“Everything okay down there?” asked Hoch.
“Looks fine to me,” said Weir.
“Thought you might be in distress.”
“I just told you I’m not.”
“Got some company below decks? Female variety, perhaps?”
“None that I’m aware of.”
“That’s funny — smells kind of fishy out here.”
Chuckles came from the boat, carried away quickly by the breeze. She had drifted closer now — twenty feet off Weir’s bow, idling slowly. The man on the plank stood, tossed his bottle overboard, and picked up a rope. It astonished him, very briefly, that these guys would think about boarding. Weir saw clearly that things could get ugly fast.
“Don’t think about coming aboard,” he said.
“Maybe you need our help,” said Tillis. “Engine trouble?”
Becky chose this moment to come on deck, repackaged in her funeral black and pea coat. She waved to the men on Enforcer II. “Hi, guys.”
All six broke into yips and yipes, the idiotic screams that men must learn from Hollywood Indians in Western movies. Weir, in a flash, foresaw the fall of his nation. Enforcer II was close enough now for him to see the CF sticker, the custom rub rail, the pinstriping down the hull. He felt Sea Urchin’s engine rumble behind him, then stall out. Fuckin’ great, he thought. The yips got mightier and the man on the swordfish plank dropped his rope onto the deck of Sea Urchin.
“Tie us up,” he called.
“Not a chance,” said Weir. He threw the coil of rope into the water and cast a quick glance back at Becky. She was working the ignition with an insouciant look on her face, the kind of look that can advance from boredom to panic in a heartbeat. But Becky wouldn’t rattle: She caught him with her brown, unperturbed eyes and tried again to turn over the engine.
“Hey,” she called over the laboring starter. “You guys are Newport pigs, aren’t you?”
Oswitz yelled back. “Just plain old guys trying to help a vessel in distress. We’re looking for a way to be useful, mayor.”
“Then pool your IQ’s and get out. You touch this boat of mine and I’ll sue your ass straight into the twelve-mile bank. Trust me.”
“We trust you, mayor. Got any tits under that coat?”
More yipes and yips. Weir cast a shut-up look back to Becky, but she was visibly riled: a shade redder in the face and this icy glint of murder in her eyes. Becky’s nature was to fuel the fire. “Sure. You’ve never seen one?”
The Sea Urchin’s engine finally caught.
Hoch asked whether someone could come aboard and have a look at them.
Becky said sure, then, to Jim’s absolute disbelief, nosed the boat closer to Enforcer. The man on the swordfish plank dropped onto the deck of Sea Urchin and caught the rethrown rope. Weir was on him in an instant, grabbing a fistful of hair with one hand, jamming the .45 into the man’s ear with the other. He pivoted his prisoner to face Enforcer and called out. “Any excuse’ll do to blow his brains out. One more of you shitcakes boarding this boat comes to mind as a handy example.”
Becky had already put Sea Urchin into reverse and motored back. Enforcer slid momentarily to a thirty-foot distance. There was a look of befuddlement on the faces of the three men on deck. Oswitz actually looked to Hoch, as if for direction.
Jim forced his man’s head down to the deck and put a knee to his neck, jamming the gun in harder. The kid seemed about twenty-five, and scared. Weir’s whole body hurt. “What’s your name?”
He shook his head, then when Jim lowered his weight onto his knee, changed his mind and nodded a frantic yes.
“Name, bubba. Cough it up.”
“No.”
“Don’t know your name?” Jim really bore down now, jamming his knee into the crook of neck. There was an outside chance it might give.
“Needham. It was their idea, I just went along to—”
“Um-hmm, yes, I see, Needham.”
Weir hauled his man up, stood him upright and rabbit-punched him. It was a perfect blow that left Needham shuddering for a helpless moment, during which Weir pushed him overboard. It felt great, as if the report of Weir’s fist on hostile flesh was a form of cutting through the crap and lies, bringing him one step closer to the truth about Ann. Jim watched as he gasped and thrashed in the cold ocean, a wholly rejuvenated young buck.
He turned to Becky. His stomach was nothing but pain. “Step on it, Errol.”
Chapter 22
The office manager of Cheverton Sewer & Septic was a dour, fat-nosed woman whose desk plaque read MARGE BUZZARD. Her hair was brown-gray, straight and thick, and lay upon the shoulders of a white blouse whose high, frilly neck suggested Victorian primness. Her eyebrows were thick, threatening to connect. She looked to Weir like Charlie Watts in drag on the old Stones album. To her left was an ancient punch clock in olive drab, with a slotted stand beside it for time cards. To her right was a dirty window that looked out to the oil-treated dirt that served as the Cheverton equipment yard. Next to that was a framed photo portrait of a middle-aged man. It appeared to be the only clean thing in the office.
Jim introduced himself as a researcher for attorney B. Flynn of Newport Beach. He told her whom he was looking for.
“I’ve been here ten years, and we never had a Dave Smith,” she said conclusively. “We had a Don Smith, back in ’eighty-five, one of the pump crew. He only lasted a month.”
“You’ve got quite a memory, Ms.... is it Buzzard, like the bird?”
“It’s Miss Buzzard, Mr. Weir, like bazaar with a d.”
Weir invented a tale involving Counsel Flynn settling out of court for a client in Laguna Beach. A Mr. Dave Smith of Cheverton Sewer & Septic now had a substantial sum in court escrow. “Something on the order of seven hundred thousand dollars,” he said.
“That’s something on the order of impossible, like I already told you. We don’t have any Dave Smith. Never have.”
“I’d like to see the operations manager.”
“That’s impossible, too. He’s out in the yard, and to get there you either have to go over the fence or past me. You are not coining past me to bother him about an employee we do not have. Those are the rules.”
“Rules just got changed,” he said, lifting the wooden partition in the counter and going through.
Marge Buzzard, nearly as tall as Weir, was on him in a second. She scolded up close like a schoolteacher, then blocked his way to the back door. Jim poked his index finger under her larynx, lifted up just enough, and guided her out of his way. He slammed the door behind him, latched it, and, finding the necessary item available, padlocked her in. He pocketed the key. He could hear her fists hitting the wood as he walked across the yard toward the manager’s trailer. The new red Corvette he’d seen the night with Blodgett was parked outside it in the shade.
Beyond the pump trucks and portable generators, Jim could see Duty Free sitting on her trailer, engine compartment open, and two men on deck steadying winch cables that disappeared into the opening. One was flannel shirt and baseball cap — Blodgett’s companion on the Back Bay — the other was a youngish blond with big muscles and long hair.
Jim walked over. “Operations manager in?”
“That’s me,” said Baseball Cap. He peered at Jim from the shade of his bill, then turned back to his task. “No work, if that’s what you want.”