Off the Chart

by James W. Hall

  Ramon sent another look to the Chinese men, and the largest of them stepped swiftly behind Vic and seized his hands and wrenched his arms in some way that made Vic Joy yelp and hold perfectly still.

  Janey looked up with tears streaming, then buried her face in her palms again. Thorn touched the top of her head with his fingertips.

  Vic opened his mouth to speak, to protest, to talk his way out of this one. But the Chinese man reached around Vic and raised a blade to his throat.

  “Hey!” Marshall yelled, and started forward, but Ramon Bella’s other thug barked for him to stay put and leveled his pistol. Marshall halted.

  Vic grunted once and dipped to the side and ripped free of the Chinese man’s grasp and ducked below the swinging blade. He was across the room, halfway to the door, when the Latino behind Thorn raised his pistol and aimed.

  “No!” Ramon Bella yelled. “Let him go. He’s no use to anyone.”

  Vic tore through the door and swung to the right and sprinted into the dense foliage behind the dining room.

  “Angel,” Bella said. “Go disable his floatplane; blow it up, burn it, whatever’s easiest. Vic Joy won’t last a day in this place by himself. In a week the vultures will be cleaning his bones.”

  The heavy Latino replied in Spanish and marched from the room.

  “All right, that’s done.” Ramon Bella looked over at the man guarding Thorn. “Benito, we’re leaving now. I want you to take care of the Americans. Tidy up, me entiendes? Be gentle with them. Show them the courtesy you would an honored guest.”

  “Certainly,” Benito said. “It will be my pleasure.”

  Thirty-Two

  Alex took the Glock from Sugar, jacked the slide, and that’s when he knew they were going to be okay. With Sugarman leading, they sloshed along the shoreline holding pistols in each hand, no words passing between them. He hadn’t even looked into her eyes to check if there was a blip of worry. Pretty sure there wasn’t but didn’t want to see it if there was.

  By the time the vegetation had begun to thin and some daylight showed up ahead, Sugar was drenched from rain and sweat. Fourth or fifth time he’d soaked through that particular shirt since he’d put it on three days ago. He smelled like a camel, and his breath tasted foul.

  He stopped behind a thick tree and peered through a notch in the brush. There were birds in the canopy, squawks and screams and whistles and pish pish noises, things whooshing up there, unsettled. On the beach and in the marina, boats were roaring to life and heading out. Inflatables full of men, some random gunfire. Automatics firing in irregular bursts—the sputter and pop of celebration or farewell salutes.

  “They’re leaving,” Alex whispered. “Party’s breaking up.”

  “We’re not too late,” he said. “We can’t be.”

  She touched him on the shoulder.

  Sugar said, “She’s in the cabin on this end, south side. A pond, she mentioned a pond.”

  “Stay together or separate?”

  “You stay on this line, keep working north. I’ll hook into the brush, come at it from the west.”

  She nodded. The woman was an ID tech. Good with a camera. Brushing for fingerprints, vials of Luminol, carrying her science kit full of fine-tooth combs. But she looked very comfortable with the gun in her hand. Maybe comfortable was wrong. But experienced. Okay with it.

  “How do we tell friend from foe?” she said.

  “If you don’t know their middle name, they’re foes.”

  “Maybe we should wait a second, let more of them leave,” Alex said. “I don’t know if we got ammo for this many.”

  “I’m after Janey,” Sugarman said. “If Thorn’s here, him, too. Shooting is a last resort.”

  “Spoken like a cop.”

  He said, “I’ll get to the cabin in two, three minutes. You might be quicker, so wait at the edge, find some cover. Better if we’re coordinated. Go in together.”

  “Take it away.”

  Sugar groped through the vines and half-light. The shower had let up a few minutes earlier and now steam rose from the forest floor. He held a course just twenty or thirty feet off the shore, digging through the branches and undergrowth, sweat stinging his eyes.

  Then up ahead he heard a voice, someone speaking in English but with a tinge of salsa. Not Cuban; he knew that accent very well. This voice was dignified, almost British. Couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was snake-charmer calm.

