Tampa Burn

by Randy Wayne White

  I ducked under the hammer’s hatchetlike stroke and heard it whap against the bulkhead where my head had been. She whirled and tried to nail me a second time, but I caught her wrist just before she connected.

  Still screaming at me, her piggish-wide face throbbed a violet red as she tried over and over to knee me in the groin. Sick of it, I held her away momentarily at arm’s length, then let her lunge her chin toward me. That’s when I hit her with a short left that numbed my elbow, but also dropped her to the deck as if she’d been shot.

  The sound of her head hitting the steel floor didn’t bother me a bit.

  The tiny woman in the jogging shorts was on her feet now, breathing heavily and wiping at her face. Her eyes had a glazed look, as if she might be in shock.

  She said, “Are you the police? Thank God you’ve finally come.” Then, staring at the woman who lay groaning on the deck, she added, “She’s just awful. Maybe the cruelest human being I’ve ever met in my life. Do you have any idea what she was asking me to do? Awful . . . disgusting things. And she hit me!”

  The hysteria in her voice was the only clue I needed. I grabbed the lady before she could move toward the fallen woman, and then held her, hugging her as she began to cry, whispering into her left ear, “It’s O.K., Dr. Santos. You’re going to be all right. I’ll get you out of here. But get hold of yourself. I need you.”

  Which seemed to do it. Made her shift emotional gears. People who are used to shouldering huge responsibility are the most likely to come through when the stakes are highest. These stakes were high.

  I was almost afraid to ask. “Is there a boy aboard? A boy named Lake?”

  She was nodding, but she’d buried her face again in my shoulder.

  “Do you know where he is? Did they hurt him? The kidnappers?”

  “The last time I saw him, he was in the same room where they locked me. It’s the next floor down, and it says ‘Visitors Quarters’ on the door. He had a small third-degree burn on his arm when I examined him. But it was healing. You must be the police or you wouldn’t be asking these questions.”

  I said, “No, not the police. I’m the boy’s father. I’ve come to get my son.”

  Through the muscle tissue of my chest and shoulder, I heard her moan softly, “Oh dear God. And it’s my fault. All my fault . . .”

  I felt a sickening sense of helplessness. Sound communicates tragedy more powerfully than any combination of words. Yet, I continued to press on.

  “Is he with the man who abducted you? If he is, I need to get to my son right away. The guy he’s with is dangerous as hell. He’s insane. I’ve got to go to him now.”

  Dr. Valerie Santos looked up at me through flooding eyes and whispered, “I can’t let you do that. As a physician. Because of what you might find.

  “That monster, that terrible monster, he told me he was going to kill your son nearly an hour ago, and he’ll be bringing me his . . . bringing a portion of your son back here any minute. Even after I told him that nothing in the world could make me do his surgery!”

  THIRTY-SIX

  POINTING to the groggy woman on the floor, I yelled to Dr. Santos, “Use surgical tape. Tape her arms behind her; after that, her legs. If she fights, use the hammer on her!” Then I sprinted down the hall and out onto the midnight upper decks of the moving freighter.

  To the west, the moon was about to set. It was partially submerged on the horizon’s seascape and appeared as a golden island, fogged by low clouds. The ship’s wake caught shards of the light, so that the ship seemed to excrete a boiling, crimson wedge astern. The wedge rolled away from Repatriate in the form of slow, expanding waves, moving across a black sea.

  I had the Glock in my right hand, the guardrail in my left, and ran down the steps two at a time. From outside, the lighting appeared better on the lower deck. I assumed C deck would be laid out just like D deck. There would be a hallway with doors, and each door would be identified by a stenciled word or two. I was desperate to find VISITORS QUARTERS, the cabin where the doctor had last seen my son.

  Perhaps she was wrong about Lake. She hadn’t personally seen his body, so she couldn’t be certain he was dead. She’d only been told that he was going to be killed. Perhaps the insane man, Praxcedes Lourdes, had lied to her. There was still a chance that I might arrive in time to save Lake. I’d saved other people under tough circumstances, so how could fate not allow me to save my own son?

