Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel (28 page)

Thompson fiddled with some controls. I drew a couple of deep breaths and felt slightly less inclined to empty out my stomach.

“What’s happening, Johnson?” asked Gina.

She’d taken to calling him by the wrong name whenever she addressed him, each time a different one.

“Fishfinder,” he muttered. “Sonar.”

We got up and gathered behind him, looking over the console at a screen with some numbers in the corners, some scraggly fields of color. A radio emitted staticky voices, but the codes and terms meant nothing to me: it was a drone of noise. Through the acutely slanted windshield I could tell the armada rose up ahead of us, its lights the tall geometry of cities, buildings. I couldn’t see the shapes of the ships, only their clusters of brightness.

“The bad guys have these toys too, don’t they?” asked Gina.

“A buttload,” said Thompson.

“With all that gear, those greedy cretins haven’t found the mermaids yet?” said Ellis.

“Maybe the mermaids have burrows,” suggested Chip. “Some
fish
do, Nancy told me. They camouflage themselves beneath the sand. Those flat ones, kind of ugly. I mean, no offense. The sonar wouldn’t show them there, would it? Maybe the mermaids are hiding.”

Thompson went
hmph
.

“Hey, can’t the other boats see us?” asked Chip. “Aren’t we too near?”

“Nothing on the channels I checked,” said Thompson. “There was a window, sure. Where someone might have noticed. Don’t think they did. I woulda heard the hail. Believe me. These morons couldn’t find their asses in a shit tornado.”

“A shit
tornado
,” savored Gina. “You’re a wordsmith, Swanson.”

“No training, is the problem.
Morons
,” he said, turning and glaring at Gina, “with no
training
.”

“We need people like you, Dobson,” said Gina. “In academia, where I work. Man, do we ever need people like you. People who
have
been trained. To do the high-level work. Such as killing.”

She smiled, of course, when she said that. Gina tends to.

“Whoa,” said Chip. “What’s that?”

On the fishfinder, a formless mass appeared.

“School of bait,” said Thompson.

“So what are you looking for?” asked Chip. “The mermaids? The divers?”

“This right here is the edge of one of the nets, where they’ve set it. Between that ship over there”— he inclined his head to the left—“and a ways off to the south-southeast is where this net stretches. I propose to cruise the perimeter of the nets, sounding and scanning. I’ll tune the radio to the frequency they’re probably using, see if we hear some shit. Meanwhile we’ll keep a lookout on the screen. See what we can see.”

“And if they notice us?” asked Gina.

“What do
you
think? We’ll book it out of here. Their boats’ll start up slow.”

So Ellis and Gina got tasked to radio, while Chip and I gazed at the fishfinder’s screen, with its frizzy fields of color. It was interesting enough for a while; Thompson pointed out fish, reefs, and the lines of nets as he steered us along, the engine putt-putting at a low murmur, running lights shining on the waves. He showed us what undersea objects looked like, in those blazes of false hue. Fishes were fish-shaped, long crescents, mostly; bait schools moved by in slow blobs. I thought of
how it really must look down there, the darkness of the depths, the warmth of the water. Waving seagrass, maybe, bulbous long whips of kelp.

It was peaceful and black out there, peaceful and nauseating; I wished I’d taken some Dramamine, cursed my poor planning. I kept hoping to see the shape of a human torso on the sonar, the shape not of a diver but of a person with a tail—I stared and stared, while Gina and Ellis listened to the radio. But the minutes soon ran together, my eyelids felt heavy, and elements of the scene blended. There were no mermaids; the closest we came was spotting a few night divers, which Thompson had to point out to me. But they had no tails, and so they didn’t hold my interest.

Thompson muttered to Chip, describing features, using lingo:
honeyholes
, he said several times, as my attention drifted. I heard it quite distinctly.
Honeyholes
.

After a while—it must have been past midnight, and I’d
given up on watching and dozed off atop one of the leather benches, imagining myself in the electronic purples and blues of the sonar images, my own body, its legs like scissors, then fused in a long, graceful triangle, tranquilly sinking down into the waving eelgrass beds—

“Shut up,” said Thompson.

I vaguely registered Gina retorting—he must have been talking to her—and heard the radio squawk. I struggled to sit up. The boat’s satellite phone was lighting up and ringing. Thompson hovered over the radio, turned up the volume, and reached out to pick up the sat phone receiver, I guess to stop the racket—I personally couldn’t parse the radio exchanges, a mere patchwork of sounds. We waited anxiously, not knowing what was going on, until Thompson handed the sat phone to Chip and nodded at him to deal with it, while he leaned in close over the radio.

Chip had to talk low so Thompson could hear the radio chatter; I couldn’t tell who was calling about what until he dropped the phone and was leaping around oddly, a raw nerve of excitement, trying to contain himself.

“What
is
it, Chip? What
is
it?”

“We have to go back,” said Chip, after he grabbed the receiver again and hung up, beaming. “We have to go
back
!”

“Not yet,” said Thompson, who was rummaging in a heap of duffel bag on the floor. Holding a padded case in one hand, he used the other to steer the boat this way, that way, around the glare of lights. “Gotta see what’s going on. U.S. Coast Guard
cutter is almost here. Boarding the flagship. They’re taking someone into custody.”

“Custody?” echoed Chip. “You mean, arresting them?”

“Not us, I hope,” said Ellis.

“These binoculars are night-vision,” said Thompson, and waved the case in my direction. “Get ’em out, wouldja?”

“Sure,” I said, but as I did it I whispered to Chip, “Tell me!”

