Flashback

by Nevada Barr

  Like moths, they were headed toward the only lights showing: the floods from the refugee boats. They were running right into the middle of Butch and Perry's game.

  Once under the guns, Anna doubted Donna and Patrice would behave in a docile and ladylike fashion. She didn't doubt for an instant that Butch and Perry would deal with interference swiftly and brutally. The men on the beach had their backs to the fort. Hoping it would go unnoticed by them, Anna raised her flashlight and clicked it on and off three times quickly, three times slowly again and again. SOS, the only bit of Morse code that most people knew.

  The running lights, blinking their own meaningless message as the waves hid then revealed them, came on straight as a die. Feeling helpless, Anna kept on: three quick, three slow.

  The red and green lights vanished. She waited, watching for the ocean to raise them into her line of sight again. A minute passed. Two. The sea remained dark beyond the fishing boats. The Zodiacs disgorged their cargo. The beach was rapidly filling. More laughter. More Spanish. Butch and Perry, backs to the broken concrete ringing the beach, moved close to one another, heads together, conferring.

  Still no running lights. Anna had to hope Patrice and Donna had seen her signal and were coming around to the dockside to see who needed rescuing within the fort. Leaving the refugees to their soggy celebrations, she ran for the sally port.

  The docks were empty but for the red cigarette boat and the three NPS boats. Anna boarded the Reef Ranger. Believing the fort personnel to be secured, the smugglers had not bothered to disable the boat radios, but there was a chance Butch or Perry still had one of the handhelds turned on. Paulo hadn't carried a radio and, working in the surf, it was a good bet Mack had left his someplace high and dry. Anna decided to chance it.

  The boat radios were far more powerful than the handhelds. Unless the storm was causing too much interference, she should be able to raise the coast guard. She only hoped they'd not write her off as the little ranger who cried shark. They'd come once before at her request, only to find the search for Bob Shaw was over.

  The gods decided to throw her a bone. Though full of static, she got her message through. The weather was too filthy for aircraft, but boats were being dispatched, fast coast guard cutters. Because of high seas, there were none closer than Key West. Being wise sailors, they'd headed for safe harbor when the gale warnings were issued. It would be a couple hours before the seagoing cavalry would arrive.

  Mike in hand, Anna pondered whether to radio Patrice and Donna. In the end she decided against it. If the running lights were indeed theirs and they'd not gotten her cryptic warning, they would have reached the beach and now be under the smugglers' indifferent care. If they had gotten her message, they would soon be docking.

  Anna decided to give them another five minutes before she returned to her lookout in the bastion. To pass the time she removed the battery cables from the boats--the Curious, the Reef and Atlantic Rangers and the go-fast boat--and cached them in the toilet tanks in the ladies' lavatory.

  The smugglers would have to catch a ride on one of the fishing yachts, some of which would probably be picked up by the coast guard unless they headed straight for the coast of Florida and hid out there. If they made for Cuba--and if the storm lifted--coast guard helicopters would find them.

  Many ifs. Still it pleased her to annoy Butch and Perry in some fashion.

  From the way the two thugs behaved and the few hints they'd let drop--the biggest being the probable shooting of Rick once the plan was well in motion and he became superfluous--Anna suspected Butch and his criminal-in-training, Perry, intended to leave the bigger slower boats for the well-intentioned suckers and use the Scarab to get clear.

  There would be hell to pay when they found the cable gone and, on the tiny key, no place much for Anna to hide when they came for her. She'd worry about that later.

  Emerging from the ladies' loo, Anna was met with the wonderfully uplifting sight of Donna and Patrice, their runabout in an NPS slip, walking up toward the main dock.

  In an uncharacteristic burst of love for her fellow men or women or whatever, Anna ran to them like an overeager teenager and gave Donna, the first in line, a fierce hug. Donna folded her tight muttering with some alarm: "What's this? What happened? Where's the real Anna Pigeon?"

