Odd Hours Part 23

"You're good people in trouble. I trust you."

"This is more than trust," I said.

"It might be. Look in the purse."

The weapon was a pistol. I examined it.

"No safeties," she said. "Double action. Ten rounds in the magazine. You know how to use such a thing?"

"Yes, ma'am. I'm no Bonnie's Clyde, but I won't shoot my foot, either."

I thought of Annamaria saying that she didn't work, that people gave her a free place to live and even money when she needed it.

Now a gun came to me when I most needed one.

Something more was happening in Magic Beach than just a plot to smuggle nuclear weapons into the country and my attempt to thwart it.

This place was the still point of the turning world, and this night was the still point between the past and the future. I felt monumental forces gathering that I either could not comprehend or was afraid to contemplate.

My cursed life, my blessed life, my struggles with grievous loss and my striving toward wonder had often seemed to me to be the random path of a flippered pinball, from post to post and bell to bell and gate to gate, rolling wherever I might be knocked.

Instead, all the while, from childhood, I had been moving toward Magic Beach and toward a moment when, with full free will, I would either take upon myself a tremendous burden-or turn away from it. I did not know what the burden might prove to be, but I could feel the weight of it descending, and my moment of decision drawing near.

All things in their time.

Birdie Hopkins pulled the Cadillac to the curb and stopped once more.

Pointing, she said, "Harbor's one block that way. Maybe you'd rather walk the last part to...whatever it is."

"I'll use the gun only to defend myself."

"Thought different, I wouldn't give it."

"Or an innocent life."

"Hush now. It's like you said."

"What did I say?"

"This is more than trust."

The fog, the night, the future pressed at the windows.

"One more thing I might need."

"Just say."

"Do you have a cell phone?"

She took it from the purse, and I accepted it.

"When you're safe," she said, "will you let me know?"

"Yes, ma'am. Thank you for everything."

I started to open the door, then hesitated.

Unshed tears stood in Birdie's eyes.

"Ma'am, I s.h.i.+ned you on about something earlier. What you feel coming isn't from watching the news too much."

She bit her lower lip.

I said, "Something big is coming. I sense it, too. I think I've sensed it all my life."

"What? Child, what is it?"

"I don't know. So big the world changes-but like you said, some kind of change n.o.body would ever expect."

"Sometimes I'm so afraid, mostly in the night, and Fred not here to talk me through to a quiet heart."

"You don't ever need to be afraid, Birdie Hopkins. Not a woman like you."

She reached out to me. I held her hand.

"Keep safe," she said.

When she was ready to let go of my hand, I got out of the sedan and closed the door. I slid her cell phone into a pocket of my jeans, and I tucked the pistol in the waistband so that the sweats.h.i.+rt would cover it.

As I walked to the corner, crossed the intersection, and headed toward the harbor, the big engine of the Cadillac idled in the night until I went too far to hear it anymore.

THIRTY-THREE.

ALONG THE SOUTHERN HORN OF THE NARROW-MOUTHED bay, toward the seaward end, the vessels in the small commercial-fis.h.i.+ng fleet tied up where they could come and go with the least disturbance to the bayside residents and to the noncommercial boat traffic.

Where I stood on the quay, along the crescent sh.o.r.e of the northern horn, I could not see those distant trawlers, seiners, and clippers through the thousand white veils of the night. From their direction, however, once every thirty seconds, came the low mournful bleat of the foghorn out on the southern arm of the harbor-entrance breakwater.

Here in the north, the marina offered protection from the storm surges that, in bad weather, muscled in through the entrance channel. Four hundred slips were occupied by a variety of pleasure craft: small electric-motor bay cruisers, sportfishers with metal lookout towers rising above their bridges, sailing yachts with canvas furled, motor yachts, and racing boats. The largest of these craft were sixty feet, and most were smaller.

As I descended a short flight of stairs from the sea wall to the wharf, I could see only a few of the closest craft through the soup. Even those appeared to be ghost vessels, moored in a dream.

Regularly s.p.a.ced dock lamps receded into the mist, a necklace of radiant pearls, and under them the wet planks glistened darkly.

I remained alert for the sound of voices, for footsteps, but no one seemed to be out and about in the chilly mist.

Some of the sailing yachts were full-time residences. Their lighted portholes were as golden as scattered coins, faux doubloons that s.h.i.+mmered and, as I walked, paled away into the murk.

Avoiding the dock lamps was easy enough, for the feathered air constrained their reach. I made my way through shadows, my sneakers squis.h.i.+ng so faintly on the wet planks that even I could barely hear the noise I made.

