I pulled my gun from my pocket and crept up to the garage door. I peeked around the corner, and what I saw made me nearly burst out laughing.
Bud sat with his hands tied behind his back and his feet bound, propped against the wheels of a large yellow dump truck. CJ stood watch over him with a rifle, her back to me. I still didn’t see the immigrants. Bud saw me first. He yelled.
“She’s a crazy bitch. You’d better be careful.”
“I’d be careful what I said if I were you. Seems like CJ’s the one calling the shots.”
CJ turned around to face me. I slipped my gun into the small of my back. I pointed to the rifle in CJ’s hands.
“You know how to use one of those?” I asked.
“I do,” she said.
She wore a gray sweatshirt with the red letters A-W-O-L emblazoned on the front. I didn’t doubt that she knew how to use the rifle, but she aimed it at my chest. My heart clenched.
“Throw your pistol down,” she said. “And kick it over to me.”
“What’s going on, CJ?”
She yelled. “Just take your damn pistol out from behind your back really slow, with two fingers. Drop it on the floor and kick it my way.”
Bud hollered. “Told you she was one crazy bitch.”
My hands went up in front of me. “Put the rifle down, CJ.”
I took a step in her direction. Her finger tightened around the trigger. My heart rate climbed, and I backed off.
“Throw out your gun, now.” Her voice sounded calmer this time, but it didn’t lack resolve.
“Okay, two fingers.” I reached behind my back with my thumb and index finger, grasping the handle of my pistol, sliding it from the small of my back, all the while watching CJ. She never blinked. A cold, hard stare set into her eyes. I dropped the pistol to the ground and kicked it toward her. She kept the rifle pointed at me while she reached down and scooped up my gun. She stuck it into the pouch of her sweatshirt. Then she waved me away from the door.
“Move over there next to Bud. I don’t have anything to lose now,” CJ said, “so I’d just as easily kill you too.”
I moved slowly to the hood of the dump truck. CJ stood with her back to the door.
“What do you mean? Of course, you have everything to lose,” I said.
CJ sneered. “What the hell do you know about me? What do any of you know about me?”
Tears welled in CJ’s eyes. My heart raced, but I forced some slow, deep breaths.
“What’s going on, CJ?” I asked.
“Fucking lunatic. That’s what,” Bud said.
I waved my hand toward Bud. “Shut up, Bud,” I said.
“Bud, you fucking prick. I intend to kill you first,” CJ said.
“Whoa.” I held up my hands. “Look, CJ, we caught them. Bud transferred some immigrants onto the island. I don’t think they’ve gotten off yet.”
I looked at CJ, but spoke to Bud. “Where are they, Bud?”
“Fucking wetbacks escaped.”
I held out my hands to CJ. “We can find them. They can’t get far on this island. There’re still immigrants aboard Longhorn. Bud and his father will stand trial for illegally transporting them here, and for killing those young women in Eagle Harbor.”
“I may’ve screwed ’em but I didn’t fucking kill no women.”
“Shut up, Bud,” I said.
CJ whimpered. “He didn’t kill them.”
“What do you mean?”
“See,” Bud said. “You heard it for yourself. I didn’t kill them. She probably did.”
“Shut up, you bastard,” CJ said. “Before I blow your balls off.”
She twisted in Bud’s direction, aiming the rifle at him. He reared back. I started to move toward CJ, but she whipped around and held the rifle on me. I put up both hands again.
I spoke calmly. “Put the rifle down, CJ,” I said. “And then tell me what happened.”
CJ’s eyes had glazed over. She stared right through me, though she kept the rifle leveled at my chest.
“He said, ‘If you like adventure, I’ll take you anywhere on the face of the earth. Exploring the Amazon. Hiking the Himalayas. An African safari.’ We flew to the Galapagos. I thought I’d finally found a man I could be with. But he only said those things, did those things, because he needed me to look the other way while he transported illegal immigrants across the island. Isn’t that right, you bastard?”
“Who’d want you anyway?” Bud said. “You’re more like a mountain man than a woman. What turns you on is tracking grizzly bears, or being dropped in the middle of some fucking jungle and hacking your way out.”
“Shut up, you fool,” I said.
