John Birmingham - Without warning

‘Not always.’

The old Chinese sea dog rolled his eyes as Thapa showed the next man through to see them. They sat behind a folding card table on the dock of the marina where Jules had berthed the sport fisher while the Rules lay well offshore, guarded by the remainder of Shah’s men. The hasty patch-up work occasioned by the gunfight with Shoeless Dan stood out on the fibreglass hull, and more than a few of their potential recruits spent their interviews nervously eyeing the damage.

The next guy through – an older, pot-bellied American, with a dense map of broken blood vessels colouring his swollen nose, and a fat cigar perched in one corner of his mouth – snorted when he saw it. ‘Hot damn! I guess I wouldn’t want to see the other guy, eh?’

Fifi glanced over her shoulder briefly at the scorch marks and bullet holes. She tried to find the man’s name on the list Thapa had provided, but the piece of paper seemed to have blown away, leaving her with nothing but a cup of flat ginger beer and a bowl of pretzels in front of her.

‘The other guy is dead,’ she replied. ‘And who’re you, Salty Sam?’

The man grinned, showing off uneven yellow teeth, but his smile seemed warm enough and contained none of the leering suggestion in Larry Zood’s eyes. ‘Rhino Ross, young lady. Chief petty officer, United States Coast Guard, once upon a time. These days, I’ve been running a fishing charter round these parts. And whom might I have the pleasure of addressing?’

‘“Fifi” will do. And this is Mr Lee, who’s our chief… petty… guy. So we already got one a them. What else can you do for us, Rhino?’ She paused and regarded him through narrowed eyes. ‘And did your parents really call you that, or something really gay that you just changed to Rhino?’

Ross smiled again and blew a perfect smoke ring. ‘Rhino A. Ross. It’s on my passport and birth certificate. Makes me kinda unique, don’t you think?’ He leaned forward. ‘And lest you have any doubt whatsoever, it is good to be the Rhino. Now, let’s get down to brass tacks. A little birdie told me you were looking to crew an oceangoing vessel. Bridge crew in particular, am I right?’

‘A little birdie?’

‘Yup. Ran his mouth right up to the point I ran a stick through his ass, and toasted him up medium rare over some hickory coals. A little scrawny, but good eatin’ – beak was a little crunchy, though.’ Another smoke ring punctuated the comment.

Lee said nothing, contenting himself with his kretek cigarette and a contemplative air. He gazed past Ross, away down the marina, where Fifi could see Thapa standing watch over a dozen men who’d also turned up to apply for berths on the yacht.

Something about the Rhino’s demeanour changed. His eyes hardened and his voice took on a commanding, almost military, tone. ‘Now, given the size of that sport fisher you got all shot up over there, I figure you’ve got yourself a real ocean liner stowed away somewhere. And it’s gonna have all manner of sensors, radar, communications gear and other assorted technological doodads, none of which you know a damn thing about – am I right? Looks more like the starship Enterprise than a sailboat to you, right? No, don’t answer. The Rhino is always right. And of course, given all the holes some douche bag has already shot in your runabout, you know what sort of trouble is waiting for you up ahead. So here’s the Rhino’s iron-clad guaran-goddamn-tee: you take me out to your boat, I’ll prove to you that I can run your systems, and then you can get me the hell out of here before it blows up. I need to get out of Acapulco, and you need a pro out there, Miss Fifi. Someone who knows these waters and the sort of lowlife scum that swims in ‘em sometimes. Seems to me that the last thing you need to be worrying about is which button to press when a bunch of bad guys come charging over the horizon with knives between their teeth.’ With that the Rhino sat back and puffed contentedly on his cigar, releasing a swirling cloud of thick white smoke with a self-satisfied whoosh.

Fifi leaned forward now, bunching her boobs up between her arms, to see if Ross would drop his gaze. He didn’t. ‘Would I be right in assuming you’d know one end of a gun from the other, Rhino?’ she asked.

‘Twenty years in service, ma’am. You can assume away, but you know what they say about people who “assume”.’

She nodded. ‘So, y’all said you ran charters. What happened to your boat? Why don’t you just get the hell out under your own power?’

The Rhino folded his massive forearms and gestured towards her vessel. ‘See all the holes in your hull? The ones in mine were a lot bigger. I ran a legitimate business, miss. I don’t know what you did before all this, but the fact that you’re sitting here tells me it probably wasn’t legit, and you had the guns and the balls to fight off whoever came after you. I wasn’t so lucky.’

Lee exhaled a thin stream of fragrant smoke. ‘Mr Rhino,’ he said. ‘Your lost boat, do you know who attacked you?’

The former Coast Guard chief nodded. ‘I do. A local pecker-head, working for a toothfish poacher down south. Said he was recruiting for his bossman. Wouldn’t take no for an answer, so he shot up my boat when that was the only answer I had for him.’

‘Why didn’t he shoot you?’ asked Fifi.

‘Shooting my boat hurt more,’ he said, quite honestly, she believed.

A lot of folks made the error of mistaking Fifi for some kind of life-sized Sluttymuch Barbie. But she’d been looking out for herself long enough to have developed a wild dog’s instinct for sniffing out troublesome men. The job at Lenny Wah’s take-out, which quickly morphed into cooking as well as cleaning, had scored her a spot on a catering-industry training course run by a Bay Area businessmen’s charity – ‘guilty fags’, she called them – sponsoring college degrees for homeless kids. Her army-surplus cot in the storeroom at Lenny’s counted as homeless. She graduated in the top five of her class, and landed a gig with an LA-based catering firm that specialised in providing ‘nutritional services’ for the military in shitholes-of-the-week like Bosnia and Mogadishu.

Fifi moved a lot more easily through that sort of crowd than the five-star ghetto of West Coast fine dining, and after shacking up with an Army Ranger for twelve months in the Balkans, she could field-strip an M4 carbine blindfolded. She’d also had a lot of experience with men like the Rhino; hard, uncompromising, and occasionally stupid men who were, nonetheless, decent at heart.

She leaned over to Mr Lee. ‘What d’you think?’ she whispered.

‘He’ll eat too much, but he’s okay,’ replied the Chinaman. ‘Mr Pete would have liked him.’

‘Okay, Rhino.’ She turned back to face the old chief, who had heard everything. ‘If you’ve brought any kit with you, stow it over there by the ramp. You can start out by helping to load some stores while we finish talking to these other guys.’ Fifi waved towards the small crowd of hopefuls gathered by the marina gate and watched over by Thapa.

The Rhino nodded brusquely and said ‘Thanks’ before looking around. ‘You said you wanted some stores loaded?’

‘Inside,’ she said, gesturing to the wooden shed in front of which they sat. ‘Bags of rice, beans, lots of canned foods. Heavy work. But that won’t bother you – you’re the Rhino.’

‘No,’ he agreed, flashing a stagy grin and tucking his cigar firmly into the corner of his mouth. He pointed at one of his massive biceps and said, around the cigar, ‘Yeah, it’ll be no bother at all since I didn’t get these from pettin’ kitty cats.’

Ross paused before ducking his head into the shed. ‘Oh, one other thing. You got a humidor on that boat?’