"That's what he's doing? Bean's running drug trials on you?" She looked at him. Her sneer came and went. She shook her head.
"The doc's your friend, and he hasn't told you any of this?"
"He used to be my friend. When we were kids."
"And he didn't hint at it or anything?"
"No."
Ginny shrugged. She rolled herself up into a wheelie again, balancing there in a slab of sunlight.
"That's the reason why Hardy got so mad at you yesterday. It wasn't just the Vietnam stuff. He saw you coming in there, legs not even atrophied yet, Doc Bean's buddy, and he thought you were there to cut in line ahead of him. Way we figure it, Hardy's next at bat. He's got seniority. Been in the clinic the longest of anybody."
The street was splashed with green shadows. A Baltimore oriole fluttered down from the oaks to peck at something in the dirt. Behind it a large black cat with white paws and white ascot came out of the tall grass. It crouched and began to stalk the orange bird.
"What Bean's doing, it's no big deal," Ginny said. "Whole goddamn country is one big drug trial. Everybody's taking pharmaceuticals left and right, nobody knows what anything's going to do to you, not really. Not long-term. Even the water, even the food."
"You're telling me that everybody in the clinic knows what's going on? He's got your permission?"
"Sure," she said. "We don't talk about it. But we know. Pepper's in on it. The doc. I don't think the other nurses know."
"And Greta? Did she know?"
"She should have. It's all there, out in the open. But then, she was a little like you, sweet and innocent. And the doc had her conned pretty good. He can be convincing as hell when he wants to be. Turn the charm on and off like a Palm Beach hooker."
"So where is she now?"
"I don't know. Probably still wherever he does the procedure. He's got a place."
"Upstairs in the clinic?"
"No, the good, shit happens somewhere else. Not in the house."
"You ever see anybody afterward? Anybody come back and tell you how it went?"
"No."
The muscles in Ginny's arms twitched and wriggled as she held her front wheels off the ground.
"So maybe the drugs aren't working," Thorn said.
"It's a trial, remember? If it's not working yet, then maybe he'll have it right by the time he gets to me. That's the way I look at it. That's how Hardy sees it too."
"And if the drugs are killing your friends from the clinic?"
"So what?" she said. "That's supposed to get me spooked? I might get killed?"
Thorn reached out and pressed hard on the arm of her wheelchair and brought her down from her balancing act.
"Doesn't bother you, huh? Dead, alive, it's all the same?"
"The fucking pain in my legs bothers me. But being dead, no, I don't think that would be a big bother."
"That's how it is? The doc could be killing your friends, you don't give a shit. Hardy's next in line, and he's pissed at me 'cause I may be cutting in front of him to get killed? That doesn't make any sense, Ginny. None at all."
She gave him a sour smile.
"That's 'cause you don't have the pain, Thorn. And if you don't have the pain, then you don't know what the fuck you're talking about."
CHAPTER 23
Monica spent the early morning hours Sunday at the Tavernier police department. She told a female officer and two deputies everything she'd seen. Told them again. Told a different set of people and then another set after that. Five times, six times, like they were trying to trip her up, find inconsistencies, like she was a suspect. After a couple of hours she even started feeling that way, vague guilt, like maybe there was something she should have done, some shout of warning to Mrs. Benitez. She tried to explain why she didn't have a phone. Feeling guiltier each time she went over it. The sheriff's people looking at her silently. No one helping.
Then the sheriff arrived from Key West and she repeated it all again. She'd seen two people. A tall man with a potbelly, a tall woman, brown hair. She hadn't seen their faces. No, she had no idea why anyone would want to kill Mrs. Benitez and her dog. No, she had no idea whatsoever. She barely knew the woman, nodded to her only in passing as the old woman walked the terrier around the neighborhood. And she had no idea why they would fire on her. Probably just surprised them with her headlights and that frightened them into firing.
At dawn they let her go. Dazed, she drove to Thorn's, lay Rover's body near the butterfly garden where he'd spent so much time stalking those fluttering yellow frustrations. She watched the sunlight take the sky.
