Blackwater Sound

by James W. Hall

  Through the mattress, Thorn felt the throb of the big diesels at low revolutions, just above idle. He imagined the happy family was having a powwow in the salon. If A. J. was still alive, he was probably trying to reassert his paternal authority. But from what Thorn had seen, the father didn’t stand a chance in hell of winning back the esteem of those two feral children. Which meant that when their meeting broke up, the real fun would begin. Thorn assumed the only reason he was still alive was that Morgan did not yet know how much of her plot he was aware of, or whom else he’d confided in. Torture was in the offing. There would be a blade and there would be cutting.

  “You don’t believe me,” Lawton said. “But I swear, I got out of these damn restraints before. I know I did.”

  Thorn rolled over to face him.

  “We’re going to have to do this together,” Thorn said.

  “I don’t know. I usually work alone.”

  “So do I,” Thorn said. “But we’re going to have to adjust.”

  “What? I gnaw through your bracelets or you gnaw through mine?”

  “Close,” Thorn said. “I was thinking about that.”

  He lifted his head and aimed his chin at Wingo.

  “Oh, he’s not going to help us. That man is in a state of rigor mortis.”

  “I mean the blade.”

  “What?”

  “In his throat,” Thorn said. “The blade in his throat.”

  Lawton rolled onto his other shoulder and looked at the dead man, then rolled back.

  “I think it’s just a nail file,” he said.

  “Well, it’s more than we’ve got right now.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Lawton said. “But how the hell do we get it?”

  “I’ll do it,” said Thorn. “Dead guys hardly ever bite back.”

  Lawton scooted toward the foot of the bed. Even in the chill of the air-conditioning, he worked up a heavy sweat before he opened up enough space for Thorn to writhe the three feet to Wingo’s side.

  He didn’t think about it. Didn’t try to talk himself out of the squeamish reaction. He simply lowered his lips to Wingo’s throat and clamped his front teeth on the half inch of steel and inch-by-inch tugged it loose from the cool, hardened flesh.

  He spit it out on the pillow and examined it.

  “Is it any good?” Lawton said.

  “It’ll have to be.”

  “I’ll cut you loose,” the old man said. “I’m the trained escape artist. This is my area of expertise.”

  Thorn tongued the nail file off the pillow and took the sharp, bloody end into his mouth. He shifted around on the white sheets until he was in Lawton’s face.

  “This is one for the books,” Lawton said. “If it works, that is.”

  Lawton brought his mouth close to Thorn’s and took the nail file in his lips, then worked it deeper until he had it clamped between his molars. Then he swiveled around to bring his face close to Thorn’s bound wrists.

  He spoke a few garbled words, dentist-chair talk.

  “Lawton, we can discuss things later. Just cut the cords. Cut the hell out of them.”

  But Lawton had to speak, and his muffled words finally came clear.

  “Houdini,” he mumbled. “Houdini would’ve loved this shit.”

  Alexandra could see the faint lights, maybe a mile ahead through the increasing darkness.

  “Is it them?”

  “It’s got to be,” said Sugarman.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a gun, would you?”

  Sugarman shook his head.

  “Customs guys frown on tourists importing heat.”

  “Great.”

  “Hey, we got a ray gun. What else could we need?”

  “Something that would draw a little blood.”

  Sugarman looked at her.

  She was gritting her teeth, a bitter smile that seemed to be holding back a sob.

  “Stay cool, Alex. Your dad’s okay.”

  “You know that, do you?”

  “Thorn’s on the case. He’ll look out for him.”

  She sighed and mashed the heel of her hand to the hollow between her breasts, grinding it against her sternum, trying to relieve the band that was tightening around her chest.

  “What’re we going to do, Sugar, when we get there?”

  “Depends on what we find.”

  “Unarmed like this, what can we do?”

  “Throw the switch,” he said. “Turn off their lights.”

  She patted him on the back as if he’d made a weak joke.

  “Yeah. Turn off their lights. That should put the fear of God in them.”

  Lawton lifted his head to take a breath and Thorn twisted around to see him. A dribble of bright blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. Lawton shifted the nail file with his tongue and licked at the blood.

