Close Reach (17 page)

“Guy looked strong. Healthy. But he didn’t pass the tests.”

She heard the Zodiac coming and looked up, marking the boat as it sped toward them from the beach. When she looked down again,
Freefall
had shifted on her anchor chain so that the dead couple lay beneath them, out of sight. She looked at the stones and the starfish. She
wondered how many other couples were dotted across this harbor’s bottom, which part of it David planned to dump her and Dean in when he was finished with them.

Sour Breath drew the Zodiac alongside
Freefall,
standing again to hold the two boats hull to hull. David gestured with the gun, and she slid over the side, landing on her feet on the wooden bench. David followed, sitting beside her with the gun pointed at her head. He spoke to the man, and then they were moving again, back to the shore.

When they landed, Sour Breath led Kelly out of the Zodiac and David stayed aboard, taking the wheel and revving the outboard in reverse until the boat scraped off the rocky beach and backed into deeper water. He spun the boat and sped toward
Freefall.
Then Sour Breath was rushing her along, her bare feet stinging and freezing on the sharp, wet stones near the waterline. They walked past cracked earth where yellowish steam billowed out from the dark hollows beneath them, smelling of boiled eggs and smoke. Then they were coming up the gentle hillside to the building, stepping through the sliding door and into the shadows.

The cage was still there, in the middle of the room. Lena’s blanket lay there. The empty soup pot was on its side, bones spilled out across the bottom of the trap. Farther away, Dean was on his back beneath the blanket this man had brought. But there was no Lena. They’d taken her. Dragged her naked and screaming out onto the beach and loaded her into the Zodiac, then shuttled her out to
La Araña.

Lena was gone.

Kelly needed to know where the others were. She tried to think how to say it in Spanish. She stopped and looked at the man, and he stood there, expecting something of her.

“Lena, y los otros?”
she said, halting between the words so she would get them right.

Sour Breath pointed beyond the inner harbor to the narrow pass. To the open Southern Ocean that lay beyond this smoking keep.

“Se fueron,”
he said.

He pointed again, this time toward the storming sea on the other side of the pass.

She nodded and knew this was it. Her one chance. She let the blanket drop to the rocks at her feet. She stepped toward the man, this animal she’d tested only once before, and put her left hand on his shoulder while she reached behind to shake the knot from her hair with her right hand. As she stepped up to kiss him, she felt his arms encircle her waist and pull her close. She took the chicken bone into her hand and tossed out her hair so that it fell loose about her shoulders, and then with the bone cupped between her thumb and her palm, she brought her right hand to the side of Sour Breath’s face and caressed him. A lover’s touch, tracing the line of his jaw. Mapping the shape of his ear.

She kissed him. His lips were chapped and rough, and his tongue moved in her mouth like a snake’s. She held the back of his head steady with her left hand. He moved his hips against
hers. When she felt him pushing against her, felt the shape of him through his khaki pants, she found the entrance to his ear with the sharp end of the bone and drove it home with her fist like driving a nail into a rotten post.

He jerked back, screaming.

She hammered the heel of her palm into the handle of the bone knife, sinking it another inch into his ear. The man staggered back, with just the bulbous condyle of the chicken leg showing in his right ear. The bone’s shaft would have tunneled through his ear canal, punching out his tympanum and the delicate web of bones behind it. The spiny tip, which she’d honed on a rock, would be somewhere in the lower folds of his brain. Blood poured from his ear and from his left nostril.

Sour Breath stopped screaming as if he’d suddenly forgotten how.

He swayed a moment on his feet and then lowered himself to his knees. She came up to him again and laced her fingers behind his head and drove his face into her knee. Twice. The second time, his nose broke and there was a wet mess of blood and mucus on her kneecap when she pulled it back.

She let him go, and he tumbled to the rocks.

His arms and legs shook and beat against the ground as the first seizure swept down his nervous system like a rip current breaking apart a smooth-faced sea. She knelt and yanked off his boots and then pulled down his pants, wanting to get them off before he soiled them with piss or worse. She pulled his sweater over his head and watched him flail while she dressed. With his belt cinched as tightly as it could go, the pants sagged around her hips. That would be all right as long as she could run. And the key to the cage’s lock was in his right pocket.

He hadn’t stopped jerking yet.

“Hurry up,” she hissed at him.

If he wasn’t dead by now, it could be a long while. He might linger in this twilight for days unless she helped him along. But she wasn’t interested in that.

His boots were too big, but she took his thick woolen socks.

She brought the empty wheelbarrow up and tipped it on its side next to the man. She rolled him into it and then flipped the wheelbarrow upright so that it scooped him up as it righted. She tossed her blanket over the man and then wheeled him to Dean’s side. She was gasping for breath and filling the cold room with the steam of her exertion, but she barely noticed.

She knelt by Dean and drew him up from his fever and dreams by stroking his forehead. His eyes opened and roamed the ceiling till he found her face. When he focused on her, when his eyes shifted down to take in the baggy sweater, the oversized khaki pants, she saw the surprise and then the understanding.

“That’s right,” she said. “I did like you told me to.”

“And Lena?”

“They took her away somewhere. In
La Araña.
There’s only one left here. The kid, David. I gotta hide you before I deal with him.”

“We can find Lena—track them somehow,” Dean whispered. She had to lean in to hear him, and when he finished, he fell into a fit of coughing.

“I know it,” she said when he was just breathing raggedly and not coughing anymore. “See if you can get your arm around my neck. Like this. Help me and I’ll lift you.”

“You know what they’re doing. With Lena.”

“I know.”

She got one of her arms under his knees and the other under his shoulders.

