Tropical Depression (32 page)

She nodded. “I know that. Now here’s what we do.”

I looked around. There were two portholes, but they were tiny. Above was a hatch. I pointed. “The hatch is our only way out.”

“Will you be quiet a moment? I’ve been thinking about this. The guard knows the hatch is our only way out, too. Besides, it’s locked from the outside.”

“Then how—?”

She put a hand on my mouth. “Just hush, Billy. I’m going to start pounding on the hatch. The guard will yell at us to stop. I’ll keep pounding. He’ll think it’s you pounding.”

“Why will he think that?”

“Trust me, Billy. I was a tomboy, I hit hard. The guard will open the door. You’ll be beside the door. When he comes in you’ll knock him out. Can you do that?”

I checked my hands. I wasn’t sure I could open a pickle jar with them, but I thought they might work as bludgeons. If the guard was Carl and not the one who didn’t blink. “I can do that.”

“All right,” she said. And then she leaned forward and kissed me, hard, on the mouth. She pulled back again too quickly for me to do anything but stare stupidly. “Let’s do it,” she said.

I stepped over beside the door and flattened myself against the bulkhead. “Okay,” I said.

Nancy stood on the bunk under the hatch and doubled her hands together. “Billy,
no!
” she screamed, winking, and then she slammed her fists against the hatch. “Please,
stop!
” She got into a good, strong rhythm, pounding the hatch. I had to admit, the pounding didn’t sound like a slim, beautiful woman’s.

“Hey!” the guard called cautiously. “Hey, knock it off.” We were in luck; it sounded like Carl.

I cupped a hand to project my voice away from the door and roared something incoherent. Nancy screamed again and pleaded with me to stop, still pounding in a mad rhythm.

“All right,” yelled the guard. “You’re asking for it.”

I heard him scrabbling at the lock. So far so good. I braced myself.

The door swung inward. And then—nothing.

He must be playing it smart, staying a step back from the doorway.

I looked at Nancy. She was frozen where she was, staring past me through the door.

“Get down from there, nigger,” Carl hissed. “Where’s the guy?”

Nancy shook her head.

“Where is he? I mean it!” Nancy flinched slightly.

“He’s—hiding.”

“Hiding
where?
”

She pointed down. “In the locker under the bed.”

“Get him out.”

She stood frozen for a moment, and then I could see her get an idea. I hoped Carl couldn’t see it, too. “All right,” she said, and got carefully off the bunk onto the deck.

The lockers were under the bunk. You had to lift the cushions off to get them open. That’s what Nancy did. She lifted one of the six-foot cushions, turned toward me and, her face hidden from Carl by the cushion, she mouthed, “Now, Billy!” and shoved the cushion towards the doorway.

“Get that out of the way!” Carl shouted. The thing filled the doorway. I slid in behind it and pushed.

The cushion flopped forward onto Carl’s assault rifle. In the half-second the barrel was aimed down I was on him.

He snarled and yanked up on the barrel. I moved inside, past the end of the gun, and chopped hard at the bridge of his nose. It wasn’t a clean hit or he’d have dropped. He froze for a moment, dazed, and I rammed the heel of my left hand up under his chin and chopped hard at his Adam’s apple with my right.

Carl gave a dry gurgle and dropped the rifle, clutched at this throat, and fell to his knees. I had hit him too hard and crushed his throat. He was dying. I hadn’t wanted to kill him, but when someone is pointing an assault rifle at you, your options are limited and so is your compassion.

“Billy?” Nancy whispered from the cabin.

“It’s okay. Stay there.”

Of course she didn’t stay. She stuck her head out at once and saw Carl, flopping and drumming his heels on the deck. It made my skin crawl. Nancy hardly blinked.

“Oh,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“Fine.” My hands were vibrating hard enough to stir cake batter. But my head was clear, probably from the adrenaline rush of combat. And maybe from the nausea of killing somebody. Anyway there wasn’t enough time to feel bad right now. “I need a knife.”

“Why? He’s dying.”

I moved through the cabin, searching. “The anchor line.”

“Can’t you just untie it?”

“The line will end in a length of chain. The chain will be bolted to the boat. I need to cut it. Find a knife.”

