The Prince Of Deadly Weapons

by Boston Teran

  The voice stumbled, "I… no. It's cold. Too—"

  With the first line tied off Nathan took the after spring line and tossed it to Romero so he could pull the day cruiser up against the houseboat fenders to allow for boarding.

  "The prosecutor," Dane asked, "would he be over there?"

  He could feel Mr. Carter swallow. "He might be."

  "Alive?"

  "I don't know. I just don't know."

  Nathan came back to the stern. Dane saw him look toward the cabin interior as if to make contact before he crossed. The darkness left that an impossibility.

  Am I my brother's keeper… I wonder.

  As Romero pulled in the line, as Nathan waited for the line to be tied off, as Dane waited for Nathan to cross, from the sky came the muffled sound of a propeller.

  Nathan crossed. From the PLYMOUTH ROC to that FOREVER was one short step. The men shook hands. Small talk followed. A head dipped solemnly. They walked side by side to the sliding glass doors. Dane saw Nathan's hand slip into the pocket where he had the gun. Mr. Carter begged, "What can I do to be let go?"

  As the men disappeared into the salon Dane told him, "There's no answer for that one."

  They were faced with the sound of the water and the dull yellow light from that curtained window. There were streaming shadows where the glow reflected up off the water against each hull. Dane's hand could feel Mr. Carter's body begin to edge, lean, press away from the seat as if it might revolt. His free hand went down to the knife in his boot and in the time that took, in the short space of a few breaths he heard Shane Fenn yell. There was a shot, and a voice hobbled with pain, a shotgun blast; they were all part of the same wave of ferocious seconds that had Mr. Carter trying to escape from his seat.

  One of the shots must have hit a propane tank in the salon galley because that dull yellow window exploded into an inferno of colors.

  The air was drenched with shards of glass and shanks of aluminum siding. A body was flung onto and over the bow deck like a broken puppet. The patio chairs and potted plants were catapulted into the bay and the day cruiser was ravaged by a swell of debris that tore through the windows in one concussive swell lifting it right up out of the water.

  * * *

  FAR UP the bay Caruso saw a dragon tongue of flame burst through the cloud cover all scarlet and yellow that the wind threw into a thousand burning match tips. It was silent to the eye, but in that headset Paul thought his eardrums had been shattered.

  Then the bay went black again, just as fast.

  Chapter Seventy-One

  IN A SMOKING haze Dane tried to stagger to his feet but he might as well have been climbing uphill. There was fire, he could see it. There was the noxious odor of melting fiberglass and carpet. The cabin of the day cruiser was a ruined listing oblique. He tried to clear away the disorder and stand using the dinette table for leverage.

  Through the blown-out cabin window Dane saw the day cruiser was half up on the houseboat's bow deck trying to mount it, surging and sliding back, its flare being scored apart.

  As his head turned groggily sideways he saw Mr. Carter was draped over the throttles. Dane pitched toward the helmsman's seat, got hold of it, got hold of Carter's shoulder, grappled over the lifeless weight of fat, and pulled. The arms and legs glided back like a dancer's taking the head with it. The turtled body sagged. Dane pulled down the throttles and the day cruiser's waterline ground its way back into the bay with a broken propeller shaft that sounded like steel hammers slamming together.

  Dane made his way to the stern wobbling under the boat's sway. His mind tried to pull together all the pieces of that destroyed frieze he looked at. He yanked the transceiver loose from his pocket as the day cruiser began to sink.

  "Paul—"

  Caruso's voice came back crackling. "I saw the fire. What—"

  Dane held onto a portside cleat for support. "We're tied to a houseboat in Grizzly Ba—"

  "Can you hear me?! I saw the fire."

  The houseboat had a blistered hole aft of the helm where flames spit and dotted and smoke poured forth from the galley and the canvas roof on the sundeck rippled with fire.

  "Dane, can you—"

  "I have to see if everyone on the boat is dead."

  The Cessna swept down into the cloud cover. Streaks of gray blew past the windows.

  "Paul, can you hear me? Your engines are close—"

  Caruso could see just the black cold dark of that knifing current.

