Gecko

by Ken Douglas

  “ Son of a bitch,” another voice screamed.

  Jim squinted as the overhead light came on.

  “ Get back or I’ll shoot.” It was the second man in black. The first lay dead on the floor. His face bashed in, the chrome IV stand at his side. “You killed him.” The man pointed a gun at Jim. His pockmarked face was flushing deep red and Jim could feel the heat of his anger. “The boss wants you alive, but I don’t think so.” He raised the gun and held it away from his body, pointing it at Jim’s heart as the black marble fell from the ceiling and landed on the man’s face.

  The man screamed, because he knew what had just bit him on the cheek. The gun flew out of his hand as he flattened both palms to slap the spider off, but before his hands reached his face, Jim’s right foot connected with his balls. The man doubled over and the spider went flying. Jim moved in, grabbed the man by the hair, forced his head against the cold tile as the spider scooted away.

  “ Where is she?” Jim demanded.

  “ Fuck you,” the man said. Jim held his head fast against the floor, forcing him to face the retreating spider. The man shivered when it stopped and screamed when it turned and headed back toward him. “Get it away!”

  “ Not a chance.”

  “ You’re supposed to be terrified of it,” the man whined. “The boss said it’d scare the shit out of you.”

  “ He was wrong. Now where is she?” The spider moved closer. The man’s eyes were open wide with fright and they turned cross-eyed as she came to a stop mere millimeters from his crooked nose.

  “ She’s on the boat,” he croaked, an instant before his heart exploded. He died before he could say which boat. Frightened to death.

  “ Jim, Jim Monday, are you in there?” Jim recognized the voice of Mohi Tuhiwai.

  “ Here,” he called out. “I’m here.”

  Mohi Tuhiwai burst in the room as he collapsed.

  “ Thank you, girl,” he whispered and the black widow scooted away, hiding under the bed.

  “ It’s 10:00, we only have two hours,” Mohi said, breathing hard.

  “ No, we have a whole day.”

  “ It’s Saturday night,” Mohi said, and Jim was crushed. He had been asleep and under the influence of the drugs for a whole day. He was almost out of time and he wasn’t any closer to finding Donna than before he’d been captured.

  “ I know where she is,” Mohi exclaimed, breathless. “Reptil Rache, Linda figured it out. It means, Reptile Revenge. In German!”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Jim checked his damaged wrist in the light. It was already starting to scab over. He turned to Mohi. “I need clothes.”

  “ The one without all the blood looks your size.”

  They stripped him, leaving the body clad only in underwear.

  “ The wool itches,” Jim said.

  “ New Zealand wool doesn’t itch.” Mohi looked at the black sweater. “Comes from Germany, not New Zealand. That explains it.”

  Jim finished dressing by putting on the dead man’s work boots, thankful that they fit. It was time something went right. Then he picked up the gun, a thirty-eight police special.

  “ This thing is older than God.” Jim jammed it between his belly and the pants, under the sweater.

  “ Guns are hard to come by in New Zealand,” Mohi said.

  “ Apparently.” Then, “What took you so long?”

  “ I got home okay,” Mohi said, “but I passed out in the driveway. Linda dragged me into the house and called an ambulance. I’d lost a lot of blood and when I came to I was delirious. They took me to the hospital, gave me blood and antibiotics. I’ve been drugged up for the last twenty-four hours.” He grimaced. “They got the bullet out, but they kept me on pain killers. It took me a whole day to remember what that guy at the motel said about this place, then I called Linda and snuck out of the hospital. Sorry, I did my best.”

  “ You did good enough, we still have time. How’s the shoulder now?”

  “ Not bad. I’ll be all right.” But the sweat running down his forehead told Jim that he was in serious pain.

  “ Linda’s outside, in the car,” Mohi said. “Follow me.”

  “ How did you get in?”

  “ Door wasn’t locked.” Mohi led him through the house to the dark night outside. Linda Tuhiwai was waiting in the parked car out front. She got out when she saw them coming.

  “ I was getting worried,” she whispered.

  “ It’s okay, you don’t have to whisper anymore,” Mohi said.

  “ How did you know to translate the boat’s name?” Jim asked Linda as he climbed into the backseat.

