Swimming with the Angels

by Colin Kersey

  “Honey.” She smiled again and this time her eyes were so large, I thought she was high on something. “You’d be amazed how much money people make where I work. It’s insane.”

  Coming from my humble background growing up in a small town in western Texas, son of an immigrant father and mother, “insane” sounded like an understatement. But if Heide and I were beggars at a waterfront banquet, we could at least enjoy it for a day.

  The twin V-8 inboard engines started with an angry growl, one after the other, followed by a throbbing burble. A seagull floating nearby squawked and departed in alarm. Debbie untied the last line, climbed on board and we backed out into the main channel.

  “All righty then,” Jeff swiveled his captain’s chair around to face us. “Let’s get this party started. We’ll be docking in Avalon in less than an hour.”

  “Aye, aye, captain.” Christy climbed into the forward passenger seat with her mother.

  Jeff put the boat in gear, and we rumbled forward. I took advantage of the calm water and slow speed to snap a few more photos, using the telephoto lens to get up close and personal with a great blue heron posing on a weathered piling.

  We had just reached the legal harbor speed of five knots when the camera’s viewfinder settled upon a solitary figure standing at the end of a neighboring dock, pointing something at us that looked a lot like a gun. So much in fact…

  “Wait,” I shouted over the engine noise. “What is that guy—”

  I didn’t finish the question before bullets began splintering fiberglass and shredding bodies with popping sounds followed by screaming.

  I threw Heide to the floor with me. “Stay down!”

  The boat was still moving forward, but the awkward tilt of Jeff’s head told me he was no longer driving it. Christy lay screaming on the floor while Debbie writhed and shrieked hysterically from the passenger seat, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”

  I snuck a quick look over the side and spotted the shooter removing a magazine and inserting another. Staying low and trying not to step on Christy, I scrambled to the front of the boat and jammed the two throttle levers forward. The sound of bullets erupted from behind us as we rocketed forward, engines roaring. Bits of vinyl seats, fiberglass, and bloody body parts peppered me as we blasted past the paddleboarders, swamping them in our wake. I barely avoided running down a man and his dog in a kayak. People stared from boats, docks, and patios as we thundered down the normally placid channel.

  When I thought we had outdistanced the bullets, I dropped the engine speed to idle, stood, and reached for the cell phone in the pocket of my shorts, thinking to call 911. It was all I could do to control my shaking and dial.

  “This is Orange County Emergency Dispatch,” said a calm voice. “What is the nature of your emergency?”

  Boom! A blow like that of a hammer struck me in the ribs and knocked me on my ass. I lay partially on top of poor little Christy as I struggled to get my breath back. Bullets continued to smack into the boat and its passengers, narrowly missing me.

  From somewhere beneath Christy’s body, I heard a faint voice repeat, “I’m sorry, what is the nature of your emergency?”

  I reached for the phone and got a handful of something mushy instead.

  “Jesus, lady!” I yelled. “I’m on a boat full of dead and injured people in Newport Harbor and everyone on the planet is trying to kill me!”

  I pulled Jeff down from his captain’s chair to the floor beside me and noticed he was missing one eye and part of his skull. I climbed just far enough into his captain’s chair to see a woman with a ponytail wearing a baseball cap, reflective sunglasses, and blood-red lipstick standing in a smaller speedboat and using a two-handed grip to fire a large gold-plated handgun. She continued firing methodically as if in no hurry, exchanging magazines as needed, the bullets striking Debbie, the windshield, and the boat. I rammed the throttles forward again and steered toward the boat traffic in the main channel. Just ahead was the ferry crossing between Balboa Peninsula and Balboa Island. As we charged toward them, passengers laughed and cheered as if we were filming a movie.

  I glanced back at Heide and was stunned to see her lying in the bottom of the boat, her legs splayed to either side, one bloody hand cupping her right breast. Her skin was a deadly white, and she was choking, foamy blood spraying from her mouth. I had to stop the boat.

