An Absence of Light (64 page)

“No, I favor the airport too,” Murray said.

“So do I,” Remberto added, “but, if something goes wrong, if there is shooting, we will be risking fire with that fuel.”

“Yeah, I thought of that,” Graver said.

“What is his personality?” Remberto asked.

“I don’t know, but judging from his telephone conversation, he’s the one in control. Ledet seems to be going along, less concentrated. And, too, Redden’s the one that Kalatis trusts, which says a lot. Kalatis seems to insist on personal contact with his three lead pilots.”

“And we’re just going to question the guy, is that it?” Murray asked.

Graver explained his situation regarding the bureaucracy he would have to negotiate in order to move officially against Kalatis.

“And while they’re trying to work out the politics of such a move, Kalatis would vanish,” he said. “And he wouldn’t be the first big target to slip out the back door while the bureaucrats are trying to make up their minds. So, my intention in questioning Redden is to see if there’s some way to salvage something out of this fiasco other than a long, drawn-out investigation that will wind down eighteen months from now with nothing to show for it but a few oversentenced small-timers.”

He looked at them. “I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I told Arnette they’d be moving money tonight, and they will be. But my sole concern here is Panos Kalatis. I want the money because Kalatis wants the money and my guess is wherever it is he’s not far away. To me the money is nothing more than bait. I’m not going to be looking at that; I’m going to keep my eyes on the shadows.”

He wasn’t going to spell it out. He didn’t think he had to.

“You’re sure the cargo’s not drugs,” Murray said.

“Ledet says it’s cash or people or both. Not drugs. According to him, these pilots never move drugs. That’s another cell, another group.”

“Goddamn,” Murray said. “Organization.”

“Yeah, and I don’t think it’s unusual for Kalatis to reorganize periodically or to change plans at the last minute. He expects everyone to keep up with this, not to be put off balance by last-minute shifts in time and place. I think Redden and his two counterparts are very good operationally. And since they know just about as much as anybody about Kalatis, I put them right up at the top. I really want these guys. They would be invaluable from an intelligence point of view.”

Both men nodded, and it seemed as though they thought his proposition a reasonable one, if somewhat unorthodox. But then Graver guessed that neither of them was too fond of orthodoxy anyway, or they wouldn’t be doing what they were doing.

Just then Graver’s handset buzzed, and Neuman told them he was pulling up in front of the house.

The Pilatus PC-12 was indeed a beautiful aircraft, a long, sleek fuselage with wings mounted from its belly, the tips of the wings turned up like fins, the T-tail gaining extra support by a straight, sharp rib extending forward to the roof just behind the last of the eight port windows. Coming in from the Gulf and approaching the northwest-by-southeast runway, it looked like a sliver of ice falling into the lowering sun.

Graver sat in the car in the shade of one of several hangars flanking the runway where Redden had just touched down. Bayfield, he observed, was one of those airstrips that looked like it had been built during the 1940s to serve what had then been a remote naval station or some other wartime installation and then had been quickly superseded after the war by better installations that grew up nearer the expanding city of Houston. But somehow Bayfield did not die. One by one the four Quonset huts were replaced by corrugated tin hangars that quickly looked as old as the huts they replaced. A variety of men hangared a variety of planes there off and on over the years, and a pilot manqué who wore glasses with Coke bottle lenses ran the “tower,” a two-room, cinder-block building with a radio and a picture window facing the strip. There were always a couple of guys hanging around working on old engines and to drive the fuel truck if someone dropped in and wanted to top off. Bayfield was almost deserted, but at the same time it was not unusual to see fancy planes parked there from time to time. They came and went. Nobody paid much attention.

Graver watched Ledet fifty yards away ease the Alfa Romeo along the skirt of the tarmac and stop at the opened doors of the hangar where Redden kept the Pilatus. Inside the hangar, Neuman was backed against the wall, watching Ledet only seventy-five feet away. A hundred and thirty yards away, inside the main hangar where Graver had already presented his credentials and impressed upon the four employees there the importance of cooperation and silence, Remberto and Murray were slipping into the bright orange overalls of the two airport mechanics who normally drove the small tanker truck. Remberto kept his eyes on another employee who was on the other side of a glass wall wearing headphones. The man gave Remberto a thumbs-up.

