“Don’t think so,” he said. “You can wait and see if we leave you any scraps.”
She crouched. If looks could kill, the one Maria gave Felix would have drawn and quartered him.
Twenty
Kenny Colbert had indeed been torn to pieces, and much more than a four count. Not all of the kid found its way to the bellies of beasts or the bottom of the sea either. Buchanan took a net and fished some of the young man’s remains out of the water near the yacht’s stern. He dumped them into a bucket and examined them: a partial upper thigh, a shoulder and armpit, and a section of torn flesh with a patch of hair. Turk strolled by and stopped to have a look.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the unidentifiable remain.
“Nape of his neck, I think,” Buchanan replied. “See the darker hair?”
“Yeah, I see it. Jeez, greedy bastards, ain’t they?”
“Those white-tips are worse than jackals. I’m surprised they left this much.”
Turk chuckled. “I’ll bet that tiger probably had a whole half of the kid to itself.”
Buchanan dumped the bucket’s contents into another bucket and fastened a lid on it. Turk headed back to the bow of the boat. Buchanan followed. They stopped before Greer, who sat in his deck chair, smoking and drinking in turn.
“What was left?” he asked.
“Hardly anything,” Buchanan replied. “Looks like an armpit got spat out again, though.”
“What is it with all the uneaten armpits?”
Turk laughed. “Sharks must not like the smell.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Buchanan. “This is probably the first bath these junkies have had in weeks.”
Reposo came out of the cabin with a pair of binoculars. He scanned the survivors on the beach, wondering who the weakest link was and how much it would factor into his betting strategy.
“Who do you think is next?” he asked.
“It has to be one of the women,” Greer said. “I can’t believe they’re both still in the game at this point.”
“Anyone got money on one of the girls getting bagged next?” Buchanan asked.
“We do,” Turk and Reposo replied in unison.
“Redhead or Cuban?”
Reposo adjusted his binoculars, focusing on Maria sitting by herself. “My money is on the Cuban. She’s ostracized herself now, and that sucker punch she took might have weakened her chances. Personally, I think she’s suffering a broken jaw. That girl is damaged goods.”
Greer gave a grunt. “They’re all damaged goods.”
Greer thought about damage. The damage he and his men had inflicted over the years, and the damage they had taken in return. He allowed it to prey on his mind for the first time in a long while, the injuries to body and soul that could never heal.
At what point are people beyond repair? he thought.
Unspeakable things came to mind. Acts committed by him and those under his command in the fog of war, both sanctioned and off the record, most of it during their tours in Afghanistan. How he loathed that fucking place, the leading producer of heroin in the world, a damned desert that was good for nothing except growing poppies and producing insurgents. No matter how many fields they razed, no matter how many drug lords or tribal chiefs they assassinated, no matter how many production houses they located and leveled with air strikes, it never seemed to put a dent in America’s appetite for the drug or the Afghan’s ability to supply it. Greer hated that part of the world more than anywhere else, yet he still maintained contacts there that could provide him with the finest opiate at competitive prices.
I can’t fix things with my hands tied.
If he’d been allowed to fight the war the way he wanted, they would have been one step closer to winning the damn thing. During many a mission debriefing, his detractors had accused him of allowing too much collateral damage, referring to some of his actions as atrocities. Even the term war crime had come up once or twice, but Greer never believed that. What Greer and his men had done to the enemy outside of mission parameters was warranted, regardless of whether those behind desks back in Washington deemed it uncivilized. Their interpretation of orders eventually led to their dismissal from the ranks, and Greer had felt it unjust. He had never felt pity or remorse over what he had done. For him all was fair in love and war. Being relieved of command didn’t mean the mission was over. Not for him. Not for any of them.
“You okay, Cap?” asked Buchanan.
“I’m fine.”
“Something on your mind?”
“Dishonorable discharge.”
Greer said no more. He threw his cigar overboard and retreated to the cabin. The others knew better than to follow him. They kept watch while Greer sat inside and stewed in his thoughts.
Twenty-One
Felix was lost in thought as he sat and watched the men on the boat. Ginger and Nash huddled together, waiting and worrying with full stomachs and frayed nerves. Maria stayed well away from everyone, unwelcome and unhappy. She hadn’t said one word to them since awakening, though they’d eventually allowed her to eat what food they couldn’t finish. Felix cupped a hand over his eyes and gauged the distance to the next island, wondering where the sharks were more likely to lurk.
“What are you thinking?” Nash asked.
Felix cast a glance at Maria. “You don’t want to know.”
“Think we’ll make it?”
“We’ll make it.”
Ginger grunted. “And if we don’t?”
Felix raised an eyebrow. “Any regrets?”
“Oh, plenty.”
“Yeah? What was your biggest?”
The question seemed to punch Ginger in the gut. Her demeanor soured more. She didn’t reply. Felix turned to her and cocked his head.
“Care to share, honey?”
“Maybe some other time.”
“All we got is time right now.”
