Undercurrents

by Pamela Beason

  The victim moaned again as Sam pushed a life preserver under her head and J.J. positioned another under her wounded leg, but now the woman had her eyes closed. Even with a grimace wrinkling her face and her eyes closed, she bore a startling resemblance to Zing. Maybe she was the model who’d posed for Zing’s photo. “What’s your name?” Sam asked.

  “Bergit,” the woman croaked.

  Having hauled all the snorkelers on board, Kyle returned to his wounded passenger’s side. With tousled sun-bleached blond hair curling from beneath his baseball cap and dressed in a yellow T-shirt and cutoffs, he looked all of twenty. What fly-by-night company thought it was a good idea to send a kid out alone in rough water with a boat full of snorkeling tourists?

  He reached for a list attached to a clipboard on a nearby seat. He ran a damp finger down the list. “Bergit Moller.” He looked at the victim in the cockpit and made a face. “I guess I should call the head office.”

  “You need to get her to the hospital,” Sam said. Surely the run-down, overcrowded clinic she’d seen was not the only medical facility in the islands. “And you need to call the police.”

  Eduardo and Kyle discussed something in Spanish, probably who should do what next.

  The other five foreign tourists talked excitedly among themselves. One of the women knelt beside Bergit and took her hand, murmuring words of encouragement. The dorsal fin of a shark briefly surfaced not far away in the water, and the others turned to look at it, pointing to other sharks visible through the clear water.

  Sam’s head ached. The sunlight was way too bright. Darting zigzags of twinkling lights stabbed her eyes. Everything seemed to slow to a crawl.

  She squinted her eyes against the pain. “Who saw that other boat?”

  Blank looks all around. “The other boat—the one with the red hull—that zoomed up to Bergit?” she clarified. The one with a killer aboard who shot Zing.

  The matched pair—clearly mother and daughter—shook their heads, and after a quick translation by the portly woman, so did the other foreign tourists. Sam checked the faces of Eduardo and Kyle. No and No.

  J.J. shrugged. “I saw the wake of a boat moving away.”

  That was just great. She was the only one who’d seen it? And all she could describe was a red hull? She sat down, rubbing her forehead. The cabin cruiser bounced in the waves. Her headache segued into massive throbbing. Lightning slashed across her field of vision, bright stars bursting within the zigzag shapes. She closed her eyes for a minute. It didn’t help. She opened them again; staggered toward the other side of the boat, fighting waves of nausea.

  “Eduardo, let’s go back to Papagayo,” she said, crawling back into their inflatable panga. “This boat needs to hightail it back to Puerto Ayora so Bergit can get to the hospital.”

  J.J. followed her and pulled her down to the bench. “You okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be? Just because I saw someone get shot?”

  “You’re holding your elbow like it hurts.”

  “It does.” That was a little weird, now that she thought about it. She didn’t remember banging it on anything. Her right arm felt prickly, too, like it had fallen asleep.

  “And you’re staggering.”

  “Did you not hear the part about witnessing an attempted murder? You’d be staggering, too. And my head hurts like you wouldn’t believe.” She lowered her head into her hands, blotting out the painful sunlight.

  She felt J.J. rise and jump to the cabin cruiser, but she was back a minute later, jiggling Sam’s arm. “Here.”

  She lifted her head. J.J. waved a plastic mask in front of her face. It was attached via a plastic tube to a tank labeled oxigeno. Sam waved it away. “I don’t need oxygen.”

  “I think you do. We need to move you back to the other boat. You need to go to Puerto Ayora, too. I just checked your dive computer. You came up awfully fast.”

  J.J. was criticizing her dive skills now? That was the last thing she needed on top of this blinding headache. “You would, too, if you saw someone bleeding out above you.”

  J.J. pressed the plastic mask against Sam’s face. “Ever heard of the bends?”

  The bends—DCS—decompression sickness. Nitrogen bubbles in the blood going places they weren’t supposed to. Potential for strokes, heart attacks, paralysis. Pure oxygen helped, but the only cure for serious decompression sickness was time in a decompression chamber.

