Gecko

by Ken Douglas

  Cheap pine cabinets, with cheap pine doors, still smelling of fresh sawdust, adorned the wall at the foot of the bed. Those doors, once exposed to humidity, would cease to function. No boat builder was responsible for this.

  They turned her head to the bulkhead at the left side of the bed. It was covered with a large mirror, giving the room an illusion of being larger than it was. The mirror was held in place by cheap plastic brackets, the kind made for a small bathroom mirror. It would come crashing down at the first hint of high seas.

  A young woman stared back at him from inside the mirror. She was naked. Her breasts grabbed his eyes and held them in their grasp, firm, with perfect amber nipples.

  “ Take your eyes off my tits and look at me,” she ordered, and he moved his gaze. She had the kind of face that could start a war. Smooth bronze skin, silky dark hair, full eyebrows and lashes, high cheek bones. And her perfect face was set on a body that would turn the head of even the most senile. She was every man’s dream woman, radiating that strange mixture of childlike innocence and sexual desire.

  She was a girl in a woman’s body. Dark amber eyes, matching her nipples, shined at him and drew him into her very being. He allowed them to swallow his soul and in them he saw his life race by and he knew that his life was nothing without this girl-woman.

  He heard a large diesel starting. The engine fired, ran for about thirty seconds, then died. It fired again, ran a minute, then died again. So, he thought, they were working on the engine. How long before they came to check on their captive.

  He might be a coward in the air, but he loved the sea and was a fearless sailor, veteran of over a hundred races. He knew boats and it was time to put his knowledge to use. From the new pine paneling and cabinets and the amateur way the mirror was mounted, he deduced that the boat was being refitted by someone who didn’t know what he was doing.

  He heard the steady sound of a forklift purring by. They were in a shipyard. Another forklift told him it was a busy shipyard. From the way the boat rocked gently in the water, he knew it had a deep keel, a sailboat.

  Someone jumped onto the hull with a solid thud. Not the sound of deck shoes on teak, more the sound of work shoes on iron. An old iron sailing ship decked out in cheap pine.

  They heard the sound of heavy footsteps coming toward the cabin. They braced themselves for the worse, but he felt himself slipping away.

  “ Don’t leave me,” she pleaded.

  “ I can’t help it.”

  “ Come back for me. Save me. Take me away to be your bride forever and ever.”

  “ I will.” He felt himself being tugged, a rope around his soul, jerking him away and he was powerless to do anything about it.

  “ Promise.”

  “ I will find you and we will be together. I swear it.” And the world turned black.

  He woke on the Tuhiwai’s sofa, the midday sun streaming in the living room window, shining in his eyes. He blinked and turned away from the light, its warmth welcome. He was covered in a soft quilt and his head rested on a down pillow. He settled his eyes on a wall clock and felt a pang at the loss of time. He had been asleep, or unconscious, for over three hours.

  “ You’re awake,” Donna’s mother said. “One minute you were talking and the next you were out.”

  “ You didn’t call the police?” he said, thankful, but wondering why she hadn’t. He would have.

  “ Mohi wanted to, but I wouldn’t let him. If Ngaarara has her, there is nothing they can do.”

  The cough attacked him again. His stomach muscles seized as he started gasping for air.

  “ Here.” She handed him the blue inhaler.

  “ Thank you.” He took three puffs and caught his breath. “I don’t know what my problem is.”

  “ It’s asthma,” she said. “We have a lot of it in New Zealand. Nobody knows why.”

  “ You’re kidding?”

  “ No. I work in a medical office in Auckland, so I see a lot of it, especially in immigrants from America and England. It happens a lot to people that had it when they were young. They come here and it comes back.”

  “ Does it go away?”

  “ Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I’ve had it all my life. I use the inhalers to control it. It’s not so bad, the brown one before going to sleep and in the morning when I wake up. The blue one if I get congested.”

  “ Isn’t there a pill you can take?”

  “ Yes, prednisone, it’s a steroid. It usually works, but we generally don’t like the side effects.”

  “ Which are?”

