Close Reach (22 page)

If only he’d find a way to hang himself in his trap and take it out of her hands.

Afterward, she dressed again and went to her husband. He stirred when she touched him, but he never really woke. The little bit of urine in the catch bag was dark as ink. That could be nothing. Maybe just a bladder infection and not the start of a reaction to the antibiotics she’d given him. Too much was riding on those drugs to stop using them.

“Dean, honey,” she said. She was kneeling next to him, her hand on his forehead. “We’ll set sail soon, go north. I know where they’re taking Lena. So we’ll find her. You made me promise. Remember?”

She waited to see if he’d wake and answer, but he didn’t. He was too far away with the codeine and the fever. At least he was comfortable.

“It’s what you wanted. So I want you to know we’re doing it.”

She kissed him on the forehead and then leaned close to the mattress to whisper in his ear. Gentle words that might find him wherever he was.

* * *

In the cockpit, she unscrewed the deck fill cap, slid a filtering funnel into the opening, and began pouring the diesel she’d brought from ashore. It was slow going because of the filter, but she didn’t know where David had found the fuel or how old it was. She couldn’t afford to seize the engine by gumming its fuel lines. It took over an hour to transfer the hundred gallons. By then
she knew
La Araña
was out of radar range, probably seventy miles from Deception Island. She could leave at any time, but it would take a while before she was ready. She took a rubber hose from a cockpit locker and went below for a collection of basic tools: screwdrivers and socket wrenches, a few sizes of pliers. She figured she might have to take things apart inside
Arcturus
and
Palida
before she could easily siphon fuel from their tanks. She motored over to them with the pile of empty jerry cans stacked in the bow of the Zodiac.

Dark clouds rode high overhead, flying east with the wind. Beyond the protective rim of the crater, she could hear the big ocean swells battering the rocks, the crash of growlers as they raced in on the breakers and hit the outer cliffs, shattering to slush that would ride back to sea on the backs of receding waves.

She couldn’t know for sure what the weather would be like in the middle of the Drake Passage when she reached it. But she could guess. She’d already started a log of the barometer, and the mercury was dropping.

* * *

When she’d transferred as much fuel as she could,
Freefall
’s tanks were half full. She went ashore and looked in on David. He was squatting miserably in the corner, his knife-cut hair plastered to his white scalp, his blanket reeking of fumes.

She took the flare gun from her coat pocket and pointed it at the cage, hating the way he cringed, hating everything about him and what she was doing.

“Passports,” she said. “Where’d you put them all?”

She knew they’d keep them. A valid U.S. passport would be worth something to someone.

“Duffel bag under one of the cots.”

She went to the bunkhouse. It was cold in there now that the heater had gone out. She found the black duffel bag and opened it. Inside were a handful of unopened Eldoncard blood-typing kits and saliva-based HIV tests. She took them out, tossed them aside, and next found the rag they’d used to gag Lena. Then David’s stethoscope. Finally, at the bottom of all this, she found a battered plastic zipper bag with the passports. Twenty-three of them from a dozen countries. An international coalition of the dead.

She flipped through them and found Dean’s, Lena’s, and her own. The rest she laid back onto the cot. Someone would find them and speak for these people, but it wasn’t going to be her. She didn’t know what would happen on Isla Clarence, what lines she might irretrievably cross before she was done.

And when she put these shores in her wake, she aimed to leave them there.

* * *

Later, after she’d done the final check of
Freefall,
she sat in the helm seat in the cold pilothouse and switched on the chart plotter. She was glad David hadn’t stolen it or the radar. While the plotter searched for satellites, she leaned to the ignition key and started the engine. The engine block had been sitting cold and would need to idle a while before she brought it up to running speed.

Using her notepad and David’s paper charts, she began to lay her course. The narrow pass from Deception Island to the open sea was marked on the charts as Neptune’s Bellows. When she exited the bellows, she’d still be in the relatively calm waters in the lee of other islands in the South Shetland chain. After sailing twenty miles to the northwest and skirting the western flank of Snow Island, she’d be in the Drake Channel proper, and then the real pounding would begin. To reach Isla Clarence from Snow Island, she’d have to sail over seven hundred nautical miles to the northwest, forty-five degrees off dead windward. If she could maintain thirteen knots, it would be a hard, bashing two and a half days. But if storms drove her off course or if she couldn’t keep up the pace for any reason, it would be longer.

There was no more time to waste. She punched the waypoints into the chart plotter one after another, a string of small goals to lead her up to
La Araña.
When she was done, she checked the engine gauges and then went below to talk to Dean. He wouldn’t be able to tell her anything. But maybe if she sat near him and spoke to him in a quiet way, she’d understand what to do.

She sat on the edge of the mattress, held his hand, and looked at him.

“We’re ready now, Dean. I could pull the anchor and we could just go.”

She fastened the lee cloth along the edge of the pilot berth so he wouldn’t spill out like a sack of laundry the first time the boat rolled. But the lee cloth alone wouldn’t be enough. Not where they were going. She used a pair of thick webbing straps and fastened him to the bunk at his chest and thighs. When the chest strap was buckled and cinched, she put her finger beneath it to be sure it wasn’t too tight. Dean was having a hard enough time breathing without a strap compressing him. But it seemed to be all right.

She crouched next to him, smoothing the blankets over his chest.

“We could just go. That’s what I want to do. I want to leave him in the cage to starve and die,” she said. “I want him to hear us pulling out and to get so desperate he starts banging rocks together to make a spark. To light himself on fire so he doesn’t have to take it anymore. And I
want that not to work. So he has to just ride it out for days until he dies.”

