Water Memory: A Thriller (Sentro)

by Daniel Pyne

  The kidnapper’s eyes widened. He crouched to remove one of the bricks and split it open with a boning knife to examine the money. Different denominations, well traveled, hastily gathered from Brownsville sources.

  In Spanish, she asked him when he would set the hostage free.

  In Spanish, the small man said it would be soon.

  “That’s not good enough.”

  The small man shrugged, put the cash back in the duffel, zipped it closed, stood up.

  “I’ve kept my word. Now you. Make the call; let him go. Let me see you do it. For his mother’s sake.”

  The small man cocked his head to one side, as if considering not just what she said but who she even was. What she was. The hot wind howled around them, pulling at his loose shirt like a flag.

  She remembers him saying: “Why do they send a woman?”

  And that was when the helicopters, wise to the ransom exchange location by way of the surreptitious texts from their inside man, came thundering low over the hill from the channel side, feds and cops, breaking their promise and making it all go to hell.

  No no no no no—

  The little man screamed into the wind something ugly meant for Sentro, dropped the knife, yanked the duffel full of money off the beach, and started sprinting to his boat.

  Waving her arms angrily, pointlessly, at the advancing air cavalry, Sentro tried to convince the cops to divert and let this play out—

  Oh, don’t do this. You morons. WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!

  —but the choppers dipped noses and floated past her, and the leader banked sharply, twenty feet above the beach and water, tail pivoting, exposing a sharpshooter tethered and leaning out of the open door with his high-powered rifle aimed down at the Mexican, who was throwing the duffel of cash into the fishing skiff and trying to push it back into the surf.

  Sand and water eddied. The kidnapper stumbled, his feet slow in the sand, body torquing as he heaved the bag in the boat and fell against the gunwale. He pulled a gun of his own from a dingy waxed-cotton pouch in the boat as sniper bullets danced in the sand around his feet and punched through the hull, rendering the boat useless and ripping into the bag of cash.

  Doomed where he stood, the man waved his weapon like a crucifix warding off demons and didn’t return fire. Sentro remembers him just watching while the second chopper flew out over the surf and floated there, another sharpshooter centering the green bead of a laser sight on the Mexican’s chest as a voice drawled from a loudspeaker, telling him to throw his weapon onto the sand and get prone.

  Sentro had made it partway down to the boat and the man, shouting at him in English or Spanish; this she can’t remember: “Listen to me—listen to me—I can talk to them and—”

  Cornered, terrified, the small man then turned his gun on Sentro.

  “You were followed. You lied.”

  Here in the eye of the storm she felt only the small man’s unbearable sadness. The helicopter loudspeaker screamed distortion—PUT THE GUN DOWN! NOW!—and Sentro sidestepped and shuffled in an abbreviated arc, trying to position herself between the sharpshooters and the kidnapper, despite the gun still aimed at her head.

  She spoke, low, calm, quick: something about how they could still work this out, how the local cops had made a promise and they’d broken it, yes, but he still held all the cards because the important thing, what everyone still wanted, was that the boy got back with his family.

  “The important thing.”

  Yes. Save the child.

  Gesturing skyward: “They should have thought about that.”

  “Let me deal with them.”

  “You think everything is negotiable?”

  Sentro didn’t, and she watched in horror as the man then turned his weapon to his chest, heart high, and pulled the trigger. Negotiate this. The gun kicked, made the softest popping sound that got swallowed by the wind and the rotor wash, and she watched the kidnapper fall backward into the shallow water, dead.

  All hope of recovering the hostage had surely died with him.

  Bills loosed from the punctured duffel were sucked up in sandy paper twisters as the helicopters circled and looked to land. The loudspeaker kept asking a question Sentro didn’t answer and can’t recall.

  She sank to her knees in the sand, exhausted, furious, lost.

  The lead chopper touched down close, disgorging the Cameron County sheriff—what was his name? Full uniform, head shaved and sunburned, pony-keg belly and more politician than cop. He yelled at her as she dragged the Mexican kidnapper’s body from the surf and peeled away the bloody, waterlogged singlet, intending to rifle through the dead man’s pockets, but not before turning and barking back at the blowhard lawman that “you get the hostage back first; then you go after the fucking kidnappers.”

