Johnny felt the hot blood in his face; his arms flexed involuntarily. “You think you're God Almighty, Joe? Go play with your wooden soldiers. Why should I listen to you?”
“Because I say so!” It was nearly a shout; the bull neck was thrust forward.
Johnny looked at him. He turned his head and looked at the smirking Cuneo, at the round-eyed Owly, at the grinning Hawkins and lastly at the expressionless Rogers. He turned silently and walked to the door; it shivered on its hinges from the smash with which he slammed it shut behind him.
CHAPTER 10
Johnny dropped the empty buckets at the foot of the standpipe at the shore end of the elongated pier and fumbled in his hip pocket for his wrench. He glanced out over the Sound's blue-green chop, already turned brassy in the early morning sunlight, and knelt on the scarred, splintered planking, warm to the touch, as he opened the cut-off valve at the base of the pipe.
As he filled the buckets he could see Mike in the cockpit of the thirty-foot cruiser dancing heavily at the end of her lines a hundred feet out on the pier. Amidst the small forest of stubby masts and tired rigging in the dingy hulls around it Johnny could make out the semicircled brass lettering on the bobbing stern: Ye Olde Beaste, NYC, NY. Mike had the cowling off the brutish-looking engine and was probing its interior with a long-necked oilcan.
Ye Olde Beaste was a marine monstrosity. Its beam was out of all proportion to its water line, so that even in a flat calm it floundered like a dish in a bathtub. It made a good fishing platform, but there its virtues ceased. In addition to its disproportionate beam-to-water line difficulties, Ye Olde Beaste's seagoing life was further complicated by its engine. The perverted sense of humor of a former owner blessed with more money than brains had caused him to install in the boat's plumply pedestrian interior a power plant barely short of Gold Cup standards. Its weight guaranteed a stern-heavy sag and a steady shipment of spray aft. The engine was Mike's pride and joy, despite the fact that it was a tricky assignment to keep the monster throttled back to the point necessary to prevent hull and engine from going their separate ways.
“Catch, Mike.” Mike straightened from his loving inspection of the engine; he accepted the filled buckets as Johnny backed down the top rungs of the wooden ladder spiked to the pier piling and swung them off the planking over his head. Mike passed up two empties and sleeved his brow with the forearm of his gray sweat shirt.
“It's a hot one, boy.”
“Gonna be,” Johnny agreed. “We'll catch exercise today, period. This sun's gonna drive 'em too deep for our surface stuff.”
“Ahh, it's a change from the asphalt, anyway. You ready?”
“Soon's I fill these and get the ice out of the car.” Johnny climbed back up on the pier, returned to the standpipe, filled his buckets and re-closed the cut-off valve. He left the buckets and walked off the shore end of the pier to the MG parked in the weeds at the end of the graveled road. He could feel the heat of the planking through the crepe soles of his sneakers, even this early in the morning; at the car he removed from the floor a fifty-pound piece of ice wrapped in a sodden newspaper and swung it up to his left shoulder. He could feel the wet trickle of the melting ice run down his back as he retrieved the buckets, passing one up to the extended left hand which balanced the ice.
At the boat he set down his liquid burden and passed the ice down to Mike; he heard it thump down into the box as he reached back up over his head and handed down the water pails. He dropped down to the deck himself from the ladder after casting off the lines and fended off from the pilings with the boat hook as Mike started the engine with a deep-throated roar that sent the nearby gulls zooming aloft.
They crept away from the dock and out into the deserted Sound, and Mike nodded at a sleekly expensive cabin cruiser which contrasted sharply with their own weather-beaten down-at-heels appearance. “I'll own one like that in a year, Johnny.”
Johnny looked at the cruiser and back at Mike. “You plannin' on hitting the sweeps? Besides, you couldn't desert the old lady.”
Mike smiled. “I'll retire the old lady and keep her for a pet.”
Johnny crouched before a compartment door in the cockpit and removed a tangle of gear. Swiftly he assembled two spinning rods and sorted out a double handful of mismatched reels, swivels, lures, leader wire, a battered knife and a rusty hatchet. Beyond the point the breeze freshened; Ye Olde Beaste lumbered through lengthening swells, and the air had a crisper tang. Johnny removed half a dozen bottles of beer from the case in the bottom of the boat and put them in the box with the ice.
“Any place in particular you want to try?” Mike asked from the wheel.
“Anywhere-I don't care. When you get tired of burnin' gas, throw over the float.” He bent double to peel his T-shirt off over his head, and Mike grimaced at the Indian-bronzed torso.
“Wish I tanned like that. Last time we came out here I nearly burned right up; some deficiency in the skin pigmentation, Doc Phillips says. On the water I've got to keep covered up. How about breaking out a sandwich? I could eat a rubber boot.”
“A beer, too?”
“Later, maybe.”
They gnawed on thick slabs of ham and cheese inartistically thrust between jagged slices of rye bread. Mike tossed his torn-off crusts to the trailing cloud of gulls, stood up and brushed off his hands, and reached down to cut off the engine. In the sudden silence they began to lose headway, and he catwalked up to the bow and tossed over the float anchor which would keep them headed steadily into the wind.
Johnny drew a deep, satisfied breath. The sun was hot on his back and chest, but the breeze was cool. He handed Mike a rod as he returned from the bow, and they settled down in silence on opposite edges of the cockpit rim. The loudest sound in the boat was the slap of the choppy little waves under the bow. With the teamwork born of long practice they alternately cast and reeled, cast and reeled, and for forty-five minutes an occasional grunt and the low whine of the gear was the only medium of exchange.
Mike stacked his rod finally, butt down in a homemade holder, and reached for his cigarettes. “Not a minnow in the North Atlantic.” It was an uncomplaining statement of fact; he shielded his lighter against the breeze, puffed on his cigarette, pulled his cap farther down over his eyes and propped his back against a stanchion. Johnny tried one more cast, reeled in and stacked his rod beside Mike's. He stepped over to the icebox and removed and uncapped two bottles of beer.
“Sure wish old Vic was out here with us,” Mike said as he accepted a chilled bottle.
“Yeah,” Johnny agreed. “Mike?” Mike widened half-closed eyes. “This Tim Connor-”
“Yes?”
“How come he can keep on cuttin' the mustard on a spread like you were tellin' about last night?”
“I'd say it was a combination of things. Some people never even wise up they're being targeted. The ones that do can't prove anything. And even if you got him or some of his people dead to rights on a job, it would probably still be borderline if it was criminal. Tim keeps a couple of two-bit ward heelers on his pay roll, and they help to tone down the occasional beef.”
Mike stared out over the blue-green-gold Sound, his shoulders swaying slightly with the movement of the boat. “I first ran across Connor three years ago. Friend of mine asked me if I could get Connor off his back. My friend was an insurance man, and a couple of years before that he'd been from hunger. Then it was laid in his lap that for a price he could get a listing each month of all the claims paid by one of the largest health and accident insurance companies headquartered in New York.”