  “Eduardo!” Sam gestured him to come over from the other boat.

  He crawled into the panga. “But Sam—”

  “We’ll keep the oxygen,” she yelled to Kyle. “You go, now!”

  The cabin cruiser’s powerful engine roared to life beside them and a cloud of blue exhaust wafted their way.

  “Sam!” J.J. tugged at her arm. “Don’t be an idiot.”

  The snorkel tour boat pulled away, leaving their inflatable rocking in its wake.

  “There’s only one decompression chamber here,” she told J.J.

  “But she is—” Eduardo started.

  “Out of commission,” Sam finished the sentence.

  At the same time, Eduardo said, “Broke.”

  J.J. looked horrified.

  Sam took a deep breath of the cold oxygen. The shooter had hit the wrong target, but he may have finished Zing just the same. She slid off the bench into the floor of the dinghy and the world went black.

  18

  When she bounced off the floor, Sam came to. It took a few seconds to register the meaning of the clouds zooming dizzily past overhead. She saw plastic in front of her nose and reached up to pull it off.

  A dark-skinned hand swatted hers away. “Just relax and breathe,” J.J. said. Strong fingers lifted her head and slid a boat cushion beneath it.

  She was body-slammed from below again. She was on the floor of the panga, still in her wetsuit, speeding back to Papagayo. The banging of the bow slamming into the waves was making her headache worse. The bends, she had the bends. And there was no decompression chamber. She closed her eyes and concentrated on breathing the cool, pure oxygen.

  Was she going to die in the Galápagos? That would really piss her off. This was supposed to be her tropical holiday, her well-paid contribution to the conservation cause. How the hell could everything have gone so wrong? First Dan, and now Bergit—God, had that poor woman been shot because she looked like a fictional character?

  “Bullets!” She tried to sit up. “We’ve got to go find the bullets.”

  “No, we don’t.” J.J. pressed her back down on the floor. “We are not exactly in CSI territory.”

  It’ll be like a vacation, Wyatt had said. A horror movie vacation, where the innocent tourists stumble into a hotel run by demons and then get murdered one by one. Zing’s writing caused an innocent stranger to get shot, and now it looked like her alter-ego WildWest, aka plain old Summer Westin, was going to end up as collateral damage. She had the bends in the middle of nowhere. Her hands felt like pins and needles. Every dive magazine she’d ever read featured someone dying from the bends or ending up in a wheelchair.

  She didn’t feel like she was going to die. But then maybe every diver with DCS thought that in her last moments on earth. Why hadn’t she moved in with Chase and learned to cook and lived happily ever after?

  J.J. leaned close. “How’re you doing?”

  Sam pulled down her mask. “That woman got shot because of me. And for the record, I’d rather die than end up paralyzed.”

  “I hear you,” J.J. murmured. “Welcome to the war.”

  That response irritated Sam. She’d expected something along the lines of This isn’t your fault, everyone is going to be fine. What kind of friend said, Welcome to the war?

  Another body slam levitated her. The hell with this. She pushed herself into a sitting position and leaned against the bench next to J.J.’s knees, facing the stern. Eduardo alternately glanced at her and the waves ahead as he manned the tiller, his forehead knotted with worry lines. She ordered her right hand
to rise and gave him a weak thumbs-up, which made him smile a little. She wiggled both feet. They felt a bit numb, but all her appendages worked on command. “Look,” she said to J.J. “I am not paralyzed.”

  “Good to know. Keep the mask on,” J.J. said.

  By the time they bumped up against Papagayo’s stern, her headache had lessened a bit, and the zigzag flashes of light twinkled only at the periphery of her vision. Her elbow still hurt, but maybe she had actually banged it on something.

  She ripped off the oxygen mask and climbed from the dinghy to Papagayo’s platform under her own power, carrying her camera.

  J.J. followed her down the stairway to their cabins. She carried the oxygen tank and mask and pressed it into Sam’s arms as she opened the cabin door.

  “I’m fine,” Sam told her.

