by Nancy Radke
But...he was Joe, probably even more than he was Hugo. Hugo was the made-up character...like Donegal. Or was "Joe the detective" made up? What was truth and what was fiction? Perri swallowed, her body shaken by the implication of her thoughts. Why had she fallen in love with this complex man?
He was not one to be taken lightly. He was a tough man with a tough job. One that called for strength both inwardly as well as outwardly. The fact that Walt considered him his best man was impressive by itself.
She knew there would be no half-measures with him. What he started, he finished.
He looked back toward the sedan again but his hand squeezed hers, tighter, and the answering leap of her heart told Perri she was likely to end up loving Joe/Hugo/Donegal in whatever role he happened to be.
The two cars had been working their way south and east, winding through the city to the shrimp boats. There the sedan drove out onto the long concrete dock that ran the length of the shore area. It was the width of a two lane road, with room for trucks to load or unload. At the present time it was lined with shrimp boats, rafted three to four deep, creating a vast jungle of masts. The sedan stopped halfway down. Walt was "assisted" out of the car and into a boat.
Joe sent the cab on three boats further, but was out of it almost before it stopped. Paying the cabbie, he slipped behind a large wooden crate. Perri joined him as the taxi drove away.
"Stay well back," Joe commanded. "If anything happens to me, get out of here. Go to Owen."
They worked their way forward; she waiting until Joe was almost out of sight before moving up where she could see him again. Pulling out her cell phone, she called the only number in it that might help. Luke Rogers’ Arizona number. No answer, so she left a message. “Walt captured. Mazatlan shrimp boat.”
It was so dark by now she had to move closer to keep Joe in sight. He had stopped, his attention centered on a shrimp boat with a light in the wheel house.
Mazatlan was the home port for the world's largest shrimp fleet. There wasn't enough dock space; thus the rafting or tying together of the boats was common practice. To reach the one where they were taking Walt, two others had to be crossed. Joe moved across them soundlessly, keeping under cover, to where the furthest boat lay.
A man was untying the lines, ready to cast off. Joe lunged forward, taking him out with one hard blow to the neck, catching him as he fell. The whole thing was like watching a scene from a silent movie.
Perri moved to the edge of the rough concrete dock, taking care she didn't trip over the many small spikes supporting the rubber tire fenders, or run into the large protruding cleats used to tie up the boats.
Silently Perri slipped down into the first boat, crossed the bare metal deck to the second and crawled into it. She followed Joe's route, using the large trawl nets draped from the boom heads as cover.
She had seen models of these boats in the aquarium's museum. Typical double-rigged gulf shrimpers, they carried two large black nets, marked with long feathers of brilliant color for easy visibility in the water. The nets were towed from the boat's two outriggers, one on each side of the rigid main boom. The outriggers were hinged at the bottom. They could be raised upright when not in use, or lowered sideways like wings out over the water to tow the nets.
All was silent. She could not see Joe. A door opened from the main cabin and a light showed briefly as a person stepped outside, then all was black as it closed again. There was a shout, then a thud.
This time the door stayed open as two men burst out. The smaller one carried a pistol. He didn't shoot, but used it like a club, smashing Joe on the head as he rose from the man he had knocked to the deck.
Stifling her instinctive scream, Perri saw Joe crumple and fall. Had they killed him?
In rising terror, she watched his still figure, highlighted by the light from the open door as the crewmen checked their two friends. Joe was as lifeless looking as the silent body he lay beside.
First Walt and now Joe...Hugo! Both dead...or dying?
A wave of despair cascaded over her as powerful as when she had cradled her mother's blood-soaked body...praying Crystal wouldn't die, yet knowing she was helpless to stop events.
Again the unthinkable was happening. Again she was helpless. Her hands, red from the flakey rust of the metal boat, gripped the edges with knuckles turned white. She watched in anguish, breath stopped. Praying.
