Apparent Wind

by Dallas Murphy

  Tense and stiff, Snack rang the doorbell. Rosalind heard it from the bathroom and began to tremble. Her life would end with Big Al Broadnax smirking at her crouching naked and helpless on a shower mat.

  Walter Vale peeked out under the curtain in the living room. Doom ducked his head. Snack waved at Walter Vale.

  It seemed as if two days had passed by the time Walter Vale opened the front door. Doom was soaked in sweat. It ran down under his straw hat into his eyes, but he dared not lift his hand from under the quilt to wipe it away. He had no makeup on his hands.

  “Well, come on in. She’s waiting,” grinned Walter Vale.

  Snack was having trouble getting the chair up over the doorstep, so Doom didn’t wait. He tore off the quilt and pointed the shotgun at Vale’s head. Vale’s jaw dropped, looking down the black tunnel.

  “Don’t move! Don’t move at all!” Doom kicked Walter Vale in the shin with the combat boots Longnecker had loaned him: “You can’t kill wearing Topsiders.”

  Vale cried out and dropped to one knee. Doom gripped the hair at the back of his head and jammed the shotgun barrel into Vale’s mouth. Two front teeth dribbled down into his open collar. The ragged edge of mad rage brushed across Doom’s forehead as he forced the barrel deeper, against the back of Walter Vale’s throat, held it there, and ordered Vale to put his hands on top of his head.

  “Search him!” Doom shouted at Snack, and the sound reverberated in his ears. “Rosalind!”

  “Doom!”

  “Are you hurt!”

  “No!”

  Doom whined with joy. “Where are you!”

  “I’m in the bathroom! He’s got me chained!”

  “I’m coming! Longnecker!”

  The kitchen door exploded open, glass jalousies flying in pieces, and there stood Longnecker. He cradled his black automatic weapon in soft hands, ready to spray the opposition in a surgical assault, leaving his friends standing, his enemies wondering where the center of their thoracic regions had gone. But everything seemed under control, and Longnecker felt slightly disappointed at the anticlimax of his kick-ass entrance.

  Snack emptied Walter Vale’s pockets onto the rug. There was a wallet, a dandruff-flecked comb, keys, the switchblade, and the silenced automatic. Doom still noticed in himself a deep longing to turn this man’s head to mush—

  Doom removed his shotgun from Walter Vale’s mouth, and Vale removed his hands from the top of his head to examine his smashed dentition—

  “No!” Longnecker snapped the rifle to firing position, aimed at Walter Vale’s temple—“Get ’em on your head, or bid farewell to everything from here up.”

  Doom picked up the keys and ran into the bathroom. When he saw Rosalind naked on her knees at the end of her tether, he threw down his shotgun, dropped to his knees, and hugged her. Doom pulled at the tape that still held her arms behind her, but he couldn’t get it loose. He unlocked her ankle from the toilet.

  “He killed your father and he killed Ozzie and Doris. He was going to kill me and make it look like Big Al did it!”

  Doom ran back into the living room, barely noticing that Sheriff Plotner had entered, and returned with Vale’s knife. When he’d cut her hands free, Doom took off his Big Al jacket and helped Rosalind into it.

  Blood was running down Walter Vale’s chin, dropping onto the front of his white shirt as Sheriff Plotner was telling him he had the right to remain silent, anything he said could be held—

  And no one saw Rosalind pick up his silenced automatic from the floor.

  —against him in a court of—

  “What’s your name?” Doom asked him.

  “Fuck you,” replied Walter Vale, whistling slightly.

  “Oh, this guy’s something,” said Longnecker.

  Doom sat down on the edge of the couch. His legs felt weary and unsure of his own weight as the speeding adrenaline slowed. What were they going to do with this guy now that they had him? This guy was different. Here he was beaten, captured red-handed, and he didn’t even look frightened. “Donald Sikes hired you to do this, right?”

  “Donald Sikes? I never heard of him.”

  “You’re in the can for the rest of your life,” said Sheriff Plotner. “You know that, don’t you? You know what happens to punks like you in Florida jails?”

