by Sean Rowe
Behind Fontana, Krystal was struggling with the big Cuban flag I had seen in the mini-warehouse in Miami draped over the Dumpster. She had fastened one corner to the wall, and now she was on her tiptoes smacking a nail with a shoe borrowed from the bandleader. The bandleader sat on a folding chair watching her, massaging his foot. The musicians had put down their instruments.
“What is the October Twenty-eighth Brigade? What is our purpose? It is this: to correct an egregious error that has occurred in recent times at the highest levels of our government, the government of the United States. Behind me is the flag of our beloved Cuba. We are common men and women who love America but also love our first homeland and who have made every effort at dialogue before taking up arms in our struggle. What struggle is this? It is a struggle for freedom—not for ourselves but for our countrymen, who lie imprisoned by a rapacious tyrant.”
With that a titter of applause came from the tables in the ballroom, something I hadn’t expected. I was moving back and forth along the back wall, trying to watch people’s hands. Miriam Benages wasn’t one of the ones clapping. Her hands stayed on the armrests of her wheelchair.
Bryant was on one side of the stage, Kip on the other, standing in front of the double doors of the ballroom. Candle lanterns twinkled on each table, even the ones where no one was sitting. It made for poor light. Everyone but Fontana had his rifle ready.
“¡Viva Cuba!” Fontana yelled into the mike, too loud. Another titter of applause.
“Soon we will leave you,” he went on. “It will be up to your captain to decide whether you continue on your voyage to Havana. But I beg you: if and when you reach that haunted shore, do not leave this ship. Do not set foot on Cuban soil until justice has been returned to that island and the tyrant cast out. Do not spend your hard-earned dollars in that city, for those dollars only serve to shore up the devil in his fortress. And when you return to your home, join us in your own small way, in spirit and in action. Write to your elected officials; explain to your neighbors; do not be fooled by this outrageous turn toward appeasement —”
“Fontana!”
He had paused to catch his breath, and in that pause she had raised her arm and leaned forward in her wheelchair. At the end of her arm, her hand held out a finger, pointed at him.
“Jack Fontana!”
It would have been a scream, but it was too even, too controlled, and too clear.
Fontana’s face was invisible behind the mask.
Then he was trying to unsling the gun from his shoulder. My eyes went back to her in time to catch her turning away from having said something to the man on her left. The man was coming into a crouch, knocking his leg against the table as he came up. He fired before I could swing the rifle toward him, my middle finger on the trigger.
He was after Fontana, but the shot hit Krystal in the throat. She stumbled backward, falling against the flag, trying to find where she was hit, going onto her knees. I put two rounds in the shooter, and he sat down in his chair, knocking over the candle lantern.
A few people had dived to the floor, but most hadn’t. Fontana was already off the stage and moving toward the table, Bryant coming in to flank him, stumbling once when he stepped on somebody. People were screaming. Kip had leaped onto the stage. He had grabbed Krystal in his arms and was starting toward the double doors that led out of the ballroom.
One of the two big guys managed to get off a round before Fontana shot him. The third man hadn’t moved. Bryant came in beside Fontana, point-blank range across the table, and shot the third man in the chest.
I watched Fontana put the muzzle of his rifle against the woman’s forehead and hold it there. I was coming up the side of the ballroom very fast now, scanning behind me and in front of me, sweeping the room. When I was close I could see that she was spattered with blood. The guy I had shot slumped a little and rolled off his chair onto the floor, leaving a chrome-plated pistol on the table.
All at once the woman’s head jerked forward, and Fontana flinched. She had spat on him, a good one too, catching him full on the mask. He lowered his rifle. Bryant and I kept covering her.
Fontana started laughing. He sat down in the chair across from her, really giggling now. Finally he stopped. Bryant’s hands were shaking. Kip was standing at the front of the room next to the doorway with Krystal in his arms.
Fontana had brought the cordless microphone with him from the stage. He pulled it out of his pocket and spoke into it. “Ladies and gentlemen, we will leave you now. For your safety, please remain here until—until you are instructed to do otherwise.”
