The Queen of Patpong (25 page)

The boat is on its way back from whatever spot Howard investigated. If he keeps to his course, he’ll be roughly where they were the first time she saw the rocks in the searchlight’s glare. It seems like a lifetime ago. If he points the light toward the rock she’s on, he’ll see her, but she has no choice—for the next minute or two, she will have to be visible.

Before she lifts her head again, she says a prayer, and it is immediately answered. The rain begins to bucket down. She can barely see the spotlight, and the boat itself is completely hidden from sight.

She’s already visualized the pose, so she works quickly. Everything depends on where the boat will be when Howard finally looks. She’s betting he’ll begin his new survey somewhere near the original position, which seemed to be where he was heading. She turns the back of the jacket toward the boat, with both arms drooping away down the far side of the stone to mask the fact that no hands protrude from the jacket’s cuffs. She slips the waist of the jeans inside the jacket, bending them sharply at the knees and putting the upper leg over the lower so its cuff faces toward the boat. She’s almost sure Howard will focus on the jacket because it’s so much brighter, but she takes off the one plastic sandal that hasn’t slipped off and drifted into the depths and leans it up against the cuff of the jeans, hoping that the light-colored sole will obscure the fact that there’s no ankle above it.

The rain emboldens her, and she gets up and runs, bent low at the waist, to the side of the rock where the boat will be. She needs to take a look. At this distance, which is thirty or forty meters closer than Howard will be on the boat, the clothes almost look like they have a body in them, but she goes back around to the far side, drops to her stomach again, and creates a sharper bend at the waist, pulling the top part of the jacket just over the crest of the rock, away from where Howard will be. From the boat, she hopes, it will look like her head is just out of sight on the other side.

Either it’s good enough or it isn’t.

Now comes the part that frightens her most.

She works her way back down the rock, heading for the pole that she left there to mark the area she’d cleared of sea wasps. She squats there with the pole in her hands and leans forward to clear the few that have floated into the empty area. Then, her heart pounding, she wades naked into the water, flailing the pole in front of her, knowing that now she has nothing, not a single layer of cloth, to protect her from the stings.

A moment later she is swimming slowly away from the rock, stopping and clearing the way with the pole every meter or so. Once the rocks are twenty meters behind her, she turns to her left and begins to work her way into the open water, toward the glistening masts of the squid boats. She keeps her legs drawn up whenever she stops, expecting at every moment that whatever bumped her before will come rushing up, all teeth, to tug her into the depths. The image is so powerful that she almost floats into a sea wasp and has to pull the pole back and bat the jellyfish away. She hangs there in the water, breathing heavily until she trusts herself to swim again, out beyond the point at which Howard dropped the anchor.

The boat is gliding past her now toward the rocks, about thirty meters away, and she treads water, her hair pulled down over her face, hoping that Howard’s eyes are locked on the rocks. The searchlight is picking out the smaller of the two rocks in front, and as Howard cranks the wheel, the light slides left, but it’s too low—it’s on the water when it passes the larger rock—and the jacket and jeans are well above the center of the beam. They slide back into the dark, but then Howard shouts, and the boat powers down. She sees him jump up onto the bow and wrench the light back, stopping it on the jacket and jeans.

For what feels like a long time, nothing happens. Howard sits there on the bow, looking at the splash of pink, at the bent leg of the jeans. At the bottom of the sandal, bone white, which Rose can see even at this distance, even with contacts washed out by the salt water.

Howard stands and cups his hands to his mouth. He calls her name. He goes all the way to the tip of the bow to call it again. He stands there, hands on hips, staring at the rocks. He even bends forward, as though those few extra inches will resolve what he’s seeing.

Then he turns around and goes back into the cabin. He’s out of sight for a moment, bent over to get something. Then he’s back, the pale shower cap clearly visible above the black wet suit. He leans over the side of the ship nearest to Rose and calls, “Rose! I’m not fucking around. If you can hear me,
move
.”

He leans forward again, peering through the drizzle. Then he raises a hand, points it at the rock, and Rose hears a terrific noise and sees a spurt of flame from his hand, and a little geyser of powder explodes from the rock, several feet to the left of the jacket.

Howard shouts, “Next one will be closer.”