  I cradled her head in my lap.

  “Sorry, Dev,” she rasped, her spittle spraying my face. “I fucked up.”

  I leaned in close to hear her. “What do you mean? This isn’t your fault.”

  She managed to grab the front of my shirt with a bloody hand. “There’s a hundred million in a bank in the Cayman Islands.” She began to shiver, and I knew she was going into shock. “They want it back.”

  My mind raced back to her comment the night before about getting a big raise. “You stole? Why?”

  “For you. To finish school. For us. Jeff said…couldn’t be traced. Guess he …wrong.”

  “But we have everything we need!” All I ever wanted was you, my heart shouted.

  She looked at me with tears running down her cheeks. “I—” Then the light in her eyes died, and her breathing stopped.

  I shook her as if that might bring her back. A tear fell on her face. “Don’t leave me, Heide. Please!”

  I heard another engine approaching. I peeked over the side of the boat hoping it was help coming. Instead, it was the fucking red-lipped woman with the gold handgun coming back to finish the job. A bullet clanged off the chrome deck railing by my head. Another punched through the side of the hull, missing me by inches. I reached down to find my shirt drenched with blood from the earlier wound, and now Heide’s blood, too.

  “Where the hell is the Harbor Patrol?” I shouted, hoping the voice on the missing cell phone could hear me.

  Then I glanced at my watch and realized that probably less than ninety seconds had elapsed since leaving the dock. Help likely was not coming for several minutes at the earliest and there was no place to hide on the boat before red lips came in for the kill. The decision was simple: I could close my eyes, give up and die here with everyone else, or I could fight back.

  “Hang on, honey,” I coaxed a comatose Christy as I crawled over bodies on hands and knees through blood, piss, cheese, soggy crackers, and tequila toward the bow, trying not to gag on the smell. I pushed the throttles forward and spun the boat in a tight arc, so tight that I nearly capsized us and had to cut the engines to prevent water from pouring in over the stern. The instant the boat righted itself, I hit the gas again, the huge engines launching us straight toward the other boat. The shooter’s face went from a smug smile to surprise. She fired again and again, bits of plexiglass from the windshield tearing at my face and arms as the short distance between us closed rapidly. I did not care. I have this unwritten rule: nobody gets to kill my wife and just walk away.

  What happened next is unclear. I recall a thunderous, screeching crash as the boats collided and being thrown upwards and over the bow. The crazy part (real or imagined) was seeing the body of the shooter fly over me in the opposite direction and I heard a scream that was less human-sounding and more like that of an incensed cougar in a wildlife documentary that missed catching its prey. Then my body crash-landed on the other boat and the lights went out. Until I woke up in a hospital room with a massive headache and a guy in a suit sitting there studying me as if deciding whether to cook me or eat me raw.

  CHAPTER THREE

  You can feel the night. It is alive with sound, smell, touch, taste, and mystery. A living, breathing thing electric with possibilities and danger. It is all I know.

  It’s called ROP, short for Retinopathy of Prematurity. I weighed just two and one-half pounds when I was born thirty weeks into Momma’s pregnancy. It was common back then for hospitals to use high levels of oxygen in incubators to save the lives of preemies like me. Unfortunately, they think that is what burned up my retinas and left me permanently blin
d.

  Mama, are you watching what is going on down here? Today, Vonda asked me why I never smile. Said she was tired of looking at my face with its permanent frown. Then her good-for-nothing husband Stu said, “She don’t realize how good she’s got it.”

  If my life is so good, why am I lying awake every night thinking of slitting their throats while they sleep? How about a little respect for a change?

  I would like to see them try to do the housework and cook the meals every day, blinder than a bat, and getting no thanks for it. Instead of complaining about the fried chicken being too dry, how about just once inviting me out to dinner? When was the last time, they asked me to come along with them? Try never!

