The Bad Weather Friend

FLORIDA

Nine feet long, four feet wide, four feet deep, weighing well over a thousand pounds, the crate was a hateful thing, not simply because it was an awkward load that could cause a serious injury to those who had to move it, but also because, well, it gave off what Dooley Peebles called “weird vibes” and what his pal Rosco Moseley described as “bad mojo.”

Dooley and Rosco were employees of Mayweather Universal Air Freight. On a humid afternoon in October, in a box truck containing a long-tine forklift rated for four thousand pounds, they arrived at the colonel’s warehouse in Boca Raton, Florida.

A flock of red-crowned parrots were busy eating nuts that the colonel had scattered on the pavement for them. As the truck drew near, the birds flurried skyward, a flung Joseph’s coat of flashing colors.

Colonel Talmadge Clerkenwell looked older than Florida. His three-piece linen suit glowed as white as his hair, mustache, and goatee. If he hadn’t been rail thin and standing as straight as a plumb line, you might have thought he was the fabled founder of the KFC restaurant chain.

The crate, like the colonel, was waiting on the concrete apron outside the warehouse. Rosco Moseley hated the thing on sight and dubbed it “the Beast.” Colonel Clerkenwell was courteous, so affable and at ease that it seemed he must have spent his life loving and being loved through a long smoothness of days. He was also mysterious. No sign suggested what the warehouse might contain. The colonel responded to questions about the place and the shipment with such graceful elusion that it almost sounded as if he had answered them.

The pickup order said the customer was shipping books to one Benjamin Catspaw at an address in California, which made no sense. Not that people in California didn’t read books. They probably did. Or used to. But a thousand pounds of books would have been packed in several smaller, more easily handled containers.

The colonel had paid dearly to have his shipment picked up by appointment rather than during the course of Dooley and Rosco’s regular schedule. It was to be taken directly to a cargo jet then loading in Miami. Yet the colonel declined to pay extra for more insurance than the standard contract provided, which was two dollars per pound. Dooley was required to offer the enhanced coverage, but Clerkenwell just smiled and said, “Oh, they’re nothing but a few hundred old books. The value is purely sentimental.”

Although Dooley warmed to most people only after he got to know them well, he liked the colonel within a minute of meeting the old guy. Dooley did not like liars, because he’d come from a family of them who lived by deceit and were as likely to defraud relatives as they were to steal from anyone else. He felt sure that the colonel was lying about the crate being full of books, but Clerkenwell had a quality that suggested he never lied about anything important, neither to obtain an advantage nor to harm another person.

Dooley didn’t know what that quality was, couldn’t define it, at least not right then, with the gray sky lowering and rain coming soon and the crate needing to be forked into the truck. It was an intuitive perception, almost psychic.