  “Lemme ask you something, cop,” said Walter Vale. “Do you know you stink like a dead turtle?”

  Doom picked up Walter Vale’s wallet. It was full of driver’s licenses and credit cards, all in different names. Walter Freed. Walter Valley. Walter Honnerside. Walter Simkus. Walter Love. Walter Schot. “So what was the plan?”

  Walter Vale showed his bloody gums in something like a grin and said, “There was no plan. I did it because she looked sooo sweet buck naked begging for her life—”

  Rosalind shot him in the right collarbone. Pop. Walter Vale spun and hit the wall. She shot him twice more, pop-pop, blood spots exploding on his chest. Either one of these would have been fatal, but Rosalind continued to shoot. Bullets pocked the wall, and one more struck Walter Vale’s body. The last hit him in the forehead, causing his entire body to bounce.

  “Rosalind! Stop shooting him!”

  “Why!”

  Silence reverberated.

  “Because we’ll never be able to make it look like suicide,” said Doom.

  The hot gun dropped from her hand.

  “Forget that, pal, this is war. Out in the sunlight, no more conniving necessary,” said Longnecker.

  Doom hugged Rosalind, took her out into the night before she had time to look upon what she had done. Snack followed and sat with her in the front seat while Doom returned to the scene, trying to get his mind to work.

  Longnecker picked up Walter Vale’s gun and put it in his jacket pocket.

  “I’ve seen suicide before,” said Sheriff Plotner, “and I’d say this was a open-and-shut case of it.”

  Bloody froth bubbled in the corner of Walter Vale’s mouth. Even the arms of his white shirt were sodden with blood.

  Doom averted his eyes. One couldn’t look upon that and think too. “You’re still acting coroner, aren’t you, Sheriff?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  Among Walter Vale’s phony IDs Doom had seen a blank white business card with a phone number written on it. “Snack, do you have Donald Sikes’s number on you?”

  “Yeah.” He handed it to Doom. It matched that on Vale’s card.

  “Longnecker—?”

  “Yeah, babe?”

  “What’s the best way to sink a ship?”

  “Submarine.”

  “What’s the second best way?”

  BOOM

  Aboard Rosalind’s skiff they motored out through Ponce Pass, seaward, into the teeth of a freshening east wind. Bert, Doom, and Rosalind had feared that east wind; Longnecker, a landsman, hadn’t given it a thought. At dawn it was blowing fifteen knots, eighteen with higher gusts by noon, more than enough time to rile the ocean. Now the wind held steady at eighteen knots, and because of its unobstructed fetch all the way from the Bahamas, conditions could only deteriorate. This would have been a glorious night’s sail aboard a seaboat like Staggerlee, but Doom and Rosalind wouldn’t be on the water, they’d be in it. Even in the absence of moonlight, whitecaps glowered, plain to see.

  Off the starboard bow the lights of the King Don twinkled like a nighttime encampment in the desert. Everyone was tense and silent except for Longnecker, who was simply silent, seasickness clawing at his lower face. His head lolled. Someone might have suggested he concentrate on the horizon, but there was none. A black and belligerent cold front, gathering force, marching westward, had obliterated it.

  Bert added some speed, but Rosalind’s boat immediately began to pound—he could feel the hull flex beneath his feet—so he throttled back, giving the foul weather further opportunity to overtake them. In a wet suit, on her hands and knees, Rosalind checked the equipment still again. Doom never tired of seeing her body strain at the rubber
, but tonight he didn’t even notice. She strapped a big luminous-dial compass to her left wrist and test-breathed each of the four tanks for about the tenth time. What if she got killed or caught and he didn’t? There’d be no way to live with that, suicide the only alternative. Was Small Hope Bay, or revenge, or justice, or whatever he was doing this for, worth the risk of her life? He put his back to the apparent wind and considered aborting the madness, but he was still angry, and he knew that if he did, he’d never be able to suit up and go again…Forget next time, could he drop into that black ocean this time?

