Redheads

by Jonathan Moore

  About five minutes later he’d heard the first animal roar and then the girl’s first scream. That was when he locked the doors and grabbed the axe. The VIP had been busy with her for the last thirteen hours and it wasn’t over yet. He looked into himself for the strength to go and do something for her and came up with nothing. He cursed himself and his cowardice, the shame of finally knowing, so late in life, that he wasn’t the man he’d thought himself to be. He knew men who wouldn’t have had a second thought. But he had locked the doors against his fear and had stood by doing nothing. Not even a radio call.

  The girl screamed again.

  “No please no please please n—” the last of it was cut off in a strangled cry that needed no translation.

  He tightened his grip on the axe and waited for it to stop. Five minutes went by and then she was silent again. He looked down at his hand and saw blood coming from under his fingernails, his clench on the wooden handle so tight he’d burst all the capillaries in his fingertips.

  He heard a sound and whipped around, his back to the helm station and the axe blade over his left shoulder, ready to swing.

  It came again: tapping on the thick steel door. Click-click-click-click, click-click-click-click. He placed the sound and froze. He was listening to four, long-nailed fingers rapping in succession against the steel. No, he thought, not fingernails.

  Not fingernails at all. He was listening to claws.

  He was shaking all over, facing the door, trying to keep the axe steady. The clicking went on and on. Then the clicking stop and the VIP spoke to him.

  “Stand in the corner by the chart table, Captain.” The voice was low and came to his ears by shivering up his spine like the tip of a rusty nail.

  “I’ve never done anything to you,” the captain said. He thought of all the times he’d carried this thing across the ocean without questions. Wasn’t that loyalty?

  “Stand in the corner by the chart table.”

  His feet took him across the wide bridge and he stood between the chart table and the thin metal drawers that held charts for every deep water port and channel in the western hemisphere.

  “Put the axe on the floor and put your face in the corner.”

  He watched himself put the axe under the table. He was too unsteady to keep on his feet, so he knelt in the corner and rested his forehead against the bulkhead, eyes closed. He could feel the uneven motion of the ship as it broke through the waves. Behind him, the steel door blasted open with a loud bang as it swung the full arc on its hinges and slammed into the bulkhead. He cowered into the corner but did not turn around. The door opening was impossible, of course. The bridge had been retrofit less than a year earlier, prompted by the M/V Arctic Sea incident. The steel doors could be locked from the inside and the glass in the windows was bullet proof. Sealed off with the crew inside, the bridge was supposed to be able to keep pirates out for five hours, even if they had cutting torches and grenades.

  The VIP had opened the door just by hitting it.

  He could feel it standing behind him, hot breath on the back of his neck.

  “Stand up.”

  He did as he was told.

  “Turn around and open your eyes.”

  He turned slowly, taking a step so that his back was against the bulkhead. He opened his eyes, expecting to see the monster, but the bridge was empty. It must have been standing on the port wing, over by the recessed windows that looked out to the stern. The trapdoor to the gangway stood open.

  “Go down to the galley.”

  Yes, it was behind him on the port wing. He didn’t know how it could have opened the gangway trapdoor and then moved to the port wing at the same time he was feeling its breath on the back of his neck. He was dizzy and he realized he might have passed out. Maybe time had stretched farther than he realized. He took hold of the handrails and went down the steep ladder. An hour ago his bladder had been an urgent bursting pressure and now he couldn’t feel it. Then he noticed that his khaki pants were soaked all the way to his socks. He didn’t remember letting go. He was at the bottom of the ladder now, moving down the greenish-gray hallway in the direction of the galley. He knew the VIP was right behind him but he couldn’t hear anything. No sounds on the steel ladder, no steps behind him in the passageway.

  He turned and entered the galley. If he hadn’t already emptied his bladder into his pants, he would have done so at that second. There was blood on the floor and blood on the stainless steel countertops and blood across the teak mess table. One burner of the gas range was lit, turned all the way up. He looked at the ring of blue-and-yellow flame under one of the bigger cast iron skillets. Smoke poured off the overheated pan and the lumps of blackened, leftover meat inside it. He felt the hot breath on the back of his neck again, and then that rusty-nail voice scraping into him like a sickness.

  “Clean it.”

  He stepped into the galley, dizzy again. The smoke alarm went off. He walked to the sink and thought, This is a nightmare this isn’t real, this is a nightmare—

  The dishwater in the sink was backed up, so he reached in, numb, to find the drain stopper. He touched something soft and slimy and pulled it out. At first he thought it was a filthy dish towel, but it was worse than that. He was holding a handkerchief-sized swatch of human skin.

  “Clean it,” the thing said again, directly into his ear. He could smell its rancid bloody breath.

  This is a dream, this is a nightmare.

  He dropped the skin into the trash can and watched the pink dishwater drain from the sink, staring at the bits of flesh and the old soap suds that clung to the sides as the water went down.

