by Sean Rowe
“When we’re rich, I want to buy a place just like this,” she said, pointing a toe at me from the water.
I almost stopped moving then but thought better of it. I would stop moving later, and for a long time.
I went down the stairs and put the things in the boat. I got in the car and worked it around so the trailer was ready and waiting to load when we came back. Then I got on board and started the engine, tested the roller furling on the jib, and removed the cover from the mainsail. We were ready to go. I looked up from the cockpit and saw her looking back at me from the screened porch, watching me watch her put her clothes on.
WE MOTORED TO THE END of the short canal and then across the backcountry water toward the bridge. Cars were coming over the causeway with their headlights on, and a couple of skiffs had anchored to do some night fishing there where the falling tide rushed past the bridge pylons. The top of the mast cleared the bridge with plenty of room to spare, and we kept going east through patch reefs and past little white floats that marked lobster traps, leaving the lights of the Overseas Highway behind us. When we got to Hawk Channel I pointed the boat into the wind and had Julia take the wheel while I went forward and raised the main. Then I came back to the cockpit and used the roller furling to get out the jib and turned southeast close-hauled, the boat heeling hard to starboard. I killed the engine, and we were airborne. Julia went below and made some coffee and brought it up, and after a time she went down to the salon and slept.
Later I would glance at the lighted compass in its binnacle and then look at her where she lay in the glow of the nav light. Key West was an hour behind us now. I watched her sleeping there inside where it was warm, and it made me feel warm. I wanted to take care of her, but I knew I was doing exactly the opposite, taking her toward something that could be serious trouble. I wondered if there was a way I could make a hiding place on the boat, a den like a fox would make to get down into and be safe. Maybe I could lock the wheel and go up to the V-berth and make a secret spot under the bunk, a space where she could hide if things went bad. But she had said she was afraid of the dark, of being closed up in a tight spot. The truth was I couldn’t protect her. There wasn’t any safety now. There was only the chance for it in the future.
But another part of me started to wonder: who was she, anyway? What did I really know about her? Jack says you’re a sucker for damsels in distress. Maybe her latest story—the tobacco barn and the Web site—was just another tale, something to make me stick with her until she got the money. Thinking about the house on the island, the weekend home of Dennis the Dentist, made me realize I hadn’t even thought what I might do with the money. I had been at the end of a life, a complete life that had run its course. It should have come to an end, but it hadn’t. Lots of people were still walking around after their lives had stopped, ghosts really. The question was whether there was something beyond that, a way to start all over again. Could it be as simple as that, a snake shedding its skin or a fox turning a new color in the fall? I was going to find out. I was going to keep moving forward down the trail I was on, all the way to the end. She was part of it; but I also knew I was going to keep an eye on her once we had the money. I took the gun out of the little compartment near the winch handle and put it in my belt, there in the small of my back, good and close.
While I was thinking about all this, I was thinking about the coordinates, too. I was so tired I could barely see straight, but I had the pain in my ribs and the cold to keep me going. The coordinates would float in and out of my mind when I closed my eyes. I tried not to focus on them because I was afraid they would scatter and disappear. The problem was I had forgotten part of them, part of one string of numbers. I knew the way to bring the numbers back: it was like looking at something at dusk you can’t quite make out. You look just to the side instead of straight on and then you catch a glimpse of it, the shape of whatever it is, in your peripheral vision. It was the same with the numbers. I closed my eyes, trying to relax and not think of anything, just feel the vibration of the rudder coming up through the rudder post and through the wheel into my hands. I would open my eyes a little and look at the lighted compass and then close my eyes again. A six and a one were moving around, revolving and floating in my mind. Then all at once the six and one stopped turning in the darkness, sort of glowing, and clicked into place. I could remember the whole sequence then, both strings: latitude and longitude, degrees, minutes, seconds; the seconds down to three decimal places. I could remember everything.
