by Nick Thacker
I RUSHED OVER TO HER. She was sleeping, stretched out on the couch, her arms raised above her head, her hands cuffed and secured to a support pole that ran floor-to-ceiling against the wall.
My fury and impatience grew. “Listen, you bastard, there’s no reason —”
I stopped.
Hannah wasn’t sleeping. One of her eyes had been plastered shut, a purplish bruise forming around it. Her other eye was open, but barely. She was staring at me. I stared back, watching her pained expression as her breasts rose and fell with each breath. She was wearing the same thing she’d been wearing when they’d grabbed her — the skirt and blouse, but she was missing her burlap shoes. Her blouse was up a bit, revealing her stomach, and the skirt looked wrinkled and worn, as if she’d slept there for some time. Those same perfect legs, now pointed toward one another at the knees, lay still on the couch.
“As I told you,” Rayburn said softly, “she is fine.”
“Fine?” I swung around to face him, seething. “Are you insane? She is not fine. She’s —”
I turned back to Hannah and noticed that she had turned her head and was looking me. I walked back over, knelt down, and placed my hand on her forehead. She was warm, but not feverish. Or she was, and my own heat was radiating back to me and canceling out hers. I was never any good at being able to tell. She seemed younger somehow, yet her eyes — or at least the one that was partly open — told me otherwise.
“Dammit,” I whispered. My eyes welled up a bit. “I’m sorry, Hannah. I’m going to get you out of here.”
She swallowed, a motion that appeared to be extremely painful, and nodded once, just a slight tilt of her head. “I know,” she whispered. Even at that volume I could hear the cracking dryness of her voice.
“I promise you, I’m going to get you out,” I said again. “And then I’m going to kill the sons of b —”
I didn’t really feel the hit on the back of my skull, but I heard it, internally, bouncing around in my head for a second.
And then I blacked out.
55
I SAW THE LED DISPLAY of a clock on a panel of instruments across from me.
2:43.
I must have been out the entire time, and yet my head was begging me to go out again. A splitting headache was bursting through my brain, and a dagger-like prick of pain lanced into the center of it from where the handgun had struck me.
But I’m still alive, I thought, which means I’m still going to kill them.
I realized I had been moved into another room. Hannah was still back in the parlor, or saloon, or sitting room, or whatever ‘luxurious living rooms’ are called on yachts. But I had been moved to much more sparse accommodations. The instrument panel was on the back wall, and I was facing a plain, white door with a simple circular window on it. Opposite the instrument panel on the right side of the door was a closed cabinet, stretching the height of the room.
I carefully moved my head so as not to upset my headache and took stock of my surroundings. A table to the left jutted out from the wall, just below a long, curved window. I couldn’t see what was on it, and I realized why.
I was sitting down on the floor of the room, and my hands had been handcuffed above my head to a steering wheel.
The bridge.
I moved my arms left and right, but the wheel was locked and only offered a few inches of give either direction. I knew it was hopeless to try to break out, and that my wrists would be destroyed long before the steering mount would.
I looked to my right. Another table, another window. More instruments and communication gear would be piled on these tables, possibly maps as well. Certainly not a weapon, unless I was the luckiest man alive.
I tried to move again and realized that if there was some sort of weapon on the table, it would be a cruel joke. I couldn’t even get close to the table.
I grunted through a few more exercises, testing my captivity and aging body. I was in pretty good shape for a near-fifty-year-old, but at the end of the day I was still closing in on fifty. I wasn’t going to perform some feat of contortionism and pretzel my way out of the steering wheel.
I heard footsteps.
“Good afternoon again, Mr. Dixon,” Rayburn’s voice said. I looked up and saw him in the porthole. The door unlocked, then swung open. I wanted it to hit my feet so I could kick the shit out of it and get him in the nose, but I was too far away. The room was narrow, but not small.