  An hour later whatever was left of Captain Douglas was hidden in a back corner of his mind, crouching in the shadows and looking through his own eyes as though looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Everything was far away and removed. The only thing that got all the way inside was the voice. It told him what to do and he did it. He cleaned the galley and ran the filthy mop water down the sink and bagged the skin and bits of meat and the charred skillet. At the voice’s bidding he carried the bag to the stern rail and threw it over the side, into the ship’s wake. And then the voice told him what to do next. There was no question of disobeying the voice.

  “Engine room. Go.”

  He went. The steel staircases leading into the ship’s belly were lit by bare bulbs inside steel cages. When he passed them, he could see the thing’s shadow on the catwalk, mixed with his own. The angles were wrong and the lights would dim as thing’s body blocked them. The hidden part of him, who was still Captain Douglas, realized the VIP was following him from above, crawling on the underside of the catwalks like a spider.

  The engine room was dominated by two diesel power plants, each two stories high. There was a black body bag on the no-skid rubber floor in between them.

  “Get the first-aid kit on the wall.”

  He went to the bulkhead at the rear of the engine room and took down the metal first-aid box next to the fire extinguisher. He backed up with it and stood by the body bag.

  “Open the bag.”

  Captain Douglas knelt and unzipped the bag down its whole length. He thought of field spiders, the big black and yellow ones that wrapped their meals in neat packets of silk to save for later. He pulled the zipper to its end and parted the canvas to see the contents. There was a man inside, wrists and ankles cuffed. The thing’s prey was badly wounded, but very much alive. He had duct tape wrapped across his mouth, but his eyes were open. His face was swollen and purple and his chest bore deep bite marks in his pectoral muscles. Captain Douglas saw the man’s eyes focus near the ceiling. The man’s eyes widened. He lay still but alert. The shadows in the engine room moved and darkened as the thing crossed another light.

  “Clean the chest wounds.”

  He looked into the bound man’s eyes and saw something that called him forward from his hiding place. For a few minutes he was all the way back again, Captain Douglas of the M/V Tantallon,
a man who had stood on the bridge during hurricanes and who had been the first lieutenant on a submarine in the Royal Navy and who had once carried himself with pride. And here in front of him was a man who would not have hesitated where Douglas had. Here was a man who’d have rushed from the bridge with or without a weapon when he heard the girl’s first cry. Douglas opened the first-aid kit and took out sterile gauze and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. He met the man’s eyes again and an understanding passed between them. Douglas knew what he had to do. It was a tiny act and he did it secretly while he was cleaning the infected bites. The thing was above them on the ceiling, but Douglas could block its view of the case by leaning in close. He understood when he was finished here, he could retreat back into hiding, and there wouldn’t be much time after that. He didn’t know if what he was doing now would keep him out of hell—he suspected it was nowhere near enough—but he did it gladly. It was quick, and he went back to his work, cleaning the long tear below the man’s navel. The man didn’t even stiffen when he poured the alcohol directly into the gouge, but his eyes met Douglas’s for a second. They understood each other.

  “That’s enough. Close the bag.”

  Douglas looked at the man’s eyes a last time and then zipped the body bag closed. He could already feel the room receding, reality backing off as his mind withdrew down a long tunnel.

  “Go to the steering room.”

  He went, dizzily, a wind blowing in his ears that couldn’t have been there. The steering room was at the back of the ship and held the hydraulic gear that controlled the rudder. The second body bag was here, zipped closed. The room was covered in blood, the rubber flooring slick with it.

  “Mop it down.”

  He did, for thirty minutes, and then the thing told him to stop.

  “Get the bag.”

  He picked it up from one end, and it wasn’t that heavy. Part of him knew why.

  “Drag it up to the stern deck.”

  He went back up into the air the way he had come down after throwing the garbage bag overboard. The thing followed him and then it was there, right behind him, speaking with its breath on his neck.

  “Open the bag.”

  He hesitated.

  “Open it.”

  He unzipped the bag and she was in there, the girl whose murder he didn’t try to stop. She looked to be no more than twenty. Neither her face nor her red hair had been touched, but the rest of her was mutilated. One arm was missing and both breasts were gone. A pair of handcuffs was locked onto the wrist of her intact arm, one cuff locked around her wrist and the other cuff free and dangling. He understood then, and the thing’s voice told him what he already knew.

  “The other cuff is for you. Put it on.”

  He knelt and reached into the girl’s open stomach and took out the cuff. He put it over his left wrist and clenched it. This is a dream, this is a nightmare. None of this is real.

  “Pick her up.”

  He held her to his chest and stood, lifting her out of the bag. The sun was setting and the ocean was a deep jade green shot with white in ship’s the churning wake. It looked cold.

  “Jump.”

