66

The Swift Trench

A faint chill mist has descended over the party of men, tiny droplets of moisture touching skin, hair, fabric, plastics, beading on the oiled metal surfaces, feeding foliage, dropping into the floodwater beneath the boats. Skinheads, most of them.

Two boats. The one in front a sleek fiber-glass V, and the man in the prow signals. A chopping motion with the hand. The one seated behind him turns and blinks his flashlight once, a long, bright flash at the larger boat behind them. Five men. Equipment.

Both engines stop in a dying purr. Jesus SanDiego, in the prow of the V, absorbs the noises into the pores of his skin. Offended by their pathetic performance. What a joke, these loud, incompetent assholes are. He shrugs it off. No problem. He hears fifty sounds in the unquiet silence.

They are floating in the mouth of the Swift Trench, a black and oily pipeline full of goosenecks and elbow joints that curves up from New Madrid past the Clearwater Trench, forking out toward Barne's Ridge and St. James's Bayou. They're maybe a couple of miles from their destination if they were going in on a straight shot. They're not. They are snaking in from the southwest, out of the cover of a long, thick treeline that runs from the set-back levee clean to the trench itself.

The boats have come upstream from Clearwater, staying west of the levees, running as silently as they could. No lights. One long blink for stop. Noise for go. The V is packed and muffled down. The thirty-footer has a relatively quiet 120-horse on her.

Sandy sniffs the wet night air, wormy and rank, listening to a truck or car rattling across the Kielheimer Bridge, moving up over the levee. He turns, nods, and the kid behind him throttles forward, and the low, throaty 120 rumbles like the glass-packs in his uncle's antique Fairlane, as it coughs into the black wake of churning water they leave behind.

It goes back to way before Farmington, this thing that made Sandy bad. The drugs that burnt him out were what the doctors blamed everything on, but truth be told they only heightened what was already there, twisted and dark, inside a man whose only secret wish had been a hard, unswervingly pernicious death dream. When a man can kill and get away with it—hell, be praised for it—well, then, chief, why not do it? It feels so good and you know what they say ... nobody stops. The people he works for treasure him for what he is.

The man in the prow of the V feels the chill spit hit him lightly in the face like a wet kiss, and his mind wanders back into a fantasy about guns.

Sandy loves guns. Somewhere under all this water old shooter Ray has got him a case or two of Alpha Kilos: sweet, neat, wiped, and piped. Custom suppressors. Assault rifles that have been combat proven in every conceivable terrain. Bitchin’ fine cap-crackers that SanDiego can almost taste, hot and sweet like physical desire. Free for the taking. Ray sure can't use them.

Old Ray will have them beautifully turned, fitted to a fine hello, packed like the Hope diamond, and hidden someplace real dumb. Mad Man Meara, a thousand times crazier than SanDiego, so fucking stupid in an age when even the most inexperienced gunrunner knows you use Ma Bell's landlines, only Ray still makes home deliveries! Begs to be taken off. Aches to be ripped.

Jesus is powerfully built, black silk bandanna over skinhead top and whitewalls, rat down the back, black and silver-flecked muscle shirt, red rag armband with his animal count, bat-belt, chute pants, 14E felony flyers, loyalties tattooed on his biceps, emotions on his knuckles. Thickly muscled arms cradling a Ray Meara speciall, as he prays for a night game.

They reach the willows and he fast-forwards his fantasy to the moment where he asks Ray where the guns are hidden. Meara starts to wise off and he sees himself jamming steel in the asshole's mouth, like a big, hard dick. Meara tastes 3-in-1 oil and his own blood. Sandy busts out a few of his teeth with the gun barrel. Lets him eye the death tube.

Perfect night. Almost no moon, and this is the last night they will work in here. The honcho found what he wanted, but they will go in this final time.

The guys with him are wussies. He smiles, wishing he could unleash a burst and watch three or four guys dive like fucking blue marlin. It breaks him up thinking about them diving overboard into eight or nine feet of muddy water. Four cartoon belly-floppers. Wussy assholes.

He chops and the kid stops, blinks, the pontoon boat throttles down and the two boats ease through the trees. On the other side of the willows the water is like four football fields of black glass stretched two by two, end to end. Perfectly still. No wind. The mist is diminishing. Somebody else drives over the Kielheimer. The muffled engines will carry a mile or two out here. He waits for the vehicle to pass.

Water sounds. Fucking frogs. “Do it,” he says, and the kid scoots them out across the glass, through Meara's northwest ground and into the woods. The 120 rumbles, penetrates the edge of woods, he motions for both boats to kill their engines. Behind him the big pontoon boat rides treacherously low in the black water.