Off the Chart

by James W. Hall

  But his screen had gone flat again, the hiss of static silent.

  “Oh, God. Jesus Christ.”

  Alexandra laid a hand on his shoulder. Telling him in a soothing voice that it was going to be all right. They’d figure it out. They would.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Jesus God, help me.”

  “You have a dictionary, Sugar?”

  He turned and looked up at her.

  “Dictionary?”

  She waited.

  “On the shelf in the living room by the TV.”

  She patted him on the shoulder, but Sugarman hardly registered it. He was staring at his crappy computer. His daughter’s image vanished. He tried to picture it—the way that fragile beam of electrons had fired out of the Central American rain forest and launched into the atmosphere, where it bounced off some passing satellite, then ricocheted back to Earth and found its way through a thousand miles of cables to his machine, carrying her voice, her face. The magic of that. The horror of it. The aching emptiness he felt now that the machine was silent.

  Sugarman’s shoulders were draped with a lead shawl. His breath was dead in his lungs, chest cavity gutted.

  He heard Lawton snoring on the daybed and Alexandra in the next room paging through the dictionary. The puppy had awakened and was chewing at a flea on his tail. More sirens screamed on the highway. But he wasn’t there. He was locked in a small, foul-smelling bathroom. He was huddled on the floor gripping a pair of eleven-hundred-dollar binoculars to his chest. He was sipping on a Coke and shivering and trying not to cry. Hot and cold and aching in every joint. He was a thousand nautical miles away, surrounded by strange foreign men with automatic weapons and God only knew what else. He was alone. More alone than he’d ever been before. The screams of the jungle, the heat and stench and darkness.

  Alexandra dragged a chair up beside him.

  “I know,” she said. “This is hard. You’re overcome.”

  “That’s not the half of it.”

  She touched his cheek, took hold of his chin, and guided it around so he was facing her.

  “But we need to shake this off. We have to go on-line for a few minutes.”

  “What?”

  “Gray g-h,” she said. “We need to do a search.”

  He was groggy now. Sleepless for two days, hardly any food. Pulse falling from its frantic high to some bottomless place. A beat, then a pause while the globe spun a complete rotation before another beat came. He was finished. It was over.

  “G-h.” Alexandra flopped the dictionary open on the desk beside him. “There’s only a few g-h words. Ghastly, ghetto, ghibil, ghost, ghoul. Only a few, and only one that really fits with gray.”

  He wasn’t following her. He was huddled in that bathroom. The men prowling outside. Men peeking in the window, pulling the boards loose. Drunk, crazed men.

  “Sugarman? Are you listening to me?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Trying to.”

  “Gray Ghost,” she said. “It’s the only one that makes sense.”

  “Bonefish,” Sugar said. “Gray ghost. That’s its nickname.”

  “Okay,” she said. “That’s good. Now we need to go on-line. We’ve got to search this. We know it’s a region on the Central American coast and we know something there is called Gray Ghost.”

  “Yeah,” Sugarman said. But he was still riding that shaft of light, a laser that rose from the jungle floor and pierced the sky and came rocketing back to Earth with his daughter’s voice riding along, Janey’s face and her thrill over toucans and her fright and pain.

  Alexandra swiveled the computer to the side and tapped the touch pad a few times, and he heard the modem’s chirp and squall as it connected to the server. She tapped more keys and then a few moments later she spoke quietly: “Okay, okay, good.”

  “What is it?” Sugarman said.

  “Twenty-two hits,” she said. She swiveled the computer so he could see, then scrolled down the list. “Most of it is John Mosby, a Civil War soldier. Also known as ‘the Gray Ghost.’”

  “Civil War?” Sugar’s mind was stuttering, two steps out of sync.

  Alex worked down the list, brought up each Web page that seemed likely, scanned it, and quickly moved on. In three or four minutes she was done.

  “We could try another search engine, but this is usually the best. Google.”

  “How do you know this stuff?”

  “It’s very basic, Sugar, I use it at work. Now ‘Gray Ghost, Central America.’ Is there another thing to try, another word?”

  “Nicaragua,” he said.

