But what to do about it? She was pretty sure the three she had murdered weren't pirates. Otherwise, they never would have pulled the two of them out of the water in the first place. The way she guessed it, some trawler or other must have come upon the wrecked boat and dropped part of the crew on board to pilot it into harbor. Which meant a large crew on a large trawler and someone organized enough to come looking for them sooner or later. They had to be smugglers or drug runners, to be so worried about witnesses to the hijacking of a floundering gringo yacht.
So staying on the boat wasn't an option, but neither was showing up in port and taking the authorities on a guided tour of the carnage. No way could she get those three bodies up the hatch and over the side, especially not now in her weakened condition. Horrified as she was by the possibility, it looked like the only way out of this mess was another long swim.
But at least she was thinking straight. That was an improvement. And she would keep thinking straight until she found Rudy. Didn't matter what it took. When Sheri Ballin made up her mind, she made up her mind.
She must have dozed off eventually, because one minute, the light through the portholes was a white shade of yellow, the next, it glowed a weak orange. She dragged herself out of bed and, for the first time, caught the reek of blood and dead bodies. The corpses lay where she had left them, crowding the hatch and making her shudder when she realized that she must have literally crawled over them more than once. Somewhere, a wife or a girlfriend, maybe even children, must be wondering what had happened to them, what was keeping them so long out at sea. But they were sailors and unpredictable, away for weeks at a time. And in any case, if Sheri started thinking of them as human beings, she would go crazy.
Up in the cockpit, she turned the boat back landward and started emptying out lockers. Looking for a life raft or anything inflatable to separate her from the water. She went below and emptied out the forward compartment, checked under every seat, and took apart the living and bed rooms. Then underneath the hatch, behind the stairs, she finally found what she was looking for.
The labels on the bags read "survival suit." There were two of them, bright red outfits with integrated feet and mittens and a waterproof zipper from the crotch up to the Plexiglas window in the hood. A thick, foam-like liner looked like it would float her through a hurricane. When she laid out one of them, it was six feet long and ridiculously oversized, so she found duct tape and started folding and taping herself in, limb by limb. She stuffed wads of dollar bills into the extra room in the legs, then thought about it and added an empty handgun to one leg and three of its clips to the other. By the time she closed the suit to her waist, she could barely waddle across the room.
She ate again, facing away from the bodies this time and staring across at the empty compartment and the Uzi still lying on the couch, ignoring the dark pools of blood congealing on the floor underneath her feet. An idea came to her. She found a plastic garbage sack and dropped the Uzi and two spare clips into it. Then she clambered topside and stopped the engines. They had been throbbing along beneath the cockpit, so she pulled up the flooring looking for them. A flashlight beam found the two gas tanks, one on either side of the boat, one entirely empty, the other half-full.
She took off one of the mittens and taped her wrist to the canvas of the suit, until she was pretty sure no water would enter. She would need at least one hand. She took the Uzi out of the garbage sack and studied how it worked, how to load and unload the clips. It was a simple mechanism, and before long, she could do it without looking. Then she put the Uzi in the garbage bag and practiced doing the same thing through the plastic, Rudy-style, over and over again, until she was ready to scream. Finally, she tied and sealed the bag and set it aside.
With all of the wandering back and forth, the boat had ended up maybe five miles off the land. When she last checked, the coastline was a barren, rocky desert with no houses in sight. Five miles was still a little far, especially at night, so she started the engines and let the boat bring her in closer. A pair of snorkeling fins in an open locker caught her eye. They fit over the suit, but were much too long for her tiny feet. She used the rest of the duct tape to attach them.
When she finally ran out of things to do, Sheri sat back and let all of the doubts and second thoughts she had been avoiding crawl in to nag at her. She had no idea what she was doing. She was so over her head. Her plan, if she could call it that, was based on zero experience. They would find her and find the boat, and everything she had done would turn out to be a waste of effort.
And Rudy had to be dead anyway. None of this was going to do a damn thing for him. She wasn't going to find him out there washed up on the shore. He was gone, and she just had to face it.