“Hell, crazy bitch’s probably gonna kill us both.”
I took a step toward Bud. He rolled back and stuck his feet up, as though ready to kick me. CJ sighed. I turned back to her.
“I heard through friends in Bellingham that Bud slept around. I didn’t want to believe them. I asked him about it. He said he loved me. He assured me I was his only lover. I wanted to believe him, needed to believe him. I spend most of my time on this island or in some remote corner of the globe. There aren’t many men who understand my lifestyle, not many willing to join me on adventures without limits. He said he loved what I did. He wanted to join me on my adventures. Lying son of a bitch. All he loved was seducing me into turning a blind eye. He said he helped poor Mexicans gain a foothold on a better life here.”
“That’s all we do,” Bud said.
“Bullshit,” CJ said. “Rumor was that Bud liked kinky sex, twosomes and threesomes, preferably with younger women. Then, about two weeks ago, Longhorn pulled into Eagle Harbor. I heard the noise and thought his daddy was throwing a party. Through the binoculars, I saw some of Bud’s friends on deck. I rowed my dinghy over and climbed aboard. I didn’t see Bud. Then I went below and opened his stateroom door. I found him in bed with three young Mexican women.”
“You killed them. You killed them,” Bud said.
CJ sneered. “Just like I’m gonna kill you.” She sniffed back tears. “He sent the women from the room and tried to talk his way out of the situation. He said they didn’t mean anything to him, they were mere toys, playthings. He loved me. Look at me.” CJ ran a hand down the front of her body. “I’m almost forty. I’ve never been an attractive woman. I traveled early to escape the dating scene. I’ve never been married. Never had a man who understood my need for adventure.
“On my way from the stateroom that night, I passed the women and in Spanish I told them I’d meet them later. Help them escape. That’s all I really wanted to do. Help them escape from Bud and their lives of prostitution. Late that night, after the partying ended, I took my dinghy back to Longhorn and brought the women ashore.” CJ began to cry. “I only wanted to help them escape. You’ve gotta believe that. I only wanted to help them.”
The rifle trembled in her hands. I took another step toward her.
“I believe you, CJ. Now, give me the rifle,” I said.
She snapped. “Stay back. I’m the one in control here.”
I stepped back. “You killed the women to get back at Bud. Is that what happened?”
CJ looked at Bud. Her gaze hardened. “Pathetic bastard. He sank his cock into every woman he could.” Then she looked at me, and her tears returned. Desperation crept into her eyes. “They were so young. They had such beautiful bodies. I wanted to be them. To have a body like theirs. To feel what it was like to have a man desire me so much that he’d pay for my body. Can you understand that?”
“Bud’s betrayal must have been hard,” I said.
CJ’s eyes narrowed. She shook her head. “You don’t understand. You’re a man just like Bud. Out after the same things. You’re all like that. All of you men. Thinking with your dicks.” Her voice had a dull, flat, monotone ring.
Suddenly, CJ’s eyes snapped open. Her voice rose to almost a scream. “They slept. Bud’s pretty little playthings slept in my bed.” Then her voice gre
w soft. “I didn’t mean to kill them. I swear, I only wanted to touch their skin, to feel their perfect bodies. So smooth. The skin around their necks felt so smooth. Not weather-beaten like mine. And their bodies were so fragile. So easily broken. Not tough and hard like mine. They slept. Bud’s pretty little playthings slept in my bed.”
CJ kept her eye and her gun on me, but she pointed to Bud. “He didn’t understand that all beauty eventually decays. He had to see that. I had to make him see that.”
“So you strangled them in their sleep?” I asked.
CJ spoke in a high-pitched monotone as if to some invisible witnesses in the room. “They were tired. They didn’t put up a fight. One tried to run, but I caught her. Such fragile bodies. So easily broken.”
She glanced at Bud, wildness now inflaming her eyes. “I planned it to look like Bud killed them. That’d teach him to fuck with me. I loaded their bodies into the truck. Drove them to the water, and dumped them where Longhorn had anchored.”
CJ spun the rifle barrel toward me. “It would have worked until you came along. It would have worked.” Then CJ’s voice dropped. “Now I have to kill you both.” She put her hand into the pouch of her sweatshirt. “Maybe I’ll use your gun. Make it look like you killed Bud and then killed yourself.”
