by Nevada Barr
For a bleak while he stared at her. Then he smiled, a mere cracking of the wrinkles on his cheeks. "Sure."
Perry started to say something rude, but Butch cut him off. "Anybody sees an NPS boat adrift's going to raise an alarm."
They'd intended to rescue the boat all along. The strength Anna's tiny victory afforded her soaked into the ache in her back and was absorbed. Mack circled the little key. Perry jumped ship to pilot the Reef Ranger back to the fort. Butch watched Anna. When Mack got the go-fast boat up to speed and the howl of the engine and pounding of the hull on the waves created a solid wall of noise between the stern and where Butch leaned near the pilot's console, Anna spoke to Rick.
"I'm an emergency medical technician," she said over the racket. "I've seen a lot of wounds. That's a bad one. It could have nicked the femoral artery."
Rick looked up, his ashen face growing perhaps a shade paler. "Butch said it wasn't spurting. I was okay if it wasn't spurting. It's hardly bleeding at all."
Anna studied the red-black hole for a moment. "I hate to say it but the placement's bad. You could be bleeding to death inside. Never know it, then bang. Lights out."
The pupils of Rick's eyes grew larger, blacker. "No," he said. "That's crap. It's not spurting."
"Easy enough to tell," Anna said, then leaned back and pretended to lose interest.
The Cuban boy stood it as long as he could--about forty-five seconds--before he blurted out "How can you tell?"
The boy was too easy. Looking at the pale and sweating face, the too-wide eyes, Anna knew she ran the risk of putting him into deeper shock. People died of shock. Guilt prodded her insides. Handcuffed and aching, she found it fairly easy to ignore.
Starting with questions to which the answers had to be yes, she asked: "Are you feeling lightheaded?" Then she went through the litany of shock: "Dizzy, sweating, nauseous, anxious?"
Rick, growing more panicked by the moment, answered yes to them all.
"Internal bleeding," Anna said matter-of-factly. "If we don't get you to a doctor soon . . . Maybe I should call for the medevac helicopter when we get back to a phone."
"Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus. Mary Mother of God."
Anna didn't know if the boy prayed or swore. She just knew she needed help. To justify the caching of fuel, the kidnapping of a ranger and probably at least one murder, Mack and his cronies must be planning on importing a whole hell of a lot of "product."
Mack cut power so he wouldn't cause a wake. He was too clever to call attention to himself by rude or illegal boating practices. A shrimper had arrived and rocked at anchor.
Butch left his place by the helm and stepped back to where Anna sat terrifying Rick. The moment the roar of the engines died, the wounded man began babbling. "Look you guys, you got to get me to a doctor. This lady says I got bleeding inside. Please. I don't maybe have long. Oh God. Oh Jesus."
"Shut up, you'll live," Butch snapped. "What she been telling you?" he demanded. The boy repeated the dire forecast Anna had outlined.
"It's crap. She's lying. No calls." He leaned down and backhanded Anna hard across the face, moving so quickly she scarcely saw it coming and had no time to duck. The blow caught her ear and the pain made tears start. Before her head cleared she was aware of a rough voice near her ringing ear and hot breath on her cheek. "You're a sneaky bitch, I'll give you that, but I ain't got time for your shit. You talk to anybody and I kill you. Got that?"
"Got it," Anna said. This time she saw it coming but could do nothing about it. The back of Butch's hand smashed into her temple with such force it loosed the pains in her back. If she hadn't been so pissed off, she would have screamed.
"You got that?" he asked again.
Anna nodded, no sound.
"You may stay alive, but don't count on it."
He took a blue plastic tarp from storage beneath a bench seat, shook it out and threw it over her. "You move and I crush your skull."
Anna didn't nod. The first time had been enough to loose her neck hinges, again and her head might topple off into her lap. Being smuggled into her own harbor beneath an old tarpaulin as if she were a shipment of something so vile the public mustn't be affronted by having to look upon it wasn't the indignity it could have been. Hidden in the tent made by head and knees, she was free to fish the tiny handcuff key out of her shirt pocket. Blinded, the leap and crash of the cigarette boat was more disconcerting than when she could brace herself, but in the harbor, the water was considerably flatter and she managed her task. Having unlocked both cuffs, she didn't remove them but loosened them to the point where, with a little effort, she could wriggle her hands free. That done, she put the key back in her pocket and waited.