The men left the others lying where they had fallen and roughly dragged Joe inside. Did that mean he was still alive? They wouldn't drag a dead person into that small cabin, would they? They hadn't taken their friends' bodies in.
Joe must be alive. The certainty of the thought renewed Perri's strength and determination. As the cabin door closed, she darted out of her hiding place, climbing over into their boat.
Barely had she boarded than she questioned her action. Joe had told her to go get Owen. Yet, what would happen if the boat left in the meantime? Once out on the ocean no one could trace it. Could she identify it to the police? Should she stay and try to help?
Torn between the two options, Perri crouched halfway under the drapes of the heavy shrimp net, hidden by the darkness on the deck.
Both Walt and Joe were trained agents. If they had been caught, what were her chances?
Indecision fled. She moved away from the concealing net, intent on leaving. But before her first step was completed, the motor started up with a rumble, making the boat vibrate...and immediately changing Perri's mind.
She'd stay.
She had to stay. Soft footsteps warned her of someone approaching. Perri ducked into the net just as the bigger man appeared, a dark shadow striding up to the side near her, casting off the thick lines before returning to the cabin. With a dull throbbing roar, the boat left the dock and accelerated into the night, toward the harbor entrance.
Trapped, but not discovered. As the safety of the docks fell behind, Perri glanced around her hiding place. What now?
She must go slow and stay hidden. It would do Walt and Joe no good if she was found before she managed to help them...somehow.
Thoughts spun rapidly through her desperate mind as fear began to turn into panic. Where were they going? What did they plan to do? Hold both Joe and Walt to trade for Alvaro?
Or...kill them?
Were they dead already? The two crewmen lay motionless on the deck; the closest one, the youth from the hotel. Perri didn't believe they were alive.
The icy fear threatened her judgement. Perri took several long, deep breaths to suppress it. This was no time for emotional, impulsive actions.
It was a time for logic. If she was going to do anything to save Walt and Joe, she had to act wisely. She needed a weapon.
Crawling into the deepest shadows, she looked around the clear open deck of the small boat. The shrimp boat was fully rigged for trawling. There were ropes and floats and nets aplenty, but nothing to use as a club.
If only she could get a gun. A gun did its deadly work no matter what the size or strength of the person holding it. It didn't require hand to hand or close quarter contact.
Owen had taught her how to shoot both a rifle and pistol. Under these conditions she had no qualms about firing at people. Perhaps there was a gun on one of the dead men?
Starting to move forward, Perri heard angry shouts. She froze, pushing back against the shadow...wishing that her hair was black or dark brown...anything but a bright beacon of light.
"You give us information, or feed the fishes!" the big man yelled in Spanish as he came outside the cabin, threatening whoever was still in the room behind him. He muttered to himself as he bent over his dead comrades, then walked forward to the wheelhouse. His accent was Cuban...just like Alvaro's.
The heavy grip of an ancient fear dropped Perri's heart downward into her stomach region. At least one of her men was still alive. But death came in many forms. If Walt and Joe were thrown off the boat into the ocean, tied up or injured, they would surely die.
She had little
hope of surviving if that happened. She'd go in after them, with life-preservers, if she had to. Then she realized how foolish that was, for there didn't seem to be any such items on board.
There was always the large net floats. They could be untied...or cut off. But they were white, easy to see, so that probably wouldn't work. A person holding onto them in the water would be easy to run down.
Her mind raced on, considering possibilities. Little could be done until she had some sort of weapon.
There was no time left to slink around. If she was to do anything at all, it had to be now.
Swallowing against the acrid taste of fear, Perri slipped over to the port side of the cabin. Kneeling over the already stiffening dead men, she felt for a knife or gun. Nothing.
A window in the cabin door, small and very dirty but uncovered, let her see inside. Walt was lying on a bunk, facing her, his hands tied behind his back, mouth and face battered and bloody. The taxi driver "guide" was standing guard nearby, almost facing Perri, helping himself to hot coffee and paying little attention to the old man who was his prisoner. Joe lay sprawled on the floor, hands lashed together behind his back. There was blood on his face and clothes.