He dropped the microphone on the table and lowered his voice, still looking at the woman. Then he said: “How many Cubans does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
The woman, Miriam Benages, kept looking at him.
“Señora?” He leaned toward her. She didn’t say anything.
“One brigade,” Fontana said, sitting back in the chair, gazing at her. “With artillery and air support from the U.S. Navy.”
He got up. We moved backward quickly, watching the room as we went, and passed through the doorway on the side of the stage and into the stairwell. On one of the landings we passed the little black man in tan coveralls who had been sitting on the bunk in the holding cell where we’d put the officers. He stood on the landing, holding his prayer book in one hand as we passed by.
17
KRYSTAL WAS DEAD. I stood in the cargo doorway and helped Bryant hand her down to Kip. He dragged her to the stern of the lobster boat and then carried her inside the little cabin.
Fontana sat on one of the stainless-steel prep counters. Krystal’s needlepoint lay beside him, the ducks and kittens speckled with blood and all but finished. He poured a glass of mineral water and shook a couple of pills out of his pill bottle.
“Where’s Menoyo?” I said.
“Cuffed in the cooler.”
“How did she recognize you?”
He laughed. “I must have left an indelible impression the last time we met.” He stood up suddenly and turned around and slapped himself on both buttocks. “Bang!” he yelled, springing forward in the air, his toes pointed at the floor. He landed in a crouch, wiggled once, then straightened and turned to face me, spreading his arms wide. “Hard to forget someone who shot you in the ass, wouldn’t you say? Or the pelvis, correctly speaking. As it happens, I’m the reason Miriam’s been sitting in a wheelchair for nine years.”
The Dumpster was closed up and ready to go. Bryant had attached the hoist chain, and now he was down on the stern of the lobster boat, checking where the Dumpster would go. Kip was sitting on the gunwale, not saying or doing anything.
“Take those extra boxes and burn them,” Fontana said. “The incinerator’s that way.”
“They wouldn’t fit in the Dumpster?”
“No, Matthew, they wouldn’t fit in the Dumpster. Come on, we’re wasting time.”
There were five of the powdered-milk cartons, each one about the size of a liquor box. I put my gun on the counter and pushed the pallet jack down the galley and got through the doors and stopped to look back. Fontana was taking up the slack in the hoist chain, and I waited to see the Dumpster swing free of the floor and hang in the air. While I was watching I saw the open door of a little office, the chef’s office. Just inside the door, on the desk, were several bottles of wine, different kinds. I grabbed one and put it with the boxes on the pallet. Then I went down the corridor.
The incinerator was inside an alcove room littered with cardboard scraps. I pushed the mask up on my head, opened the incinerator doors, and saw how to switch the thing on. Then I sat on the powdered milk boxes and wondered how I would open the wine. I had a folding knife, but the blade was too wide to shove the cork down into the bottle. While I was thinking about just breaking the neck, I saw a little steel stem sticking out from the handle of the pallet jack. I held the bottle sideways against the stem and shoved, and the cork went in, squirting red wine on my hand. I turned the bottle up and took
a big drink and then put it down on the floor while I loaded the boxes into the incinerator and watched them start to burn.
I had another couple of swallows and went out in the corridor, leaving the pallet jack but taking the bottle. The label on the bottle was a drawing of a house, a big estate with vineyards planted all around it. It was a place I had actually been once in California with my wife. I paused outside the galley door and took another drink. I would have a couple more and put the bottle back in the chef’s office on the way through the galley.
I opened the galley door as quietly as I could and at the far end of the long room I saw a wheelchair and Miriam Benages’s head, with her short black hair. I could see Fontana and Bryant standing in the cargo doorway, unarmed, the Dumpster hanging out over the side of the ship at the end of the hoist boom, rain blowing back through the doors.
I had stopped, but now I started moving again, thinking what a lucky break to have come in so quietly. It gave me a chance. There was no way to set the wine bottle down without making noise. When I was halfway across the galley she heard me and turned the wheelchair fast with her left hand so that it was sideways in the space between two prep counters. Fontana and Bryant froze.