  I told myself that such an unfairness was contrary to . . . something. Momentum. Order. Reason, maybe.

  I was hurrying. I felt rushed and clouded by panic. I certainly was. Because I was running far too fast as I approached the watertight entrance into the ship’s house on C deck, and so was unprepared and vulnerable when the heavy steel door came flying open just as I tried to use it to stop my momentum.

  I was lucky the impact didn’t knock me unconscious. As it was, it sent the Glock flying, jammed both my wrists, and knocked a gash in my forehead. I felt and heard a couple of joints or small bones pop in my right hand.

  Broken.

  The collision had knocked me to the deck, so I was looking up into the house’s bright lights when a huge man stepped out, paused, and then stepped over me. He looked to be wearing surgical scrubs that were wet in places, stained with some liquid—blood?—and he was carrying something by a handle. I realized it was a medium-sized Igloo cooler. The circular kind with a screw-on lid.

  The big man said, “Watch where you’re goin’, you fuckin’ asswipe. Fuckin’ drunk merchant sailors are a pain in the ass.” Then he pivoted, as if to proceed on his way.

  Hearing the voice, I knew.

  It was my son’s abductor.

  He wasn’t wearing a mask.

  THE moment Lourdes started to leave, I was on my feet, straightening my glasses. I lunged three long steps and grabbed him from behind. Grabbed him so violently that it nearly ripped the scrub shirt off him, and he dropped the cooler, which went banging down four or five steps to the next platform, slowed, then bounced down another flight.

  He came whirling around in a rage, screaming, “Hands off, motherfucker!” and took a big, pawing swing at me that I caught with my forearms. “What is your problem, asshole?”

  I ducked in close as he threw a couple more punches that missed, but he was so freakishly strong that they jarred me to the core. The shock of the punches made me unprepared for the bear hug that came next.

  He was grunting, trying to squeeze the air out of my lungs, trying to crush my ribs, cursing into my ear with his sour breath, a terrible ether-stink about him, and I could feel vertebrae pop up my spine, and then maybe a rib or two.

  I got my right hand free. It was already beginning to swell; had to be some broken bones in there. But it didn’t matter. Not now.

  As he continued to squeeze, I felt a racing, chemical chill move through me that I have come to recognize. It is the sensation that accompanies pure rage. Rage feels no pain, so I could feel no pain.

  In the human brain is a tiny region called the “amygdala,” a section of cerebral matter so ancient that scientists refer to it as our “lizard brain,” or “reptilian core.” It’s here, in this ancient, isolated cellular place, that the killer that is in us all resides. It is from here that a million years of genetic memory encodes us with a horror of spiders, snakes, and tight, black places that might rob the air from our land-breathing lungs.

  Rage resides in that dark area, as well.

  Its presence is signaled in me by the physical chill, followed by a surflike roaring in my ears . . . and then there is the illusion of a blooming redness behind my eyes that colors the world.

  I rarely allow my rage to take control.

  I did now.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  WITH my free right hand, I grabbed him by the throat and dug my fingers into his carotid artery until he was woozy enough for me to pull my left hand free. Then, still holding Lourdes by the throat, I hit him across the bridge of the nose three times, as hard
as I could, with the heel of my left hand.

  The lighting here wasn’t good, but I could see him clearly enough to know that his face wasn’t as bad as the scorched teen I’d seen in the medical photographs. Lourdes had had a bunch of plastic surgery since then.

  He would need another after what I did to his nose.

  He screamed and dropped me, then bowed to put his face into his hands, yelling, “Don’t hit me in the face!”

  I grabbed him by his ripped shirt, turned him, then slammed him against the ship’s house. I ducked through his arms, hit him with an undercut right, then held him up against the wall by the throat. “Where’s my son? What have you done to Lake? Take me to him now!”

  “No fucking way, asswipe! You’ll hit me in the face again!”

  “Tell me!”

  “No.”

  His nose was bleeding. He was trying to use his hands to cover his face, but I could see in his eyes that he suddenly realized who I was. I was the biologist; the stubborn man on the phone. I was the father of the child he’d abducted.

