“Fine.”
“I’ll also need to e-mail you a retention agreement. So we’ll need to figure out a fee structure for this.”
“Oh. Yeah, okay.”
David held up the paper again. He’d thought this far already.
“How about this?” Annie said. “You could—”
David shook the paper and tapped the matchbook against it.
“I got an idea,” Kelly said quickly, cutting Annie off. She looked at David’s writing again. “We’ll do it like a commission. You get half a percent of the sales price if it sells for ten million or less. A full percent if it sells for anywhere between ten and fifteen. And 2 percent for anything over fifteen.”
“Yeah,” Annie said, and paused.
Kelly knew she was doing the math in her head, realizing that if she could sell the Pratihari-Reid estate for over $15 million, she’d be home free for the rest of the next year.
“That’s … generous. I’ll draft the retention and see you by video on Monday.”
“Okay.”
“Anything else you need to talk about?”
David shook his head.
“That’s it.”
“You sure you’re doing okay? I mean, this is a little—”
“I’m fine,” Kelly said. “See you on Monday.”
“Thanks, Kelly. And thanks for thinking of me first.”
David ended the connection before Kelly could answer.
She moved away from the edge of the cage to put more distance between herself and David.
“Please let Dean down. I did what you asked.”
“Sure, okay.” He shrugged and stood up. “You did good. Really good. So I’ll let him down. But you know what I think your lawyer is doing right now?”
“Drafting a power of attorney and a retention letter. You heard her. She wants the commission.”
“Yeah, maybe. But first she’s going to check out Minerva Reefs or whatever you called it. See if it’s really there. Because if it’s not, like you just made it up, or if it’s not anywhere between Tonga and New Zealand, she’ll know something’s wrong.”
“Go check it out,” Kelly said. “You’ve got Google.”
David walked to the center post and took hold of the rope. The other man had tied a quick-release knot. David jerked down on the free end of the rope, and the knot popped open; he let go, and Dean fell feetfirst into the pot of diesel. Kelly heard the broken bones in his shins crunch together, and he cried out as he fell face forward into the rocky floor. He lay still a moment, then struggled to roll over. The diesel spread in a pink pool and then sank into the ground. Dean’s arms were still above his head, his shoulders dislocated and useless.
He was like a man who’d been broken on a rack. He might live. He might even walk and use his arms again if Kelly could get to him, if she could take him aboard Freefall, where there was medical equipment.
But without that he wouldn’t last long. They all knew it.
“I’ll check it out,” David said. “It’s not there, you know the deal.”
This time they were alone in the building for hours without any of the men coming. Kelly and Lena laid one of the blankets on the bottom of their cage to soften the rocks and steel wires, and they put the other blanket over themselves and held each other while leaning against the side of the trap. Dean had rolled as far as his side in a process that had taken almost an hour. During that struggle he’d been breathing hard and raggedly but had not spoken at all. When he finally reached his side, he rested and was perfectly still.
He wasn’t facing the trap. For a long time, Kelly couldn’t tell if he was breathing. His exposure suit was padded with flotation foam and insulation, and so she couldn’t see the rise and fall of his chest.
Outside, the men were arguing, stomping around, and moving gear. Then silence.
From that silence, humming up from a long distance, came the sound of a smoothly running diesel engine. It cut out, and there was the splash of an anchor hitting the water. Freefall had arrived, she was sure of it.
Next came the buzz of the Zodiac leaving the beach, and then, as soon as it was back, the arguing started up again with a new voice thrown into the mix. The men were behind the wooden wall of the building. Kelly could see them briefly through the cracks. Then they moved away, footsteps crunching over the black basalt. Perhaps they were going to whichever shed they’d picked for themselves, where there’d be a fire and dinner.
They’ll have liquor there, too, Kelly thought. Rum or whiskey.
