Red Tide

by Jeff Lindsay

  We got the door open in about five minutes, using a screwdriver we found with the cleaning supplies, and then Nicky shook my hand and disappeared in the darkness.

  I wondered if I would see him again. I wondered if either of us would ever see Key West again. And when I stumbled as I took my own first step into the darkness, I wondered if I would make my legs work anytime soon.

  I hung onto the screwdriver. It was big and flat bladed and the weight was re-assuring. I felt my way along the passageway to the office where I had met Cappy.

  There was no light showing this time. I listened carefully at the door and heard nothing. I bent over the knob with the screwdriver. It took me a couple of minutes, fumbling around in the dark with what still felt like somebody else’s fingers, but I got the door open and slipped inside.

  The room was empty. I pushed the door closed again and felt for the desk light I had seen the last time I was in here. I found it; the snake was gone—the whole coat rack was gone.

  I found a large key ring in the desk and stuck it in my pocket. There was a lot of other stuff in there that might have been interesting another time—ledgers and other business stuff, and a lot of things that looked like charms, magic powders, and small vials of liquids.

  It might have made Nicky very happy. I didn’t really feel like getting too close to any of it. I left it and turned out the light.

  I slid back into the passageway and went from door to door. I listened for a minute at each one before trying the keys. It seemed like I was working through the entire key ring each time, but I did get all the doors open eventually. The screwdriver might have been quicker.

  All the rooms were empty. I found crew quarters, cargo holds, the galley, machine shop, engine room—everything you would expect on a small freighter in the Caribbean, and not a sign of life anywhere. One of the holds was loaded down with cheap-looking luggage, bundles of clothing, paper bags filled with food. The kind of stuff Haitian refugees might carry into a new life.

  But that was it. If Anna was on board this ship, she was somewhere above decks.

  Either she was at the party or she was already over the rail, and it was hard to figure which was worse. In any case, it meant the same thing to me. I had to go up on deck and check.

  The noise up there hadn’t let up at all. As I got closer I wondered why Cappy would put on a party like that for a crowd of people he intended to kill.

  Maybe he really believed the dark voodoo stuff, and he was making a sacrifice to whatever evil spirits he worshipped. And maybe he enjoyed toying with them; go on, have a drink, by the way—you’re dead.

  It didn’t seem likely to be any normal motive, whatever it was. It didn’t really matter a hell of a lot. I took a deep breath, stepped through the door and out onto the deck.

  It took a minute for my eyes to adjust. Or more accurately, for my eyes to convince my brain they were telling the truth.

  I was looking at a scene from hell. It was like one of those medieval paintings where everybody is half-naked and committing every possible sin, from drinking to what my grandmother used to call cavorting.

  There were about a hundred people on deck. I counted only four that had to be Cappy’s crew. They stood at the edge of the crowd, holding cattle prods and making funny comments on the dancers.

  The madly dancing rest were all over the deck, going crazy under the thundering umbrella of the drums. Some of them were spinning wildly in circles, with each other or alone. Some stood in place and stared at something nobody else could see. A few were having sex, others drank from rum bottles, and a few simply ran or danced around the whole crowd mouthing furious syllables that didn’t seem to belong to any human language. Most of them just seemed to be dancing to the sound of the drums, which rose over the whole scene like the sound track to a movie about eternal damnation.

  At the far end of the deck, in an open space, four posts held a canopy about twelve feet off the deck. The posts were painted to look like they were wrapped with vines. Under the canopy an altar was set up. Rising up above and behind the altar was another post. A thick vine coiled around the post. As I watched, the vine moved; it was the python, hanging above the whole scene like a pale demon god.

  The altar was piled high with baskets of fruit and other foods, and bottles of rum, cigars and pictures of saints.

  And one other thing: Anna.

  She was lying in the center of the altar. From this distance I couldn’t tell if she was dressed in a white robe or just draped in a sheet, but she was there, all in white, and her face was as pale and bloodless as the cloth that covered her.

