The Picture Kills (The Quintana Adventures)

by Ian Bull

  I like this girl more every minute.

  Now it’s time to hide him. I open Carl’s pack and pull out his survival bag. It’s really just a fireproof plastic bag with camouflage coloring which you crawl inside to keep from freezing or burning to death. I lay it out next to him, unzip it, and motion to Julia to come alongside.

  “When I push him on his side, slide this under him,” I whisper.

  I push on Carl’s hip and roll him on his side, and she slides it under him. I pull up on the edges and we zip him in. He’s still not hidden well enough. We can’t drag him, because that will leave a trail of crushed grass.

  I’m getting worried. That duct tape noise was loud enough to get people heading our way to investigate. There’s a slight breeze coming from behind us and my ears burn, expecting trouble.

  I take off my night vision goggles and hand them to her. “Put these on, find the morphine syringes, put them in his left hand, then roll up the first aid kit. Pull his backpack close and give him water and some goop, but not a lot. Then clean up so it looks like we weren’t here,” I whisper.

  I get up to leave and she grabs my arm. “Where are you going?”

  “I need to hide him better,” I explain, and sneak away.

  Fifty yards to the north I find three dry palm fronds that will work. With Carl zipped in his bag and with the palm fronds on top of him, someone will have to step right on him to know he’s there.

  I hear a voice and a crack under the breeze. Someone is coming closer. I carry the palm fronds back. Julia has already done everything I asked, and now she’s holding the hydration tube from the water pack so that Carl can sip water. Carl touches her hand as she strokes his forehead. Carl mutters something and she giggles.

  Even shot and bleeding, Carl still has life in him to flirt, thank God. Maybe he’ll make it, but he has to beat infection and shock and a lot of blood loss.

  I want to put fluid in his veins, but the voices are too close. I lean down and whisper.

  “People are coming. We have to go. Water and food are on your right, but don’t take much. We’ll be back in a few hours and I’ll do more for you then. You have four morphine syringes in your hand. You want one now?” I whisper.

  He nods.

  I put the night vision goggles back on and take one of the syringes, uncap it and hold it in my mouth while I straighten his arm and feel for his vein. I find it with my thumb and press until it bulges and feel the pulse throbbing. It’s thready and weak, which isn’t good. I take the syringe and angle the needle, and push it into what I hope is his vein. When I push the plunger, I know I hit it right because his eyes roll back in his head. He’s still awake, but his pain is fading.

  “Concentrate,” I say, and he nods.

  I put on my pack, then take Mary off the grass and slide her into the nylon scabbard attached to Carl’s pack. All I want is the 9mm on my hip and the one Julia’s holding. As we creep back, I brush at the bent grass with the palm fronds, like a hairdresser flicking up some flattened hair, and then gently cover him with them.

  We hear voices less than fifty yards away. “He’s got a bullet in him, he can’t have gone this far,” one voice says. “He’s closer to the Atlantic side.”

  “No, he’s here somewhere,” another says.

  “Then let’s come back in the morning after he’s bled to death,” the first says. “My skin is burning.”

  “That’s from the poison wood trees. I said not to touch them,” the other voice says.

  “I can’t stand it, I’m going back,” the first voice says, and he trudges past us through the underbrush, swearing. The other voice mutters and kicks at the grass.

  I take Carl’s handgun back from Julia and we creep away from Carl, still moving backwards. After fifty yards I stand taller and start running. I have my weapon in one hand, aimed down and in front, and I clear leaves from my face with the other.

  After another fifty yards I push hard on a branch, cracking it. I want to draw them away from Carl because I know once I get them on my path I can lose them.

  I run faster and Julia stays behind me. All she’s got is an Army hat on her head, a jacket over a black bikini and oversize men’s boat shoes, but she’s keeping up. Fear is a great motivator, but she’s got more than fear driving her. She wants to make it out of here and she’s depending on me.

  Now I have to find us our own hiding spot—but where?