“You know who they are, too.”

“No,” she said. She lifted him then, struggling to stand with his weight in her arms. After eighteen months of sailing, she was lean and strong, but her legs still shook and her lower back tightened with the strain of it. “I don’t know who they are.”

“The Colonel, he was DINA—secret police, under Pinochet. Fucking torturers and murderers. They’re fugitives now, wanted everywhere.”

Kelly laid Dean atop the other man, their legs dangling off the wheelbarrow’s front. Dean coughed, and she saw the bloody sputum foam at his lips. She tucked the blanket around him, then hefted the wheelbarrow by its handles and pushed it out the back door. When she got out of the building, she left the wheelbarrow against the back wall and then crept to the corner of the building to look out. The Zodiac was tied alongside
Freefall,
but David wasn’t in view. He was down inside the yacht. If she hurried, she’d have time while he was inside and couldn’t see.

She scanned the shoreline and began making some quick decisions.

A dilapidated building was crumbling into the earth a thousand feet from where Kelly stood. Its far side nearly reached the harbor. A cement quay angled down from the building and disappeared beneath the water’s black lens. A half dozen rusted iron tanks were scattered nearby, some of them collapsed from the weight of winter snows or thrown over on their sides by the ground’s recent heaving.

She thought this building once had been a kind of slaughterhouse where whales were towed up to the quay and flensed of their blubber at low tide, the long strips of it processed inside and held as oil in the storage tanks. The whalers were long gone, but their building was host to something equally violent. Geysers of steam shot skyward in three places near one of the half-collapsed walls, the vapor forming a thick cloud that hung heavily on the broken ground and occluded everything that lay beyond it.

It would be a good place to hide Dean if she could get there before David found them. The building would grant some shelter, and the steam would keep him warm. She looked at the sorrowful fleet moored just offshore—
Freefall
,
Arcturus
, and
Palida
—and then set out, pushing the wheelbarrow as fast as she could over the loose stones. She wove around the patches of snow and ash and followed a course that kept the wheel on broken stones. She paused twice to look back and be sure she wasn’t leaving a trail, and she saw nothing. The Zodiac was still tied up alongside her own boat. Dean coughed some, and the man beneath him was still trembling with seizures. If his jerking got too bad, enough that he might kick Dean out of the wheelbarrow, she supposed she could find a rock and brain him with it until he was dead. But it never came to that, and she reached the building after two minutes of pushing without having to deal with him and without hearing the Zodiac start up and speed along the shore toward her.

She found an open doorway along the side of the building and ran the wheelbarrow over the broken hump of the sill stone, then stood in the shadows of the building and looked at it. The half-collapsed space was made of rotted timbers and corrugated sheet metal so rusted that ashen-gray storm light filtered through the roof and walls like a burst of constellations. A deep fissure had opened across the middle of the rubble-strewn floor, and steam poured out of it. It was like a Turkish bath here. The air was moist and warm.

Kelly pushed the wheelbarrow to within ten feet of the crack and then knelt and put her palms against the ground to be sure it wasn’t too hot. When she stood again, she came to Dean and saw that he was awake.

“I’ll lift you down now. You’ll be more comfortable.”

He nodded and let her put his arm around her neck. She slid him off Sour Breath, and Dean gasped a little when his broken legs hit the floor. She set him down as gently as she could, but he was heavy and it wasn’t easy. She yanked the second blanket off the other man and gave it to Dean as a pillow. When she was finished tucking the blankets around him, she looked at Sour Breath. He was still breathing and his eyes were open, but he wasn’t moving. The lower half of his face was covered in blood from his broken nose, and his left pupil was as wide as a bullet hole.

She looked around the building and saw a scatter of debris half covered in ash in the far corner. There were rotten boards and pieces of junk there, but she also saw tools. She stepped up to the fissure and looked down. Hot steam wafted past her face. The crack was four feet wide at its narrowest point, and its bottom was somewhere beyond the shadows and billowing steam. She backed up and then ran toward the crack, feeling the blast of heat as she leaped through the wall of steam and landed on the other side, still running. She came up to the debris pile and knelt to sort through it. She took hold of a piece of carved hardwood and pulled a long-handled shovel from the ash. The shovel blade was rusted and caked with grime, but it would do if she couldn’t find anything better.

She sorted through rotten, nail-studded boards and rusty saw blades, but the last thing she pulled from the ash was better than the shovel by far. It was a maple-handled flensing knife the length and shape of a hockey stick. Its long handle and curved blade were each so impregnated with whale oil that time hadn’t touched them. She tested the blade, running the ridges of her finger pads across the edge. It was still sharp. Some man had held this thing and swung it like a scythe to cut whales into pot-sized pieces. To boil their flesh in a tryworks and render it to nothing but oil. She knew that it could slice David in half, that this blade could cleave his skin and flesh and bone as easily as she could swing it through the air.

She stood, using the flensing knife’s handle as a walking staff, and as she turned, she heard a clatter and a bang. She looked past the wavering heat of the steam rising from the fissure. The wheelbarrow had tipped over. Sour Breath was crawling on his hands and knees toward Dean, was pulling on the blanket to take it for himself.

Kelly gripped the knife in both hands and ran, leaping the crack and coming around the wheelbarrow. She kicked Sour Breath hard in the ribs, and he fell onto his side, curling to a fetal ball, his arms clutching his head to fend off the blows.

“You fucking son of a bitch!” Kelly screamed.

She kept kicking him, her foot stomping his ribs and finding his crotch, and then she was coming down on his chest and neck with the handle of the flensing knife.

Part of her stepped back from this.