The Mind Pirates (Harbingers Book 10)

by Frank Peretti

  By some miracle, I recovered, neither falling nor letting go of the bucket, though some of the contents escaped and splattered on the boards.

  Rock, Scalarag, and Norwig the Bean had been lying in wait just outside the companion, and now were having a good old laugh at my expense. Scalarag came at me, his eyes on the bucket, and . . .

  What happened next would haunt me. Was it that leering face? The desperation of a prisoner with no alternatives? Within me, something animal overpowered reason and, with reckless power, I swung the bucket in a violent arc and struck the huge man in the face. The kitchen scraps splashed on him, on the deck, on everything; he reeled, hand to his face, and fell back against the capstan, blood trickling from his nose.

  Rock and Norwig became stunned onlookers, suspended in time. Scalarag was quickly recovering, planting his feet, powering up his muscles, preparing for murder.

  As for me, I considered myself as good as dead, and upon that conclusion, saw no point in timidity. I held the bucket out as if it were a weapon and said, “A word!”

  Rock and Norwig looked at each other, amused.

  “A word, says he!” said Rock.

  “Aye,” said Norwig, “more words. Be still me tremblin’ ‘art!”

  And then I amazed –– or rather, dismayed –– myself. “If it be flesh yer hungerin’ or blood yer thirstin’, then step in, the lot o’ ya, and be measured against me dyin’ carcass, but you can lay to this: for every piece of me you take, be it nose or ear, I’ll take for meself a piece a’ you, so count it up and decide!”

  There. Me dyin’ words. Or so I thought.

  Rock was the first to start laughing. Norwig came next and then, wiping the blood from his face with the back of his arm, Scalarag smiled and laughed with delight.

  “So there be a man before us!” said Rock, exchanging a gleeful look with the others.

  “Ask me,” said Scalarag, regarding the blood smeared on his arm.

  “Give the man his badge,” said Rock.

  Scalarag took the red scarf from his head and approached me.

  I tensed. What was this, a trick? A ruse? Hidden gadgetry?

  Scalarag smiled, and the smile looked friendly. “Heave to, my man. It’s only a scarf.”

  He stepped around behind me, and tied the scarf about my head as Rock and Norwig raised their fists in the air and cheered.

  Scalarag came around and clapped me on the shoulders. “You’re one of us now!”

  * * *

  I returned to the galley with emptied bucket in hand and a pirate’s scarf upon my head. Spikenose noticed the scarf, of course, but only raised a knowledgable eyebrow and went about his work.

  I went back to peeling potatoes, my head a thicket of quandaries.

  I was alive, and the muscular monster Scalarag was the only one injured. Astounding.

  Nevertheless . . .

  I had fallen to the level of an animal, yielded to temper, lashed out, abandoned reason for violence.

  Nevertheless . . .

  There could only be advantage in being “one of them:” perhaps safety, perhaps information.

  Nevertheless . . .

  I, a savage? A barbarian? Even though I could not argue against the ship’s philosophy–No Truth, no Shame, no God to draw the line–I was ashamed.

  Chapter Twelve

  A Narrow Escape

  The Conch was a nice place –– three stars, perhaps; they even had a walk-around combo playing steel drums, bass and guitar –– and Daniel was just discovering that he liked calamari without encouragement from Brenda who didn’t. Tank went for the mahi mahi because it sounded sophisticated, the polar opposite of hamburger. Brenda ordered sea bass.

  “Pardon me,” said a waitress. “Would you be Mr. and Mrs. Christiansen?”

  Brenda was nearly insulted. “Whoa! I wouldn’t say that, girl.”

  “I’m, uh, Mr. Christiansen,” said Tank.

  The waitress spoke to Tank. “You have a phone call from someone named Lacey?”

  Brenda and Tank exchanged a look. Brenda checked her cell phone. It was turned on.

  “Uh . . . ” said Tank, checking his own cell, “sure . . . ”

  “The phone’s in the kitchen.”

  Brenda, Tank, and Daniel followed the waitress through the restaurant and into the kitchen where she handed them a cell phone and left them alone.

  Tank looked at the cell phone curiously. He put it to his ear. “Hello?”

