little town’s stubborn lack of animation. So far, the most entertaining groundside event of the day had involved a pack of dogs. Heatedly quarreling among themselves, the dogs had followed a lame mongrel bitch into the alley behind the Okaloosa Cafe. You could see a lot from a hundred feet up, but in Blackwater Springs not very much of it was edifying.
Joshua was an employee of Gulf Coast Coating, Inc., a Fort Walton company specializing in sandblasting, painting, and sometimes epoxying a variety of large metal structures. Water tanks. Bridges. Mining equipment. Towers. Joshua had been nearly six years on the job—ever since running away from home and arriving back in Florida from New York. Although he routinely checked his safety belt before changing altitudes beneath the tank, he had long since lost his fear of falling. The cardinal rule of the steeplejack, or water-tank mechanic, was to keep his brain in gear. Joshua usually did, for which reason, along with experience, he was probably the best man in a set of falls then employed by Gulf Coast Coating, Inc.
As talented aloft as Tarzan.
That was what Tom Hubbard, the president of the company, said about him. Hubbard knew Joshua’s worth, and Joshua knew that he knew it, and the result was that Joshua sometimes took liberties with his work schedule or made disparaging remarks about Hubbard’s business acumen. If the boss got his back up and canned him, Joshua could count on being rehired within a week or two, so long as he appeared repentant and asked for his job back. In six years Hubbard had canned and rehired him a grand total of fourteen times. This game united the two men in a resentful dependency on each other.
Of late, though, Joshua’s discontent had begun to outpace his boss’s. He had finally realized that he was never going to own his own tank-painting company. Or any other sort of business, either. What the future held for him, if he continued to jockey up and down in harness, was thirty more years as a blue-collar trapeze artist, right up to the day his brain clicked off and he tumbled ninety feet to the concrete or touched his spray gun to a power line and electrocuted himself. In time, both his luck and his skill would run out.
If he survived, he would look like a Jim Crow version of poor old R. K. Cofield. Cofield was a sixty-year-old peckerwood from east Alabama, who, at the moment, was operating a blasting hose in the tank directly over Joshua’s head, doggedly stumbling about in a sandstorm of his own creation. Out from under his blasting hood the old man was a toothless zombie; he had once broken his back in a fall, and his eyes absolutely refused to focus on another human being’s face. His whole life had been devoted to tank work, and although Joshua had once heard him mutter that every other sort of employment, viewed from a steeplejack’s vantage, “looked like pitiful,” Cofield was himself a doddering object lesson in the curriculum of the woebegone. Hubbard found him wonderfully dependable, but the only reason Cofield reported to work each day, Joshua felt, was that the alternative—calling in sick or quitting, then confronting at every turn the ruins of his own personality—terrified him. That was also why he stayed drunk every weekend.
Joshua did not want to end up even a slightly less dissipated version of R. K. Cofield. Nevertheless, the demands of self-sufficiency and the narrow compass of his marketable skills were channeling him, inexorably, in that very direction. Also to blame were pride and inertia. He could not get off center. Yesterday, though, the pressure of his dreams and the threat implicit in Cofield’s vanquished eyes had set him zipping down Highway 98 to Pensacola.
* * *
On the greensward just beneath Joshua, Tom Hubbard was monitoring the operation of a sand pot and a yellow air compressor. A tall man whose eclectic tonsorial style included a William Powell mustache and jet-black Elvis Presley ducktails, he was shouting over the noise of the compressor and beckoning Joshua to descend. His arm movements were urgent, typically uncoordinated and brusque.
What the hell’s going on? Joshua wondered.
Then he saw the Air Force limousine parked at the curb behind the equipment truck, well within the restricted area where falling paint could lightly polka-dot its dark-blue finish. Near the snaky tangle of hoses lifting sand and fresh air to Cofield stood Alistair Patrick Blair and the colonel