Privateers

by Charlie Newton

  Anne makes her knees using the .45 to push upright, then stands, crouched below the lip of our crevice. “He’s a clever bad one. Give me a moment and I’ll see to ’im.”

  I tell her, “Seen this lineup in the desert. He’s gonna put their heads in the sand one at a time.”

  On the rim behind the Gryphon, the Tontons break into two groups. Eight run to our left, toward the rim with the ramp/road, then disappear.

  Eight run to our right, toward the rim where Tania’s supposed to be, then disappear.

  Anne spits, trying to focus.

  More Tontons appear on the rim behind the Gryphon. They aim across the crater, over our heads at where Bill was before the .50s fired at him.

  Anne says, “They’re gonna engage Tania on our right, block the ramp on our left, circle past it to kill Bill if he’s still alive. Then come down for us.”

  I nod. “Start beheading the kids to draw us out . . . away from the Jeep.”

  “Can ya fix that detonator?”

  “Think it’s the sensor. If the detonator’s good, I could attach it direct to the vest, spike it with the backup cord. Would work for the tires too—”

  “No. Ya’d have to spike the tire, then punch the button. Be shot before ya could make the second move.”

  Exhale, squint at the rims, the ten kids. “Without the Jeep’s C-4, my vest is twenty pounds; won’t kill him for sure unless he’s out front of the Humvee.”

  “If I bait him out, can you throw it? My good arm’s strugglin’ with this pistol.”

  “Throwing won’t work. No way to detonate it other than this button.”

  We both glance under the Jeep—see ten kids, three gunmen, and the Gryphon.

  Anne says, “We gotta make a move.”

  I nod. “Once they’re behind us, it’s over.” My hands fumble to connect Tania’s backup cord to the detonator button. I suck a deep breath—so does Anne. I stab the cord’s spike into the vest’s C-4.

  We don’t explode.

  I grip Anne’s shoulders with both hands. “Vest is live.”

  She nods to the high rims around us. “Aye. ’Tis a witch’s cauldron he’s in.” Anne grins through the pain. “And we’re the Witches.”

  AKs roar on Tania’s side of the crater. A huge explosion answers. The AKs cut to just spits. A chunk of Tania’s rim is on fire. No voices shout Kreyol.

  I check the ramp side opposite Tania. No Tontons are visible yet. But they’re there. I yell behind us, “Bill?”

  Distant: “Yeah!”

  “They’ll be coming on your left—”

  Distant: “Already here!”

  “Forget plan A. Use the rocket to stop ’em.”

  “Doesn’t work! Piece of shit won’t fire!”

  Anne spits blood, wobbles. “I’ll climb out first. If they don’t shoot me, I’ll position at the back bumper, use the tire for cover. You stand at the front. That’ll split two of the gunmen—”

  “What good’s that do? The only way we’re sure he dies is this vest. Stay here. I can bluff him.”

  “I’ll not be stayin’ behind—”

  I yell over the Jeep, “Start killing kids and we all die—” turn to Anne. “Stay put. Trust me, stay put till I yell for you.”

  Anne inhales to argue.

  I shove her off her feet, then scramble out of the crevice using the Jeep for cover.

  From behind it I yell, “Twenty pounds of C-4!” then jam my left arm up above the Jeep’s hood where they can see my thumb on the button. Slowly, I stand—don’t get shot—loop the Jeep toward the gunmen, stop, and tell the monster behind them:

  “Should’ve shot me coming out of the crevice. At ten, I kill us all. I make it eighty-twenty your Humvee is UN papier-mâché; these kids go to heaven instead of back to the veal crates with you. Or you can send them up the ramp, take your gold, and build yourself another red-market paradise. Up to you.”

  I point at the children, then the ledge ramp.

  The children don’t move.

  “Ten. Nine. Eight—”

  The Gryphon speaks in soft Kreyol. Half the children run/waddle weak legs toward the ramp.

  I wait for the children to reach the ramp and scramble up to the rim. “Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three.” I extend the hand with my thumb on the button. “Two.”

  The remaining children break for the ramp.

  When they are over the rim, I lower my hand.

