Water Memory

by Daniel Pyne

  Shit.

  —to never, ever have it happen again.

  “How do I know—”

  Castor Z. cuts her off, cruel. She can hear him gauging his advantage and doubling down on it. “Right, right—” In the whistling audio on the other end of her radio call, she can imagine him holding the phone out into the bay wind for her son, as he shouts, “Sing for Mommy!”

  Sing.

  Jeremy’s voice comes distant, flat, scared. “Um—hello? Mom? Mom, I’m sorry.”

  Her soul splinters. She hears the twin put the phone to his own ear again. “There. Content?”

  “If you so much as hurt him—”

  “Yeah, yeah, blah blah. Noted,” Castor says. “But you’ve had your bloody run, Grandma. Fuck off. We’re on our way.”

  A dizzying rush of fear and utter helplessness overtakes her for the first time since her mother died. There is no click of Zeme hanging up, only the sudden absence of cellular static, and it claws at Sentro’s heart.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Sagging power lines quicksilvered by headlights slipped past her side window like drooping music staffs, tethering her back to the motel, to her mother, the last threads fraying as they drove back to Dallas, her stepfather silent, his big shadow draped over the wheel of the truck, arms folded across it as if he wanted to sleep, his face etched soft blue by the instrument panel, eyes lost in darkness, mouth set sharp and hard. He was ghostly granite and chiseled like the giant faces of Mount Rushmore that she’d seen the other time she and her mother had taken a runner, but that one had ended in a different way.

  Truck tires winged against the asphalt, and a blood moon hung on the horizon for a long time and then was whispered away by clouds.

  They didn’t sing.

  Texas went on and on.

  “She wouldn’t have hurt me,” she told him at some point.

  “I know,” he said softly. “She wouldn’t have.”

  It was the only conversation they ever had about it.

  The gunshot was loud, but the corresponding forced entry by faceless cops in helmets and Kevlar was the greater shock; she had heard him calling her name on the bullhorn but couldn’t gather enough air in her aching lungs to make a sound. Her mother had checked out; what remained there at the foot of the bed was no one Aubrey recognized, just a lifeless shape dusted by the spectral light of the fluttering TV.

  The tactical squad broke in with their battering ram and rattle-tag guns, awkward armor squeaking, and she screamed and her stepfather stormed in right behind them. As if from a high corner of the room, she watched him glide across the floor to her; she didn’t want to be touched, but he took her up in his arms anyway and carried her out into the hot night, where whitewashed faces were all turned to her, so she buried her eyes in his hard shoulder, and he put her in the cab of the truck and told her to stay there, and she heard him tell someone to wait with her, and he was gone for quite a while.

  She felt the cab tilt when he climbed in. She didn’t look at him. He didn’t say anything; they just remained in darkness until she felt his hand warm on her shoulder, lighter than she expected. He didn’t leave it there long. There was the turn of a key and the scrape of the starter; the engine rumbled to life.

  “Are you hungry?”

  She was but didn’t answer him.

  Somebody outside was trying to talk to him, but she heard him keep saying quietly, “Later. Later.” And they drove away.

  On that other trip, to Mount Rushmore, she was younger enough that she doesn’t trust that her memories of it aren’t corrupted by what she must have learned later, growing up—about her mother, from her father, from her mother’s friends, and years afterward while going through the boxes in the basement of their Dallas house after her father died.

  There was a Rapid City hotel ashtray that her mother had slipped into her purse as a souvenir; there were some snapshots that had been taken with a Brownie Bullet, faded and casually focused, like a fever dream of another life. Aubrey was four, then (or just turned five?), a girl’s girl, judging from the clothes she wore in the photographs, or maybe that was what her mother wanted for her; she’ll never really know.

  He showed up on the third day of their Dakota walkabout, as her mother later called it; she has an image of him entering the lobby café and removing his hat and glasses and looking across the room to where they were sitting, eating breakfast, by the window, bathed in full sun. There was the worry in her mother’s eyes and the easy smile that broke across his face to reassure them both, a smile Aubrey is sure she’d never seen before and never saw again: relief, sadness, love.