  The last saved what was left of Anna's abandoned dignity. The warmth of the embrace and the joy of seeing people who were actually on her side had begun to bring tears. In front of men, unless in the grips of madness or hallucinogenic drugs and hysteria, Anna wouldn't cry. Women were much harder on her self-control. Women, touted as the illogical gender, actually believed tears were normal.

  "Come," Anna said and hurried them to the shelter and sheltering darkness of the sally port. There she told them the situation and her plan to sit tight, lay low, hide out--whatever it took to stay alive and unharmed.

  Donna swelled with an angry need to bust heads, see justice done. Patrice, a cop for a lot of years, just nodded. "We can always catch 'em later when the odds are in our favor."

  "What if there is no 'later'?" Donna grumbled.

  "Criminals are good at giving law enforcement plenty of chances. There's always a later," Patrice said.

  An urgency to be back on the beach side of the fort where the refugees were landing was upon Anna. Though she could do little but observe and had made the decision to do that and only that, she needed to be there. The whole situation with the joyous refugees, the exuberance of their greetings with Paulo, Mack and Rick, their rescuers, the hanging back of the thugs, armed, conferring, was at best unstable. At worst . . .

  Anna didn't want to think about at worst.

  "I need to get back, get close," she said.

  "We'll go with," Patrice said. "We'll be there to do whatever you need done."

  "Even nothing," Donna conceded.

  First they made a stop in the office. The new and brighter flashlight didn't make the nailed door look any easier to open. Donna, with her greater strength, could have chopped through it with an axe, but it would have taken time and made noise.

  Over Daniel's protests they opted to leave him and Teddy incarcerated a while longer. To Teddy's repeated, "Is Bob okay?" Anna could only reply that she'd not seen him. The news regarding his blood smeared on the floors could wait.

  Anna was glad to have the company of the lighthouse keepers, though it made stealth and invisibility a greater problem than had she been alone. It was quickly decided their best hope to avoid detection was to follow the moat, not along the wall but in the water.

  As Anna jumped off the bridge connecting the sally port with the rest of the key, Donna asked, "Are there sharks?" It was the first time Anna heard fear in the big woman's voice, and it amused her. For no reason whatever she was put in mind of Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. "Swim hell, the fall'll probably kill yah." Sharks were the least of this night's predators.

  "Not usually," Anna replied truthfully. She'd heard tales of the larger fish visiting, but the only shark she'd ever seen in the moat was the baby nurse shark. Nurse sharks had the alarming silhouette of their more aggressive sisters but were gentle creatures not much given to biting bipeds.

  "In you go," Patrice said.

  Anna heard a squawk, then there was a sizable splash.

  Donna had joined her. Patrice came last.

  The moat was uneven in depth. At no point was it over Anna's head, but along the northern side she would have preferred swimming to wading chest-deep. A desire to keep her flashlight dry kept her from it. With the rain and the sweat of her palm the metal cylinder was already running with water, but she could hope, short of submersion, it would continue to function. The light was six cells, long and heavy and encased in hard metal. She'd kept it more for its value as a weapon than a light source. One never knew what might be needed.

  Reaching the corner where the moat angled south, they were just above the invaded beachfront. Behind moat wall with cover of darkness and
rain and sufficient noise from wind and refugees to mask their splashing, Anna had little fear of discovery.

  To the right the moat ran along the edge of the sea. To the left was a not-so-gentle slope down to the small beach. Across an open space, maybe fifty feet at a guess, the tumbled mass of concrete and timber of the ruined coaling dock provided cover.

  Being smallest, fastest and, in this instance, boss, Anna went first. It was three feet from the surface of the water to the top of the moat wall. The strong arms of her companions boosted her easily, and Anna was grateful for the help. What with one thing and another, her usual strength of ten men had dwindled. She wasn't sure she could hoist herself up that far one more time this night. Bent over, moving quickly but not running, she crossed the open area without being seen. Over three hundred pair of eyes now crowded the sandy strip between stone and water, so many there was scarcely room to move, but none were interested in the high ground.

  On the southern edge, cuddled up next to the rocks directly beneath where she had been boosted out of the moat, Butch was shouting for quiet. The crowd ignored him till he fired off a volley from his Uzi. Anna dove for cover. Silence fell. But for the hush of wind and rain, the quiet was absolute, with the waiting quality of an indrawn breath.

