Guns [John Hardin 01] (6 page)

“Hell, Sam, there’s outlaw in us all. And we like our big-time outlaws, too. Look around. If Blackbeard was nothin’ but a cold-hearted thievin’ killer, why’s he treated like some kinda hero up and down this coast? He walked in here right now his money’d be no good and everybody would want his damn autograph. You know that’s so. Who got more write-ups, Mother Teresa or that asshole Gotti, what’d they call him, the Dapper Don? They did what, half a dozen movies on the godfather thing. Just about everybody in there was a stone killer, but we sit down and watch it all on TV with the kids, see do they discover happiness in the end. What was that most popular series on TV for a while there? The thing about the mob jerk with his wife and kids and his shrink, right? What’s the most important thing in this whole country? Money, right? And the more you’ve got the less everybody else cares about how you got it. Where did the money come from to build Las Vegas? How did the Kennedy millions get started? Who’s been in control of the big labor unions for so long? Who gives a damn, right? You get rich enough you get to live by the rich people’s rules, and they’re not the same as for you and me. Not many rich men in prison. You’re poor like us you just got to bend the law a little once in a while so you can afford your oatmeal. Oh, yeah, there’s a touch of outlaw in us. We can’t help it. Just makes life interesting, you ask me. And like I say, all you and me are trying to do here is put a few beers on the table.”

He watched the wench collecting empties from booths across the room. He grinned broadly, appraising her, and said as an idea evidently firmed up, “Yessir, there’s a bit o’ the pirate in us all.”

“You know,” Sam said thoughtfully, “there was a movie called
For A Few Dollars More
some years back. Clint Eastwood and Lee VanCleef are fast-draw bounty hunters. They team up to go after a pack of killers led by a psychopath called Indio. Over a drink they settle on the terms of their temporary partnership and VanCleef tells Eastwood they don’t want to be shooting each other in the back.”

“Meanin’?”

“Like I said, I think you could talk the varnish right off of this table in about twenty minutes, or the skirt right off of that waitress over there in about two, but we don’t want to talk about our temporary deal here to anybody. It’s just you, Spud, Tony the bartender, and me. Let’s not even tell your gray-haired mother, okay? I won’t talk about it, either. We don’t want to be shooting each other in the back, do we?”

“Hey, sure thing, Sam,” Bo said, thinking
you know, the son of a gun even looks like a cowboy.

Later that night, back at the Pony Island, Spud having been asked to take a walk for about an hour, Bo and his companion having done serious damage to a fifth of Jim Beam chased by a quart of beer, Bo, still wearing his new orange hat and his underpants, managed to turn off all but one of the lights. Step two of his three-step plan. The wench, by now minus both peasant blouse and skirt, stood unsteadily there in her panties in front of him, pushed down his tight jockey shorts, and said woozily, “Wow.”

Bo, looking down at himself, said, “What you just done ‘minded me of that movie.”

“Which movies zat?” the wench said.

Grinning dimpledly, Bo said,
Free Willy.

The wench fell over onto the bed giggling.

And across the village, as they lay sleepily side-by-side in the darkness, just holding hands now, Sam said, “Val, do you declare all your tips?”

“What brought
that
up?”

“Just wondering.”

“Of course I do.”

“Thought so.”

She was quiet a moment, and then said, “Well, you know, almost all.”

8

D
AYBREAK FOUND SAM BASS RUNNING NORTHEAST ON
the Ocracoke beach, not another soul in sight, no sign whatsoever of other human habitation on the planet. The pain had left him three miles ago as he’d gotten his second wind and his fluidly pistoning legs were moving easily on their own now, his sneakers hardly touching down, flicking small regular sprays of sand up behind him, his forearms swinging slightly in perfect rhythm in front of his chest, the clean cool air flooding his lungs and softly brushing the light perspiration from his forehead. He could picture his endorphins and all his other little blue-jeaned peptides in there tumbling out of the bunkhouse raring to have a real old-fashioned rodeo. Who needed a sixty-dollar set of magnets?

