Brigands Key

by Ken Pelham

  “We don’t have any idea where to start,” Hammond said.

  “Yes we do. I’m going where Blount is hiding out, and where he’s got Kyoko. He’s sitting pretty right now in the securest place on the island, a place he magnanimously maintains for the City, and that only he has keys and access to. The only place on the island strong and high enough to escape the storm surge. Hammond Lighthouse.”

  * * *

  Blount’s furious pounding on the door suddenly stopped. Kyoko waited, shaking with tension. She had no weapon, except for the tiny shard of glass. The broken metal railing she’d wedged the door shut with would make a worthy, even lethal, weapon. Yet she dared not pull it from the door.

  What was Blount up to?

  She stared out at the raging storm, transfixed. Amid the thrashing and whipping of trees and the flying rain, something caught her eye, something unnatural in that fury of nature. Something far below her.

  She leaned against the shaking glass and peered down, hoping to catch a glimpse. A lone figure, black and hunched, leaned into the wind, stumbled to its knees, and crawled onward.

  Roscoe.

  Somehow, he’d slipped by Blount, hidden in the dark. No, he couldn’t have sneaked past in such a confined space. Roscoe had played dead. That was the only explanation. He was near death anyway and it wouldn’t have been difficult to fake the rest of the way. Blount had found him motionless, probably kicked him in the gut and left him for dead, thinking Kyoko, a low-paid government physician, wouldn’t have just abandoned the poor soul to his own fate.

  Guilt stung her. Abandoned him? That was exactly what she had done. She had to, she forced herself to think. There was no other way.

  Roscoe crawled into the brush at the edge of the yard and disappeared. Kyoko swallowed hard. Out of the frying pan, into the teeth of the storm of the century. Roscoe would surely drown when the sea swept in.

  The lantern room was walled with heavy glass storm panes framed in riveted, rusting steel from floor to ceiling. In the center of the room the gorgeous Fresnel lens towered over her, fixed upon a vertical axle. Her light played on the lens and the lantern room glittered and sparkled, rainbows of color dancing all around, the lens’s hundred prisms scattering it in a dazzling display.

  Outside the storm panes was a sagging steel deck, a catwalk encircling the lantern room, topped with a handrail.

  There had to be an access way to the catwalk. She glanced about at the storm panes and realized that one set had a slightly heavier frame. A glass door.

  She found and tried the door handle. The mechanism refused to budge, likely fused into a solid, unmoving mass by years of salt air. She threw her weight into it, with no results.

  Abandoning the glass door, she felt about quickly. She needed something, a weapon, a plan, a hope, anything. A dark heap at the base of the Fresnel lens caught her attention. She hurried to it and found a canvas tarp covering a mass of piled objects. She threw the tarp aside and examined the items. Empty paint cans, brushes, a small broken chair, a coil of steel cable.

  She hefted the chair. It was a small wooden rocker, missing a leg, its cane seat rotted through. Decades old, no doubt sat in by a lonely light keeper whiling away the hours. Kyoko pulled off a leg. It splintered, rotten in places. The chair felt puny and irrelevant against a gun-wielding enemy. It would have to do. She set it behind the lens.

  A crash at the trapdoor startled her. Blount had returned with something heavy and was bashing his way inside.

  Again he struck the door. It bulged upward and she threw herself onto it. She prayed he couldn’t shoot her through the steel and doubted he would risk being killed by his own ricocheting bullet. She could hold him out indefinitely.

  He struck the door again. No, not the door. The frame that secured it. The door was not the weak point; the aging mortar holding the frame in place was.

  He struck again and again. She reached down and felt the mortar. It was cracking and crumbling with each blow.

  She abandoned the door. Attempting to hold him out was futile. When the mortar and frame gave way, she would tumble down with it. She returned to the pile of debris, running her hands over each item. Nothing of value, nothing.

  She felt the cable.

  It was a long coil of twined steel, the thickness of a pencil. Metal threads bristled along its length like tiny quills, painful to the touch.

