Off the Chart (10 page)

“Nice,” he said. “Hey, Marty, I think her reflexes might be a little quicker than yours. You might want to keep a close watch on this lady.”

“Yeah, like I'm fucking worried,” he said.

Vic pointed the pen at her.

“But it's true, Annie. I'm in awe of what you and Marty accomplished. Fucking oil tankers. That's a business I'd like to know more about.”

“Marty didn't have much do with it. He was just along for the ride.”

“I heard different,” Vic said. “I heard he handled the foreign contacts. Working the phones. Sounds to me like that might be a pretty important part of the business.”

“Sure,” Anne said. “Whatever you say, Vic.”

“I mean, yeah, I understand it was Danny Salbone running the show. Oh, and too bad about him. I hear he got his head blown off. Sorry about that. I always liked the guy. Played fair. Respected my territory. We had a few encounters over the years, but it was always businesslike. I liked him. Guy was pretty cool for a wop guinea fuck-head goomba bastard.”

Marty chuckled.

Since he was a kid, Vic had been a big-time bullshitter. Words streaming from him constantly, coming out too fast to mean anything. Just white noise, like he was swinging a watch in front of your eyes, trying to put you into a trance before he stole your wallet.

“Thing is,” Vic said. “Top of my hit parade at this moment, I'm trying to acquire a parcel of land down the road. It's like the cornerstone for a major project. Part of my legacy. That's one thing I'm
working on these days: my legacy. Way I'm remembered.”

“Like anybody cares,” she said.

“What I decided I want,” Vic said, “I want the biggest goddamn tombstone in the graveyard, if you know what I'm saying. Big monster headstone celebrating my larger-than-life stay on earth.”

Anne shifted her gaze to the photos on the far wall, the pack of elected thieves shaking Vic's hand. If you looked close enough, you'd probably see the hundred-dollar bills they were palming.

“So anyway, Marty had no luck with the owner of the land, though he made the guy a hugely generous offer and silver-tongued the hell out of him. All to no avail. So I was telling him just now when you showed up that I'm coming at this from an oblique angel. You know that word, Annie,
oblique
? It means sideways. Catty-corner.”

He drummed the pen against his desktop and smiled at her.

“So what I'm doing,” Vic said, “it's like the way you cut a diamond. Something hard, you locate its flaw, the little invisible crack, then all you need is a light tap, just one bump, and the thing's in a million pieces. That's what we're going to do with this guy Thorn. You following me, Annie? We're going to break this fucker into a million pieces.”

“Thorn?” she said.

Vic smiled.

“Yeah, your old boyfriend. Mr. Laidback Shithead himself.”

“What kind of bullshit is this, Vic?”

“Truth is, Annie, I owe you a serious debt of gratitude. You hadn't been banging this guy Thorn, I would've never known he existed. Fucker keeps such a low profile. Last year when you two started going at it, I made it my business to look him up, go over, have a talk, see if he was up to the challenge of being a full-fledged member of the Joy family, and that's when I see this prime piece of real estate the dumbshit's squatting on.”

Anne sat forward in her chair.

“I don't believe this. You fucked around in my personal life?”

“Just making sure my little sister isn't climbing in the sack with some loser. It's like a surrogate father thing. Anyway, this Thorn guy, I was thankful when it fell apart. No way I would've had that pain in
the ass for a brother-in-law. Fucking smart-ass do-nothing. I took an instant dislike to the fucker.”

“And how many times did you do that, talk to my boyfriends?”

“I don't know. How many men you sleep with over the years? Twelve, thirteen? That's my count.”

“You asshole.”

“Just watching out for my little sister. Same as Dad would've done.”

In the sanctuary, the organist was mangling “Yesterday.” Some hoarse voices trying to join in, “All my troubles seemed so far away.”

“So anyway,” Vic said, “this Thorn asshole, he's got this hard-core lack-of-motivation thing going on. Doesn't respond to normal business stimuli. But that's all about to change because me and Marty are going to put him in the nutcracker and turn the crank. Right, Marty?”

Marty grinned.

“Vic,” Anne said. “What the hell does this have to do with me?”

“Well, I know it's short notice, but I was hoping maybe you'd come along on a boarding party I got planned for tonight. You might be a help, given your vast expertise with piracy and all. Plus it'd give you a chance to prove you're for real.”

“I don't need to prove anything to you.”

She shot Marty another look. The same smug grin on his face.

“Okay. You don't want to go along, fine. So then let's come at this from a different direction. What would you say to a half-million dollars for about ten minutes of your time? You could use some spending money, couldn't you?”

“A half-million.” Anne tried for ironic, unimpressed, but she heard a wisp of eagerness get through.

