by Zoe Sharp
Around the boats, spilt fuel created greasy rainbow rings in the water. The whole place had a run-down dirty air to it, but retained a certain picturesque quality, even so. More like a film set than real life.
Next to the building sat the rusting hulk of an old step-side pickup, a relic from the 50s. It was no longer possible to tell what colour the body might once have been. Tough grasses and weeds had grown up past the level of the floor and were making slow but steady progress in retaking the ground they’d lost during the first engagement.
“Where are you planning on putting them?” Haines asked as he approached. He had Trey by the scruff of his neck, casually shoving him along in front of him.
Mason glanced at Brown before replying, as though he didn’t like being questioned by the cop. “We’ve a couple of storerooms in the back,” he said, short, jerking his head towards the timber building. “They can stay there for a couple of hours or so. Until it’s time.”
Haines shrugged and nodded. “Sounds good to me,” he said and then he turned to Brown. “What do you want to do about the others – the kids she was with in Daytona?”
“Let’s make sure this mess is cleared up first, then you can go tie up the loose ends,” Brown said.
Trey started to squirm harder, protesting. Haines didn’t even bother to look at him, just tightened his grip. I could see his knuckles turning white with the effort he was putting into punishing the boy.
“Let him go,” I said with quiet feeling.
Haines looked at me and smiled while Trey thrashed at the end of his arm like a hooked fish.
“Or what?”
“Oh, leave him be,” Brown said with mild irritation. “You’ll get your chance for that.” He checked his watch. “Anyhow, I gotta scoot. It’s welcome night and I have to go play genial host up at the clubhouse.”
Haines dropped his hold with marked reluctance, even though he was still smiling at me.
Brown ignored him and moved back to the Suburban. He climbed in and cranked up the engine before leaning out of the window. “Let me know when it’s done.”
He rolled up the tinted window and the Chevy quickly disappeared down the narrow track cut between the Cypress trees. We could see his dust trail long after he had gone.
Mason looked at Whitmarsh and Lonnie. “Well, I guess you got a choice now,” he said. “Either you do what the boss man wants with these people, or you join ‘em. What’ll it be?”
Despite the doubts I’d tried to plant on the ride down there, Whitmarsh barely hesitated. “We’ll do it,” he said, looking me right in the eye as he spoke. “Don’t you worry none about that.”
***
They put Sean and me into one storeroom and Trey and his father into the other. The rooms had bare concrete floors and a row of tiny windows, little more than meshed glass vents up under the roof line. Apart from that they were empty of either creature comforts or possibilities for escape.
Mason’s only concession to our well-being was to take the keys from Whitmarsh and unlock the restraints. I think it was probably down to Whitmarsh’s obviously lack of enthusiasm for letting Sean loose that made Mason do it, rather than any particular concern on his part. When Sean shook his hands free I could see the bloody bracelet marks on both wrists but he never even winced.
Then they put us inside our prison and locked and padlocked the door behind us. We listened in silence as their booted footsteps receded.
“So this is it.” Sean’s voice was disembodied in the gloom.
“Maybe,” I said. “We still have a chance to get out of this.”
I felt him turn. “You reckon?”
“You remember what was said at the Ocean Center?” I asked. “Well, Trey and I have been helped out over the last couple of days by a retired FBI man called Walt – lives down on the beach. He gave me one of those micro-cassette tape recorders to try and get a confession out of Gerri Raybourn.” I blanked out my own reasons for wanting to confront Gerri and pushed on. “It was in my bag at the Ocean Center. It should have got everything that happened there.”
For a moment Sean was silent. “If it recorded OK from the inside of a bag,” he said at last. “If the local cops bother to play it back. And if they recognise its significance and pass it on to the FBI, we might have a chance. That’s a lot of ‘ifs’, Charlie.”
“I know that,” I said, hearing the wobble in my voice. “But right now it’s the only hope we’ve got of getting out of this, so please don’t take it away from me.”
I heard him sigh. “Come here,” he said. My eyes were beginning to adjust to the dimness now. I could see his outline more clearly but I would have known where to find him, in any case. My system was tuned to his, alert and sensitive.
I walked into his open arms without a stumble and laid my head against his chest. Under my ear his heart beat a steady hypnotic rhythm. His hands closed gently across my back, enveloping me.
I wanted to stay like that forever.
“I thought I’d never get to do this again,” he said into my hair, so quiet I had to strain to catch the words.
I said nothing. What could I say? That I’d already accepted his death? I kept the cold little secret to myself. It sounded so faithless to admit it out loud.
Sean didn’t seem to notice my silence. “They got me getting out of the bloody swimming pool – how stupid is that?” he said, rueful. Those agile fingers had begun to stroke up and down my spine, feeling their way across each vertebra, almost distracted.
