“I need to go to the city,” she said.
The woman placed the boxes with the Kapanol and Hedex tabs and the change in shillings beside the mattress. “How do you go?” she said. “You don’t take matatu.”
“I can pay for a taxi.”
The woman shook her head. “You stay,” she said, and only after Munroe settled back did she stand and leave the room.
Left with silence and muddy thoughts that filled in for memories, Munroe placed a hand on the rags by the side of the bed; slashed and shredded, they’d once been her clothes. She had no recollection of how they’d come to be that way, no grasp of what had happened to the gang who’d set upon her. From outside the house the woman’s voice carried back with the tone of instruction, and when she returned she carried a steaming chipped ceramic bowl. She knelt and put the bowl in Munroe’s hands and said, “You need eat.”
The dish held broth with sparse chunks of vegetables floating about and some kind of meat or fat that Munroe didn’t recognize, all of it boiled, cooked well enough to be safe. She blew and sipped steadily while the woman watched with approval, and when Munroe had finished nearly half, the woman, satisfied, left her.
Munroe angled her legs off the mattress and her feet to the dirt. For the first time she truly saw the clothes she wore, an embarrassing getup of ill-fitting pants and a button-down shirt, most probably spare pieces from the men who’d brought her to the house. Even being clean, they were dirty and stank with body odor from overuse, the by-product of poverty, which made the kindness in the gesture of having put them on her all the more eloquent. She searched the pockets for the money she’d collected from the hotel room, all of which seemed still to be with her—the result of being a guest of the household rather than an employer or neighbor of it. The gun and ammunition were still in plastic beside the bed next to the fisherman’s knife.
Munroe made her way into the next room, a living area of sorts with mismatched furniture fitted so closely together there was barely room to stand. Every flat space was cluttered: a mixture of dishes, tattered books, a few towels and sheets, and a small TV with rabbit ears sandwiched between wooden cupboards with broken doors, as if all the family’s worldly possessions were stored here.
The woman wasn’t inside and so Munroe opened the front door, a solid piece of wood, overkill for what the rest of the place was built from, and stepped out into a wide yard, squinting against light that made her head hurt.
The house sat on a compound of sorts, the property hedged by lush greenery that opened onto what seemed to be the Mombasa–Malindi road. Chickens ran freely chasing bugs, and three goats were tethered to a stake off on the edge where the ground was still green and not barren and caked mud. There was another house to the right, with cinder-block walls and a tin roof—had to belong to someone better off than her host family. Smoke rose and twisted from a small lean-to built against the house, and because it had no door, Munroe could see the back of the woman as she squatted near an aluminum pot boiling over an earthen-pit fire.
The woman stood and turned, and noticing Munroe she smiled again. Put hands to hips and scoldingly said, “You go rest.”
“I will soon,” Munroe said, and perhaps because of the morphine, she smiled back. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Mary. And you name?”
“Michael.”
“Michael a boy name,” Mary said, waving a finger toward the overworn slacks as if contradicting her own statement. “You no boy.”
“Not a boy,” Munroe repeated. “But Michael is my name.”
Eyes still hurting, Munroe squinted toward the sky and gauged maybe another hour of daylight. She needed to get to the captain and discover what had become of him. “I have to go to Mombasa,” she said. “I have to get a friend from the hospital.”
“You friend sick?”
“Hurt. Like me. But he can’t stay at the hospital anymore. I need to bring him. I can pay you, like a hotel, if we can stay for a few days.”
“How you go get him?”
“Help me with the car,” she said. “I can pay.”
The woman smiled again, a rich flash of bright white teeth. “Maybe,” she said, and waved Munroe toward the house of wooden sticks. “You rest, I go ask.”
THE SKY WAS fully dark, the inside of the house even more so, when Mary returned, her arrival announced by the put-put rumble of an old car with muffler issues, probably the same car that they’d used to take her to the hotel.
