by John Oakes
“Enough,” the Aussie said. “It’s just not sporting. If you’re gonna kill him, get it over with. If not, I’ve got better things to do.”
Rabelais spit on Winton while Elgin rifled through his pockets, tossing Winton around like a rag doll as he searched.
Winton silently spasmed in pain with each jerking motion. He thought he heard Julius being attacked, but as the world came into focus again, he realized he was listening to the sound of his own pained breathing, half grunting. He sounded to himself like a cow giving birth.
“Here it is,” Elgin said. In his diminished sight, Winton saw something golden glint in the afternoon light before Elgin pocketed it.
Winton closed his eyes and focused on calming his breathing, so as not to aggravate his hurt rib, and prayed for no more blows.
“What happens now?” Elgin asked.
The Aussie raised his weapon. “You go back to your master.”
“You’re keeping them?”
“That was the deal. Tell your boss it’s time he and I had a real chat about the future.” The Aussie tossed something shiny through the air. Even in his fog of pain, Winton could tell it was a police badge. He’d seen its like a thousand times.
Elgin snatched it out of the air, and looked at it. “You? You had Chevalier this whole time?”
Winton pressed his forehead into the dirt, hiding a smile.
Find your brother, his father had commanded him. He’d accomplished that at least. If they were gonna kill him? Well, at least it was because he’d gotten close enough to scare the big bad men.
The blond Aussie and another man hauled Winton to his feet, as Elgin watched.
“We learned so much from chatting with Lucas, too.” The Aussie nodded again at Elgin. “Quite an interesting fella, your boss. Off you go, now.”
Elgin looked at Winton, at Lucas’ badge then up at the Aussie, one side of his face collapsing in a dark expression. He turned and pushed Rabelais toward the car.
“Jemma, drive the truck into the facility. Blackie and Tom Thumb ride in the back. Joey, go with.” The young man called Joey picked Winton up under the arms and another guy hoisted his feet into the bed of the truck. Julian climbed in on his own power and sat quietly, gazing at his feet.
The woman called Jemma started the engine and pulled a u-turn.
“That fella crush your marbles or what?” Joey asked in the same Aussie accent. His submachine gun swung from his shoulder lazily with the motion of the truck.
Winton answered by vomiting.
“Fuck sake.” Joey reared back, then gave Julius a look. “And what about you? I thought cops in America never missed a chance to beat down a black guy.”
“I’m as surprised as you.” Julius answered with a shaky voice, still not looking up at his captor.
It was only a short ride to the dock, where they were pulled from the truck and set on their feet.
“You can walk, can’t you?” Joey prodded Winton in the back of his head with a submachine gun.
Winton took one step, and the world spun into black.
EIGHTEEN
Winton caught only fleeting glances of the trip up the stairs, onto the deck and down into the ship. By the time he was dropped on a rusting metal floor, he’d regained his senses enough to feel the cracked and peeling paint on his skin and smell the musty odor of the ship. His ears registered the clang of a metal door shutting and sealing him in a room.
“Hey man, you all right?” Julius’ voice. “I mean, not all right, obviously. But uh… Shit.”
“I’m gonna need an aspirin,” Winton said.
“One or two.”
“They got the bone.”
“Yeah,” Julius admitted. “They did. And our daring raid didn’t even exit the planning stages.”
“So technically,” Winton said, voice shaking, “the raid didn’t fail.”
Julius huffed a laugh. “And I tried so hard to avoid lock-up, but here I am. On a boat, if you can believe that shit.”
Winton couldn’t bring himself to open his eyes yet. He felt feebly for Julius and found an arm. “Did you see where they brought us? Describe it.”
“They took us down a level. There’s a slit window, but it’s below deck.”
“Would you remember the way out?”
“Sure. But you think we’re getting out?”
Winton sniffed. “I’d like to keep the option open.”
“You know,” Julius said. “When a man gets tuned up like that, and he’s still cracking wise, that’s something.”
“Julius, don’t let me go out again.”
“Why, you think you got a concussion?”
