Wild Card pp-8 Read online

  “And your share of the take?”

  “An equal cut… no more, no less.” Baxter’s eyes gleamed. “You see, lord, I am ready to check my natural greed for our common purpose.”

  Morpaign had fallen still again, hands clenched into tight balls at his sides, beads of perspiration gathering in the furrow above his upper lip. His hatred of having to stand at another man’s mercy was almost choking in its intensity, matching only his disdain for the brigand’s swagger. And yet…

  And yet despite all that, he could not have pretended to ignore the sharp bite of curiosity, and the tantalizing sense that it might be pursued to some unforeseen and illimitable gain. No, not even at point of gun, with the dead still pouring their blood into the ground under his feet.

  “You fail to account for British maritime patrols,” he’d said in a deliberately hedging tone. “The cargo once aboard that merchantman is in your hands. Should you have found undeclared goods aboard, they would have been limited to inconspicuous quantities, stowed where they might have slipped past inspection. But a pirate vessel loaded with contraband… how could it elude the admiralty?”

  Baxter laughed. It was a cold, somehow arrogant outburst that would echo in Morpaign’s thoughts very often in times to come, always inseparable from his recollection of molten red fireglow that had risen high into the black roof of the night.

  “Now there’s the tickler,” he said. “I have become the admirality’s arm, lord. No longer pirate but privateer in its service. With the King’s colors flying from my masthead, and a letter of marque in my breast pocket, I am warranted to board vessels hostile to the empire and seize any illicit freight for a prize.” He grinned broadly, nodded in the direction of the torched vessel below. “Nothing could be safer from interdiction than a shipment carried under my banner.”

  Morpaign looked at him for a long moment, opened his mouth to speak… and then shut it, his attention drawn by a sudden movement over to his right.

  Didier, he realized. The impulsive, loose-lipped fool had turned from the bodies of the slaves, his face contorted with anger.

  “That what cleared him to blow the brains out o’ our two best and strongest, seigneur?” he blurted, pointing at Baxter. “Or was his trigger finger actin’ on its own?”

  Baxter’s grin pulled in at the edges but remained on his lips. He straightened, whirled on his heel, and swung his pistol toward the gesticulating overseer.

  “Noise for noise,” he said.

  His gun crashed and spouted flame. The horses tethered to the wagons reared up with fear, their tails flicking, front hooves kicking at the air. Morpaign heard Didier scream, saw him fall to the ground clutching his kneecap with both hands.

  Baxter spared a moment to glance down at his whimpering victim, gave out an audible cluck of his tongue. Then he lowered the gun’s smoking barrel and turned back to Morpaign, his expression that of someone who had tolerated a fleeting, barely consequential interruption.

  “Patch the sorry creature and he will survive — lame but better behaved,” he said. “Now I’d hear your response to my offer.”

  Still struck with astonishment, Morpaign raised his eyes from where the overseer lay bleeding and crumpled near the murdered slaves.

  “And if I decline?” he said, gathering himself together.

  “I’d consider it a business decision and bear no grudge,” Baxter said. He nodded back toward the wagon, the flintlock resting against his hip. “That shipment of rum would adequately curb my disappointment as we part ways.”

  The two men did not speak for a tense minute, the silence about them penetrated only by Didier’s sobs, the stamping and snorting of the horses, and the whispered exchanges of the stunned, frightened laborers inside the cave. They were peering out its mouth at the latest victim to fall before the gun, and Morpaign again found himself doing the same. Writhing in agony, his knee gushing, the overseer was a bad sight. If his wound was not tended soon, he would suffer the worst for his impulsive mouthings.

  There was, however, a decision that needed to be reached first. His mind working, Morpaign gazed past Baxter at his ragtag band of sea rovers. Gathered around the wagon and its agitated team of horses, they returned his scrutiny with hard stares, the light of the flames over the water glinting off their blades.

