Hell's Bay (39 page)

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A mile was farther than I'd swum in years and my heart was letting me know, banging body shots to my left rib cage like a nasty middleweight working me over from inside. I'd let my body slip, getting sloppy in middle age. Even the adrenaline charge was already wearing off.

I was two-thirds of the way across the bay when the airplane dropped from the clouds, loud and wobbling its wings, skimming close to the water like it meant to land. Then the pilot seemed to lose his nerve, pulled up sharp, and banked away. A drug drop or the park-service flyover. Hell, my thoughts were too scrambled to make a decent guess.

When I looked back at the Mothership, the spotlight cut off, and the black curtain dropped again before me. Blacker than before because my pupils had corrected for that glare.

I kept on swimming, trying to stay on the track I'd managed so far. It was only another ten or fifteen minutes if I didn't stray off course.

I toed off my boat shoes to get better snap in my kick, then fumbled open the top button and unzipped my shorts and swam right out of them. I didn't want to chuck that shirt, even though it was proving a hell of a lot less lucky than I'd believed.

Another five minutes and my arms were as heavy as if I'd been lugging a bag of cement up twenty flights. I wanted to stop but couldn't. Couldn't get Rusty's words out of my head. She'd been cut but claimed she was okay, an assurance I didn't buy.

I was lost in the rhythm of my stroke, taking a breath on every right hand reach, when something below me in the water brushed my leg. A gentle, whisking swipe.

It woke the jet-fuel gland and sped me up by double.

There was no creature living in those waters that I could possibly outswim. But that didn't stop me from trying. I pumped my legs, left a fluttering roil behind me. And whatever it was dropped away for a full minute.

Then it grabbed my ankle. Left ankle, and hauled me to a stop, then let go. I spun back on it, ready for a punch, a kick, whatever I could do. Go down scrapping.

I was panting hard and couldn't hear a thing beyond my breath.

I swiveled a one-eighty, faced behind me, came back almost at once. A spastic water dance. On impulse, I smacked the surface flat-handed, which I knew at once was a fuck-up, more likely to draw attack than spook.

She surfaced five feet away and I made out enough of her through the darkness to know who it was. Black gleam of hair, pale sheen of skin.

I was about to speak when she sunk out of sight. Then the hand gripped my right ankle and drew me down.

I got only the quickest breath and knew at once I would drown in seconds unless I broke her grip on the first try.

Her hand strength was staggering, a grasp that numbed the flesh. I relaxed and went along for another second, then tucked into a ball as tight as I could squeeze, and plowed my hands forward, turning an underwater somersault.

Halfway around, it broke the hold and I shot to the surface.

A few seconds later she bobbed up nearby.

“Better than your granny,” she said. “Better than Uncle John.”

I didn't waste my lungs on words, trying to drag in deep breaths as quietly as I could, stifling the gasps, not wanting to give her any reason to attack again so soon. Treading water, moving backward, little by little, opening up some distance.

“You ever timed yourself?” she said. “How long you can go? I have. Lying beside my boy, him struggling to get a sip of air, coughing blood and little specks of tissue. Five and a half minutes, that's my best.”

I heard the plane off in the west. Closing in, but still minutes away.

“That's not record territory or anything,” she said. “But it's longer than you can hold yours. I'll bet my life on that.”

“What do you want?”

I saw her teeth and suspected a smile, but couldn't be sure.

“You going to offer me cash? That's what the rest of your people did.”

“I don't have any money. What do you want?”

“You know,” she said, “I don't want a damn thing. That's the weird part. Not a damn thing. Already had joy enough for a lifetime, until you people stole it from me, bone by bone.”

I filled my lungs and filled them again, then ducked below the surface and frog-kicked away from her. I made what I hoped was a wide circle, trying to get back on path to the Mothership.

She was stronger than any woman I'd ever grappled with. Stronger than nearly any man. Just that grip around my ankle was enough to scare me. The flesh still deadened. I stayed down until my chest was ready to break open, then angled upward, ruptured the surface with a gasp and started swimming hard. I called out Rusty's name. Called it again. Then got back to swimming.

