The Water Keeper

by Charles Martin

  She waited. Baiting me for more. She leaned closer, her face inches from mine. Breath on my face. She had yet to let go of my hand, and I could tell she liked being in my space. She found comfort there. “Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Going to find the one.”

  “Working on it.”

  She shook her head but didn’t back up. Still bathing me in breath. Sweat. And the smell of woman. “Why? Why you? Why not—” She waved her hand across the earth. “Some other schmuck out there?”

  The no-wake zone ended. I turned to her and spoke as the names flashed across the backs of my eyelids and I pressed the throttle forward. “I don’t know that I have an answer for that. Maybe I got tired of waiting.”

  Sensing that we were now swimming beneath the surface, she didn’t speak. Just waited. Finally, she offered, “In my experience, men who say things like that seldom, or never, back them up. They chicken out when it comes time to pay the bill.”

  A dozen or so places on my body began hurting simultaneously. I turned the wheel slightly. “It can be costly.”

  She was playing with me now. Still invading my personal space. “What’s it cost you?”

  I slid my shirtsleeve to the elbow and exposed a long scar that traveled nearly to my wrist. “Knife.” I lifted my pant leg and pointed to a scar mid-shin. “Sudden impact with the ground after I jumped out of a third-story window and my shinbone poked through the skin after it snapped.” I pressed my left ear forward, allowing her to see the long scar behind my ear. “Jumper cables.” Those were probably enough, so I fell quiet. The complexion of her eyes changed as she looked at me.

  She glanced at my ear. “Jumper cables?”

  I nodded.

  “You’re serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “What? How?”

  I chuckle. “Somebody was attempting to jump-start the truth out of me.”

  “You’re playing with me, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m trying to talk about something I don’t want to talk about.”

  She nodded. “I guess I had that coming.”

  Hidden in the safety of the eye of the hurricane, Summer wrapped both hands around my waist, pressed her chest to mine, and kissed my cheek. Then the corner of my mouth. Her lips were tender. While my heart fluttered, fear flooded me. I’d been down this road. I’d seen what we were about to see. Angel could be dead. Or worse, about to be dead after having been violated by God knows how many men. To Summer, Angel was her daughter. The product of her womb. Bone of her bone. To the men who held her, she was property. Worth about as much as the wrapper on a candy bar. And while Summer was hopeful, sometimes the end of this road was real bad. Sometimes where we were headed and what we were about to see were the two most awful things any human would ever witness.

  Chapter 20

  With one no-wake zone following another, the trip south took an hour. We passed through Juno Beach and under US1 and were about to turn into the northern tip of Lake Worth when we saw Fire and Rain moored inside the Old Port Cove Marina. She was in a slip at the end of the dock made for hundred-plus-foot yachts. We circled around her, but I didn’t like it.

  The marina was a safe-harbor marina, meaning the water was calm and protected. It also meant one way in and one way out, so I returned to the IC, cut the wheel north, and then slipped into the narrow channel leading into a cul-de-sac of sorts that gave water access to about a dozen homes. I docked on the bulkhead but knew it wouldn’t last long. The first homeowner to catch us would have us towed. My hope was that we could get in and get out before somebody noticed, but this was West Palm. I had my doubts.

  We tied up, walked around a pool, over a chain-link fence, through a parking lot, across Lakeshore Drive, and into the parking lot of the marina. Fortunately, the dock was empty of people save a few crew members washing various boats. We walked past the harbormaster’s office, alongside the dock house, and onto the dock for about two hundred feet before ending at a ninety-degree corner. The dock was wide enough for a golf cart, which is the case with most high-end marinas. We turned right, walking in between boats ranging from fifty feet to well over a hundred.

  Her bow pointed south. An ominous compass needle. The Intracoastal Waterway south of Jupiter Island is where the wealthy bring out their toys. They may invest in homes, but their boats are where they brag. And Fire and Rain was no different. She was on display for all the world to see, which suggested she was empty.

