Down the block, Abatangelo watched from the car as Shel exited the luncheonette. Squinting in the sunlight, she walked to the curb, rested her hand on a lamppost and removed her shoe, as though to shake out a pebble. That was the sign.
He put the car in gear and headed for the interstate. An hour and a half later he was in the Medford bus station, buying himself three packs of gum and copies of Esquire and Photography and Sports Illustrated, then retreating to one of the long wood benches in the lobby for the four-hour wait till the bus from Roseburg rolled in, hopefully with Shel and Eddy on it.
From time to time he got up, stretched his legs, ambled about the shabby premises, scouting among the bedraggled Greyhounders for anybody who might be undercover, checking the parking lot for unmarked cars. Time crept past, giving him more than ample opportunity for reflection.
In Bangkok the preceding spring, Steve Cadaret had watched all his old contacts disappear. Rumor suggested the vanishings were the handiwork of certain officers in the Royal Thai Army, who were not-so-secretly taking over the trade, running off the minor players. It wasn’t till the wane of the dry season Cadaret finally tracked down a new source he felt he could trust. The price, though, to be transferred between Hong Kong accounts, was exorbitant, forty points on the tonne over anything he’d heard of before.
“Only the DEA will offer you better,” he was told. “Make your decision quickly. Soon the rains will start.”
Once a suitable ship was found and rendered seaworthy, the Company’s skipper, Jimmy Byrne, set sail with a crew of marginally sober Australians, heading up the South China Sea to pick up the load. He made one communication, just one, to Abatangelo- to explain that the engineer he’d hired to wire and tune the radio had burnt out the capacitors. To make matters worse, the backup could only reach high frequency ARRL bands, the ones monitored by the Coast Guard. Byrne signed off promising in code that he was coming in to the Oregon coast at the appointed time, but he’d be radio-silent the rest of the way.
And so we sit, Abatangelo thought, waiting for a shipment from a source we don’t know, en route aboard a ship we can’t contact. As if all that weren’t bad enough, there were the stateside foul-ups, Eddy’s little problem with drink only the most recent. Joey Bassinger, the Company’s paymaster, had left twenty grand in the trunk of a rental car. Mickey Bensusan, in charge of distribution, couldn’t whip his wholesalers out of their lethargy; rumors of a grand jury in Portland had people spooked. Add to all that the lamentable beach crew, and you had a damn good recipe for disaster.
The bad turn in luck underscored the intelligence of getting out. The winds had changed, and it wasn’t just Nancy Reagan and her berserk crusade to spare suburban teens the perils of pot. It wasn’t just the competition from the sensemilla farmers along California’s north coast, either, them and their mad botanist partners. The Mob had reclaimed the dope trade with a fury. No longer content to limit themselves to coke and skag, where the margins were better, they were perfectly content to blunder in where they had no place and glut the market with mediocre weed. On top of that there were blowback Cubans in the thick of it, too, not to mention the Marielitos, the Vietnamese, the Colombians, even the Mexican inheritors of the old candelilla contraband routes. Everybody was muscling for a piece of the prize. Greed ran wild, with a grisly streak of menace trailing behind. No more room for jokers like Danny Abatangelo. The era of the wildcat smuggler had played itself out.
Not that getting out was the snap the uninitiated made it out to be. First, it took time to work the money right so you weren’t a sitting duck. Instant millionaire? Do tell. Second, you couldn’t just strand your friends. Eddy, Joey, Mick, not to mention Cadaret and Byrne- he owed them, which was what this whole last run was all about: Put a little lucre in everybody’s pockets, take the bitter taste out of their mouths as they tried to figure out an answer to, So what am I supposed to do now?
And not just them. Walk away wrong, he knew, leave too suddenly, it smacks of betrayal, the rumors begin. Wholesalers, not the most enlightened breed of cat on the planet, they get edgy. If any of them got in a jam down the road, Abatangelo might well be the very first guy they handed up to save themselves. Especially if they were of a mind to stay in the trade. Can’t burn a bridge that’s no longer there. And just because he hadn’t been in the business for a while, that didn’t mean the feds wouldn’t be obliging. That was the beauty, so to speak, of conspiracy. Statute of limitations stretched to infinity, you were always good for a nailing. Hell, if anything, once you were out, you were the perfect fall guy. Fucking useless to everybody.
None of which, in the final analysis, was his chief concern. He’d done his best to keep Shel at a reasonable arm’s length from the business, but there was no way to keep her completely out, not and still be together as much as their need required. Regardless, the subtler nuances of her involvement would prove largely academic if the hammer came down.
Shel was on her fourth packet of Necco wafers when Eddy staggered into the Roseburg station a mere five minutes before the Medford bus was due to leave. Steady now, she told herself, getting up, strolling over, looking past him through the glass doors to see who might be following. Rising on tiptoes, she kissed his cheek and whispered, “You sad, sorry motherfucker, don’t you ever worry us like that again.”
“I am so sorry,” Eddy moaned, pressing the heels of his hands against his temples. He was a tall, hulking man, a mechanic’s son. Now he was stooped, raw from lack of sleep and wildly hung over. “Stupid. Stupid. Shoulda fucking known.”
She pulled on his arm. “Move now, repent later. We got a bus to catch.”
It was almost dark by the time the bus arrived in Medford. Abatangelo watched as Shel and Eddy stumbled out with sour, bleary expressions and stiff legs. Spotting them, he ran to fetch the car, and pulled up along the curb just as they came out through the station’s glass doors.
They hopped in, he made a few countersurveillance moves- a quick trip down a one-way alley; a sudden turn then a dead stop, waiting to see what followed- then headed for the interstate, checking the rearview constantly until, a half hour into the drive, he felt reasonably certain they were okay.
“Didn’t mean to create an adventure,” Eddy said from the back. He chafed his hands, his tone contrite. “By the way, just in case it makes you feel better- that guy you hired, he sprung me before John Law-di-da got around to my prints.”
“That’s what he got paid for,” Abatangelo said.
They decided to leave Eddy’s car where he’d been arrested, for fear of it being watched. They stopped in Grant’s Pass, bought a used car with cash, and Eddy went his separate way, promising to link up the following afternoon for final preparations on the incoming load. Once Shel and Abatangelo were alone in the car, she asked him, “You sure it wouldn’t be smarter just to call this whole thing off?”
Abatangelo shook his head. “Not with Byrne coming in. I don’t show up, he’s stuck out there at sea.”
“I know the radio’s a problem. But just one call, fill him in?”
“Not the way things’ve gone. Coast Guard snags the signal, may as well send up flares.”
Shel undid her seat belt and slid across the seat, nudging her hip against his. “This one’s got me spooked.”
Abatangelo turned to kiss her hair. “I can put you on a plane in the morning,” he said. “Head back to San Francisco, hang out till we wrap this up.”
Shel chuckled miserably. “Like that’d make me any less scared.” She reached inside her shirt, withdrew the amethyst hanging around her neck. Staring through the windshield, she rubbed the wine-colored stone with her thumb. “You gave me a chance to walk away two years ago, remember?”