  “Hello?” came a female voice. “This is Lacey. Is this Mr. Christiansen? Tank?” With the chefs and kitchen staff cooking and clattering, it was hard to hear.

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry to call you on another cell phone. I’m just afraid of hackers, you know?”

  “Uh, yeah. Okay.” Tank wanted to put the phone on speaker but he wasn’t familiar with this make and couldn’t figure out how. He held it just a little away from his ear so Brenda could lean close and listen. “Go ahead. Brenda’s here too.”

  “And Daniel?”

  “Yeah, he’s here.”

  “Please keep him close. I’m afraid for you.”

  Daniel was across the room, looking out the back window. Brenda signaled and said, “Daniel, get away from the window.”

  Daniel looked at her in alarm and pointed toward the street.

  Linked at the ears with the cell phone between, Brenda and Tank moved through the kitchen hubbub and toward the window.

  “Hello?” came Lacey’s voice. “You still there?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Tank as he and Brenda looked wherever Daniel was pointing. “Go ahead.”

  “I need to tell you that . . . ” Now there was traffic noise. They couldn’t make out what she said.

  “Uh, say again?”

  Daniel was pointing to a woman hurrying away from the restaurant with a cell phone to her ear.

  “I was saying that you could be in real danger. There’s a . . . ” More traffic noise, a loud truck.

  At that moment, an old truck passed right by the lady hurrying away. She glanced sideways.

  The waitress.

  “Lacey!” said Daniel.

  “Honey, that’s not Lacey!” said Brenda as if seeing an omen.

  “No,” Daniel insisted, pointing toward a side alley, “Lacey!”

  Tank and Brenda followed Daniel’s pointing finger down a side alley, and there, running frantically their direction, was Lacey –– not on a cell phone. She caught sight of them through the window and gestured with flailing arms, screaming something.

  “It looks like . . . get down, giddy up . . . “ said Tank.

  Suddenly a lady burst into the kitchen shouting, “Get out! Everybody out, NOW!”

  Daniel started tugging at them. “Get out!”

  Tank got the concept. “Get out!” he yelled.

  Brenda, Tank, Daniel, the kitchen staff, the lady, all got out, scattering, finding cover. Daniel tugged Brenda and Tank into the alley, around and behind a big dumpster. Lacey, huffing and puffing, piled in with them, shielding her head with her arms.

  The explosion was instant, deafening. They could feel it in the ground, in their guts. Bits of glass, wood, and masonry pinged and pummeled the alley walls. There were screams and shouts from up and down the street as debris rained down and after that, bedlam.

  * * *

  Scalarag ducked through the door to my small compartment with the evening meal on a tin plate. Though I’d been assigned to help prepare it, I was condemned to eat it in my quarters, my ankles in irons. The big man handed me the plate. I sat on my cot while he took the only chair. It seemed as if he might stay a while.

  “Bless me father, for I have sinned.”

  What? This brute, now penitent? Our altercation must have made a deeper impression than I thought. Even so, having disgraced myself once through violence, I wasn’t about to lie as well. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was a priest, but that was a long time ago.”

  “But you can still do the confession thin
g, can’t you?”

  He wasn’t kidding. I told him, “Confession is always good for the soul, my son. I’m sure we can work something out.”

  He clasped his hands as if praying and looked mostly at the wall. “It has been . . . oh, ten, fifteen years since my last confession.” Then he started confessing. It burst out of him. “My name isn’t Scalarag, it’s Tommy Bryce. I’m from Dubuque, Iowa, and I was a heavy equipment operator until I got in a fight and got fired and someone told me I ought to try out for the pirate show and so I ended up here. It started out being fun, all the pretending, the tourist show, the pirate ship. But you know, there’s something about being a pirate. I mean, you start believing it, and then . . . there’s just this wicked thing that happens.”

  “Like, for instance, an innocent tourist being locked in a cabin for reasons he doesn’t know?”

  Tommy nodded fervently. “Yeah, and ripping off the rich tourists. It’s gotten out of hand, and now there could even be a murder.”

  There is a God, I thought –– in jest, of course. “Ben?”