  A thought, an insane, impossible one born of desperation, sprang into her mind.

  * * *

  Grant hesitated, gripping the handle of the bank door. “Ready?”

  “There’s not a damn thing will get me ready for this,” Sanborn said. “Let’s do it.”

  “Once more unto the breach,” Hammond said.

  Grant shoved the door open. The angle of the wind had shifted enough so that it no longer pinned the door shut. The door was leeward, sheltered by the building itself, in relative calm. Just a few feet beyond, the wind roared. Spray flew in sheets, a whipping wall, and foliage and debris sailed past.

  Dawn was breaking somewhere, washing the scene in shades of gray and black. Across the street, the giant live oak that had stood guard over City Hall, that had outlived two hundred hurricane seasons, lay on its side. With a metallic shriek, a huge sheet of steel roofing peeled off the Island Mart and flew spinning away, becoming a blade that could slice a man in half.

  The street was under a foot of racing water, the rain falling too fast, too hard, to drain anywhere.

  “Surreal,” Sanborn muttered.

  “Flat against the wall,” Grant shouted. “Wind’s blasting southwest to northeast, so if we stay on the north and east faces of buildings we’ll avoid the worst of it. Keep to the back of the bank and try and make the next building. That’s forty feet unprotected. We take it that way, building by building, all the way to the lighthouse.”

  He stepped out, glued himself to the wall and edged his way along the building, his companions following close behind. He reached the end of the bank, looked across to the drugstore. He steeled himself and sprang out into the open.

  The wind caught him like a great hand and threw him sprawling to the ground with a splash. Rain stung him like needles. His face slid over pavement and he felt the skin on his cheek strip open.

  The pain of his punctured thigh welled up, a great searing wash of agony, overwhelming the painkillers Hammond had pumped into him. He squeezed his eyes shut, forced back the pain.

  He struggled to his feet and ran with the howling wind, being shoved ahead. He reached the lee wall of the pharmacy and escaped the wind, gasping for breath.

  His companions, stumbling, pushed along by the wind, staggered up after him.

  “How the hell did we do that?” It was Hammond.

  “Clean living,” Grant shouted.

  Charley grabbed Grant by the arm. “Doc!” He pointed west across town.

  Grant’s blood froze. Two hundred yards away, driven by the tempest, a wall of water raced through the streets, engulfing houses, crashing into them with great sprays of white. Trees uprooted and were swept along with the flood. An old Victorian was lifted off its foundation and swept along, disintegrating as it came, slamming into other buildings.

  The surge would be upon them in seconds.

  Grant shoved Charley along. “Run! If we don’t make the lighthouse before the flood they’ll never find our corpses.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Blount lashed out at the door frame again and again. It bulged upward and tore free from the mortar and clanged onto the floor. Kyoko considered abandoning her wild scheme for an instant. This is it, your last chance, she thought. Charge headlong into the son of a bitch and win some tiny advantage before he’s all the way in. But hesitation robbed her of the fleeting opportunity and Blount surged through the shattered doorway, pistol in hand, ready for any attack she may have planned.

  She backed against the storm panes, positioning herself so that the Fresnel lens stood between her and Blount.

  “
End of the line, bitch,” Blount said.

  She willed herself to be calm, or to at least sound calm. “I thought you needed me alive.”

  Blount’s voice was tinged with something from the dark boundary of morality. “I gave your boyfriend instructions; find the prize and deliver it or the Chinese bitch comes back bit by bit. Time’s up. It was worth a shot, leveraging you with your boyfriend, to see if he knew something about the treasure. But he failed and has either fled or will be dead soon, so you’ve got no value left. Blame him for your death.” He leveled his pistol at her.

  Kyoko stared at the gun, transfixed. Panic welled in her, and she forced it down. No time for that. Be cool, be smart. Buy some time. She wanted to run, but where? She forced herself to be still. “I know what this is all about, Blount,” she said, struggling to mask the terror in her voice.

