by Daniel Pyne
Hugging one dark corridor wall and creeping cautiously to the opposite exterior stairway, she clears sight lines out in both directions and then, with an overabundance of caution, for a long time just waits and listens to the kiss of water on the hull, the pop of loose rigging, the steely complaints from deep in the restive ship.
A new headache crawls up and away, behind her eyes. Her shoulder throbs, sending electric tendrils down her arm.
On G-deck the corridor is lit, and the doors of all the passenger cabins are thrown open, clothing and personal detritus strewed out from each across the carpet like the plunder it became. A disemboweled telescope has left a glitter of lens glass that sparkles like fallen stars.
Her suitcase, in her dark cabin, has been looted, the clothing and contents dumped on her bed. She kicks off the ruined running shoe and laces up high-top sneakers, then turns the soft bag inside out, rips the bottom lining, and finds what she concealed out of habit for contingencies: a dozen twenty-dollar bills, a debit card, a pocketknife, and a matchbook.
She can’t find her cell phone. Lord Jim lies open upside down against the wall, some of the pages creased, the cover ripped. For some reason she picks it up, and a sudden movement on the periphery of her vision spooks her; she whirls and finds herself facing a cut, battered, broken version of herself reflected in the mirror, lit cruelly from the hallway. The faucets still work, so Sentro takes a quick pass at cleanup, washing away the blood and grease and running wet hands through her frazzled hair in a futile try at taming it. Marginal improvement, and it makes her feel better, somehow. But a deep laceration on her forehead starts to bleed again. She searches the other cabins, finds in the pocket of a half-emptied suitcase a tiny travel sewing kit with needle and thread.
A candle she fashions from a bottle of perfume, using yarn for a wick; its soft light flickers off the bruised face staring back from her own fractured bathroom mirror as she sterilizes the needle and sews closed the gash along her hairline that won’t seem to stop bleeding. Nobody mentions, when they teach you to do this, how painful it will be; each stitch makes her eyes water, and she has to stifle a series of tiny screams.
She hears no human movement penetrate her tinnitus. Just the tug of the thread through her skin, the squeak of her high-tops on the bathroom floor, and slow water dripping in the shower.
She ties off the last suture and snaps the thread.
Dips her head to the washbasin and gently flushes the wound with warm water that makes it throb. When she looks at herself in the mirror again, there’s only a pink skim of liquid running down one side of her face, which she blots with a towel before she discovers with alarm the acne-scarred face of a young mercenary behind her.
He presses a handgun against her head.
The cold barrel chills her. It’s a Glock or a Bren. She’s never cared to learn the difference, since they’ll both do what’s required of them. Pidgin Portuguese, a threat mumbled. Shaking off a stab of panic, Sentro angles her head to stare into his eyes and sees uncertainty there that she can work with.
She lets her hands float up as if in helpless surrender and in a blur of practiced motion simply rope-a-dopes away from the barrel of the gun. The startled mercenary tugs the trigger. Closing her eyes to the flash from the muzzle, she smells it burn her hair; the vanity mirror explodes like a firework, but she’s already turning, ducking, and the flying glass finds the face of her startled assailant instead. He screams, Sentro’s rising forearm wedges under the man’s chin, and her legs plant and thrust and drive them both out of the bathroom into her cabin, where they crash to the floor. With the side of his gun, he manages a glancing blow above her ear. Fire spits from the muzzle again, harmlessly upward this time, and Sentro’s world splits, shimmers, tilts; a wave of vertigo overtakes her; she falls, rubber legged, away from him, digging into the pocket of her jeans as the mercenary pirate, screaming, face peppered with bloody cuts, looms over her, intending to shoot again, point-blank. But she deflects the barrel with the heel of one hand and with her other plunges deep into the side of his neck the sharp yellow bolt seal she found on the deck.
He goes rigid, arches his back, gasping, clawing at the bolt, eyes wide.
Don’t do it, Sentro wants to tell him.
But he does—pulls the bolt out—and from the gaping carotid puncture his blood sprays like one of the Rain Bird sprinklers in Sentro’s hopeless Baltimore backyard garden, which, every time she went away, Dennis would replant with fresh healthy things and then insist were the originals when she returned to find the garden blooming.
