THE FOURTH WATCH (38 page)

"White powder first," Sal said, shaking his
head. "I want to test it."

This provoked a round of chatter among the
Chinamen. When it petered out the old man hefted a package from the
deck and passed it over the rail. It looked to be a ten pounder,
wrapped in thick brown paper. "You test, okay? All
same."

Sal nodded and held out his hands. The man
dropped it slightly out in front of him, so Sal had to reach toward
the front of the cockpit to catch it. As he did he heard Carlos
scream behind him.

"Sal, NOOOO, ambush, ambush!"

In one motion he caught the package and rolled
into the shadows of the cockpit. He heard a whoosh and the thunk of
wood splintering. Then another whoosh and a howl from Carlos and
when he looked up he could see him tumble backwards and fall over
the rail with a spear sticking through him, his gun flying out of
his hands as he fell. Sal let go of the package and pulled his own
weapon out of his waistband as he rolled. In one motion he came up
in a crouch and shot the boy who was about to fire his spear gun.
The roar of the Barretta in the quiet night was deafening and the
muzzle flash lit the darkness brilliantly. The bullet hit the boy
in the mouth and he went over backward, discharging the spear gun
as he went. The spear hissed away, arching harmlessly into the sea.
Sal could see the other two men, surprise etched in their faces,
reaching into their clothes for weapons. They had hoped to do the
job with the spear guns quietly, but had failed. Now they were
going for real firepower. Sal fired twice more, missing,
splintering wood on the rail of the fishing boat. The two men
ducked and Sal hit the throttle on the powerboat. It jumped
forward, but the grappling hooks held and both vessels lurched
sideways. Sal was sure that the sudden tug on the hooks had knocked
the pirates off balance, but knew he only had a minute. Quickly he
pulled a switch-blade from his pocket and snapped it open and cut
through the line of the hook on the safety rail around the cockpit.
He turned the wheel to the starboard and throttled up again. The
bow moved away but jerked to a halt again when the stem line came
taunt. Behind him there was a shot just as the line jerked the
boats again, and a bullet hole appeared in the windshield on the
passenger side of the cockpit. He had his knife in his right hand
on the steering wheel and the Barretta in his left. He fired
blindly behind him and once again hit the throttles full. This time
there was a jerk, and then a ripping sound, and suddenly he was
loose and moving away. He glanced behind him. He could see that the
rear port section of the safety rail was gone back to the stern,
and on the fishing vessel he could see the two pirates climbing to
their feet.

He came around hard and headed back toward
them, firing at them over the windshield. They were moving now,
making a wide arch and heading out to deeper water. Sal was in a
murderous rage and gave chase firing wildly, but when his weapon
locked open empty, he throttled back and coasted, watching them
go.

Sal turned back and searched for Carlos. He
called his name and circled back again. He didn't want to risk the
lights. The gunfire might have carried to shore, and for all he
knew coast guard cutters could be on their way. He shut the engine
down and drifted and called to him.

In the quiet he heard a weak reply, off to the
starboard. As his eyes scanned the choppy surface in the dull
moonlight, he thought he saw a lump cresting and dropping fifty
yards away. He fired up the engines and let the boat glide over. It
was Carlos; he was floating on his back, the spear through his left
shoulder.

"Carlos, man, can you hear me? Are you
alright?"

Carlos rolled onto his side and his eyes came
up and his right hand reached out to Sal weakly. Sal grabbed it and
carefully pulled him aboard. The spear had gone right through him
and there was as much of it sticking out of his back as there was
sticking out of his front. He had to sit sideways on the seat in
the stern. He couldn't lay down with the spear sticking through
him. He was groaning.

"The fucker's had spear guns, man." Carlos said
gasping in pain.

"I know," Sal said.

"Shot me with a fuckin' spear gun!"

Sal nodded.

"I'm bleeding like a pig, man!"

"We'll get you in and get you to a doctor,
you'll be alright."

"That's easy to say. You ain't the one was
shot!"

"I know," Sal said. He went back into the
cockpit and turned the boat toward shore.

“With a fuckin' spear gun," Carlos mumbled
behind him.

