Rather than let him struggle, I reached down. He looked up at me and shook his head. So, I dropped my hand and let him try to stand up on his own again. No progress. In fact, he might’ve sunk a little lower in the chair.
I put my hand out again. “Come on, DJ.”
He pursed his lips at me. If he spat on my hand, it wouldn’t have caught me unaware. At least I was wearing a pair of nitrile gloves.
This wasn’t about offering a hand to help him walk. It wasn’t even about me being overly concerned with DJ’s safety. Our problems were deeper than that. When I looked into his sunken eyes, I saw a man stuck on shore, cursing the ocean, and kicking the sea foam. A raving mad bastard daring the water to take him into oblivion, fully aware that his mortal flesh and bone could never hold back the sea.
The waters took his dare. He held to his soggy piece of land. As if we were the same person, I felt the seafoam rise past our knees, smelled the brine in our nostrils as it crawled over our upturned face, coming together an inch beyond our lips. Our hair wafted in the current like seaweed.
We shared those feelings because he and I both knew what it meant to keep our feet firmly dug under the muck. The same tides that swallowed him swallowed me.
Looking back on it, we both sensed that about each other, I think. Since Stockwell’s meeting on Ambrosia, sure, or before that, when the Onayans wanted to force-feed Alicia and me to a swirling school of hammerheads.
The exact moment didn’t matter. What mattered was that we’d never acknowledged it, we’d never treated each other honestly. Was it both of our faults? Probably. I don’t know. I couldn’t control DJ; I could only control myself. I could only make myself do the right thing.
I crouched down and scooped my arm across DJ’s back, getting his left arm to rest on my shoulders.
“All right, partner,” I said. “We’ve got a long road ahead of us. You ready to get the hell out of here?”
DJ squinted at me. I wondered if the gulf between us was too deep to be bridged. Then he nodded, and I knew we had a chance.
“On three?” I asked.
“Let’s do it, man.”
I got in a squat position, my feet under me. DJ’s pulse tapped my shoulder.
“One, two, three!” I lifted off. DJ was much lighter than I’d expected, and the two of us got him standing without much trouble.
We negotiated our way down the steps and across the yard. On the beach, I lowered DJ onto the floor of the dinghy. We had just enough space to lay his head on the inflated bow, with his legs going under the single bench. I shoved us into the water, then hopped in, started the motor, and guided us back toward Wayward’s swim platform.
Alicia came down from the flybridge, looking at me as if I’d pronounced DJ dead on the scene.
“He’ll be fine,” I called out to her. “He’s lost some blood, and he drank himself stupid, but his wound is not life-threatening. I’ve got it packed with a small amount of gauze.”
She combed her hair back from her face and blew out her cheeks. I tossed the line to her and she pulled the dinghy in. With her help, I got DJ onto a settee in the cockpit.
He and I had a lot to talk about.
We stayed anchored off Havensight Point through the day and into the evening. The currents moved gently and the wind tiptoed past, letting DJ and Flor rest. Even I got some rest in, after Alicia begged me to sack out in our stateroom, promising me she’d keep watch.
Sleep came quickly, but I woke at least twice. The first time, I calmed myself and rolled back into sleep. The second time, my hand whipped out before I was fully awake, looking for the dream journal I kept in my nightstand back at the house. All it found was Wayward’s starboard bulkhead and a nasty ache that hung around as I got out of bed, got dressed and walked out to the cockpit.
I’d slept longer than I thought. The sun was going down over the waters to my left. DJ was lying awake on the port settee, looking up at the pink sky.
He had on my T-shirt from the SDCCU marathon. Specifically, the year I finished a hair under three hours. I treasured that thing.
“You’re not going to get blood all over that, are you?” I sat down a few inches from his foot.
“The thought occurred to me, but I hadn’t got around to it yet.”
On the built-in cooler in front of me sat a plate with the remains of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a mostly-finished glass of orange juice and a banana peel—Alicia had tried to get some blood back in him.
