Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 11 - Flashback

by Flashback(Lit)

  "You shut the fuck up." This time Butch was talking to her. He backed up a foot or two and allowed the muzzle of his gun to veer away from her chest to a more benign position.

  Anna took this as permission to sit up. It was harder than she'd expected and hurt a lot worse. She got her back against the hull and her knees pulled up just in time to avoid being landed on by Rick. Perry and Mack flopped him onto the deck with the same lack of gentleness with which they'd managed her landing.

  Rick had lost his weapon. Blood trickled from a neat round hole a couple of inches above his kneecap. Salt water had washed it clean. It was seeping not spurting. He would live. Anna wasn't sure how she felt about that.

  He wasn't much more than a boy, and when he talked he sounded just enough like Ricky Ricardo that Anna wondered if his name wasn't a cruel joke laid upon him by uncaring parents. His hair was a perfect black with water but would have reddish hues when dry. The face was square and boyish, innocence only marred by a bad case of acne and the fact that he'd tried to kill her. He was dressed in khaki shorts and a white polo shirt complete with tiny alligator and web belt. Anna guessed he'd had Weejuns but lost them while floundering around in the water.

  "You didn't have to shoot me," he said to her in a lilt millions of Americans would find comedic.

  "You were going to shoot me," she said reasonably.

  Butch, Perry and Mack crowded back to the gunwale to help the last gunman onboard. Anna looked around for something that might better her odds but saw nothing. Going over the side wouldn't do her much good, and at the moment her back was a plank of stiff hard-core pain. She doubted she could move very fast.

  "I was not," Rick said. "Nobody's supposed to get shot."

  "You play with guns, accidents happen," Anna said unsympathetically.

  The gunman from shore was brought aboard, cursing-or so it sounded to Anna-in rapid-fire Spanish. He, too, was young and Cuban and as clean-cut as a fellow could be dragged from the surf carrying an automatic weapon. He held it by the barrel the way a drunk might hold a bottle of Johnny Walker. Once he had both feet in the boat he threw it down.

  "Hey! Watch it, Jose."

  That was from Butch. A chill shivered through the two Cuban boys and Mack. "Paulo," the boy said, then spoke angrily in Spanish while the boat rocked, Rick bled and Anna watched.

  Mack cut him off with a few words Anna didn't understand-her Spanish running a short gamut from hola to cervesa. Then Mack turned to Butch. "Leave it alone," he said.

  "Si, senor" Butch said.

  In her mind Anna was chanting fight! fight! but they didn't.

  Mack expressed his anger mechanically. He shoved the cigarette boat's throttles ahead, and the powerful engines all but stood the narrow boat on its stern. Anna and the Cubans were sitting on the deck and only slid. Butch grabbed onto Perry and both fell, landing on young Rick's wounded leg.

  The engines roared. Rick screamed. Perry lost his gun. It and Paulo's discarded weapon slid down the deck. The pain in her back anesthetized by hope and adrenaline, Anna pounced on the first one that came her way, rolled and, still lying on her side, hugged the butt close to her ribs, muzzle pointed at the tangle of blood, water and men.

  "Shit."

  "Fuck."

  "My leg."

  "Watch it, Jose."

  "Jesus."

  Anna waited as this intellectual exchange sorted itself out. Over the sound of engine, wind and waves, any shouted commands would be lost.

  Perry was the first to extricate and right himself and the first to notice the balance of power had slid into Anna's court during the impromptu skirmish.

  "Holy fuck, she's got a gun," he announced.

  The men stopped mid-scramble. Had Anna been in a cheerier frame of mind she would have found it funny.

  "Stop the goddamn boat," Butch yelled.

  Mack looked back for the first time. He cut power and the boat's bow fell into the ocean with a jar that sent a numbing pain up Anna's arm from where her elbow connected with the deck. She didn't drop the Uzi, nor would she. She and Charlton Heston. They would have to pry the thing from her cold dead hands.

