He pulled the boat up onto the bank easily and tipped it over on its edge, a 275-pound wooden jon boat, tipping it like it weighed fifty pounds, letting it plop back down in the muddy water. It had been badly caulked and the caulking was only partially holding in the cracks, but it appeared to still be halfway sound. Bunkowski checked to see how the bottom looked and, satisfied, he gingerly stepped in, propelling his bulk into the middle section of the boat. It didn't sink to the bottom with him, which he considered a good sign.
There was a broken piece of oar and a couple of old cans and milk jugs, which had probably been used to bail the old leaky tub with. He picked up the oar and shoved off from the bank. The water was probably quite shallow along here, he thought, with the bank only ten or twelve feet high and maybe—tops—six or seven feet of water beneath the boat.
Silently, with the powerful arms and wrists and back that possessed superhuman strength, the behemoth dipped the piece of wood into the water and sent the rowboat gliding upstream, aiming quietly in the direction of the enemy's heartbeat.
Lee clip-clopped down the steps into the squad room to find Eichord with his chair tilted back, one foot hooked onto a desk drawer, the room otherwise empty.
“I can't go off and leave you, can I?” Lee said, shaking his head. “I come back—it'sa same damn thing every time, hats, horns, drunken behavior, screaming, and wild parties. You're an irrepressible knucklehead, ya know that? What am I gonna do with you?'
Eichord calmly looked up from his book. “Well, look who's here, it's the Chinese Willie Sutton.'
“Oh, cute. Real funny. Like they'd never think to put a you-know-what in here. Right?'
“I don't know. What's a you-know-what?'
“A mike. A fucking
“Jeez, pal. Take a couple dozen Valium and get a hold of it.'
“YOU get a hold of it,” Lee said, dropping a newspaper on top of Eichord's book,
Eichord saw the headline “FBI links robbery gun to killing,” reading “A handgun taken from fugitive Wendell De Witt, 31, has been identified as the weapon used in the shooting death of a Buckhead bank guard on July 3, according to testimony given by a Federal Bureau of Investigation forensics analyst.
“The unnamed FBI analyst verified that tests conducted on a .38-caliber pistol taken from De Witt at the time of his capture showed conclusively that it was the weapon used in the killing of Floyd Coleman, 52, during the robbery of Buckhead Mercantile Bank and Trust.
“The gun is reportedly one of several weapons stolen from a Buckhead store on June 26. De Witt's accomplice in the bank robbery and shooting, John Monroe, 24, was granted immunity by the Federal Bureau of Investigation working with Buckhead County prosecuting attorney Arthur Wiegrath, in return for Monroe agreeing to testify against his accomplice in the July 3 robbery and homicide.'
Eichord glanced at Lee and gave him a shake of the head and one of those thin-lipped you-stupid-asshole looks of exasperation as he finished the last paragraph:
“Wiegrath said that information given by Monroe had resulted in De Witt's capture. Both De Witt and Monroe have claimed that only $16,000 of the $28,421 taken in the robbery was removed from the bank.'
“What I want to know is this,” Eichord said. “Just tell me how anybody with your brains, can—” They finished in unison, “—
He'd always wanted to know how Chink and Chunk did that—but not THIS bad.
He picked up his book and tried to get back into the world of gentleman's clubs but he kept reading the same line. The last sentence of the story in the paper.
Locally it had once been known as the Iron Bridge, but like all the iron around here the exposure to the elements had eventually taken its toll, and as we all know rust never naps much less sleeps. When the Iron Bridge had rusted through to the point where it was long past being deemed unsafe, somebody from the county road agency came and made an assessment and work began. When the workmen were done after a summer's toil the rusting iron girders that remained were resting on huge, treated utility poles, X-braced, and it had become the Wooden Bridge. Then the flash floods came to eat at the banks.
But the county people had run out of money somewhere along the way toward completion, and they'd never gotten around to fixing the bridge right in the middle, nor had they rebuilt the sides. It was a nice potential Chappaquiddick as it stood there, some sixty feet above the ditch at highest watermark, no rails and no center, but safe enough in outward appearance to an approaching stranger.
They feared that vandals would take down the bridge out signs, cut the chains and steel cables, and stand around with fingers crossed waiting for some hapless civilian from the city. So the county came back and blew the whole center section of the bridge out. Only the drunkest party animal would fail to see the bridge was gone.
To Daniel, looking up and seeing the blown bridge's sides arching out from either bank, miniature sandbars, the tallest Johnson grass you've ever seen, gigantic trees and weeds hanging over the brown water, it was a green-choked world of paddies and tree lines and blown bridge and quasi-jungle, and it looked more like Vietnam than anything this side of the Philippines. And his sensors began blinking as he saw this blown artifact from his past. And he smelled Cong.
Up on the high bank two pickups were parked side by side. Three men were talking.
“Kenny caught a twelve-pound channel cat down there around the eddy?'
“Yeah? By the ferry?'
“Yeah. Worked all up an’ down there clean up to just south of Kerr's Store.'
“D'jew do anythin'?'
“Hell!” The other man shook his head in exasperation.
“Three'—he laughed mirthlessly—''n a couple of damn drum.'
“Where was ya?'
“Number Thirty-Six.'
“They in close,” he said.
“I was draggin’ ‘em off the bank.'
“Get in there, boy,” the third man said with a knowing nod.
“Yeah.'
“I put in off Whitetail and worked all the way back down that bank where the drain north of Clearmont Church is?” The other man nodded. “'N I shagged seven and some bluegill.” His head shook once in disgust.
“D'jew go crappie fishin'?'
“Naw. Me ‘n Cecil's goin’ tomorrow,” he said, and they talked about the fact it hadn't rained hardly at all for two weeks, and about the big later patch, and some new pre-emerge one of them had heard about, and they had got around to bait again about the time Chaingang came out of the water and heard the three Cong chattering away in their singsong Vietnamese monkey gibberish, and a huge hand holding a gleaming fighting bowie comes up out of the muddy waters like the fin of a silver shark, the back of the hand matted with hair as thick as an animal's pelt. A huge head followed silently out of the water, tiny, hard black eyes gleaming in the doughy, scarred face, sun-brown,