The man’s eyes roll back; he dies and collapses.
Sentro pushes away from him, struggles to get to her feet, spattered with blood again, but this time it’s not hers. Stumbling out of the cabin, she falls, still dizzy, but wills herself to crawl to the next cabin and roll inside before pushing the door closed. She senses and then hears a second mercenary come worrying into the G-deck hallway from the stairwell deck, alerted by the gunfire, calling for his friend.
She forgot to take the dead man’s gun.
More telescopes, cases, and broken equipment are strewed here. She recalls a large pale man and that this is his berth and belongings. Brad. Brian? She knows she should get to her feet, but the room keeps rotating like a teacup ride when she tries. A low, angry keening tells her the second mercenary has found his fallen friend bled out. She listens to his rage trundle into the corridor, where he kicks open the door to another cabin, hollow wood booming and the man yelling what she assumes are obscenities as he hunts for her.
She can hear his angry breathing rasp outside the door behind which she’s hiding. Her hand grasps the huge optical tube of a dismembered telescope, and when the door crashes inward, she raises it out and up and puts all her weight behind it. She jams the wide-aperture convex lens between the onrushing hired man’s eyes, pivots, redirects his momentum into the corridor wall, and crushes what’s left of his face.
The pirate drops to the floor and doesn’t move.
Are there more of them? She listens but doesn’t believe what she’s hearing, which is nothing again except for the aggravated ringing in her ears.
Steadying herself, Sentro finds a grimy .22 pistol the second mercenary has dropped and hurries out onto the stairwell landing to make her way down deck by deck, rattled because she’s fearful that everything in front of her—ship, water, sky—roils on a troubled sea of concussed misperception. And she can’t afford any more mistakes.
On the main deck she discovers the accommodation ladder has been lowered and the shore boat is gone. In its place, ghosted by the big freighter’s dark shadow but betrayed by a steady slap of water, is a battered, rusted, and overloaded Boston Whaler with a tiny outboard motor and a pair of oars.
The skiff sits low and stays stable when Sentro steps into it. She pulls back the tarp and discovers all kinds of pilfered items from the Jeddah: rope, tools, pots, pans, kitchen supplies, new boxed hair dryers, wine . . . compact LCD TVs. A pair of her own shoes. Jesper’s fancy binoculars. The crew’s PlayStation. A plastic sack filled with video games.
Somebody’s been pirating from the pirates.
Looking out across the water at the harbor town’s shoreline, Sentro estimates it’s not more than a quarter of a mile to the nearest quay. She senses motion above her and looks back up at the stern railing of the Jeddah, where the ladder is secured, reaching for the .22.
A small dark shape drops down on her, causing her to fumble the gun, lose her footing, and fall. The creature proceeds to hit her repeatedly with a cricket bat while shouting in a broken form of French.
Sentro curls fetal, catches the cricket bat under her good arm, and uses it to flip her tiny attacker down hard onto the deck of the whaler. She’s on top of him; her hands go by habit to the neck, thumbs against the larynx, squeezing, a filthy, raw-scab-pocked face revealed to her in the dim starlight: a boy.
A small, shirtless boy. Writhing, wheezing, thin. Blistered arms pounding uselessly
against Sentro, who is astonished by how young her attacker is and decides to let him go.
The boy gasps for air. His body looks boiled, covered with fresh, weeping scabs.
A voice not the boy’s cries out, “Zoala!”
Something crashes hard against the base of Sentro’s skull. She reels, feels consciousness slip away yet again, goes limp—the last thing she sees as she rolls to her back is a pretty, ebony-skinned teenage girl with rainbow orthodontia and a Hollister sweatshirt, gazing down with lovely, angry, liquid brown eyes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Il est vivant.”
Standing clear of the blackened blood soaked into the cabin carpet, Castor Z. considers with revulsion the sorry corpse of the hired man the American woman has mashed to death with a telescope. He was always a problem, this one: sloppy, overconfident. Castor is not all that surprised that the American, Aubrey Sentro, prevailed here, considering all the other carnage she’s left in her wake. She’s like some kind of wild animal they’ve set loose. A crouching smaller local hire in silky Laker shorts has a seemingly hopeful ear to the man’s chest.