  Summer and I started making our way down the boardwalk. In order to minimize suspicion, I held her hand—just two lovers on a walk. She adopted the ruse and leaned into me—although I wondered if the leaning was ruse or need. We stopped at a waterside café and bought two coffees, giving ourselves a few moments to study the decks. The boat was quiet, but its tinted windows made it impossible to determine who, if anyone, stirred inside.

  Walking alone and blind into a boat manned by bad men was one thing. Walking into the same boat with an unsuspecting woman was something else entirely. I gave her one last chance. “You can stay here.”

  She gritted her teeth. “Not a chance.”

  We stepped onto the aft deck and walked up the stairs and into the main salon. She was nicely appointed. Mahogany. Marble. Granite. China. Crystal. No expense spared. Unlike the first boat, this one was a bit cleaner. Not clean, of course; just cleaner. There had been a party here but with some restraint. Which possibly suggested wealthier clientele.

  Summer followed me as we began searching the staterooms, galley, lower level, crew cabins, guest cabins, upper level, and helm. Finding the boat empty, I began filtering through drawers. Turned out, Fire and Rain was owned by a company out of Australia and rented for $42,500 per week. Sifting back through the bedrooms, I turned on every electronic screen I could find. My guess was that these guys were paying that bill by bringing paying customers aboard in one port and dropping them off at the next—allowing them time and freedom to purchase what they wanted while aboard. A flesh buffet. One swipe with Amex Black. In my experience, men who did what these men were doing liked to have a record of it. Which meant video. Most men were careful to take the evidence with them as a memento when they disembarked, but copies were often made, and copies had a way of multiplying. I also took note of the multiple closed-circuit television cameras pointed at us. Every room, every hallway contained a camera. All of that data had to be going somewhere. I had a feeling it was live-streaming off the ship at that very moment, but every camera had a backup. It’s just the nature of electronics.

  I returned to the main stateroom. Decadence defined. I turned on the TV and then rummaged through the external inputs—one of which was labeled “Library.” Didn’t take long to find the list of last week’s videos.

  I turned to Summer. “I’m pretty sure you don’t want to watch these.” I was certain I didn’t either.

  She crossed her arms.

  There were sixty-some videos in just this one library. I did not like this aspect of my life. No matter how many times I had come upon just such a cache, I still had a tough time removing these images from my mind. They didn’t titillate me. Didn’t entertain me. Didn’t excite me. They made me want to vomit. I didn’t want to see them. Ever. And these men were the sickest among us. Animals. While the slave trade was abolished in England in the nineteenth century, it was alive and kicking in the twenty-first.

  The only help I had was the fast-forward feature or the 4x scan. I began scanning through the videos, which were a wealth of information. The traders—the guys who ran this ship of flesh—cycled the men through the girls at one-, two-, or three-hour intervals. Depending on how much time they bought. For one girl they would charge fifteen hundred to three thousand an hour. Sometimes more. And the girls worked round the clock. Often twelve to fifteen hours a day. Or longer. Multiply that by a dozen or more girls and it’s easy math. And that doesn’t include the fee just to get on the ship. The buy-in was often several thousand. Ships like this were cash cows
. As a result, video quality was high and the length varied.

  With each video, Summer’s face became more disgusted. Fortunately, Angel’s face did not appear in the bedroom videos. We did find her in the hot tub, on the pool deck, on the jet skis, and in the common areas. Upon first glimpse, Summer sucked in a deep breath and covered her mouth. The transformation in her daughter was striking. Angel was noticeably skinnier, the circles beneath her eyes darker. She was living the high life, but for some reason she didn’t appear in any of the hourly videos, which meant she hadn’t been sold as of yet. Or they were saving her because she had been bought on the black web, and they were waiting for transfer at a safer location. Like a dock in Cuba. Or the Bahamas. Or some other vessel in international waters.

  I rummaged through each room, each screen, but found no thumb or hard drives or laptops left behind. In terms of electronic evidence, the boat had been bleached. I climbed down into the engine room, finding nothing of interest there except a lot of cables and wires, including ethernet, routed from the different levels above us into another small room just outside the engine room. The door was locked.