After they’d eaten and warmed themselves with fire and drink, maybe they’d be back. One at a time or all at once. Maybe this time, when they reached into the trap with the fish gaff, they’d pull her out instead of Lena. Maybe they’d—
“You have to stay with it,” she whispered. “You can’t do this. Not now.”
“What?” Lena murmured, her breath warm against Kelly’s throat.
“Nothing.”
Kelly was so thirsty, she’d have licked dewdrops off the filthy wires of the trap if there had been any. Her throat was dry, and her head thumped steadily. She leaned against the bars and let Lena hold her and thought through how she’d care for Dean if she could. This was something better to think about. Better than thinking of water she didn’t have or the man with the gaff. She could get Dean on a saline drip and give him a shot of codeine for the pain that would come when she reset his shoulders. She could clean the harpoon wound in his thigh and bandage it properly and put his legs in splints.
It had been almost a decade since she’d dealt with a fracture.
She’d been on an ER rotation in medical school when the emergency room filled with the victims of a school bus accident. She’d taken the lead on the first patient wheeled to her and hadn’t forgotten it. That had been a compound fracture, the child’s bones jutting through the skin of her shin. For Dean, it might not be so bad. The real worry would be infection. Or maybe frostbite and gangrene. She didn’t know where they’d kept him, how cold he’d gotten. She couldn’t feel her own toes, yet she hadn’t bled much and had Lena for warmth.
“Dean?” she said.
He didn’t move. At least not at first.
But then he was struggling to roll onto his back. When he tipped past the point of resistance and rolled the rest of the way, his head came over and she saw his face for the first time since he’d been strung up. He’d bled from his nose and down his neck, and that was all dried now, black and caked with dirt and volcanic soot. Below his nose, his face looked like a fright mask. His eyes were still clear, though, and she took that as a good sign. He was fighting.
“What do I do now, Dean? Tell me.”
He opened his mouth. They’d pulled out two of his front teeth. Or else he’d knocked them out when David had cut him loose from the rafter and he’d fallen facefirst into the rocks.
“You … gotta … get out. Some. Somehow.”
“I don’t know how, Dean. I tried, but there’s nothing. The trapdoor’s locked, and the wires are welded to the frame.”
“A tool. You need—”
He coughed. A bubble of blood expanded from his lips, then burst.
“You need to find a tool. And find … the …”
Again he trailed off into a spasm of coughing. She thought he’d probably come close to drowning when they’d dragged him off Freefall and into the waves. His lungs would have filled with seawater in the shock of his immersion. Later, after the beatings, they’d have filled again with blood. That he was alive now was a miracle. Or a statement about Dean and what he was made of.
He was just a few feet from her, but she could do nothing for him.
“Find what, baby?” she said.
She didn’t know if she truly wanted to hear what he thought she should do or if she was just making him stay with her. Maybe it was both. When his fit finally passed, he looked at her again.
“The weak spot. Everything has a weak spot. So you find it … and then you break it.”
She nodded because he was right. The trap was a problem, but she knew most problems could be solved through either cleverness or pure will. Dean knew she had both. Even in his agony on the ground, he was nudging her in the right direction.
“Dean,” she whispered. “I’ll find it. I love you.”
She’d needed to say it to him so badly that it choked her coming out.
He mouthed it back at her, and she read the words off his black-crusted lips. Then he closed his eyes. For a while, as he slept, she watched him. Finally, when she could take it no longer, she turned and began to study the floor, seeking anything within plausible reach of the trap. She was looking for any tool she might use: a bent nail, a scrap of wire. Lena watched her a few minutes, then started her own search of the other side.
David was true to his word.
In the lingering twilight near midnight, one of the men came. The one she’d named Sour Breath. The man who’d rapped on the trap with a fish gaff and pulled Lena out while they’d still been aboard La Araña. This time, instead of the gaff, he carried a steel soup pot. When he walked through the door, the breeze coming off the water carried the steam from the pot into the building, and Kelly could smell hot rice and chicken in the pot.
