by Henry Carver
The watch read 71:23 in blinking numbers. As I watched, it kept counting up, seventy-one minutes and twenty-three seconds…twenty-four seconds…twenty-five seconds.
I let out a breath. When it read 90:00, all hell would break loose.
I had been imagining the worst, something like eighty-nine minutes having passed. I did some quick mental subtraction, and realized that despite my luck in waking up before the Purple blew all to hell, things weren’t exactly looking good.
Eighteen minutes and change. Better make the most of it.
“Seriously, after being out that long, I think I need to see a doctor,” I said.
Carmen hit me on the side of the head with something heavy, and I cried out.
“Sure you do,” she said.
I opened my eyes and checked her hands. One gripped a small but sturdy-looking silver revolver. It winked at me in the morning light.
“Where did you get that?”
“My luggage, silly,” she said, putting on a little girl voice, complete with giggle. Then she let the act drop. A switch flipped somewhere inside her. Her face went slack, and her eyes went dead. I think she wanted me to see it.
“Ballsy,” I said.
“I wrapped it in my panties. Ben would never look through there. He’s very…proper like that.”
Ben was missing from the deck, I noticed. Carlos slouched behind Carmen, present but seemingly unhappy for some reason. Rigger was there too, but he couldn’t be happier. Happy on Rigger looked like a rabid dog. His eyes glinted, too wet, never blinking. One finger traced his scar up and down, pressing hard. His other hand sported my fillet knife, held loose and ready. He looked like a man with professional-level knowledge of what to do with it.
“Where’s Ben?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s so sweet,” Carmen said, suddenly back in her sweetness-and-light character. “You made a little friend. Well, your little friend is down below, locked in a guestroom. I wanted us to be able to talk alone. Don’t you want to talk to me alone, Frank?”
“You sick bitch,” I said.
She reached out with the gun hand again, and I winced. She didn’t hit me, though. Instead, she started stroking my hair.
“My, my. What language. Don’t you want to hear what I’ve planned for you?”
I risked a glance at my watch. 73:51 blinked back at me.
“I think I already know the plan,” I said. “Use your bank access—better yet, your access to Ben Hawking—to get some undocumented money in the vault down here. Introduce a small error into their paperwork. By the time they discovered the mistake, you’d be down here on ‘vacation’ with the bank vice president. Hmm, I wonder who they’ll look to? Then you used Ben’s access to get your goons in to take the money.”
She nodded encouragingly, her green eyes smiling.
“Meanwhile, you track me down, a man with both a record for counterfeiting and ownership of a boat. Book a trip. Make a casual suggestion that we be here, near this island, and what do you know, your friends just happen to be at the same spot. A rendezvous. Only I don’t think they were supposed to sink the boat.”
She laughed, high and tight, the tinkling of a crystal chandelier. “No, that wasn’t part of the plan.” Her eyes slid sideways, towards Rigger. He still stared at me, unblinking. Now he was flexing and unflexing his good arm, the veins bulging like high tension wires.
“Assuming Rigger hadn’t blown it,” I continued, “the plan would have been to kill me, kill Ben, deliver this boat to some port, or hell, even set her adrift. You go back to the mainland, call the police from the hotel and say, ‘oh, my finance is missing, I’m so worried.’ Turn on those doe eyes of yours for anyone who questions you.”
She grinned wolfishly at me. Rigger was gripping the knife much too tightly now.
“And they spend the next few years looking for Ben Hawking and Frank Conway. But they never find them, do they?”
“No,” she said, “they never do.”
She raised the gun, thumbed the hammer back until it gave a sickening click.
“One thing I couldn’t figure, though,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“The third guy, the one on the boat—the grinning man. Why’d you kill him?”
Something slithered behind those dead eyes of hers. I sensed I’d touched a nerve.
“Nice little group,” I said, “and you kill the one guy.”
“It was an accident,” Rigger said, a little too quickly I thought.
“What, like he slipped and fell on thousand pieces of buckshot?”
