Without Remorse

Piaggi looked up and headed to the front, stopping only briefly to shake hands with someone on the way. He did the same with the black man, then led him back past Kelly's table, and up the back stairs to where the private rooms were. No particular notice was taken. There were other black couples in the restaurant, treated the same as everyone else. But those others did honest work, Kelly was sure. He turned his thoughts away from his distraction. Sothat's??nr? Tucker. That's theonewho killed Pom. He didn't look like a monster. Monsters rarely did. To Kelly he looked like a target, and his particulars went into Kelly's memory, alongside Tony Piaggi's. He was surprised when he looked down and saw that the fork in his hands was bent.

'What's the problem?' Piaggi asked upstairs. He poured each of them a glass of Chianti, good host that he was, but as soon as the door had closed, Henry's face started telling him something.

'They haven't come back.'

'Phil, Mike, and Burt?'

'Yes!' Henry snarled, meaning, no.

'Okay, settle down. How much stuff did they have?'

'Twenty kees of pure, man. This was supposed to take care of me and Philly, and New York for a while.'

'Lot of stuff, Henry.' Tony nodded. 'Maybe it just took them a while, okay?'

'Shoulda been back by now.'

'Look, Phil and Mike are new, probably clumsy, like Eddie and me were out first time - hell, Henry, that was only five kees, remember?'

'I allowed for that,' he said, wondering if he'd really be right about that or not.

'Henry,' Tony said, sipping his wine and trying to appear calm and reasonable, 'look, okay? Why are you getting excited? We've taken care of all the problems, right?'

'Something's wrong, man.'

'What?'

'I don't know.'

'Want to get a boat and go down there to see?'

Tucker shook his head.'Takes too long.'

'The meet with the other guys isn't for three days. Be cool. They're probably on their way here now.'

Piaggi thought he understood Tucker's sudden case of the shakes. Now it was big-time. Twenty kilograms of pure translated into a huge quantity of street drugs, and selling it already diluted and packaged made for sufficient convenience to their customers that they were for the first time paying top dollar. This was the really big score that Tucker had been working towards for several years. Just assembling all the cash to pay for it was a major undertaking. It was an understandable case of nerves.

'Tony, what if it wasn't Eddie at all?'

Exasperation: 'You're the one who said it had to be, remember?'

Tucker couldn't pursue that. He'd merely wanted an excuse to eliminate the man as an unnecessary complication. His anxiety was partly what Tony thought it was, but something else, too. The things that had happened earlier in the summer, the things that had just started for no reason, then stopped with no reason - he had told himself that they were Eddie Morello's doing. He'd managed to convince himself of that, but only because he had wanted to believe it. Somewhere else the little voice that had brought him this far had told him otherwise, and now the voice was back, and there was no Eddie to be the focus for his anxiety and anger. A streetwise man who'd gotten this far through the complex equation of brain and guts and instinct, he trusted that last quality most. Now it was telling him things that he didn't understand, couldn't reason out. Tony was right. It could just be a matter of clumsiness in the processing. That was one reason they were setting their lab up in east Baltimore. They could afford that now, with experience behind them and a viable front business setting up in the coming week. So he drank his wine and settled down, the rich, red alcohol soothing his abraded instincts.

'Give 'em until tomorrow.'

* * *

'So how was it?' the man at the wheel asked. An hour north of Bloodsworth Island, he figured he'd waited long enough to ask the silent petty officer who stood beside him. After all, they just stood by and waited.

'They fed a guy to the fuckin' crabs!' Oreza told them. 'They took like two square yards of net and weighted it down with blocks, and just sunk his ass - practically nothing left but the damned bones!' The police lab people were still discussing how to recover the body, for all he knew. Oreza was certain it was a sight he'd take years to forget, the skull just lying there, the bones still dressed, moving because of the water currents... or maybe some crabs inside. He hadn't cared to look that closely.

'Heavy shit, man,' the helmsman agreed.

'You know who it is?'

'What d'ya mean, Portagee?'

'Back in May, when we had that Charon guy aboard - the day-sailer with the candystripe main, that's who it was, I'll bet ya.'

'Oh, yeah. You could be right on that one, boss.'

They'd let him see it all, just as a courtesy that in retrospect he would as soon have done without, but which at the time had been impossible to avoid. He could not have chickened out in front of cops, since he, too, was a cop of sorts. And so he'd climbed up the ladder after reporting on the body he'd found only fifty yards from the derelict, and seen three more, all lying facedown on the deck of what had probably been the freighter's wardroom, all dead, all shot in the back of the neck, the wounds having been picked at by birds. He'd almost lost control of himself at that realization. The birds had been sensible enough not to pick at the drugs, however.

'I'm talking twenty kilograms - forty-some pounds of the shit - that's what the cops said, anyway. Like, millions of bucks,' Oreza related.

'Always said I was in the wrong business.'

'Jesus, the cops look like they all had hard-ons, 'specially that captain. They'll probably be there all night, way it sounded.'

* * *

'Hey,Wally?'

The tape was disappointingly scratchy. That was due to the old phone lines, the technician explained. Nothing he could do about that. The switch box in the building dated back to when Alexander Graham Bell was doing hearing aids.

'Yeah, what is it?' the somewhat uneven voice replied.

'The deal with the Vietnamese officer they got. You sure about that?'

'That's what Roger told me.' Bingo! Ritter thought.

'Where they have him?'

'I guess out at Winchester with the Russian.'

'You're sure?'

'Damned right. It surprised me, too.'

'I wanted to check up on that before - well, you know.'

'Sure thing, man.' With that the line went dead.

'Who is he?' Greer asked.

'Walter Hicks. All the best schools, James - Andover and Brown. Father's a big-time investment banker who pulled a few well-tuned political strings, and look where little Wally ends up.' Ritter tightened his hand into a fist. 'You want to know why those people are still in sender green? That's it, my friend.'

'So what are you going to do about it?'

'I don't know.' Butit won't be legal. The tape wasn't. The tap had been set up without a court order.

'Think it over carefully. Bob,' Greer warned. 'I was there, too, remember?'

'What if Sergey can't get it done fast enough? Then this little fuck gets away with ending the lives of twenty men!'

'I don't like that very much either.'

'I don't like it at all!'

'Treason is still a capital crime. Bob.'

Ritter looked up. 'It's supposed to be.'

Another long day. Oreza found himself envying the first-class who was tending Cove Point Light. At least he had his family with him all the time. Here Oreza was with the brightest little girl in kindergarten and he hardly ever saw her. Maybe he'd take that teaching job at New London after all, Portagee thought, just so that he could have a family life for a year or two. It meant hanging out with children who would someday be officers, but at least they'd learn seamanship the right way.