We could do worse, Ben kept saying—when who to lease to had never been Ben’s department, just which draws to lease and which to work—but he couldn’t say Ben was wrong, except today it came to him that they’d blown near two months here, and they only now got Trinidadfree. He and Ben could go ahead and make a run—
Yet here they both were, with karma piling up with the pair who’d stayed by them. He couldn’t figure how he’d gotten into this, or when it had gotten too late—but when the cops had raided them and thrown Meg and Sal’s stuff all over, that had been a real bad time to tell them shove off and forget it—
It seemed a worse time this morning, with their account bleeding money and him into Meg for a beer. He knew he ought to say, coldly as he could: Meg, Sal, don’t you buy me a damn other drink this morning, because you’re not getting what you’re after, and you’re wasting your money on what isn’t going to come through—
But Meg set the mug down in front of him, patted him on the shoulder and sank into the chair beside him. “We got an idea, Bird. You and Sal go out in Trinidad. Ben and I stay here to keep that application alive and take care of problems—we get us a little finance, put what Sal and I got in the pot with yours—make sense?”
“I got to say—” was as far as he got toward a desperate I don’t think this is a good idea, and I can’t take your money—
—when a familiar step came up behind him and a hand slapped a paper down in front of him.
His eyes must be going. For a moment it failed to make sense as what it was. A piece of real paper. With official print.
And Ben landing in the chair on his other side, grabbing his arm, shaking him and saying, “We got it! We got it, Bird!”
“The ship?” Of a sudden he knew it was a ship title. He’d handled Trinidad’s—years ago, before he put it in the bank vault. “It says Two-Two-Ten-Charlie. That’s not the number…”
“Same ship. Same ship with the blown tanks. They renumbered it. Like she was new. New start. Everything. We can sell her or we can fix her. We got her, Bird!”
He felt a little dizzy. He took a drink of the beer. Meg grabbed his arm from the other side. Sal was on her feet hugging Ben, and Ben was ordering drinks.
“Wait a minute!” he said, “wait a minute! Free and clear?”
“Free and clear,” Ben said. “We got a few charges to pay, but hell, we got the collateral, now!”
“What charges?”
“We got—8, 9 k to pay… plus the dockage.”
“Nine thousand!”
“Administrative. It’s nothing, Bird,— nothing, against the value of that ship. Figure it! It’s ours!”
“I don’t believe it.”
Ben pointed on the paper, where it said: joint ownership, and both their names. That wasn’t the terms of the split they’d always had, but, hell, he thought, Ben had hunted down the forms, Ben had done the legwork, Ben had pushed the thing when he never thought it would happen.
Mike came over, Mike heard how it was, and gave them a round of drinks on the house—The Hole never did that. But Mike did now.
They had more than was good for them.
Which was when Ben said how he’d heard Dekker was going to be in hospital a long, long time. How he’d gotten his license pulled.
Brain damage, Ben said.
“Shit,” he said, suddenly sick at the stomach.
“Hey, I told you,” Ben said. “Dekker’s a certified mental case.”
“They pull him all the way?” Sal asked.
Ben shrugged. “Close as makes no difference, ifhe gets re-certified there’s no way they give him a class 1. D3, maybe, but no way he can ever be primary pilot. Ship’s ours, on account of it was a tumbling wreck when we got it, and just because he was inside it is im-ma-terial. He was just baggage. He couldn’t stop it and he was in no shape to help himself.”
Poor guy, he thought.
“Fact is,” Ben said, “we stillgot a stack of bills against his account. And if he’s gone for a long walk, he doesn’t need the money: they’ll just ship him out to the motherwell. I got an attachment on his bank account.”
That was too much. “Now, wait a minute, Ben, we gotthe ship.”
“And the repair bills. And our fuel and our dock time—and itsdock time, don’t forget that. They’ll stick us with all those bills.”
Unpleasant thought. “And the clean-up inside,” he said. “God, have you got any figure what that’s going to cost?”
“I dunno,” Ben said. “But we can get our expenses back.”
He was disgusted with himself, being happy to hear that. Maybe there was a lot of disgust at the table. Meg and Sal had gotten real quiet.
But Ben pulled out his pocket slate and started running figures. “What we can do, we do the repairs ourselves, we use the reserve cash—”
“Whoa, wait a minute. That’s our private insurance fund.”
“You don’t have to think like that now. That shipout there’s our insurance fund. We got flexible capital now, Bird, sure we want a reserve, but we got to get that thing in running order. We risk it now, while it’s in this shape; we don’t lease Trinidadthis run, we can do that work in a month if we push it, and we build back our fund. It’ll work.”
“Hell,” he said, “I don’t know. This poor guy—”
“It’s not our problem,” Ben said.
“Ben…”
Ben gave him a bewildered look.
“We don’t take anything more from that guy. That’s flat. No more charges against him.”
Ben didn’t say anything for a moment. Ben looked as if he were worried about the objection, or confused. Finally: “Yeah, well, all right. But we’re talking about a guy that may not make it out of the psych ward.”
“If he does.”
“Yeah, if he does, fine. So we’re all right, so we collect it and if he gets out we can stand him a stake. If not, who cares?” Excitement got the better of him, he broke out in a grin and slapped Bird on the shoulder. “We got it, Bird, we got it, we got it made.”
The guys went off to somewhere, talking about checking out prices on tanks, happy, mostly—they all should be. Everything had worked.
But Meg sat there with Sal turning her glass in a pointless circle and scared for a moment that didn’t clearly make sense. She wasn’t superstitious, as a rule. Maybe she’d gotten to distrust a winning hand: it always seemed to be the big breaks that stung you, the ones that made you lose your sense of reality and pushed you to commit to big mistakes—like the break that had had her believing that sumbitch back at Sol.
“No damn luck at all,” she said. “Poor bastard’s had all up and down, isn’t he? Good old MamBitch. Screwed him good.”
“Yeah,” Sal said. “Didn’t Mitch say?”
“Suppose he iscrazy?”
“Ben swears he is.”
“Brut bad luck for him.”
“Company’d only get that ship. That’s who we’re screwing.”
“That’s the truth.”
“Bet MamBitch passes a reg real fast says this can’t happen again. Bet MamBitch never severely figured somebody’d get through the shitwork and file all those forms. They don’t count on us knowing how.”