“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.”
“Ah, but they paid off. That proves MamBitch is honest, doesn’t it? Then she’ll pass her rule.”
Sal gnawed her lip, tilted her head to one side, a clash of metal-clipped braids. “That gives Mama credit for brains. That’s never been proved.”
“That’s the truth. True here, true everywhere.”
Clink of glasses.
“Here’s to one more poor bastard,” Sal said. “Up the corp’s.”
“Yo,” Meg said. “Here’s to regulations.”
“Stupidity,” Sal said.
“Inefficiency.”
“Venality.”
“Is that a division?”
“Right under the corp-rat president.”
Clink. “Here’s to somebody Responsible.”
“Must be on Mars.”
“Sure ain’t here.”
A quiet snort. And a look in Sal’s eyes that was dead serious.
“Screwed,” Sal said.
“Yeah,” Meg said, “but what’s new? Maybe he’ll get lucky. Maybe they’ll ship him back to his zone, let him re-train.”
“Lay any bets? He could have friendsthere.”
“No takers,” Meg said, and stirred a water-ring with her finger.
Sal said: “Worth a nudge.”
Meg looked at her then, and Sal made a little shrug, gave her a lift of the brows with this smug look in her eye.
“You let it alone, you and your friends.”
“No worry, Kady.”
“Yeah.” Cold as ice, Sal was; but sometimes you got this feeling she was thinking of something that risked her neck and she was breathing it in like an oxygen high. Sal was a Shepherd’s daughter. Sal was also an orphan—in one deep dive into the Well.
That was worth remembering, too.
CHAPTER 9
THEY’D asked his shoe size at breakfast. Now they turned him out of bed, gave him underwear and socks that came folded, likewise a cheap little Personals kit, a pair of brand new boots (black) and coveralls (blue) with fold-marks all over, so he looked like a mental case. They let him shave himself this time, but his hair hung around his ears and down into his collar: he didn’t even remember the last time Cory had cut it. He just stood there in front of the mirror staring at a hollow-cheeked, wild-eyed stranger and didn’t understand what Paul Dekker had to do with this gaunt crazy person. He didn’t remember that small white scar on his temple, didn’t understand how it could have healed so far without him ever knowing he’d gotten it… Tommy took him gently by the arm—he liked Tommy more than Alvie. Alvie just did his job; Tommy cared. Tommy always gave him that little moment to get his balance, that moment to figure out that he had to do what they wanted, because Tommy had his orders, but Tommy was never rough with him, and Tommy guided him now with a real concern for his comfort.