by Tom Shepherd
He stepped back slightly. “Give me the guns. You can’t kill anybody.”
Crack! April screamed again. Men were shouting. Blurred figures crawled under tablecloth skirts.
The Inspector crouched on a knee. “Give me the guns.”
He was right. I couldn’t kill him, even a fool who needed to be shot as badly as Borkowski did. “All right, I’ll give you the guns.”
He stood. And when he did, I whipped the pistols straight up and pulled the triggers, blasting the ceiling. Borkowski ducked, flat on the floor. The recoil of Springer’s heavier gun kicked my hand down, but I raised it and continued firing. Wood beams splintered, spewing plaster and paint and drywall, and the air filled with the pungent smell of gun smoke. My hands ached as the pistol grips chaffed the cuts in my palms, but I kept shooting, hoisting my hands, and crying, shooting, swearing and shooting—Then the hammers went click-click-click.
“Here!” I threw them at Borkowski. Hit the jackass, too. He yelped and grabbed for me, but I screeched and fell backwards over a table. Then two of the Army guys tackled Borkowski and held him down. When I crawled to my feet, Moses was standing over Curtis and Springer, who were still wrestling for the gun. The old black bartender twisted Curtis’ hand until the pistol fell out, then scooped up the revolver and stuck it in the bad cop’s ear.
“FBI—you’re under arrest,” Moses said.
“You’re FBI?” Uncle Bob said.
Tanella clapped her hands. “I knew he wasn’t a bartender!”
“Special Agent Lorenzo Clark,” he said. “We’ve been monitoring drug activities along the Georgia coast. All roads lead to this hotel.”
He thumbed at Hector Bennett, and one of the hotel workers snapped handcuffs on the owner of the Island Club Hotel while the other guy collected Borkowski from Army custody. The two black guys from Atlanta were FBI agents, too. Was anybody not hiding secrets?
Olivia Bennett screamed. “Oh, no—Nate!”
Between the piano bar and the table where the pilots played cards, Dr. Blake lay still on the floor. Blood trickled on the carpet. His feet twitched. His hands were still shackled. Sergeant Springer pulled Tanella away so Uncle Bob could study the wound.
“Chest shot. Very bad, I’m afraid. Must’ve caught a stray bullet.”
“Please tell me I didn’t shoot Tanella’s dad!” I started to cry.
“No, hon,” Olivia said, taking me in her arms. “He was hit when the policemen were fighting over the gun.”
Ahmad stood beside me while Olivia Bennett held me and I cried uncontrollably. Tanella was squatting Asian-style on the floor beside her father. Her face was solemn, but she did not cry.
“We must get him to a doctor,” she said.
“Hagar’s a major obstacle,” Moses—I mean, Agent Clark—said.
“What about the eye?” Tanella said. “Rain is slacking off, and the National Weather Service predicts an unusually large eye for Hagar.”
“You want to put a boat into the channel during the eye?” April Eddington said. “You’re crazy.”
“No boats,” Agent Clark said. “Locals all evacuated. Antonucci’s sank two hours ago.”
“The helicopter?” Tanella said.
“Blade strike,” the command pilot said. “Can’t fly unless a Technical Inspector clears us.”
I pulled away from Olivia’s embrace and confronted them. “One of your most important scholars in America is bleeding to death because y’all are afraid to fly in the rain?”
“Sally Ann, please,” Uncle Bob said.
“My government is very interested in his recovery,” Ahmad said.
“So is mine,” Mordecai Wechtel said.
The command pilot smiled. “Well, let’s see how the ol’ bird has weathered the storm.”
Twenty-four
The chopper wheels sat in two feet of water inside the flooded red clay tennis courts. Lots of palm leaves, mud and sand had blown into the concrete shelter and splattered the length of the aircraft with debris. Armed with flashlights, the Army crew crawled all over their helicopter, checking it out like a CSI unit processing a murder scene. They worked quickly and found no structural damage.
By the time they rolled the chopper out of its makeshift hanger, the rain stopped and stars were shining. Night air was heavily perfumed with pine resins from exploded trees, and a sticky stillness smothered the sea breezes. The eye of Hagar was upon us. Bright stars appeared above in a cloudless sky.
