I saw no sign of Summer or her date. Off to one side stood the outdoor kitchen. Complete with an eight-burner gas stove. Given that no one seemed focused on food, the kitchen was cold and dark. Gunner and I climbed down, and I began looking for a spare propane tank. I found one in the gas grill on the aft deck. I carried it back to the stove, clicked it on, and set the tank on the burner. I didn’t know how long it would take a propane tank to get too hot, but I wasn’t going to hang around to find out. I knew this wouldn’t sink the ship, but I didn’t need to sink it. I needed to make people want to get off it. My plan was about like sending a large rat or snake into a dance hall full of people. Wouldn’t take them long to file out.
Gunner and I made it around the port side of Pluto when I got my answer. The explosion cut the tank into pieces of razor-edged shrapnel and was followed by a loud boom and fireball that, although unintentional, lit the gas lines leading through the galley and down into the internal tank in the belly below. The second explosion sounded as if the fire hit the internal tank, which, given a vessel this size, could have been close to five hundred gallons.
The first explosion blew off a chunk of the second story, sending the DJ and all his equipment into the waters around the Tortugas. The five men smoking cigars were next to join him, and based on their vocal dissent, they weren’t too happy about it. The second explosion occurred about two seconds later and sounded more like a muted thud than boom as the resulting force shot down and out of the hull and into the noise-canceling water. Fire exploded from beneath the waterline, scattering debris and people. Immediately the ship began listing to one side. Given a depth of only ten to twelve feet, it couldn’t go far.
Chaos ensued. Flames rose out of the galley and began filling other parts of the ship with smoke. Screams sounded fore to aft. Half-dressed and undressed partygoers began exiting the boat in swan dives off the upper decks, swimming to one of the dozen boats anchored around us. The rising heat triggered the ship’s fire sprinkler system, which began dousing us in water. The owner of the Yellowfin climbed into the helm and attempted to lift the anchor. Doing so revealed his problem. The captain of Pluto simultaneously engaged the larger ship’s twin diesels and attempted to move the listing vessel to one of the larger docking sites next to the fort, but the sudden lurch suggested that while he was taking on water, he was also playing tug-o’-war with a Yellowfin. The wrestling match was forcing him to spin in a circle. The interaction between the two captains was almost comical as they yelled obscenities and revved their engines. The Yellowfin looked like a dog chained to a tree and pulling against its collar.
Gunner and I watched in the shadows as Summer’s date, the tattooed driver of the demon boat, came running out with a screaming and kicking body draped over his shoulder. I met him in stride and caught the body as it was falling to the deck. The man, who was faster than I’d given him credit for, sent his boot into my rib cage, pulled his Sig, held it a foot from my head, and pressed the trigger. His face changed just slightly when he heard a click. He cycled the slide and pressed the trigger again. I was regaining my ability to breathe when he kicked me again and smashed an iron fist into my face. By the time I stood, he was in the demon boat, gunning the engine so that he, too, found himself in a tug-of-war with Pluto. Now all three captains were screaming at each other.
Despite the fact that I’d dismantled his Sig, the captain of the demon boat reached below him and pointed something in my general direction that started spitting fire and bullets. I pulled both the girl and Gunner down beneath me and crawled below into what looked like a theater room connected to the galley. Outside, there was a momentary pause, followed by the revving of the powerful engines. I poked my head above the sill only to watch as the demon boat shot eastward. In eight seconds, he was gone from view.
Chapter 46
I shined my light on the screaming girl pounding me with her fists, but it was not Angel or Summer. I’d never seen her before. Above me, the sprinklers doused the fire but did little to lessen the smell of burning rubber or rid the cabins of the smoke. The boats anchored around us began disappearing, one by one, into the darkness.
I grabbed the girl’s hands. “Hey . . . hey . . . I’m not going to hurt you. How many girls are on this boat?”
Her face was swollen. Purple. Eyes little more than slits. Lips bloody. “Maybe fifteen.”
“Where?”