Dean woke either from the smell of food or from the sound of the man’s footsteps over the rocks. He followed the man’s progress with his eyes but could do no more than that. The man passed Dean without looking at him, came up to the cage, and squatted by the trapdoor. He used his key to open the lock, and then he lifted the door and set the pot inside the cage. As he was threading the shank back into the hasp, Kelly turned to Lena.
“Ask him in Spanish if he’ll let me feed some to Dean.”
The fear on Lena’s face was easy to read. She looked at Kelly, her eyes full and wet, and gave the barest shake of her head.
“Lena. I need to. Tell him it’ll be a secret if he needs it that way. It’ll be between us, and David won’t know.”
Lena’s lips quivered, but she turned to the man, who was beginning to stand. She whispered the question. The man looked at her and said something back and made a hand gesture that Kelly understood: What do I care?
He took out the key again and bent to the lock, saying something else to Lena.
“He says you can,” Lena whispered. “But you have to leave your blanket.”
He pulled the lock out of the hasp but held the trapdoor closed with his left hand while he found a rock the size of an ax blade and held it in his right hand. Then he lifted the trapdoor and stared at Kelly. His right hand was cocked just past his ear. She looked at him, at the sharp rock in his hand. The soup pot lay between them at the threshold of the cage, its contents still steaming. She knew how thin this ice was. Everything could crack apart right now if she went the wrong way.
“All right,” she said. “If that’s how he wants it.”
She took a breath and closed her eyes, then slipped the blanket off her shoulders. She came out of the trap on her hands and knees, not looking at the man, and then turned and took the soup pot in both of her hands. She stood, her back still to the man, waiting for the blow to fall. Lena looked at her from the back of the cage, her eyes blurred with tears. She knew Lena’s fear and humiliation—the girl was terrified of the man and the things he’d done to her, ashamed of her hunger for the food Kelly was now carrying away from her to give to someone else.
Sour Breath was working his eyes over Kelly’s naked body. She knew it even though her back was to him. But she ignored his crawling stare and Lena’s pain. Neither could exist, not now. She stepped to her right, around the trap, carrying the pot to Dean.
She got to Dean and knelt in the rubble, setting the pot beside her bare knees. She put her hand on his cheek, and he met her eyes.
“Baby, I’m going to set your shoulders. It’s going to hurt. Bad. But then it’ll be better. And there’s some broth here, with rice and chicken. I’ll feed you some, after. If you’re up to it.”
He looked beyond her, and she knew he was looking at the man, Sour Breath. She would let Dean watch him for her. She had to focus.
“Be quick,” Dean whispered.
She started with his left shoulder. This one would be easy. He’d dislocated it twice before, and she’d even set it for him once.
She took his wrist and brought his arm around, then unzipped the top of his exposure suit and felt his shoulder with her fingers. She pushed his bicep against his rib cage and held it in place with her knee while she bent his elbow ninety degrees so that his hand was pointing at the rafters. Then she pushed his wrist to his stomach while pulling back on his elbow, pulling hard against the tension of his shoulder muscles. Dean was clenching his teeth, but he didn’t take his eyes off the man. Now Kelly rotated Dean’s elbow until the back of his hand was nearly touching the rocks, and she eased the tension on his arm and felt the ball of his humerus pop back into the joint.
Dean took in a sharp breath and let it out slowly. She used her palm to wipe the sweat off his forehead.
“You did good, baby,” she said. Without turning her head, she spoke to Lena. “Please tell the man I said thank you. Tell him I need three more minutes.”
She listened to the girl whisper in Spanish as she stepped across Dean and knelt to work on his right shoulder. This one would be much harder. In all of Dean’s life, this joint had never come apart. She had to pull with all her strength, feeling under his shirt with her fingers until she knew she’d eased the end of the bone past the joint. Then she twisted his arm and pushed the bone home, and it made a sound like an egg breaking.
Dean screamed and arched his back.
