The Vessel

by Taylor Stevens

  Munroe pushed away the pressure and drew down into reptilian calm.

  The hurry was of her own making, and hurry would be her undoing. She would pursue the target as long as it took, and if she didn’t succeed today, then she would tomorrow, or next week, or next month. For now, she had the ship, she knew the routine, and she knew the coming change of routine. Once the master of the Omicron II arrived and was settled, the entire crew would be provided a week of paid shore leave.

  THE CALL ANNOUNCING the Dog Man’s arrival never came, though the Dog Man did. Munroe knew this from the increased activity on the deck of the yacht, and the tender that transferred from yacht to shore and back again, and then twice more, and the helicopter that arrived nearby just after the sun had reached the midday high, only to leave again fifteen minutes later.

  Munroe disassembled and reassembled the handgun. Unloaded and reloaded the magazine. Secured the suppressor, then unscrewed it. These were habits. An illusion of control and purpose through busy hands.

  On the dirty cushions that lined the hull, she set out the weapons of war acquired over the course of her journey toward murder. She would carry less than ten pounds total—couldn’t afford more than that.

  Piece by piece, she placed the items into a waterproof deck bag, then stood the bag up on end and stared at it without seeing, her lips moving soundlessly to words of the past, words from the book ingrained by her missionary parents, a thought that chained itself end to end and ran in a loop inside her head.

  I have sinned against heaven, and before thee.

  Prior to the hunt for the Dog Man, her kills had always been instinctual: souls struck from the earth in the passion of defending her life or the life of another—though perhaps self-defense was merely a technicality.

  Was there really a difference between seeking a victim, as a predator would, and the way she allowed herself to appear a victim knowing that inevitably predators would seek her out? Either way, she killed.

  Either way, death was death.

  She’d asked that question once of Miles Bradford, the man who understood her better than she understood herself and loved her for who she was: How is it that I can hate killing so much, and yet at the same time desire it, and be so very good at it?

  Have you ever considered that it’s not always wrong to kill? he’d said. Maybe some people need killing, maybe by taking them out you break the cycle of pain and suffering.

  Perhaps.

  But what she considered and what she believed no longer mattered.

  The tools in the bag at her feet were not born of passion or self-defense. Today she sought blood for the purpose of blood, and she was tied to this course, regardless.

  Munroe left the fish stink of the cabin for fresh air, and she glanced at the cathedral of sky, and then the yacht far off in the distance, and to the wind she whispered, I will show my faith by my works.

  CHAPTER 17

  Munroe boarded the Omicron II in deep night, long after most of the lights ashore had winked out, and those who slept, slept deepest, and the bay had gone relatively quiet and the last cruise ship of the evening had left port.

  Lights aloft the bridge separated the yacht from darkness, but there was little light coming from the deck windows, and there were no shadows or movement to indicate people behind the glass, though she knew they were there somewhere.

  The Dog Man hadn’t come alone.

  Instead of assistants and sycophants, he’d brought two bodyguards.

  Munroe drew up out of the water onto the narrow platform at the yacht’s stern that was more lip than ledge. She slipped fins off water shoes, secured them to a carabiner on her pack, and pulled on coated gloves. Paused to listen, checked again for shadows, then rushed the stern.

  The aft gunwale was five or six feet off the water and angled fore. Grooves and notches within the design that covered the stairs provided enough grip to climb and heave over. Munroe dumped into the cockpit, where lounge chairs were paired in sets beneath the shadow of the deck above.

  She knelt, dripping water from the wet suit, listening for movement and for reaction. She uncoupled the fins, set them down lightly, and slipped the waterproof bag off her shoulders.

  While her eyes scanned the shadows, her fingers worked through the seals for the pockets, for the handgun and suppressor, and, still kneeling, still watching for movement, she screwed the pieces together, then closed her eyes and placed palms to the deck, allowing hearing and smell to take over where sight failed.