The sea beyond the bay had been flatline all day; and the currents in the harbor were so gentle that the boats wallowed only slightly in their berths. They creaked and sometimes softly groaned, but the motion was not strong enough to clink halyards against metal masts.

As I walked, I took slow deep breaths of the briny air, and relying on psychic magnetism to pull me toward the conspirators, I concentrated on the images from my dream. Red sky. Red tide. Fiery phantoms of reflected flames swarming the beach.

At the west end of the marina, on the sea wall above the wharf, stood the building housing the harbor department, which was under the authority of the city police. Here below, the last several berths were reserved for department vessels.

Three were the twenty-foot, firehouse-red harbor-patrol boats that, among other tasks, chased down those who violated the five-mile-per-hour speed limit pertaining from the main channel to sh.o.r.e.

Of the other three craft, only one drew my interest: a seagoing tugboat, half again as big as the st.u.r.dy tug that worked only in the bay. From it came the rhythmic laboring of a generator. Many of the portholes and the large windows of the bridge were aglow; a work lamp shone upon a small crane fixed to the long, low afterdeck; and the running lights were on, as if the boat would soon leave port.

The sudden scent of cigarette smoke warned me that someone shared the dock with me. The fog would have filtered out the smell if the smoker had been as far away as the tugboat.

I moved closer to the stone face of the quay and took shelter against a wharf shack, which had been painted red to indicate that it stored firefighting gear.

When I peered around the corner of the shack, I could see the break in the dock railing where a gangway led down to the slip in which the tug was berthed.

After I had stared for a couple of minutes, and only when the eddying fog briefly opened a clearer line of sight for me, I saw the guard move. He was hunkered down this side of the entrance to the gangway, his back against the dock railing. The lamp above him had been broken, probably a short while ago, to provide a dark place where he could not be seen as long as he remained still.

At police headquarters, when Polterfrank had done his thing, Shackett must have thought that I, Harry Lime, federal psychic agent, had tapped a power of my own to escape.

Those events had occurred within the hour, so the conspirators would be at their highest alert, searching for me all over town but expecting that I might come to them. Panic would have seized them: the fear that with one phone call I would bring a hundred FBI agents, or others, down on them before they could take delivery of the nukes and get them out of town.

Evidently, loath to forfeit their newfound wealth, they hadn't canceled the rendezvous at which they would acquire possession of the deadly cargo. Judging by preparations at the tugboat, they intended to transs.h.i.+p the weapons from another vessel at sea.

Now that I knew their intentions and I was on the loose, they might have decided that they dared not return to the harbor with the bombs. If they executed a contingency plan to bring the nukes ash.o.r.e elsewhere along the coast, I had no chance of stopping the operation unless I stowed away with them.

To get aboard, I would have to take out the guard here on the dock, but I could see no way to do so quietly.

Besides, I had to cross a swath of open planking to reach him, and I had no doubt that he would be better armed than I was. A better marksman. A better fighter. Tougher than I was. More brutal. Probably a kung fu master. Wicked with knives and martial-arts throwing stars that would be secreted in six places on his superbly fit body. And if I was somehow able to disarm him of every murderous implement, this guy would would know how to make a lethal weapon from one of his shoes, either the left or right, he wouldn't care which. know how to make a lethal weapon from one of his shoes, either the left or right, he wouldn't care which.

As I worried myself toward paralysis, a man appeared on the long afterdeck of the tug. In spite of the fog, I could see him, a shadowy figure, because of the brightness of the big work lamp focused on the deck crane.

He called out to someone named Jackie, and Jackie proved to be the guard who was hunkered along the deck railing, waiting to kill me with either of his shoes. Jackie rose out of his shadowy lair and disappeared down the gangway to the slip in which the tug was berthed.

Crouched, I crossed the dock to the sentinel position that the guard had just vacated. Through a gap in the railing, I had trouble seeing Jackie on the unlighted slip below, but after a moment, he appeared as a shrouded form on a shorter gangway that led up to the low afterdeck of the tug.

He joined the other man at the deck crane, and together they attended to some final task before departure, sacrificing a kitten to Beelzebub or whatever deeply evil men did to ensure a safe sea journey.

Unlike the boat slip to which it led, the gangway was lighted, but it offered the only sensible approach to the berth below. The noise I would make by diving from here and swimming to the nearest finger of the slip would bring everyone aboard the tug to the open decks to discover if the fabled Harry Lime might be as bulletproof as he was psychic.

Both men at the crane had their backs to me.

All things in their time, and the time had come for reckless commitment.