Carlos took two big steps forward, reached out, and pushed Carmen’s gun barrel down towards the ground. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the third guy,” I said.
“My brother,” he said.
“Ah, I see,” I said.
And I did.
I glanced at Rigger. He twitched visibly. The point of the fillet knife, previously directed downward, now pointed at Carlos’s back like a laser.
“He drowned,” Carlos said. “It was an accident.”
“That’s what Rigger told you?” I directed it right at Carlos. He wouldn’t meet my eye.
“Yes,” he said under his breath. “We split up after the bank, just in case. They were supposed to pick me up at a different dock. They were supposed to pick up Marco first. He took care of the cleaning crew that night. Only Rigger showed. Said the police had tried to catch up with them. Said my brother hit his head, went over, that there was no way he could have made it.”
“You’re lying,” Rigger shouted at me. “He’s lying.”
Carlos said nothing.
“Carlos,” I said, “how would I even know he exists? Because his body was stuffed into the locker on your boat. It popped open before the boat went down, and I got a great look at the big gaping hole in his chest. Who was carrying a shotgun? Maybe a sawn off one?”
Pay dirt.
I saw his resolve waver just for a second, then his eyes narrowed. Someone had been carrying a sawn off, for sure, and I had a pretty good guess of who it might be.
“Don’t listen to this piece of shit, Carlos,” Carmen said, “he just wants—”
Carlos spun on his, heel stalked towards Rigger.
“Did you do it?” he said.
Rigger made some small effort to look shocked, then seemed to come to some decision. He gave up the act, smirked at Carlos, then threw back he head and laughed.
“Fucking right I did, ya cunt. And the better we are for it. More money for everyone. Besides, your brother didn’t have the stomach to do what needed to be done.” He spit on the deck between them. “For that matter, neither do you.”
I stole a glance at my watch. 78:02. Less than twelve minutes.
“Rigger, don’t,” Carmen said.
But it was too late. The moment the words left her mouth, everything happened all at once.
Carlos flicked his wrist, and a thin curved blade appeared there. Much faster than I would have thought possible, he closed the gap between Rigger and himself, his arm already moving in an upward slash.
Had he been coming at me like that, I would have been jumping backwards. But Rigger waited. He let Carlos get close. At the last second, just before the switchblade reached him, he swept his injured arm across and into Carlos’s wrist. It deflected the path of the blade just enough—it missed him by inches.
In the same breath, he brought my fillet knife down from above, hammer-style, and opened Carlos up. The blade caught him at the shoulder and traced a diagonal down across his chest to his hip. For a second there was only a tear in his shirt. Then the long, jagged tear bloomed red.
They both froze. Carlos looked like he was expecting to die. Rigger seemed to be expecting something similar.
It was my fillet knife, though, and while flexible and excellent for boning fish, it wasn’t very sharp. Rigger had delivered a hell of a blow, but it was a slash and not a stab. Without any internal organ
s pierced, I knew Carlos was only badly injured, not dead. I looked at Carmen, hoping for an opening, but she had backed away from all of us, the gun still carefully trained on me.
“Bloody hell,” Rigger muttered, and moved in again. Carlos, catching a second wind as his survival instincts kicked in, gave him a terrific shove, then slashed, and caught Rigger across the top of the hand. The fillet knife skittered across the deck, bounced through the scupper, and was lost to the sea. Rigger raised his hands, as though asking for a reprieve. He was at Carlos’s mercy, and for a tiny second Carlos lowered the tip of his blade, considering the situation.
Rigger dropped both hands, rotated on the ball of his foot, and shot his leg out sideways. The boot caught Carlos dead in the center of the chest, delivering all of Rigger’s momentum in a blow of tremendous force. Carlos and I locked eyes, a mixture of pain and shock written across his face, and then he flipped backwards over the rail and disappeared under the water.
I shot to my feet. Carmen kept her finger on the trigger of her gun, but didn’t tell me to sit. We both watched the surface.
