The Catch: A Novel (15 page)

The man tensed with a hesitation that said he’d been told to keep what he knew to himself because worrying guests was always bad for business. Munroe relaxed into nonchalance, handed him a hundred shillings, and with her tone mellow to ease his tension, asked again, “What happened?”

He pocketed the money and his focus drifted toward the ground. “A man die,” he said.

“A white man?”

His face jerked up. He shook his head and, as if the lifeless form still sprawled out on the sand meant nothing, said, “Everything finished now, you don’t worry. No problem for any guest only with men on the beach, everything okay.”

Munroe would have asked him if such
problems
were a regular occurrence on this stretch of coast, but there was no point to that. He continued on and she listened to the noise of the night and, when the pathway emptied, returned to shadow to slip through the dark for the far edge of the periphery where stone retaining wall met sand, where the only light was that which came from the sky, and where it was possible to observe the pier without being seen.

She would have preferred to be on the beach among the loiterers, where learning could come faster and she could place blame and find culprits, but fear and uncertainty infested the air, and as it was
no secret that the owner of the boat had been a foreigner, she would draw suspicion and anger from the moment she stepped into their midst. Crowds were easy to incite, difficult to control—pack mentality turned rational individuals into an unthinking, brutal mass, and she didn’t want to wind up on the receiving end of that kind of mob justice.

An argument erupted between several of the men near the pier: pushing, shoving, yelling in a language Munroe only partially understood and which brought on mental anxiety that amplified the inner tumult. The crowd parted slightly and among those shoving and being shoved were the two young men who’d helped carry the captain and whom Sami had later befriended and fed.

The fight ebbed, and with the crowd still pushed back, Sami’s body was clearly visible, surrounded by the darkness that had bled from him, left behind and out in the open for show-and-tell. Permutations danced and collided inside her head, answers to questions she hadn’t thought to ask, and anger for never having asked them.

The rate of crime near the big cities and the cheapness of life on the continent said Sami’s death was a statistical inevitability, a coincidence, bad luck and timing: He was new to the area; he’d had money and had flashed it around. Instinct, and the confusion and fear written within the actions of Sami’s new friends, said otherwise.

This death had followed from the
Favorita
, had finally caught up with her because she’d stayed in one place long enough, but it was a statistical improbability that someone hunting for the boat would have found it by chance among the thousands along the entire Kenyan coast. Munroe closed her eyes and filled in the gaps with what had no words, breathed in the tenor and again watched the crowd, the young men.

If his killers had wanted the boat, they would have taken it already and gone, and she understood that these boys had not been the ones to commit this atrocity, understood that they, like her, would never know if Sami’s killer or killers now hovered together with the curious.

Munroe studied the beach and counted those who came and
went, mentally retraced each step since her arrival in Kenya: the Internet searches and hotel stays, merchants and hospital visits, the few precautions she’d taken out of habit, not out of concern that she would have been tracked or targeted.

If it was the captain they were after, they should have just asked her nicely. She’d wanted him off her hands, would gladly have traded him for Victor—for the whole of Leo’s team if he was worth that much—and then walked away, but now this was personal, now she had her own dog in the fight. Now she wanted blood.

The mood on the beach shifted, whispers upticked on the wind, and glances turned toward the dirt road. Several of the bystanders walked away, some of them passing close enough that Munroe could clearly see their faces, though none of them were familiar. By the time the two local policemen reached the base of the pier, the entire crowd had bled off, no one wanting to be hauled in for questioning and, regardless of guilt or innocence, forced to bribe his way to freedom.

The men stood over Sami’s body. One knelt and poked him, as if to confirm he was dead. They spoke for several minutes, conversation carried away on the wind, and at last one of them left for the dirt road. When he had gone, his partner sat on the pier and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He showed no interest in the boat moored at the far end of the dock—perhaps hadn’t even noticed it—struck a match and casually smoked a cigarette.

