Cobra Strike (13 page)

Errol Nelson was on his feet when Nolan came back. He was big and menacing and was trying to rip off the door handle on the
other end of the cuffs.

“I ain't going nowhere with you, scumbag,” he said, snarling. “You're a Youngstown cop operating over the state line, and
so long as I keep you here, you're the who's going to be busted, not me.”

Nolan went around to the other side of the car while he told Nelson who he was. He put the cop's gun and shield in the glove
compartment and drew out some papers that he showed Nelson across the car roof by a streetlight.

“Here's your surrender piece, Nelson. Know what that is? It's from the bail bondsman you cheated by skipping town. And this
paper here is a certified copy of the bond on which you were released. Now, these two papers together make a warrant a bounty
hunter can use. I could take you to Seattle from here if that's what these papers said, but lucky for me, I just got to run
you in to Youngstown.”

“I ain't going nowhere and you can't make me. You come around this side of the car, I'll tear you apart with one hand and
kick your head in. You won't catch me by surprise this time.”

Nolan smiled and climbed in behind the wheel. He started the car and moved out into the road at six or seven miles per hour.
Nelson ran alongside, shouting and cursing. When he fell, Nolan slammed on the brakes, but he wasn't in time to prevent Nelson's
right arm from being nearly wrenched out of its socket. Blood flowed from his wrist where the metal had cut the skin and soaked
into his pants at his torn kneecaps. Nelson took a second fall before he agreed to be cuffed and sit quietly in the back.

Joe was feeling pretty good about his night's work when he arrived back at the Bunch o' Shamrock.

“There was a phone call for you,” the barkeep said. “Guy with a foreign accent. He's called for you here before.” He gave
Joe a severe look like he should stay on the straight and narrow now and not go back to whatever it was he had been doing
before.

Joe guessed it might be Andre Verdoux. “He didn't leave a number to call back?” Joe asked, surprised.

“You told me you were coming back later, so I told him to call again. I'm not your fucking social secretary, Nolan.”

The phone rang and the barkeep picked it up and nodded to Nolan. But it was not Andre Verdoux on the phone, as Joe had hoped,
nor was it Mike Campbell. It was the Youngstown plainclothesman who had tipped him that Errol Nelson was in Pulaski.

“You brought him in a little more than an hour ago, right, Joe? You're not going to believe this. Even I don't believe this,
and I see bullshit from morning till night, week in, week out. The Nelson guy jumped twelve-thousand-dollar bail and allegedly
wasted that store owner who was to testify against him. Do I have the facts straight?”

“Those are some of them,” Nolan agreed.

“Some half-assed judge has just released him again on a seven-thousand-dollar bond.”

“Jesus!”

“Not even Jesus would have turned that sucker loose.”

This time Joe ordered a whiskey at the bar. When Andre's call finally came, as usual all Joe said was, “Count me in. Just
tell me when.”

The big Australian looked out of place on the rear deck of the fancy motor yacht purring into dock at the exclusive resort
colony on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. His cropped straw-yellow hair was only slightly longer than the several days
growth of yellow stubble that covered his red jowls. His broken nose, cauliflower ears, and blubbery lips looked like those
of a sparring partner in a pro boxing training camp. His long powerful arms hung from broad shoulders on a stocky body. His
fists were huge and gnarled. Definitely not the portrait of an average luxury yacht owner. That was how men saw Bob Murphy.
Women saw him differently. They noticed that he liked them, that his brown eyes were soft and understanding, that he actually
listened to what they had to say.

Murphy was a loud, raucous Australian outbacker with a tranquil marriage to a wealthy New England socialite. She was no beauty,
any more than he was, and to the continuing amazement and envy of their friends they kept their romance going strong despite
years of marriage. They spent summers in the Green Mountains of Vermont at his wife’s
old family place. They wintered in Palm Beach, at another of his wife’s old family places. And now they were cruising north
with the spring in his wife’s family’s luxury yacht, registered these days in Bob Murphy’s name, with stopovers scheduled
for Hilton Head, Charleston, the Chesapeake, Manhattan and Montauk, with a few days social activity at each place before dropping
anchor in summer waters at Newport, Rhode Island. Bob liked life aboard the yacht when it was moving; Eunice put up with that
in anticipation of the social gatherings she could organize at each port of call. Bob hated the parties on board, with some
clown tinkling on the white baby grand, the crew serving as champagne waiters, and people in new deck shoes whose names he
could not remember saying to him, “So
you’re
Eunice’s husband.”