  “You learn that in girls’ gym?”

  “No, it’s common sense. Unless you’re up for reelection in some backwater sewer of ignorant redneck fools, I guess.”

  Emergency vehicles came screaming in over the dunes from the Park Road barrier, including a dusty Jeep Cherokee from which Falcone emerged, as the sheriff continued to bitch at Sentro, something about something something and how Cameron County could not abide every miscreant Mexican with cash flow issues snatching sacrificial lambs from its sovereign citizenry and something something something get away with it.

  In the dead man’s pants, Sentro found a cheap cell phone, waterlogged, bricked, and flipped it to Falcone, who popped the SIM card and confirmed that it was useless but that they might be able to pull the phone number and trace any movements of the cell over the previous few days, maybe find a pattern. She filled him in: two kidnappers; one must still be with the hostage and waiting for his partner’s call.

  Two shiftless Houston feds spilled from the second helicopter in their creased chinos and cross-trainers and joined them. What rock had they crawled out from under? Law enforcement was unanimous in the opinion that Sentro’s two-man theory was bullshit, but then her phone began to ring, and when she answered it, the voice she knew was soft and sardonic on the other end.

  “You give him the money?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. No, you didn’t.”

  The voice sounded hollowed out. The shore wind blew a flutter in her phone’s tiny speaker. She looked out and scanned the dune ridges. He’s watched us. Where is he?

  “Now is when you ask me where your client is.”

  Sentro acquiesced, heart sinking: “Where?”

  “The boy is in God’s hands. Like my brother.”

  “Your brother shot himself. His own hand,” Sentro told the caller. “I couldn’t stop him.”

  There was a long pause.

  “It’s an unforgiving world.”

  Sentro felt chilled. “You’re not a murderer.” Did she believe it?

  “Shit happens. God decides now.”

  Her eyes flutter open, glistening in a twilight darkness. She blinks away the haze of filmy mucus and tastes smoke and rust and her own stale blood and oil.

  Lying in an abstract of twisted steel and shredded fabric.

  A full moon above.

  The long, gentle roll of the sea, like a baby’s cradle.

  She doesn’t feel like moving yet; as if in time lapse, the moon travels a narrow slice of ink-black sky, neither day nor night, the moon huge and bright, slipping left to right, eclipsed by the sharp edge of a shipping container.

  She revels in the steady sound of her heartbeat.

  A gentle mist salts her face.

  It was their Jeep Cherokee that led the caravan of county patrol SUVs down a dusty dirt levee road along the Pilot Channel, pretty much the middle of nowhere. Headlights bled yellow in the dying day. Pulling over to the shoulder, Sentro leaped out before Falcone had fully stopped, and she scrambled down a shallow dry ditch and up the other side, to the edge of a rolling field, scanning it for any sign of life. Windmills on the ridge spun helpless arms, the low light silvering off them in fluttering sci-fi pulse
s.

  “This is the place,” she shouted back at the deputies and their chief and the search team spilling from the other arriving vehicles.

  They’d lost precious time on the Padre Island dunes trying to convince various bureaucratic telecom functionaries to provide Unger with the necessary tower feedback to generate a GPS map of greater Brownsville and Cameron County, with data points overlaid, so they could pinpoint where the dead kidnapper’s phone had traveled over the previous ten days.

  Chief Lewis had dismissed Sentro’s scheme out of hand. “This pooch was screwed out from start gate, with all your fancy spy-girl tomfoolery, dragging us all out to this here goddamn catastrofriggin’ circus.”

  Falcone and Sentro ignored him. Eventually, with the help of a black hat hacker who had recently dimed on some compatriots for federal sentencing leniency, Unger ginned them up a scatter of repeated locations that, at first blush, seemed to be without pattern—as if the kidnapper had simply driven around in random directions twenty-four seven, but the points kept evolving, converging, as Unger’s algorithm worked its magic, suggesting a single location, here, in the barren hills northeast of town, where the boy must be.

