Redheads (37 page)

Chapter Thirty-Nine

For the first time since he got out of the body bag, Westfield really believed he was going to make it. He’d climbed the steel ladder to the aft-end of the freefall lifeboat. The lifeboat was set on sled-like davits that tilted it steeply over the stern of the ship. He had never used a lifeboat like this, but was counting on the idea that emergency equipment should be easy to figure out. The hatch at the back opened easily enough, and when he looked inside, he immediately recognized the wheel and lever that released the clasps on the transom so that gravity could take over.

There was a 220-volt power cord that connected the lifeboat to the ship. He bent to look at it. It would be easy to unplug, but after that, everything would have to happen very quickly. If he knew anything about ships, it was that everything had an alarm wired to the bridge. Disconnecting the free-fall lifeboat from the ship’s power source was going to be one of those things. He grabbed on to the cord with his good left hand and yanked it out. Then he stood and climbed through the orange hatch into the lifeboat. The interior lights were on—unplugging it must have activated the internal systems. Now he could see the ladder he would have to climb to reach the raised helmsman’s seat. He turned to shut the hatch and as he did so, he slipped on the tilted deck and tumbled backwards. He somersaulted down the steeply sloped aisle, all the way to the bow. The bulkhead that stopped him was well padded. He got to his knees and then pulled himself up by holding on to the headrest of one of the backwards-facing seats.

The Englishman was there. Westfield reached the hatch just as the man jammed a pistol at Westfield’s chest. Westfield ducked to the side and slammed the hatch. The man fired three shots, none of which hit Westfield. They were eye to eye with the hatch’s reinforced glass window in between them. Westfield had his right arm locked through the wheel and was pulling the door closed. Because of the boat’s tilt on the davits, he had gravity on his side: he could put all his body weight on the door just by leaning back. The man’s hand was still trapped inside the lifeboat, but he had dropped the gun. The man was shouting, probably asking for help, but Westfield wasn’t listening. He was too busy using his left hand to turn the wheel on the aft bulkhead that unlocked the release lever. Then he found the lever. His eyes never lost contact with the man’s. The Englishman must have realized what was about to happen, because he started to beat on the window glass with his free hand.

“Hey!”

Westfield nodded at him.

“That’s right,” he said.

He released the lever.

The motion was immediate. The lifeboat hurtled forward on the sled and then was airborne off the high stern of the ship. All the seats faced backwards to give the crew the best chance of surviving the impact unscathed. Westfield rode down standing at the back of the enclosed boat in its aisle, his arm locked through the steel wheel on the hatch. He braced his arm and held on to the wheel with his left hand. As the boat cleared the davits and started its freefall to the ocean, its bow tilted nearly straight down.

Westfield felt himself flying, his body parallel to the deck and his feet pointing at the bow. Then there was the jolt of impact as the bow hit the waves and the entire boat submerged.

He held on as best as he could, feeling his right elbow stretch and pop, and finding what purchase he could with his feet on the backs of the first row of seats. The light went blue green as the stern drove under the water from the force of the drop. Westfield slammed into the floor as the boat righted and popped back up to the surface. He got to his knees and turned the wheel hard to the right with his left hand, sealing the aft hatch. Five or six gallons of water had splashed in when the boat submerged, but no more than that. The blood all over the hatch explained that. The man’s hand must have been severed on impact, and then Westfield’s weight pulling on the hatch kept it closed while the boat was underwater. His eyes followed blood trail to the bow: the Englishman’s arm, sliced unevenly midway up the forearm, lay next to the pistol. Two sharp bone ends poked out through the skin and muscle. He remembered the pistol shots, supposing he’d know in a moment whether they hit anything important.

The short ladder to the helmsman’s seat was a challenge. He felt as if he’d spent the last week on a medieval torture rack being pulled apart. The relief was that the control panel was straightforward. There were meters showing battery charge, a main breaker, a fuel meter, an oil pressure gauge, a tachometer, and an engine temperature gauge. He found the throttle and pressed the rubber starter button. Down below, the engine turned over once and then purred like a sewing machine.