She checked his catch bag and checked the IV drip. It was time for the second round of antibiotics, and she took them from the little shelf and prepped the syringe.

“But, Dean, something tells me that’s not what you’d have us do. You’d say he may not deserve a second chance but that we’ve no right to kill him. I know I can’t let him out. And I don’t fucking want to bring him on this boat, Dean.”

She slipped the needle into the catheter’s port and gave him the second dose of amoxicillin. Then she took the empty syringe and put it in the trash can in the galley. She came back and took Dean’s hand.

“So tell me what to do, Dean,” she whispered. “Please, just tell me what to do.”

She got on her knees and put her head on his chest lightly so that she could listen to his heart. For a long time she just knelt there, listening to him. The beat of his heart. His painful fight to suck air into his lungs. She listened until she was sure. She stood up and kissed him, tenderly biting his bottom lip as she pulled away.

“All right, Dean,” she said. “Goddamit. All right. I’ll do this for you.”

David hadn’t hanged himself. He hadn’t self-immolated.

He was curled on his side under the blanket, but he rose when Kelly pushed the wheelbarrow into the building. She stopped it next to the cage and looked down at him. There was a fresh blanket from one of the cots in the wheelbarrow, and she showed it to him.

“Pass yours out, through the slot,” she said. “I’ll give you a fresh one after you clean up.”

She pulled out the cedar bucket of steaming salt water and dropped a wet bar of soap through the top of the cage. He stared at the soap but didn’t touch it.

“Give me the blanket, David. And then lather up. Don’t waste my time.”

David fed the corner of his blanket into the slot in the wall of the trap. She grabbed it and yanked it through, then tossed it aside. David took the bar of soap and worked it in his left hand. His right hand was a swollen, bloody claw that he held close to his shivering chest. Diesel glistened in his hair and on his face, and he rubbed the soap into it, working it into his puffed red eyes and into his ears.

“Crawl into the corner. I’ll pour water on you. It’s hot, but it’s not boiling anymore.”

She hadn’t gotten the hot water from the crack in the flensing house. She didn’t want to go in there again or lower anything into that ground. Instead, she’d tied a rope to the bucket and tossed it down another crack she found outside the building.

When he was in the corner, she poured half the bucket of water on him and let him lather up again. Then she poured the second half, and he scrubbed at himself while he crouched in the corner. Steam rose off his red skin.

“Stay there. I’ll put a towel through the slot.”

She did, and he took it and dried himself. When he was done, he put the towel in the slot and she took it, passing back a clean blanket.

“Understand I’m only doing this because I don’t want you to stink up my boat.”

He looked up at her, the surprise clear on his swollen face.

“That’s right,” she said. “We’re going hunting. If
La Araña
isn’t where you said she’ll be, you die. Anything happens to Dean or Lena, same deal.”

He tried to answer, but his throat was too choked. She cut him off before he said anything.

“You don’t have to answer. I really don’t give a shit what you think about it.”

David swallowed and turned his face from her.

The last things in the wheelbarrow were a block and tackle and a long length of rope, both taken from
Freefall
’s equipment room. One thing about owning a sailboat, Kelly thought as she tossed the rope over the rafter, was that you never ran out of pulleys and lines. Or things to do with them.

With the mechanical advantage of the pulleys, it wasn’t hard to lift David three feet off the floor. She tied off the rope to the same post they’d used for Dean, then put the wheelbarrow under the cage. She lowered David’s trap onto the wheelbarrow, took down her lifting gear, and tied the cage to the handles of the wheelbarrow so it wouldn’t slide off the front when she lifted the skids to start rolling.

When she got him to the Zodiac, she upended the cage. It flipped and crashed into the bow of the boat. David cried out when he landed with his back on one of the crab funnels. Before boarding the Zodiac the last time, she walked back up the slope to the bunkhouse. She’d left the flensing knife there, and she wanted it. David watched her load it into the Zodiac, its handle wedged under the cage.

“You’ll want to get in the middle, try to balance,” Kelly said. She pushed the Zodiac into deeper water and hopped in as it began to float out. “You go overboard in deep water, there’d be nothing I could do. Assuming I even tried.”

She started the engine, jammed it into forward, and opened the throttle, spinning the boat in a tight U-turn toward
Freefall.
David fell onto his stomach, flattening himself across the bottom of the cage as the boat heeled with the turn. The trap slid and wobbled at the edge but didn’t tip off. Again Kelly marveled at the delicate balance underlying everything. She could have drowned him in four feet of water, but he’d been saved by a bit of friction between rusty metal and the inflated rubber. And that was it. If she kept intentionally rolling dice for his life, she might as well just push him off the side, because they’d come to the same thing in her conscience. She throttled back and put her shaking hand on the corner of the trap to steady it.

* * *

Hoisting the trap aboard
Freefall
was easy. She was far beyond caring about scratching the hull. She tied the spinnaker halyard to the top of the cage, winched David up until he was swinging against the lifelines, and then brought the trap around to the stern on the ambit of the halyard. She lowered him until the cage sat in the cockpit, ahead of the main wheel and behind the protection of the pilothouse. It would not be a warm spot, nor would it be dry when they got into real weather, where spray and green water would come over the rail. But that didn’t concern her. A wool blanket could still give some insulation when it was wet. She’d learned this firsthand
with Lena and had David to thank for it.

The only precaution she was willing to take was to run webbing straps from the corners of the cage to tie-down points in the cockpit so the metal box wouldn’t fall off the side in a knockdown or skid into the pilothouse and break something. When the cage was strapped down, she scanned the area for anything that might roll within his reach. Some tool he could use to escape.