Close Reach (13 page)

“Find what, baby?” she said.

She didn’t know if she truly wanted to hear what he thought she should do or if she was just making him stay with her. Maybe it was both. When his fit finally passed, he looked at her again.

“The weak spot. Everything has a weak spot. So you find it … and then you break it.”

She nodded because he was right. The trap was a problem, but she knew most problems
could be solved through either cleverness or pure will. Dean knew she had both. Even in his agony on the ground, he was nudging her in the right direction.

“Dean,” she whispered. “I’ll find it. I love you.”

She’d needed to say it to him so badly that it choked her coming out.

He mouthed it back at her, and she read the words off his black-crusted lips. Then he closed his eyes. For a while, as he slept, she watched him. Finally, when she could take it no longer, she turned and began to study the floor, seeking anything within plausible reach of the trap. She was looking for any tool she might use: a bent nail, a scrap of wire. Lena watched her a few minutes, then started her own search of the other side.

David was true to his word.

In the lingering twilight near midnight, one of the men came. The one she’d named Sour Breath. The man who’d rapped on the trap with a fish gaff and pulled Lena out while they’d still been aboard
La Araña.
This time, instead of the gaff, he carried a steel soup pot. When he walked through the door, the breeze coming off the water carried the steam from the pot into the building, and Kelly could smell hot rice and chicken in the pot.

Dean woke either from the smell of food or from the sound of the man’s footsteps over the rocks. He followed the man’s progress with his eyes but could do no more than that. The man passed Dean without looking at him, came up to the cage, and squatted by the trapdoor. He used his key to open the lock, and then he lifted the door and set the pot inside the cage. As he was threading the shank back into the hasp, Kelly turned to Lena.

“Ask him in Spanish if he’ll let me feed some to Dean.”

The fear on Lena’s face was easy to read. She looked at Kelly, her eyes full and wet, and gave the barest shake of her head.

“Lena. I need to. Tell him it’ll be a secret if he needs it that way. It’ll be between us, and David won’t know.”

Lena’s lips quivered, but she turned to the man, who was beginning to stand. She whispered the question. The man looked at her and said something back and made a hand gesture that Kelly understood:
What do I care?

He took out the key again and bent to the lock, saying something else to Lena.

“He says you can,” Lena whispered. “But you have to leave your blanket.”

He pulled the lock out of the hasp but held the trapdoor closed with his left hand while he found a rock the size of an ax blade and held it in his right hand. Then he lifted the trapdoor and stared at Kelly. His right hand was cocked just past his ear. She looked at him, at the sharp rock in his hand. The soup pot lay between them at the threshold of the cage, its contents still steaming. She knew how thin this ice was. Everything could crack apart right now if she went the wrong way.

“All right,” she said. “If that’s how he wants it.”

She took a breath and closed her eyes, then slipped the blanket off her shoulders. She came out of the trap on her hands and knees, not looking at the man, and then turned and took the soup pot in both of her hands. She stood, her back still to the man, waiting for the blow to fall.
Lena looked at her from the back of the cage, her eyes blurred with tears. She knew Lena’s fear and humiliation—the girl was terrified of the man and the things he’d done to her, ashamed of her hunger for the food Kelly was now carrying away from her to give to someone else.

Sour Breath was working his eyes over Kelly’s naked body. She knew it even though her back was to him. But she ignored his crawling stare and Lena’s pain. Neither could exist, not now. She stepped to her right, around the trap, carrying the pot to Dean.

She got to Dean and knelt in the rubble, setting the pot beside her bare knees. She put her hand on his cheek, and he met her eyes.

“Baby, I’m going to set your shoulders. It’s going to hurt. Bad. But then it’ll be better. And there’s some broth here, with rice and chicken. I’ll feed you some, after. If you’re up to it.”

He looked beyond her, and she knew he was looking at the man, Sour Breath. She would let Dean watch him for her. She had to focus.

“Be quick,” Dean whispered.

She started with his left shoulder. This one would be easy. He’d dislocated it twice before, and she’d even set it for him once.

She took his wrist and brought his arm around, then unzipped the top of his exposure suit and felt his shoulder with her fingers. She pushed his bicep against his rib cage and held it in place with her knee while she bent his elbow ninety degrees so that his hand was pointing at the rafters. Then she pushed his wrist to his stomach while pulling back on his elbow, pulling hard against the tension of his shoulder muscles. Dean was clenching his teeth, but he didn’t take his eyes off the man. Now Kelly rotated Dean’s elbow until the back of his hand was nearly touching the rocks, and she eased the tension on his arm and felt the ball of his humerus pop back into the joint.

Dean took in a sharp breath and let it out slowly. She used her palm to wipe the sweat off his forehead.

“You did good, baby,” she said. Without turning her head, she spoke to Lena. “Please tell the man I said thank you. Tell him I need three more minutes.”

She listened to the girl whisper in Spanish as she stepped across Dean and knelt to work on his right shoulder. This one would be much harder. In all of Dean’s life, this joint had never come apart. She had to pull with all her strength, feeling under his shirt with her fingers until she knew she’d eased the end of the bone past the joint. Then she twisted his arm and pushed the bone home, and it made a sound like an egg breaking.

Dean screamed and arched his back.

