by Nick Thacker
Shit, I thought for the tenth time.
I trudged through the inch layer of gasoline on the floor toward the tank. It might be possible to plug it, but I’d have to find it first. If the hole was somewhere on the top of the tank, the fuel would have spilled out only down to the hole.
But we’d run out of gas completely, which meant there was a hole in the tank somewhere below the intake line to the engine. Even worse, I doubted it was going to be on the side of the tank I could access — the bullet had come in through the ship’s outer hull, so the hole would be on the outer side of the tank, flush up against the side of the Wassamassaw.
This was getting even worse. I screamed. Just a quick, empty fit of rage. I wasn’t really feeling angry as much as frustrated, pissed that I’d gotten myself and Joey and Shalice — and now this ATF guy named Frey — into this mess. I screamed again, realizing how massive of the mess this was. We were sitting dead on the water, an inch of fuel covered the floor of the engine compartment, and the twenty-odd gallons of fuel we’d kept on reserve would only fill the tank up to the hole in its side — which would only empty again onto the floor. Even trying to start up the engine again afterward could be disastrous. If any of the fuel fumes had found their way into the line of fire from a spark…
Shit.
Okay. Think, Dixon. You’ve been through worse. I thought about it. Had I? Honestly, I wasn’t sure. I’d gone into battles in places I’d rather forget, but I’d been armed better, well-prepared, and briefed by professionals who spent their days writing briefs and studying the best ways to do things like that. I’d been in few sticky situations with Joey, but again we were in our element — on land.
Out here, on the water, we were dead.
“Dixon,” Joey called. “You down there?”
“Yeah, why?”
“We have company.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and cursed again. You’ve got to be kidding me. “What is it?”
“You — you’d better just come up and see,” he said.
I sighed. Yeah, that’s probably about right. If it were good news, he’d have just said it. ‘Dixon, there’s a dozen Navy Seals up here who want to help us get Shalice back,’ or, ‘hey, man, turns out Elizondo’s ship just sank and Shalice is on her way over in a paddle boat.’
But it wasn’t going to be anything close to that. I didn’t have to hear it in his voice, hear it in his hesitation. I just knew. My mother used to say that bad luck came in threes. Three funerals of people you knew in one season, three divorces of friends or family members, three financial crises.
I thought about it. If I really tried, I could have made just about everything that had happened today an instance of bad luck, but I had to admit that all the bad luck had happened in major themes. First the guys had come and shot our fuel tank, then we’d run out of fuel. Then Frey told us he was working for the federal government and that this was nothing short of a major sting operation he wanted to play sidekick on, since he didn’t quite have the resources to do it the right way.
So whatever news I was about to receive was not going to be any good.
I trudged back to the set of steep, ladder-like stairs leading to the compartment and jumped up onto them. I could smell the gasoline swirling up from my shoes. They were soaked in it, and my socks were already starting to squish around inside them.
At the top of the stairs I could hear voices. Frey’s, and then Joey’s. They were talking to someone, not to each other. I rose the rest of the way out of the engine compartment and made my way to the main deck. Another half-set of stairs and I was at the top and could Joey and Frey arguing with someone, both men leaning out over the deck rail.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Our buddies from earlier. Three more of the boats,” Frey said, turning to me. “They started shooting from farther out this time. Nothing hit, but we took cover and then they were on us.”
I looked over the edge and saw that he was correct. Three more boats, each identical to the ones we’d put out of commission earlier. Two of the speedboats were hovering nicely out of range of our pistols, but I could have made a shot with one of the Bushmasters. They were armed, though, the same subcompacts we’d faced earlier, and there were three on each boat, plus a driver. The driver of the third boat had grabbed the side of the Wassamassaw while two men aimed up at Joey and Frey, and now me. The fourth man was doing the talking.
“Mr. Dixon,” he said. “Welcome. Elizondo’s not going to be happy to see you.”
“We weren’t planning on seeing him until after you guys had your turn.”
“We figured that out,” he said. “Makes for a decent plan. Perhaps Elizondo would honor his end of the deal in that case. He’s still alive, he lets you live. But the deal was that you were to protect him, no? And sitting back here while all the fun happens isn’t what I would call protecting anything.”
“That was the deal with Elizondo’s men, yes,” I said. “But that’s not the deal we had with you.”
The man nodded, fifteen feet down and standing on the front of his boat. He bobbed up and down like a cork in a bowl of water. “Quite the conundrum, then,” he said. “You were supposed to take out Elizondo, you failed.”
“You didn’t even give us a chance!” I shouted. “You just came after us, while we were —”
“You were called off, Dixon. We had a better team in place. There was nothing more we needed from you.”
I glared at him. “Well where I come from that’s now how we do business.”
“Yes, that’s why we’re making you an offer now.”
“An offer?”
“Yes. We noticed you had some appropriate weaponry for the kind of thing we —”
“No.”
“Dixon…” the man smiled, almost laughing, then turned to the driver, still holding the handle on the Wassamassaw to keep their boat flush against its side. He nodded. The driver let go of my yacht, stepped back, then moved over to the covered canopy part of the speedboat’s rear end. The two men aiming up at us shifted as the boat did, but kept their aim steady and true.
