Acts of Nature - By Jonathon King Page 0,19

cord to form a kind of necklace.

“You carrying a little nose powder here, boy?” he said to the pair of unblinking, swamp green eyes.

The man just spat a string of tobacco juice to the side but when Squires selected the largest tooth on the string and started twisting at the clasp, the dark-skinned rigger raised his right hand as if to wipe the spittle from his chin and then in a blur of movement and a spin of elbow so quick it caught Harmon flat-footed, the man had stepped chest to chest with Squires and had a blade to his neck.

“You don’t touch a man’s prayer beads, you, less you preparin’ to bleed,” the rigger said through his clenched teeth, and Harmon was amazed to see the bundle of teeth back in its owner’s possession.

But there was no hint of fear in Squires’s face, even as the knife edge pressed hard against his jugular. The Cajun seemed only mildly baffled by the security man’s stoic response until everyone in the silent bunkhouse heard the muffled snick of a gun hammer being cocked and the rigger must have felt the hollowed pipe of an HK Mk23 special ops handgun muzzle being pressed up into the rounded notch at the bottom of his breastbone. During the man’s pirouette, Squires had come up with his own practiced sleight of hand.

“You might cut me, boy. But I’ll blow your heart through a hole out your back before you see a drop of my blood hit the floor,” Squires whispered.

They stood eye to eye for three seconds and an eternity before the rigger finally backed off.

“Ain’t no powder in these,” he said, holding the teeth out. “You look yourself. I ain’t no doper, me.”

Now Harmon was shaking his head at the memory, looking across the office at the back of Squires’s computer. They’d found plenty of stash that trip but not in the tiger teeth. Squires had been wrong on that one account, but almost before the incident was over it was if he’d already forgotten it. That was the beauty of the guy. No memory, no conscience.

Blessed are the forgetful, some old philosopher once said, for they get the better even of their blunders. It was a way of living that suited warriors and lawyers, and Harmon could never understand it.

“You gonna get that, boss,” Squires said, snapping Harmon out of his flashback. “Line two?”

Harmon looked down at the blinking light on the phone. They’d disabled the chirping noise of incoming calls the day the last receptionist left. Only the boss ever called on line two. It had to be Crandall. He would be alerting them to get ready to travel after the storm passed. But Harmon knew from experience the man wouldn’t say where until the day they left. He picked up the phone and swiveled his chair away from Squires.

“Harmon,” he answered. “Yeah. Sure. Yeah. We’ll be ready. Have we ever not been ready?”

SEVEN

“What are we going to do, Max?”

I hear the question, but with only half of my attention. I thought Sherry had been reading, her back settled in the bow of the canoe, ankles crossed on top of the cooler, which held the last of the beer, a book of Ted Kooser’s poems I’d lent her in front of her face. I was at the other end, a hand line dropped over the side, daydreaming. Like the gentleman that I am, I’d kept the eastern sun to Sherry’s back and pulled down the brim of my baseball cap, the one stitched across the front with the reversed script letters that perplexed most people unless they figured out that it was simply “FOCUS” spelled mirror backward. After three days my eyes were getting used to the starburst glitter of sun off the slow-moving water.

“Huh?” I said, full of elocution.

“What are we going to do about us? When we get back, I mean, to civilization?”

It hadn’t all been small talk since we started this odd vacation, but tackling the future and the meaning of our relationship was not something we’d poked at. I’d decided the reason was because we were both, fundamentally, cops. We’d been trained, I suppose, to be more reticent than most people. Trained also, I believed, to be more careful with the people we met, be they citizens or suspects or potential trouble or all three at once. If you ever sat down in a diner with a few of us you would immediately feel it as an outsider.