It was a single-barrel shotgun, cut off short, and as soon as I saw her start to turn and bring the gun across her body I began to run. The blast must have hit a bunch of the pots hanging from racks overhead because after the blast, even half deaf, I could hear pots and pans clattering all over the place. She pumped the slide but didn’t have time to aim. The second blast went even wider than the first.
I turned my ankle as I brought the bottle down on her head, and instead of her head, I hit her shoulder. A sound came out of her, a grunt. She still had the gun, but I had it now, too, the barrel scalding my hand. I brought my arm up, and this time I smacked her hard on the side of the face with the bottle and pulled hard on the gun at the same time. It came out of her hands, and I fell back on the floor, the gun sliding out of sight under a counter. She was still struggling, scrambling and grabbing for something under the seat of her wheelchair, trying to get at whatever it was, and going unh! unh! as she did it. Bryant was moving now, but he slipped and fell hard when he hit a patch of Krystal’s blood. I heard Kip outside yelling like crazy from the lobster boat.
What happened next happened so quickly it was like a dream. I was behind her, behind the wheelchair. I got it by both handles and ran with it, shoving it along in front of me. Then I let go. Miriam Benages went straight through the cargo doorway and the chair hit the side of the Dumpster that was hanging in the air outside. Then came a dull bang, maybe her hitting the lobster boat and then going into the water.
I walked back to the wine bottle. It wasn’t broken, and some wine was still in it. I picked it up and killed it. Kip was really hollering now.
Bryant got up and went over to the cargo doorway. He crouched down and peered over the lower edge. Fontana hadn’t moved.
“I can’t see her,” Bryant said. “Christ, Matt,” he continued, starting to laugh. He took an orange life ring from a hook and tossed it through the doorway into the night.
“The blood,” Fontana said. “We need to hose down all this blood. Then we’re ready to go.”
18
I KEPT EXPECTING something to go wrong with the hoist, but it didn’t. We got the Dumpster in place on the lobster boat, chained it down, and that was that. Kip cast off the mooring line, and we were free.
I watched the Empress drop away behind us until she no longer blazed but just twinkled in the distance. Then she was only a light, and after a long time she was gone.
It was nearly one a.m. I scanned the horizon with binoculars, but there was nothing to see. Or not yet, anyway. Inside me, like looking down a tube, I saw a piece of what I knew was out there, coming toward us. I saw a steep hull cutting black water, the hull painted with numbers, dim in the darkness but done up in the bright colors of the Coast Guard that would be strong and bold in sunlight.
For twenty minutes we motored up and down the long, rolling swells with the running lights dark. We had to take it slow with the Dumpster on board. Bryant was under the cabin roof, steering, while Fontana studied the radar screen and fiddled with the GPS. A sliver of moon came out from behind a cloud, and then the engines went to idle and we stopped moving. Bryant got on top of the cabin roof with a flashlight and blinked it, and pretty soon I could see a light coming at us dead ahead.
Julia was on the bow of the Ya-Ya with a line in her hands, and when the cabin cruiser got in close, she threw the line to Bryant. He tied it off to our bow, giving it plenty of slack. I watched Manny climb into the spotting tower and back the Ya-Ya down and cut the engines.
Fontana cursed and came out of the cabin, brushing past me. I ducked inside and looked at the radar. A pair of green dots had appeared on the edge of the screen, thirty miles to the north.
It took all four of us to get the cement block over the side, the thing that would anchor the Dumpster. It must have weighed three hundred pounds, with a big metal ring in the center. Before we started lifting, Bryant clipped the end of a cable onto the ring. Then the cement block went in with a splash, and the cable started running off a big spool mounted on the back of the lobster boat. When the cable was two-thirds gone, Fontana tested the hand brake and then let the rest of the cable unspool until only a few wraps were left. He applied the brake until the cable stopped paying out. Now the cement block hung a thousand feet beneath us.
Kip hauled on the chain hoist until the Dumpster came off the deck and kept coming, a few inches above the low gunwales in the stern. Everyone but Kip moved to one side of the boat, and then Kip swung the boom over the other side. The boat tilted sideways, but not as much as I had guessed it would. Kip went back to the chain hoist, clicked a switch, and started hauling on it again. The Dumpster came down from the boom, settling into the water, and the boat rose back to level.
