Close Reach (25 page)

* * *

She woke cold and hungry on the morning of January 2. Dean was a stiff lump beneath the blankets in the salon. She turned off the diesel heater. She had tried so hard to keep him warm, and now she would have to keep him cool. That was her first job as a widow. Maybe on Isla Clarence, when she was finished, she would find a proper place for him. A slope with a view of the sea. A tree to shade him in the summer months, to shield him from the winds in the wintertime. A spot with stones nearby so that she could pile them atop him to keep animals away.

She would not bury him in the Drake Passage.

That was where she was going to put David, and she didn’t want that thing anywhere near her husband.

She drank a glass of cold water standing in the galley. Then she dropped the plastic cup into the sink and put on her hat and gear and went up into the pilothouse to do what needed to be done.

* * *

His spit and blood were twisted together into a single icicle that flowed from his nose and mouth and pooled in the chain link at the bottom of the cage where it had turned into a bubbly puddle. His fingers were locked around the bar in the corner of the trap, and he was on his side with his knees drawn up to his body. She stood looking at him a long moment and realized she felt nothing. She pulled her rigging knife from its sheath on her chest harness and used its serrated blade to cut through the webbing straps that held the trap in place. Then she clipped her tether to the jackline and went up to the mast for the spinnaker halyard.

Once she had the cage winched up, it swung with the heel of the boat and hung out over the water. She used the boat hook to trip the lanyard she’d tied to the halyard’s snap shackle. The trap fell free, hit the moving water with a muted splash, and was gone. She pulled in the spinnaker halyard and made it fast to its cleat at the mast, then came back into the cockpit. With the hose, she sprayed what was left of David off the deck and into the scuppers to the sea.

* * *

In the late afternoon, she made radar contact with land, comparing the green shape of the target with the landfall marked on her charts and judging the mass ahead to be Isla Cook.

Three and a half hours later, she saw it.

Gray mountains cleaved by glaciers and green-brown hills in the lowlands dotted with a few hardy trees. She sailed past its shore and then, eight miles later, threaded into the narrow labyrinth of islands that would lead eventually to Isla Clarence.

Seven hundred miles north of Deception Island it was warmer now. Maybe in the mid-forties. She took off her hat and went to stand at the bow with the binoculars, the hard katabatic winds draining from the folds of Isla Furia’s mountains like rivers of snowmelt, whipping her hair until it tangled on the forestay. Birds were swooping and diving in a tight pile atop a patch of troubled water where baitfish schooled. She saw no boats, no houses. There were no fingers of smoke rising from the hills. In the pilothouse, she turned on the VHF radio and listened to silence on every channel.

The chart plotter showed only twenty-six miles left to go. She throttled back to 1,000 rpm
and rolled in the genoa to slow the boat. She wanted to time it correctly.
La Araña
would be there already, but the Colonel’s men wouldn’t be able to start right away. The doctors would want Lena to have a few hours of sedated rest. They’d want her fed so she’d be able to hang on as long as they needed her. They wouldn’t want to put stress on her, on her heart. There’d be enough of that later.

* * *

She saw the mouth of the fjord just before midnight and shut off the engine. There was still wind, but the water was calm. Islands rose around her in every direction and reduced the fetch to nothing. She went to the mast and lowered the mainsail, furling it and tying it to the boom. She brought the dark blue sail cover from below and put it on so that the lowered sail wouldn’t flap in the wind and make noise. She made the turn into the fjord and then rolled in the genoa to bring
Freefall
the last mile on her staysail alone. She’d already turned off all the lights in the cabin. The masthead tricolor was dark, and the navigation lights were off. She switched off the chart plotter and toggled the radar screen to its night mode, throwing a chart book atop the screen so that its glow would show only if she bent to look at it.

Now it was quiet and dark.

She could only hear the water slipping past the hull, the trickle of the wake settling into the calmer sea. She took the binoculars and went to sit on the side deck while the autopilot steered
Freefall
up the fjord. From studying the charts, she knew the branch was coming up. She was on the far side of the mile-wide fjord, where her yacht’s silhouette would blend with the gray cliffs. She put the binoculars to her eyes and adjusted the lenses to watch the other shore.

This could all be for nothing.

If David had lied to her, if the charts were wrong, she’d have no recourse. She saw the narrow branch of the fjord where it broke away from the main channel and split up to meet a mountain valley. It was less than a quarter mile wide and only twice as long. Down at the far end, moored close to the cliffs, was
La Araña.
By its shadow alone, she’d recognize it on any ocean for the rest of her life. Next to the old crab boat was a propeller-driven float plane. Neither of them was lit, but when she searched up the slope, she saw the glow of lantern light in the windows of a small cabin. And as she breathed in, she could smell the wood smoke that was drifting down the fjord on the cold mountain breeze.

Please God
, she thought,
let me make a stand here. Please, that I am not too late.

Rather than turn down the branch toward
La Araña,
she let the autopilot continue to steer up the fjord. She went up to the bow and quietly prepped the anchor, shackling the chain to the
anchor’s shank. When she was done, she went back to the helm and switched off the autopilot. The Colonel’s branch of the fjord was out of sight now. She steered to cross the main body of the channel, knowing from the charts there was a cirque in the cliffs up ahead, a quiet roundabout in which to anchor
Freefall,
beyond the cabin’s line of sight.

