Black Water Transit (34 page)

“Christ, who knows? Maybe he enjoys watching Vermillion scamper around. Cat-and-mouse thing. Pike’s cold enough.”

Dexter drained his glass, poured them all another round.

“If Pike is making a project out of Vermillion, then the smartest thing Vermillion can do is come in from the cold. Out there, Pike on his case, he’s gonna last as long as a butterfly’s fart.”

Nicky broke up at that. Nicky was also getting a little smashed.

“A butterfly’s
fart?
How long is that? Have you looked into it? Dexter, you can’t go around citing etymological data without some sort of scientific proof. Chaos would ensue.”

Dexter gave Nicky a look of sorrowful rebuke.

“Nicky, you should have stayed in school. Etymology is the study of words. Entomology is the study of bugs.”

“So what’s the study of bug words?”

“Bugs don’t have words. They communicate with their antlers.”

“Antennas, Dexter,” said Casey. “Bugs have antennas. Not antlers. Moose have antlers.”

“It’s ‘antenn-eye,’ not ‘antenn-ah,’ ” said Dexter primly. “And it’s the plural form. It’s from the Latin, which you should know, being an educated woman, as I am pleased to observe, and anyway, everybody knows moose have horns, not antlers.”

“
Cars
have horns,” said Nicky. “You ever see a car with antlers? Hah? Answer me that.”

“As a matter of fact, I have,” put in Derry Flynn. “It was on an old Cadillac I saw once in Denver. Guy had stuck antlers right on the hood. Big old deer antlers. I have also seen cars with antennae. I believe we’ve got one or two in the ATF.”

There was a silence while they pondered the implications.

“Bucks,” said Casey after a time, looking very smug.

“What?” They all looked at her.

“Bucks have antlers. Does don’t have anything. They’re the ladies. In your world of the deers, it’s the
bucks
that have the antlers. This has been my experience.”

“Bucks,” agreed Nicky. “She’s right. I love this woman.”

Dexter remained unconvinced and said so.

“You’re being … obtuse,” she said. Nicky approved.

“I believe he is, my dove. You’re obtuse, Dexter. It’s not your fault. You can’t help it. You’re management. By the way, for the record? Butterflies can’t fart. It’s anatomically impossible.”

“Yeah?” said Dexter. “How would
you
know?”

Nicky extracted a Marlboro, lit up, and gazed off into the distance with a look of deep and profound sadness.

“You weren’t there, man. You had to be there.”

“Where?”

Nicky rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles, faked a racking sob, clutched at Casey’s hand.

“The Nam.”

Dexter blinked at him.

“Nicky, you’re thirty. You were a baby when the war ended.”

“You’re right. I was drafted. Right out of kindergarten. My whole class went, except for little Donnie Nubbins. His mother wouldn’t give him a note. Osh-Kosh made combat jumpers for all of us, with teddy bears all over. Plus matching backpacks. We sang the
Sesame Street
song on our way up to the front. God. We were so innocent. We got cut to ribbons at Phu Bai. NVA regulars. It was hell. I was the only one who made it back. I’ve been holding it in for so long. Maybe now, with the love of a good woman, the healing can begin.”

Nicky held out his hand, palm up. Casey put a Kleenex into it, which Nicky thought was a nice touch. Dexter’s cell phone beeped. He picked it up, said his name, and listened to the voice at the other end for about three minutes. The others watched him.

“Well, butter my butt and call me toasted.”

“What?” said Casey. “Who was it?”

“Our esteemed leader, Detective Vince Zaragosa. Guess who’s just come in from the cold?”

“Jack Vermillion?” said Derry Flynn.

“Nope,” said Dexter. “You do not get a new car. Vanna, throw this man out into the street. Anybody else?”

“Holy Christ,” said Casey.

“No. But an interesting choice.”

“I meant Earl Pike,” she said.

“That’s cheating,” said Dexter. “But yes.”