  I lifted an ax from the engine room but hesitated. I knew breaking this door meant an alarm would sound, and whoever placed these cameras would probably begin looking at us on a live-feed screen somewhere around the world. I also thought through the process of covering our faces with pillowcases like Casper the ghost, but they’d had us from the moment we’d stepped foot on the aft deck. It was too late for that. Summer, and maybe more importantly Summer and I were now on somebody’s radar. Breaking down this door did little to affect that. The only advantage I had was that they didn’t know who I was and wouldn’t be able to figure that out apart from high-level security clearance. What they would know was that I’d done this before and I was nobody’s dummy. They’d be less inclined to leave the boat unattended in the future, which meant life was about to become more difficult.

  I swung through the door, splintering the area around the knob. Two more swings and I’d loosened it from its hinges. A few more and it swung open. The electronics room was ventilated and cooled and humming with expensive and sophisticated equipment. This was no weekly rental. Two computer processors and four hard drives were hardwired and mounted to a frame that traveled from floor to ceiling. They were not large but they were bolted in, which meant they’d survive rough seas or somebody wanting to steal them. Which I did. Fortunately, I’d seen tools in the engine room that allowed me to unscrew the mounting hardware and place the drives into the tool bag.

  It took five minutes.

  The moment I finished, footsteps sounded above us. Followed by voices. I turned to Summer. “Stay behind me. Do what I do. And don’t hesitate.”

  She nodded, but the fear had crept in.

  I climbed the stairwell and was met by a smaller man with a loud mouth and a lot of hand motions. He was screaming at me. Behind him, two more men appeared. They were not small. Nor were they loud. Bears wearing suits. If he was the brains, they were the wrecking crew.

  I smiled and played the idiot card. “You guys are all finished up, but you might think about replacing it in the next year. Salt water and satellites don’t really mix.” I kept walking toward the aft deck while Summer followed me. Little Man stepped in front of me, and I continued the ruse by handing the tool bag to Summer. “Put that in the truck and I’ll finish the paperwork.” She walked through the sliding-glass door, where a fourth man stood. She skirted around him, but he put a hand on her arm.

  Time was short now. Measured in seconds. The chances that one or all four had weaponry were near one hundred percent. Chances they knew how to use it were higher. With no desire to be a hero, I raised a finger to the fourth guy, who was looking at me through the glass.

  Flesh is serious business, and Summer was about to learn. Fights are never fun and seldom does anyone win. Even when you win. I would have the element of surprise, but that was about it.

  I stepped around Little Man, who didn’t like me dissing him—but the fourth man had one hand inside his jacket. I slid out the door with an ear-to-ear smile on my face and said with a stutter, “H-h-h-hey, you s-s-sign this paperwork for me?”

  A Glock 17 is not a fancy or flashy weapon, but it is effective. Maybe one of the most effective. Ever. Somewhere around sixty percent of all law enforcement agencies on the planet use it. And while the 9x19mm Parabellum projectile is a deterrent in its own right, so is looking down the barrel. Of any weapon. Especially if you’ve been shot by one.

  He aimed it at me but he still had one hand on Summer, so his grip was weak. I broke his elbow and then his wrist. The pain of that breaking caused an accidental discharge, sending the chambered round through the floor and into the engine room. Whether it continued through the hull and into the water was anybody’s guess, but I doubted it. With a broken wing, the goon wasn’t much of a threat, so I took the Glock and beat him in the face with it.

  Both the sound of the shot and the speed with which I moved stunned little Napoleon, who paused. Asking himself who I thought I was. His hesitation gave me the second I needed to slide in underneath and hip-toss him overboard. This dramatic movement brought the two circus bears running, and they weren’t as stupid.