  We come to a clearing. The half-moon is high enough to reflect off the white coral rock in front of me. Where am I? It looks familiar. We creep forward and I almost walk off a ledge. I’m at the blue hole, and I pull back just before falling in, but I kick a rock with my toe and it splashes in the water below.

  I grab Julia’s hand and we sprint on the coral around the rim to the other side of the hole. Then, from across the blue hole, a man breaks through the trees and aims his pistol. It’s the tall Latin guy from the patio scene this morning, the one I called the Thin Poker.

  “Stop!” he shouts and starts talking into his headset. “Encontre la puta,” he mutters, and steps forward, one step, two steps—until he reaches the edge of the hole and glances down and sees the water, just like I did.

  When his eyes are off me, my movement is automatic from deep in my muscle memory. I raise my gun and pull the trigger. I feel the kick and hear the blast as the bullet goes right through his chest and knocks him off his feet. He lands on his ass right on the lip of the coral rock and tries to sit up. His eyes widen in shock as he realizes something is terribly wrong—he grabs his chest, then falls forward and splashes in the water face first.

  I stare at him floating as Julia stifles a little cry. He’s the first man I’ve killed since Afghanistan, and the first man whose face I saw when I pulled the trigger.

  Voices come at us from three different directions. I put on the safety and slide Carl’s gun into a deep front pocket of my pants, then get down and grab the edge of the limestone rock and start climbing into the hole, but Julia is still standing there, either from shock or because she thinks I’ve lost it.

  “I know what I’m doing. Come on, this rock is like a ladder.”

  She gets to the edge and climbs down into the blue hole alongside me. The hole is almost a perfect fifty-foot circle of white rock that goes down twelve feet before blue water starts, which is still sloshing from the dead man’s splash. I ease into the lukewarm water and feel it soak my clothes. Julia comes beside me and we breaststroke slowly along the edge, staring at the rock until I find it—the lip where I saw the cave swallows hiding their nests. I duck my head under the water and come up under the rock lip, and emerge inside a small cave. I reach up with my hand and I feel that there’s some space with a ledge above me. I’m about to go back underwater again to get Julia, but she pops up right next to me and wastes no time grabbing at the rock and climbing onto the cave ledge. I dig the toes of my boot into the rock and find a purchase point and heave myself up out of the water.

  Julia helps me by pulling at the top of my heavy wet pack and I lurch onto the ledge beside her. I pull my feet up and scoot my butt back. The cave is almost pitch-black and I can feel the birds flapping around us.

  We hear voices close by. Light flashes on the surface in front of us, bouncing through the water and up against the rock walls. Fear forces our bodies together and we push farther back into the tiny cave until our shoulders are wedged against the rock wall. I feel Julia shivering as we hold our breath waiting for the men to finish staring at the dead body floating outside.

  Minutes pass.

  Their voices die down as they finally walk away.

  Chapter 40

  Julia Day 11: Sunday

  Steven stays as still as a rock for five minutes just listening, until I’m shivering so badly he has to do something. He finally pulls off his backpack and cracks open another chemical light stick like the ones the kids use at Halloween, which casts a weak green light inside the tiny cave. The cave is as big as the backseat of a small sedan, wit
h a low ceiling and barely enough room for the two of us to fit sitting down. The cave shrinks down and keeps going into the rock behind us, but you’d have to be the size of a gnome and crazy to want to crawl back there. Water must have carved all this a long time ago, and I’m sure there are creepy crawlies looking at us right now.

  But what creeps me out more is the dead man floating in the water just outside.

  Steven pulls out food rations, opens the plastic pouches and hands them to me. Each one is a slurry: meat, peas, rice, pudding and chocolate. It’s just fuel, but it’s amazing how much it restores me. He must see that I’m racing because he pulls the last pack from me and motions to drink water from his water pack.

  When we’re done, he wraps up the remains in a Ziploc bag and stuffs it away in his pack. Dinner is over. He then signals for me to take off the wet men’s jacket I have on, and he pulls out a dry T-shirt from yet another compartment. This guy is like Mary Poppins with that bag of his.

