Wayward Sons

by Wayne Stinnett

  She pulled her knees tighter. Her ribs were a girdle around her lungs, her minute of life being squeezed away. The flickering orange light crept toward the toes of her flats, then touched them. The gate holding back the invaders from her body fell, and a burning terror rushed from her feet to her heart, seizing control of her soul and lashing it with hellfire. The light retreated. It slid against the railing far to her right.

  The orange light pressed toward her. It advanced across the porch’s ceiling. She thought she’d been spotted—that a porch light had come on, and the man with the gun had come to shoot her.

  Until she saw the fireball.

  The fire soared over her, then crashed through the front window above and behind her. Glass rained down on Gabriela’s head. She squeezed her eyes shut. Cold stung her unprotected arms and the back of her neck and scalp.

  She opened her eyes to see a long shard of glass embedded in her right forearm. It bled freely. And before she knew it, a swell of heat pressed down on her.

  She jumped up from her hiding spot, her eyes drawn to the inside of the house. Through the broken window, she saw books burning. The big TV screen warped and bubbled. The seahorse’s glass shroud popped and cracked from the explosive heat.

  Flames overran the front room.

  I tried calling DJ after I’d left the VA office, but he didn’t answer, and I wasn’t in the mood for calling more than once.

  A lot of things had come at me this morning, and I needed some DJ-free time to decompress. So, I walked down toward Crown Bay until I found a little mom and pop seafood stand near the shore.

  The stand was all kitchen, save the counter, which was a half-height wall open to a wooden deck where three round, steel-wire tables sat. A frond-thatched roof topped the deck, giving some shade from the early afternoon sun.

  The owners were a nice, retired couple from Michigan named Sheryl and George. They said they’d sold their property where they’d once raised emus, rheas, and three boys, then moved down this way for the year-round motorcycling weather. Sheryl and George were a fix for all the thorns pricking me. She was empathetic, conversational, and outgoing, and I could tell that George, despite keeping his back to me while he cooked up a basket of conch fritters and not saying much, was a man with a good heart who put his soul into everything he did—including running their little restaurant.

  After a few minutes, he popped the fritters out of the fryer, and sat them in a small plastic basket for me. I took my order, added a cold Miller High Life to it, then ate at one of the tables while I watched a cruise ship pull into port.

  Thousands of people disembarked onto St. Thomas on any given day. My mind wandered past them, past Luc Baptiste and all the people glad to see him dead, then idled near Arlen.

  Over my life, I’d wasted plenty of mental energy on that man. Coming to the USVI should have been the end of it, but the past had a way of staying close behind.

  Arlen never did what other people told him. I should’ve remembered that when I’d stormed out of his office in Irvine.

  All that thinking and drinking, and before I knew it, an hour had gone by.

  I set my third High Life bottle on the table.

  “How do you feel about another beer?” Sheryl asked me while she scrubbed the counter.

  “I’m feeling like I have to get back to work.” I sighed and rubbed my hand through my hair.

  She flapped her hands at me. “Oh, come on. Who’s dying?”

  I couldn’t answer her question. I pulled out my phone and called DJ again.

  He answered. “How’s the Pity Platoon getting along, Dep? Anybody cry about their daddy not giving them a pony?”

  “If you were there, you’d know.”

  “I’ll let that mystery be a mystery,” DJ said. “You got an upper limit to how much human suffering you’re willing to take on?”

  “We need to ship out,” I answered. “I’ve got another lead to follow.”

  “That mean we’re giving up on Nick Garner? I always thought he could do with a federal sentence to get him to knock off all that phony garbage he’s pushing.”

  “He might stand in front of a judge yet,” I said. Though from the things Garner had implied about DJ, I wondered if the two of them wouldn’t be right alongside each other. “For now, I’ve got a line on a doctor over in PR. Luc was asking around about him.”

  “Need a charter fishing boat to take you over? I’ll rake you over the coals on rates, but I’m your only option, so too bad.”

  “We’ll negotiate terms later,” I said. “I’ll meet you on Reel Fun.”