  Before the others could recover, she snatched the second weapon and threw it over the side, then sat up. Two automatic weapons remained to her kidnappers. Rick was all but sitting on one. Butch's Uzi was still in his hands.

  "Put it down, Butch," Anna said into the relative quiet of the engine's idle. Without forward drive, the boat pitched and heaved sickeningly. Anna had her elbows braced on her knees, butt and feet firmly on the deck so it bothered her not at all. Rick looked as if he was about to be sick. Given pain, shock and rough seas, Anna wasn't surprised. Butch, Perry and Mack were clearly used to the water. They rode the deck without effort.

  "See what you've done with your stupid fucking around," Perry yelled at Mack. "If you'd driven the boat like a goddamn white man she wouldn't've gotten it."

  "Leave it alone," Butch said. He never looked away from Anna. Perry was dangerous but Butch was the powerbase. Kidnap, killing: Anna guessed he'd done it before. Unlike his young prot‚g‚, when things went bad he became calm.

  Butch twitched the gun.

  "Down," Anna said sharply, and he stopped but he didn't let go of it. "I haven't the patience to screw around with you. Throw it over the side." The ache in her back, near drowning, maybe shock, came over her in a palpable wave. She was too wired up to feel afraid, but shaking started behind her breastbone and began spreading outward. Before it reached her hands, she needed compliance.

  Mack watched her, an odd mixture of admiration and stunned disappointment on his weathered face.

  "The gun," Anna said quietly, and she moved the barrel of hers till it pointed at the middle of Butch.

  "Oh, wait," Rick said, his voice light and young all of a sudden. "That gun's got no bullets."

  "Shall I test out Rick's assertion on you?" Anna asked Butch. "Throw it over the side."

  Careful not to turn the automatic in such a way Anna might mistake it for aggression, Butch held the Uzi out over the gunwale.

  "No. Really," Rick insisted. "She got my gun. I used all the ammo. See, it's got my initials on the barrel. I used my sister's fingernail polish because it won't come off."

  Anna didn't look but the ring of truth and the childish detail of the name shook her.

  "Drop it," she yelled at Butch, but he'd believed Rick. He swung the gun toward her. Anna pulled the trigger.

  "See?" Rick said.

  Before it could be retrieved and reloaded Anna threw it overboard to join its fellow. Diving around East Key was going to be exciting for somebody.

  "No!" and the rattle of machine gun fire so close it hurt the eardrums. Anna flattened into the bottom of the boat. At this range a bullet would go through her body and the boat's hull. If they shot her, at least they'd sink their own damn boat. Nobody shot her, though it had been a genuine attempt. Mack had hit Butch's arm and the shots had gone high.

  "No killing," Mack said.

  "She's a pain in the ass. You get rid of her or she's going to be trouble."

  "No I won't," said Anna. "I'll be good. I promise."

  "See?" said Rick again. Rick and Paulo believed her. They really were very young.

  Butch ignored her. "We don't need trouble," he said.

  "You shoot a federal law-enforcement officer and all of a sudden it gets personal. They won't give up," Mack told him.

  "They don't find the body so nobody got shot so they're short one pain-in-the-ass bitch. Nobody's going to look too hard."

  "No killing."

  "Yeah. Right," Perry said and smirked.

  Butch shut him up with a look. "You got it, Mack. But the vest goes. I don't want any supergirl shit."

  "Sure," Mack said.

  "Lose the vest," Butch said.

  "I can't," Anna said. "I don't have anything on under it." Butch was unmoved by the argument, but Anna figured anything was worth a try.

  The shakes that threate
ned earlier had migrated and her fingers trembled and fumbled with the buttons of her shirt and the Velcro tabs on the Kevlar vest underneath. For the first time in a while she wished she were in the habit of wearing a bra. The rain had let up to a gentle, wind-born drizzle, but when Anna removed the heavy vest she felt cold. Colder. Fear, consciously admitted or not, had shut down much of the blood flow to her extremities.

