Read The Confession of Joe Cullen for Free Online

Mercedes truck rigs. Everything was top dollar.”
    â€œAnd where did all of these top dollars come from?”
    â€œMostly they came from a millionaire type, name of Fred Lester. Should I spell it?”
    Freedman shook his head.
    â€œMaybe he was just a funnel. Oscar figured he was the source, but he took orders and sometimes crap from another man, name of Monty — M-O-N-T-Y. No other name.”
    â€œOscar? That’s Oscar Kovach, the guy who steered you to the job?”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œOK,” Freedman said. “Let’s go back a piece and see what we have. This guy, Oscar Kovach, picks you up in Sullivan’s saloon. He’s a vet, you’re a vet. He needs a pilot — wait a minute. He doesn’t do the hiring for the outfit?”
    â€œNo, but his copilot had a heart attack and was hospitalized. They told him to find a pilot he could trust and someone who could navigate decently. He needs a pilot, I need a job.”
    â€œGo on. You meet him. What then?”
    â€œHe pitches the job. I tell him yes, and he gives me a couple of hundred for some tropical clothes and a flying jacket, and I meet him the next day and we take a plane to El Paso. Out of El Paso, we take an eight-seater commuter job to Salsaville, and the day after that, Oscar and me, we’re flying an overloaded 727 down to Honduras, where we unload carbines, hand grenades, mortars, heavy antitank stuff, and missiles and ammo, and I’m five thousand dollars richer.”
    Cullen felt better than he had for weeks; his head was clearer, the tension that lived at the base of his neck and around his shoulders had eased off. He had just begun to think of what the consequences would be — ten, fifteen, twenty years in prison, or a lifetime in prison — and they didn’t matter. Something inside him had changed, snapped, released him from himself. If he could have thought it through and put it into words, he might have said that he was free for the first time in his life, not only free from a father who beat him unmercifully, a mother who was an alcoholic and another subject for his father’s beatings, a father who hated his education, who drove him out of the house when he began his freshman year at City College, but free from savage, semidemented drill instructors, free from hardly-more-sane senior officers, free from the lunatic horror dreams that were with him in Vietnam, free from the contempt and the lack of interest of a country in the men who fought in Vietnam — a freedom that he had tasted only in the air, high, high in the air. But this was more than a taste. He was released. The cops stood and sat around him not like inquisitors, but in his mind at the moment like priests hearing his confession.
    â€œYou had no trouble — walking into a 727?” Freedman wondered.
    â€œI can fly anything. So can Oscar — well, he’s not as good in a helicopter as I am, but there’s a kind of pilot — I don’t know exactly how to put it. I read a book of Faulkner’s called Pylon . Faulkner understood it.”
    Freedman, who had been studying Cullen thoughtfully, was taken aback by the reference to Faulkner. He had not known that Faulkner wrote a book called Pylon . Cullen had not struck him as either very literate or introverted, but simply as a heavy-set roughneck with enough of the Catholic locked into him to recoil from the murder of a priest. Nor did Freedman know, at this point, how it had come about. All that in good time. No need to hurry it.
    â€œJust like that” — Freedman nodded — “you waft into Honduras and unload your guns. How do you get there? You and this Oscar guy — who was your navigator? And where? From what I hear about Honduras, it’s a stinking pesthole with a couple of million people who are mostly engaged in killing each other.”
    â€œNo,” Cullen said. “No, Lieutenant, it