  Done talking, I settled up the bill and left George and Sheryl a nice tip. The food was good, and I had a feeling I’d be back their way.

  I walked west and arrived at the marina within a few minutes. Reel Fun bobbed among the other boats, her tuna tower sticking up like a radio antenna at the top of a dry hill in Chino.

  I boarded her, checked in the salon for DJ, and didn’t find him. But I didn’t have to wait long. He was back on the boat about the time I sat down on the flybridge settee.

  “How was the walk?” I called down as he stepped onto Reel Fun’s swim platform.

  “Invigorating,” he belched.

  When he started up the ladder, I reached a hand down to help him get up the last rung, but DJ ignored it and pulled himself up. He made for the skipper’s chair, while I took out my phone, unlocked it and pulled up the note I’d jotted down with that doctor’s name and address.

  “Now that you’re good and greased up, what do you say about following our next lead?”

  “Fine idea, Dep. Fine, indeed.”

  “Doctor James Markel,” I said. “He lives north of Manati, which is west of San Juan, if memory serves.”

  “Got his address?” DJ started the boat.

  I handed him my phone. He pushed down on the nav-console, opening the compartment to his GPS chart plotter, then tapped my phone’s screen to get the latitude and longitude and entered the coordinates into the chart plotter. He seemed to study the screen for a moment, comparing it to my phone’s GPS—I couldn’t see what he was looking at.

  “The chart plotter says it’s about a hundred nautical miles from here. Looks like his place is right on the coast.” He turned, handing my phone back to me. “Lucky for you, you hired yourself a very comfortable charter.”

  I hopped out of the settee, then tapped the fuel gauge. “A charter with full tanks.”

  Down the flybridge ladder, I hit the aft deck, then untied our lines from the dock while I prepared myself for the task ahead. Two hundred miles round trip would suck most of the fuel from DJ’s tanks. It was going to be another late night.

  Once I was back aboard, DJ motored us out, taking us southwest from Crown Bay as I dutifully coiled the dock lines and stowed them with the fenders.

  Once out of the bay, we moved generally westward, passing the Flat Cays, then Savana Island and finally turning slightly north of west to cross the ten or so miles of open water between there and Culebra. The sun was fat and red as we cleared the water from Culebra to Puerto Rico, then traced along Puerto Rico’s north coast, the lights of San Juan coming into view. In the three hours since we’d left, DJ hadn’t said much of anything. My own thoughts kept circling back to Arlen.

  As we passed San Juan Harbor, with the sun starting to dance with the horizon, I noticed DJ’s eyelids getting heavy. I’d almost forgotten he hadn’t slept, and the monotonous drone of the engines and bow waves were enough to make anyone sleepy.

  “You want me to take the wheel, Captain?” I said over the wind.

  He looked at me, blinking, his eyes red. “Not a chance, my man. I got it.”

  So, he kept it.

  Another hour passed before he looked down at his chart plotter, the glow from its screen lighting his features in the darkness. He gently pulled back on Reel Fun’s twin throttles until the boat’s wake caught up to us, lifting the stern.

  The wind disappeared and the air felt
heavy. When the sound of the engines dropped to a low rumble, I became more aware of the night—the waves splashing against Reel Fun’s hull and against the rocky shore to my left, and the billions of stars over our heads. Alicia and I had become entranced with the night sky after moving to the islands. Sitting on the back deck and looking up, we were much more comfortable than we were around others or watching TV.

  I couldn’t explain why. Some people were troubled by knowing the world was insignificant compared to the empty vastness of space—Earth comprised less than half a gnat on the celestial windshield. That idea gave me comfort. It reminded me that all this trouble came and went, and the universe continued to move forward. Time kept ticking.

  “Get out the NVs.” DJ motioned toward the compartment under my seat. “Tell me what you see.”

  I rose, lifted the settee cushion, and recognized the hard case with his night vision binoculars inside. I put the case on the flybridge’s deck, then pulled out the binos.