“No, they didn’t get me in the noggin all that bad. I just want to stay alert. We gotta think.”
“Word. Not much else we can do.”
“Let’s pull an Apollo 13,” Winton said. “Let’s do a quick assessment of the skills we both have and the materials at our disposal.”
“Okay. Helicopter repair and maintenance. Remodeling homes. I got a gold chain and couple cough drops in my pocket.”
“Good, Winton said, “in case we run across a broken helicopter. As for me, I worked in city planning and magic shows.”
“Okay,” Julius said. “So, we’re hoping for a miracle then.”
“Well, we ain’t dead yet. I heard him mention my brother. He’s here somewhere.”
Their subsequent plotting mainly consisted of Julius sitting against the wall, head leaning on a shoulder, and Winton lying on his less injured side, trying not to move or cry.
“Never told anyone what my dream was,” Julius said softly. “About being the first black guy on HGTV. I never mentioned it to a soul.” When Winton didn’t respond, he went on. “Something like, Flip that Hood with Julius Vincent.”
“That’s nice,” Winton said, lips scraping on flakes of old paint, a tear running across the bridge of his nose into his other eye.
“It’s like that broken windows theory but in reverse. If I could kick start the process, maybe people would start investing a little more in paint and curb appeal all on their own. Pride increases. People work together. Crime goes down. Communities radiate positivity.” Julius groaned into his hands, a muffled sound of despair. “I suppose we ain’t dead yet.”
“Not yet,” Winton said. With that, he felt the clock ticking down to his final moment, knowing that it was only a matter of time. “My dad will never forgive himself.”
“For what?”
“For sending me after my brother. He told me it would come to this, too. I mean, forget being four-foot-nothing, I run a theme resort for foreign businessmen. I’m no Jason Fucking Bourne.”
“He told you you were gonna fail? That’s messed up.”
“No. He told me that if I did it wrong, I’d fail.”
“How were you supposed to do it?”
“I was supposed to find my old rage, or something, he said.” Winton sniffed. “I thought I had a little moxie built up after those fucks locked me in that trunk, but then they beat it right outta me.”
“Your old rage? What’s that mean anyway?”
“Ah, man.” Winton rolled onto his back. “I grew up angry, deep down. For being cursed with this body. I was just a ball of uncontrollable rage in my teens. My poor parents. Teachers and classmates too.”
“Damn,” Julius said. “I can’t imagine.”
“I learned to hide it with dark humor, then with partying in college, enough that I could have a semi-normal life, but it was just waiting there all the time. The rage. The anger. The shame. Few years later I had a major burn-out. Rock bottom. Long story, but I made the choice to move past my issues, to be happy and embrace what life could still offer me. It wasn’t all cotton candy and rainbows from then on, but it seems like every good thing that’s happened in the decade since was because of that decision.”
“And you were just supposed to flip a switch? Bring back the old Winton?”
Winton shook his head and sniffed, as more wetness rolled
down into this hair. “It’s gonna tear him up inside.” Winton sniffed again, choking back tears. “It’s best, quite honestly if he could just pass on in that hospital.”
Winton rolled onto his back, feeling pain rise and fall in his side and lower abdomen with each breath. Other pains slowly made themselves known: His thigh, his hips, his glutes, lower back, arms and face where he’d taken shots from Elgin and Rabelais’ kicks. He groaned, realizing that if he didn’t try to move around, he’d grow stiff as a board, but if he moved he’d agitate his worst injuries.
“I’m sorry you got done like that, man,” Julius said.
“Thanks, man.”
“This is fucked up.” Julius got up and stood on his toes to peer down through the slit window. He ran his hands over the walls and over the door. The handle looked like it had once locked from the inside like a normal state room, but when Julius tried it, the door held firm. He slinked closer to Winton and whispered, “Handle turns, but won’t open the door. Must be bolted on the other side.”
Winton gave as much of a nod as he could muster.
“You’re bleeding.” Julius pointed at the ray of light on the floor, stretching across Winton’s lower half.
