“My brother Pete and I,” he said, “we’ve been making these flights over to the States, from Port Elgin. We were flying at night.”
“We know that part of it,” I said. “You find an empty airstrip in Michigan, turn on the ground lights from your cockpit.”
“The PCL, yeah. Pilot-controlled lighting.”
“That’s how you deliver a whole planeload of marijuana across the border, without anybody catching you.”
He just looked at me.
“We’re not the police,” I said. “We don’t care at this point. Please, continue what you were saying.”
“Yes, it’s pot,” he said. “Not hard drugs. Not even an addictive drug at all, if you want to get technical. Way less dangerous than tobacco or alcohol.”
He raised his glass to emphasize that last point. I didn’t feel like hearing the whole extended argument again, so I just waved him on.
“We were doing it for the money, I’ll give you that much. These growers in Canada, they can make a lot of money moving it over to the States, and we get a good cut of that. Even though it’s a pretty easy flight. Just fly low, right over the water. Light up and land. They’re waiting right there, unload, boom, you’re done. Back in the air in ten minutes. Fly back home. It was actually kind of an adrenaline rush. I really enjoyed it, I admit. Until the one night I landed and the wrong people were there waiting for me.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “That was you? Earlier this summer?”
“That was me, yes. I landed and there were these two guys there, with guns. I told you, I hate guns. But they pointed them at me and they told me I would be working for a new organization now. Same schedule, same pay. Everything nice and friendly, they said. Which would have sounded a little better if they didn’t have guns pointed in my face. Then they made me help unload the cargo. When I was going to their truck, I could see my regular contacts handcuffed to the fence. They were alive, at least. I mean, nobody got killed that time, right? That should have been enough of a warning.”
“Who were these guys who hijacked the cargo?”
“They weren’t exactly wearing name tags. But they said they were working for a man named Corvo.”
“Corvo,” I said, looking over at Lou. He shook his head. The name was just as new to him.
“I think they were from Chicago,” Perry said, “if I know my American accents. But whatever. I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned, that was my last flight. I tried to convince Pete of that, too. But, well, he wasn’t there with me when the men with guns showed up, first of all. And second of all, he always was a little more crazy than me.”
“Was he doing the flights all along?”
“We both were, yeah. Mostly me, because I had a lot more hours in the air and visual flying by night can be a little tricky. But once he got his license, I started bringing him along once in a while. I figured he could start spelling me if I didn’t want to make a run, and hell, he could start making some money, too. He’d already done like three or four solo flights by the time this happened. I told him, hey, that’s it for us, we’re done. No sense getting killed over it. But then when Harry and Jo kept calling…”
“Those are the Kaisers you’re talking about,” I said. “Harry and Josephine Kaiser.”
“To tell you the truth, I never did hear their last name. They weren’t calling us directly, they were calling the growers and then they’d put the product together and they’d say like, ‘Harry and Jo will have a couple men waiting for you. Go to this airport at such-and-such a time.’ That kind of thing. I never met Harry and Jo, because they’d always have their guys there doing the unloading.”
“Would they give you the money, too?”
“No, that was all done separately, between Harry and Jo and the growers. Then the growers would pay us. But anyway, when this thing happened with Corvo and his men, like I said, I was all done. But then Harry and Jo got this idea that they could move the drops way the hell up north, in the Upper Peninsula. I said no way, because we’d have to fly over Lake Superior instead of Lake Huron, which means taking off from a different airport, like maybe Batchawana. You need something small but not too small. But even if you got that worked out, it would only be a matter of time until the wrong people found out about it again. And this time they wouldn’t be so ‘friendly.’”
“So he did the flight to Newberry,” I said. “You tried to stop him.”
“I didn’t get the chance. I didn’t even know about it until he was gone. The growers came right to him, told him they had this new route worked out. Harry and Jo were gonna pay more, and it was a longer flight so Pete would be paid more, and everybody would be happy. It’s four days later and I still don’t even know which airport he took off from. None of the growers will talk to me. They’ve all disappeared. Their phones are disconnected. Finally, I remembered I had this one number for Harry and Jo, an emergency number in case their men ever didn’t show up. I called and I talked to them. To Jo, actually. She sounds like a real charmer. She was all like, oh my God, we’re so sorry, we had no idea. We lost two of our own men here, they were like family to us. And I was like, I just need to know what happened. Why did they have to kill Pete? He was just the pilot. What on earth were they thinking of that they had to kill the guy flying the plane?”
He stopped talking for a while. He sat there in the kitchen holding a half-empty glass of whiskey with both hands. He stared down at the floor.
“Please keep going,” I said. “Did they mention Vinnie and Buck?”
“They mentioned Buck,” he said, looking up at me. “Buck and his getaway driver. I assume that’s Vinnie you’re talking about.”
“His getaway driver?” Lou said. He’d been leaning back in his chair, listening intently to Perry’s story. Now he was halfway to his feet.
“Jo said it was all Buck’s idea,” Perry said. “This whole new plan. Buck was working with this other dealer up here, some guy named Dukes.”
“Andy Dukes,” I said.
“Yeah, she said it was Buck and this guy Dukes who were really running the show now. Harry and Jo didn’t even want to be in the business anymore, not after what happened. That’s what she said. But then these guys went behind their backs and made the new arrangement to keep things going.”
Lou sat back down, but he was leaning forward in his chair now. I could see him flexing his forearm muscles as he made two fists.
“I know it was a lie,” Perry said. “Okay? I’m not that stupid. I know she was trying to cover her ass. I know this was all Harry and Jo and that these other guys were just the hired help. Like always.”
“So why are you here?” I said. “If you know they weren’t behind this…”
“They told me Buck was there,” Perry said. “At the airport. They told me he was the only guy who walked away. Whether this other guy, this Vinnie, whoever he is, if he was the man who drove him away, I don’t care. Whether any of this other stuff they’re saying is true, I don’t care. I just want to know if that one part of the story is true. If this one man named Buck Carrick was there that night, and if he really lived to talk about it. That’s why I’m here. I just wanted to look him in the face and ask him what happened. Why my brother got killed. Or if he was, I don’t know, if he was even alive when Buck just walked away from it. If he left him there dying on the ground.”
He stopped again. I watched him stare at the floor for another half a minute.
“Even if this guy Buck is a walking dead man,” he finally went on, “I had to hear it from him, face-to-face.”
“Why did you say that?” I asked. “Why is he a walking dead man?”
“That’s what Jo said. Him and Vinnie both.”
I looked at Lou, waiting for him to react. But he just sat there like someone had slapped him across the face.
“She said Corvo would carve them all up like Thanksgiving turkeys,” Perry said. “Her exact words. She told me I should stay out of the way, in fact, or I might get caught in the middle of it. She said I should just lay low for a while, wait for Corvo to get it out of his system. That’s what Harry and Jo were going to do.”