I switched off the light, opened the door, and came face to face with the barrel end of a shotgun.
Not so paranoid after all, Quant.
Jaegar.
“Put your hands behind your head,” he ordered in a deep voice.
“Uh, what about this stuff?” I hated to be pragmatic at a time like that, but really, my hands were full with knapsacks and duffle bags, mine and Cassandra’s.
“Put the bags down…no…hold them.”
I guess he realized that if I deposited the bags outside the activities director’s office, they’d attract someone’s attention sooner or later, and I suspected that that was the last thing he wanted.
“Walk forward,” he barked.
I did as directed, and in case I needed further encouragement, I felt the tip of his firearm jab the middle of my back. “Where are we going?” I asked as casually as the situation allowed.
“River.”
Oh shit.
Jaegar prodded me along as we marched down the deserted corridors of the lodge, through the front foyer, past the pleasant sitting areas, the bar, the dining room, then down a set of steps that took us into the darkness outside. We made our way past a pool area, landscaped lawns and gardens, and finally onto a dirt path that was on a slight decline (which I took to mean we were getting close to the water’s edge). I could smell dampness in the air, along with a faint pungency that might have been the scent of blood from a distant lion kill, warthog poop, or just my own fear.
When we were far enough away from the lodge that it was unlikely anyone awake at that hour would see us, Jaegar lit a pocket flashlight, which did its best to illuminate the way but only revealed shadows of trees and grasses along the path and alarmed a few night creatures that scurried out of our way. Eventually we rounded a bend in the path, and I saw a faint light, moving gently up and down, side to side. I soon recognized the source: a lantern on a boat, shifting listlessly in the water alongside a wooden pier.
“Get on,” Jaegar ordered when we reached the craft, a large, flat-bottomed thing with a knee-high railing around its circumference and a slightly pitched roof held up at each corner by thin, round stems of metal. I realized this was probably one of the boats used for the lodge’s water-based safaris, but somehow I didn’t think this voyage was going be a pleasure ride. There was a long, narrow table at the centre of the boat, surrounded by a half dozen of the kind of white plastic chairs you’d expect to find around a pool or barbecue pit. Huddled beneath a coarse blanket on one of the chairs was Cassandra Wellness. There was only one oil lamp burning on the boat, but it was enough for me to see the look on her face and immediately know that I’d been mistaken about her role in all of this. She was scared.
“What’s going on here?” I demanded to know from Jaegar as he urged me aboard. Cassandra and I exchanged wordless stares.
“Sit down,” was his informative reply.
I did as I was told, lowering myself into a seat next to Cassandra. “Are you okay?” I asked in a shushed voice. “What’s happening here?”
“This stupid asshole broke into our room; he attacked me, then brought me here,” she spit out with enough venom to take down a tyrannosaurus rex.
“Yeah,” I said, “I got that. But why? And why didn’t the villagers help you? By the look of things, you put up quite a fight.”
“He had his big, fat hand over my mouth!” she explained, glaring at Jaegar.
Cassandra Wellness was pissed. And when Cassandra Wellness is pissed, everyone is going to know about it. Her eyes came back to mine. “I was so tired after you skulked off that I fell right to sleep. I didn’t even know he was there until he was already on top of me. He probably wanted to rape me!” She turned to him again and hissed at his face. “Pervert!” Then back to me. “I couldn’t scream, but I kicked things around pretty good.”
I could appreciate Cassandra’s disgust with our captor, but I needed facts. “How did he know where to find us?”
“He said he followed us,” she told me. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t believe a word this jerk has to say.”
I frowned. “But that’s impossible. We saw the truck that pulled up behind us. No one got out of it. They were still in the vehicle watching the Jeep burn when we left.”
“He said he followed us,” she repeated, pulling the blanket closer around her shoulders. The night had brought coolness, and the water surrounding us was adding its own chill. “That’s what he said; don’t ask me.” She was in a generally belligerent mood.