  "You're close—"

  The clouds cleared and as Paul scanned the cabin windows in desperation he saw off his right wing in the snapshot night a two-boat tangle of carnage. "Holy shit!" He throttled skyward and banked. "Do you still have the strobe I gave you?"

  "I have to get on that houseboat."

  "What?"

  "The Fenns took Roy Pinter tonight."

  "It's you I'm concerned about. Not that—"

  Caruso could hear the boy's voice was rocky. "He might be on that boat alive."

  "That houseboat is sitting on two hundred gallons of gasoline."

  "I've got to—"

  "Put the strobe on. And I'll come down and try to—"

  "I'm crossing over, Paul."

  * * *

  AN ENGINEER for the Southern Pacific was taking a train across the railway bridge when he saw a disturbing flash of light far up Grizzly Bay. The harbor master for the Suisun City Marina saw the same flash of light as he was driving home down Grizzly Island Road. At Pelican Point a Department of Fish and Game worker was walking her dogs in a swale just back from the shoreline when she heard what could not be mistaken for anything but an explosion.

  It was 12:01 when the first calls came in to the Coast Guard station at Port Charles. They would reach Grizzly Bay at 12:14 and bear witness to the final moments of a tragedy.

  * * *

  FROM A listing PLYMOUTH ROC to the deck of that burning FOREVER was just one hard leap of faith. And Dane took it.

  When he hit his legs almost buckled. The bow was strewn with broken glass and twisted remnants of metallic door frame, with chunks of torn-out fiberglass. The salon entrance was now an open mouth of smoke and fire licks.

  Dane did the best he could covering his face as he measured his way into that reek of carnage and burning plastic. He choked his way through the detritus of a living room. A couch had been flung into the bar, there were sparks overhead from ravaged wiring. The first of the dead he saw was Damon Romero. He lay bent oddly under an overturned chair with a piece of metal tanking through the back of his skull.

  Dane turned, gasping for bits of air. The transceiver was still in his pocket and he could hear Paul calling to him. Dane's eyes blinked and watered. The sparks overhead hissed and when another wire burst the ceiling looked as if it were a sky of summer lightning. He needed to make the bedrooms, which were aft. They were the only places Roy could be if he were on board at all. Then Dane saw Nathan.

  He was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall where the explosion had thrown him across the sixty foot salon. The eyes were open and those untouched dusky movie theater looks had an expression of staring off into the quiet. Nathan's pants at the thigh were torn and charred. Edges along the rip were still on fire and there was a pungent stench from the burning flesh beneath.

  Dane found himself kneeling down and using his hand to stamp out the fire as if all pain were enough now that Nathan were dead. When Dane stood he had to find his way to a window. He took the transceiver from his pocket and hammered the glass to have at some air. He put his mouth to that pigeonhole of sharp edges and breathed. He could feel the cold damp cleanly fill his lungs. And he could hear Caruso shouting desperately into that hand held radio. "Are you all right? Talk to me!"

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  ONE OF THE airport managers was a fixed-base operator. There was a scanner in his office and Sancho Maria had a key to that office.

  Essie stood in the open doorway while Sancho Maria, who knew the fre
quency Paul used on his transceivers, tried to hone in. Essie leaned against the door with her arms crossed. She stared at the sky as if married to something in its shadows. She told Dane silently, almost as a plead, "If you can hear me, we'll be all right. If you can hear me, we'll be all right."

  Sancho Maria was having trouble hooking into the signal because of a run of cross traffic that had begun about an explosion and a boat on fire up in Grizzly Bay.

  Essie quicked it back into the tiny office, pulling up a chair and sitting close beside Sancho Maria. In the dead center of the night they listened to those faraway voices all wrapped in static both knowing Grizzly Bay was only miles from Antioch.

  * * *

  AS DANE started toward the bedroom hall he told Caruso, "Everyone is dead here."

  "Get-out-of-that-boat. So I can—"

  Dane yelled back through a cough. "I have to see—"

  There was another burst of wiring that sent blue white sparklers of filament across the room. Another set of curtains ignited. The wind was drafting the smoke in endless directions. The empty corridor going aft seemed to be floating in murk. As Dane put the transceiver back in his coat pocket he could hear the engine propeller practically strafing the upper deck as it passed over.

