Water Memory: A Thriller (Sentro)

by Daniel Pyne

  Shouting at people to get out of his way.

  She goes with it for a while because it feels like a theme park ride, and her hair blown back cools her head and calms her jangly mind. But when they pop out onto a main thoroughfare and nearly get T-boned by a truck, Sentro reaches around to grab the handlebars and swerves them to safety in the proper lane.

  “Let go of the throttle,” she says, but Zoala either doesn’t understand her or could be willfully ignoring her. He points ahead, and sure enough, the Land Rover carrying the resurrected blonde woman and the fake-pirate twin is only half a block ahead of them, turning right onto another angled street.

  The scooter weaves between traffic, and Sentro bumps it up onto a sidewalk. Zoala waves for her to veer down a pedestrian walkway between buildings parallel with the Rover’s new direction, a passage so narrow the scooter’s handlebar brake levers scrape and spark against the walls on either side as they swerve through.

  Zoala’s bare foot pushes off walls and vendors’ handcarts, and locals are jumping into doorway niches to get out of their way, screaming as they pass.

  After bouncing up some stone steps, Sentro curls the Vespa around a couple of oil-drum grills; she can smell the bacon and sausage and peppers and, stabbed by hunger again, tries to remember when she last ate. The aroma is fleeting because they crest the climb and pop out into another narrow street, this time in a quieter residential area pooled with more honey-colored mercury-vapor lamps. The Rover is just up ahead, taillights flaring as it pulls under a brick arch and up the driveway of a massive tropical art deco apartment building.

  City police cars are parked out front. A couple of khaki-uniformed cops stand guard, smoking.

  The Vespa motors past the driveway, and Sentro watches as the blonde and Castor emerge from the Rover, still arguing, and go inside the building with the cops.

  She drives the bike farther, onto a dead-end side street, hops off, pulling the boy with her, and lets it bury itself in an overgrowth of stunted palms. Zoala twists free and looks like he’s about to yell at her.

  Sentro puts her finger to her lips: Shhhhh.

  The side street is lined with smaller, plainer, blocky clapboard apartment buildings nestled thick in overgrown palms and a heavy hush of trees. Some soft incandescent lights burn here and there in upper-floor windows. The blue cast of televisions ghosts empty walls.

  The tallest of these old pastel structures flanks the one into which Castor and his friends disappeared. Rusted iron grillwork and meaningless Moorish details, plus big faded yellow awnings and carved decorative shutters like wings on clumsy glass butterflies. Sentro walks around the block to get to its entrance, with Zoala trailing behind at a moody distance. They haven’t spoken since the quay.

  The front door is broken, propped open with a cinder block. Rap music blares from somewhere upstairs. She leads him to an unlit staircase, past scattering cats, abandoned appliances stacked against peeling walls, a sleeping man, and the closed doorways of more apartments than were originally designed.

  Four flights of stairs, then a narrower climb to the roof-access door, which is stuck. Sentro thinks about forcing it but remembers her shoulder. Zoala tugs on her dress; she steps aside, and somehow, after he jimmies the handle, it’s open and yawning to the night.

  Crouched low behind the back parapet, they can look down on the courtyard of the art deco building. An algae-clouded pool glows eerily under canopies of palms. Empty steel tables and cushionless loungers. Castor sits with the two policemen, all smoking and arguing in French.

  “You’ll get paid when I get paid. Isn’t that how it works?”

  “Sometimes,” one of the cops concedes. “But sometimes a retainer is required, to secure the cooperation of those in the public arena.”

  A giant black moth flutters past on the muggy night’s thermals, and Zoala makes a sudden lunge over the edge trying to catch it. Sentro pulls him back.

  Below, in the courtyard, Castor snaps, “No retainer. No up-front payment. My rules: we are all in this together.”

  He flicks his cigarette into the pool and walks into the deco building, leaving the chastened cops to confer. For a long time, there is a scatter of their low murmuring through the whisper-shaking of the poolside vegetation. Night birds dart out and back. The odor of burned tobacco. They don’t seem to be able to decide anything. Their cigarettes burn down; they both light another. And fall silent.