  "Listen up," Butch shouted. Murmuring began. Another volley of gunfire. Everybody, including Anna, listened up.

  "We got you here," Butch yelled. "Now what we got is a kind of customs levy. You're going to give us anything you got in the way of cash and jewelry, and we are going to let you stay alive to see more of America than this godforsaken sandbar."

  The swell of human noise began again. Mack cried: "What the hell . . ."

  In heavily accented English a man yelled: "We already give you the ten thousand dollars. You don't get no more. That was the deal."

  A sharp crack of gunfire. A scream, then the long drawn out, "Nooo" of a grieving woman.

  Anna took the risk of peeking out from behind the jagged slab of concrete. Between Butch and the refugees--now huddled even more tightly together on her end of the beach--a space had opened. In the middle of it, stark and stagelit by the lights from the offshore boats, lay a man. A woman knelt beside him, her hands held out in front of her as if in supplication. Her palms were a shocking bright and glistening red, the color fired by the light.

  "Jiminy Christmas, the guy's a psycho."

  Anna twitched with such violence she rapped the back of a hand painfully against the concrete. During the volley of gunfire, Donna had emerged from the moat and run across the open space to join her.

  "Anybody else want to discuss terms?" This was Perry, a swagger in his voice, his Uzi muzzle pointed toward the mass of Cubans.

  "It wasn't no ten thousand . . . What the fuck are you doing? My God, you killed him . . ." These utterances slammed together, Mack and Paulo and Rick trying to make sense of this betrayal of their dream.

  Paulo and Mack, now standing shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the sea, were stunned into a stupidity that would have been funny under less deadly circumstances.

  "This is what's going to happen," Butch told the cowering crowd. "Two by two like Noah's fucking animals, you're going to come up by your dead hero here and put down what valuables you got. Perry's going to see to it you don't 'forget' anything. You hold back, you get shot. You mouth off, you get shot. You do anything I don't like, you get shot."

  No one moved.

  A voice raised, shrill in protest, then three shots, rapid fire. A woman on the edge of the crowd nearest Anna fell to the ground screaming.

  "Tell 'em, Mack," Butch said.

  Mack began speaking Spanish, translating. The refugees grumbled, a swelling buzz that grew, then abruptly died. Anna guessed he'd gotten to the part about mouthing off and getting shot.

  Perry handed his weapon to Butch and pointed at the nearest crouching family group, a very young mother, babe in arms and a man of an age to be her father or uncle. "Andale, andale," he yelled.

  Anna's sketchy Spanish education included the word for hurry. The owner of Pepe Delgado's where she'd waited tables in college used to yell it at the waitresses.

  The woman clutching her child and the man with them hurried to where Perry stood near the corpse, the symbol and promise of what was meted out to those who would disobey. The woman Butch had shot was still screaming.

  With brutal efficiency, Perry collected their offerings in a lawn-sized garbage bag he pulled from one pocket or another. He patted the refugees with professional thoroughness, learned, Anna was willing to bet, by being patted down himself prior to probably more than one arrest.

  "Andale." The next two sheep hastened to the shearing pen.

  "We've got to do something," Donna said.

  Anna shared the sentiment but had no idea what "something"--at least something that didn't end like the last act of Hamlet--would entail.

  "Why don't they rush him?" Donna hissed.

  "They're used to being ruled by force," Anna said. "Peaceable citizens aren't accustomed to running headlong into machine gun fire."

  "Good point."

  The Cubans kept coming. The sack grew fatter. Perry, bored by easy pickings, grew ever more violent, cuffing those who were too slow or too quick or too human. He backhanded a boy of eight or nine, knocking him to the ground. The mother sprang at him. He shot her with the .44 that appeared from somewhere on his person and she fell back. More red-red and surprisingly beautiful blood spattered the sand in the wash of the floodlights. Paulo cried out. He and Mack took a step forward. Butch, an Uzi under each arm now, turned toward them and they stopped.

