The Catch: A Novel (22 page)

The doctor had said it would be another twenty-four hours before the sedatives fully wore off. He was loopy now, and disoriented, and although eventually he might try to get free, he wouldn’t get far. Munroe eased down onto the bed. Swallowed another dosage of morphine, antibiotics, and another round of anti-inflammatories. With painkillers back in her system she lay on the mattress beside the captain, hand gripping the knife, trusting the instinct of the blade to keep her alive if for some reason he should touch her.

S
HE WOKE TO
a sun-shadowed room and to the captain’s face less than a foot from hers, staring at her. Munroe’s focus traveled from his eyes to the walls, and measuring the level of light penetrating in between the slats, she guessed at early afternoon. If only one night had passed, then she’d slept another fourteen hours give or take a few on either side.

With the captain still watching, Munroe struggled upright. Turned her back to him, took off the shirt, and unwound the tape from her chest. Breathed deeply and felt dizzy. Her focus turned toward the Kapanol beside the bed, tablets singing sweetly to her, calling out with more than one temptation, and with her focus resting on the box, she inched back into the shirt. It was a dangerous game, self-medicating for physical pain when numbing oblivion had once been her chosen method for muting the demons of the past.

Munroe nudged the pills away. Took a heavy dose of ibuprofen instead; she would last as long as she could without the morphine, measuring the minutes waiting for relief. She stood slowly, untied the rope from around her waist, and tied the tail off around a beam. Not perfect but enough that he wasn’t going to get free in the next five minutes.

She collapsed back on the bed, screaming silently, breathing in shallow gulps to push past what the little effort had caused her, and when she could think again, Munroe hobbled for the opening.

There was no one in the next room, but on the cloth-covered table pushed up against and filling the back wall were a pitcher of water and a couple of chipped dishes with food: cooked dark and oily greens and a sticky white dough, both still warm. Over the dishes a swath of mosquito netting kept circling flies off the food, and on a scrap of notebook paper was a beautiful shaky scrawl that said
Please take
.

Munroe tore into the dough with her fingers; ripped off a bite-size piece and formed it into a ball, pressed her thumb into the center to form a spoon of sorts to scoop the greens; she tried not to shovel it into her mouth faster than she could chew. The texture and taste were a little different from what she’d grown up on in the houses of her playmates in Cameroon, but the concept was the same: thick starch and cheap vegetables; an acquired taste, a luxurious meal considering her last food had been the broth yesterday evening, and before that she had no idea.

Munroe stood over the table, swallowing until both dishes were empty, and although the food had most likely been intended for both her and the captain she ate it all without shame: The hungrier he was, the easier it would be to get him to talk, and regardless, he had an ample spare tire to burn for energy. He’d live.

Satiated, she stacked the dishes and re-covered them. Limped back to the room, and this time the captain was on his back, staring at the palm fronds above. She checked his neck for rope burns. She needed to get him water, needed to get herself water, but couldn’t trust what Mary had left behind the way she could trust food that had been boiled to death.

Eventually the captain’s eyes shifted from the ceiling to her face. “My name’s Michael,” she said, and his head turned in her direction. “I don’t know if you remember. Your ship got hijacked.”

His expression betrayed no understanding, no reaction, and he
turned back to staring at the ceiling. She ignored him in kind and, with effort, lowered herself to the floor. Picked up the knife, the gun, and the drugs, carried them into the adjacent room to keep them out of the captain’s hands, shoved the handgun into a crevice between cushion and armrest on the tattered floral sofa, and left the house for the late-afternoon sun.

The brightness brought the headache back full force and Munroe squinted against it. Three of the school-age children were in the yard area, and with them two others, little ones, half-naked and young enough that their potbellies still poked out. The eldest was a girl, one Munroe had seen with Mary the day before, about ten years old, perhaps eleven, and Munroe assumed she was Mary’s daughter. The children stopped playing when Munroe opened the door, and then all of them, a group at the zoo flocking to the monkey area, came slowly in her direction and stood around in a half circle, staring.

