by Brandon Webb
* * *
—
Olivia sat at her editorial desk deep inside the inner office at Public Affairs. Working late; last-minute edits on the next edition of the Penny Press. Thinking about their SEAL guest, how she’d known the moment they’d met that here was a man with a colorful past, a man with a story to tell.
Someone she would just about kill to have the chance to interview.
She hadn’t seen him in over a week, not since she loaned him that big Lincoln volume. And look at what had happened since then! A third missing crew member; that bloody finger; good grief! She was itching to get their mysterious guest on record and hear his take.
When she heard he’d been arrested for brawling she nearly jumped out of her skin. Now she had to get a sit-down with him. Talk about color!
Huh. The sound of someone in the outer office. Footsteps, stopping now; then starting again, coming her way.
She felt a quick spark of panic and squelched it just as quickly. Don’t be ridiculous, Liv. Whoever it was, if they needed her they’d find her back here. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t.
She returned to her edits, her thoughts wandering back to her piece on the SEAL. She’d heard he was being released that night. Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow I’m gonna hunt him down.
She heard the door behind her open and the spark in her stomach puffed into a small blue flame of alarm.
Who besides herself would be coming in here in the middle of the night?
She pivoted in her chair and stifled a scream.
The overhead light snapped on.
It was Drew, one of their staff photographers.
“Jesus!” he said. “You scared the shit out of me!”
She forced a laugh and turned back to her desk. “Don’t be a dork, Andrew,” she said over her shoulder, thinking, You scared the shit out of me, too.
* * *
—
Willy Chavez hated it when Ángel smoked on the job. Even in a place as funky as the recycling compartment it was totally against the rules, and if someone walked in on them Willy knew it would be his ass hung out to dry, too. And now Ángel was telling him about some porn DVD Willy just had to see to believe. Ángel had sneaked a whole collection on board, man! This one chica, you will not believe what she does!
Willy was doing his best to pretend he was interested. Truth was he could care less about Ángel’s stupid DVDs.
Ángel paused to take a drag and Willy tried to think of a way to change the subject. But Ángel did it for him. “Hey, man,” he said, serious now. “How’s it going with Marisa?”
Willy was surprised Ángel remembered her name. They’d been together almost two years now, Marisa and him, since high school. He had been with other girls before, but she was different, special. And then, just before they embarked on the Lincoln, she had stunned him with her news. “Stunned” didn’t cover it. Blew his freakin’ mind.
“She must be gettin’ pretty big now, uh?”
“Like, seven, almost eight months big.”
“Whoa, man,” said the smoker. “Li’l Willy, gonna be a daddy.”
“Yeah,” said Willy. “I can’t believe it.” But he did. He was gonna be a daddy. A good one, too, way better than his own pop ever was, straight up.
Ángel took another drag. “Whole new kind of life, bro. Seriously, man. Congratulations.”
“Thanks, Ángel,” said Willy. “I just hope we get back in time, you know?”
Ángel stared at him. “Whoa, man. You gonna, like, be there? For the birth an’ shit? Watch the little guy make his big entrance?” He hooted and grinned.
Willy was about to reply when he heard the latch to the compartment door behind him snick open.
Ángel stumbled to his feet and hastily stamped out the smoking butt.
At that moment, his biggest concern in the world was that he not get caught yet again, smoking on the job.
The man who came through the door stood still, looking at the two of them.
Why was he wearing goggles?
86
Jackson was lying on his back in the dark when the switchblade came at him. He felt his daddy’s hot breath on his face as the blade slid into him and buried itself deep in his liver, the hot blood rushing out of him—
The phone in his stateroom rang, jerking him awake.
He grabbed at the receiver in the dark.
“It was recycling.”
Click.
The SEAL, calling from God only knew what phone. “Sweet Jesus,” muttered Jackson as he fumbled the thing back onto its base. “What are we, partners now?” He glanced at the luminescent dial on his watch: 0530. Barely an hour of sleep, if you could call it that.
He sat up and started pulling on his trousers.
The phone rang again. He snatched at it. “Jackson.”
“Robbie? Arthur. Better meet us down at recycling. Right away.”
Recycling. Dieu.
Jackson ran his hand over the dome of his head. Start signal, the SEAL said. He’d looked it up. “A communications term; a signal that prepares a receiver to begin receiving data.”
Had they just begun receiving data?
He hoisted himself to his feet and headed below and aft to the recycling compartment, arriving to find Arthur, Captain Eagleberg, Scott, and one terrified-looking E-2.
Arthur nodded to the E-2, then at Jackson. “Tell him.”
The boy was so frightened he could barely stutter out the words.
“Me and Dougie, we got morning shift. Willy—Willy and Ángel, they, they got graveyard.”
“William Chavez and Ángel Cristobal,” inserted Arthur. Nodding again to the E-2. “Go on.”
“When we got here—me and Dougie, I mean—when—when we got here…” At this point the E-2 seemed to run out of sentence. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, looking from Jackson to Arthur and back again.
“When you got here this morning?” Arthur prompted gently.