  Through me you can expand your trade beyond measure, Baxter had said. It was a bold declaration, yes. But could anything have made it easier to believe than the brazen ruthlessness of his actions?

  Finally Morpaign returned his attention to Baxter, his bunched fists loosening at his sides.

  Through wreck and violence, through blood and fire, his path had become clear. And more than that, or so it felt.

  In the unreality of the moment, it all might have been a consecration of his destiny.

  “Doing business with you,” he said with intent slowness, “shall be my pleasure.”

  Redbone Baxter smiled. Then he holstered his flintlock, slipped another from his bandolier, and held it out by the long gold-plated barrel. Its elaborate scrollwork was similar to what Morpaign had seen on the first pistol, but here he also noticed a gleaming silver butt cap cast as a demonic face with narrow eyes, grotesquely distorted features… and, Morpaign thought, a grin of cold, insolent delight eerily similar to the one on Baxter’s face.

  Or so it appeared to him, at least, in the tricky light and shadows hurled by the soaring, distant flames.

  “Take the pistol as a gift, and consider it a symbol of our newborn alliance,” Baxter said. “May it endure for many long and profitable years.”

  Morpaign nodded and accepted the gun.

  “Long years, indeed,” he said, wrapping his fingers around its demon-headed stock.

  ONE

  VARIOUS LOCALES APRIL 2006

  MIAMI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, FLORIDA

  “Seems to me you’ve probably got a couple’a leakers,” said Hendricks, a big, burly, florid-cheeked guy in his middle fifties wearing a dark blue uniform with a U.S. Customs patch on the upper left breast of its shirt. He shook his clipboard at a skid truck parked on the nearby tarmac. “Better come see them for yourselves.”

  Three of the four men standing in a semicircle around him seemed disinclined to budge an inch. They were also in uniform, albeit of a type that represented no government agency or legal authority. Still, their green jumpsuits, orange Day-Glo vests, yellow hard hats, and Sun West Air Transport employee ID tags did help get across the message implicit in their balky expressions — namely that this was not their specific responsibility, not by any interpretation of airline procedures, being they were only cargo handlers whose job pretty much began and ended with clearing out the DC-9’s transport hold, which was precisely what they and the rest of their crew had done minutes earlier. It was obvious they’d seen all they would have preferred of the questionable freight, and didn’t intend to see any more unless and until they were told to move it over to the terminal. Either that or they heard from their boss, Tom Bruford, the other man outside the jet representing Sun West, that they would need to put their aching arms and backs toward doing something else with it… though they hadn’t the foggiest idea what that something might be.

  “A couple, well, I don’t know. It seems pretty unusual,” Bruford said now. An assistant transport manager with the freight forwarder, he was short, thin, tired-eyed, thirtyish, and in his blazer and tie, the only one in the group to be sporting ordinary business attire. “They’re stacked one on top of the other, right? I’m guessing it’s just spillage on that bottom crate.”

  Hendricks gave him an irritated frown.

  “I used the word ‘probably’ for a reason,” he said. “Do we really need to argue?”

  “I wasn’t arguing.”

  “Whatever you want to call it.”

  “I’m just trying to explain something about the fish crates.” Bruford sighed. “They’re required to have Styrofoam liners, absorbent pads for drippage—”

  Hendricks held up
a hand to stop him.

  “Before you raise more of a fuss,” he said, “you might want to remember the shipment’s got six containers in total listed on your manifest, and I’ve got them all sitting on that truck over there, and won’t have any choice except to reject the whole goddamn skid load for likely contamination if you won’t cooperate.”

  Bruford opened his mouth to answer, decided he’d better snap it shut for his own good. In his sound and objective critical estimate, the inspector was a hump of the first order. Wait and see, in a minute he’d claim he had cut Sun West some kind of break by conducting his spot check out here on the runway instead of routinely waiting till the crates got inside the Customs building — which happened to be right next door to the freight forwarder’s international reception terminal, a hell of a lot more convenient location for everybody involved.