  It ain’t right what I have to deal with, Mama, and it is making me crazy. No one cares about how I feel—not even Daddy. I am just their slave girl.

  I wear long-sleeved tops and Farmer John overalls every day so no one can see what I have done to myself. Otherwise, they would lock me up instead of just calling me “looney tunes” like they do now. And then I really would go crazy from the bad music in my head.

  You said a man would come for me when the time was right, and I believed you, Mama. But you also said God promises in the Bible that he only has good plans for us and that was a lie. Because how could letting you die and taking you away from me possibly be “good?”

  I have given up believing there is really a God. If there is, he does not care about people—at least not me. It has been ten years since you said you were going to heaven. If you are really up there, can’t you say something? Maybe get one of the angels to get off their lazy ass and do something? The truck delivering “our daily bread” appears to have broken down somewhere.

  I wiped away tears with an old towel.

  Listen, whoever you are, wherever you are, if you are out there, you best be getting a move on pronto. Momma said you would be coming someday to take me away from this place, but I may be running out of time. I only know one way to deal with the pain and loneliness and it ain’t working like it once did.

  If you are out there, please come soon. Before I lose control.

  I heard Patsy whimper softly.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “How much do you know about the Sinaloa Cartel?” FBI Agent Catania leaned forward in his chair.

  A dark blue, tailored suit emphasized his lean physique. I caught the glint of an elaborate cufflink on one sleeve. Who in Southern California still wears cufflinks? I did not even own any long-sleeved shirts.

  Earlier, I had thumbed through a thick binder of mug shots which now lay at the foot of the hospital bed. I certainly could not have missed the photo of the female shooter. It was like she wanted to be identified. Ramona Gutierrez was said to be the head of Los Antrax, the armed enforcement wing of the cartel. A newspaper clipping called her the “el Angel de la Muerte.” Angel of Death. Her image was engraved in my memory and would be until the day I died. Of course, no one was taking bets on my living for more than a couple of days. A week at most.

  “Look, I realize you’re still hurting and probably groggy from the drugs, but you need to accept the cold hard facts. There is no place you can hide where they will not find you. You just witnessed firsthand what they do to people who steal from them.” He sat back. “What do you suppose they’re going to do now that the news media has posted your photo everywhere?”

  I searched for the button that would release more oxycodone into my IV. My bandaged side made even moving an arm painfully difficult and whoever was barbecuing my ribs had just turned up the gas.

  “This what you’re looking for?” Catania held up the control. “You can have it back when we’re done.”

  I waved my hand with the pink glow of a blood oxygen monitor clipped to my forefinger.

  “Like I already told you,” I said. My throat was still raw from the tube they had stuck down it on that first day when I was out cold. “I know nothing about the money. Believe me, I would tell you if I knew. My wife said she was working late with her manager on an important project. It never occurred to me they were up to something like this.”

  Catania replaced the cap on his fountain pen and put it and the small leather-covered notebook in the breast pocket of his suit. He leaned back in the chair.

  “Then, to put it bluntly, you’re fucked.” He smiled. With his dark suit and whitened teeth, he reminded me of a shark.

  I shook my head to clear the fog that dulled my ability to think. “What can I do? Can you hide me?”

  “Hide you?” Catania smirked. “You want the U.S. government to hide you?”

  “Don’t you have a…” In my muddled state, I could not think of the right words. “A program for people—innocent people like me?”

  “You mean witness protection? WITSEC is for political prisoners and people of value. It appears that our clever friends in the cartel have figured out how to launder their drug money in millions, and maybe even billions at a time, using your wife’s hedge fund and legitimate SWIFT bank transfers. Unless you can explain how your wife and her associate managed to siphon a hundred million dollars from the cartel and where exactly that money is located, you have zero value as a witness.” Catania straightened the lapels of his suit jacket. “Actually, zero might be on the high side.”