I cautiously stuck my head up through the companionway and looked for the inflatable dinghy.

It was about a hundred feet away, straight off the bow. Doyle was looking over the side and one man sat beside him. As I watched, the third man surfaced beside them, wearing mask and snorkel.

They were setting the hook solidly by swimming down and ramming it hard into the sandy bottom. That was the safest thing to do in a bad storm. It also gave me an extra minute.

I looked behind. The
Windshadow
bobbed behind the sailboat on a short rode. A plan was forming.

“Billy?” Nancy called softly from below. I ducked under. “I found this in one of the bags,” she said, holding up a knife that Crocodile Dundee would have liked.

I took it. “Hand me the rifle, too,” I said.

Nancy stepped over Carl, who was all done kicking. There was a stench in the cabin. Carl was all done living, too. His bowels had opened in a very appropriate last gesture of defiance.

It didn’t seem to faze Nancy. She picked up the rifle and handed it to me.

“All right,” I said. “Come up here. And stay low.”

In a moment we were crouched together at the wheel. I pointed to the controls. “This starts the engine. Push the black lever forward, the boat goes forward. Back is reverse, middle is neutral. It’s in neutral now. The red one is power. Push forward to go faster.”

“I think I can handle that,” she said.

“I’m going to cut the anchor lines. The boat will fall off and start to drift that way.” I pointed towards the gulf. “On my signal, start the engine, kick it in gear, and steer for that channel marker.”

“What about Doyle?”

I patted the rifle. “I’m going to sink his boat. That gives us time to get away. The Coast Guard can come back for him later—he won’t get far in this storm. He’ll have to hole up on the island.”

The wind was rising as I moved forward, and I was lashed by the first hard drops of a rain squall. The taut steel wires of the rigging were squealing. I crouched low, squinting against the wind and rain, and slid forward to the anchor lines.

The lines ran out onto a roller on the bowsprit. But I didn’t need to crawl out that far. The lines came up through a metal fitting in the deck. I just had to get that far and cut them there.

I crawled along the deck, rifle in one hand and knife in the other. A sudden blast of thunder almost made me jump overboard. At the inflatable, the man with the mask came up for air again and Doyle said something to him. The man in the water raised a hand, said something, and then went under again.

I got to the two anchor ropes. The first line was holding all the boat’s weight at the moment. I pulled carefully and eased the boat ahead, just enough to get two turns around a cleat. That way the boat would not lurch and give me away when I cut the first line.

I cut it. I reached for the second line. The man in the water was climbing into the inflatable. Holding the end in my hand, I cut the second line. I reached for the first and untied it, dropping both lines over the side.

The boat rolled immediately and fell off before the wind. Doyle looked up as the anchor line went slack. And then things started to go wrong.

“Now, Nancy!” I yelled. But nothing happened.

I turned back to Doyle, raising the rifle. But with no anchor to hold it, the sailboat had drifted in a half-circle and now the cabin roof was between me and the inflatable. I couldn’t see over it.

“Nancy, start the engine!” I shouted again and scrambled over the top of the cabin.

A shot went past my ear with that flat popping noise you can never mistake for anything else once you’ve heard it. I hit the deck, inched around the mast, and looked.

The inflatable was fifty feet away and coming in at top speed. Doyle was crouched in the bow, a Glock in his hand. He snapped off another shot and the mast beside me gave a hollow bonging sound.

I had only seconds. I brought up the assault rifle, pulled back the bolt, and squeezed the trigger. I had aimed low, and the water in front of the inflatable boat churned with my shots before they started to connect.

Then the shots hit home into the rubber airbags of the boat. With a sudden lurch, the little boat folded in half and went quickly under, just as I ran out of rounds in my clip. Doyle was thrown forward and disappeared into the water.

I ran for the cockpit. Nancy was grimly grinding away at the starter.

“It’s not working,” she said, tense but not panicked.

“Doyle must have disabled the engine,” I said, diving through the companionway. I handed up another of those damn Glocks that Doyle had so many of. “Watch for them,” I told Nancy. “Shoot if you have to.”

She gaped at me, but I was already into the engine. With a heavy sea rising, the reefs and mangroves on one side and Doyle on the other, I didn’t want to spend one more minute without an engine if I could avoid it.