She hadn't slept. Might never sleep again. She lay the dog's body on his right side near a clump of lantana blooming yellow and red. The dirt was soft and rich there. She'd planted some roses last month, so she knew. She stood for a while and watched Blackwater Sound lose its leaden glaze, turn pale blue and glossy.
She went into the house, got her drawing pad and pens and came back down and squatted in the grass a few feet from Rover, and she opened the pad to a blank page.
She'd doodled all through high school, then majored in art in college, and had drawn ever since. But the fact was, she'd never had any compelling reason to draw. A distraction, a way to minimize the world, bring it down to some manageable size, have some small margin of control. But Monica had never tested her craft with a subject of any heft. She had drawn what interested her eye, but her heart had stayed clear. At best she was a craftsman. She'd never pretended to be an artist, had no philosophy of art, wanted none. It was a hobby, a habit, not even close to a need.
But that morning she drew in a different way than she'd drawn before. She drew because she had to, because there was no choice. And what she saw was different. Rover lying there. Every blade of grass, every flicker of shadow, the matted fur, the crust at his eyes, the complicated arrangement of his paws. The flesh sinking against his ribs, his muzzle dancing with flies.
This time she sketched in every line and angle. Everything she saw she put on the page. And even more than she saw. This time she put in the things that were not there but needed to be there to make the other things real.
She drew it all and she drew it to save herself and defend herself and because she needed to draw it and because she didn't believe she was good enough for such a subject, a dead dog in the grass, because it seemed a challenge beyond anything she had prepared herself for, and she drew it because someone had tried to kill her a few hours earlier and that could be her lying in the grass, and because Thorn was not there and Rover was his dog and he would want to know what happened and so the drawing damn well better be real.
And all of that only made her draw harder, see more clearly, work and work in the early morning light until the page was filled until finally what was out there on the lawn was not out there anymore. All of the death and all of the grief and all of the fear and desperation and doubt were on the page of her pad.
Sunday morning, the seventh of April, almost noon when she was finished and set the pad aside. And she was different now. She knew she had made herself different. She had changed the way her brain was wired, changed the way she breathed, the way the blood pressured in her veins, changed the way the goddamn light weighed on her skin.
Rover was dead. Someone had tried to kill her. And Monica Sampson was there, sitting in Thorn's yard. She had prepared herself for years to draw the picture that lay on the grass before her, and now she had drawn it.
***
Brad Madison listened to the phone ring in Echeverria's hotel room. Ten times, fifteen. Fourth call he'd made this morning. Starting at 8:30. He knew Echeverria was no early riser. But the guy wasn't in. Hadn't been in his room all night.
Brad was in the Georgetown Sheraton. First buds of spring coming up in the park across the street. Usually a fun trip, the yearly SAC meeting. All the special agents in charge gathering to vie for the year's awards, next year's funds. Brad always came out near the top on both. One of the advantages of livin
g in South Florida. Business was always booming.
The meeting was mandatory. SAC's came sick. They got rolled in on stretchers fresh from surgery. No one skipped. No one even tried. A career breaker if you didn't show. But at the moment Brad was a half-second from grabbing the rip cord, bailing.
He put the phone down and called Echeverria's home phone and got a Cuban woman saying "talk to me." He tried, but the two of them quickly figured out that his Spanish wasn't as good as her English. They met in the middle and Brad Madison asked her if she'd heard from her husband in the last twenty-four hours. Echeverria's wife shouted a few Spanish curses that Brad was intimate with. No, he hadn't been home. He hadn't called home. And she didn't care if he ever did again. She hung up.
He called the Casa Marina again and asked the operator to leave another message. Urgent. The last one said urgent too, the operator said. Will he be able to tell the difference? Okay, then make this one very urgent, no, extremely urgent. Yeah, she said. That's good. Maybe next time you can try stupendously urgent.
Brad hung up and stared out at the flowers across the street.
