Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

Everett was going to hear about this.

I was starting up the stairs when I heard someone on the deck above me. There was a dark space under the stairs, and I was beneath them in about the time it took to unbuckle my belt. I pulled it through the loops in what was beginning to be a practiced gesture, and a foot hit the stairs and stopped. The foot was bare.

“Yo,” Dexter whispered.

He was waiting for me at the top of the stairs, rubbing his arms against the cold and looking past me toward the crew's cabin. “Six guys in there,” he said. “They dancing to the music.”

“I have to look,” I said. "See if Charlie's there. Cargo's downstairs. "

“Wo, Everett. Look fast. I too old for this shit.”

There were indeed three male Chinese couples practicing 1970s disco moves to a Cantonese rendition of “Stayin' Alive.” A table was littered with bottles of cognac. None of the six dancers was Charlie, but I recognized one of them from the merry band who had barged into that alley in Chinatown only-what? — two nights before. Working my belt back into place, I ran to the grapple and climbed over, clutching the rope for dear life.

“Remember,” I said to Dexter. “Small splash.”

With gravity on my side, going down was easier. Hands grasped my pants and guided me on deck, and I turned to see Tran. “Push off,” he said. “Quick.”

I joined him and Captain Snow in shoving against the side of the tanker, and when we were an arm's length apart she picked up a long gaff, put its business end against the ship, and we all shoved on it. We drifted away, six, then eight, feet, and the rope hanging from the ship's side suddenly began to whip from side to side, and the grapple and Dexter hit the water at about the same time. I hauled in on the rope, scanning the water for Dexter. He surfaced a moment later, spitting water, and grabbed the end of the gaff we held out to him.

Thirty seconds later the engines had been cut in and Dexter was toweling himself dry on a sheet Tran had fetched from the cabin. Then, at a word from Dexter, he went back in and brought Everett.

“You lied to us,” I said to him. The freighter was well behind us now, and I didn't have to whisper. “You brought us out here hoping we'd get caught. You wasted our time. You got my friend here wet, and, what's worst of all, you forced him to reveal his taste in underwear.”

“They just kisses,” Dexter grumbled, buttoning his shirt.

“I thought Charlie was there,” Everett said. He couldn't keep his eyes on me; they kept shifting to Dexter.

“You're not taking us seriously,” I said. “That's a mistake.” I reached down and picked up the knife from its resting place in the coil of rope.

“Wait.” Everett ran the tip of his tongue over his lips. “I was wrong.”

“You were indeed.” I cut the grapple off the rope. “And you were wrong to be wrong. Get his shoulders, Dexter. Tran, hold on to his legs.”

The two of them moved into position, and I wound the rope around his waist, making three coils for safety's sake. I was fumbling with the knot when Captain Snow pushed my hands aside and said, “Allow me. You couldn't tie a granny around your granny.” She tugged the rope upward until it was beneath his arms, tied something large and complicated over his sternum, tugged it hard enough to make Everett gasp, and went back to the wheel.

“Not over the stern, over the side,” she said. "Avoid the propellers. "

Everett screamed something that sounded like the gull Tran had caught, and he kept screaming as Dexter and I hoisted him sideways and tossed him into the water. He bounced once, like a skipping stone, and then sank, and I ran to the rope and paid out a few yards' worth and watched him bob up, still screaming, three or four yards behind the boat. He trailed behind us like living chum, fighting to keep his head above water as he zigzagged from one of the churning trails of our wake to the other.

“Not too long,” the captain said, working the steel Zippo again. “Hypothermia. Guy's got no fat.”

We left him out there for five minutes, until we burst through the fogbank and the lights of shore blinked their welcome. He'd stopped screaming by then, although he hadn't stopped struggling for air.

Captain Snow cut the motors and we pulled Everett in, accompanied by a castanet orchestra that I identified as his teeth. When he was flat on his back on the deck, she punched the engines in, hard this time, and the front end of the boat lifted itself out of the water as we surged forward.

“No more bullshit,” I said, kneeling next to him.

He shook his head, trying to press his jaws together before he fractured his molars.

“Take him below,” I said to Tran. “Warm him up a little.” Tran cut the rope and got Everett to his feet, but he stumbled twice before he reached the doorway.

As we pulled into the dock at Marina Del Rey, Captain Snow lighted another cigarette and gave Dexter a grin. “Satisfied with the service?”

“You do bar mitzvahs?” He gave her the grin back with interest, the kind of interest I hadn't seen since Carter was president.

“Your friend here knows how to reach me.” She took off the cap and fluffed out the frizzy dark hair, and Tran came out of the cabin propelling a soaking Everett in front of him. “If you want to, I mean. There's a phone on the boat.”

“My,” Dexter said, making two sweet syllables out of it. “All the comforts.”

“Do you mind?” I asked. “We've got to get Everett home before he flatlines.”

“On the way,” Dexter said. He touched an index finger to the bridge of Captain Snow's vulnerable looking nose and said, “Permission to go ashore?”

“What if I say no?” Captain Snow said.

Halfway up the dock, in between kicking at Everett's sodden heels to help him along, Dexter turned to me and allowed himself a smirk. “It's the shorts,” he said. “Gets 'em every time.”

I'd overstated the case when I described Claude B. Tiffle to Dexter as a white man. Claude Tiffle had virtually no color at all. He looked like something that had evolved underground: eyes as pale and soiled as mushrooms, hair like alfalfa sprouts, a sparse mustache that looked like a scraggle of centipede's legs. Fat, wet, white lips it was easy to imagine him licking, a dirty dimple in his chin that you could have sharpened a pencil in, and a belly so beery I expected to hear it slosh when he got up.

Four weary-looking young Chinese women, whom Dexter had nicknamed Weepy, Bleary, Mopey, and Snowbell, had reluctantly passed me, like the baton in a relay no one wants to win, toward the sanctum of Tiffle's office in the back room of the cottage, the one Tran and I had seen lighted first.

My watch said four p.m. Everett was reclining in Dexter's bathtub, wrapped in an honest-to-god straitjacket Dexter had proudly pulled from his closet, thereby justifying all my suspicions about what went on in that glittering, clinical decor. Tran and Dexter and I had been watching in turns for most of the day, timing the arrivals and exits of the staff and getting to know them by sight, with the odd man out racing to Dexter's apartment to relieve the one keeping Everett company. Although the four women worked from eight-thirty or nine to six, Tiffle himself didn't make his morning appearance until eleven or so, probably enervated by his exertions with Charlie Wah's slave girl of the previous evening.

Tiffle's tardiness, I thought, could be a problem.

Nevertheless, I'd have watched for another full day, making sure that the timetable was right, except that a clock I didn't know how to reset was ticking its way toward the moment when the little boats would take the pilgrims on their last short sail into slavery.