  When the first charged me, I slid the glass door more toward the closed position. With as much mass as he was carrying, it was tough to slow down, so his head went through the glass—which was good for me and not so good for him. While he bled across the aft deck and cussed my entire lineage, starting with my mother, the remaining muscle, who looked more like a block of granite than a human, saw that the commotion had gained the attention of some deckhands walking our direction. Figuring gunplay was not wise, he pulled a knife.

  I hate knives.

  Almost as much as guns.

  Sixty seconds later, we were still standing. I was bleeding, but he was both bleeding and broken. I finally shattered his left knee, he dropped the knife, and I hopped off the aft deck and onto the boardwalk where Summer waited. Shaking. Sirens sounded in the distance. Incidentally, the man I threw overboard had not landed in the water. He’d landed on a smaller boat. Somewhere between the T-top and the polling platform. He had yet to move, but judging from the twisted look of his legs, plus the unnatural sight of bone sticking through his pant leg, moving wouldn’t be fun.

  The whole mess would be reported. If we weren’t on their radar before, we were certainly on it now.

  I grabbed Summer’s hand and started to return up the dock when we saw that our four friends had driven a golf cart. Which we stole. The last thing I wanted was for any of them to see us getting into Gone Fiction, so I drove past the dock house, under the nose of the harbormaster, and out into the parking lot while Summer clutched both the tool bag and me. We crossed Lakeshore Drive, sped through another parking lot, and abandoned the cart next to the fence, which Summer hopped and I fell over. I made it through the grass and into Gone Fiction about the time my adrenaline dump ended.

  Over the last few minutes, I’d paid little attention to my body, but apparently the guy with the knife had been a surgeon in a former life. I was swiss cheese, bleeding everywhere. I cranked the engine, turned the wheel, and we pulled out of the cul-de-sac and back under US1. A glance behind us showed no one, but I had to assume someone was watching us leave.

  Fortunately, the marina had been positioned at the end of a no-wake zone, so I put Gone Fiction up on plane—and only then took a look at myself. He had cut me six times that I could count, and I wasn’t sure about my back. The deck of Gone Fiction was running red. Summer was about to hyperventilate when I asked her to hold pressure on two gushers as we made our way north.

  In the delirium of moments of high stress, I often focus on the comical. I can’t explain that, but it’s how my body deals with stress. As Summer held pressure on my wounds, I had an odd sensation that she was playing whack-a-mole. Every time she stopped the bleeding at one spot, it would surface at another.

 
We passed under PGA Boulevard and around Seminole Marina and then wound our way a few miles north to the Jupiter Yacht Club and Best Western Intracoastal Inn. I pulled on my Gore-Tex rain jacket so I wouldn’t scare people, and we walked to the office. Summer paid, got two room keys, and, carrying my first aid kit, led me to a room facing the Intracoastal. Had I not been leaking like a sieve, it would have been a nice room. We could step out our door and right into the IC.

  Chapter 21

  Standing in the shower, I pulled off my jacket and shirt and let the warm water wash the red off me while Summer found the source of each wound. Then she began pouring hydrogen peroxide on my hands, forearms, biceps, and chest. Evidently I had more than six cuts. When I turned my back to her, she gasped, covered her mouth, and recoiled in both horror and surprise.

  In the several days we’d known each other, she’d never seen me without a shirt. I had some explaining to do.

  She was crying, so I turned and held her hands with mine while I bled into the drain.

  Her eyes were darting, tears were falling, and she was shaking her head slowly from side to side. On the verge of cracking. I cupped her hands in mine, took the bloody rag from her, and said, “Hey.”

  She looked at me, but she wasn’t really looking.

  “It would be really nice, before I bleed to death in this hotel room, if you could help me out.”

  Her eyes were wide and she made no response.

  “If I turn back around, do you think you could try to stop the bleeding?”

  She bit her lip and nodded. When I turned, she sucked in another involuntary breath of air and attempted to compose herself. After a moment, I felt her touching my back. Moving from point of pain to point of pain. “Did I do this?”

  I shook my head and smiled. “No, the guy with the knife did.” I rinsed the rag and handed it to her. She whispered, “And the scars?”