On shipboard, with men intent on keeping her in their control apparently at any price, was not the time to flaunt her freedom or attempt escape or coup. Maybe later when the odds were better. If there was to be a later. If the odds got better.
Bumping that caused Anna to fall into Rick, and Rick to cry out in pain, announced their arrival at the dock. The tarp was jerked off and rough hands hauled her to her feet.
Mack had taken the slip at the visitors' dock. Butch leaped offboard and began tying the boat to the cleats. The wind had slacked off but rain came down steadily, and low, thick skies brought an early dusk. Visibility was down to nearly nothing, and the beach was deserted. Two tents, campers huddled inside, remained in the small campground.
Butch grabbed a towel and threw it over Anna's cuffed wrists, then took her by the elbows. "Keep those handcuffs covered as if your life depended on nobody seeing them," he hissed in her ear.
Anna nodded, gently this time, keeping her head balanced on top of her spine. Butch half lifted her out of the boat. She stumbled on the dock and he hauled her upright. "None of your crap." His grip tightened above her elbow, squeezing till she could feel her fingers growing numb from lack of blood.
"No crap," Anna said. "Just clumsy. Loosen up before I get gangrene, for Pete's sake. You afraid I'm going to get the better of you in hand-to-hand combat?" Butch outweighed Anna by a hundred pounds and was a good ten inches taller.
"Shut the fuck up," he said, but he did loosen his grip somewhat.
Rick was next. Mack and Paulo helped him out of the boat and over to one of the pilings so he could support himself.
"You gotta walk, Jose," Perry said. He'd docked the Reef behind the red boat. "We aren't calling attention to ourselves because you got yourself shot by a girl ranger."
Rick looked to be fighting back tears. "I can't," he said. "You got to get me a doctor."
"You'll walk and you don't limp, neither," Perry growled. Anna'd not seen him pull it but Perry had a knife in his hands, a wicked-looking little number with a blade about three inches long and nearly that wide, both edges honed for cutting.
"Hey!" Mack yelled when he saw the blade. Both Perry and Butch turned dull, flat eyes on him. Eyes like carp Anna thought. Or shark. Eyes in which the windows to the soul were blacked out from within.
Mack looked from one to the other. His blue eyes, once too light and cold for Anna's taste, by comparison looked reassuringly human. There was an exchange between the three men, thug number one, thug number two and Mack, but Anna wasn't sure exactly what transpired. An understanding was reached, a balance of power shifted, a new card turned up on the table.
This moment of dark epiphany was over before Anna could swear it happened. "I'll get one of the carts," Mack said. "It'll be easier than herding her and holding up Rick."
"Give him a hand, Perry," Butch ordered. The two men walked off over the sand to be swallowed by the black maw of the sally port. Under hostile skies, brick dark with rain, the fort was a forbidding place. Anna found herself thinking not of the gunman at her elbow, the wounded Cuban boy or Mack's treachery, but of her ancestors, Raffia and Tilly, of the pressing company of warring men, innocence preyed upon and innocence lost. Though Anna would kill him if she had to--and if she got half a chance--William Macintyre had started ou
t the innocent here. Maybe. Maybe it didn't matter, but she'd watch, ready to shove her fingers into any small crack that might appear in this little crime family.
"You got to get me to a doctor," Rick began again. Movement had started his leg bleeding. It was no more than a seep, but mixed with the rain, and the only true color in a gray landscape, it made a good show. The sight of it was renewing the boy's panic, pushing him deeper into shock. Anna wondered if she'd killed him with her lies.
"You keep crying and I'll give you something to cry about," Butch said.
The statement was so incongruous Anna said: "You got kids?" before she remembered the cuff her last spontaneous outburst had earned her.
"Shut the fuck up," Butch said. A man of few words.
Rick turned panicked eyes on Paulo. White showed around the dark irises. His skin was the color of the sky. "You'll be okay," Paulo said. "We'll get you to a doctor tomorrow."
Anna's plan to divide and conquer was probably doomed to failure. She might have literally scared Rick to death for nothing. She took pity on the boy.
"Rick, listen to me," she said.
"Shut the--" Butch began.