  Or did she add that detail at some point, wish that it had happened? She never asked him, and then it was too late.

  Rand Sentro is not her father, but she’s his daughter. He raised her as best he could.

  His sister in Lubbock offered to take in the motherless child; Ruth Muzzie had two girls of her own and lobbied hard to make Aubrey her third, but Ranger Sentro refused, and then, as if to prove his point, he never remarried. Took a promotion and got a big desk downtown supervising other marshals so he wouldn’t be gone so much.

  But he’d been emptied out by the events at the motel.

  Never remarried. If he even had another relationship, she saw no evidence of it. He was home every night, her taciturn sentinel. He made them dinner until she couldn’t stand it anymore and took over.

  Theirs was a polite understanding, father and daughter; he taught her what he knew, which was, at its core, how to hold the world at arm’s length, how to stay human but not feel too much to be useful, how to navigate violence and havoc and death and come home.

  A Vietnam veteran (she only learned of it when, in his will, he asked to be interred in the National Cemetery with full honors), he once told her, “All this posttraumatic bullshit they’re saying is bullshit; well, it’s real, and it’s tragic, because you take a boy and send him to war and ask him to forget everything he knows about being civilized; then you bring him back and expect him to forget all that and live by the very rules he had to break every day in order to survive.”

  A boy.

  His was a world where boys became men and girls became wives, but torn between his chauvinism and prejudice and the sanctity of paternal legacy, he taught her to stand straight, to shoot and to hunt, to defend herself and recognize bullshit when she saw it. Try as he might, he was never able to understand her, so it shouldn’t have surprised him when, first chance she got, she was pregnant and leaving home for happily hapless Dennis Troon.

  When her husband first got the cancer, it hit so hard and fast. Before they could even begin to make plans, Dennis was in the hospital and fading, the aggressive oncological campaign his doctors devised already scuttled by the scorched-earth blitzkrieg waged by the disease, and Aubrey was embroiled in some shady NOC fuckery as a hire-back for Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority that pulled her away from home and turned out to be her last government assignment. Her husband was dying; Aubrey wanted compassionate release. Dennis insisted that she honor her commitment. Insisted this wasn’t his time yet, and they would need the hazard pay from the mission to cover his growing list of meds.

  The day she shipped out for Baghdad, she discovered her father in Dennis’s room, camped out. Rand Sentro had driven nonstop to Bethesda from Dallas, told her, “I have this under control; don’t worry about anything.” In the farewells and confusion, she never asked him how he’d found out about it, and three weeks later she got an urgent sat-phone call from the hospital that she assumed would be bad news about her husband. Instead a nurse told her that her father had died, peacefully, during the night while sitting vigil.

  He was back and buried in the dry Texas hardpan before her Iraqi nonsense was completed.

  Dennis was right: he’d have another five years of hell before the ugly end came.

  And now the only men in her life are the ones she works with and the scoundrels that keep them busy.
/>   Like this phony pirate bastard who has her son.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  From a distance, looking back across the bay at the harbor, the red-pulse conflagration of emergency lights, vehicles, and official personnel on the veranda of the Malabar House seems staged.

  A mechanical bird buzzes overhead, destined for the Jeddah, presumably some kind of tactical drone, and as Morehouse points this out to Eccola, she shouts an alarm, and he swerves portside to narrowly avoid the pair of police boats sluicing out toward the ship. The harbor patrol zips past them, following the drone, and the doctor instantly recognizes the white man Sentro called Zeme, but not the other young Anglo they have under heavy guard on the stern deck. Bloated by a life preserver, his head squeezed, he looks terrified and struggles to keep his balance despite sitting.

  Morehouse counts half a dozen local gendarmes on each of the two boats, fully armed, plus the pirates, and doing the math in his head, the doctor can only assume that Sentro and the crew of the Jeddah will be toast. A wiry, scar-faced mercenary in a windblown madras sports coat has taken command of a big nasty deck gun on the patrol boat that follows Zeme’s.

