Off the Chart

by James W. Hall

  “Move!” Anne shouted. “They’re in trouble. Move, goddamn it!”

  Raising up, Pedro lifted one foot to the lowest rail, and a half-second later the small man was kicked backward by a burst of fire. He shrieked and somersaulted, the heel of his boot clipping Anne Bonny on the shoulder as he pitched into the sea. For a half-second she lost her grip, burned her hand on the rope as she fought to regain her hold, and scrambled up the rope ladder and wrestled past Sal Gardino, who was paralyzed and gibbering to himself. A techno geek, rendered useless by the first sounds of a gunfight.

  On the top rung of the rope ladder, Anne Bonny paused and found her breath. Head down, crouched below the gunwale, she gripped her Mac-10, formed a quick image of her next move, then sprang up and tumbled over the rail, ducking a shoulder, slamming into the rough pebbled deck, and rolling once, twice, a third time until she came to rest against an iron wall.

  She was dizzy and nauseous and for a moment thought she’d been hit by one of the slugs strafing the deck. She closed her eyes and scanned her body but sensed no numbness, no hot prickling. Just a throb in her shoulder where she’d slammed the steel deck.

  She sat up, pressed her back flat against the wall, and was fumbling with the Mac-10, trying to find the right grip, when she made out the shadow of a man moving to the rail. Then saw the bright flashes as he unleashed on Sal and the rest of her crew following her up the ladder.

  The man got off a dozen rounds before Anne Bonny could raise her weapon. Sal screamed and one of the Nicaraguans cursed in Spanish and went silent. Anne Bonny aimed at the center of the body armor sheathing the man’s back and curled her finger against the cool metal and the tall man bucked forward and tumbled over the side.

  She blew out a breath, but before she could move again, dozens of spotlights bathed the deck in staggering brightness and in the same instant the whup and blare of a helicopter sounded from the north.

  “Stay down, Anne. Stay down!”

  All around her, automatic weapons erupted, the raw thuds and clangs of bullets slamming the ship’s tough hide.

  Daniel’s voice had come from her right, roughly fifty feet away. She rose from her crouch and craned around the edge of the wall, which she could see in the blue-white glare was not a wall at all but a yellow cargo container emblazoned with the logo of the Maersk shipping line.

  “Anne, flat on the deck! Stay down.”

  A staccato chain of blasts cut him off. Louder ones answered back and a dozen more of the muffled shots replied. Then it was silent. To the north she saw the helicopter searchlight prowling the dark waters on the starboard side of the ship. Again and again, a large-caliber machine gun unloaded on men in the water. One of their speedboats exploded, the fireball blooming against the black sky.

  Facedown, she wormed to the edge of the yellow container and peered toward the spot where she’d last heard Daniel’s voice.

  Two men in camouflage pants and black T-shirts were standing over Daniel’s body. They gripped silenced weapons. The taller of the two men said something to the other and the man unloaded his weapon at Daniel’s body. She thought she saw Daniel twist aside in time to avoid the gunfire; then both men scrambled out of view.

  A wail broke from Anne’s throat, but before she could rise to fire, she was staring at a pair of black boots not more than a yard from her nose.

  “Fuckin’ move and you’re dead.” His growl was all New York, the nasal bray of a street punk. “Shove it out slow, that fucking gun. You hear me, cunt? Twitch and you’re dead.”

  A year before, she would have obeyed instantly, raising her hands in relief that this long and terrifying dream was done. But that was before Daniel. Before he led her to the edge of the precipice, took her hand in his, and looked past the surface of her eyes into regions of her self she had barely sensed were there and the two of them leaped over the brink, dropping and dropping in one long ecstatic rush, only to land in the black heart of this moment.

  Anne Bonny Joy nudged the Mac-10 forward along the deck, inch by inch until it was fully exposed; then without a flicker of hesitation she slid her hand down the stock and squeezed off a half-dozen rounds at the toes of the black boots and watched them jerk and dance for a half-second; then she spun to the right, came to her feet and sprinted to the rail, and dived into the bottomless dark.

