“You gonna live?” Joe asked him.
“Gonna kill you.”
“Sounds like you’re gonna live.” Joe turned to the three trigger-happy Cubans. “Get another guy and take this one to the cells.”
He looked at the one they’d shot. He was curled on the floor, mouth open and gasping. He didn’t sound good and he didn’t look good—marble white, way too much blood flowing from his midsection. Joe knelt by him, but in the moment it took to do so, the boy died. His eyes were open and tilted up and to the right, as if he were trying to remember his wife’s birthday or where he’d left his wallet. He lay on his side, one arm pinned awkwardly beneath him, the other splayed up and behind his head. His shirt had bunched up at his ribs and left his abdomen exposed.
The three men who’d killed him blessed themselves as they dragged the giant past him and Joe.
When Joe closed the boy’s eyelids, he looked quite young. He might have been twenty, or he could have been as young as sixteen. Joe rolled him onto his back and crossed his arms over his chest. Below his hands, just below the steeple where his lowest ribs met, dark blood climbed from a hole in him the size of a dime.
Dion and his men lined the National Guardsmen up against the wall and Dion told them to strip to their skivvies.
The dead boy had a wedding ring on his finger. Looked to be made of tin. Probably had a picture of her on him somewhere, but Joe wasn’t going to look for it.
He was also missing one of his shoes. It must have come off when he was shot, but damned if Joe could see it near the corpse. As they marched the Guardsmen past him in their underwear, he searched the corridor for the shoe.
No luck. It might have been under the boy. Joe thought of rolling the body again to check—it seemed important to find it—but he was due back at the gate and he needed to change into another uniform.
He felt watched by bored or indifferent gods as he pulled the boy’s shirt back over his abdomen and left him lying there, one shoe on, one shoe off, in his own blood.
The guns arrived five minutes later when the truck pulled up to the gate. The driver was a seaman no older than the boy Joe had just watched die, but riding shotgun was a petty officer in his midthirties with a permanently windburned face. He had a ’17 Colt .45 riding his hip, the butt weathered from use. One look in his pale eyes and Joe knew that if those three Cubans had charged him in that corridor, they’d be the ones lying on the ground with sheets over them.
The IDs they handed over identified them as Seaman Apprentice Orwitt Pluff and Petty Officer Walter Craddick. Joe handed the IDs back with the signed orders Craddick had given him.
Craddick gave that a cock of his head, left Joe’s hand hanging in the space between them. “That’s for your CO’s files.”
“Right.” Joe withdrew his hand. He gave them an apologetic smile, not putting much into it. “A little too much fun last night in Ybor. You know how that is.”
“No, I don’t.” Craddick shook his head. “I don’t drink. It’s against the law.” He looked out the windshield. “We backing up to that ramp?”
“Yes,” Joe said. “You want, you can off-load it and we’ll take it all inside.”
Craddick took note of the chevrons on Joe’s shoulder. “Our orders are to deliver and secure the weapons, Corporal. We’ll be walking them all the way into the hold.”
“Outstanding,” Joe said. “Just back it up to the ramp.” He raised the gate, catching Dion’s eyes as he did so. Dion said something to Lefty Downer, the smartest of the four guys he’d brought along, and then walked off toward the armory.
Joe, Lefty, and the other three Pescatore men, all four dressed as corporals, followed the truck to the loading ramp. Lefty had been chosen because he was smart and didn’t lose his cool. The other three—Cormarto, Fasani, and Parone—had been picked because they spoke English without an accent. For the most part, they looked like weekend soldiers, although Joe noted as they crossed the lot that Parone’s hair was too long, even for a Guardsman.
He hadn’t slept properly, if at all, in two days and he could feel it now in every step he took, every thought he tried to formulate.
As the truck backed up to the ramp, he saw Craddick watching him, and he wondered if the older man was just naturally suspicious or if Joe had given him a reason to be. And then Joe realized something that nauseated him.
He’d abandoned his post.
He’d left the gate unmanned. No soldier would do that, not even a hungover National Guardsman.
He glanced back, expecting to see it empty, expecting a shot in the back from Craddick’s .45 and the peal of alarms, but instead he saw Esteban Suarez standing erect in the guard shack, wearing a corporal’s uniform, looking to all but the most curious eyes every inch the soldier.
Esteban, Joe thought, I barely know you but I could kiss your head.
Joe glanced back at the truck, saw that Craddick wasn’t looking at him any longer. He was turned on the seat, saying something to the seaman apprentice as the boy applied the brake and then shut off the engine.
Craddick hopped from the cab and shouted orders to the back of the truck, and by the time Joe got there, the sailors were out on the ramp and the tailgate was down.
Craddick handed Joe a clipboard. “Initial the first and third pages, sign the second. Clearly states that we are leaving these weapons in your charge for no less than three and no more than thirty-six hours.”
Joe signed “Albert White, SSG, USANG,” initialed where appropriate, and handed it back.
Craddick looked at Lefty, Cormarto, Fasani, and Parone, then back at Joe. “Five men? That’s all you got?”
“We were told you were bringing the muscle.” Joe gestured at the dozen sailors on the ramp.
“Just like the army,” Craddick said, “putting its feet up when the work gets tough.”
Joe blinked in the sun. “That why you guys were late—you were working hard?”
“’Scuse me?”
Joe squared off, not just because his blood was up, but because not to do so would look suspicious. “You were supposed to be here half an hour ago.”
“Fifteen minutes,” Craddick said, “and we were delayed.”
“By?”
“Fail to see how any of this is your business, Corporal.” Craddick stepped up close. “But, in truth, we were delayed by a woman.”
Joe looked back at Lefty and his men and laughed. “Women can be hard work.”