“They wasn’t here. I mean, it was empty.”
A warrant officer stepped into the compartment and murmured in Arthur’s ear. Arthur nodded and turned to the E-2. “You can go with this gentleman,” he said quietly. The warrant officer and the E-2 withdrew, leaving the four men alone. Arthur repeated the warrant officer’s update for the group: a cursory search had not turned up the two boys. Awaiting further orders.
Eagleberg turned to Scott. “That’ll be all for now, Commander.” Then, to Arthur: “Will you wait outside for me, Artie?”
As Scott and Arthur both left the compartment, Jackson thought about the E-2’s stammered pronouncement. Willy and Ángel, they, they got graveyard. That certainly summed it up, didn’t it. Summed it up like poetry.
Alone now, the captain scowled at Jackson. “Selena is on board the Stockdale till day after tomorrow. She doesn’t know about this.”
Jackson opened his mouth to ask a question, then thought better of it. Was Eagleberg saying what Jackson thought he was saying?
The captain leaned in close. “Robbie,” he hissed. “Fix this.”
87
Scott had waited for him around a corner. As Jackson approached he growled, “We need to talk.”
Reveille was still a few minutes off; there was hardly anyone in the passageways. The two men easily found a nearby alcove where they could grab a minute in private.
“Robbie,” said Scott. “Are we overlooking the obvious?”
Jackson feigned innocence. “Such as?”
“Who showed up just before this all started? And just happened to be on hand to witness both Schofield’s and Shiflin’s last documented moments?”
“I don’t know, Scottie. That’s a little—”
“He’s released from the brig, and blam!” Scott snapped his fingers. “Two more gone. I’m sorry, R
obbie, but what else do we need, a Venn diagram?”
“Correlation doesn’t equal causation, Scottie. Didn’t they teach that in OCS?”
“What did Lew’s man say? ‘The guy is damaged.’ ”
Jackson held up both hands. “Hang on—no, hear me out. Has it occurred to you that those same circumstances you just mentioned, the timing, all of it, could constitute the elements of a perfect frame-up?”
“Oh, come on!”
Jackson pressed on. “That the killer could be using all that to set the guy up and take the heat off himself?”
“That’s a reach, Robbie. I mean, that is one serious reach.” He shook his head. “I don’t get this. Where the hell are you coming from here?”
Jackson felt a pit in his stomach. How could he even have this conversation when he hadn’t yet shared that Mukalla bombshell? Or at least told Scott about his private conversations with Finn?
“I talked with him. Chief Finn.”
Scott’s eyes narrowed. “About?”
“About using him as an asset. An intelligence asset.”
Scott took a step backward, glaring at Jackson.
“Well, sonofabitch,” he said. He looked away, shook his head. Looked back at Jackson. “I don’t know how else to put this, Robbie—are you out of your fuckin’ Creole mind?”
Jackson sighed. “I don’t know, Scottie. I honestly don’t.”
“When we started this thing I thought you were jumping at shadows—”
“Hell of a leap, you said.”
“Yeah, hell of a leap, but I was wrong, and you were right, the shit truly had hit the fan and you were the first one to see it. I give you that. But now you’ve got a prime suspect staring you in the face, and you refuse to look at it?”
“Scottie—”
“I can’t do this anymore. I’ll keep working with Mac and have one of his guys liaise with you and the others.”
“Scott—”
“I’m sorry, Robbie. I’m out.”
He turned and walked away.
88
“And then there were three,” said Indy.
Jackson had told them that Scott would be focusing on his work with Mac and their interviews. He had not mentioned their disagreement, but neither Indy nor Lew were naïve.
Also not mentioned—by any of them—was the pressure they all felt bearing down on them. The captain was frantic to have their culprit caught before the admiral returned in two days. With Scott and Jackson running what were now essentially two parallel investigations, the task felt even more daunting. And with the killer’s pattern and apparent timetable both up in the air, there was absolutely no way of guessing where or when he would strike again.
“Speaking of three,” said Jackson. “Factoring Chavez and Cristobal into the picture, which of Mac’s theories seems likeliest at this point, if any?”
Lew thought for a moment. “That may not be the right question,” he said. “The three scenarios are not necessarily mutually exclusive. And my guess is, no one of them goes quite far enough on its own.”
“Explain,” said Jackson.
“It’s possible that he could be acting out of inflamed bigotry, for example, or resentment, but at the same time be motivated by a broader purpose.”
“Such as?”
Lew was pensive for a moment. “Well,” he said, “look at the result.”
“Okay. Which is what?”
“Look around,” said Lew. “Look at the crew. They’re terrified. This thing has been building for weeks in a carefully laid out sequence. And now you have some six thousand people locked up on this boat together, terrified of one another and their own shadows.”
“Point being?” said Jackson.
Lew once again thought for a moment before replying.
“In my career I’ve heard thousands of people spill their worst fears. Ninety-nine percent of those fears are basically insubstantial: echoes of traumas long past, baseless anxieties about imagined future calamities. Maybe one fear in a hundred concerns something real, something bad that could genuinely be about to happen. The hungry lion circling you in the jungle; the wildfire surrounding your house.