  His pale, lidless eyeball seemed to grow wider.

  I yelled, “You don’t want me to hit you? Then you better talk. Now! Because I’m going to keep hitting you until you take me to my son.”

  I did; hit him beneath the eye with my broken right hand, and I didn’t feel it, so I hit him again.

  He bowed his face into his hands once more, then shoved me away and sprinted down the stairs. For a man his size, he was an astonishing athlete. He’d apparently inherited the genes of his wrestler mother, the woman who could beat up men.

  Even so, on the main deck I caught him from behind. I dragged him to a stop, then spun him against the ship’s railing, yelling, “Tell me, damn it! What have you done to my boy?”

  “Fuck you! Stop following me, asswipe! You’re aboard my ship!”

  This time, when I hit him, Lourdes went down in a heap, mouth wide, head bouncing on the deck, his lidless blue eye fluttering.

  Unconscious.

  WE were near the fantail, where I’d boarded. I left him lying, hurried across the deck, and grabbed one of the empty 50-gallon drums. Hurried because I could see a helicopter working far inland. It was umbilicaled to the night sea by the beam of a searchlight.

  The Coast Guard would be here soon.

  I laid the drum on its side at Lourdes’ feet, using the guard rail as a stopper. Then I pushed and pulled until I had enough of his body inside the barrel to tip it upright again.

  Breathing heavily, but not feeling the least bit spent, I hurried across the deck once more and returned with the drum’s steel lid. Oddly, there were holes punched into the lid.

  Breathing holes?

  Perhaps.

  It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be able to benefit from the holes for long.

  I shoved Lourdes fully into the barrel and started to seal the lid, but then stopped for a moment.

  Because I had the drum braced beneath the outboard lights, I could see his face clearly for the first time. It was a mess. It was worse than I’d thought.

  Along with the remaining burn scars, his face was a patchwork of skin colors and stitch scars. A patchwork doll—that’s what he reminded me of. The man’s cheeks, jaw, and lips were made up of strips of skin—rectangles and squares—all seemingly sewn together, but probably on different occasions, one small piece at a time. The skin color varied from place to place. There was brown skin, white skin, black skin, and a piece or two that had a jaundiced shade.

  Did each piece represent a person that he’d murdered?

  His nose had been hideous even before I smashed it. It was a discolored black flap, as if his body had rejected the thing. Now the cartilage that supported the dark skin was slowly peeling off his face.

  I didn’t feel sorry for him. Not a bit. He’d done damage to someone I loved. How much damage, I didn’t yet know. I was still furious, and panicked, and it horrified me to think what I might find in that Igloo cooler.

  I shoved his head down and banged the lid on tight. Then I dumped it on its side again, and was rolling it toward the ship’s accommodation ladder, where I planned to depth-charge the monster known throughout Masagua as the Man-Burner into the open Gulf of Mexico.

  He’d have been headed for the bottom within less than a minute, if I hadn’t heard a voice behind me say, “Doc? Hey, Doc! What do you think you’re doing?”

  I stopped and looked around slowly, terrified that I was imagining the voice, and his words.

  But no, there he was, dressed in shorts and a blue chambray shirt very similar to the one I was wearing—both of us stained with blood, it appeared.

  It was Lake. It was my son.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  I ran to him, tried to scoop him up in my arms, but realized he had grown too big for that: a lanky, rangy kid with a big jaw, big hands. So I hugged him to me instead, so weak in the knees that I felt my legs might buckle.

  He stood very stiff, as if embarrassed, kept saying patiently, “O.K., Doc. That’s enough, Doc. It’s good to see you, too.”

  Then: “What in the hell took you so long? I sent you every damn hint I could think up, and you still took forever. You should have asked Tomlinson if you needed help figuring it out.”

  He wasn’t smiling, but I found that funny and began to laugh, and he chuckled for a moment, too.

  But then, looking at the 50-gallon drum, he grew serious. “Praxcedes is in there, isn’t he?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’re you going to do with him?”