  “I’m a professional,” began Rosalind after they had made love twenty-four hours earlier. “This is my job, and I don’t want you out there getting in my way.”

  “I won’t get in your way, because I’m going alone.”

  “Absolutely not. You’re my student and I’ve never lost one yet. You stay in the boat.”

  “You stay in the boat.”

  “How many night dives have you done?”

  “…None.”

  “There’s my point. I’ve done over two hundred.”

  “What about right now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s night now.”

  Doom reveled in the nighttime reef. He had been anxious on the outbound boat ride, but anxiety vanished as soon as warm, still water covered his head. The coral bottom was only thirty feet down, and the powerful light in his hand felt secure, like personal, portable, on-demand daylight. But it was when Rosalind signaled him to kill his light that the wonder of the marine night revealed itself.

  Coral is a living thing, a tight colony of tiny animals called polyps. Only in daylight does coral appear to be inert, if colorful, stone. Indeed, beneath the upper, living layer it is stone, the protective limestone secretions from thousands of generations of now-dead polyps. But at night living polyps by the millions protrude from their stony niches in the upper layer to feed, casting minute poisonous tentacles for microorganisms in the water, and the blackness comes alive. Polyps flash blue and red and green like points of gaudy neon against black water.

  Other, bigger creatures make nighttime appearances. By day only the toothy snouts of moray eels protrude from their holes in the reef, but at night they swim free, undulating, some six feet long and weighing eighty pounds. Octopi slither in the open. Colors shimmer as creatures move by every imaginable means of propulsion. Night after night it goes on, this extravagant sea show, as it has since the last Ice Age.

  It felt to Doom a privilege to be down there with Rosalind, the darker purpose of the practice dive forgotten. She took his hand in hers and drew him gently down to the sandy bottom. She had seen something beneath the arching base of an elkhorn coral tree, and she wanted to share it. Seeing it, Doom forgot to breathe. A stoplight parrot fish slept. Red belly and caudal fin, green on top, the two-foot-long fish floated motionlessly in a bubble of mucus secreted to repel predators while the parrot fish dozed in peace and safety. Gently, Doom held it in his hands. Its black eye moved languidly…

  But tonight was entirely different. There had been no wind last night, the sea flat, calm, benign. The reef was life-rich, warm, and welcoming. Tonight’s sea was dark and deathly. There was no coral close below. Here at the northern extreme of coral’s range, few polyps can survive in the diffuse sunlight and cool water fifty feet down; the depth sounder was showing 92. (Christ, Bert was thinking, how much anchor rode would it take to hold the King Don in these conditions?) Last night’s ocean beckoned; tonight’s warned the foolish to stay the fuck on the hill. Longnecker leaned over the side and barfed.

  “Come on, Bert, give us some speed,” Rosalind snapped.

  “She’s gonna pound like mighty Jesus.”

  “Then let her pound.”

  Longnecker had curled into a helpless ball.

  “Better go out and drop you to windward of her,” said Bert. “You won’t make it otherwise.”

  Rosalind nodded. The boat dropped off a crest and slammed into the trough with a tooth-splitting crack.

  Preparations had been carefully laid. Longnecker had built a simple, artistic time bomb, but the means of housing it—watertight—had proved a thornier technical problem. They considered welding it into a metal box but discarded the idea, since the resulting ensemble would have weighed over a hundred pounds. They considered stout plastic freezer bags, but experiments showed that the bags leaked under less than one atmosphere of pressure. Then Rosalind hit upon the solution: an underwater-camera housing. Size and weight were practical, and watertight integrity was guaranteed by the manufacturer. That solved, they had debated how best to attach the bomb to the King Don’s hull. Longnecker had suggested taping a strong magnet to the housing and sticking it to the bottom of her keel. With that, technically, at least, they were ready. Emotionally, they were all atwitter.

  Rosalind took the helm while Bert rigged twin fishing rods, their cover, and stuck them in holders on the stern. Rosalind slowed to a credible trolling speed. Longnecker threw up and lay in it. The King Don was abeam of them now, several hundred yards away. Bert recovered the helm, and he and Rosalind discussed their course. Seaward of the target, they would turn south and pass as close aboard as they dared, slowing to a stop momentarily while Doom and Rosalind dropped into the black water, then continuing on the phony fishing trip.