The driver walked over to the canopy and pulled off the cover with a flourish. The poles keeping it upright groaned and split, breaking and falling into the center of the boat. The greenish brown canvas material snapped and folded in on itself, then fell backwards off the side of the boat.
I watched the proceedings, now thoroughly confused. The tarp was gone, and there was a fifth man sitting in the center of the area the canvas flap had previously covered.
No…
“Mason?” the man called out. “Mason, that you?”
I dropped my head. My eyes closed. No.
“Who is it?” Joey asked. “Mason, do you know —”
“It’s my dad.”
“Mason,” the man said. “You up there? I can’t see anything with the light. Listen — don’t trust anything they —”
The driver kicked, his foot lashing out quickly and knocking over the man. He grabbed his side, groaning. He fell off the seat he had been cramped up in and then sprawled out on the floor of the boat. He pushed himself up, but then the driver kicked again. I could hear the air leave his gut from all the way up on deck, and I tensed up. I wanted to pick up Joey’s gun and fire. I wanted to retaliate, but then… I didn’t.
It’s my father.
It was him, no doubt. He was handcuffed, his hands behind his back and his face smashed up against the carpeted side of the bilge pump enclosure and live well, and I was immediately torn. I wanted to fight back, to kill the bastards, but then again — it was my dad.
There’s something weird about family. You can run away from it, you can abandon it, you can deny it, but it’s still blood. In some cases you can even overcome it, but for me, for my entire life, I’d wanted to run away. I’d wanted to overcome my childhood, to deny it, to ignore it and become the exact opposite of what it had been.
But I had never been able to.
Call it
most egregious irony in the universe, but I wanted, at that moment in time, to make sure my old man was okay. It was like all of the things in my life that had happened that I’d sworn to hate to him for were culminating in one final test of familial love. Like he’d been testing me my entire life, trying to measure the depths of my manhood, and I’d always come up wanting until now.
I hated myself for it, but I felt something in that moment. I truly did. I felt shame, and hatred, and grief, and the stomach-wrenching burn of injustice, all at the same time. I felt remorse, and the want for revenge, and the desire to just turn around and float away, as slowly and as quickly as the tides would allow.
But the tides weren’t going to allow that. The universe had caught up with me, and so had my old man. The same old man who’d pushed out my little brother, hurt my mother, and then sucked me into this nightmare reality.
“Mason, I didn’t want — I didn’t mean for this…” my father’s voice trailed off, but the guys in the boat didn’t kick him again.
“Dixon, your old man would like to come aboard and say hello. That okay with you?”
No. “Yeah,” I said. “Head to the stern, I’ve got the deck open.”
39
I WALKED DOWN THERE MYSELF, Joey and Frey following behind. Joey sped up and took the stairs directly behind me, then came up next to me as we made our way to the back of the Wassamassaw.
“What’s the plan here, Dixon?” Joey asked. “We can’t fight them off.”
I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to do anything. “You know how I feel about plans.”
I turned to look at Frey. He was wide-eyed, but I didn’t get the sense that he was scared. He’d completely duped us, so the man was likely trained well enough to fit in here. Instead, he looked as though he was surprised. Surprised that I wasn’t fighting back. Or making a plan.
Or doing anything at all.
The first man, the one we’d been talking to came aboard. “The Wassamassaw,” he said, then whistled. “Quite the ride, Mr. Dixon.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”
The next man came up with my father and both stepped onto the deck at the same time. My father righted himself, steadying his frame on the much sturdier boat. He looked up at me. “Mason.”
“Dad.”
That was it. Two words spoken, two men worlds apart crashing together again in a way neither of us wanted. I wanted to just kill him right there, to get it over with, but that feeling once again returned. He was my father. I couldn’t do it.
I followed the first man into the living room, only half-listening as he examined every corner of the space. I’d forgotten the effect it had on people — the Wassamassaw wasn’t a particularly luxurious yacht compared to some of the outrageous ones I’d seen, but to someone used to boating around on a speedboat or fishing barge, my ride seemed downright garish. Even though it had been refinished, the interior completely redesigned, I’d opted for a very simple design and decor — since I was neither interested nor good at choosing interior decorations of any space.
“You going to pour us a drink, bartender?” the man asked.
“I usually get a name first,” I shot back.
One more man came aboard, and I assumed it was the over gunman, leaving the driver to keep an eye on their boat. The man followed my father and the man holding his arm, his subcompact hanging by his side in his other hand.
“You can call me Jet.”
“Chet?”
“Jet.”
“Like an airplane?” I asked.
“Like — yeah, like an airplane. Now how ‘bout that drink?”
“What’s your drink?”
“Damnit, Dixon, I don’t care.”
I reached beneath the counter and rummaged around until my hand found the top of a plastic 1.75L bottle. I pulled it out, keeping the label to myself.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I thought you didn’t care.” I poured a glass of the liquid and shoved it his direction. “Shouldn’t care if it’s on ice either, then.”