Ginger’s lip quivered. She allowed her hair to fall in her face so her companions would not see the tears that were welling up. Felix felt bad, knowing he’d scratched the surface of something, but a confession seemed timely. He breathed deep, taking in the oxygen needed to lift a certain weight off his chest.
“I killed a guy once,” he confessed. “That is my biggest regret.”
Ginger looked up, brushing her hair away to reveal tear tracks running down each cheek. Her face was a strange mix of relief and anguish.
“Tell me about it,” she said. “Please.”
Felix sighed and drew circles in the sand with a finger, letting his dreadlocks hang to hide his face. Nash and Ginger stared at him, but he wouldn’t look at either of them.
“Wasn’t completely my fault,” he said, voice strained. “I was young and stupid. Twenty-two years old and out to do some damage.”
“What happened?” Nash asked.
Felix didn’t speak for a while. He simply sat and mulled over the worst memory in his collection, motionless except for the breeze that swayed his matted hair. Just when Nash thought he might have turned to stone, the man’s lips began moving.
“I was twenty-two years old,” he repeated. “Twenty-fucking-two with a knack for fighting that I’d built up from a bad childhood and even worse adolescence. I had too much to be angry about, and what did they go and do? They put me in a goddamn boxing ring and told me to take out all my rage on the guy in the opposite corner.”
“You killed a guy in the ring?”
The flinch was slight, but Nash saw it. The words bit Felix, just as they had gnawed at him every single day of his life since the fateful one.
“I beat Tommy ‘the Sweeney’ Todd to death in a clusterfuck of a fight,” Felix said. “Some Limey bastard, tough as nails with a cocky mouth and a great right hook. He came over for an exhibition match and I sent him home in a body bag.”
Nash a
nd Ginger gawked at Felix, mouths unable to respond, minds processing the revelation. Felix peeked at them through his dangling hair, then closed his eyes and hung his head even lower.
“It happened in the eighth round. Tommy had gone toe-to-toe with me every second of the fight, but I’d landed a couple of stunners in the fourth and sixth and dropped him to the canvas. That damn Englishman beat the count every time.”
“All fighters step into the ring knowing the risks,” Nash said. “Fatalities are a reality of the sport.”
“This one is on me, though. Tommy could have survived it if I hadn’t kept putting him in his place. Stubborn fucker just wouldn’t stay down and the damn ref kept letting him get to his feet.”
Felix’s hands balled into fists and shook as his voice rose. Ginger and Nash scooted back, frightened by the man’s volatility.
“If he’d just stayed the fuck down, all that would’ve been hurt was his pride.”
“Wasn’t your fault,” Nash said. “The fight should have been stopped.”
“But it was my fault,” Felix corrected. “I beat him until he didn’t know where he was anymore. I beat him until the light in his eyes began to go out. Then I beat him some more. I was beating the poor fucker to death and I knew exactly what I was doing the whole time.”
Nash said nothing. Ginger tried to say something comforting, but the words caught in her throat. She mumbled a sentence, none of it coherent.
“I hit the bottle hard after that,” Felix continued. “When that failed to numb me anymore, I graduated to prescription pills and then smack in order to dull my demons.”
“I abandoned my son,” Ginger blurted out, fresh tears coming. “I gave him up for adoption. I let someone take him away from me.”
She dropped her face into her hands and began to sob. The men exchanged glances, unsure of what to say or do. Even Maria looked up from where she sat, edge of her mouth curling with satisfaction at the other woman’s despair. Nash tried to put an arm around Ginger. It was instantly shrugged off.
“Your son?” asked Felix, voice uncharacteristically soft. “What was his name?”
“Justin,” she said. “I named him Justin.”
“And why did you have to let him go?”
“I was only eighteen,” Ginger moaned, drying her tears. “Eighteen and too young and stupid to know what to do with a baby. More than anything I was too fucking selfish to even care. He was such a healthy, happy child. The kind anyone else would think was a blessing, but not me. Oh, no, Ginger had her own life to live, and it wasn’t going to be tied down by the gift of some beautiful baby boy—”
Her throat bucked and she lost her words again. The stone in her chest that had replaced her heart years before was cracked through and through. The confession ground pieces of it into dust, which thickened with her blood into clay. That clay could patch her heart if only she would allow it. If only she could see her son one more time, hold him in her arms for just a moment and whisper to him how sorry she was, then maybe she could find some respite. That was what she wanted, more than heroin, more than anything: just another minute with her son.
She would speak no more of her biggest regret to the others. In the ensuing silence Nash knew it was his turn. He swallowed hard and spoke quietly.
“I took this girl home after a gig once . . . sweet little thing had been giving me the shy eye from the side of the stage all night, and I thought I’d capitalize on it.”
Felix chuckled. “That doesn’t sound too bad.”
“Turned out she was fifteen years old.”
Ginger gave Nash a horrified look and he matched it. He held out his hands to her in apology, guilt quickening his heart.
“I had absolutely no idea,” he said. “She didn’t look that young. She was in a club late at night with a drink in her hand. I thought she’d been carded at the door, figured she was legal.”
Ginger shook her head. “So you took an underage girl home to your bed?”