  She tapped it in, got over sixteen hundred hits. They scanned the list together, Sugarman starting to come out of it, head clearing, feeling this had to work. The last resort.

  “Too many,” he said. “Try gray ghost, kingfisher, and Central America.”

  Alex killed the first search and tapped in the fresh parameters.

  A few seconds later, she said, “Nothing, no documents.”

  “All right, try gray ghost and Costa Rica.”

  “I thought you said ‘Nicaragua.’”

  Sugarman reached out and grabbed the pages of notes he’d made, pawed through them quickly, found the map he’d cut out of the encyclopedia.

  “This longitude, eighty-four degrees west, it skims into the northeastern edge of Costa Rica. The kingfisher overlaps with that, too.”

  She put it in. Gray ghost and Costa Rica. A half-second later the hits came up.

  “Here,” she said. “Right there.” She touched a finger to the screen, the third item down. “Gray Ghost Lodge. A fishing camp. Ten cabins, on the coast of Costa Rica in the Barra de Colorado, Limón Province. Bingo.”

  “Double bingo.”

  He was fully awake now, staring at the computer as Alex brought up the Web page for the Gray Ghost Lodge. The page taking forever to load.

  The three small pictures finally unspooled, showing a clearing in the jungle. Wood cabins, walkways, a marina, small airstrip. Five hundred dollars a day to fish for tarpon and bonefish or take guided ecotours into the rain forest. “A vast array of exotic wildlife,” the ad copy said. “Toucans, three-toed sloths. The lodge offers a rare combination of quality service, comfort, and unspoiled wilderness. The complete isolation provides an atmosphere of absolute relaxation.”

  “You have any idea where this is, Sugar?”

  “I don’t,” he said. Feeling a flood of heat in his face and chest. “But we’re about to find out.”

  “It’s four-thirty in the morning, for chrissakes,” Kirk Graham said on the phone. “I got a trip tomorrow, Rio and back with a one-day turnaround.”

  Lawton was inside the house sleeping while Alex stood next to Sugar out on the front porch. He was using his cell to keep from waking the old man.

  “Hey, Kirk, I’m desperate. You’re my last chance.”

  “Man, I got to fly tomorrow. Didn’t you hear me?”

  “It’s about Janey, my daughter. She’s been kidnapped and she’s being held in the jungle in Costa Rica.”

  “Christ, call the police.”

  “Kirk, listen to me. I need an amphibian. A plane like the one we saw at Vic Joy’s. Steal it, rent it, borrow it, whatever it takes. But we need it, and we need it now.”

  Kirk laughed.

  “You don’t want much.”

  “Can you do it, Kirk?”

  “And I guess you want me to fly it, too, over to Costa Rica?”

  “I guess I do, yeah.”

  “Man, Sugar. Man, oh, man.”

  “Do you know where we can get a plane like that?”

  Kirk was silent for a moment. Alex was staring up at the stars, a clear night, the heavens peeled open to reveal all their secrets.

  “There is this one guy I know,” Kirk said.

  “Great,” Sugarman said.

  “But I don’t know about the range. It’s a beauty of a plane, a big single-engine Cessna Caravan. But hell, a thousand nautical miles, I don’t know, that
might be a hundred or so beyond what this baby can do on a single tank.”

  “So we’ll stop somewhere and fill up again.”

  “Out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico? Right.”

  “And there’ll be two others along. Adults.”

  “Two others? Jesus. That’s cutting it damn close, Sugar.”

  “They’re coming, Kirk. No way I can leave them behind.”

  “Well, we’ll have to stay low, avoid the headwinds. That would offset some of it. Maybe clip Cuba a little.”

  “Where do we meet you, Kirk? Give me a location.”

  Alexandra brought her eyes down from the heavens. She smiled at Sugar and balled her hand into a fist and held it shoulder-high. Yeah!

  With his blue duffel full of handguns sitting by the front door and Alex and Lawton waiting on the porch, Sugarman went back into the guest bedroom, sat down at the desk, and reconnected to Markham’s server and clicked his way to the video chat room. The screen was blank. Outside his back window, the sun was beginning to waken the mockingbirds and blue jays. On a low branch a fat squirrel twitched its tail at a neighbor’s cat and jeered.