I found the problem quickly. Somebody—presumably Doyle—had removed the wire that ran from the solenoid to the glow plug. A quick security measure: with the wire pulled the engine might start eventually—if the batteries were strong enough to keep it turning over for a good five minutes.

I connected the wire, and jerked my hand back reflexively as I heard a sharp
pop.
But the sound had come from above. It was followed by three more.

I pulled myself out of the engine compartment so quickly I banged my head, right on the tender spot where Doyle had whacked me. Cursing, rubbing the spot with my hand, I stumbled on deck.

Nancy stood at the rail looking down into the water. “Are you all right?”

She nodded and turned a pale green face toward me. “I—he tried to come on board. So—” And she turned away and threw up over the side of the boat.

I would have liked to comfort her, but there wasn’t time. The boat was drifting towards the mangroves. One small, innocent-looking mangrove root can drive a hole through any boat ever built, up to and including a destroyer.

I jumped instead for the controls and hit the starter. I held my breath, but the motor turned over and caught. I rammed it into forward and turned the boat out the channel.

Nancy was still leaning over the rail. She’d held up well, but to shoot somebody at point-blank range had taken her to her limit. There had been three of them in the boat, but I assumed it was Doyle she had shot. It had taken a powerful swimmer to overtake the boat in these seas.

And now he was dead. I couldn’t feel bad. I knew Doyle would be turning up in my nightmares for quite a while. The power of his presence, the incredible strength of the man, and that guileless smile as he beat the tar out of me would haunt me.

For the next couple of minutes I was pretty busy. The storm winds were rising, gusting at what I guessed was over fifty knots. Lightning flickered, thunder banged, and the wind screamed in the rigging.

This was a tricky passage, with a lot of unmarked reefs and flats, and if I strayed from the channel I could end up facing a serious storm while aground. As soon as I got clear and Nancy felt good enough to take the wheel, I’d call the Coast Guard. No hurry now.

I’d beaten the odds. I should be dead, but I wasn’t. Instead I was sailing away with a beautiful woman and a storm at my back. I’d slain the dragon, won the fair maid. I was going to be all right.

I suddenly felt better than I had in months, more alive, more hopeful.

That’s when I heard Nancy call, “Billy! Look out!”

I spun around into a faceful of wind, rain, and lightning.

And Doyle.

Before I could more than blink stupidly, he was up over the transom and on me, swinging his open left hand at my face almost playfully, with that terrible speed and power.

I saw stars and dropped to one knee and in that brief moment he stepped past me and hit Nancy hard on the side of the head with the gun in his right hand. She dropped without a sound and lay on the deck.

As I struggled to stand, Doyle grabbed my collar and lifted me off my feet, holding his pistol in my ear.

“One of the nice things about the Glock,” he said in a conversational voice, “is that it’s waterproof. Recently most Miami police officers have switched over to it for just that reason.” He could have been talking to a friend over lunch instead of standing on the deck of a pitching sailboat in a rising storm with a gun in my ear.

“I get the idea,” I said. I looked for some sign of life in Nancy’s still form. I didn’t see any. A bolt of lightning slammed into one of the nearby islands two hundred yards away. The following thunder almost deafened me. I could barely hear Doyle’s polite voice.

“I know you understand, Billy. I have been impressed by your intelligence and tenacity. But now is the time for you to realize you can’t win.”

“I was about to say the same thing to you, Doyle.” There—had Nancy’s chest moved slightly in a soft breath? Or was that wishful thinking? Would it happen again? Was I going to lose someone I loved while I stood by helpless?

Doyle smiled, that soft, fond-uncle smile again. “But I
can
win, Billy. And I will.”

“Alone? In a hurricane? With the Coast Guard looking for you?”

He nodded. “Yes.” To him it was that simple. And maybe he was right.

“I don’t think so,” I said, but it was hard to sound convinced. He still held me off the ground, apparently without effort. In the brief struggle he had turned me. I was now looking forward and he was facing the stern, where the
Windshadow
still bobbed in our wake.

There—Nancy moved, a small breath, I was almost sure of it.

“I think so,” Doyle was saying. “This boat is rigged for single-handed sailing. I could solo it around the world if I wanted.”