Christopher Buckley - Wet Work

Charley settled on McNamara and Bundy. Big Mac described himself as a hands-on kind of guy who had gotten very wet in Vietnam but who had drawn the line at eating Vietcong liver. "Something the folks in Psy Ops thought up," he explained to Charley. "The Vietcong, they believe that you have to be whole to enter heaven, so the idea was to take out the liver and bite a chunk out of it and leave it on the ground beside the body." He shrugged. "You want to know the honest truth, I was just never partial to liver in the first place." Bundy was a weapons specialist from Georgia, a sniper. His dossier was full of "CITATION CLASSIFIEDS" and he would not say what they had been for, other than to point at each and say, "Thousand meters, seven hundred meters in a crosswind, twelve hundred meters."

A few days after Charley had made his selection, Felix, posing as an FBI agent, paid McNamara, Bundy and Rostow separate visits, asking them if they'd been approached by a Mr. Charles Becker in connection with certain criminal services. They each denied it and reported the contact to Charley. It was something Charley prided himself on, being able to get the measure of a man right.

He heard the rumble of the engines through the fog and then saw the running lights, red and green, heading straight for the pier. Spook started swimming out to it. Charley told him to come back, stop being foolish, you can't fetch a whole boat.

Felix was at the wheel, looking ragged from not having slept in two nights, carrying a limp body up a four-story walk-up and then driving the other from Manhattan to Cambridge, Maryland. Ramirez was in a crate marked "Frozen Turkeys-Perishable." Spook came running down the pier, wet, and started barking at the crate as though it contained a year's supply of Purina Dog Chow. McNamara and Bundy, being the two largest, did most of the carrying as the procession moved by flashlight down the pier and along the shore and up the path that cut through the honey locust to the clearing of heather and moss where Charley, over Felix's strange objections, had decided he was going to put his garden. Sure enough, he started in as soon as they'd set the box down, none too gently.

"Boss," he said, "I wish we wouldn't put them here."

"Felix, we been over that."

"She had a special feeling about this place."

Charley said, "You remember that walrus tusk?" It was one summer he took Conquistador up to New England. They were in Nantucket and she found a walrus tusk in a shop; it had a hole drilled through the tip and a leather thong looped through it. She had the sweet arrogance of youth; was appalled to find a walrus tusk for sale in a store. She asked the owner what the hole and thong were for, and he said they'd used the tusk to club baby seals to death and the thong was just so they could hang the club on a nail in the wall after they were done killing the baby seals. That did it. She made Charley buy the thing-$500 worth of walrus molar-and scoured the town until she found a scrimshander to scratch "Save the Seals" all over it, and while he was at it, "No Nukes," and "Arms are for loving," and other slogans that made Charley groan to pay for.

"Yeah," said Felix. "So?"

"She said it was to get the 'negative energy' out of it. That's just what we're doing here. Getting the negative energy out."

"No no," said Felix, "you're putting negative energy in . This is a special place and you're filling it up with drug dealers."

"Think of them as fertilizer," said Charley. "I'm thinking of planting-it's too shady for roses. Maybe some ferns and wildflowers. Those meadow anemones she liked. Maybe some wild columbine. That's hardy. Lady slipper, blue lobelia." Felix was looking more and more like a basset hound, but it was something he could not explain, there was just no way he could explain it.

McNamara and Bundy dug and said they hadn't done any digging since the early seventies and wanted to know if there was Ben-Gay, because they were going to need it tomorrow. Charley kept looking over at Rostow, but he wasn't going to say anything yet. Spook kept barking at the crate. When the hole was deep enough they opened it up and tossed Ramirez in and shoveled it over. They all stood around for a moment wondering if Charley was going to call a priest on the cordless and ask him to say a few words.

Back in the cabin Charley waited until they'd settled in with beers by the fire. He took the New York Times clipping out of his pocket and put it on the coffee table. The men stared at it. Charley said, "All right, who did it?"

It was obvious. A CIA polygrapher had told Charley once you could usually tell if a man was lying if he looked up and wiggled his eyes.

"Rostow," said Charley. Rostow picked up the clipping and read it and put it down.

"A little collateral damage is inevitable," he said. The others nodded. So they were all in on it. Well, goddamnit.

"Collateral damage?" said Charley. "Hold on just a moment here. He was walking away and, and you shot the sumbitch!"

Rostow said, "Mac and Bundy and I agreed that a no-witness policy made sense." McNamara and Bundy nodded.

"Agreed? Who the hell are you, the board of trustees?" Bundy started flipping through Colonial Homes , Mac looking over his shoulder. During the Ramirez planning session the two of them had gotten into an argument over whether kilims went with Saltillo tiles. It occurred to him that he-rather, the late Mr. Luis-was the victim of the incentive package he'd put together. In addition to the million dollars-and the medical, the stock options-they'd each receive a CPI-adjusted yearly bonus of $100,000 for the rest of their lives, as long as the operation remained secret. It was meant to encourage mutual enforcing. If one of them said anything, the other two were likely to look him up and express their unhappiness over the loss of their retirement package.

"Well, damnit," said Charley, it being about all he could say.

Rostow said, "There wasn't time to get him a priest, but I did him in front of the church there. You must get some credit for dying in front of a church, right?"

"Right," said Mac helpfully, looking up from Colonial Homes .

"Book me five suites at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables," said Charley, charging out of the elevator from the rooftop chopper pad at his old velocity. He was still in his hunting clothes, tracking dust from dried mud. These hunting trips were certainly restorative, she thought; he no longer looked the broken man he was at the funeral. "For tonight," he said, peeling off his jacket and tossing it onto the sofa. He left a trail of clothes on the way to the shower, an old habit from his days on the shrimp boats along the Gulf coast. Margaret used to give him hell for it. Miss Farrell picked up his jacket. There was something on the sleeve.

"Tonight," she said absently, studying the stain. Charley took quick showers. He was on his way to his desk in the oversize terry bathrobe when Miss Farrell's assistant's voice said on the boom box in a worried tone, "Sir, there are two men here from the FBI to see you."

Miss Farrell looked at the jacket she was holding and folded it to her breast. There was a back way out of Charley's office; she headed for it. On her way out she heard Charley say, "Send 'em in. And can we have some coffee, please?"

They were in there twenty minutes. Miss Farrell couldn't concentrate. When the door finally opened, she looked up, stricken. She heard Charley say, "And the politician says to the Devil, 'What's the catch?'" The FBI men laughed. Charley followed them out. He shook their hands and said, "I'm sorry to cause you all this trouble."

"What was that about?" she asked.

"Oh," said Charley, "I strayed a little too close to Andrews on the way back from the island. Air Force Two was on final and, well, it's nothing, really, just… You know," he said, chuckling, "I used to let Tasha handle the controls sometimes and the same thing happened, we just kissed the inside of the Restricted Airspace and all hell broke loose. They scrambled an F-4, buzzed us, nearly knocked us down. Damn near wet my pants. Course, she thought it was the greatest thing ever happened. Tell Chuck to have Forty-nine ninety fueled for Miami with a five o'clock wheels-up. Now what do I have for today?"