While we talked, I was also keeping a close eye on Jaegar. He had released a rope that bound the boat to the dock and was now using an oar to push the vessel back from the grassy shore with a silence that assured our departure would be unheard and probably unseen. Maybe he just wanted to get far enough away so no one could hear Cassandra calling him a pervert.
“Where are we going?” I stood and demanded to know in a forceful voice, hoping that someone, somewhere might hear me (if they hadn’t already heard Cassandra’s cussing) and come to see what the ruckus was all about.
“Shut the mouth,” he ordered harshly. “And sit!”
He had the gun; I thought it best to comply.
Showing great dexterity with a shotgun in one hand (pointed at yours truly), and the boat’s controls (the kind that faced into the boat—and at us—rather than outward from the bow) in the other, Jaegar started the motor. He kept it at a quiet idle, but that was enough to back the boat further away from shore and send it floating down the centre of the river. I guess I was wrong earlier. This was The African Queen.
We travelled this way for several minutes, Cassandra continuing to fume and me trying to get my bearings and figure out an escape plan. The water and sky were black as tar, becoming one at some indistinguishable point. The river was not so wide as to make the shore on either side invisible—in daylight—but at this time of night I could barely make out the vague impression of some unidentifiable shapes that might signify trees and bushes on good, old terra firma. But it didn’t matter, for I had other measuring sticks that told me we weren’t travelling too far from land.
Every so often, the purplish glow of the African moonlight would catch a flash of silver—the watching eyes of night predators on the prowl for supper, the eyes of hyenas, leopards, and those damn warthogs. Along with the visual evidence of the hunt came the sounds: low moans, snarls, and rumbles born deep within powerful chests; and too, somewhere in the far off distance, I could hear drumming. African villagers were beating out the traditional rhythms of a time long past but never forgotten. Under other circumstances, this ride would have been a most remarkable experience, magical, unforgettable, but tonight it was a foreboding journey, part of a sinister master plan I’d yet to figure out.
Jaegar throttled down, bringing the boat’s engines to a halt. We seemed to be drifting aimlessly until the craft unceremoniously bumped up against a spit of land, a three-metre-by-three-metre island of mud chunks and tall reeds with edges so sharp they looked as if they would slice skin with the slightest pass. I knew we’d departed from Botswana and that the land mass on the opposite shore was Namibia, so that made this little piece of soggy earth in the middle of the Chobe River…up for grabs? Perhaps we’d landed here to lay claim to this desolate, sodden piece of dirt in the name of…Jaegarland?
Jaegar’s steps made heavy sounds that reverberated over the calm surface of the water as he made his way to where Cassandra and I sat. With the gun’s barrel level with my face, he ordered me to get up.
Dark. Deserted. Gun in my face. Not good.
“No!” Cassandra let out in a tremulous voice, her earlier brashness discarded as she gave in to the gravity of our threatening situation. “What are you doing?”
“It’s okay,” I lied as I stood, giving her a reassuring look followed by a “come on, you’re not really going to shoot me” look for Jaegar.
“Hands up,” was his disheartening response.
I did as I was told.
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With the front of his gun, SpongeBob SquareHead motioned for me to walk ahead of him to the far end of the boat. I proceeded to the desired spot, my feet moving slowly but my mind racing, frenetically trying to identify ingenious “how am I going to get out of this one?” scenarios. So far all I’d come up with was a quick swim to shore, hoping he was a poor shot.
I reached the edge of the boat, the insubstantial railing the only thing between me and the water.
“If you don’t agree to do what I tell you to, I will shoot you, and you will fall into the water and you will die,” Jaegar said with irritating succinctness. I’d never heard him speak more than a few words at once before, so he must have been practicing this soliloquy for quite some time.
“I’ll probably go for the ‘doing what you tell me to’ thing,” I replied, “but can you tell me exactly what that is first, and then I’ll decide?” A smart ass to the bitter end.
“Russell, don’t fool with this guy,” Cassandra warned. “I think he means business.”
You think?
I couldn’t see because my back was to them, but I was hoping Cassandra was sneaking up on Jaegar with a flowerpot or something to hit him over the head with. It worked on Three’s Company; it could work here.