  The faintest hint of cigarette smoke drifted in the air, meant that at least one of the bodyguards was outside, not in. She nudged the fins out of sight and slid along the rail, moved fore on starboard, staying below the windows, searching the deck for the guard. Didn’t hear him, didn’t see him, or feel him, and so she slipped back the way she’d come, skirting around the corner for the sliding door in the cockpit.

  She tugged the glass and found it locked. Anything less would have been a surprise—would have made things too easy. She checked the deck on the port side and, when she still couldn’t find the guard, followed the blueprints inside her head to the nearest hatch.

  The yacht had over a dozen on the main deck, escape hatches and access hatches that she’d come prepared to force open to gain access to the interior, if needed, but she’d been spared the trouble.

  The ladder led into the garage, filled with water toys but missing the tender, which had never returned after the last of the crew left for shore. The flashlight beam pointed the way out, and the walls hummed with reverberation from the generator, cranking out the power to keep the electricity on the yacht running.

  The door from the garage to the interior gave easily, and Munroe waited again, listened again. Down the passageway, she shut herself in at the next hatch and turned on the light. If nothing else, the crewmen had a lot of time on their hands, and the engine room, clean, pristine, and freshly painted, showed it.

  She located the fuel lines, cut them, and placed the hosing so that the liquid pooled on the floor and would trickle down into the engine wells. Diesel wasn’t flammable in the same way gasoline was, and that was a shame, but like vegetable oils and kerosene, the liquid would burn if ignited. A large stack of fresh cleaning rags filled wire shelving, and Munroe pulled off a wad, layering the cotton into the fuel, trailing the cloth toward the door, creating a wick. Then she shut off the light, stepped back into the dim passageway, and headed up a level.

  Laughter stopped her short, and she closed her eyes, straining for the sound.

  Reality filtered out fantasy.

  Television.

  Inside her head the chessboard shifted and she placed the guards: one on an upper deck, one in the crew’s quarters. The tactician processed through the options. To move forward with the enemy at her back meant the possibility of becoming trapped, and of losing the element of surprise if he should happen upon her as she set about her business. To attempt to eliminate the enemy before moving forward meant the possibility of never getting to the business in the first place.

  She flipped a mental coin, then retraced her steps and toed down the narrow space with her back to the wall, ever closer to the talking and laughing, which grew louder until at last she reached the source. She peered around the wall, into an empty berth, and the hair along the back of her neck rose in warning.

  Speed was life, and speed was death, and she dropped to the floor a fraction before the spit-pop of suppressed fire sounded out from the end of the passageway. The doorframe splintered where her head had been.

  She rolled into the room with the television, tucked back away from the opening. The second bullet hit the spot on the floor she’d left a second earlier. She waited, blocking out the noise and laughter, fingertips pressed to the wall to feel the subtle whispered tells of his footfalls.

  She kept pace with him inside her head, one careful step at a time, could picture him in her mind’s eye, military prowl, two-fisting the weapon as he checked each berth before he
reached hers, ensuring she’d come alone.

  Adrenaline burned through her veins, heightening senses, shortening time. She kept still, silent: a perfect corpse with eyes open only enough to catch movement when his head drew in and drew back to mark the room.

  He stayed on the other side of the wall another minute, perhaps two, while the seconds ticked long. She breathed in the focus. Time segmented, parsed in magnified gaps, like a progression of slides under the microscope. His toe moved into the breach, his foot, his leg, and Munroe fired into the knee. She was already off the floor and across the door before he leveled his weapon toward her.

  He made rapid pulls, aim off but closing in.

  Her rounds reached the target first.

  He slumped to the floor, and she rose up and fired again to be certain he hadn’t repeated her trick of playing dead.

  She frisked him. Found his radio, inserted his earpiece.

  Took his weapon and removed the magazine, tossed both into the berth.