“Downstairs.”
“Can you swim?”
She shook her head, suggesting she was hurt more badly than I’d thought.
The captain of the Yellowfin recognized his problem and cut the line, freeing himself from Pluto. He, too, disappeared in an obscenity-laced roar of engines and frothy wake. I grabbed a life vest and fed her arms through it. She whimpered. “If anybody but me comes back through that door in the next five minutes, slide down in the water and make your way to the island. Park rangers live there.” I glanced at the dark island. “I’m hoping they just heard the boom and they’re headed this way.”
She nodded, crying.
I stood, realizing one of my ribs was causing a piercing pain in my lungs, and stepped into the clearing smoke.
Given that most bullets travel faster than sound, I felt the sledgehammer pick me up and slam me against the far wall before I heard the report of the gun. While the chest plate saved my life, it also knocked every ounce of air out of my chest. I sat there retching, attempting to fill my already-damaged lungs, while Gunner launched himself through the air and began chewing on the shooter. Through the smoke, I heard Gunner growling and snapping, and the man screaming.
I had climbed to my feet and was on the way to help when a single gunshot sounded. Gunner tumbled to the floor, only to try to rise but then fall again. One leg was limp, cocked at a weird angle, and he winced and fell over when he tried to place weight on it. When he stood up a third time, his white chest was painted red. He tried to crawl his way over to me but couldn’t. The man stood and kicked Gunner’s body, then his pistol flashed again, sending something piercing hot into my hip.
Looking at the man, I had a singular thought: You killed my dog.
Two seconds later, I stepped over the man, stared down at Gunner’s unmoving body, and moved farther inside toward the main deck lounge, where three men were coming toward me. I wasn’t in the mood for conversation, so our interaction was short. Having stepped over them, I climbed the spiral staircase up one level to the bridge-deck lounge, finding two more men. After another short conversation, I kicked open the ship’s office door, tripped over a sixth man, and ran into the bridge, which was deserted because of the fire. Either the fire or the tank explosion had blown out the front glass, and a gentle breeze of salt spray cooled my face—which suggested I might have earned some burns from the blast.
I climbed to the top floor and onto the owner’s-deck lounge, where I was met by a large man with an enormous belly and a foul mouth wearing only his underwear. As he screamed at me, I almost laughed at the enormous tattoo of a hundred-dollar bill across his hairy chest. Below the bill, the words “Cash Money” had been tattooed in script. I laid him out, used the curtain cords to hog-tie him, and was able to learn that Cash Money was a frequent customer from Cuba. Owned an oil company. He offered me a lot of money to cut him loose. I told him to hush or I’d cut off his masculinity. When he didn’t hush, I broke his jaw.
A young girl lay on the bed, unconscious but breathing. I pulled an ax off the wall and cut through the Honduran mahogany doors and into the larger stateroom where I found another man holding a knife to another girl’s throat. He was skinny, not dressed, his face smeared with white powder, and he was screaming nonsense.
The amazing thing about the cerebral cortex is how quickly and immediately it controls our movements. It’s the area of our body where we think something and our body moves as a result of that thought. It’s also amazing how quickly it ceases to function when a hard copper object passes through it traveling over three thousand feet per second. With his
lights turned out, he dropped the knife and let go of the girl, who stood screaming at the top of her lungs.
Beneath us, Pluto rocked forward suddenly, telling me she was taking on more water than I’d initially thought. She was, in fact, sinking. That told me I had only moments to find Summer, Angel, and anyone else held here against their will, and get off this thing before we all drowned. In the air, I smelled smoke, suggesting the fire had restarted, probably in the engine room because something had disabled the sprinklers. I descended the stairs and turned aft into the engine room, but the bottom half was flooded and the top half was engulfed in flames and the smell of burning diesel fuel, so I waded fore through waist-deep water into the crew cabins, past some sort of prayer shrine, and toward the door of the anchor room, where the water had turned red.
And there I found Summer.