  He let himself fall forward, the weight of the girl carrying him over the rail and thirty feet down into the water. He hit head first with the girl still held in his arms. Now he was out of the reach of the thing and its voice, and he was Captain Bryce Douglas again. He was all the way back. But there was no point in trying to come to the surface, so he kicked his legs to propel himself downwards. His last thought before he took in a searing lungful of cold green ocean was of the man in the body bag, the thing’s prisoner. They had understood each other, he was sure of it. Maybe he wouldn’t go to hell. Maybe he had seen his moment and taken a chance to do the right thing, like a man. He held the girl tightly and opened his mouth for the last time.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  They finished their breakfasts and lingered over their second cups of coffee, and then Julissa brought the laptop back to the table and turned on its screen.

  “We’ve got him,” was all she said.

  Chris leaned close to her and looked. The computer showed a street map with red circles where the routers were located. The map was a city he knew well.

  “San Francisco,” Chris said. All five circles were clustered within about six blocks in the Inner Sunset. “He must live nearby, walks out to find free Internet when he wants to do his work.”

  “It’s a good bet.”

  “If we were in San Francisco, could you find him?”

  “If he’s still there, using his computer, we’ve got a shot,” Julissa said. “Finding the routers was easy, but finding the computer will be a lot harder.”

  “I’ll book our tickets as soon as we get back to the hotel. If we leave Boracay this afternoon we can probably be in San Francisco in twenty-four hours.”

  It didn’t take long for Chris to pack his room after he booked their tickets. He put the duffel bag with his clothes on the porch and sat down next to it, waiting for Julissa. It worried him they hadn’t heard from Westfield. For that matter, it worried him that it was so easy to trace the hacking to a neighborhood in San Francisco. And then there was Julissa. Maybe he was worrying about San Francisco to avoid worrying about her. He thought about their night, how perfectly they had fit together. He thought about the way she had ridden him, her hair spilling across his face and her breasts brushing his chest, and thinking through the memory of it, he realized throughout the entire act of their lovemaking, he had thought only of her and not of Cheryl. It was too early to wonder if they would still be together after they were finished with this.

  That sort of thought had too many presuppositions—that they would finish at all, that they would both be alive at the end of it.

  At every step of the trip, Chris felt their safety slip away: when they showed their passports to the guard at the airport entrance and then a second time to the guards at the metal detector and x-ray machine, and yet a third time when they paid their airport tax. Then they were on the propeller plane to Manila, and upon landing their bag was searched and their passports inspected again. They paid their airport exit tax and took a taxi to the international terminal and went through the same process to reach their next flight, except here, in the capital, their passports were entered into computers instead of ledgers.

  Then there were the cameras.

  There were video cameras at the security checkpoints and at passport control, and video cameras at the jetway where they would show their tickets the last time to get on the plane. The cameras’ gray wires snaked to the ceiling and disappeared, carrying the video feed with them, perhaps to the Internet. An American in khaki pants and a Hawaiian shirt stood at a newsstand and stared openly at Julissa and only turned away when Chris caught his eyes and started to walk over. The American turned and disappeared into the crowd.

  They found a cafe in another part of the airport and he left Julissa at a table in the back, out of the view of the crowded terminal hallway. He went to the counter and ordered coffees, paying with his credit card. Chris looked for the American in the Hawaiian shirt but didn’t see him again. He told himself it was normal. Julissa was beautiful; therefore, men would stare.

  They sat across from each other with their laptops. Chris searched the Internet for any sign of Westfield. A simple Google news search for Westfield’s name brought him to the story right away. It was a video on the website for KRQE News Channel 13 out of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The thumbnail image on the link to the video showed Westfield’s beat-up blue van parked in front of a rundown motel. Police tape cut across the front of the image. Under the image was a headline: FBI Investigates Double Murder in Carlsbad.

  “You’ll wanna watch this.”

  Julissa moved to the other side of the table and looked at Chris’s screen.

  “Oh shit.”

  Chris clicked on the link and waited for the video to load. They both leaned close to the laptop so that they could hear the
audio over its small speakers. Chris lowered the volume so no one else in the cafe would hear.

  The video opened with a newscaster sitting behind a desk in a studio. As he spoke into the camera, a newsreel played in a box to the left of his head.

  “Yesterday’s double murder in Carlsbad took a new twist today when agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced the FBI is taking the case off the hands of local officials.”

  The newsreel showed video of the murder scene, presumably shot the day before. Policemen and crime scene teams were moving in and out of the hotel room beside Westfield’s van. The camera panned to show a white-sheeted stretcher being loaded into a black van.

  “The FBI made the announcement today after two of its agents removed the bodies of both victims from the Eddy County morgue.”

  Now the video cut to a shot of a man in a blue FBI windbreaker standing in front of a concrete Federal building in Albuquerque. There were other news crews around and the man was in mid-sentence.

  “—all we can say at this time is that there’s an FBI interest in this case. Both victims were preliminarily identified as persons of interest in an ongoing Federal investigation—”

  “There any terrorism connection?” an off-screen reporter asked.

  “No comment.”

  “How were they identified?”

  “The victims’ profiles matched information in the State Department’s biometric database.”

  “You know the victims’ names?”

  The FBI man blinked. “That’s an ongoing investigation. I don’t have any comment on that.”

  “Is Captain Westfield a suspect?”