Willie Longfellow sat in the boat house at the Excelsior docks listening to the rain pound the tar roof of his little shack.
The wind that night was ferocious and he
wouldn’t go out in the storm.
There were plenty of people wanting to take a
ride across the water and get to the casino, but the wind was too strong and
the chop too high for the paddlewheel he drove back and forth to Big Island.
Willie might have been a drunk, but he was a
competent sailor, and he wasn’t going to risk his life or the lives of his
passengers, he had too much respect for the forces of nature.
His boat house was cramped.
There was a small desk with a kerosene lamp
and a phone, a wood burning stove that was cold at the moment, but there was a
small gas-burner on top of it that he used to boil water for coffee.
In the space between those fixtures there was
barely enough room for Willie to turn around.
He drank his coffee hot with brandy, and
smoked his Navy Cuts with the narrow door cracked open. He tolerated the
weather coming into the shack because it would be too hot inside if he didn’t
have a little ventilation.
Willie knew that if he went to the boat the
people gathered at the dock would expect him to make way for the island; they
would pester him until he did something stupid.
He didn’t want the pressure, and for that same
reason he had taken the phone off the hook. One of the fellows at the Casino had
been calling again and again, demanding that he bring people over…and to do it
now.
Willie Longfellow had his own agenda…he was
too salty to care what anyone else had to say about the matter. He had been a
boatswain in the Navy for twenty five years, and he had dealt with much tougher
men than the Norwegian gang that had recently taken over the operation out
there….that’s what Willie believed, though he frequently had to remind himself
of it.
He was just in the process of doing that when
he watched a small boat pull up to the dock with its running lights on. He
watched the slender silver haired man people called The Wolf, get out of the
boat and approach his little shack.
Willie Longfellow made eye contact with him
and a chill ran up his spine.
He wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything, but he
knew enough to see this man for what he was…a killer who walked through the
storm as if the rain couldn’t touch him.
Willie took the last swallow of his boiling
coffee, flicked the butt end of his cigarette out the door, pulled on his
raincoat and hat, turned on his flashlight and went out into the storm.
He tried to ignore the Wolf as he passed him
on the dock, he kept his eyes on the people waiting beneath the shelter, waving
to them to let them know that it was time to board.
The Wolf stopped him and said, “You’re an hour
late.”
Willie mumbled, “Better late than dead.”
Lightning struck the water with a long flash
and rolling thunder.
“You
know…the weather,” Willie said as he moved on.
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