An Absence of Light

“He died sometime Monday afternoon or night. They found him yesterday, brought his body to Houston last night.”

“When did you talk to Kalatis last?”

“Same night Besom died, though none of us knew it at the time,” Burtell lied. Sheck, especially a drunk Sheck, didn’t need to know about the previous night’s meeting at the art museum. “Faeber was there too. They wanted to know if Tisler’s death had initiated an investigation, a witch-hunt inside the Department. They wanted to know if they should be afraid that Art had left behind something incriminating.”

“Should they?”

“I don’t know,” Burtell said. “But I do know they shouldn’t have blackmailed him. They miscalculated.”

“Well, the guy sure had a sweet tooth for black ass, I’ll say that. I saw those damn photographs.”

Burtell flagged this remark. Kalatis’s children ate each other, every one of them a scorpion. Sheck obviously had known about the spying efforts against Tisler, may even have been a part of it. Burtell wondered what kind of paranoia these people lived with. Were they ever free of the suspicion that they themselves might be the next ones to be fed upon? It took only a word from Kalatis to change them from victor to victim. In the long run, that had to weigh heavily on the nerves.

“He shot himself twenty-four hours after they showed him the pictures,” Burtell said pointedly.

Sheck shrugged, smiled a little, and shook his head. The gesture infuriated Burtell, and he took a drink of the beer to help him hold his tongue.

“What did you call me for?” Burtell asked.

Sheck had sat back on the padded cushion of the cabin banquette, his back against a porthole, one leg drawn up so that he was resting one arm on his bent knee, a bare foot on the cushion. He was holding his beer bottle by its neck between the first two fingers of the hand resting on his knee, studying Burtell with a cocked head as though he was trying to see a flaw in Burtell’s character. He seemed to be wanting to say something but not yet altogether sure it was the right thing to do.

“I don’t know what your whole story is, Burtell,” Sheck said. He wasn’t smiling now. He seemed to be working up to some kind of confrontation with the leisurely swagger of a bully.

Burtell’s heart raced and a hot, moist sensation bathed him in an instant He deliberately did not take a drink of beer at this moment Sheck knew to watch for that little trick. Burtell simply looked at him. He did not swallow even though he felt the saliva gathering rapidly at the back of his throat. He did not speak. He wasn’t going to let Sheck draw him out. If Sheck had something on his mind, he was going to have to come out with it Burtell had no intention of making anything easier for Bruce Sheck.

“Are you satisfied with the money you’re getting out of this operation?” Sheck asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“Are you?”

“Why do you ask?”

Sheck grinned, but it was not a completely natural grin. Tension and risk lay behind it, a quivering at the corner of his upper lip that he could not control. The man was showing some stress, which instantly caused Burtell more concern than anything that had happened up to that moment.

Sheck’s grin faded, and he dropped his foot to the deck, placed his forearms on the table, and leaned slightly toward Burtell. The grin disappeared completely, replaced with a grim, downward pull of the sides of his mouth.

“I think something’s about to happen with this operation,” he said. “I think my ass is in danger, and I think yours is too.” He paused to see how Burtell was going to react to such a revelation. “The only reason I’m having this conversation is because I think Kalatis is getting ready for a big change in the way he operates, and I think he’s getting ready to cut me loose. And not just me. He’s getting ready to wipe out a hell of a lot of his past, start a new era.”

Sheck stared at Burtell and Burtell could smell the mixture of beer and Wild Turkey with which Sheck apparently had been fortifying his nerves all night, long before Burtell’s arrival.

“The way this is set up, Burtell, is ingenious,” Sheck began. “It’s a system in which knowledge flows only one way from a thousand origins through a nervous system that grows increasingly less complex as it reaches the top. Less complex, that’s the brilliant part of it If Valerie Heath and all the others like her were cut off, the people who bring her information would not know what to do. The woman who has a first name and an initial, who gives them money for photocopies, would simply never call them again. They wouldn’t know how to get in touch with her. The money would dry up. The whole thing would be over for them. One day they have a contact, one day they don’t It’s over, gone forever.”

Sheck raised one hand and imitated a bubble bursting.