“What do you want, Jaegar?” I asked. “I really want to know.”
“Not what I want,” he told me. “What the boss wants.”
Interesting. This was beginning to sound kind of Sopranos-ish. Maybe Matthew Moxley hadn’t changed his stripes so much after all. Maybe he’d become some kind of crime lord, and Jaegar was his muscle. “Who’s your boss?” I asked, not really expecting an answer. I was surprised with the one I got.
“Christian Wellness.”
I slowly rotated on the spot, hands still in the air, and let my eyes move past the considerable bulk of Jaegar to Cassandra Wellness. I couldn’t make out much in the muted light given off by the lamp, but I could see enough to know that my fellow prisoner was in as much shock as I was at this tasty tidbit of information. She remained motionless in her seat, then ever so slowly her eyes made for the floor.
“Relative?” I asked, sucking in my cheeks, seeing as I was too far away to bite off her head.
“My husband,” she answered in a muffled voice after a moment of stunned silence.
“This is what he wants,” Jaegar interrupted our lovely chat.
“Okay, spill it,” I said, feeling more than a little pinch of irritability in the knotted space between my eyes.
Jaegar began. “He wants you to be so very much scared that you are going to run so fast no one will see you. And you run so far you will never see his wife again. If you don’t agree to this, I will shoot you. And if the bullet doesn’t get you, the hippopotamuses will.”
I almost laughed. It was not just the way the word hippopotamuses sounded in his thick Germanic accent, but really, “The hippopotamuses will get me”? I was pretty certain I could outrun or outswim a roly-poly hippo.
Jaegar must have seen the skepticism in my face and sensed the lack of seriousness with which I was taking his threat, so he added, “Hippopotamuses are the most dangerous animal in the water in Africa. Not snake. Not crocodile,” he said darkly. “Hippopotamus.” He smiled then, as if in respect for their reputation. “They will snap you in half with their jaws, just because they can.”
“It’s true, Russell,” Cassandra said in a sombre voice.
I glanced over my shoulder at the black swill of water below me and rapidly changed my mind about that swim to shore.
“Who are you?” I called to Cassandra in not the friendliest of tones.
“Russell, I’m sorry,” she said, moving to get up.
“Sit!” Jaegar commanded, and she complied.
“My husband is…my husband is Christian Wellness, and we live in Atlanta, but…but…I don’t work for a magazine,” she said contritely, but for me, well, it was a little too little a little too late.
I swore under my breath and reconsidered diving into the river, just to get away from these two.
“But I do love to take pictures,” she added brightly. “And I do love adventure, and I do love Africa. It’s just that I need to get away sometimes, by myself, to be the girl I was in college instead of this stuffy, proper, Southern wife of a stuffy, proper, rich, Southern man.” She looked at me and didn’t see what she hoped for and kept going. “You have to believe me, Russell. I had no idea this big oaf worked for my husband or why he was following us. I’ve never seen him before in my life.” She turned and gave Jaegar a disgusted look. “And I hope I never see him again after tonight.” Back to me. “Christian has never done anything like this before.”
“Before?” She’d obviously taken an unannounced powder from her proper, Southern life on more than one occasion.
She ignored the question. “Usually when I go away, I have some fun, do some things, then I go back home. I always go back home. He yells, he forgives me, and we go on. But this time…this time….”
“He’d had enough,” I concluded. I didn’t disagree with him.
I looked hard at Cassandra Wellness and wondered why I’d been so attracted to her. Yes, I enjoy her type of personality: bold, brash, adventurous, a force of nature. But, I realized, I hadn’t gotten involved with her because I’d foolishly been drawn to her, pursuing her like some lovestruck puppy, but rather because she had pulled me in with a leash of her own design. As I watched her wring her hands, her brows knitted with worry, I knew I liked her still, but I no longer admired her.