The Dumpster floated beside the lobster boat, tethered to it with a line, with most of its bulk beneath the water.
Kip disappeared over the side with a mask and flippers and a flashlight. Bryant handed him one end of a chain. Next I saw light moving under the Dumpster. Then Kip was coming back on board, throwing the flashlight over first.
“All set?” Fontana asked.
“Yeah.”
Using the hand brake to keep the spool from spinning too fast, Fontana let out almost all the rest of the cable. There was a loop in the cable nearly at the end of the spool. Fontana stopped the cable playing out, and Bryant attached the end of the chain to the loop.
“Untie it,” Fontana said. “Quickly.”
Kip took the line off the cleat and threw it across the Dumpster. Then he shoved until the Dumpster moved a few feet away from the side of the lobster boat.
Bryant went under the cabin roof and got the bolt cutters and came back out, ready to cut the cable from the spool.
“OK,” Fontana said.
Bryant cut the cable. The chain pulled tight and slipped over the corner of the transom. When I looked, coming out of the cabin with two gallon cans of diesel fuel in my hands, the Dumpster was already gone, leaving a puff of foam and bubbles where it had been. Fontana was at the controls in the cabin, writing something on a scrap of paper.
We followed the Ya-Ya north for what I guessed was ten minutes. Bryant steered the lobster boat while Fontana stood beside him. He was holding the scrap of paper in his hand, looking at it from time to time. He would look at it, then close his eyes, moving his lips. He walked back to the stern and handed me the paper.
“Memorize it,” he said.
It was the coordinates for the Dumpster, a string of numbers to mark the location. “What if I just hold onto this?” I asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.
The two boats came together. Julia threw down a pair of canvas bags, and we all stripped and changed clothes, leaving our old ones in a pile on the lobster boat with everything else: masks, guns, body a
rmor, gloves. Fontana and Bryant went through the cabin cruiserand brought two more pistols and some charts onto the lobster boat. Then everyone but Kip got back on board the Ya-Ya.
Before I went I looked at the radar and felt my mouth go dry. The green dots had moved closer together and much closer to the center of the screen: sixteen miles.
From the Ya-Ya I watched Kip go inside the cabin on the lobster boat and bend down where Krystal was. He was out of sight for about a minute. Then he appeared in the doorway and poured the two cans of diesel fuel over the decks, into the cabin, and all over the stern. He dipped his hands over the side, scrubbed them, and climbed into the Ya-Ya’s stern. Manny gunned the engines and got us a hundred feet out.
The next thing was something different. Fontana came out of the salon with an object I hadn’t seen before on the cabin cruiser: a bow, with a quiver of target arrows clipped to its side. It was a complicated-looking rig, all wires and pulleys and sights, something a tournament archer would use. He handed the bow to Julia.
She nocked an arrow against a dot on the bowstring. While she stood at full draw, Fontana used tape to fasten a wad of cloth near the tip of the arrow. He lit it with a cigarette lighter and stood back, and suddenly the arrow vanished with a slap-crack of the bowstring, gone across the water like tracer fire. I looked and saw it lodged in the transom of the lobster boat, still aflame.
The fire went quickly up the stern and into the cabin. Then it really started burning.
Kip sat on one of the deck chairs and watched the fire fall away behind the Ya-Ya. He had taken something out of a handkerchief and started eating it. I stood beside him and looked at the fire, barely more than a light in the darkness now, far away and starting to disappear between swells. You could hear the pop-pop of ammunition going off. What Kip was eating was pale, with blood on it, a piece of raw meat. He put the last bite in his mouth and chewed, looking at the firelight, then got up and washed his hands over the side.
Julia came up behind me, kissed the back of my neck, and put a glass in my hand. I took a drink and smiled at her and then went to help Bryant start baiting hooks and putting them over the sides on outriggers. In a few more minutes Manny cut back to trolling speed, and we started fishing along a weed line.