  Blount sneered. “I doubt it.”

  “It’s about a huge payday. An unimaginable payday.”

  “You have no idea.” He steadied his gun hand with the other.

  “What’s bomb-grade nuclear material sell for on the black market these days? The answer is, sky’s the limit.”

  Blount’s eyes widened and his gun hand sagged for a split second. So she was onto something. The realization sent a shiver of fear through her. He really was after a nuclear weapon. But he didn't have it yet.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  That lie was a good sign, Kyoko thought. Blount was suddenly struggling with the thought that she might be worth keeping alive a little longer. She had to keep him on the hook.

  “We wring our hands about nuclear proliferation but can’t find enough spare change to buy up old Soviet stocks. Yet there are monsters in the world with exceedingly deep pockets who’ll find the money. You’re auctioning off a warhead! The flaw in this marvelous plan is that you don’t even have it. Otherwise, there’d be no point to all the kidnapping and murder.”

  “You’re a smart bitch, I’ll give you that, but things have to add up. The bomb core is on this island and I’ll be the only person alive that knows it. Nobles hid it and managed to keep his secret. Soon as I tried to pry it out of him, the quarantine was dumped on us. But this hurricane’s a Godsend. Once Celeste passes, I’ll sweep this sand pile with a Geiger counter, house by house if I have to. Brigands Key isn’t so big I can’t find it in a single night. It’s as good as mine.”

  Kyoko’s mind raced. Blount’s scheme could only succeed if she, Grant, Charley, Hammond, and Sanborn were all dead. He would kill them all. “You won’t pull it off without drawing attention. I have a better idea.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I can take you to it.”

  “Bullshit. You don’t know where it is.”

  “Roscoe told me. Right after I released him and right before he died.”

  “Why would he tell you?”

  “I was his last hope. I’m confused, though,” she said. “I take you to the bomb core, you kill me, you eliminate one witness. But Grant, Sanborn, and Hammond also know what you’re after. You’re rolling the dice, betting the hurricane kills them all. If even one survives, you’re screwed. He’ll bring hell down on you. How do you think you’ll get out of here?”

  Resolve crept back into Blount’s eyes. “I don’t survive officially. There’ll be a lot of missing persons to sort through.”

  “Ah. A casualty of Celeste. Good plan.”

  “Say goodbye, bitch.”

  “I can guarantee your escape.”

  He hesitated.

  “Sanborn’s missing a walkie-talkie. You had free run in City Hall and the Police Department. You stole the radio to eavesdrop, keep track of their movements and guesswork. Pretty thorough, you are.”

  “I’m still listening.”

  “Call him on it. Tell him to steal the mayor’s Hummer and rush it over here. It’s the only vehicle on the island that can make it in a storm like this. I lead you to the atomic core and you make your getaway.”

  “No good. They don’t know who I am and I plan to keep it that way.”

  “And you will.”

  “How?”

  “They stay in the lighthouse. It’s the only way I can save them. You get away and I save my friends.”

  “No good. You know my identity.”

  “But I’m your insurance policy. You’ll take me hostage. That’s your only chance. You cross the bridge as soon as the eyewall passes. In two hours you’ll be in Tampa. You ditch the Hummer and lay low. You can kill me then.” She edged a few inches closer to the coil of steel cable on the floor.

  Blount watched her through narrowed, wary eyes. Cold, calculating, sorting through the idea, weighing it. He shook his head almost imperceptibly. “And then I’m tracked down. I learned a long time ago, you don’t act impulsively. Things add up, then you act. This doesn’t add up. Tough luck, huh, lady?” He leveled his pistol at her face, an eager fire in his eyes. His knuckles flexed as his finger tightened on the trigger.

  Kyoko grabbed the broken chair and hurled it at him and dropped to the floor in one swift motion. Blount jerked reflexively aside, trying to dodge. The chair smacked a glancing blow across his face. The gun roared and the bullet hissed past her face. The glass behind her exploded and wind gushed into the tiny interior.

