Off the Chart

by James W. Hall

  “Is this a joke? What the hell do you want?”

  “More than you got,” Vic said.

  Then the yellow-haired woman who’d been talking to the captain edged up behind Markham and touched his back with her fingertips, prodding him.

  “That man killed the captain,” she said. “He stabbed him in the stomach. I think he’s dead, Andy. I think he’s dead.”

  The shrink looked at her, then turned back to Vic, squinting. He took a wary step his way.

  “Okay, let’s all lie down, why don’t we?” Vic said. “Doc and the rest of you old-timers. Make yourself comfortable. Choose a spot, spread out.”

  The old folks moved to obey, but Markham shouted no.

  “Stay where you are. No one’s ordering my guests around.”

  The white-haired woman swung her gaze back and forth across Vic and Marty, her lips quivering until finally she broke into a long belly laugh.

  Vic moved a step closer to her and her laughter sputtered to a stop, but her smile stayed wide. Big red lips trembling like she was holding back another guffaw. The woman wore a black low-cut gown with thin straps, a pound of diamonds around her neck, and strapless gold sandals. She had white fleshy arms, and sun freckles scattered over the tops of her deflated breasts. Her eyes wouldn’t hold still, moving from Vic to Andy Markham, back to Vic.

  “What’s so funny?” Vic said.

  “Oh, really, Andy, these aren’t nearly as good as the last ones. Those harem slaves, now they had me going, yes, they did. All those muscles and shaved chests and baby oil. But these are so scruffy. A little on the clichéd side.”

  “Clichéd?” Vic said.

  “Scarf, eye patches, knife in the teeth. Come now, that’s bad Errol Flynn.”

  Vic swung his pistols back to Markham.

  “But it’s true,” the blond one said. “I saw it. That man stabbed Captain Johnson in the belly. He’s dead. It’s true. I saw it happen.”

  “They’re actors, Charlotte,” the old lady said. “Andy does this now and then. It’s one of his little dramas to spice things up, get us in the proper mood. Only this time it’s all a little cartoonish.”

  “Cartoonish, huh?”

  Vic snorted at the old woman and aimed his pistol at the shrink.

  “So, Markham. I take it we interrupted one of your séances?”

  “Who are you?” The doctor stared at Vic, tipping his head to the side as if to find a better angle.

  “That’s what you do, isn’t it? You hypnotize these nimrods, take them on a magical mystery ride. That’s how you bought this boat? Scamming weak-minded idiots?”

  “It’s no swindle,” the old man said. He had a mane of dignified white hair and a red face and a blue ascot at his throat. A British banker dressed for dinner after a long day on safari. “Dr. Markham is world-renowned. He’s a marvelous guide into the world of past lives.”

  The shrink took another uncertain step forward.

  “Take them outside, Marty,” Vic said. “Start with the laughing lady.”

  “And do what?”

  Vic ripped off his eye patch and stuffed it in his pants pocket.

  “Buy her a ticket to her next life.”

  “Oh, this is ridiculous,” the old woman said. “This isn’t the least bit amusing, Andy. Do something. Stop this at once.”

  “Take her, Marty. Take her outside where she can laugh her head off. Show her what kind of cartoon this is.”

  Marty hesitated, so Vic went over to the old woman and pressed the muzzle of his Ruger to the side of her neck and jabbed. The woman stumbled forward and Vic jabbed again, harder this time, and she whimpered as she moved toward the cabin door. Markham shifted in her direction, but Vic waved his pistols at him and the air went out of him.

  “Andy? Andy? This isn’t right, Andy. This isn’t right at all.”

  The doctor licked his lips.

  “You want to see how it’s done, Marty? This is how it’s done.”

  Vic shoved the woman out the cabin door, pushed her onto the deck and over to the port side.

  “Watch, Marty. Maybe you’ll learn something.”

  Marty looked out of the cabin window and Vic pressed the pistol to the old lady’s head and fired. She slumped against the gunwale and Vic had to lift her up by her flabby waist to heave her over.

  He walked back inside.

  “Get the picture, Marty? What’d they fucking teach you in that country club prison, anyway? Ballroom dancing?”

