Water Memory: A Thriller (Sentro)

by Daniel Pyne

  “You want to be the one to educate the client, Lucky?” Falcone drawls.

  “I would. I doubt you’ll want me to,” Elsayed drawls back.

  Drewmore cackles. “He’s right.” The tension in the room is easing. The requisite hazing, to Sentro’s great relief, has come to an end.

  “Look, Vic, I’m fine,” Sentro insists. Vic, not Hector. Vic Falcone. She’s said the name automatically, before she recalls it, like that awkward delay in a bad cell connection. There. Her memories aren’t lost; some of them are just slow finding her. “I’d rather get right back onto something new,” she adds, still slightly troubled by the suggestion of time off. “A simple wiretap op, if you’re so, you know, worried I’m going to start World War Three.”

  A crushing weariness washes over her. What if the work is all that’s holding her together?

  Falcone nods, neutral. “You must have a boatload of vacation time coming, though, huh?”

  It’s not a suggestion.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Another half hour unspools before the meeting breaks up. The Bug goes quiet, lips pursed, eyes hooded, returning again and again to Sentro like surveillance cameras. Peers and partners delve into other business: a Case Western archeologist who needs site security in Cape Town, the partisan attacks dogging East Timor, how to monetize the ongoing White House obsession with Tehran, a dispute with Raytheon over incidental expenses during what all agree was a regrettable circle jerk in Honduras.

  And the ill-fated events of Port Isabel shudder back to Sentro in installments, raw.

  It didn’t help that her marriage was fraying.

  The Yoder boy’s kidnapping had been Sentro’s first private-sector caper after the seemingly bottomless largess of government-funded work for one agency or another. Lean crew, just her and Falcone, with a Houston-based gearhead freelancer named Unger providing remote tech support; but there was an unusually robust posse of rubbernecking hometown cops and bottom-feeding feds sent from Houston to babysit. Sketchy Mexican extortionists out of Matamoros had been holding a young American boy hostage for six months before the parents, wealthy Brownsville developers, had reached out to Solomon in their desperation. The kidnappers had a price; the clients were willing to pay it; the endgame was just about Sentro getting the proper proof of life, making the money drop, and ensuring a fourteen-year-old who had crossed the border with a hundred bucks and a couple of very white friends, intending only to lose his virginity to a sex worker, got set free. After testy negotiations, the G-men and the locals had agreed to stay clear until the boy was safe.

  Sentro holed up in a Best Western comfort suite and waited for a call, a handgun she didn’t want on top of a squeaky AC with tattered viscose strips fluttering. Falcone—his dusky-red hair a riot of defiance in those days, with the beginnings of the tattoo sleeve he now hides, old-school can headphones, and a cheap laptop—and two deputies had set up shop in an adjacent unit, impatient, listening to phone taps while Unger, back in the office, videoconferenced and provided a full complement of satellite tracking technology and computer support for when things broke open.

  Gulf coast. Hellish heat. Summer squalls. This was three months before Dennis had learned his body was riddled with cancer. On her back, on a bedspread of bright-yellow tropical fish swimming in a soft blue polyester sea, open eyed, one arm outflung, Sentro waited for the extortion call and talked on her personal cell phone to her husband about divorce.

  Dennis had called to tell her that he’d decided to let her go. He would just do what she wanted, he said. “Because if you love someone, you do what they want. Right?”

  He was so determined to take control of their free fall.

  Sentro, numb, unsure of anything back then except the job in front of her, offered that maybe she didn’t know what she wanted. That maybe as soon as you stopped wanting something, you got it.

  “You’ll say anything,” was his observation. Dennis sounded so tired. They should both have guessed why.

  She remembers saying to him: “Before you called, it’s stupid, but I was thinking. Well, dreaming. A daydream. About my mom.”

  “Again? What a surprise.”

  “The truth is that what I remember are just stories and her smile,” she continued, letting his gentle dig roll away. “But it reminded me how pointless it all is—history, I mean.”

  “Dreams are history?”

  “Everything is history. And you can’t live in the past, and it maybe wasn’t really happier anyway; you just think it was. And how, I don’t know, sometimes things are just over.”