  “ Weak bones, enlarged head.” She made an oval with her thumbs and index fingers around her head. “And a hump on your back.” She held her right hand over her shoulder, just below the neck to indicate where the hump would be.

  “ Three things I don’t want,” he said.

  “ I believe your story,” she said, changing the subject back to her daughter.

  “ You believe me?”

  “ Nobody, except the females in my family, knows the end to that story. It’s something that’s been handed down from mother to daughter throughout the generations. We’ve been waiting a long time for Ngaarara to exact his revenge. Now he’s come.”

  “ And your husband, does he believe me?”

  “ He doesn’t know what to believe.”

  “ Where is he?”

  “ Not far, I sent him out when you started to wake, so that I could talk to you alone. He doesn’t believe in the old ways, like I do. Is my daughter’s spirit still in you?”

  “ No.”

  “ Taawhiri-maatea, the god of the winds, carried Donna’s spirit so far, halfway around the world, to find you. It’s almost too much for even me to believe, but who knows the ways of the Gods. The only thing I can think of is that the connection binding you and my daughter must be great for her spirit to be drawn over the seas like that.”

  “ Okay, Linda, what did you find out?” Mohi Tuhiwai came through the front door. His strong stare bore into Jim. His patience was clearly worn.

  “ If we want Donna back, we should help this man,” Linda Tuhiwai said.

  “ I think we should call the police.”

  “ Then we’ll never find her, can’t you just this once admit that there might be something in this world you don’t understand,” she said.

  “ Listen,” Jim interrupted, “I want her back as badly as you, but if we go to the police, they’ll put me in jail and we’ll lose any contact we have with her.”

  “ Are you sure she’s not still with you?” Linda Tuhiwai asked again.

  “ Yes.”

  “ Why not?” Mohi wanted to know.

  “ How do I know. I don’t know anything about this kind of stuff. But while I was asleep I was with her, where she is.”

  “ Give me a break,” Mohi said.

  “ Listen to him. We’ve already lost Danny. I don’t want to lose Donna, too.”

  “ I think they’re going to burn her, Sunday, at midnight.”

  “ Midnight, Sunday morning or midnight, Sunday night?” she asked.

  “ I don’t know, but I’m guessing Sunday morning. He wants his revenge. He wants her to burn, like he did. I can’t swear that’s his plan, but I feel it.”

  “ Like Danny,” Linda Tuhiwai said, and she told Jim that her son and his new bride burned to death when his car went off the road and struck a lamp post. “Maybe it wasn’t an accident, the car going out of control, and the fire. Maybe it was Ngaarara.”

  Mohi Tuhiwai still looked skeptical.

  “ I know you want to call the police, but there’s nothing they can do. We’re her only hope. There is no one else. Until I came you were just sitting around waiting for news. If you keep that up, the only news you’re going to get will be bad. I don’t want bad news for her, not now, not ever. I need your help.”

  “ Listen, darling,” Linda said to her husband, “he’s right, at least we’d be doing something. He wants to save our daughter and he needs our help
.”

  Mohi Tuhiwai was silent for a moment, then said, “He’ll have it.”

  “ She’s on a boat that’s being refitted, in a port somewhere. An old iron sailboat, probably big, the refit is being cheaply done. They’re using pine where they should be using teak. We find the boat, we find her. Also there is a man working at the Park Side Motel that might know something.”

  It had been dark for almost an hour when Jim Monday and Mohi Tuhiwai drove into the parking lot at the Park Side Motel. They had spent a discouraging six hours checking out the sailboats in and around Whangarei and found only two that looked like they might be what there were looking for. One, the Sundowner, an iron clipper in the marina, hadn’t seen a refit in the last ten or fifteen years and the other, the Reptil Rache, an old iron Dutch schooner converted into a cruising boat, but it had a new teak deck, a new paint job and new sails. It looked first rate, a very expensive refit. Not the cheap job he had witnessed earlier. Either the boat he was looking for wasn’t in Whangarei or it had sailed earlier in the day.

  Jim felt he was missing something.