I scraped the folds of my brain to figure out what to say next. Nothing felt sufficient. Nothing felt right. What had happened on the back porch of my house? I’d patched DJ up. He was shot. I was proven right.
I didn’t feel vindicated. Shouldn’t I feel pissed, at least? I’d warned him not to do what he did, and look at him now, laid up on my couch. But I couldn’t muster up any anger toward him. I was glad to see him alive.
“What?” DJ sat up on his left elbow. I noticed his right arm was in a sling.
I waved him off. “It’s nothing.”
“Oh, come on now, man. You can say, ‘I told you so.’ I won’t be mad. I jumped out of the frying pan, and you pulled my ass from the fire. Ain’t that the very thing you’ve been warning me about from the beginning? False modesty hurts worse than just owning up to the fact you were right.”
“Yeah, I was right.” I shrugged at him. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”
He studied my face for a moment. Then his eyebrows went up. “Man, Jerry. You actually are glad I’m okay.” His fingers combed through his goatee.
It was impossible to know what he was thinking, but we must’ve been close to the same mind. We hated each other. We did. No point in lying about it. In the couple of months DJ and I had been partnered together, the things we’d agreed on didn’t stack up anywhere close to the stuff we argued about. Our relationship seemed destined to blow up, and probably one of us would be killed, to the other’s indifference.
But now, our arguments, our fights—they seemed like childhood quarrels being left behind by boys who had grown into young men.
“Can’t believe I just said that out loud,” I said after a moment. Then I chuckled. “Two days ago, I would’ve shot you myself.”
“A sobering thought, ain’t it, compadre?” DJ said with a grin.
I noticed Alicia in the salon. She was rummaging around the kitchen, then winked at me.
“You were in a bad way this morning,” I said to DJ. “Glad you haven’t seemed to have lost as much blood as I thought.”
“I’m gonna miss being a cheap date. Might let some of my blood out next time I want to get ripped.”
“Then you show up at somebody else’s back door next time,” I kidded. “Fact is, DJ, I’m not your dad, and I shouldn’t have acted like I was. You’re capable of a lot—I know that—but I can’t help myself.” I took a slow breath, steadying my shivering hands.
“My service re-wired me,” I began. “Things happened for me that shouldn’t have. Everything fell my way. I passed all the tests, I got all the certifications, put in all the training hours, got the good assignments that other guys were breaking their backs trying to get—” My face pinched. I sounded like an asshole. Like I was bragging, which made me want to stomp myself into a hole.
“I shouldn’t have come back from the Sandbox,” I said. “And I know that sounds crazy, but it’s the truth. We left behind better guys, guys more capable, guys with more to offer the world, and more to live for. But I came back. For the life of me, I can’t square why.”
DJ stayed silent. And it helped, like he was giving me a blank canvas to color with all the rotten junk I’d been bottling up for years.
“I think about those guys every day. They’re behind everything I do. I have to live for them, I have to do well in their memories, I have to fill in the blank spaces where their lives would’ve been. Understand?”
He nodded at me.
“Before I joined up, I wanted to test myself, but I wanted t
o do something good, too. I wanted to save people, and being a PJ gave me a chance to do that. When I got out, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. So, I started doing what they said they wanted me to do.”
“The men you lost.” DJ knew without me having to say it.
I nodded.
“Dad and everybody else expected me to take over Snyder & Burkhart. Instead, I became a cop. I wasn’t sure if that’s what I wanted to do. Hell, the only thing I’ve been sure about since I left the service was marrying Alicia.”
“Are you sure about Armstrong?” DJ asked.
I scratched my head. “Armstrong hasn’t gone the way I pictured.”
DJ clicked his teeth and nodded. “Man, I know that feeling. When I lost ole’ righty and picked up this bad boy…” He tapped the cuff of his prosthetic, which stood at attention on the floor between the settee and the cooler. “…I thought, ‘well, DJ, here it is, the thing you’ve been crying for since you found out you kicked in the wrong door, so put it on and get your ass in gear.’”
