An Absence of Light

He stood impatiently and shifted the gun at his waist. “Shit,” he said, and leaned again on the porch post The freighters were at another angle now, headed into the strait.

The telephone in the house rang, and Graver whirled around and burst past the broken screen door, through the kitchen and into the main room where Ledet sat bound on the floor, looking at the telephone on the rattan table as though it were a cobra.

“If this is Redden… be careful,” Graver said, putting his hand on the telephone. “If you screw this up, by God, I promise you I’ll make sure you die of old age in a cage.”

Ledet looked as if he were being confronted by Satan. The telephone kept ringing. Ledet nodded, and Neuman was on his knees unlocking Ledet’s handcuffs. Then Neuman stood and rushed back to the bedroom as Graver took the telephone off the rattan table and put it on the floor with Ledet.

“Okay!” Neuman yelled.

Ledet picked up the telephone on the sixth ring.

“Hello.” He tried to make his voice sound normal, whatever the hell that was. The past two hours had caused him to completely lose sight of it.

“Hey, Rick.”

“Eddie, what’s happenin’?”

“When did you get in?”

“About five-thirty yesterday. What happened to you?”

“Well, there’s a lot of shit going down with our friend here. When I called you we had a routine job. We still have a job, but now there’s nothing routine about it.”

“Something wrong?”

“No, not wrong, just… serious.”

“We going to clock some hours, then?”

“Yeah, a lot Look, I need you to come out to Las Copas, okay?”

“When?”

“Right about dusk. Eight-thirty would be good.”

“Can’t do it.” Ledet looked at Graver.

“What do you mean?”

“I came in with oil line problems, Eddie. I haven’t fixed it yet.”

“Why the hell not? You had time yesterday, didn’t you? You’ve had all day.” He hesitated. “You picked something up, didn’t you.”

“Well, yeah, I did…”

“Shit… is she still there?”

“Yeah,” Ledet said tentatively, as though he expected to be reprimanded for it.

“Christ,” Redden said. “Well, get the hell rid of her, Rick. Jesus, man, that was stupid.”

“How was I to know this was going to be something special,” Ledet said, looking at Graver. “Okay, I’ll get her out of here. What about Las Copas? Why don’t you just swing by and pick me up on the way?”

“I don’t know,” Redden said, sounding worried.

“What?” He raised his eyebrows to Graver, surprised. “What do you mean you don’t know? What’s the deal?”

“I told you this is serious, Rick. I’ve got a schedule, and it doesn’t include stopping by to pick you up, know what I mean?”

Graver grabbed his notepad, jotted something, and shoved it in front of Ledet.

“Where are you now? Can’t you just come get me now?”

“Forget it,” Redden said. “Look, Rick, can’t you patch up the oil problem? How bad could it be, for Christ’s sake? Rick, listen to me, trust me, just by-God get there. We’re going to pull in some big money on this one. Something’s going on here. I’ll tell you about it when you get there. Just believe me when I tell you you can’t miss this, okay? Besides that, I can’t go flying in there without a copilot. I don’t know what he’d do.”

Graver got on the floor and jotted another note on the pad holding it so Ledet could read it as he wrote.

“Okay, okay. Uh, I’ll, shit, I’ll try and patch it up somehow. But what about Las Copas, I mean is that where they’re staging this, whatever it is? I mean, what if I come in there slinging oil? I’m not going to want to do that if all those-”

“Wait a minute, Rick… uh, Rick, stand by.” Silence. “I’ll call you right back.”

The line went dead and Ledet sat on the floor looking astonished.

“Jesus. He just hung up, just like that,” Ledet said, looking up at Graver, still holding the receiver. “You think he smelled something? You think he knew something was wrong here?”

“Put down the damn receiver,” Graver snapped.

Ledet hung up. Neuman came into the room.

“I don’t think he suspected anything,” he said. “It sounded to me like he was interrupted from that end. I think we’re okay.”

“What’s Las Copas?” Graver asked.

“It’s a little strip Kalatis had cut in the boonies,” Ledet said. “Inland from Kalatis’s beach house, across Chocolate Bay in Brazoria County. It’s a secret strip, no roads in, just air traffic. A dirt top, bayous and low-water ponds all around. The pilots use it as a rendezvous point, and sometimes to transfer goods from planes to boats. There’s a navigable bayou within seventy-five yards of it, but it’s a swampy place.”

“It’s near Kalatis’s house?”

“Yeah. Ten, twelve air miles. He owns a shit-load of beachfront property across the West Bay from there, on the Gulf side of the island.”

The telephone rang again.

“See what he says before you repeat the part about patching the oil line,” Graver said as Neuman went back into the bedroom. “We want him here.”

Ledet nodded. “Hello?”