A Quarter for a Kiss

by Mindy Starns Clark

  Sure enough, we soon heard the low hum of an engine, much closer than before. We didn’t dare look out of the window, but we could see the search light bounce through onto an interior wall. Holding my breath, I prayed until the light passed.

  I had a feeling they were pointing the light at each of the anchored boats in turn. When I caught the sound of voices, I crawled to our “stash” and dug out the directional microphone. Flipping it on, I slid the headphones into place, pointed the microphone in the general direction of the two men, and prepared to listen as they argued.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t work. I needed a better line of sight to pick up sound. As quickly and quietly as possible, I slid open a window, poked the mike through, and then hovered in the shadows as I listened. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than nothing.

  “…sleeping here! What are you doing?” one of the men said.

  I couldn’t catch every word even with the mike, but it sounded as though a man had been awakened on his boat by the probing search light. I heard a different man’s voice explaining that a home had been broken into nearby, and whoever had done it had swum out from the beach.

  “Well, there’s nobody swimming out here. It’s a quiet night. Nothing’s going on.”

  I finally heard the sound of the little outboard motor revving up, and then the boat sped away. I put down the mike, crawled to Tom, and pulled off my hood.

  “I think they’re gone,” I whispered, my breath short, my heart still pounding.

  “Good,” he replied, his voice sounding weak. “Can you get my hood too?”

  I pulled it off for him, seeing his pale face against the fiberglass wall of the cabin.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, putting a hand to his cheek.

  “Not really,” he replied softly. “Callie, I’m bleeding.”

  Thirty

  “It wasn’t so bad at first,” he said. “But now it’s really starting to hurt.”

  Tom held out his hands, palms up, and I gasped.

  The skin looked as though it had been shredded off, in some places almost down to the tendons. Though he could flex all of his fingers, both hands were covered in blood. I looked down at the pile of towels I had used to dry the diving platform, and I realized that what I had thought was mud was actually dark red blood. The front of Tom’s wet suit was also covered with the sticky, slimy substance.

  “That’s why I thought we ought to get out of the water,” he added. “I didn’t want to, you know, draw things to us.”

  I shuddered, thinking of all the creatures his bleeding might have attracted. Though sharks weren’t usually a concern in the Caribbean, the scent of blood could reach far and wide, bringing all sorts of predators.

  Holding back tears, I told him to wait there while I found the boat’s first aid kit. We didn’t dare turn on any lights inside, but he needed attending to, fast.

  I fumbled around in the underseat storage cabinet and finally found the kit. I crawled back to him and zipped open the case, glad to see it was a complete one. While Tom explained what had happened, I pulled out the supplies we needed, setting them on the floor beside us.

  It was Tom’s rapid rappel down the cliff that had caused the damage. He’d had to move so quickly that he hadn’t had time to make the proper loops in the rope. Without gloves, sliding that fast on standard-issue hardware-store rope had cut into his hands, imbedding shards of the twine and tearing away flesh.

  I pulled a big plastic bowl from a low cabinet and had Tom hold his hands over it while I rinsed the wounds with Betadyne. He winced, sucking in air between his teeth, but he didn’t cry out.

  Once his hands had been cleaned, I took a chance on using a small penlight. I shined it on each hand, inspecting the damage. It wasn’t pretty.

  Holding the penlight with my teeth, I had Tom rest his hands on a pile of towels in my lap while I used tweezers to pull rope fibers from the wounds. He remained silent throughout. When I had taken out all the fibers I could see, I put Telfa pads against the mangled flesh and then wrapped up both hands thoroughly in gauze.

  “We need to get you to an emergency room,” I said.

  “There’s no rush,” he replied. “It’s not like they can give me stitches or anything. The cuts are too wide.”

  “True.”

  “And as bad as it looks, they really are just flesh wounds. I don’t think any tendons are involved. We can go in the morning, let them put me on antibiotics, give me a tetanus shot, whatever. Again, there’s no hurry. You need to do your job right now anyway.”

  “At least keep your hands above your heart,” I said. “That’ll slow the bleeding.”

  I told him to lie down right there on the floor, and then I put a pillow under his head and propped life jackets under each hand.

  “Callie, go ahead and do what you need to do,” he said. “You’re losing valuable time tending to me.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked, leaning over him.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Give me a kiss and get to work.”

  I kissed him hard on the mouth, and then I crawled to the forward cabin and brought out the listening station. I dragged it back out to the lightest part of the room, where the moonlight spilled in through the window and cast a soft glow on the carpet. Then I opened the small valise-type case, flipped on the power, started the digital recorder, and put on the headphones. If this didn’t work, everything he had just been through had been for naught.

  It took a while to zero in on the frequency. Tom said he had put the transmitter deep inside a thornbush quite close to the house.

  “I’m sure that’s when I set off the alarm,” he said now as I worked. “There wasn’t any brush to hide it in right there on the cliff point. I had to move within the range of their motion detectors.”

  At last I caught the sound I was looking for. I set the dials, adjusted the volume, and listened. Though there weren’t any voices, I could detect movement. It sounded as though someone was pacing along with the clickity-clack of dog nails against a tile floor. The sound was so clear, in fact, that I felt certain someone had already distributed the ant baits throughout the house.