“There it is,” Remberto said, zipping up the coveralls. “He just radioed for the fuel truck.”

Using his handset, Murray relayed this to Graver as Neuman listened in, and then the two men climbed into the high-seated fuel truck, Murray behind the wheel, and pulled out of the shade of the hangar. Behind them, well back from the door, a clutch of men—the two tanker drivers, a mechanic, and the dispatcher—watched the unfolding scenario as though it was a spectator event with more than a hint of serious danger about it.

The sun glinted off the Pilatus as Redden turned at the end of the runway and began taxiing back toward the hangar, halfway up the tarmac.

Wearing sunglasses, Ledet got out of the Alfa and leaned back against its front fender and watched as Redden approached at a ninety-degree angle from the hangar and then twitched the flaps to swing the plane around so that it was headed straight into the open doors. He taxied the Pilatus almost to the door, the whine of the turboprop growing louder inside the hangar as it drew near, the powerful engine reverberating against the corrugated sheet metal walls. Then he cut the engine, and the turbo began its long whining wind-down.

Peering through a crack in the seams of the sheet metal, Neuman watched as Redden, his face unemotional behind dark aviator sunglasses, began gathering together miscellany from the cockpit, getting ready to open the door. Neuman shifted his eyes to Ledet who stood up from the car but didn’t move away from it, while on the other side of him, behind the plane, the tanker truck advanced on the plane.

Neuman could see Redden crawling out of his cockpit seat into the center aisle, and then the full door behind the cockpit levered out and slid back against the body of the plane.

“Hey, Rick,” Redden shouted, and jerked his head for Ledet to come over. Ledet hesitated. The fuel tanker was approaching the wing of the plane, and he didn’t want to be anywhere around Redden when the guns came out. Inexplicably, he just pointed to the fuel truck.

Murray was pulling to a stop, and when he saw Ledet pointing at him he grabbed a clipboard off the dash of the truck and raised it and pointed to it Redden looked toward the truck and saw the driver waving the clipboard. He laid something in one of the passenger seats, lowered the steps, and stepped down out of the plane. He was sandy-haired with a light, sun-flushed complexion. Though he was not a heavy man, he had a well-developed beer gut which was hardly camouflaged by his loose-fitting guayabera, a common garment for convenient handgun concealment. He wore cowboy boots and faded blue jeans, one leg of which was caught on the top of his boot revealing the boot’s red leather top which served as the background for a hand-tooled Mexican eagle, its wings spread out on either side of the boot.

Murray and Remberto got down out of the truck, slammed their doors, and came around the end of the wing as Murray again raised the clipboard.

“They said you had paperwork to clear up before you could take on fuel,” Murray said.

Redden looked around at Ledet “What’s this shit?”

Ledet shrugged.

Redden and Murray approached each other as Murray held out the clipboard, turning slightly as he did so to allow Remberto to approach Redden a few steps later than Murray and on Redden’s blind side.

“I’m paid up. What the hell’s the matter?” Redden said, grabbing the clipboard.

As soon as he jerked it out of Murray’s hand, Remberto’s arm went inside his bright orange overalls and came out with the Sig-Sauer, the muzzle of which went instantly into the fleshy reserve covering Redden’s left kidney. Redden flinched, and as he did so the muzzle of Murray’s .45 screwed into his stomach while at the same instant Remberto’s left hand gripped his left arm just above the elbow.

“A forty-five and a nine-millimeter,” Murray said, his face right up in Redden’s. “And a Mac-10 right over there in the hangar.”

As Redden rolled his eyes cautiously to look at Ledet, Neuman came out of the hangar with his gun leveled at Ledet who simply raised his hands in the air.

“Son of a bitch,” Redden said. “Jeee-sus, I’m not believing this.”

“Believe it,” Murray said and his thick hand went around behind Redden and relieved him of the gun he had jammed into the back of his waistband. “Nine-millimeter… Beretta,” Murray said before he had even brought it out in the open.