  “You’re pigheaded.” White salt crystals dotted J.J.’s mahogany skin and black hair.

  “I’ve got to get that video on the Net before anything else happens.”

  “Not yet.” J.J. stepped behind her and unzipped Sam’s wetsuit. “Does anything hurt?”

  “Not too much.”

  J.J. frowned. “Do you see any visual anomalies, like flashes?”

  “How’d you know?”

  J.J. gave her an exasperated look and tugged on the neck of Sam’s wetsuit. “Take this off, lay down, and put that mask back on. I’m coming back to check on you in a while and you better be horizontal.”

  “Can you find out how Zing—I mean Bergit—is?”

  “I’ll try.” J.J. turned toward her cabin.

  Sam shucked off her clammy wetsuit and lay on her bunk in her bathing suit, sucking on the oxygen for a few more minutes. It really did help her headache. Could anyone buy a tank of oxygen? Maybe she’d get a little one for home use. Blake might appreciate a toke when he stumbled out of bed after a late party.

  J.J. came back to check on her. She made Sam sit up, raise both arms, and then hold them in the air with her eyes closed. It was a test that she must have passed, because J.J. said, “Looks like you’re going to be okay. But lie back down and do ten more minutes, just to be safe. Oh, and it looks like Bergit’s going to be fine,” she added. “She’ll have quite the story to tell the folks back home.” Sam heard the door close behind her as she left.

  Back home. It felt like years since she’d been home. It was still winter back in Washington State. Had Blake mentioned something about snow?

  In a few days, she was supposed to be enjoying snow with Chase. She grabbed the phone from her desk to check the missed calls. The screen was blank. Damn it. She’d forgotten to plug it into the charger last night.

  She set the dead phone on the desk and lay back down. She couldn’t wait to introduce Chase to cross-country skiing. He was a downhill skier, so he’d have the snowplow down; that was the hardest part. Of course he’d be klutzy at first. But Chase was fit, and soon he’d be sidestepping up hills and crossing streams on snow bridges.

  She’d show him why cross-country was superior to downhill skiing. She’d point out prints left by hares and birds, listen to the hoots of owls hidden among the snow-laden branches of the evergreens. When they stopped for lunch, they’d be visited by gray jays—birds that would perch on their hands, feather light, their clawed toes wrapped around human fingers as they ate crumbs out of human palms. The jays, also called “whiskey jacks” or “camp robbers,” were brazen wild creatures. Once a fluffy gray bandit had swooped down from a branch and sheared off a chunk of the peanut butter sandwich she held. Remembering that incident brought a smile to her lips. But wait—the gray jays were in the Cascades. Did they live in Utah, too?

  A soft knock sounded at her door. She pulled off the oxygen mask and turned off the flow. Just as she recalled the word Pase, Eduardo slipped in, accompanied by Captain Quiroga. Yeesh, was there no privacy on this boat? She assured the two men she was fine, raising her arms and waggling her fingers to prove it.

  “Lunch will be served in a few minutes,” the captain told her.

  The thought of food made her nauseous. She must have looked a little green, because then he said, “I will have someone bring soup?”

  She nodded. “Thanks.”

  They left without saying a word about the woman who had been shot.

  Sam pulled herself out of bed, plugged the phone into the charger, then trudged to the shower and rinsed off the salt that gummed up her hair and made her skin itch. She exchanged her bathing suit for shorts and T-shirt.

  When she emerged from the tiny bathroom, a tray containing a bowl of steaming soup and a chunk of bread was on the desk next to her laptop. Her bed had been straightened. The traffic through her personal space was downright creepy.

  Muffled noises from the adjoining room told her the tour group had returned. She heard Ken say, “You idiot!” followed by a loud thump hitting the wall, then mutual laughter.

  Each day in the Galápagos felt more surreal. The sun was shining, the scenery was stunning. Only hours ago, she and J.J. had explored a magnificent reef. They were sharing a yacht with a bunch of happy-go-lucky tourists. But Dan was dead and someone had just tried to kill Zing. She had slipped into a twisted parallel universe.

