to do. A job nobody can hack like you can.’
Hatcher looked astounded. ‘Fuck off,’ he snarled.
‘Listen to me —‘
‘Our slate’s clean.’
‘I don’t quite see it that way.’
‘I don’t give a damn how you see it.’