  In the choppy sea she stripped a life jacket from one of the Nicaraguans. She ducked away from the spotlights, stroking slowly and steadily beyond the perimeter of their search zone. Through the night, she paddled and drifted in a swoon of dehydration, rage, and despair. She was carried by the current mile after mile northward until an hour after sunrise she was spotted by a Panamanian fishing boat and plucked from the sea.

  They put her ashore on a beach at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, and she used some of the American dollars she was carrying to work her way south by bus down the Mosquito Coast. Campesinos on the bus turned to stare at her. As Anne slumped in her seat, an old woman nudged her shoulder, checking for life. At Punta Castillo Anne chartered a skiff to the Barra de Colorado. In a deadened haze, she left the boat behind and trekked through fifteen miles of rain forest and made it to the lodge late in the afternoon four full days after the disaster on the Rainmaker.

  Taking cover in a gully on the outskirts of the camp, she spent an hour listening to the shrieks of parrots and howler monkeys. She sniffed the air but detected neither foreign aromas nor the charred ruin of the camp. Until dusk she waited; then finally she rose and entered the camp.

  In the gathering darkness she inched along the shadowy edges of the buildings, a pocketknife her only weapon. The sour stench of the staff latrine, a can of garbage overturned and raided by jungle creatures. The cigarette reek of the bunkhouse where the Sandinistas slept, and at every step there were the vaporous echoes of voices.

  She slipped into the main cabin that she and Daniel had shared the last weeks. Their bed was neatly made. She stared at his comb lying on the dresser and her brush, which lay beside it. She wiped her eyes clear and stepped over to the bathroom mirror and took it down from its hook. She calmed the jitter in her fingers and dialed the numbers and swung open the steel door. For a moment in the gloom she thought all was well, then she reached out and ran her hands across the bare shelves and a low groan rose from her chest. Someone had beaten her back to the camp and looted the reserves.

  The journey back to Florida took two weeks. Riding Greyhounds through the long nights, exiting at dawn, eyes down, speaking to no one. Staying in cheap motels along the coast, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida. Blinds shut tight against the daylight, drinking herself to oblivion while she spent the impossibly long days staring at the pitted walls and the blank screens of televisions. Paranoid, grieving, so twitchy she couldn’t sleep. Not even in those desperate weeks after her parents’ deaths had she felt so hopeless.

  Somewhere east of Pensacola she woke from a drowse, jerked upright in her bus seat, and startled the teenage kid in a cowboy hat beside her.

  “You okay, ma’am?” The kid had taken his Stetson off and set it in his lap. “Bad dream?”

  Anne looked at the boy for a moment, then turned her eyes to her window, at the palm trees and scrub brush flashing past.

  “I wish it were,” she said. “I wish to hell it were.”

  Five

  “Oh, come on, Thorn. Even a guy like you could find a use for two million bucks.”

  “Not really, Marty.”

  Marty Messina shook his head and groaned. He was a big man with a blocky head and coarse black hair that he wore in a military flattop. An inch of hair across the front was greased into a small curl like a perfect wave rolling off the black ocean of his skull. He was several inches above six feet. In the years since Thorn had seen him last, Marty had chunked up, and now dangerous muscles flared in his shoulders and arms. His neck was so thick, he probably had to custom-order his flowered shirts. He wore white high-top tennis shoes with a complicated lacing system, and skintight blue jeans and a
black rayon shirt printed with yellow hibiscus blooms. The shirt was opened to the sternum, showing off a pad of black hair that rose to his throat. Five, six years ago when he’d been sent away to prison, Marty had been fond of heavy gold jewelry, but they must’ve had a fashion class up there, because now he wore only a single diamond stud pinned to the top of his right ear.

  Marty shook his head and made a show of sighing and marching over to the wood stairway of Thorn’s stilt house and planting his butt on the fourth step with such resolve, it appeared he meant to stay as long as it took for Thorn to cave in.