Uncle Bob went back inside, but Mr. Rightmeir waited with us as the helicopter hovered straight up, cleared the flagstaff atop the witch’s hat, and banked over the channel toward the mainland.
I shielded my face from the last gasp of rotor wash. “How long do they have?”
“The Weather Channel’s last report made the eye about thirty to forty minutes wide,” Tanella said. “We’ve been in a lull for twenty minutes, but they’re flying with the storm, so they’ve got extra time.”
“They can just bop along inside this air bubble?”
She nodded. “Birds frequently get trapped inside the eye of a hurricane and fly thousands of miles with it. Tropical birds have crashed, exhausted, on decks of ships at sea. Sometimes rooftops in New England.”
“So, they’ll make it, huh?” I said.
“With God’s help.”
It was the darkest part of the night, just before dawn. Lights of the aircraft faded and the weak glow of candles and oil lamps seeped from a few cracks in the hotel plywood, which made the resort look oddly like an abandoned building where the homeless cooked their meals.
“Tanella,” Rightmeir said, “you have made a contribution to world peace today.”
“Thank you. But the puzzle pieces still don’t fit.”
“You think Borkowski was Antonucci’s hymnal?” I said. “Or maybe his Hermie or Hymie?”
“Hymie!” Rightmeir laughed. “I haven’t heard that term since Jesse Jackson’s gaffe.”
“That’s right!” Tanella said. “Hymie a derogatory locution for a person of the Jewish faith.”
“Know what else I don’t understand?” I said. “Who’s Davidson?”
“In the Bible,” Mr. Rightmeir said, “it’s King Solomon.”
Tanella’s hand found my arm, her fingers clenched.
“David’s son is Solomon?” I felt a cold chill. “Your name is Solomon Rightmeir.”
Tanella tugged on my elbow. “Let’s go back inside. The wind is picking up.”
“Carsten O’Malley’s diary said, ‘No gold in Davidson’s mine.’ Black gold—oil!”
“Sally Ann—” She pulled me toward the hotel, but I jerked free, and the words tumbled outa my mouth, like I was hearing somebody else talk.
“There ain’t no oil strike. You’re bullshitting the Arabs.”
“Sally Ann, shut up!” Tanella grabbed my shirt and dragged me away from him, but I spun around, whipping free.
“Carsten O’Malley knew it. He was going to sell the information to the Arabs, so you whacked him. You knocked O’Malley out, because you’re a golden gloves boxer. You took off the cartouche ring, then put it back. Not to incriminate Olivia, but because you realized its disappearance would suggest she took it. But you got the wrong finger. You pushed him overboard. You’re Olivia’s Mossad contact.”
“I’m sorry you figured it out.” He grabbed Tanella’s shirt and pulled a small pistol from his pocket. The barrel reflected moonlight like a fluorescent tube.
“You can’t shoot us,” Tanella said. “People know we’re out here together.”
“I don’t have to—move!”
“Move where?” I said.
“The beach.”
I looked at the dark sky. The stars were gone now. “But the eye is almost past.”
“Go!” Rightmeir pushed Tanella in my direction. She and I clasped hands, then started walking in the knee deep water, stepping over palm branches and debris, working our way around the log jam of fallen trees.
“Do
es the government of Israel murder people like Hitler did?” Tanella said.
“The government doesn’t know what I did. Never will.”
“But the fake oil—”
“It was real,” Rightmeir said. “When we struck in the Negev, all our experts pronounced it huge. ‘Billions of barrels,’ they said.”
“Your field dried up,” Tanella said. “So, you decided to squeeze the Arabs before the truth escaped.”
“Why kill us?” I said as we sloshed beyond the water-logged lawn to the parking area. “You got diplomatic immunization.”
“Immunity,” Tanella said.
“Will you quit fixing me!” I said. “He’s driving us at gunpoint into a hurricane, and you’re correcting my vocabulary?”
“The Israeli government will revoke his immunity when they learn he murdered Carsten O’Malley and killed Peter Antonucci to cover up the crime.”
“Almost correct,” he said. “Too naive.”
Tanella climbed over the hump of a man-sized boulder that looked misplaced in the flooded gravel parking lot just above the beach. She glanced at her feet and hopped down from the rock, splashing me with cold rainwater. Solomon Rightmeir followed her to the boulder, pausing on top.
