by Daniel Pyne
He pulls into the driveway and is parking next to the Range Rover when Castor Zeme comes strolling out of the lobby to meet him, yawning away and griping, “Lobby sofa is a foul place to get a power nap on.”
Stepping out of his car, indicating the Rover, Robbens says, “Looks like you’ve got a flat tire.”
Castor, still rubbing sleep from his eyes, glances at the Rover and frowns deeply.
“Four of them, in fact.”
Castor steps back to the front entrance and shouts back into the building, “Carlito!” then looks at Robbens, peevish. “What’s the word?”
“They weren’t happy about the dead one.”
“Accident.”
“So I informed them.”
Irritated, Castor yells impatiently back into the lobby, “Carlito! Qual é palavra?” No response.
“Seven hundred thousand euros,” the Dutchman continues, “random bills, airdrop tomorrow.”
The twin circles the car, examining all the flattened tires. “You said it’d be over a million.”
Following, Robbens lets his temper get the better of him. “YOU ARE AN AMATEUR. Okay? Seven hundred. Minus my fifteen percent and fifteen for my counterpart on the other end—what’d you promise the local police?”
“Sod off.”
“Fifty? That means only four forty, net, then, to you. Because you’re a fucking amateur. Sorry. But still.” Robbens is thinking Castor, eyes sunken in, bedhead hair, looks like he’s regretting the whole cursed operation.
“Fine. Done. Do it. I want to be shed of this. I buried my brother today.” He crouches down at one of the flats. Finds a twig someone jammed in the fill nipple.
“Godverdomme. What happened?”
Castor just stares at the flat tires, as if confounded, until Robbens gives up on an answer and presses on with the business at hand. “They have asked me to confirm the condition of the passengers and crew.”
Castor looks up at him blankly, an eyebrow angled. “What?”
“It’s insurer boilerplate. Due diligence. I just, you know, eyeball the asset and say that I’ve done so.”
Castor says nothing, still preoccupied with the car. Without looking back, he screams out, “Carlito!” then scans the street. Empty. Stands, crushes the twig from the fill nipple with his boot, teeth set. Jerks his head for Robbens to follow and leads the way into the building, where Robbens hears the disfigured one they call Carlito finally shouting something back at his boss from upstairs.
With downtown Porto Pequeno deadened at the first blush of dawn, the city bus rocks and sways its dogged way along empty, trash-strewed streets, zigzagging toward the docks. The driver, stubborn, insists on making all scheduled stops, though there are no riders waiting and there’s a woman standing behind him with two guns.
The deserted boardwalk Coaster Wheel spins, throwing crazy light across the hushed passengers and crew.
Fontaine hasn’t spoken to her since leaving the art deco building on the hill; Sentro faces the seats, watching everyone as they avoid making eye contact with her, wondering what they’re thinking about her now and also watching the road the bus has just traveled. Her thoughts stray to the operation in Cyprus and getting the wrong door and the likelihood that the deteriorating situation with her brain and her thoughts and decision-making (that’s what it is, isn’t it?) means she will need to stop doing this, stop trying to save her mother—because isn’t that what she’s been doing all along? That’s what the agency therapists said, as well as the private ones who followed. That’s what Dennis kept telling her, especially toward the end. Maybe he was right.
And yet. Why does she so vividly remember knowing she couldn’t save her mom? Couldn’t stop what happened in that West Texas motel room any more than she could stop the black, towering thunderstorms when it was just the two of them, her and the man she called her father, hard rain that would roll in off the panhandle and rattle the light fixtures and drive her to his room, where she’d wrap herself in a blanket on the big chair and watch him sleep.
If her condition causes her to forget all that, will she feel relief or regret?
A siren startles everyone. Flashing lights swerve from a side street behind the bus. Sentro’s hand goes to the gun in her lap, but the bus yields, and the police car flashes past, on a different errand.
The harbor quays are dusted by a morning mist, spectral, and the bus driver downshifts to veer off the wide oceanfront avenue and find its last stop.