Nash sighed. “I did more than that. I introduced her to heroin. Gave the poor girl her first taste that night and sent her on her way next morning.”
Felix chewed that over. “And how did that work out for her?”
Nash’s voice was barely a whisper. “She died.”
“Overdose?”
Nash nodded. “About a year later, in some dive motel off the interstate where she’d been turning tricks for money and dope. Someone shot her up and left her alone in a room. Body was there for days before anyone found it.”
He spoke no more, heart twisting in his chest the same as the others. They were beyond fucked up, emotionally wrecked and chemically imbalanced to the point where they were toxic to the hearts and souls of others they came in contact with. Their personal demons had come to roost with the skeletons in their closets, resulting in a rape that produced a broken bastard love-child in each of them. This love-child, born of heroin and regret, needed constant feeding. Sacrifice was the only thing it would eat.
They looked over their shoulders at Maria, wondering what her story was. There was something much darker about her, as if regrets weren’t part of her makeup. The way she had pulled the sharp stone on Kenny and slashed at him without a second thought—it unnerved them all, even Felix. There were certainly skeletons in her closet, and they figured she’d dumped each and every one of them in there.
An idea came to Felix. He gathered himself up and marched into the wooded area in the middle of the island. Ginger and Nash watched with mild interest as he poked around the trees and bushes. He returned a few minutes later with three short, thick sticks and a flat rock.
“What are you doing?” Ginger asked.
“Improvising.”
He took one of the sticks and rubbed its tip vigorously against the rock face at an angle. Soon a point began to form.
“I’m not going back in that water without a weapon.”
“Those are pretty big fish you’re looking to skewer,” Ginger said with a smirk. “It’ll be like sticking a thumbtack in them.”
“Better than nothing,” Nash said. “You saw Felix coldcock that shark near the shore. They don’t like being attacked any more than we do.”
“Not going down without a fight,” Felix said, grinning hellishly. “And if we make them bleed instead of us . . .”
Ginger’s smirk dropped and she nodded. Felix sharpened the end of the first stick to a fine point and handed it to Nash, then set to work on the remaining two. With the makeshift dagger’s tip Nash wrote the word fuck over and over in the sand beside him.
“Not going down without a fight. . . .”
Twenty-Two
“They’ve definitely got some fight in them,” said Greer. “I’m starting to like these scabs.”
Greer and Turk stood on the bow of the yacht, watching the survivors closely with their binoculars, wondering if the next leg of the game might require some motivation. Seeing three out of four moving toward the water with stick daggers in hand gave Greer hope.
“Hey, boys, come take a look.”
Buchanan and Reposo appeared in the cabin doorway and stepped out onto the deck, each holding a beer. In Buchanan’s other hand was his camcorder.
“Let me see,” said Reposo.
Greer handed him the binoculars. Buchanan put down his camera and beer and climbed up into the cockpit of the boat to retrieve something, returning moments later carrying a .50-caliber Barrett M107. He shouldered the sniper rifle and raised the barrel. Defined biceps locked it into place, supporting the weight easily. He used its powerful scope to survey the situation.
“Why is the spic chick staying away from the others?” he asked.
“She’s been avoiding them since the black one knocked her out,” Turk replied. “There’s some serious animosity going on. I think they might do her more harm if she gets too close.”
&nb
sp; Turk watched as Maria suddenly began walking toward the other three. There was rigidity in her posture and anger in her stride. Reposo took note.
“Hey, I think there might be another scuffle coming. Shit, do we want any of them bleeding before they get back in the water?”
“No,” said Greer. “Not yet.”
“Gotta keep them apart, then,” Buchanan said and chambered a round in the M107. “Want me to fire off a warning shot, boss?”
Greer took a swig of beer and considered it. “Hold off for now, but keep them targeted. If anyone takes a swing, then yeah, give them a scare.”
Buchanan fixed the crosshairs on Felix’s torso, watching and waiting for any sign of violence. He noticed the sharpened stick in Felix’s hand.
“Damn, look at those pokers,” he said with a smirk. “They’re starting to get innovative, aren’t they?”
“Getting a little smarter too,” Reposo mused, checking the sun’s position overhead. “Good time to try and swim for the next island. There’s a lot less shark activity this hour. I wonder if they know what they’re doing.”
Greer grinned. “I wonder what they’re saying right now.”
The four men watched as Maria began arguing with the others. Greer sat down in his deck chair, placing a pair of aviator sunglasses over his eyes. He polished off his beer before firing up a fresh cigar.
“Raise anchor,” Greer ordered, puffing thick smoke. “Let’s pull around and get a better view. This is going to get interesting.”
Twenty-Three
“This might get ugly,” Ginger whispered to Nash.
Maria stood defiantly before Felix, close enough to be struck again, spittle on her weathered lips and traces of blood on her bared teeth. Ginger couldn’t believe the girl had the balls to get in Felix’s face after what he’d done to her the day before.
“Why you not make sharp stick for me?” accused Maria.
“You won’t need one,” Felix growled.
“I am to swim without?”
“Not exactly.”
Bait: A Novel Page 14