  Leaning back against the seat, I smiled at Tom and gave him a thumbs-up. Closing my eyes, I thought of all we had gone through to reach this point—from planting the tiny transmitters in the bug traps at the grocery store to putting into place the larger transmitter that was now sending those signals out to us. If this didn’t work, nothing would.

  I tried to get comfortable, finally lying down next to Tom and putting my head on his pillow, flipping out the earphone so that he could hear too. The set had a speaker, but I didn’t want to be making any more noise than necessary. And though it would have been better to have my laptop open for taking notes, I didn’t want the light to be seen through the window. We could always play back the recording later and take notes then.

  Together we heard a woman’s voice, but it sounded as though she was talking to one of the dogs, making soothing sounds and trying to calm it and herself down. It was the same voice we had heard earlier, asking for her security guard to do a bug sweep.

  Now, she simply cooed and whispered to the dogs, telling them how much she loved them. Finally, we heard the sound of a door and then a man’s voice.

  “William!” she cried. “Who was it? Did you catch them?”

  “Earl’s still out on the skiff,” the man said in his Caribbean accent. “But so far he hasn’t found anyone.”

  More clicking made it sound as though all three dogs were now in the house.

  “Tell me again what you saw outside.”

  “Nothing much. Just a man running across the beach. Bob almost caught him, but the guy dove under the water and then he never came back up again.”

  “How can that be possible?”

  “Earl was shooting, so maybe the man got hit. Or, more likely, he was able to swim away. There are about six boats anchored around on the other side of the point. Earl went looking, bu
t they were all closed up for the night. Personally, I think there must’ve been some other craft tied up somewhere out a ways that we didn’t see, and he got away.”

  “What was he doing here? What did he want?”

  “I don’t know,” William said, his voice fading as he walked out of range. “I’ll look at the security camera loop and see if we got a picture of him.”

  We heard a door open and close, and I assumed William had gone to the security area. There was some rustling and other indistinguishable noise, but no one spoke again until the phone rang. The woman snapped it up instantly.

  “Where have you been?” she demanded. “We had a breach here!”

  She was silent for a moment, and I was reminded that there was a soft tap on her telephone. I wondered if the cops were listening to the conversation live, or if they only reviewed the taped replays—as they would with the tape we were making. I double-checked the recorder; it was rolling along smoothly.

  “No, I’m not alone,” the woman said. “William is here. Earl is out on the skiff.”

  There was a pause, and I wondered who was at the other end of that call. It wasn’t Earl or William, so that meant it had to be someone else, on the outside.

  “Fine, then fine. See you in the morning. But come first thing!”

  She slammed down the phone.

  There was more pacing, some exhaling, some finger snapping. Whatever this woman was up to, Tom’s appearance there setting off the security system had completely thrown her for a loop.

  We heard a door and then the voice of William again.

  “Okay, the cameras caught somebody, but I’m not sure how much good it’ll do us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s only in the frame for a second, kind of hovering near the laundry room. I don’t know what he’s doing, but as soon as the alarm goes off, he leaves.”

  “He leaves? Where does he go?”

  “Out of the frame. We don’t have cameras on the cliff. My best guess is that he climbed down.”

  “Climbed down the cliff?” she exclaimed. “That’s impossible.”

  “Maybe so,” William said, “but I don’t know how else to explain it. If you watch the loop, somebody else appears down on the beach just a minute later. So I guess there were two of them.”

  When the woman spoke again, it was in a whisper.

  “Are you sure they’re both gone? What if one is still here?”

  “We’re locked down, Mrs. Streep. There is no one on this property except for you and me and these dogs.”

  “Oh, William, I just don’t think I can take this anymore. Go man the cameras. I don’t want you taking your eyes off those screens for anything.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I whispered to Tom in the silence that followed.

  “You got down that cliff so fast, they think there were two of you.”

  “Yeah, but speed at what price?” he replied, waving his bandaged hands.

  I was just glad he was back here safe with me. I had planned the whole thing so carefully, but I hadn’t considered the possibility that they might use guns! Tom was fortunate to have gotten away from there with only the injuries to his hands. A shudder passed through me as I tried not to picture all that might have happened tonight.

  After mostly silence the dogs started barking about 15 minutes later, and then we could hear the woman’s voice again, this time speaking to a different man. From what we gathered, this was her husband, Earl, the one who had shot at the water and then taken out the skiff and nosed around our area here.

  “…full circle, several times. There’s nobody out there anywhere.”

  “What do you think happened?” she asked.

  “I found a piece of rope near the cliff. I think somebody climbed up, set off the alarm, and shot back down. I’m not sure if there were one or two, but whatever craft they used to escape in was mighty silent.”

  “How do you know they’re not still out there, lurking in the dark?”

  “We’re fully activated,” he said. “There are no breaches right now. I might go back out at first light, check out that little group of boats again. But I don’t expect to find anything.”

  Tom and I looked at each other and then at my watch. By my calculations, first light would be in about two hours.

