faded almost to gray, the pants something that looked like bluejeans. Gunbelts crisscrossed
his hips, but the loops were almost all empty. The holsters held guns that looked
like .45s—but .45s of an incredibly antique vintage. The smooth wood of their handgrips
seemed to glow with their own inner light.
Eddie, who didn’t know he had any intention of speak- ing—anything to say—heard
himself saying something never- theless. “Are you a ghost?”
“Not yet,” the man with the guns croaked. “The devil-weed. Cocaine. Whatever you call it.
Take off your shirt.”
“Your arms—” Eddie had seen them. The arms of the man who looked like the extravagant
sort of gunslinger one would only see in a spaghetti western were glowing with lines of
bright, baleful red. Eddie knew well enough what lines like that meant. They meant
blood-poisoning. They meant the devil was doing more than breathing up your ass; he was
already crawling up the sewers that led to your pumps.
“Never mind my fucking arms!” the pallid apparition told him. “Take off your shirt and get rid of it!”
He heard waves; he heard the lonely hoot of a wind that knew no obstruction; he saw this
mad dying man and nothing else but desolation; yet from behind him he heard the
mur- muring voices of deplaning passengers and a steady muffled pounding.
“Mr. Dean!” That voice, he thought, is in another world. Not really doubting it; just trying to pound it through his head the way you’d pound a nail through a thick piece of mahogany.
“You’ll really have to—”
“You can leave it, pick it up later,” the gunslinger croaked. “Gods, don’t you understand I have to talk here? It hurts! And there is no time, you idiot!”
There were men Eddie would have killed for using such a word . . . but he had an idea that
he might have a job killing this man, even though the man looked like killing might do him
good.
Yet he sensed the truth in those blue eyes; all questions were canceled in their mad glare.
Eddie began to unbutton his shirt. His first impulse was to simply tear it off, like Clark
Kent while Lois Lane was tied to a railroad track or something, but that was no good in real
life; sooner or later you had to explain those missing buttons. So he slipped them through
the loops while the pounding behind him went on.
He yanked the shirt out of his jeans, pulled it off, and dropped it, revealing the strapping
tape across his chest. He looked like a man in the last stages of recovery from badly
fractured ribs.
He snapped a glance behind him and saw an open door … its bottom jamb had dragged a
fan shape in the gray grit of the beach when someone—the dying man, presumably—had
opened it. Through the doorway he saw the first-class head, the basin, the mirror. . . and in
it his own desperate face, black hair spilled across his brow and over his hazel eyes. In the
background he saw the gunslinger, the beach, and soaring seabirds that screeched and
squabbled over God knew what.
He pawed at the tape, wondering how to start, how to find a loose end, and a dazed sort of
hopelessness settled over him. This was the way a deer or a rabbit must feel when it got
halfway across a country road and turned its head only to be fixated by the oncoming glare
of headlights.
It had taken William Wilson, the man whose name Poe had made famous, twenty minutes
to strap him up. They would have the door to the first-class bathroom open in five, seven at
most.
“I can’t get this shit off,” he told the swaying man in front of him. “I don’t know who you are or where I am, but I’m telling you there’s too much tape and too little time.”
14
Deere, the co-pilot, suggested Captain McDonald ought to lay off pounding on the door when McDonald, in his frustration at 3A’s lack of response, began to do so.
“Where’s he going to go?” Deere asked. “What’s he going to do? Flush himself down the John? He’s too big.”
“But if he’s carrying—” McDonald began.
Deere, who had himself used cocaine on more than a few occasions, said: “If he’s carrying,
he’s carrying heavy. He can’t get rid of it.”
“Turn off the water,” McDonald snapped suddenly.
“Already have,” the navigator (who had also tooted more than his flute on occasion) said.
“But I don’t think it matters. You can dissolve what goes into the holding tanks but you
can’t make it not there.” They were clustered around the bathroom door, with its
OCCUPIED sign glowing jeerily, all of them speaking in low tones. “The DEA guys drain
it, draw off a sample, and the guy’s hung.”
“He could always say someone came in before him and dumped it,” McDonald replied.
His voice was gaining a raw edge. He didn’t want to be talking about this; he wanted to be
doing something about it, even though he was acutely aware that the geese were still filing
out, many looking with more than ordinary curiosity at the flight-deck crew and
steward- esses gathered around the bathroom door. For their part, the crew were acutely
aware that an act that was—well, overly overt—could provoke the terrorist boogeyman
that now lurked in the back of every air-traveler’s mind. McDonald knew his navigator and
flight engineer were right, he knew that the stuff was apt to be in plastic bags with the
scuzzball’s prints on them, and yet he felt alarm bells going off in his mind. Something was
not right about this. Something inside of him kept screaming Fast one! Fast one! as if the fellow from 3A were a riverboat gambler with palmed aces he was all ready to play.
“He’s not trying to flush the John,” Susy Douglas said. “He’s not even trying to run the basin faucets. We’d hear them sucking air if he was. I hear something, but—”
“Leave,” McDonald said curtly. His eyes flicked to Jane Doming. “You too. We’ll take care of this.”
Jane turned to go, cheeks burning.
Susy said quietly: “Jane bird-dogged him and I spotted the bulges under his shirt. I think
we’ll stay, Captain McDon- ald. If you want to bring charges of insubordination, you can.
But I want you to remember that you may be raping the hell out of what could be a really
big DEA bust.”
Their eyes locked, flint sparking off steel.
Susy said, “I’ve flown with you seventy, eighty times, Mac. I’m trying to be your friend.”
McDonald looked at her a moment longer, then nodded. “Stay, then. But I want both of
you back a step toward the cockpit.”
He stood on his toes, looked back, and saw the end of the line now just emerging from
tourist class into business. Two minutes, maybe three.
He turned to the gate agent at the mouth of the hatch, who was watching them closely. He
must have sensed some sort of problem, because he had unholstered his walkie-talkie and
was holding it in his hand.
“Tell him I want customs agents up here,” McDonald said quietly to the navigator. “Three or four. Armed. Now.”
The navigator made his way through the line of pas- sengers, excusing himself with an
easy grin, and spoke quietly to the gate agent, who raised his walkie-talkie to his mouth and
spoke quietly into it.
McDonald—who had never put anything stronger than aspirin into his system in his entire
life and that only rarely— turned to Deere. His lips were pressed into a thin white line like
a scar.
“As soon as the last of the passengers are off, we’re break- ing that shithouse door open,” he said. “I don’t care if Cus- toms is here or not. Do you understand?”
“Roger,” Deere said, and watched the tail of the line make its way into first class.
15
“Get my knife,” the gunslinger said. “It’s in my purse.”
He gestured toward a cracked leather bag lying on the sand. It looked more like a big
packsack than a purse, the kind of thing you expected to see hippies carrying as they made
their way along the Appalachian Trail, getting high on nature (and maybe a bomber joint
every now and then), except this looked like the real thing, not just a prop for some
airhead’s self-image; something that had done years and years of hard— maybe
desperate—travelling.
Gestured, but did not point. Couldn’t point. Eddie realized why the man had a swatch of
dirty shirting wrapped around his right hand: some of his fingers were gone.
“Get it,” he said. “Cut through the tape. Try not to cut yourself. It’s easy to do. You’ll have to be careful, but you’ll have to move fast just the same. There isn’t much time.”
“I know that,” Eddie said, and knelt on the sand. None of this was real. That was it, that was the answer. As Henry Dean, the great sage and eminent junkie would have put