The stark nightmare had visited him again last night, filling him with the same sickening hollow hopeless feeling of being rooted to the spot, unable to do anything, and he had jolted awake sweating in the dark room with Val stirring but not awakening beside him.

With the light of day it had all receded into what now seemed a distant past.

The stars had faded and the eastern horizon was afire, long motionless ropes of cloud flaming up crimson and scattering sparks onto the sea. The clear new sky overhead might have been from a perfect day a thousand years ago. The sea birds soared and cried, greeting the day around him. He ran on for another two miles beside the glossy swells that each curled and broke with that ancient sustained sound that, if you closed your eyes, could be the exhalation of some magnificent coruscating serpent risen up from foraging the deeps. Then he turned back, never slowing until forty-five minutes later when he drew abreast of the line of early anglers parked on the sand near the cut through the dunes onto the access road near the airstrip. He walked to the plane feeling loose and refreshed.

He did a leisurely walk-around, singing Waylon Jennings’ “Good Hearted Woman” and thinking of Valerie.

He climbed in and went through start-up, the airplane trembling alive under his hands. He taxied out onto the strip, lined up, went through the run-up checks, and pushed the throttle smoothly all the way to the stop. The Cessna faithfully gathered up her skirts, the prop invisible now, and sprinted nimbly down the faded dashed line, faster and faster until Sam felt the familiar little shot of euphoria as she broke free and left the world of groundlings behind. The dunes fell away below and they climbed into the morning, the cool air rushing in through the wing root vents, the four-cylinder Lycoming bellowing strongly and the prop slapping the breeze smartly. The Cessna’s previous owner had fitted her with a 180-horsepower engine, thirty horses more than she’d been born with, giving increased speed and useful load capacity, and Sam had often had cause to bless that fact when he was hauling three well-fed adults or getting out of a short strip somewhere.

The sea was hammered gold off to his left and the wide Ocracoke Inlet was spread out ahead. Beyond lay the narrow twelve-mile-long stretch of uninhabited Portsmouth Island. He flew low over the ghost town of Portsmouth at its northern tip, a jumble of old overgrown buildings—crumbling cottages, the tiny post office, a boarded-up store, the shuttered abandoned Coast Guard station off by itself—and the one pristine structure left, nestled up near a cluster of yaupons, the small white chapel that a few volunteers from Ocracoke kept painted and in good repair, also tending the little fenced cemetery in a shady grove out behind it.

Earlier that year Sam had visited there with Ralph, Adele, Valerie, and Joshua, in a borrowed eighteen-foot flat-bottomed outboard skiff, picking their way through the maze of shoals for what seemed ten miles—although the dead town was actually only five miles as the pelican flies from Ocracoke village—backtracking twice, nudging aground three times, and finally tying off to the crazily tilted Coast Guard station dock, a loose shutter up on the old gray structure banging a slow unsettling cadence in the hot light breeze.

They had explored the silent town for only fifteen minutes before the big seasonal deer flies had found them. Capable of inflicting a bite like a sudden match burn, the persistent maddening flies had driven them from the island in haste, Sam trying to keep them brushed away from Joshua until they could get the boat clear.

Portsmouth had once long ago been home to inlet and sound-side pilot skippers, seamen, fishermen, and their families, but the spreading shoals had gradually choked the island off and now it was left to its birds, its tough scrub trees, its dunes cloaked with shivering sea oats, and to its ghosts.

Bo and Spud were in the skimmer, anchored where Bo had said they would be, two miles southwest of the inlet, three hundred feet from the back side of Portsmouth Island. There were stacked boxes in the skimmer and some big coolers. There were other small boats scattered out but none near them. Sam flew over them at six hundred feet, thumbed the yoke switch, and said, “I have the traffic in sight.”