  Blount wiped a sudden line of blood from his eyes. “You whore!”

  Kyoko darted behind the Fresnel lens. He whipped his pistol toward her and fired. The bullet nicked the lens and glass sprayed from a shattered prism. The light of the gun blast refracted through the great lens, flashing bands of colored light in all directions.

  Kyoko scrambled across the floor, hooked the coils of steel cable into the crook of her arm, and darted through the shattered window. Broken glass raked her shoulder, slicing her blouse and skin. She gained the catwalk, in the leeward side of the lighthouse, away from the blasting wind.

  Blount fired again. Another storm pane exploded.

  Kyoko crawled quickly, staying low.

  Above the rush and roar of the hurricane, she heard a metallic groan, a giving of rotted steel. The catwalk shook under her and dropped a few inches. Another couple of seconds...

  The catwalk broke under her weight. She grabbed a slat of steel and clung to it, its ragged edges digging into her fingers. The cable slipped off her arm and tangled in the decking. Her legs swung crazily out from the wall of the tower. The deck lurched and twisted, catching Kyoko’s hair and pinning her head against the wall. She could not move.

  Blount staggered forward. He raised his gun, took aim.

  She was suspended, immobile, a mere six feet from the gun. This time, there was no way he could miss.

  With all her might, she lunged toward the coiled steel. Her outstretched hand caught it, and with her other hand, she released her grip on the catwalk. The gun roared again. She felt her hair tearing out by the roots and an instant later she was plummeting into wind and rain and space.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Hammond was slammed to the ground by a powerful gust. He staggered to his feet, pushed ahead, and shot a glance behind him. The flood rushed through the street, seventy yards behind, closing in fast. If it caught them…

  He stumbled forward. The lighthouse loomed ahead, towering above them in the dim gray rushing world.

  A street sign whistled through the air inches from his face. He dodged, trying not to think about the carnage it would have done to his good looks.

  They closed in on the lighthouse. They were going to make it! They passed into the wind shadow of a stand of leaning, thrashing cedars and raced up the driveway.

  He skidded to a stop, colliding with Charley.

  The fence gate was locked.

  They glanced about. The chain link fence was ten feet high, topped with three strands of barbed wire, the result of a lame attempt by the City Council to thwart vandalism. The Council had overlooked situations like this.

  A roar rose behind them. The flood was within thirt
y yards. There wasn’t time enough for all of them to climb the fence.

  “There!” Hammond shouted, pointing. To their left, a giant magnolia had fallen, and lay in a heap across a tangle of crushed fencing between them and the on-rushing water.

  They raced to the breach in the fence, climbed onto the trunk of the magnolia, and scrambled through the tangle of branches and dropped onto the other side.

  Water poured over the driveway and enveloped the base of the lighthouse, striking it with a great splash and spray of white.

  The lighthouse was cut off.

  Hammond waved to them and ran ahead to the lighthouse keeper’s home.

  The building was a sturdy old concrete and brick house. It was the second one built, the first having been destroyed in a hurricane in 1901. It stood on an ancient Mississippian mound seven feet higher than the island; the house’s first floor was another four feet above that. It had withstood hurricanes but none like this. It would have to do.

  They bounded up the brick steps as the flood rushed in. Five feet of water slammed into Hammond and knocked him off his feet and off the steps. Panic grabbed him as he felt himself irresistibly swept along. He struck the heavy brick pilaster at the corner of the steps and clawed for a finger hold, slowing himself for an instant.

  Grant, clinging to the wooden handrail, reached out and hooked his arm under his, and pulled him free of the surging water, dragging him onto the porch.

  He tried the door, found it locked, and threw his shoulder against it. It didn’t budge. Sanborn stepped back, steadied himself against the howling wind, and leapt and crashed through the window to the right and into the interior. Broken glass became airborne and sailed off into the gloom.