Jack reached the table, looked over the cluttered piles of descramblers.
“They’re called black boxes,” Marbles explained. “Plug them into the outlet and you get every premium channel for zip.”
“Premium channels?”
“HBO, Showtime, Spice, pay-TV events—you know.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Christ, where you been for the last twenty-five years, Jackie?”
The lamp attached to Marbles’ skull followed Jack around the table like a spotlight.
“Here and there,” Tyrell said. “How ’bout you?”
“You might say I’ve gone into the entertainment business.”
Jack gave one of the boxes a closer look. “That the best you can do with your talents?”
“People on the up-and-up aren’t racing to hire fugitives with a generation of paper following them. Anyway it lets me stay on the move and keeps me in cash. Enough to eat, work on my projects.”
Jack liked the way Marbles said that, a man who still kept his real life hidden where no one could find it.
“I got lots of accounts,” Marbles continued, “don’t care where I work out of or what hours I keep, ’long as I make good on their orders. I got a new box I’m working on, lets you steal off the Internet.”
“I read about that,” said Jack.
“Pays well.”
“That’s what all this is about?”
“Times change,” Marbles said unapologetically. “You want your tech-ware updated, Jackie, you come to the right place. Otherwise …”
Jack laid his briefcase down just to Marbles’ right, unsnapped it, and lifted the top. The hundred-dollar bills stacked and wrapped neatly inside were caught in the spill of his beam.
Tyrell could see Marbles’ eyes bulge behind his thick glasses. “What the hell …”
“I’ve been busy the past twenty-five years.”
“Okay, you got my attention,” said Marbles.
“I need a wire man. Very elaborate setup. One-day gig.”
Marbles looked up, his light suddenly angled on Jack again, stinging his eyes. “Twenty-five years go by and all of a sudden you flipped your switch back on?”
“It got flipped back on for me. I bought into something, but that’s done and over now. There’s nothing holding me to them anymore, and four of them got dead for being disrespectful.”
That made Marbles straighten a little.
“You understand what I’m saying here, Marbles? I feel like the last twenty-five years never happened, like I’m picking up just where I left off, only this time I’m gonna make this country hurt in a big way. Where it counts. Make them stand up and take notice. Give them something they’ll never forget.”
“You expect me to just drop everything and come along?”
“Yup.”
Marbles picked up one of the black boxes and let it crash to the floor. “Just tell me what it is we’re going for. Tell me where we’re gonna lay this hurt.”
“A city,” Jackie Terror told him.
“A
city
?
”
“We’re going to take a whole fucking city hostage.”
B
laine lay on the porch of Buck Torrey’s stilt house, the crickets and night birds singing around him. He had come outside so the breeze could cool his body, which was drenched in sweat even now, the air like a sauna from dawn to dusk and, after dark, a steam room inside Buck’s stilt house. If his former sergeant major’s plan was to make him forget about his shoulder and hip by making him hurt everywhere else, it was working. They’d been at it for three weeks now.
Three weeks
…
But it felt like much longer. Blaine couldn’t recall a time when he’d ever been this sore. His early years of training were certainly worse in terms of duress, but he’d been decades younger, which made the pain easier to swallow. No reprieves from training due to injury or hurt at that level, and with good reason.
You’re in the jungle wounded, shot probably. Or maybe you got winged by a frag, or couldn’t dance clear after hearing the
click
of the mine you triggered. Alone with your pain for company and the enemy on your tail, closing fast. Stop and you die. Nobody surrendered in the jungles where Blaine had spent his formative years. The Special Forces training he’d endured was meant to build tolerance, as well as character. If you couldn’t take the pain in camp, you wouldn’t be able to take it with a bullet in your leg, or an artery doing its damnedest to bleed out while you humped across twenty miles of jungle.
The door creaked open and Buck Torrey joined Blaine on the porch, settling his bulky frame on a patch of dry wood, a pair of beer bottles in hand.
“Woulda brought you one, son, but I know you and booze ain’t exactly in bed together.”
Blaine propped himself up gingerly on his elbows. “We were once.”
“All of us were lots of things back then that fortunately got a way of changing, moving on. Life’s not much more than that, from where I’m sitting. Going from one place to another. Packing up. You know how you can tell when an old dog like me’s had enough?”
“No.”
“He stops
un
packing. Just leaves the pieces of his life in boxes, so they’ll be easier to move the next time.” Buck Torrey took a hefty swig from his bottle. “Trouble is, you can’t fit everything in boxes. Knew another guy never took nothing with him. Just bought everything new when he got where he was going, give himself a fresh start.”