  Grimly, Rosalind began to gear up, and Doom followed suit. She strapped a heavy knife to her shin, slid an extra snorkel into her weight belt, clipped two underwater lights to the belt, and stuffed a pair of emergency flares into the Velcroed pocket on her buoyancy compensator. Then she stopped to think, consulting her checklist. The King Don’s lights would bedazzle the night vision of all aboard her, and that was good—they’d probably never even see the boat that bombed them. But the weather was bad and getting worse.

  Her beam to the wind and seas, Rosalind’s boat rolled violently. Doom sat on the sole to pull on his tank straps. Then he steadied another tank for Rosalind to don. Damn! He should have fetched the bomb from the cuddy before he put his tank on. Should he take it off? Could he get it back on? No. Timing his trek to the top of a roll, Doom crawled through Longnecker’s vomit to get the bomb, which he placed in a nylon net bag. He tied a knot in the bag and strapped it to his belt, but he tied it too low—the bomb bounced against his thighs. He shortened up on it.

  Some piece of his consciousness stood apart from himself, slightly above the jouncing deck, watching critically. Only madmen did this kind of shit, it seemed to contend. But there he was, tugging, adjusting, yanking at his gear. Everything chafed, and, sweating in his wet suit, he began to smell himself in offensive waves with each movement. Rosalind was doing the same. Did she stink too? Doom looked over his shoulder, dreading the sight. The King Don was abeam of them again, bow-on to the wind. Something—what the hell was it?—was bouncing against his shoulder.

  This guy’s going to panic on me. Rosalind knew it. He had totally checked out, another hemisphere. She stopped tapping his shoulder and considered leaving him. “Doom!”

  “Huh! What!”

  “Time to go.”

  “Okay. I’m ready—”

  “Sit up on the gunwale with your back to the water.”

  Damn fool, contended the floating part of Doom’s consciousness as he did so. Rosalind sat beside him and clipped the eight-foot-long tether to him with a snap shackle. The rolling threatened to throw them over the side.

  “Good luck,” mouthed Bert as he throttled back to neutral. Longnecker gurgled something similar.

  And Rosalind rolled over backward. The snarling sea took her without a splash. Doom clutched his mask and regulator and rolled—

  The water throbbed as the boat motored off. Surfacing, Doom watched the phony fishing rods waving wildly. He was face-to-face with Rosalind for a moment, then a wave enveloped her. She bobbed up again. She was signaling something. What? Concentrate! His eyes were blurry. She was signaling him to submerge. His eyes were blurry because it was dark a
nd his mask was wet. That all made perfect sense. He submerged.

  Fifteen feet down the blackness was total, but the motion was easier, as if this were a different ocean. How deep was the blackness below him? Best not to dwell on that…The plan was this: Rosalind would take a bearing on the King Don before submerging, and maintaining a depth of fifteen feet would swim that bearing down until they came upon the ship. If they didn’t find the ship, if sea or the current set them off course, Rosalind would poke her eyes up and take another bearing. Had Rosalind taken the initial bearing? Doom didn’t remember seeing her sight across her compass…The tether between them jerked tight—

  Rosalind flashed her penlight in his eyes. He flashed his back, the okay signal. His job was to follow her fins, keeping some slack in the line so as not to pull her off course, but he wasn’t doing it, he was lagging, fucking up. Concentrate! He felt the turbulence from her fins on his face. Just keep it there, right there on the forehead, no more, no less turbulence than this. They were swimming in harmony now…Was his father down there somewhere? What was swimming in the wake of his own fins? Some maw? Any second now he’d feel the bayonet teeth tear through his thighs, hot billows of his own blood, Rosalind reeling in his legless torso…Keep the cadence, kick, kick. Christ! The bomb! Where was the bomb! He should have felt it against his thighs! Was it gone? Or were his thighs gone?