“That’s what we’ve got here. This place is on fire—on fire with fear. And not the hypothetical kind, not the typical anxieties of modern living. We’ve got six thousand people all terrified of the monster under the bed—but the monster is really there.
“My guess is, that’s the result our killer is after. Not the thrill of the kill: the thrill of the emotion his kill elicits. Yes, he’s started taking trophies, but in this case the trophies aren’t for himself, they’re for us. For everyone on board. I don’t think he gets off on the killing per se. He gets off on the building terror.”
Lew pursed his lips and frowned. “In fact…” he added. “You know, that helo crash, back in the Gulf, that cast quite a long shadow. What if our killer took advantage of what was already a haunted mood and used it as…well, as his stage setting.”
He turned to Indy. “And that’s why he didn’t care about not slipping away into the crowd at Perth. He didn’t want to slip away. He wasn’t finished.”
There was a long silence.
Indy cleared her throat before she spoke again. “So does any of this narrow the profile down?”
Lew sighed. “Just the opposite, I’m afraid.”
“Because…”
“We’re likely talking here about APD, antisocial personality disorder. In this case, your classic psychopathy. A genuine sociopath would have zero affect, basically a flat screen with nothing projected on it—yet that wouldn’t necessarily be something you’d see. Sociopaths are often extremely bright, keenly observant. Our subject could be quite skillful at aping affect.”
“Aping affect,” said Jackson.
“Projecting normal responses, such as empathy or bonhomie, to blend in. Simulating emotions as the situation calls for it.”
“Pretending to be normal,” said Indy.
“Exactly.”
“Which means it could be more or less anyone on the ship.”
Lew spread his hands apologetically. “Wish I had more.”
There was another long silence.
Jackson was thinking about the rumor.
According to nautical lore, crossing the line was supposed to neutralize any shipboard curses. Not this one, apparently. And now, according to crew scuttlebutt, their ghost-shark curse had a cause: it was because they’d left the Gulf without finishing the search for Schofield.
Sailors’ curses: the seagoing version of conspiracy theories.
Madone.
“When I was little,” he said, “they told us stories about a swamp creature. A kind of demon, I guess you’d say. The Rougarou.”
He spoke softly, gazing at his bulkhead display of drawings and God’s eyes.
“Stood seven, eight feet tall, all covered in wet matted hair, big canine incisors. Glowing red eyes. Least that was his natural form—but the Rougarou, he was a shape-shifter. Could transform himself into any animal he chose. A bear. Wolf. Snake. Anything.
“In the bayou the Rougarou was more than a bedtime story, more than just one more boogieman cooked up to scare the young pups into behaving. Grown-ups believed in him, too, plenty of them. Still do today. Some say after Katrina the Rougarou stepped out of the bayou waters and roamed the streets of Nawlins, riding the diseased floodwaters, feeding on the misery, spreading chaos and evil far and wide. Some say the beast can travel anywhere, unseen, long as there’s water to carry it.”
After an awkward silence Indy said, “What exactly are you saying, Master Chief?”
He looked at her, then at Lew, then let out a heavy sigh.
Damn you, Sister Mae, he thought. Stay out of my head!
“I’m saying, I grew up with that cr
ap, and those stories scared the living bejeezus out of me. But I was an ignorant little kid.” He looked at Lew again. “What you’re describing makes sense. Maybe our guy is a sort of shape-shifter. But he’s no Rougarou. He’s just a man—flesh, blood, and bones.”
He took a big breath and forced his shoulders to relax.
“Just a man. And we’re gonna find him.”
89
Lew Stevens had just stepped out of his office that evening to grab some late supper when he saw Chief Finn sitting on a bench outside, waiting.
“Chief Finn.”
“Lieutenant Stevens.”
Stevens regarded Finn for a moment, then cocked his head. “Forget something?”
Finn stood.
Stevens opened his door again and beckoned Finn to follow.
“I just have one question,” said Finn once they were inside the little space, sitting in two chairs side by side.
“Please,” said Lew.
“How do you remember something you can’t remember?”
“Now, that is an excellent question.” Stevens thought for a moment. “A traumatic memory is like a cornered bear. You don’t want to go charging in after it. But you might be able to coax it out.”
“How would you do that?”
“Don’t try to recall what you don’t remember. Just let yourself recall what you do remember.”
“Such as what?”
“Such as whatever you can. What’s the earliest memory you can pull up? Where did you grow up?”
“I’m not sure that’s especially relevant here.”
“Humor me,” said Stevens. “Think about your boyhood, your neighborhood. Anything you remember.”
Finn closed his eyes.
He remembered running through the trees…
The sun-dappled forest floor, a canopy of broadleaf maples, the sweet-tangy scent of the grand firs…tracking through the woods together, Ray showing him how to follow the deer tracks, elk tracks, black bear tracks…
Ray making grilled cheese sandwiches for the two of them when their parents were away, showing him how to make a Duncan Hines Devil’s Food chocolate cake out of the red box…