Anna stopped him, both hands up, palms out, "No. Let me."
For some reason he did.
"Look at me Rick."
He did.
"You're not going to die. You're not bleeding internally. You've got a little bitty piece of lead in your leg about the size of the tip of my little finger. I said all that stuff so these bozos would let me call the mainland. You're not going to die. Are you hearing me?"
"You lied about me bleeding to death?" The look of shocked disbelief made her want to laugh. Knowing it would verge on the hysterical, she didn't give in to it. "Yes. I lied. A bald-faced lie. There's a nurse here, she'll tell you the same."
"No nurse," Butch said.
"Okay. No problem. We'll get you some hot tea, get that leg up, and you'll be right as rain." Anna's decent impulse earned her the reward of seeing a hint of color return to the boy's lips.
"You can do that, okay?" she asked Butch. "Let me get him some tea, bandage the leg?"
"Maybe."
Paulo got a bit of his spine back. He stood up straight, balled his fists. He was a big guy, almost as big as Butch. The older man took in his situation and did some rapid mental calculations. "Sure," he said. "Why not?" He even managed to force a semblance of affability into his voice, if not his eyes.
Mack, driving the electric cart, materialized out of the rain. The absolute silence of the machine continued to amaze Anna. On occasion she pictured cities running in blissful quiet, the streets and avenues of New York whispering through rush hour.
"Is everything quiet?" Butch asked.
"It'll take a few minutes to kick in," Mack replied.
An image of poisoned corpses strewn about sprang to Anna's mind. For a panicked moment she fought the urge to slip off her cuffs and take her chances in the sea.
26
I stayed with Dr. Mudd another quarter of an hour. I tried all the tricks--bluster, threat, innuendo, pleading--I have learned over a lifetime of watching Molly and Joseph get the truth from wayward girls and soldiers. Mudd never changed his story: he had not summoned Tilly the night she disappeared, he had asked neither her nor Joel to carry his proof to the mainland in any but a safe and usual channel, he knew nothing of the children's whereabouts or destination.
Dr. Mudd theorized--and it sounded as if he believed what he was saying, but I am a woman easily fooled by liars--the plan to remove both Tilly and Joel was hatched by Samuel Arnold. According to Mudd, Mr. Arnold knew the doctor was innocent of conspiracy but would do all he could to keep that information from getting out and, thus, starting a hunt for the real conspirator, this doppelganger in the purloined photograph. Knowing Mudd to have had a falling-out with his cellmate, I found his theory self-serving. It too neatly fitted facts only Dr. Mudd was privy to and told a story he was desperate for others to believe. I did not take it on faith. Still, it was sufficiently sensical, I knew I must speak with Mr. Arnold despite the strictures laid upon me.
After much cajoling on my part, Mudd told me the name of the soldier he had suborned into carrying messages to Tilly: Charley Munson. At first I couldn't place the name in the roster of near a thousand boys and men at Fort Jefferson. Once Mudd described him it came back. Charley Munson was the boy-faced soldier Tilly and I briefly glimpsed the night of the theatrical, when we'd been drawn into this prolonged insanity by Joel's screams. Private Munson had been on duty at the sally port when Sergeant Sinapp hung Joel by the thumbs. I remember how white-faced and stricken he looked. Sympathy for a fellow recruit, even if an enemy in name, must have made him vulnerable to Dr. Mudd's winning ways.
Shortly thereafter I left Dr. Mudd to his dungeon, feeling my way out like one of the blind mice and sharing the same terror that a carving knife was poised above my tail. The watch was calling three A.M. when I slipped out of the stifling darkness of our man-made cavern and into the shadows at the edge of the parade ground. Less than an hour had passed. I'd thought I'd been so long whispering through the bars of the dungeon I would emerge to a full dawn and have to run a gauntlet of curious and mocking eyes as I scurried home in my husband's trousers.
Knowing I had at least two more hours of darkness decided me. Trying to keep to the shadows, call no attention to myself, yet not appear furtive should a sentry catch sight of me, I made my way through casemates housing cannon and shot till I reached the small opening into the south side of the sally port. This is a mere slot in the brick, narrow and shaped in an el for easy defense. There in the black of the shadows I watched the guardroom across the entryway.