  She did not move, not even a twitch, in spite of the horrible carnival going on around her, and she looked as dead as a person can look.

  As I stood there feeling like I’d been pole-axed, Cappy stepped up to the altar, raised a conch shell to his lips, and blew a trumpet blast on it.

  He lifted the shell high over his head and shouted, “Ay bobo!” The crowd went crazy. They repeated the cry, “Ay bobo!” whirled faster, shivered harder. Two of them fell to the deck and lay there, twitching and bucking.

  Cappy shouted a few sentences in what must have been Creole. Then he pointed the shell and shouted triumphantly. The crowd swayed, then ran to the rail and looked where he pointed.

  I looked, too. From where I stood I could just make out the skyline of Miami, its lights and skyscrapers standing out against the dark sky, no more than half a mile away.

  It didn’t seem possible. If Nicky’s timetable was right, we should be in the middle of the Gulf Stream. And even Cappy wouldn’t hold a voodoo service with 100 illegal aliens this close to the Port of Miami.

  But there it was. The skyline was there, and the crowd recognized it as easily as I did. It was their dream. Some of them had been saving up and dodging death for ten years to see those lights.

  And now Cappy had brought them here. He shouted something again, blew the conch shell, and shouted, “Ay bobo!” and the people began to crowd over to the rail.

  The crewmen with cattle prods were waiting for them. Each person who came to the rail was searched, everything removed from his or her pockets. Then the guards “helped” them over and into the water.

  And still the crowd pushed to get there, to jump in and swim the short distance to a new life.

  I had thought the scene before was hellish. This was worse. They were pouring over the side and into the water in family groups, in handholding twos and threes, mothers holding children and jumping.

  And for those few who hung back, unsure or unwilling, there were Cappy’s crew to encourage them forward with cattle prods.

  A small piece of the puzzle clicked into place. I had wondered how a small crew could force such a large crowd into the water. It was a simple and, in its ugly way, elegant solution: don’t force them. Make them want to go over the side.

  But how could we be this close to Miami? Unless—

  I leaned out as far as I could and looked at the skyline dead astern. Something was not quite right about it. Something about the lights—

  I got it pretty quickly, which might mean I was recovering. The lights of Miami’s skyline are many colors, many shapes and sizes. These lights were all the same size and shape.

  The last piece clicked into place.

  I remembered the strange chunk of plywood on pontoons I had stumbled over. I remembered the rings on it, like it had been meant to be towed, and the batteries.

  And I remembered what the mate on the Chinea had said: “They all jump in the water. They think they’re in Miami…”

  Nicky’s estimate of time was right. We were still in the middle of the Gulf Stream. But we were towing a plywood silhouette of Miami, hung with cheap Christmas lights. And the people, a little unbalanced from a few hours of drinking and dancing, were going over the rail. They thought they were swimming the half mile to freedom. Instead they were dropping into the big deep.

  They see the lights. And everybody jumps in the water. />
  Cappy blew a final long blast on his conch shell. He put it down and picked up something else; a knife. Looking serious, even solemn, he raised the knife high over his head.

  And turned to Anna.

  I jumped forward. I heard a kind of dumb animal howl and realized it was me. The fifty feet between Cappy and me seemed like nightmare distance. I moved forward with lead feet and the distance stayed the same.

  Most of the crowd, still on deck, whirled around in my way. A man jumped on my back, yammering syllables that sounded like, “Ya-laylee loto lulu!” I threw him off. A woman leaped at my face with a maniac smile and poured rum on my head. I pushed her away. Two happy men grabbed my arms and tried to pull me into a ring of dancers. I yanked my arms free and stumbled forward, leaning on the ship’s gunwale for a second to get my balance.

  But one of the crew had spotted me. He ran forward, holding his cattle prod like a baseball bat. He swung for the fences. I was not quite quick enough to duck. I caught it on my arm and felt the force and the shock travel all the way up the arm and through my whole body.

