The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(18)

You are talking to me.

He sat down at the other side of the desk. Lou was scribbling on a pad. He looked up at Western. Can you tell me why they have such a thing as a long ton?

No.

I thought you were supposed to know everything.

I dont. What do you know about this airplane?

Lou scrolled the tape up through his fingers and studied it. That’s fucked up, he said. What airplane?

Dont jack with me.

Western, what would I know? Stuff dribbles down from the front office. Who the fuck knows? Apparently a courier showed up here with a check and that was that.

No way to know who the check was from.

Apparently not.

Did you know there’s nothing in the papers about it?

I dont read the papers.

You dont think that’s odd?

That I dont read the papers?

Why would a planecrash not be in the papers? Nine people dead.

Maybe it’ll be in tomorrow.

I dont think so.

Let me ask you a question.

Go ahead.

What the fuck do you care? Did you see any laws being broken?

No.

Because that’s Taylor’s policy. Halliburton policy, for that matter. If it looks wrong we walk.

Yeah, well it looks wrong.

So? We’re out of it. Forget it.

All right. What time do you have?

What time do you?

Ten o six.

Lou rotated his wrist and looked at his watch. Ten o four.

I need to go. If you hear anything more about the mystery flight let me know.

My guess is that we’ve heard the last of it.

Maybe. Can I borrow a vehicle?

There’s nothing out there but the boomtruck.

Can I take that?

Yeah, sure. When are you bringing it back?

I dont know. In the morning.

You got a hot date?

Yeah. Are the keys in it?

Unless somebody’s carried them off. Dont bring it back empty.

All right. You dont have a pair of binoculars do you?

Jesus, Western. What else?

He opened the bottom desk drawer and took out an old pair of olivedrab army binoculars and stood them on the desk.

Thanks.

Red says that thing is actually great for picking up chicks.

The kind he picks up I wouldnt doubt it.



* * *



—

He drove to Gretna and took the highway north and then turned off on the road heading east to Bay St Louis to Pass Christian. On the far side of the bridge lay the marshlands at the lower end of Pontchartrain. Two graylooking Cajun boys with cigarettes hanging from their lips held their thumbs out in a desultory manner. One standing, one squatting. He watched them draw away in the rearview mirror. The one standing turned lazily and raised a finger after him. When he looked back again they were both of them squatting on their heels. Staring at the road where it lay motionless before them in the morning sun.

The truck had a top speed of about sixty. A faint blue haze of motorsmoke seeped up through the floorboards and he drove with the windows down. He scanned the marshes for birdlife but there wasnt much out there. A few ducks. On the far side of the Pearl River a dead otter in the road.



* * *



—

He drove into Pass Christian and down to the docks where he parked the truck and asked around about a boat. He wound up with a sixteen foot lapstrake skiff with a round hull and a twenty-five horsepower Mercury outboard. When he pulled out of the estuary it was almost one oclock.

Out in the bay he twisted the throttle open. The slap of the waves under the hull leveled out, the sun danced off the water. No horizon out there but only the whiteout of sea and sky. A thin line of pelicans laboring up the coast. The salt air was cool and he zipped up his jacket against the wind.

He’d slung Lou’s binoculars around his neck by their strap and he raised them and scanned the open water. No sign of the Coast Guard boat. When he reached the cluster of offshore islands he turned to the east and ran along the south shore until he came to a small bay. He eased the throttle back and chugged on until he came to a beach and here he pulled in.

He cut the motor and ran the boat aground in the sand and went forward and climbed out and hooked his hand under the foredeck and hauled the boat up onto the beach. It was a pretty heavy boat. There was a small kedge anchor wedged in the bow and he lifted it out and dropped it in the sand and walked up the beach. Maybe a hundred feet of sand. Then grass and palmetto. Beyond that scrub liveoak. There were bird tracks in the hard sand above the tideline. Nothing else. He tried to remember the last time it had rained. He went back to the boat and pushed off and knelt aboard and took up one of the oars and poled out through the shallows and then shipped the oar and put his foot on the transom and hauled on the starter rope.



* * *



—

By late afternoon he’d pretty much circled the islands, putting in at every beach. He found the remains of a fire and he found fishing floats and bones and bits of colored glass ground dull by the sea. He picked up a piece of parchmentcolored driftwood in the shape of a pale homunculus and held it up and turned it in his hand. Late in the day with the light failing he put ashore in a small cove and beached the boat and climbed out and turned and saw almost immediately the tracks in the sand. Just above the thin dark rim of wrack. They looked to have been partly filled in by the wind, but that wasnt it. Something had been dragged over them. He walked out to the edge of the palmettos and here the tracks came back and went down the beach. Clean tracks. The rubber ribs of wetsuit bootees. He stood looking out over the gray water. He looked at the sun and he studied the island. Would the wildlife include rattlesnakes? Eastern diamondbacks. Eight feet long. Atrocious or adamantine he couldnt remember. He picked up a piece of driftwood and broke it to length across his knee and followed the tracks into the woods.