It was too much to hope that Charley Munson would be on duty. Neither of the sentries were men I knew. They were passing the time in the forbidden but common practice of one keeping watch while the other napped.
From my many visits to Joel I knew where the key to the casemates was kept. All the keys were stored in a heavy wooden box bolted into the brick to the left of the guardroom door. The box was padlocked but the key to the lock was stashed in a niche carved out of the mortar a couple of feet above and to the right of the box.
There was a good deal of coming and going in the cells: food, water, men going to and returning from work, laundresses, mail when the ship brought it, so I suppose this weakness in the system was considered less problematic than having sentries lose the key periodically or have half a dozen keys in as many pockets.
The guard whose turn it was to sleep was doing so most profoundly. From where I stood in my niche in the shadows I could not see him, but I could hear the snoring. The sentry on watch paced back and forth. Four times he walked through the sally port, stopping for a moment to gaze out over the harbor, then back to stop again to do the same with the parade ground. Each time, he passed within six feet of where I stood and never sensed or saw me. I was frightened and anxious about my ability to carry out my plan--if you will allow me the conceit of calling anything so crude a plan--but being thus secret and watching gave me a heady sense of power, as though I could go where I wished, do what I wished and there would be no consequences. Perhaps I am cut out for a life of stealth and deceit. If not for the accompanying feeling that I should vomit at any moment, I would be tempted.
Under his breath the sentry was whistling a lively tune brought to the fort by the confederate soldiers. We have won the battle but it is their battle hymns our children will sing.
Whether this pacing out and in and out was what was required of the night sentry or whether this whistler merely stretched his legs to stay awake I couldn't know. Nor could I foresee how much longer the pattern might continue. Before the utter stupidity of my so-called plan could dissuade me, I acted. As the sentry reached his farthest-most point from the guardroom door in his pendulum swing, I slipped out of my crevice, across the sally port and into the guardroom. There I flattened myself against the wall as he turned and paced back.
Hear
ing sharpened by fear, I was aware of every scuff of his boots, every fragment of gravel set in motion by his passage. He slowed as if he stopped or turned to come back to his roost. My stomach grew tighter till I had to swallow back the bile in my throat. Across from where I stood was the sleeping guard. I watched with terror each time an explosive spasm of snorts and gurgles threatened such violence that I thought he must surely wake himself.
Hearing the outside soldier's boots stop, this time for real, at the parade ground end of his short patrol, I slipped the key from its niche and unlocked the cabinet. A person perennially terrified would miss nothing of life. Each movement, each second that passed, I was acutely aware of: small snicks of the key in the lock, the faint creak of the hinges as I opened the cabinet. These were magnified till it seemed I passed half a lifetime in the doing. The clatter the key I took from the third peg made as it bumped the one below rang so loudly in my ears I thought the whole garrison must wake.
Lest the guards have cause to look in the cabinet anytime soon, I took a key from another peg and used it to replace the one I'd stolen, in hopes immediate suspicion would take them some other place than where I intended to go. This done, I relocked the cabinet and slipped the key to the padlock back between the bricks. The key to the casemate I put in my trouser--or, rather, Joseph's trouser--pocket.
Footsteps began again. The eternity I'd spent fumbling with locks and keys, with snorts and snores and the sound of my own heart beating in my ears, had passed in that brief moment while the sentry surveyed the parade ground.
Once again, back against the wall, face to face with the man dreaming in his chair, I prayed to each and every saint Molly ever made us light candles to but especially to St. Dismas, the patron saint of thieves. It was he whom I thought might be most sympathetic with my spiritual needs at that moment.
Either my prayers were heard or heaven was closed to me, leaving me free to do the devil's work. The sentry passed. I slipped out of the guardroom and around the corner. In moments I was in the inky darkness within the spiral stairwell. Courage and strength deserted me and I sat till the shaking in my legs and the staggering faintness of my heart passed and I could walk again. Sitting in the dark hugging my knees, gasping for breath and trying to keep my insides from vibrating so hard they rattled my teeth, I thought of the soldiers asleep around me. How did they go into battle? How could they make their legs work as cannon banged and their fellows bled and died or fell screaming? Once I fancied myself a courageous woman and had fantasies of stanching wounds with my petticoats or daring enemy lines to carry messages to turn the tide of war.
