Zale leaped up with an animal cry and swung and beat at him with mostly ineffectual punches. Richard never stopped smiling, but he got his hands around the boy’s wrists and lifted him up until his feet left the deck.
“You gotta learn to fight better than that, boy. You’re looking at a trained U.S. Marine scout sniper. When Janet told me what your mama yelled out so’s everybody could hear—about wanting to kill your daddy? That was an opportunity the Lord had provided, and I just couldn’t pass it up. I’d been wanting to put a bullet in your daddy’s head since the first time he fucked my sister on a blackjack table on the TropiCruz IV. I watched the whole thing, thanks to the eye in the sky. She only did it so’s we could get enough money to get ourselves some peace. That’s what she says. I’m gonna cut my CD and she’s gonna run a business where she can get some peace from all those dirty hands. My sister’s smart. It was her idea to use a Russian gun. And she put it in your mama’s garage. Those cops didn’t know what to think. Now, once you tell me what your daddy told you, then Janet will be through with all these other men. This time it’ll be enough for her.”
Zale hung from Richard’s grip like a limp marionette, his head slumped forward on his chest. He had been sobbing when he first struck out at the man, but he was quiet now—too quiet. Richard shook him hard. “Your daddy told you where he hid it,” he yelled, and he pushed him away. The boy collapsed against me as though all the life had been wrung from his body. “It won’t do you any good. I’ll find out eventually. No food, no mama, and if it comes to it, I’ll start working on her with my blade. You’ll tell me. Janet’s been tearing up the house for days looking everywhere, but I don’t think it’s there. Doesn’t matter. You’ll tell me.”
There is a difference between a regular strong gust of wind and the first heavy gust of an approaching squall. The squall’s wind carries with it a colder chill and the clean smell of rain. It was at that moment that I felt the first gust, and only seconds later fat raindrops began to burst against the plastic windows. When I turned and looked behind me, it was like something out of The Wizard of Oz. Not a waterspout, thankfully, but the meanest, blackest-looking squall I’d ever seen was swallowing up the south tip of the island and heading our way.
“Jason!” Richard yelled. Then he turned to us. “You. Both of you. Down below.”
I helped Zale down the ladder, but he was listless and unseeing. When Richard yelled for him to hurry up, Jason reached up and pulled the boy off the ladder. I scrambled down and put my arm around the child’s waist. Jason, still carrying his gun, pointed the way inside.
In the main salon, I turned to him. “Jason, he’s nuts. What are you and Anna doing here?”
“Move,” he said, poking me in the ribs with the gun. Just before he closed the stateroom door, he said, “It’s just about the money. Nothing personal.” And then he locked the door.
Rain was now hammering the deck overhead, and the motion of the boat had become so rough that it was difficult to stand as she hobby-horsed in the wind chop kicked up by the squall. Just before the engine growled to life, I heard the anchor chain rumbling across the coral pan bottom, and I knew we had broken free and were dragging at a fast clip. I heard their feet pounding overhead and the grinding of the windlass trying to bring in the anchor rode against the force of that wind.
I wished I could see, wished they’d let me help. But since there was nothing I could do to help with the wild anchor drill on deck, I sat on the bunk, put a pillow on my lap, and rested Zale’s head on the pillow. I stroked his hair and told him that everything was going to be okay, that I was going to figure out how to get us out of that place, that he didn’t have to worry.
In other words, I lied.
XXV
It was only after the squall had passed and Richard and his gang had managed to re-anchor the boat that I slipped out from under the pillow and stood and stretched. Residual chop from the high winds still rocked the boat, but I was accustomed to moving around with that kind of motion. I switched on the reading light in the top bunk and found that it worked.
I started with a thorough search of the stateroom, including crawling up into the top bunk, checking out the types of screws on the dome lights, examining the twelve-volt bunk fans, and seeing if there wasn’t some way I could pull out the bar in the hanging locker. I tried to pull the decorative mirror off the bulkhead, but decided it must have been stuck on there with 5200 adhesive, and nothing was going to pull that damn thing down.
