Something for Nothing (12 page)

There was no fog today, just a light breeze from the north. They could smell the stink of the oil refineries in Benicia and Martinez and Vallejo.

Those old towns actually had some character—more than the made-up character of Walnut Station, that's for sure. Benicia had even been the state capital for a year or two at one point. But they'd been bought out and overrun by the oil companies. Standard, Shell, Gulf, Exxon, and the rest of them. He couldn't even keep the names straight anymore. They'd plopped down their giant production facilities right on the edge of these towns. Crazy mazes of pipes winding hundreds of feet in the air, huge smoke stacks, big fat holding tanks the size of city blocks, practically. At night, when the facilities were lit up with different-colored lights, it looked like an amusement park,
or the Emerald City in
The Wizard of Oz
. Nothing could have been further from the truth, of course. For one thing, it really did stink. Martin couldn't imagine how anyone could live there. Could you get used to something like that? Martin didn't think so. But you never knew, maybe if you'd grown up there you wouldn't notice. In fact, maybe if you were from Martinez or Benicia or one of the other little towns up there—maybe towns like Walnut Station smelled bad to you, or smelled wrong, somehow.

In the first two hours of fishing they caught an ocean trout, a few bullheads, and a stingray. The stingray was big—almost two feet across from wingtip to wingtip. They laid it out on the deck on its back, so they could see its whitish-gray underbelly. Its mouth looked strangely human. It opened and closed as they stood there looking at it.

“It's like it's trying to tell us something,” Peter said, looking at the ray and then at Martin.

“You think?” Martin asked.

“Yeah,” Peter said. “Maybe it's some kind of warning.”

Martin smiled, but he wasn't sure if Peter was joking or not. It was hard to tell with him these days. He was tempted to ask, but he decided against it. He picked up the ray and threw it off the side of the boat, back into the water. They watched it float there for a second, hard to see in the brackish green of the bay, and then it glided away.

After an hour of no action (not even a bite), and after they listened to the game for a while, Martin told Peter stories about ghost pirates looking down at them from the ships, rattling their sabers and warning them off, maybe shooting a few ghost muskets and cannonballs at them. A while after that, Peter got up in the prow, shooting his pretend gun at the pirates, ducking and firing in some sort of pitched battle with Captain Kidd or whoever it was he was imagining out there. It was a nice game, nice to watch him play. Eventually, Martin joined in, and then they started battling each other. They climbed all over the boat—up onto the bridge, along the narrow side ledges, into the cabin. Finally, Martin used his favorite maneuver: he slipped down through
the forward hatch, snuck through the bedroom and cabin, and then came up behind Peter and scared the shit out of him. Maybe, he said to Peter, the ghost pirates on the battleships had been helping him.

“Yeah, right,” Peter said. “You wish.” But Martin could see him thinking about it, glancing up at the boats and wondering.

Martin looked upward along the steel side of the
O'Brien
. It was like standing next to a building. A ship like this would be a great place to hide, he thought, if you really needed a getaway. Fill the Viking with provisions, take it out there, sink it, and then climb up the big ladder that was still affixed to the side of the
O'Brien
. You could last a year or more up there, Martin thought, especially if you caught some fish. You could capture rainwater in buckets. Shit off the side of the boat—whatever. And the beauty of it was that they'd think you'd been lost at sea. When they did finally track you down (because in the end they always did), you could go out fighting, shooting at the police and whoever else it was that was after you until you were out of ammunition and too tired to care, anyway.

After the stingray, they couldn't catch anything. Finally, Martin suggested that they both jump off the boat and into the water.

“Come on,” he said. “It'll be great. We'll jump at the same time. I dare you.”

“No way,” Peter said.

“Why not?” Martin asked. “What's wrong? It's not that cold.”

“Aren't there sharks?”

But Martin persisted, and then he started in with the bribes. “I'll give you a box of baseball cards,” he said. “How many packs are in a box? Twenty? Thirty? Come on—you can't turn
that
down. And think how impressed Mom will be. Plus, you can tell your friends about it when you get back to school. They'll wish they'd gotten suspended, too.”