  He waited for a minute in the empty room.

  Alexandra came to the bedroom door and stood there for a few seconds watching him.

  “We’d better get going, Sugar. It’s six, seven hours. We’ll be lucky to get there by noon.”

  “I know. I know.”

  Alex dug into the pocket of her jeans and came out with a business card and held it up.

  “I got to call this guy,” she said. “Before we go, I have to call him.”

  “Who?” Sugarman stared at the empty screen.

  “Agent Fox, the guy I told you about at Thorn’s. You understand that, don’t you? It’s my duty.”

  “I understand.”

  Sugarman was still staring at the empty screen.

  “I don’t want to do it,” Alex said. “I know how those SWAT types can be. When he hears about this, he’ll come with everything they’ve got. All those thugs gathered in one spot. I mean, I could try to wheedle a promise out of him. Rescuing Janey would be his top priority or I refuse to give him the details.”

  “You can’t do that,” Sugar said.

  “It’s what Thorn would do. He’d finagle something. He wouldn’t play by their rules.”

  “You’re not Thorn. You’ve got obligations.”

  “I don’t know, Sugar. But with all those men in that camp, the place swarming with them, I just don’t know. It’s such a volatile situation, no way to know how it’ll break if the feds hit them head-on.”

  “We can’t control their strategy,” Sugar said.

  “You sure? It’s your call.”

  “It’s the right thing to do,” he said. “They’re the proper authorities.”

  “Are you all right? You sound like you’ve given up.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m all right. You’ll call Fox, because it’s what’s right and proper. But just don’t do it till the last second before we take off. That way the chances are we’ll get there first. If the layout looks right, we take a shot, just you and me. We know where Janey is. We make a run at it before the cavalry arrives.”

  “I can live with that,” she said.

  Sugarman pushed back his chair and was reaching for the touch pad to disconnect when there was a tiny pop and Janey’s ghostly face materialized on the screen.

  “Holy shit.” Sugarman sat up straight. “Janey?”

  “I’ve been trying,” she said. “The battery’s beeping, it might go out. But I had to try.”

  “What is it, sweetie? We’re about to leave. We know where you are now, we’re on our way.”

  “Thorn’s here,” she said.

  “What?”

  “He’s in a cage, hanging from a tree, Daddy. It’s Thorn. I looked at him in the binoculars. He’s hanging from a limb. I don’t know if he’s still alive.”

  And she was gone.

  Sugar was getting into Alex’s car when he heard his phone ringing. He sprinted back, got the door open, made it to the phone, ripped it up. Dead.

  He punched in the star code to callback and got a young man’s voice.

  “Who is this?”

  “Who is this?” the young man said.

  “This is Sugarman. You just called me.”

  “Oh, yeah, hello. This is Special Agent Meeker. I was told by Agent Sheffield that you needed a call trace on a satellite phone.”

  “Already did it,” Sugar said. “The old-fashioned way.”

  And hung up and sprinted to the car.

  Thirty

  Anne Bonny Joy was lying on the mattress she and Daniel had shared for so short a time. His scent was gone from the pillow. Replaced now by a musty scent and the tang of wood smoke from the dying bonfires. Only the last wisps still rose from the embers.

  Outside, men were sprawled in the shade on blankets and in bed-rolls; the ones she supposed had more status were crammed into a few of the cabins. She’d seen a couple of women, too, as she and Vic and Thorn and the others had tramped up from the marina a while ago. Prostitutes, from the look of them, small half-naked Mayan women curled close beside the sleeping men. The gagging stench of sweat and putrid food filled the camp.

  Whiskey bottles littered the grounds; automatic weapons and handguns lay close beside the sleepers; machetes had been stuck deep into several trees. Everywhere she looked there were scraps of bread and tortillas, chicken bones, and the charred remains of greasy meat hanging from spits. There were even some fast-food Styrofoam containers scattered about, as if some of the men had made a quick stop in San José or Puerto Limón to pick up food along with the women before finishing the last short leg to the jungle.