Two hours out of Hazleton his hearing began to improve and the shock began to subside; the zoned-out calm, the euphoria, the crazy confidence he was feeling, it all dried up and blew away. He had executed three people. It didn’t matter that they were penny-a-pack street thugs who could only make the world a better place by decomposing in a drainage ditch. What happened back there was murder. Up until that moment, he had been an innocent man fighting to get his life back. Now he had no life to get back. There was no way around that, no way out from under it. Another five hours of racing along back roads and hiding under bridges and scuttling around villages in western New Jersey like a big green cockroach, and Jack was just beginning to realize the dimensions of the stone wall he had smacked into. He’d been monitoring the van’s police radio. Every half hour he heard the same bulletin, a taped alert:

There you go. A description of the van he was in, what he looked like, with the warning that he was armed and considered dangerous. He’d have abandoned the van miles back, except for two things. They never mentioned a direction of travel, and they were still describing the vehicle as a white van with government plates. Which meant his lunatic stunt, the paint job, the stolen plate off the garbage truck, was still working. God knows why. Jack would have described this as a lucky break if the phrase hadn’t made him choke every time he tried. Whatever was going on in his life, and he meant to find out in the next few hours, good luck wasn’t a factor.

He was listening to a late-night DJ play a Sinatra song—“Summer Wind,” by Johnny Mercer—the traffic roaring all around him as he rolled eastbound through the lights and the noise and the eastern New Jersey landscape, full of towns and suburban sprawl. Here was Paterson coming up now, all the buildings lit up, the glow from downtown, the highways busy even at this hour, trucks and the vans and the cabs, all the familiar names that came up bright electric green out of the dark—a few miles back he’d passed Highway 287 and a
sign that said
Albany 163
and
Troy 170
—he could be home in three hours—in his own bed by sunrise—here was Elizabeth, where he’d gone for a kid’s birthday party with Frank, Frank’s father driving them in a huge old pink Packard that smelled of cigars—Teaneck—he had an uncle there who had been gassed at Inchon—Union City—bought his first truck from a yard in Union City—Palisades Park—made out with a big blonde girl there three years before joining the Marines—can’t recall her name—she had one blue eye and one green eye—Paramus—used to go through there on the way to picnics at Mount Nebo—his father driving the delivery van he used for his flower shop—his mother knitting in the passenger seat—Hoboken—where Sinatra was born—and all the New York names—Van Cortland—Mosholu—Yonkers—Riverdale—the Bronx—Harlem—Long Island City. And Astoria, and his own block.

A few miles on and he could just make out the strut-work of the George Washington Bridge, a glimmer of it through the huge green darkness in between the city lights, and up ahead, just around the curve or seen through the trees that filled the rolling countryside, the huge skywide glow that lit up the low clouds floating over it—the lights of New York City. He was back on his home ground.

Now what? One thing was keeping Jack together. Get back home, find out who the people were—the man, the woman, whoever—who had taken his life apart, for fun or money or revenge—and, maybe, prove to anybody who still cared that he was … what?
Innocent
didn’t fit anymore. Let’s say not totally guilty. If he could do that, then whatever else happened to him, he wasn’t going to end up in the county morgue as another dumb-dead-and-indicted dork on a stainless-steel tray with a paper toe tag on his right foot with a little haiku epitaph that read:

The air inside the marshals’ big van was smoky, the green glow of the dashboard lighting Jack’s face in the rearview mirror, making black holes of his eyes, his cheeks pale green. He was doing a steady sixty in the middle lane, trailing a big yellow Freightliner hauling fifty-foot sections of rebar—Jack figured this was just God still jerking him around for kicks—and he had the CB radio set tuned to nineteen, listening to the truckers talk their road talk.

