In the distance, Will imagined a man on horseback approaching. He hoped, as the rider neared, to discover it was himself aboard Blue Jacket. That would have been nice to feel, to see. But it was a man, a large man, a stranger, yet there was a familiar curvature to his jaw, the cheekbones, the black Seminole hair, tied back with a red wind band, that Will knew without thinking was not Seminole, because the man was not Seminole. He was a Skin, but from a tribe that was older than the Seminoles, or Cherokees, or Apaches. Much, much older.
The name Chekika came into the boy’s mind.
The horse was brown, at first, but faded to gray as it neared, paler than Cazzio, and it did not possess the expensive confirmation of Blue Jacket. Yet the horse had a sweet, quartering gait, bouncing along as if the earth were a trampoline yet smooth as a rocking chair, the way the large man sat the saddle.
When the rider came to a fence—there had been no fence in the dream until now—the horse wanted to open the throttle, speed up and jump, which caused Will to smile, feeling Cazzio’s spirit alive again beneath him.
For the first time, the man spoke, but to the horse, saying, “That ain’t no fake fence like the horse shows, Buster. You’re in the real world now.”
The real world? Buster?
An awful name for a horse, but Will accepted it because he now recognized the man, even though the two had never met, and Will had never seen a photograph. But Will’s mother had often spoken of the man—a huge, handsome Skin who the women loved.
That sounds familiar.
When a white bird descended and landed on the man’s shoulder, the man’s face zoomed closer, smiling at Will, allowing the bird to communicate a name.
Egret. Joseph Egret.
It was Will Chaser’s grandfather.
The feeling that came into Will’s chest was so powerful that he chose to ignore the rising water that was now lifting him, floating him water light, pressuring his body upward against the coffin’s lid.
Will chose to ignore it even when water began testing his lips and nose, finally leaking into his mouth when the boy could not hold his breath any longer.
He gagged . . . tried to hold his breath again . . . then choked as he breathed water into his lungs. After a brief, panicked flurry, Will gave up, before returning his mind to the buoyant, ascending sensation in his chest.
Will clung to that feeling, held peacefully to its warm power, as his lungs ceased struggling . . . as his heart slowed . . . the drumming heart muscles dimming, then losing their electric spark . . . yet Will felt easy, empty of fear, as a small, true voice within him whispered, You have endured enough . . .
Will’s grandfather remained in focus behind the boy’s eyes, a man astride a good horse, a horse bred for business, the dissimilar images joining as a luminous, knowing energy that offered nothing—not pleasure, not even hope—but was real, as real as his grandfather’s fire-bright face, a face that became serious when Joseph extended his hand, inviting Will . . . somewhere.
Somewhere, Will decided, was good enough.
But as he reached to take the hand, Joseph was abruptly replaced by the fierce flat mask of a plains Indian, his body, wind-sculpted, sundried, with two cavernous, red-sparked skull eyes glowing with a scent that Will knew too well: rage.
A mask-behind-the-mask appeared, an old male Skin who was thinking loud enough for Will to hear, even as the boy’s heart slowed, slowed, then ceased beating, in a silence that spoke: Come with me . . . Come with me now . . .
In what Will did not believe were his final seconds, a windblown name formed. It vibrated drum notes through wood and earth, resonating long afterward in the living flesh of the boy, and the echo of a coffin that housed two skulls.
Geronimo . . .
34
I was on the flybridge of the luxury yacht talking with Hump. I had just maneuvered him into sharing some surprising information when the lights of Barbara Hayes-Sorrento’s van swung through palm trees, then hunted for the turnoff to the dock.
Hump was carrying a gun, which was unusual—Shelly Palmer’s gun. He touched the barrel to the back of my head and whispered, “The senator is here. Get down.”
For the first time in many minutes, my attention shifted from what the rhino-sized Cuban was saying to what I was seeing.
