Guns [John Hardin 01] Read Online Free Page B

crisply uniformed young woman wearing a headset seated in front of the lit-up equipment. Somewhere out back a diesel generator hammered noisily at high rpm. Stanton ushered him into a small conference room decorated with a large nautical chart of the mid-Atlantic coast and framed photos of cutters and motor lifeboats and their assembled crews. A fit, lean man wearing a paint-stained denim shirt was slouched at the table. He had a mass of black hair resembling a charcoaled mop. Early forties. He looked damp. His jacket and cap were drying on the back of the chair beside him.
    “You must be Sam Bass. I’m Ira Cohn, with the Raleigh
Sentinel
.”
    Bass looked immediately defensive, but leaned across the table to take the offered hand and shake it once, unsmiling.
    Stanton said, “We’ve got coffee in a thermos and a couple dozen donuts there in the corner. Help yourself.”
    “Thanks, I sure will.” Ira turned over a mug bearing the Coast Guard emblem and filled it with steaming coffee. He piled six donuts onto a paper towel and took the feast over to sit at the table with the other two men. He got out the recorder and notebook and began asking questions between large mouthfuls of donut and sips of the aromatic coffee.
    Stanton was smilingly cordial and helpful, filling him in on the weather and sea conditions, what facts he knew about the Stilleys and their ketch
Osprey
and the procedures of the rescue, the capabilities of the motor lifeboat and its crew chiefed by an old hand named Ruben Dixon, volunteering information about how many distress calls they got annually and about the Ocracoke Station in general and its long proud history. Bass volunteered nothing, just sitting there quietly with his hands wrapped around his mug, gazing down into his coffee. Ira let the tape run and used the notebook to supplement it, jotting impressions and ideas as they came to him.
    “So, Mr. Bass. I understand it was you who found them. In your plane.”
    Bass didn’t look up. Just nodded.
    Ira flipped back a page to some notes he’d already written on Bass. Not handsome. Somehow striking, though. Might have been a cowboy in an earlier time. What the hell’s bugging him about me?
    “How did you learn about the Stilleys being in trouble?”
    Bass gestured at the recorder and said, “Maybe we could do without that for a minute.”
    “Sure thing,” Ira said, and switched off the recorder and put down his ballpoint. He didn’t need them anyway. He had a memory like a Gateway computer. He used the notebook and recorder mostly to help him think, to make interviews appear semi-formal, and so interviewees would remember they had been recorded when they sometimes later might want to decide they really hadn’t said that.
Bingo,
he thought.
Now we’re getting to what’s bothering him.
    Bass leveled penetrating gray eyes at him.
There’s a hell of a lot more to this guy than shows on the surface, Ira thought.
    “I hope you’ll understand, Mr. Cohn. I’m not associated with the Coast Guard in any official way. I do have a couple of friends here at the station, though. I was talking with one of them on the phone early this morning and he mentioned the Stilleys.”
    So somebody in the Coast Guard had asked him to conduct the search, but they’re not supposed to do that.
    “Please. Call me Ira. I understand. Suppose we just say you heard about the Stilleys from a friend. How’s that?”
    “Good,” Bass said, but something sizable was still bothering the man. Ira could sense it. He switched the recorder back on. “Flying a light plane out there this morning had to’ve been pretty rough, to put it mildly.”
    Bass looked into his coffee again and said, “It was turbulent but not all that bad, really. Visual flight rules conditions, basically.”
    Aw shucks time. And bullshit. I’ll have to dig at him, Ira thought.
    Then things began happening fast. There was the whapping of an approaching helicopter outside and the young woman