But then the boat reached as close to the shore as she dared, and she brought it around with the half-filled gas tank side of the boat facing the land. She was at the point of no return. Stupid as the entire idea now struck her, she zipped up the suit the rest of the way, hefted the sack with the Uzi, and lowered herself off the ladder at the back of the boat.
The water was cold, but nothing like the violent, horrifying soup she had floated through before. She kicked away from the boat, floating easily on her back, the money and gun pulling her legs beneath the surface where the fins could push her along. But the bobbing boat started to turn with the current, leaving her almost no time to organize her thoughts. She felt through the garbage sack for the Uzi and somehow got it pointed at the fiberglass hull and waterline, no more than thirty feet away. She held down the trigger, and the gun exploded with a snarl that shocked her even through the survival suit. She couldn't tell if the bullets hit above or below the water, or sailed off overhead to Japan.
Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all. But it was too late now. Before the Uzi got wet, she changed out the clip and emptied another into the boat. This time she connected with something. An enormous explosion blew a gaping hole in the fiberglass and started a fire.
Sheri let go of the Uzi and kicked away. She hadn't counted on all the noise and fire lighting up the night. The boat started to list as it took on water, but for some reason or another, refused to sink. It burned like a beacon, drifting along in the nighttime breeze. Sheri kicked as fast and hard as she could to get out of the aura of light around it. This was such a bad idea. She should have just run it aground on the shore, instead of leaving this funeral pyre for the entire marine world to converge on. But then something else exploded—some tank she must have not known about. The boat split at the cockpit, and the two halves sank immediately.
Sheri glanced awkwardly over her shoulder and found the shore no more than a mile away. She eased off to a steady, smooth kick of the fins. Within five minutes, the night-blinding light of the fire had faded out of her eyes. Overhead, the stars appeared without a moon to overwhelm them. She hadn't taken the time to study the stars and the astrological signs like this since she was a child. For a minute, she thought she recognized Virgo, the virgin, but she really had no idea. She would have to ask her mother Marta the next time she ran into her.
Chapter 25
Sam never would have agreed to the surgery if he knew what came afterward. He had been through this already with his knee—one god-awful therapy after another, a persistent ration of pain-killers, months of focusing on the pettiest minutiae of existence, all of those tiny bodily mechanisms that he had always expected to auto-pilot through his life.
And now Lydia had taken to hounding him—hovering over him with pills, glasses of water, and a blood-pressure cuff, forcing him to walk, first around the apartment, then out shuffling along the Esplanade like a sandwich-board advertisement for euthanasia. She made him walk at least twice a day, refused to even buy groceries, until he agreed to shuffle along to the store with her.
As if starvation worried him. The gruels and soups and pre-masticated stews Lydia fed him had taken less than a month to start turning his stomach. He had paid no more attention to food and eating in his life t
han he had to any other bodily function. Now that Lydia insisted on forcing his focus in that direction, he understood why. It all tasted like shit in his mouth, a bland effort to ward off the inevitable failure of human flesh.
He had heard about this happening to old people—the world shrink-wrapping you, until your entire existence revolved around a single room, a single armchair, where you sat and measured your pulse and breathing, licked the pabulum and ice cream off the spoon in the nurse's fist, and waited for some stranger to show up with a posse of alien grandchildren they swore belonged to you. Too weak to get up and do anything about it, until one day your internal auto-systems gave up wasting the planet's energy on your technical existence.
At least Sam's ill-mannered brother Henry had the good manners to go out quickly, a monster with his boots on, pretending to the last that he owned all he surveyed. Henry would be laughing at Sam now, if he weren't so busy roasting in hell.
But the good news, post-surgery, was that Sam at last seemed to be hiding his habitual melancholy and bitterness from Lydia. And he felt better for that. Before the surgery, he had done his damnedest to drag her along with him, swirling around the vortex, determined to suck her down through every inch of his deepening misery. And as much as Sam still found himself wanting to cut her determined enthusiasm down to the manageable dimensions of his gloom, he resisted, kept his mouth shut, even conjuring an occasional joke or smile. It didn't help either of them, but at least he felt a bigger man for it.
