Acts of Nature

SIX

They sat in the office at noon, Harmon at his desk in the middle of the room, alternately watching the unlighted incoming lines on the phone and the TV mounted high in the front corner. He used the same cynical and disdainful eye for both. Squires was at the other desk behind him, against the back wall, his short-cropped, blond-gray hair poking out on occasion from behind his computer monitor. When Harmon cut his eyes to the left, he could see his partner’s hand cupped over the mouse on his desk like it was a cigarette you didn’t want to expose or a clump of something you spilled on your mother’s table linen and didn’t want her to see. Squires’s finger twitched and Harmon could hear the constant click of the machine but he knew the guy was just acting like he was working.
“Black eight on the red nine,” Harmon said over his shoulder.
Squires hesitated, clicked once and then said: “F*ck you, Harmon.”
Harmon grinned, knew the guy was playing solitaire back there and then reached across the desktop for yet another toothpick, and looked up over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses at the Weather Channel.
“This drag-ass hurricane is going to kick Cancún’s butt and then shoot right up the middle of the Gulf,” he said. The sound on the television was muted and the bubble-headed bleach blonde had obviously just finished her spiel and was silently staring at the black guy sharing afternoon anchor duties with her like she was paying attention to him. Harmon was waiting for the blonde to get up and go to the wall map to point out the various “computer forecast tracks” for this new storm, Hurricane Simone.
“You just watch. Crandall’s going to yank those rig monkeys off the platforms in Section C-seven and C-eight and we’ll be out there three days later going through their lockers and the rig bosses’ files trying to figure out what they’ve been screwing with for the last ten weeks,” Harmon said, glancing again at the phone like his boss was going to call the orders in any minute.
“Better they’re on leave than having those greasy Cajun f*ckers on the deck giving you the voodoo eye while we’re doing inspections,” Squires said from behind his monitor. Harmon grinned. He was listening.
“You’re a racist, Squires. Admit it,” he said, just for something to do, poking at the man.
The glass door on their office said Martindale Security, stenciled on with some cheap paint by some cheap sign painter they’d found in the Hollywood, Florida, yellow pages. Martin Crandall, their biggest, hell, their only client these days, had ordered them to rent the space and label it up like a legitimate business. Probably had something to do with a tax write-off for the oil company but Harmon had liked the old days when he and Squires simply worked out of their homes or apartments, got a call from some contact, set up a meet at an obscure diner somewhere, and went over a plan. The only advantage now was the way things like the shooting in Venezuela seemed to disappear. When you do work for the corporations, matters like a few dead paramilitary smudges in the outback can disappear under the heap of more “important” and income-producing affairs. Harmon had rented this place because it was cheap and he could pocket the rest of the expense like he’d done with the extra forty grand he’d split with Squires from their latest trip. He knew Crandall would never ask for verification. It was a corner space in an old-style strip shopping center. The east wall was theirs alone. The west wall they shared with a Chinese restaurant and take-out place. Every time the Chang Emporium brought an exterminator in to spray, the cockroaches and monster-sized palmetto bugs would migrate through the cracks to Harmon’s side of the wall. The infestation had scared away two receptionists already but Harmon didn’t care. He just went ahead and pocketed her salary as well and never bothered with a replacement. It wasn’t as if they were busy.
“I ain’t racist. I like the black folk just fine,” Squires grumbled from the back. “Least they ain’t so stupid to bring a knife to a gunfight.”
Last time they’d been sent out to do a security check on one of GULFLO’s Gulf rigs he and Squires were doing a routine search of the worker’s lockers, pawing through their personal stuff, knowing from years of experience what to look for. These guys were never too creative when it came to hiding their dope—the meth that kept them going at the dangerous and boring-as-hell jobs they held, the coke that gave them something to dream about, and the downers to keep them level enough not to lose an arm in the drill works. One day Squires came up with a handful of some kind of animal teeth the size of a tiger’s all strung out on a leather cord.
“Pop the tops!” he’d told the big Cajun rigger whose foot- locker he was searching.
“Don’t know what you askin’, me?” the old roughneck said, staring into Squires’s eyes like a dare.
Squires had seen all manner of hiding places for the worker’s chemical stashes including the one like this where they hollowed out the bones they used as jewelry, filled them with cocaine, and then capped them with a silver attachment that looped onto a chain or cord to form a kind of necklace.
“You carrying a little nose powder here, boy?” he said to the pair of unblinking, swamp green eyes.
The man just spat a string of tobacco juice to the side but when Squires selected the largest tooth on the string and started twisting at the clasp, the dark-skinned rigger raised his right hand as if to wipe the spittle from his chin and then in a blur of movement and a spin of elbow so quick it caught Harmon flat-footed, the man had stepped chest to chest with Squires and had a blade to his neck.
“You don’t touch a man’s prayer beads, you, less you preparin’ to bleed,” the rigger said through his clenched teeth, and Harmon was amazed to see the bundle of teeth back in its owner’s possession.
But there was no hint of fear in Squires’s face, even as the knife edge pressed hard against his jugular. The Cajun seemed only mildly baffled by the security man’s stoic response until everyone in the silent bunkhouse heard the muffled snick of a gun hammer being cocked and the rigger must have felt the hollowed pipe of an HK Mk23 special ops handgun muzzle being pressed up into the rounded notch at the bottom of his breastbone. During the man’s pirouette, Squires had come up with his own practiced sleight of hand.
“You might cut me, boy. But I’ll blow your heart through a hole out your back before you see a drop of my blood hit the floor,” Squires whispered.
They stood eye to eye for three seconds and an eternity before the rigger finally backed off.
“Ain’t no powder in these,” he said, holding the teeth out. “You look yourself. I ain’t no doper, me.”
Now Harmon was shaking his head at the memory, looking across the office at the back of Squires’s computer. They’d found plenty of stash that trip but not in the tiger teeth. Squires had been wrong on that one account, but almost before the incident was over it was if he’d already forgotten it. That was the beauty of the guy. No memory, no conscience.
Blessed are the forgetful, some old philosopher once said, for they get the better even of their blunders. It was a way of living that suited warriors and lawyers, and Harmon could never understand it.
“You gonna get that, boss,” Squires said, snapping Harmon out of his flashback. “Line two?”
Harmon looked down at the blinking light on the phone. They’d disabled the chirping noise of incoming calls the day the last receptionist left. Only the boss ever called on line two. It had to be Crandall. He would be alerting them to get ready to travel after the storm passed. But Harmon knew from experience the man wouldn’t say where until the day they left. He picked up the phone and swiveled his chair away from Squires.
“Harmon,” he answered. “Yeah. Sure. Yeah. We’ll be ready. Have we ever not been ready?”