  Maybe it was because he was tuned to her pitch, a father’s extra-sensory awareness, for among all that raucous jungle music and gunfire he heard a cry, a soft whimper, and knew it was Janey. Knew it down to the root of his spine.

  He changed his angle toward her voice, a line closer to the beach, still trying to keep from rustling the leaves, snapping a stick, but moving faster now, in a crouch. Using the barrels of the pistols to tug aside the web of brush. The voice speaking again in English with that soft and careful enunciation of old Spain. Calm, respectful, well-bred. Sugar’s skin was prickling and his head was empty. His future didn’t matter anymore. Throw himself on a grenade, whatever was required.

  Sugar ducked through the matted branches, fumbled forward through the thick weave of twigs and vines, till shit, he was almost on top of them. Four people on their knees, their backs to Sugar. Two steps away. Thorn, Janey, and two other guys with long, scraggly hair. From his position Sugar couldn’t tell if the Latino was alone or if there were a dozen others standing close by.

  As he craned to the side for a better view, the Latino speaking in that soothing voice said he wanted them to stay exactly like they were, frozen in that position, while one of them counted slowly out loud to a hundred and he and his friends had time to get safely away. The man suggested that Thorn should do the counting. Then the man asked if they fully understood the instructions, nothing short of a hundred. And when they mumbled their agreement, he told Thorn that he could begin with the counting.

  Thorn hesitated for a moment, head bowed forward, but Sugarman could see he was straining to see behind him, then he said, “One,” while the Latino stepped in close behind the red-haired guy in a black T-shirt and camouflage fatigues and aimed into the back of his head and fired. Snake-quick the Latino pointed at the next kneeling man.

  But in that fraction of a second the scene blew apart. Thorn swiveled and rolled his body over Janey’s and slung a handful of mud and leaves at the Latino’s face, then hooked a leg around the shooter’s ankle and dragged him down, the man tumbling onto his back but recovering instantly and sighting his pistol into Thorn’s chest, and Sugarman stepped forward and fired twice and hit the man with both shots in his stomach, and a half-second later Alexandra hurtled out of the bushes ten feet to the east and fired four or five shots into the head and shoulders of another Latino Sugarman had failed to see, a man who when he fell was taking aim at the center of Sugar’s forehead.

  Thorn lay atop Janey till the gunfire was done.

  And then as he lifted up and looked across at Sugar and Alex, his face torn and bleeding but with a lopsided smile, overhead black helicopters filled the sky.

  Sugarman whisked Janey into his arms. Thorn looked up at the choppers, four, five, a couple more arriving from the west. Then he looked at Alex. She was gripping a pistol in each hand, but she lifted her arms and held them open and Thorn walked into the embrace. She turned her head to the side and laid it on Thorn’s shoulder and he breathed in the scent of her hair and the heady tartness of her sweat.

  She held him tightly and he felt the poke of the pistols in his back, and then that sensation and every other one dissolved as she clenched him harder and he gripped her with equal force.

  “You son of a bitch,” she whispered into his ear. “You worthless bastard.”

  “Yeah,” he mumbled back. “I love you, too.”

  The pirates in the boats and the others still on land had opened fire on the helicopters, and the men in the choppers were returning it. An amplified voice rumbled from the sky, giv
ing orders to the fleeing men, but the voice was garbled in all that noise and fury and gunfire.

  Alex eased out of the embrace. A step away, Sugarman was cradling Janey, both of them weeping. The other biker was long gone.

  “That’s Fox,” Alexandra said. “And America’s finest.”

  “How the hell did you find this place?”

  “Birds,” she said. “Birds and butterflies and moonrises. You got a great friend, Thorn. A real great friend.”

  “More than one, I hope.”

  “We’ll see about that,” she said. “We’ll have to see.”

  Ten feet behind them a spray of machine-gun fire tore into the cabin, slugs ripping open the shingled roof, then more lead kicked up a patch of dirt near one of the fallen Latinos.

  “Hey!” Thorn stepped out into the open ground and motioned up to the descending chopper. Dark-clothed men hung from the open bay and sighted on their group. Thorn held up his hands. “Hey!”

  Marshall Marshall’s body jumped as the automatic weapon fire riddled his remains and more gunfire danced around them, spurting in the dirt.