  The Gryphon says, “Perhaps what you truly wish is to come home, assist in the reconstruction of Dimanche? Be America’s interrogator again.”

  My thumb flexes on the button. “Don’t think that’s where you and I are headed.”

  “There are worse outcomes.”

  “Nothing’s worse than you being alive tomorrow.”

  High up behind me on Bill’s rim, his rocket tube booms; I duck; the far edge of Bill’s rim explodes in a fireball; the Gryphon ducks back behind his Humvee’s wheel.

  Anne scrambles for the Jeep’s rear bumper and tire.

  The Gryphon’s three gunmen crouch, focused on the fireball.

  Bill yells from the rim: “Got ’em! Flyers rule!”

  Anne rolls out into the open from underneath her end of the Jeep. In her right hand is another detonator button. It’s attached by a four-foot cord to a spike detonator she has buried to the hilt in the rear tire. She makes her knees, then wobbles to her feet, collapses to a knee, looks at me, and says, “Always have a backup. I’ll drive from here.”

  I scream: “See that, Marcel? Quarter ton of C-4 in those tires. You bitches ready?”

  The Gryphon doesn’t move.

  Anne says, “Step back, Susie.” She coughs blood. “Feels like I’m goin’ either way. Would prefer to take this man with me.”

  I glance up toward Bill, hoping he can see me pull his talisman off my neck, grip it tight in my right hand, then step back next to Anne. “Love you, Annie.”

  Anne winks, sags against my shoulder.

  I turn to the red-market monster trapped behind his Humvee, show him my forearms, stare into his pig eyes until I’m absolutely certain this thirty-year horror show knows it was Anne Bonny and Susie Devereaux who killed him.

  The Gryphon stands, confident that his next move will save him and kill us.

  I wrap one arm around Anne. “They say hell hath no fury . . . Believe it’s time we carved that in stone.”

  The Gryphon answers: “Sadly, Susan, you’ve always lacked the courage—”

  Anne and I count, “Three, two, one,” and punch the buttons.

  ***

  Bill Owens

  Susie and Anne both click their detonators. The caldera erupts. I duck. Jeep and Humvee fragment into razor shrapnel. The heat blast hits my rim, blows high over my head, and sucks all the air out of the sky.

  ***

  Bloody blond hair. “Up. Up.”

  “Huh?” I push away, scramble, rub volcano out of my eyes. “What the fuck—”

  Tania Hahn says, “We gotta go. Your LAW clocked the Tontons on the south rim. Susie and Anne did the rest. C’mon.”

  I roll to my stomach, make my knees, cough smoke, and she helps me to stand. Lotta smoke; smells like a forest fire in a salvage yard. “Where’s Susie”—wobble, cough—“and Anne?”

  Tania jerks my arm. “Make your feet run or you’re gonna die right here.”

  I wave smoke out of my face, look left and right. “Where are they?”

  “At the plane; come on. We gotta go.”

  Chapter 37

  Bill Owens

  Tania skid-stops her Jeep under the Lear’s wing, helps me out, then up the plane’s stairs. Susie and Anne aren’t there. They’re not inside when Shelia Lopez buckles me into a seat. Tania bangs the door shut and shouts “Vamanos!” to her pilots. The Lear’s engines roa
r and the torque blasts me into my seat.

  “Wait, where are they? We can’t—”

  The Lear screams down the airstrip, lifts off, and banks hard north, the wings almost perpendicular like we’re gonna roll. We snap level out of the bank and climb into the sun. Every part of me hurts.

  Lopez throws Tania a towel. “Okay?”

  Tania nods, wipes grit from her face and neck, looks at the towel for blood, exhales deep, and tells Lopez, “We need new rockets. No more French shit unless it’s got a Michelin star.”

  Lopez looks me over like a battlefield medic might, then pushes a warm, unopened Presidente beer at me. “Drink one. You’re alive; trust me, I can tell.”

  “Susie and Anne?”

  Tania leans in close and checks my eyes for focus.