Vic said, “A few minutes, that's all it'd take. Teach me how to crack into this FROM thing Marty told me about, so I could see where all the tankers and cargo ships are. Now that's something we could use.”

“So that's what this is all about. The code to break into FROM.”

“Hell, make it a million,” Vic said. “A couple of oil tankers, I'll recoup it.”

“You don't know anything about Daniel, do you?”

Vic's simpleton smile surfaced again.

“A million bucks, Annie. One million.”

Anne looked at the walls of Vic's office. Scattered among the photos of mayors and commissioners were a few pirate trinkets from their mother's collection, some old gold coins, a black Jolly Roger flag, a flintlock pistol.

“I'll give it some thought,” she said.

Vic stood up. Dropped his pen on the ink blotter.

“Okay, little sister, you do that,” Vic said. “You give it some thought.”

He cast a slow look across her face, as if searching for some sign of deception. Anne kept her mouth bland, muscles relaxed.

Vic said, “I understand you need a place to stay. Fact is, I got lots of room at my place. Plus there's a couple of things there I'd like to show you.”

From the weeks of travel Anne was exhausted, a heaviness in her bones. Wondering how Daniel would find her if she was no longer working at the Lorelei or living in her apartment. Like it or not, Vic's was the next best bet.

“Why not?” she said. “Sure, Vic. Why the hell not?”

“And maybe you'll change your mind about coming along tonight on our little boarding party.”

“No, Vic. My pirate days are over.”

“Don't be so sure about that, Annie girl. It's in our blood. That shit's in our freaking blood.”

Closing in on nine o'clock that same night, Vic and Marty were twenty miles offshore, the Atlantic Ocean an oily black slick in every direction. Marty was at the wheel and Vic stood beside him staring out through the windscreen, standing there feeling the itch grow in his bloodstream. A mile ahead was the yacht they were tracking, glowing from the big-ass full moon.

“Pretty night,” Vic said. “Too bad Annie couldn't come. She'd enjoy this.”

Marty turned his head and peered at Vic like maybe he was losing it. “Hey,” Vic said. “Just because we're about to commit mayhem doesn't mean we can't enjoy the moon and stars above.”

Vic gazed out at the empty expanse of ocean and told Marty to speed up a notch. The big man tapped the throttle forward, gaining slightly on the monster yacht. The big pleasure craft had all its deck lights illuminated, making about twenty knots across the calm seas, leaving a white foamy path. Hell of a lot harder for anyone on the
yacht to see into the darkness with all those lights blaring. Which was just fine, just fine and dandy.

Vic picked up the binoculars and fixed them on the lighted fly-bridge, found the focus. Still the one skinny man in a white shirt and white trousers at the wheel. Gold buttons glimmered. A uniformed captain, all alone, been like that for the last hour since they pulled out of the channel at Morada Bay Marina.

Vic wasn't sure, but he guessed there were a couple more crew down below serving cocktails, young guys probably, suntanned studs plumping pillows, chilling the mousse pâté. Back at the marina, he'd counted five getting aboard. Didn't see the crew, who were probably already down below. Two, three, it didn't matter. Only person that counted was the one at the controls, the guy who could grab the radio, make the Mayday call.

But he wouldn't have time. He wouldn't know what hit him till he was on his butt. Vic had mounted two superquiet four-cycle engines on the twenty-five-foot Interceptor, three hundred horses no louder than a snoring kitten. And anyway, the fifteen-mile-an-hour breeze was in their face, carrying away any sound. They were tucked directly inside the big boat's wake. Their running lights off. The captain would have to have night-vision goggles to see him. Vic only had to close the half-mile gap, slide up alongside, then the fun could begin.

“You guys use knives when you stormed your ships?”

“Knives?” Marty said.

“You heard me.”

“We didn't need knives, Vic. We had Uzis, Mac-10s, that's what we used, heavy firepower.”

“Knife-between-the-teeth, that's my approach. You got both hands free to pull yourself over the side, then you got the knife ready when you need it, slice a throat. Plus a sharp blade has a high impact factor. They see me coming at them like that, they shit their shorts.”

Marty pulled back on the throttle and they fell off-plane.

“You telling me you didn't bring any guns, Vic? I'm not doing this without a gun.”

“I brought guns, sure I brought guns. Whatta you think, I'm crazy? I just got a soft spot for knives is all. Part of the pirate tradition. And
for good reason. Wait'll you see their reaction, they get a look at the knife in my mouth.”

Marty revved them back up to speed and Vic turned his eyes back to the dark water. Not even a gleam out there on the glassy tabletop.

“You weren't lying? You did this before, Vic? Small boats like this.”