  For a change, the Internet seemed like an ally instead of an enemy. She booted up her computer, attached the camera, and brought up her video of the attack on Bergit. The footage started off distant and blue, but when she watched closely, she spotted the bullets as they streaked through the water. She had obviously kept the camera focused on Bergit as she swam upward, bringing the bloody scene into startling close-up. Then the video became all dizzying motion as she dropped the camera and let it trail, twisting on its tether while she swam with Bergit and J.J. to the boat.

  Sam deleted all the blurred footage and saved the remaining video on her laptop, along with the colorful stills of the fish and basket star.

  She connected the phone and computer and brought up Out There’s home page. At the right side of the screen remained Dan’s photo and the words Mystery Death, but above that, surrounded by flashing markers, was the message: zing attacked and shot!

  What? She clicked on the headline, which brought up another short notice.

  An anonymous source in the Galápagos Islands has reported via email that our correspondent Zing was attacked and shot this morning. Stay tuned to Out There for updates.

  She checked the missed calls on her phone. Sure enough, there was a message from Wyatt, marked with a red exclamation point. She played it. “Is it true? Were you shot? Are you all right? If you’re not dead, you need to report in right away.”

  She briefly considered not calling him to find out what he would do next. While she was pondering the professionalism of that move, he called again.

  “Hi, Tad,” she answered.

  “Zing, is that actually you?”

  “No.”

  “What? Who is this?”

  “My name is Sam, remember?”

  “Whatever,” he growled impatiently. “Did you get shot this morning?”

  “Nope.”

  “Bogus,” he said to someone else. “Totally bogus. Someone’s playing us.”

  “Tad!” she said loudly to get his attention back. “I didn’t get shot, but a woman who looks like Zing did. I’m writing the story now. Can you forward me the email message you received about the shooting?”

  “I’m posting it now on the website. When will your story be done?”

  “Half an hour?”

  “Try for fifteen minutes.” There was a pause, and then Wyatt said, “Glad you’re still alive, WildWest.” She heard him talking to someone—probably the editor—before the connection ended.

  She wrote a brief account of the dive and the attack—the video pretty much spoke for itself. Will the police arrest the attackers? Zing asked at the end of the post. It was a damn good question. She uploaded the story and video, savoring the thought of Carlos Santos reading this post and realizing his thugs had missed his real target. They’d been tr
acking the wrong woman.

  When she received Out There’s acknowledgment—Great video!—she sat staring at the words for a second. Shit! Had she just blown her cover? There had been no other boat in the bay when she and J.J. had entered the water, but the thugs who had tracked “Zing” might have been observing the area from the island. Her video clearly showed her position at the time of the attack, so if any of the snorkelers or tour guide Kyle thought about it, they’d realize she had shot the film. She had posted as Zing but anyone watching would know that she was Summer Westin.

  She slurped the soup—seafood bisque—as she thought about the scenario for a moment longer. Oh hell, this had been true all along. Either her enemies were already after her or they weren’t that analytical.

  She checked Out There’s home page again. A link had been added to the notice. It led to the email message received from the Galápagos:

  This morning two strangers in a speedboat shot Zing as she snorkeled in a tranquil bay. Galápagos was a peacefull paradice before foreign influences brought violence. In less than one week, we have one death, and now a shooting—more violence than was seen here in five years past. Zing and friends Wilderness Westin and Daniel Kazaki entered our islands posing as tourists, but clearly they came to make trouble for reasons we can not understand. We pray that our government will protect our peacefull citizens and our tourists from foreign agitators like these.

  Sam snorted in disgust. Peacefull! Whoever wrote that clearly didn’t know the meaning of the word or how to spell it. The phrase foreign agitator brought to mind her conversation with the woman at the consulate. Did the police now consider her a foreign agitator? Were they amassing evidence to use against her? Carlos Santos, Ricardo Diaz, and perhaps Tony, too, wanted her to leave. If she appealed to them, could they persuade the police to give her passport back? She squirmed in her chair, thinking about trusting any of them to help. It seemed more likely that they’d kill her and dump her body overboard.