Stand By Your Hitman (9 page)

My eyes popped open at daylight. I have this weird inner alarm clock that goes off when I need something. In my imagination, it’s a Raggedy Ann clock that says, “Wake up, wake up you sleepy head—it’s time to start our day.” I don’t know why it’s Raggedy Ann. I never liked her. Something about those red and white–striped socks seems creepy.

I sat up and looked around. Everyone was still asleep. I stood up slowly and moved quietly to the burned-out shelter to see what I could find.

At first glance, everything seemed to be normal. I mean, a fire like that wasn’t exactly normal, but nothing looked out of place. I couldn’t smell any accelerant, like gasoline. There was no trace of foul play. Maybe it really was an accident.

Glancing over at my slumbering team, I thought I saw something shiny out of the corner of my eye. I got down on my hands and knees and peered under the floor of the shelter. Half-buried in the sand was a smooth, black oval. It took me two sticks to reach it and I managed to drag it out from under the ruins and slip it into my pocket as Silas woke up.

“Morning,” he grumbled.

I nodded. “Sleep well?”

“Yeah, right.” Silas stood and tottered off toward the jungle.

As soon as he was out of sight, I pulled the object out of my pocket. It was a cigarette lighter. Where had that come from? It certainly implied that the fire had been deliberately set. But why? Who? It really bothered me that I didn’t know. Especially since I was the past president of the Nancy Drew Fan Club. Of course, that was back in 1975, but it still counts and I still had the ID card in my wallet.

Sami rose next, winked at me, then headed off into the jungle. It was that time of day when everyone had to turn the jungle into a latrine. I followed her with my eyes. Sami was a likely candidate. I was convinced she was a smoker. Maybe she smuggled some cigarettes and the lighter onto the show? I could just picture her sitting on the corner of the shelter, lighting a smoke and dropping it as someone came into view.

But why wouldn’t she admit it? We’d all had contraband the night before, so it wasn’t like we were going to geek out and turn people in.

Duh! Of course she wouldn’t want anyone to know! She might think it could get her voted off somehow.

Isaac and Lex woke up simultaneously. In a few minutes they had snatched up the spear to fetch fish for breakfast. Sami and I went in search of coconuts
and fruit. Silas hadn’t come back and Cricket was still asleep. As I climbed the tree to collect mangoes, I toyed with the idea of handing Sami the lighter. For some reason, I just couldn’t do it.

Cricket finally woke up and Silas returned to find fish sizzling over a fire. Our perky little camper didn’t say a word about where she’d been the night before. In fact, she didn’t say anything at all. Maybe we’d come down too hard on her.

“Well,” said Isaac as he stood and stretched, “I guess we’d better get started on another shelter.”

Sami nodded. “I am itching from all that damned sand.”

Lex and I wandered off to find what we needed for a new shelter.

“What a team,” I moaned. “How did I end up here?”

“They aren’t so bad. I think it would be worse to be on Inuit.”

“Are you serious? Between Cricket the camp counselor and Silas the Civil War reenactor, we’re doomed.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. At least we have someone to lead a suicide charge should we find ourselves in combat.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted.

“And if one of the challenges involves knots, Cricket can probably lead us through it with a song.”

“Well, I
was
feeling better.”

“Didn’t you ever go to summer camp as a kid?”

I wondered how much to tell him. The Bombays do their own kind of camping. Capture the Flag usually
ends rather badly, and our songs tend to have bloodthirsty military cadences.

“Nope. And from being around Cricket I can tell I really missed out.”

“Well, I went to camp. And it wasn’t that bad.”

You know, it was kind of cute how he stuck up for everybody. But I didn’t have time for this.

“There’s some brush over there.” I pointed and he grabbed it. “How about reenacting bloody carnage? Ever do that?”

“I was a stuntman in Hollywood for years. It was my job to make the guys who got hit by cannon fire fly through the air and not get hurt.”

“Silas wouldn’t like that. He seems like the type who’d love to get sun poisoning by playing dead on a battlefield all day.”

“I worked with some reenactors on a period piece once. They drove me nuts with their demands for authenticity. I eventually had to replace them with actors. They called them ‘farbs’—people who don’t follow the tradition to a T.”

“What didn’t they approve of?”

“We had pads for the actors to land on so they wouldn’t get hurt. And they were pissed off because the boots all fit. No one got any blisters—and that is some kind of badge of honor with them.”