The image went through his head, quick but vivid, of going across the street and picking every single one of those flowers and jumping on the next plane to Key West and giving them all to Greta Masterson.
If he only knew where the hell to find her.
***
Greta felt a faint yaw in the big boat, a quiet creak as Pepper stepped from the dive platform to the rubber raft. Greta had spent the last four days listening to every tick and twitter of that old yacht. It was all she had now; whatever knowledge she could accumulate about her surroundings was her only advantage. And now she was as certain of Pepper's departure as if the young woman had cranked up the outboard and roared away.
They were taking precautions. Now Pepper would probably paddle the raft well out of earshot before starting the engine. And they had attached restraining straps to the bed frame and tightened them across Greta's ankles and breasts. They'd seen what she was capable of, swimming almost to shore.
But Greta had solved the straps. Some nearly forgotten Nancy Drew lore from her youth—puffing herself up as her captor cinched the belts, taking a slow, deep breath, clenching the muscles in her arm, inflating, pressing up against the tethers, all the while keeping her face as serene as possible.
Now, when she was certain Pepper was well away, it took Greta only a few minutes to wriggle one arm free, work the hasp loose, sit up and unbind her feet. Then she was out of the bed and on the floor, squirming down the passageway and once again working herself up those six steps to the upper deck. Same journey, only this time in daylight. Sunday midday.
She dragged herself up to the transom, brought her head above the gunwale, and surveyed the surrounding waters. Greta groaned and fell away. It must have happened late at night while the morphine had been occupying Greta's full attention. They'd moved the boat to a new anchorage. The city of Key West was barely visible to the east. Six miles of gray choppy water, maybe more. Absolutely no hope she could cross such a distance.
Greta flattened herself on her back for a few moments, staring up at the clouds, their endless shaping and reshaping. She blinked back the tears that grew warm at the back of her eyes. And at that moment, watching the busy sky, the pump in her belly began its morning buzz.
Almost immediately, as it had done the night before, the mechanism shut down. No morphine was left in its reservoir. So there would be no bleary hour as the drug trickled onto her spinal cord. That, at least, was some small reason for thanks.
Greta Masterson lay on the deck and inhaled the ocean scents and watched the clouds cruise past in neat squadrons of threes and fours. She followed the darting gulls and terns, and for a while she studied a black frigate bird hanging in place from the dome of the sky like some dark angel gazing down on its handiwork.
Greta Masterson was okay. Echeverria had not returned since Friday night. After he'd gone, she'd examined her body with a mirror and had found no bleeding, no outward signs of harm. The rape itself had been grim but painless. The first time since her fall she'd been grateful that everything below her navel was numb. And Echeverria had been mercifully quick—apparently an experienced premature ejaculator. Even his second time, he'd come in less than a minute, four or five hard humps and he was done. He hadn't struck her, had even stayed mercifully silent after getting her aboard. Going about his carnal business with flat and empty eyes, as if he were living out some twisted reverie he had nursed since youth.
As for psychic trauma, yes, perhaps some emotional time bomb might detonate a year from now. But for the moment, it was nothing she couldn't handle, certainly a lesser horror than the one she'd already suffered at Bean's hands. An even more gruesome foreign body inside her own, metal and cold, with a silicon mind.
She lay back and took the early morning sun, let her eyes drift closed, relishing as much as she could, the freshening breeze.
Moments later Greta roused herself. Dark splotches of sweat had begun to stain her blue scrub. She was squandering time. This was not the moment to sunbathe, no time to mellow.
She rolled onto her belly and crawled over to the lower deck console. As she'd expected, the VHF radio had been removed, hidden away somewhere on board. And naturally the ignition key was also gone.
Greta wormed back to the companionway steps and bumped down them. Belowdecks, she made the arduous crawl down the narrow corridor, lifting herself up to try each door along the way. Coming first to a cramped head with a tiny shower, and then a small cabin that was apparently used for storage—the narrow berth stacked with engine parts and cans of oil, tarps and tools.