  “Got to be spillage, but I’ll go have a look,” Bruford said, and turned toward the skid truck.

  Hendricks tagged along with him.

  “They’re pushed a little over to one side,” he said. “I had them separated from the rest, see?”

  A Hump with a capital H, Bruford thought. “I can see that, right, thanks…”

  Dropping back about a foot, Hendricks glanced at the documentation on his clipboard.

  “Trinidad,” he read aloud in a sour tone. “I noticed that’s the shipment’s country of origin.”

  “Right.”

  “You ask me, whoever carries imports or exports from over there is only looking for trouble,” Hendricks said. “Its national health regs, oversight procedures, airport security… they’re all a joke.”

  Crouched over the supposed leakers, Bruford was thinking he didn’t remember having asked the fat leprechaun for his opinion about that or anything else. In fact, he’d have gotten along just fine and zipa-dee-doo-dah dandy without it.

  As he’d started telling Hendricks, the rugged three-hundred-pound-capacity wooden crates his men had offloaded onto the truck were a standardized type the Trinidadian client, an international seafood wholesaler, always used for moving large fish. Each ordinarily would have three sides pasted with the requisite stickers marking out its point of departure, weight in pounds and kilos, exact contents, and other important information. The contents code labels on these half dozen boxes in particular read “YN/THU-NALBA”—an abbreviation used industry-wide for yellowfin tuna, scientific name thunnus albacares.

  A quick examination of the skid load Hendricks had cited did reveal evidence of a leak in the topmost crate, and irrespective of his feelings about the inspector, Bruford couldn’t deny it looked fairly serious. Most of the spillage was at the lower left-hand corner, where he saw a wet, dark red slime that appeared to consist of blood, mucous, and maybe some water from melted packing ice. The heavy goop had run onto the lid of the crate underneath, and then gone dripping down over the crate’s side panel, soaking through most of the adhesive markers there and causing a couple of them to warp and peel away at the edges.

  That, Bruford decided, was the discouraging part. On the positive flip side, he didn’t notice any visible damage to either of the crates, which meant that the problem in all likelihood could be attributed to the upper container’s load exceeding its weight limit rather than a break in the wood or insulating material during transport — that second possibility a worst-case mishap liable to spoil the fish inside.

  “That fluid’s been seeping out so fast you ought to be glad I held back the crates,” Hendricks commented from behind him now. “If I’d let them stay together with the rest of your freight, sent ’em ahead to check-in, there’d be botulism and God knows what other germs crawling on everything off the plane. It’d leave you open to all kinds of financial liability.”

  Bruford had to bite his lip in annoyance. Yeah, right, he thought. Such big-hearted concern. Hendricks breaking his chops was bad enough. Hendricks chumming up to him, freely offering his sage advice, took the prize cake. As if the guy was doing anybody here a favor. As if he didn’t have the slightest inkling freight forwarders were indemnified against that sort of thing. And as if it made more sense from a public health standpoint to keep the boxes sitting out in the baking Miami sunlight than to have them segregated inside the terminal’s enormous cool room, where their perishable contents could be refrigerated while awaiting inspection.

  Bruford sighed, rose from his knees. “You want both crates opened?” he said resignedly.

  Hendricks nodded.

  “Be safest for everybody involved,” he said.

  Bruford raised a hand and beckoned over a couple of his waiting freight handlers, one of whom had already pulled a crowbar from his leather tool-belt holster. “The inspector would appreciate a peek inside these two,” he said, motioning toward the crates.

  The handlers looked at him unhappily.

  “Right here, huh?” said the guy with the crowbar.

  “Yeah,” Bruford said with a commiserative nod. “Here.”

  The handlers turned toward the skid truck and got to work.

  For a minute Bruford stood watching them start on the top crate. Then he turned to Hendricks, figuring he’d see how his theory about excess weight had gone over.

  “Suppose the crate’s leaking because it was overpacked,” he asked. “We going to need to put it on a scale for you?”