“I brought us something to ease us through the transaction,” Rayburn said. He had two cigars in a pocket of his shirt, and I could see the bulge of a lighter hidden in there as well. He stepped fully into the room and I could see a cart sitting in the hallway behind him. “I’m not much into torturing, my friend, regardless of what you’ve been led to believe.”
He pulled the cart farther inside and I couldn’t help sitting up straighter, trying to get a good look at what was on it.
Bottles of liquor, judging from the differing shapes and sizes. A couple glasses, a metal bucket with a lid. Probably full of ice. He continued sliding the cart on its casters into the bridge and let it stop in front of him.
“But you understand,” he continued, “I’m not above torture. It’s just such a dirty way to conduct business. Your friend, Joey? How do you know each other?”
Rayburn reached for one of the bottles, a scotch. One I had poured a thousand shots of before. Decent, for a fifty dollar bottle.
I heard a scream, something brutal and sharp. A man’s scream, echoing around in the room and open hallway.
Rayburn frowned and smiled at the same time. “It really is a brutal way to conduct ourselves, wouldn’t you say?”
I gritted my teeth.
“My associate is with your friend right now, actually. And from the sound of it, you got a little too long of a nap. That leaves, what? Six tries?”
I didn’t understand at first, but then it hit me.
Joey’s fingers.
“Shit,” I said. “Shit.”
Rayburn shook his head and brought the scotch up to his mouth. “No, it really isn’t shit. This is an opportunity. Certainly an opportunity for me, but really an opportunity for you. To not die. Might not be too late for your pal, either, if you can come up with those transfer codes, Dixon.”
My nostrils flared, and I yanked hard against the steering wheel and handcuffs connecting them. It hurt like hell, and nothing budged. I felt one of the cuffs wrench against my skin, drawing blood. I knew it was there, but my anger masked the pain.
“Give me the transfer codes and I’ll head down to my brother’s computer and get them entered. That’s it. Plain and simple, and we’re done here. You saw the girl, and you know I’ve held up my end of the bargain.”
He stepped over to the cabinet to my right and pulled the handle. When he opened it, I saw a spiraling set of stairs that shot straight down.
“We’re right above the office, and the computer is ready to go. We’ve already got the login, we just need the transfer codes.”
I frowned. “You had to hack your brother’s computer?”
He laughed, then took a sip of scotch. “Hardly,” he said. “Would you believe the password to his computer — everything he had been working on, everything he had been trying to hide from me — was just a single word? A single, plain, word. Nothing more, nothing less.”
In that moment I knew. Of course I knew. It was so obvious. It had been staring me in the face the entire time.
“Hannah.”
He nodded. “No one would think it would be that simple. No capital letters, no numbers. Just six letters. Hannah.” He laughed again and sipped again. Then his demeanor changed. “So we’re close, Dixon. The transfer codes?”
“Your own niece,” I said. I thought about spitting to really underline my pissed-off-ness.
“My own niece,” he said. “Not surprising, when you think about it. Bradley, my brother, always seemed to have more of an interest in his boy. They were inseparable. But there’s always a special place
in Daddy’s heart for his little girl, no? So I knew she was the one, even before he told the rest of us.”
I was actually interested now, so I tried to tell him that with my expression. I wanted him to talk, to keep things moving, but I knew Joey — and Hannah — were in the boat as well, and we were running out of time for at least one of them.
“Bradley had all of us — the business partners — over for dinner a few years ago, and he told us the succession plan. I don’t know that I’d expected it to be Hannah, and I certainly didn’t expect it to be me.”
“You were chosen?” I asked.
He laughed. “No, unfortunately. As I said, I never expected it would be me. But I did think he would keep things simple. I thought it would be Daniel, or one of the more senior partners. But I didn’t think he would split it up completely.”
I got it. Rayburn had told his team about what would happen if and when he died — part of the company would go to Daniel, part of it to Hannah, and the rest of it would be split up evenly amongst the other owners. The estate of Bradley Rayburn would not have an ownership interest any longer.