  “ Mohi told me the man at the motel said they were German.” Linda got back in and started the car. “German bad guys, boat with a German name, it wasn’t hard to put together. After I figured out the Reptil Rache was the boat we were looking for, I went down to the port and did a little asking around while Mohi was in the hospital.”

  “ But the boat we’re looking for is fitted out with cheap pine. We saw that boat. It’s first rate,” Jim said.

  “ On the outside,” Linda said. “The inside is pretty, but not practical.”

  “ How do you know?”

  “ I talked to the man who installed the new air-conditioning unit below,” Linda said. “He’s married to a friend of mine. He told me the boat had been completely refitted last year. That’s why she looks so good. A German named Manfred Penn bought it two months ago and gutted the inside. He didn’t like the boat toilets and showers. He wanted the kind he was used to, never mind that they’ll flood as soon as he hits rough seas. The plumber tried to tell him, but he didn’t listen. He also wanted larger staterooms and he didn’t like the look of teak. He wanted light, knotty pine. He thinks it’s prettier. The carpenter tried to tell him you need hard wood on a boat, but he still didn’t listen. After a while people stopped trying to tell him.”

  “ That sounds like the boat,” Jim said.

  “ There’s more,” Linda said. “The boat sails with the dawn. Nobody seems to know for where.”

  “ You learned a lot,” Jim said.

  “ She’s a smart woman,” Mohi said.

  “ What’s this Manfred Penn look like?”

  “ Bald and ugly as my husband’s mother.”

  “ Linda!” Mohi chastised.

  “ Uglier,” Linda said.

  “ We’re here.” Linda parked the car at the end of a pair of long twin piers. The pier on the left had a small oil tanker tied to its left side. There was nothing tied to its right. The pier on the right had a cargo ship moored to its right. Pallets of bagged cement, six feet high, were stacked on the twenty-foot wide pier, four abreast and over thirty deep.

  Two forklifts were busy scooping up the pallets and delivering them to a crane that bent down from the cargo ship. On the left side of the right pier was the old Dutch schooner, Reptil Rache. She was a hundred and twenty-five feet long, but sandwiched between the cargo ship and oil tanker, she looked small.

  They got out of the car.

  “ Keys?” Mohi asked and Linda tossed them to him. He went to the trunk and opened it. “Take one of these.” Mohi handed Jim a fishing rod. “Maori men fish here every night, even some pakehas, white men. We can get close without them suspecting anything.”

  Jim followed Donna’s parents out onto the left pier, where they sat a few feet away from three old Maori men who were fishing in the moonlight. They dropped their lines into the water and stared at the boat. The three fishermen didn’t comment on the fact that Jim and Mohi weren’t using bait.

  The sails were tied on. There was a rough looking man sitting on the deck, watching the forklifts and the crane do their work. The Reptil Rache was ready to sail and they had posted a guard to keep off unwelcome visitors. It would be impossible to sneak aboard.

  “ How come the diving ladder’s still down?” Jim wondered aloud, referring to a stainless steel ladder hanging over the side of the boat and extending into the wat
er.

  “ It was delivered today,” a Maori man from the group to their right said. “I guess they wanted to see if it worked.”

  “ If we can distract the guard, I could swim over and climb on board.”

  “ The water is dirty, polluted and awful cold,” the Maori said. The two others in his party nodded their assent as the three moved over to join them.

  “ I think my daughter’s on board.” Mohi explained the situation to them.

  The Maoris wanted to storm the boat, but Jim told them if they did, the men onboard might kill the girl. He didn’t tell them they might get hurt themselves. These kind of men wouldn’t think of their own safety.

  “ I need a way to keep this old thirty-eight dry,” Jim said.

  One of the fishermen went to his lunchbox, took out two sandwiches and removed them from a Ziploc plastic bag. Jim zipped the gun into the bag and nodded his appreciation when the fisherman offered him the sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. He didn’t have to ask. These men were Maori, they knew when a man was hungry.

  With his hunger and thirst partially satisfied, Jim was ready to go into the cold water.

  “ There’s a ladder at the end of the pier,” Mohi said.

