‘What do you figure? Two weeks, maybe three, and then no more Angelo.’
‘What if somebody -‘
‘Not much chance of that,’ Tucker said, not bothering to look. ‘Too shallow for a sailboat to risk coming in, and motorboats don’t bother much. There’s a nice wide channel half a mile south, fishing’s better there, they say. I guess the crabbers don’t like it here either.’
Piaggi had trouble looking away, though his stomach had already turned over once. The Chesapeake Bay blue crabs, with their claws, were dismantling the body already softened by warm water and bacteria, one little pinch at a time, tearing with their claws, picking up the pieces with smaller pincers, feeding them into their strangely alien mouths. He’d wondered if there would still be a face there, eyes to stare up at a world left behind, but crabs covered it, and somehow it seemed likely that the eyes had been the first things to go. The frightening part, of course, was that if one man could die this way, so could another, and even though Angelo had already been dead, somehow Piaggi was sure that being disposed of this way was worse than mere death. He would have regretted Angelo’s death, except that it was business, and … Angelo had deserved it. It was a shame, in a way, that his gruesome fate had to be kept a secret, but that was business, too. That was how you kept the cops from finding out. Hard to prove murder without a body, and here they had accidentally found a way to conceal a number of murders. The only problem was getting the bodies here – and not letting others know of the method of disposal, because people talk. Tony Piaggi told himself, as Angelo had talked. A good thing that Henry had found out about that.
‘How ’bout crab cakes when we get back to town?’ Eddie Morello asked with a laugh, just to see if he could make Tony puke.
‘Let’s get the fuck outa here,’ Piaggi replied quietly, settling into his seat. Tucker took the engine out of idle and picked his way out of the tidal marsh, back into the Bay.
Piaggi took a minute or two to get the sight out of his mind, hoping that he could forget the horror of it and remember only the efficiency of their disposal method. After all, they might be using it again. Maybe after a few hours he’d see humor in it, Tony thought, looking at the cooler. Under the fifteen or so cans of National Bohemian was a layer of ice, under which were twenty sealed bags of heroin. In the unlikely event that anyone stopped them, it was unlikely that they’d look farther than the beer, the real fuel for Bay-boaters. Tucker drove the boat north, and the others laid out their fishing rods as though they were trying to find a good place to harvest a few rockfish from the Chesapeake.
‘Fishing in reverse,’ Morello said after a moment, then he laughed loudly enough that Piaggi joined in.
‘Toss me a beer!’ Tony commanded between laughs. He was a ‘made man,’ after all, and deserved respect.
‘Idiots,’ Kelly said quietly to himself. That eighteen-footer was going too fast, too close to other fishing boats. It could catch a few lines, and certainly would throw a wake sure to disturb other craft. That was bad sea manners, something Kelly was always careful to observe. It was just too easy to – hell, it wasn’t even hard enough to be ‘easy.’ All you had to do was buy a boat and you had the right to sail her around. No tests, no nothing. Kelly found Rosen’s 7 x 50 binoculars and focused them on the boat that was coming close aboard. Three assholes, one of them holding up a can of beer in mock salute.
‘Bear off, dickhead,’ he whispered to himself. The jerks in a boat, drinking beer, probably half-potted already, not even eleven o’clock yet. He gave them a good look, and was vaguely grateful that they passed no closer than fifty yards. He caught the name: Henry’s Eighth. If he saw that name again, Kelly told himself, he’d remember to keep clear.
‘I got one!’ Sarah called.
“Heads up, we got a big wake coming in from starboard!’ It arrived a minute later, causing the big Hatteras to rock twenty degrees left and right of vertical.
‘That,’ Kelly said, looking down at the other three, ‘is what I mean by bad sea manners!’
‘Aye aye!’ Sam called back.
‘I’ve still got him,’ Sarah said. She worked the fish in, Kelly saw, with consummate skill. ‘Pretty big, too!’
Sam got the net and leaned over the side. A moment later he stood back up. The net contained a struggling rockfish, maybe twelve or fourteen pounds. He dumped the net in a water-filled box in which the fish could wait to die. It seemed cruel to Kelly, but it was only a fish, and he’d seen worse things than that.
Pam started squealing a moment later as her line went taut. Sarah put her rod in its holder and started coaching her. Kelly watched. The friendship between Pam and Sarah was as remarkable as that between himself and the girl. Perhaps Sarah was taking the place of the mother who had been lacking in affection, or whatever Pam’s mother had lacked. Regardless, Pam was responding well to the advice and counsel of her new friend. Kelly watched with a smile that Sam caught and returned. Pam was new at this, tripping twice as she walked the fish around. Again Sam did the honors with the net, this time recovering an eight-pound blue.
‘Toss it back,’ Kelly advised. ‘They don’t taste worth a damn!’
Sarah looked up. ‘Throw back her first fish? What are you, a Nazi? You have any lemon at your place, John?’
‘Yeah, why?’
‘I’ll show you what you can do with a bluefish, that’s why.’ She whispered something to Pam that evoked a laugh. The blue went into the same tank, and Kelly wondered how it and the rock would get along.
Memorial Day, Dutch Maxwell thought, alighting from his official car at Arlington National Cemetery. To many just a time for a five-hundred-mile auto race in Indianapolis, or a day off, or the traditional start of the summer beach season, as testified to by the relative lack of auto traffic in Washington. But not to him, and not to his fellows. This was their day, a time to remember fallen comrades while others attended to other things both more and less personal. Admiral Podulski got out with him, and the two walked slowly and out of step, as admirals do. Casimir’s son, Lieutenant (junior grade) Stanislas Podulski, was not here, and probably never would be. His A-4 had been blotted from the sky by a surface-to-air missile, the reports had told them, nearly a direct hit. The young pilot had been too distracted to notice until perhaps the last second, when his voice had spoken its last epithet of disgust over the ‘guard’ channel. Perhaps one of the bombs he’d been carrying had gone off sympathetically. In any case, the small attack-bomber had dissolved into a greasy cloud of black and yellow, leaving little behind; and besides, the enemy wasn’t all that fastidious about respecting the remains of fallen aviators. And so the son of a brave man had been denied his resting place with comrades. It wasn’t something that Cas spoke about. Podulski kept such feelings inside.
Rear Admiral James Greer was at his place, as he’d been for the previous two years, about fifty yards from the paved driveway, setting flowers next to the flag at the headstone of his son.
‘James?’ Maxwell said. The younger man turned and saluted, wanting to smile in gratitude for their friendship on a day like this, but not quite doing so. All three wore their navy-blue uniforms because they carried with them a proper sort of solemnity. Their gold-braided sleeves glistened in the sun. Without a spoken word, all three men lined up to face the headstone of Robert White Greer, First Lieutenant, United States Marine Corps. They saluted smartly, each remembering a young man whom they had bounced on their knees, who had ridden his bike at Naval Station Norfolk and Naval Air Station Jacksonville with Cas’s son, and Dutch’s. Who had grown strong and proud, meeting his father’s ships when they’d returned to port, and talked only about following in his father’s footsteps, but not too closely, and whose luck had proven insufficient to the moment, fifty miles south-west of Danang. It was the curse of their profession, each knew but never said, that their sons were drawn to it also, partly from reverence for what their fathers were, partly from a love of country imparted by each to each, most of all from a love of their fellow man. As each of the men standing there had taken his chances, so had Bobby Greer and Stas Podulski taken theirs. It was just that luck had not smiled on two of the three sons.