“Let me do something,” I said weakly. “Let me help him.”
Carmen smiled at me, the pink sickle of her lips slicing across the bottom of her face. She was enjoying herself.
I knew what would happen to him out there in the water. The thought of it made me sick. But Carmen was enjoying this.
Carlos came sputtering out of a wave, tried to grab the edge of the fiberglass, slipped off again. There were no hand holds. Even from where I was standing, the dark fluid seeping out of Carlos was obvious. His blood stained sea. It would only be a matter of seconds.
“Rigger!” he cried. “Help me! For God’s sake, please, not the shar—”
One of them must have gotten his leg then, because he started to scream. It wasn’t terror—it was horror. He was about to be eaten alive. Worst of all, he knew it.
He looked at us with eyes that pleaded, that begged. Carmen laughed once, a short, horse bark. Then the sharks dragged him under, and he disappeared.
Chapter 18
“HOLY SHIT,” RIGGER said.
We all stood welded to the spot, staring at murky surface of the water. It roiled for another few seconds, bubbles escaping from somewhere in the deep. Then nothing.
I glanced over at Rigger, and he had moved over to one of the bow storage compartments. He reached inside and pulled out a sawn-off shot gun, pumped the action, gripped it in his good hand.
“You know what, fuck this,” Rigger said with characteristic elegance. “I’m done.”
“Stay with me, baby,” Carmen said. “Don’t leave me now.”
I snorted. It must have been audible; they both looked at me.
“You two?” I said.
“Together since the start,” Carmen said.
“Sure, since the start of this job. You believe a word she says?” I asked Rigger.
He said nothing.
“She was with me five years ago, Rigger. Know what happened? She played me. She played Ben Hawking. She played Carlos. Then she played me again. See a pattern developing?”
“Shut up,” Carmen said to me. To Rigger: “Don’t listen to him. We have something special.”
“Yeah,” he said, “about a half-million in cash.”
Rigger went stone-faced.
“Don’t be like that,” she said.
“Maybe you love me, maybe you don’t. Here’s the thing: I’m not sure which would be worse.” He laughed. “I’d rather never know. But what I do want is my half.”
The pleading look on Carmen’s face dissolved, turned cold again. “Half?” she said slowly.
“Half. Two of us left. You do the math.”
“I set this whole thing up. I get—”
The mouth of the shotgun suddenly swung around and pointed her way. That shut her up.
“Half,” he said again, and backed away from both of us, down the port side to the stern, the shotgun never wavering. She stared at him. So did I. Then he vanished around the bulkhead and down the stairs.
My watch blinked at me. 82:21.
I had to do something, but of course that’s what Carmen was waiting for. On the other hand, she was trapped, forced to cover me instead of going after Rigger. She tore her gaze away from the stern and focused it on me. He look was reptilian in nature. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I realized she was deciding whether or not to shoot me right then and there.
My blood ran cold.
Then she smiled, and leveled the barrel of the gun right between my eyes.
Now or never.
I snapped my leg out and swept it from right to left as hard and fast as I could. It caught Carmen right in the back of the knees, and they started to buckle just as she pulled the trigger. The revolver roared at me, and something tapped me on the left side of the head.
I waited to die.
Nothing happened, except that Carmen stumbled.
She took a step to catch her balance, had to take another one unexpectedly, tangled her own feet, and tipped over backwards. Her hands never let go of the gun’s grip—not for a second. That didn’t leave anything to catch herself with, other than her head.
It cracked onto the deck, and the gun skittered away towards the bow. She lay between me and the gun, and I had to make a decision.
No time.
Something hot and sticky dribbled down my forehead. I raised my left hand to wipe it away, and it came back red. I’d been shot after all, and the wound was bleeding right into my eyes.
I wiped them. When my vision cleared, Carmen had pulled herself more than halfway to the gun.
No time!
