Crash Tack

by A. J. Stewart

  “Stiltsville,” I said to Lenny.

  Lenny nodded. “Have you been before?”

  “No,” I said. I’d heard about it. A community of houses built on stilts on the sand flats in Biscayne Bay. Back in the day they had been quite the thing, lots of illegal gambling and drinking, lots of good times for swell people. But hurricanes and bureaucracy had taken their toll, and from a peak of almost thirty buildings in the sixties, the area now only had seven.

  “I thought it was off-limits,” I said.

  “It is,” Lenny nodded. “The whole area is now national park. You need a permit to even moor at one. I don’t think Alec cares about that.” Lenny pointed again, and I looked ahead to see a yellow building with a green roof. It was low-built, despite being high on stilts above the water. Below the deck of the house, a speedboat was tied up .

  “Is that it? That his boat?” I asked.

  “It is,” he replied, dropping the speed right down. The motor put out a low purr, but there was no way Alec could hear it. The rain pummeled the water and the deck and the tender, and cracks of thunder sounded across the bay in a deafening rumble. Lenny pulled the boat almost into line with the house, and cut the motor. We drifted forward and a little sideways, and came in directly under the stilt house. It was some relief from the rain, but not the sound. It was ear-piercing. Lenny used the stilts to pull the tender alongside the speedboat that was tied to the same dock under the house. Lenny grabbed our mooring line and reached around one of the stilt poles and tied us off. We climbed across the speedboat, and held up just under the house, out of the rain. Lenny reached back and pulled out his gun.

  “You don’t have yours, do you?”

  I shook my head. “It’s at the shooting range.”

  Lenny nodded. “Yeah. So I’ll go first. Stick close. Visibility is going to be poor.”

  He looked at me, winked, and then jumped out into the torrential rain.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  THE SUN WAS falling in the sky but that was immaterial because it shone no light. The gods had grown angry and the clouds were as dark as night. Lenny was right—visibility was poor. Worse than poor. I could barely keep my eyes open to see Lenny right in front of me. It was like standing in the shower fully clothed. We crept up the steps to the deck of the stilt house, but we could have run for all the difference it would have made. There was no sound above the drum band of heavy rain and thunder.

  Lenny stopped at the top of the steps and I looked over his shoulder. There was a deck that ran right around the entire house. Unfortunately the roofline only came out about a third of the way, and the pitch of the roof served to do nothing but concentrate the downpour onto the deck. Lenny pointed with a flat hand toward the house, along the side that took our direction toward the distant but invisible skyline of Miami.

  We eased across to the side of the house. There was no rush, no dashing through the rain toward shelter. Sometimes there was only so wet a person could get. Lenny pressed himself against the house to get some respite from the rain, and looked at me. I brushed the water from my face and hair to get some sort of vision. What I saw was like standing on the inside of a waterfall.

  I could no longer make out the handrail that ran around the outside of the deck, let alone the water beyond. Water ran in little rivulets down the creases in Lenny’s face, random and racing to the bottom, where they met finally at his chin before falling from him. He ran his hand through his hair and turned away.

  We moved slowly, Lenny edging forward until he reached a door that was about halfway along. He signaled for me to wait, and then he stepped past the door. With his pistol held high in his right hand, he reached back with his left and tried the door. The knob gave a little but not enough. He shook his head, and then he signaled that we would keep moving.

  I stopped as Lenny reached the corner of the house, my eyes on Lenny’s mane, the red hair gone waterlogged and brown. The rain was collecting in it like a sponge, and without its bounce it had lost its vitality.

  He got into a crouch, and then edged his head around the corner to take a look. I assumed that he got low so anyone waiting in ambush would instinctively look to standing height, thus giving him a second to recoil if he saw something he didn’t like.

  But he pulled his head back slowly, stood and then slipped around the corner. We were now at the front of the house, nearest the Florida mainland, a little over a mile away. Despite not being able to see five feet, let alone a mile, I kept the map in my head to help me keep my bearings. I was edging around the corner when I felt Lenny stop.