My hands were duct-taped behind me. Hump had looped a braided rope around my neck and knotted the end to the heavy aluminum sun canopy three feet overhead. Aside from concentrating on stretching the duct tape and working myself free, there wasn’t much else I could do but look and listen and follow Hump’s orders—for now anyway.
I ducked below the flybridge fairing but could still watch the van as it parked and its doors opened. Barbara wasn’t alone as she had told me.
On the passenger side was a man, a large man, shoulders twice as wide as his seat in the van. For a moment, I felt hopeful. But then I heard the hydraulic drone of a sidelift and knew it was a van for the handicapped, one of a special fleet maintained for tourists in wheelchairs.
Because it had to be Otto Guttersen, I could guess what had happened.
Barbara had met the man at Tampa International. Because it was the polite thing to do, she had probably invited him to ride with her. They had compromised by driving Guttersen’s rental van.
“No problem,” she had answered over the phone when I had asked if she was alone. Only now did I realize it was a politician’s device. Again, she’d done the polite thing.
And why not? I had already met Guttersen via telephone, so she’d meant it as a pleasant surprise.
Now here she was, walking into a trap, accompanied by this fraud wrestler with his showtime name, Sheriff Bull-something. Will Chaser’s male guardian, newly arrived in Florida to find comfort in sunshine and being close to the U.S. intelligence group based at MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa.
Damn it.
I remembered Barbara telling me, “We’re flying the foster grandparents to Tampa. After what we’ve been through, it’ll be good for all of us.”
Yes, that’s what had happened.
I was thinking, Where’s the foster grandmother? Something about the flu? Wherever the woman was, I hoped she remained there. A volatile situation was now out of control. Farfel was desperate to get the senator on the boat, but Guttersen? The Cuban would view a cripple as a liability, as useless as empty baggage, and he would dispose of the man.
Otto Guttersen was about to die.
Up until that moment, I’d been mildly optimistic. Things had begun to go my way. It had required subtle countermoves and some risk to convince Farfel that if he killed Shelly Palmer, I wouldn’t help him.
The man had agreed for a simple reason: He was afraid. The infamous interrogator, who specialized in using fear as a weapon, was now the hunted, not the hunter. He knew it and was tired of dealing with his mounting problems alone.
So we had left Shelly Palmer, duct-taped and gagged, in one of the stalls. I hadn’t been able to say good-bye, but she and I had exchanged a look before Hump shoved me outside. I had attempted an apology by shaking my head, thin-lipped. Shelly stared back with a familiar quizzical sadness, asking once again Who are you?
I hoped the woman was still alive an hour from now so I could answer at least part of that question. I was the man who planned to take Farfel and Hump safely into the Gulf of Mexico, then return without them.
The odds had been shifting in my favor . . . until now.
The Cubans had lost their edge. Another rough day for the kidnappers, I knew, because Hump had been telling me about it. We had been alone on the flybridge for about ten minutes before the van arrived, and I’d goaded and plucked information from him.
Hump had run the ugly little cabin cruiser aground while attempting the channel between Tamarindo and the Gulf of Mexico. After Hump finally wrestled the boat free, Farfel took the wheel, then made the same amateur mistake minutes later, running the boat high and dry onto another oyster bar.
Farfel had injured his back. His
arms were a mess from the oysters. He had wrenched a knee trying to push the boat, and, as Hump had explained, the man wasn’t a hundred percent to begin with.
“His hand was already bleeding,” Hump told me, and I felt a charge of admiration when he described the boy decoying Farfel close enough to bite him.
Will Chaser: That’s who we had been discussing finally when the van appeared. It had required a different style of manipulation to convince Hump that he could trust me, that I really didn’t care if the boy lived or died, but that I was talkative just like him.
There was something else he believed we had in common: I was afraid of Farfel. Which was true. Farfel was injured and in pain, so he was even more foul-tempered and more likely to use violence as an easy solution to minor irritants.