  Marty stared silently at Vic.

  Vic swung around and aimed his pistol at the shrink.

  “Now where’s the girl?”

  The shrink blinked twice and tried a smile, which turned sickly on his lips. The other two looked at each other.

  “You won’t get away with this. You’ll be caught.”

  “Take another one, Marty,” Vic said. “Your turn.”

  “Who?”

  “Take Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.” Vic nodded at the guy in the ascot.

  Marty went over, grabbed the man’s right biceps, and yanked him around the table and out onto the deck. The old man tried to twist from Marty’s grip, but it was useless.

  Vic waited until out on the deck there was a sharp pop. No one said anything; they just stood there trying to breathe. Then Marty reappeared at the cabin door looking a little green.

  “I’ll say it one more time, Markham.” Vic jiggled the pistol at him. “Where’s the fucking girl?”

  Nine

  In his back bedroom, with his legs wedged beneath his ex-wife’s antique dressing table, Sugarman stared at the screen of his second-rate laptop computer while out in the Atlantic Ocean Janey held up a pair of binoculars to her Web camera. Showing the present she’d received from her soon-to-be stepfather, Andrew Prescott Markham.

  Janey wasn’t letting Sugarman say a word as she demonstrated all the cool stuff the binoculars could do.

  The antique table where he’d set up the computer was one of only three things Jeannie left behind when she departed after their marriage. That and a mirror whose frame she’d decorated with seashells she’d harvested from beaches around Florida early in their marriage, and an unwieldy mobile she’d constructed with tiny dried alligators attached to strands of yellow yarn.

  “It’s a ‘Zeiss Victor, eight by fifty-six S,’” Janey recited from the manual. “‘Waterproofed for submersion and dry-nitrogen purged to prevent fogging.’”

  “Wow,” Sugarman said. “That’s a mouthful.”

  Janey positioned the binoculars squarely in the camera’s eye. Sugarman glanced across the room at the hundred-dollar pair of binoculars he’d bought Janey for her birthday lying on the bed next to Jackie’s new MP3 player. Wrapping paper and Scotch tape lay beside them.

  With The Sibley Guide to Birds open beside him, it’d taken Sugar a couple of hours to draw fifteen different birds on Janey’s birthday card. Marbled godwit, frigate bird, roseate spoonbill, the palm warbler. A damn good job, if he did say so.

  “Cool present, huh? Lot better than that old pair I’ve been using.”

  “Yeah, they look very nice, sweetie. Nitrogen-purged is a good feature with all the humidity.”

  But he wasn’t sure his voice made it across the black gulf between them. Janey was celebrating her ninth birthday aboard Markham’s yacht. The laptop computer she was using had a satellite phone built into its base. Markham always had the latest high-tech gadgets so he could commune at any time and from any location with his addle-brained clients. Sugar and Janey were dialed into Markham’s server that hosted a warren of private chat rooms available twenty-four/seven for just such video chats. Clients talking to clients, or one of Markham’s flunkies spreading the gospel one-on-one with some rich chump.

  But tonight there must have been solar storms, because the image of Janey’s face was choppy, freezing, then jumping ahead a few seconds, and dense snow came and went, once or twice almost whiting out the image entirely. And the audio wasn’t cooperating, either
. For the last half hour Janey’s voice kept dropping into a lower register as if she were being possessed by evil spirits.

  Her sister, Jackie, had caught the flu the day before, and she and her mother had stayed home in Fort Lauderdale. But given the choice, Janey went along on the boat ride anyway. She liked boats a lot more than her twin did, and more than Jeannie, for that matter. Another area where Janey had inherited considerably more of Sugarman’s disposition than her mother’s.

  These computer chats were still uncomfortable for him. Sugar would much rather use an old-fashioned telephone, but the girls seemed energized by the Web cameras, and with only two weekend visits a month allowed by the divorce agreement, this way Sugar at least got a chance to see his daughters more often, even if it was on these flattened and grainy screens. Last fall when Jeannie floated the computer-visitation idea, Sugarman balked. He didn’t own a computer, and with his private security and investigation business floundering on the brink of bankruptcy, he certainly didn’t have the cash to buy one. Anyway, it all seemed wrong, too impersonal, too technical.