Munroe was in the doorway when the car shuddered to a stop and Mary stepped from the passenger side, laughing and joking with the driver. He was younger than she, taller, thin in the same way that most men in the area seemed to be. “This Gabriel, my brother,” Mary said. “You know him. You remember?”
Munroe nodded.
“He take you Mombasa.”
Munroe paused for a moment at the combination of names. Gabriel and Mary. Had the parents had any idea how strange those names played out when paired as brother and sister? The world tilted at an odd angle, and Munroe wrote off playing a biblical name game as the drugs talking. She shook hands with Gabriel, and whatever he said entered her head through a funny slow-motion haze that left her feeling far happier than the situation warranted. She limped back to the room to collect the money and weapon and drugs on the off chance she wouldn’t return, left the few thousand shillings that had come as change for the prescription purchase; and with Mary already on the other side of the compound untethering the goats and talking to three of the children who’d returned home, Munroe eased into the passenger side of the car, and Gabriel shut her door.
The vehicle was a Toyota, spray-painted light blue, and twenty years old at the least, with bald tires, a missing window, and doors that had been dented and reshaped several times, one of them latched closed with wire. For a family at this end of the socioeconomic scale, the car was an incredible and costly luxury.
They crawled from the compound entrance to the highway, where buses, matatus, overladen trucks, and an array of cars from luxury vehicles to those decrepit like this one moved past, and Gabriel waited a long, long time for the road to clear. With emergency flashers going, he pulled out onto the highway. The vehicle gained speed slowly and only after he was up over thirty kilometers an hour did he turn off the flashers. The car never got much faster than that, but it was better than walking, and unlike many of the other cars on the so-called highway, the headlights worked, which limited the chance of hitting someone along the side of the road. Even if Munroe had had access to her own vehicle, she wouldn’t have driven it. Not in the condition she was in, not driving on the left-hand side, everything opposite, and where in a road accident, no matter the circumstances or who was at fault, the white one was always to blame.
Gabriel glanced at Munroe several times along the way, and finally, when she in her chemical daze offered nothing to fill the silence, he said, “You very lucky.”
She turned just enough to briefly catch his eye.
“I watch when they come,” he said. Both of his hands gripped the steering wheel and he focused on the windshield and the taillights of the truck belching black smoke in front of them. “Six men. Seven men. Eight men. Three dead now. Three. Four.”
Munroe tipped her head back against the cracked vinyl headrest. “I don’t remember anything,” she said.
Gabriel glanced at her again. “Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
He sighed, and after a weighty pause the story unfolded in halting, measured, and broken English, and with his words flashes of memory returned, and then imagined memories rose to re-create what she could never have known unless he’d told her; that she’d fought for the kill, to die killing, unwilling to go to the grave in brutality or alone, that she’d fought until overpowered and bludgeoned, beaten unconscious and dragged toward the ocean to die.
“They want kill you,” he said. “And then come light and shout from the houses, many askari from houses, maybe they hear and they come
and the men, they scared. They run away.” He paused. “You a very dangerous woman. I think you die,” he said. “Me and Johnny get the boat. We are Sami friend, we think you die and we carry you to the boat, but you live and you scream in you sleep. Bring you to my sister house. You have very much pain, but we have no money for doctor. Sorry.”
Munroe touched his shoulder, whispered, “Thank you for giving me help.”
He smiled. “Very welcome,” he said. “You think you be okay?”
“In a few days,” she said. “Do you know the people who did this?”
He shook his head.
“Do you know who killed Sami?”
He shook his head again. “Maybe same people who try kill you.”
“Do you know why?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But very bad for business, very bad. Nobody come to beach, nobody buy when trouble come.”
“You didn’t see them do it?”
“I find Sami after.”
“Thank you,” she said again. Took fifty dollars from her pocket and offered it to him. He looked up, surprised.
“No,” he said.
“For petrol,” she said. “For the car.”
He nodded and took the money.
