Eve's Men (32 page)

“You’re not gonna
let
me?”

“That’s what I said.”

Brian gave him a pained look. “Aw, come on, Charley, don’t try anything, okay? If you’re thinking of swimming to shore here, keep in mind the water’s not even fifty degrees. A lot of people go into shock after only ten or twenty seconds in it. And even if you did make it, which I can’t let you do incidentally, it’d take you an hour to find a phone and try to blow the whistle on us. So why not just relax and go with it? Like I said, it’s only a fucking boat.”

Eve’s eyes had filled. “God, Brian, you should hear yourself. You’re really over the edge this time, and you don’t even know it.”

“By your standards maybe. Not by mine.”

“And what comes after this?” Charley asked. “Kill some Stekko stockholders? After all, they own the company too.”

Brian sighed in boredom. “Look, I don’t have time for all this. I want you two and Terry to go down below and stay there till it’s all over.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Charley said.

“Come on, man, please.”

“Fuck you.”

“Then just stay out of my way, all right?” Brian turned away then, starting to leave.

But Charley wasn’t finished. Reaching out, he roughly took his brother by the arm again, to pull him back. But Brian came too easily, spinning, and drove his fist hard into Charley’s ribs, just below the heart, knocking the wind out of him and dropping him to his knees. Unable to breathe, Charley knelt there on the deck, vaguely aware of Eve cursing Brian and crying at the same time. Then she and Terry were each holding him under the arm and struggling to help him up. Above, on the bridge, Chester was squealing happily and pounding his fist into one of the seats.

“Way to go, Brian! Way to go! Don’t take no shit off nobody! Nosiree!”

In contrast, Brian’s voice was level, unexcited. “On second thought, we’d better keep them in the bow cabin, where we can watch them. Down below, he might try to screw with the engines.”

“Right on,” Beaver said, watching from the salon. “And I’ll padlock the hatch too, just to be safe.”

Brian nodded. “And we’ll keep the guns out here. No sense inviting trouble.”

Charley was on his feet by then, with Eve and Terry still helping him. His ribs felt as if a stake had been driven between them, and every breath he took seemed to work it in deeper. Before going inside, he looked over at Brian again.

“I’ll remember that,” he told him.

Brian shook his head in regret. “Hey, I’m sorry, man. Believe me, it wasn’t what I wanted.”

“That boat won’t be either.”

“We’ll see.”

The bow cabin was not as large as the other stateroom. It had a narrow bed on either side, connecting at the front, with storage compartments below. In the back, one step up, there was a vanity and closet on one side and a head and shower on the other. Two more steps up was the louvered door to the main cabin, with the helm immediately on the left and the dinette on the right. It was there that Beaver sat watching them while Brian and Chester kept watch on the bridge.

Terry had got an ice pack for Charley’s swelling ribs, and Eve filched a bottle of brandy on the way forward, so he was not without care. Both women seemed cowed by what Brian had done, not to mention what he was planning to do. Eve begged Charley not to try anything else.

“They’ve got guns now.” she said. “Even Chester. Brian actually gave one to that murderous little creep. So we’re helpless now, Charley. We can’t do
anything
. Do you understand?
You
can’t do anything.”

When the women were helping him down into bow cabin, Charley had been vaguely aware of Beaver getting a rifle and handgun out of a locked cabinet near the helm, and this hadn’t surprised him greatly, considering what Brian was planning to do.

“Terrorists do carry weapons,” he said to Eve now.

“Right. So we’ve got to cool it. Agreed?”

Charley didn’t answer. Terry, sitting on the opposite bed, was moist-eyed and trembling, nothing like the snarling Amazon he had seen at Greenwalt’s. He reached across the aisle and put his hand on her shoulder, and she immediately began to cry.

“Hey, we’re going to be all right,” he said. “The worst that can happen is like the man said—a boat gets blown up. That’s all. We’ll be okay.”

“After Greenwalt’s, I just couldn’t stop shaking,” she got out. “I couldn’t believe what I’d done. But Brian was so cool, you know? Just like now, like it was his daily routine or something. I really like him, and respect him—I really do—but I guess he scares me now.”

“That’s his problem,” Eve said, “that he’s
not
scared.”

“At Greenwalt’s he was so cool about it all,” the girl repeated. “And I thought, well, it was the right thing to do. I believed in what he was doing, and that’s why I helped him. But I was so scared, I thought I’d die.”

Still watching them, Beaver laughed out loud. “Christ, you three sound like you’re at a wake. You ought to be grateful you’re here, for shit’s sake. The man’s making history, and all you do is whine. You make me want to puke.”

But instead of puking, he bragged. If it hadn’t been for him, Brian never would have even known about the
Nomad
, he said. And he was the one who located it too. Calling himself photo-journalist Roger Moon, he had phoned the home office of Stekko Inc. in San Francisco and had explained that he was doing an article on classic yachts for
National Geographic
and needed to interview Mr. Stekko and get some fresh shots of the
Nomad
. Stekko’s very cooperative secretary then made a few calls and phoned Beaver with the good news that her boss had reservations at the Romano Resort through the weekend and could be reached there. She also gave him the
Nomad
’s marine phone number.

“So here we are,” Beaver said. “And I might add that without my help Brian Poole wouldn’t know how to blow up a balloon. For a job like this, it takes more than gasoline and a lighter. You also gotta have fuse cord and the know-how to use it. And it don’t hurt to know something about boats either, like where the fuel intakes are on an old scow like the
Nomad
.”

“You’re a wonder,” Charley told him.

“Ain’t I, though?” Beaver paused to shake a small amount of white powder onto his thumb, which he then brought up to his nose and snorted, almost as if he felt compelled to demonstrate for them the source of his remarkable endurance, not to mention bad judgment.