Sal just nodded.

"Right through me!"

“We'll get you fixed up, you'll be
alright.”

“Right through me with a fucking spear gun,
man.”

Sal said, “Shut the fuck up,
Carlos."

26

JACK HEALY DROVE
his beat up 1991 Honda across town, listening to the news on
the radio but not hearing much. It was Indian Summer, a warm and
beautiful late October day. The maple trees looked like red torches
against the blue dome of the sky. The oaks had gone orange-brown,
their limbs tangled together forming a canopy above the streets.
The sun was slanting low in the sky and glaring through his
windshield.

The Bishop had been as understanding as Jack
could have hoped for under the circumstances. He didn't refuse
Jack's request for a short leave to go to Seattle, but he did ask,
not unreasonably, why the Diocese was sending a Priest across the
country to search for evidence related to a homicide.

Jack sat for a long time, his elbows on his
knees, the logs in the Bishops fireplace snapping. "Father," he
said, "my best friend is in a coma, he was with the victim that
night." He rubbed his face and looked up at him. " I could never
look him in the eye again if I did nothing."

The Bishop was a short, thin,
handsome man, 70 years old, and should have been preparing for
retirement. But with the dwindling ranks of the clergy these days,
the Holy Father had asked him to stay on for another year. He got
out of his chair and went to the bar and built himself a tall
high~ball and came back and sat down on the couch next to Jack and
looked into the fire. He sighed. He knew, of course, about the
shooting and about the long friendship Jack had with Michael
Knight. “Listen, Jack, I'm an administrator...follow your heart my
Son, but
do not
affect my budget." They laughed together. In other words
don't bill me, and keep me out of it - other than that - go with
God.

Money was no object. Jack had Alex
Andreason.

Mike Knight had been in a coma now for almost a
month. Jack had spent endless hours sitting in the hospital room,
praying until he couldn't think of words to pray anymore. There was
no sense to the coma. All his body systems were up. There was
consistent brain activity. His heart pumped and his cardiovascular
system worked without error. His punctured lung and cracked ribs
were healing nicely. He just wouldn't wake up. The doctors had said
that he could sit up tomorrow or next week or next year. Maybe he
never would. The crunch he had taken when his head hit the curb had
turned off a wake up switch deep in his brain.

But Jack couldn't stand just going to the room
and saying prayers anymore. He couldn't look at, or listen to, the
crumpled figure in the bed that gasped through a hose, and had to
be turned and have bedsores salved and feed bags and waste lines
changed and linen rolled out from underneath him. His faith never
wavered, but he had prayed so hard that his head ached. He needed
to do something else. That's why he was going to
Seattle.

He hadn't been out to Mike's house since the
day after the shooting, when he'd gone to collect some clothes for
him. In emergency surgery they had just cut his clothes away, so
Jack had gone, optimistically, to get something for him to wear
home. Now he had decided to go out to the house and see what needed
to be taken care of. Kato was coming home, he wouldn't think
otherwise, so things had to be done that he wouldn't be able to do
for himself when he got there.

As he came up the drive he smiled to himself at
how quickly disorder had imposed itself. God's natural world was
reclaiming space. The grass was high and full of weeds, and the
hedges and shrubs had stringers on them and were uneven and unruly.
The pebble-stone path to the dock had the curled remains of
dandy-lions withered along its edges and the screens on the doors
and windows were gray with dust. He parked and climbed the front
steps. On the top of the mailbox was a notice that all future mail
would be held for pick up at the post office. Jack took the mail
that was collected there and reached into the bottom of the box
where he knew Mike kept his spare garage door opener. He pressed
the button and the door on the garage under the main frame of the
house rumbled up. He put the opener back in the box.