“Why? Why split it up at all?” I asked. I knew I was buying time, and I knew the other Rayburn knew it as well. But get someone talking about themselves, or about something they care about, and you might as well grab a beer and a chair and get comfortable.
“To keep his name clean, and to protect his children,” Rayburn said. “As you know, Crimson Club engaged in some extracurricular affairs that weren’t part of the original company’s manifest. My brother thought it put a bit of a smudge on the family name, so he wanted to make sure that the pieces of the company that his children received were clean.”
“But you want the stuff that isn’t clean, don’t you?”
He looked at me with a wry smile. “As do you, correct? The portion of the business that truly has value.”
He still didn’t know who I was, even though I’d tried to tell his boys that I was just a lowly bartender, and none of them believed me. Maybe it was time to try convincing Rayburn.
“I’m just a bartender,” I said. “Nothing more.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “I see. A bartender with a flair for, what? What’s your flavor, Dixon?”
I stared at him, not wanting to try to understand what he was talking about.
“Oh, come on, it’s just us here — two men wanting the same thing. We’re both in it for the financial upside, but let’s be honest. We have our preferences about it, as well. Mine’s girls, actually. Younger than Hannah, though she’s quite tempting, even for family.”
This time I didn’t even want to spit. I decided to up the stakes a bit. I never was great with negotiations like this, but then again I never had been handcuffed to the wheel of a multimillion-dollar yacht with a psychopathic pervert threatening me and my friends.
He had swayed over my way just a bit, probably reacting subconsciously to the gentle movement of the floating yacht. He still wasn’t quite close enough to do anything substantial, but I wasn’t going for substantial. I was going for annoying.
I lashed out with my left foot, catching the bottom of his glass of scotch, still nearly full with two fingers of sharp liquor, sending it pummeling toward his face.
It connected with a satisfying crunch with his nose, and the scotch splashed down his chin, over his neckline, and soaked the shirt he was wearing almost to the breasts. He sprang backward in surprise, even eliciting a small cry of pain as the blow to his nose reached his brain, but then he stood still again — this time out of my foot’s reach.
I settled back down, working on an Eastwood-level frown with my eyes and a James Dean-esque wry grin with my mouth. He didn’t seem impressed, and for a second I thought he was going to simply put me out of my misery and be done with it.
But he must have really wanted this company. Crimson Club was certainly worth something to this guy, and even though I had absolutely no interest in the smut they were dealing in, I could understand how a man would be so drawn to a cash cow that dealt in international currency.
He wiped his mouth and chin with a shoulder, taking the time to make sure there was nothing left of the mid-shelf scotch on his face. We waited there, staring each other down, for a few seconds, neither of us speaking.
The scotch was soaked through his shirt, the alcohol stuck in liquid form in the material. I knew from experience that it would evaporate, the alcohol eventually vaporizing and drifting away, leaving his shirt with a minor stain and a great smell.
My mind raced, suddenly getting an idea.
“I’m terribly sorry about that,” I said. “I’m not sure what came over me. I — I have a bit of an epileptic leg, sometimes it gets out of hand.”
“Similar to your stutter?”
“No, that… that was just bullshitting. Trying to buy time.”
“And what would you call this?” he asked. “Mr. Dixon, I don’t think I need to remind you the state your friend is in. And I know I don’t need to remind you about Hannah.”
He paused, his demeanor changing. He shifted, widening his legs a bit and adjusting. “You know,” he continued, “I am feeling a little… anxious. Hannah might be a relation, but she is, still, a beautiful woman.”
“You son of a —”
“Besides, we never really saw much of each other. It’s not like most families — my brother’s family was actually pretty reclusive, and we didn’t get invited over for holidays. After his wife died, it was even more…”
He drifted off, his eyes looking somewhere out in the distance.