  “But what if I don’t have the money?” Then I remembered Heide’s last words. “My wife said it was in a bank in the Cayman Islands. Does that help?”

  “Lots of banks in the Caymans.” Catania shrugged. “Unless you know which bank, the account name, and password, you’re out of luck.”

  He sat forward again. “Let me explain something to you. If you are like most people, you probably think they are some little ragtag gang of Latinos with bad teeth who never made it through junior high, let alone college. I hate to burst your bubble, but these guys are way more sophisticated than you think. They have got jets, helicopters, computers, all manner of weapons and people who know how to use them. They can afford to pay their best people ten or twenty times more than what our government pays us. Which means that if we can find you, they can find you.”

  “From what our team has learned so far,” he continued, “it looks like your wife’s friend in systems admin had been skimming money in relatively small amounts for more than a year that didn’t raise a red flag. His monthly debt load, however, had finally reached a level that required his recruiting help within the firm to make a big score. Your wife probably had no clue who she was stealing from—just spin the dial and collect your winnings. Unfortunately for her, they ripped off the wrong people.”

  “But why kill everyone?” I asked. “Don’t they want their money back?”

  “In case you have not noticed, these guys don’t play by the rules. Matter of fact, there are no rules,” Catania said. “I’m guessing they’ll eventually recover the money. What matters most to them right now, however, is avoiding further losses. That and making a statement in case anyone else gets crazy ideas. The last thing they want is someone else trying to rip them off. They would rather lose the money and have no one left alive to explain how it was stolen. Killing people is their way of putting a damper on anyone having similar thoughts.”

  “Yeah, I could see how that might work,” I said.

  “To you and me, a hundred million is a lot of money,” Catania continued. “But to them, it’s small potatoes.”

  He paused. “There’s one last bit of information our forensics team discovered from reading the emails and text messages between your wife and her partner in crime that I thought you might want to know. They may have been thieves, but from what we can tell, they weren’t lovers.”

  A tear raced down my cheek before I could hide it. The knowledge that Heide was plotting behind my back was excruciating, even minus the infidelity.

  “What happened to the girl, Christy? She going to be okay?”

  He shook his head no.

  There was a large clock on the wall, but I was having difficulty reading the time. “How muc
h time do I have?”

  “I’d guess twenty-four hours. Maybe forty-eight tops. Based on the amount of damage to both boats, you may have managed to injure the female shooter. From what I hear, you better hope she is dead. Regardless, they will have replaced her by now. The Newport Beach cops are watching your place, but they’ll probably move on by tomorrow.” As Catania stood, he handed me the pain medication controller. “Here. Knock yourself out.”

  He started to leave, then stopped. “Listen, if you’re telling the truth, then I’m sorry for you. Your only hope is to go off the grid and hope they get tired of looking for you someday. Because otherwise, they’re going to hunt you down and kill you.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Not long after Catania left, a nurse showed up with a tray of food.

  “How are you feeling?” She reached for my wrist. She had a nice accent and freckles. Her name tag read Ximena, which she had conveniently written with a pronunciation key, “she-men-ah,” in large, neat letters on a nearby whiteboard.

  “I could use some aspirin, a Diet Coke, and a facelift,” I said. “Otherwise, great.”

  She frowned with concern as she took my pulse.

  “I really need to get out of here,” I said.

  “You need to eat. Besides, your pulse rate is too high to be going anywhere. Eat then rest,” she ordered.

  “Listen to me, Ximena: the people who shot me and killed my wife may still be hunting for me. The man who was just here from the FBI warned me that I’d be putting everyone at risk if I stay.”

  That got her attention. She dropped my wrist like it was radioactive. “El cartel narcotraficante?”

  In her dialect, every word carried a few extra calories. I nodded.

  “These are very bad people. Trust me. They kidnap innocent people and cut off the heads of their enemies.”

  Her eyes darted to the doorway as if they might be standing there even now. “Where will you go so they won’t find you?”