To the oldest girl Munroe said, “You speak English?”

She smiled bashfully, looked away and then back again while her bare toes dug little holes in the ground.

Munroe held up a fifty-bob coin and every pair of eyes followed the money. Munroe palmed the coin and with a flourish and misdirection showed them her empty hand. Five sets of eyes grew wide, and wider still when she pulled the money from the oldest girl’s ear, an old and boring trick but new here, and the children burst into squeals of surprise and laughter.

“Do you know where to buy water in bottles?” Munroe asked.

The girl nodded. Munroe handed her the money and then another two hundred shillings. “Bring me water,” she said, “and I’ll show you the trick again.”

The children ran off in a chorus of excited chatter, and Munroe returned to the mattress; was on her back, eyes closed and ignoring the captain’s unabashed glare, when the girl opened the front door and slipped inside.

Munroe picked up the box of Kapanol and struggled upright. The rest of the children huddled in the doorway, peering inside as if the
house were strange and foreign and they expected their sister to be eaten by a monster. Munroe motioned for the water bottles, took them and the change from the girl, and set it all aside. Held up another coin and as she’d done earlier vanished the money and pulled it from the girl’s ear.

The expressed delight was even louder the second go-around, and Munroe smiled, offered the coin to the girl, and when she reached for it, pressed the tiny fingers around the money. The children squealed again, crowded into each other to examine the shiny piece, and then the little herd ran off with their collective treasure.

Munroe shut the door against the light and drank half a bottle while searching through the broken cupboard for a clean glass. Found a chipped teacup and used its base to grind a morphine pill into powder, swept the powder into the cup and poured a few sips of water over the top and swirled it around: an amount of liquid small enough that the captain, thirsty as he must be, would drink it all regardless of the medication.

She took the water to the room, offered the captain the cup. He reached for it and drank unassisted. The drugs were a way of mitigating the risk of an escape until she could come up with something better. He handed back the cup and she filled it again and he drank that, too, and after several rounds back and forth, having met her obligations to keep him hydrated, she collapsed back into bed and into sleep while time marched on through the foggy haze.

The direction of the shadows in the room said early morning, which meant Munroe would have slept fifteen hours or so. Another day of rest had done her mind good, though her body would take longer to heal.

Munroe inched upward. Balance was better, pain levels dropping if only slightly. She could sit without agony, and although her chest still hurt, the pain was mostly dull and only grew sharp if she moved the wrong way.

The captain, next to her, snored lightly and so Munroe rolled to the floor and pushed to her knees. First movement off the bed and his eyes snapped open. He still hadn’t spoken since she’d collected him, but he woke when she woke, slept when she slept, and observed in a way that approximated the patience of one who had plenty of experience as a prisoner, or prisoner of war.

She took money from her pockets, stood and peered around the door frame where sound had reached out to her. In the crowded living room Mary tucked clothing onto a shelf. She turned when Munroe entered.

“How are you?” Mary said. “You sleep?”

Munroe nodded. “Thank you.”

“You want eat?” she said.

Famished, Munroe shook her head no. She desperately needed
sustenance but didn’t want to take any more from a family who gave so generously out of what little they had. “I have to go to the city,” she said, “but I have a big problem. My friend will try to run away while I am gone.” Munroe opened her fist and presented the five one-thousand-shilling notes she’d taken from her pockets, money that had seen more grime than the mattress on the dirt floor—a hundred dollars, give or take: a month’s wages for a laborer.

“I need help to protect him,” Munroe said. “It’s very important that he stays in the bed and doesn’t run away. If he leaves, the men who tried to kill me will find him, too, but he doesn’t believe me. Please? Sit in the room with him until I return? A few hours, or maybe until dark.”

As if under hypnosis Mary reached for the money and Munroe tightened her fist around it. “He may try to fight you,” Munroe said. “I can give him medicine to make him sleep. Is there a pharmacy close?”

“Maybe one kilometer,” Mary said.