She stepped over him again and knelt by the pot. She wiped the sweat from his forehead and wet her fingertip with her tongue to clean the blood and caked dirt from his lips. It took a while to clean him. Her time was gone, but the man hadn’t said anything yet. Dean was still watching him, so she knew he was still watching her. But if she’d gotten this far, he would let her feed Dean. She sensed this the way she sometimes knew when a dog would let her go past its yard without lunging.
“I’ll give you broth and some of the rice. You can keep it down?”
He nodded, or tried to.
She dipped the spoon into the pot, filled it with the tea-colored broth, and brought it to her own lips. She sipped a little to be sure it was fit for eating. It was salty and hot, and she could taste the fat that had boiled out of the chicken. She put her hand under Dean’s head and lifted it, then brought the spoon to his lips and tipped it so he could drink slowly. She put a piece of the chicken in her mouth and chewed it for him and then put the pulp in his mouth with her fingers so he could swallow it with the next spoonful of broth.
She didn’t give him much. Just enough to warm his stomach and slake his thirst. If he ate too much or drank too quickly, he might vomit after she was locked in the trap again. If he couldn’t roll to his side, she might have to watch him choke on it from the cage. She stopped after she’d fed him half a cup. She kissed Dean’s forehead and then stood, holding the pot in front of her hips with one hand and holding her other arm across her breasts.
The man lifted the trapdoor and watched her backside from so close that she felt his breath as she crawled in. Once she was inside, he locked the cage. He said something else to Lena in fast Spanish, and then he left. Then they sat across from each other with the pot in the middle.
“Can you eat?” Kelly asked.
“God, yes.”
“Here.”
They took turns with the wooden spoon. The soup wasn’t much more than a boiled chicken and a few handfuls of rice. Between them, they ate it all, and it was delicious to the end. They picked the bones clean and licked the fat from their fingers. Kelly felt warm again.
When they were done with the meal, they arranged the blankets as best they could. Lena hadn’t said anything since they’d started the meal, but now she came close to Kelly and held her tightly.
“I was s
o afraid. That he’d hurt us. Or take the food away and dump it on the ground out of reach and laugh at us.”
Kelly took her shoulders and looked at her.
“You did good, talking to him. You kept him calm. You made him think he was doing the right thing. They’re breaking us. But we can work on them, too. Like you just did.”
“No,” Lena said. “It’s not like that. They don’t care about anything. On the ship, before they got you and Dean, they came and they pissed on Richard. In his cage. He was dying. Freezing. And they came out, three of them, and pulled out their pricks and pissed on him. They were laughing. Right up till he froze.”
Kelly smoothed Lena’s hair back and ran her hands along the girl’s thin back to stop her trembling.
“We’ll find a way,” Kelly said. “I promise you.”
“Or like what they did to me,” Lena said. “Over and over. Till I bled. And then the last time, promising the stew, so I didn’t even fight them.”
“I promise you, Lena.”
Kelly kissed each of Lena’s closed eyes. The tears were cool against her wind-cracked lips. The girl fell into her and began to cry outright.
“I wish I were dead. I wish they’d just kill me, like Jim. That’s the only way.”
Kelly had nothing to say to that.
She held Lena close and kissed her forehead. She looked at the picked-clean bones, the squalor of their cage. Her husband was dying just out of her reach. She knew the food she’d just eaten hadn’t been for her and certainly wasn’t for Dean.
It was for Lena.
They’d thrown her in Lena’s cage like an extra blanket so the girl would be just warm enough to stay alive. They hadn’t left Lena to die like the others when they’d learned she was penniless. In fact, they’d sought her out, had raided Jim’s yacht with Lena’s Community Health Index number in hand, which meant they’d already searched records in Scotland. But not financial records.
They had something else in mind for Lena. A theft, certainly, but one that would cut straight to Lena’s heart.
Kelly held her until she was asleep and then lay awake against the bars of the cage. Dean was dipping in and out of consciousness. It wasn’t sleep, but it looked like it. At least he wasn’t screaming and writhing.
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