Thomas Harris - Black Sunday

Logan reached up to scratch his head. For an instant his brain registered the blinding flash, but he never heard the roar. Twenty darts shredded him and the blast slammed him back against the barn wall.

Lander, Fasil, and Dahlia came running through the smoke.

“Ground meat,” Fasil said. They turned the slack body over and examined the back. Rapidly, they took pictures of the barn wall. It was bowed in and looked like a giant colander. Lander went inside the barn. Hundreds of small holes in the wall admitted points of light that freckled him as his camera clicked and clicked again.

“Very successful,” Fasil said.

They dragged the body into the barn, sloshed gasoline over it and over the dry wood around it, and poured a trail of gasoline out the door for twenty yards. The fire flashed inside and lit the pools of gas with a whump they felt on their faces.

Black smoke rose from the barn as the Cessna climbed out of sight.

“How did you find that place?” Fasil asked, leaning forward from the rear seat to be heard over the engine noise.

“I was hunting dynamite last summer,” Lander said.

“Do you think the authorities will come soon?”

“I doubt it. They blast there all the time.”

EDDIE STILES SAT BY THEwindow in the New York City Aquarium snack bar worrying. From his table he could see Rachel Bauman below him and forty yards away at the rail of the penguin pen. It was not Rachel Bauman who disturbed him; it was the two men standing with her. Stiles did not like their looks at all. The one on her left looked like Man Mountain Dean. The other one was a little smaller, but worse. He had the easy, economical movements and the balance that Eddie had learned to fear. The predators in Eddie’s world had moved that way. The expensive ones. Very different from the muscle the shylocks employed, the blocky hard guys with their weight on their heels.

Eddie did not like the way this man’s eyes swept over the high places, the roof of the shark house, the fences on the dunes between the Aquarium and the Coney Island board-walk. One slow sweep and then the man quartered the grounds going over it minutely, infantry style, from close to far, and all the time wagging his finger over an interested penguin’s head.

Eddie was sorry he had chosen this place to meet. On a weekday the crowd was not big enough to give him that comfortable, anonymous feeling.

He had Dr. Bauman’s word that he would not be involved. She had never lied to him. His life, the life he was trying to build, was based on what he had learned about himself with Dr. Bauman’s help. If that was not true, then nothing was true. He drained his coffee cup and walked quickly down the stairs and around to the whale tank. He could hear the whale blowing before he reached the tank. It was a forty-foot female killer whale, elegant with her gleaming black and white markings. A show was under way. A young man stood on a platform over the water holding up a fish in the pale winter sunshine. The surface of the water bulged in a line across the pool as beneath the surface the whale came like a black locomotive. She cannoned vertically out of the water and her great length seemed to hang in the air as she took the fish in her triangular teeth.

Eddie heard the applause behind him as he went down the steps to the underground gallery with its big plate-glass windows. The room was dim and damp, lit by the sun shining down through the blue-green water of the whale tank. Eddie looked into the tank. The whale was moving over the light-dappled bottom, rolling over and over, chewing. Three families came down the stairs and joined him. They all had loud children.

“Daddy, I can’t see.”

The father hoisted the boy to his shoulders, bumping his head on the ceiling, then took him outside squalling.

“Hi, Eddie,” Rachel said.

Her two companions stood on the far side of her, away from Eddie. That was good manners, Eddie thought. Goons would have come up on either side. Cops would have, too. “Hello, Dr. Bauman.” His eyes flicked over her shoulder.

“Eddie, this is David and this is Robert.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance.” Eddie shook their hands. The big one had a piece under his left arm, no doubt about it. Maybe the other guy had one too, but the coat fit better. This David. Enlarged knuckles on the first two fingers and the edge of his hand like a wood rasp. He didn’t get that learning to yo-yo. Dr. Bauman was a very wise and understanding woman, but there were some things she did not know about, Eddie thought. “Dr. Bauman, I’d like to talk to you a second, uh, personal if you don’t mind.”

At the other end of the chamber, he spoke close to her ear. Yelling children covered his voice. “Doc, I want to know—do you really know these guys? I know you think you do, but I mean know them? Dr. Bauman, these are some very hard guys. There are, you know, hard guys and hard guys. This is a thing I happen to know about. These are the harder type of hard guy, rather than mugs, if you follow me. These don’t look like no fuzz to me. I can’t see you around these type of fellows. You know, unless they were kin to you or something like that you can’t do anything about.”

Rachel put her hand on his arm. “Thanks, Eddie. I know what you’re saying. But I’ve known these two for a long time. They’re my friends.”

A porpoise had been put in the tank with the whale to provide her company. It was busy hiding pieces of fish in the drain while the whale was distracted by the trainer. The whale slid by the underwater window, taking a full ten seconds to pass by, its small eye looking through the glass at the people talking on the other side.

“This guy I hear about, Jerry Sapp, did a job in Cuba a couple of years ago,” Stiles told Kabakov. “Cuba! He ran in under the coastal radar close to Puerta Cabanas with some Cubans from Miami.” Stiles looked from Kabakov to Rachel and back again. “They had some business on shore, you know, they ran in through the surf in one of these inflatables, like an Avon or a Zodiac, and they came off with this box. I don’t know what the hell it was, but this guy didn’t come back to Florida. He got into it with a Cuban patrol boat out of Bahia Honda and ran straight across to Yucatán. Had a big bladder tank on the foredeck.”

Kabakov listened, tapping his fingers on the rail. The whale was quiet now, resting on the surface. Her great tail arched down, dropping her flukes ten feet below the surface.

“These kids are driving me nuts,” Eddie said. “Let’s move.”

They stood in the dark corridor of the shark house, watching the long gray shapes endlessly circling, small bright fish darting between them.

“Anyway, I had always wondered how this guy ran in close to Cuba. Since the Bay of Pigs they got radar you wouldn’t believe. You said your guy slipped away from the Coast Guard radar. Same thing. So I asked around a little, you know, about this Sapp. He was in Sweeney’s in Asbury Park there, about two weeks ago. But nobody’s seen him since. His boat’s a thirty-eight-foot sportfisherman, a Shing Lu job. They’re built in Hong Kong, and I mean built. This one’s all wood.”

“Where did he keep his boat?” Kabakov asked.

“I don’t know. Nobody seemed to know. I mean, you can’t ask too close, you know? But look, the bartender at Sweeney’s takes messages for this guy, I think he could get in touch. If it was business.”

“What kind of business would he go for?”

“Depends. He has to know he’s hot. If he went himself on this job you’re interested in, of course he knows he’s hot. If it was a contract job, if he let out the boat, then he was listening to the Coast Guard frequency the whole time. Wouldn’t you?”