A bright orange ellipse appeared atop Bo’s shaggy head and Spud started hauling in the anchor line. It was hard to tell for sure from this altitude, but Sam could have sworn Bo was suffering from a pirate-class hangover. He flew on and let down to three hundred feet, searching along the ragged back side of the island, but the bottom was colored in many hues, shadowy and grassy here, rippled lighter sand there, sky glare all over the surface, and it was difficult to see much, though he thought that twice he caught glimmerings in among the marsh grasses.

This wasn’t going to work. So he let down to a hundred feet, and the details below began to sort themselves out, although they of course appeared to be going by much faster. He slowed and put down ten degrees of flaps. Right there, by a small grassy hummock. A tight school of good-sized sleek gray fish. Maybe ten or fifteen. Had to be them. He climbed up in a long arc, taking a quick fix on the hummock, noting that it was roughly aligned with a particular notch on the island shoreline. He flew back over the skimmer at five hundred feet, thumbed the switch, and said, “Downwind for two zero.”

The skimmer sprouted a white feather at the stern and bounded away on the heading, Bo’s bright orange hat prominent. Sam watched the boat’s progress but then checked around for any other airplanes and waited until it was almost too late, the boat no more than seventy-five feet from the school, so he said quickly,
“Short
final for two zero.” Bo got the message and immediately chopped his throttle, Spud kneeling in the bows pointing toward the hummock. The boat sped up smoothly again, curving out in a neat fast circle, net tumbling off the stern over an upright H-shaped support, quickly surrounding the whole hummock. Bo was good, give him that.

Sam flew off down the Banks for a few minutes, then came back. The skimmer was waiting by the hummock, the net piled neatly back inside, and Spud was icing down what looked like a fair number of fish in boxes. When Sam went over, Bo took off his hat and swept it wide as he bowed deeply like a Musketeer.

It was working like a charm. Sam found another two small schools over the next hour and a half, then while they were boating the most recent load he flew down to Michael J. Smith Field in Beaufort—named for the commander who lost his life aboard the
Challenger
in 1986 and who had first learned to fly here—to get a Coke and top off the fuel.

By early afternoon the skimmer was heavily filled and Bo took off his hat. The boat looked overloaded and too low in the water, but when Bo poured the coals to her, she labored up onto a sluggish plane and headed west across the sound for the fish house in Hobucken. Sam flew over a last time, climbing, and both Bo and Spud looked up and pumped their right fists enthusiastically in the air. Sam smiled to himself and banked away for Ocracoke.

That night Sam went to The Privateer just before closing and sat at the bar. Tony drew a beer for him and gave him a greasy envelope. Sam took the cash out and counted it, leaving two twenties on the bar top. Tony nodded and said, “Bo says how about five miles up the back side of Ocracoke from the ferry docks at eight tomorrow.”

It went well for three days, Bo and Spud hauling large loads off to Hobucken each day. On the morning of the fourth day it was overcast but the ceiling was above twelve hundred feet and the wind was light. Sam met the skimmer in the gray light farther down the islands where the sound narrowed to just four or five miles across between the Core Banks and the waterfront hamlet of Sealevel on the mainland. Sam had only been flying for half an hour when he saw Bo wave his hat in agitation and then stuff it away out of sight.

Sam scanned the few other small boats in the area. There were two more skimmers, a runabout with two men in it using rods, and what looked like a very old couple in an ancient outboard skiff working crab pots, but there was no boat that he thought might be law. Then he looked around in the sky and there it was, another light plane at his altitude, a Cessna about two miles back and closing. It looked to be another Skyhawk. Good. It likely had the smaller engine.

Sam kept at five hundred feet, making a shallow left turn to see if the other plane followed. It did, as though it were on a tether, so he straightened out, heading west, retracting the ten degrees of flaps he had out and fire-walling the throttle. He picked up even more airspeed as he put her into a shallow descent, flying inland over the desolate salt marshes of Carteret County, bearing left because there was a Marine Corps bombing range not far off to his right now and he didn’t know if it was currently hot, keeping the transponder off and leveling out at two hundred feet, looking back.

