Free Crackdown by Bernard Cornwell Page B

realised that McIllvanney would not have told me anything that might have risked my acceptance of the charter, but now that I had learned that the twins had such a severe drug problem I was even less keen to take on the job. “I’m no expert on drugs, senator,” I said. “There must be hospitals they can go to?”
    He nodded. “Of course there are such hospitals, and the twins are under the supervision of a clinic right now, but I believe they need extraordinary help.” He paused, and gave me a flicker of his famous smile. “Help from an extraordinary person, Nick. You.”
    “I’m not extraordinary,” I said flatly.
    Crowninshield smiled. “You were a marine.”
    “They’ll take anyone who isn’t blind,” I said with dismissive untruth.
    “And you understand what makes a son rebel against a father,” Crowninshield went on. “I remember those nights we shared our thoughts on that subject, Nick, and I think my son kind of needs the understanding you can give him.”
    I shied away from the very American-sounding compliment. “Get him a good doctor.”
    “I want you.”
    “I’m not an expert!” I protested.
    “Yes you are,” Crowninshield insisted. “You’re an expert sailor, and that’s good because it means you can take the twins to sea and keep them there until they’re damn well cured. I don’t care what hell they go through. I don’t care if they have to be strapped to the mast. I don’t care if they’re hallucinating purple snakes and blue baboons, because the whole point of putting them on a boat is that they can’t get off and swim home, and they can’t get drugs on board, and they can’t bribe you to take them to land, and that means they’ll have no damned choice but to get cured.”
    I said nothing. I was thinking of all the work I needed to do on Masquerade; all the painstaking hours of sawing and planing and caulking and rigging.
    Crowninshield stared at me through his obscuring lenses. “Nick,” he said at last, “my son is going to die within a year if I don’t do something very drastic. He’s already lost the sight of his left eye because cocaine starved the retina of blood, and he’s damn lucky not to be totally blind, or even dead, because the next time it could constrict the arteries of his heart or block the blood from reaching his brain. Or next time it could be Robin-Anne. So I have to do something because I can’t just stand idle and let my kids die.”
    The pain in the senator’s voice was awful, but I still did not want to become involved. I began walking along the track leading behind the beach towards the village, which was marked by the red tin roof of a tiny church showing above the casuarinas and palm trees. The senator fell into step beside me while some of Bonefish’s smaller children followed at a safe distance. We stopped close to a small graveyard where a tribe of wild goats stared suspiciously at us from between the mounds of earth and bleak wooden crosses. The senator was looking at the sun-reflecting sea. “The truth is, Nick, I messed up my kids, and that hurts. It wasn’t lack of love. Hell, I had a bumper sticker saying ‘Have You Hugged Your Kids Today?’ and, sure, I hugged them every day I could, but nowadays I sometimes wonder just what in hell is going on inside their heads. Especially Rickie. It’s easier to extract sense out of a fruitfly than to get a civil word out of Rickie. They threw him out of college because of cocaine, and he was damn lucky that they didn’t call the police, but all he’d say to me was to stay cool! To stay cool, for Christ’s sake! Your only son is a college drop-out, and bleeding from the nose because his blood vessels are popping from all the cocaine in his system, and he tells you to keep your cool!”
    I didn’t know what to say, so said nothing. A tiny lizard watched me with unblinking eyes from a rock beside the lagoon, while above the trees the red tin church roof shimmered bright in the sultry