Although I didn’t come up with a whole lot of great ideas, the fact was, it felt good just to be doing something. I don’t take well to confinement, and after all those hours, I was beginning to feel as nuts as Richard Hunter. I wondered how Molly was handling it. Better than me, probably. Now if I could just get out of here in one piece, I could clear her, too.
Of course, Richard would not have told me so much if he had thought I was going to survive our little Keys trip. Nor Zale. I’m sure he intended to go a ways offshore and dump both our bodies. Right now it was three against two, and those weren’t the worst odds ever. I had no doubt that I could take care of skinny little Anna, but the other two? As if it weren’t bad enough that they were bigger and stronger and my partner was a seemingly catatonic thirteen-year-old boy, they were the ones who had all the guns.
But we had something they wanted. I figured there had to be some way we could use that.
It had been quiet for a couple of hours, and I had managed to take apart one of the bunk fans and extract the wooden bar out of the hanging locker. I now had a bat and had fashioned a nasty device out of the stainless steel cage that had covered the bunk fan. When I held it in my fist, steel prongs protruded between my fingers.
The quiet ended when somebody turned on the boat’s stereo full blast and Richard Hunter began singing along with the Oak Ridge Boys’ tune “Put Your Arms Around Me Blessed Jesus.” The music pounded from the speakers. I had no idea what time it was, but my guess was mid to late afternoon. The sustained wind had not let up after the squall, and judging from the whistling and flapping noises as well as the motion of the boat, I figured this nasty norther was going to blow like stink all night long. They lowered the volume on the music just enough so that I could hear their voices, but I could not understand what they were saying. In between songs I heard the microwave running, and I began to smell food. The generator wasn’t going, so I figured they were running stuff off an inverter, and from the sound of the laughter out there, they were starting to party. Maybe they’d get too drunk, flatten their batteries, and we’d all die out here.
My stomach grumbled and my mouth felt dry all of a sudden. It smelled like pizza and fried chicken out there. And beer. And I thought that coffee had been bad hours ago. I had to get out of here.
I sat on the edge of the bunk and tried to rouse Zale. He moaned and jerked away, a perturbed look on his face.
“Look, Zale, we’ve got to do something to get out of here. I’m not willing to sit here until they decide to come and start cutting my fingers off one by one. You saw how crazy he is. He’d do something like that.”
The kid grabbed the pillow and pulled it over his head. I yanked it off. “Stop that. You’ve got to get up. You’ve got to help me.”
“Go away,” he said, his voice muffled as his face was pressed to the mattress.
“What would your mother think of me if I just lay down on this bunk and let them kill both of us? What would she think of you? Do you want her to stay in that jail for the rest of her life?” He rolled over so that I could see his face in profile. “That’s right. What about your mom? We know who really killed your dad. That means they’ll let her go home. But we’ve got to get out of here so we can tell them.”
He sighed and pushed himself up to a sitting position. “But what can we do? We’re never gonna get out of here.”
The sounds of the party in the main salon were growing louder and more raucous. They were nuts to get bombed in this kind of weather. Especially
with two very angry prisoners in the bow. The drunker they got, the better our chances got.
I showed Zale my weaponry, such as it was, and we began to hatch our plan.
Twenty minutes later when we thought we were ready to try it, we were interrupted by the sound of large marine engines. Even with their music, we could hear the engine noise transmitted through the water and then through the hull. It’s hard to tell direction from down in the hull, but it sounded like a big go-fast boat like a Donzi or a Cigarette. They were probably going to ask if we needed help. There was no good reason for anyone to anchor out at Elliot on an afternoon like this.
When Richard and the others realized we were being approached, the music shut down abruptly and, in the quiet, all I could hear was cursing and the sound of panic. Somebody went scrambling into the cabin across the hall and began throwing things around. Anna was crying and cursing at Richard for what he’d brought her to. I wasn’t sure where it started or who started it, but just before the first shots were fired I heard an amplified voice from the other boat, and then Richard yelled, “Go straight to hell, Kagan!”