Castor Zeme hurries up the stairs to discover a bewildering still life: the bachelor-flat door gaping, the TV blaring some annoying shooter game’s main-menu theme in an endless loop, a fat dead hostage gutshot and splayed along the hallway wall opposite, and one of his best hired men, Berto, disarmed, left beached on the floor, coughing, hollow eyed, and useless. A hot curtain of fury drops; he struggles to process what he’s seeing: a cock-up of epic proportions. How could this get any fucking worse?
Carlito comes clattering down from the third floor, his good eye jacked paranoid from the meth he’s been chipping. “Foi.” He sheepishly motions down the corridor to where most of the hostages were being kept. “Gone, gone, gone.”
“Our assets?”
Fuck.
And the third man Castor assigned to watch them?
Carlito hesitates, waves his arm down the hallway again, and admits, “I’ll need a knife to cut him free.” He reeks of a chemical flop sweat.
Castor scowls. “How?” Carlito twitches, nervous, avoiding his boss’s fiery gaze. Castor takes the switchblade from his pocket, Carlito holds his hand out for it, and for a moment Castor imagines stabbing his number two in the neck, maybe stabbing him twice or three times, severing the artery, like he did the arrogant rich fuck who tried to defy him on the yacht. The head flapped back like a hatch cover.
So much blood.
He hears Robbens’s shoes heavy on the stairs. It just gets better and better. Hand trembling with bridled fury, Castor hands Carlito the knife and asks once more, “How?”
Carlito gestures to the man down the hallway. “Miguel says it was the woman from the boat.”
“The American.”
“Yes.”
Castor Z. does his best to process this, paralyzed by rage.
Now Robbens comes huffing up, joining them. “Somebody in this hemisphere needs to invent the elevator.” As if from a great distance, Castor watches the Dutchman’s eyes take in the dead hostage and Carlito’s shame, consider the dry hacking of the hireling on the floor, then turn as if idly to Castor himself. Poker faced. What a smug bastard.
“Problem?” Robbens asks.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Passengers and crew file out of the city bus and hurry to where Morehouse and Eccola are waiting below the pier in the Jeddah’s twin-hull ship-to-shore skiff.
A wedge of pink sun just starting to rise out of the eastern ocean table.
The empty cat-logo shipping container looms with its broken promise, mocking Sentro, catching the light and casting its long shadow over the quay and across the bay water. Ever vigilant, she keeps glancing back over her shoulder to scan the oceanfront streets of the port city, wary of a pursuit she knows is coming. This is an adversary she would prefer not to confront head-on; she hopes to outrun it and that its attention span is short. If not, she can lock the passengers back in the safe room and let the big ship be her martello tower.
Zoala fidgets beside her as an argument breaks out.
“No! Don’t let her on!” Last in line to board, Fontaine Fox’s way has been blocked by Asta and the Gentrys, preventing her from stepping on the boat.
“She can’t be trusted.”
Jesper coos, “Darling.”
She snaps at him, “Be a man. The woman double-crossed us.”
Nodding at this, grim, Fontaine turns to go, but Sentro catches her arm. “Just get on the boat.”
Second Mate Salah is overseeing crew members manning the mooring lines. “We need to fucking go.”
“Yes. Go. But not with her,” Jack says.
Sentro walks over, bringing the Englishwoman with her. “Cast off.”
Morehouse looks up from the wheel of the boat. “What about you?”
Sentro, without answering him, pushes Fontaine ahead. “Let her board.”
“We’re not taking her!”
Lines dropped, the engine fires up. The crewmen hop to the gunwales and help Montez over the gap.
Sentro looks from the quay to the passengers and crew crowded in the stern of the skiff. “If you leave her here, they’ll kill her. That’s their default. Is that what you want?”
Nobody answers. Nobody meets her gaze. Waves rock the skiff, and it drifts from the dock. Morehouse reverses the inboard to keep the craft close while Sentro stares Asta down until, relenting, she and the newlyweds move to the port side of the stern.
But Fontaine is walking away. Back toward the city.
Sentro calls after her. The Englishwoman turns around but keeps walking, backward. A vague shrug, a smile of resignation, as if to say: I’ll make this easy for you.