CHAPTER 22
The hospital gates were closed when they arrived, and Gabriel honked the horn. An askari stepped from the pedestrian opening, scanned the car, acknowledged Munroe in the front seat, and opened to allow them entry. Gabriel waited in the car, and Munroe, grimy and hair still matted from the blood and the beating, eased out onto the pavement and walked barefoot through the front doors.
The receptionist did a double take and let out a small gasp.
“It’s bad?” Munroe said, and the woman nodded.
She hadn’t seen herself in a mirror. Could only imagine. “I’m here to collect John Doe,” she said. “Dr. Patel wanted him released.”
With her focus never leaving Munroe’s face, the woman picked up a phone and punched a number for the doctor. It took him a few minutes to arrive, and he, too, stopped short when he saw her. She said, “I got mugged.”
“I see,” he said. “Are you here for yourself or for your friend?”
“I’m here to get him.”
“Have you had any medical attention?”
She shook her head.
“Your friend is still resting,” he said, and studied her face, his eyes tracking from her jawline to her hairline, as if he wasn’t sure she was all there. “I want to look at you before I release him to you.”
Munroe didn’t argue; she followed him down the hall. The doctor opened a door, motioned her inward, and she inched up onto an exam table, went through his questions and prodding. He disinfected and stitched up the deepest of the lacerations that hugged the hairline at the back of her neck, and when he’d finished, he held up the needle and motioned to her body. “Do you have any others?”
“I think so,” she said, and with effort inched out of the shirt. The doctor stared at her torso and it was difficult to tell if he was more shocked by the scars or the realization that she was a woman. “You get in a lot of fights?” he said.
She glanced down. “Those are old.”
He didn’t say anything, just numbed and disinfected the wound that ran from the side of her rib cage down toward her hip, a gouge considered superficial but which hurt like hell. He counted out the stitches as he tied each one off. Stopped when he reached thirty-three.
He wanted X-rays, and she went along with the request; fell asleep on the exam table while he checked the prognosis. Woke to the door opening. Fuzzy and without much concept of passing time, she smiled at the news, which was about as she expected: concussion, two fractured ribs, and a whole body’s worth of bruising. “It could have been worse,” he said. “Are you taking pain medication?”
Munroe nodded.
“I thought so,” he said. “What are you on?”
“Kapanol and Hedex.”
He shook his head in disapproval. “The anti-inflammatory is good; the morphine is a problem. Do you know what you’re doing?”
She nodded, and he didn’t say more. Between the scars and her odd request to sedate the captain—and now the fighting and self-medicating—he probably figured that whatever she was mixed up in was something he should stay far, far away from. He stretched a hand to help her sit.
“Take a deep breath,” he said, and when she did, he wrapped tape around the upper portion of her torso and she winced. Even with the morphine, the pain was brutal. When he’d finished, he handed her the roll. “Keep it,” he said. “You need to unwrap for a bit every day to make sure you’re breathing deeply enough. The tape compresses the lungs, invites pneumonia.”
“I’ve had broken ribs before,” she said, and then she smiled, her way of apologizing for having bullied him into sedating the captain. “Thank you,” she said.
He smiled back. Apology accepted.
“They’re hairline fractures,” he said. “Should be easy compared to the broken ribs. I’ll write you a prescription for antibiotics.” Motioned a finger toward her abdomen. “You don’t want to take a chance with that.” When she smiled again, he offered his arm as leverage so she could inch off the table. “Your friend is starting to come around,” he said. “I think he’ll make a full recovery.”
Munroe nodded. That was good. As soon as the morphine was out of her system and she was back to being angry, she’d start asking the captain a lot of very pointed questions.
Munroe fell asleep in the lobby; woke when a nurse wheeled the captain in. He was back in his original clothes, which had, she was grateful, been laundered, and his facial hair had grown to the point that he had an aging, wild, crazy-man look to him. He sat slouched over, hands limp in his lap, and when the wheelchair turned to face her, his half-open eyes met hers and there was recognition on his face.