  But when Jeannie said, okay, forget it, if you don’t care enough about your own flesh and blood to learn how to use a simple computer, Sugarman caved. He had to max out his one credit card to buy the cheapest laptop he could find. Took lessons from a teenage geek in his neighborhood to get up and running, which set him back another hundred bucks he didn’t have. Not to mention what he had to pay for the DSL hookup, the monthly service fee. But after a dozen or so video chats he was getting used to the idea and was grateful to have the increased contact with his girls, even if it meant he’d be eating peanut butter sandwiches three times a day for the rest of his natural life.

  When Janey paused in the demonstration of the binoculars, Sugarman said, “So, sweetheart, you feeling okay? No sign of the flu?”

  “Dr. Andy said I’m too tough for the flu.”

  Some doctor, Sugar wanted to say. Doctor of hocus-pocus. Dr. Flimflam Man. Physician to affluent suckers. Just so happened that every single one of his rich clients used to be Cleopatra or Julius Caesar or Shakespeare. Not a single galley slave or field hand in the bunch. Markham wrote books, had a weekly cable TV show, took a few rich idiots on these cruises once a month so they could reincarnate his bank account. Jeannie had been cohabiting with Markham for over a year and still denied he was a charlatan.

  “So where are you all going tonight, sweetie?”

  “Into the ocean, Daddy. We’re on the yacht.”

  “Just out and back, or you headed up to Lauderdale?”

  Markham kept his yacht in a classy marina down in Islamorada. A long and inconvenient drive from his home in Lauderdale, which made Sugar wonder if it was Jeannie’s idea to store the boat there, a way to rub her ex-husband’s nose in her greatly improved status. Almost every weekend Markham and Jeannie were showboating around Sugarman’s backyard, the flashy couple with the pretty blond twins. Their pictures showing up regularly in the local paper’s social scene section.

  “Janey, can you hear me?”

  Janey’s reply was lost in the three seconds of static that blasted from the speaker. The screen went white, then came back.

  “You’re out kind of late,” Sugar said. “Thursday, a school night.”

  “It’s only nine o’clock, Daddy. And anyway, I’m skipping tomorrow. Mother said it was okay.”

  “She did, huh?”

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Janey said. “Dr. Andy is going to take us around the world. I get to miss school for a whole month.”

  That was news. Sugarman was fairly sure Jeannie had to get permission from him for something like that, but then again he hadn’t actually studied the divorce agreement like he should have, gotten out a magnifying glass and pored over the tiny print. Once or twice he’d tried, but his eyes always burned and clouded before he’d gotten more than a sentence or two.

  “Around the world? When is that supposed to happen?”

  She pressed the binoculars up to her eyes and peered into the Web camera.

  “I don’t know, sometime,” she said. “Around the whole world. Africa and Paris and all the nice places.”

  “Well, I don’t think you can get to Paris on that boat, sweetie.”

  “I know that, Daddy. Dr. Andy says we’ll take a private jet to Paris.”

  Sugarman sighed.

  She was toying with the binocular’s focus and didn’t seem to hear.

  “Janey, will you be back tonight? Because Daddy’s supposed to pick you up Saturday morning, day after tomorrow.”

  She lowered the binoculars and looked into the camera’s eye and smiled.

  “What’re we going to do? Can we go to the beach?”

  Jeannie refused to take the girls to the beach. She claimed to be worried that their skin would coarsen and permanent damage would be done. Sugarman knew it was more than that, but he’d never called her on it. It was too tender a subject. But the truth was, Jeannie was afraid if her daughters’ precious milky complexions turned a shade or two darker, people might notice they were of mixed race.

  Their grandfather, Sugarman’s old man, had been a hard-core Rastafarian from Kingston, Jamaica, complete with giant ganja cigars, dreadlocks and all. Lead singer for a reggae band in an Islamorada bar till the place was shut down by drug agents. Sugar’s mother, an ardent groupie of the band, was a statuesque Norwegian ice queen. They married a month after they met and divorced a month after Sugar was born. It was a weird and unsustainable marriage. And Sugar, their only child, tilted hard toward his mother’s looks, his skin the faintest mahogany, his facial features chiseled with her severe Nordic angles. It was ironic, really. His father had been so fiercely proud of his African heritage, flaunting it in nearly every way he could imagine, yet that blood he considered so noble had been thinned to pale froth in his only son.