Their eyes linger. Sentro tries to think of something she can say that would matter. Nothing comes to her. She needs to let this go; there are bigger issues looming. Fontaine turns her back to Sentro and keeps walking.
The ship-to-shore skiff motors off, parallel to the dock, just as Sentro realizes that Zoala is still standing beside her.
“Get on the boat,” she tells him.
Zoala, resolute, tells her in Portuguese something about how he’s going to stay to help her kill the pirates. How he made a promise.
Sentro puts an arm around the boy and gets him moving, runs with him, and (“Jump!”) practically flings him across the widening gap between the quay and the skiff, where Charlemagne and Jesper are there to catch him.
Twisting angrily out of their arms, Zoala barks something sharp back at Sentro while the skiff swerves out into open water. The sound of the inboard drowns out the boy’s complaints. Sentro keeps running along the quay, past more containers, to where she has spotted two familiar fast boats tied up at the end of the berth.
Castor’s fleet.
A faint voice draws her look back to Fontaine. The Englishwoman has her cell phone flipped open, her expression all business: “Bonjour. J’ai besoin d’un taxi pour aller prendre le taxi au quai principal . . . près de la grande roue, oui . . .” She keeps walking, proud.
Lengthening her stride to run faster, Sentro draws the handgun she stripped off the hired man in the corridor and, when she passes the mercenary boats, fires down into the outboard gas tanks until they explode in flames.
Safely beyond them, Sentro looks down the pier and sees Fontaine react to the explosions, shading her eyes and covering her nose from the smoke, squinting through the billowing petroleum haze. She waits for Fontaine’s eyes to find her, trying one last time to solve the riddle she knows is buried there. No luck. The skiff swerves back into the pier. Morehouse cuts the wheel hard; the stern comes around, and Sentro jumps aboard, just the way they planned it. Fontaine is still watching her, opaque, as the throttle kicks and the skiff aims across the harbor, leaving the burning fast boats and the Englishwoman quickly behind.
Cresting sunrise strikes the bleached art deco facade of apartments and the hills above Porto Pequeno and lends both a hellish quality as Castor Zeme, Carlito, two shamed mercenaries, and Robbens hurry out into the driveway. The hired men head for the Rover, but Castor calls them back. No time for recriminations—he’ll tally all transgressions and collect for them, once this is over.
“Not that one.” To Robbens: “Give me your keys.” Castor flips the Rover keys to the wheezing Berto, who stupidly shot the fat hostage and nearly got his larynx punched through by a woman. “Get a truck to come fill the tires. Then, attrapez les autres, and, uh, vena, no, shit—venez sur la jetée. Venez sur la jetée.” The kid nods dutifully, pulls out a cell phone, and walks away to make the call.
Robbens warns Castor, “They won’t pay the ransom if you don’t have the hostages.”
“How would they know? If you don’t tell them?”
From the guilty expression on the Dutchman’s face, this is exactly what Robbens was planning to do as soon as he separated from his partner in crime, and he even lies: “Well, I—well, naturally they’re going to—look, I won’t offer, but if they ask, I’m just the messenger.”
Castor hopes his dark look makes Robbens’s blood run cold. Later for him too. “Give me the keys to your car.”
“How am I supposed to get back downtown?”
“Walk.”
Robbens musters his best manly defiance. “You won’t kill me. If you kill me, you’ll never see a cent of the money.”
With a dead gaze Castor says, “Correction: if I don’t see any of the money, I’ll kill you, yeah? You understand the difference?”
Robbens does and, moments later, in the rearview, looks relieved to be watching his precious Jaguar fishtail into the street and away, carrying Castor, Carlito, and the other hired man back down into the city. Away from him.
The same morning sun sparks off the struts of the Ferris wheel in long slanting streaks, dazzling the quay and the bay as the skiff carrying Sentro and the hostages powers out toward the Jeddah. Growing smaller and smaller.
