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“You’re not out for the Medal of Honor?” Adonis said.
“Don’t make fun of the guy, Adonis,” I said.
He reached into his coat pocket and removed the tin box that contained the syringe and the ampoules of morphine.
“Before you give him that, can you answer a question?” I said.
“What’s the question?”
“I don’t get this stuff about a black sail and a white sail.”
“If this deal is worked out and most of what we own is transferred to a bank in Malta, Isolde will be on her way to us in a boat with white sails. If not, the sails will be black.”
“Why not use a radio?” Clete said.
“Because other people can pull the transmission out of the air,” Adonis said. “Because Mark Shondell likes to pretend he’s a man for the ages.”
Clete’s green eyes were half-lidded, his shoulders humped; he resembled a contemporary Quasimodo brought down from the bell tower. But as always, Clete’s externals were misleading, his intelligence and complexity silently at work in a gargantuan body he had spent a lifetime abusing with weed, pills, cigarettes, trough-loads of deep-fried food, and oceans of booze. Put more simply, Clete Purcel was the human equivalent of an M-1 tank plowing through a stucco building.
I could see his upper arms expanding like a firehose swelling with pressurized water. In the corner of my eye, I saw him twisting the ligatures on his wrists, working them over the heels of his hands, ignoring the broken vessels and torn flesh, blood slipping off the ends of his fingers, all of this with his eyes straight ahead, like a brain-dead man gazing at empty space.
Suddenly, his hands were free. He clamped one on Adonis’s mouth and the other on the back of his neck and drove his skull into the bulkhead, then dropped him to the deck as though he were a rag doll. He opened the tin box and removed the syringe. It was already loaded.
“Hey, guy out there!” he called through the hatchway. “Balangie is having a seizure! Get him out of here! We got enough problems!”
The man in overalls came through the hatch. “Seizure?”
Clete hooked his arm under the man’s chin and peeled it back, then jabbed the needle into the carotid and plunged down the piston with his thumb. “How you like it, shit breath?”
The man’s mouth fell open and his eyes rolled. Clete eased him to the deck and went through his pockets. He found a box cutter but no firearm. He
sliced the ligatures on my wrists, then Carroll’s.
“We’ve got to get a gun,” he said.
I went through Adonis’s pockets while Clete stood by the hatchway. “Nothing,” I said.
“Got any idea what time of day it is?” Clete said.
“No,” I said.
Clete chewed his lip. “You call it, Streak.”
“When we were up the passageway, I thought I could feel the screws behind us,” I said. “If there’s an armory, it’s probably aft.”
“What about these two guys?” he said.
“What about them?” I said.
“What if they wake up?”
I knew what he was thinking. “Lock them in and leave them alone.”
“Okie-dokie, big mon,” he replied. “How you feeling, LeBlanc?”
“No matter how this comes out, I think you’re a righteous dude, Purcel,” he said.
“Don’t tell anybody,” Clete said.