“I suppose so,” she agreed meekly. “I told him I come to Africa because I love the country, the people, the culture, the food, the vibe of its cities, and all of that is true. But I presume he must have come to suspect that I come here for something more—to be with other men. Obviously he sent his henchman to find out for sure.” She turned on Jaegar once more. “But you’ve made a big mistake, you goon. You have it all wrong.” Then back at me. “I guess he saw us hanging around and, well, assumed the worst.”
Oh really, sister? Our short-lived, drunken dalliance in Cape Town flashed through my head like a dirty movie. I focused on Cassandra’s face. Her lips were saying one thing, her eyes quite another. She was asking me to protect her, to lie for her, to pretend that what her husband suspected of her wasn’t true, when indeed it was. Regardless of the fact that we hadn’t actually had sex, the lack of touchdown had nothing to do with Cassandra’s unwillingness. Christian Wellness had good reason to be distrustful of his beautiful wife. The question was, on whose side would I come down? I regarded Jaegar. I debated trying to convince the big lug that I was gay and could never want what Christian Wellness suspected I wanted from his wife. But really, what was the point? It’s not as if I carry around a gay membership card to prove my preference. There was only one efficient way out of this mess.
I shifted position and looked Jaegar in the eye. “I’m gonna do what you told me to. I’m very scared, and I’m gonna run away very fast and very far.” I nodded towards shore. “As soon as you get us back to dry land.” I heard Cassandra give a squeak of consternation, but I didn’t really care. “How about it?”
Jaegar searched my face for deception, then shifted his gaze to Cassandra. I could have jumped him at that point. But nah, I was pretty certain this was over, that I wasn’t about to become hippo chow. This was all about Christian Wellness hiring a thug to scare the pants off his wife and the man she was fooling around with; this wasn’t about murder. Studying the look on Jaegar’s face closely for the first time, I doubted the big German was even capable of killing anyone.
That’s when the shooting started.
Chapter 14
As we scrambled for cover from the spray of bullets biting the boat, we simultaneously realized there was precious little to be had. We were fully exposed on a flat, floating piece of wood (or whatever the damn thing was made of) with nothing to hide behind except the podium that housed the controls. Jaegar seemed intent on hogging that spot
all to himself, and given the look of horror on his face, I was quite certain he wasn’t about to give it up. Fortunately, even though bullets were zigging and zagging all over the place like in a Dick Tracy comic strip, the shooters were either particularly bad shots or having a hard time getting a bead on us in the dark all the way from shore.
“The lamp!” I called out to Jaegar, who was closest to it. “Extinguish the lamp!” My hope was that with no light to draw attention to our position in the water maybe they’d give up their midnight hunt as hopeless.
But Jaegar was useless, frozen with fear into a balled-up position. I was right about the guy; he really was just a big, old teddy bear on the inside—a useless, pansy-ass, fluffy-eared, cotton-hearted teddy bear. I would have to do it. The boat wasn’t that big. Jaegar and the lamp weren’t that far away.
I laid a hand on Cassandra’s head, which was plastered against the floor like gum to a shoe, and laid my lips against her exposed ear. “It’s gonna be okay,” I whispered.
She turned her head ever so slightly and gave me an “Are you insane? People are shooting at us!” look. Justified, I suppose.
“Stay here,” I ordered. “And don’t move a muscle.”
“Don’t worry,” she managed through lips squashed against the bottom of the boat.
“I’m going to try to get to the lamp,” I said to no one in particular.
She mumbled something that did not sound anything like, “Be careful, Russell” or “You’re my hero, Russell,” but I could be wrong about that.
Leaving Cassandra’s side, I slithered off, as close to the ground as I could get, and alligatored my way toward Jaegar and the offending lamp. The big guy’s eyes were shut tight, probably with the childish hope that if he didn’t see them, they couldn’t see him. Idiot. I noticed his hands were wrapped around himself. Where was the gun? Jaegar might not be in the mood to do any shooting back, but I certainly was. But the firearm was nowhere to be seen. Was he lying on it? I finally reached his side and lay next to him like a reluctant lover, waiting for cessation in gunfire before reaching up for the wick knob of the lamp, positioned on a ledge just above his head.
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