  Through her mobile came only a pulsing, soft static, waves of it.

  “Dennis?”

  “Like this is over, you and me?”

  Hearing it said out loud like that was beginning to make her have second thoughts.

  He asked: “Second thoughts about the divorce? Or everything you’ve done to make it inevitable?”

  They’d traveled this road before, many times. Her job, the long absences. Why couldn’t she make a commitment to her family? Sentro had no answer, except that Dennis knew what she was, who she was, when he married her.

  “Sorry.” He backed off. “I didn’t mean . . .”

  “I fly back tomorrow. Just waiting to make this one last drop and get the asset; then I’m done. And everybody’s happy.”

  “Everybody except us.”

  “Don’t say that.” Sentro stared at the backlit window blinds. She didn’t tell him that she knew he’d been sleeping with Jenny’s sixth-grade teacher. Couldn’t bear to hear him deny it and didn’t want to risk that he would; she made her livelihood and stayed alive by parsing lies.

  Plus, this was different. She didn’t blame him. They’d been given a gift and squandered it, both of them. Regular life was so much more treacherous and complicated than anything she faced in the field.

  “Don’t say anything more,” she told him, smiling sadly. “I’ll come home; we’ll get takeout from that bulgogi place and put the kids to bed and sneak out into the garage and cuddle in the back seat of the Odyssey and have one last angry, high, hard one.”

  She remembers how Dennis laughed, in spite of himself.

  “And after that, hell, I dunno. I don’t know what else we’ll do besides telling ourselves that it’s no good to let yourself die without knowing, once more, the wonder of fucking with love.” She’d forgotten to breathe, so she inhaled, ragged, fighting tears, and added:

  “Or something like it.”

  Was this how her mother had felt? Was she taking the same empty ride? Her room’s landline started ringing, shrill, and she had to hang up on Dennis and pick up the receiver to answer the call and go to work.

  “How is he doing?” Nothing. Just a soft huffing static on the other end. “My client, Andy. How is he?”

  The voice on the other end of the call was soft, musical, comically high pitched. “You got my rescate?”

  “I do.”

  “A’ight.”

  “Bring Andy to the phone.”

  “You think I’m stupid? No. I get the money; then I let the hostage go.”

  “I need proof of life.”

  The kidnapper switched to Spanish. “Are you listening to me?”

  “Have Andy tell you the name of his first girlfriend. They won’t release the money unless they know he’s still alive.”

  “Señora, I am a businessman, not a murderer.”

  She could hear, in her communications earpiece, the freelancer telling Falcone to make her bring the gun.

  She said, “Try to see it through their eyes: once you have your money—”

  The caller cut her off, sounding impatient. “Yes, okay. I will have the answer for you. Proof of the boy’s life. No cops. No shadow.”

  “You’ll have the answer when?”

  In Spanish: “When I’m ready. You have eight minutes to get to the lighthouse.” And then, in English: “Mark, set, go.”

  Dial tone. Shit. Sentro was already grabbing her k
eys, her sunglasses, the lumpy gray duffel bag near the door, in a hurry, pointedly ignoring the handgun, despite the admonitions of Falcone.

  “Unger wants you to take the gun.”

  “No. Just make sure they give me space.”

  She could hear Falcone arguing with the Port Isabel cops about a surveillance tail. “Aubrey, wait.”

  Sentro pulled the door open; the smothering humidity hit her as soon as she stepped out into the day.

  “Lots of space, Vic.”

  Her rookie mistake was thinking she’d get it.

  Elsayed stews as he follows Sentro back to their private offices. “Bean-counting bastards have no concept of dynamic truth in the field.”

  “They have investors to consider.” She caught herself. “We have.”

  “The hell does Bob Drewmore have against you? Besides that you’re competent?”

  Where to start? Sentro thinks she says aloud, but Lucky just stares at her, waiting. That I’m still out doing fieldwork, and he has trouble seeing the tops of his feet over his gut? That he hates women because he got passed over by the Pentagon on account of his wife fell into the opioid swamp? That he’s old and scared and feels marginalized and, like the rest of us, wonders what the hell he will do when the circus shuts down?