“You’re talking about family, Buck.”
Torrey’s eyes turned to hot spheres of fire, hiding the wryness behind them.
“Sir,” Blaine corrected, as he rose to a sitting position. No longer did he need to hold on to the porch railing to manage the effort. He casually stretched his bad arm toward the rail now and put some weight on it. The shoulder took all he gave it, complaining with a little stab of pain but holding fast.
Blaine watched as Buck drained a hefty portion of the bottle in a single breath, his stilt house like a moist wood shroud behind him. There were three small rooms, with a gasoline generator out back for electricity and propane tanks to make hot water. A cramped bathroom featuring a toilet that took a half day to fill and a galley kitchen with a stove Buck almost never used. He cooked virtually every meal out here on an old, rusted gas grill. Many of those meals consisted of fresh fish dropped off every few days by local fishermen. Shrimp was a staple, along with snapper and small, spiny lobster-like creatures called crayfish. Blaine didn’t always like the taste of what came off Buck’s grill, but he was so hungry by the end of the day it didn’t seem to matter.
On a clear day Buck could glimpse a few of his neighbors’ comparable dwellings, stretching up to a half mile away. At night and on foggy days, he might have been the only person living on Condor Key, a few flickering lights the only hint of others in this waterbound neighborhood.
The residents were all like Buck in one way or another. People who had come here because there was no place else they especially liked, but who took care of each other nonetheless. There wasn’t a day went by that a neighbor didn’t come up in his or her skiff just to check on things. And Torrey had taken Blaine out on several similar sojourns three or four times.
Folks around here looked after each other but didn’t get in anyone’s way. And the few times a stray boater had wandered into their stretch of water, it was a race to see which resident could motor out the fastest to turn him around. There would probably never be a time when everyone got together, yet they were a community all the same.
“I’m talking about family, all right,” Buck was saying, the second bottle of beer cradled between his squat legs. “The one thing you were smart enough not to get yourself.”
“I never wanted to settle down.”
“You never wanted to give up being what I taught you to be. I see you on that dock three weeks ago from a distance, it was like ’69 all over again. From that far away I swear you hadn’t changed.”
“I’ve changed. You know that now.”
“Not enough to want that family.”
“No.”
“Not enough to want to hang up your guns and live off the world for a time instead of visa-versa.”
“It’s what I’ve got.”
“And you come down here looking for me to make sure you could keep it.” Buck went to work on his second beer, flipping off the top with a flick of his thumb as he squeezed the neck of the bottle. “Best thing I coulda done was send you on your way. Maybe told the sheriff not to bring you by in the first place. Shit, I thought about it. Figured I mighta been doing you a service.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Torrey leaned back against the stilt house. “’Cause I wanted it to be like the old days. ’Cause maybe I figure you’re the one who’s got things right and I oughta be out there with you.”
“So come with me when I’m ready to leave.”
Torrey smiled, but he didn’t look happy. “Can’t teach an old dog new tricks, son. You come down here for one purpose, I come down here for another. When I got your note, I was hoping it was from my daughter.”
“She ever visit?”
Torrey squeezed his beer bottle. “Never invited her. I haven’t seen her since I popped that general in the face. Busted his jaw, you know. He was drinking his supper through a straw for six weeks.”
“Well,” Blaine said, “that’s at least one new trick.”
B
laine stayed awake for a while after Buck went back inside. He moved his shoulder up and down, back and forth. Stood up, grabbed the railing, and put all his weight on his bad leg. There was no pain, not even a throb. He let go of the railing.
They had started the day after Blaine’s arrival, his khakis swapped for some old fatigues Buck insisted upon that made him hot but kept the bugs
from eating him alive. They took the skiff past all the stilt houses, into the shallow muck that made Blaine remember this was the Everglades. The thickness of the vines that seemed to grow out of the water itself varied by the amount of light they got.
“All right,” Sergeant Major Torrey ordered. “Climb out.”
Blaine slid out of the skiff without question. The voice was the same one he remembered from a generation before, just a little more rasp to it, born of a thousand cartons of cigarettes. Blaine’s boots touched the bottom only long enough for him to sink in up to his ankles.
“What now?” Blaine had asked eagerly.
“What now,
sir,”
Buck Torrey corrected. “Now I start paddling and you start walking.”
Blaine tried to budge his feet. “Walking?”
“You get a bullet in your hip or in your brain? Yeah, walking!”
