Odd Hours

civilization.
    Once in the compartment, I hesitated to close the door, though I seemed to be alone.
    This was a tugboat, not a battleship or even a destroyer, so the engine room didn’t have a lovable but tough Scottish-American warrant officer overseeing a jokey but dedicated team of sweaty enlisted men who—between poker games and harmonica interludes and sappy conversations about their girls back home—were forever tormented by boilers failing, boilers overheating, pipe joints bursting from too much pressure, and a host of other crises. Nobody needed to be stationed in this compartment for the vessel to go about its work with efficiency, which is one reason why Hollywood never made a great World War II movie about a tugboat.
    Because the lights had been on when I opened the door, however, I had to assume that someone had recently been here and intended to return.
    As I was about to retreat and search for another hiding place, I heard a crewman descending the companionway. I closed the door behind me.
    Although the equipment was tightly fitted, the layout allowed for repair. I snaked quickly through the service aisles, toward the point farthest from the entrance. Unfortunately, the farthest point was not far enough to make me feel safe from discovery.
    Crouched behind shielding pumps and pipes, I had no view of the door, but I heard it open and close.
    Someone had entered, though he did not seem to be doing anything but standing over there. The engines were not even idling yet, and the quiet in the compartment was such that I would have heard anyone moving around.
    As I had admitted to Chief Hoss Shackett, when I was suffering from amnesia and unable to remember that I wasn’t Matt Damon, I am a guy with a good imagination, which now kicked into overdrive. I envisioned the newcomer, in a gas mask, preparing to pull the release pin on a canister of poisonous chemicals, to kill me as if I were a cockroach.
    Before I could elaborate this simple scenario into an opera, the door opened again, and I heard someone say, “What the hell happened to you?”
    The reply came in the distinctive bearish voice of Utgard Rolf: “I fell down.”
    “Fell down what?”
    “Some stairs,” Rolf said.
    “Stairs? How many stairs?”
    “I didn’t count them, idiot.”
    “Man, that’s gotta hurt.”
    Utgard closed the door behind him. “Been a change of plans. We’ve got to cut some throats.”

 
    THIRTY-FOUR
    ON THE FARTHER SIDE OF THE ENGINE ROOM, which was nearer than I would have liked, Utgard Rolf said, “Listen, Joey, once we have the packages aboard, we won’t return to the harbor.”
    “What? Why not?”
    “There’s a guy, he’s onto the operation.”
    “What guy?” Joey asked.
    “A government sonofabitch.”
    “Oh, man.”
    “Don’t freak.”
    “But we kept this so tight .”
    “We’re gonna find him. He’s as good as dead.”
    With sharp anxiety, Joey said, “He’s here in Magic Beach?”
    “What do you think, I fell down some stairs in Washington?”
    “This guy was the stairs?”
    “Don’t worry about it.”
    “How big is the guy, he could do this to you?”
    “He looks worse than I do.”
    I resisted the urge to stand up and disprove that boast.
    “If we don’t go back to the harbor,” Joey wondered, “where we gonna go?”
    “You know the abandoned boatyard south of Rooster Point?”
    “That’ll work,” Joey said.
    “Damn right it will. The facilities there, the privacy, it’ll be an easier off-load than we’d have in the harbor.”
    “The trucks know the new meet?”
    “They know. But here’s the thing.”
    “I see what’s comin’,” Joey said.
    “We need five of us to take delivery at sea, but the way things are at the boatyard, three can handle the off-load.”
    When boarding the tug, I’d had two main concerns, one of which was how I would be able to determine the number of crewmen I might be up against. Now I knew: five.
    Joey said, “We were gonna drop those two, anyway. So we drop them sooner than later.”
    Perhaps a falling-out among thieves had not occurred, as I had thought when I’d found Sam Whittle drilled five times in his bathtub. The initial entrepreneurs who set up this operation might always have intended, toward the closing of the business, to issue pink slips to those lesser partners whom they considered mere employees. A few bullets were a prudent alternative to generous severance payments.
    “After the transfer,” Utgard said, “Buddy