The man sniffed it, held it up to his lips, and took a sip. He didn’t spit it out, which was surprising, but he certainly didn’t think it was very funny.
“Taaka. It’s a vodka. Runs less than ten bucks for a handle of it.”
“It tastes awful.”
“Well, you should have been more specific,” I answered. “Now, if you don’t mind getting to the point of why you’re here, I have a ship to track down.”
The man nodded. “I already told you. We can work together.”
“How’s that now?”
“We need your guns.”
“And I already told you no.”
The man holding my father lifted the butt of his subcompact and slammed it into his gut. My dad groaned and collapsed on the floor.
“Knock it off,” I said. “I already thought he was dead. Why not just kill him now?”
The man stepped over to my father, pulled out a pistol he’d had in his belt, and held it up to my dad’s head. “Sounds fine with me,” he said. “Makes it easier, even.”
He pressed the safety. I tensed. Unfortunately he was watching me.
“That’s what I thought, Dixon,” he said. “Even for a schmuck like your old man, you can’t watch me do it.”
“Try me.”
The man laughed. “I don’t need to, Dixon. I know men like you. Known you all my life. You’re though, but you’re not an idiot. You know there’s nothing gained by offing your old man.”
I glared at him.
“Kill him now, and you retaliate. Maybe you can get that weapon out from underneath the bar top and get off a round or two. But my guys have a bit of an advantage over your guys.”
He was right — his weapons were made for this sort of close-distance combat. Far faster and more agile, like their boats. Plus, I didn’t have a gun underneath the bar. Note to self.
“Let him live, and you might just find out what it is we need from you.”
“I thought it was my guns,” I said. “You could have just shot your way up here, taken them yourself.”
The man looked like he was deep in thought for a moment. “I could have, sure. But that would have killed the three of you, and you’re really what I want.”
“We are?”
“You are. The guns are nice, but I seem to remember coming out here with a few more men. I think you took them out, so I’ll need you to replace them.”
“I see,” I said. “No.”
He laughed, amazingly took another sip of the vodka, and walked closer to me at the bar. “Dixon, here’s the thing. We have that cute little girl of your.”
I cocked my head sideways. “What girl?”
“Oh, you know. You know very well. Dark hair, dark skin, beautiful eyes. Pretty good body, too.”
Joey’s jaw clenched twice, but he didn’t move. Just stood by the railing, just outside the door to the living room all the rest of us were in. Unguarded. Alone.
Don’t. I hoped he was watching my face, but then again I wasn’t even sure if my face was sending the proper signal. For all I knew it could have been saying, ‘go for it, kid.’
“How’d that happen?” Frey asked, suddenly a part of the conversation.
The man — Jet — turned to look at him, and I saw on his face the confusion, as if he’d not even noticed Frey was in the room until just now. “And who might you be?” Jet asked. “We were briefed that there were two of you. You don’t strike me as much, so I’m still willing to say there are only two of you, but — it would be poor form to completely ignore you, now wouldn’t it?”
Frey coughed. Took a step back. “I — I’m Jonathan Frey.”
“Ah, right. Whoever the hell that is.”
“How’d you get her?” I asked.
“We just took the boat while it was heading back to the Rummer. Simplest thing, really. Couple of shots to the engine, couple to their hull, and they were sinking fast. Just kept a bead on them whi
le one of my guys nabbed her.”
“So where is she?”
“Safe, for now. With my team.”
So she’s on one of the boats heading to the Rummer.
“But I want to be clear, Mason. I am not opposed to having a little fun with her before we put a bullet through her head. Not sure if you’re a ‘save the girl before she dies’ kind of guy or a ‘save the girl before we have a little fun with her’ kind of guy.”
“Both.”
“Well. In that case, here’s your play. It’s all you’ve got, so be thankful you’re getting it in the first place. You help us get to Elizondo’s ship, get inside, and get him, we give you Shalice back. Alive. You help us but make it difficult, you get her back alive, but after we’re done with her.”
“Option three?”
“I shouldn’t have to spell it out. She dies, you all die, everyone dies. Except Elizondo, and that’s the whole point.”
I nodded. This isn’t getting easier. “Okay, well, can we talk about it?”
“No. I’ve already decided for you, so it’s time to move out. I will accompany you to wherever it is you keep those pieces we’re so fond of, and you will carry them back up. As many trips as it takes.”
“I’ve got three Bushmasters, that’s it.”
“Fine, and two of them are sitting against the chair there, so we’ll go ahead and start with those.” He motioned to his teammate and the man ran over and picked up the weapons. He did it fast, like he’d practiced it, and within seconds he was holding both M4A3s under his left arm while still aiming at us with his subcompact.
“Any other goodies you want to bring along? Remember, you’re the ones using these. Elizondo’s guys won’t be able to tell the difference in the dark, so I’m sure you’d feel better being well-armed.”
“I had grenades,” I lied. “But I used them against your boat.”
The man nodded. “I wondered how you pulled it off. Don’t have any more?”
I shook my head.