Pulling the pistol from my waistband, I rose and went to the break in the railing. I descended the gangway boldly, hoping that even if someone stepped onto the foredeck or the bridge deck and saw me, they would see only a figure in the mist and would a.s.sume that I was one of them.

Echoing across the bay, the foghorn sounded like the plaintive call of a prehistoric behemoth, the last of its kind crying out in loneliness.

I reached the bottom without raising an alarm, and crossed the slip to the second gangway. The afterdeck had such a low profile that I could see the two men up there working at the small crane.

Their backs were still turned to me, and I risked setting foot on the second gangway. The first had been a permanent feature of the dock, and therefore solid; but this much shorter ramp was detachable and collapsible and, it seemed to me, fearsomely noisy. Nonetheless, I boarded the tug without drawing attention.

Jackie and his friend were no more than twelve feet away. The halogen lamp burned through the fog with such intensity that, if they turned, they would be able to see me clearly enough to know that I wasn't one of them.

The quickest route off this deck was up a set of six open stairs to the foredeck, immediately to my right. The higher deck encircled a portholed structure containing s.p.a.ces that an experienced seaman would be able to identify but that were, to me, as mysterious as any female wrestler's boudoir-and just as scary.

Instinct told me that I would be less likely to encounter people if I went below decks. The bulkhead that separated the afterdeck from the forward structures featured a door that most likely would take me where I wished to go.

I had to walk across half the width of the afterdeck, behind the two laboring men, through the bright halogen backwash, but I reached the door, opened it, and stepped through without being shot in the back.

Beyond lay a landing at the top of an enclosed companionway. I descended the circular stairs to a narrow, low-ceilinged pa.s.sageway with cabin doors on both sides and another door at the farther end, which was well aft of the bow.

Understandably, you may at this point be wondering What is this bozo's plan? What is this bozo's plan?

As usual, I had no plan. After the fact, it might sometimes appear to a celestial observer-if one happened to be tuned in to Channel Odd-that I had performed according to a meticulously worked-out strategy, using well-rehea.r.s.ed tactics executed to an operations schedule timed with a stopwatch. As you know, I make it up as I go along, heart in my throat and bowels quivering near a state of collapse.

Over the years, I have found that my seat-of-the-pants approach works well. Except when it doesn't.

By doing, I learn what to do. By going, I learn where to go. One day, by dying, I'll learn how to die, and leave the world and hope to land in light.

Pistol ready, I went forward along the pa.s.sageway, ignoring doors to the left and the right, behind which might wait the lady or the tiger, neither of which I wanted. All I asked was that I be spared surprises, although in this world of six billion souls, all acting with free will and too many with audacity, surprises are inevitable, too few of them the kind that make you smile and that lift your heart.

Easing open the door at the end of the corridor, which bucked one of my cherished traditions by swinging smoothly on quiet hinges, I was pleased that I did not at once receive a bullet in the face. I stepped across the raised threshold into the engine room.

An extravagance of cool machinery and a maze of pipes crowded this compartment, a three-dimensional jigsaw fitted to perfection in the stingy s.p.a.ce, a testament to the engineering skills of humanity. High maintenance standards resulted in a room that was cleaner than many kitchens, with fresh paint everywhere and not a spot of rust to be seen.

Evidently, not everyone in the harbor department was distracted by plots to destroy civilization.

Once in the compartment, I hesitated to close the door, though I seemed to be alone.

This was a tugboat, not a battles.h.i.+p or even a destroyer, so the engine room didn't have a lovable but tough Scottish-American warrant officer overseeing a jokey but dedicated team of sweaty enlisted men who-between poker games and harmonica interludes and sappy conversations about their girls back home-were forever tormented by boilers failing, boilers overheating, pipe joints bursting from too much pressure, and a host of other crises. n.o.body needed to be stationed in this compartment for the vessel to go about its work with efficiency, which is one reason why Hollywood never made a great World War II movie about a tugboat.

Because the lights had been on when I opened the door, however, I had to a.s.sume that someone had recently been here and intended to return.

As I was about to retreat and search for another hiding place, I heard a crewman descending the companionway. I closed the door behind me.

Although the equipment was tightly fitted, the layout allowed for repair. I snaked quickly through the service aisles, toward the point farthest from the entrance. Unfortunately, the farthest point was not far enough to make me feel safe from discovery.

Crouched behind s.h.i.+elding pumps and pipes, I had no view of the door, but I heard it open and close.

Someone had entered, though he did not seem to be doing anything but standing over there. The engines were not even idling yet, and the quiet in the compartment was such that I would have heard anyone moving around.