I was in the process of reaching for her when I felt the familiar impact of the sledgehammer lifting and slamming me into the wall in front of me. I tried to lift myself off the floor, but whoever had just shot me in the back did so again. This time the bullet missed the plate but passed back to front through my shoulder—then another passed through the flesh on the outside of my left thigh.
He was coming at me when I heard myself say, “Front sight, front sight, press.” He dropped in a pile in front of me and Summer, who had completely lost her mind. She was alive, awake, and screaming at the top of her lungs.
The water around us had turned red, and I wasn’t sure if I was the cause or something beyond the door. Water poured through the crack beneath the door, proving the room had flooded. I pulled on the latch, but pressure from inside made opening the door impossible. I waded back into the engine room, ducked beneath the flames, and swam to the far side, trying not to breathe the smoke. I lifted a wedge bar off the wall and returned to the anchor hold. I slid the tip in against the lock mechanism and pulled, using my legs as leverage. Or at least one leg. The leg that had been shot wasn’t working right. Fearing her daughter was drowning as I fumbled with the pry bar, Summer stood alongside me and pulled, screaming something incoherent. I felt myself growing faint and knew if I didn’t stop the blood running out of me, I’d bleed out in the bottom of this boat.
With one last effort, I pulled with everything Fingers once had. When the pressure from the inside and my leverage on the outside broke the lock, the door slammed open, pinning Summer and me against the wall until the water levels balanced out. I could hear girls screaming, but the sound was muted by the water. My eyes fell on a scuba tank hanging just inside the door. Next to it hung an assortment of weights and gear, including an underwater spotlight. I checked the regulator, fed my arms through the straps of the tank, clicked on the light, and swam down the stairs leading into the dark belly of the ship.
There I found eleven scared girls in a tight group breathing the last of a trapped air bubble. With a little prompting and a quick comment about the Titanic, we formed a daisy chain, and I led them through the dark water and up the stairs. When they saw the flashing orange emergency lights of the yacht above, the girls swam out and started climbing up the now-inclining keel toward the main-deck lounge. My problem was how to get them off this boat and over to Gone Fiction, which was more than a half mile away. I needed the Tortuga park ranger.
Each girl was scared, shaking, and mostly naked. Angel was not one of them. I swam down one more time into the dark hole, but Angel was nowhere to be found. I checked the other three rooms, but each was empty. Finally, I checked the electronics room and scoured back through the rooms upstairs. Everything inside was filling with smoke.
Angel was not on this boat.
On the aft deck, Summer had corralled fifteen girls. They kept coming out of the woodwork. Thankfully, two park rangers appeared in some sort of dual-engine utility boat used for moving heavy loads from larger boats through the shallow water and onto the island. Seeing the flames rise out of the engine room and the smoke pour from the windows, they knew we had only seconds to spare. The girls, followed by Summer, climbed into the rangers’ boat and stood in a tight huddle. Summer pulled out her phone, opened the picture I’d sent her of Angel, and showed it to the girls. None of them had ever seen her before.
We were on the wrong boat.
Where was Angel?
One of the rangers saw me and offered to help me into his boat. I limped back inside, knelt, slid my arms beneath Gunner’s body, and lifted him off the blood-soaked carpet. As I did, the dog moaned.
I could have kissed him.
Gunner and I made it to the boat, but I wasn’t sure which of us was in worse shape. The walls of my world were closing in, and I was having a tough time focusing. I laid Gunner on the deck of the boat.
The ranger asked, “Is that everyone?”
I asked the girls, “Is this all of you?”
They shook their heads. That’s when I remembered the unconscious girl upstairs. I dragged myself up the spiral staircase and back into the stateroom. Cash Money, realizing he was about to burn to death, begged me to cut him loose. I did, lifted the unconscious girl off the bed, pointed my empty Sig in Cash Money’s face, and told him to move his expansive derriere. Coughing from the smoke and unaware that my nine-millimeter was empty, he did.