Jack put the mail on the stairs leading up into
the house and picked up a long handled spade and went around to the
side of the house, where Annie had once had her garden. It was weed
grown now and the earth hard, but Jack worked steadily, turning the
earth over and then making a pit at one end for compost. Then he
fired up an aging Craftmaster walk behind mower and cut the lawn,
bagging as he went, dumping the filled bag every few lengths of the
overgrown yard in the compost pit. By the time he was done he had
stripped to the waist and was sweating profusely. He cut and shaped
the shrubs and hedges with an electric trimmer he found on a shelf
at the back of the garage, and then used a gas powered weed-whacker
to clean up the edges of the lawn and walks. When he was done he
thought the place looked pretty good . He put everything back in
the garage, hit the automatic garage door control and carried the
mail upstairs. The house was like a furnace so he turned the
thermostat down to 65 degrees. There were some dishes and two pots
in the sink. Whatever the pots had contained had hardened into a
foul crust. He found some dish soap and filled the sink with hot,
soapy water and left it all to soak, then he went back down to the
basement and put together a wash from a few half-full baskets of
moldy clothes Mike had left in the bathroom. Upstairs again, he
picked up empty beer cans and other household trash, and cleaned
the spoiled food out of the refrigerator, not that there was much
in there. Mike's bed looked like it had been made clean, but he
stripped and remade it anyway, and carried the linen
downstairs.

He stood in the kitchen and washed the soaked
pans and looked around the open first-floor layout. Everything
looked okay. He wandered over to the dinning room table and looked
at the work mess on it. He thought about tidying up but was
deciding against it when he noticed that it looked more frazzled
then usual. It was as if someone had shoved everything around
randomly. The piles were blurred together. Mike always had stacks
of paper all over the place, but he knew what was in each of them.
These were kind of shuffled together, like someone had rifled them.
He also noticed that the computer was turned off. Jack could have
sworn it was on the last time he was here. He remembered thinking
about turning it off but then thought he better not touch anything.
Maybe the cops had turned it off when they came through. Might have
shuffled the papers around to. Somehow that didn't seem right
though. He knew that Alex Andreason had insisted on being present
when the cops went through the house. He was sure he would have
never let the cops look at Mike's files, seeing how it was mostly
criminal stuff and that would be some kind of violation of
attorney-client privilege.

He went back to the kitchen and bundled up the
mail that was in the box and tucked it under his arm as he locked
up. He'd go to the post office and pick up everything that was held
and then sort the bills out from the junk mail and other stuff.
Alex had told Jack to gather up all of Kato's bills and send them
on to him. He decided to mention the odd mess on the dinning room
table to Alex. He would send a note along with the mail, and drop
it off when he put the arm on him for the money he needed for his
trip to Seattle.

*****

WALTER STOOD IN
the throbbing pulse of a neon sign that threw it's light from
an all night diner across the street, into the window of Tell Me's
digs. Othello Meehan was nowhere to be seen. Walter re-holstered
his long barrel .357 Mag. after clearing the apartment. It had been
in his hand when he used a credit card to slip the lock and let
himself in. He'd searched the apartment methodically wearing
surgical gloves, with no results. He got the feeling that someone
else had searched it before him. It was clean. Well, clean of
anything that would tie the pimp to Michael Knight.

Actually the place was filthy.

The kitchen counter and sink were cluttered
with dishes and bowls that still had sedimentary food in them, and
the white and black checkerboard pattern on the floor was almost
indistinguishable with ground in grime. There was beer and wine and
rancid milk and butter in the refrigerator, and various
freezer-burned Hot Pockets and Hungry Man frozen dinners in the
ice-box.

The living room held a tattered couch with
broken springs, which Walter noticed when he tossed the cushions
and found a treasure trove of McDonald's wrappers, rubbers, bottle
caps, loose tobacco, coins, a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses,
a film canister one-third full of little white pills that looked
like speed, a blunt of hash wrapped in tinfoil and a pair of
crotchless panties. The couch had three legs, a stack of smut
magazines acting as a shim where the forth leg should have been.
There was a beat-up, pull stick recliner in front of an audio/video
entertainment center worth about a billion dollars. More of the
same under the cushion. Next to the recliner, on a produce crate
that served as an end table, there was a bag of weed, an ashtray
with half a joint leaning on the side of it and a three quarter
empty Heiniken bottle with cigarette butts fermenting in the bottom
of it. The floor was littered with magazines and
newspapers.