The Gift of the Dragon

by Michael Murray

  The man leaned in closer. “And here is something else. You must have noticed I used my friend’s first name. Well, my name is Michel Thorn.”

  Jacob felt sick. He recognized the name. Thorn would not have said it aloud unless he planned to kill them. All of them.

  “Right, I see you get what my pol-lite-ness means. You can die easy, or you can die hard. You can go before your sister, or you can go after watching her and her little girl expire.”

  Thorn straightened up and pointed back to his men. “Now, Alan Marsdale there is a Brit and rather civilized. But not as civilized as Almaribe. He’s a freaking poof when it comes to babes getting hurt. So we sent him down the beach to check on our boat. Pigpen, however, is German. KSK. He liked to watch small things suffer when he was a kid, and then they trained him to really enjoy it. What happens next is up to you.”

  “What do you want?”

  Thorn pounded the table, rocking the solid wood. “Satisfaction. You came here with a girl. A skinny thing. She was dark-haired, but she got a dye job. Looks better as a blonde. Hell, most women do.” Thorn leaned over the table, some spittle flying out of his mouth as he roared, “Taking her was a big fucking mistake! Guzman was supposed to deliver her to me!”

  He leaned in, glaring into Jacob’s eyes.

  The man with the smartphone moved in, saying, “Look, Jacob, you signed your death warrant when you got in Thorn’s way. Now, tell us where she is, and we can get this over with. The Guvnor here, he means it when he says women and children first, you understand?”

  At that, Nanette screamed, “Jacob, Anna! Why the hell did you come here! You said you couldn’t be followed!” She dissolved into sobbing. Anna stared at Jacob like a trapped animal giving up, her silence hurting more than Nanette’s screams.

  Thorn walked over behind Nanette, grasping her chair and turning it to face Jacob.

  “Look at her, moron.” Thorn pulled out his black stick. Jacob recognized it now as a form of Taser mashed up with a metal club. Thorn jabbed it into Nanette’s back. Her angry look at Jacob dissolved into fear as she felt it. Thorn leaned over her, staring intently into Jacob’s eyes.

  “See how she looks now. She’s got an idea what this is going to feel like. Come on, Jacob, this is your big sister. Stop faking jacks, and tell me where little Miss Sangerman is. Have some mercy on your sis, lil bro.”

  “Up yours,” Jacob said.

  Thorn grinned, and Nanette screamed, went rigid, and then went limp. Jacob noted that Marsdale looked pained while the thin one called Pigpen grinned, looking excited.

  “Mom!” Anna jerked in her chair, shrieking.

  Thorn turned to her.

  “Ah, the rug rat speaks. Well, now, she hasn’t felt the sweet tase yet. What you say, Jacob? Tell me where Alice is, and the little girl can meet her maker without the joy of feeling fifty thousand volts on her way.”

  Seeing the look of fear in Anna’s eyes, Jacob said, “Look, man, we don’t have any idea where Alice is. We all went to bed. She was going to bed too. If Alice isn’t in the goddamn house, then she is outside somewhere.”

  Thorn’s dark eyes went black. His hand a blur, he struck Nanette’s hanging head a vicious blow with the black metal zap stick, making a wet, smacking sound. Her chair fell over.

  With his other hand, he pulled Anna up almost off the floor by her hair as she screamed in terror.

  “Enough bullshit! If you don’t know where she is, you are all dead weight! And I mean fucking dead!”

  He pulled his silenced gun out of his belt then and fired several shots into Nanette’s motionless body. Blood pooled on the wooden floor.

  Jacob felt his brain shut down as a red rage burned through him. He strained at his bonds, but they did not give way. Getting his feet under the chair he tried to rise up and charge Thorn, but strong hands were behind him as Marsdale held him down. Anna hung her head, her body trembling with silent sobs.

  Calmer now, as if murder relaxed him, Thorn looked at Jacob. “Now, that is what will happen first to this one,” jerking his gun toward Anna, “and then you if you don’t tell me where that Sangerman bitch is, now.”

  Michel

  A screen door slammed. Thorn motioned for Siegert to check it out.