As the guide put down the coffee pot, Walt raised his head slightly. "What information do you want?" he asked.
Smiling, the man turned so Walt could read his lips better through his thin beard. "From you? Lots. Names and places."
"Let me talk to my friend."
"Bah! That won't do any good." He was facing Walt full on, his back turned completely to Perri. His English had improved greatly in the past few days, unaccented as if learned from an early age.
"I won't say anything until I talk to him first."
"Your friend might not feel like talking." Laughing coarsely, the guide put down his cup and turned toward the door. He had only three steps to take to reach it.
Perri scurried away like a frightened mouse desperately seeking a dark hole.
Even on a deck so small, she didn't have time to reach the refuge of the nets. She stopped amidships to wedge herself into the dark, narrow space between the side of the boat and the flat otter boards used to hold the mouth of the trawl nets open. It put her closer to the cabin and actually turned out to be a less exposed position than among the nets.
He walked aft, past her toward the stern, and Perri wiggled her way in deeper, losing some skin as she shoved the boards apart a little further.
The cleanliness of the deck had not found its way here, and the broken bottle Perri cut her hand on was the first good luck she had had.
It was a large, triangular shaped piece of glass, sharp as a knife, and she picked it up gently, careful not to cut herself any more. Her palm was bleeding. Under any other circumstances, she'd run for antiseptic and a bandage, but at the moment she barely noticed it.
The man had been working with the long towing line, untying it so that it now hung straight down from the starboard outrigger, which was still in its upright position.
From the models in the Mazatlan aquarium, Perri knew that the outriggers could be lowered horizontally, and a trawl net towed behind them, one on each side, to catch the shrimp. A line called the warp ran along each outrigger, through a pulley at the end and from there to the nets. The otter boards behind which she crouched were used to hold the mouth of the nets open.
Why then had the man released the warp from the nets so it was hanging freely from the end of the upright outrigger? Like a hangman's rope?
They had cleared the harbor entrance and were out in the open sea. The wave action was no longer broken by the jetty and the little ship pitched and rolled as it breasted the long ocean swells.
How many guarded Walt and Joe? Two dead. But there were at least three more—maybe four if there was an extra man in the wheel house.
The bearded man had adjusted the warp to the length he wanted, and went back inside the cabin, to be joined by the bigger man as he came back from the wheelhouse. Knowing her position by the otter boards was weak, for she couldn't move without attracting attention, Perri raced the short distance across the open deck to the starboard side of the cabin and climbed quietly up a ladder onto the low, flat roof. It was covered with equipment, heaped up in disarray. She slipped into the shadow of an upside-down dory as the two men appeared again, this time dragging Joe with them.
From this angle, she could barely see his head. Perri's heart caught with a cold, sickening flash of anguish; a deep, cruel kick in the innermost parts of her being as she saw the man she loved injured and helpless.
Quickly the two untied his hands, then tied them again to the dangling end of the warp, laughing when the guide turned the trawl winch enough to yank Joe off his feet.
"Gonna cut him some more?" the guide asked, turning it until Joe was suspended three feet above the deck, his body beginning to twirl slightly. He was shoeless, but semi-conscious, still bleeding from the beating they had given him.
"A little," said the big man, drawing out a long knife. "Just enough so the sharks can smell him easily. I don't want him to bleed to death before they have their snack."
The evil hate and revenge in his voice made Perri's stomach heave, while the vivid image of what he planned flooded her mind with horror.
Sharks! Scenes from "Jaws" flashed past. Her flesh chilled with the sweating dread provoked by the mere thought of the flesh-eating fish.
They'd tear Joe to pieces while he dangled on the end of that line...