  On the radio was only silence. Hands to the floor, catching her breath, allowing the adrenaline to subside, she waited for a voice, for anything to indicate that the dead man had notified his partner of the intrusion before he’d come hunting.

  CHAPTER 18

  Like most yachts that required a full-time crew, the Omicron II had divided living space. But, unlike most, where the lower fore was typically reserved for crew’s quarters, the Dog Man’s blueprints pointed to a gym. The anomaly made Munroe queasy. If exercise was all he’d wanted, a gym could easily have been placed on an upper deck.

  She followed the passageways up to the galley and out of the area reserved for the crew, into the owner’s space, into a wide entertainment deck filled with wet bar and long dining table and U-shaped sofas; down again, searching for the other bodyguard, level to level until she reached the door that separated passageway from gym.

  Munroe tested the handle gently. Waited for a response and then pushed.

  The door gave slowly in the way a vault door might, letting out a hint of sweet-sick rot, overpowered by bleach and disinfectant. The thickness of the door matched the thickness of the walls—something that hadn’t been noted on the blueprints—and hinted toward insulation and soundproofing.

  Inside the gym, the only light was what filtered in from small darkened portholes at the upper fore reaches of the room, and, as Munroe’s eyes adjusted, her stomach knotted. She stepped in, and the burning rose.

  She’d found his cutting room, as she knew she would, found a young girl racked inside, which she’d hoped she wouldn’t. In the weeks of watching the yacht she’d seen nothing that fit the profile of the Dog Man’s victims, but she’d been out of visual contact with the vessel for too long and had hoped against everything she knew about him.

  The anvil pounded inside her head, swinging frantic, angry, and wild, forging swords and shields into weapons for the heat of war. Several long strides brought her to the girl, barely a teenager, pale and white with curled blond hair and a face so similar to the merchandise she’d been forced to deliver in the spring that flashbacks layered over reality.

  Munroe gritted her teeth to force a return to clarity.

  Only focus, only the mission.

  The girl was still alive if barely, strapped to the table and bleeding from wounds that had been placed for maximum pain and maximum life.

  How long? How long had she been subjected to the whims of monsters? Hours? Days? Months?

  The crew, did they know? Did they know the way the chauffeur knew? The way Patrick Haas knew? None of this was possible without enablers.

  The girl didn’t move when Munroe stood beside her, but she was aware, she was aware that Munroe had come. Through barely open eyes and whispers too low to hear she begged for an end to the torment.

  Nauseated, unable to breathe, Munroe couldn’t move.

  Violence inside her head, her chest, pushed her toward the edge of madness. The only way to get off the yacht and bring the girl with her was to abandon the Dog Man, and, should she choose that route, the girl wouldn’t survive.

  After all she’d endured to save a life, to save other lives, this beautiful thing was too far gone to save.

  Darkness rose from deep inside, and Munroe stood on the brink of the abyss, that place where she ceased to feel and ceased to care, where insanity blended with brilliance and called to her, inviting her to let go and fall, and fall, and fall, until time lost meaning and the choices forced upon her turned life and death into one and the same and nothing mattered anymore.

  The smell of blood and fear rose into her nostrils, mixing with pain.

  Munroe brushed a palm over the young face and closed the girl’s eyes, then released the bonds and gently, ever so gently, slid her hands beneath the fragile shoulders and bloodied knees. She refused to allow this innocent creature to die together with the man who’d done this to her.

  The girl whimpered when Munroe lifted her off the table and gurgled a yelp when she carried her to a sofa at the opposite end of the room. And there, kneeling beside her, in an act of mercy that tore at the fabric of her soul, Munroe put the suppressor to the young girl’s head and set her free.

  MUNROE FOUND THE monster in his bed in the master suite, wrapped in a bathrobe and half-drugged from pills, basking in the afterglow of sickness and desire. He twitched awake when she slapped a strip of tape across his mouth, and he froze, blinking up at her, as if not quite able to distinguish between the medicated high and reality.