  Because she needed to know them, Anna watched the men watching her. Rick and Paulo averted their eyes. Perry saw the vest come off with a leer in his eye, looking for a cheap thrill. Butch looked on only for treachery and concealed weapons. Mack's face registered something very like pain or maybe hatred.

  "Toss it," Butch said.

  Anna did as she was told, but as the hot, miserable, uncomfortable thing had saved her life, she hated to see it go. She put her shirt back on. The back of it was in shreds. Both bullets had struck her at an angle. Without the vest the lead would have cut tunnels the width of her body.

  "Are we set?" Mack asked.

  Butch was still focused on Anna. "Cuff yourself."

  Anna took the cuffs from her pouch on her duty belt and put one loosely around her left wrist. It was funny how much louder the ratcheting was to the one being cuffed. In various law-enforcement training sessions Anna and countless others in the field had been warned of how deadly a weapon unsecured cuffs can be, or cuffs secured only on one side. Properly used, the metal, the hook, the chain, the teeth on the locking mechanism, could maim and kill. Fleetingly, Anna wished she'd paid more attention in class. Probably when she was drawing cartoons or writing her sister under the guise of note-taking, one small middle-aged woman armed with half a pair of handcuffs facing five grown men, two armed with automatic weapons, had been covered.

  "Other side."

  Fantasies of morphing into Jean Claude Van Damme evaporated. Anna closed the cuff over her right wrist. Secure enough to come closer, Butch leaned down and squeezed the cuffs, tightening them to where she wouldn't be able to wriggle out.

  "Where's the key?"

  "It's on the key chain in the Reef Ranger's ignition," she told him.

  Butch gave her a few seconds to recant her lie, and Anna fought the urge to say Honest, really, go look and settled for sullenness. One cuff key was on her key ring. Like many law-enforcement people, she kept a spare key-they were tiny things, like the key to a girl's jewelry box-in the watch pocket of her trousers. As women's uniform shorts lacked this amenity, she carried it in the breast pocket of her shirt. Had Butch cuffed her hands behind her back she'd have been out of luck.

  Mack watched the exchange with growing impatience. Anna wondered if he regretted his decision not to let Butch shoot her. Cuffed, she sat timidly back in the stern by the wounded Rick.

  "We're set," Butch said.

  Before Mack could power up, Anna said: "Hey, Mack, could you put one of these goons on the Reef Ranger? Drive it back? I lose another boat here and I'll be writing reports till you guys get out of the penitentiary."

  For a bleak while he stared at her. Then he smiled, a mere cracking of the wrinkles on his cheeks. "Sure."

  Perry started to say something rude, but Butch cut him off. "Anybody sees an NPS boat adrift's going to raise an alarm."

  They'd intended to rescue the boat all along. The strength Anna's tiny victory afforded her soaked into the ache in her back and was absorbed. Mack circled the little key. Perry jumped ship to pilot the Reef Ranger back to the fort. Butch watched Anna. When Mack got the go-fast boat up to speed and the howl of the engine and pounding of the hull on the waves created a solid wall of noise between the stern and where Butch leaned near the pilot's console, Anna spoke to Rick.

  "I'm an emergency medical technician," she said over the racket. "I've seen a lot of wounds. That's a bad one. It could have nicked the femoral artery."

  Rick looked up, his ashen face growing perhaps a shade paler. "Butch said it wasn't spurting. I was okay if it wasn't spurting. It's hardly bleeding at all."

  Anna studied the red-black hole for a moment. "I hate to say it but the placement's bad. You could be bleeding to death inside. Never know it, then bang. Lights out."

  The pupils of Rick's eyes grew larger, blacker. "No," he said. "That's crap. It's not spurting."

  "Easy enough to tell," Anna said, then leaned back and pretended to lose interest.