  The doctor cuts his throttle and jacks the skiff around to watch the patrol boats recede and tries to make his peace with his coward’s choice here.

  Eccola has sagged to a bench. Her eyes rise to meet his. There’s fire in them. He looks away, ashamed. This girl.

  “We go back,” she says.

  “If I want to kill myself, I’ll do it with morphine, thank you very much.”

  “Go back,” she repeats.

  “No.” In her language he reminds her she’s with child.

  “Back. For my brother.”

  To himself, grim, the doctor murmurs, “Yo ho ho.” Shoves the throttle full and cuts the wheel starboard.

  She’s lied a little to Mulligan. But not so much to herself.

  Making this up as she goes along has been her principal strategy, from the moment the so-called pirates burst into her cabin.

  It’s when it became personal that the doubts crept in.

  After Jesper finishes setting up and focusing the late Bruce’s smallest telescope, Sentro and Captain Montez take turns watching the police boats approach from the quay with a shared sense of worry.

  “We didn’t get out quick enough.”

  “They’d have caught us anyway,” Sentro admits and wonders for one bleak moment what she was thinking coming back to the boat if she knew this. Was it the best bad option? She catches her concentration straying, recommits herself to the task at hand, remembering out of nowhere what must be a training trope from Quantico or Bragg: When facing superior force, shrink the battleground.

  Right?

  A speck of a drone hovers two hundred feet above them, whirring eerily. Salah was first to point it out. The gulls on the masts and containers twitch, unnerved but too stubborn to be chased off.

  Jesper offers a different eyepiece to her, and Sentro pans a much closer view across the deck of the lead patrol boat and finds her son, wearing the old leather jacket that she brought back for Dennis, years ago, from Spain. A ragged breath escapes her.

  “Is it him?”

  Sentro nods, numb, staring at her son’s stony features through the telescope.

  “How did he get himself all the way here?”

  Yes, how?

  She wonders at how many other moments like this she missed, all the times he stumbled, got lost and needed direction, got scared and wanted comfort, got himself in some kind of trouble that Dennis—not she—had to help him resolve. She has no memory of the first girl her son liked, whether he ever wanted to learn to play guitar. If he was bullied in middle school.

  It’s not because she’s forgotten. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t there to know it.

  “Do you have children, Captain?”

  “Five. In Gibraltar.”

  “You know the answer to that, then.”

  “They’re resourceful,” Montez agrees.

  Below them, fifty yards out from the ship, the patrol boat carrying Zeme and her son throttles down and lets the rolling wake overtake it, rising, dipping, gliding sideways, as if worried about coming too close just yet.

  “AHOY THERE.”

  “That’s a good bullhorn,” Sentro thinks aloud, recalling the harsh distortion of the one she heard in West Texas, in the motel. The captain glances at her, annoyed.

  “HEY! AHOY THERE!”

  Montez raises a microphone to use the ship’s comm, but Sentro reaches out and stops him. The hatch above them opens, exposing the forest of antennae on the observation deck. First Mate Mulligan struggles down the ladder while the Tagalog remains up top, frantically trying to put the Gustaf together and load it. Zoala squats beside him, offering a stream of unheeded suggestions.

  “Progress?”

  “He’s getting the swing of it,” Mulligan says without conviction.

  Castor Z.’s voice booms across the bay water. “IF WE DO THIS RIGHT? EVERYBODY GETS WHAT THEY WANT.”

  Um, no. Sentro watches the crew on the second patrol boat inflate a rubber pontoon boat and drop it over the side. Its coiled line is thrown to the lead boat, and hand over hand, Carlito pulls the inflatable across to where Jeremy is already being positioned to climb down to it.

  Wearing her husband’s jacket. In this heat. A worrisome detail. Probably not his choice, she thinks. So what is it hiding?

  “AS YOU CAN SEE, WE’LL BE PUTTING LITTLE MAN SENTRO INTO THE FLOATY FOR A BIT OF QUIET TIME. UNTIL TODAY’S SWAP IS DONE.”