  “Ben Cardiff. Seemed like a nice guy. He and the Captain were like that, but they still didn’t trust each other. Cap could run the old satellite system, but then Ben did an upgrade to all the wireless internet stuff so he was the only one who knew how to run everything, all the Readers and Writers –– but I guess I shouldn’t say too much about that.”

  Oh, please do. “As you wish.”

  “But Ben had money problems and probably ended up being a traitor, trying to sell us out. He lit out Sunday night after our show, took all his stuff with him, and then . . . hey, if he made a deal with somebody it went south. They say Ben drowned, but the Cap saw Ben in the doc’s freezer and somebody beat him to a pulp and tore the Reader out of his ear.” He wagged his head. “It was bound to happen, that’s what I’m saying. On this ship, the spoils go to the crafty and every man makes up his own rules. And it’s a tough bunch. Rock used to be a drug dealer. Norwig got busted for armed robbery.”

  “So how does the Captain keep them all loyal?”

  “As long as the takings are sweet they play along, but they’re all looking for a better offer. Ben was, that’s what we think.” He leaned toward me. “Not that you and the Cap are friends, but I wouldn’t stand too close to him. You never know what might be coming his way.”

  “Good advice, my son,” I said, laying my hand upon his head.

  He waited, then finally asked, “You gonna give me some penance or something?”

  “Just tell God you’re sorry. And do what’s right.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lacey and Delilah

  Tank looked up and down the street. Folks were shaken, coated with dust, helping each other to their feet. A few were bleeding, but not seriously. No fatalities.

  Lacey tugged his arm. “You’ve got to get out of here!”

  “But people are hurt!”

  “They’ll live. You won’t, not if you stay here!”

  “But –”

  “Get out of here!”

  She tugged and urged Brenda, Tank, and Daniel until they ran headlong down the alley and didn’t stop running until they’d regrouped in the living room of a comfortable bungalow a few blocks inland. Lacey drew the shades, then cracked one aside to double-check the street.

  “What . . . what just happened?” Brenda asked, settling into a soft chair, holding Daniel close.

  “Somebody tried to kill you by planting a bomb in my mom’s restaurant,” said Lacey, finally sitting in another chair. “In the kitchen, to be exact. It was set to go off at 6:01, and it did.”

  Tank figured the sofa would be okay and sat, speechless.

  Brenda shuddered. “But . . . how did you . . . ?”

  “You ought to know,” said Lacey.

  The back door opened.

  “We’re in here, mom,” said Lacey.

  In came the lady from the restaurant, the one who burst into the kitchen and told everyone to get out. She was bedraggled and dusty, and carrying a shopping bag.

  “You okay?” asked Lacey.

  “I’m all right,” the lady answered, brushing a disturbed lock of hair from her face. “Everyone’s okay. The insurance rep will be by tomorrow.”

  “So what caused it?”

  The lady gave her head a cynical tilt. “They say it was a gas explosion.”

  “Oh, I’m sure!”

  “Purely accidental, just a leaky gas line and then a spark somewhere set it off. In a kitchen with flames and cooking going on everywhere, a spark set it off?” She sat on the other end of the sofa and looked Brenda, Tank, and Daniel up and down. “So just who are you people, anyway?”

  “Mom, this is Brenda, Daniel, and Tank. Brenda, Daniel, and Tank, this is my mom, Delilah.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Tank.

  Delilah still stared, even glared, at them. “So what was that movie line? ‘Of all the restaurants in all the towns in all the world, you had to come into mine’?”

  “Mom . . . ”

  “And into your store,” she said to her daughter. “So first it was your boss, and now it’s my restaurant. Why’d you send them to my place?”

  Lacey was mortified. “I didn’t think ––”

  “No, you didn’t.” Delilah reached into her shopping bag and pulled out a half-melted wall clock, it’s glass face shattered. The hands indicated 6:01. “So how’d you know there was a bomb set to go off at exactly 6:01?”

  Lacey pulled a scrap of paper from her shirt pocket –– the paper on which Brenda had scribbled her and Tank’s cell numbers. She turned it over to show Brenda’s sketch on the reverse side: the very same half-melted wall clock with the glass shattered and the hands indicating 6:01.