  For a second I couldn’t move at all. The crewman raised the prod for another swing at my head and I stumbled at him. I didn’t have full use of my arms, so I rammed him with my shoulder. He fell back, into the gunwale, and I scooped him up and over, into the ocean.

  I ran for Anna, trying to shake the feeling back into my arm. I got some back, and it wasn’t good. The spot where I had blocked the cattle prod felt broken.

  Well, if I lived I could get a cast.

  The crowd spun past. I stumbled, shoved and battered my way through to the altar.

  I was close enough now to pick out details; the patterns carved on the wooden bowls around Anna, a bad spot on one of the mangoes. I could see that Anna was still alive. The bad news—

  Cappy had slashed Anna’s arm at the bicep, where a doctor takes a blood sample. The blood was running into a silver bowl and the snake was slowly untwining itself from the tree above the altar and moving down toward the bowl, toward Anna, tongue flickering.

  And Cappy himself had turned to wait for me, smiling, the sacrificial knife hanging loosely by his side.

  He looked so cool, so superior, and so damned happy. And I felt like I was cobbled together out of backyard mud by clumsy six-year olds. Everything hurt. Anything that worked was slow, filled with sludge and rust. I couldn’t keep a clear idea of what to do, except that I had to save Anna and smash Cappy, flatten his head, crush his skull—

  I rushed him. I lowered my shoulder to crash into him and he flicked up the tip of the knife, still smiling. I almost ran right onto the knife; at the last second the message got through to my brain and I twisted aside, skidding to a stop beside the altar, facing him from a few feet away.

  He moved. Maybe it was my sluggishness, but I couldn’t react. I had never before seen anything move so fast. I felt a coldness along my good arm, and then wetness, and he was standing there smiling again. My arm was bleeding where he had lightly slashed with the knife.

  Before I could do anything but stare he did it again. I managed to stumble half a step back this time, but he had opened up a new cut on my forearm.

  Cappy stood watching me, relaxed and hardly breathing. He looked like he was having fun, like a kid with a new toy who knows it will be broken soon, but for now he’s having a blast.

  When you are fighting someone that much faster than you, the textbook says you find your edge. Are you stronger? Tougher? Longer reach? More skillful? Then you try to trap your opponent in a position where his speed will not help.

  It was a great theory. But I was having a hard time finding my edge. He was astonishingly fast; he had a knife, a snake, and a couple of thugs on call. I was half-dead with a broken arm, and a long way from home.

  And Cappy was not giving me much time to ponder. He snaked the knife in again and found the side of my face this time. I jerked back. The knife might have taken out my eye if I had not. As it was, I now had my own dueling scar.

  I was just about out of time and options. If I just stood there, Cappy would cut me to ribbons and the snake would crush Anna. And if I rushed him, he would skewer me and feed me to his snake.

  He moved again. The knife went for my eyes and I got my arm in the way. I felt the point go in at the bicep and glance off bone. I twisted a little and the knife came out of Cappy’s hand and slapped to the deck. Without waiting for either one of us to go for the knife, I drove my shoulder into him.

  I caught him high and he leaned backwards. A dim reflex from high school football got my legs churning and I pushed him into the altar. I heard the breath whoosh out of him and brought my broken arm around to hit him with an elbow into the face. It hit him hard, but it might have hurt me more.

  I kept leaning, pushing him into the solid altar, not giving him a chance to recover, pick up the knife, get that smile back on his face.

  His fist came forward, holding a mango from one of the offering bowls. It smacked me hard on the side of the head and I felt something trickle down onto my neck, whether blood or mango juice, I couldn’t say.

  There was a ringing in my ears to go with all the other aches and pains. It didn’t matter. I had him now. If I could keep him pinned to the altar, his speed wouldn’t help him and he couldn’t get to the knife. I could live through a couple more mangoes. I couldn’t use my fists, but that didn’t matter, either. There are other ways.

  I hit him with another elbow, this time with my knifed arm. He grunted and leaned backwards as I brought the other elbow forward. It missed him. He groped behind him for something, but I was too close to see what it was. I brought my knee up and caught him just below the belt, then hammered my head forward into his solar plexus.