Rusty answered through the darkness.

“Thorn!”

I was off course by ninety degrees.

Rusty called again and I veered toward her and plowed on. Taking breaths on every stroke, leaving behind me a furious wake.

But Sasha cut me off. This time mounting my back and looping an arm around my neck and twisting me to the side, hauling me under, not so much with her weight, which was far less than my own, but using some kind of leverage, that precisely controlled force I remembered from a brief and unsuccessful fling at high school wrestling.

I twisted and writhed and tried to punch her somewhere solid. But she rode with me, and had me under and we were going down, her naked body pressed flat against my back, right forearm locking across my throat, left hand braced against the back of my head, jamming my chin against my chest. A neck breaker, a stranglehold from the playground, the barroom, the back alley, crushing so hard the sparklers began to fire up in my eyes.

I pried at the arm at my throat, dug my fingernails into her flesh. Her body was as slippery and hard as a bag of eels. I threw an elbow into her gut but it didn't faze her. I threw another with the same result. She tightened the pressure, wriggled for further advantage, using her weight and angle to keep me buried a few feet below the waterline.

I had no secret countermoves. I'd never drilled in breaking choke holds. For a loony moment I thought of the hero in that novel Sugar had pushed on me. That eight-foot-tall fantasy man had black belts in a dozen martial arts and could dispose of enemies with his little toe.

But I was going to die down there in the black depths, either by drowning or by broken neck. It was just a question of which came first.

The lights were winking out, brain cells bidding each other farewell, when the plane thundered across the water. Maybe twenty yards away, forty. I don't know how deep we were at that moment, but the plane's roar and shudder exploded in a chaos of bubbles.

It woke me from my defeat. I wrenched and bucked and fired an elbow backward, and this time I caught bone. The grip around my neck softened by some tiny fraction.

I twisted again, down to my last seconds of consciousness when I broke free, kicked to the surface. As soon as I got a breath, she was beside me. Breathing harder than before.

“Round two,” she said.

But before she could duck out of sight, I snapped a right hand full in her face. Hit her again in the right eye.

That first punch dazed her. In that defenseless second I struck her with an overhand left and felt her nose crunch. I punched her twice in the forehead, then sent a roundhouse to her temple. No traction in the water, but the blows landed hard enough.

She slumped forward, sputtered. I grabbed her hair, hauled her face out of the water, and held her before me. She gagged and coughed and swatted at my arm. I slammed my fist into her mouth, slammed it one last time, then held her head underwater and counted off the seconds.

I was nearing sixty, watching a thin trickle of bubbles rise from her mouth, when Rusty called out my name, and swept the beam of the flashlight across the water.

I flipped Sasha on her back and hauled her by the hair through the dark bay toward the Mothership. I didn't know if she was dead already, or if I was drowning her as I towed her in. And I can't say I really cared.

Back at the ship, I heaved her onto the dive platform. She wound up facedown, head turned awkwardly to the side, looking out to sea. I didn't bother to right her. I squatted down and fingered her throat for a pulse. Got nothing and felt a black thrill.

“Mona's upstairs,” Rusty said when I broke into the salon. She was biting off her words, a sharp wince at each breath. “She's got the Kyocera—Teeter's best sushi knife.”

“Where'd she cut you? How bad?”

Rusty was crouched in the corner behind the upturned table, close to where I'd left her. She raised the flashlight and brightened it against her shirtsleeve. The cut was six inches long and the bloody trail ran from wrist to elbow. A defensive wound.

“Shallow,” she said. “Not bleeding anymore. The bitch was pissed cause I got the radio from her.”

“How the hell did you manage that? Your knee like it is.”

“Teeter helped me. Gave me the juice.”

“Bless his heart.”

“The knee, it's really fucked.”

“We'll get you a new knee.”

She closed her eyes and swallowed. Turned her eyes down.

“Take the flashlight, Thorn.”

“You keep it. We may not be done yet.”

As I climbed the spiral stairs, the Cessna idled across the bay. It was Mosley's plane, the 185 Sky wagon.