  After a drawn-out moment, he lunged for the edge of the bed.

  His movements were slow and awkward, and Munroe stepped up and over him and shoved a knee into his back. She pressed the muzzle to his head. He twisted slightly to look at her, and she smiled.

  Seek and ye shall find.

  On the table, inches from where his hand rested, was a panic button. Behind her, she knew, beyond the suite, and the dressing room, and the sitting room, was another galley, and beyond that galley the sun-deck that shadowed the cockpit. The bodyguard was there, and she would come for him, eventually.

  Munroe rolled a finger in the air, motioning the monster to turn over, and he did, and he stared up at her as she stared down at him. Hatred welled up and burned through her, consuming her in a replay of all the agony, the death she’d borne, the sacrifices and choices she’d made, because of him.

  He was shorter than she remembered, smaller than she remembered, with a forgettable face, sandy gray hair, and a soft body beneath the tan, as if time and pain had increased his stature inside her head and turned him into a legend larger than life.

  Munroe kneed into his groin, and he cried out and curled into a ball. He was a man, just a man, weak and made of flesh and bone and blood; a man who had shredded lives, and who feasted on pain.

  A man who must die.

  Munroe wrapped tape around his wrists as he struggled to be free of her. She grabbed his hair and pulled him by the head, dragging him inch by inch to the floor as he flailed and fought and finally landed with a thud, bathrobe open, displaying his wares.

  Blood streaked his thighs, and she knew it wasn’t his blood.

  He clawed away from her, screaming for help beneath the tape, scratching at his face in an attempt to rip it off.

  Munroe fired into his leg, a discharge softened into a pop-spit by the suppressor, and he screamed again. She wrapped a fist around his arm, angry at the drugs that dulled his pain and dulled his terror.

  No drugs. No bruises.

  Those had been the rules he’d imposed on his victims, and yet now he escaped suffering the same awareness and fear he’d forced upon them.

  Munroe paused and fired again, into his shin.

  She dragged him toward the door while his muted screams went unheard and unanswered. She kicked him through hatchways when he refused to move, and shoved him down ladders out of spite, until she reached the soundproofed room with the thick door where the girl lay dead and shoved him to the table.

  She put t
he muzzle of the gun to his head and said, “Up.”

  This was the first she’d spoken, and he looked at her, and then the rack where his victim had been, and he shook his head.

  Munroe slid the knife from its sheath and sliced his arm before he’d fully registered what she’d done.

  “Get up on the table,” she said. “Otherwise I’ll put you up there piece by piece, starting with this.” She glared at him, and stabbed the knife into the back of his hand.

  He screamed again.

  She smiled again.

  “Your choice,” she said.

  He dragged himself off the floor.

  Munroe shoved him back. Locked him to the rack, fastened straps around his wrists and ankles in the same spread eagle the girl had been. And when he was secure, she fired into his groin and abandoned him there, in that room of death, screaming for help behind the tape, and behind soundproofed walls.

  She ran back up the way she’d come, retracing the trail of dripped blood.

  CHAPTER 19

  In the master suite Munroe turned off the lights, waited for her eyes to adjust, and then hit the panic button. The alarm was silent, but whispers of sound reached out from the sundeck, and she played the scene inside her head.

  The bodyguard came through the sliding door, quiet, cautious, but far less so than he should have been. He called out to his boss from the dressing room, and Munroe answered with silence.

  He opened the door to the cabin and kept his body shielded by the wall. He tipped his head inside, then out, and called again.

  Munroe walked in his direction.

  He stretched his hand into the cabin, searching for a light switch.

  She reached around the wall and fired, and followed behind the gun, firing again, and then again, and then there was only an empty magazine.

  The guard gurgled blood bubbles, and she wrenched his weapon from his hand and fired one last time. She stared down at him, slid the pack off her shoulders, and left him to follow the diagrams in her head.