  I felt a rib crack. If I could keep this up for just a few more hard blows, he would be down.

  I didn’t get the chance. He brought his hand forward, the one that had been groping behind him on the altar.

  He wasn’t holding a knife, or a gun, or a baseball bat, or even another mango. I would rather have seen any of those things than what I saw him pull forward and drop onto me.

  The snake.

  And as Cappy gave his peculiar trilling whistle, the snake whipped a coil around me and tightened.

  The pain was enough to cut through all the numbness. It was fire where the knife had gone in, and dull agony on the broken arm.

  I tried to move, but it was like being drugged again. I was helpless. My arms might have been sewn to my sides. The snake tightened again, and the world went a few shades darker. I could hear a rib snap, feel the sharp pain of it in my side. For the first time that night, the sound of the drums faded just a little, covered by the pounding of blood in my ears.

  I couldn’t breathe. The snake seemed to get heavier, forcing me down to one knee.

  Cappy followed me down, his face just a few inches from mine, watching me with his soft, relaxed smile back in place. And as I watched him, the life being squeezed out of me, my breath gone, my vision dimming, that smile was all I could see. Like the Cheshire cat, Cappy faded and all I could see was the white of his teeth.

  I did not want to die looking at that smile. Reaching for all my last reserves, I got back to my feet. It took almost the last of all I had, and as I stood there almost blind and deaf from the snake’s constriction, Cappy took it away from me. He moved into my field of vision again. I saw his lips pursed and I heard faintly the whistle he made for his snake.

  The snake squeezed harder. My upper arms were crushed against my chest and I heard more ribs breaking.

  My knees buckled again. I leaned on the altar, close to Anna’s face. It was so pale and beautiful. It was a pretty good choice for the last thing I would see. It summed up my failures as well as the pleasures of life.

  I’m sorry, Anna, I thought. I died trying.

  She did not answer. The snake squeezed. I looked Anna over one last time, thinking about what might have been. Already I could feel a kind of distance from all th
at silly human stuff. All the agonizing and self-torture.

  We could talk it over soon enough. Anna would follow me into the black unknown. The bowl beside her was nearly full of her blood. It wouldn’t be very long now. Too bad.

  The blood.

  The bowl of blood.

  No matter how far gone you are, how completely you have already accepted the idea of death, there is always a tiny voice in the background yelling at you to for God’s sake get us out of here. And as I looked at the bowl of Anna’s blood the thing stood on its tiptoes and yodeled for all it was worth.

  Pick up the blood. The snake likes blood.

  Ah, said the part of me that had already quit. But I can’t really move. So it’s useless, you see?

  Try. Wiggle your fingers.

  All right, but what’s the point? Look, they wiggle, so what?

  So pick up the bowl of blood. Pick it up now!

  My right arm was free from just below the elbow down, outside the snake’s coils. It hurt like hell, but I could just do it. I picked up the bowl of blood.

  Okay; now what?

  The snake moved its head past my face, tongue flicking. I had its attention and for a moment it wasn’t squeezing quite so hard. That huge flat head moved past mine and waved down to the bowl. It dipped into the blood.

  Cappy moved close, purring to the snake, coaxing it back to duty. He put one hand out for the bowl and one on the snake’s head.

  Now! screamed my annoying little voice.

  I threw the bowl. It wasn’t much of a throw, more like a flip using just my wrist, but it worked. It hit Cappy in the chest and the blood soaked him.

  Cappy looked at himself, annoyed. The snake looked at him, too. And slowly, very deliberately, it moved off me and onto Cappy.

  He scolded it. He wheedled. But the scent of blood was too strong. The snake slid onto his shoulders and threw a couple of gentle coils around Cappy, relaxing, exploring the blood.

  I leaned on the altar, panting, watching. The most wonderful feeling I had ever had was the air moving into my lungs. Breathing took everything I had. If Cappy wanted to kill me with his bare hands now, I could not raise a finger to stop him.