  The Cuban boy stood it as long as he could-about forty-five seconds-before he blurted out "How can you tell?"

  The boy was too easy. Looking at the pale and sweating face, the too-wide eyes, Anna knew she ran the risk of putting him into deeper shock. People died of shock. Guilt prodded her insides. Handcuffed and aching, she found it fairly easy to ignore.

  Starting with questions to which the answers had to be yes, she asked: "Arc yon feeling lightheaded?" Then she went through the litany of shock: "Dizzy, sweating, nauseous, anxious?"

  Rick, growing more panicked by the moment, answered yes to them all.

  "Internal bleeding," Anna said matter-of-factly. "If we don't get you to a doctor soon... Maybe I should call for the medevac helicopter when we get back to a phone."

  "Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus. Mary Mother of God."

  Anna didn't know if the boy prayed or swore. She just knew she needed help. To justify the caching of fuel, the kidnapping of a ranger and probably at least one murder, Mack and his cronies must be planning on importing a whole hell of a lot of "product."

  Mack cut power so he wouldn't cause a wake. He was too clever to call attention to himself by rude or illegal boating practices. A shrimper had arrived and rocked at anchor.

  Butch left his place by the helm and stepped back to where Anna sat terrifying Rick. The moment the roar of the engines died, the wounded man began babbling. "Look you guys, you got to get me to a doctor. This lady says I got bleeding inside. Please. I don't maybe have long. Oh God. Oh Jesus."

  "Shut up, you'll live," Butch snapped. "What she been telling you?" he demanded. The boy repeated the dire forecast Anna had outlined.

  "It's crap. She's lying. No calls." He leaned down and backhanded Anna hard across the face, moving so quickly she scarcely saw it coming and had no time to duck. The blow caught her ear and the pain made tears start. Before her head cleared she was aware of a rough voice near her ringing ear and hot breath on her cheek. "You're a sneaky bitch, I'll give you that, but I ain't got time for your shit. You talk to anybody and I kill you. Got that?"

  "Got it," Anna said. This time she saw it coming but could do nothing about it. The back of Butch's hand smashed into her temple with such force it loosed the pains in her back. If she hadn't been so pissed off, she would have screamed.

  "You got that?" he asked again.

  Anna nodded, no sound.

  "You may stay alive, but don't count on it."

  He took a blue plastic tarp from storage beneath a bench seat, shook it out and threw it over her. "You move and I crush your skull."

  Anna didn't nod. The first time had been enough to loose her neck hinges, again and her head might topple off into her lap. Being smuggled into her own harbor beneath an old tarpaulin as if she were a shipment of something so vile the public mustn't be affronted by having to look upon it wasn't the indignity it could have been. Hidden in the tent made by head and knees, she was free to fish the tiny handcuff key out of her shirt pocket. Blinded, the leap and crash of the cigarette boat was more disconcerting than when she could brace herself, but in the harbor, the water was considerably flatter and she managed her task. Having unlocked both cuffs, she didn't remove them but loosened them to the point where, with a little effort, she could wriggle her hands free. That done, she put the key back in her pocket and waited.

  On shipboard, with men intent on keeping her in their control apparently at any price, was not the time to flaunt her freedom or attempt escape or coup. Maybe later when the odds were better. If there was to be a later. If the odds got better.

  Bumping that caused Anna to fall into Rick, and Rick to cry o
ut in pain, announced their arrival at the dock. The tarp was jerked off and rough hands hauled her to her feet.

  Mack had taken the slip at the visitors' dock. Butch leaped offboard and began tying the boat to the cleats. The wind had slacked off but rain came down steadily, and low, thick skies brought an early dusk. Visibility was down to nearly nothing, and the beach was deserted. Two tents, campers huddled inside, remained in the small campground.

  Butch grabbed a towel and threw it over Anna's cuffed wrists, then took her by the elbows. "Keep those handcuffs covered as if your life depended on nobody seeing them," he hissed in her ear.