Scorpion Rain
Page 22
“Just sit down,” Kyle said. “The nausea…the boat will stop rocking. Why didn’t you tell me you get seasick?”
Wong opened a tin of some kind of pickled fish. Herring, I think. The smell made me even more nauseous, but he ate three of them, took a drink of bottled water, ate five more.
“It’s fifty feet astern,” Viveca called down from on top. “I’m throttling back.”
The Campion slowed, rocked as she put it momentarily into reverse to stop it dead in the water. Wong quickly poured the bottled water on his hands, cleaning them and drying them on a towel.
Gates was not onboard, his gunshot wounds too serious. Wong’s arm was tightly wrapped in gauze and tape, but neither of the slugs had damaged any vital muscles and he could still move. Kyle went up on deck and I could hear him clanking the dive tank, fixing it on his back. Wong and I stood went up the curved wooden stairway, stopping before our heads rose above the deck.
“He’s alone,” Kyle said to me again, trying to reassure me. “This is what I do, Laura. It’s one on one. I’ve got the surprise. It’ll be over quick.”
I wanted to believe him.
“And you think Meg is on that cruiser?”
“Yes. The man that Jo didn’t slaughter, he talked enough. Didn’t know Meg by name, but yes, she’s on the boat, with the man called Victorio?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Viveca said. “How do you say it, you are go to good?”
“Good to go,” I said to Kyle. “Be careful.”
He kissed Viveca, in case anybody on the cruiser was watching, strolled to the aft rail, where Viveca had lowered the swim rail. Settling on the port rail, he lowered his dive mask into the water, rubbed it, spit into it, put it on, stuck the scuba mouthpiece into his mouth, and rolled over backward.
After that, we just waited. And waited. And suddenly, it was all over.
Kyle appeared on the bow of the cruiser, waving at us. Viveca pushed the throttles forward, and we slowly came alongside.
I jumped onto the cruiser’s deck as soon as we touched her side.
Meg sat, dazed, on a cushion. She looked at me blankly, medicated beyond any capability to recognize me.
Against the far rail, a man sat with handcuffs around his ankles, another handcuff on one arm and attached to the rail.
“Victorio,” Kyle said.
The man stared at us in fury.
“Who are you?” I asked.
Nothing.
“Why have you done this?”
Nothing. His eyes worked, he looked for an out, he slowly realized there was none and his body relaxed.
“Hello, Laura Winslow,” he said. “Laura Marana. Laura Cabeza. Laura—”
“Who are you?”
“He’s an…he says he’s an Apache.”
Meg struggled, tried to stand, slipped, waved off my hands, stood up.
“All this time, I thought he was Taá Wheatley’s brother.”
“He’s no Apache, Meg. He’s Polish. From Chicago.”
“Not Wheatley’s brother?”
“A brother, yes. But to Audrey Maxwell.”
“Maxwell?”
She walked slowly, like a drunk, like a person totally stoned, she walked to the head of the cabin and took down a spear gun.
“Viktor. Victorio. It’s a long story. He wanted revenge. On me. On you.”
“Well, Victorio,” she said to him. “Revenge has many teeth.”
Before either Kyle or I could do anything, she cocked the gun, turned to the man, and fired the spear directly into his heart.
“Take me home,” she said. “I’m so tired, please, just take me home.”
laura
We traced him all the back through Audrey Maxwell’s ever-changing life, back to when she was Magda Kocinski in Chicago, daughter of Polish immigrants, with a sister named Svetlana and a brother named Viktor.
Two years ago, I’d ruined an enormous financial scam she ran with a Tucson mob boss. Once ruined, she came to my old house to kill me, and Meg, firing a shotgun for the first time in her life, killed Audrey Maxwell. Earlier, Audrey’s younger son, Jeffrey, had died in a fiery car crash when he tried to ram Rey’s pickup truck off the highway.
I never knew if Victor was addressing his web log diary messages to his dead sistrichka Magda, or the living sister, Svetlana. Data-bank tracing for Stephen Dobbs showed a long list of women who’d worked for him as a plastic surgeon, but all of them, when interviewed by LAPD, proved not to have any involvement with donor organs, either legal or on the black market.
Meg and Rey got married again. It lasted seven weeks. Jo Kanakaredes shifted jobs from one cable TV network to another, but gradually she wound up doing segments on a series called Movies and Salsa, where repeated showings of male action flics were chopped into commercial bits while Jo and two cooks prepared snack food for the viewers.
But so many things I never learned.
Who ran the black market in body parts? How extensive was this market, how they buy and sell, who were the customers? When people face the choice of a new kidney or death, and there are no new kidneys available, they will do anything. But I never learned how the market operated.
Why did Viktor have such hatred for Meg and me, why did he want revenge for a sister to whom we had absolutely no evidence of any contact for years, for decades.
Why did Viktor post his “diaries” on a public website, to be indexed by search engines, to be read by anybody? Was he so furious that he’d been disbarred from practicing medicine, hounded to Mexico, that he moved across that mental border into instability of thoughts and actions?
Nothing is ever wrapped up tightly, except in mystery novels, or in the movies. Like Heat, where Robert De Niro tells everybody that they’ve got to be ready to give up their lives, their loves, their possessions, everything, given up when the heat is around the corner. It’s the discipline, he tells Al Pacino. And sure enough, he gives up Amy Brenneman and dies at the end. All neat, all the plot threads tied together, not even a spirit trail, like the loose ends of yarn hanging off the end of a Navajo blanket, so the spirit of the rug is never captured within.
One thing I knew.
I’d stopped taking Ritalin. My therapist likes that. She also champions my improved sense of social relationships, like the old Tewa fiddler in Florence, who plays a three-stringed cello like a guitar. And an old Navajo friend, a blanket weaver, who’s invited me to move into her sprawling ranch house near Casa Grande, that magnificent fourteenth-century building north of Tucson that sits in the middle of declining economies and dwindling cities. I revel in the memory of the evanescent spring flowers, and vow to avoid scorpions and seek out the life-giving wetness of the fall rains.
After two years working both sides of the border, I need to move away from those tensions. I’ve been invited back to the Hopi reservation. I haven’t yet decided whether or not to go.
One thing I know that I don’t like.
If I’d been the one with the spear gun, I’d have killed Victorio. I know this as surely as anything in my life. I remember the day I walked into a Flagstaff gun shop and bought a handgun, I remember hunting down the killer of young Hopi women, I remember shooting a young boy and causing a horrific death when the killer allowed himself to be stomped to death by rodeo Brahma bulls.
It frightens me, to acknowledge my capability for violence. But it doesn’t make me anxious, doesn’t give me panic attacks. And it settles my antagonisms about Rey Villanueva’s Vietnam killing mentality. There, but for the goddesses, would be me.
One last thing is certain. It’s time to look for my daughter, to follow the spirit trails leading off my life.
I’m ready to move on, I’m ready for…
Whatever.
About the Author
DAVID COLE is the author of five previous books featuring Laura Winslow: Butterfly Lost, The Killing Maze, Stalking Moon, Scorpion Rain, and Dragonfly Bones. In 1994 he co-founded NativeWeb (www.nativeweb.org), an
Internet corporation for Native Americans and indigenous peoples of the world. A longtime political activist, he lives in Syracuse, New York, and Tucson, Arizona.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Other books by
David Cole
STALKING MOON
THE KILLING MAZE
BUTTERFLY LOST
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SCORPION RAIN. Copyright © 2002 by David Cole. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition April 2008 ISBN 9780061753619
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900
Toronto, ON, M5R, 3L2, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com