On the aft deck, Cash Money climbed down into the ranger’s boat. Whimpering. I stepped onto the deck, holding the unconscious girl, and asked again, “That all?”
They nodded in unison.
The ranger gunned it, and we had cleared only a hundred yards when the explosion sounded. Summer turned as the fireball engulfed Pluto and a zillion pieces of super-luxury yacht rained down on the Gulf of Mexico. I stood in the bow, smiling at the sight behind us, unaware that I was leaking from multiple holes. The ranger cut the wheel toward shore, gunned it, beached the keel on sand, killed the engine, and began helping each of us off the boat.
Still holding the girl, I asked, “You got an infirmary?”
Chapter 47
The ranger nodded. “Follow me.” Given that they’re sixty miles from Key West and even farther from medical care, the rangers had a well-supplied medical room. While his partner, whom I later learned was his wife, worked on the girl, I ripped off my vest and shirt. He took one look at me and started rifling through drawers and cabinets. Over my shoulder, his wife checked the girl’s pulse and then her pupils, stating, “She’ll be all right.”
My ranger wasn’t so optimistic. Seeing that I had pretty much blown a gasket, he kicked things into high gear. Within four minutes, George Stallworth, a fifty-eight-year-old park ranger who’d spent twenty years in the Coast Guard as a medic, plugged my holes while Summer assisted in stitching me up. Her hands were shaking and her face was puffy and swollen. She was trying to focus on me, but her lips whispered, “She wasn’t on the boat.”
I put my hand on hers. “It’s not over.” Once he’d stopped the bleeding, George started an IV and began putting physical pressure on the bag with his hands, forcing the contents into my blood supply in an attempt to raise my blood pressure, which had dropped dangerously low. Finally, he popped open a Coca-Cola and said, “Drink this. Quickly.”
It was the best Coke I’d ever had in my life.
Within seven minutes, he had patched me up and had me feeling more alive than dead. While life flowed back into my veins, I stared down at my vest and realized there was much I didn’t remember. All the magazines were gone. As in, I’d run through them all. My Sig rested in the holster attached to my vest but the slide was locked back, proclaiming even to the near blind that it was empty. Evidently Cash Money didn’t have much experience with weapons or he never would have been so compliant. My AR was gone and I had no recollection of where it and I had disconnected. My front and back plates had stopped at least six rounds.
I was lucky. Again.
We walked out of the infirmary to where the fifteen girls had surrounded Cash Money, who had dropped into a fetal ball and lay squealing on the ground. One of the girls was holding a piece of woo
d; three others were holding bricks. All of them were screaming at him.
I turned to George. “Can you hold him here ’til help arrives?”
“Gladly.” He looked at me. “You going somewhere?”
I waved my hand across the darkness that stretched between us and Key West. “Got one more to find.”
“Anything I can do to help you?”
“Get these girls some clothes and food. They’ve had a rough go. I’m afraid some of them have been on that boat for quite some time, and there’s no telling what manner of evil they’ve endured.”
“Got it.”
I stared down at Gunner’s body. I knew that when help arrived, he’d be last on their priority list, which meant he’d die if I left him on the island. I also knew that putting him in a boat with me and riding back to Key West would probably kill him. In the end, I couldn’t leave him. So I slid my arms beneath his limp body and lifted him, causing him to wince. He was having trouble breathing and a gurgle had set in.
I walked to the bulkhead, set Gunner on the back bench of Gone Fiction, wrapped him in a blanket, and was in the process of cranking the engine when Summer grabbed my arm and wrapped a blanket around me. Her face told me she was not open for conversation. “Don’t even think about telling me to stay here.”
I loosed the anchor line, threw the throttle forward, and a minute later we were gliding back toward Key West at fifty-eight miles an hour. When I’d trimmed the engine and tabs, I dialed Bones on the sat phone. “Bones, Angel wasn’t on the yacht.” Silence followed. I thought back through the last few hours. I said, “When he left Key West and circled the Marquesas, did he stop?”
The Water Keeper Page 29