“If it was up to me,” he said, “I’d take you out back on the beach and shoot you in the head. I’ve never shot a man, but I don’t think-in this instance-it would bother me. Not more than a few minutes, anyway.” He paused. “But the truth of the matter is what ultimately happens to you isn’t going to be up to me. There will be a prosecutor, a judge, and a defense lawyer. You’ll get a lawyer who will do everything in his power to mitigate the circumstances here, the coke, the stolen guns, the little girls, but he won’t be able to do you any good if this is all he’s got to work with.”
Graver looked over at the stack of guns, at the pile of tapes, taking his time to think about it.
“I wish I didn’t need your help,” Graver went on, “but I do. And if you help us, you’ll also be helping yourself, though I regret this. Your lawyer will take what you do for us and milk it for all it’s worth. I personally don’t think you ought to benefit a scintilla-you know what a scintilla is, it’s about as little as your mind can imagine-I don’t think you should benefit even that much for helping us. I think you ought to be forced to do it by law. I think you ought to get the needle if you don’t help us, maybe life if you do. But your lawyer will do a lot better than that… unfortunately.”
Alice was listening to this with her mouth dropped open slightly, as if she couldn’t believe this pretty sober thing she had gotten herself into when she agreed to this one-night stand.
Graver stood up from the bed and walked around and got the maps and came back and stood in front of Ledet.
“You want to try to make it a little easier on your lawyer?”
According to Rick Ledet, Eddie Redden was one of three principal pilots for Panos Kalatis. Redden kept a pager with him at all times and was on call twenty-four hours a day. His instructions from Kalatis were delivered to him in a variety of ways, sometimes by telephone, sometimes by personal messenger, sometimes at the conclusion of one of his flights. Ledet himself went along as copilot or flunky assistant, whatever was needed.
“What are the reasons for the flights?” Graver asked. They were sitting in the large main room again, at the rattan table, the flight maps spread out in front of them. Neuman was taking notes and Alice was in the back bedroom. Graver decided she had heard just about all she needed to hear of what was happening, so he asked her to stay in the bedroom while they finished talking. Now that she knew they were police, she was compliant and- after they removed the telephone and told her she could watch television-relatively content to wait it out and see what happened next. After all, this little ordeal was going to make good tavern talk when it was all over.
“Just about everything and anything,” Ledet said. He was smoking, raising both cuffed hands every time he wanted a puff on his cigarette. “But about eighteen months ago Kalatis kind of reorganized the pilots and put me and Eddie exclusively on runs with people and money. That’s our main cargo. We take out a lot of cash. A lot of cash.”
“From his drug operation?”
“That’s what Eddie says some of it is. And some of it’s from other kinds of business. Kalatis and Faeber sold information of some sort.”
“How much money, how often?”
“I do a money haul with them about once a month. How much? Shit, Eddie said millions, and I guess it must be. They load these reinforced cardboard storage boxes into the plane, you know, the kind with handles cut into the ends, and a top that fits down over it I saw inside one of them one time, one of the guards let me look, and the bills were stacked in there nice and neat, banded and labeled. It’d already been counted, and they knew just exactly how much was in each box. Millions, like Eddie said. We have thirty or forty of these things stacked in the cabin. A box of cash is heavy, quite a load.”
“So they take money out of the country about once a month…”
“No, I said I do money hauls about once a month,” Ledet corrected Graver, mashing out a cigarette into an ashtray sitting on the table in front of him. “Eddie does it all the time. I only go when they’re going to Panama or the Caymans or Colombia. They want a copilot who can speak pretty good Spanish on those jumps in case something happened to the pilot. They don’t want to risk losing a load.”
“Then where does Eddie take it when he’s by himself?”
“Offshore. He runs loads to cruisers sitting out in the Gulf, past U.S. jurisdictional waters. Once every week he does that, a regular milk run.” He looked down and tapped the maps. “That’s what these are. The cruisers never wait at the same place. Keep shifting around. The coordinates change every week, every run.”
“How do you get around filing flight plans?”
Ledet gave Graver a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look. “Come on, man, flight plans?” He snorted. “Look, flying is one of the last great freedoms in this life. They’ve got all these rules, sure, but, shit, do you have any concept of how goddamn big ‘airspace’ is? The volume?” He gestured with a tilted bob of his head toward the hazy heat out the back door of the house. “The sky out there is full of planes that nobody knows shit about, not the DEA, not the Border Patrol, not any of the branches of the military, not NSA… ‘Airspace,’ man, it’s just too damn big to know what’s going on up there all the time. They can monitor some corridors some of the time, but that’s about it That leaves about ninety-nine percent of the airspace unaccounted for. It’s a smuggler’s paradise. Like the high seas two hundred years ago. You read in the paper where the DEA says they figure they interdict only about five percent, seven percent of the shit coming through? They’re not lying about that Poor bastards are just pissing into the wind, and they know it And pound for pound there’s probably more cash going out than dope coming in.” He grinned and gave his head a little shake. “It’s a ‘free-flowing stream,’ just like the old church song says.”
When you heard a man like this talk you understood why so many law enforcement officers were getting out of the business. After a few years the futility of it was a persuasive deterrent to a career. Or, on the other hand, the temptation to skim a little off for yourself became too great. When there was so much cash that you had to talk about it in terms of its weight rather than its unit value, it began to lose its meaning.
“Then you think Redden is making a money haul now?”
Ledet looked a little uneasy at the question, though he had shown no uneasiness earlier when he gave up the information. He reached for a cigarette and lit it with a throwaway plastic lighter.
“I guess,” he said.
“He’s not on a charter to Mexico.”
Ledet shook his head.
“Spell it out for me,” Graver said impatiently.
“When Eddie called me he said something big was up with Kalatis. He, Eddie, needed me for a long-distance run.”
“As copilot.”
“Right. But I copiloted on other kinds of things, too, not just cash runs. Kalatis has people brought to his place, people he does business with. He always wants copilots on those.”
“What people?”
“Eddie said they’re ‘clients,’ people the Greek needs to talk to. I’m not sure about what kind of dealings. But I do know they’re more cash customers of some sort, having to do with either the information business or the dope business.”
“Then you think you’re here for taxiing services, to take people to Kalatis for meetings?”
“Yeah. My understanding is tonight’s going to be hectic. I think all the pilots are on duty tonight.”
This was what Graver wanted to hear. He wanted to hear something about Kalatis. He wanted to hear the details of a plan of which Kalatis was an integral, necessary participant.
“Each pilot has a copilot as well?” he asked.
“Right. There’re six of us.”
“Three aircraft.”
“Right. We’ve done something like this before, when he was closing deals, a big program with everything coming together in one tight time frame. All three planes, carrying people, money, dope. That’s kind of Kalatis’s strong suit Organization. These big operations, men and schedules coordinated real close, planes and boats on the move, everything clicking like clockwork. And that’s the way it happens too”-he snapped his fingers in a quick, measured cadence, snap, snap, snap, snap-”just like that.”
“All of you taking people and money down to Mexico, to Kalatis’s place.”
“To Kalatis’s place, yeah,” Ledet confirmed, but his eyes slid away from Graver as he said it.
Graver and Neuman exchanged looks.
“You realize,” Graver reminded Ledet, “that the point of all this is still the first thing I said to you. I want to