  I could see now that there was a large, skin-colored bandage on my son’s neck and another on his arm where Dr. Santos said he’d been burned.

  I said, “I’m not sure,” which was a lie.

  I knew precisely what I was going to do—but I had to act quickly. A couple of miles away, I could see the helicopter’s running lights now, broad white beam still scanning. It was getting closer.

  I said, “It might depend on what the guy did to you. You can tell me. It’s O.K. There’s nothing you can’t tell me.”

  My son shrugged, started to speak, but paused to listen to a banging that was now coming from inside the drum. Then a muffled howling, too.

  As the pounding continued, he said, “The night he snatched me, he did this.” Lake lifted his arm briefly, as if it were an exhibit. “But it’s not bad. That’s the only time he hurt me. Until tonight. Tonight, he knocked me out with ether. It made me puke. I guess he planned to kill me, but . . . I don’t know what happened. I woke up, and had this—” He touched his neck. “It’s a little cut about an inch long. I guess he started, but then stopped. There was blood on me, but he’d already stuck on the bandage. Or someone did.”

  He added, “I met a doctor he snatched, too. She’s a nice lady, but really scared. So maybe she’s the one who took care of me.”

  No—it couldn’t have been Dr. Santos. She didn’t know that Lake was still alive.

  For some reason, the monster had spared my son.

  It didn’t matter. Not to me, it didn’t. I was still going to take my revenge. The Gulf of Mexico awaited. But I had to get it done very soon. The Coast Guard helicopter had banked sharply, was now beginning to vector toward the lights of the freighter.

  I said, “In that case, unless he gives me some trouble, I’ll wait here with him until law enforcement shows up. You and I can talk later. But remember the lady doctor you mentioned? I’m worried about her. Would you mind running up to the fourth deck and checking on her? Maybe bring her down here to the main deck. So we’re all together. With some luck, you’ll be flying back to the mainland soon.”

  The boy didn’t budge. He stood there staring at me, then began to shake his head. “You’re lying, Doc. I know exactly what you’re going to do the minute I’m gone. I’ve done a ton of research on you. It took me more than a year, but I found out who you are. What you did . . . and what you do. You’re not going to do it again. Not with me here. I’m not going to let y
ou kill him.”

  I was stunned. Was it possible? I said, “You’re the one who found my files?”

  “Yeah, me. And it wasn’t easy. It took me fourteen or fifteen solid months to dig up the photos and piece it all together.”

  “Then showed it to your mother.” I said this with unintended bitterness.

  “No. I would never have done that. Not to either one of you. She . . . snoops through my things. It’s the sort of thing she does. She has . . . some chemical problems. But I’m the one who found out that you assassinated my great-uncle, Don Blas Diego. You murdered him. Him and at least two other men who were fighting for my country. Our revolution.”

  Lake was walking toward me now as he talked. I realized, for the first time, that he’d found Harris Lilly’s Glock 9 mm; that he was holding it near his leg so it wasn’t easily seen. That’s why he’d seemed so stiff when I hugged him.

  Why would he feel it was necessary to hide a gun from me?

  I said, “It’s not murder if it’s sanctioned. It’s a process. You’re studying biology, so you should understand the difference. Diego was a ruthless little psycho. That’s the truth. We can talk about it. But later, not now.”

  Soon, I’d be able to hear the helicopter.

  Lake said, “Your truth,” as he continued to approach me. His attitude, his tone, the way he now carried himself, suddenly all seemed confrontational.

  I said, “Lake? Why are you carrying that gun?”

  I’d begun backing away, trying to maintain some space between us.

  He seemed not to hear . . . or he chose to ignore me, because he said, “Praxcedes Lourdes was fighting for the Revolution, too. The man you have sealed in that can. He’s crazy. He’s a monster. But he was still part of the cause. That’s why you want me to check on the doctor. It’ll give you time to kill him. Because that’s what you do, isn’t it, Doc? Kill?”

  Still backing, I said, “Do you have any idea how many people he’s murdered? Look at his face—you’ll see his trophies. He abducted you, for God’s sake. My son. How do you expect me to react?”