  I think she says, “We’re running the DR west, then the north coast of Haiti—stay this course until someone starts shooting at us—then veer north, fly the Old Bahama Channel between the Bahamas and Cuba, put down in New Orleans if I can wire it from the air. If not, there’s a strip on Eleuthera at Governor’s Harbour we can use; figure New Orleans while we refuel.” She opens her brown bottle. “To the Witches of Eastwick. I take back what I said; some serious badass girls in that crew.”

  Reality hits me; what I saw; what I know. The exhale empties me top to bottom. My eyes close. I rerun the 8 mm movie behind my eyes. “You’re sure? Maybe . . .”

  “Gone, Bill. Went out big.”

  I want to stay in the dark, but don’t.

  Tania nods at me slow and small, then accepts another beer from Lopez, toasts again, and chugs half.

  I twist off the beer cap but can’t. Lopez does it for me, then clinks her bottle to mine. Tania does the same. We drink to . . . being alive, to all the shit that should’ve been, that won’t be.

  My beer has no taste. “He died with them? The Gryphon?”

  “Vaporized. The Witches should get a monument. That was one straight-up evil motherfucker who needed to go.”

  The plane bucks hard. Tania checks the window, then points. “Hurricane and the Rebelyon have half of Haiti on fire.”

  I look down at what might be Haiti’s north coast, then farther west at what has to be Cap-Haïtien. The last thirty-six hours have not been kind to Haiti. If this plane had a bomb rack, I’d use it. I look back from the window. “The kids he had with him? They’re dead?”

  “Probably not. Not from the blast; no telling what the surviving Tontons intend other than hunting gold fragments till the Dominicans we tip off get there.” Tania looks at Lopez, who’s already on a sat phone doing that, then back to me. “That kind of country, Bill. Add natural disaster and revolution; gonna be all nine circles for a while.”

  I show her my palm. “I know what kind of country it is.”

  Chicago

  Chapter 38

  Bill Owens

  Loef Brummel and I stand on the backside of the Jardine Water Purification Plant at the Ohio Street seawall rocks. Lake Michigan’s September breeze is cool on my swollen face. It’s not doing much for Loef’s. Our end of the plant’s parking lot is under construction and empty, other than the two bodyguards at my back and Lieutenant Denny Banahan’s Crown Vic idling at the Ohio Street curb.

  Loef’s scarred fingers count his money—currency, not gold coins. He closes the Flyers gym bag, then says, “What else?”

  “Have a nice day?”

  Loef sniffs his bent nose, then spits. “Not happy, Bill.”

  “Maybe see a therapist?” My smile is genuine, probably the Myers’s Rum and hydrocodone tablets.

  He looks at the gym bag’s logo. “I lost people. They got families, some of ’em.”

  “I lost people too. Two women in particular. Could’ve married either one. Would’ve died young but happy.”

  Loef inhales to threaten me.

  I wave it off. “Save it, okay? In an hour I’ll be in the hospital. Five minutes after the docs are done and while I’m still IV’d to the bed, my lawyer and I get to do an assistant state’s attorney showdown for my exit last week—the police seem to think I’m involved in Dave and Barlow’s bloodbath up here. Assuming I survive the hospital and the ASA, then I have a hockey team to save.” My smile flattens. “And some shit I need to forget. How about we leave it at that?”

  “People talking, Bill. Saying you found a lot of money.”

  “Could be I found enough to pay you what I didn’t owe. That what you mean? Kinda hoped you’d be happy. But should you decide not to be—say you decide to put the arm on me, or one of your Belfast assholes threatens the Flyers again.” I crank my thumb over my shoulder at Lieutenant Banahan’s Crown Vic. “I’ll drop a house on you—every word I can write down, every phone tape, everything a US attorney might want to tee up a RICO run for the roses. And if that doesn’t get you the death penalty, I’ll tell your childhood neighbor in the Crown Vic that I saw you shoot his partner at Nick & Nora’s.”

  Loef’s lips peel. “Talk like that could put a guy in a Canaryville basement.”

  “Yeah, it could. And so you know, that’s the kinda place I went to get you your fucking money; saw stuff that’d turn your head sideways. The Bill Owens who made it back is not the guy who left here last week. Don’t fuck with me, Loef, and I won’t fuck with you.”