  Mohi shut the engine off and they got out of the car. It was raining hard and he held his hand above his forehead in a futile attempt to keep some of the rain out of his eyes. Jim, with a quick dash from the car to the office, didn’t bother.

  “ Remember me?” Jim asked, shaking water from himself.

  “ You were here yesterday. You left without paying.”

  “ If you think I came to settle my bill, you’re mistaken. I want to know who you called.”

  “ I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The left eye started flapping, but only for a few seconds, because before he could say anything else Mohi’s left hand shot forward like a striking cobra, grabbing the taller man by the hair. He pulled down in a swift jerking motion, bouncing Phil’s head off the counter with a thud that sounded like a handball coming off the wall. Phil started to scream, but before sound could escape his lips, Mohi, with his left fist still balled firmly in Phil’s hair, held his head up and slapped him in the face, causing Phil to flush red. That out of control left eye stopped flapping.

  Jim was stunned at the smaller man’s speed, but there was more to come. Mohi’s hand shot into his jacket pocket and came out holding a scaling knife. He slammed Phil’s head back onto the counter and held it there. He flashed the sharp steel in front of the frightened man’s eyes.

  “ I will end forever your nervous little tick if you don’t answer, my friend.” He held the knife a mere centimeter from the left eye, which was flapping again, “Then I’ll give you a second chance. If you still don’t answer, I’ll put out your right eye. Then I’ll pop your eardrums and leave you blind and deaf.”

  “ They’ll kill me,” Phil squeaked.

  “ I’d rather be dead than the way I’m going to leave you, but then I’m Maori.”

  “ I have the number taped to the cash register,” he said. Jim saw it and pulled it off. “It’s a mobile phone, on a boat somewhere. I don’t know where. That’s all I know, I swear.”

  “ I think you lie.” Mohi lowered the knife from Phil’s eye and ran it lightly along his cheek. Phil shivered, and Mohi continued playing with him, running the knife along Phil’s jaw, bringing it to rest under his chin for an instant, then moving it down his neck, over his Adam’s apple and down to his throat, where with an easy flick, he pricked the neck, causing a droplet of blood and a quivering gasp from Phil. “What else do you know?” Mohi asked.

  “ They have a place ten minutes out the Tutikaka Road. Big house, secluded, lot of land, several acres.”

  “ How will I know it?”

  “ The entry is right before a sharp bend in the road. There’s a red mail box on a post by the entry. You can’t miss it if you know what you’re looking for.”

  “ How can I believe you? How can you know this?”

  “ My brother delivered parts there. He recognized them from the description I gave him.”

  “ What description? What parts?

  “ German, they’re German. Boat parts.”

  “ That’s quite enough, Phil.” A man entered, pointing a gun at Mohi. One of the men Jim had seen through the window from his hiding place in the bushes. He was still wearing the black seaman’s cap and wool sweater “You can drop the knife, little man.”

  Instead Mohi did the opposite. He thrust the knife through the soft flesh under the chin up into Phil’s brain. Then he whirled toward the man with the gun, lunging toward him, screaming like a man charging into battle.

  The man in black fired and Mohi spun backwards, but before he could fire a second time, Jim kicked him in the groin. He screamed and doubled over. Jim smashed his fist into his face, sending the man sprawling to the floor. He wanted to stop, but he had been hounded and terrorized beyond his limits. He was filled with anger and hate and he finally had somebody he could vent his rage on. As the man struggled to get up, Jim kicked him savagely in the head, killing him. Only then did he turn to see if Mohi was still alive.

  Jim feared the worst and his thoughts were racing ahead. How could he tell Linda Tuhiwai her husband was dead? She trusted him and he repaid her trust with more grief, as if she hadn’t already suffered enough.

  “ We have to get out of here,” Mohi groaned from the floor. “Help me up.” Jim obeyed, bending to help the man to his feet.

  “ How bad is it?” Jim asked, thankful the man was still alive, but cringing at the sight of so much blood covering Mohi’s left shoulder. He had seen worse, Mohi would live.

