"Not yet," the man with the guns croaked. "The devil-weed. Cocaine. Whatever you call it. Take off your shirt."
"Your arms―" Eddie had seen them. The arms of the man who looked like the extravagant sort of gunslinger one would only see in a spaghetti western were glowing with lines of bright, baleful red. Eddie knew well enough what lines like that meant. They meant blood-poisoning. They meant the devil was doing more than breathing up your ass; he was already crawling up the sewers that led to your pumps.
"Never mind my fucking arms!" the pallid apparition told him. "Take off your shirt and get rid of it!"
He heard waves; he heard the lonely hoot of a wind that knew no obstruction; he saw this mad dying man and nothing else but desolation; yet from behind him he heard the murmuring voices of deplaning passengers and a steady muffled pounding.
"Mr. Dean!" That voice, he thought, is in another world. Not really doubting it; just trying to pound it through his head the way you'd pound a nail through a thick piece of mahogany. "You'll really have to―"
"You can leave it, pick it up later," the gunslinger croaked. "Gods, don't you understand I have to talk here? It hurts! And there is no time, you idiot!"
There were men Eddie would have killed for using such a word … but he had an idea that he might have a job killing this man, even though the man looked like killing might do him good.
Yet he sensed the truth in those blue eyes; all questions were canceled in their mad glare.
Eddie began to unbutton his shirt. His first impulse was to simply tear it off, like Clark Kent while Lois Lane was tied to a railroad track or something, but that was no good in real life; sooner or later you had to explain those missing buttons. So he slipped them through the loops while the pounding behind him went on.
He yanked the shirt out of his jeans, pulled it off, and dropped it, revealing the strapping tape across his chest. He looked like a man in the last stages of recovery from badly fractured ribs.
He snapped a glance behind him and saw an open door … its bottom jamb had dragged a fan shape in the gray grit of the beach when someone―the dying man, presumably―had opened it. Through the doorway he saw the first-class head, the basin, the mirror … and in it his own desperate face, black hair spilled across his brow and over his hazel eyes. In the background he saw the gunslinger, the beach, and soaring seabirds that screeched and squabbled over God knew what.
He pawed at the tape, wondering how to start, how to find a loose end, and a dazed sort of hopelessness settled over him. This was the way a deer or a rabbit must feel when it got halfway across a country road and turned its head only to be fixated by the oncoming glare of headlights.
It had taken William Wilson, the man whose name Poe had made famous, twenty minutes to strap him up. They would have the door to the first-class bathroom open in five, seven at most.
"I can't get this shit off," he told the swaying man in front of him. "I don't know who you are or where I am, but I'm telling you there's too much tape and too little time."
14
Deere, the co-pilot, suggested Captain McDonald ought to lay off pounding on the door when McDonald, in his frustration at 3A's lack of response, began to do so.
"Where's he going to go?" Deere asked. "What's he going to do? Flush himself down the John? He's too big."
"But if he's carrying―" McDonald began.
Deere, who had himself used cocaine on more than a few occasions, said: "If he's carrying, he's carrying heavy. He can't get rid of it."
"Turn off the water," McDonald snapped suddenly.
"Already have," the navigator (who had also tooted more than his flute on occasion) said. "But I don't think it matters. You can dissolve what goes into the holding tanks but you can't make it not there." They were clustered around the bathroom door, with its OCCUPIED sign glowing jeerily, all of them speaking in low tones. "The DEA guys drain it, draw off a sample, and the guy's hung."
"He could always say someone came in before him and dumped it," McDonald replied. His voice was gaining a raw edge. He didn't want to be talking about this; he wanted to be doing something about it, even though he was acutely aware that the geese were still filing out, many looking with more than ordinary curiosity at the flight-deck crew and stewardesses gathered around the bathroom door. For their part, the crew were acutely aware that an act that was―well, overly overt―could provoke the terrorist boogeyman that now lurked in the back of every air-traveler’s mind. McDonald knew his navigator and flight engineer were right, he knew that the stuff was apt to be in plastic bags with the scuzzball's prints on them, and yet he felt alarm bells going off in his mind. Something was not right about this. Something inside of him kept screaming Fast one! Fast one! as if the fellow from 3A were a riverboat gambler with palmed aces he was all ready to play.
"He's not trying to flush the John," Susy Douglas said. "He's not even trying to run the basin faucets. We'd hear them sucking air if he was. I hear something, but―"
"Leave," McDonald said curtly. His eyes flicked to Jane Dorning. "You too. We'll take care of this."
Jane turned to go, cheeks burning.
Susy said quietly: "Jane bird-dogged him and I spotted the bulges under his shirt. I think we'll stay, Captain McDonald. If you want to bring charges of insubordination, you can. But I want you to remember that you may be raping the hell out of what could be a really big DEA bust."
Their eyes locked, flint sparking off steel.
Susy said, "I've flown with you seventy, eighty times, Mac. I'm trying to be your friend."
McDonald looked at her a moment longer, then nodded. "Stay, then. But I want both of you back a step toward the cockpit."
He stood on his toes, looked back, and saw the end of the line now just emerging from tourist class into business. Two minutes, maybe three.
He turned to the gate agent at the mouth of the hatch, who was watching them closely. He must have sensed some sort of problem, because he had unholstered his walkie-talkie and was holding it in his hand.
"Tell him I want customs agents up here," McDonald said quietly to the navigator. "Three or four. Armed. Now."
The navigator made his way through the line of passengers, excusing himself with an easy grin, and spoke quietly to the gate agent, who raised his walkie-talkie to his mouth and spoke quietly into it.
McDonald―who had never put anything stronger than aspirin into his system in his entire life and that only rarely―turned to Deere. His lips were pressed into a thin white line like a scar.
"As soon as the last of the passengers are off, we're breaking that shithouse door open," he said. "I don't care if Customs is here or not. Do you understand?"
"Roger," Deere said, and watched the tail of the line make its way into first class.
15
"Get my knife," the gunslinger said. "It's in my purse."
He gestured toward a cracked leather bag lying on the sand. It looked more like a big packsack than a purse, the kind of thing you expected to see hippies carrying as they made their way along the Appalachian Trail, getting high on nature (and maybe a bomber joint every now and then), except this looked like the real thing, not just a prop for some airhead's self-image; something that had done years and years of hard―maybe desperate―travelling.
Gestured, but did not point. Couldn't point. Eddie realized why the man had a swatch of dirty shirting wrapped around his right hand: some of his fingers were gone.
"Get it," he said. "Cut through the tape. Try not to cut yourself. It's easy to do. You'll have to be careful, but you'll have to move fast just the same. There isn't much time."