  “Almost there,” he mumbled, then something else Thorn couldn’t decode.

  Lawton bent back to his work, sawing the file against an edge of the duct tape. All they needed was a tear and Thorn could do the rest. With just a nick in the edge of the tape he’d found he could rip it in half like a cotton sheet. They’d already cut away one section of tape and Thorn’s hands were looser, feeling the first prickling sensations of life.

  Out in the salon there was shouting. The family meeting getting ugly. Thorn could make out only a word here and there. Morgan’s voice, Johnny’s. Either Papa was dead or speaking in muted tones. From the fragments he’d made out, he gathered they were still assigning blame, sorting out the guilt and responsibility for deaths past and deaths to come. Whining and upbraiding, the thrust and parry of a family who would never know the sweet relief of forgiveness.

  “Shit,” Lawton said. “I dropped it.”

  “Where is it, Lawton?”

  “On the floor. Here at the end of the bed. I see it.”

  Without warning, Lawton rolled off the foot of the bed and flopped hard on the deck. He gasped. None of it was loud but the voices out in the salon went quiet.

  Thorn wriggled over the side of the bed, let himself down as smoothly as he could, and squirmed quickly over to Lawton. The old man was trying unsuccessfully to pluck the nail file off the deck with his lips and tongue. While Thorn positioned himself and presented his bound hands, Lawton cursed and grumbled.

  The big diesels notched up slowly, and the yacht’s bow tipped up, then gradually settled back as the boat rose up on plane.

  “Better move it, Lawton.”

  Lawton famed and muttered. His mouth stuffed with cotton and marbles. Thorn felt the old man’s lips against his wrists, the jab of the nail file. Lawton’s spittle and blood coated his flesh. With a grunt and a growl, he resumed the sawing. Faster now, while Thorn strained against the fabric of the tape, his shoulders aching.

  “There,” Lawton said.

  He spit the nail file on the deck.

  “I’m still caught,” said Thorn.

  “Go up and down, your arms, pump them like pistons. There’s only a little thread holding you.”

  Thorn tried it and on the second pump, the duct tape broke apart.

  There was a voice in the hall. It took Thorn a moment to recognize it, so different from how she’d sounded before. Morgan giving commands to her father.

  “Keep moving. Go on. Move.”

  A cold, rigid authority in her tone. The sound of someone holding a gun and damn well ready to use it.

  Thorn brought his hands around, stretched his arms, worked the blood back into his fingers. He groped with the cable ties around his ankles, fumbled for precious seconds with the locking mechanisms. When he had them open, he snatched up the nail file and gouged several quick holes in the duct tape on Lawton’s wrists, weakening it, then ripped it in two. He unknotted the bungee cords, unwrapped the several turns of duct tape, unlocked the cable ties. It took a minute, two minutes.

  The voice in the hallway was gone.

  He got to his feet. Lawton opened his mouth to speak, but Thorn put a quick fing
er to his lips. He moved to the edge of the door and waited. Lawton got to his feet and went into the small head and ran the water in the sink and used the toilet and flushed it. If that didn’t bring them running, they could always try singing a verse of “Twist and Shout.”

  A second later Thorn heard the heavy clomp of someone running down the hallway. Even though he was prepared, when the door exploded he stumbled backwards and fell into the dresser. The shotgun blast had opened a fist-sized hole at eye level in the door.

  Lawton came out of the head, rubbing his face in a towel.

  “Cause for celebration,” he said. “A feat worthy of the great Houdini himself.”

  He took another step around the edge of the bathroom wall and Thorn hurled himself across the room and tackled Lawton around the waist and they tumbled back onto the bed as a second blast widened the first hole to the size of a cantaloupe. A spray of buckshot lashing his right leg, turning it hot and numb. He shoved Lawton across the bed.

  “What the hell’re you doing?”

  Still clutching the nail file, Thorn put his hands against the man’s bony chest and forced him into the crack between the mattress and the wall. Wingo was in the way, so Thorn wrenched the dead man’s arm, pulled him aside, then crammed Lawton over the edge into the narrow space.