  DJ cut Reel Fun’s lights. I put the binos up to my eyes and scanned the coast.

  “Nothing’s glowing at me, Captain,” I said.

  “Make sure you’re in the right places.”

  “We’re looking for some doctor’s house. With these binos, it should be like looking into headlights. And since it’s on the coast, he’s probably got a dock. The dock should be lit up.”

  “Like that one?” DJ pointed westward.

  I pointed the binos over the bow, then had to pull them away from my eyes when the screen flashed white from bright light just up the coast. Through the darkness ahead, I saw exactly what I expected to see: a well-lit jetty.

  “Exactly what I told you would be there,” I said.

  His only answer was to push on the throttle. Reel Fun lurched forward, and I was thrown backward, catching myself on the top of the still-open settee compartment.

  I pulled myself steady and sat on a different part of the settee, then brought the binos back to my eyes.

  I spotted something.

  The light would’ve been hard to see with the naked eye, even as dark as it was, but the IR sensors picked up a faint glow. It was up on the coast. A shimmer in the trees.

  Fire.

  A Molotov. That’s what Gabriela had seen flying through the air. Standing at the broken window, looking at the destruction it caused, left her mesmerized. Never in her life had she seen a house fire. Ribbons of flame crawled up the spines of leather-bound books, a wild streak of fire gorged on the hardwoods and the carpet, spreading at the base of the bookshelf as it simultaneously crawled upward.

  The heat gnawed at her skin. God help her, shouldn’t she be afraid? Shouldn’t she feel some kind of empathy? A man’s home, his footprints, his memories, his passions, his comforts, were being devoured right before her eyes. Dr. Markel might’ve profited off Flor’s misery, and a thousand other girls like her, but even he didn’t deserve to have his home turned to ash.

  Gabriela watched in fascination and horror. The flames seemed to leap from the bookshelf in fits and starts, crawling up the far wall, while at the same time, writhing across the floor like the serpent slithering over the roots of the Tree of Knowledge. Part of her wanted to be taken by the flames. The pain would be all-consuming. It would drive her insane, engulfing her body, her mind, erasing her sense of self as it overwhelmed her senses and burnt into her brain.

  But it would be over. She would be cleansed. Her mortal husk would be shucked, and her spirit would be free to revel in Glory on Highest, to bath in the light of eternity, to know the face of grace. She reached out. A leaf of flame brushed against her finger.

  Gabriela reeled her arm in. What in God’s name was she doing? Standing in front of the fire like an idiot, losing her mind? But for the grace of God, she hadn’t already been shot down.

  Turning from the fire, she stepped to the edge of the porch. She looked left, then right, and saw nothing but the fountain and the cars.

  He was gone. Or hiding, waiting to kill her. Her hands trembled at her sides, so she grabbed the rail around the porch. If she could stay out of sight and get to her car, she could get away.

  But… what then?

  Back home to Flor?

  At that moment, Gabriela held her last bead of hope. She could turn tail and run, or she could bite back her fear, risk herself against the fire, and fight for Flor’s life. The moment she’d called Dr. Markel’s office, she knew she had to press forward at all costs. This was her one shot at righting the wrongs of her life, of undoing her teenaged mistakes. Her justification for leaving her family back in the Dominican Republic was to give her newborn baby Flor a better life. Well, this was it, and this one chance was more than most people ever got.

  Whether there was a murderer in the house, or a fire, or if Dr. Markel, himself, turned her away at the door screaming, pointing a gun in her face, Gabriela Ramos wouldn’t run.

  She moved to the open front door. Inside, fire painted the rightmost entryway wall and inverted waves of flame rolled across the ceiling. Dr. Markel and his wife had to be in the back of the house near the kitchen.

  She took a step forward, wondering if she could get past the fire, but a few feet in, the heat puckered her skin.

  There had to be another way in. A place like this had to have a big porch and big windows for looking at the water on the backside of the house.