THEY TRAVELED OUT of Mombasa, routing around the city one wrong turn to the next while Munroe watched mirrors and traffic, until finally, convinced they’d not been followed, she asked Gabriel to take them home.
He didn’t question when she’d made the requests for misdirection, and asked no questions now as he headed for the Nyali Bridge. Having witnessed Sami’s death and then Munroe’s beating, he knew as well as Munroe did the risk of bringing the captain home—and, of course, there was always Hollywood. Movies were the only examples that most in Africa would ever see of average daily American life, and this fit right in.
Gabriel pulled the car from the highway onto the dirt shoulder, slowed to turn into his family’s compound, and Munroe asked him to switch off the engine and lights and wait awhile. Even medicated as she was, she could think clearly enough to see that there was little that the killers could have used to follow them to this hideaway: If they’d been able to trace her to the hospital and had found the captain, then they would simply have taken him, not laid a trap to find her—he was what they wanted, and as far as they knew, she was dead.
But being dependent on the kindness of others made the guilt burn inside. Her hosts were simple people who had done right by a stranger at their own inconvenience and expense with no expectation of anything in return, and all she could offer in exchange was the risk of bringing death and killing to their families.
Munroe checked the mirrors one last time and to Gabriel whispered, “We can go now.”
He started the engine again but didn’t turn on the lights; the car crept into the compound. Uncertainty tore at her. Painkillers made for poor choices, made for missing things that should be obvious. She watched the mirrors again, chasing phantoms. The car shuddered to a stop and Munroe waited in the passenger seat, eyes closed, head tipped back, while Gabriel went in search of his cousin. There was no sound or movement from the captain, and at some point she must have fallen asleep again, because she startled awake at the sound of laughter and conversation, and then Gabriel opened her door.
Johnny was with him, the other man who’d rescued her from the beach and gon
e with her to the hotel. He knelt to eye level. “Everything is good?” he said, and Munroe forced a weak smile for answer.
She watched and then followed inside the house as the cousins worked through the effort of hauling the captain’s dead weight from car to mattress, and when he was situated, Munroe gave Gabriel another fifty dollars and asked him to find rope. This far into the evening she didn’t expect he’d show up with anything new, so she wasn’t disappointed when he returned an hour later with a twenty-foot segment that, from the smell and texture, had to have once been part of a longer line used to keep a boat moored to the shore.
Munroe knelt by the bed and grasped the captain’s wrist, and his eyes snapped open. He had little strength to struggle as she wound between his hands a tight figure eight that he wouldn’t easily slip free from, and his eyes shut and he said not a word as she tied the rope tail around her own waist and strung it through her belt buckle.
The doctor had said it would be another twenty-four hours before the sedatives fully wore off. He was loopy now, and disoriented, and although eventually he might try to get free, he wouldn’t get far. Munroe eased down onto the bed. Swallowed another dosage of morphine, antibiotics, and another round of anti-inflammatories. With painkillers back in her system she lay on the mattress beside the captain, hand gripping the knife, trusting the instinct of the blade to keep her alive if for some reason he should touch her.
SHE WOKE TO a sun-shadowed room and to the captain’s face less than a foot from hers, staring at her. Munroe’s focus traveled from his eyes to the walls, and measuring the level of light penetrating in between the slats, she guessed at early afternoon. If only one night had passed, then she’d slept another fourteen hours give or take a few on either side.
With the captain still watching, Munroe struggled upright. Turned her back to him, took off the shirt, and unwound the tape from her chest. Breathed deeply and felt dizzy. Her focus turned toward the Kapanol beside the bed, tablets singing sweetly to her, calling out with more than one temptation, and with her focus resting on the box, she inched back into the shirt. It was a dangerous game, self-medicating for physical pain when numbing oblivion had once been her chosen method for muting the demons of the past.
The Catch: A Novel Page 16