If only Lydia would stop nagging him about the Smullen brothers. She had threatened to call the local police and jab at that hornet's nest with her stick of questions that would do neither of them a bit of good. Sam couldn't blame her for pondering the inexplicable visit from the twin giants, even though she did strike him as a mite too absorbed in the superficial beauty of the slicker brother. But the other brother's condition, the mention of the missing Rudy's name, and the elliptical nature of the conversation, all smelled like serious trouble. They already had enough of that.
In the end, Sam warded off the entire idiocy by promising to re-open a nosy channel into his journalistic past. That channel, at least for purposes of this misguided inquiry, consisted of Jamie Crossfield, a reporter Sam was pretty sure still worked the city desk at The Times. Crossfield was at least fifteen years younger than Sam. A gazillion years ago, they had crossed paths in Sarajevo, where Sam's knee and career finally fell to pieces. They had despised each other then and probably still would today, like any two dwindling souls with dirt and secrets on each other.
Sarajevo was a mess, not just the war itself—which involved perfectly indistinguishable Europeans running around like lunatics trying to kill people they had lived beside for hundreds of argumentative years—but the journalistic set-up Sam found himself in. The paper sent over Crossfield, a rising star, and enlisted Sam to show him the ropes. Crossfield turned out to be a rank coward, a gutless journalism school creation, whose idea of reporting consisted of attending briefings, pawing through Sam's photographs, and purloining just enough local color to convince himself and the reading public that he was reporting from the apex of a pile of corpses. He would have faked it all from his hotel room, if Sam hadn't forced him into the occasional detour into the field. And when Sam periodically landed them in some cacophonic corner of the civil war, Crossfield always swore that Sam was deliberately trying to kill both of them. And maybe so.
Things came to a head one afternoon in an obscure, decrepit back street disco left over from the 1984 Olympics, where they had taken refuge from a sniper in a nearby building. Donna Summer writhed through the scratchy remains of the disco's failing sound system. Sam hung onto the filthy bar and drowned himself in what was becoming a daily bottle of Sljivovica, the Bosnian Rakia. Crossfield disapproved of boozy photographers, but with bullets firing within a light-year of his carefully tended coiffe, drank enough to calm his jitters. Or so it seemed. As usual, he launched into a rehearsal for his next filing, a maudlin diatribe against the evils of war. At the sound of the umpteenth cliché, Sam lost his patience, picked up his cameras, and shoved the loudmouth at the door.
"You wanna see the evils of fucking war, let's go."
"What are you doing? Get your hands off me!"
"Come on, asshole. We're going out there."
"Get your hands off me!"
By the time they reached the entrance, pushing and pulling had degenerated into a vicious brawl, Sam taking drunken swipes with his camera, Crossfield reaching out for a bottle on a nearby table to defend himself. The bottle crashed to the floor and broke, just as Sam lost his precarious, drunken balance. His knee landed in the glass and drove one long, green shard clear through his kneecap.
Crossfield came up with the knife story later, in yet another imaginary account of journalistic derring-do. It was his way of pissing on Sam, the self-righteous lout who slammed about, torturing others with his guilt-ridden soul. Sam never read the story—he never read a thing Crossfield filed—so it caught him unaware. Once again, he found himself extolled as an icon for brilliant, fearless photojournalism. Sam clammed up, shut out the background noise, and fled the business. He had lost it anyway—he had been putting out crap ever since Beirut—and the knee was just an excuse. Sam was finished. Finally, the zombie awoke to its mindless stalk through the shadows of his extinct career.
Crossfield was the last person on earth Sam felt like calling now, but the man did have one unique qualification. The last time Sam stopped by Ginny's, the ornate and faintly malodorous journalist watering hole downtown off Figueroa, a mutual acquaintance had mentioned Crossfield's burgeoning coke habit. Crossfield was just the kind of fool to confuse business with pleasure. If the worm hadn't got himself thrown out of work by now, Sam was pretty sure he would know all about the Smullen brothers.
