James Burke: Dixie City Jam

'What happened?'

'It's Buchalter. We found him about three this morning,' he said, pulling a blanket around his shoulders.

'We came up on him from the south. I thought we had him. There's a metal stairs on his port side. We were going to drift up to it, then take them from behind while all that machinery was roaring. Except we hit a log and punched a hole in the hull.'

He sat on top of a locker filled with life vests and scuba gear and worked the stopper from a bottle of Cutty Sark he had taken from the liquor cabinet. The scar through his eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose looked like a stitched strip of pink rubber.

'Who's we , Clete?'

'Brother Oswald.' His voice changed when he said the words. His eyes looked away from me, then at Lucinda and Zoot. Then he looked at the deck. He lifted the bottle to his mouth.

'Why didn't you wait?' I said.

'For what? The guy to blow the country?'

'You could have waited,' I said.

'Get real, Streak. You nail this guy under a black flag or he'll live to piss on your grave.'

'What's a black flag?' Zoot said.

Clete started to raise the Scotch again, then the color drained out of his face and he went through the hatchway and threw up over the stern. He came back inside, wiping his mouth with a towel.

'Excuse me, I swallowed some oil out there,' he said. 'When the boat turned over, I hung on to it. Brother Oswald had on a life preserver. He was drifting right past that stairs I was talking about. He didn't come out north of the ship, either.'

'You mean he's onboard with Buchalter?' Lucinda said.

'The tide was coming in real strong. He couldn't be anywhere else,' Clete said. 'I would have seen him. I know I would have.'

'I'll give our position to the Coast Guard,' I said.

'The old guy kept talking about Gog and Magog. What's Gog and Magog?' Clete said.

'It's a biblical prophesy about the war between good and evil,' I said.

'I don't know about no black flags and Magogs, but there's something I ain't mention yet,' Zoot said.

We all stared at him. In the silence a wave broke across the bow and streaked the glass.

'The radio don't work,' he said.

I was crouched behind Clete on the steps of the small passageway that gave onto the bow. He had put on my raincoat and a red wool shirt he found in a closet. His big hands were clenched on the stock and pump of the twelve-gauge shotgun. I could hear him breathing with expectation.

He glanced backwards at me and started to smile. Then stopped.

'Why the scowl, mon?'

'This is your fault.'

'I don't read it that way.'

'Why didn't you go take care of Martina? Why'd you have to go out on the salt with a fanatical old man?'

'I don't like what you're saying to me, Streak.'

'Too bad.'

'Remember the dude in New Iberia General? He got a hypodermic load of roach paste. Buchalter ends here.'

I punched him on the shoulder with my finger.

'We need to understand something, Clete. You're not going to re-create the O.K. Corral out here.'

He twisted around on his haunches.

'What do you want to do?' he said. 'Go all the way back to land to notify the Coast Guard, then hope they're not a hundred miles away? The old man's on his own up there. We go in there and blow up their shit.'

I punched him with one finger, hard, on the shoulder again. He turned and slapped my hand away, his green eyes suddenly disturbed and dark, as though he were looking at someone he didn't know.

'This whole gig started with you tearing up the Calucci brothers,' I said. 'It's not going to end that way. We're putting Buchalter in a cage.'

'Tell it to the Rotary Club,' he said, and looked upward toward the closed hatch.

We could hear Zoot cutting back the gas now, the exhaust pipes throbbing at the waterline, echoing off the steel hull of the salvage ship. Then we heard Lucinda making her way forward, picking up the bowline off the deck, as though it were natural to tie onto the metal steps that zigzagged down the side of the ship.

Clete eased the hatch upward a half inch.

'We found an injured man on an oil platform! We need your radio!' Lucinda shouted.

There was no answer. We could hear the sounds of an air compressor, a winch grinding, chains rattling through pulleys, a diesel engine working hard.

'It's a boat hand who doesn't know what to do,' Clete said. 'He probably went for somebody else.' He looked back at me again. 'Lighten up. I figure no more than five of them, including the diver in the water. Easy odds, mon.'

But the creases in the back of his neck were bright with sweat, his knuckles white and ridged on the shotgun's stock.

'We're calling it in for you!' someone yelled down at Lucinda.

'I'm a nurse! I need to describe his condition! I think he's had a coronary!'

'We're radioing your message! You can't come onboard!'

The hull bumped against the rubber tires that were roped to the bottom of the steps.

'Repeat… You can't come onboard! No one but company personnel are allowed! Your message is being transmitted!'

'This man may die!'

Clete's eyes were level with the crack between the deck and the hatch.

'She's tying on. That broad's got ice water in her veins,' he whispered. 'That's it, Lucinda, get on the steps, do it, do it, do it, do it…'

'Mr. Dave, leave me something 'case I got to come after y'all.'

I turned around. It was Zoot, bent down below the level of the passageway in the cabin.

'If it goes sour, partner, you get help,' I said.

It was very fast after that.

'Party time,' Clete said, and charged out onto the bow with the shotgun at port arms.

Lucinda had already reached the top of the stairs and was on the deck of the salvage ship, her.357 pointed straight out in front of her with both hands, her hair whipping in the wind, while she shouted at two paralyzed deckhands, 'Police officer, motherfucker! Down on your face, hands laced behind your neck! Are you deaf? Down on your face! Now! Or I blow your fucking head off!'

I hit the stairs running, right behind Clete, my.45 flopping in the pocket of my field jacket. I had already chambered a round in the AR-15, and my hand was squeezed tight on the grip and inside the trigger guard, my thumb poised on the safety. I could hear waves bursting against the stern and hissing along the hull.

The salvage ship was old, covered with tack welds, the scuppers orange with corrosion, the paint blistered and soft and flaking under the hand, the glass in the pilothouse oxidized and dirty with oil. The hatch to the engine room was open, and from belowdecks I could smell electrical odors, diesel fuel, stagnant water in a sump, a salty, rotten stench like a rat that's been caught in machinery.

Lucinda was standing above the two deckhands, her weapon moving back and forth between them while she worked her cuffs off her belt. I took them from her hand, hooked up one man, pulled his arm through a rail on the gate to the steps, then snipped the loose cuff on the second man's wrist.

'Where's the old-timer?' I said.

One man was bald and wore a chin beard; the other had an empty eye socket that was puckered and sealed shut as though it had been touched with a hot instrument. The bald man twisted his head and looked indifferently toward the south, where lightning was pulsating amid muted thunder on the horizon.

'Look at me when I talk to you,' I said. 'Where's the old man?'

He slowly turned his head and let his eyes drift over both me and Lucinda.

'Fuck you, nigger lover,' he said.

Then I heard Clete's weight shift above me and looked up just as he threw the shotgun against his shoulder and aimed at a man in a canvas coat and rain hood who stood in silhouette by the stern with a blue-black automatic in his hand.