  Even Brenda was amazed. “I was just playing around with a Salvador Dali kind of thing.”

  “I grew up looking at that wall clock in the kitchen,” said Lacey. “And when I saw this I thought of what happened to Mr. Moore after you and your friends came into the store, and I called Mom. I was going to call you next, but time got really tight.”

  “So that waitress who said we had a call?” Tank asked.

  “Never seen her before,” said Delilah. “I was about to ask her what she was doing in my restaurant ––and in my kitchen–– but she ducked out, then Lacey called, then I put it together, and anyway . . . you saved my life and the lives of my staff–– after putting us all in danger by walking into the restaurant in the first place.”

  “Mom . . . ”

  “So one more time, just who are you people? And who is it that wants to kill you and the rest of us over a stupid earring?”

  Lacey explained to Brenda and Tank, “I didn’t sell your friend the earring, but I saw Mr. Moore sell it to her, and then, Monday morning, after the pirate guy was killed, two men came into the store asking Mr. Moore about it: if he’d picked it up off the beach and if he still had it ––”

  Delilah broke in, “Neville Moore used to go out with a metal detector and find things on the beach in front of the resorts: jewelry, money, anything valuable. Then he’d take it back to his shop and turn right around and sell it. All the merchants knew about it, so those two men could have found out real easy.”

  “Anyway,” Lacey continued, “that’s where the earring came from. Mr. Moore found it on the beach under a tree and brought it back to the shop and ended up selling it to your friend Andi.”

  “What did the men look like?” Brenda asked.

  “One was an older man, blond hair, dressed casual like a tourist. The other guy . . . ” She cringed. “Big Asian guy, like a villain from a James Bond movie. They asked Mr. Moore to show them where he found it, so he went with them to show them, and the next thing we knew, Mr. Moore had drowned . . . just like the pirate guy.”

  “Ben Cardiff,” said Tank.

  Delilah nodded. “Which means you’re in deep you-know-what.”

  Lacey explained, “Whoever those two men were, Mr. Moore told them
about your friend Andi and where she and the rest of you were going. They know about you, they’ve probably been following you.”

  “You were lucky this time,” said Delilah, “And I get a whole new kitchen if the insurance company pays up.”

  “But you don’t know who they are?” asked Brenda.

  Lacey exchanged a look with her mother and said, “Ever heard of The Gate?”

  Delilah cautioned, “Shhh!”

  Brenda and Tank could not conceal their shock. “We’ve, we’ve heard the term, yes,” said Brenda, quite the understatement.

  “Its the whisper around town,” Delilah said guardedly. “With all the offshore banking that goes on here, a lot of money goes through this place, and a lot of dirty money too, and a lot of shadowy people. But we don’t talk about it, do we, Lacey? We mind our own business and make our livings and stay out of the way.”

  “Well, we tried to,” she admitted.

  “Until you people stumbled in and stirred everything up. Guess it had to happen, though. Nobody here’s got the guts to stand up to the . . . ” She whispered it. “The Gate.” Then she added at a cautious volume, “Whoever they are. Everybody’s either bought or scared.”

  “But that’s why maybe we should tell you—” Lacey hesitated.

  “Say it, daughter.” She nodded toward Brenda, Tank, and Daniel. “You never know, they might be here for a reason. Maybe they’re the only ones who can break this thing open. Maybe God sent them.”

  “Wow,” said Tank. “Cool!” Then Brenda gave him a corrective stare. “Sort of.”

  Lacey leaned forward. “A strange little man came into the shop with his wife about a month ago. He looked at jewelry, he looked at watches, he looked at scarves, he just looked at everything, and he liked some of it, he didn’t like some of it, he talked about the colors and the styles of things. But the funny thing was, he was blind.”

  “He did the same thing at the Conch,” said Delilah. “He saw the menu, looked at the choices, could read right off it without looking at it.”

  “Turns out it was his wife. She was doing all the looking and reading, and somehow he could see everything she was seeing. She’d look at a scarf and he’d comment on the size and the color. She’d look at a watch and he’d talk about the features he liked as if he could see it. It was like he was seeing through her eyes.”