Blaine pulled his good foot out first, felt it squishing around beneath him. He hesitated briefly before following with the second, finally gritted his teeth and lifted. His hip felt like someone was rubbing glass against it, but his foot broke free of the muck and sank back down. He stepped out with his good leg next and had repeated the process for ten steps each foot before the temptation to reach out for the skiff’s side got to be almost too much.
By the twentieth step, it was too much. He went to grab hold of the boat and got an oar cracked against his knuckles for the effort.
“I say it was time to take a break, son?”
“No.”
“No …”
“No, sir.”
“Keep walking.”
Blaine did as he was told. Occasionally he got lucky and the bottom hardened beneath him. But more often it stayed soft. Sometimes it swallowed his knees, taking every bit of strength and energy he had to negotiate his way through it. His bad hip felt numb by the time Sergeant Major Buck Torrey let him lean into the skiff for some water out of an ancient canteen, but it wasn’t dragging any more than his good one.
“That’s enough,” Torrey had said, and snatched the canteen from his grasp.
“How far’d we go?”
“Well, let’s see.” Torrey turned around and gazed back dramatically, pointing his finger. “We left from there and now we’re here. That far enough for you?”
“Yup.”
“Good, son, ’cause now we’re gonna walk back.”
“You mean
I’m
gonna walk back.”
Torrey snarled and hurled himself over the skiff’s side.
“That’s not necessary, sir.”
“Yeah, old dog, it is, ’cause I want you to tow the skiff back with you this time.”
It had been a long time since Blaine had taken this much pain willingly, but he liked it. Liked the way his dead-tired legs were dragging, each step feeling like his last, only to give way to the next.
The mosquitoes came out just after they started back, and Blaine had only his bad arm to keep them off. Torrey trudged along next to him, smiling as McCracken swatted at them, striking mostly air. The sergeant major seemed especially to enjoy when Blaine missed a bug and slapped himself hard instead, and that made Blaine swat even harder.
“Okay, switch,” Torrey ordered, holding up.
Blaine figured Buck meant he was going to take the skiff now for a turn and extended the line toward him.
Torrey’s eyes narrowed. “You fuckin’ crazy, boy?”
“I thought—”
“No, you didn’t think none. If you’d’ve thought, you’d know I got me something more important to carry.”
He reached into the skiff, which was still in Blaine’s hold, and fished a beer from his cooler. Popped the top off the bottle with a trademark flick of his thumb.
“See. Now,
switch
!
”
Blaine’s left arm had seemed a foot shorter than the right for months now. The wound from the Monument had healed clean, the doctors insisted, but left what they called adhesions—scars deep inside that were thicker and uglier than the single one that remained on the outside of his shoulder. Stretching them religiously would give him back his mobility, at least that dreaded ninety-five percent. Give it time, they’d said.
Blaine gave it Buck Torrey instead. The weight of the skiff dragging against the soupy current pushed his shoulder to its limits. He kept the arm crimped to keep the pressure off it at first, then gradually straightened it. The pain had started out bad and didn’t get much better. But Blaine realized it wasn’t a pain he should fear; it was like the throbbing ache that came with overexertion. He wasn’t hurting himself more and began to realize that eventually he wouldn’t hurt at all.
Buck Torrey walked ahead of him, coaxing him on the whole time. Despite the pain, the exhaustion that had long ago set in, and the bugs that were subletting space in his close-cropped beard, Blaine felt invigorated; even euphoric. The muck beneath him didn’t feel as thick anymore. His feet churned through it like a plow, shoving it from his path. The sweat poured off him into the steamy water; even the snakes moved aside from his determined rush. Torrey set a faster pace, and Blaine resolved not to drop behind, dragged the skiff harder to keep up. His chest ached. His breath heaved.
He felt wonderful.
They stopped in almost the very place they had started, where the water level deepened and dropped, just beyond view of the stilt houses in Buck Torrey’s neighborhood. Blaine found himself gasping.
“Not bad, son,” the sergeant major said, climbing agilely back into the skiff. His forearms looked like slabs of flesh-tinted steel. “Not bad at all.”
Blaine moved to follow him.
“The fuck you think you’re doing? I don’t remember saying we were finished.”
“We’re not finished?”
“I am, son. Think I’ll rest a mite, take me a snooze. You remember the way home?”
“I can find it.”
Buck Torrey stretched out inside the skiff, head resting against the padded seat. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he said, and tipped the bill of his cap low over his eyes.
Blaine knotted the line under his arms and around his chest, dragged it till they reached the deep water, and then began swimming forward, with the skiffs dead weight inching along behind him.
“I’m hungry, boy,” Buck Torrey called to him. “Can’t you go no faster?”