Robbens’s Jag arrives, and men spill out behind Castor, who stares irritably at the dark mark of his assets deserting him, more than half a mile away now on the gray bay water. Nearly there. His smoldering, sinking fast boats mock him from their watery grave beside the pier.
He’s shackled by his rage. He can’t let this go.
“We’ll need a boat,” he tells Carlito.
The tweaker sucks a miserable drainage back into his sinuses. “Où pourrais-je trouver un bateau à cette heure?”
A cell phone is ringing, somewhere.
Castor screams, “Do I fucking look like I care?! Just find one!”
He shoves Carlito away from him. Nothing has gone right since Pauly died. When the blind anger of the botched hostage detainment eases and he stops and lets the truth settle on him, his anguish and discouragement feel to Castor like they might bury him. Back before the fuckup on the hill, Castor dreamed that none of it had happened. Pauly was sitting across from him, in the fried-fish place off Second Street; they were drinking aguardiente and planning the trip they would take on the profits from some other business they’d done. It was so fucking lovely, just Castor and his twin. Like looking in a mirror all his life, but better, because the other side had its own ideas.
The English one came in, then, and sat down—Fontaine—and Pauly, in the dream, began to bleed from his eyes.
Such as it is and was.
And Castor woke back up to this nightmare.
The phone is still ringing. Ringing. Ringing, muffled.
Finally understanding the sound is coming from his own pants pocket, Castor fumbles for the fucking American woman’s phone, which he’s been carrying around in the event of just this possibility. He looks blankly at the caller ID (blocked) and answers: “Hullo?”
“Hello?”
“Who’s this?”
“Who’s this?”
The tiny regional airport outside of Porto Pequeno consists of a couple of monstrous prefab corrugated-steel hangars and a squat wooden control tower that probably dates back to the Cold War. It is nearly deserted at this hour, but a solitary fat white commuter prop plane has parked on the tarmac behind the austere, flat-roofed, one-room terminal. A few laconic workmen in safety vests and cargo shorts are kicking blocks under the wheels.
Already too warm in his father’s old leather jacket and chiding himself for bringing it, Jeremy Troon stands outside the terminal building, tired, overwhelmed, at a taxiless taxi stand, on his cell with the man he assumes must be his mother’s kidnapper, repeating: “Wait. Hello? Can you hear me?”
“I can.”
“Okay.”
“Who’s this, then?”
“What?”
“Who’s calling?”
“Jeremy Troon. You have my mother’s phone.”
“Yeah, and? You got the money?”
Jeremy hesitates, nervous. He’s so far out of his comfort zone it’s ridiculous. But he keeps telling himself that in a rational world a reasonable man can prevail, because the alternative is too terrifying to consider. “I’m here.” Here to get his mother back. “At the airport,” he adds, rattled. His feet feel dull and fat from the long flight. The light of the day in this strange land seems all wrong. “I have the money. Where is she?”
Castor Zeme can’t believe his good fortune; maybe fate has turned. Wind fills his sails.
Carlito is staring at him, clearly curious.
“I want to talk to my mother,” the voice of Jeremy Troon says, sounding strained.
Castor nods. Back on it. “I’ll send a car.”
PART THREE:
NO WOMAN GIRL NO CRY
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The accommodation ladder they used to disembark three long days ago has been raised and disabled. So one by one, with the gathering heat of the day pressing down on them, the freed hostages of the cargo ship Jeddah climb an unspooled pilot’s ladder from the skiff tied near the Jeddah’s stern up to the main deck walkway, where the worried passengers mill uncertainly while the crew quickly begins dispersing to their stations.
Last to disembark, Sentro helps Zoala hop across to the ladder, but Eccola and Morehouse stay in the rolling boat, and Sentro realizes they’re intent on going back to shore.
“They’ll come after you.”
The doctor shrugs. “I’m a good talker. We have nothing they want.”
“What he’ll want is payback,” Sentro says. “Wherever he can find it.”
Morehouse looks unmoved. While there’s no guarantee that staying with the Jeddah will be safer, Sentro feels it’s worth arguing with him about not staying in Porto Pequeno.
“You could do better than this,” she says then.