  "We've got to do something," Donna said again.

  "You're right," Anna said. "Give me ten minutes and then create a diversion."

  "What kind?"

  "Be creative." Overcome with the movie-bred idea of saying, "synchronize watches," Anna looked to her wrist. Her timepiece was barricaded in the office with Daniel and Teddy. No matter; salt water had probably stopped Donna's anyway.

  "What's the plan?" Donna asked.

  "It's a little sketchy at this point," Anna admitted.

  Donna looked as if she had more questions. She didn't ask and Anna was grateful. "Ten minutes," Donna said.

  Anna returned to her peephole where two chunks of concrete lay one atop the other. When both Butch and Perry were occupied with their harvest, she said, "Okay."

  Donna left in a crouching walk. No one shouted in alarm or pointed. Seconds later the big woman was gone, hidden in the fort's moat.

  Anna followed, feeling the rush of fear as she entered the exposed area and a bowel-loosening relief when she reached the shelter of the moat and lay flat along its wall.

  Donna was already heading back the way they'd come, forging ahead with such force she left a sizable wake in the rain-pocked water.

  Patrice was waiting, chest-deep in water, next to the moat wall.

  Anna hung her head over the brick till her face was less than a foot from Patrice's. Rain had plastered Patrice's thin, over-permed hair to her scalp. So close, even with what little light bled over from the beach, Anna could see the coarseness of her skin, the bluntness of her features. Patrice was there, and strong and brave, and she looked beautiful as far as Anna was concerned.

  "Go with Donna," Anna whispered.

  "I stay with you," Patrice replied.

  Anna hadn't the courage or fortitude to argue with her convincingly, so she didn't try.

  "We've got eight or so minutes till Donna does whatever it is she does. Here's the plan." Quickly she outlined her thoughts.

  Patrice was silent a moment.

  "Got a better idea?" Anna asked hopefully.

  Patrice smiled. "I was just admiring its simplicity," she said. "It's got that classic Popeye and Brutus style."

  Anna was glad Patrice had refused to leave. "Let's do it," she said.

  It was a matter of less than two or three minutes before they were in place. They'd crawled on their bellies like un
gainly lizards along the top of the moat wall till they were above and behind Butch. There was no cover and had either of the gunmen taken time away from their gathering of ill-gotten gains to look, they would have seen them. So close, so exposed. Anna and Patrice's lives would have been instantly forfeit. If any of the refugees saw them, they gave no sign. Once a little girl pointed, but her mother snatched her up and began whispering in her ear.

  Lying in plain sight atop the moat wall like a couple of sacrificial ex-virgins, time seemed to stop. Anna's internal clock ticked away not minutes but the quarters then halves of hours as they waited for Donna to create enough of a disturbance the two armed men would be distracted and confused for a moment.

  Just as Anna was beginning to think archaeologists of the future would discover her bones splayed over the concrete cap of the wall and muse over cause of death, she heard the unmistakable sound of an engine revving. It was impossible to tell if it was one of the sportfisher boats offshore or if Donna had fired up the runabout.

  The noise grew. Too rumbling for the runabout; a deep guttural roar of a piston engine with an attitude.

  "On my God," Patrice muttered at the same moment a wild Indian cry built with the scream of an engine suddenly glutted with gasoline.

  Anna looked south where the noise gathered. Suddenly the spotlight from one of the offshore vessels swung, and a vision acidic in its intensity and epic in execution came shrieking out of the darkness. Donna, astride Mrs. Meyers, throttle ratcheted down, both screaming like banshees, roared down the top of the moat wall. The Harley looked immense and black and silver and mean; Donna, wet hair streaming behind, wide shoulders bunched into muscle, a Valkyrie, an Amazon. The bike seemed to be coming at the speed of sound though it couldn't have been traveling more than thirty miles an hour tops.

  Anna glanced at Patrice. Her face was radiant with love. No surprise; at that moment Anna was in love with Donna herself. Patrice's face cleared, all business now. She nodded. Anna nodded back. As one they rose.