  “I see you,” Johnny said through the hole in the door. “Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to run. Game’s over. Time to go bye-bye, Tinkerbell.”

  But the blasts must have bent the hinges off-center. The door moved a few inches, then stuck. Johnny leaned his shoulder against it and heaved, and the door screeched and started to move.

  While he wrestled with the door, Thorn spun back and looped an arm around Wingo’s waist and hauled him to his feet. A heavy corpse, stiffening. Thorn lugged him like a drunk toward the opening door, then got him moving, managing some good momentum by the time the door came open and Johnny stepped through smiling, lifting his shotgun. Wingo doing a last good deed, hurtling across the room, running interference for Thorn. Good old Wingo taking the blast in his face as Thorn followed a second later, staying low, his shoulder digging into the small of the dead man’s back. Then letting him go and stepping out from behind him and uncorking a wide hooking arm, catching it around Johnny’s throat, then slipping behind him, Johnny’s neck in the crook of Thorn’s arm. Thorn trying for an enraged second to tear the boy’s head off.

  But Johnny Braswell was one of those rubbery, strong young men. A kid who’d probably never spent a second in a gym, done nothing but work on a marlin boat to earn his strength, but that was enough, more than enough, because it was hiding there under the husk of fat and sloppiness, the power of honed muscles, a bullish, unmoving bulk. Thorn wrenched backwards, tried to cut off Johnny’s air, twisting hard and sagging his knees to bring all his weight against the boy’s throat like some wrangler twisting a calf to the rodeo dirt.

  Johnny didn’t budge. He widened his stance and rode Thorn’s grinding hold. Then when he sensed Thorn was weakening, about to change his angle of attack, Johnny swiveled to the side and wrenched the butt of the shotgun into Thorn’s belly. The blow would’ve broken down a door, but it missed by inches, creased his ribs and knocked only half the breath from his lungs. Thorn staggered and dropped his hold. Something giving way inside his gut, some nameless organ whose function he didn’t know. He heard a shrill whistle as he dragged down a breath.

  Maybe those people trained in street fighting saw it all as a diagram. He’d heard that somewhere. That if you fought enough battles, then everything slowed down, got simpler. You saw with perfect clarity the geometry of punch and counterpunch, you feinted and dodged and suckered a less skilled opponent into your snare. But for Thorn it was all wild confusion. It was that way now and it always had been that way. He acted without subterfuge or strategy. If there was anything on his side at moments like that one, it was his simple creed. Inflict the most damage as fast as possible. Stay awake as long as you can.

  He was only dimly aware of the nail file he’d palmed, that it had been riding in his hand through the mayhem. But as Johnny wheeled around, driving the heavy black barrel of the Remington toward the side of his head, and as Thorn ducked back out of its vicious arc, the nail file fit itself into his right hand as naturally as if he’d been facing off against switchblade punks all his life.

  The shotgun clipped the edge of the door and threw Johnny off-balance for a half second, and as he was cocking his arms back to take a left-handed swing, Thorn seized the barrel and flung the shotgun across the cabin. It hit the wall next to the bed and clanged to the floor.

  Thorn cocked his right fist and was measuring an uppercut to Johnny’s jaw, when the kid whisked his hand by his belt and came up with a knife. Same kind as Thorn had pulled out of Lawton. Not for skinning rabbits, not for cleaning fingernails. Good for one thing only.

  Johnny started to square off, take a stance, like they would play by some formal rules of knife fighting. But Thorn didn’t wait for him to get set, he lunged at the boy, jabbed the nail file into the first available patch of flesh, which happened to be the side of Johnny’s neck, and he pulled down and to the side and then back to the other side, ripping a ragged hole. Johnny gagged and stumbled backwards. He took a wild swipe at Thorn with that exotic blade, but Thorn blocked his wrist and deflected the blade downward. It nicked his shirt and left a warm trail across his right ribs.

  Thorn continued to work the nail file back and forth, esophagus and windpipe and Adam’s apple, his hand slick with Johnny’s blood.