“Does Mrs. Bennett know you’re a murderer?” Tanella said. Her fingers closed around my wrist and she gently tugged. I moved close, feeling her breath on my cheek.
“Olivia’s a fool.” He waved his pistol. “Keep going.”
Tanella took a step backward, pushing me with her. The wind was beginning to pick up, stirring treetops in the fading moonlight.
“Mr. Rightmeir, you have about ten seconds to throw away your gun,” she announced.
He adjusted his glasses. “What happens in ten seconds?”
“That rock you’re standing on will bite off your foot.”
He laughed and shifted his feet. “What?”
The rock stuck out a leathery head, and hissed foul breath and lurched forward. Rightmeir toppled off, splashing water in my eyes. With a snap of steel lips the Caretta ripped the heel off his shoe and barely missed the diplomat’s black sock and white flesh. His pistol plunked in the water at Tanella’s feet. She scooped it from the muck.
I yelled, “Shoot him! Shoot him!”
But Tanella couldn’t shoot Solomon Rightmeir any more than I could gun down Inspector Borkowski. She hurled the pistol into a maze of sunken palm branches and cracked tree trunks. I opened my mouth to screech at her when Rightmeir regained his footing and lunged at us. He missed, only because his ankles tangled in debris and he belly flopped into the water again.
Tanella dragged me into the wind. Darkness had surrendered to faint light as we skirted a flooded meadow on the edge of the battlefield between sea and forest. Even in the dawn haze, the broken branches and sopping surf meant the trees were losing the fight. When another breaker smashed the tree line, an ancient oak burst with a sickening crunch, so loud I heard it over the wailing wind.
She grasped my shirttail and shouted. “Split up!”
I shook my head violently. “No!”
“He can’t chase both of us—go, go!”
Tanella shoved me landward; she broke in the opposite direction toward billowing surf and staggering trees. Looking back I saw a shadow stumble into the clear space between fallen palmettos. Like a ghost of the storm, Rightmeir paused, looked my way, then splashed after her.
“Tanella!” Hurricane Hagar sucked my shout into the whistling air. Instead of doing what she said, I plodded after Rightmeir into the teeth of the gale.
You had to be there. Rain slashes my face as I fight for each step. I’m completely drenched and shivering cold, and the wind is blowing so hard it’s threatening to lift me off the island like a kite. Worse, I can’t see Tanella through the downpour, and I’m catching only glimpses of Solomon Rightmeir, and I’m screaming at myself—Fool, what happens when you catch up with him? You ain’t Lara Croft!
Something big swooshed overhead. I ducked, flopping in the cold wet again. Floodwater shot up so sharply I thought an underground pipe had burst. My fingers brushed jagged wood and bent pipe that once served as a handrail. Beyond, a splintered wooden deck, cracked bricks and the chapped lips of a conical roof.
“Uff-dah!” I recognized the shattered remains of the hotel tower. Hagar tore off the witch’s hat and hurled it hundreds of feet through the air, nearly swatting me like a mosquito in a puddle.
I fought to my feet in the muck and was immediately grabbed by the wind, which flung me against a broken pine tree. I cried out as green bristles clawed at my legs and arms. Crawling in knee-deep water, gulping salt foam, whimpering in the roaring rain, I knew I was going to die.
Then a hand grabbed my elbow, slid down the forearm to clasp my hand, and tugged me up. With his white robes whipping in the wind, headdress pulled back and hair drenched slick against brown skin, Prince Ahmad embraced me while I coughed up the sea.
“Sally Ann! We must return to the hotel.”
“Solomon Rightmeir is going to kill Tanella. He’s—”
“A double agent, working for jihadi terrorists. Abdu’l discovered his secret. That’s why Rightmeir killed him.”
“I don’t care! I’m going after Tanella.” I yanked away, tumbling backward in the water.
“You are a brave fool.” He offered me a hand and we trudged off together in the storm.
We only covered a few dozen paces before Rightmeir saw us coming. He tackled Ahmad from the shelter of a surviving live oak. The two of them tangled limbs, thrashing in the shallow water. Then Tanella appeared from the mist like a rain spirit, her jeans soaked blue-black. She rushed to embrace me, but I shook free and plucked up a fallen branch from the water and assumed a good batting stance while waiting for Rightmeir’s head to drift into my strike zone. They rolled toward me and I struck, nailing Prince Ahmad across the shoulders.
