Afterward, she stood, shouldered her backpack, and listened to the breeze. Once again, she noticed how drained she felt, physically, from her feet clear up, as if she hadn't drunk a drop of water in weeks. She was coming to an end. She couldn't help it. She was by no means ready to quit searching, but in her bones felt the hope slipping away from her.
She was halfway back down the bluffs, when she glanced out and spotted the object floating out in the surf. At this distance, identification was strictly a matter of imagination, but her imagination immediately ran away with her. She stumbled down to the sand and ran across the flats. The surf tugged at the object, trying to detach it from the land and haul it back out to sea. She ran into the water and dove onto it, grabbing and lifting it up like a talisman. "It's from the boat!" she shouted. "It's from the boat!" No question in her mind, no question whatsoever. She was holding one of the life vests off Rudy's yacht.
The boys caught her charge into the surf and rushed out to join her. They cheered and danced and pulled Sheri and her trophy out to the sand. The three of them flopped down and stared in wonder at the miraculous icon from some weird religion between hope and survival. But then Sheri allowed herself to sink earthward from her euphoria far enough to puzzle things through.
If the hijackers had stripped the vest off Rudy before throwing him back into the sea, then both of their vests had to have been blown off the boat when it sank. Sheri was pretty sure the area where she blew up the hulk still lay at least a half-hour south of here. Which meant the currents must have scattered the floating wreckage up and down the coast for dozens of miles either way. Her missing Rudy could have floated ashore anywhere in that vast fan of debris. Or nowhere at all.
She kicked the life vest away from her and sank onto her buttocks. She really wasn't doing any good here, was she? What the hell was she doing? Somewhere in her stupid, childish mind, she must have expected to find Rudy lying in the surf in one of these remote coves, waiting for her to come along and kiss the life back into him. Just like a pathetic fairy-tale. How could she be such an idiot? How could she... But then she heard Mike say something and glanced up, annoyed.
"What did you say?"
"I said, are you sure this is off the boat?"
"Of course I am. Why?"
"Because you told us the boat blew up, didn't you?"
"Yeah—"
"Then why isn't it burned?"
Sheri grabbed the vest and clambered to her feet. She turned it inside out, peered at it, smelled at it, even tasted it with her tongue. Holy shit, it was Rudy's vest! She knew it! Suddenly she knew it stronger and more clearly than she had ever known anything in her life.
Of course! All of the vests were stored together in the locker in the cockpit where the explosions and fire had destroyed the boat. This particular vest could have left the boat intact only because Rudy was wearing it. He had to have floated to shore with the vest on after all. He had survived and someone had found him and this...
And this...
And this made Sheri a cold-blooded murderer.
Sheri already felt bad enough about the callous way she had shot and disposed of the hijackers. If this new thinking computed, if Rudy had floated ashore alive, then she had murdered three human beings over a smirk. A smirk that could have meant anything. Could have even meant, What do you take us for? Thoughtless, callous gringo murderers like you?
"What's up?" Tommy asked innocently enough. Sheri forced herself to breathe, to pull her wits together. She didn't know anything for sure. She latched onto the memory of Rudy's voice offering the hijackers her body and the heartless way they had tossed her down into the cabin. She would deal with that later. This wasn't about her, it was about finding Rudy wherever he was and bringing him back from the dead where he had lain in her heart since last night.
"Do you guys have a map?" she asked.
"Of course," Tommy answered. What a dumb question. He led the way back to the Jeep and stood around, chewing on tortillas and dried sausage, while she pored over the geography. Finally, he pointed down over her shoulder. "We're here, right off this point." His bitten fingernail speared the Pacific coast around a half-hour north of a town called El Rosario.
"You've been there?" Sheri asked.
"Sure, with my dad. They got a restaurant there."
"What about a hospital?"
"I dunno. Maybe, but it's a pretty small town. It used to be the end of the road, when we came down here."
