Suitcase City. Sterling Watson

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СКАЧАТЬ pulled out a half pint of Wild Turkey. He took a swallow and offered it. Carlos took the bottle and sniffed it, then drank. Again. “Muy bueno,” he said. “Gracias, amigo.”

      Teach nodded, took another bite, and put the bottle away. He saw something, some glimmer through the trees ahead. He caught a murmur of surprised talk from the deck below. Carlos slipped out of the wheelhouse, his feet rapping on the ladder. The Santa Maria was approaching a bend in the canal, and now Teach made out the glow of a lantern, a small boat, a man in it, glittering through the mangrove branches. They had never met anyone back here, though Teach had always known it was possible. He also knew that the only people a man would meet back here at midnight would be locals who observed the unspoken rules of silence.

      Teach put the shrimper into reverse and spun her screw until she barely drifted. He went down onto the foredeck. The man in the boat was Frank Deeks. Deeks was a sometime handyman, sometime fisherman, and full-time drunk. Deeks kept his back to the men in the boat as it drifted up, pushing a heavy wave ahead of it, and Teach could see why. Deeks was poaching stone crab traps.

      Teach had heard rumors about Deeks doing it. Few men would have dared. A crabber was justified, at least by local standards, in shooting anyone he caught messing with his traps. Looking down into Deeks’s leaky skiff, Teach could see next to the hissing Coleman lantern a bottle of Heaven Hill bourbon and some sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Deeks wasn’t brave tonight, he was just more than normally drunk.

      The three Guatemalans stood behind Teach, talking in low, urgent tones. Teach heard cantar. Informer. He didn’t get it all, but he knew he had to improvise. He stepped to the rail and said, “What you doing out here so late, Mr. Deeks?”

      Deeks looked at him out of pale, rheumy eyes. He was saintly thin and egg-bald and wore a railroad engineer’s cap made of gray ticking, a khaki shirt, and old Bermuda shorts. Like a lot of thin men, he moved his limbs with exceeding slowness. His mouth was another thing. “Uh, fishing,” Deeks said. “Ain’t doing no good, though.” There was no fishing gear in the boat. Deeks looked up at the Santa Maria. “What you doing out here in a boat so big, boy? You lost?”

      Teach kept making it up: “Uh, Mr. Deeks, these gentlemen hired me to take this boat down to Harry Parsons’s High and Dry for some repairs. I guess we a little lost.” He smiled, winked at Deeks. A don’t-let-on-how-lost wink.

      Deeks didn’t catch it. “Hell, boy, Harry Parsons’s is two miles in the other direction and you know it. And . . .” Deeks’s eyes left Teach’s face and went to the shrimper again, the three men behind Teach. “Who you say that boat belong to? She sure don’t look like she come from around here. What’s her name, anyway? What you say’s wrong with her?”

      Teach was about to say he hadn’t said what was wrong with her. He was about to shift the conversation to the crab trap oozing mud into Frank Deeks’s leaky boat, ask Deeks when he had taken up crabbing, when the pistol went off next to his right ear.

      Teach grabbed the ear, screamed, and fell to his knees. His first thought was that the concussion had ruptured his eardrum, but soon he knew it hadn’t, and soon there was more to worry about. All three of the Guatemalans were firing, the muzzle flashes wild and bright against the green wall of mangroves, the smoke thick and sweet, hot shell casings raining down around Teach. He crabbed backward on his knees and heard Esteban yelling, “Paren! Basta! Se acabó! Enough!” He had no idea how many shots they fired, just knew Carlos and Julio ignored the order, kept shooting until their magazines were empty.

      Teach edged forward and peered over the rail. Frank Deeks lay in a sinking boat covered with blood and gasoline. A good-sized crab lay shot to pieces on his chest. Fragments of crab, flesh, brain, and fried egg sandwich littered the boat and the surface of the water.

      Before Teach could speak, he felt Esteban’s hand on his shoulder. “Get up. Take us out of here. Rápido. Vámonos.”

      In a fog of head-hurt and shock, Teach did what he was told. When he had the boat moving, her stern abreast of the little skiff, he felt a second concussion, heard a whoosh, saw a tower of flame rising behind the Santa Maria. Heard Esteban call out again, “Rápido! Rápido!” Teach gave the shrimper more power. When he had her out in the middle of the canal, he stepped from the wheelhouse and gazed back at the shallow place near the bank where Frank Deeks lay burning in the gasoline from his outboard.

       TWO

      By the time they reached the off-loading site, Teach had calmed himself and treated his headache with whiskey. His first job, he knew, was to keep quiet about what he had seen. There would be plenty of time later to explain to Naylor. No telling how Naylor would react if Teach told it now.

      Teach eased the Santa Maria as close to the canal bank as she could go. Naylor always hid in the scrub beyond the bank until Teach gave the signal to bring the truck up the last half mile. Teach idled the engine, picked up his flashlight, and shot the beam at the scrub. Naylor flashed back twice. Teach waited in the wheelhouse while Naylor threw aboard the two lines he kept secured to the trunks of cypress trees. When the boat was moored fore and aft, Naylor lowered a gangplank fixed by hinges to the base of a cypress. A block and tackle in the treetop let the gangplank down across the twenty feet of water to the shrimper’s rail. It was a good and speedy arrangement. The plank was the only permanent apparatus, and when it was upright you had to be in the water directly opposite the tree to see it.

      Naylor waved his flashlight to Teach and took off jogging for the truck. Teach went down to the deck. He hadn’t spoken to the Guatemalans since the shooting. He found them in the stern, smoking, their heads together. They stopped talking when he approached. He stood only a few feet from them, but he and they were separated now by more than land and language. It had been crazy stupid to kill Frank Deeks. If they had given Teach the chance, he could have explained Deeks to them, told them the guy was poaching traps. Told them Deeks would have cut off his hands before admitting he’d seen the Santa Maria.

      Teach said, “Mi amigo va por el camión. Regresa en unos minutos.” He could already hear in the distance the slow whine of Naylor’s engine.

      Esteban stepped away from the other two, looked at Teach. “It is just as it always is. Hurry with the unloading.”

      Teach nodded. Ordinary nights, Teach had ten bales ashore before the truck arrived. He looked at Esteban. The man was different. Teach was not sure how. Was this the way you were after you shot someone? Esteban was always tense, wired. Now he seemed relaxed, serene, satisfied. The change frightened Teach more than the pistol under Esteban’s arm.

      He looked at Carlos and Julio and saw it there too. Their faces settled, their eyes uncurious, decided. Maybe he saw a little sorrow in the eyes of Carlos, the fisherman. The man who knew boats.

      Teach humped bales until the truck arrived. When Naylor’s face loomed out of the darkness, sweating from the half-mile jog, Teach only smiled and said, “Get aboard, buddy, and put some weight on your back. Those clouds are blowing south. Pretty soon it’s gonna be moon over Miami.”

      Naylor looked at him. He sensed it. Something was wrong, different. Teach turned back to the gangplank, hurrying for the next bale.

      When the unloading was finished, Teach went to the truck cab. As he passed Esteban, who stood at the back of the truck looking at the bales with those uncurious eyes, the man said, “Adónde vas?”

      Teach stopped. “To the truck. For a cigarette.” Esteban nodded.

      In the truck СКАЧАТЬ