She furled the staysail and let the boat drift into the wind for the last three hundred feet of its journey. When it came to a stop, she was already at the bow, lowering the anchor into the water, paying out the chain by hand so that it did not bang against the deck or make a splash in the water. She felt the anchor bite the bottom and dig in. By the feel of it when she pulled on the chain, the bottom was loose gravel and scree from the cliffs. She didn’t know how long she’d be gone from
Freefall.
It could be ten minutes. It could be forever. She hoped the anchor would hold as long as she needed it. She shackled the chain and then went below.

When she’d changed into a pair of black jeans and a black fleece jacket, she knelt next to Dean and uncovered his face.

She kissed him, and then she whispered in his ear. She told him all the things she wished she’d said every day of their last year, the things she should have been saying whenever she woke next to him or fell asleep at his side. That she needed him. That he had showed her the way and she would always follow it now. Whether he was here or not, he could count on it.

She kissed him once more and covered his face with the blankets.

Then she went to the galley and took David’s gun from the drawer. She’d discovered if she cocked it so that a bullet was in the firing chamber, she could pull the magazine and load another round to carry eleven shots. Still, she took a handful of the bullets and put them in one of her jacket pockets, and then she put the cocked pistol in the other.

She went up to the pilothouse and untied the flensing knife.

It was fifteen minutes till 1 a.m., and the sun was already painting the northern sky a glowing shade of purple. She looked at her yacht one last time, this home Dean had built, and then went to the stern and hit the button to lower the transom. It swung down like the tailgate of a pickup truck on hydraulic struts. When it was down, the transom became a swim platform, inches above the water’s surface. She stepped to it and crouched, turning to see into the dinghy garage. Their little Zodiac was sitting on rollers, waiting to slide out. The outboard was attached and ready to go, but she wouldn’t use it going ashore.

There were oars. Rowing would be quietest.

Kelly knelt in a copse of southern beech trees and looked at the cabin. She was a hundred feet from it and off to the side. There were no windows in the back or along the sides, and from her hiding place she could not see through the windows facing the small front porch. But there was a glow of light from the windows, and by it she could see the man sitting on the porch, smoking a cigarette.

It was the man who’d strung Dean from the rafters: Scarface.

He was sitting on the thick boards of the porch, his feet in the tufted grass that grew in patches around the cabin. A dozen yards from him, on level ground, were three gasoline-driven generators. Big portable generators, five or six kilowatts apiece. They were all running in a loud din of smoke and half-muffled combustion. Thick yellow cords uncoiled from each generator, up the porch steps and into the cabin. Tanks of gasoline were stacked in rows nearby.

They’d brought the generators to run the machines they’d need for Lena and the Colonel. There was no other electricity here. But the generators would serve Kelly, too: they were so loud, Scarface would never hear her coming.

She checked that her jacket pockets were zipped so that the bullets and gun wouldn’t fly out. The flensing knife was in both of her hands, its curved blade rising past her right shoulder. In the last hours of her sail, she’d taken Dean’s whetstone and used it to hone the knife’s century-old blade. Now the carbon steel shone like a dirty mirror along the cutting edge where she’d ground and tapered it with the stone. This was a crude instrument, good for only the most basic operations. It would be fine for what she had in mind.

There was no pretense, no hiding. She simply stepped out of the trees and walked up to the man from his right side, the flensing knife cocked in her arms like a scythe. He’d brought the cigarette to his lips and was drawing on it, his eyes watching the glowing ember as it brightened and burned closer to his fingers. When he looked up, she was standing in front of him. She waited only for his eyes to widen in recognition, because she wanted him to have her face in his mind at the last.

But she gave him no time to stand or cry out.

She swung the flensing knife over her right shoulder and down. The man tried to fend off the blow with his left hand, raising it palm out in shock. The blade sliced easily through all five of his fingers and then went diagonally into his flesh where his neck met his shoulder. It went deep, nicking past his clavicle and catching in his spine somewhere just north of his heart.

She leaned back on the handle, rocking the knife in his flesh the way a woodsman rocks an ax to draw the blade free of green wood. The first cut would have been enough to end this man. But Kelly wanted more than that. She wanted satisfaction. The first cut had been out of necessity; the second was for Dean. She brought the blade back and swung it horizontally from her hip, catching the man below his left earlobe even as he was falling back. She followed through, like swinging at an easy softball pitch, and she got all of it. The full force of the swing ended with the flensing knife resting over her left shoulder, while the man’s head rolled down the porch. The head came to a rest on its scarred cheek, open eyes facing Kelly.

She hoped he could see her.

Kelly leaned the flensing knife against the rail and unzipped her pocket. She stepped past the rest of the dead man and went across the porch to the door. She stood quietly and listened but couldn’t hear anything over the steady roar of the generators. Finally she took the rusty doorknob in her hand and turned it, stepping into the cabin behind the pointing barrel of David’s gun.

She’d known what was happening, known what Lena was to these men and why they’d kept her heart beating when they’d killed everyone else they met. But she was unprepared for what she saw when she stepped into the cabin. She’d been so sure that she wasn’t too late, that the storm had taken Dean but had delivered her to Chile in time for Lena, that God had dealt her a hard trade but not an outright loss.

She hadn’t been ready to fail.