Bob didn’t give a damn that most of them regarded him a some sort of leech or parasite on a poor little rich girl. Eunice
herself knew that he cared little for money and was happier with a gun on a duck swamp or a rod and line at a good fishing
spot than he was hobnobbing with wealthy trendies or old-money horsey types.

Few people knew that Bob more or less paid his own way from his mere work with Mad Mike. Campbell and he went back a long
way. They had met while fighting the Cubans in Angola. Murphy had been in Vietnam with the Australian army but had not known
Campbell there, and before that, he had fought communists in the Malayan jungles with the British army. As a Green Beret colonel
fresh from the Southeast Asia conflict, Campbell had thought when they met in Angola that no one could show him any new tricks
in combat. Bob Murphy had shown him some and had saved his life more than once by coming up with something neither Campbell
nor the enemy had ever seen before. Eunice had been on peace marches to Washington while Bob was fighting in Vietnam; they
had yet to meet. Now she dismissed his mere activities along with his hunting, fishing, and drinking. It was just something
that men did. The nature of the beast. She was pleased at the fact that womanizing was not also on the list and a bit disappointed
that Bob could be very unpleasant to her distinguished guests.

But this night at Hilton Head he was on his best behavior and apparently more or less sober. He chatted with people and even
remembered some of their names while he introduced them to others. Eunice did not complain when he eased away early to their
stateroom for a long night’s sleep. He was up two hours before dawn, stalking up and down the dock, until a battered station
wagon arrived and he climbed in the front seat with two other men.

“Good to see you, Bryce,” Murphy said.

“This here is Don Crockett,” Bryce said from behind the wheel, and Bob shook hands with the man between them. “He’s the county
man where we’re going this morning.”

Bob Murphy had contacted Bryce Cummings by radiotelephone while the yacht was still offshore, and it was looking forward to
this day’s trip with him that had made Bob so agreeable to guests the previous evening. Bryce had been invited but laughingly
declined the invitation to the plush party aboard the yacht, which many others would have given their eyeteeth for. Bryce
was a tough Georgian whom Bob had once fought outside a bar in Savannah because Bob was drunk and had acidentally bumped against
him, and Bryce hated liquor and anyone carrying it in his gut. Bryce lost that fight, but the two men got to talking down
at the police station and were soon amused at each other’s absurdities.

Bryce Cummings was an agent for the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms stationed in Beaufort, through which
they drove. Don Crockett was an alcoholic-beverage officer for Colleton County, immediately north of Beaufort County. Murphy
had been out with Bryce a few times over the years, yet hadn’t met Crockett before, although it seemed as if the two men worked
together very often. They kidded each other like old friends as the station wagon wound down tiny back roads in the half light
of dawn.

“Hope you feel like a good walk this morning, Bob,” Bryce said. “Where we’re going is right deep in the woods. We was back
in there yesterday morning, and the mash was just nice and ready to go. We’re betting they’ll be working
there this morning, wanting to finish the run before the heat of the day.”

“That mash’ll turn sour if they don’t run it today,” Crockett confirmed, “unless they was to add more sugar, and they have
no call to do that.”

Bob listened to their tales of busts they had made together, both red liquor and white liquor. For Bryce those were the only
kinds of liquor. Red liquor covered all legitimately manufactured whiskey sold by bootleggers after hours and on Sundays in
wet counties, or at any time in dry counties. White liquor was moonshine, made often by families with generations of tradition
in the business. This morning they were after a still that had been accidentally pinpointed in the woods from an aerial forestry
survey photo.

“What gets me, Bryce, is I ain’t got no idea who’s running this still, and damn, I pride myself on knowing everyone in this
part of Colleton County who might be tempted to let anything more than a glass of apple juice ferment.” Don Crockett was taking
this still almost as a personal insult.