There was less heel to the boat ever since we had turned south at Key West, and less apparent wind. I locked the wheel and went down the stairs to the nav station and entered the coordinates in the GPS, figuring out how to set an alarm to tell me when we were getting close.
She woke up at sunrise. The wind had died almost to calm, and I started the engine. She helped me get the sails down and took the wheel while I lay on the quarter berth and slept until I heard the alarm going off.
I got the boat as close as I could to the spot, then kept it in place against the northbound Gulf Stream. The sea was nearly flat. After about forty minutes, when it was time, I started scanning for the Dumpster with binoculars. When it popped up and broke the surface, it was only sixty feet away.
24
SHE LEANED OVER to take the last box out of my hands. When I had climbed back on board, she put her arms around my neck and kissed me and then stepped away.
We stood in the cockpit looking at the empty Dumpster bobbing next to the sailboat, neither of us saying anything. The money was stacked inside the salon, the boat nearly full of boxes. I reached out to take her hand, but she was too far away and not reaching out. Then I heard what she heard: the high-pitched whine of an engine.
I stood on one of the cockpit seats. Just off to the left of the rising sun a rooster tail shot up from the back of a boat. The boat was coming at us fast, the engine already much louder. I got through the door and down the steps into the salon and grabbed the gun off the quarter berth where I had left it and fell going back up the stairs. Julia hadn’t moved. She stood there with her mouth open, arms folded. The boat was fifty yards out and not slowing down.
I thought they would run right over us, but at the last moment the big Scarab throttled down, its bow plunging forward. I could see four men on board—one hanging out over each side with short rifles sighted on us, another driving, and one more behind the windscreen holding onto a grab rail. It was the last one who yelled at us as the boat turned broadside, idling, the rifles close in now.
“Mr. Shannon! Take that gun out of your waistband and pitch it in the water!”
I did. One of the two with rifles had come up onto the long, narrow bow of the Scarab and stepped catlike onto the sailboat. Then he was on one knee on the cabin roof, pointing his rifle at my chest. Julia started shaking, not looking at anything. I was keeping my hands out front where they could be seen. The second man kept his rifle on Julia and came aboard the way the first one had. So did Carl Sandolin.
He crawled and scooted his way past the two others until he got down into the stern of the sailboat and stood up. He was dressed in khakis and a green Polo shirt, and his skin was yellowish gray. He took a pistol out of a shoulder holster and hit me with it as hard as he could in the side of the head.
“You fuck!” he screamed. “Do you have any idea how much I hate boats?” Then he hit me again, and I was gone.
It must not have been for very long. When I came around I was sitting with my back against the transom. Sandolin was looking at me, sitting cross-legged on the cabin roof. The two others were moving the money as fast as they could. I looked down into the salon and saw they were almost done. One guy would pitch a box from the salon up into the cockpit. Another would pitch it from the sailboat cockpit into the Scarab. The man in the Scarab was heaving the boxes through a hatch into the speedboat’s big bow compartment.
The guy in the salon moved to grab another box, and I saw Julia. She was on her knees up tow
ard the V-berth, naked from the waist up. They had tied her hands behind her back and knotted a piece of cord around her neck. The other end of the cord was tied to the door of the lazarette in front of her, underneath the quarter berth. The cord made her lean forward. Her hair fell in her face. She wasn’t making any sound, but I could see she was swaying back and forth and trembling.
Sandolin was sitting off at an angle so he could keep his eyes on me, but the guy pitching boxes out of the cockpit kept getting between me and him. The lawyer was sucking on one of his cough drops while he looked at me and I looked back. He was shaking. While he sucked on the cough drop and looked at me, he kept clicking the rifle’s safety. Off, on. Off, on. It was a nervous habit. He clicked the safety one way, and I saw the red pin pop out of the rifle bolt. He clicked it again, and the red vanished back inside the steel. On, off. On, off. He didn’t know the gun well enough to know which position was on or off without looking. Sometimes he would glance down and look for the red to see that the safety was off. Then he would glance down again later and see what position it was in. I had to do something to make him stop looking at the safety.
