Shockwave by Andrew Vachss Page B

they’re hungry—hungry for food, I’m saying—we’ve always got something. But if they come back, they better be bringing something to share with us.”
    “What could Homer bring?”
    “Hey, you’d be surprised. Homer likes the beach late at night, when there’s no one else around. You’re not supposed to take driftwood, but that’s just a stupid rule some ‘I’m
soooo
Green’ made up. And tourists, that’s
exactly
the kind of thing they want.
    “One of the women at the art gallery, she comes by every once in a while. If we’ve got driftwood—specially if it’s all dried out—she’ll buy it from us. And sometimes Homer brings ambergris—little lumps of rock that the whales throw up, or dump out some other way. It’s got this pink center, looks real pretty. This woman, she’ll buy that, too.”
    “Homer tries to sleep through the day,” Mack said. “Not many people are going to walk around after dark looking for driftwood. And if you try and take a piece in daylight, some environmentalist will call the cops.”
    “Makes sense,” I said.
    “Homer’s no sponge,” the kid added, just to make sure I understood. “He always tries to bring something, even if it’s just old magazines.”
    “Sounds fair to me.”
    “It
is
fair,” the redhead said, a little more strength in his voice. “He comes here because he knows it’s safe. There aren’t that many safe places for a guy like Homer to be around after it gets dark.”
    “That’s why you’re all here, right? I don’t mean for the same reason, but for the same
kind
of reason.”
    The redhead took a small step back, like he wanted to get a better look at me. “You ever go on the run?” he finally asked.
    “A long time ago. When I was a lot younger than you.”
    “You ever find—?”
    “All I found was a way out. Nothing like what you have here.”
    “How would you know what we have here?” he said, quick-glancing over at Mack.
    “You stand by each other,” I said. “You share what you have. You stick together as best you can.”
    “That’s all you know, and
that’s
enough for you to say—?”
    “That’s all there
is
,” I cut him short. “All there ever is.”
    The redhead nodded. I couldn’t see the others, but I could feel they were nodding along with him.
    “Come on,” he said, turning his back and walking into the deeper brush.
    M ack took his own pack of smokes from a side pocket of his cargo pants.
    He shook one out for himself and then placed the pack on a flat rock, together with a black metal tube. Without hesitation, the redhead tapped out a smoke for himself and gave Mack a questioning look. When Mack moved his head just enough to show he was nodding an okay, the redhead pulled the metal tube apart, stuck the tip of his smoke inside, took in a breath, turned his cigarette to assure himself it was glowing, let the smoke drift slowly out of his nose, then recapped the tube.
    I hadn’t seen one of those no-flash lighters in years—they were once standard issue for soldiers all over the world, especially freelancers working in places where no government would ever acknowledge them, and no family would ever claim their body. We all knew it would be closer to “when” than “if,” but that’s why we got paid what we did.
    If any of us had a family, they never said so—those picturesof women some carried, they might claim it was a girlfriend, but never a wife. More likely, a whore they paid to pose with them while they were on leave.
    Mack’s gesture was clear to the redhead. Whether I smoked or not wasn’t important—what was important was that I was as welcome to the cigarettes as he was. Sharing tobacco was an Indian thing. How it got to be so, I don’t know. But no Indian casually passes a pack around. I took a cigarette for myself, lit it the same way the redhead had, took a single drag, then put the filter-tipped smoke flat on the rock, still burning.
    “You know how Homer is,” the redhead said to