The instant Remberto’s hand had gone into his overalls, Graver started the car and drove quickly across the tarmac, pulling up between Ledet’s Alfa and the plane. He got out and came around the front of the car to where Redden was still trying to absorb the past twenty seconds. Graver handed a pair of handcuffs to Murray who stepped around behind Redden and cuffed him.

“Who the hell are
you?”
Redden demanded, leveling his dark lenses at Graver. His nose was hawk-beaked and raw from the sun. Graver guessed it didn’t take much sun to be too much sun for Redden.

Graver reached out and took off Redden’s sunglasses to reveal pale blue eyes and an extraordinarily woolly pair of ginger eyebrows. Redden immediately grimaced in the bright light.

“Shit,” he said.

On the spur of the moment Graver decided not to take Eddie Redden back to his house in Seabrook for questioning. Instead he sat him down in the center of the empty hangar, his hands handcuffed behind his back, his legs crossed yoga fashion. He placed him so that he faced the hangar’s sliding doors that were pulled wide open so that he had a good view of his precious Pilatus PC-12 fifty feet away. Graver stood just to the side of the plane so that Redden just about had to look at both of them when he spoke to Graver. The sheet metal hangar was at its maximum heat level, having soaked up the coastal sun all day long. Even though the huge doors were wide open, the occasional breeze that slipped in was only a different way of feeling the heat, and caused the hangar to function very much like a convection oven.

Everyone removed their coats and hung them wherever they could find a place, on a nail or over the handle of an hydraulic jack, or on the hasp of a door latch. The empty hangar magnified their voices so that no one really had to talk above a conversational tone to be heard. Outside, the droning of cicadas and grasshoppers was interrupted occasionally by an airplane approaching or taking off. And occasionally, too, when there was a pause in the talk, you could hear the sheet metal walls of the hangar crackling and popping as they expanded in the heat.

Eddie Redden was harder to deal with than Richard Ledet For one thing, he was not the sort of man who let his imagination play tricks on him. He was long on common sense. You didn’t convince him of anything by trying to work on his anxieties—he didn’t have any. He seemed to face life with an unadorned philosophy of acceptance, a kind of West Texas stoicism that had no use for breast-beating and wailing. Sometimes life pissed on you, and sometimes it didn’t. When it did, you were unlucky. When it didn’t, you were lucky. There wasn’t anything you could do about it one way or the other. That could have been his credo. And in light of that, he had become adept at making the best of a bad situation. Life might piss on Eddie Redden, but he didn’t moan about it. What he did was, he took a long soapy shower during which he gave some serious thought to how to stay the hell out of the way next time.

And that’s what he was doing now, sitting cross-legged like an Indian—probably the first time he had done that since he was fifteen—trying to figure out how not to get pissed on any more than he already had.

Graver had laid it all out as methodically and dispassionately as he could, guessing that Redden would appreciate a right-to-the-bone explanation of his situation. Graver stated the facts like an accountant. The porno film with the little girls, the cocaine, the stolen ordnance, his employment by Kalatis, the weekly money jumps to the cruisers in the Gulf—Graver had the maps for documentation—the monthly money jumps to points south… for starters… enough right there to assure Redden that when he had taxied up to the hangar a few minutes ago he probably had piloted an airplane for the last time in his life.

Now Redden was thinking it over, breathing heavily—it wasn’t easy to sit on a hot concrete floor with your legs crossed and your arms cuffed behind you while the too-tight waist of your blue jeans cut into your beer-induced and doughy overhang. He was sweating profusely, so much so that dribbles of it rolled down his forehead and clung to his ginger eyebrows like drops of salty rain. He had sweated through his guayabera which clung to his back and stomach, and the strain of his position was giving him something like a charley horse in his side, causing him to tilt slightly to try to ease it.

Redden was grunting softly with each breath. He looked up at his Pilatus PC-12. He shook his head. He grinned a little.

“Hey, Ricky,” he said, speaking to Ledet who was sitting directly behind him in the same position, but out of his sight “You cut a deal with these boys, didja?”

Neuman shook his head at Ledet.

When he didn’t answer Redden grinned and said, “Shee-it.”

Since they had walked into the hangar no one had said a word except Graver and Redden.