Sweat beaded over my forehead. “You don’t want to do anything more that you’ll regret. You have to hand me the rifle,” I said.
CJ couldn’t hear me. She seemed completely self-absorbed, as if many people were simultaneously conversing in her mind, and occasionally she narrated one of their conversations.
“You’re just like them . . . just like them,” she said to me.
Then she turned the rifle on Bud. He cried like a child, cringing up against the dump truck’s huge black tire. “Don’t shoot me. Please don’t shoot me.”
“Don’t, CJ,” I said.
Her trembling finger wrapped around the trigger. She muttered now, more than she spoke. “You can’t treat me like that. Adventure without limits. That’s me. You can’t treat me like that.”
“Don’t compound the tragedy and the sorrow,” I said.
She turned the rifle back on me, that wild look still in her eyes. “You pathetic bastard.”
I couldn’t tell which of us she meant. She whipped the rifle around to Bud.
Suddenly, a shadowed figure stole through the door, then flew through the air at CJ’s legs. I lunged for the rifle barrel and pushed it up and away. All three of us tumbled to the ground. The rifle went off. Bud screamed. The shot rang in my ears. An acrid smell of gunpowder stung my nostrils. I ripped the rifle from CJ’s hand. Bud lay crying on the ground, but the shot had only shattered a window of the dump truck above his head.
Raven buried his knee between CJ’s shoulder blades, trapping her arms beneath her body. With his palm on the back of her head, he pressed her face into the ground. She sobbed. “You can’t treat me like that. . . . You can’t treat me like that.”
I yelled. “She’s lying on my gun.”
Raven rolled off of CJ’s back and reached beneath her. I lunged toward her. But we were both too late. A muffled shot rang out. I flinched. CJ’s body heaved.
Bud sang out. “She shot herself. That crazy bitch shot herself.”
A pool of blood seeped from beneath CJ. A dark red gurgle ran from her mouth. I grasped both of her arms and spun her over. Blood soaking through the front of her sweatshirt obliterated the red letters. I pulled my gun from her limp hand. I checked her neck. She had no pulse. I shook my head. CJ’s lifeless eyes now looked toward an otherworldly adventure.
Raven stood. He closed his eyes and sighed. “Too much sadness on this island. Too many lost souls trying to find their way home.” Then he kneeled and whispered into CJ’s deaf ear.
“Told you she was a crazy bitch. Told you I—”
I put my hand out to Bud. “Shut up,” I said.
I grabbed Bud’s bound legs and dragged him outside, propping him up against the garage wall. Raven joined us.
“I have to get back to Longhorn,” I said to Raven. “There are other immigrants on the boat.”
“I need to stay with her,” Raven said. “To help her soul find its way home.”
“I understand.”
Bud blurted out. “But what about me? What are you—”
“Shut up, Bud,” I said.
Raven reached into his pocket, whipped out a cloth, then stuffed it into Bud’s mouth. Finally, Bud shut up.
Raven stepped back into the garage. I set out for Eagle Harbor. Behind me, tremulous chanting echoed through the night.
ONCE BACK AT EAGLE HARBOR, I pulled RB’s inflatable into the water. I started the motor and headed around the north end of Cypress to Smuggler’s Cove.
When I got aboard Longhorn, I moved quickly through the salon past Dennis Kincaid, who craned his neck up and mumbled a string of incoherent imprecations.
I walked up a few steps into the wide, sweeping galley, then through it to a narrow passageway toward the helm. Just before the helm, I took the companionway down and found myself in a carpeted corridor with doors on either side. I followed the soft strains of music emanating from behind one door.
I pulled my gun out. I twisted the handle and burst in. I swept my pistol in a wide arc. Wrinkled light-blue satin sheets fell from a king-sized bed. Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson serenaded an empty stateroom with “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.”
I moved forward from the stateroom, shouldering open each door I passed and scanning each room with my pistol. The carpeted passageway ended at the crew’s quarters. Inside the small, V-shaped cabin, a built-in chest of drawers protruded from one teak sidewall, upper and lower bunks from the other.