  The last thing he pulls out is his own little camouflage bag just like the one in which we hid his injured friend, and he motions for me to crawl inside with him. I hesitate, of course, which makes him sigh.

  “I once hugged a guy from my squad for three nights in the snow, and our body warmth is what kept us alive,” he says. “We both need to stop shivering, and to sleep.”

  We crawl in and lie down. We both barely fit on the tiny ledge. I wonder how we can do this without rolling into the water, but then he adjusts my arms and legs so we are entwined with each other in a pattern that holds us in one spot yet somehow doesn’t pinch any nerves in my limbs.

  “Did they teach you this in the Army?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer.

  “We both stink, but you get over that quick,” he says instead, then hugs me tight. It certainly isn’t romantic; it feels more like we’re two sweating wrestlers grappling.

  “What’s your friend’s name again?” I ask.

  “Carl.”

  “So you both came to help me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he going to die?”

  “He knows how to stay alive. We’ll check on him in a few hours.”

  “What about Trishelle?” I ask.

  “What about her?” he asks.

  “They have Trishelle—my girlfriend with the dark hair,” I add.

  He exhales, then pauses a long time before answering. “They want you, and as long as you’re out here, they won’t do anything to her.”

  I want to believe him, but the tone of his voice says he might not believe it himself.

  “Now sleep,” he says, and within moments he is out as if someone flicked a switch.

  I close my eyes and feel the rhythm of his chest rising and falling next to mine. The food and water in my stomach warms me and feeds energy to my empty legs, which feel like cold wood attached to my aching hip sockets.

  I’m wet, scared, sore, cut and bruised. The faces of the men we hurt, shot and killed tonight flash in front of me—but I also feel safer now than I have since the night of the movie premiere when this all began. I close my eyes.

  I wake up in his survival bag with his arms and legs still tangled around me and his face an inch away from mine. He’s still asleep. I feel damp and everything smells like seaweed and old gym socks. Except for one piece of rock digging into my hip, the ground is soft.

  How long has it been? I wonder. I’m surprised that I even slept at all. I know it’s morning because the sun has risen high enough for light to hit the water and send rippling beams into this grotto. It’s amazing how sunlight can get through any crack, even into a cave hidden underwater.

  The lip of rock that hides the cave is also higher out of the water like it moved up a half foot somehow, but that’s impossible. No, the water must have sunk. It’s got something to do with the tides—this blue pond must somehow attach to the sea.

  A bird with a little red head and tiny black beak flits above my head, disappearing out into the sunshine, then returns. That bird has no clue or care about what happened to me yesterday. While people are shooting and running and dying, life on this island keeps going on without a thought about us.

  I watch the bird disappear into a little hole in the cave wall. Is that her nest? I squint and see that the hole in which she disappeared is surrounded by dark mud. I then notice a dozen mud nests above me, and realize the gooey soft feeling under me is probably a thousand years of bird crap acting as a mattress. Nice. Even worse, it makes me realize how badly I need to pee.

  Then I feel something hard against my thigh. Is that his morning boner jammed up against me? It is, but he’s also fast asleep. It’s gross, but I know enough about male anatomy that it has more to do with a full bladder than him trying to nail me.

  I feel sorry for myself. I haven’t felt a man’s morning boner since…I can’t remember. You need a boyfriend who stays the night and wants to be pressed up against you in bed in the morning with the sun pouring in the window and both of you wrapped up in sheets. It leads to morning sex, cuddling, talking, showering together and going out for an anonymous breakfast with all the other couples in the world.

  It’s been years since any of that has happened.

  His eyelids start to flutter. He’s having a dream, and it’s not a good one. He moans with his mouth closed, like he’s trying to shout in his dream but he can’t be heard.

  His eyes open and we stare at each other. The guilty look on his face tells me he knows exactly what’s going on. He extricates himself from the survival bag faster than a man who wakes up next to the coyote-ugly bar pickup that he can’t remember from the night before.