“Thank you,” he said, looking down where the engine must have been. If it started and ran like that, it couldn’t have been hit by a bullet.

He put the transmission into forward and revved the engine to four thousand RPM. Right then he was more interested in putting distance between himself and the ship than in worrying about the engine’s health. It probably wouldn’t blow a gasket or overheat right away. The helmsman’s seat was in a raised turret at the back of the enclosed lifeboat. By turning around he could see to his stern, through reinforced windows. Looking aft, he saw two satisfying things. The ship was steaming away without any sign of turning, probably going twenty knots. And there was a body in the water a hundred feet from the lifeboat, floating facedown.

The Englishman must have been knocked unconscious by the impact and the shock of losing half his forearm. If he hadn’t already drowned, he was in the process of doing so. Westfield watched the ship for five minutes and it never tried to turn. Either he’d knocked out the steering so completely that it could do nothing but plow across the ocean in a straight line, or its crew hadn’t noticed the lifeboat was gone. Either option was fine with Westfield. He wondered if the creature were still aboard. If it had come aboard the ship by helicopter, it may well have left the same way once it was finished with the girl.

The pain flared in his chest and his thoughts turned from the creature to the infection it gave him. The creature had provided Westfield at least a rudimentary cleaning. Apparently it wanted him alive long enough to answer the Englishman’s questions, whatever they had been. Now Westfield decided to try to finish the job. The lifeboat had no autopilot, but the steering wheel had a lock, and he engaged it to set the rudder amidships. Then he climbed down the ladder to find the lifeboat’s medical supplies. The boat was made to hold eighteen men; it was well stocked, and its first-aid kit was in good order. Westfield took what he needed and then climbed back into the helm seat, working on his chest with antibiotic ointment, then using finger splints and white medical tape to bandage his mangled right hand. Finally he used his left hand and his teeth to rip open a vacuum-sealed Z-pak of azithromycin. He swallowed two of the tablets with a long pull from one of the liter-sized bottles of water he’d found stored in plastic crates under the seats. The instructions on the back of the package told him to take one of the remaining tablets a day for the next four days.

“If you live that long,” he told himself.

That thought brought his eyes to the stern again. The ship was so far towards the horizon, he could only make out its superstructure as a faint white blur. In another five minutes it would be gone entirely, and he would be alone on the ocean. Then it would be time to throttle back and conserve fuel while he tried to figure out where he was. As he looked around, he realized he didn’t even know what ocean this was.

Chapter Forty

They were looking at a man who should have been dead.

Julissa had followed Chris up the stairs, keeping her hand on the small of his back so she wouldn’t lose him in the shadows. When they reached the landing, he switched on his small flashlight. He’d turned the throwing knife in his hand, holding the blade in his palm. Maybe he knew how to throw it. Then she let her eyes follow the circle of light as Chris worked it across the floor and along the walls of a richly decorated study. She saw the oiled wood paneling and the carefully placed paintings, the desk in front of the bay window with its leather-padded writing surface and a laptop computer open at the center; she saw these things, but without any immediacy, because what she was truly seeing was the blood splashed on every surface touched by Chris’s light. It was dripping from the desk onto the floor and there were splashes and spots of it on the walls and across the fronts of the paintings, and there was a wide trail of it from the desk to the bathroom door, and that was where the man who should have been dead had finally tumbled to the floor to finish doing the only thing left for him to do.

Chris did not go to him right away, but instead played the light along the walls into all the corners of the room and then crouched to shine it beneath the desk. There was plenty of blood, but there was no living man to be seen. Chris went across the room, shining the light at their feet so they could step clear of blood. He stepped over the man and shined his light into the bathroom, then turned again and crouched close to the man. Julissa stood with her back near the wall, watching Chris with one eye and the staircase with the other.

“His throat’s been slit,” Chris said to her.

