Free The Babe Ruth Deception by David O. Stewart

place?”
    Joshua knew it was a dig, not an actual question. The smugglers’ boat was late, but that wasn’t any shock. Smugglers didn’t run on a timetable. Anything could gum up the works. Engine trouble. Fog. A squabble over price. Confusion about which liquor supply ship was the right one. Six or eight supply ships might be loitering out in international waters, past the three-mile limit, waiting for the speedy rumrunners to show up. Even the coast guard might have stuck their big noses in the deal, though the word was that the coasties didn’t bother Halloran’s boats. Joshua had heard there was an arrangement.
    Two white guys stood out at the business end of the dock, over the water, stamping their feet and blowing on their hands. When they drove up in their truck two hours before, Cecil and Joshua were already crouched behind the shed. They could have taken these two guys, but then they would have had to do something with them until the liquor boat showed up. Tying them up wasn’t a great option and Joshua wasn’t eager to kill over booze. Anyway, neither of these geniuses thought to look behind the shed. He smirked. Hard to get good help these days.
    Joshua figured there’d be two more guys on the boat, the skipper and a guy to haul the cargo. That was the crew when he watched them come in the other night. That would make it two against four, but he and Cecil would surprise them, have that edge. Also, when Joshua watched them the other night, they looked soft. They weren’t careful, not nearly careful enough. The krauts would’ve eaten these guys for breakfast.
    Wearing dark clothes, pistols in their waistbands, he and Cecil watched and listened. It was a quiet neighborhood. A few foghorns in the bay. Some damned bell that never stopped clanging. Twice they heard a car engine. Not much else.
    In France, on the line, he had clung to the night. Daylight showed the horrors. Mud everywhere—on clothes, seeping into skin, caked on guns, sucking boots down. Men scratching. Bodies all around, some alive, some sick, some asleep, some dead. And the eyes. So many dead eyes. Night was better, at least when there wasn’t any fighting. It cloaked the horrors, leaving only the monsters of his imagination, and his imagination couldn’t come up with anything to compare with what lay around him. For months after the war, those images stayed stuck in his brain, but they were fading now, at least a bit. Joshua mostly wasn’t afraid of sleeping any more, not the way Cecil was. Joshua wondered if there was something wrong with him, if he’d been emptied out, numbed to the horror. He thought about Violet and smiled, then pushed her out of his mind.
    Joshua checked his pistol again. It was the Mauser he took from a dead kraut officer. The crazy thing was that after the army let him out of prison, after his record got cleared, they gave him the gun back. Like it had been his. Damned US Army didn’t know where half its soldiers were during any battle, but they’d kept track of this stolen pistol, delivered it to him in a cloth sack with a pack of cigarettes, the lighter he carried when he was arrested, and two letters from his mother.
    Their plan wasn’t airtight, but that didn’t bother him. With houses around them, gunplay wasn’t a great idea, so they had left a couple of oars out on the dock. Those would be the weapons. Unless they had to use guns. They would see what was what, improvise. Also fuzzy was how to get the liquor from here to where Cecil left their rented boat. The war taught Joshua to mistrust detailed plans. Nothing worked out like you planned. Check out the ground and understand what it offered. Think about the options. Trust yourself. Then get on with it. They weren’t up against the German High Command tonight.
    A throaty engine gurgle came over the water. The other night, Joshua had been impressed with the bootleggers’ boat, its