  ***

  One week later

  Track announcer John Dooley PAs the paddock apron: “THEY’RE IN THE GATE FOR THE SIXTH RACE AT ARLINGTON.”

  Standing with me in the paddock, Jonathan Eig stirs coffee from a paper cup he hasn’t sipped. There’s no sugar or milk in the coffee, so stirring it seems stupid. Jon Eig isn’t stupid. He lowers his cobalt-blue Maui Jim sunglasses and says, “Rough trip, huh?”

  “Every bit of that.”

  Eig glances at the two formidable fellows who came with me, now thirty feet away. “Hear it was Haiti.”

  “Might’ve been.”

  Eig chins at someone in the crowd. Not a look-alike, but similar. The new guy walks over.

  Eig introduces us. “Bill Owens; Jonathan Eig.”

  “Jonathan Eig” no. 2 extends his hand. I cut back to the original. “Who are you?”

  Original Eig says, “Barlow died before he could pay those bills I mentioned.” He backs into the crowd. “You and I never met.”

  Jonathan Eig no. 2 sips a beer. “So, the deal you’re offering is . . .”

  The crowd swallows my ghost. I tell Eig no. 2: “Gimme your wallet.”

  He does.

  It’s filled with “Jonathan Eig” cards, including two photo IDs. I call the number on one. A phone rings in his pocket. I hand him his wallet. “Who’s my ghost?”

  “Don’t think you want to know.”

  “You’d be wrong.”

  Eig stares, relents. “My guess? Ex-spook. Blood on his hands. Looking for absolution or revenge, or both.”

  I know the concept; sift the crowd again, as do my bodyguards.

  “So, Bill, your deal, as I understand it, is you’ll tell me the whole story. I write the book and keep whatever it pays. In return, your hockey team and its coach get my personal best at media spin—whatever your lawyers say they require to keep the county off your team’s back?”

  “Forever.”

  “What if—”

  “No what if. Forever.”

  Eig lowers his beer. “Don’t think I can guarantee that. The Hurricane Lana smoke hasn’t cleared, and already there’s some pretty scary chatter. ‘CIA’ and ‘red market’ could be awfully explosive if your story’s part of that.”

  “Possibly Mary Poppins suits you better? Always best to write about what you know.”

  He smiles under a Panama stingy brim that suits him, then winces. “The Barlow shooting. Then his murder in some kind of vodou ritual.” Headshake. “Nine dead at Nick & Nora’s—some of them foreign
pre-op transsexuals with a brand?” Bigger wince. “Dave Grossfeld’s ritual murder on his boat in Haiti . . .”

  “You’re right, Jon, better I give the story to someone taller.”

  Eig doesn’t inflate or stop his Jimmy Olsen cub-reporter impression. “In Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica, they’re reporting—”

  “You’re gonna believe ‘reports’ coming out of Haiti?”

  “Who’s the Gryphon?”

  “No idea.”

  “Cranston Piccard?”

  Shrug.

  “If they were in your story, would you be talking about them?”

  “If they were in it, yeah, I would.”

  “And Barlow and the CIA would be part of it?”

  “If they were.”

  Eig sips more beer but doesn’t avert his eyes. “On a scale of one to ten, how dangerous is your . . . story?”

  Shrug. “Don’t know, maybe a hundred? Hide in a hole the rest of your life and hope the forces of evil are busy elsewhere?”

  He contemplates the risks, then allows voracious-journalist/author DNA to overwhelm his education and spousal responsibilities.

  “And the gold?”

  “Jesus, Jon, did you hear what I just said?”

  “I did.”

  “The story isn’t scary enough?”

  “Haven’t heard it yet.”

  I look up at the paddock odds board. This Jon Eig is crazy. The diminutive, intellectual act is thinner than varnish. “You’re probably gonna surf the Banzai Pipeline.”

  “Already have.” He touches the scar on his forehead.

  Headshake. “Okay. Rumor is, part of Anne and Susie’s share went to an orphanage on Rum Cay in the Bahamas, sprucing it up to first world. Plan is to take in one-third Jamaican kids, one-third Haitian, one-third Cuban. Think it’s a trade school for boats and sailing, and an adventure school as well; something like that. Like what Oprah’s millions did in Africa.”