  Siegert went around the staircase in the center of the Key West–style house, into the grand room.

  “That you, Almaribe?” Thorn shouted, “What took you so long, mate? Stop for some shrimp?”

  He saw a figure coming through the doorway. The figure grunted.

  Siegert turned back to where Marsdale and Thorn were watching him, shrugging.

  “Hah, the little roo-fucker still can’t talk after what sleeping beauty did to his throat…” Thorn stopped and stared at the point of Sanchez’s long, black knife sticking out of Siegert’s chest.

  Thorn realized the body now rolling forward dressed in the black uniform of his team was a woman. Alice Sangerman! She sprang over Siegert’s falling body but stopped as Thorn pointed his gun at Anna.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Thorn saw Castellan hurl himself backward, taking Marsdale by surprise. The old wooden chair that held Castellan made a cracking sound as it shattered into kindling on the floor.

  Startled, Thorn glared at the struggling pile of Jacob and Marsdale, pulling his trigger. Suddenly, a something heavy struck Thorn in his broad back, spoiling his aim. He saw a silenced pistol clatter to the floor between his feet. He realized that Sangerman had thrown her gun at him. Maybe she didn’t trust her aim!

  He saw his bullet take Anna in her stomach instead of the center of her chest, knocking her backward with a scream. Then Alice struck at Thorn with a Peacemaker she must have taken, but he managed to block it with his own. With his left hand, Thorn grabbed her hair and spun Alice around. He tried to bring the business end of his own Peacemaker up to jab Alice in the throat. She managed to block this, turning inside his encircling arms and smashing him in the jaw with her elbow.

  Thorn staggered back, amazed at the speed of the woman. Alice lunged forward and struck him in his groin with the Peacemaker’s business end, adding its fifty thousand volts to the force of her blow. Thorn flew backward, landing on his head, and for him the room went dark.

  Alice

  Alice raced round the table to where Jacob and Marsdale lay locked together, hands around each other’s throats. She struck at Marsdale with her foot, kicking him hard in the side of the head. Marsdale went limp. Jacob kept squeezing, his eyes wild.

  “Jacob! Leave him.” Alice yelled. “We’ve to get out of here. There may be more of them coming.”

  Jacob gave Marsdale one final shake and then rose.

  “Right, we need to get moving. And find out who sent them.”

  Alice bent over Anna. Her eyes were still closed. Looking up at Jacob, tears streaming down her face, she said, “Anna is dying, Jacob. I can’t save her.” Taking a deep breath, Jacob knelt beside Alice and brushed Anna’s bloody bangs from her head. “We’ll call 911, get help on the way. An ambulance. They can help her.”

  “And Nanette?” Alice looked at her crumpled form.

  Jacob ran over to her and felt her neck.

  “She’s gone.” Jacob said. “Ah, Alice, what have I done! I got my sister killed. Nanette! All because I was so fucking sure that no one could follow me at night on the ocean. Now she’s gone, and for what? You?”

  He is on the verge of losing it, calm him down. Alice looked down and said softly. “I’m sorry, Jacob. I have no idea what I’m doing here, how it came to this. I can’t tell you there is any sense in any of this. We have to call for help for Anna, and then we have to get out of here. We need to either kill or secure these two and then go find out who sent them. If Anna lives, she will be safer when the one who sent these killers is dead.”

  Jacob put his face in his hands and breathed in deeply then. He looked up at Alice.

  “There’s been enough blood here tonight. Let's just secure these… things and leave them to the Monroe
County sheriff’s office. They should know how to deal with men who kill women and children.”

  He picked up the phone and then put it down. “No dial tone.” Jacob located Nanette’s cell and said, “This works. I’ll call 911.” As he spoke with the dispatcher, Alice pulled Sanchez’s knife out of the dead man, cut the plastic cuffs still binding Anna to the chair, and laid her gently down. The dishtowel below the sink looked reasonably clean, so she took it and tried to staunch the bleeding. She noticed her own hands were bleeding. Somewhere in the night, she had cut her finger. Deeply. Her blood mixed with Anna’s, dripping in her wounds, as Alice put the rag in the bullet hole and tied it on with Anna’s shirt. She kissed her and whispered, “Stay strong, Anna. You still have to show me how to catch a lobster. You promised.”