“Did you work on any movies where you kill off camp counselors?” I asked hopefully.

“No. I didn’t do the
Friday the 13th
stuff. I worked on some television programs, but mostly action flicks.”

“Anything I’d have seen?”

I listened as Lex listed a string of movies from the early 1990s.

“Are you serious?
Bad Blood
is one of my favorite films! Your explosions were top notch! How did you manage to make that water tower blow?” He was hitting on my territory now.

“Mostly C-4. You like explosions?”

Do I! How could I phrase it without sounding like the Unabomber? “I guess I can really appreciate a good bombing scene. Most of them are so unrealistic.”

Lex nodded. “Now everything is done on computer. Very little is real these days.”

I sighed in agreement. We were almost back to camp.

Lex put his hand on my shoulder. “Let’s give Cricket and Silas a chance. If they blow it, I’ll be the first to admit I was wrong.”

My knees went a little weak. He was far more mature than I was. And he was right. Getting along with everyone was crucial to doing my job. Gorgeous, compassionate, responsible
and
he liked to blow things up. I was definitely in trouble.

We had just gotten back when Julie came out of the jungle, clipboard in hand. She surveyed the burned remains and looked at us.

“Have a little trouble last night?” She didn’t wait for us to reply. “I hope Bert and Ernie got it on tape.” Huh. She didn’t ask if anyone got hurt. Bitch.

Her eyes rested on me and it occurred to me that Julie wasn’t my number one fan. I shuffled my feet trying
to buy time. I didn’t want to rat out our camera crew. If I told her they were AWOL last night, she’d probably shove them up our asses for the rest of the time.

“Yup, they got it,” I decided aloud.

I noticed the rest of the team staring at me. “We screwed up and accidentally caught our shelter on fire. Silly us!”

No one else spoke. Apparently, they thought I should run with this alone.

“Well,” Julie scowled, “I’m glad to hear they’re finally doing their jobs.” She squinted down the length of the beach. “Where are they now?”

“Oh,” Sami said, “they needed to get some more batteries or some shit like that.”

“Yeah.” Cricket added.

“Fine.” Julie looked at her clipboard. “We have the first challenge this morning, followed by the immunity challenge and Tribal Council.” She was reading as if she were our cruise director.
Julie the Cruise Director.
Ooh! Lex could be Gopher
.

“When this morning?” Cricket asked, her head cocked to one side. Suspicion reared up when I saw her and I suppressed it. There was no evidence she had done anything wrong. Maybe sneaky, but not wrong.

“Now,” Julie said a little too angrily. “We’re heading there now.”

“Wait a minute,” Silas interrupted. “We have two challenges in the same day?” Apparently, he was the only one smart enough to catch that.

Julie nodded. “Yes, that’s right.”

We all began to protest at once and Julie threw her hands up in the air.

“Look! There will be no argument on this! Let’s go!”

Everyone followed her down the beach. It was hard to see where all this was going. Two challenges and a Tribal Council in the same day? What the hell was going on? Were we shortening our stay? I wasn’t ready to take care of Isaac yet. In fact, I didn’t want to take care of him at all.

A looming sense of panic bloomed in my stomach. I was running out of time and options. I prayed Monty and Jack would have something for me soon.

“Any ideas about the fire?” Isaac whispered to Lex and me as we lagged behind the rest of the group.

I pulled the lighter from my pocket. “I found this.”

Lex took it from me and, after examining it, handed it to Isaac.

“Do you think maybe it came from the camera crew?” Isaac asked. Huh. I hadn’t thought of that.

“Where was it?” Lex asked.

I told them where I’d found it but kept my suspicion of Sami to myself. She was part of our alliance and I didn’t want them to vote her off should we lose our immunity challenge.

“It was probably just an accident,” Lex mused.

Isaac nodded. “We’re just getting paranoid. We really need to focus. Two challenges in one day is a lot.”

His words died off when we realized we were suddenly in the middle of the Inuit camp. They were located
only about five minutes down the beach! Was this whole show being planned by monkeys? That made me think about monkeys in suits and I shuddered.

Now, when I say “camp,” I’m using the word very loosely. This team never built a shelter and barely had a working fire pit. Where did they sleep? It looked like they just crashed in the sand—just as we had last night. Yeesh.