Munroe asked for paper and Mary found a scrap and then a chewed-off broken pencil, and Munroe wrote down nearly identical instructions to what the doctor in Lamu had given her when buying supplies for the captain. She handed the slip to Mary, then offered more than enough money to cover the costs.

Munroe gave the captain water, then rested in the living room until Mary returned.

Seeing the syringe, the captain’s eyes widened. He sat up and then, even against the bonds that kept him trussed and choked him when he moved, he tried to struggle to his feet.

Without the port Munroe would have to inject him directly, and if he struggled it would be an exhausting chore. “Don’t fight me,” she said. “It’ll only be worse for you.”

Then, lips twisted in a snarl as if he was pissed off that she’d forced him to speak, he uttered his first words since leaving the
Favorita
.

“What are you doing?” he said. His voice was hoarse and sticky from lack of use, his accent thicker than she remembered it having been.

“Sedating you,” she said. “I have things to do and I don’t want you going anywhere.”

“Where would I go?”

“I’m sure you’ll figure something out,” she said, and tapped the air bubbles to the surface of the syringe. “Hold out your arm for me, will you?”

“I’m hungry,” he said.

She nodded. “There’s no food in the house. I promise that if you go to sleep I’ll bring food back with me when I come.”

His expression stayed hard, as if he pondered the options, as if there was no way in hell he’d trust her to inject him with anything, but the morphine in his most recent glass of water was in full effect, and although he pulled away when she took his wrist, he was weak from having gone so long without anything but the IV for food and he winded easily and gave up.

The pain of holding on, even with so little resistance, was excruciating, and Munroe pushed past it the same way she’d pushed past the pain those many nights in the jungle, just long enough to get her knee on top of his forearm and a fist on his shoulder so that she had him under control; enough to get the sedative into him, though his arm wouldn’t be pretty tomorrow, and then she let go and collapsed onto the floor.

When she finally crawled to her feet, she took the tape and rebound her chest. Was tempted to beg Mary to find Gabriel so she might hire his car to get back into town, but she couldn’t become dependent on him; the pain wasn’t going away for a while, things were going to get a lot harder before they got better, and the only way was to push through. As long as she didn’t use her left arm much, didn’t breathe too deeply or turn too rapidly in any direction, the pain dissolved into a dull constant and became easier to ignore.

Munroe finished with the taping. Put the shirt back on and lay down to allow the exhaustion and breathlessness to subside. The captain’s eyelids had already closed, his facial muscles had relaxed, and she envied his happy place; would gladly have traded places for the gift of drifting off into la-la-land. Instead she struggled to her feet.

Mary was on the sofa, an old torn paperback Bible in her lap. Munroe said, “You have a machete?”

“I have,” Mary said.

“He’s supposed to stay asleep, but if he wakes up, you might need it.”

Mary stood. “I go get,” she said, and Munroe patted the woman’s shoulder, handed her the promised payment, and hoped she’d keep her word.

M
UNROE WALKED A
painful hobble out into the compound, found her stride, and continued to the road. Stood out in the heat under the shade of a mango tree and waved down several shared taxis before she found one with space.

The Safaricom store was her first destination, and like the receptionist who had gasped when Munroe had entered the hospital, so the proprietor grimaced when she opened his door. He was the same young Indian man who’d been there the first time, though she doubted he recognized her. She hadn’t showered since before her beating and assumed that the smell was as repugnant as her looks. That she was barefoot and in other people’s clothes didn’t help.

Munroe went through the process of buying and setting up a new phone, and when she’d finished and had no more energy left to stand, she slid against the far wall to sit on the floor, and there in the shop with the manager eyeing her warily from behind the counter, she dialed Djibouti for Amber Marie.

She’d lost five days since the attack and braced for the possibility that Amber and Natan had already left for Somalia. But the phone rang just twice before Amber answered.

“Hey,” Munroe said. “Did you call or leave a message?”

“Yeah, did you get it? We’re leaving for Somalia in three days, we’re set to go—will you come with us?”