The cabin two doors aft of Greta's was Pepper's stateroom, twice the size of Greta's and exceedingly tidy. She'd tacked a poster of a cluster of red chili peppers on one wall and a barechested Brando on the other. Her bunk had hospital corners, the top blanket rigid enough to bounce a quarter. Her hanging locker was tight with clothes, blouses and hot pants and skirts all organized by color, from white to yellow to blue to green to red and finally to black.
Greta opened each of the drawers in the built-in cabinet and found that Pepper was just as fanatical with her underwear and slips and socks. Everything folded and organized by hue. An entire drawer devoted to black lingerie, as if she felt some ghostly parent were hovering near, grading her performance, watching her deportment for the slightest flaw.
Greta patted through the rayon and silk and cotton things, careful not to ruffle Pepper's fastidious system. But she found nothing hidden beneath the underthings.
Across the cabin there was a small mahogany linen locker fixed high above the bulkhead, clearly beyond her reach. Greta stared at it for a moment, then turned and crawled to the cabin door and drew it open.
In the passageway she halted. It wasn't like her to give up so easily, to abandon the cabin half-searched. Perhaps she was worn down by the drugs, more dispirited by the rape and the captivity than she'd known. But that wasn't her way. That was the habit of a flincher, someone who planted the seeds of their own defeat—who did a half-assed job, then whined about half-assed results.
She twisted around, and on her belly she studied the geometry of the narrow cabin. The single bunk was butted up against the bulkhead and just beyond the edge of the wall, the linen locker door was positioned within easy reach of the sink. A perfect storage spot for washcloths, hand towels, and night creams. There was no chair to crawl onto, no ladder, no stool. But by kneeling on the bed, a cripple might still have a shot at opening that interesting door.
Greta hauled herself to the bunk and muscled the deadweight of her body up over the edge of the bed frame. She rolled the single pillow into a hard cylinder, positioned her knees on the pad, and taking a handhold on a small shelf fixed to the bulkhead, she swiveled around and levered her body upright, flattening her right cheek against the bulkhead, straightening her arm overhead as she reached for the locker door. Arm and shoulder lengthening to their max
imum like some overzealous schoolgirl pleading to be called on.
After a second or two of struggle, she could see the knob to the locker was an inch or two beyond her fingertips, so she shifted her hand to the right, crooked it at a better angle around the edge of the bulkhead, and managed to hook a fingernail into the bottom edge of the cabinet door.
She pried the door forward, but the wood was swollen from the constant humidity and was tight in its frame. She continued to tug at it, bending her fingernail back and back, edging the door open, a half inch, another, until finally the fingernail snapped off at the quick.
She sucked in a breath, clenched her eyes, cursed quietly. After another moment she shook it off, reset her knees, then used her second finger and pried the door the rest of the way open.
She had to come down from the pillow and back away to the foot of the bed to get a glimpse inside the closet. And from there she saw what she had not even allowed herself to hope for. She had been looking for the VHF radio, the boat keys, or maybe even a mirror she could use to flash Morse code back to shore. But what she saw was the silver butt of a pistol resting on the edge of the single shelf—a very substantial pistol.
***
When she heard the outboard motor roar up to the hull of the Miss Begotten, and felt the big yacht sway in its following wake, Greta was a few feet from her cabin door.
The pistol was a stainless steel .357 Smith & Wesson with a four-inch barrel and a rubber grip. It was loaded with Magnum hollow-point shells so powerful, they would be able to tear a hole through the side of that old mahogany yacht big enough for Greta to squeeze her head out, scream for help.
She squirmed through the door, hauled herself back into her bunk, and settled against the mattress. The plan took shape quickly in her imagination. When Pepper walked in, came over to the bed, stood close, Greta would show her the pistol. Freeze her, give her slow, careful instructions, then she would follow Pepper down the hallway again, out to the deck, and supervise the navigation back to shore.
Red Sky At Night (Thorn Series Book 6) Page 21
