Minus Tide (15 page)

It was as if they were a pair of strangers who suddenly find themselves forced to work together, like those true life survival shows where people are trying to get out of a collapsed train tunnel or escape from an unstable hostage taker. She’d tried talking to him in the boat, but he hadn’t stopped being angry over the money. It was clear to her that if she hadn’t moved it, James would have taken it all without telling her.

“When are you going to stop sulking?” she asked. “You should be glad I didn’t run off like I’d wanted too.”

James stopped to light a cigarette while fog drew across his forehead. He raised his dark eyes and stared into her face. She’d become someone he did not know and he was angry she’d dared to change. He’d thought she still might be in his back pocket, that he could return some day and they would get together and this time he’d have the experience under his belt and she’d be almost like he’d left her only needing him more. And yet he knew he’d been fooling himself all along, didn’t understand where such a messed up fantasy had come from and why it had turned into a kind of addiction. What Ann said was usually the truth, and to be around her now felt like standing in a center of grass fire hoping that if you are to be consumed that it would be over fast.

“Maybe you should quit the bullshit now, Ann. I know exactly what you would have done as soon as you got the chance.”

“Listen to yourself. That money was never ours to keep in the first place. If you hadn’t spent so much time hiding somewhere and feeling sorry for yourself, you would have found out that the world changed without you…”

“And what do you know about the world, Ann?” James said, his voice rising. “Do you really think I’m the one who’s delusional? Do you?”

“You’re scaring me.”

“Well fuck me.”

He put his lighter away and they resumed walking. They could hear gulls circling around them in the fog, cawing with excitement over the dead or dying snacks left behind the retreating tide. Back when they were dating they would have made a special trip to the beach just to see what might be found. Sometimes people came upon live fish thrashing in the shallow water and they’d carry them home to their kitchens. James uncle had once come home with a thirty-pound steelhead he’d found gasping on the beach. Other than a hook they’d found buried deep in its stomach, it had baked nicely.

“I wish I knew why you’re acting this way,” Ann said. “I didn’t know a person could change so fast in the wrong direction.”

“You’d be surprised what someone will do if backed into a corner.”

“I’ve been there. Do you really think I planned to still be in Traitor Bay? Maybe I haven’t grown wise to the world like you have, but at least I didn’t throw my conscience down the toilet.”

James shot her a glance but didn’t slow his pace. “Well there’s one thing about you that hasn’t changed, Ann.”

“And what would that be?”

“Your mouth.”

As Ann laughed it off, she felt something inside her break. Before she was aware of what she was doing, she reached out and took hold of his arm and he shrugged her off without looking at her.

“I thought we once loved each other. Doesn’t that still glow in you some place, or has it been completely snuffed it out?”

“It doesn’t matter to me anymore. Nothing does.”

“Seriously? That’s what living on the road did to you?”

“All I know is that when I hit bottom I had to sell everything to get out again. I’ll die before I go back to living that way. As soon as I get my money this place will only be a bad memory and the only hard decision I’ll have to make is deciding what I’m going to drink it off with.”

“And me?”

James stared at maps in the sand, wondering if his life was written there by waves. “It’s what I have to do.”

Ann stopped walking. “Wait.”

“What do you want, Ann? Don’t you understand a thing I’ve said?”

She closed her eyes off from the distraction of the fog. “Stop talking and listen ... What do you hear?”

James toed the pulpy remains of a starfish. “I don’t hear anything but the ocean.”

Ann leaned forward. “You’re not listening. It’s a low growl ... Like an engine coming closer.”

“There’s no way it could be them.”

Chapter 29

When she opened her eyes she first saw a faint light, a stain on a thick wad of gauze. It reminded of her summers when the fog rolled in unexpectedly and the sun hung in the sky like a red scab. As it floated toward them it intensified and divided into two. A dark shape caused the fog to billow and when it roared closer they saw the chrome bumper of the Russian’s van plowing through.

They ran instinctively for the water, where soft sand would most likely mire tires. Fog still clung to the sentinels of wave-hewn basalt, passable ruins of ancient temples. Although James was breathing hard he didn’t fall far behind, fought back the hot stitching in his torn shoulder and lungs. They slipped on seaweed and struck rock, unable to stop and pick out the barnacles that had cut through their jeans and chipped off into their flesh like small teeth. Only when they reached a series of wide shallow pools did they turn to check on the whereabouts of the van. They could see nothing but blurry gray shapes behind the cottony veil of fog, the sounds of tires spitting sand and men cursing and then suddenly the crackle of gunfire overhead.

“They’re going to kill us.”

“Only if they can get close enough. They don’t know this beach like we do.” Ann took James by the arm and pulled him forward through an icy pool and up onto a shelf of rock, a natural staircase that wrapped around the base of an exposed seamount usually half-covered by deep water. She hadn’t been here since her early teens. It had been that long since the tide was this low.

They paused for a moment and listened to the van’s motor chug to a stop. When they heard the men splashing in the water toward them, they clawed at slick handholds of rock and began to take slow cautious steps around to the other side. The wall of rock was alive next to them as they hugged passed, as soft and swollen as cold alien flesh next to their exposed skin. The air itself was filled with a squelchy static made by barnacles and anemones expelling putrid brine, retreating into holes and cracks bleeding seawater. Ann glanced up and saw the old sheet of steel that was still attached to the rock by rusted, two-foot bolts, its warning message to visitors long eaten away by salt.