  I looked over Lenny’s shoulder at the wall of wet darkness ahead. There, like a water spirit, I saw a shape appear at the far end of the deck. It emerged like an apparition, not seeming to come from anywhere, just appearing. A dark shape, formless and flowing. A ghost floating above the deck. It seemed to be looking at us, but I saw no face. Then my mind quickly did the recalculations, and the apparition took shape.

  A man, standing just under the cover of the eaves, our side of the wall of water. A man wearing a dark poncho. A pointless attempt to ward off the rain. The hood covered his face, and the sides flapped, hiding his arms. The wind blew the shapeless poncho about, making it seem as if the man were floating in front of us, and I felt a shiver go down my spine.

  Lenny raised his gun, two-handed grip, feet splayed.

  “Freeze, Alec,” he said.

  He didn’t yell it, but somehow the deep resonance of it permeated the white noise. There was no doubting Alec heard him, loud and clear. But he didn’t move, he didn’t speak. For what felt like minutes but was probably only seconds we stood there, one move from checkmate, waiting for someone to budge.

  The apparition budged first. One moment he was floating there, the next he ducked around the corner of the house, gone.

  “Stay close,” Lenny said over his shoulder. He paced across the front of the house, gun held out in front. He got to the corner and spun around in one swift move, forgoing the get-low-stick-head-around-corner routine.

  I took a few quick steps to keep in behind Lenny, and bumped into his back. He didn’t turn. Again I looked over his shoulder, along the line of his arm, at the end of which extended the barrel of his pistol. I followed the sight of the weapon to the other end of the deck.

  The poncho flapped at the far corner of the house, toward the deep blue, or as it was, deep black.

  “There’s nowhere to run, Alec,” Lenny called. He held the gun steady and took small steps, like a dance move .

  One, two. One, two.

  We reached the midpoint of the house, and like the other side there was a door. Lenny moved by it.

  “Just stay where you are,” said Lenny. “Let’s talk.”

  There was no response.

  I moved to the door and tested the knob. It was locked, and I wondered if Alec had been waiting on the deck the whole time.

  A crack of lightning exploded across the water, like a giant strobe. It lit the side of the house in vibrant color, but everything beyond the wall of rain was just a featureless silver burst. In front of the water wall I saw the poncho had his arm extended toward us.

  A gun. Pointed right at us, or more specifically at Lenny.

  I blinked my eyes to readjust to the darkness and heard Lenny yell again.

  “Drop the weapon, Alec!”

  Lenny stopped moving and I stopped behind him.

  The rain continued pummeling the roof and the deck and the ocean, and all my senses were focused hard on Alec.

  I didn’t hear the door behind me open. I felt the earth move, the deck beneath my feet sending the smallest ripples through me, a physical sensation of creaking rather than an audible one. It made me turn back toward the door. Which, as it turned out, wasn’t the best move.

  I don’t know exactly what it was—a plank of wood, a baseball bat—but whatever it was, rather than catching me on the back of the head, it hit me hard on the temple. Whoever had swung it did so with some pent
-up energy, because it was out-of-the-park hard.

  I heard a loud crack through one ear, a burst of pain, and then the vacant sense of falling, down and down and down, as if I were a giant, and Jack had cut my stalk.

  I landed hard on my knees, a temporary position because I had no motor function to hold myself up. My brain had ceased all communication with my body as its internal alarm system shot to defcon one . From my good ear I heard a yell, a muffled scream of anguish.

  “Miami!”

  That wasn’t the last thing I heard. As my body flopped forward toward the wet deck, I heard a shot ring out, then another. Perhaps two shots, perhaps one echoing in my mind, bouncing around my skull, in and out of my malfunctioning brain.

  Then I hit the deck, a face plant, arms beside me, my cheekbone taking the full impact, as the darkness grew that little bit deeper around the edges of my vision. Then another thud, like I had fallen a second time, or was getting an instant replay in my mind. And then my limited field of vision was filled with another apparition, not my life flashing before my eyes, but a face.