  Changing subjects, she says, “Vacation. Wow. Dennis and the kids usually had to go without me. Even if we planned ahead. Shit happened. Then the kids got older—sports, camp. I bet I haven’t had one since . . . I don’t know. Maybe Disney World. Right after I left the agency?”

  “You missed Disney World, Aubrey.”

  “No, I remember it.”

  “From your husband’s photographs, maybe. It was the first time we did a gig together. I remember you calling them every night.”

  She stops short outside her office doorway. Looks at Elsayed fondly; he’s walked alongside her without judgment through a lot of unforgiving and hostile terrain.

  “Dennis took great pictures.”

  “He did.”

  “You came in and hit the ground running,” Lucky says. “Port-au-Prince, dropping the hammer on Cédras, remember?”

  She doesn’t remember. “Oh, right.”

  Lucky may sense this is a lie, but he doesn’t press her on it. He asks again, with real concern, “You okay?”

  Sentro deflects. “So. Anyway. Vacation.” She shakes her head. “Where should I go?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Lush green islets dawn from an azure sea.

  Fouled by a nosing of fish oil and decay.

  The luxury yacht floats becalmed, glorious, midday in a pristine equatorial lagoon. Silvery water licks at its sides when a wave rolls through. Rigging shivers and clicks. The quiet is unreal.

  And like some tropical trope, a lean, sun-kissed young woman is reclined on a deck chair. Her flawless brown body shames an impractical white bikini dazzled with sequins and a pink spritz.

  His burly shadow eclipses her; his ferret eyes scutter over her one last time before his hands send the storm of flies thrumming.

  Gossamer ginger hair floats out on the midday thermals like a shredded nimbus. All the hustle on the ship she appears to be aloof to. The bite of diesel fuel in the breeze doesn’t faze her. Seabirds crisscross overhead, warped in the lenses of her sunglasses.

  Her arm has slipped from the chaise. Her hand dangles limp, wrist engirdled by diamond bracelets.

  Blood drips from the ends of her fingers onto the screen of a smartphone and spills off into the ruby pool spreading under her chair.

  Pauly Zeme lifts the dead woman in his arms like she’s nothing, her blood spatting down his board shorts onto the tops of his bare feet as he shuffles across the teak deck to an open hatch that leads to the galley and living quarters. He locks his hip and shifts her weight and, balancing her, removes her jewelry before tossing her down below, where a half dozen other bodies are tangled in fleshy discomposure.

  He frowns at the violent red smear she’s left on the front of his aloha shirt. “Aw shit.”

  A voice cries up, “Oy!”

  Pauly’s own face seems to detach from the lower-deck shadows, blue eyes finding the light and looking up. His identical twin, Castor. Same gym-rat build, sun blond, but flashing teeth that Castor’s had filed into points, and his brother’s forearms are girdled with serpent tattoos that Pauly thinks immodest.

  Castor says, “Give us a fucking warning, ya knob.” Then he adds, “Hullo! Back atcha!” and heaves a huge ziplock bag up through the hatchway, where Pauly fumbles to catch it. Rings, watches, and jewelry jangle in the plastic. Pauly splits the seal and adds the diamond bracelet from the dead woman’s wrist as his brother shouts again. “And another!”

  A second ziplock bag is tossed up, this one stuffed with wallets, pocketbooks, and loose cash: dollars, pounds, euros, yen. It arcs and slaps to the deck uncaught.

  “And another!”

  “Piss off! Not so fucking fast, ya knob!”

  Laughter and bottles of champagne erupt from below in rapid succession like a juggling act gone awry. Pauly struggles not to drop them, but a few go wide and shatter on the gunwale, spewing foam and glass. A pirate boy in a wine-and-gold jersey watches, expressionless, crouched on the lip of the cabin. Castor comes up the ladder with a clean shirt that he throws at his brother.

  “You look like the meat man.”

  “Can I help it they were bleeders?” Pauly peels off his ruined tropical shirt and examines the label of this new wardrobe critically before trying it on.