Which was fine. I wanted a word with Carter Mosley.

 

 

 

 

All the crew cabin doors were closed. The passageway was dark, just a slash of illumination leaking in from the Cessna's distant landing lights.

I tried Rusty's cabin first. Turned the handle, threw the door aside, stepped into the darkness. The shades were open and the floatplane's lights threw diamond patterns on the wall. Teeter lay beneath his blanket, a dark bulk.

I rummaged through Rusty's drawers, searching for any-thing close to a weapon. But there were only clothes. All her hardware was on her skiff.

Teeter's cabin was empty too. His drawers were even more bare than Rusty's.

So she was in my cabin. In there with a knife. Waiting for me.

My fists were puffy, the knuckles gashed from Sasha's cheekbones and jaw. My palms were sliced from the barnacles on the mangrove branch as I'd swung away from the bull shark. The wound at my neck was throbbing again, and I'd been feeling an acid burn in my throat when I used my voice as though the tissues deeper down had been violated in some ugly way.

I was tired beyond imagining. Bruised, battered, hacked, and gutted. I didn't want another fight. Another barehanded brawl with another woman. But I could hear the Cessna drawing close and suspected it had not come on a rescue mission. There was more fighting, more dying to come. I had to move.

Quietly, I turned the handle on my cabin door, raised my foot and kicked it, then went in fast.

She was sitting in the shadows on my bunk. She'd drawn the shades but there were threads of light showing at the edges. I made out a glimmer in her lap. Too dark to see her face, too dark to make out the size or shape of the knife, or how she was gripping it.

“That's Carter out there, isn't it?”

“Yes,” I said. “It's his plane.”

“He's come to take me away.”

I held my place by the door. The cabin was only ten by ten. No room to maneuver. Even in that total dark I knew the space perfectly. On our shakedown cruises and from months of work, I'd navigated every inch of the space in every weather and every light. The sharp-angled deck gave her a slight advantage, however. I was downhill, she was up. Seven feet between us.

“Carter and I,” Mona said, “have become very close.”

“I see.”

“We're kind of an odd couple, I guess you could say.”

“You have Abigail's murder in common. That's something.”

“I think we'll probably go to Costa Rica, maybe Mexico. Carter's been moving money in case the bottom fell out. I think it's fallen out. Don't you, Thorn?”

“Yeah, it's fallen out.”

“This wasn't supposed to happen,” Mona said. “Sasha went off the reservation. I lost control of her.”

“She was just supposed to take me down and leave?”

“You or Dad, whichever was easier. That's all. Not all this carnage. This is wrong. I didn't want this.”

“John wasn't in on it?”

I took a step to the right, a better angle of attack.

“Dad, the big hero. He goes out there in the kayak, thinks he can take Sasha down, or bargain with her, or whatever he was thinking. What a fool.”

“Yeah,” I said. “What a fool.”

“I could try, but it'd be hard to explain all this to the cops. I've been sitting here working through plausible scenarios. You know, like Sasha Olsen did this all on her own. Revenge for her husband and kid. Put it all on her. Maybe that would fly for a while, but someone could start poking, look a little closer. Then there's Timmy. She'd be a problem. This is way past her threshold. If she caved, the whole thing would fall apart.”

“It already has.”

“Oh, I haven't given up. I'm optimistic. I've got a relatively good feeling, actually.”

“Then you're insane.”

“Oh, Thorn, I was hoping you'd be different. But you're not. You're as petty as the rest of them. Typical egocentric. Everything's about you guys. You spoiled, self-indulgent brats. But this is so much bigger. There are global problems at stake, huge issues we've got to solve. A lot of shit you and your parents caused, and now my generation's got to fix. We need the right people in place, and we need them fast. We can't dillydally while you all die off.”

“Oh. That's how it works. Murder the old farts, make way for the enlightened kids. That's the plan?”

“Hurry things along, Thorn. That's all. Speed up the inevitable.”

I heard voices down below and felt the shift of the plane's wake rolling under them. No more time to wait.