  The face of Lenny Cox. Looking at me, the way he often did. That trademark sardonic smile, as if he knew something I didn’t know, which was almost always the case. As the darkness bled across my view I looked at his grin, and then up at his eyes.

  His cold, lifeless eyes.

  And then everything went black.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  IN THE MOVIES people wake from a concussion, shake their heads, and run off after the bad guys, as good as new. It doesn’t happen like that in real life. I’d been concussed before, on football fields in college and high school, although not as often as some. Playing quarterback kept the brain injuries to a minimum. But I had seen guys lose their memory of an entire game. I’d seen other guys remember everything, even the hours and days they sat gazing into space afterwards. The brain is mission control, and there is no mission without it. So it takes its sweet time getting itself together. But it also has an emergency system, a life-preserving ability to keep going, to keep moving, even when the circuits are frazzled.

  I woke from darkness to near darkness. Not the sense of light, but the feeling of less dark. I lay in place for an eternity. I may have had my eyes open, or they may have been closed. Images began forming in my head, but there was no sense of urgency there. As if somehow my mind had floated out of me, taken stock of the situation, and then returned to tell me that the danger had subsided. After an indeterminable time I lifted my head from the deck, and propped myself against the side of the house. My vision wasn’t blurry but my head pounded, a constant source of nausea. I tried breathing deeper but that felt bad, so I tried breathing shallow. That was less bad. I touched the side of my head and felt swelling around my eye and cheek and the side of my head, soft like a bag of rice. My hair was matted, sticky with congealed blood. I looked around, slowly moving my eyes but not my head.

  The rain had stopped. I remembered the rain. Heavy drops still fell from the roof, hitting the deck and my legs, but the deluge had definitely moved on. I wasn’t sure how long it had rained. I didn’t know what time it was. I didn’t know what day it was. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure on the year. We had a new president—that I could remember, though I couldn’t picture him.

  I sat for the longest time, not replaying events or planning movements, just existing, like Lizzy’s computer printer taking forever to power up. I finally decided to look along the deck, to move my head. Or maybe it just moved, I don’t know. But I looked along the deck and saw nothing. A door, a long wet deck and then misty cloud. Then ever so slowly I rotated my head the other way, bracing against the wood siding of the house. More of the same. Deck, then nothing. And then I remembered the man in the poncho. And then I remembered Lenny.

  I glanced down. Lenny lay next to me. He was on his belly, his face side on to where I had been lying for however long. One arm was propped under him, the other lay by his side. I slowly moved my hand to his head. His hair was thick and wet. I looked him over. There were two dark spots on his back. One about kidney position, the other in the shoulder blade. Bullet holes.

  My eyes took it all in like a tourist videotaping the art in the Louvre. Capturing the scenery but not really seeing it for himself. Saving it for later, to be processed at another time, in another place. I noticed that one of his shoelaces was untied. The back of his shirt was pulled up a touch, exposing the small of his back. After I’d captured it all for posterity, I refocused my eyes on the mist that hung over the water. And then I cried.

  It seemed utterly pointless. Everything was wet already. The rain had come and gone, washed the earth clean and moved on. It was a large ocean and a massive sky and my tears wouldn’t fill a matchbox. But there they were. First just tears running down an already damp face, and then sobs that shook my body and pounded my head. For some reason the pain in my skull went away, for just a while. Maybe some kind of chemical reaction, one of those amazing things that our bodies can do. Great gasping sobs across endless water, the sound of my grief swallowed whole by the mist. I played no visions in my mind, no flashbacks of good times or bad times, of words said or not said. Just empty tears and groans.