  She felt Jacob grip her shoulder. She looked up and saw that he had tied the two men head-to-foot with their own plasticuffs, securing the one man’s ankles to the other man’s throat. “That should hold them until the sheriff gets here.”

  Jacob bent over Anna, smoothing her hair. “I think she’ll make it. Now, we have to leave. If we get caught here, we’ll be stuck for days with the police while whoever sent these freaks puts together another kill team. We need to get to them first.”

  Alice nodded. “The car?”

  “Maybe.” He grabbed the keys to Nanette’s Malibu off the counter, and they went downstairs to the carport. The car leaned drunkenly in the moonlight, the driver’s side tires slashed.

  “I guess it’s back to the boat, then.” The moon ruled the cloudless sky as they raced down the dock.

  Alan

  Alan opened his eyes. He knew when to play dead, and as he heard the footfalls fade down the stairs, he knew it was time to stop. He moved a bit then, choking as the plastic bands tightened around his throat. He lay on his side, back-to-back with another body, with his neck bound to someone’s feet, and he felt his own feet must be bound to the other's neck.

  Trying to move his hands, he realized they were bound to the other man’s hands. He heard and felt the man moan and realized it was Thorn. The asshole is still alive! And I’m tied to him!

  He was glad to find his hands bound to his belt, palm out. The way they were tied, with his right hand he could just reach one of the two razor blades he kept in hidden slits in the thick leather. Catching the single-edged blade’s blunt top between his pinkie and his palm, he eased it out of the slit in the belt. With a flick of his fingertips, he tossed it up toward his head. It landed a bit in front of his mouth. Choking, he found he could move his head just enough to grab the blade between his lips.

  He cut them but got the sharp side facing outward, and by twisting his head, he could slash at the plastic zip ties binding his neck to Thorn’s feet. Thorn seemed to be waking then, starting to stir, not making Alan’s work easier. Little by little, with sweat dripping into his eyes, Alan sawed through the plastic. Then, straining against Thorn’s arm, Alan brought his right hand close enough to the blade in his teeth to cut that wrist free.

  Alan cut the rest of the plastic bonds and sat up, pins and needles flowing down his hands and feet as the blood returned. Thorn groaned and twitched, probably reacting to his own pinpoint pain in his half-awake state. Alan heard a different sound, from the girl lying in a pool of blood on the other side of the table. He looked around. What a mess. The mother’s dead body, the daughter in a bloody pile soon to join the mother. Siegert’s body crumpled in the hallway, also in a pool of blood.

  Northwin would go ballistic. He told them to minimize collateral damage and to avoid involving the authorities. Just then, Alan heard sirens. Well, so much for that. Sangerman or her boyfriend must have called them in. Alan searched himself for his own phone but found nothing. Not his gun, fake identification as Martin Probender, nothing. They needed to get to the boat and send an alert that things had fallen apart. Northwin would call in a damage-control team. Very official-looking people flashing what looked like federal badges would arrive, clean up the evidence, and make up a story. Maybe Siegert would turn out to be a crazed drug addict seeking prescription pills. He went over to Johan’s body, lying in a sea of blood. No pulse. Well, the clean-up team will take care of him, one way or the other.

  Alan hauled the still half-aware Thorn to his feet. Thorn immediately fell back down on his back.

  “Michel, we have to get to the boat now. Stop playing around and stand up.”

  At Alan’s tone, Thorn’s face switched from limp to angry. Alan knew he would be back soon. The best chance to keep Northwin from busting them down to privates and giving them latrine duty would be to catch Sangerman and Castellan and finish the job. Over the sirens, Alan heard the distant roar of an outboard starting up. Castellan’s boat! If he could get Thorn moving, they could get down to their own boat, and it was much faster than Castellan’s.

  Alan went to the sink, took a glass from the dish rack, and filled it with water. He turned back to where Thorn splayed on his back and tossed the water in his face.

