The Water Keeper

by Charles Martin

  A forced laugh. “They were there before. It’s the nature of a scar.”

  She washed over them with the rag. “What caused them?”

  I weighed my head side to side, trying to decide how to answer. “Remember that price we were talking about?”

  She nodded, slowly touching each of the scars. “But . . . ?”

  I spoke slowly. “Bullets . . . exiting my body.”

  I could feel her fingers tracing the lines on my back. “And . . . the tattoos?”

  Over the last twenty years, my back had been tattooed with a long list of names in paragraph form stretching from the edge of my left shoulder blade to the edge of my right shoulder blade. By now the paragraph was thirty lines and eight inches long. An ink column down my spine.

  Her lips moved as she read each name out loud. One after another. “There must be a hundred . . .”

  I spoke without looking at her. I knew them by heart and in order. “Two hundred and twelve.”

  “Who are they?”

  When I answered, the remaining stones of a wall she’d erected to protect herself from me shattered in a pile of rubble at our feet. If we’d been staring through the window at the table set before us, we were now seated. White tablecloth. Buffet before us. The faces attached to each of the names flashed across my mind’s eye. Each distinct. Each anchored in time and place. The pain returned beneath the scars. As did the laughter, the screams, and the silence. I shifted beneath their weight. “Daughters. Friends. Moms. Broken children like . . .”

  She stood, holding one hand over her mouth, tears streaming down her face. “Angel?”

  I shook my head. “Like you and me.”

  She dropped her hands and wrapped her arms around my stomach, pressing her chest to my back. Holding me and wanting to be held. She spoke with her face to my back while I bled. “Tell me about them?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  She read the sixth name on the third line. “Fran McPherson.”

  “Number thirty-six. Fourteen at the time of her disappearance. Taken from a Boston school bus stop. Sold in southwest Texas. We stole her back in Mexico. She’s now married with two boys. Husband is an architect.”

  “Blythe Simpson.”

  “Fifty-eighth. Seventeen at the time. Not real compliant until it got real bad because she was having too much fun. Last seen in Chicago. We found her in New Orleans. Spent a couple years in rehab. Talented artist. Overdosed eleven years ago. Opioids.”

  She dragged her finger gently up my back and whispered, “Melody Baker.”

  “Number seven. Twelve years old. New York City. Taken out through the window of a movie theater bathroom while her parents shared a bucket of popcorn. We lost the trail in Managua, Nicaragua. Her body was found on the shoreline by fishermen a hundred miles away.”

  Summer swallowed and said, “Kim Blackman.”

  “One hundred and eighty-third. Eight years old. Taken in Dallas. Day care. Flown to Seattle. Later to Brazil. A year later, I found her in a hospital in South Africa. She died six hours later.”

  I felt her finger move across my skin. “Amanda Childs.”

  “Two hundred and fifth. Thirteen at the time, which was three years ago. Still missing.”

  Summer stood crying. Finally, she moved her finger to a single name, tattooed at the base of my neck, above the paragraph. While the names had been tattooed in script, this word had been etched in small, bold block letters. Her question fell to a broken whisper. “Apollumi?”

  “It’s a Greek word. It means ‘that which was lost.’ Or ‘to perish . . . die.’”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a reminder.”

  “Of?”

  “The consequences.”

  “Of what?”

  “Not going.”

  Summer hugged me from behind again. “And Angel? Where will you put her name?”

  I turned. “We’ll find—”

  Her eyes narrowed and she pressed her finger to my lips. “How do you know?”

  I wrapped my hands around her arms.

  She was shaking her head when she spoke. “She’s already gone, isn’t she? I’m living in a fairy tale.”

  “No. She’s not.”

  “She’s gone, isn’t she?”

  I held her by the arms. “Summer.”

  She wouldn’t look at me.

  “Summer!”

  Her eyes found mine. She was cracking.

  “You have to let me do what I do. She’s not gone. Not yet. If she were, I’d tell you. It would hurt too much not to.” I looked around. “We’ve got a couple of problems and I need to get to work on them. And I need your help. Starting with not bleeding to death. You standing here crying and me bleeding does no good. Just makes you tired and me weak.”

  She stared at my back. “How do you live this way? Why not just move on? Forget. Live your life.”

  I shook my head once. “Once you step foot into this world, there is no moving on. No forgetting.” I tapped my back. “No matter what happened to put them on the list, no matter what they might have done or not done, these are people. They laugh. Hurt. Cry. Hope. Dream. Love. I wrote them in ink so I won’t ever forget. They go where I go. Always.” Blood dripped onto the floor. Dark red, warm, and sticky. A single tear drained out of my eye and mixed with the mess on the floor. “These are the names I carry.”

  Chapter 22

  Summer had sewn her fair share of costumes both on and off Broadway, which proved helpful. Once she had closed all the leaks in my hull—a phrase that had caused her to laugh the most delightful laugh—she brought me some clean clothes from Gone Fiction and we returned to the dock. One of our biggest problems had to be addressed quickly.