  Curtains draw open on the third floor. Castor appears backlit, pushes a casement window wide to scowl out. When he turns away, Sentro sees the blonde step into the light behind him. She’s on a cell phone, pacing, pleading her case with someone.

  Zoala taps Sentro on the arm. Holds out a small eyepiece Sentro recognizes as once belonging to a fellow passenger. What was his name?

  Lens to her eye, Sentro gets a closer look at the blonde on her phone.

  I should remember you.

  The woman looks played out. A faint bruise purples one side of her jaw where Castor hit her. Her voice drifts across, distant, frantic, and it rattles incoherently around the courtyard and through the palm fronds, but Sentro can read her lips for some of it. “There was nothing in the container. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Who told you? Who said I was dead? No. I don’t know! Believe me, I don’t . . .”

  When she turns her back to the window, her voice becomes inaudible.

  Another room light turns on, same floor. A plus-size man from the Jeddah, owner of the eyepiece—Bruce?—looks out and up into the night sky. Bruce. Two other men she recognizes are behind him. The captain. The first mate. More names she can’t remember.

  A fifth man crosses the room, shirtless. The Tagalog—Charlemagne.

  Why that name and not the others?

  Sentro sinks behind the parapet, overwhelmed. She’s light headed; she needs to eat. But the circumstances of the night have calmed her; this feels like familiar ground. Cairo, Split, Istanbul, Lagos, Kiev. Cities tumble through her thoughts, flicker jumbled postcards of distant assignments she’s always ticked off like chores on a to-do list.

  This is what she does.

  This is what she’s good at. Focus narrowed. Task at hand.

  Zoala kneels beside her, watchful.

  Locate the assets. Check.

  Risk assessment.

  Strategic plan. Drawing a blank, there, sorry.

  Tactics. Not yet.

  A low rumble has them both scrambling to the other edge of the roof.

  On a street corner beyond the art deco building, a decrepit city bus finishes its crawl up the hill and pulls to the curb, brakes hissing, its doors clattering open to disgorge a small woman with plastic bags in both hands. As the woman slowly makes her way up another street, Sentro grasps Zoala’s wrist and pulls it toward her to read his Rolex. She finds a small, torn triangle of roofing and uses it to scratch the time on the back side of the parapet flashing.

  Mopping the perspiration from the night’s oppressive heat off her face with the hem of her shift, Sentro sits back again to think.

  Locate the assets.

  Risk assessment. Skip the plan.

  Assemble a team.

  Recover and return.

  It’s not such a long list, once you break it down.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  WHAM.

  WHAM WHAM.

  A steel door with a red cross on it is unlocked and opened by a clearly sleep-deprived Morehouse only to discover Sentro glaring back at him. He glances past her, with obvious worry, out into the hallway of his decrepit building as if expecting someone else to cause him trouble.

  “I found them.”

  “Good on you. And?”

  “I need your help.”

  “Christ on a cracker.” He makes like he’s going to shut the door, but Sentro squares herself to him.

  “This is what I do. This is how I’m built. You don’t wait for things to work out; you make sure they will.”

  “Dude.” Morehouse shakes his head. “
You barely remember your own name.” Behind him, in a shabby one-room, green-walled clinic, are the cluttered trappings of his so-called medical practice and paraphernalia from his heroin addiction, organized around a battered examining table on which Eccola, bra and skirt, sits, hunched, hugging her knees.

  Sentro estimates the girl is six months pregnant. It’s hard to tell. When you’re young, Sentro knows, you can carry it so well.

  “How’d you find me?”

  Zoala steps out of the shadows, where Morehouse must have sensed him. Locks eyes with the bad-boy doctor, then shifts them to his sister, impassive. They exchange sharp words in a pidgin Portuguese Sentro can’t begin to decode. Zoala spits dryly on the carpet and turns away, walks to the end of the hallway, where it looks like he intends to wait.

