An Absence of Light

“And then there’s me. If something happened to me then the Valerie Heaths are left without a thought in their stupid little heads. It’s over. They don’t even know enough to ask a question. Who are they gonna ask? One day they have a contact, one day they don’t If nobody calls them again, shit, that part of their life is over. Forever.”

Sheck stopped, picked up the Wild Turkey bottle and took a nip from it. Burtell forced himself to be patient Sheck was being frustratingly repetitious. Burtell reminded himself that he owed a lot to Sheck’s tenacious curiosity. It was Sheck who had discovered Kalatis’s scheme to end all schemes, an elaborate plan to reduce a multiplicity of intrigues to one simple equation and, ultimately, to one man. One wealthy man. Burtell owed him, even to the point of indulging his endless reliving of Kalatis’s betrayal, a betrayal that Sheck could do nothing about.

Wiping his mouth, Sheck resumed speaking, his voice a husky, raspy sound that died in the dead air of the cabin almost as soon as it left his throat.

“The point is, all Kalatis has to do is eliminate four or five people-I don’t know exactly how many, but just a few-and that whole, big, complex system that involves several hundred people is shut down”-he snapped his fingers-”just like that. Gone. And you couldn’t piece it together again for love or money. Very clean. You sure as hell couldn’t trace it to Kalatis.

“This system here in Houston has been running nearly four years now. Kalatis and Faeber have more shit in their computers about key people in this city, in this state, than the goddamn FBI and CIA combined. They know where all the money is. They know where all the scandal is. They know where the future is. They’ve gotten to this point by milking this big nervous system of theirs.”

Though Sheck paused, letting his sometimes slightly unfocused eyes rest lazily on Burtell, Burtell said nothing. Sheck had called the meeting, and the whiskey and beer were lubricating a normally reticent personality. The best thing Burtell could do was to let the chemistry take its course.

“I’ll tell you what I’ve learned. Burtell.” Sheck continued, as though he had made a difficult thought transition through the vapor of alcohol. “I’ve learned that an operation has a certain life span. Kalatis knows this… like God. The son of a bitch sees the beginning and the end, and he controls both of them. But if you’re a guy like me, just a peon in this deal, if you keep your eyes and ears open, learn to read the signs, you start to notice certain little shifts and changes, signals that some kind of shit’s about to happen. You get to where you can predict the rhythm of the seasons, so to speak. Get to know when there’s going to be rain, or frost, or when the sap is rising in the trees.”

Sheck finished his beer and very carefully set the empty bottle to one side of the table, out of his way. He leaned closer to Burtell, resting his forearms on the table, and his raspy voice grew softer still.

“Well, let me tell you, Dean Burtell, the sap is rising. Things are going to heat up. This season has just about run its course.”

He stopped. Outside a lanyard slapped with a hollow ping against an aluminum mast on one of the sailboats, and a dock creaked as the bay waters shifted on the tides in the marina.

“Give me something I can believe, Sheck,” Burtell said after a pause. “I can’t make any judgments about your feelings.”

Sheck kept his eyes on Burtell and nodded slowly.

“I don’t fly for Kalatis as much now as I used to,” he said, easing back from Burtell, “but it’s still pretty damn regular. So I know his two other pilots pretty well. Kalatis, he loves compartmentalization. Believes it’s the vitamin C of intelligence work… keeps away infections, system screwups. So we’re not supposed to talk to each other. But I’ve been with that greasy Greek longer than anybody, and when these guys came on board they discovered that working for him was so goddamned weird they’d sneak around and feel me out about things. This is happening, that’s happening, they’d say. What do I think that means? I’d shoot straight with them. Give them some pointers about working close with the guy because they were right there at ‘headquarters.’ Flying was all they did. I was still in operations, not so close to the Greek on a daily basis. I couldn’t see who was coming and going. But that’s all they could see, who was coming and going, but they didn’t know anything about what was happening in the background, in operations. So between us pilots-there’s a comradery with pilots, people don’t understand that-we can pretty well follow the fortunes of Kalatis’s business. I mean, in a ‘big picture’ sort of way.”

Sheck stopped, paused as he straightened his back, drew his neck in, and belched, not a croaking belch from his gut, but a loud, wind-rushing belch of hops and malt that hissed up through his throat He shook his head like he was clearing it from a hard blow.