Winton opened his eyes. “Huh?”
“Look.” Julius touched his leg.
“Great.” Winton reached down and bent his leg up at the same time so he could feel the wet spot. He felt something hard underneath it, and reached into his pocket. He felt more squishy blood and a slick-surfaced object about an inch long. He brought it out, and after a moment, began to laugh.
His bloody fingers held a bit of bloody, golden metal, broken at a sharp angle.
“What’s so funny?”
“This.” Winton, showed Julius the sharp nub, one end of the golden bone. “Those stupid meatheads broke Remus’ little baby bone!” Winton cackled under his breath and winced at the resulting pain.
Julius let out a chuckle, too. “Well, well. That thing’s supposed to have magical powers, right?”
“Yeah,” Winton said. “What was that door unlocking spell from Harry Potter? Let’s try that.”
Footsteps thudded down the passage toward them. The bolt creaked open, and the door swung free. Joey trained his gun on Julius. The boss Australian stepped into the doorway behind him. “Up, playa’,” he said in a mock American accent.
“Where’m I going?” Julius asked.
“Going for a chat. Up, up.”
“What about him?” Julius stood, nodding down at the floor.
“He looks rather comfy,” the Aussie said in his chipper manner. “Are you comfy, friend?” he asked Winton overloud as if speaking to a deaf person, foreigner or small child.
Winton clutched his piece of gold baby bone and glared down his nose at his captor.
The boss took Julius’ arms and pressed his wrists together, then looped a heavy-duty zip tie around them and cinched it tight, forcing Julius to gasp.
“Just a precaution. Now walk.”
Joey pushed Julius out and the Aussie boss winked at Winton before closing the door.
A minute later came the shouts, like a one-sided argument punctuated with pleading and cries of pain. Winton rolled into a ball and sobbed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He muttered apologies to Julius, to his dad, to Missy and his unborn child, to his closest friends and all his co-workers at the resort.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Lastly he apologized to himself. He had made a wrong move somewhere, and forfeited his freedom in the process, maybe his life.
He’d worked hard to be something resembling a good person. He’d learned kindness, both to others and himself. He’d become a peacemaker, a motivator, a shoulder to cry on. He’d finally become a person the world could benefit from, a person who might be happy, and here he was floating on a drug ship in the Mississippi, beat to hell and about to get more. This was how the cops did it after all: Take one prisoner and interrogate them. Then come for the next and use whatever they’d gleaned to help break the second.
The sounds echoing in his cube-shaped prison cell were taking on new dimensions, seeming to come from different directions. There were small sounds along with large, as if the ship itself were reacting to the drubbing Julius was taking, tittering like a little three hundred ton sparrow.
Tink, tink, tink.
Tink, tink.
Winton’s wet eyes shot open.
Tink-tink. Tink. Tink-tink.
Winton rolled to his hands and knees despite the pain. His ears searched the echo chamber trying to locate the sound. No particular wall seemed to be the source. The tinking sound was irregular, but he traced it to a spot beneath his nose.
The floor.
Winton lay back down and pressed his ear into the metal.
The was silence spanning four labored breaths.
Tink-tink. Tink-tink-tink.
Winton began to hyperventilate. He fished the little piece of gilded bone out of his pocket again and held it above the floor with a trembling hand.
W-I-N-T-O-N, he tapped out in Morse code.
The reply tapped out the letters L-U-C-A-S.
NINETEEN
Winton bunched his fist and pressed it to his eye, unable to staunch joy that only complicated his pain. He sniffed and tried to clear his eyes of wetness.
U-H-U-R-T, Winton tapped out. There was another long silence
Y-E-S. A pause. D-R-U-G-S
I-K-N-O-W-R-E-M-U-S.
K-I-L-L-E-R.
Y-E-S.
C-R-A-Z-Y.
Winton tapped an acknowledgment. What he wouldn’t give to speak to his brother in a normal fashion.
O-Z-B-A-D.
Oz. Australians. The Aussies were bad. Wasn’t difficult to imagine Lucas feeling that way.