“Dixon, we’re done screwing around. I’m getting restless, and I’ve got business to attend to. Hannah is part of that business, and if you don’t cough up those transfer codes in the next thirty seconds, I’m going to make you watch.”
My face melted into the best ‘I give up’ expression it could generate, and I widened my eyes just a bit to really sell it.
“I — I’m sorry,” I whispered.
He waited.
“I’m so sorry. I was told never to —”
“Just tell me, ass—”
“LC9545MD —”
“Hold on,” Rayburn said. He scrambled, pacing around the narrow room as he looked for something to write with. “Start over,” he said.
Mustache was suddenly there, his face appearing in the open doorway. He stepped in, grinning, a stupid-looking victorious thing that made his face even more detestable. I almost told him he had a face for radio — and the voice for it, too. He must have heard the noise from my perfectly aimed kick to Rayburn’s glass, as he walked over and pulled out a second pair of cuffs from his back pocket. He then laid on my legs, as if they were snakes with a life of their own and he felt the need to corral them, and pulled them together and toward a pipe in the corner of the room.
He cuffed one of my ankles, still laying across the tops of my shins, and then brought the cuffs around the pipe and onto my right ankle. I heard the clicking sound of the cuff latching back to itself. Mustache stood up, looked down at me for a moment as I tried in vain to get more comfortable, then smiled.
“That ought to keep you in one place,” he growled.
I nodded. “Yep, it ought to.” I wriggled my feet a bit and was surprised at just how sturdy everything felt. I was now stretched out between the bridge’s steering wheel and a pipe, and my back was at a diagonal. If I pulled tight, I could even get my ass lifted off the floor.
“Ready,” Rayburn said, turning back to me. He had a pad of paper and a tiny pencil, the kind I’ve used at golf courses and literally nowhere else. I wondered if they sold them like that to normal people or if you had to be a golf course owner to get them.
I started again, bullshitting a string of numbers that sounded like a fancy transfer code a bank might use. “LC9545” — for my first address growing up, 9545 Lancer Court — “MD” — my initials — “2358” — part of the Fibonacci sequence. No idea why I remembered what the hell that was, but I guessed it
was from a Kevin Tumlinson book or something.
Rayburn wrote, Mustache ugly-grinned down at me. I waited for Rayburn to finish, then he looked up. “The second code?”
I looked up at the ceiling of the bridge, feigning a deep-in-thought recall of a memory I didn’t have. I waited, milking it, then shot my eyes back to Rayburn.
“Okay, here it is. 8532EN5459DM.” I waited for them to call my bluff. Rayburn was writing, not thinking, and Mustache was just… not thinking. It was the same sequence of alphanumeric characters in reverse, and to mask it a little without forgetting what was next I just substituted the next letter in the English alphabet for the actual letter I was intending. Instead of ‘D,’ ‘E.’ Instead of ‘M,’ ‘N.’
It appeared they were none the wiser.
The first part of my plan — to give them two strings of numbers that I could actually recall at will without messing up — had worked. The second part? Well, that really depended on how ‘ready’ they were to get the transfer codes. Like all negotiations, time was of the essence. In my case, as the hostage, I needed more of it.
So it really depended on how ready they were to type in the transfer codes — was the computer already booted up? Was the ‘hannah’ password typed in and the transfer code entry site loaded?
These questions were all stressing me out. One of the many reasons I don’t like making plans. If I don’t have a plan, the plan can’t fail.
But I had a plan, so I knew there were about a thousand ways it could fail. Whatever. Hannah and Joey were worth the risk.
Mustache took the small piece of paper from Rayburn and began heading toward the stairs.
This was my shot.
56
“YOU SMOKING THOSE WITH MUSTACHE after you close this deal?” I asked, genuinely curious. “Seems like you can find a better smoking buddy than that loser.”
Rayburn scoffed. “Oh, you mean Riley? He’s good for a few things, but ‘smoking buddy’ isn’t one of them.”
“So what do you say, then? Considering our business is about to be complete.”