"Never heard of them," Crossfield said a little too quickly. Translation: Of course, I've heard of them, but why the fuck should I do anything for you? Sam had called Crossfield from the office at the studio. It only took a receptionist and two secretaries to drag the pompous windbag to his phone.
Sam hadn't thought of this. He recalled Crossfield as a loud-mouthed braggart, constantly on the hunt for ways to impress and dazzle. But that was back in the day when Sam was the Man With The Prize, and Crossfield was still trying to figure out how to build a career on a cloud of empty words. These days, the retired old geezer Sam had nothing to offer the coked-up fool—unless he flat-out made it up.
"I heard something about kiddy porn," Sam tried. The idea sailed into his head from out of the blue, but for some reason he couldn't explain, felt about right. "Snuff films, stuff like that."
"There isn't a hint of any of that shit," Crossfield sneered.
"So you do know them."
"Fuck you. You're not working."
"I'll give you anything I come up with."
If only Crossfield could picture the bald old fart with the colostomy bag on the other end of the telephone line—but of course, he couldn't. And the Sam he had once known was just the crazy, outrageously lucky loon to stumble out of retirement onto the scoop of the century. Sam listened to the wheels in Crossfield's brain creaking through their agonizingly predictable revolutions. The fool was no match for dying old Cancer Dude with nothing to lose.
"Abe and Gus," Crossfield started warily. "Abe's the brains, Gus is the muscle. They came out of the south side Crips in the eighties. Drugs mostly, cocaine, maybe a little smack, the occasional girl. They still operate out of a place on Western, but their real business is high-end users, movie people, politicals. From Beverly Hills to Westwood up to Malibu."
"They looked like movie stars."
"You've met them?" Suddenly Sam had Crossfield's undivided attention. "Abe Smullen doesn't talk to anybody."
"Really? He told me you were his best customer."
Crossfield exploded. "Are you threatening me? Fuck you! I've been clean for ten years, and everybody here knows all about it. Don't even—"
"Relax! I don't have a thing on you. And Abe and I didn't talk about drugs anyway."
Crossfield calmed down. "What did you talk about?"
"I'm still trying to figure that out."
Crossfield let that oddity pass. "Last I heard, they had something new going on, but nobody seems to know what. Kiddy porn? Who knows? It's a booming business these days."
"Thanks. I'll be in touch."
"But not snuff films. They're definitely not that far out."
Sam hung up. He had come to the office at the studio mainly to avoid Lydia. She had left to run some errand, and he had snuck out after her. He had already lost most of the morning to a black funk, and if nothing else, he wanted to spare both of them the fallout. Now, he was glad of a chance to think without her standing over him, demanding to hear what Crossfield had to offer on the Smullen conundrum.
And the answer was, not a whole lot that Sam couldn't have come up with on his own. Abe Smullen was obviously a serious individual who wanted Sam to think about some connection between his battered brother and a photographer named Spavik. A missing photographer with a missing girlfriend. The man had clearly accepted the notion that Sam was out of the loop, and had decided to give him a chance to plug in. But plug into what? And what would Smullen expect him to do, once he lined it out?
Sam glanced up from the desk and, for the first time, noticed that Lydia had taken his photographs down from the wall. Empty nicotine squares on the white surface, where they hung through all the years of her smoking. Sam had finally caved in, glanced through a handful of Rudy's shots, and found himself reluctantly impressed. Enough so, that he suggested Lydia replace his photos on the wall with the kid's. Something about being a big enough dude to recognize another artist's talent. Not to mention that he would no longer have to torture himself by staring at all that gloomy shit.
The telephone rang—not Sam's cell phone, but the instrument out on the desk where Lydia used to sit and defend the customers against her crank of a husband. Sam climbed to his feet, wondering why Lydia would call him on that line. Must have been because he was already on the phone.
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