Mike cast a sour glance at the leftovers from last night's meal and threw away the tortilla he was chewing. "Let's go. I'm hungry."
So they bundled into the Jeep and took off for the highway, Sheri promising breakfast and wondering how she could get past the authorities and through the hospital doors without papers. Up until now, she had avoided the larger towns along the spine of the Baja, partly because of the potential for trouble over documents, and partly because of the three dead hijackers she had sunk with the boat. But now, the life vest squeezed into the floor space with her backpack had changed all that. She no longer gave a damn what happened to her, as long as there was the slightest chance of finding Rudy.
They were barely back on the highway, when they ran into a line of stopped cars headed south. Sheri climbed to her feet in the back seat. Over the Jeep's windshield, she saw the first of the soldiers. Shit. It was one thing to be heading north in the back seat of a truck driven by a middle-aged gringo couple, and another to be hanging off the back of a Jeep with surfboards and two unwashed teenagers.
"What?" Tommy asked, catching her alarm.
The Jeep jolted forward. Before Sheri knew what she was doing, her hand was in the backpack, yanking out the handgun and flipping it out into the brush off the road. Two of the clips followed. She was glad to see the end of them, but couldn't find the third. Had she left it by the fire? The sight of the tightly wrapped wads of money in the backpack fed her growing panic. How would she explain those? And the lack of normal tourist clothes and supplies, not even a toothbrush?
Fifty yards from the makeshift roadblock, her hand finally found the third clip of bullets. But now, two of the soldiers ambled up and down past the cars, lazy and watchful at the same time, rifles slung over their shoulders. Ahead at the checkpoint, the soldiers had opened a truck's doors and were rifling through the welter of camping gear inside. A vaguely seedy pair of gringos stood on the highway and glared nervously out at the landscape.
An officer and two of the soldiers stood off to one side, laughing about something. Sheri waited for them to turn away so she could toss the third clip out of the Jeep, but the damn fools just stood there and stared at the cars. Finally, the officer must have decided that they had tortured enough tourists for one morning. He waved a trio of cars through the roadblock around the stopped truck. Thank God, Sheri thought. Except when Tommy drove up, the officer said something to the two soldiers that set them to laughing again, and waved the Jeep to a halt.
"Hey boys," he said in thickly accented English. "You take big sister surfing with you?"
Before either boy could reply, Sheri recovered and butted in with, "Well, someone has to make sure they brush their teeth in the morning!"
The officer laughed uproariously and waved them through. Tommy took off, puzzled, while Sheri checked her sweat-stained jeans for traces of urine. The Jeep sped off down the highway. Sheri waited until they had crested the next rise, before pitching the final clip as far out into the brush as she could. But the instant the warm metallic weight left her hand, the enormity of what she had done—the sickening weight of the dimly recalled carnage aboard the boat—came crashing back down on her.
The worst part was, Sheri couldn't even recall the three hijackers' faces, just their arms flailing and their bodies slamming against the bulkhead before they collapsed to the floor. And the pools of blood she had trailed all over the boat through the rest of that god-awful day. Now when she tried, she couldn't recall the sound of them dying or the smell of their blood and bodies fe
stering away in the close cabin, while she casually ate, slept, and made her shell-shocked plans.
And now that she had tossed away her only physical defense, Sheri realized how tiny and insignificant and easily squashed a bug she was, rooting around through the haystacks where the hijackers no doubt had lived. It was a pure fluke that she had survived to breathe the hot, thick air of the Baja desert. By any account, she should be dead herself, not racing about in search of a vanished boyfriend.
But she wasn't dead. Apparently. And apparently, there had to be some reason behind it all. She was nothing if not practical, and right now, she could hardly afford what a neutral observer would have recognized as a vicious war between guilt and survival. But one thing Sheri knew for sure. No matter what happened—no matter if she found Rudy or not, no matter if the hijackers' employers found and killed her first—no matter if she and Rudy both left their bones rotting in the emptiness of this arid and waterlogged hell—she would never touch another loaded gun as long as she lived.