“Don’t worry about me saying anything to Dr. Navárro,” I had reassured the huge man. “What we say here stays here. Maybe tomorrow when we’re in Havana we can go out and have a beer together. A man can’t have too many friends.”
It was a less subtle lie. Truth was, I had come to despise Angel Yanquez almost as much as I despised René Navárro from the very beginning.
Hump had enjoyed putting the rope leash around my neck, then leading me aboard the boat, pausing once to slap my face, then club me with the back of his hand. He claimed it was because I moved too slowly, but I knew the truth. Hump was enjoying this rare opportunity to act out as the alpha male.
By the time we’d made it to the flybridge, my head was pounding, and my ribs ached because of the kicks he’d landed in the stable. Hump’s simpleton way of speaking, and the uneasy alliance I had forged with him to protect Shelly Palmer, made me impatient.
I didn’t trust Farfel. He had returned to the stable alone as Hump led me to the boat. He’d been gone for several minutes before returning to hide in a storage shed, anticipating the senator’s arrival. I hadn’t heard a gunshot, but that meant nothing due to the Cuban’s fondness for the drill.
Had he used it on the detective?
It made it tough to bide my time but I knew I had to wait. I had to wait until Farfel and Hump were together on the flybridge.
It hadn’t happened yet—Farfel was shrewd that way. He had a jackal’s instincts when it came to self-preservation and a professional’s gift for tactical positioning.
The man had always stayed just out of my reach, allowing Hump to do the dangerous work, and never getting close enough to his assistant to allow me a single, united target.
But it would happen. Hopefully, my opportunity would come before we cast off, but even if Farfel didn’t join us until later I would continue waiting until we were together, then I would kill them both, at the very least leave them miles from shore.
Farfel, with his jackal wariness, had ordered Hump to duct-tape my hands—a mistake. When I’d taped Nelson Myles’s hands, I had made sure his thumbs were exposed and that his fingers were not symmetrically interlaced. Myles hadn’t protested, and Hump didn’t care, because neither of them was aware of that basic escape-artist’s ploy.
Hopefully, it was the last mistake the two Cubans would ever make.
Since then, I had been steadily stretching the tape, working it off my hands so it now covered them like gloves. I had been polite and cooperative and acceptably submissive.
I had remained submissive as I listened to Hump warn me, “You will learn to jump if I tell you. You have never dealt with a man such as me.”
I had answered honestly, saying in Spanish, “You are very strong—stronger than me—you’ve proven that.”
“Yes, it is true,” he had replied. “Many men have said so.”
We had been talking long enough by then for me to risk mentioning Will Chaser. I still didn’t know if he was alive or dead so I had nudged the truth closer, saying, “With your size, you should have been an athlete in the Olympics. Cuba always does very well. You could have been a great boxer or weight lifter. Boys all over the world would have admired you. Boys everywhere, even here in the United States.”
Hump had nodded, his expression saying If you say it’s true, I won’t argue. “When I was only twelve, I could lift the front end of a Lada from the ground! I could have held an entire Calina over my head, but they are difficult to balance, those ugly Russian cars.”
I suggested, “By the time you were fourteen, you probably could put a horse under your arm.”
The man made the association. “Don’t mention boys or horses to me. I never want to hear about them again. I have always distrusted horses, but now I distrust them both. The boy you call William, can you guess what my name for him was?”
I shrugged.
“Devil Child, that is what I called him. I was afraid of that brat, I admit it! What man wouldn’t be afraid of a vicious demon? Have you noticed that he ate part of my ear? It is true!”
Hump turned his head to show me and I felt another surge of admiration.
“Perhaps it was because the boy was an Indian, an Apache, he claimed, like the painted ones I watched on television in René’s barbershop in Havana. They are savages, you know. Why, the Devil Child even threatened to scalp me.” He lowered his voice to confide, “The child put a curse on me. He admitted it, then bragged of it!”