Julie collected the Inuit members and we took off, heading further down the beach. The other tribe said nothing. Actually, they looked incapable of thought. I wasn’t certain they’d eaten anything since we got there. They appeared to be too weak to take on one challenge, let alone two in the same day.

The other members of my team looked just as shocked as I did. Sure, you wanted to beat out everyone else for the money—but you didn’t want them to die of starvation and exhaustion in the process. Lilianna looked thin and tired. I was worried about her the most. What was happening to these people? They really weren’t going to survive at this rate.

Julie stopped suddenly, causing us all to crash into her like the Keystone Cops. She, of course, didn’t fall over. Evil never does.

“Hello.” Alan stood on the beach, waving his arms to reveal nothing around him.

Where was the challenge course? This couldn’t be it…could it?

“Welcome to your reward challenge,” Alan intoned.

We looked around us. There was nothing but sand and surf. How in the hell could this be it?

“As you now know, we have two challenges today. This one is for reward. Want to know what you’re playing for?”

No one nodded. No one did anything. Alan ignored us dramatically.

“Bavarian beer!”

Julie grunted as she dragged a keg out of the jungle.

Absolutely everyone cheered. Being drunk was a much better option than being sober in this situation. And the beer we’d had the other night was warm and flat by the time we got back to camp.

“Real German brew,” Alan continued. “This stuff has the highest alcohol content possible. And the keg is completely chilled, so it should stay ice-cold all day.”

I started drooling at the mention of ice-cold. I hadn’t had anything ice-cold (except the cold shoulder from Julie) since we left Canada.

Jimmy, Bert and Ernie stumbled out of the jungle. But where was the other camera crew? In fact, our three boys looked pretty bad. Big party last night, perhaps? That would explain their absence last night and this morning.

“Here’s what’s going to happen.” Alan pointed at each team. “You are going to play charades. Each team member will act out the item listed on their card. The first team to guess all six answers wins the beer.”

Charades? On a reality show? Seriously? In my mind’s eye I now saw the aforementioned monkeys screaming with glee.

Julie separated the two teams and we were asked to select our first player. No one volunteered. I guess we all thought we sucked at this stupid game. Inuit chose Lilianna. This was going to get really interesting.

“I’ll do it!” Cricket chirped a little too eagerly. We nodded our assent and she jumped up and stood in front of us. Julie started the stopwatch.

“Go!” Alan shouted.

Cricket nearly mauled Julie for the card and squinted at the writing. Suddenly, she leaped forward, eyes open
wide, wiggling her arms and prancing about in circles in front of us.

I had no idea where to begin. Was there even a theme to this?

“A jellyfish with seizures?” I guessed.

“Jesus, bitch!” Sami shouted. “Are you wiggling your arms or flapping the goddamned things?”

Cricket frowned and I even thought I saw her middle finger go up briefly. She went back to her galloping spasms.

“Johnny Reb with a bullet in the heart?” Silas asked. Wow. How did he come up with that? Maybe everything looked like a Civil War reference to him.

“A butterfly!” Isaac called out—bringing my thoughts back to the present.

“A parrot?” Lex asked.

I really wanted that beer. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what the hell she was. I looked over at Inuit and saw Lillianna making some similar movements. Hers made sense.

“She looks like a hummingbird,” I said quietly.

“That’s it! Ottawa wins the first guess.” Julie forced a grin.

That’s weird. I was just looking at the other team and…oh my God! They gave us all the same cards! How completely stupid were they? The monkeys in suits did backflips in my head.

I jumped up and took my card. My mind was still reeling from the fact that both teams had the exact
same clues. A few yards away, Kit was getting her card. Damn. I didn’t have much time.

The card said I was a volcano. Okay—so there was a theme. I couldn’t tell my teammates or let them know that if they couldn’t figure it out by looking at our team, they should look at the other team.

So, I erupted. Well, as a volcano, that is. Never the one who excelled at party games, I gave it my best shot. After making what I thought looked like a pointy mountain over my head, I crouched down and then kind of shot upwards, flinging my arms open at the top. I even threw in this kind of jazzy move where my arms slithered down like hot lava. I was pretty proud of myself.

Of course, I faced five completely blank faces. So I did it again. Nothing. Not even a guess from Ottawa. Obviously they didn’t appreciate my genius.