He shook his head stubbornly, still wearing that grin.

I handed Thompson the binoculars as he throttled down, as we took up a position near a much larger vessel, maneuvering around a bit, this way and that. It was one of the soaring white yachts. Sure enough, another boat was pulling up alongside, the small police boat we’d seen once or twice before; then there was a gangway-type deal, a walkway was being lowered. We didn’t need the night-vision goggles, as it turned out: the scene was flooded with halogen-white lights, and there were crowds on the decks of the yacht, looking down. My problem was I couldn’t get a good angle on the scene, Gina and Chip were blocking my line of sight. I tried to peer between their heads, around and over them, but it wasn’t working out for me.

“Well bugger me,” said Ellis, “it’s the bird from the beach,” and at first I thought he meant a waterfowl—a seagull, possibly a tern.

“The woman from the parent company,” crowed Chip. “Look, Deb. And the guy with the spray-on tan!”

I got a good, solid five-second glimpse, between the heads of my companions. They were walking across the gangplank:
the previous Mormon and her coworker, Mike Chantz, Janz or Djanz. They wore polo shirts and shorts, dressed for leisure, I guess, but there were plastic twist-ties around their wrists, and their wrists were behind their backs, and they were walking a little awkwardly.

“What’s the game now,” growled Thompson.

But Chip nodded. “I think I know, I think I know,” he said. “Thompson, you have to get us back!”

I stayed frustrated with Chip as the boat sped toward the shoreline, Thompson talking sometimes on the radio, other times hunkered down over the controls. I was frustrated because Chip wouldn’t tell me what the good news was: Chip was flat out convinced his information-withholding was in my own best interest, a point on which I flat out disagreed. He was like a small child on Christmas morning, during that trip back—the nearer we got to terra firma, the more excited he.

I tried some tactics: I tried to freeze him out, completely stonewalling him, my face shut tight and bitchy, my eyes dead like a shark’s. I wished, by signaling my coldness, to force him into confession. But it did no good.

Long story short, we achieved the shore without anything surprising happening. Next we scrambled out of the boat and trudged/hastened up the beach, each according to his mood. Thompson exchanged a series of grunts with the boat’s owner, who sat in the small parking lot idling his truck. Finally, when Chip had almost expired of pent-up energy and boiling impatience, Thompson hauled himself into the driver’s seat and drove us back to the motel.

There, in our room, surrounded by a raucous crowd, was Nancy.

Not dead at all.
Au
contrary.

I DON’T KNOW
if you’ve ever been sure someone was dead, then found out you were wrong. It’s not really a standard experience—there’s no card section for it.

Prof. Simonoff, for obvious reasons, was the hub of startlement/amazement; we were bowled over and stupefied, but the professor was in a different category. That guy’s whole self was
completely transformed
, his bearing, his voice, even his face looked new to me. Although, in any of these arenas, I couldn’t have told you exactly why. The instant change taught me a lesson about mood or affect or what have you—not quite sure what the lesson was, per se, but it was in there somewhere. Something about the spirit animating the body. Or not animating it.

My point is, there was Nancy, a smidgeon paler but alive and well, not decomposing in the least—except insofar as we all are, dying as we live, or living as we die, taking that opportunity. Depends if you’re a glass half-full type or a glass half-empty, I guess.

Nancy was full color, animated, and life-size.

We charged up to embrace her, plowing through the cluster of others, Chip just ahead of me—though Nancy was never much of a hugger, if I’m being honest. Even at that moment,
appearing among us like Lazarus from the tomb, the risen Christ, etc., she wasn’t big on hugging. She’s more the kind of person who stands there stiffly, passively enfolded. When she gets hugged her cardboard form sends out a signal of awkward unresponsiveness, with her plainly wondering when the “display” of “affection” will be completed. In that realm she has a maybe autistic quality.

Imagine my shiver of recognition, then indignation when she told us she’d been kidnapped. My kidnapping was extremely small potatoes, next to hers; mine was a casual, throwaway kidnapping where hers was serious (though also highly incompetent). I felt embarrassed by the inadequacy of my personal kidnapping. I was in the bush leagues, as a kidnapping victim.

Unlike me, Nancy had been stuck with a syringe, covered in a sheet, and rolled out of her cabana and across the grounds on a gurney, dressed up as a corpse. Then they’d stowed that expert in a windowless room, a room off the hallways behind the main restaurant, where she’d been found an hour before, while we were on the boat. Annette had been passing the door on her way to a walk-in freezer and heard Nancy’s thin wail of
help, help
through the wall; she used a key off the ring she’d snatched from the staff pegboard and
voilà
, set her free.

Not one of the refrigerators, no—the place had simply been a disused storeroom, standard room temp, but they kept Nancy on a cot, shot up with drugs to make her sleep. (“Benzodiazepine, I’d guess,” she said.)

Periodically a man would come in and hustle her to a small bathroom down the hall or give her a tray of restaurant vittles; he wouldn’t talk much at those times, she said, no one had deigned to tell her what she was doing there until she got it out of a second guy, who subbed in with the food one time. The Venture of Marvels needed a certain number of days, he said, to put its claim in place, to establish its rights. Until then, she was stuck.

“No one told me they faked my
death
,” she said, as her father stood close beside her and gazed fondly at her living face, with its many-legged eyebrows (Homely virtue! I thought. How good to have her back). He kept a hand posed quasi-formally on her shoulder, as though to indicate to himself that his daughter was there, actual, real and independently breathing—without, however, showing excessive affection: like daughter, like father.