The trailing Cessna was losing the race, falling farther and farther behind into a gathering haze until finally it was out of sight. Sam turned northeast along the mouth of the Pamlico river, skirting the bombing range, then let all the way down to fifty feet, below Cherry Point’s radar, and headed east across the sound for Ocracoke, pulling the power back to normal cruise.

After he landed he went to the Burger Box and treated himself to a Monster Special with a thick slice of Vidalia onion and a goodly slathering of their excellent chili on it, along with a large root beer float. He topped off the plane with auto gas using the cans in the back of the Jeep, did some more on the dry wash job, then stopped in to talk with Brad Meekins for a while. Brad planned to go over on the Cedar Island ferry the next day for materials, so Sam said he would be available for work the day after that, intending to call Bo that night and strongly suggest they cool it for a few days anyway until the coast seemed clear again. He stopped at The Privateer to tell Tony his services would not be needed until further notice, and to have two leisurely drafts while he watched the national news on Fox, then he went shopping for a few things he needed at the General Store. After all, he had a few dollars in his jeans, although they smelled a little fishy, and his kitty was no longer so undernourished.

When he got back to his cottage in late afternoon there was a spotless Dare County Sheriff’s car parked in his yard.

He parked the Jeep alongside and got out. Deputy Thomas Mason, a very black man in his fifties with a dusting of close-cropped white at his temples showing under his squared-away billed cap, got out of the patrol car and adjusted his tie minutely. “Somebody ought to cite you for the muffler on that thing,” he said, not smiling. “But that’s not why I’m here. Hello, Sam.”

The crisply-uniformed Mason gave the impression of being starched top to bottom. Not a large man, he nevertheless projected a certain aura that warned those nearby not to try anything dumb. Sam had done a favor for him a few months back. He’d been in Manteo dropping off a charter party when the distraught Mason had asked him which way he was headed. Sam had asked where do you want to go, and Mason had explained that his brother had been in a wreck in Wilmington and was in poor shape at the hospital, so Sam had flown him down there, refusing any fee, and had grabbed a courtesy car at the FBO to drive them to the hospital at some speed. They had been too late, but Mason had been grateful to at least get there to offer immediate comfort to his sister-in-law and three nephews.

“Good to see you, Thomas.”

Mason leaned back slightly against the fender of his car and crossed his well-toned arms. “The reason I’m here, Sam, is because I’ve got a certain lady friend with Fisheries. Do you know a man named Bo Brinson? He’s a real charmer who might have been an award-winning con man, or one ace of a used car salesmen, if he wasn’t a fisherman.”

“Well, you know, Thomas, I meet a lot of people—”

Mason held up a palm and said, “Never mind. Wrong approach. I’m sorry. Let’s do it this way. My friend in Fisheries called me this morning. She’s been calling around asking questions of several people on our side of the legal fence in the coastal counties. She told me that they—the good people at Fisheries—think that an aircraft, coincidentally marked a lot like yours and with a last tail letter that could possibly be an S for Sierra, may well have been spotting sea mullet recently, specifically for this one Mr. Brinson. It seems he’s been uncommonly fortunate to have hauled in big loads of mullet for several days now, earning for himself and his partner respectable sums.”

“Thomas, I—”

“No, now, let me finish my little story here. It’s just getting interesting. It seems that spotting for the big mullet is very much against the law. Fisheries would dearly love to hook somebody perpetrating this particular crime in order to gaff him, string him up, and take an eight-by-ten of him to serve as a clear example that will cause all potential sea mullet rustlers out there to perhaps get religion. With any kind of proof, they can cause an offending aircraft to be grounded and levy a fine of up to five thousand dollars against its hapless pilot.”

“That much.”

“Yessir. That much. The thing is right now they have no real proof of any such nefarious activity, other than Mr. Brinson’s rather sudden good fortune and the fact that when a Fisheries patrol plane happened upon a suspicious aircraft this morning the aforesaid aircraft hightailed it for the hills, so to speak, like a turpentined tabby cat. That’s the end of my story, and I believe I told it well.”