  “Never a dull moment,” the old man shouted. Lawton stumbled out of the snarl of vines, his puppy trailing him. Behind them Kirk Graham rushed into the clearing.

  “He got away from me. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  Thorn was waving his arms at the helicopter. The loudspeaker roared some command, a man speaking in English, but his words were again lost in the racket.

  “They think we’re the bad guys,” Sugarman said. “Let’s go.”

  Lawton ducked down and seized a handgun lying next to the Latino and raised it and fired three quick shots at the chopper before Thorn could grab him and spin him around and haul him into the dense foliage.

  All about them bullets ripped the leaves and splintered branches. Chunks of the damp ground erupted at their feet. Janey screamed and they fled into deeper cover. Branches snatched and lashed at them, vines tripped them. Sugar leading the way with Janey in his arms. Thorn and Alex gripped Lawton’s arms, dragging him along. The puppy barked in a frenzy and trotted beside them and took nips at Thorn’s ankles.

  The voice in the sky rumbled again, but the blare of engines drowned it out. Thirty, forty yards in, the jungle grew more dense, but in every direction slugs continued to shred the brush.

  A few feet ahead of Thorn, Kirk Graham bellowed and went down, and Thorn got to him first. A tear had opened across the meat of his right thigh.

  “I’m all right,” he said. “I’m all right. I’m all right.”

  Thorn looped Kirk’s arm across his shoulder and hauled him forward through the maze of green. His eyes blinded by the bite of twigs and stung by nettles. The chopper swung away and was gone for a moment, then circled back, hovering close and letting loose another barrage.

  “Hold it!” Sugar shouted.

  The group halted, then gathered around him.

  “They can’t see us from here, but they’ll be putting people on the ground. They may be on the ground already. We need to wait.”

  “And then?” Thorn said.

  Kirk groaned and sagged heavily against him.

  “Then we pick our moment and make a dash for the plane.”

  “These are our guys. We didn’t do anything wrong,” Kirk said.

  “Yeah, we did,” Sugar said. “We got in their way.”

  At the edge of the jungle, they waited within sight of the inflatable. The chopper came and went; no doubt the men up there had binoculars and were scanning for breaks in the canopy.

  “Forget the boat,” Thorn said. “Too big a target; we’ll never make it. We’re going to have to swim.”

  “Swim?” Lawton said. “I could use a swim. It’s hot as hell in this place.”

  The puppy yelped and slumped hard against Thorn’s leg and when he looked down he saw that a slug had sheared off a few inches of the dog’s tail.

  “Goddamn it,” the old man said. “Lawton’s wounded.”

  Alex tore the sleeve from her shirt and wrapped the puppy’s tail.

  While she made the knot tight, Janey came over to the injured dog and sank down beside him and stroked his head, and the pup calmed and washed his tongue over her bare leg.

  The chopper had been gone for several minutes when they heard quiet voices in the jungle behind them, the muffled grunts of men following the same path they’d traveled minutes earlier.

  “All right,” Sugar said. “Buddy up and let’s do it.”

  “These are our own frigging guys,” Kirk said. “What’re we doing?”

  Thorn took Kirk. Alex took Lawton.

  They followed Sugarman as he sprinted out of the shadows of the thicket with Janey in his arms. He trotted along the edge of a mucky beach, the jungle a few feet to their right, the glittering blue water stretching off on the other side.

  A half-mile out at sea several helicopters hovered above three white yachts. Thorn could see the wake boiling up behind the big boats and the bright yellow flashes of ordnance coming from the decks and answered from the sky.

  Kirk was gimping along fairly quickly given the ugliness of the wound, his right arm still slung over Thorn’s shoulder. Sugarman waded out into the water and let Janey go and they started breast-stroking side by side, Sugar giving her words of encouragement.

  The floatplane was a hundred yards away, but it might as well have been ten miles. Out on that open water there was no hiding. But the helicopters appeared to be engaged with the yachts and this was their moment.

  They swam. Kirk struggling, thrashing his arms hard. Lawton did a graceful crawl, head held high and steady, like something he’d learned at the YMCA a hundred years ago and not forgotten a bit of. Beside him the dog kept pace. Alex slid along in a sidestroke beside him, looking across at Thorn, sending him eye messages. Despite the embrace, the words of love, there was sadness there, and he knew forgiveness was not going to come easily.