  Sentro says to Morehouse, “Listen to me: these are not your normal pirates. This is not business as usual.”

  “You need help,” the doctor says. “But not my kind.”

  “I make my living untangling knots snarled by clueless people who think evil can’t touch them.”

  “A bottomless well, no doubt. Are you sure? How’s your head?”

  Light as a balloon. “Feels like someone’s trying to push my eyes out from the inside. So not so bad now.”

  “Pupillary reaction time, that tremor in your right hand. Anybody ever evaluate you for concussion syndrome?”

  “You’re not going to help me.” A statement, not a query. Her attention strays to Eccola, who has taken up a clinic blanket and wrapped herself in it. It looks like she’s hiding a basketball in her lap. Sentro thinks: She’s so young.

  “Is that yours?”

  Morehouse knows what she’s talking about without even turning to look. “Might as well be.” He flattens his mouth, petulant, sheepish looking, shifts his weight, and gets defensive. “Dude, look. I know—”

  Words appear to fail him. He doesn’t, or can’t, finish. But if Morehouse expects outrage or criticism, he’s not getting it; Sentro believes she has no moral high ground from which to judge him. And she’s feeling storm clouds gather behind her eyes.

  “What?”

  “Give me a sec.” She’s going weightless.

  “You better come in and sit down.”

  “This is no place to raise a kid,” Sentro observes, enigmatic, and then collapses to the floor as her world goes blank.

  Lights out.

  She sat there in the hot darkness with her back to Scooby-Doo and Shaggy, listening to her mother sing and watching her sway, cross-legged, on the edge of the bed, feeling her father outside with the other rangers and the lights and the High Plains drama she was too young to understand then.

  The AC had shut down. Water pooled underneath the window unit, silvery in the TV’s cold light. The handgun they had brought with them from their house in Austin was in her mother’s lap, the handgun her father had instructed his little girl never to touch, and both her mother’s hands were on it, slender fingers trembling, gimlet eyes dry. The chapped, faded lips that Aubrey thought were peeling lipstick sang in a voice so high and thin it could have been merely air escaping.

  I know all the songs that the cowboys know.

  The phone in the room rang and rang and rang. Her mother was no longer interested in answering or talking to them.

  “Mom?”

  ’Bout the big corral where the doggies go.

  “Please, Mommy.”

  We learned them all on the radio.

  Gentle, fragile, as if her body were breaking, her mother moved the gun to the side and pulled Aubrey onto her lap.

  “Sing, sweetheart,” she said. “All we can do is—”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  —Sing.

  On the street corner beyond the building where the hostages are being kept, another rainbow-painted local bus pulls to its scheduled stop. An old man gets out, sets his walker with the yellow tennis ball feet, and begins to make his way home. The engine revs, but the bus remains, and when the doors open again, Zoala recognizes the scarred face. Even though there’s no way Carlito can see him, he sinks lower behind the parapet and watches the madras coat flap in the bellowing bus’s wake before the tweaker crosses the street to the art deco apartment building’s entrance.

  The police cars are still parked out front. The cops who drive them are somewhere inside.

  On the parapet’s inner edge, Zoala marks the new bus arrival time with one of the doctor’s marker pens the way the strange American woman taught him to do it.

  Another hour has passed.

  He can hear their voices in the rear courtyard before he sees Castor and Carlito emerge below him, deep in a private conversation the gist of which Zoala can easily guess: Carlito is still furious about his missing scooter.

  Good.

  Zoala would like to find a cinder block and drop it on them both and crush their skulls. The American woman wants him to watch and wait until she returns for his report, so he does so because he finds he doesn’t want to disappoint her.

  His peeling skin itches, but scratching makes it bleed. The island beetles are a fading fever dream, but being set adrift, the fire, the explosion, the fear of dying are things he will never forget.

  When he thinks of the future, he draws a blank. All that matters to him is payback.

  Exactly one hour later, the same battered rainbow bus pulls to a stop at the bench, coming back the opposite way. A couple of waiting passengers climb onto the empty vehicle.