  Johnny bleated and his knife clattered to the floor.

  That was the precise moment when Thorn could have stopped. Stepped away and let the boy fall on his back, but he didn’t. He kept bulling forward, partly for Farley and Lawton, partly for the hundred strangers in a diving jet, but mainly for reasons of his own, because this was the only way he’d learned to handle rabid dogs. You didn’t give in to human sympathy. You didn’t weigh it all out on some delicate moral scale. You made sure the dog was dead and then you made sure he was even deader than that.

  Thorn dug the nail file back and forth in the boy’s neck, through the hot gristle, the meaty layers, shoving him backwards until Johnny thumped against the wardrobe, his butt riding up onto the countertop. The boy gurgled like a newborn at his mother’s breast, his eyes rolling inward. Behind him the wardrobe mirror shined. Thorn looked past the dying boy at the creature reflected in the glass. Killer caught in the act. Blood smeared across Thorn’s mouth and cheeks as if he’d eaten a pie without his hands. Blood seeped from Johnny’s artery, coating Thorn’s arm. A look on Thorn’s face he didn’t recognize. A look he’d never seen on any human face.

  Twenty-Seven

  Morgan heard the shots coming from down below. Johnny executing Thorn and the old man as instructed. She would’ve left the flybridge, gone down to supervise, hold his hand, make sure the klutz didn’t screw it up, killing two men who were bound up head-to-toe, but she was a little preoccupied at the moment, watching another boat approaching across the dark water. From the spread of its running lights, it looked like a small fishing boat, which meant she could almost certainly outrun it if it came to that. But now she wanted to know who it was that kept changing their course each time she changed hers. Dogging her, now getting even more aggressive, on a heading that would cross her bow in only a minute or two.

  So she didn’t go down below to oversee her little brother. She kept her eyes on the boat, watching it drawing closer. Coming from her starboard, which gave it the right of way if you wanted to get technical, but she didn’t think the rules of the sea were going to apply to this situation. She didn’t think any rules were going to apply. She just had that feeling.

  “Try both of them at once,” Sugarman said. “Both buttons.”

  “My father’s on that boat. And Thorn.”

  “Your father wear a pacemaker?”

  “No.”

  “So what’re you worried about? It didn’t kill anybody at Ne
on Leon’s. It just shut off the power. That’s what you said.”

  “You sure about this?”

  “I’m not sure about any damn thing. But hey, we gotta do something quick. They make a run, we’re screwed.”

  So, Alexandra shifted the cone, directing it toward the ByteMe, and took a deep breath and pressed both buttons. The device hummed. Quiet as a small electric shaver, then a few seconds later she felt a sharp tingle in her sinuses, a sudden rush of electrons or neurons or some damn thing flashing up her spinal cord. That could’ve been the electromagnetic pulse, or just a jolt of her own adrenaline.

  Even though she hadn’t been to Mass in twenty years and had long ago lost hope that God was watching every sparrow as closely as she once believed, still, at that moment, as another throb brightened her nerve endings, Alex said a few silent words of thanksgiving.

  In the mirror Thorn watched Lawton crawl back onto the bed.

  He caught Thorn’s eyes. Thorn starting to feel the buckshot smoldering in his leg, and the sting that swiped across his right ribs.

  “I think you can stop now,” Lawton said. “Looks like the boy’s finished.”

  Thorn nodded. He let go of the nail file. Let his arms fall to his sides. The bones had turned to iron. He might never lift them again.

  “So, tell me,” Lawton said. “You done that a lot, kill guys with your bare hands?”

  Thorn stepped away from the dead man. Johnny’s chin slumped forward, pressing against his chest, long blond hair falling around his face.

  Thorn looked at Lawton.

  “Not for a while,” he said.

  “Could’ve fooled me,” the old man said. “Could’ve fooled the hell out of me.”

  And a second later, Thorn was still looking at Lawton, trying to find something to say, when the lights went off and the big diesels shut down.

  “Mother of God,” Sugar said. “The damn thing works.”

  “There’s a couple of lights still on,” Alex said. “Up on the bow.”