  “ Get the gun and let’s go,” Mohi said, ignoring Jim’s question. Jim scooped up the gun and helped Mohi hobble to the car. They were a full kilometer away when they heard the sirens. Jim Monday was still one jump ahead of the law.

  “ Hospital?” Jim questioned.

  “ No, I have someone I can call,” Mohi said. The words were an effort. He was losing a lot of blood.

  “ But-”

  “ No, it’s better this way. No report, no questions.”

  “ Can you trust this someone?”

  “ Yes, he’s Maori. Some of us still stick together.”

  “ Can you drive?” Jim asked.

  “ Sure.”

  “ Can you direct me to Tutikaka Road? Would you be able to drive back after you dropped me off?”

  “ Yes, but I don’t want you going after them alone.”

  “ You can come back with reinforcements as soon as they patch you up, but I want to go now. Time’s running out.

  Jim was cool and damp as he moved through the trees. Moving through the bush at night reminded him of night patrol in Vietnam. He didn’t like it then. He didn’t like it now. He rubbed his arms against the cold as he started up a small hill. On the top he looked to the heavens. He was directly under the Southern Cross. Its five stars had guided sailors for centuries and he hoped they would bring him luck and guide him tonight.

  He started down the tree-covered hill, moving silently, every lesson he’d learned in Vietnam guiding his footsteps. Halfway down the hill he saw the house. It was built into the side of the next hill. A three story wooden home that ran along the side of the hill, each floor surrounded by a balcony that ran the length of the house. A river ran through the small valley between the two hills, sending up pleasant sounds of running water.

  The house was nestled in its own little world.

  He continued down the hill and was relieved to see that the river was nothing more than a shallow stream he could jump across. A twig snapped behind him and he forgot about the stream, throwing himself to the ground and hugging the damp earth. He lay quiet as something moved by in the bush to his right. He strained his eyes, but saw nothing. Whatever it was, it didn’t appear interested in him as it moved on.

  He started to rise when he heard the sound of voices approaching the stream from the other side. He moved away from the stream to the cover of the bush. An insect crawled along his arm, but he let it be. The men were too close for him to ri
sk even the slightest movement.

  The arm under the cast begged to be scratched and another insect crawled on his neck and moved under his shirt, inching its way down his back, but he remained still. The voices were speaking German and were coming closer, making no effort to hide their presence. Jim willed himself to blend with the bush as they came into view on the opposite side of the stream. He held his breath as they both bent over and set their beer cans on the ground, before undoing their flies and urinating into the water. They were talking and laughing, not like they were drunk, more like they were having a good time.

  He coughed and the laughter stopped. The sound of their twin streams of urine, splashing in the stream, cut through the night. Jim clenched his stomach muscles, fighting to control the spasm, while the two men finished and zipped up. They stood at the edge of the stream, ears tuned to the night, listening for a sound that didn’t belong. After thirty seconds that seemed like forever, one of them laughed and bent down to pick up his beer can. The other returned the laugh, said something in German that made his companion laugh louder and stooped to pick up his beer. Jim held his breath as they turned and headed back into the bush, glad the two Germans were not outdoorsmen.

  He allowed himself a series of muffled coughs after he was sure they were gone. He started to rise when the spasm finished, but checked himself. He heard something. He remained flat, face on the ground, senses aware and he felt sick as the familiar smell of the Gecko’s putrid breath danced along on the breeze.

  It was here. Out there somewhere. And he knew what he had heard earlier. It had been here all along. Waiting for him. Then he was blinded by light.

  “ Don’t move.” The command was meant to be obeyed. “Stand, hands on your head, or die where you lay. Your choice.” The voice was thick with its German accent.

  Jim stood, slowly, with his fingers laced on top of his head.

  “ Come forward, toward the light.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Pain shot down his spine. His eyes were open but he was encased in black, unable to move. Paralysis was the first thought that struck him. The lights went on. He squinted against the intense white and his eyes gradually grew accustomed to it. The powerful light was directly overhead, its rays, reflecting off the bare white walls, showered the room.