  He burrows around in his Sergeant Mary Poppins backpack pretending to look for something. I sit up but keep my legs in the bag so I don’t have to sit in a cushion of bird poop like he’s doing right now. The ceiling is an inch above our heads, and we’re side-by-side. I feel a slight breeze on my back coming from the narrow black tunnel behind us, which means it leads to the surface somewhere, but the breeze smells like rotten seawater.

  “Hello, I’m Julia Travers,” I say and stick out my hand.

  “I’m Steven Quintana,” he answers, taking my hand and shaking it. “Nice to finally meet you.”

  “How’s your tooth?” I ask, pointing to where I kicked his face in.

  “You got me good,” he admits. “But I guess I deserved it.” He laughs to himself and then hands me an energy bar. I take a bite and chew. He bites into his own.

  “I’m guessing you weren’t always a paparazzo,” I say.

  “Carl and I were Army Rangers five years ago. We were part of a reconnaissance team that would go into war zones and locate and photograph bad guys. We then fed the information to the authorities so they could take action. Carl led the missions and I took the pictures.”

  “And I thought you were just a Hollywood scumbag,” I say.

  “I was, but I’m trying to make up for it.”

  I want to thank him, but I don’t. Not yet. I still don’t trust this guy, although he did an impressive job last night.

  “You know what? In five years of working in Hollywood, no one saw me taking their picture except you. And you saw me more than once, even recognized me,” he says.

  “I’m observant. I was that way as a kid, but now it’s part of my job. My acting coach calls it being ‘attuned.’ Sort of like a receiver.”

  He laughs and shakes his head, which makes me curious and pisses me off.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Carl and I use different words for the same thing. We call it S.A., or Situational Awareness. We say ‘antennae up’ instead of ‘attuned.’”

  “Does that mean I have what it takes to be an Army Ranger?” I ask.

  “Sure. You kick hard and run pretty fast,” he says. “I could never be an actor, though. I know that for sure.”

  “Why not?” I ask, expecting some insulting answer.

  “I’m not brave enough.”

  His answer surprises me. W
ho is this guy?

  He grimaces and rolls his right shoulder like he’s doing some kind of yoga move.

  “Sleep on it wrong?” I ask.

  “An old injury. It bugs me in the mornings,” he answers. Then he stares at me. I can tell he’s assessing me now. “How about you? Are you okay?” he asks.

  “I’m worried about Trishelle. And Carl.”

  “We’re leaving here soon to do something about them.”

  “Do you have a plan?” I ask.

  “Kind of,” he says. “But something else is bugging you. What is it?”

  He’s good at reading my angry suspicion despite me doing my best to hide it. “Why did you come? Did you work for Xander?” I ask.

  “Xander?” he asks. “You mean Constantinou?”

  “Yeah, him. The Slimeball,” I say.

  “No. I took the photos for the magazine spread about you ‘running away’ with him when you boarded his yacht in Miami. Later I realized it was a con to cover up you being kidnapped.”

  “And that bugged you enough to want to come and get me?” I ask.

  “Sometimes when I took my photos, innocent people got hurt or killed,” he says as he finishes his breakfast and then wipes his hands. “When I left the Army, I swore no photo of mine would ever get someone killed again.”

  Steven doesn’t look me in the eye when he says any of this; he just stares down at the water in front of him.

  “So now you just humiliate them.” I look at him, waiting for a response.

  He finally faces me, but he examines my face, my ears, my hair, my nose, as if he’s still assessing me—and then he finally looks me in the eyes. “If you want to knock out another tooth I’d understand. I was caught up in the past and I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing to people,” he says, then he points at me. “What I was doing to you. But I’m aware again—”

  “You’re attuned,” I interrupt.

  “Exactly. And I can’t fix every mistake I’ve made, but I’m fixing this one. Or I’ll die trying.”

  “Die?” I ask. “But you don’t even know me.”