Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 Read Free Page B

luxuriated in long wavy
orangey hair, atop which perched sunglasses. He was got up in a safari shirt
and khaki British Army shorts and cowboy boots decorated with stitched bucking
broncos. He carried a small olive-drab canvas shoulderbag that tried to look
like some sort of military accoutrement, but which was in fact a purse.
                 Those
were the ones, all right. But what did Kirby want with them? And what was
making them so excessively nervous? Money is going to change hands, Innocent
told himself. He wanted to know all about it.
                 Remaining
outside the building, he glanced through its glassless windows, seeing the
sheeplike processing of the arrivals. Out on the runway, luggage extracted,
doors shut, the plane snarled and turned aside, at once hurrying back up some
invisible ramp into the sky, busily on the way to its next stop, Tegucigalpa,
capital of Honduras.
                 Innocent
watched Kirby, inside the building, watch the pansy-boys clear through
Immigration, then watched him shake their hands, one after the other. No
squeezing hard with those two. They collected their luggage—Louis Vuitton for
the bald one, a large black vinyl thing with many zippers for the other—and
Kirby escorted them out to the sunlight and over to his pickup.
                 He
would be taking them to his plane, yes? Perhaps a hotel first, but then his
plane. Even though Belize is a very small country, and even though Belize City
is no longer its capital, it is a city possessing two airports. Commercial
international flights moved through this one here, but the charter planes and
the small locally-owned craft were all back in town, at the Municipal Airport
built on landfill beside the bay. Kirby would take them there, and fly the
plane . . . Where?
                 These
were not marijuana buyers. And if they were, they would meet Kirby in Florida,
not here.
                 Pocketing
his toothpick, Innocent went inside to chat with the Immigration man who’d
checked the pansy-boys’ passports. They were named Alan Witcher and Gerrold
Feldspan, they lived at the same address on Christopher Street in New York
City, and each listed his occupation as “antique dealer.”
                Innocent went back outside, frowning
slightly, feeling a bubble of gas in his stomach. The pickup was gone. He
wished he could fly. Not with a plane or a helicopter, but just by himself,
like Superman. Except that he wouldn’t like that foolish posture with the arms
over one’s head, as though diving. Arms folded, perhaps, or hands casually in
jacket pockets, he would like to be able to lift into the sky like an airship,
like a dirigible, and float along behind Kirby, unknown, unseen.
                 What
was Kirby’s business with those two? Where was he taking them? To his land?
“There’s nothing there,” Innocent grumbled aloud.
                 He
should know.
     

 
           3 FER-DE-LANCE
     
                 “Sweeeeeeeettt,”
said the tinamou.
                “Kackle-icker-caw,” said the toucan.
                 “Bibble
bibble ibble bibble bibble,” said the black howler monkey.
                “Sssssss, sss,” said the coral
snake.
                 “This
way, gentlemen,” said Kirby. “Watch out for snakes.” He thumped his machete on
a fallen tree trunk, which said throk. “The noise keeps them in their holes,” he explained.
                 Witcher
and Feldspan, having long since abandoned their earlier pretense at
heterosexuality, had been nervously holding one another’s hands since before
Kirby’s little six-seater Cessna had landed. Now, at talk of snakes, they
pressed shoulders together and gazed round-eyed at the deceptively peaceful
green. Well, it gave them something other than the law to be nervous about.
                 “I
bought this