I glanced over at Kit. Apparently her team hadn’t yet figured out that we had the same clues, and she didn’t know a different way to portray a volcano any more than I did.

Completely exasperated, I simply made the V sign with the first two fingers of my hand.

“Volcano!” Lex shouted.

I smiled at him. What a great guy! As I took my seat and Silas stood up, I whispered what I knew to everyone else. From the shock on their faces, I guessed they couldn’t believe it either. We were just starting to discuss it when Alan shouted out that Inuit got the
suggestion. There were now two points for Ottawa and one for the other team. Silas glowered as he sat down, probably because we hadn’t paid any attention to him.

Sami stood up and took the card from Julie. She looked pissed when she read it. So, she turned to look at Brick/Norman to see how he was faring.

Sami got our attention and pointed at the other team. Brick was sliding forward, then back in a weird flowing motion.

Isaac yelled, “The tides! The sea tides.”

Sami grinned and rejoined us, slapping him on the back.

“Wait! That’s not fair!” Julie shouted, her face turning red. “They guessed what the other team was doing. Sami didn’t play, she just pointed to Brick!”

Alan looked from us to Inuit and back again. “Well, they did get it right.”

Brick and his teammates looked stunned. I guess they just now realized what we’d known all along.

“I say we give the point to Inuit!” Julie snapped, winning her no favor with us.

“Hey! It’s not our fault you’re too fucking stupid to give each team separate suggestions!” Sami got right up in her face. “We won. We played by your rules and I motioned. Isaac guessed it. Our point.”

Julie took a step back. Maybe she realized that Sami would beat the shit out of her. I had no doubt about it, myself.

“Ottawa wins the point. Let’s continue,” Alan answered.

Isaac rose to take his card for the next round. Julie gave Moe his card but held on to ours.

“Knock it off, Julie,” Alan said when he saw what was happening. But Julie started running in circles, keeping the card out of Isaac’s hands. Inuit was working hard on guessing Moe’s word. He looked like a beached whale, lying on his side in the sand.

By now, Alan had joined in and both he and Isaac were chasing Julie around the beach for the card. The guesses were coming fast and furious from Inuit. We didn’t have much time.

I stood up as Julie ran toward me and clotheslined her in the throat with my extended arm. She dropped to the ground and I stood on her neck until she released the card to Isaac.

Moe was now on his arms, dragging his body across the beach. Isaac hung his arms in front of him and loosely made a clapping motion.

“A sea lion!” Cricket said.

I pulled Julie up to her feet and dusted the sand off her. She clung to her clipboard as if it would save her life.

“Four out of six answers right!” Alan smiled at Julie. “Ottawa wins!”

Julie snapped her clipboard in half and marched off into the jungle.

“Ottawa, you win the reward. But there is a twist.
You have only two hours to drain this keg before the immunity challenge. If it isn’t completely empty before the challenge—you lose automatically. The losing team votes a member off, tonight.”

Oooh. That was bad.

“Whatever, dumbass.” Sami was already dragging the keg back toward our camp. Isaac and Lex jumped in and soon the three of them were practically running across the beach.

Lex tapped the keg with a speed I felt might have broken the laws of physics, and within minutes we were gulping down the frothy brew. No one spoke. I was actually afraid that someone from the resort would show up and take it away from us. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Alan had swiped it from some vacationing Berliners.

“Mmmmm…” I groaned in delight after polishing off another coconut husk of beer. It felt so good going down. We just lay there in the sand, nursing that keg.

Sami filled her fifth mug of beer without any obvious effects of drunkenness. Maybe we could pull this off after all.

Cricket vomited for the third time. Okay. Maybe not. But Lex was doing okay. Isaac seemed a little bombed. Silas passed out after his third.

My buzz was kicking in. This beer was seriously potent. I nursed another mug as I watched Sami go for her eighth. She had an amazing tolerance.

I looked down at the stopwatch Julie had left behind. Only an hour to go and we still had half a keg.

“Maybe we should give up,” Cricket hiccuped.

“How mush had you have?” I mumbled. Okay, so I was more than a little buzzed.

“Oh,” she thought for a few moments, then turned back to me. “Did you shay something?”

“I think we should take a break,” Lex said. “Some of you need to throw up to get this out of your system.”

Oh yeah! He was a barfender. I pictured him in a G-string.

“Especially you.” Two Lexes quivered in front of me as they took the huskkkk out of my fands. Blahhhhchhhh.