“They always come up with something new,” Bryce said, “which is how we get to keep our jobs. Best one they done on me recently
was over near Govan in Bamberg County. Fella there turns the rooms of a nice big ranch house into vats by nailing plywood
to the floors and up the walls to just below window level. He’s got four rooms with thousands of gallons of mash at different
stages, and his cooker, doubler, and cooler are set in a central room so he can run each vat of mash as it comes ready. I
don’t like to even think how long he was operating there right under my nose. Last place I ever thought of looking, a nice
suburban house with children’s swings out on the lawn.”

“How did you discover it?” Bob asked.

Bryce grinned. “By chance I caught a local fella red-handed at his still. He was mad as hell, not so much at me but at who
might have given him away. I didn’t tell him no one had, that I had come across him by smelling his still at work in the woods—it
smelled like a bakery, all yeasty like. I said to him, ‘You got some mean competition in these parts, my friend.’ So, sitting
in the car, he got to thinking
which of his competiton turned him in to get rid of him, and he ended by giving me a name that was new to me and that led
to the still in the house.”

“You’re a real nice guy,” Murphy said. “Been shot at lately?”

“Sure. All the time. But no one’s hit me in the past eight years. They don’t like revenuers hereabouts.”

The federal, state, and county agents were known as revenuers because the illegal sale of red liquor and the making and sale
of white liquor was treated not as a regular crime but as the evasion of taxes. That’s what bootleggers went to jail for—not
for making moonshine but for cheating the government out of tax revenues.

“You know whose side I’m on in all this, don’t you?” Bob said once to Bryce.

“When you’re with me, Murphy, you’re on the revenuers’ side. When you’re not with me, do as you please. Only remember, if
I got to thinking you was making white lightning, I’d bust you fast as I would some old redneck out in the woods.”

“All I drink is twelve-year-old Scotch,” Murphy said.

They left the station wagon at the end of a trail through the woods and set out on foot. Bryce checked his .38 Smith & Wesson
and Crockett patted a long-barreled .45 in his shoulder holster. Bob Murphy was unarmed, which Bryce always insisted on since
he was present only as an observer. They plowed through endless woods, the thorny undergrowth tearing at their skins and the
mosquitoes droning after them. Although it was full daylight by now, it was dark in some of the evergreen forest. Crockett
was hoping the moonshiners would show and bring their car long, saving them a return walk back this way like they had yesterday.
Murphy knew that Crockett, as the county man, got to seize whatever vehicle the moonshiners brought along. Because of all
the stuff they would have to move in and out from the still, including the finished product, wherever the still was located
would have to be accessible by some kind of track a truck or car could be driven over. Murphy knew that Bryce and Crockett
were taking him along a cross-country back-
entrance way that only a hog or a revenuer would think of using.

When it seemed like they had been walking through the woods for hours and only occasionally emerging in a field or a clearing,
Bryce turned to Bob and said, “Go easy from here on and no more talking.”

Murphy nodded tolerantly. In spite of his height and bulk, he could ease across woodland without snapping a twig, which was
more than he could say for his two companions. They came to a path, and Bryce pointed down at what looked like fresh tire
marks on a damp patch. Bryce sniffed the air. There was no smell of wood smoke or mash cooking. He listened. There was no
sound of men working. Then he plucked a tall fern and felt his way with it along the grassy path, a few paces ahead of the
others. When he stopped, they did too. He jiggled the fern to show them the length of green thread it had picked up, almost
invisible, stretched across the path a few inches above the ground. Murphy saw that the thread was tied at either end to saplings
and was not set to release some diabolical weapon if broken, as it would have been in Nam. The three men stepped over the
thread and left it unbroken behind them.

In a small clearing at the end of the path, a steel drum lay on its side across two cinder blocks. Wood ash and some half-burned
logs filled a pit beneath it. A pipe connected the steel drum to three wood barrels, which in turn served as cooker, doubler,
and cooler. The cooler was filled with water, and a spiral of copper pipe, called the worm, ran through it. A pump head was
installed in a well shaft the bootlegger had sunk.