  Two small, battered aluminum fast boats are tied up along the lee side, and the Zemes’ motley crew of mostly teenage pirates, with their chipped, rusted machetes and long knives, looking for anything of value, has piled both high with booty: clothing, shoes, fishing gear, espresso machine, pots and pans, perfume, electric razor, ice chest, deck chairs, instruments ripped from the helm, a couple of spearguns, and a fancy assault rifle with all the trimmings. Their ebony shoulders are rimed with sea salt, and their shorts sag, slender frames gutted by hunger, shoes flecked with blood, and empty eyes hidden by the Ray-Bans and Oakleys and Warby Parkers they’ve found in the forward cabins.

  One thin tweaker with a scar that runs through his ruined eye and a mustache he should not have grown snakes among them, shaking out gasoline from a spout can. The madras sports coat he’s owned all of twelve minutes is too big; he lets the sleeves hang down over his hands.

  In the clean shirt, Pauly jumps down into the closest skiff, and the still water trembles around it. He battens the plunder under a patched tarp and starts to cast off. His brother takes the helm of the second boat and whistles. Pirates lope back across the deck like a pack of dogs.

  They start to settle in the two boats, jostling for position. But as Pauly watches, Castor grabs the smallest by the scruff of his ragged wine-and-gold West Indies cricket jersey and pulls him up and shakes him so hard the toes of his sneakers squeak on the bow trim. Common dinnerware clatters from threadbare cargo shorts pockets. Knives and forks. Worthless, but—

  “Hey now.”

  The kid is shaking, he’s so scared. He can’t be more than ten.

  “Fuck off my boat, Zoala,” Castor says.

  The boy’s eyes plead: Please. He smiles, helpless, not meaning to.

  “Fuck OFF!” Castor smacks Zoala with the back of one big hand, and the kid’s sunglasses shatter as he recoils and half falls and half leaps back to the deck of the yacht. Eyes welling huge.

  “Desculpa.”

  “You don’t steal from me.”

  Castor guns the engine, and the boat veers away, and Pauly follows in his brother’s wake, throwing white water and leaving the boy and the plundered yacht behind. “Little useless knob.”

  Pauly looks back over his shoulder. Marooned, Zoala watches the fast boats hurry into the open sea. Pauly feathers his throttle, his boat slows . . . and he cranks the wheel sharply, as if turning to go get the boy.

  Zoala grins and waves. Relieved.

 
; From the fast boat’s helm, Pauly waves back. He kills the motor and makes a vague gesture to the stern.

  “Carlito. Vai.”

  The boat lurches, idling, rocks bow to stern, drifting sideways. The scarred tweaker lifts a flare gun, and the others watch without expression as the flare fires and streaks across the cloudless cyan sky in a long lazy arc at the yacht.

  For a moment, Pauly watches the boy dance on the deck, as if delighted by the fiery tangerine tail.

  Then he stops, as he understands what it portends.

  Zoala yells something obscene and scrambles over the cabin for cover. The flare strikes spilled fuel and combusts. The yacht explodes, spitting flames so hot that the teenage pirates flinch and recoil from them even as Pauly shoves the throttle to send his fast boat leaping around again to catch up with his brother.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Driving home, under a sky afire with purpled Chesapeake sunset, she can’t stop thinking about Port Isabel.

  The freshly whitewashed lighthouse that sprouted from a half-dome berm of green grass. The sound of a cheap cell phone ringing as her rental sedan skidded to a stop at a no-parking curb. Sprinting into the building, the bulky duffel bag slung over her shoulder.

  The phone nagging. Four times. Five. Circular stairs she took two at a time, willing herself up to the gallery deck, where a throwaway cell phone taunted from the ledge, ringing.

  Sentro picked it up, wheezing, “I’m here. I’m here.”

  The voice and accent she recognized from previous calls said, “Check out the view, why don’t you?”

  “Nobody’s following me. We don’t have to do this.”

  “Mira. Look at the view.”

  Heart pounding, she did: the shimmering channel, the traffic bridge, South Padre Island in the distance, and a quaint little harbor tourist village stretched a couple of blocks north and below her. Boardwalk and the usual little shops and amusements.