  Resetting his grip on the pine slat, Thorn pressed it against the sawhorse, then drew the handsaw back and forth through the last inch of softwood. When the excess piece dropped in the grass, he smoothed away a couple of brittle ends on the slat and stepped over to the shade of a tamarind tree and set it on the bench that was three-quarters complete. He brushed the sawdust from his hands and wrists and looked out at Lawton Collins, who was napping in a hammock strung between two coconut palms a few yards from the rocky shore of Blackwater Sound.

  It was about four o’clock on that May afternoon, and Blackwater Sound shivered with sharp blue light. A brown pelican coasted a few feet above the still water, carried along by a warm draft from the west. An Everglades breeze full of mold spores and mosquitoes and the first ozone whiffs of a spring thunderstorm. It had been a brutally dry year. During the winter only a couple of cold fronts had plowed all the way down the state, and those brought no rain. And so far, the summer monsoon season still hadn’t kicked in.

  His grass was charred and crispy underfoot, but the bougainvillea seemed ecstatic about the drought, and their great clouds of purple and pink and white cascaded over trees and lesser shrubs all around the perimeter of his five acres. The wild lantana and the penta were doing fine as well. For generations those indigenous plants had thrived in the inch of sandy soil dusting the limestone rubble that passed for land in the Florida Keys. Regularly flooded by the salty sea or scraped back to nubs by hurricanes, those native plants seemed to bloom with even greater flourish after each new trial.

  The year of relentless heat had been nearly ruinous for Thorn’s fly-tying business. Out on the flats the bonefish and reds were lethargic in the overheated water. A warmer-than-average winter in the Northeast and a series of airline crashes had cut the tourist flow by half, so the fishing guides who worked the flats hadn’t snapped up Thorn’s custom flies in the numbers they had in the years before. And though Thorn had almost exhausted his savings and was starting to make uneasy calculations whenever he looked into the pantry, he wasn’t about to confess any of that to Marty Messina.

  Back when Marty Messina had been a bush-league dope peddler around the upper Keys, word was Marty was connected to a Miami crime family. Whether it was true or not Thorn didn’t know, but the guy certainly had acted the part. As a sideline, he’d laundered some of his profits through Tarpon’s, a waterfront restaurant he operated in nearby Rock Harbor. Probably through dumb luck, Marty signed on a young chef who’d discovered some creative uses for cinnamon and bananas and exotic Caribbean fruits in his fish dishes. Nobody had ever cooked that way in Key Largo before, and the restaurant became a trendy hit with locals. Even Thorn had gone there once or twice for special occasions.

  Marty kept the prices low, routinely buying rounds of drinks for the whole bar to celebrate his great good fortune. But then a trawler Marty was piloting was boarded by the DEA just off Islamorada. Nearly a ton of Mexican grass was aboard at the time. Within a few weeks Marty was sent away to perfect his croquet skills in a minimum-security prison somewhere in north Florida, a place that housed corrupt politicos, white-collar embezzlers, and other well-lawyered crooks. In his absence, the restaurant changed hands, the chef moved on, and finally the place became just another tourist joint, pumping out fish sandwiches and limp fries.

  A couple of weeks ago Marty Messina had materialized again in Key Largo. Thorn had heard from one of his fishing guide buddies that Messina had been planting his butt on a stool at the bar of his old restaurant, running the place down to anyone who’d listen. Reminding everyone what a cutting-edge hot spot it had once been.

  “So you a Realtor now, Marty? Get your license in prison?”

  “Fuck you, Thorn.”

  “Seems reasonable,” Thorn said. “Real estate’s the logical next career choice after apprenticing in crime.”

  “Hey, Thorn, come on, man, I don’t have all fucking day. Just say yes, and I’ll go back and draw up the papers and get your money bundled up.”

  Marty gave him a cheerless grin.

  “My buyer will pay all cash,” he said. “Two and a half mil.”

  “A minute ago you said two.”

  “I’m negotiating.”

  “Oh, is that how it’s done?”

  “Okay, three,” Marty said. “Three million dollars, Thorn.”

  Marty stood up and lumbered back over to the sawhorse.

  “You’re negotiating in a vacuum. I’m not selling.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I told him. You were a first-class knucklehead.”

  Thorn glanced up, but Marty was looking out at the glassy bay.