Eve asked him if he wasn’t worried about going to prison, and he made a face, dismissing the idea. “All this is under duress,” he said. “Brian’s forced me to do it, can’t you see that? And he’s the one who called Stekko, not me. That’s what he’ll tell the police anyway. Just ask him.”

“So you’ll be free to get yourself an agent and sell your story,” Charley said. “Go on talk shows. Be a celebrity.”

Beaver shrugged in helpless agreement. “A man’s gotta live.”

“And some gotta crawl.”

“Aw, quit it. You’re breaking my heart.”

It was then that they heard Chester begin to yell up above.

“
There they go! There they go!
”

Brian immediately appeared in the rear doorway, hanging sideways from the ladder, and announced that it was time to leave. Then he went back on top. Beaver squared his captain’s cap and moved across the aisle, into the helm seat, out of Charley’s view. One after another, the engines kicked in, followed by the whine of the anchor windlass. Looking out through one of the cabin’s slotlike windows, Charley saw in the distance the tiny Chris-Craft as it departed the long white yacht and headed around the breakwater, toward the resort’s landing. Though it was not quite dark yet, lights were burning in the buildings and over the walkways and the tennis courts and pool.

As the
Seagal
began to move out across the waterway all the lights on the boat suddenly went off, Beaver evidently having thrown a master switch of some kind. In the dimness, Eve looked at Charley, practically glared at him.

“There’s nothing we can do,” she said.

Charley nodded, but in his mind he was thinking of the explosion to come, pieces of the
Nomad
falling on the resort, hitting innocent people, maybe a child or two. And he was thinking that if anything were to be done, it had to be done
now
, while Brian and Chester were still up on the bridge. And all he could think to do was overpower Beaver and lock the other two out of the cabin, then turn the boat around and beach it on the near shore. Certainly Brian wouldn’t shoot at him or allow Chester to. He knew full well that it would be a wildly reckless thing to try and that the stakes probably didn’t justify it, since he really didn’t know that anything other than property loss was involved. Yet he couldn’t control the sudden thumping of his heart or the dryness in his mouth or the coiled tension in his body, the urge to do something, to
move
.

And move, he did, bounding up the three steps to the salon now and coming around the corner onto Beaver at the helm like a cat onto a mouse, not missing the man’s bugged eyes or his long fringe of hair flying out as Charley seized him by the front of his jacket and, yanking him out of the seat, threw him down the curving stairway. Abruptly the boat veered to the left, causing Charley to lose a step in his headlong rush to the sliding glass door, to close and lock it. And it proved a costly step, for Brian suddenly dropped like Tarzan into the opening, having jumped down from the ladder. Instead of breaking his forward motion, however, Charley simply put his head down and plowed into his brother’s stomach, sending them both sprawling out onto the deck. Then, scrambling to get to his feet before Brian, he heard Chester’s feral squeal again and saw in his peripheral vision the glint of a handgun coming at him.

When he regained consciousness, Charley found himself lying on his side on the salon carpet, with his head in Eve’s lap and his hands taped behind his back. He could see Terry looking out through the open doorway at Beaver handing a five-gallon can of gasoline and a large bundle of rags over the railing to Chester on the stern ladder. And beyond Beaver, Charley could see the lights of the resort, much brighter now that night had fallen. The boat’s engines were silent and the only light in the salon came from the helm control panel, green and faint, but enough for Charley to see clearly the fear and concern in Eve’s eyes as she held a compress to his head.

“How long have I been out?” he asked.

That made her smile. “You
haven
’t been out. You crawled in here. The little bastard was going to hit you some more, but Brian stopped him.”

“Brian’s a prince,” he said.

From the doorway, Terry looked down at him. “And Eve kept Beaver from kicking you. She practically threw him down the stairs again.”

Charley felt weak and nauseated, and his head ached, to the point where he had forgotten about his ribs.

“He wasn’t too happy about what you did to him,” Eve said. “He was limping and his nose bled all over his little sailor suit.”

“You’re my girl,” Charley said.

“That’s for sure.” She bent down and kissed him on the head.

“I take it Brian’s still going through with it,” he said.

“So it appears.” Eve took the compress off his head and looked at it. “Well, Rambo, you’ve stopped bleeding. You’ll probably live. So I imagine you’ll be wanting to try something else now, maybe something reckless for a change.”

“Not very likely.”

“In case you do, you should know that I won’t be freeing your hands. Beaver’s orders. And he’s carrying a rifle.”

At that point Beaver called out over the water: “Remember! It burns at four feet a minute!”

He came over to the doorway then and told Eve and Terry to “bring the bastard” out onto the deck. “I wanna keep my eye on him,” he said. “And you bitches too.”

The women helped Charley to his feet. Then the three of them went outside. Beaver was gesturing nervously with the rifle.

“Over there,” he commanded.

Eve helped Charley into a canvas chair at the corner of the stern railing, as far from Beaver as they could get. She and Charley were both wearing jackets, and Terry had pulled a blanket around her, yet they were all shivering in the cool, salty air as they watched the dinghy moving toward the long dark shape of the
Nomad
about two hundred yards away. Silhouetted against the brightness of the resort, the yacht had one white light burning atop its superstructure, plus some dim interior lights in the main cabin and above the outside stairway. Without these, Charley doubted that he would have been able to make out the men in the dinghy—Brian rowing and Chester huddled down, holding onto both gunwales as the tiny craft rose and fell in the two-foot chop. Charley saw that the
Nomad’s
speedboat was still gone, apparently tied up at shore while Rupert Stekko and his family and guests were enjoying dinner.