  Two small planes were parked on the short asphalt runway. Several boats and a small trawler were tied up at the marina. Anchored a half-mile offshore she’d seen three heavily chromed sportfishing yachts. Boats that cost millions, though more than likely their current owners had not paid a cent for them.

  She’d counted maybe thirty men as she picked her way to the cabin and found it empty. Reserved for Vic and his entourage.

  Now she was alone, lying flat on her back, staring up at the naked rafters, listening to the rain forest. That at least had gone unchanged, the clamor of the jungle, the songs of insects, the hiss and shriek and cawing of dozens of hidden creatures, flittering and darting just beyond the range of sight. Listening to it. As she listened to the bright noise, the screams of ecstasy and terror, her head gradually cleared. The dense mist parted. And without warning, all her senses seemed to clear. She saw and smelled and heard everything, absolutely everything. No thoughts, no worries, no grief, no confusion.

  Just this! This place in the wild. The reek of the moment. Only those noises and the perfume of wood smoke. No Anne Bonny. No Antoinette and Jack Joy. No Harlan. Nothing but the sag of the mattress beneath her weight, the rising light, the voices waking outside, men stirring.

  It felt religious. Like incense in a cathedral, and sunlight fractured through stained glass, and organ music swelling in the enormous sanctuary. The holiness. A vast opening inside her, filling with light, filling with sacred oxygen. Like nothing mattered. Like she didn’t matter. For the first time. For the first time since before she could remember being alive. Way, way, way back before anything. Before galleons, before the dreary, ridiculous pirate novels, before breath itself.

  Just this. Just this place, this mattress and this cabin and this body.

  Drunk, stoned, ecstatic, swimming beyond herself, rising through an airless grave to break through to the oxygen, the holy air. It didn’t matter. It truly didn’t. None of it. Loving, hating. Living, dying. Every touch, every word and gesture. It was just flux. Simply the endless ticker tape of trivia.

  Anne stood up. She walked without knowing where she was headed. To the heavy oak dresser that stood against the west wall. Looking at it for a moment, then reaching out and opening the third drawer. In a swoon, a
dreamy wakefulness, she pulled out the empty drawer. Turned it over. Carried it back to the cot.

  Peeled off the adhesive. Held the cool weight, the mechanical beauty of blued steel. Fit her hand to it. No need to check the magazine. She knew it was loaded, she’d watched Daniel do it, watched him tape it there so many ages ago. The Beretta .25-caliber. Perfect for the purse. Perfect for her hand that curled around it and hefted it like some hallowed stone, some bright precious gem full of luxurious light, richly bright, terrible and mighty and utterly without meaning. That’s where everything had led. To this wild place. This Eden where everything had started, where everything was about to end.

  Just this!

  Okay, so maybe Thorn was still alive, maybe he wasn’t. At that second, he didn’t know. All he knew was that his brain was busy with a vision of a few hours earlier when he’d first arrived at Vic Joy’s compound and Vic had examined his body so carefully. Like a slave trader at auction. And now Thorn knew what that was all about. Measuring him for his new suit, all this thought out in advance. Giving himself plenty of time to construct this metal cage that Marshall and the other biker had hauled out of the rear of the floatplane, clanking and rattling, then lugged it up the hill to the campground.

  When he’d seen what was coming, Thorn had chosen that precise moment to move. Swiveling on Marty, he’d popped him once in the point of his jaw and sent him reeling backward into the two bikers. But Vic’s silent rage at Thorn had given him hair-trigger reflexes.

  Vic clipped him hard on the skull, and as Thorn wavered, watching a flock of toucans fluttering into the sky, Vic cracked him a second time and sent him down into the splintered darkness.

  When he woke, he was suited in the armor, suspended ten feet off the ground. Still alive, maybe, but it was taking a while to be absolutely sure. The sensation bleeding back inch by inch, fingertips, toes, joint by joint, lips and tongue, the soft tissue parts of him.

  A good view of the grounds from up there. Ten cabins, a dining hall. Men gathering around the tree branch to horse around and punch one another in excitement and celebration. A giant party favor hung out for their amusement. Thorn, the piñata.