Alternating stripes of teak and holly covered the floor. I eyed a small door ahead of me, then yanked it open. The musty smell of mud and saltwater met me. I stuck my head inside, but I only saw anchor chain piled into a mound. I slammed the small door shut and turned away.
The other immigrants had to be somewhere nearby. I twirled around and tapped the anchor locker door with the barrel of my pistol. Three short taps. Three long taps. Three short taps. I waited. Nothing. I tapped again. This time, I heard a faint reply. Three short. Three long. Three short. It sounded like it came from beneath the cabin sole.
I dropped to all fours and stuck my ear to the teak and holly. I tapped again. The wood resonated with the reply. I looked around but I didn’t see a latch, a hinge, or anything to suggest an entrance to a space below this deck. Maybe a doorway from the engine room? That couldn’t be. The engine room sat too far aft. I ripped out the bottom dresser drawers and peeked into the opening. I felt around, but I didn’t find anything there.
Then I remembered the fifty-four-foot Krogen trawler that Sharon and I had liked so much. The berth in the forward stateroom folded up and a shelf dropped down to make a desk, turning the space into a convenient floating office.
I reached up and under the bottom bunk. My fingers walked back and forth until finding their way over a small latch. I tripped it with my trigger finger. The bunk popped up. I pushed it higher until it mated with a latch on the sidewall that secured it in place. Then I lifted and twisted the stainless steel O-ring embedded in the floor. A large section of the cabin sole swung up on hinges. Muffled voices called from the darkened space below.
I stuck my hand down into the hold, where I felt a bony arm. With one foot propped against the sidewall, I braced while I pulled a man up. He sat on the edge of the hold. I stripped the gag from his mouth, then whipped out my pocketknife to cut the rope from around his wrists.
The drawn brown skin of his face suggested he hadn’t eaten in some time. Still, his dark eyes sparkled, and the corners of his lips curled into a tight smile. He balled his hand into a fist and rapped his knuckles on the floor. Three short. Three long. Three short. He bowed his head toward me more than once.
“Muchas gracias, Señor. Muchas gracias.”
Then he brought h
is legs up and he kneeled down. He reached back into the hold. I reached my hand down again, and together we lifted a young woman out. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, with dirty, matted, jet-black hair and a tiny mole in the middle of her right cheek. Her body trembled as we set her on the edge of the hold. After we untied her, she pushed herself up, and with shaky legs she moved to the other side of the small cabin. She leaned against the dresser and stared at us with dazed eyes.
The man and I reached down into the darkness again and again, until we’d brought up four men and two women.
“Una más,” he said. He pointed down. “Una más.”
We reached down one more time and raised another tired, frightened teenage girl from Longhorn’s hold.
twenty-eight
A summer high had finally taken hold. Treetops swayed in the stiff northwest wind. In the distance, puffy columns of white smoke rose angularly from long industrial stacks. I’d anchored deep in Mark Bay, so deep that the Noble Lady rested in calm, glassy water, the current swaying her more than the wind. The flood pointed her bow away from the land while only a hundred yards farther out the bows of other anchored boats pointed toward us like weathercocks turned by the wind. One against many. The Noble Lady stood proud.
I checked my watch. Almost eleven in the morning. I imagined the captain of Kate’s big British Columbia ferry radioing Vessel Traffic Control about now, reporting they’d just passed Entrance Island, heading for Duke Point. I hopped in my dinghy and rowed the short distance over to Newcastle Island.
The small red water taxi bobbed at the dock. Inside, passengers filled the benches. The taxi’s captain untied the boat and pushed off. We darted in and out of the boats anchored in the bay. Then, closer to Nanaimo, we waited while two bright yellow planes landed, throwing trails of water from their floats.
After arriving at Nanaimo Harbor, I headed up the ramp to the harbormaster’s office. Perfect timing. A yellow taxi rolled down the hill and pulled into the circular driveway. The door opened. Kate stepped out. My heart soared. She had on jeans and a T-shirt. The brim of her wide, floppy straw hat partially hid her face. The driver hurried around to the back of the cab. He popped up the trunk and swung two duffels onto the sidewalk.
Precious Cargo Page 25