  “Earl, sit down,” the woman said, and my ears perked up. There was something in her hushed tones that seemed significant. “Do you think it could’ve been Merveaux?”

  “Merveaux? Why would he come here like that? Sneaking around?”

  “Perhaps he doesn’t want to pay this time. Perhaps he wants simply to steal instead.”

  “Nonsense. He has always been easy enough to deal with before.”

  She was quiet for a moment.

  “I told him to watch for midnight,” she said finally, “but maybe he is in a hurry.”

  “It wasn’t him. Making it up that cliff? No, Merveaux is too old. Too fat.”

  “What about Interpol? I know they’ve been sniffing around.”

  “They’re listening in on the phones, Dianne, not climbing around the mountain.”

  The woman started crying.

  “Then it must be Rushkin,” she said. “Who else could it be?”

  “Shhh,” the man soothed. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

  “I knew he was coming. It’s like dominoes—Eli knocked the first one over and now they are tumbling down the line, whether he meant for it to happen or not. We have to finish this, Earl. There’s no longer any option. We’ve got the passports, we’ve got the code. It’s time to make our move.”

  “Not without the money from Merveaux. How quickly can you gather everyone?”

  “I put it in on Sunday, for Friday.”

  “Good. We will wait and meet, and then it’ll be done. We’ll be gone from here by Sunday.”

  She sniffled a bit, and then it sounded as if Earl began to comfort her in other ways. There was a lot of rustling and movement, and I had a feeling they had gone into another room—one that also had an ant trap with a bug in it. They sounded distant for a moment, and then close again. I thought I detected the sounds of kissing. I handed the headphones to Tom.

  “You keep an ear on things, would you? I’ve got to go back down and bring up the scuba gear. If he comes around in daylight, he just might spot the tanks under the boat.”

  “No,” Tom said, sitting up. “I’ll get them. I’m not hurt that bad.”

  “Don’t be silly. You’re still bleeding.”

  Dreading the dark water, I opened the cabin door and looked around at the windless night. The moon was gone, and though the stars were bright, there was something eerily still in the air.

  I crept to the diving platform and silently lowered the ladder. I was just climbing down when Tom came creeping across the deck as well.

  “You’ll need help with the tanks,” he whispered.

  “Wait here, at least,” I said.

  Then I climbed down the ladder into the water.

  For some reason, my heart was pounding. Taking a deep breath, I did a surface dive straight to the bottom. I found the weight belts first, lying heavily on the sand. I brought them all up at once, but without flippers, it wasn’t easy. Tom was waiting for me when I surfaced, both bandaged hands outstretched to take the belts from me.

  I hesitated and then handed them off, caught my breath again, and went back down, feeling the blackness of the water overtake me. It wouldn’t be hard to get disoriented down here. Concentrating mightily, I swam down to the spot where the belts had been and felt around until I touched a tank. I grabbed for the handle and got something slick instead.

  It moved.

  I screamed underwater, letting go and kicking off for the surface.

  Though I wouldn’t let myself make any noise when I surfaced, Tom could see the terror in my face.

  “What is it?” he whispered sharply.

  I clung to the ladder, heart racing, breath wheezing. />
  “It’s nothing,” I whispered. “I thought I had the tank, but I think it was a turtle. It swam away from me when I grabbed it!”

  Shaking, I clung to the ladder. I knew I needed to admit what was really bothering me here: Knowing Tom had been bleeding in the water, I was terrified that whatever he might have attracted was still around.

  “Callie, this is crazy,” he said. “Come on up. We can do this in the morning.”

  “The water’s too clear,” I whispered. “It’s too risky. I’m almost done.”

  Without waiting for his reply, I took a deep breath and went down to the bottom. Feeling around with my feet this time, I located one of the tanks and swam it up to the surface. He took it from me, and as quickly as I could I went back down for the next one. It was harder to find, but finally my big toe slammed into the side of it. I grabbed it, crouched on the sand, and pushed off with my legs as hard as I could.

  Relief filled me as I handed the tank to Tom and was able to climb quickly up the ladder.

  Once I was back on the boat, I carried the tanks into the cabin and then went back and dried the platform again. He pulled up and locked the ladder, and then we both went into the cabin and closed the door. By the time we changed his wet dressings to dry ones, I was overwhelmed with exhaustion.

  “It’s almost sunrise,” he said gently. “Why don’t you try and get some sleep?”

  I looked up at him, at his handsome face, and wanted nothing more than to wrap myself in his arms forever. I gave him a deep hug, pressing my face into his chest.

  “But you’re hurt,” I whispered. “You need rest more than I do.”

  “I’m still wired up,” he said. “I’ll listen now and take a nap later.”

  I was too tired to argue. I dug through the first aid kit and fished out some aspirin, handing them to him with a bottle of water. Then I pulled some clean, dry clothes from my overnight bag, intending to change in the tiny head.

  “Why don’t I go out so you can change in here?” he suggested thoughtfully.

  He stepped out the door and I peeled off my wet suit in the darkness, relishing the feel of a cool, dry T-shirt against my skin.