  Lewis trundled up out of the ditch behind Sentro while she took measure of a landscape they couldn’t possibly cover, even with all the town and county resources plus whatever additional volunteers could be quickly deputized for a grid search. Wheezing like a broken Hoover, the chief had brought along with him the Yoders, Beth and Dean, the middle-aged parents of the victim, six weeks of worry etched on their sunbaked faces. They stood on the other side of the ditch and overheard Falcone speculate aloud, as he hurried past them to join Sentro: “He’s buried the boy. We’ll never find him in time.”

  Beth cried out. Dean had to catch his wife to keep her from falling forward into the arroyo when, it seemed, her legs gave out from shock.

  Sentro had already thought about and discarded the idea of a buried boy. Not in the ground. What was it the kidnapper had told her on the beach? In God’s hands.

  Sentro started running.

  “Whoa, wait. Aubrey?”

  Not in the ground. Held high, above it.

  The chief barked, “Hey. HEY!”

  Falcone raced after her, over corduroy ridges of parched Texas bristle grass blown to stubble, and a blue darkness dropped on them. They crossed the wide barren field to a raised, rotting wooden water reservoir with abandoned, rusting train tracks still stretched half-grown over beneath it.

  Sentro started to climb the wooden ladder strung on one side. A rung snapped under her weight, and she went crashing down onto the hardpan. Falcone jumped over her and clambered up the broken ladder, hand over hand, so nimbly it seemed to Sentro like a magic trick.

  At the top of the tank, he pulled himself up and looked down inside and shouted back: “Here. He’s here.”

  A fourteen-year-old boy, deathly pale, bound hands and feet, was coiled, fetal, in his ashen underwear and a sweat-stained T-shirt, trembling from a fever. Coughing. By the time Sentro could renegotiate the broken ladder, Falcone had clambered in and picked the boy up in his arms. She flashed on her own children, safe at home with Dennis; how fragile a life was.

  “Hang in there, buddy,” she heard Falcone whisper to the boy. “Don’t go anywhere on me.”

  Sentro looked back from the water tower to the open field and saw cops outpacing the police chief and emergency personnel and, farther back, the Yoders, lagging, but clearly moving as fast as they could. A bright bleed of red and orange was all that remained of the day. Sentro sidled aside on the narrow ledge that circled the tank, testing her turned ankle and keeping a grip on the lip in case her feet found another feeble section. Cops took command of the ladder then, formed a chain over and into the tank, helped Falcone lift the boy, and brought him down to the tower’s base. Chief Lewis was waiting with the Yoders, who touched the boy and tearfully embraced him and praised Jesus while paramedics wrapped him in a silvery thermal blanket like a gift. Flashlight beams crisscrossed through gathering darkness, over the growing crowd of first responders at the water tank, and found Falcone helping Sentro gingerly limp back to their Jeep. Fire trucks and a four-wheel-drive ambulance and one brave, foolhardy local news rig that would be stuck for a week rumbled past them, bringing searchlights and cameras to bear on the happy ending to a breaking story.

  The Yoder boy died two weeks after his rescue.

  People did that—died. You could save them from one fate only to deliver them to another.

  The Yoder boy died after two weeks from an acute secondary infection resulting from his deeply devout parents’ dogged distrust of modern science, which meant all vaccines, including one for the tetanus that he’d been exposed to during his long ordeal. Nevertheless, a grieving Beth and Dean sued, settled, and bought a barrier island vacation triplex in Galveston, which would be later destroyed by Hurricane Harvey.

  For this they received FEMA funds, returned to Brownsville, and are active on social media condemning the deep state that conspired to take their son.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  As if reborn in the broken debris from the blown-up container, Sentro is heaved from the dusty twilight fields of Cameron County with a cold spasm of shock that makes her entire body jump. Her fingers claw at nothing; it takes what seems like forever just to sit up; dazed, she cannot track time. Her clothes are torn, her exposed flesh smeared greasy, black, and bloody.

  Did she dream she’d taken a cargo-ship cruise?

  No. Blinding colors bloom before her eyes. She blinks them away, and Dennis whispers to her: Now, baby. Now.

