“Not hardly,” Andy said. “Trader can’t tell the truth. So he couldn’t possibly be Trooper Truth, now could he?”
“You’re probably right.” Macovich blew out a cloud of smoke. “You also right about us being short of pilots.”
“Why do they keep quitting?” Andy wanted to know.
Macovich decided he had said enough. He was already in trouble with the First Family. No point in making matters worse, and he was worried that Andy might prove to be a threat to him. That white boy sure was smart–a lot smarter than Macovich. Andy didn’t even have to think hard about anything before he made a comment, and sometimes he used words that Macovich didn’t know.
“So, I bet when you was in school, you was one of those bookworms,” Macovich said as envy crept into his tone and compelled him to find a way to put Andy down. “Bet you lived in the library and all you did was study.”
“Hell, no. I never studied,” Andy said, not adding that he had sailed through college in three years and loved learning so much that he never considered his school-work studying. “All I wanted to do was get out and get on with things.”
“Yeah, no shit.” The cloud of smoke nodded.
Machovich had suffered through one year of a technical college where he grew to strongly resent his father’s ambition that his eldest son would one day hold down a respectable job at Ethyl Corporation, making solvents. Macovich moved out of the house his freshman year and joined the Army, where he learned to fly helicopters, and then moved on to law enforcement. A couple months back, he gave his father a framed autographed picture of the First Family, just to rub it in a little bit. Mrs. Crimm had written a nice personal inscription on it that said, “First Lady Maude Crimm.”
A cigarette butt sailed in a perfect arc and landed on the pavement, where it glowered like an angry eye.
“All I gotta do is say one word to the guv about you flying as my co-pilot and he take care of you,” Macovich bragged without the slightest intention of facilitating helicopter flying or anything else for Andy–except trouble, maybe. “That’s assuming he don’t remember me. Now if that pool shark daughter decides to make a fuss, then I might be best off speaking to him another time. Wooo, I’d better light up quick before they come out.”
For a brief instant, the smoke cleared enough for Andy to remember that Thorlo Macovich was the biggest black male he had ever met.
“Now, it ain’t the guv who mind people smoking.” Macovich lit another menthol cigarette. “But the First Lady–wooo.”The smoke shook its head.” ‘Member that interview she did in the paper the other Sunday on tertiary smoke? I mean, how?” The cloud of smoke went on and on. “What? I inhale, then I blow it in your mouth, then you hurry and locate a third party and blow it in their mouth?”
“You’d better blow it somewhere quick,” Andy said as he worked out a plan. “Here they come.”
Ten
The most malignant smoke in Virginia was not generated by Salem Lights but by a highway pirate named Smoke, who had been consummately evil from birth. His lengthy rap sheet of crimes as a juvenile ranged from truancy to setting cats on fire to malicious wounding and homicide. Although he had finally been brought to justice in Virginia several years earlier, he had managed to break out of a maximum-security prison by forming a noose of sheets and pretending to hang himself from his stainless steel bed.
When prison guard A. P. Pinn noticed Smoke slumped over on the floor, a noose around his neck, bug-eyed with his tongue protruding, Pinn threw open the cell door and rushed inside to see if the inmate might still be alive. Smoke was, and he jumped up and smashed a food tray against Pinn’s head. Then Smoke quickly dressed in Pinn’s uniform and sunglasses and walked out of the penitentiary without detection. Pinn had gone on to write a book about his ordeal and published it himself. Betrayed had not sold very well, and Pinn turned to hosting a local cable show called Head to Head with Pinn.