“Oh, no!”
Rightmeir leaped up, snatched my stick, and cocked his arms to strike. I ducked.
“Sol!” A woman’s voice called over the gale.
“Olivia! Over here.”
Wearing a hooded yellow raincoat, Mrs. Bennett clambered broken palms and splashed beside Tanella. She spoke to my friend, and the next thing I knew Tanella rolled over a trunk out of sight. I knelt in the water as Mrs. Bennett drew a small black pistol from a slit in her raincoat.
“No!” Rightmeir said. “They have to drown in the hurricane.”
“You’re a traitor, murderer and liar, and frankly I don’t care who knows what I’ve done. You’re going back to Israel to face the people you betrayed.”
He waved the branch-bat at her. “You won’t shoot me.”
“To protect these kids, I’d shoot Moses.” Olivia fired, knocking the club from his hands. Solomon Rightmeir turned and darted into the storm. They found his body two days later, washed up on the mainland.
Twenty-Five
The National Weather Service said the hurricane was only Category Three when it hit. Tanella insisted God spared us by a miracle. I told her I appreciate divine intervention and all that, but a real miracle would have been no hurricane at all. She called me a skeptic, but I think that’s a Protestant sect.
They fixed the drawbridge almost as soon as the storm blew inland from the Georgia coast. Hagar wasn’t so horrible anymore and beat himself out in the hills of Tennessee. Still took three days for work crews from the mainland to chainsaw fallen trees blocking Barrier Island’s lone highway. Tanella, Eric, and I spent those days watching the nest of sea turtles. The baby reptiles barely escaped Hagar’s wrath when a palmetto collapsed just inches from the fenced mound above Antonucci’s hotel. Tanella arranged for their long-term safety with the new manager of the Caretta resort. I think the whole staff missed Peter Antonucci, so they agreed to adopt his turtles until the little loggerheads hatched and returned to the sea.
On a blue sky morning, Olivia drove us across the causeway in an Island Club mini-van, the sole survivor among
all the cars and trucks on Barrier Island, including Dr. Blake’s blue Mercedes. Olivia went into the Glynn-Brunswick Hospital with Tanella and me. Mrs. Bennett spoke to the lady at the info desk and learned Dr. Blake had moved from first floor Intensive Care Unit to the surgical ward on the fifth floor. He had a tiny private room with a window facing the ocean. Like all hospitals, it smelled of disinfectant.
When we shuffled into the room, Special Agent Clark was standing beside his bed, laughing at something Dr. Blake said. I reminded myself he was not Moses the bartender anymore.
“Tee!” A wide smile flashed across Dr. Blake’s face.
Tanella couldn’t speak. She couldn’t hug him, either, because they had Dr. Blake hooked up to hanging plastic bags of fluid and bleeping machines and wrapped like a mummy. She buried her face in his palms and wept, kissing his hands. Mrs. Bennett, Agent Clark and me stood there while Tanella and her dad got emotional. Guess I cried a little, too.
“I was telling your father,” Agent Clark finally said, “how you and Sally Ann risked your lives to smoke out Borkowski and Rightmeir.”
“She’s quite a girl, Nate.” Olivia slipped her fingers inside Dr. Blake’s hand and squeezed.
“I didn’t know anything about Rightmeir,” Tanella said. “He fooled us until the very end.”
“Still don’t understand,” I said. “If he was working for Arab terrorists, why’d he try to trick Ahmad with the fake oil strike?”
“After the oil gave out,” Agent Clark continued, “Rightmeir pushed his government to pretend they held vast reserves. Said it was a good trick on the Arabs. Actually, his jihadist employers wanted to embarrass Israel worldwide. They planned to release the story of the fake oil, which is why Carsten O’Malley was here. Terrorists hired him to leak the news to the rest of the Arabs. But Carsten O’Malley got into a fight with Prince Ahmad. O’Malley apparently got so angry he refused to release the crucial information, no matter how much money Rightmeir offered him. He probably threatened to tell Mordecai Wechtel, blow the whole scam.”
“So,” Tanella said, “Rightmeir killed his own contact?”