“I managed to put Whitmarsh on his arse before Chris waded in and then Lonnie turned up with that shotgun and made it pretty damned clear I was a disposable item. Chucked some clothes at me, then it was the usual blindfold and cuffs and into the boot of his car.” I felt him shrug to try and slacken the tension that was tightening him up as he recounted the story. “I thought that was it. Game over. They’d lined the whole thing with plastic.”
“I know,” I said, remembering what we’d found in the boot of the Taurus I’d hijacked outside Henry’s place.
“The worst thing was knowing what they had planned for you and not being able to do a damned thing about it,” he went on. “They were talking about you like you were already dead.”
“We probably would have been if I hadn’t found the SIG where you left it,” I said. And as I said it I remembered that I’d abandoned the gun, too, in the little flowered bag at the Ocean Center. What I would have done to have it back right now.
“I wasn’t sure if they’d miss it when they cleaned out my room,” Sean said, “but I knew if they did you’d find it. If you made it back to the house.”
“Yeah, we made it.”
“So I understand. You know where I was when that little bit of news came through?” Sean said and his voice had taken on a flat, dispassionate tone now, like he was debriefing after a disastrous operation, burying the emotion and keeping strictly to the facts.
I gave a slight shake of my head, though I realised his question was largely rhetorical.
“Haines took me out into the Everglades – some godforsaken track in the middle of nowhere – and they put me on my knees and he put a gun to the back of my head,” he said calmly, although under my cheekbone his heart was punching like a fist. “And just before he did it Haines’s mobile rang and that’s when he found out that they’d missed you at the house, and then again at the motel. And they thought I might still have some value, after all.”
“Jesus,” I murmured.
He told me the rest then, not that there was much to tell. They’d kept him and Keith in a darkened room not unlike this one and told him nothing. The only time he’d gleaned that something was happening was when Whitmarsh’s crew had suddenly tooled up and cleared out in a hurry yesterday. Their mood had been one of jubilation, he said, as though they’d set a trap for me.
Which, of course, they had. With Henry as the bait.
Sean had sat and sweated until their return and then the ill-tempered slamming of doors
and kicking of walls and the morose snatches of conversation had made it plain that I’d somehow got Trey away from them again.
“I felt so damned helpless, just waiting for it to happen, and then the relief was just incredible,” he confessed. “Not just at your survival but my own too, I suppose. I don’t know what you did, Charlie, but it really pissed them off.”
So I told him my side of the story. The only part I glossed over was my real intention when I’d gone to face down Gerri. I wasn’t quite ready to admit that yet. Even to Sean.
Eventually we sat against the wall opposite the doorway, close together, unashamedly holding hands. The floor was hard and unforgiving, and occasionally things with more legs than I wanted to think about skittered across it but at least they weren’t rats. Besides, I was just so glad to be with Sean that I didn’t care about the minor problems of insect infestation and my backside going to sleep.
Outside, the sun finally began to lose its harsh edge as another day died in flawless, but largely-ignored tragic beauty. The light filtering through the vents turned mellow, almost misty, as the ferocious heat started to abate a little.
Sean and I sat without speaking as we watched the onset of the end of the day, my head tilted onto his shoulder. There was too much to say to know where to start and so it was better to say none of it than to say it badly.
“If you see a chance, Charlie, take it,” Sean said at last. “If I have to go I’d rather go out fighting than being caught with my bloody pants down again.”
“You never told me you were skinny-dipping in the pool,” I said.
Just for a moment he laughed and squeezed my fingers.
“I’m serious,” he said. “If you get an opportunity, don’t hesitate. They won’t, that’s for sure.”
He paused and when he spoke again his voice had lost any trace of amusement. “Do you remember you once told me that if I went out of my way to kill a man – even one who blatantly deserved it – you’d feel compelled to try and stop me?”
My mouth had suddenly gone so dry I had to peel my tongue away from the roof of it. “Yes,” I said. “I remember.”
“You know what you mean to me, don’t you, Charlie?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “Good,” he said, cool and distant now. “So this time, don’t try and stop me.”
I should have made some response to that. How could I accept such a sinister statement of intent without argument? If you planned to kill in advance of needing to, it wasn’t self-defence any more. It was murder.
But I knew all about planning a murder, didn’t I?
And then we heard the footsteps approaching and it was too late for anything else but jumping to our feet, braced and ready.
The light gushed in like floodwater as the door was unlocked and swung wide. Beyond it stood Whitmarsh, now reunited with his Beretta. His jaw was set, determined. He waved us out with a jerk of his head.
“OK people,” he said, tense. “It’s time to go for a little ride.”
Twenty-four
I’d never been in an airboat before. Given other circumstances I might even have enjoyed the experience.