  Hendricks shrugged.

  “Look at it from my position,” he said. “There’s a big enough difference between its declared and actual weight, it could be an intentional duty violation.”

  “Or an honest mistake.”

  Another shrug. “Subject to enforcement either way.”

  Bruford frowned. He was guessing his question had been answered with the closest equivalent of a solid yes available in this piss-pond bureaucrat’s lingo. He was also wondering what cosmic sin he could have committed to merit God’s having punished him with the ridiculous crap being squarely dished out on his head today. But maybe there was no cause-and-effect explanation. Maybe sometimes you just had put it down to a hump being a hump to his core.

  Bruford expelled another breath. Behind him the fish crate creaked and squealed in protest as its lid was wedged upward with the flat end of the crowbar.

  He had started turning toward it again to check on his men’s progress when the most awful scream he’d ever heard tore through the air from that same direction, shredding through the loud turbine roar of planes that were landing and departing on the airport’s busy runways.

  His skin erupting into gooseflesh, Bruford whirled around the rest of the way to discover the brawny six-footer who’d been working at the crate howling his lungs out, shrieking like a terrified little kid. He had his back to the skid truck and was pressing his fists into his temples, the crowbar he’d been using dropped heedlessly on the tarmac beside the box’s displaced lid. Meanwhile the other handler had remained by the crate, staring into it, his eyes so wide Bruford could see their bulging whites from where he stood.

  He rushed forward, thinking maybe he shouldn’t be too eager to find out what inside those boxes could have sent a pair of grown men into crazed and seemingly unashamed fits of hysteria, but letting his feet take him over to the skid truck anyway, moving up to it with three or four long, hurried strides.

  And then he was standing there looking down into the crate, feeling his stomach seize with horror and revulsion.

  There were body parts inside. Instantly recognizable human body parts. Bruford’s disbelieving eyes picked out a headless torso with white knobs of bone protruding from its arm sockets. Then another beneath it, partially exposed under torn plastic wrapping and a scattered layer of freezer gel packs. One of them had belonged to a light-skinned person. The other to someone with skin that was a very dark shade of brown.

  Both looked like they were male to Bruford, though he couldn’t be sure. He had also had no way to be positive the severed limbs packed in the crate belonged to the same two people. The only thing he did know before recoiling in shock and a
version was that there was a hacked-up anatomical jumble crammed against the container’s bloodstained foam liner. He could see everything, everything, wedged into every possible space, awash in a soup of gore. Arms, legs, feet, other pieces of human beings he either couldn’t or didn’t want to identify…

  Everything but the heads, and the hands.

  He turned away from the horrible sight, clapped a palm over his mouth to fend off an attack of nausea. He was aware of Hendricks behind him now, peering over his shoulder at the gross butchery inside the crate. His radio up against his ear, the inspector was calling out for assistance in a cracking, excited voice — either from airport security or the police, Bruford was too far out of his skull to tell. He heard a response squawk from the Customs inspector’s handset, jerked his head around, and knew at a glance that Hendricks was struggling with the same kind of paroxysms he’d managed to subdue a moment before.

  Their eyes met for an instant. The color had drained from Hendricks’s cheeks until they turned an ashen gray.

  “I told you,” he gasped hoarsely, wringing the words through livid, contorted lips. “Fucking Trinidad!”

  Then he covered his stomach with his hands, doubled over, produced an awful retching noise, and threw up all over his shoes.

  SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CALIFORNIA

  “Hey, you!” said Marissa Vasquez without slowing her jog in the sand. “Watch it!”

  Felipe, who’d fallen a step or two behind Marissa, reacted about the way she would have expected and ignored her. Of course her zippy tone wasn’t what she might have called high in the intimidation factor…

  “Ouch!” she said, feeling him pinch her rear end again. “Thought I warned you to quit—”

  Before she could finish protesting, Felipe caught up to her, hooked an arm around her waist, and drew her into his embrace.