There were a few more boxes in the salon, some piled on the table, but the man down there stopped and took a break while the guy in the cockpit hollered at the one in the Scarab. The guy in the Scarab had disappeared into the bow compartment, no doubt to rearrange boxes and make more space and settle the weight. I watched the man in the salon as he ran his hand through Julia’s hair. He stepped over her and sat down on the quarter berth and grabbed the back of her head. He reached his hand down and started fondling one of her breasts. She didn’t make any sound.
I decided to laugh.
Sandolin stared at me, sucking on his cough drop, clicking the safety. The guy in the cockpit glanced at me and then went back to waiting for the other guy to reappear from inside the Scarab’s bow compartment. He lit a cigarette. The man in the salon had pulled Julia’s head back and was kissing her on the lips. Now she was fighting him, trying to call out.
I laughed again like I had thought of the most amusing thing in the world.
“What’s funny, Mr. Shannon?” Sandolin asked.
“You.”
“Am I? Why is that?”
“Because I just thought of something I bet you’re trying not to think about.”
He sucked on the cough drop. “What would that be?”
“Steak,” I said. “Steak and eggs. Eggs over easy, real runny, with hash browns and ketchup. Maybe a side of silver-dollar pancakes with maple syrup.”
He didn’t say anything. He looked sick. He spit the cough drop over the side and then spit saliva out of his mouth.
“In the old days, they had this cure for seasickness,” I went on. “They would take a piece of whale blubber —”
Julia screamed, and the man slapped her and said something in Spanish. He stood up and unbuckled his pants. The one in the cockpit told the one in the Scarab to hurry up. He was finishing his cigarette.
“A piece of whale blubber about half the size of your fist,” I said, “a good chunk, like a big piece of gray fat. They would tie a string around it. Then they would make the guy who was seasick swallow it.”
Sandolin had stopped clicking the safety, and he wasn’t looking down anymore. “Mr. Shannon —”
“When he had swallowed it, another guy would pull on the string, pull the chunk of whale blubber back out of his stomach and up his throat. Slowly.”
It would take me two moves. One to get up, get my feet under me in a crouch; another to get to the guy with the cigarette. I wasn’t sure how good my balance was going to be.
“Anyway,” I said, “that’s not what I was thinking about. I was thinking about steak. A rare steak, with eggs over easy and really greasy hash browns.”
The lawyer was about to do something, start yelling or maybe climb off the roof and get to the side of the boat to throw up, but I didn’t wait. As fast as I could I rolled up into a crouch. The man with the cigarette had just inhaled and flicked the butt into the water. He turned when he felt me move, felt me come into a crouch there not two feet away from him. He wasn’t ready for that. I ran at him as well as I could and hit him low with my shoulder. I was a bit bigger than he was. I took him pretty well off his feet, and he came down on the gunwale, his feet tangled, grabbing with his arms and going over the side into the water. The one in the salon with Julia was yelling, but I wasn’t thinking about that too much.
The gun muzzle was almost against my chest when Sandolin started squeezing off. The safety was still on. He panicked, fumbling with the gun. I got in close and brought both my palms down hard, boxing his ears. He yelped and dropped the gun, and I got my hands behind his neck and pulled him off the cabin. He fell down over the edge of the roof, straight down to where the steep stairs into the salon began. I pushed him, and he fell backward down the companionway on top of the man coming up. I got on my knees and picked up the gun, clicked off the safety. The man who had been down below popped his head up over the top of the stairs and then dropped back down out of sight. I moved into the edge of the companionway door, made sure I could see Julia, and then let go. The gun was a full automatic, and that took me by surprise. It almost jumped out of my hands.