The wait dragged out longer than an hour and one cigarette turned into six, while the man kept watch over the body. What would have been a crime scene elsewhere left nothing for him to investigate. Even if someone better qualified had arrived to handle the case, or there had been technicians trained to collect the evidence, even if the city had forensic equipment to lead the investigators to culprits, there were still no databases through which said evidence could be compared, no hair samples or fiber samples or DNA or fingerprints, nothing at all but eyewitness testimony to sort out what had happened tonight, and the eyes had all long since vanished.

Detectives might return tomorrow, knocking on doors, asking
questions, might even make arrests based on hearsay, but the investigation would be limited to first- or secondhand accounts, and because Sami was a stranger without family making demands for justice, the truth had likely died with him.

The first man returned carrying a sheet or cloth or possibly burlap, and was accompanied by two others not in uniform. The two new men wrapped the body and the four carried it away, and Munroe was left to face the empty beach with nothing but rage to keep her company. Sami was lost to the night, lost to her, lost to life: a man who’d gone to sea and would never return, a vanished soul whose family would ever be waiting, hoping for him to come home. If she’d had any inkling of how to contact them, she would have made a point of finding them before she left the country, but that was something for another night, perhaps another lifetime.

The hours deepened and quiet settled. The pool emptied. The cabana closed and the lights turned off, and in the long darkness she was left alone, watching the boat, the pier, the surf. And when the tide had come in fully and began to ebb out, Munroe finally moved again.

According to the clock on her phone it was after three in the morning, that time when those who slept, slept deepest, and it was more easily possible for someone waiting on shore for her to return to have fallen asleep on watch. She removed her boots and socks, stuffed the socks inside her pockets, tied the laces of the boots together, slung them over a shoulder, and then, big cat on the prowl, left the safety of her shadow to slink from one hotel to the next between pauses and silences until she was far enough away from the pier that there was no way she could be seen from it, and there she slipped from hiding out onto the open beach and into the ocean.

The water was warm and the waves rolled gently up the sloping shore. With the cell phone gripped between her teeth and the boots draped around her neck, she waded out far enough that she could move among the currents without being seen from the seaboard and, using the cover of the water, reversed the half kilometer that she’d come.

As a precaution against the possibility that the trap that had not
been sprung earlier might be laid for her here, she waited when she reached the pilings. Listened for any sign of life from within the boat and, hearing nothing, thumped the hull to see if noise might rouse the unexpected.

No response and so she thumped again, harder, louder, and then, as sure as she could be that she wouldn’t be climbing to her death, swam aft and stretched for the ladder.

The metal groaned loud against metal. She climbed from the water and tipped over the side of the boat. Knelt and waited. Dumped the waterlogged boots onto the bench, and shielding the phone with her hand, guided its low light as a flashlight of sorts to check the fuel tank, which was half full, and the fuel lines, which were intact. The rifle was missing and she couldn’t know if Sami had sold the gun or if whoever had killed him had taken it and left the rest of her supplies.

Munroe pushed the propeller into the water.

The engine’s roar was a scream to the quiet, and if someone had been waiting for her, he was now fully aware that she had returned and was on the move.

L
IGHTS BLINKED OUT
over the water, and with them Munroe kept a steady distance from the shore; hugged the curves of the coast north toward Malindi in a patterned hum and rise and fall that once again drew long in the night, allowing the rage and violence that had followed in the wake of Sami’s death to feast and fester and scheme into threads of possibility and action.

Taking the boat to Malindi would eat time. The faster plan would be to wait for dawn and find a quiet place not far up shore where she could scuttle the vessel—wouldn’t be the first time she’d sunk thousands of dollars off an African coastline—but that would give Sami’s killers nothing to play with. This way she would draw them away from Mombasa, provide an opportunity to mask the trail, and buy the opportunity to sort through options.