  For her part, Jeannie was doggedly and proudly all-American, a Scotch-Irish princess who desperately wanted her daughters to pass for the same. Though she’d never said it straight out, Sugarman knew that even so much as a light tan on the two young girls terrified her. What lengths she was willing to go to keep them out of the Florida sun for the rest of their days were frightening to consider. Once during the divorce when Sugarman asked Jeannie why in the hell she married him in the first place, she said, “Because you were a football hero, honey. I was eighteen years old, in a swoon over the star running back.”

  On the computer screen Janey was paging through the binocular manual.

  “We can’t go to the beach, honey. We’re invited to Thorn’s house, remember? We’re going to catch some fish and grill them.”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot. Thorn’s house is better than the beach. A lot better.”

  “What kind of cake are you having for your party tonight?”

  “Chocolate,” Janey said. “You know these binoculars cost eleven hundred dollars, Daddy?”

  “Eleven hundred?”

  “Yeah. Dr. Andy showed me the receipt. Eleven hundred’s a lot, huh?”

  “Showed you the receipt,” Sugarman said quietly.

  Janey asked him to say again.

  “It’s the thought that counts,” Sugarman said. “Money isn’t the only way to measure things.”

  Then Janey jerked away from the camera and swung her gaze upward.

  “Janey?”

  She continued to stare up at the ceiling.

  “What is it, Janey?”

  With her face turned away, her words came to him as electronic garble.

  “Is something wrong?”

  She half-turned to the microphone.

  “Fireworks, I think.”

  Sugarman heard a faint pop of static, followed by another buzzing pulse as if the connection were flickering and about to break.

  “Daddy’s shooting firecrackers,” she said.

  “Daddy?” The word escaped Sugarman in an airless croak. It was the first time either of his girls had referred to Markham that way, and Sugarman felt his hear
t lurch and a thick fog of gloom rise inside his chest.

  Janey was still peering upward, leaning away from the Web cam, giving Sugar her right cheek in hazy profile. His computer had terrible depth of field. On the expensive models he could’ve counted the freckles on her nose and read an eye chart on the wall behind her. But with the piece-of-shit version he’d bought, if one of the girls moved two inches too close to the camera, his screen became a fluttery funhouse mirror. Put that together with all the garble from the satellite connection, it was a wonder he could see Janey at all.

  “Janey?”

  “They didn’t wait for me. They didn’t tell me they were starting.”

  “Well, maybe you should go,” Sugar said. “You don’t want to miss your own party.”

  But she didn’t reply. She swung around, putting her back to the camera, and her blond curls fluttered hard as if she were refusing some command. Sugarman leaned close to the screen, peering at the bright mist of electrons. He spoke her name.

  Then he heard her say a single word, “Daddy.”

  Sugarman was bent forward, inches from the screen, when Janey came briefly into view, her mouth drawn back into what might have been either a large smile or a grimace of alarm. A sphincter shut hard in Sugarman’s throat.

  In the next second another face pressed close beside his daughter’s and bent toward the video camera. The man’s features hovered on the edge of focus. Too blurry to determine much beyond the oblong shape of his face. All Sugar could make out for sure was a red bandanna tied over the man’s head and the glint of what looked like a large blade gripped in his teeth.

  He was cheek to cheek with Janey, with the point of the blade dangerously close to her flesh. Then through the fuzzy speaker came his daughter’s voice, a single girlish squeal that might have been either delight or terror. And then the two of them were gone.

  Ten

  “I’m still not used to it,” Alexandra said. “How quiet it gets. Nine o’clock, half the island’s in bed.”

  They were sitting outside on the upstairs porch looking out at the glossy black water. All the shoreline houses in either direction were dark, only a few dock lights burning. Lawton was asleep on his cot in the living room. On the floor beneath him, the puppy was stretched out, legs trembling, making small yips at some rival in his dream.