  He took the safety strobe he'd clipped onto the back of his belt that Paul had made him bring and aimed it down the hallway. He turned it on. It burned white and all the broken glass and mirror pieces in the carpet and along the walls reflected back a thousand eyes of light that guided him.

  The Fenns. He'd seen one body lifted overboard. But the other—

  When he reached a bedroom he sent the beacon in first. It made a cautionary sweep of the quarters and in that slash of light he saw an unmade bed, a pile of filthy clothes and closed drapes. The next room the beam ran was a cuddy of mirrored walls with a treadmill, a stationary bike, a television and a body wrapped in a plastic tarp.

  It lay there as if it were just another casual addition to the room. Behind the strobe and into that hazy cuddy Dane moved through endless light blazing mirrored corridors toward an endless line of corpses while Caruso's voice squawked from that transceiver in his pocket. "Get out of that fuckin' houseboat so I can try and get you off of there. Do you hear me?"

  Dane knelt. The day cruiser had begun to keel and its twin propellers turned into blades that sent metallic grinding shivers through the houseboat's hull and it echoed and shook as if fiends and furies were trying to score their way free to have at him.

  Dane pulled back the plastic tarp which crackled as it went. Roy Pinter was already turning color. His eyes were closed, his tongue protruded slightly from between tightened lips. The look he wore for eternity was suffering and sadly foolish.

  If it wasn't for the strobe Dane would not have seen what he could not hear above the screeching madness against the hull. As he turned to stand and go the light caught an endless line of lunging bloody Shanes who wielded a shotgun barrel like a scythe.

  Dane hunched and leapt away. He fell as that mirrored wall took an awful blow from the stock head on. An endless line of Danes clawed and crabbed over a tarped corpse skimming corners and twisting sideways to elude the madness of the dying and disordered coiled driving arms that hammered and whipped and bludgeoned that broken shotgun down at where the fragments of a form had been.

  The treadmill arm was severed. The television screen burst on impact and toppled over. The stock sheared and clipped but kept smashing those walls of mirror with every follow-through. The endless line of bodies warped and tore with each new crack and shattered hole of glass. In that darting confusion forms conceived and reconceived themselves in a labyrinth of blazing half black shapes. The funnels of light bent and moved, they hitched and jarred, they arced and fell like wild comets in a chaos.

  Driven into a corner of desperate seconds Dane managed to unsheath the knife from his boot as the shotgun swept down on him. An endless line of hands rose to meet the blow. The forearm bone shattered and the strobe flew loose. Dane could feel the crack all the way into his skull and an endless line of double-bladed knives retaliated upwards.

  He could hear the flesh under Shane's sternum tear like cloth. As Dane juked backwards he could see Shane's hands try to find the knife. They couldn't. Endless bodies dropped in an avalanche to their knees. Air sucked through that open slough of a wound. Shane's face held on to darker curses as it toppled over, trying to stanch the blood.

  Dane used his good arm to lift the broken one and get it against his chest. He used the good arm to reach the strobe and wrap its fingers around the strap. He leaned forward and lifted himself toward Shane against the shrill coarse echo of propeller blades.

  Endless beams of light moved with him in to catch both faces and Dane whispered, "Hey, dooms linger, I'm going to watch you die through the eyes of a boy you've killed."

  And Dane did. But all that was left of Shane Fenn was a mortal wound where the past leaked out. The eyes gradually rolled down into the darkened cell of the skull, like a boat or a body as it sank beneath the waves.

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  THERE WAS NO way back to the bow deck through the salon. Too much smoke, too much fire. Too much in pain. Dane held his broken arm and labored aft to the exterior stairway where he intended to go up to the sundeck and cross it to reach the forward bow. If he could.

  Paul was in another descent when that strobe just appeared burning a hole in the fog like the tip of a candle. Bright and separate from the flames. Moving.

  * * *

  ESSIE'S CELLULAR rang. She scrambled for her purse. It was Flesh. "Where are you?"