I was standing by the cabin door with my ear to the wood when it sounded like World War III broke out. I pulled Zale off the bunk and we landed with me half on top of him on the little bit of cabin sole. I reached up and pulled the mattress off the bunk and down on top of us. It wasn’t as though I really believed that foam could stop bullets, but there is no such thing as rational thinking when your world explodes in a storm of gunfire. I squeezed my eyes shut, grabbed hold of the dolphin charm around my neck with one hand, and wrapped my other arm around the boy’s back.
I know that it couldn’t have taken that long, but when we were there, huddled under that cushion, hearing the nonstop blasts from those guns, the crashing noise of the breaking windows, and the splintering of the interior woodwork, the screams of the others as they were hit and wounded and dying, it seemed to go on for hours. I didn’t even know I was screaming until the shooting stopped.
And that was when I felt the first shock of cold water as it started to seep up through the floorboards. The engines of the other boat roared to life, grew less and less audible, and soon were gone.
Aside from the sound of lapping water, it was quiet for a moment before I heard the moaning start.
I pushed the cushion off us, and Zale and I rose warily to our feet. The water was up over the tops of my boat shoes already. Scared as I was of getting shot, I wasn’t real keen on the idea of being locked in a stateroom on a sinking boat, either. I banged on the door with my fist. “Hey, hello! Open the door!”
Someone out there coughed and spit. I wasn’t sure it was the same voice that had been moaning.
“Anna? Is that you? Open this door. We can help you.”
The moaning changed. It was definitely a woman’s voice. She started saying, “Oh, oh, oh.”
I grabbed hold of the doorknob and shook and rattled it senselessly. I stopped to listen.
Then a different voice, a lower voice, the one that had been coughing and spitting earlier, started choking out the word, “Help. Help me,” he said.
I picked up the bar we’d taken out of the closet and began banging on the door. “Richard, Anna, Jason, unlock this door and I can help you.”
“Help, help me,” he said again, and I attacked that door, beating on it with everything I had, cursing and spewing every curse word I knew. I threw my shoulder at the wood, oblivious to the pain in my ribs, until finally, tears streaming down my cheeks, I pounded my head against the door as the moaning and crying faded. When I stopped, exhausted, there was no sound but the lapping of the waves against the hull. The water was already up to my midcalf. “Hello? Are you there?”
No moaning. No coughing. No answer.
I looked at Zale’s wide eyes and saw that he was hyperventilating. I knew I had to pull myself together, calm down, think this through.
“Come on. We can do this together.” There were only about three to four feet from the cabin door to the edge of the lower bunk. I pulled Zale next to me and said, “On three. One, two, three,” and we both slammed our shoulders into the door. Nothing moved.
I looked down at the door handle and saw below that water was pouring in around the edges of the door. This meant that the water level was much higher outside the door than it was inside our cabin. There was no way we were going to budge that door against that kind of water pressure. I knew what that meant, and I didn’t like it at all.
“Zale, listen.” I looked up at the top of the door. There were a good three inches between the top of the door frame and the vinyl headliner. “See if you can use that metal cage off the fan to tear down some of that headliner. We’re going to need every last inch of space in here. See that ventilation hole there? That’s what’s letting the air out so that the water can come in this fast.”
Before I’d even stopped talking, the boy had seen what I was thinking. Whereas a few minutes ago he’d been willing to lie there and let death take him, now that he had something to do, he was attacking it with an enthusiasm that would have made Molly proud.
“I’m going to have to wait until the pressure on the outside of this door is equalized before I’ll be able to bust it down. Once the water reaches the top of the door frame, there will still be a few inches of air left. I might have about four or five chances to try to bust through, then we’ll take a breath and swim out.” Standing as I was on the cabin sole, the water was already up to my armpits. It was achingly cold. Zale was pulling down the vinyl in long sheets, exposing the fiberglass underside of the deck. Once he saw that the hole for the ventilator was only about five inches across and nothing we could crawl out through, he began stuffing vinyl in the hole, trying to slow down the exiting air so we might be left with a little pocket.