  It all comes back to her. The siege, the run, the brush with death. Her heart pounds, flops with fits and starts when she begins moving. She shivers hard, cooled by a breeze. Her breathing, though, is long, deep, relaxed. Listening for the sound of them coming for her. She wonders at the very faint bleat of a foghorn and assumes she’s imagining at least this.

  Either it’s night or her eyes are damaged.

  She feels around herself with palms and fingertips scraped raw. No longer feeling the big roll of open sea and puzzling why.

  Folding her stiff legs under and struggling to stand, she feels a searing pain cut behind her eyes and fights the urge to throw up. For a long time, she just stays upright, balances on the rubble underneath her, hearing mostly the shrill ringing in her ears but feeling the low-frequency rumble of a city.

  When she’s ready, she picks her way down a rutted slope of debris, sinks into the shadows until she feels the level pushback of decking, and gropes forward, arms out, reaching to find the two sides of a container gap and guide herself through. Cool breeze off open water pulls her to the perimeter of the ship.

  A dreamlike scrim of lights confronts her, confounds her, and then arranges itself into what Sentro takes for a harbor town curled in a natural cove of glassy black water in which the Jeddah has been moored.

  The bay’s surface shimmers with civilization’s reflection, making it difficult for Sentro to discern where the town begins and the water ends. There’s a worrisome tilt to this world that she first ascribes to her compromised perception, then realizes is the deck itself. The odd looming shadow of containers knocked out of alignment angles out, bent over the starboard side, midship, causing the boat to list.

  In the harbor’s elbow, the few modest modern buildings are jammed in the chaos of squat colonial structures lining narrow streets draped with tea lights. Palms tremble like lunatics. A dimmer shantytown scatter of apartment buildings, bungalows, and tin-roofed shelters rambles halfway up steep hillsides thick with trees and brush.

  Here and there are flashing billboards in Spanish and French, with random letters unlit; neon signs flicker from the waterfront, where a broken-down Ferris wheel turns and trash fires flare.

  In the harbor is what looks to be a small graveyard of hostage ships, their hulking forms anchored together like dead leviathans. Floating, dark. Silent. Seemingly abandoned. Guarded on either
side by the distant rise of two dark rocky points.

  Another searing blade of pain takes its cut from her, temple to temple, and she doubles up and dry heaves over the railing. She listens for the movement of mercenaries on the decks.

  The accommodation tower that looms in front of her now is dark. Silent. Lifeless.

  The worrisome lean of the Jeddah’s containers, held fast for now by distorted cables and stays, moans with each bay wave’s pass under. Legs less quaky now, Sentro flows in and out of the shadows cast by the main deck supports, stopping every few yards to listen again. Distrustful of the oppressive quiet.

  Her tinnitus easing some, she begins to hear music, even stray voices, drifting across the water from the town. Laughter. The foghorn again. The flatulent rattle of an engine’s busted muffler.

  The fevered wind chills her again. Faint whiff of soil and sewage and the smoke of wood ovens.

  A clock tower tolls twice.

  Night birds. More smells: fish and diesel and the incendiary chemical hangover from the RPG meant to kill her, and for a moment she considers whether they have, in fact, succeeded and sent her to some other world, her own private purgatory.

  The door to the secure cabin yawns open. A single light bulb burns inside. No hostages. Sentro recognizes flip-flops in the corner but can’t remember who they belong to; she notes the crumbs of some dry biscuits the passengers and crew must have shared, thinking they were in for the duration. There’s no clue how the ship’s attackers got them to leave the security of the room.

  Killed? Kidnapped?

  Not pirates, she reminds herself. Something else.

  A pink hoodie plummets across her thoughts, uninvited.

  Do I scare you?

  Someone died; someone had no chance.

  Sentro steps back into the antechamber, where, shiny in the spilled light, thickening blood is splashed and smeared on the floor and walls. The funk of death lingers. Clarity usually sharpens for her in crisis mode, but the veil she’s felt cast over her since Cyprus remains. She can’t trust the instincts that are telling her she’s alone.