“I’m good.” Sami poured herself another one.

Lex led me off down the beach a little ways. I jammed my finger into my throat and puked into the surf. We stumbled back to the rest of them.

Sami, Isaac and Lex continued working on the keg while Cricket, the unconscious Silas and I watched. I plopped backward into the sand and stared up at the clouds, which resembled monkeys in suits for some reason.

“Missi?” I heard a voice murmur in my ear.

My eyes opened to see Lex, a little less blurry and only one of him, standing next to me.

“It’s time to go,” he continued.

I stumbled to my feet and saw that Sami and Isaac were carrying Silas. Cricket just looked green.

“Ish the keg gone?” I asked his lovely blue eyes.

“Yup.”

Jimmy the cameraman grinned and seemed to have
sprouted two heads. Bert and Ernie looked more like the Muppets than themselves. How much had I drunk?

We followed the crew into the jungle. Thank God it was a short trip or we wouldn’t have made it. Every single one of us was bombed. Even Sami couldn’t walk straight.

“This is a twisted show,” I complained as Lex walked into a tree.

We came into a clearing with an extremely complicated obstacle course. Oh shit.

The Inuit tribe took one look at us and smiled. Things were looking up for them. I, for one, desperately had to pee.

“Ottawa!” Alan shouted, making us all flinch with pain. “You have to sit one person out. Who will it be?”

Silas answered by passing out, face down in the sand.

“I guess it will be Silas,” I said.

Alan explained the course in some dialect of the Tagalog language, while we struggled to stay upright. I have no idea what he said. I’ve never been to France. Wait. They speak French there. Tagalog is something else. It begins with an fffff. Philippiano?

They led us to a raised platform where we would begin the course. The stairs were particularly challenging. Alan shouted and we began.

Sami took one step on the balance beam and fell off into the sand below. She didn’t move. Neither did we. If she was dead, we didn’t want to take any chances.

So, we watched as the Inuit tribe won their first challenge. It was nice to see them jumping up and
down together with glee. I was happy for them. And I wanted a nap, a toothbrush and complete darkness.

Somehow we made it back to camp. It hadn’t really hit us that we had to vote someone off in a few hours, just that the banging of the surf on the sand was making so much noise. I lay down, pressing my forehead against the cool metal keg. It felt wonderful. The rest of me felt like shit.

At that moment, an annoying little voice in my soggy brain told me there was something wrong. That was weird. I’m usually pretty good about sizing up a situation. Figurative alarm bells were going off and I had no idea why.

Sitting up, I looked at my teammates—all passed out in the sand around me. No one else seemed concerned. I tried to ignore the nagging intuition, but there was no use. Bombays rely heavily on instinct. When you feel that something is wrong, chances are it is.

But what in the hell was it? I leaned against the steel keg, my head throbbing. Maybe my senses were overreacting. I mean, it’s not like that hasn’t happened before. Like the time in the pool on Santa Muerta with the sharks. Oh. Wait. There really had been sharks in the pool.

“Get up!” I shouted as I jumped to my feet. No one responded.

“Get up! Now!” I yelled louder, and then grabbed my head as it ached.

Lex leaned up on an elbow. “Missi, can’t you just let everyone die in peace?”

The alarm in my brain was getting louder. Something very bad was going to happen. I kicked, pushed and dragged my teammates toward the jungle. I didn’t know why exactly—a fact that they didn’t seem to appreciate. I had just pushed Isaac into the trees when the keg I’d been leaning against exploded and shot up into the sky.

We all watched as what was left of the smoking metal crashed to the sand. After a few minutes, we emerged from the trees to inspect the bomb that had been in our midst (and inconveniently pressed to my forehead earlier).

“Holy fucking shit!” To my surprise, that came from Silas, not Sami.

I took two of the discarded coconut shells and gingerly turned over the twisted metal. A small, smoldering lump was attached to one side. C-4. Somebody had tried to kill us using the old “bomb in the keg” trick. This was far more serious than sabotage.

Isaac raced to the resort and found the crew. Bert and Ernie were more than happy to have something to film…an enthusiasm I found slightly creepy. Alan contacted the police, and we all sobered up quickly during the interrogation. By the time they left with the twisted wreckage of the keg late that afternoon, our hangovers had turned into exhaustion. Lex talked me into trying to get some sleep.