She stepped over him again and knelt by the pot. She wiped the sweat from his forehead and wet her fingertip with her tongue to clean the blood and caked dirt from his lips. It took a while to clean him. Her time was gone, but the man hadn’t said anything yet. Dean was still
watching him, so she knew he was still watching her. But if she’d gotten this far, he would let her feed Dean. She sensed this the way she sometimes knew when a dog would let her go past its yard without lunging.

“I’ll give you broth and some of the rice. You can keep it down?”

He nodded, or tried to.

She dipped the spoon into the pot, filled it with the tea-colored broth, and brought it to her own lips. She sipped a little to be sure it was fit for eating. It was salty and hot, and she could taste the fat that had boiled out of the chicken. She put her hand under Dean’s head and lifted it, then brought the spoon to his lips and tipped it so he could drink slowly. She put a piece of the chicken in her mouth and chewed it for him and then put the pulp in his mouth with her fingers so he could swallow it with the next spoonful of broth.

She didn’t give him much. Just enough to warm his stomach and slake his thirst. If he ate too much or drank too quickly, he might vomit after she was locked in the trap again. If he couldn’t roll to his side, she might have to watch him choke on it from the cage. She stopped after she’d fed him half a cup. She kissed Dean’s forehead and then stood, holding the pot in front of her hips with one hand and holding her other arm across her breasts.

The man lifted the trapdoor and watched her backside from so close that she felt his breath as she crawled in. Once she was inside, he locked the cage. He said something else to Lena in fast Spanish, and then he left. Then they sat across from each other with the pot in the middle.

“Can you eat?” Kelly asked.

“God, yes.”

“Here.”

They took turns with the wooden spoon. The soup wasn’t much more than a boiled chicken and a few handfuls of rice. Between them, they ate it all, and it was delicious to the end. They picked the bones clean and licked the fat from their fingers. Kelly felt warm again.

When they were done with the meal, they arranged the blankets as best they could. Lena hadn’t said anything since they’d started the meal, but now she came close to Kelly and held her tightly.

“I was so afraid. That he’d hurt us. Or take the food away and dump it on the ground out of reach and laugh at us.”

Kelly took her shoulders and looked at her.

“You did good, talking to him. You kept him calm. You made him think he was doing the right thing. They’re breaking us. But we can work on them, too. Like you just did.”

“No,” Lena said. “It’s not like that. They don’t care about anything. On the ship, before they got you and Dean, they came and they pissed on Richard. In his cage. He was dying.
Freezing. And they came out, three of them, and pulled out their pricks and pissed on him. They were laughing. Right up till he froze.”

Kelly smoothed Lena’s hair back and ran her hands along the girl’s thin back to stop her trembling.

“We’ll find a way,” Kelly said. “I promise you.”

“Or like what they did to me,” Lena said. “Over and over. Till I bled. And then the last time, promising the stew, so I didn’t even fight them.”

“I
promise
you, Lena.”

Kelly kissed each of Lena’s closed eyes. The tears were cool against her wind-cracked lips. The girl fell into her and began to cry outright.

“I wish I were dead. I wish they’d just kill me, like Jim. That’s the only way.”

Kelly had nothing to say to that.

She held Lena close and kissed her forehead. She looked at the picked-clean bones, the squalor of their cage. Her husband was dying just out of her reach. She knew the food she’d just eaten hadn’t been for her and certainly wasn’t for Dean.

It was for Lena.

They’d thrown her in Lena’s cage like an extra blanket so the girl would be just warm enough to stay alive. They hadn’t left Lena to die like the others when they’d learned she was penniless. In fact, they’d sought her out, had raided Jim’s yacht with Lena’s Community Health Index number in hand, which meant they’d already searched records in Scotland. But not financial records.

They had something else in mind for Lena. A theft, certainly, but one that would cut straight to Lena’s heart.

Kelly held her until she was asleep and then lay awake against the bars of the cage. Dean was dipping in and out of consciousness. It wasn’t sleep, but it looked like it. At least he wasn’t screaming and writhing.

She watched him and watched the light grow brighter as the postmidnight dawn broke at the bottom of the world. Lena thought these men couldn’t be manipulated, but Kelly wasn’t so sure. There had to be a weakness somewhere, as Dean had said. A hairline crack she could work into slowly, the way winter frost splits stones. She’d find it.

Lena paid for her meal in the morning.

She paid with blood and spit, and finally, as she was struggling against the gag in her mouth, she paid with the beat of her heart.

* * *

It began when two of the men came into the building carrying a narrow metal workbench between them. They kicked rocks and rubble aside until they had a level spot for it, and then they set it down. They left, and Kelly and Lena watched the dust settle while they stared at the new addition to the far side of their prison. It was waist-high and six feet long.

Once it had been painted white.

Now it was rusted through, its remaining paint clinging like dirty scales. Kelly had no idea what it had been built for or what the men planned to do with it today. But it reminded her of the cadaver dissection tables abandoned in the subbasement of her first hospital.

She took her eyes off it and turned to look at Dean. He was still skimming just beneath the surface of consciousness, so that for now he was out and gone. Whatever came next, she and Lena would have to face it without him.

She swung to look at the door when she heard footsteps.

Scarface, the man who’d strung Dean from the ceiling, came into the building. He was carrying a half dozen heavy webbing straps and a black duffel bag. He tossed them on the low shelf beneath the table’s main work surface. Afterward, he left again, his heavy boot steps crunching across the scree that had tumbled from the crater’s rim. They heard a door open and slam. Kelly noted the direction and the distance of the sound.