He waits, and then he goes to the wheel, and Rose hears the motor thrum into life. Howard halves the distance between the boat and the rocks and then shuts down the engine and goes to the rear.

The instant she hears the anchor splash, she begins to move.

She can’t keep the pole. It slows her progress. She dives a foot or two down, closes her eyes, and pulls herself forward, then again, and then again, until her lungs are bursting. Just as she breaks the surface, she hears the splash.

She knows where to look, and the bathing cap on his head reflects light, so it’s easy for her to pick Howard out. He’s swimming strongly toward the rocks. Too strongly, she thinks with a jolt of panic: She doesn’t have enough time. She forgets about swimming underwater and strikes out for the boat, moving as fast as she can without making too much noise. The boat doesn’t seem to get bigger at first, but Howard is nearing the rocks, and with a rush of terror she kicks so hard her feet break the surface, and Howard stops swimming.

She goes under again, trying to decrease the distance to the boat, pulling herself through the water until her lungs threaten to explode. She forces herself to take another stroke, and then another, and then, at the moment when she will inhale water if she doesn’t surface, she points herself up and feels a long line of flame erupt down her left arm.

She screams into the water, emptying her lungs and reflexively sucking in seawater, feeling it pour into her throat before she finds half a pint of air somewhere to blow it out again, and then she’s coughing spasmodically, wasting air she doesn’t have, as she summons the strength to pull herself forward in a desperate attempt not to come up beneath the sea wasp. When she surfaces, it’s floating less than a meter from her, and, whimpering, she propels herself away from it, with nothing in her mind but the pain and the sea wasp. She’s put two body lengths between her and it before she remembers Howard.

He’s swimming again, maybe ten or fifteen meters from the rocks.

And she looks up and finds herself at the boat.

She sidestrokes to the rope and grabs it with her right arm, but the left is sluggish and heavy-feeling, as though the pain were lead flowing thickly through her veins. She forces the arm up somehow, grasps the rope, and gets both feet on a knot. With agonizing slowness she pulls herself up until she’s halfway in, her feet hanging over the side, the edge cutting into her stomach, and she just rolls and falls the short distance to the floor of the cabin.

Her left arm is a wildfire of pain, radiating up into the shoulder and the side of her neck. And she’s finding it difficult to draw a deep breath, as badly as she needs the air. Her lungs don’t seem to be working right.

In the searchlight’s beam, Howard stands up and wades onto the rock, pushing through the sea wasps in his wet suit as though they’re not there. Something glints in his hand. Rose has completed only two revolutions of the handle that pulls the anchor up when she hears his scream of rage.

She manages one more crank on the handle and then has to stop, gasping for breath. She sees Howard sprint toward her across the rock and then arc out, his body straight and arrow-true, and he hits the water and begins to swim.

He swims very fast.

She manages one more turn of the handle, and then she spins and runs to the wheel.
Turn ignition.
She twists the key, and nothing happens. She wants to scream again, but she can’t seem to draw enough air.
Press ignition,
she thinks, and there it is, the button. She pushes it hard enough to shove it through the panel, and the engine powers on. The boat begins to move but then jolts to a stop, and she is flung into the wheel, her forehead hitting the Plexiglas of the windscreen. The anchor has caught on something.

She runs back and tries to turn the handle on the anchor crank, but she hasn’t got the strength. She puts all her weight behind it, and yet she might as well be a breeze. It won’t turn.

She can hear Howard knifing through the water. He can’t be far.

She has no idea how to back the boat up, which would probably free the anchor. She knows how to do one thing, and she does it: She throttles to full power. The motor churns up a tremendous amount of water, but the boat doesn’t move. There’s a terrifying creaking from behind her, as if the anchor assembly is going to be ripped through the rear of the boat, and she has an instantaneous vision of it taking the motor with it, so she reduces speed and then powers up again, repeating the pattern several times, trying to rock the anchor free.

She can’t hear Howard swimming.

She powers down again, and the anchor snaps the boat back, and something jolts forward on the cabin floor and strikes her bare foot. It’s cold and it’s hard.

The boat tilts sideways, toward the rocks. The rope—
why didn’t she pull in the rope?
—goes taut.