  “ Okay.” Jim tucked the gun back into his pants, then took off the sweater and the work boots. “I’m ready.” He turned to Mohi, “If I’m not off by midnight, assume I’m dead and burn the boat.”

  Linda gasped.

  The old men’s eyes popped open.

  “ If Donna’s alive, we’ll be off. If we’re not, it’ll mean I found her dead and it won’t matter what happens to me.”

  “ I won’t burn it if she’s not off,” Mohi said.

  “ We’ll need a fire in front of both entry ways and under the windows on that doghouse,” Jim said, ignoring Mohi. “If I do find her alive, we can leap through the flames into the sea. If that thing is on board, the fire will hold it back.”

  “ I won’t burn it if she’s not off,” Mohi repeated.

  “ Start the fire.” Jim looked him in the eyes. “If we get away, I don’t want that thing coming after her ever again. If she’s there and alive that fire might be the only chance we have of getting off.”

  “ He’s right, Mohi,” Linda said. “We have to do what he says.”

  “ I have gasoline in my trunk,” one of the old men said.

  “ Can I count on you?” Jim asked, standing on the ladder.

  “ You can,” Mohi and Linda said as one.

  “ You can,” the three fishermen echoed.

  “ You might need this.” The fisherman who had given him the sandwiches held out a scaling knife. “It’s very sharp, skin a man easy, if you want.”

  Jim put it between his teeth, climbed down the ladder and slipped into the cold, dirty water.

  Donna struggled against the ropes, but only managed to chafe her wrists further. The brass seaman’s clock on the wall read thirty minutes to midnight. Not much time left. She remembered when she was a little girl and used to count down the days till Christmas. Time seemed to take forever. The night before she would lay awake and watch the second hand on her lighted bedroom clock creep ever so slowly around the glass enclosed circle. The second hand facing her now seemed to be racing.

  She gasped as someone opened the cabin door.

  “ Ah, did I startle you?” She heard the German accent before she saw the face. Long thin nose, beady gray eyes, hollow cheeks, and hairless. No eyebrows, barely any eyelashes, no hair, not balding, but shaved. If there ever was a living Death’s Head, this was it. If ever a head belonged on the shoulders of a Gestapo uniform, this was it. If ever evil flashed from behind a grin, she was seeing it now. “Someone will come and untie you in just a minute,” he said.

  Donna caught the gleam in his eye and was afraid.

  “ By the time you finish your shower, we will have some clothes ready for you and after a quick examination to make certain you are all right, a policewoman will drive you home.”

  “ Shower?” Donna said through parched lips.

  “ Yes, you’ve soiled yourself and besides, your hair is a mess.” The man attempted a laugh, as if he had made a joke. Donna didn’t find it the least bit humorous. Then it hit her, what the man had said.

  “ Policewoman?” Donna couldn’t believe it. She also couldn’t believe she’d soiled herself without noticing. It must have happened while she’d been out. Just a short while ago she’d have been embarrassed about it. Now she didn’t think she could ever be embarrassed again.

  “ I’m here, Doctor.” A pleasant female voice drifted into the cabin from behind the man.

  “ Ah, yes.” The doctor turned to face a woman in uniform. “Officer, untie this woman and help her to a shower, but first get me a glass of water.” The policewoman left and returned almost immediately with a glass. She handed it to the doctor.

  Donna looked up into the woman’s eyes as she bent over her with a sharp knife and sliced through the ropes that had been binding her to the bed. She allowed herself to be filled with hope. Once the ropes were off, the policewoman massaged her wrists and helped her sit up.

  “ Feel a little better now?” she asked and Donna nodded.

  “ Give her some of this, but not too much right away.” The doctor handed the policewoman the glass. Then he left and Donna sipped at the water and reveled at the clean, clear taste. It felt glorious as it slid down her throat.

  “ There is a very anxious man waiting to see you,” the policewoman said, “and I know you don’t want to see him looking like this.”

  “ Jim Monday?” Donna said.

  “ Yes.” The policewoman smiled. “He’s in the salon. It’s because of him that we found you.” The woman helped Donna stand and wrapped her in a bathrobe. “The shower is at the end of the corridor.” She showed Donna the way. “You’ll find soap, shampoo and conditioner inside.”

