An Absence of Light

“No, I said I do money hauls about once a month,” Ledet corrected Graver, mashing out a cigarette into an ashtray sitting on the table in front of him. “Eddie does it all the time. I only go when they’re going to Panama or the Caymans or Colombia. They want a copilot who can speak pretty good Spanish on those jumps in case something happened to the pilot. They don’t want to risk losing a load.”

“Then where does Eddie take it when he’s by himself?”

“Offshore. He runs loads to cruisers sitting out in the Gulf, past U.S. jurisdictional waters. Once every week he does that, a regular milk run.” He looked down and tapped the maps. “That’s what these are. The cruisers never wait at the same place. Keep shifting around. The coordinates change every week, every run.”

“How do you get around filing flight plans?”

Ledet gave Graver a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look. “Come on, man, flight plans?” He snorted. “Look, flying is one of the last great freedoms in this life. They’ve got all these rules, sure, but, shit, do you have any concept of how goddamn big ‘airspace’ is? The volume?” He gestured with a tilted bob of his head toward the hazy heat out the back door of the house. “The sky out there is full of planes that nobody knows shit about, not the DEA, not the Border Patrol, not any of the branches of the military, not NSA… ‘Airspace,’ man, it’s just too damn big to know what’s going on up there all the time. They can monitor some corridors some of the time, but that’s about it That leaves about ninety-nine percent of the airspace unaccounted for. It’s a smuggler’s paradise. Like the high seas two hundred years ago. You read in the paper where the DEA says they figure they interdict only about five percent, seven percent of the shit coming through? They’re not lying about that Poor bastards are just pissing into the wind, and they know it And pound for pound there’s probably more cash going out than dope coming in.” He grinned and gave his head a little shake. “It’s a ‘free-flowing stream,’ just like the old church song says.”

When you heard a man like this talk you understood why so many law enforcement officers were getting out of the business. After a few years the futility of it was a persuasive deterrent to a career. Or, on the other hand, the temptation to skim a little off for yourself became too great. When there was so much cash that you had to talk about it in terms of its weight rather than its unit value, it began to lose its meaning.

“Then you think Redden is making a money haul now?”

Ledet looked a little uneasy at the question, though he had shown no uneasiness earlier when he gave up the information. He reached for a cigarette and lit it with a throwaway plastic lighter.

“I guess,” he said.

“He’s not on a charter to Mexico.”

Ledet shook his head.

“Spell it out for me,” Graver said impatiently.

“When Eddie called me he said something big was up with Kalatis. He, Eddie, needed me for a long-distance run.”

“As copilot.”

“Right. But I copiloted on other kinds of things, too, not just cash runs. Kalatis has people brought to his place, people he does business with. He always wants copilots on those.”

“What people?”

“Eddie said they’re ‘clients,’ people the Greek needs to talk to. I’m not sure about what kind of dealings. But I do know they’re more cash customers of some sort, having to do with either the information business or the dope business.”

“Then you think you’re here for taxiing services, to take people to Kalatis for meetings?”

“Yeah. My understanding is tonight’s going to be hectic. I think all the pilots are on duty tonight.”

This was what Graver wanted to hear. He wanted to hear something about Kalatis. He wanted to hear the details of a plan of which Kalatis was an integral, necessary participant.

“Each pilot has a copilot as well?” he asked.

“Right. There’re six of us.”

“Three aircraft.”

“Right. We’ve done something like this before, when he was closing deals, a big program with everything coming together in one tight time frame. All three planes, carrying people, money, dope. That’s kind of Kalatis’s strong suit Organization. These big operations, men and schedules coordinated real close, planes and boats on the move, everything clicking like clockwork. And that’s the way it happens too”-he snapped his fingers in a quick, measured cadence, snap, snap, snap, snap-”just like that.”

“All of you taking people and money down to Mexico, to Kalatis’s place.”

“To Kalatis’s place, yeah,” Ledet confirmed, but his eyes slid away from Graver as he said it.

Graver and Neuman exchanged looks.

“You realize,” Graver reminded Ledet, “that the point of all this is still the first thing I said to you. I want to know how to get to Kalatis.”

Ledet nodded and dragged on his cigarette. His hands were resting on the rattan next to the ashtray. The one holding the cigarette was trembling. He seemed to be coming to some crucial decision, a personal Rubicon.