DJ leaned forward a bit. “My ass is in gear, but I still got problems. Some days I wake up wondering why I bothered to wake up at all.” He sat up higher. “But, Jerry, I learned the important thing is that I wake up. From there on, things happen as they happen.”
Movement in the salon grabbed my attention. Flor was awake, walking over to Alicia, then sitting next to her and resting her head on my wife’s shoulder.
DJ noticed me looking and turned to look as well.
“That’s Gabriela’s kid?”
“The one and only.”
“How’s she holding up?”
“She’s a strong kid, but she misses her mother.”
“I would too,” DJ said. “How about we do something about that?”
I helped DJ get to his feet after he put his leg on. He moved into Wayward’s salon under his own power, while I walked behind him, ready to catch him if he stumbled. We sat down on the big settee with Flor while Alicia got up and threw together some pasta with marinara sauce and the last of the shrimp from Vieques.
After we all ate, Flor cuddled her head onto my wife’s lap while she, DJ and I split a twelve-pack of beers. Despite the messes around us, it felt good to sit and talk with them, to laugh like friends enjoying a nice evening on a boat together.
I was hesitant to break the mood, but every time I looked at Flor, I was reminded of what had brought us here.
So, I told DJ what we’d learned from Dr. Markel’s notes. About Hildon’s botched drug, Poraxim, and how it had given Flor, and God-only-knows how many others Li-Fraumeni syndrome. And about Hildon’s plans to double-dip on their own mistake by selling the cure for Li-Fraumeni for more than most people made in a year.
Outwardly, he took the news calmly, but I could see the motors kicking to life in DJ’s head. I heard the fires popping and smelled the smoke. Things were going to get dicey. I just had to make sure DJ remembered I had his back, and that if we were going to take on Hildon, we had to do it together.
He shared the information he’d learned and told me about tracking Dos Santos. I excused myself from the table and finished what was left of my beer while I walked toward the fridge to grab another.
“How’d you know the cops were hired by Hildon?” I asked DJ as I reached into the fridge and pulled a beer out.
“Wasn’t hard to figure out.” DJ’s eyes danced toward Flor. He was concerned about sharing all the details with a kid around.
“Flor, why don’t you go sack out in your stateroom for a little while?” I asked.
She lifted her head. “I’ve been lying down all day.”
“How about a shower, honey?” Alicia asked. “It’s been a couple days.”
She grimaced at Alicia. “You can talk around me. I’m not scared to hear what you guys are saying to each other. I deserve to know.”
Alicia and I exchanged an uncomfortable look. Flor wasn’t oblivious. She’d gained a lot of perspective in her short time on Earth—more than most people twice her age.
“I’ll help you walk down to the head.” Alicia slid out behind her, then wrapped an arm around Flor’s waist and kissed her on the cheek.
After she and Alicia disappeared down the port hull, I grabbed a second beer from the fridge, and slid it across a corner of the table to DJ.
“Thanks, boss.” DJ cracked it open and drank.
“So… the cops and Hildon?”
He finished his sip and smirked. “A man finds the truth real easy to tell when he’s staring down a sawed-off.”
“You got a confession under duress?”
He shrugged with his eyebrows. “I wasn’t gonna get it any other way.”
“Getting information that way is no good, DJ. You can point a gun at a man and he’ll confess to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby. Did you get some other source to back up Officer Dos Santos’s claims?”
“Hell, Jerry, the boys at the station and I weren’t really on speaking terms.”
Still, information gained under duress was flimsy.
“What about that computer from the doc’s house?” he asked. “Doesn’t that back up somebody at Hildon being behind all this? Who else but the lady at the top?”
“Rachel Little?” I asked. “I’m sure she didn’t like Dr. Markel, but does that mean she’d hire the police to kill four people? If she wanted to get at Markel and Baptiste, she could have had Hildon sue both of them into oblivion.”
“Sue them? Come on, Jerry,” DJ said. “You think that’d stop a professional muck-raker like Luc Baptiste from going to press? If I’m running a big company, I’m not taking the chance that it would. Once Luc writes about the stuff Markel had, it’s over. People aren’t going to forget seeing Hildon’s dirty laundry waving from a flagpole.”