It was Martin's first reference to what had happened, and he knew he was taking a chance.

Peter stared at the water, and Martin felt as if he could hear him
thinking. He looked at Martin, then shrugged. “All right,” he said. “But we're both doing it, right?”

“Absolutely,” Martin said. “But we've gotta take our clothes off. Once you're wet, your clothes will be too heavy. You'll get tired out right away. You'd drown if you had to swim very far like that.”

So they stripped and on the count of three they jumped in. The water was cold—really cold, Martin realized after about a second or two. His head started to hurt even before he surfaced after his dive. He came up splashing and a little panicked, gasping and turning immediately to look for Peter. If he was this cold, how did Peter feel?

But just a second later he spotted Peter. He was whooping and smiling at Martin and giving him a thumbs-up sign. Martin laughed, and they started back to the boat. The water was pretty calm, but even the slight swell of the bay made it a little harder to swim than Martin had expected. Peter wasn't much of a swimmer, and Martin saw that he had to kick and stroke with real energy to move the ten or fifteen yards to the boat (it had begun to drift away from them the second they dove).

They climbed up the little ladder on the stern. “Jesus,” Martin said. He was breathing hard and shivering. He wrapped a towel around himself. “I feel like we just swam a mile—at least a mile. How do those guys who swim out to Alcatraz do it? My head hurts, it's so cold.”

“I know,” Peter said, adjusting the towel that Martin had given him. “It's fucking freezing.”

This caught Martin off guard, and he laughed.

“Hey,” he said. “Watch the language.”

He watched Peter hop up and down, trying to pull his pants on. Martin saw that he was smiling. It was the first time he'd seen that in a while.

T
HEY HADN'T CAUGHT A
sturgeon—not even one that was under the limit (which, Martin knew, he would have kept). And Peter hadn't offered up a sudden confession about his notes, his eyes
brimming with tears, repentant, suddenly, for his actions (and Martin tearful as well, grateful for Peter's honesty). But that night, back in the marina, neither of these things seemed very important. The plan had been to go out to a fish place like the Sea Wolf, but Martin was tired, and he was able to talk Peter into settling for dinner on hot plates down in the cabin—canned Chef Boyardee raviolis and Campbell's chicken soup and toast. Martin had a few beers, and Peter had hot chocolate. Peter read a book with a knight on the cover (Martin had a feeling the notebook days were over), and Martin read a couple of semirecent issues of
Sports Illustrated
.

Peter was asleep by eight-thirty. Martin didn't fall asleep right away, though. He was uncomfortable, tucked with Peter into the V-shaped bunks up in the prow. He tried listening to the calm lapping of the water against the hull and to Peter's deep, regular breathing, but hovering at the edge of his thinking was what lay ahead. Very soon, Martin knew, things were going to change. He wasn't sure how, exactly, but he knew it would be different. Lying there in the Viking, Martin hadn't stepped over the line yet, at least not officially, and so he tried to relax and focus on the present moment—being there with Peter, listening to the sound of the water. But he knew that it was like Val had said back at the track: once you were in, you couldn't go back again.

V
al's instructions had been simple and succinct. First, fly down to the tiny airport in Santa Barbara and meet up with Derek Hano. Then, once it was dark, fly with him down to Ensenada. Or just outside of Ensenada, to Ramirez's ranch. Once they got the dope, they'd pack it into the plane, and then retrace their steps. Hano would get out in Santa Barbara with half of the heroin. Martin would gas up the plane and then fly up to Hayward and give the rest of the shipment to one of Val's guys.

And so now—finally—he was on his way. He was really doing it. From the air, five thousand feet up and moving along at about 120 mph, the coastal hills looked to Martin like the little papier-mâché hills you might see in the garage of one of those people who built miniature railroad sets. Alan Guthrie, the guy who lived across the street from Martin, had one of these crazy setups. He was a sales guy for IBM in San Francisco—which was a little surprising, because in point of fact he was basically a redneck from somewhere in Georgia. He had a whole little world out in his garage, built on a bunch of big sheets of ¾-inch plywood: toy tracks snaking through a landscape of hills and plants, with little bridges and buildings, and signs with actual corporate logos, even mini people in frozen postures of activity. What a fucking waste of time, Martin thought whenever he saw Guthrie in his garage, hunched over and gluing some little piece into place, or watching his HO scale trains zip past and disappear into a fake tunnel. Guthrie loved to call them over to see some new bridge or grain silo he'd put in—he'd stand there sucking on his bourbon, yakking about his train dealer out in Detroit, how he had the best and most realistic stuff.

