on the bottom, tie it off nice and tight so it don't go noplace. Hey, somebody in the deck division leaves stuff flapping around like that, I tear him a new asshole. Gear is expensive. We don't go around breaking it for kicks, sir. What do you think, Portagee?'
'He's right. That was a pretty good blow we had that night - didn't the captain tell you? - the only reason we still had the punks aboard was that we waved off the helo pickup 'cause of the weather. We didn't have any work parties out on deck that night, did we?'
'No chance,' Riley said. 'We buttoned up tight that night. What I mean, sir, is we can go out and work even in a damned hurricane if we have to, but unless you gotta, you don't go screwin' around on the weather decks during a gale. It's dangerous. You lose people that way.'
'How bad was it that night?' Murray asked.
'Some of the new kids spent the night with their heads in the thunderjugs. The cook decided to serve chops that night, too.' Oreza laughed. 'That's how we learned, ain't it, Bob?'
'Only way,' Riley agreed.
'So there wasn't a court-martial that night either?'
'Huh?' Riley appeared genuinely puzzled for a moment, then his face brightened. 'Oh, you mean we gave 'em a fair trial, then hung 'em, like in the old beer commercial?'
'Just one of them,' Murray said helpfully.
'Why not both? They're both fuckin' murderers, ain't they? Hey, sir, I was aboard that yacht, all right? I seen what they did - have you? It's a real mess. You see something like that all the time, maybe. I never have, and - well, I don't mind tellin' you, sir, it shook me up some. You want 'em hung, yeah, I'll do it and they won't bitch about it the next day, either. Okay, maybe I shouldn't 'a snapped the one over the rail - lost my cool, and I shouldn't have - okay, I'm sorry about that. But those two little fucks took out a whole family, probably did some rapin', too. I got a family, too, y'know? I got daughters. So does Portagee. You want us to shed tears over those two fuckers, you come to the wrong place, sir. You sit 'em in the electric chair and I'll throw the switch for you.'
'So you didn't hang him?' Murray asked.
'Sir, I wish I'd'a thought of it,' Riley announced. It was, after all, Oreza who'd thought of it.
Murray looked at Bright, whose face was slightly pink by this time. It had gone even more smoothly than he'd expected. Well, he'd been told that the captain was a clever sort. You didn't give command of a ship to a jerk - at least you weren't supposed to.
'Okay, gentlemen, I guess that answers all the questions we have for the moment. Thank you for your cooperation.' A moment later, Wegener was leading them away.
The three men stopped at the gangway for a moment. Murray motioned for Bright to head for the car, then turned to the captain.
'You actually operate helicopters off that deck up there?'
'All the time. I just wish we had one of our own.'
'Could I see it before I leave? I've never been aboard a cutter before.'
'Follow me.' In less than a minute, Murray was standing in the center of the deck, directly on the crossed yellow lines painted on the black no-skid deck coating. Wegener was explaining how the lights at the control station worked, but Murray was looking at the mast, drawing an imaginary line from the yardarm to the deck.
'Captain, for your sake I hope you never do anything this crazy again.'
Wegener turned in surprise. 'What do you mean?'
'We both know what I mean.'
'You believe what those two -'
'Yes, I do. A jury wouldn't - at least I don't think one would, though you can never really tell what a jury will believe. But you did it. I know - you can't say anything...'
'What makes you think -'
'Captain, I've been in the Bureau for twenty-six years. I've heard lots of crazy stories, some real, some made up. You gradually get a feel for what's real and what isn't. The way it looks to me, you could run a piece of rope from that pulley up there, down to here pretty easy, and if you're taking the seas right, having a man swing wouldn't matter much. It sure wouldn't hurt the radar antenna that Riley was so worried about. Like I said, don't do it again. This one's a freebie because we can prosecute the case without the evidence you got for us. Don't push it. Well, I'm sure you won't. You found out that there was more to this one than you thought, didn't you?'
'I was surprised that the victim was -'
'Right. You opened a great big can of worms without getting your hands too dirty. You were lucky. Don't push it,' Murray said again.
'Thank you, sir.'
One minute after that, Murray was back in the car. Agent Bright was still unhappy.
'Once upon a time, when I was a brand-new agent fresh out of the Academy, I was assigned to Mississippi,' Murray said. 'Three civil-rights workers disappeared, and I was a very junior member of the team that cleared the case. I didn't do much of anything other than hold Inspector Fitzgerald's coat. Ever hear about Big Joe?'
'My dad worked with him,' Bright answered.
'Then you know that Joe was a character, a real old-time cop. Anyway, the word got to us that the local Klukkers were mouthing off about how they were gonna kill a few agents - you know the stories, how they were harassing some families and stuff like that. Joe got a little pissed. Anyway, I drove him out to see - forget the mutt's name, but he was the Grand Kleagle of the local Klavern and he was the one with the biggest mouth. He was sitting under a shady tree in his front lawn when we pulled up. He had a shotgun next to the chair, and he was half in the bag from booze already. Joe walks up to him. The mutt starts to pick up the shotgun, but Joe just stared him down. Fitzgerald could do that; he put three guys in the ground and you could see in his face that he'd done it. I got a little worried, had my hand on my revolver, but Joe just stared him down and told him if there was any more talk about offing an agent, or any more shitty phone calls to wives and kids, Big Joe was going to come back and kill him, right there in his front yard. Didn't shout or anything, just said it like he was ordering breakfast. The Kleagle believed him. So did I. Anyway, all that loose talk ended.
'What Joe did was illegal as hell,' Murray went on. 'Sometimes the rules get bent. I've done it. So have you.'
'I've never -'
'Don't get your tits in a flutter, Mark. I said 'bent,' not broken. The rules do not anticipate all situations. That's why we expect agents to exercise judgment. That's how society works. In this case, those Coasties broke loose some valuable information, and the only way we can use it is if we ignore how they got it. No real harm was done, because the subjects will be handled as murderers, and all the evidence we need is physical. Either they fry or they cop to the murders and cooperate by again giving us all the information that the good Captain Wegener scared out of 'em. Anyway, that's what they decided in D.C. It's too embarrassing to everyone to make an issue of what we discussed aboard the cutter. Do you really think a local jury would -'
'No,' Bright admitted at once. 'It wouldn't take much of a lawyer to blow it apart, and even if he didn't -'
'Exactly. We'd just be spinning our wheels. We live in an imperfect world, but I don't think that Wegener will ever make that mistake again.'
'Okay.' Bright didn't like it, but that was beside the point.
'So what we do now is figure out exactly why this poor bastard and his family got themselves murdered by a
'Not much in the way of rules for the druggies,' Bright pointed out.
'Yeah - and I used to think terrorists were bad.'
It was so much easier than his work with the Macheteros, Cortez thought. Here he was, sitting in the corner booth of a fine, expensive restaurant with a ten-page wine list in his hands - Cortez thought himself an authority on wines - instead of a rat-infested barrio shack eating beans and mouthing revolutionary slogans with people whose idea of Marxism was robbing banks and making heroic taped pronouncements that the local radio stations played between the rock songs and commercials. America had to be the only place in the world, he thought, where poor people drove their own cars to demonstrations and the longest lines they stood in were at the supermarket check-