Chapter 31
It was the strangest thing. Whenever Lydia looked at the physical Sam these days, she found an old man struggling with death, disease, and aging. But whenever she glanced away and listened to his voice, she heard the same tough, angry, fearless sonofabitch she had fallen for all those years ago. There really were two Sams—entirely separate and at war with each other—and she loved and hated both of them. No wonder she had hit the booze—no one had prepared the young Louisville belle for a romance remotely this complicated.
But it was definitely a romance, always had been, always would be. She might kill him, she might leave him, but she would never give up on loving him. And if nothing else, she knew he had never wavered for one second in his reciprocal feelings for her. It was just too bad that he had to be so damn hard.
She glanced at him now, sleeping apparently, his window cracked to let in a sliver of breeze off the ocean. The BMW cruised down the new highway with the grimy desert hills on the left and the ocean below on the right. The Sam Lydia now saw was the dying love of her life. It broke her heart to watch him struggling to hold onto his dignity. But the other Sam, the sonofabitch, held the key to that struggle. The sonofabitch who was always the smartest guy in the room, who could outthink the rest of them in his sleep. Like now, on the outskirts of Ensenada, when he apparently woke up, and she heard him tell her to watch out for the blue H.
"The what?"
"The local hospital, I would imagine. In case anyone asks, by the way, we're not there to find anyone. We're stopping there because you forgot to bring me a spare colostomy bag."
Was he being offensive? "What do you mean? I brought plenty—"
"This isn't the time or place to telegraph our intentions. Don’t worry. They'll only sneer at your nursing skills for a minute."
And so they did. When Lydia parked outside the clean new building and walked Sam into the emergency room, she was immediately put on trial for criminal neglect. How could she forget something so basic as his bag and medicines? And then Sam naturally let drop that he had been out of surgery for less than a week. Ola! Was she a monster? Sam spoke a rough version of Spanish, while Lydia spoke none at all. But she was pretty damn sure the nurses understood that he had been forced into this lethal vacation by the tears of a bored, self-centered wife.
Finally, a doctor came out to remonstrate with her in Spanish. She didn't need a translator to get the gist of it. She was to turn around immediately, go home, and take her poor dying husband with her. Shame on her. How could she do this to him? Would she please wait out in the car while they at least changed his bag?
Lydia waited outside all right, but she wasn't going near the car. The emergency room entrance and that sonofabitch and his cute little nurses made too compelling a target. Just stomping around in the heat, sucking down one cigarette after another, she could hear the sliding glass doors shattering around the BMW, as she plowed through into the corridor and ran over the lot of them.
Finally, a nurse wheeled Sam out to the curb and stood there, insolent, waiting for the neglectful wife to get the message. Lydia climbed into the car and drove all twenty yards to the wheelchair without crashing into either of them. Sam chattered away infuriatingly with the little bitch and even let her strap him in. The second Lydia heard the door latch, she took off like a rocket and skidded, screeched, and fishtailed out of the parking lot.
She drove ten minutes into downtown Ensenada, before she could stand to look at Sam without hitting him. Was that legal in Mexico, by the way? Was it okay to punch the daylights out of a neglected, dying old man?
Sam was studying the passenger side mirror, just the tiniest shadow of a grin on his face. "Rudy wasn't brought in there. No sign of either of them. No word about a boat sinking out on the ocean either."
"They told you all that?"
"Of course. We chatted about all kinds of things. They were very sympathetic to your poor, mistreated husband."
"You sonofabitch!" Lydia shouted. "Don't you ever pull something on me like that again!"
"All right! All right!"
"And stop your laughing before I beat the living shit out of you!"
"Okay!" He let her simmer down to a mild boil before continuing, "There are other clinics in town that we could check, but that place was Gunshot Central. Those nurses would have heard."