Martin guided his Cessna 182P Skylane along past San Luis Obispo, bobbing on the prevailing trade winds that swept along the West Coast. Down below, Highway 101 was like a little string that some kid had set down as a pretend road, and the cars were like busy ants, hurrying along the string, happy that it was there but knowing it might not last—that soon they might have to make their way off-road again, through the grass and trees and over the hills.

Near Pismo Beach, the coastline jutted in to the east. Martin swung right, out over the water. It was a clear day, and down below he could see a few sailboats, as well as a few larger commercial boats. It was an open expanse of white-capped water, deep blue and endless. If he wanted, he could simply veer off to the west and keep flying, out and out and out until he ran out of gas and plunged into the Pacific. No one would know where he was or what had happened to him. Fifteen or twenty minutes from now he could disappear into the ocean, drifting down to the sandy coastal bottom and lie there for years, maybe forever.

He landed in Santa Barbara at about three o'clock, and by four he was sitting in a little bar on State Street with Derek Hano. They were out on an open-air patio, surrounded by palm trees and seated just beyond a big stucco arch that had lots of colorful tile set into it. The floor was also tile; it was a muddy red, and the tiles were really big squares, with smaller and more colorful tiles set between them at regular intervals. The patio itself was bordered by thick stucco walls that were about waist high. People were leaning against the walls, drinks in hand, chatting.

The whole town was like this: white-washed stucco and red-tiled roofs and flowery bougainvillea vines and lots of palm trees. It was a lot like the Stanford campus, actually. This made Martin wonder if they'd see Radkovitch walking around the streets with a stack of books in his hand—maybe even a young, college-age version of him. The sighting would let them know that they'd entered a warp in the space-time continuum: one minute you're in Santa Barbara in 1974, sick with fear about flying down to Mexico and making a drug deal. Then the next
minute you're up in Palo Alto in the 1960s, pretty much worry free and watching Radkovitch trotting around Stanford as he works on his fancy business degree. If he had to choose, Martin would opt for option number two, even though it meant watching Radkovitch live a life that Martin could only dream about.

“So what do I need to know?” Martin asked Hano. He was big—Hawaiian or Samoan or something. Thick arms and muscular shoulders, but also kind of lean, with narrow hips. He had straight, black hair, which was noticeably shiny, and green eyes. His hair made him look young, as did the fact that he had a sort of chubby, youthful face, like he still had some baby fat but only in his face. Martin knew he was thirty-four, because he'd mentioned it for some reason. He was actually a little funny-looking, but Martin could tell he was one of those guys who did pretty well with women, anyway.

Hano shrugged, and fiddled with his drink. It was a margarita, which Martin thought was a little absurd, given the setting and the circumstances. “Not a lot,” he said. “I've dealt with these guys a few times now. They're cool—they're all right. We'll give them the money, they'll help us load up the dope, and we'll be outta there.”

Martin nodded and sipped from his own drink, which was a beer.

“But this is a new set up, right?” he asked. “I mean, you haven't done it this way, have you—flying, I mean?”

Hano shrugged again, looking over at a table with a couple of secretary types. They were both blond and tanned, probably in their late twenties. Hano leaned back in his chair, stretching, showing off his muscles in his tight short-sleeved shirt. Martin felt a little jealous; he'd like to have arms like that. The guy had probably been a quarterback in high school, he thought, and had probably had sex with all the cheerleaders. Probably the bad girls, too, the ones who hung out behind the school or in the parking lot, smoking cigarettes. Martin had had minimal sexual experience in high school—a couple of quick drunken encounters, that was it.