I was standing on the lower bunk with my face up close to the overhead, trying to make myself take long calm breaths, oxygenating my blood, when the boat lurched aft and the bow rose, tilting everything in the cabin at a crazy angle. Zale and I both lost our balance and our heads went underwater. There was now a pocket of air in the bow big enough for us to breathe in, but the door to the cabin was about two feet underwater. Amazingly, the upper bunk light was still on.
I took three deep breaths and pulled myself underwater. I opened my eyes. I couldn’t see a thing. I felt for the door, found it, then found the bunks opposite. It was amazing how just tilting the cabin on its side had disoriented me so. I braced my back against the bunk, holding on with both arms, and kicked with everything I had. The door didn’t move. I resurfaced for air.
In the small remaining air space in the bow, it was difficult to get through to the surface. The bunk cushions and pillows had floated up to the top of the four-foot-square hole, where Zale kept pushing them aside. There was just enough space now for me to get my head above water, but the top of my head bumped against the overhead. Somehow, Zale’s glasses were still on his face, but they were covered with droplets of saltwater and for some reason, as I took my next three deep breaths, I wondered how well he could see.
Another deep breath, and down I pulled my body. This time I didn’t take as long getting lined up on the door, as the geography of the strangely canted boat had grown more familiar. I braced my back once again and kicked with both feet. Nothing. I paused to refocus and this time as I kicked, I screamed with all the rage and will to live I had inside me.
My right foot busted through the plywood as the bubbles floated up around my face. I was desperate for air. For a second, when I tried to withdraw my shoe, I thought my leg was stuck, but then I twisted right and pointed my toe and pulled free. I brought myself up for air, hoping there would still be some. Zale was holding aside the debris so I could get my head into the tiny air pocket. This time, I had to hold my head sideways, my mouth close to the overhead. I allowed myself four breaths before I spoke. “This time, you’ve got to come with me, okay? I’m almost through the door. Hold my hand. Don’t let go. We’re going
to take three deep breaths. Okay? On the count of three. One, two, three.”
We both took slow, long, deep breaths, our cheeks scraping against the scratchy underside of the fiberglass deck, and we dove.
XXVI
I held tight to his hand as I felt again for the door and then lined my body up, my back against the bunk. That’s when his hand slipped out of mine.
I opened my eyes and looked around in the darkness, feeling this moment of utter despair. Somewhere in my mind or my heart, Zale and Molly had become one, and I knew if I could only save him, I could save us and restore all that I had once lost. I wanted to rewrite that ending. I wanted to create a new beginning. I could not leave him behind.
And then, as I was just about ready to start for the surface, I felt his arm over my shoulder, his back, too, against the bunk, and together we kicked for our lives. Two kicks later and the hole was big enough to swim through.
Without a face mask, it’s difficult to see underwater, and with all the chop the north wind was kicking up, the water was unusually murky as well. I didn’t even try to open my eyes. My brain was screaming for air but I tried to concentrate on the layout of the boat. I told myself to stay calm. Because of the way she was sinking stern first, we had to swim down to get out the companionway to get into the salon, and then we had to go deeper yet to reach the windows on the port side. I followed the overhead down, knowing that I would soon get to the windows that I was sure had been shot out.
I prefer free diving to scuba, always have. And I can normally hold my breath a very long time. But breath-holding is harder when you’re exerting yourself, and even harder still when you’re scared. I felt the blackness closing in. My eyes were closed, but even then you still see lights on the insides of your eyelids. This blackness was different. I’d been this close before and managed to hold on until I reached the surface, but I knew I had only seconds before I would black out.
Bitter End (Seychelle Sullivan #3) Page 25