Page 20 of Shadow Ticket
“This…U-boat…”
Drover looks back over his shoulder, catching Hicks’s eye, points his thumb at one earphone, nods, goes back to monitoring traffic.
“Just came by to say so long. To people I can still trust.”
“Where they takin you, Stuffy?” Hicks tries but it still comes out like you talk to crazy people.
“To where it’s safe.”
“Mind if me and Drover tag along?” sez Skeet.
—
Evening on the Lake,ice fishers either preparing to spend the night or heading back to shore, Stuffy indicates a shack in the distance, “That’s the rendezvous point, but you guys ought to stay here. Far as the Lake’s OK if you want, but any further forget it, they tell me no witnesses allowed.”
Stuffy bids everyone a good night that sounds like a goodbye, trudges off alone in the direction of Grand Rapids, Michigan, crunching, squeaking over the ice into the darkness, as the coast of Wisconsin slips step by step away behind him…
They watch him till it’s too dark.
“Looked like a fishing shack,” sez Skeet.
“You think he’s gone bughouse?”
“No more than he ever was.”
“Maybe we better…”
They hurry out onto the ice. Nothing much to see when they finally reach the shack, which is strangely un-winterbeaten, some firewood stacked under a tarp, wheels, a towing hitch…
“Door’s open,” Skeet reports.
“Anybody home?” Hicks loud but friendly. Nothing inside. Ashes in a cold woodstove, scatter of cigarette butts on the floor, Stuffy nowhere in sight.
“Where’d he go, then?”
Picking up a penciled note, “If you’re here and I’m not, means I’m on my way and time you were on yours. Head toward the city lights, brighter the better, keep going, try not to look back.”
About halfway back to shore, “Uh-oh, what’s this?”
Lights beneath the ice. In from the unscaled distance, dim halos each slowly sharpening, outlining a sleek black underwater shape, making a careful approach, brighter as they glide closer.
“Is it what I think it is?”
“All black, can’t make out too much detail through the ice, but it has to be Stuffy’s sub,” Skeet less casual than normal.
“You’ve seen it before?”
“Fits the description according to Stuffy.”
The jet-black apparition slows, slides underneath them and matches their course and speed. When they pause, it pauses. After a short while Drover notices one light in particular, blinking unevenly on and off. “Seems to be Morse code,” Drover with a concentrated look. “Yeah, it sez, ‘Now you’re all up to speed, suckers. BCNU, Stuffy.’ ”
“He’s on board that, whatever that is?”
“I didn’t see nothin,” sez Skeet. “You guys?”
—
As days passwithout further word, suspicions grow that Stuffy has been taken aboard the U-13 and into its history of pickups and deliveries, back to his old contraband-running ways, assigned a sleeping space, standing watches regularly…