  “Michel, come on mate, we need to get up now.”

  Sputtering, Michel Thorn opened his eyes.

  “What… fuck, what happened?”

  “Alice Sangerman kicked ten bells out of you.”

  “Ten… Alan, quit that British shit.”

  Shaking his head, Thorn tried to get up. Again he fell back down.

  “Come on now, Michel. Let me help you. They’re getting away.”

  The outboard sound got louder outside. “Northwin will break our asses!”

  “My thoughts precisely, Michel.” Alan put his shoulder under Thorn, lifting him yet again. After Thorn went a few steps, he walked on his own. Then he ran. As they raced down the dock, in the bright moonlight they saw Castellan’s twin-hulled boat moving away, one engine up out of the water.

  Reaching the end of the dock, Thorn stopped, gasping. “Sanchez was supposed to disable that thing!”

  “Something must’ve stopped him before he could finish. It looks as though he got one motor.”

  They saw the dark shape of their SeaCraft anchored a hundred feet or so from the dock. With a glance at each other, they both kicked off their shoes and leaped in. They reached the stern of the SeaCraft at about the same time and swarmed up the transom. Thorn said, “Anchor!” while he clawed under the console for the spare key.

  With the razor blade still in his hand, Alan cut the stern anchor line and then ran forward and cut the one at the bow. The twin engines roared as Thorn brought them to life. They could see Castellan’s boat actually planing on one straining motor, but it couldn’t have been going more than twenty miles per hour. Alan grappled with the zipper on his duffel as Thorn activated the radar and the spotlight and then opened up the throttles, and the SeaCraft sprang out of the water, getting up to full speed in less than half a minute.

  Castellan headed a bit north of east, around a small island. Alan raised his carbine and took a few shots. A south wind had picked up, and the SeaCraft bounced hard off the chop of the Bow Channel between Sugarloaf and Cudjoe Key. Even with the bright moonlight and the carbine’s good night scope, the boat’s motion proved too much for accurate fire. Alan stopped shooting when he almost put a shot through the front of his own boat. They needed to get closer before he would have a chance of a good hit on the fleeing catamaran.

  He looked back to see Thorn shouting and pointing at the coffin box, a large cooler in the center of the boat for storing fish. They had put a second RPG in there. Alan stumbled back to the box and hauled it open. He took out the RPG and, fighting the gale-force wind created by the speeding boat, lurched forward. I don’t have to be all that accurate with this! As he pointed the RPG out over the SeaCraft’s bow, he could see they were rapidly gaining on Castellan.

  As he tried to aim in the bright moonlight, Alan saw Castellan’s remaining engine throwing more water into the air than it had been before. Hoping that his quarry was having some problem that would slow them further, Alan tried to steady the RPG
for a shot. Then he saw white shapes under the water all around them.

  “Coral heads!” He threw himself backward, screaming a warning just as the SeaCraft seemed to slam into a wall. Alan bounced off the bow of the boat and felt himself flipping upward, seeing Thorn flying over the steering wheel into the boat’s windscreen, which shattered. As if he were flying in slow motion, several scenes of Thorn flashed before Alan. First, Thorn’s torso flew through the windscreen, and then his head burst like a melon on the steel tube that supported the leading edge of the boat’s hardtop. Just as he hit the water, Alan saw Thorn’s body, blood streaming from his head, land spread eagle on top of the coffin box as the sinking boat’s bow reared up. Then everything went black.

  Alice

  Alice looked back at the onrushing boat, tears coming to her eyes as she recalled Anna naming it Lost Sailor, its white upper deck and top glowing in the light of the big fall moon. When they had made it to Lazy Lightning, she had hoped they would be able to escape cleanly and leave the murderers bound for the police to deal with. However, they had found that Sanchez had sliced deeply enough into the control harness of one of Jacob’s motors to prevent it from running. With Jacob cursing, they had managed to manhandle the dead motor to tilt it up out of the water.

  The one working motor howled at its maximum power now, but the boat couldn’t go very fast this way.

  “What are we going to do? They’ll catch us soon!”