  “The money is on its way,” Sentro says to Montez, just realizing it.

  “How do you know that?”

  “He wouldn’t expose himself like this if it wasn’t. Too many moving parts.” Everyone on the bridge is staring at her with looks of confusion. “He’ll have arranged for it to come by plane. An airdrop. He just needs to show them that he can deliver the ship, its cargo, its passengers and crew, intact, and that he has it under his control.” Sentro closes her eyes, feeling a twitch of headache that wants to come back. She wills it away.

  “HELLO?”

  Montez raises his microphone again, and again Sentro stops him, shaking her head. “I’m going down to talk with him face-to-face about my son. Get the passengers into the safe room. As soon as I have Jeremy, if Charlemagne has managed to assemble it in time, put a shell from the Gustaf into that lead patrol boat. Maybe you’ll get lucky and kill Mr. Zeme.”

  “You’ll be in the line of fire.”

  “Don’t worry about me.” She means it.

  “And if we don’t kill him?”

  “It’ll get messy,” she allows, then removes the handgun wedged in the small of her back and puts it on the map table, asking the first mate, “Do you keep a signal gun up here?”

  “Take the Kalashnikov.”

  “I can’t possibly shoot all of them.” Mulligan doesn’t seem to understand, and she doesn’t have time to explain. “Signal gun,” she says again.

  He limps to a cabinet to find it, exasperated, while the captain asks one last time, “Why not just let him have his money?”

  “There’s more to this than the ransom,” Sentro replies, almost a chorus now. Cartoon cats, empty containers. Twins and her very own femme fatale. She imagines a bird’s-eye view of the Jeddah: glassy bay water, police patrol abreast the hull, gulls, drone, fake pirates waving signal flags. Castor Zeme on the bow of his baby frigate, arms akimbo, king of the world.

  It always comes down to a dinner theater production number, best intentions, bravely sung. And the buffet sucks.

  Some kind of colorful seaplane will make the drop, she guesses, with the clown-shoe pontoons and overhead wing. She imagines it circling, a package tumbling out. The parachute pops; the ransom floats over the bay, to the Jeddah, in a lazy spiral, down, down, down.

  “Which means he’s going to want to kill me as soon as he can.” Below her, the second patrol boat has begun motoring slowly around the fre
ighter, trailing Jeremy in the rubber dinghy like some kind of door prize. “Then my son.” She can’t, won’t, let this possibility overtake her. “And kill the passengers and the rest of you as soon as he has the money.” She takes a beat to gather herself and let the others process this certainty. “Because this whole endeavor has gone horribly south on him,” she tells them. “And that’s who he is.”

  Bloody carnage.

  Flies swarming in blue-black clouds.

  Everyone on the Jeddah dead when the ship’s owners finally send a boarding party to assess their losses. And no Marlow to tell the tale.

  The bridge has gone quiet. While Mulligan crosses to hand Sentro the yellow flare gun he’s located, Captain Montez stares at her, dumbfounded.

  “I know,” Sentro says kindly. “It’d be wonderful to live in the civilized, transactional world you have always believed was real. But we don’t. We live in mine. You’d better get everyone locked down. Now.”

  And because it’s been bugging her, she asks, before he leaves, the impertinent question she probably should save for later, if there is one: “How much did she pay you to turn a blind eye to all those Gustafs hidden in the soybeans?”

  The captain turns beet red. He stutters guiltily about how he doesn’t know what Sentro’s talking about, and even if he did, he had no idea the complications that might ensue.

  “Oh, stop. Stop.” Securing the flare gun in the back waistband of her leggings and letting her shirttail drop over it, she cuts him off, impatient. “Don’t lie to me. I suspect it was you I heard in the dead of night moving them.”

  Montez blinks guiltily, like a kid caught shoplifting.

  “I don’t care,” Sentro says. “Thieving from thieves, good for you. I hope your kickback is a fortune.

  “But don’t think for a minute that you will live to spend any of it on your children if we don’t take care of this monster now.”