  And then I stopped. Just stopped. Not because I wanted to, not because I felt foolish. But because somewhere deep inside a switch went off. Or perhaps on. I gathered myself, took some deep breaths and felt the pain ebb back into my head. I wiped my face and resolved to move. I didn’t know if the man or men who had been there before were still there, but my dinosaur brain said no, so I believed it. I edged myself up the wall and stood on unsteady pegs. Leaned against the wall and patted myself down. Something told me I didn’t have a phone but I didn’t know where it might be. So I tried the door to the house. It was unlocked. I moved slowly into the room, holding onto the jamb to keep myself upright. The interior was as dark as a cave. There was no ambient light making it in, and nothing to see.

  I turned away. Stepped over the edge of the deck and grabbed hold of the railing, and then eased myself around Lenny and along the deck. I took a long time to make it down the steps to the dock below. The speedboat was gone. So was the tender. I sat on the steps and looked at the water below the house, bereft of ideas and will. Then after some time, a little of both appeared. I dragged myself back up the steps, and around the deck. I knelt beside Lenny.

  I didn’t want to move him and I certainly didn’t want to roll him over, so I reached under him to try his front pocket. He was heavy. The words dead weight seeped into my mind and I quickly removed my hand and breathed hard to stop the nausea from erupting. Then I started again, lifting him at the side. I reached in and felt his cell phone. It took some doing getting it out of his wet pocket without turning him right over, but I did it. I sat back against the wall exhausted.

  I waited for the nausea to abate to its new baseline of imminent, and then I looked at Lenny’s phone. It was a flip phone, an older thing like Lenny. It had literally been through the wash, so I figured the electronics would be shot, but I flipped it open and the little screen came to life, glowing blue. I tried the contacts, found Lucas and hit call. The ring tone was garbled, maybe from getting drenched, maybe because of the distance to shore. The ringing went to voicemail, a robot reciting the phone number. I hung up and looked for something else.

  I wanted to call Lenny but his number wasn’t there. I found a contact for MB Marina, and I hit it. It rang and rang, and then it too went to voicemail. An Australian accent telling me the marina was closed, try again tomorrow, if they weren’t out fishing. I hung up the call and dropped the phone into my lap and looked out toward the mist. I felt very alone, like the last man on earth. No one left, not a man, not a woman, not even a volleyball to keep me company. Then the night burst into sound and the phone buzzed in my lap. I flipped it open. The screen told me it was Lucas. I hit the little green phone icon and held the thing up to my good ear.

  “Where the bloody hell’s my boat, mate?” I heard him say.

>   “Lucas,” I whispered. I hadn’t noticed how dry my mouth was until I had tried to talk. There was a metallic taste on my tongue.

  “Miami? Where are you blokes? What’s going on?”

  “It’s Lenny.”

  “Lenny? What about Lenny?”

  I didn’t know what to say, and anything that came to mind refused to pass my lips.

  “Miami?” Lucas repeated.

  “Man down,” I said.

  “Where are you, mate?”

  “Stiltsville.”

  “Stiltsville? What the—? Which one?”

  “Don’t know. Yellow. Green roof.” I wasn’t sure if that was accurate or if I’d imagined it.

  “Bay Chateau. Don’t move—I’ll be there a-sap.”

  I didn’t move. I just sat there and waited. It might have been thirty minutes; it might have been two hours. But I heard the throbbing engine of the boat from the channel behind, and then it dropped low and took its time and then a spotlight hit the side of the house like a trainee sun. The light disappeared under the building, then the whole structure groaned under the weight of footsteps, and the light appeared around the corner of the house. Lucas dropped to the deck beside me. The flashlight lit him from below, his features hollow and dark.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  I nodded slowly. Then Lucas looked down at Lenny. He put his hand to Lenny’s neck, the final gesture. He held it there for ten seconds, but there were no numbers to count. Then he flopped against the railing.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said. He looked at Lenny for a moment, maybe taking it in as I had. But there were no tears from Lucas. He got to his haunches, looked at the house and then stood. He stepped past me and in through the door. With his flashlight there was probably something to see. But whatever it was, it wasn’t of interest. He stepped back out, and looked at me.