As good as dead, though.
Castor has no visible reaction—or any remorse for hired men incapable of surviving a lucky, lucky woman—he just itches to find her nearby, dead. He steps over the body and winces when his damaged knee locks up; he limps out into the G-deck corridor and from there into the Swedes’ cabin, where, striped by sunlight, the unfortunate Portuguese has bled out, dispatched by Sentro’s fatal long bolt, still clutched in his bony fingers like a tube of ChapStick about to be applied.
Blood everywhere.
Mort.
Unsteady footprints that stagger out into the hallway. The bullet-shattered mirror in the bathroom. The upended sewing kit. Castor’s expression darkens.
To himself: “Still alive.” Meaning the American bitch. His mouth twitches. Thinks: Bloody useless.
A grind of gears draws him to the cabin window, where he looks out over the displaced containers at the small salvage crew working from an old yellow sheer leg crane cozied up against the side of the Jeddah. The rusty-red container with the cat logo swings free of its stack and rotates out over where it will settle on the deck of a ship-to-shore barge.
His brother’s death rubs raw. Castor’s never known a time without Pauly, and it’s difficult for him to process the finality of what has happened. He catches himself carrying on conversations with the twin in his head; he aches over how they could have celebrated their success and strategized their next move.
Rage turns to anguish; tears leak down his cheeks. He turns away from the window. Carlito has come in the cabin, and Castor catches him trying to pretend he didn’t see his boss crying.
The Caribbean harbor city of Porto Pequeno is, depending upon whom you ask, either an unmapped rumor nestled on stateless, disputed coastline between Venezuela and Guyana—or perhaps some other equatorial realm entirely. Isolated by a ring of sharp, arid mountains, tropical, fertile, rotting, and alive, once a provincial capital, now a crowded clutter of traditional Caribbean clapboard buildings interspersed with decaying midcentury moderns from a brief infusion of foreign investment. Crowded streets show the neglect of no government; Renaults, BMWs, Ferraris, Vespas, Brazilian Trollers, and Soviet-era Lada rust buckets rendered useless, in a state of constant gridlock, on narrow cobblestone streets.
Huaraches, pastel guayabera with a palm-frond pattern, a briefcase he found in the Jeddah crew quarters and brought with him, although it’s empty, to present himself as a serious man—Castor Zeme is all cleaned up and swankified, as Pauly would say, with his usual bling plus pilfered luxury-yacht Ray-Bans. He limps across an intersection, avoiding the swerving scooters, panhandling homeless, and a shopping cart costermonger selling plums and sooty lingerie that looks familiar, somehow. Past two strip club street hawkers, he eases up onto the steep stone steps of what, in Porto Pequeno, passes for chic patio dining overlooking the harbor.
It’s like he’s entered a parallel universe. In the Malabar House, all the skin is lighter, the sweat swaddled in aftershave and imported perfume. Paris fashion, continental Spanish and French, or cultivated public school English accents as mimosas circulate and iced oysters disappear.
A private club his brother had hoped they’d join when they made it big. Castor couldn’t give a shit. Dress it in silk, wrap it in gold—the world is a cold, unforgiving cesspool, and everyone gets fouled.
Pushing his sunglasses back up on his nose, Castor swings his sore leg around straight and slides into a chair opposite the plus-size Robbens, who’s wearing small, retro, square tinted wire-rims and a salmon-colored suit.
“How’s that breakfast, Masta Robbens?” Castor eyes the scramble Robbens is devouring. “People say the waffles here are to die for.”
“I could take that for any of several meanings. Coming from you.”
“How ’bout this one.” Castor lifts his briefcase up on the table, pops it open, and pulls out ship documents and the pile of passenger and crew passports from the Jeddah. “Singapore ownership, flag of the Bahamas. Tramp ship. Assorted cargo, bulk and container. Squint—you can see it out there. North of the tanker I’m guessing is one of yours.”
“We all wondered whose ship came in.” Robbens wipes his mouth with his napkin. “This is so unlike you.”
“How’s that?”