On the other side they could no longer hear the Russians shouting curses. Ann climbed down first and showed James where to leap onto a rampart of rock that led further out to sea. James stopped to catch his breath.

“We can’t keep going. We’ll get ourselves trapped and drowned.”

“If you have any better ideas then let me know. Come on, they’re going to be here soon.”

“But this is suicide, Ann.”

He couldn’t stand the sea much anymore, not after spending a night holding onto the outside of an overcrowded life raft, feeling the hot strands in his shoulder begin to slowly tear while waiting for Navy searchers to rescue him and his team from an exercise gone terribly bad. And he hadn’t even thought about the sharks much, although he could sense them circling down below.

The fog had moved out some more, exposing a tide he’d never seen, so dark and full of menace in its almost mirror-like calmness. He sensed they’d crossed into a place where the doors one came through would quietly be locked behind. The tide would begin to come in, at first lapping playfully against your legs until it grew into merciless waves that took you and pulled you under and out to a swaying black forest of kelp where your mind might still sense through clouding eyes the variety of creatures eagerly gathering to disassemble you.

“Come on,” Ann said, grabbing his hand.

Wading through belly-deep water, they came to a three-story wall of steaming rock. Ann stuck her hands under the water and felt for the starfish-rimmed opening she recalled from years before. They could hear the Russians shouting at one another. It sounded as if they’d split up to look for them.

“What are you doing?” James asked.

“Stay still. We have to wait for the water to recede.”

Just as they heard the Russian slapping around the last slimy edge of rock, the water they stood in began to draw back, and the passage Ann remembered from long ago began to appear.

“Quick. Before the water flows back.” Ann bent down and plunged through the hole. James followed, and when he emerged on the other side he climbed after Ann up a ladder of broken rock and mussel outcroppings to a ridged lookout above. By the time he reached the top his shoulder was on fire. Ann pulled him down next to her in a smooth hollow pasted with feathers. The rock was dry and slightly warm, but they would need much more to stop them from shivering in their wet clothes.

“You’re going to die out here,” the Russian shouted from the other side. “Tide is coming back in. Give yourselves up. We won’t hurt you if you give yourselves up.”

They listened to their pursuer slosh through the tide pool. He had no other route to reach them unless he swam around the wall in one of the deeper pools where the risk of a strong undertow was likely. Ann slid on her stomach to the edge of the rock and saw a hand groping the side of the hole they’d climbed through. She took out the .38 and waited for the water to recede again.

“No,” James whispered in her ear. When he tried to put his hand over the .38, she jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow and he rolled away in agony. She turned and set the gun against the rock between her outstretched arms.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Ann said.

“He said he wouldn’t hurt us,” James replied.

“He just tried taking pot shots at us in the fog. Not exactly a friendly gesture.”

“I’m just saying. We should talk to him.”

When Ann looked back down again she saw the bloodshot eyes of a man flicking up at her. Dark stubble covered his face except for the pink welts of old scars creasing his lower jaw and throat. He’d only made it halfway through the hole and looked like a burglar frozen in spotlight. He kept his left arm tucked up beneath his chest and it worried her.

‘It’s not too late.”

“What do you want?”

“Tell me where you’ve hidden the money and I’ll leave.”

“No.”

“Listen up bitch because I’m not going to repeat myself. I know everything. So, no more games, understand? I’m not here on vacation.”

From this angle he can’t tell that I’m armed, she thought. He thinks he’s got the upper hand. “Then maybe you should just swim back to Russia when the tide comes in.”

When the man began to laugh Ann could sense in his seething overconfidence an underfed appetite for sadism. His eyes wandered toward the slate sky, pretending to focus on something behind her and attempting to distract her. But Ann had kept her attention zeroed in on his body language, had watched the subtle stirring of his left shoulder blade below the leather jacket.

When she saw his arm shoot out from under his chest she lifted the .38 above the lip of rock and fired. Fragments of shell and ancient basalt exploded and the man sprang back through the hole, screaming. Ann lay her arms down on the rock and waited, her heart pounding her ribs against the rock below her. She felt faint for a moment, then washed over by cold chill. She heard her grandfather’s voice, warmed by an afternoon of sipping whiskey on the back porch while watching Ann shoot down tin cans set out on old tree stumps.
If you have to shoot at somebody don’t shoot to injure, Ann.

They listened as the hurt man splashed across the tide pool, shouting his partner’s name until his voice was drowned out by a surge of larger waves. It wouldn’t be long, Ann knew, before she and James would be completely cut off. She’d spent much of her life watching the sea roll in and roll out. For natives it became something you felt inside, as steady as the ticking of a grandfather clock. People unfamiliar with the tide or the speed in which it moved often made the fatal error of believing they had plenty of time to crawl off an exposed seamount or avoid being trapped in coves carved by waves. But if you sat down next to the water’s edge and really watched, you could actually
see it
edging toward you.