The same landmarks that Sami had pointed out those few days prior came into view shortly before dawn when the sky was purple and shifting through color and the small dots that were fishermen’s
skiffs or pirogues could be seen as blemishes on the water. Guided by the clues and working through trial and error, she eventually reached a small cove where the local fishermen congregated and the slow hustle of selling off the early-morning catch to households and restaurateurs had already begun.

The beach was spattered with small wooden boats dragged up and tied off, a miniature armada resting on the sand while the bigger vessels anchored in deeper water. The sun had already crested the horizon, and between the shouts and the cries of the merchants on shore, seabirds dove and squawked in a fight over fish offal.

Munroe neared the largest of the boats, a fiberglass V-hull nearly as long as hers with an improvised tarp under which five fishermen in cutoff pants, either bare-chested or wearing torn T-shirts, tended to nets and lounged in the developing shade. Munroe called out a hello in English and said, “I’m looking for the owner of your boat.”

All of the men had already turned to watch her approach, but in response to her shout the youngest stood, and arms and torso ripped with definition, leaned against the side in her direction. “Why?” he said.

“I have a boat to sell.”

He smiled and his head ticked toward her. “That one?”

Munroe returned the smile, sweeping her hand toward the bow.

“How much do you want?”

“Are you the owner?”

“I’m the renter,” he said. “But I want to buy my own.”

His English was perfect, melodic and educated and proper with the British history that was part of the country’s accent, an English more common in the big city, not the broken fragments of Sami’s or the pidgin of the hotel staff, and she adjusted her own grammar accordingly. “Together with the engine and the fuel it’s worth at least ten thousand U.S. dollars,” she said. “I want five thousand.”

He whistled. “I’ll give you five hundred.”

She laughed. “Let me talk to someone with money.”

“Six hundred,” he said.

Still smiling, she shook her head and said, “Do you carry a knife?”

He threw his arms wide. “I’m a fisherman! What a question.”

“Sell it to me.”

“How much will you pay?”

“How much is it worth?”

“Eight thousand shillings,” he said.

“I’ll give you four thousand.”

“Deal,” he said, and motioned her in closer, and when her boat had neared and she’d cut the engine, he used an improvised gaff with a cloth wrapped around the end to pull the boats together. His knife had a six-inch blade, clean and sharp, pointed and narrow and better suited for paring than hand-to-hand combat; was holstered in leather that had been resewn several times; and was worth far less than Munroe had agreed to, but it was a blade all the same, a weapon until she could return to collect those she’d left behind in Mombasa.

With the transaction complete, Munroe asked for the number of his boat’s owner, and he fished around by his feet. Held up the stub of a blade-sharpened pencil. “You have paper?”

She pulled out her phone, punched through the controls to insert a new contact. “One better,” she said.

He laughed again and recited a number and a name. Munroe entered the information. “A woman?” she said.

He motioned toward the other boats anchored just offshore. “She owns five of these.”

“Is she difficult?”

“Of course,” he said. “She does good business.”

Munroe gave him a mock salute and he let loose the gaff, and when she no longer had an audience, the mask of her smile faded and the rage returned.

Another kilometer up the coast, where the shore was emptier, Munroe made the call. The woman was pure business and her questions were articulated with a solid knowledge of nautical terminology; she knew exactly what she wanted and what she could work with, and when Munroe had satisfied those concerns, the woman described
the large concrete pier that Munroe could see from where she now floated and arranged to meet there in half an hour.

Lack of papers were going to be the biggest hurdle to the sale. Anyone who was anyone or who knew anyone could find a way to them, but even so, the buyer would play up the issue as a way to undercut the price. And that was okay. Munroe needed the cash, but selling the boat was more about misdirection and a way to keep the tracker on the move.

In the wait for the buyer Munroe dialed Amber Marie; held through ten, fifteen, of the irritating pulse tones while the phone in Djibouti rang long and went unanswered. There was no voice mail or caller ID on the other end, no digital footprint to provide notice that she’d attempted contact, so Munroe let the ringing continue.