  “ Thank you so much,” Donna said and with the woman’s help, she hobbled down the hall to the shower. She was too tired and too overjoyed at being rescued to feel humiliated, besides she didn’t think she would ever feel humiliated again.

  Once in the shower she allowed herself to finally feel relief. She had been saved. Jim had done it. She would be with him in a few minutes and the horrible nightmare would finally be over. Shivering, she turned on the water, stepped under the warm spray and sighed as the water washed the filth from her body.

  She reached for the shampoo and lathered her hair, luxuriating in the soapy suds. She poured more shampoo into her hand and lathered her arms, breasts, stomach and legs. It felt wonderful just to be clean.

  Then all of a sudden she felt guilty. Her brother was dead, so many others, but thank God it was over now. Jim had done it. He had arrived with the police in time.

  “ Are you almost finished?” It was the policewoman.

  “ Almost.” She hated to leave the shower, but Jim was waiting for her. She quickly poured some conditioner in her hand and ran it through her hair. She wanted to look her best for him. She rubbed it in, massaging her scalp and running her fingers through her long hair. She continued massaging as she rinsed it out.

  “ Hurry up honey,” the policewoman said, “everybody is waiting.”

  She turned off the water and stepped out of the shower. There was a warm towel hanging on the rack. She wrapped it around herself and sighed as it soaked up the water. It was so soft. She was so lucky. Dry, she put on the robe and opened the door.

  “ This way.” The policewoman had been waiting. She led Donna down the hallway. “Everybody is waiting in the salon.”

  “ Go on, honey,” the policewoman said when they’d reached the end of the corridor. “Just a little more and it will all be over.” She opened the door for Donna.

  “ Thank you so much.” Donna stepped into the salon.

  Something wasn’t right.

  “ Come in, we’ve been waiting,” the hairless doctor said. His voice and accent frightened her. She froze. The two men with th
e doctor were no policemen. They were dressed in the same black sweaters and seaman’s caps she had seen through the window of the Park Side Motel.

  The only furniture in the salon was a double bed in the direct center of the room. Its clean white sheets glowed, reflecting the rays of an overhead light. There were two video cameras mounted on tripods, one on each side of the bed. This wasn’t right. Something was wrong-very, very wrong.

  “ Get on the bed, bitch,” The policewoman smacked her on the back. Donna stumbled and the woman pushed her again, guiding her, so that she fell onto the bed.

  The water chilled him to the bone. The salt in it sent pain stabbing from his damaged wrist up his arm. He fought the urge to scream out. He pushed off toward the boat, conscious of the unnatural weight of the revolver tucked into his belly and the awkward weight of the cast on his right forearm. He decided on the breast stroke, took a deep gulp of air, careful not to lose the knife, shivering as he made his way toward the Reptil Rache.

  He estimated he had to cover about twenty-five yards at a stroke a yard, five strokes per breath, five breaths and he would be there.

  Three strokes, four strokes, five, first breath. He broke the surface, sucking air around the knife. Water seeped under the cast and the jeans he had taken from the dead seaman were heavy and uncomfortable to swim in. Eight strokes, nine, it felt like his lungs were going to burst, one more stroke before the precious air, ten. He took another breath.

  Eleven strokes, twelve, he needed air now. He was freezing. His fingers were numb. He felt the cold steel in his mouth and tasted the polluted water as it seeped between his lips to wrap itself around the tip of his tongue as it stuck out and rested below the sharp blade. Thirteen strokes, fourteen, he was light headed, he couldn’t make the last stroke, not without blacking out. Yes, yes he could, only one more, the thought raced through him. A short, quick stroke, but a stroke, fifteen.

  Suck air.

  Sixteen strokes, seventeen, well over halfway. He felt something big glide by. Shark was his first thought. It came within inches. Maybe a dolphin, but he discarded that thought, too close to shore. Polluted harbor, there would be no dolphins here. Eighteen strokes, nineteen, it came by again. This time it bumped him as it swam by. He forced his eyes open and got a quick look at it as it broke the surface. It was no shark. Twenty. He took the scaling knife out of his mouth, gulped air and waited for the Gecko’s return.