  The doors clatter and hiss. The bus rumbles away. Zoala checks the wristwatch that hangs loose on his arm like half a shackle and notes the arrival time again on the back side of the parapet.

  The carnival glare made her eyes hurt as she peered out at him through the motel curtains, but she couldn’t look away. His face painted pale red by the whirling emergency lights, his thick angular features were sparked sharp by white searching beams that roamed over the motel while her mother rocked and sang in the room behind her.

  Rand Sentro wasn’t, factually, Aubrey’s father.

  Laundry-crisp white-yoked snap-pocket shirt, khaki chinos, and those Lucchese boots he lived in; the star that gleamed on his breast; the ivory-handled .45 always strapped to his hip and never to be touched without asking. That her stepdaddy was a Texas Ranger was a source of great pride when she was growing up, and not only because her playground friends were awed by it. A big, stern, quiet, inaccessible man whose righteous violence was legendary in Lone Star law enforcement but never shown to her, he would come and go like panhandle summer storms, thrilling and unpredictable, just as likely to take her up in his arms as walk right past her to the high cabinet where he kept the Jim Beam.

  Her biological father never factored. The way her mother looked at Ranger Rand Sentro when he came home to them was unwavering and absolute, as if there had never been anyone else. Once, as a teenager, Aubrey had searched through what remained of her mother’s things in the basement, looking for a clue to this other man who had helped create her. She found nothing, but the following weekend Rand Sentro was down there “cleaning up,” and the next time she dared venture into the cellar, all her mother’s things were gone.

  Absent her mother, theirs was a relationship fraught with polite silence. He was kind to her, a sad gentleness that saw a hole in her heart but was helpless to fix it. And he was nothing if not a fixer. So he was nothing: a taciturn, tentative single parent who, when her rebellion began, withdrew into his work and threatened to leave the rest of her upbringing to the rigid, righteous Baptist catechism of his spinster cousin Jean, who he’d ask to move in with them.

  Dennis saved her. Loved her, impregnated her, married her with a promise to shield her with his unwavering devotion, which he did, and which, looking back, she often feels she didn’t deserve.

  But in that oppressive midnight heat of the West Texas motel room where her mother sang one last time, a girl too young to understand what was happening watched through a gap in the curtain—the man who wasn’t, fact
ually, her father pacing the parking lot behind the circled wagons of first responders and repeatedly removing his white Stetson to mop his face and squint into the temporary crisis lights, as if he’d run out of ideas.

  The phone kept ringing. Her mother wouldn’t allow her to answer it.

  Rand Sentro called out to his wife from a bullhorn that made his deep, warm voice hard and splintered. It felt like the night terrors from which she sometimes woke to find her mother looking down at her, smiling, stroking her face, telling her everything was okay.

  To lift a gun from lap to temple takes only a moment. It happens so fast it’s done before you know it, and you’re wiping the warm bits and pieces of a lost cause off your cheeks while salty tears fall.

  An IV tube snakes from her wrist to a yellowing saline bag dangling from a coat hanger hooked over a ceiling water pipe right above the examining table where Sentro finds herself surfacing, naked again and wrapped now in what Eccola was wearing, which must be the only blanket Morehouse owns.

  Sitting up doesn’t make her too light headed this time, but the crackle of her bare ass on the paper covering the table padding causes a sleeping Eccola, slumped in a corner chair, to wake up with a start and shout for help.

  Morehouse fills an interior doorframe faster than Sentro thinks possible. The pupils of his eyes are huge.

  “Welcome back.”

  “How long was I unconscious this time?”

  “Sleeping. You were sleeping.”

  “How long?”

  Crossing, Morehouse cradles her wrist in one hand and with his fingers takes her pulse. “Couple of hours.” His stoned gaze makes her uneasy. Maybe clarity is too much for him; she wants it back. Desperately.

  “What time is it?”

  “Why does it matter? You need to rest.”

  “Where are my clothes?”