“If you call a seventy-five-foot Davis small, yeah, I've done my share. Like I said, I'm up to maybe a dozen. Enough to know it's profitable. More money out here tonight than I turn in a month on that cheap-ass casino boat. And my restaurants, motels? Hell, don't get me started. This is the kind of business makes sense, Marty. Simple, neat, and clean. Plus this time out, I get two for the price of one. That's my philosophy of life. Two birds, one rock.”

Vic took the binoculars and sighted on the bridge. There was a blond woman talking to the captain, pretty lady in a low-cut white dress fluttering in the night air. One of the guests hobnobbing with the help, but the captain was still looking back in their direction, raising the binoculars again.

With the yacht so close, the itch in Vic's blood was turning into a serious jingle. He drew the red scarf from the back pocket of his jeans, shook it out, folded it, and fit it over his hair so it rode an inch down his forehead. He knotted it in the back, then dug in his hip pocket and got the eye patches and offered one to Marty.

The big man looked at Vic and shook his head.

Vic stretched the elastic band over his head and snugged the patch into place. The yacht was coming into clear view. Three hundred yards, at most a minute more, they'd be over the side.

“You don't want an eye patch, fine,” said Vic. “But I'm a known quantity around these parts. I can't go out doing havoc and anarchy without some kind of fucking disguise.”

Vic bent down behind the leaning post and opened the lid on the chest and drew out a couple of handguns. He tapped Marty on the shoulder and handed one of them over.

Marty held it up to the moonlight, twisted it around in his big paw.

“Jesus, Vic. These are .22s. Goddamn plinkers.”

“Those are Rugers. Special Forces uses them. There's two for each of us. One for each hand. It's a nice effect.”

“Shit, these aren't but half a step up from a BB gun.”

Vic dabbed at the eye patch to keep it planted.

“Yeah, okay, so if this was an oil tanker maybe we'd pull out the heavy stuff. You're the acknowledged expert on that. But a boat like that Davis, believe me, .22s are best. We have to shoot somebody, the slug goes in, it doesn't come out. On these posh yachts, you spray a bunch of high-caliber shit around, you're in there patching teak for a month before you can deliver the boat to your buyer. Not to mention the goddamn bloodstains. It's not cost-effective.”

Marty came up to the stern, keeping pace with the big boat, riding its bumpy wake, then eased in beside its starboard hull. Vic reached out for the cleat on the dive platform, lashed a line to it, and gave Marty a grin, then hoisted himself up the side.

Vic was wrong about the crew. There was only one, the captain, tall, fiftyish guy with a long, skinny face and big ears. Jughead would've been his nickname back in Harlan. Bony man, like a tangle of oak branches stuffed inside that white admiral's uniform. See him on the street, you'd say he was a harmless scrawny guy, but as Vic came over the side with his knife between his teeth, that man stood only a foot away with one mean-ass, throat-ripping look in his eyes.

A second after Vic glimpsed the captain, he caught the blur of something dark flashing at the side of his head. Pool cue, something like that.

Vic ducked back below the gunwale, but the stick clipped him on the shoulder. And for a half-second he lost his grip, slipped backward, the rope burning his palm. Inside the pain, Vic felt a wild thrill. He sucked down a breath and surged back up the line, directly into the next thump of the club, feeling reckless, growling.

Vic took the second blow on his other shoulder. With a yowl, he heaved his body over the transom, flopped on the deck, rolled once, got to his feet. He dipped and sidestepped, and blocked the next blow with his numb arm. He spit the knife into his right hand while the next strike hurtled in. The captain was swinging the goddamn pool cue as methodically as a carpenter hammering home a tenpenny nail.

Vic bobbed once and waded in, took another thump to his neck, nearly slipped away into blackness, tasting blood this time, so close to the guy he inhaled the captain's lime aftershave, then thrust the
knife into soft meat somewhere in all that starched white, Cloroxed white, gold-buttoned cloth.

And twisted. And heard the meat tear, felt the give of flesh, the softening of the man's stance, sticky lather coating his right hand. Looking up then into the man's eyes as they changed, as they fell away into nowhere.

He lifted his head and turned and saw Marty standing a yard away with his hand clamped over the mouth of the woman in the white dress. Thin, with her hair woven into a braid coming undone. She squirmed against Marty's hold and stared down at the captain's body.

“You're just standing there,” he said, “watching.”

“You were doing fine.”

Vic massaged his left shoulder, a throbbing lump.

“Am I going to have to keep looking over my shoulder, see if you've split?”

Marty hardened his grip on the woman and she stopped struggling.

Vic let his eyes linger on Marty a moment, then turned and climbed up to the bridge and backed down the engines. He drew a pair of wire clippers from his holster and snipped off the microphone and hurled it over the side.