  “Tell him to drop by. I’ll refuse him to his face.”

  “This guy doesn’t drop by, Thorn. He pays people to drop by.”

  Marty turned and looked Thorn in the eyes and a smile spread slowly across his face as if he’d surprised himself with his own ominous wit.

  “What’s his name, Marty? The guy who wants this place so bad.”

  “Look, Thorn. If you fuck with me, you fuck with him. And believe me, buddy, you don’t want to fuck with him.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah, really.”

  Marty’s dark eyes held to Thorn’s and he clamped his lips together as if to keep from blurting out the name. The buyer could’ve been any of a hundred of Marty’s old associates, dope runners of an earlier era who’d stashed away enough to buy their way into legit businesses around the Keys. Thorn had nothing against their kind. He’d smoked his share of funny stuff back in his younger days before grass got all inbred and so full of hallucinogenic juice that one toke would give you the munchies for a month. He knew a ton of plumbers and electricians and roofers around the island who’d bought their first tools and panel trucks with the proceeds of one successful dope run. Most of them were upstanding citizens now. Churchgoers with a mortgage, kids in high school, a small fishing boat they took out weekend yellowtailing. But there were other guys he’d run into back in the good old dope days who’d gaffed and gutted one too many of their competitors, waded a little too deep into the dark sea of deadened senses. They were still around the island, but you didn’t see them out and about. They sent their lackeys, guys like Marty Messina, to do their bidding.

  “Okay,” Thorn said. “So what exactly does he want to do with my land?”

  “Improve it,” Marty said.

  “Ah, yes.” Thorn lined up another slat of pine on the sawhorse and drew out the aluminum tape. “This land’s long overdue for improving.”

  “Don’t get funny with me, Thorn. I’m running low on patience.”

  “Hey, Marty. I have a tip. Tell your guy to swoop in and buy the tract where the Island House motel used to be. Back in March somebody knocked all the trees down, scraped the land bare, then left it sitting there. Guy must’ve run out of money. That’d be a nice spot to improve.”

  “He wants this land,” Marty said.

  “You hit town one week, you’re out throwing around millions of dollars the next. How do I know you’re even legit? You know what I’m saying?”

  “This is for real, Thorn. A bona fide offer. Far as just getting into town, yeah, that’s true. But some people around here remember me, respect my abilities. I got excellent credentials.”

  “A stretch in jail being near the top of the list.”

  “I been out for a while, jerkhole. I been into some other things; now I’m into t
his. Not that it’s any of your fucking business.”

  “You’re standing here trying to buy my land. That sort of makes it my business, doesn’t it?”

  Thorn took the pencil from behind his ear and marked the slat, then set the blade of the saw against the mark, drew it back an inch to score the spot. But before he could begin to saw, Marty stepped close to the horse, blocking his stroke.

  “Look, Thorn. You got a piece-of-shit car; it’s rusting through. Same fucking car you had before I went off to the joint.”

  Thorn looked up at Marty. He held the saw in place.

  “You got this falling-down house, one good storm comes along, a puff of wind, trust me, Thorn, that shack’s gonna wash right into the bay.”

  Marty made his eyes go droopy like he was bored with this, bored trying to reason with a knucklehead, but still trying real hard to be decent.

  “Three million, you could buy any car you want. Buy ten cars. A house on the water anyplace in Florida. Put the rest in mutual funds, live off the interest. See what it feels like to be an adult for once in your life.”

  Thorn looked over at Lawton stretching his arms, yawning, then rearranging himself in the hammock and easing back for the rest of his nap. Lately the old man had taken to dressing in Thorn’s clothes. Today he was wearing a baggy white T-shirt and khaki fishing shorts with flap pockets in the front, the exact same outfit Thorn had on. The official uniform for Camp Thorn.

  “I’ve already got a house on the water, Marty. I have the piece-of-shit car I want. So why don’t you go on back to Mr. Hotshot’s office and tell him to find another plantation to sack and plunder.”

  Marty peered into Thorn’s eyes for several seconds, then shook his head sadly as if about to deliver a fatal diagnosis.