He had a good point. Dead men told no secrets.
“Even if Rachel Little weren’t behind the murders, a drug her company made gave a little girl cancer.” He looked pointedly at me. “We can’t let this get away from us, Jerry. Was I wrong to try and kill her? Maybe. But you read those papers from the doc.”
Another good point.
In either case, we had to act. The time to drop the laptop in the ocean and forget about this whole thing had come and gone. Gabriela was in jail, Flor needed help, and I couldn’t live with myself knowing I’d walked away from this.
“We can’t kill her,” I said. “We can’t go to the local police, either. Stockwell or Armstrong has to know somebody in the FBI. So, we get Rachel, turn her in to Armstrong, and let them hand her off to the feds.”
“Sure. We’ll turn her in.” DJ rolled his eyes as he turned away from me.
I kicked him in the shin. “I’m not helping you, or anyone else, kill this woman out of revenge.”
“Fine.”
“Did I just hear you two promise not to kill someone?” Alicia came up the steps from the port hull, looking a shade paler.
“Just the boys talking,” DJ said.
“No reason to get worried, honey,” I said.
“Good. If you were seriously considering it, I’d take Flor and leave.”
I believed her.
She opened the refrigerator and took out a fresh beer. After cracking it open, she rested her elbows on the counter behind me. “I suppose your little Boy Scout troop doesn’t have a place for a girl, huh?”
“Alicia, darling,” DJ began, “I’m all for women doing their part in things, but—”
“Jerry, I want in. I want to help.”
DJ’s eyes pleaded for help from me. What the hell did he want me to do? Snap my fingers at her?
“Alicia—”
She held her hand up at me. Whatever I was going to say, I forgot it. Then, she slowly brought her beer to her lips and took a long, loud sip.
“Actually, I don’t know why I’m asking, because I’m already in this with you two,” she said. “Or did you think I was still on the outside?” She looked at me, then at DJ, waiting for one of us to open our mouths.
“When you brought Gabriela to my home, I was in. When you needed someone to take care of Flor, I was in. And when we both agreed, Jerry, that I was the best person to read over Dr. Markel’s notes, you better believe I was in.”
She stood up straight and sauntered to the salon table, spreading her fingers on it. My wife’s nails, which were normally immaculate, were chipped in places, chewed in others. Alicia raised her eyebrows at me. “Do I need to say more?”
DJ’s toe tapped into mine. His head shook almost imperceptibly—a clear no. She was not in.
Too bad for DJ. He didn’t have to live with her.
“You’re in,” I said.
“All right!” Alicia clapped her hands and bounced. “So, what’s the plan?”
“We already decided we’re not blowing away Hildon’s people, right?” I said, with a nod toward DJ. “It’s pointless to shoot anybody. They’d have someone else come in and keep things running the way they’ve always run. That doesn’t help anyone. And I’m not so sure Armstrong would look kindly on us for killing business people.”
“Even scumbags getting people sick, then charging their first-born for the drugs they need?” DJ asked.
“Even them,” I said. “There’s a fate worse than death for them. I know.”
“What’s that?” DJ asked.
I grinned at my partner. “Losing their money. If we can get Markel’s info out to the press, Hildon’s sunk.”
“Dr. Markel already tried that,” Alicia said. “God rest him.”
“There’s another way,” DJ said.
My ears perked up.
“They got this thing coming up,” he said. “I remember seeing it on their website when I was scoping out Rachel Little.” DJ pulled out his phone, turned it on and poked around. “They got a new campus opening up. Some big party to celebrate—I’m willing to bet all kinds of reporters and cameras will be there, and anybody who’s got money in Hildon will be there.”
Alicia took the phone from him and looked it over. “He’s right, Jer. With the right eyeballs there, we could do a lot of damage.”
“You wanna get them good, you do it right in front of their friends,” DJ agreed. “Pull their pants down while the whole class is watching.”
Wayward Sons Page 36