Each craft was around eighteen or twenty feet in length, with a flat-bottomed hull that sat less than six inches into the water. Rows of ridged aluminium bench seats for the long-departed day trippers filled the blunt forward part of the boat.
At the rear was the hulking great V8 Chevy motor. It looked like it had been lifted straight out of a Yank truck, leaving the better part of its exhaust silencer system behind in the process.
The motor was connected to a giant carbon fibre prop, mounted inside a mesh guard above the stern. Just in front of that, at the controls, sat Mason. He was wearing a Rolling Rock baseball hat with a pair of camouflage-coloured ear defenders jammed over the top and he watched our approach without any expression on his face. One of the Mossberg shotguns was slotted into a rack by his raised seat.
Whitmarsh brought us out first, then unlocked the door to retrieve Trey and his father. Keith came scurrying out, jerking to a stop when the rush of movement brought guns up in his face.
“Look,” he said, sly now in his desperation, “we can still work this out! Trey really might have something to offer, y’know? Take him and I’ll work on the rest of the program for you. For nothing! I—”
That was as much as I could take of that but Sean beat me to it. He took one quick step forwards and hit Keith in the face with a beautiful right hand, following it up with a left to the solar plexus that dropped the little weasel gasping to his knees. Neither Whitmarsh nor Lonnie made any moves to stop him.
“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to see somebody do that to this piece of shit,” Whitmarsh said. “You’re a jerk, Pelzner. Now stop whining and get up.”
Keith regained his feet slowly, holding both hands to his bleeding nose. He glanced at his son for support but Trey wouldn’t even look at him.
Whitmarsh kept a hand on the boy’s shoulder as we walked single-file down to the waiting boat. It was a canny move on his part. Trey was probably the one person we’d all try to protect – all of us except Keith, that is.
By this time Mason had the motor cranked up and the prop had started to spin. The noise of it set a pair of gangling birds that looked like white herons to flight.
The black guy who’d burst into Brown’s office with Mason was waiting for us with the other Mossberg in the bow of the boat. Haines was further back, nonchalantly holding his usual Smith & Wesson pistol. He seemed to have it pointed as much at Whitmarsh as at the rest of us but it was hard to tell because his eyes were hidden behind those Oakleys again.
If Whitmarsh noticed this lack of trust, he gave no sign of it. Despite the fact that the burn had gone out of the day, he was still sweating heavily, his shirt sopping with it now.
What’s the matter, Jim? This too cold-blooded for you? Didn’t have any trouble at the motel, now did you?
The four of us, the condemned, ended up on one row in the centre of the airboat. Trey tucked himself in between me and Sean, leaving Keith to sit, sniffing loudly, on his own at the other side. Shunned even in his final moments.
Lonnie unhooked the bow rope from its post and jumped into the front section with the black guy. Whitmarsh climbed less nimbly into the row immediately behind us, with Haines lurking behind him, still smiling like this was the most fun he’d had with his clothes on in ages.
Mason cranked up the revs and moved away from the dock and I immediately understood why he was wearing those ear defenders. The V8 began to roar as the airboat glided across the small inlet and headed for the open swamp beyond, picking up speed all the while.
The surface of the swamp was coated in a thick layer of water hyacinths but, without any projections from the hull, the airboat scudded over the top of it. It hardly cut a swathe through the vegetation in its wake, leaving very little evidence to mark the trail to our final resting place.
Mason opened the throttle until we were really flying. He handled the airboat with easy confidence, banking into the turns as he skirted round the larger patches of weeds and semi-immersed trees. Insects of all descriptions splatted into us so hard you daren’t breathe with your mouth open or you would have swallowed enough of them to qualify as a last meal.
And all the time we were moving I was watching the men watching us, looking for a break, a weakness, a moment of inattention that would spell our opportunity.
It never came.
After ten minutes or so Mason eased back and the airboat’s speed dropped off until it was dead in the water, letting the motor idle lazily. The sudden reduction in noise was a deafening silence by comparison. Without the cooling breeze whipping past us, the temperature level also rose abruptly, so we almost seemed to be back to the high heat of the day even though the sunset was now in full swing.
We had come far enough to be out of sight of the small dock and the building next to it and had swerved about so much I couldn’t even have
pointed in the right direction to get back. We were in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by Cypress trees that towered out of the turgid water, draped with the Spanish moss that would eventually smother them.
I glanced with growing apprehension at the darkened water alongside the boat. There were snakes in there, I knew, as well as the alligators Livingston Brown was relying upon to dispose of our mortal remains.
A group of bubbles broke the surface close by. I tried to tell myself it was just gas from rotting down plants. I wasn’t particularly convincing.
Mason seemed to be looking around, too, with the advantage of his elevated position. After a moment he pointed over to his left and, following his direction, I spotted the long gnarly shape of the submerged ‘gator about a hundred metres away.