An Incident At Bloodtide

'Brain inflammation?'

'I told them you didn't have a brain to be inflamed, but they insisted. You walked out of here with a mild concussion, right?

Well, it's not so mild anymore. All that time you were running around doing whatever it was you thought you were doing, you could have had a stroke at any time. The swelling is down now, but if you look like Mr. America when you get out of here, it's because of all the steroids they've been pumping you full of. The way you've been bouncing around on your head, it's a wonder you've got any uncracked brain cells left. But you never put that organ to much use anyway, do you?'

'Tee-hee. You've got a great bedside manner, Garth. How long have I been. . away?'

'Not quite a week.'

'Not quite a fucking week?'

'Take it easy, Mongo,' Garth said quickly, putting his hand on my chest and pressing me back down on the bed as I tried to rise. 'You're out of danger, but you're going to have to stay here another week at least, and probably longer. I was told not to talk to you for longer than fifteen minutes if you came around. The doctors said you'd probably want to go back to sleep by that time.'

'Well, they're wrong again. I don't want to go back to sleep. I have nightmares. What the hell's been happening?'

Garth smiled wryly, chuckled, and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling-a flamboyant display of reckless emotion from my taciturn brother. 'I'll bring you your reviews in a day or two. You've made two out of three of the network broadcasts, and I can tell you that you're selling a lot of newspapers. That's the good news, if you're a newspaper publisher.'

'Aha. Since I'm not a newspaper publisher, my surviving brain cells interpret that to mean there's plenty of bad news for me.'

'We'll talk about it tomorrow or the next day. Really, Mongo, I don't think I-'

'Damn it, Garth, I've been sleeping for a week. I promise I'll rest. Just tell me what's been going on. I absolutely guarantee I'm going to get better, because I'm going to find Julian Jefferson and separate his head from his shoulders. That's twice the son-of-a-bitch tried to kill me.'

Garth sighed, propped me up with some pillows behind my back, then sat down again in the chair next to my bed. 'Too late for that. Jefferson already separated his head from his shoulders for you-at least most of it. He shot himself on the deck of his tanker, presumably with the gun he was using to try to kill you.'

'Well, well,' I said. I thought about it for a few moments, waiting for some sense of satisfaction that refused to come. 'It doesn't make any difference. He was just a drunk doing what he was told, and the person who ordered him to rev up those engines was none other than Chick Carver, our friendly neighborhood sorcerer. Carver was on the tanker that night, because Jefferson called him to report that the local troublemaker was back. He also seriously trashed Tom's boat, then drove it himself down to the salt marshes.'

'The captain told you that?'

'Yep.'

'You got it on tape?'

'Gee, Garth, I don't. I plumb forgot to pick up my recording engineer before I went chasing after that ship.'

'So you haven't got it on tape. Too bad.'

'Anybody else aboard the tanker killed?'

Garth shook his head.

'Jefferson was just something broken that Carver used as a murder weapon. But Chick Carver's kind of broken too. I want to nail him, but I want even more to nail the gray suit or suits responsible for hiring a freak like Carver in the first place, and then giving him free rein to act as an enforcer to cover up their illegal water-transport business. Maybe that's Roger Wellington, but I suspect it's somebody even higher up, somebody Mama Carver could pressure. Damn it, Garth, this whole thing is about responsibility, and I want to nail the people responsible for making policy.'

Garth grunted, then stared at me for some time with an enigmatic expression on his face. Finally he asked quietly, 'Just what the hell did you think you were doing, Mongo?'

'Uh. . bringing things to a head?'

'You mean onto a head; your head. I can't understand what you hoped to accomplish, aside from almost killing yourself, by playing Tarzan off the Tappan Zee Bridge, and then trying to hijack a tanker.'

'Hijack a tanker? I wasn't trying to hijack that thing, I was trying to park it, for Christ's sake! And don't give me any more of this 'what did you think you were doing' crap. I was pretty pissed off when I left the hospital, because you were where I am right now. I went to have a little chat with Bennett Carver, to show him the photos and ask what the hell his company and son were up to. He was pretty shocked by the whole thing, especially since he disowned his shithead son years ago. But Mama wasn't shocked; she wasn't even surprised.'

'She got him the job?'

'Right. She's a tough one. The lady as much as told me to go to hell, because there wasn't a damn thing I could do about any of it. That kind of annoyed me. I got even more annoyed when I got back and found the tanker gone; obviously Mama had called somebody, probably her boy, to tell him the tanker should get out of there fast. I took off after it in the car, because I knew if it ever got out of New York Harbor, we'd never see it or Julian Jefferson around here again. I was intending to make a last-ditch effort to get the Coast Guard to stop them, but while I was on the road I realized that was a waste of time. I saw the construction equipment on the TZ, and I just went for a head-to-head with the captain; I knew it was probably the last chance I'd ever have. If you'd been in my place, you'd have done the same damn thing.'

'Yeah,' Garth said mildly. 'You're probably right. These goddamn people and their attitudes, and the attitude of the authorities toward these people with attitudes, is enough to give you an attitude. Well, you certainly stopped that ship, brother, and you sure as hell made sure the situation would get a public airing. But we're left with a few problems.'

'Like what? Everything you've told me so far sounds like good news.'

'Care to guess where you are?'

'Uh, Cairn Hospital?'

'Try the hospital ward on Rikers Island.'

'Oh-oh.'

'Even as we speak, the state and federal authorities are arguing over who gets to beat on you first. Since Carver Shipping claims you caused three million dollars' worth of damage to their tanker, they want at you first in a state court so they can sue you for everything we've got. But the feds' position is that what you did was an act of terrorism, and they want to make an example of you by first trying you on charges of attempted hijacking of a ship and then putting you away for twenty-five or thirty years. Naturally there's politics involved. We don't have anything but enemies in this administration, and this is probably their way of punishing both of us for what they believe to be our close ties to our dear ex-President.'

'Who's winning? State or federal?'

'Your lawyers, I hope.'

'Who are my lawyers?'

'Benson, Quadratti, Kratz, and Pringle.'

'Hoo-boy,' I said, raising my eyebrows. 'Ira's on the case, is he? Talk about heavy hitters.'

'Yep. He's working pro bono, no less. Any number of the firms we've done business with over the years volunteered to represent you. I thought it best to let Ira handle it.'

'Why pick a Washington firm?'

'Because that's where the real pressure in this case is coming from, and Ira does have friends in this administration. Even more important, he has friends in high corporate places, and, to my thinking, it's in the boardroom that this little drama you've produced is going to play itself out.'

'Your thinking? What about my thinking? I'm the one they're trying to brand and try as a terrorist!'

Garth grunted. 'I'm taking over as quarterback. You worry about resting and getting your strength back.