The Fan by Peter Abrahams

Author:Peter Abrahams [Abrahams, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: C429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780307777881
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-08T13:00:00+00:00

17

“Have you done this kind of thing before?” asked Gil.

“For Christ’s sake—you were with me,” said Boucicaut.

They stood side by side at a rest stop just south of the bridge, pissing. No cars went by. There was nothing to hear but the sibilance of their piss in the tall grass, and the tide flowing through the canal, also a liquid sound, but deeper, and infinitely more powerful. It was late, dark, quiet. Above, the stars were bright and beyond count. How could whatever you did down here mean anything at all, one way or the other? The boys who held the whip hand knew that from birth.

“I meant with people inside,” Gil said.

“Lots of times,” Boucicaut told him.

“Lots?”

“Some.”

“And what’s it like?”

“Like?”

“What happens?”

“Nothing happens. They sleep like babies. The whole country’s doped to the eyeballs every night.” Again Gil felt Boucicaut’s heavy hand on his shoulder. It reassured him. “This is going to be cake,” Boucicaut said.

Gil turned onto the Mid-Cape. Boucicaut spread his tool belt across his lap, stuck the tools through the loops: crowbar, flat bar, three different screwdrivers, glass cutter, pencil flash. Gil thought right away of Boucicaut on one knee by the dugout, strapping on his catcher’s gear. “Tools of ignorance” was the phrase sportswriters used for catcher’s equipment when they were trying to be funny, but Gil had never known why: catchers were smart. Boucicaut had been more than a rock; he’d done the thinking for all of them. Boucicaut with dust streaks like war paint on his face, Boucicaut spitting through the bars of his mask, Boucicaut doing the thinking: If you want to put him on, at least hit him in the head. Gil smiled to himself. He felt right, there in the quiet cab of the pickup, with Boucicaut beside him. He opened his mouth to say something that began with the word remember, but Boucicaut spoke first.

“Cake,” he said, “as long as you can fence ’em.”

“No problem.”

Still thinking: yes, Boucicaut was smart. Bobby Rayburn, Gil thought abruptly, was not. Not as smart as Primo, certainly. Gil pictured Primo’s flashy blade. “You like the number eleven?” he asked.

“Huh?” said Boucicaut, folding the tool belt and laying it on his knee.

“Rayburn’s old number,” Gil replied.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about, Gilly.”

Gil took the exit, turned onto the shore road. They drove through the darkened village, past the stone church, where a light shone in the tower, stopped in the deserted parking lot of the seafood restaurant, no longer boarded up. They got out, Boucicaut strapping on the tool belt, Gil slinging an empty backpack over one arm.

“I’ll take the keys,” Boucicaut said.

Gil gave them to him.

They walked to the road with the PRIVATE sign posted at the entrance. Not far ahead a TV screen glowed blue through the windows of the guardhouse. Gil and Boucicaut ducked into the scrub beside the road. Moving as one, thought Gil. A team. They passed the guardhouse in silence—through the trees, Gil saw a head in the window, silhouetted in blue light—and cut back onto the road.

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