  Ahead of him, Sugar paused midstroke and took a backward glance at the beach and frowned. Thorn followed his gaze and there, thirty, forty yards away, standing knee-deep in the water, was Vic Joy. He was naked, with what looked like a large hunting knife clamped in his mouth.

  Thorn swung around and headed back to shore, but Alex lurched out and grabbed him by the shoulder and Thorn halted. A foot or two apart the two of them treaded water while the others swam on.

  “What’re you doing!”

  “I’ve got to get him.”

  “Get him?”

  “Kill him,” Thorn said. “The fucker kidnapped Janey. He burned down my house.”

  “Your house!”

  The others were only forty yards from the plane. Sugarman was calling back to them to hurry up, come on, come on.

  “That man’s going to keep coming after me, Alex. I got to take care of this now, or I’ll be looking over my shoulder the rest of my life.”

  “Goddamn it, Thorn. Leave it alone. You’re putting us all in danger. We’ve got to go now. Right now. No time for this. Let the feds have him.”

  She gripped Thorn’s shoulder and tugged him toward the plane. He resisted for a moment, then put himself in motion and began to swim again close beside her.

  The slices on Thorn’s hands were stinging and seeping blood, and he was leaving a filmy trail through the crystal sea. A shark attractor, though sharks were hardly high on his list of concerns. He took another quick glance back to the beach, but Vic had disappeared. Thorn swung back into his stroke and caught up with Alex.

  They were halfway to the boat and the water around them was so blue and clear that when he opened his eyes as he swam he could see the conch shells and rays scooting along the bright white sand fifteen feet below. A small cluster of orange elkhorn coral twisted up from the sand, bright fish weaving through the spiny branches.

  Ahead, the floatplane was tucked into a cove just this side of a jut of land. Half a football field away, an easy jog if they’d been on land, but his arms were already weighted with wear
iness and the silky water seemed to be making him even more sluggish. Loss of blood, lack of sleep, the deep plummet of his body’s chemistry that came after the last surge of adrenaline burned away. He looked ahead at the other swimmers. His friends, his lover. The inner circle of his heart.

  Alex drove forward with a strong, even stroke and a hard-bubbling flutter kick and she caught up to her father and Thorn brought up the rear, swimming freestyle, an easy stroke he’d mastered as a child, swimming alone in the shallow waters of the Keys.

  Of course Alexandra was right about going back for Vic. It was pure selfishness, a mad impulse that risked the lives of these people he cherished. Another bad instinct formed by a lifetime of isolation. A man living alone could do as he pleased, follow his codes, develop his eccentric routines, his peculiar addictions. He could lash out at those who threatened him without fear of endangering others. But in this new circumstance, he was bound by a different set of rules. To live within a group required a limberness of spirit, an absolute need to compromise and adjust. Subordinating his maverick urges to the needs of the common good. By God, it ran contrary to every inclination Thorn had acquired over the years, but as he knifed through the water, he found himself, for no reason at all, trying to mirror Alex’s stroke, swimming in unison for once. Adjusting his natural willfulness to the needs and wisdom of the group.

  Sugarman and Janey were only seconds from reaching the floatplane when the black chopper swung around the nearby point of land, roaring twenty feet above the water.

  The two men leaning out of the open bay were close enough for him to read their name tags. Janey screamed as a spray of bullets dimpled the sea all around them. Sugarman stopping short, sheltering his daughter with one arm, sculling with the other. The chopper hovered close as if the marksmen were choosing the best angle, and the water kicked into foamy chop while the shooters fixed their sights.

  They would’ve all been dead in seconds, chewed to pulp by those streams of lead, if it weren’t for a shipment of military arms that had been stolen months earlier by pirates in the South China Sea, a cargo that James Lee Webster had described to Thorn, serious, heavy-duty weaponry, a payload that must have included at least a few heat-seeking missiles, because that’s what flashed off the nearest yacht, one after the other. Shoulder-fired, streaks of wind and scorching light.