CHAPTER 15 - SALT


Sonny woke with a start, dripping with sweat, and didn't know where he was for a moment. The echo of a dream hung in his head, something about a barrel full of poison, and being pursued across tidal ledges by armed men in fish scale armor, and wearing flippers. He'd just thrown himself into a deep crack in the ledge he was running across, as some kind of mechanical cormorant went droning overhead. Sonny could still hear the drone.

Then the dream was gone, and he was sprawled on Suzy's big brass bed, a sheet tangled around one leg. He could hear some kind of airplane flying low over the reach. It was hot and close in the bedroom, and the scent of his wife's gewgaws and folderols was cloying. Untangling himself, Sonny swung his legs off the bed, sat upright on the edge, and put his elbows on his knees, working his fingers on his scalp.

"What would Grandpa Tink have done?" he wondered. He knew which barrel had disturbed his sleep. If Gram already knew something, it wouldn't be long before someone else sniffed out the windfall, and following the trail from the Jones Ground to Sonny's barn might not be so difficult after all.

Sonny got up and shocked himself fully awake with a cold shower. Then he dressed in clean clothes and went out through the connecting building and into the barn. Sonny had built new stalls for Suzy's riding mare when they were first married, all of two years ago, but she'd taken the horse when she stormed out. Now the barn was silent, redolent with dried manure and fresh hay, flies buzzing at a south window. Sonny went over to the double swinging doors and lowered the latch plank into place, securing the doors, then he latched the access port, and turned toward the pile of loose hay.

Sonny could see where Jumbo and Buster had buried the barrel, and he easily uncovered the big gray drum, standing it upright with an effort. "First things first," he thought, fishing a 5/8 open-end wrench and a matching box-end out of the toolbox on the workbench. In a few moments he'd cracked the nut and bolt securing the latch band to the head of the drum, broken the water-tight seal of the head gasket, and pried the top off the barrel.

It was full of thick plastic envelopes, as they expected, and Sonny hefted one. "Probably a kilo," he judged. How many were in the barrel? A fortune in contraband, to be sure. He noticed the sliced bag Buster had punctured, and chuckled, shaking his head. He took this one, and half a dozen other bags, placed them in the bottom of his mechanic's box, and put the nesting tool tray in place over them. Then he replaced the head on the drum, and rebolted the latchband, torquing it tight. Tossed the wrenches into the toolbox tray.

Sonny grabbed the drum's top rim at 2 o'clock and began spinning it counterclockwise across the barn floor, toward the back of the building. "Old Tink would get a chuckle," Sonny thought, sweeping hay off a trapdoor hidden near the rear wall. The back of the barn was set on pilings over the water in a tiny cove off the reach, and his grandfather had devised this way of moving contraband during Prohibition. He tested to see that the old trap would still open, and when the hinges complained, he went over and got some WD40 and sprayed them. While he waited for it to penetrate, he moved a block and tackle from over the haypile to a beam over the trap.

When they'd first brought the drum aboard SUZY, they'd cut the buoy line off close to where it was tied to a wire loop welded on the side of the barrel. Now Sonny measured off 12 fathom of potwarp, tied an unpainted styrofoam buoy to one end, and the other to the loop. Then he went over to one of the stalls where there was a pile of 50 pound bags of salt, cut the top one open, and began measuring salt into an empty burlap bag with a one quart coffee can.

Sonny was plotting an old poacher's trick. You fill a bag with salt and tie it to a buoy attached to what you want to hide under water. If you match the buoyancy of the float with just the right amount of salt, the salt will dissolve and the buoy will pop up when you want it to. The key is timing the rates and weights. Tink had taught Sonny the rule of thumb as a childhood rhyme, and he was chanting it as he counted, smiling with memories. When he'd prepared three 24-hour bags, he tied their throats tightly with baling twine, set them in a fish tub, along with some more twine, and dragged it over to the trap. He checked the trap door, and it opened easily and silently. Sonny closed it, set the drum on its side, dragged a tarp over trap, drum, tub, buoy and all, and pitched loose hay over the works.

Just then he heard an outboard cough, and start. Going over to the window Sonny looked down on the family float, jutting out below Tink's old fish house at the mouth of the cove. Buster's boy Dunk, was casting off a line, and motoring out into the reach. Dunk throttled up onto the step and headed east.

"Must have been visiting Gram," Sonny concluded. Which reminded him. He doublchecked to see that everything was hidden, then he took the can of WD40 and went next door to oil Gram's front door hinges.

When he slipped in the door Sonny could hear Gram's voice down the hall. She was on the phone, and he could just make out her saying something about "..little girl Annie.. No.. It's not right," as he sprayed oil on her hinges.

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