O-K, Winton tapped.
S-A-V-E-R-S-C-O-M-E. A dire question forced to sound childlike by the limits of the code.
Winton’s face bunched up on the verge of tears again. N-O. Winton held the golden nib a long moment before tapping out, J-U-S-T-U-S
The floor below was silent, then four letters.
L-O-V-E.
Winton bit his lip, and his shoulders jerked as he cried. L-O-V-E, he tapped back.
D-A-D.
Winton heard steps down the passageway. He quickly tapped O-K and pocketed the bone nub, rolling to his back and wiping fresh tears from his eyes.
The door swung open and a stylishly-dressed, dark-haired fellow appeared. He was the first man Winton had seen climbing stairs on the ship through binoculars. He waved the muzzle of his submachine gun, beckoning Winton out. Winton slowly got to his feet, wincing and groaning the whole way. He stumbled forward, and the man caught him by the shoulder. For an instant, Winton was a foot away from him, nose just six inches from the gun. Close enough to grab for it.
“Try it,” the Aussie said, “and I’ll bugger you with it.” He produced a looped heavy-duty zip tie, and Winton slipped his hands inside it, careful to cross his wrists and flex. This Australian guy didn’t seem to know or care it was the best way to get zip-tied if one wanted to try and wriggle free at some point. Few did. One of the many odd bits and pieces of knowledge Winton had picked up over the years from other illusionists.
The dark-haired Aussie led him back down the passageway and into a large cargo bay. The sun lit the space through the open cargo hatch twenty feet above. On the floor, as many feet below, there were guide posts for holding shipping containers and other open spaces for miscellaneous cargo. There were red-painted winches with thick cables, control panels, and other tools and odds and ends that Winton couldn’t imagine a use for. The inside of a cargo ship wasn’t something he’d ever seen before. In any other circumstance, Winton would have examined the hold with more pointed curiosity.
His guard helped seat him in a chair tall enough that Winton’s feet dangled above the floor. The blond Aussie stood directly before Winton, fifteen feet away, just barely in the shadows. He had his hair tucked behind his ears and was using a large
knife to clean his nails. To his right stood Joey, seemingly the pup of the crew, and the stern-faced woman, Jemma.
“I’m told your name is Winton,” the blond man said, attending to his nails. “Is that right?”
“Winton. Yeah.”
The Aussie’s neck straightened. He looked at Winton. “Like the jazz musician.”
“Spelled different. What can I call you?”
The Aussie grinned, seeming pleased by the question somehow. “Call me Gandalf.”
Winton didn’t show even a flicker of reaction at that.
“No? Okay, let’s try Tom, then.”
Another Lord of the Rings reference, just not a well-known one. “Right. Tom Bombadil. He didn’t make the movies. Kind of a boring part of the book if you ask me.”
Tom, or whatever his name was, examined Winton and grinned. He stowed his knife in a sheath. “Ah. Well. Winton. I have a couple questions for you.”
“I figured.”
“Obviously, we don’t know exactly what to do with you lot, yet.” The Aussie took two steps forward into the light.
Was it obvious? Winton was glad to hear it, either way.
“Tell me why you came sniffing about this ship.”
“I was looking for my brother,” Winton said plainly.
“Fair answer.” He took another step. “How did you know to come here?”
“Found a map showing where all of Maroulis’ docks were. Then I saw a picture of this ship on my brother’s phone. Throw in some trial and error and here we are.”
Joey shifted uncomfortably. The boss eyed him over a shoulder. “Hear that, Joey? The fucking phone.” The boss’ tone was tutorial, as if capping a lesson he’d already doled out.
So Joey had been the one tasked with ditching Lucas’ cruiser.
“Do you know why your brother is here?” the boss asked, returning his gaze to Winton.
“I only have guesses.”
“Go ahead then, Winton.” Tom held his hands behind his back in a casual pose. “Guess.”
“Smuggling.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“I dunno,” Winton said. “Koala pelts? Kookaburra licorice. Fucking Ugg boots? I really don’t care.”