"Okay, so—"
"And besides, I made my main point."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You've been on my ass since last night. You want to play dirty and threatening with me, I'll kick your ass at it."
Lydia brought the car to a screeching halt in the middle of the street. Horns blared behind her. She didn't give a damn. "How dare you—"
"I'll do what you want!" he insisted. "But shut up with all the threats and motivation. I'll take care of everything, like I always have. But I'll do it my own way, without you breathing down my fucking neck!"
Lydia barely stopped herself from leaping onto her seat to cheer and turn somersaults and cartwheels. For the first time in weeks, she was talking to the sonofabitch she had married! But she knew better than to let Sam see it. She took off again and grimly followed his directions away from the highway and the ocean.
"Never mind," he said when she asked. "I have to make a stop here before we head out to San Quintin and El Rosario. According to the girls, those are the only two towns south of here with clinics where she might have brought him."
"You and your damn girls."
But Lydia let it go. As they turned through one alley after another, each seedier than the last, she began to worry about all of those warnings about driving in Mexico. "They're all looking at us," she said.
"I'm counting on it."
Finally, he told her to pull up outside a broad sidewalk with a pair of decrepit old cafés wedged together. No sign over either of them. A handful of sleepy customers lolled around in the hot, humid shade. Sam rolled down his window and sat there, silent.
"What are we—"
"Quiet. Give it a minute."
Someone must have noticed something, because presently, a tall, casually dressed Mexican elder appeared in the entrance of the café on the right and squinted out at them through thick black-rimmed glasses.
"Rique!" Sam called out.
The man approached the car warily. "Sam?"
"Sure is, old buddy."
"Sam, you look like shit!"
Sam laughed. "And fuck you too! At least I got cancer. What's your excuse?"
Rique beamed and broke into Spanish, Sam more or less keeping up with him. Five minutes went by, then Sam broke back into English with, "No, none of that knock-off shit. I want a D300, and it better have a Nikon serial number on the mount. Batteries and cards too, and a two-hundred zoom."
Rique turned and barked a series of orders at a waiting acolyte. The boy ran off, while Sam fished a roll of bills out of his pockets. "Dollars okay?"
"Dollars better. And who's the lady?"
&
nbsp; "Jesus," Sam apologized. "I'm sorry. Rique, this is my wife Lydia."
"Señora Spaulding!" Rique reached through the window past Sam and took Lydia's hand with genuine enthusiasm. "I see your husband's manners haven't improved with age."
"Not a bit," Lydia laughed. "Nice to meet you, Rique."
"I would invite you in, but the old fool seems to be in a hurry."
"Yeah, we are," Sam agreed. "We're here to pick up our daughter and her boyfriend. They got caught in the storm last week and blown out of their boat by a rogue wave."
If Sam astonished Lydia with the casual fall of the bombshell, he floored Rique. Rique backed up, shocked, then either horrified or very, very alert. "No, no they're fine," Sam added quickly. "They got to shore okay, but the boat's gone. Not that I give a shit. It was Donny and Mischa's old heap, the Morgan ketch."
Rique took a minute to digest all of this. "So you don't really want a camera, I take it?"
"Of course I do. We came so quick, I left all my gear behind."
Rique thought a beat farther. By the looks of him, he had heard all about the wrecked gringo yacht and the attendant miasma of troubles. "So you're just going to pick up the kids and leave right away, take a few pretty pictures along the highway, and forget all about the boat and everything?"
"Sure, amigo. What do you think?"
"I think it is a very good idea, amigo. The food down here sucks anyway, nothing but Mexican shit. Just a minute."
Rique strode into the café and reached over the bar, his back to them.
"You want to tell me—" Lydia tried, but Sam cut her off. The acolyte appeared with a green plastic sack, just as Rique came striding back. A silver object came out from under Rique's shirt into the bag and then though the window to Sam.
Exposure Page 15
