His voice had a shrill energy. "Goddamn, this is a joke? This better be a joke! Untie me, take this damn tape off my eyes!"
Listened to him rattle on for a while; recognized the sound of fear in him—an overoxygenated breath-lessness. Finally, in a low voice, I silenced him, saying, "Nope. No joke." Gave it a Deep South inflection: Nawp. No-o-o joke.
"Then what? Why? Who the hell are you!"
On the ride to Patricio, I'd decided how I was going to work it. Now I let Julie hear the voice of my imaginary accomplice—cupped my hands around my mouth, turned my back to him, and spoke a few sentences of cold, nasal Spanish.
"You guys Cubans? Jesus, what is this?"
I said, "I ain't no Cuban. And it ain't none of your business what my boss is. He says he wants you to talk. I was you, I'd start talkin'."
"About what? Shit! Cut me down. Hell, whatever you want to know, I'll tell you. I can't think like this. Feels like my head's 'bout to explode."
"We listened to you boys on the beach. That's what he wants to know about."
"Huh?"
"My boss and me heard you tell that real interestin' story. The guy you beat."
"The hippie, you mean? That's why—because of what we did to the hippie?"
I thought: Got you, you bastard.
More Spanish. I pretended to translate: "The hippie don't mean nothin' to my boss, but he says maybe we should hear you tell it again anyway. See if you tell it twice the same way. My boss, I guess he thinks you might try an' lie to us. That wouldn't be good, you lied to us."
Through the night-vision goggles, Julie's face had begun to resemble an engorged green grape. His breathing had become so rapid that I wondered if he would pass out. Snatch a person out of familiar surroundings, tape him, soak him, then short-circuit his equilibrium, and an existential terror will erase all the familiar groundings of self. I took no joy in his reaction . . . and was relieved that I didn't—only the truly twisted find pleasure in wielding dominance over another human life. Yet neither did I feel much pity.
"He's not gonna . . . kill me, is he?"
He was asking about my boss.
"You talk, probably not. That's up to him."
"I mean it, I'll tell you anything you boys want to know. Hell, you and me . . . the way you sound, we prob'ly got some of the same friends. You from around here? I know lots'a people from around here. You cut me down, I'll answer all the questions you got. Man, I'll help you."
I said, "Nope. The man pays me, so I do what he says. I hear what you're sayin', but these Colombians, they ain't like us, buddy-row." Listened to a sound of pure anguish escape from Julie—Colombians—before continuing. "My advice is, you start talkin' straight. My boss, he listens to me sometimes. You help us, I'll try to help you. You give us the information he wants and I don't see no particular need to kill you. I'll tell him that. But if he does give me the order, partner, I promise you this: A coupl'a country boys like you and me, well. . . I'll make it so you won't feel a thing. That's not somethin' I do for ever'body."
"Oh God . . ."
Julie began to talk. He talked nonstop. What had happened, he said, was Tomlinson had walked right into their camp. Julie, of course, recognized him—"He an' this big dude jumped me a while back"—and there was a rumor being spread around the island that Tomlinson was a spy. To them, it made sense. Some of the other men in the camp knew that Tomlinson had been talking to commercial fishermen on Sulphur Wells, asking lots of questions. What Tomlinson was, said Julie, was an informer sent to snoop around by some government agency. So they had slapped him around a little, trying to make him confess, but Tomlinson wouldn't talk.
"You should've made him talk," I said encouragingly.
"Man, we tried! But he just kept sayin' weird shit, not at all what we was askin' him. Like this stupid poetry crap and Bible verses. And was too scared to fight back a'tall. So what you gonna do? I made an example out of him. Hell, we had plans to track that hippie down and nail him anyway. So I thumped him pretty good. We dumped him off on the road, and we dropped his girlfriend's truck back where he was livin'. How else you gonna deal with somebody like that?"
I was feeling no pity at all for Julie now. But I said, "Sounds like the pure damn truth to me."
"Hell yes, it's the truth. I'll be straight with you guys. I'll work with you."
I told Julie that I appreciated that. Told him I was going to try and convince my boss that Julie was actually a pretty good guy. I moved off through the bushes and had a whispered conversation, South American Spanish, then slow Spanish with a Deep South accent. Returned to Julie's side—his body convulsed at my touch—and said, "Thing is, now my boss wants me to ask you some other questions . . ."
"If I know the answer, you got it!"
Julie didn't realize how much he knew. It took a long, long while to scrape pieces of information out of him. It wasn't that he wasn't willing to talk—"I'll tell you anything I know, man!"—but what he might think was some mundane, unimportant incident might, to me, be a key bit of data.
So I took my time with him. Showed a lot of patience. I became his buddy. Played good cop to my Colombian boss's bad cop. I didn't want Julie so desperate that he would begin inventing information just to please us. I comforted him, I complimented his memory when he reached down deep and brought out a name or some other forgotten fact. Gradually, very gradually, I pieced together the information I wanted.
Julie knew a lot about a lot of things. He told me how the boat-theft ring worked. They trucked the stolen engines to a little house Kemper Waits had back in the palmetto flats. There was a shallow freshwater pond behind the house. They dumped the engines in the pond—no one would ever think to look there—and then waited until it was safe to truck them north to Georgia where Waits had connections with a professional chop shop. The fresh water didn't hurt the engine components, and the chop shop paid off in cash, or in cocaine. Waits preferred cocaine. It was a lot more valuable to him—particularly now, since the local netters were going to have so much more time in their hands. Waits believed the net ban would help open up a whole new market. Give the younger ones enough free cocaine to get them interested, then get them involved in the stolen outboard motor business. Waits didn't like or trust the Sulphur Wells locals, and they didn't like or trust him. For Waits, it was just one more way to even the score.
Julie knew less about the bomb that had killed Jimmy Darroux, but he knew enough. Once again, Waits had played a central role. Julie didn't know for certain, but he thought Waits had built the bomb in a little concrete block shed near his house. Only he had heard that maybe, just maybe, Waits had botched the bomb intentionally as a favor to a friend. "Jimmy Darroux, hell, he was a pretty good buddy of mine," Julie said. "But I think he may'a stepped on the wrong toes, probably over that bitch of a wife he had."
I didn't want to press the issue too hard. I wanted Julie to leave the island with an entirely different impression about why he was being questioned. I nudged the conversation off the topic, then nudged it back again. Then I listened very carefully, as Julie said, "There's this guy used to work for the state. Him an' Kemper, they're pretty tight. Might go into business together. This guy used to come around an' inspect Kemper's boats an' stuff, give him advice about how he could fish better. He's the one says we can't take this net ban bullshit laying down. He told us he didn't recommend breaking any laws, but the only way to get Tallahassee's attention is to do like a white man's riot. You know, like burn baby burn. Hell, those people always get their way. The man's been up there in Tallahassee working; part of it all. So he'd know. I think it was him that give Kemper some book on how to make a bomb. I heard he told Kemper he prob'ly shouldn't do it, but Kemper, he went ahead and did it anyway."