And all she had was a broken piece of glass.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Suddenly Joe whipped his legs tightly around the neck of the laughing man who had ventured too near; applying pressure so that he screamed and slashed wildly with his knife.
The man at the winch, not knowing what to do, raised Joe even higher...and his friend was carried off his feet, then dropped dead when Joe released him.
Three men down. The blood ran in a red stream down Joe's leg as he dangled from the end of the outrigger, spinning helplessly like a plumb bob at the end of a string.
Never a fan of violent movies, Perri's senses reeled under the impact of the deadly game of life and death she was witnessing. A black cloud swirled around her, filled with tiny white lights. Realizing she was about to faint, she put her head down, forcing herself to breathe deeply.
Recovering, she looked up. Right into Joe's eyes.
She held up the piece of glass for him to see. Her bleeding hand was shaking, as if with high fever, and she knew her face was as white as the dory she lay beside.
Fear flashed in his eyes, though he gave no other acknowledgment than a tightening of his lips.
The guide was talking to himself, swearing. He had told his friend not to go so close, he'd told him to be careful. The idiot! Big men always think they can't be hurt...that they needn't move with care. Well, now it was his turn, and he would show this CIA pig how it felt to die.
Angrily, he turned the winch. It raised Joe halfway up to the outrigger's towing block, his body spinning first one way and then the other.
Another winch lowered the outrigger to a horizontal position, suspending Joe over the water. With each roll of the boat, his legs hit the water, sometimes up to his ankles, sometimes up past his waist, and a few times he went completely under.
"We'll do a little shark fishing now," the man yelled viciously, stopping the winch. He picked up the bodies of the dead men and dumped them over the side, then, facing the cabin, he added, "You'll want to watch. We'll give them a little bite first, then lower him some more."
For a heart-stopping second, Perri thought he had seen her, then Walt's voice answered, "You won't get any information this way." He had been pulled outside and was near the cabin door.
"Then we'll hang you out on the other side. We'll see who catches a shark first."
Incredulously, Perri heard Walt's voice falter, then sink lower still as he capitulated. "Pull him up. I'll tell you what you want to know."
The man laughed s
neeringly. "Not him. He killed my comrades."
"Pull him up."
"No! You can't save him, not now."
"Let's go inside then, where I don't have to watch." Bitter with defeat, Walt turned and stumbled back into the cabin.
"Yeah," the man muttered to himself, yet loud enough Perri could hear. "Tell us all, old man. We'll make your death quicker."
Unable to adjust mentally to the nightmare around her, Perri struggled against the numbing effects of horror. There was nothing she could do. Soon they would all be dead. The bearded guide still carried Joe's gun, stuck in the waistband of his trousers.
As he had followed Walt into the cabin, he had called forward to the wheel house. "We're out far enough, the bodies won't float back in if the sharks leave anything." The motor slowed to an low idle. The swaying increased.
Sick and shaking, Perri focused on the thickness of the warp just a few feet from her. The line was cuttable, but even if she succeeded, Joe would fall into the water, hands tied. The sharks would still be fed.
Could she crawl out on the end of the outrigger and slide down the warp to Joe? How could she possibly hang onto the rope and cut him free?
Should she throw the dory overboard? No. It was so heavy, they’d hear her before she got started. What...?
Perri bowed her head and prayed silently for wisdom. If she made the wrong move they were all dead.
Then her questions were answered.
Joe's feet were no longer dipping in and out of the waves. The roll of the boat had dumped him completely under again...and the buoyancy of the water had enabled him to get a grip on the warp and pull himself up to where he could wrap his legs around it. Using his legs and hands he was climbing up to the outrigger block. As she watched, he reached the pulley and began swinging his legs up to where he could pull himself onto the outrigger.
Had Walt sought to remove the crew to give Joe his chance? It seemed likely. He was buying time. But if Joe couldn't get untied...he'd be stuck out at the end of the outrigger until he grew weak from loss of blood and fell back in.