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“What do you want with that?” he said in a suddenly flat voice.
“We want to stop it,” I said.
He cocked his head a quarter of an inch to one side. “You said you weren’t cops.”
“That’s right.”
He moved his lips in and out and squinted. “Reporters?”
“Nope.”
He looked at me for a long moment, flicked his eyes over to Anna and Nicky, then looked at me again. He shook his head and picked up his glass. “I don’t get it,” he said finally, taking a long pull on his drink.
“I’m not sure I do, either,” I said. “We’re just trying to find out enough to give somebody a starting place on digging in and stopping it.”
He looked at me with complete disbelief. “Concerned citizens?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Sorry it sounds like that.”
He drained his glass and put it down on the bar. Somebody had gouged a chunk out of the bar there and the tumbler stuck in the pothole, tilted at a crazy angle. “I’ll take another drink,” Bud said.
I got him his drink. But he didn’t take a sip from it, just stared at the ice cubes. “I came here in 1959,” he finally said. “You probably weren’t even born.”
“Probably not.”
He jerked his head at the huge dinosaur of a jukebox over in the corner. “There was Pat Boone and The Crewcuts on that thing first time I came in here. Most of the guys in here were veterans, got used to the sea during the war. Just looking to stay on the water, do a job, make a few bucks.”
Now he took a drink, draining off about half of his whiskey and water. “Started to change around 1965. New kind of cash cargo coming in.”
“Dope.”
“Dope,” he agreed. “Changed everything.” He sighed heavily and finished the drink, letting the glass hang from his hand, tilted so that one ice cube hung just inside the rim. “Changed… Everything,” he repeated, drawing out the vowels. “Used to be a pretty damn good life. Not curing cancer, maybe, but you could feel good about what you did. And then drugs started creeping in, until you never knew when you might have some stuck in your hold, hidden in something else. You accept it, you go along because either you can’t be sure or hell, everybody else is doing it, making that amazing money, why not. And once you’ve gone one step down that road, there’s no going back.”
He sighed again and looked in his glass, but it was still empty.
“Things have just gone from bad to worse since then. Maybe I should have seen something like this coming, the way things have just been turning bad, a little worse every year. Hijacking, piracy’s coming back, murder so common it doesn’t even make the papers anymore.”
He wound down and just stared at the floor for a minute. I didn’t want to interrupt him, but I didn’t want him to stop talking either. “Let me get you another drink,” I offered.
“Hell, I don’t need another drink, I’ll start crying.” He looked up at me with guarded intelligence. I’d seen him put down three drinks, and who knows how many before that, but there was no sign of the drinking in his eyes. “What do you know about the Black Freighter?” he said, turning it right back on me.
“I don’t even know if it’s real,” I told him.
“Then why in hell are you knocking around looking for it? Hellfire, boy, you have any idea at all what you might be sticking your nose into?”
“I was hoping you might tell me.”
“I’ll tell you this, I hope you swim mighty good.” He raised his glass halfway to his mouth, realized it was empty and put it down on the bar. “Listen, sonny, the professionals don’t want to touch this thing, that tell you anything?”
“It tells me it’s complicated.”
“Complicated. That’s very good, complicated. Sure, it’s as complicated as a thump on the head. Complicated as quick death.” He turned away, slid his glass down the bar and nodded at the bartender for another. “Go home, sonny boy. It’s dark out there and full of monsters.”
I know the sound of a door slamming when I hear it. I also know a few ways to pry them back open. I could try to scare Bud, maybe grab him and lift him straight into the air and shake him a little. That didn’t seem like a good idea, since I was surrounded by his friends, and they were all guys who thought losing a tooth in a fight was like putting a quarter into a jukebox; a small price to pay for so much fun. Besides, I wasn’t sure this guy would scare.
So I tried something that wasn’t quite as subtle. “Sure, Bud. I understand. You don’t want to get involved, that’s fine. If I was retired I’d probably be a little scared, too.”
He sighed and shook his head without turning around. “That’s very funny, Billy. Kick him again, he’s still moving.” The bartender put a new drink in front of Bud and he swirled it once. The ice cubes rattled. “A little scared doesn’t cover it. This is major league terror, and if you don’t understand that, you’re sticking your head in the lion’s mouth with your eyes closed.”