It was like a red spring welling up in the back of the man trying to climb and crawl over the lawyer, trying to get forward toward the V-berth, thuk-thuk-thuk-thuk, and the man stopped moving. Sandolin was looking behind him, looking wildly for Julia’s pistol. Thuk-thuk-thuk, and the lawyer had his own spring flowing and blooming out of his side through his green Polo shirt.
I started running, scrambling from the cockpit onto the cabin roof, past the mast and up to the bow. The man in the water was climbing up the opposite side of the Scarab, ducking down when he saw me. He wasn’t my concern just now.
I felt fine then, not dizzy or tired, not thinking in any way you could call thinking, but moving and moving very fast, feeling every part of me working together and doing just fine. The man inside the Scarab wasn’t coming out. It was a hole, and he was an animal like me, one animal down in his hole and another up above in sunlight. I had to assume he had the other rifle. If he came out I would kill him; if I went in, he might kill me. The other guy was staying in the water. I couldn’t see him, but I didn’t have to worry about him; he was unarmed.
As I was about to step onto the bow of the Scarab, I stopped. I went backward, all the way back to the cockpit, watching the door of the bow compartment. I put the rifle down quickly, picked up a box from the seat in the cockpit, and heaved it through the blue air as hard as I could throw. Before it came down I had the rifle back in my hands.
The box landed with a bang near a big square hatch that was screwed shut. Almost as soon, a burst of rifle fire came from inside the compartment, and fiberglass popped and splintered all around the hatch. Then it stopped, and I let things get quiet. After a moment the man inside the compartment yelled a name: “Luis.”
If Luis was the one in the water, he wasn’t yelling back.
“Tomás!” he hollered.
Everything got quiet, and nothing happened, but I was pretty sure what was about to. I waited for it to come, all ready for it.
He came out the door of the compartment yelling as loud as I’ve heard a man yell. He turned the rifle to point it back over the top of the Scarab’s bow. He was hoping I was there, but as he turned he caught sight of me tucked down in the sailboat’s stern. He tried to readjust everything he was doing, yelling and trying to aim but firing wide. I rose up, rising forever it seemed, and firing at the same time he did, thuk-thuk—just enough—and he went down in a clatter. I shot him again, thuk-thuk, making sure he was gone. As I had risen up from the cockpit I saw why the other man, the man in the water, hadn’t yelled back at the one I had shot. He was swimming away toward the south, and he was a long way off. I let him keep swimming.
I went down into the salon and found a knife in the galley to cut Julia free. I found her blo
use and helped her put it on and got her on her feet. The side of her face was red. She rubbed her hands and wrists until the color came back into them. We were both breathing hard. She sat down on the quarter berth rubbing her hands and looked at the two men on the floor. She got up and stepped between them and tore open one of the boxes that was left on the table. She ripped at the plastic and took out as much money as she could hold and sat back down on the quarter berth and sort of rubbed at the money, looking up at me and then back down at the money. A few of the bills fell into her lap, but she kept most of it in her hands.
There were two or three inches of seawater sloshing around on the floor. It was coming in through the bullet holes in the hull. She got up, took one of the boxes from the table, and climbed the companionway stairs. I took another and followed her up and out into sunlight.
IT WAS A FINE, wild way to travel, I thought later on, after I had patched the holes in the top of the bow compartment with duct tape and sluiced the blood out through the scuppers. After I had dumped the dead guy and his gun over the side of the Scarab and picked up the shell casings from the deck. After I had motored over to the man who had been trying to swim away and who was now just treading water in the purple swells. After I had untied the dinghy from the sinking sailboat and left it adrift for him. A fine way to travel, doing forty knots in a cherry red speedboat stuffed with money and shot full of holes, running for the Keys in broad daylight and taking sips from a bottle of Haitian rum we’d found under the big padded console. It was noon when we tied up to the dock and went inside the dentist’s house and fell asleep in the enormous bed, exhausted, holding each other close in the half-light with all our clothes still on, waiting for nightfall to come and cover us, blue shadows playing on the walls of the quiet house.