From the water Howard says, “Ahhhh, Rosie.”

She looks down at her foot. The thing that slid into her is an automatic pistol, short and black. The one he fired at the rock. So the thing in his hand had to be—

Howard’s hand slaps the top edge of the deck. Then his left hand appears, holding the knife he’d flashed before. He heaves himself upward and puts both arms inside, hanging there by his underarms. He grins at her beneath the silly-looking bathing cap.

“Baaad girl,” he says. He begins to pull himself the rest of the way in, and Rose stoops down and picks up the gun and pulls the trigger.

It jumps in her hand, so hard she thinks she’ll drop it, and wood chips fly up from the edge of the deck. Howard freezes, his face all eyes, and he raises a hand to stop her.

And she takes the gun in both hands this time and aims and very deliberately squeezes off two shots, and one of them hits him somewhere, because he’s flung back, away from the boat, and an instant later she hears a splash. She runs to the edge of the deck, pointing the gun down, but she can’t see him, so she yanks the rope out of the water with her free hand and goes back to the wheel. She powers down one more time and then gives the engine full throttle, and with a screech of wood being stretched the boat strains forward, and the anchor pulls free, and the vessel takes a leap that puts her on her back on the floor of the cabin, but she’s up instantly, grabbing the wheel and cranking it all the way to the right, watching the rocks grow nearer and nearer and then begin to slide aside, and she leans there, all her weight on the wheel, sobbing and coughing, until the boat is pointed out into the empty sea. Only when she’s been in motion for several minutes does she throttle down and go back to the stern to wind in the rest of the anchor chain.

Once that’s done, she has to sit. Her breaths feel like they can be measured in millimeters, as though her lungs are shrinking into nothing. A band of numbness squeezes her chest. She sits on the floor of the cabin, gasping, as the boat glides slowly forward. She needs both hands to stand, one pushing down on the cabin floor and one pulling on the edge of the bench. As soon as she’s up and heaving for breath, she goes back to the wheel, and in the clamp that had held the rubberized flashlight, she sees the cell phone, open and blinking. She picks it up and listens. Nothing.

Her voice an almost breathless whisper, she says, “Hello?”

A man’s voice says, “Did you get the bitch?”

Rose’s arm straightens automatically, as though she’s just realized there’s a tarantula crawling on her wrist, and the phone flies out of her hand and over the side of the boat. She’s hanging on to the wheel, shuddering, when she hears it hit the water.

Fighting for air, she turns and squints back at the rocks. The rain is still coming down, but she can see him standing on the biggest stone, the wet suit a black vertical against the pale of the rocks. She thinks, with a jolt of joy that literally makes her grind her teeth,
Tide’s coming in.
And then the rain grows heavier, and it all disappears—the rocks, the man, everything.

But she can still see the floating fire of the squid boats, and she steers directly toward it.

TWO DAYS LATER
she checks out of the hospital in Phuket Town, where she’s been treated for the sea-wasp venom, and gets on a bus to Bangkok. Her breathing has improved, although it will be months before she draws a breath without thinking about it. She has all of Howard’s money and the extra clothes she had packed in the suitcase she took aboard the boat. Except for the money, everything that belonged to Howard, including the wallet and the gun, are at the bottom of the Andaman. She had given one of the squid fishermen two hundred dollars U.S., plucked from Howard’s wallet, to lead her back to Phuket. He’d taken one look at her arm and poured vinegar on it, and the sting had eased a bit, but her breathing was still labored. One of his crew had piloted her as she lay in the bottom of the cabin, gasping like a fish, across the dark sea to the lights of Phuket.

Once in Bangkok, she checks into a cheap hotel miles from anywhere and sleeps for twenty hours. When she wakes, she takes the longest shower of her life and then goes down to the hotel’s overpriced shop to buy tourist clothes, including a hat into which she can tuck her hair. There’s no way to disguise her height, but at least she can change how she looks from a distance. A taxi delivers her to her bank, where she withdraws every penny she has deposited. Back in her room, she adds it to Howard’s money and finds she has almost four thousand dollars, nearly 160,000 baht. That night, at 5:00
A.M.
, she is waiting across the street from her apartment when Fon and the other girls come home.