  I couldn’t guarantee that no one had seen Gone Fiction as we pulled out of that harbor. If the harbormaster had seen us, he’d know what type of boat we were in. A Whaler like mine is easy to spot. The lines of the Dauntless are distinctive. If you know boats, chances are good you can pick mine out of a crowd. If I was smart I would abandon her, walk away, and find another. But I was short on time and we had too much history. I could no more abandon Gone Fiction than I could cut out my own heart. Too many miles traveled.

  I returned to the marina where I pointed to the “Marine Wrap” sign and asked the guy working, “You do that?” Marine wrapping is something akin to vacuum wrapping really tough plastic wrap around a boat. Most guys do it to advertise a brand name, but it also protects the hull from pretty much anything. It can also affect the speed for the better, at least until something tears the wrap.

  He spoke without taking his eyes off the Yamaha he was working on. “Yeah.”

  I pointed to Gone Fiction. “How long would it take you?”

  “What do you want done?”

  “Solid color. Complete wrap. Just something to protect her.”

  “T-top, motor, hull, everything?”

  “You got time?”

  “Yeah, but it’ll be next week.”

  I pulled out a wad of hundreds and he quit working on the Yamaha. I licked my thumb and started pulling them off one by one. “Would tonight be too soon?”

  He wiped greasy hands on a rag and stared at the money.

  I said, “How much you make in a week?”

  “A grand.” That was probably the truth.

  I handed him a thousand dollars. “Another thousand if you can finish her tonight and I can roll out of here tomorrow morning.”

  He took the money and started studying my boat. “Done.”

  I pulled out another three hundred dollars. “You got a car I can borrow?”

  He pointed at a Tacoma. “Keys are in it.”

  I gave him the money. “I might be gone a few hours.”

  “No hurry.” He took off his cap, glanced at the coffee maker, and smiled. “I’ll be up awhile.”

  While Summer went to find something to eat, I opened my laptop and began searching the hard drives we’d stolen from Fire and Rain. There were h
undreds of videos, which mandated a rather sophisticated video monitoring and recording system. All total, I counted fifteen girls, multiple clients, and lots of traffic. In business terms, this was a well-oiled machine, and I felt my anger rise with each new face. I was also careful with the drives, producing backups—both in hard copy and on the cloud. Each video would serve as nails in the coffin of a courtroom conviction, no matter how much power or money these animals once had.

  Each of the sick and twisted men I saw on video believed his past lay behind him. Buried. Hidden. Each was currently walking about the earth with a smile on his face. Having gotten away with it. Going about his everyday life as if he’d made a run to the grocery store to buy butter. But in the next few hours, I was going to pass these videos to a group of people who had made a career of putting guys like that in dark cells the rest of their natural lives. And prison is not kind to men who take advantage of young girls.

  There is courtroom justice, and then there is prison justice.

  Angel appeared often in the common areas of the boat but never with a client. The two men I’d seen on the Sea Tenderly when she’d docked at my island were regulars in the videos but never with the girls. Professionals, they didn’t sample. Lastly, the cameras had recorded Summer and me as we’d stepped on the boat, following us throughout our journey. I guessed that one of the four men we’d met had been watching a live feed. I doubted the hard drives I now held were the only backup, but with that much video, it would take a long time to upload to the cloud. That meant there was a chance, albeit small, that the flesh drivers did not have a record of Summer and me. Only what the four guys could remember seeing.

  As I expected, each video had a GPS signature. I opened Google Maps and began entering the coordinates for the video signatures. The results told me what I already knew: that Fire and Rain had motored south down the IC without stopping, which meant they used tenders to ferry customers to and from the moving vessel—which again suggested a well-oiled machine and a rather effective word-of-mouth advertising campaign. It also meant they’d done it before. That the customers knew about the boat and were expecting to be contacted. What I wanted was that list of customers—the names.

  While most of the longitudes and latitudes formed a series of satellite bread crumbs moving down the IC, one coordinate stood out. It looked like a house along the water where the vessel had moored for a couple of hours.

  I saved the coordinates in my phone.

  Summer returned with lunch while I took screen shots and cut the videos into shorter three- and five-second videos that showed clear faces and features. Just enough for identification. I uploaded it all to a Dropbox account, sent my contact the link, and dialed his number. He answered quickly. I put him on speakerphone this time so Summer could hear. There was a ping-pong game in full volley in the background, including the sound of laughing women.

  He spoke without waiting on me. “My fun-meter tells me you bumped into some trouble.”

  “Same stuff. Different day.”

  “You hurt?”

  “Summer closed the leaks in my hull.”

  Summer laughed again. And the sound was even more delightful. Almost medicinal.

  He paused. “Summer?”

  “Long story.”

  “You’re good at those.”

  “You’re on speaker. Say hi.”

  Summer waved at the phone and said, “Hello.”

  I could hear him smiling. He liked it when I came out of my shell and interacted with other humans. It meant something in me was alive. “Summer, everybody round here calls me Bones. Nice to make your acquaintance. A friend of Murph’s is a friend of mine. You need me, you call me. I have two words of caution, and you should listen because I know what I’m talking about.” Summer sat upright. He continued, “Don’t let him get you on the back of a motorcycle. He’s an idiot and can’t drive one to save his life. And whatever you do, I don’t care how he makes it sound enticing or if it’s the end of the world and the last meal on planet earth, don’t—under any circumstance—let him cook anything. Ever.”