Jack had done the long-haul jobs himself in the early years of Black Water Transit, and in this black hour of the night he bitterly envied them the wide-open doorways of their lives, the way they took in the whole country when they talked, Oklahoma City, Fresno, Seattle, Chicago, Memphis, Kansas City, they’d been everywhere, and they were always going to be everywhere, and once in the distant past he had known the things they knew about, the quirky little road facts like you got better mileage going east on I-90 than you did going west because I-90 was downhill all the way from Bozeman to Chicago, but going west you were better off on 80 because 80 took the low road through the Wasatch in western Wyoming, with the Grand Tetons off your right shoulder, and you could get all the way to Salt Lake City on half the gas that it took to get you through Lookout Pass up on the Idaho border, but on 80 westbound you didn’t get to take the long slow climb up I-90 out of the Columbia Basin west of the Saddle Mountains and see the cone of Mount Rainier across fifty miles of high desert, the setting sun coloring the glaciers on its crest as red as lava, and the glittering plume of snow crystals that fluttered from the highest peak as
the mountain cut into the jet stream at fifteen thousand feet, the Kilimanjaro of the far western plains.

Hours from now, these Freightliners and Kenworths and Macks would be far away from here, rolling westbound up the curving of the earth under a wide night sky scattered with cold stars and the western horizon an arc of pale green fire, but Jack would still be pushing this hijacked prison van toward the bitter dead end of his pointless little road, because he had killed three kids for no reason he could explain or even really understand, other than at the time when he squeezed that trigger, inside that cold blue airless silent bubble, what he had really been looking at was the back of his own son’s head, at Danny’s skull, and it had felt so
damned
sweet to do it. It was entirely possible that he’d shot those three kids because they reminded him of Danny, that he might have been killing his own child. Why? For getting him into this disaster in the first place with that pathetic, desperate phone call from the prison clinic in Lompoc.

And he had even enjoyed shooting those kids. It had felt just damn fine at the time, which was the usual problem with that kind of thing. But in his heart he also knew that, given the same chance, he would have tried to help Danny all over again. Danny was his son, and that’s what fathers do. It’s the way things are, the way they have to be, if any kid anywhere is ever going to find his way back home, find forgiveness and redemption. He hadn’t really been killing Danny when he shot those three little thugs. He’d been killing his fear, his sense of being helpless and afraid.

Well, it was done now, and nothing could be taken back or made whole ever again, and his time was running out. He had one thing left to do. In other words, who to kill? Who had put him here? That was the question. It was a big question.

Flannery? Could Flannery do this? Life had taught Jack that almost everybody could talk themselves into almost anything provided the circumstances were brutal enough. People betrayed for love, for money, for revenge. Usually for money. Did Flannery need money? Flannery knew enough about Jack’s business to set him up. But Flannery had argued against the deal with Pike.

So had Creek, for that matter. Did Creek do this to him? Could Creek do it? Much as he loved the man, this thing had far too much in the way of organizational skill to it. Creek couldn’t organize a fall off a porch swing without a book of instructions and three assistants. But Creek needed the money. Creek always needed money, and Frank had told him that Creek was into Carmine and his people.

Carmine? Carmine had a big attitude in place about Jack. But he loved Frank, and Frank loved Jack, and if Frank ever heard that Carmine had done anything to hurt Jack, it would take Carmine a week to die and another week for the cleaners to mop up the mess. Besides that, Carmine wore his anger right out there in front. If somebody from Astoria wanted to take you down, the first thing he did was convince you that you were his best buddy. Get you relaxed, get you confident. Then do it, do it while you still had that dumb happy grin on your face. Not Carmine, then. Somebody else in Frank’s organization. His kid? Claire? Would Claire do this?

Maybe. Not maybe. Definitely. It was just her style. But she’d need help, and there was nobody in Frank’s outfit who would make a move without Frank’s okay, especially a move that involved Frank’s wife. Again, the week to die and the bloodstains on the rug.

Pike, then?

Pike had the skill groups. Had the motivation. But he had lost the only thing he seemed to care about in that
ATF takedown, his weapons collection. Why let that happen? Unless the weapons were just a front for something else.