Hump had already let other information slip. I now knew that he and Farfel had planned the kidnapping with men from two different organizations. Choirboy wanted documents that would embarrass Rome. There was an American who took orders from another American, Tinman, although Hump didn’t say it. They wanted all the files destroyed but were also in it for the money.
I already knew why Hump and Farfel were involved, so now I was concentrating on the boy. This was the first time Hump had spoken openly of Will, but he was using the past tense.
Hump was borderline mentally retarded, I was convinced. It took him many sentences to communicate even simple facts. But he spoke with the carefully constructed syntax of a slow learner. It was unlikely he would confuse tenses, but I refused to be so easily convinced because I didn’t want to believe it.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to spend much time around William Chaser,” I told Hump. “One time, the boy swore at me. He threatened me, too. It’s true.”
“Hah!” The man was pleased to hear it. “What a dangerous hostage he made. As I said to Farfel”—the man craned his neck to confirm that Navárro couldn’t hear—“no one will pay ransom for a demon teenager. We should kill the boy, I told him, before the U.S. demands money from us.”
I affected a casual disinterest. “Good. Sometimes, a bullet’s the best way.” “Not in this case. Because of the curse, you see. Also, we have made certain promises. Unlike Farfel, when I give my word I keep it! So we buried the boy in a box. He is less than three kilometers from here.” The man motioned toward the bay, then stopped to focus on something that surprised him. “What is that orange light in the distance?”
He was looking toward a line of mangrove islands, dark shapes on moon-blue water. Beyond the islands was an orange corona of light. It pulsed like a slow-motion explosion.
I said, “A fire. Maybe a boat,” but was thinking of Tamarindo, more worried than I’d been before.
Because his attention was still on the fire, it took a moment for Hump to reply, “We used a little fan. I connected the fan to a battery for air . . . for the boy, I’m telling you. By now, though”—Hump didn’t have a watch so his eyes moved to the night sky—“the battery was not strong, and the fan, it didn’t work so very well. So the brat, he is probably dead. Although, personally, I hope he is not.”
I said, “What?,” before remembering I didn’t care.
“Before I filled the grave, the boy promised he would remove the curse if I returned. I told him I would come back. I would like to. It would be a wise thing to do. He’s going to die anyway, so I could kill him later. What’s the difference?”
The man reached and lifted a necklace from beneath his shirt. “These beads are blessed to protect me from evil. I also made a small offerin
g to the Devil Child. But it didn’t help. Not ten minutes later, Farfel crashed our boat.”
I pretended to look at the beads, as I said, “Well . . . the boy is an Indian.”
“An Indian priest, he told me, but used a word I do not know.”
“Some people scoff at religion,” I said. “Not me. I’ve heard of voodoo curses and Santería curses. People have died—it’s been documented. Some say they can bring the dead back to life. That, I doubt. But from an Indian? Maybe your curse isn’t fatal.”
“You think I don’t know of these things? I have Santería priests who instruct me. Don’t make the mistake of thinking me a fool. I am not. Even Farfel now takes my advice. Sometimes, I come right out and tell Farfel what we must do! Of course . . . I do this privately. Why embarrass an old man?”
He was swerving off topic, so I said, “Personally, I don’t care if the kid’s dead or alive. But, if you’re asking me to help, the answer is no.”
Confused, Hump said, “Help do what?,” then demanded, “Why are you refusing me?”
“Because I can’t. I’m not taking you back to where you buried the boy just to have a curse removed.”
Hump had been leaning against the safety railing, his attention now on the shell road watching for the senator’s car to appear. He straightened. “You told me curses sometimes kill people!”
“It’s not part of our agreement. I’m taking you to Cuba, that’s all. Sorry. I follow Dr. Navárro’s orders, not yours.”
“But Farfel is not the one who has been doomed by that bastard savage! If you expect me to go with you to Havana and drink beer, then you should at least—”
That’s when the rental van appeared.
Hump crouched low as he touched the gun to my head, saying, “Get down.”
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