  "Rio Vista Airport."

  Flesh was in her office faxing Sergeant Farr at the Tracy headquarters. "When you asked about Damon Romero, I knew then something—"

  * * *

  SUDDENLY PAUL'S voice came through on the scanner scratchy and shouting, "I can see you. I can see you. Are you all right?"

  Sancho Maria slapped her hand on the desk to get Essie's attention. "I have them!"

  "Flesh," said Essie, "Hold on!"

  * * *

  THE FINGERS of that broken arm were laced through the strobe's braided strap. In the other hand Dane held the transceiver. He crossed the upper deck hunched to one side and fighting off the first waves of shock. The canvas roof that covered part of the upper deck was a burning effigy of cloth streamers that singed the air around him. The satellite dish hung from the radar arch by wires that sparked and burned his cheek.

  "I'm trying to reach the forward bow. Can you hear me, Paul?"

  "Are you all right?"

  * * *

  ESSIE WAS on the line with Flesh. "They're up in Grizzly Bay. We can hear them on the scanner."

  With all its currents of cross traffic and shifting frequencies the pain came through when Dane answered, "My arm's broken… Paul. Can you hear?"

  "We've got to get you off that boat."

  Essie kept talking to Flesh while she listened at the scanner, then Dane said, "Paul… Roy Pinter is dead. I saw him on the houseboat."

  Essie covered the phone with her hand as if to protect Flesh, at least for the moment. She looked at Sancho Maria to make sure she had heard right.

  * * *

  FLESH WAS pressing the elevator button talking right over Essie's sudden silence.

  "I'm going to the Coast Guard station."

  "Francie—"

  "I've got some calls to make."

  "Francie—"

  "But leave your line clear, all right." Again Flesh thumbed the elevator button hard. "I still haven't gotten hold of—"

  "Francie. Listen to me. I think something terrible has happened."

  Flesh stood in the dark and listened. She heard the words, but tried to rearrange the unfathomable brutal fact of them.

  A janitor mopping his way slowly through the graveyard shift heard a woman's cry flood the silent corridors, saying only, "How?"

  * * *

  ONE OF the day cruiser's inboards ble
w. It sent a rip of flames across the water from its keeling hull. The houseboat shook. Dane was thrown against the forward stairwell railing. His broken arm hit the metal bannister full force and the strobe dropped and tumbled down the steps.

  He could hear Paul yelling into the transceiver as he fell to his knees on the bow deck. He pulled the strobe toward him using the hand with the transceiver, scraping it along over all that broken glass and pieces of shorn metal. "I'm here," he said. "On the bow deck."

  He waved the strobe, then slipped the fingers of his broken arm through the strap.

  * * *

  SKIMMING THE bay Caruso saw that match light beam arc then arc again in the illusion of a wave. "I'm coming down," he said. "I'll land on the water. Get close as I can." He pulled back on the column and that Cessna began to climb so he could right himself for an approach.

  "Hold on," he told Dane, "I'll get you home."

  Dane was on his hands and knees. He looked around him. One boat was sinking in the cold inlet, the other was burning itself away into the sky. The emptiness about both was a world awash in wreckage and what looked to be the head and shoulder of a man.

  Dane set the transceiver and strobe on the deck. He slid off his coat, bending his back as best he could so as not to move that bad arm. He picked through the debris for a piece of metal to use as a splint. He ripped loose the lining of his coat and began the excruciatingly painful turns of cloth it took to tighten the metal rod against that bleeding stretch of broken bone.

  Dane fought back the cold, the shock. He clenched the strap around that beam, forcing his fingers to concentrate through the pain. To keep himself from passing out. He used the battered railing to stand.

  The sky was filled with ash. Dane's eyes burned from smoke and chemical grime. He pinned them to that inclement bay of fog and distance from where the Cessna's engines came.

  And there at the margins of a gaze, where all memory gathers, where no precautions avail you, where you wait naked for the unseen, he had met the world and found himself.

  All the universe is fought out within the few feet of flesh we each wear. All that comes against us, comes from that alone. It is the labyrinth within a labyrinth within a labyrinth.