She looked down and saw the two rough slashes across the center of the man’s throat. Chris briefly let the light roam around the room again. As she watched it go from the leather chair, to the walls and then to the trail of blood that led to the body, she understood the chronology here. The man’s attacker cut his throat while he was sitting in the chair; in his struggle the chair had spun, jetting blood from his jugular all over the room. The attacker must have left him for dead, but he wasn’t. The thump they’d heard was him falling out of the chair and dragging himself across the floor to the bathroom. When Chris knelt next to him and put the light in his face, the man’s eyes rolled back and tried to stare past the beam. They were unfocused and registered no expression.

“Can you hear me?”

Bubbles of blood came from the man’s slit throat, but there was no sound of his voice.

“He can’t talk,” Julissa said.

“Were you the one hacking into the FBI?”

The man closed his eyes for a few seconds, and then opened them again. He was so thoroughly covered in blood it was impossible to tell anything about him. He had black hair and brown eyes, but even the shape of his eyes was obscured by the clotting blood on his face.

“Is that a yes?” Chris asked.

The man blinked.

“Do you know how to find him?”

The man blinked again.

Julissa saw that the man’s fingers were scrabbling against the floor weakly. She and Chris must have had the same realization because as she was turning towards the desk, Chris said in a low whisper, “A pen. Get him a pen!”

She stopped when she saw what the man was doing. He bent his elbow and dipped his finger into his own slit throat and then reached out to the wall in front of his face and drew a diagonal slash. He made a second diagonal slash in the other direction and then a small horizontal dash in between. He’d written an upper-case “A”. Chris and Julissa stared at him as he reached his finger back into his neck to re-wet it with his blood. He reached back to the wall and made an upper-case “I” next to his first letter. As he was dipping his finger into his wound a third time, a spasm overtook his body, starting at his feet and moving upwards until it had all of him. He tried to steady himself and get his finger to the wall to paint another letter, and he died just as his finger reached the wall. It was as simple as that: he stopped shaking and lay still on the floor in the spreading pool of his blood, his finger outstretched and pointing at the two letters he’d written. The wet blood, heaviest at the corner of the letter A, ran slowly over the baseboard towards the floor.

“Let’s get out of here,” Chris said.

“I’ll grab his laptop.”

Julissa was still trembling when they got into the car, but she stopped by the time Chris drove them down from the hilltop and made a right turn onto Lincoln Way. There were cars parked along both sides of the street, but there was no other traffic. Chris drove at twenty-five miles an hour. He hadn’t said anything since they’d left the house. She had so many questions she couldn’t even think of where to begin. She looked at the computer and tapped at its keyboard for three blocks, then shut the screen and tossed it into the backseat. Chris looked at her. They were stopped at a red traffic light; its glow lit the left side of his face.

“The hard disk was scrubbed less than half an hour ago,” she said.

“We walked in right after his killer walked out.”

“Except we don’t know if he ever walked out. We never searched the whole house,” Julissa said. “If they came here to kill him so we couldn’t get anything out of him, don’t you think they’d stick around and kill us too? Isn’t that what you’d do?”

Chris nodded. The light turned green and they started rolling.

“They left the laptop on even after they scrubbed it, probably to draw us in. They know what I do for a living. They knew I’d find him.”

“Maybe they didn’t think you’d get here so fast.”

Chris glanced into the rear-view mirror and then turned his head to look at a car that was overtaking them in the left lane. She followed his gaze and saw they were being passed by a black sedan, driving without its headlights. As it pulled alongside, Chris slammed the brakes at the same time the passenger in the overtaking car let loose a burst of gunfire. Julissa screamed as she hit her seat belt. The car skidded sideways, knocking her head against the window glass. Chris jerked the wheel all the way to the left and accelerated into a high-speed U-turn, over the low curb separating the four lanes of Lincoln Way. They bumped into the westbound lane, laying rubber on the road as they sped towards the ocean. Julissa swiveled in her seat and looked out the back window. The rental car’s front bumper lay on the curb along with a part of its muffler. The black car was sideways on the empty road, pushing over the curb into the westbound lanes. Its headlights were still off. As she looked at it, she saw a muzzle flash from the driver’s window. She ducked and heard the shot hit the side of their car with a bang.