Vic climbed back to the deck and drank down a huge breath of that fine salt air, held it as long as he could, then blew it out.

“I'll take her,” Vic said.

Marty let the woman go and Vic took hold of her shoulder and shoved her toward the salon door. He clamped the bloody knife between his teeth, drew one of his Rugers from his belt, threw open the glass door, jostled the woman ahead of him into the cabin, and followed her inside.

Lounging around a big circular table were three adults. A four-tier birthday cake sat in the center of the table. An old white-haired woman in a cocktail dress and the two guys wearing yachting clothes. White loafers, sporty white pants, shirts with epaulets, shirttails out. The younger man was the jerkwad who owned the seventy-footer. Dr. Andy Markham. The woman gasped and Markham puffed out his narrow chest, took a step toward Vic, then halted.

Markham was in his forties, with pale blue eyes and heavy lips. His sandy hair was styled to look shaggy. One of those haircuts you had
to touch up every other day to keep it looking right. Boyish face, good tan and sandy hair, prep school, Princeton. All the advantages.

“What's the meaning of this?”

Vic took the knife from his mouth and holstered it beneath his belt. He drew out the other Ruger and aimed his right pistol at Markham and swung the other one at the two men behind the table.

“Meaning?” Vic looked at Marty. The big man was sweating heavily, starting to give off a sour gas. “We're fresh out of meaning. All we got left is chaos and random disorder.”

“Is this a joke? What the hell do you want?”

“More than you got,” Vic said.

Then the yellow-haired woman who'd been talking to the captain edged up behind Markham and touched his back with her fingertips, prodding him.

“That man killed the captain,” she said. “He stabbed him in the stomach. I think he's dead, Andy. I think he's dead.”

The shrink looked at her, then turned back to Vic, squinting. He took a wary step his way.

“Okay, let's all lie down, why don't we?” Vic said. “Doc and the rest of you old-timers. Make yourself comfortable. Choose a spot, spread out.”

The old folks moved to obey, but Markham shouted no.

“Stay where you are. No one's ordering my guests around.”

The white-haired woman swung her gaze back and forth across Vic and Marty, her lips quivering until finally she broke into a long belly laugh.

Vic moved a step closer to her and her laughter sputtered to a stop, but her smile stayed wide. Big red lips trembling like she was holding back another guffaw. The woman wore a black low-cut gown with thin straps, a pound of diamonds around her neck, and strapless gold sandals. She had white fleshy arms, and sun freckles scattered over the tops of her deflated breasts. Her eyes wouldn't hold still, moving from Vic to Andy Markham, back to Vic.

“What's so funny?” Vic said.

“Oh, really, Andy, these aren't nearly as good as the last ones. Those harem slaves, now they had me going, yes, they did. All those
muscles and shaved chests and baby oil. But these are so scruffy. A little on the clichéd side.”

“Clichéd?” Vic said.

“Scarf, eye patches, knife in the teeth. Come now, that's bad Errol Flynn.”

Vic swung his pistols back to Markham.

“But it's true,” the blond one said. “I saw it. That man stabbed Captain Johnson in the belly. He's dead. It's true. I saw it happen.”

“They're actors, Charlotte,” the old lady said. “Andy does this now and then. It's one of his little dramas to spice things up, get us in the proper mood. Only this time it's all a little cartoonish.”

“Cartoonish, huh?”

Vic snorted at the old woman and aimed his pistol at the shrink.

“So, Markham. I take it we interrupted one of your séances?”

“Who are you?” The doctor stared at Vic, tipping his head to the side as if to find a better angle.

“That's what you do, isn't it? You hypnotize these nimrods, take them on a magical mystery ride. That's how you bought this boat? Scamming weak-minded idiots?”

“It's no swindle,” the old man said. He had a mane of dignified white hair and a red face and a blue ascot at his throat. A British banker dressed for dinner after a long day on safari. “Dr. Markham is world-renowned. He's a marvelous guide into the world of past lives.”

The shrink took another uncertain step forward.

“Take them outside, Marty,” Vic said. “Start with the laughing lady.”

“And do what?”

Vic ripped off his eye patch and stuffed it in his pants pocket.

“Buy her a ticket to her next life.”

“Oh, this is ridiculous,” the old woman said. “This isn't the least bit amusing, Andy. Do something. Stop this at once.”

“Take her, Marty. Take her outside where she can laugh her head off. Show her what kind of cartoon this is.”

Marty hesitated, so Vic went over to the old woman and pressed the muzzle of his Ruger to the side of her neck and jabbed. The
woman stumbled forward and Vic jabbed again, harder this time, and she whimpered as she moved toward the cabin door. Markham shifted in her direction, but Vic waved his pistols at him and the air went out of him.