  She laughed.

  I said, “We’re in that uneasy lull when a whole lot can go wrong and a little bit can go right.”

  He knew what I meant, but he was being cute for Summer. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I just sent you a link. There are fifteen new faces and I think the number is growing. Somebody, somewhere is looking for them.”

  “We’re on it.”

  “They are not going to take kindly to my busting up their boat and taking their drives. These guys are smart, financed, and they won’t sit. They may well move. Possibly even split up. We may have hurt ourselves more than helped.”

  “The trader’s dilemma.”

  Summer looked confused. “What’s he mean?”

  I spoke loud enough for Bones to hear. “It means the guys who do this live in this tension: at the first sign of trouble, do they wholesale everything and disappear, ensuring they’re not caught and they can live to trade another day? Or do they continue doing what they’re doing, shake the money tree for all it’s worth, make as much cash as possible, and try to stay one step ahead of us?”

  Bones picked up where I left off. “Choosing the latter means doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling their money. And we’re not talking chump change.”

  I continued, “Just do what you do and get back to me. I just uploaded the videos and will FedEx the actual drives to you soon as I eat something. I found nothing on the boat to tell me where they’re going, and other than a GPS signature on a couple of the videos that suggest where the boat spent a few hours, my trail is cold. Ask the guys to listen closely to the audio. And bring in Nadia. She speaks Russian.”

  “I’ve already forwarded the link. Get me the drives.”

  Before he hung up, he paused. “Summer?”

  She leaned in closer. “Yes?”

  He spoke with the gentleness for which he was so well known and loved. “What’s your daughter’s name?”

  Summer’s eyes watered. She leaned in close to the phone and whispered, “Angel.”

  “Ah . . .” I could hear him scratching his chin. “It’s a good name. Was she on that boat?”

  “Yes.”

  He must have moved inside, because the background noise grew distant and muted. “How well do you know Murphy?”

  She looked at me. “I’ve known him for about four days.”

  “Has he let you read his book?”

  I stiffened.

  “It’s etched across his back.”

  I breathed out.

  She glanced at me. “Read? No, but I did glance at it.”

  “I realize there’s not much I can say to make you feel better in this moment, but you might ask him to tell you the stories of 87 and 204.”

  Her eyes found mine. “Okay.”

  “And don’t let him leave out the good part.”

  She continued looking at me but spoke to the phone. “What’s the good part?”

  He chuckled. “You’ll know it when you hear it.” He paused. This time speaking to me. “You going to check out that GPS location?”

  I nodded but not for his benefit. “Shortly.”

  “Want me to send some help?”

  “Maybe when I leave. Let me snoop around first. There’s always the chance we get lucky.”

  “Watch yer top knot.”

  “Watch your’n.”

  He hung up. And I unwrapped my Publix sub. One of my simple pleasures in life. I was starving. Summer looked confused. “Top knot?”

  I spoke around a ginormous bite of food. “Robert Redford movie. Jeremiah Johnson. Something he and I have watched a few dozen times.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “It means don’t let somebody with a knife peel the top of your head off while you lie there and scream helplessly.”

  “Pleasant thought.” She pointed at the phone. “Who is he?”

  I weighed my head side to side. “Bones i
s the guy who taught me how to do what I do.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Colorado.”

  “What exactly does he do?”

  “He does a lot, but right this minute he’s babysitting.”

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

  “Not right now. Sometime. We need to get back to the hospital.”

  She sat cross-legged, unwrapping her sub. “Eighty-seven?”

  “A difficult one. Maybe the most difficult. Teenage daughter of a senator. High profile. We chased her through more states than I can remember. Then countries. The guy who bought her was wealthy beyond measure and somehow had better intel, so he was always a step ahead of us. But he was also cocky. Which is a bad combination. The trail went cold for weeks, and then one of our guys found a credit card transaction at this remote spa in Switzerland. The receipt included lemonade. We knew it wasn’t his. Guy was a health nut and didn’t consume sugar. We rented the suite next to his and extracted the girl when he brought in a masseuse.”

  “How?”

  “I was the masseuse.”

  “And?”

  “The little girl and I walked out the front door. She’s in college now. Harvard. On the rowing team. Top two or three in her class. Headed to law school. Sends me Snapchat videos.”

  “And the guy?”

  “Confined to a wheelchair. Drinks his meals through a straw. Does not enjoy prison from what I hear.”

  She chewed silently. “And 204?”

  “204 is the mother of 203. Sally Mayfair. She felt somewhat guilty for the circumstances that led to her daughter’s disappearance. Felt like she was to blame. She wasn’t, but while it’s possible to convince the mind, convincing the heart is another thing entirely.”

  “Why did he suggest I ask you about those?”

  “To encourage you. He can’t tell you everything will be all right because we don’t know. It might not be. It might be really bad. But he was trying, in his honest way, to lift your spirits by telling you that we have found even the most difficult ones.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “And 204?”

  “Most parents feel responsible. Blame themselves. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. He’s trying to silence those whispers.”