I turned and ran down the side of the boat. I reached the stern, and dodged sideways around the bulkhead just as another shot rang out behind me. I looked over my shoulder, started down the stairs—
—and ran right into Rigger’s massive, barrel chest. He put the hand from his good arm right in the center of my torso, and gave what looked for all the world like a casual shrug.
It felt like being hit with a cannonball. I flew backwards up the stairs and across the deck, my legs pinwheeling. The engine housing caught me in the back, and I bounced off.
My back screamed at me, and something felt twisted inside.
“Don’t do it,” I muttered to Rigger.
“Don’t do what? You can have her for all I care.”
“Don’t leave.”
He laughed out loud, pushed me again. I sprawled across deck.
“Yes, don’t leave,” Carmen said, coming out from behind the corner. “We can still work it out, baby.” The gun hung loosely by her side.
Rigger still had his shotgun.
“The only reason I think you’d want me to stay,” he said, “is that you never planned to give me my cut of the money. Did you?”
He studied her face, then nodded to himself.
“No, I didn’t think so. These boys have it right. Everyone around you gets burned. See this?”
He traced the smooth canyon of a scar down the side of his face.
“I’ve already been burned. And once was enough.”
“Rigger, please, don’t leave me here with them,” Carmen said. Her lips puckered in fear, and a single tear emerged from the corner of her eye and ran down one cheek.
Rigger laughed again. “You’re a hell of a woman,” he said. “With one of them locked up, and you with the gun? I’m sure you’ll do fine.”
Carmen petted the revolver’s hammer, sizing Rigger up.
“Don’t even think about it,” he said. “You hired me for a reason.”
He slung a heavy-looking backpack over one shoulder, checked his grip on the shotgun, then started to climb backwards over the rail onto the raft. He moved slowly, carefully. He was very aware, I thought, of the fins slicing the water behind him. He felt with one toe, found the plastic bottom of the raft, and bounced down into it.
“Half the money’s still down below. I’ve got s
upplies too, enough to make it across the island. I won’t spend one more minute with you. I want to live.”
“Just shoot me then,” Carmen said.
“Never killed a woman. Don’t really want to. But push me…” He raised the shotgun barrel, leaned down, and tugged hard on the cord attached to the little engine. It sputtered, then caught and came to life.
“Shoot her, Rigger,” I yelled over the engine.
Carmen raised the revolved, pointed it at me.
“Shoot her,” I said again.
“Naw.” Rigger grinned at me. “Good luck with that one.”
“Don’t leave me here with her alive,” I said. “I’m warning you.”
He looked puzzled for a second, then his face cleared. He brushed off my words. “You warning me. That’s a good one, mate.” He let the shotgun drop into his lap. The throttle twisted under his meaty hand, the Kodiak shot away from the stern.
It got about fifteen feet, and then something tugged on it. The raft began to slow down. Rigger, as I’d known he would, twisted the throttle harder, then harder still.
Something gave an audible pop, and the craft blazed away from us like an arrow from a bow, as though a rubber band connecting us had just been cut.
And indeed, it was nearly that.
I knew exactly what the sound was. Back on the island, just before we left, I’d scrounged a hot coal from the fire and found a piece of nylon cord. On my knees, bent over the boat, I’d melted the end of the rope to the plug, the one used to deflate the raft. It was the same rope I’d tied securely to the Purple just before climbing aboard. I’d been adamant with Ben: no one was going to leave in the raft except for us.
And no one would. Rigger had just pulled his own plug.
He made it another ten yards before the sides started to collapse. I could see him twisting at the throttle, desperately pulling at the throttle arm, trying to turn back.
“What did you do?” Carmen said, and hit me across the back of the head with the butt her gun. I wiped blood out of my eyes again. Scalp wounds gush.
Somehow, Rigger got the Kodiak pointed back towards us. I had an excellent view of his face. He looked determined. He knew something had been done to the raft, but was confident he would survive it. After all, he’d survived everything else in his life up until this point. I wondered how many other people like Carlos and his brother had made the mistake of working with Rigger.