  Gabriela hurried down the front steps, turned right, and ran through a flower bed. She hooked around a corner, followed the driveway past the garage, and came to a stone-paved path through a garden running parallel to the back of the house. To her far left, through the trees bordering the rear of the property, she saw lights tinkling far away. Below, she could hear the wash of waves assaulting the beach.

  The garden gave way to a raised wooden deck. Gabriela sprinted up the pair of steps leading onto the deck and ran as hard as she could toward a pair of glass doors leading into the back of the house.

  Through the back doors, she saw the fire had spread quickly. Smoke licked the walls and chewed the ceiling. She would have been able to see the front entryway, except for a partition wall on the right being blackened.

  Suddenly, movement down low and to her left caught her eye. A man’s foot dragged on the floor like a wounded animal. She couldn’t see beyond the midpoint of his shin, but it had to be Dr. Markel.

  Gabriela grabbed the doorknob. Her hand was slick with rivulets of her own blood, the knob was hot to the touch, and it wouldn’t turn.

  The door was locked.

  “Dr. Markel!” She banged on the glass, hoping he’d see her and could unlock the door.

  He didn’t.

  Gabriela turned and scanned the back deck. Maybe there was another entrance, or an open window, or a key left on the edge of the hot tub.

  She checked, but nope. None of that.

  However, there were deck chairs.

  Gabriela grabbed the first one she saw. It was wicker wrapped around a steel frame, and it had some heft to it.

  Wasting no time, she gritted her teeth, picked up the chair by its backrest, wheeled on her heel, and smashed the chair into the back door.

  The glass cracked, but it didn’t break. So, she laid the chair on its back. She grabbed it by the legs. Holding it at her waist, she took a couple of steps back, and fixed her gaze on the door with a determination she hadn’t had in a long time.

  Way back in her high school days, Gabriela had been the captain of the school’s varsity softball team. She was a hitter and a threat to sock a ball past the fence any time she was at the plate. Here, on Dr. Markel’s back porch, feeling the heat upon her face, she squinted at the door like it was the deadliest close-out pitcher she’d ever gone against.

  Everything rode on this at-bat.

  She saw it coming, low and just a little outside.

  Gabriela set her shoulders, cocked her hips, then stomped her leading foot as she brought the chair around like she was going to knock the cover off the ball.

  The har
d, arched back of the chair smashed through the glass, and kept going until it crunched a second pane of glass, then tore into the blinds, and finally stopped when Gabriela jerked back on her swing, killing the chair’s momentum.

  Her shoulders hurt more than they had in an exceedingly long time. She was no longer the conditioned athlete of her youth, but she didn’t have a second to stop and think about it. She ripped the chair free of the blinds. Tiny knives of glass came with it, most of them missing Gabriela, save a few splinters that caught in the legs of her pants. She was so pumped full of fear and adrenaline, she hardly felt them. Using the chair, she knocked out a few errant spikes of glass from the door before crouching below the smoke and stepping inside.

  On the floor, Dr. Markel cradled his wife. She was as pale as moth wings against the spread of crimson beneath them. Markel kissed the top of her head and muttered something Gabriela couldn’t hear over the growling flames.

  Mrs. Markel was still. And all that blood. Gabriela knew that she hadn’t heard her husband. She was already gone.

  “Dr. Markel!” Gabriela shouted, then coughed as smoke fed into her lungs. She lowered her head, catching him glancing at her. He turned back to his wife, holding her tightly and muttering.

  She wouldn’t be ignored. Not after all this. Gabriela dropped to her hands and knees and crawled toward him. She grabbed his foot, then used his legs as a guide through the thickening smoke of this man-made hell.

  At his shoulder, Gabriela’s fingers slipped over wet, warm blood. His T-shirt was spongy and sticky. God, she hoped it wasn’t Dr. Markel’s blood.

  “Please! I need to talk to you. Do you have any Anthradone here?”

  “Anthradone?” His voice was a throaty rasp. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I talked to you on the phone,” she said. “I’m the reporter—actually, I’m not a reporter, I’m—”

  Why was she wasting his time? She had to get him out.