“Seems like just the other day, your brother was shooting his gun while drooling into my café con leche and trying to convince me to buy some pawnshop bling he’d robbed from corpses you fashioned and had no business looting afterward.”
Castor says nothing. The mention of Pauly makes his throat tighten. He takes the Ray-Bans off and puts them in his pocket. “I don’t appreciate how you disrespected him.”
“I mean”—the Dutchman is on a roll—“you boys’ve always been more of a slash-and-burn, scorched-earth kind of outfit; am I wrong? You’re limping.”
This insufferable asshole. Castor feels hot impatience. “I should bring my freight to somebody else, then?”
“Who? You’re radioactive. I told your brother. Those sundowners you slew were greatly loved.”
“By other rich gobshites. Got the message, yeah. Okay, fine. I’ll fuck off, then.” Castor turns to go, but Robbens tugs at his shirttail and fashions a grin.
“Not so fast. Sheesh. We’ll add big-ship high sea skullduggery to your long list of talents, then. Some kind of injury. Your knee?”
“We won’t talk about that.”
“And how is the mirror image?” Robbens has his smartphone out, and he’s working the tiny keyboard with agile thumbs while he chats. “Two d’s in Jeddah.”
“Yeah.” Castor adds, “Pauly’s fine. Thanks for asking.”
“Cargo?”
“It’s all in the papers. This and that. Boxes and bulk. I could give a rat’s ass.”
Reading an entry: “Soybeans?”
“Yeah.”
“You have passengers and crew?”
“Yes, and yes.” Anticipating the next question: “Safe and sound, don’t worry . . . but for the ladybit who had this unfortunate accident and, well, died.”
Robbens looks up at him. “Died.”
“Yeah.”
The Dutchman stares at Castor.
“Accident, I swear. Fucking tragic, it was. My condolences to the family.” Castor opens Fontaine Fox’s passport and turns it around. Robbens stares at her picture. His good humor gone.
“Pretty.”
“Hot. But bottom-feeder fare, I suspect, by now. Sea chum.” Castor smiles mirthlessly, saw toothed.
“That’s not remotely witty. Fatalities complicate things, Mr. Zeme. You know as well as anyone,” Robbens lectures, brittle.
“Like I said. Couldn’t be helped, yeah? You tell ’em I’ll give ’em a price break. My bad.”
“I’ll tell them bubkes until the transaction clears. But no one else gets hurt, understand? You want to work your mayhem on the leisure cla
ss, take your chances with their so-called friends, God be with you. But don’t screw this freighter insurance market up for the rest of us.”
“Or what?” Castor glares back darkly, fighting the urge to stab this fat white fuck in the eye with an oyster fork.
Robbens seems to get that he’s pushed too hard, and Castor watches him back down. Sits back in his chair with a look of, Let someone else deal with this when the time comes. And Castor thinks, Yeah, bring it. “Bad business, is all I’m pointing out,” Robbens says. “After such a bright turn of fortune.”
Fuck does that mean?
“Why risk it?” Robbens adds.
“Like we could have stopped it.”
“I wasn’t there.”
“What part of ‘accident’ do you not understand?”
“Oh, right. Accident.”
“Mm. Panicked, fell overboard. Women.” Castor wonders if Robbens has already snitched them out for the yacht job.
A website gathers on the screen of the Dutchman’s phone. “United Maritime Group is the underwriter. London. So. I just happen to know one of the partners.”
“Just?”
“They won’t be happy about the dead one but—”
“You said that. And you said they don’t have to know.”
“Let’s hope.”
“I’m not interested in dicking around, Mr. Robbens. All these mouths to feed and so forth. So.”
“You did this with your lost boys?”
Castor wants him to think so.
Robbens sorts through the other passports with an irritating self-importance. “The market right now is running about point eight to one point and a bit million US. Depending.”
“On what?”
“Well. When no one dies, for example.”
“’Kay. Fuck you. Give it a rest. And let’s not bid against ourselves, wot?” Castor wonders if Robbens negotiates for each individual or in bulk, but he doesn’t feel at liberty just yet to ask. “Let them make an offer. Who knows? I might just take it.”
