Chapter 19
B
rian was halfway down the stairs to the main deck before he heard footsteps behind him. He took the remaining stairs two at a time, different scenarios running through his mind. The life belt inflated into a series of plastic-lined compartments, and when they were all deflated Gilly’s body would sink. In this deep, cold water, his body might never float back up.
The stairwell ended in a hallway and he paused, unsure of which way to go. The footsteps were louder now, and a shadow fell across him. He spun around, fist cocked.
“Go left,” Destiny said, stopping five steps above him. “Then another left.”
He didn’t move.
“Go,” she said. “If you can get your friend’s body somehow, go do it. A left and then another left.”
He turned and ran down the hallway, shoved a door open, and was greeted by the open air of the front deck. He sprinted toward the bow, then detoured to the railing. The rope that Gilly had tossed to the
Nokomis
’s crew was coiled on the deck and he gathered it up, leaning over the side and looked up and down the length of the ship. He could see nothing but water; if Gilly’s body was still afloat, it had either floated down the ship farther, or it was on the other side of the ship.
Or it had already been pulled back under.
“Hey! Stop right there!”
Three men emerged from the stairwell and started toward him. Kharkov, plus two others he didn’t recognize, a huge blond man and a guy in a white shirt and sport jacket. The guy in the jacket held up a hand, his face bemused, and for a second Brian almost believed what this gesture implied, that he should hold on a sec. That they might just want to talk.
Then he sprinted toward the far deck, the man’s face losing its benign look as they veered off at an angle, meaning to cut him off. He cast his eyes about the deck as he ran, looking something he could swing, a piece of pipe or a wrench. The deck was barren.
He reached the port side railing and craned his head over. For a moment he saw only the endless gray-green of the sea, then caught a glimpse the orange cell of the life vest, disappearing around the curve of the ship, over a hundred feet down the side of the ship. No way to reach it from the lower decks.
“Hey!” the big man shouted in a thick Scandinavian accent. “You stop now!”
Brian turned as the huge man leaped over one of the hatches on the deck, felt the thud of his landing. Brian made a quick loop in the rope he still held, then pushed the free end of the rope through to form a crude lasso. He hitched the free end of the rope over the railing and tied it in a quick clinch knot.
“Stop!”
The huge man was only fifteen feet away, too close. Brian reached for the small of his back, pretending to reach for a weapon. The big man skidded to a stop, as did Kharkov and the other man, and Brian used the few seconds of extra time to shrug the lasso over his shoulders. If he let these men detain him, Gilly’s body would be lost forever.
“He won’t,” Kharkov said. None of them had moved, even when they realized Brian wasn’t armed. “Not enough balls.”
“How’s the nose?” Brian said, swinging a foot onto the railing. He jumped as both Kharkov and the big man lunged forward, one of their hands brushing against his back as he dropped over the side. Then he was freefalling, the ocean rushing up to meet him.
* * *
It was like hitting skim ice, his body slamming into the top of a wave so hard his shoulder and hip went numb. His momentum drove him deep into the water, in the shadow of the
Nokomis
. Finally, his rate of descent slowed, and he paused for a moment, surveying the ship. He could see large furrows in the hull, and further back a thin trial of oil leaking from the gaping hole where the propellers should have been. He started toward the surface, climbing the rope rather than swimming. He could already feel his muscles contracting, growing stiff.
He broke through the surface and spat out a mouthful of water, paddling clumsily. The rope was caught in the slack, pulling on him with each wave. He turned in a slow circle and saw Gilly’s body thirty feet away, bumping facedown along the hull, and started splashing toward it.
His corpse was caught in a seam created by the hull’s displacement, not subject to the full force of the waves or current. Brian reached out and snagged the back of his collar.
“Gotcha,” he said. “Gotcha, bud.”
He looked around. The air pocket in Gilly’s vest was enough to keep them both afloat. A good thing, Brian thought, because he probably couldn’t tread water much longer. His jeans and boots restricted his movements, and his body was trembling with the cold. There was nothing here to grab on to, the hull rising up slick and featureless above them.
He let the current carry them down the length of the ship, letting the rope play out behind him, maneuvering Gilly’s head above water. A silly gesture; he knew Gilly was dead, because his flesh was the same temperature as the water. Finally the rope pulled tight and they came to a stop, just aft of the wheelhouse. There was a row of portholes a few yards farther down, and the tops of the swells brushed the bottoms of the rounded glass. Above them was a deck way, ten feet above the portholes, a recessed hallway decorated with electric lanterns.
Another large roller washed over them. He peered into the wind. Nothing but endless sets of waves, coming out of the fog bank like rows of dull gray mountains.
He began banging on the side of the ship. It made almost no sound.
“Pull me back up!” he shouted, then coughed as water splashed down his throat. “Pull us up!”
The tension on the rope remained the same, periods of slack and then a hard pull as it caught a wave. He took a deep breath, waited until a wave broke over them, and yelled again, so loud his throat ached. The sound was swallowed in the roar and crash of the waves.
He felt the water swirl as something passed underneath him, dragging an immense wake. He went very still, pressing his body against the hull. The creature was only fifteen feet down, just low enough to pass under the hull of the
Nokomis
. It passed slowly, growing thicker until it seemed as wide as a two-lane highway, then began to narrow into a thick tail. Then the tail curved to the left as it banked into a wide circle.
Coming back.
Gilly’s severed legs were still leaching a thin trickle of blood into the water. Brian watched the blood swirl and spin in the water. It didn’t matter. Whatever had passed below them did not want Gilly.
Brian wormed a hand into his pocket, withdrew his pocketknife, and flipped it open. It had missed them as they huddled tight against the hull. It didn’t matter. Their scent was thick in the water. Gilly’s blood and his terror.
It would return, and when it did, he was going to cut out its other eye.
* * *
He treaded water. He waited for the monster to return.
He remembered.
The bodies had never been recovered. They had not been that far offshore when the sailboat capsized, perhaps two hundred yards from the harbor entrance. Sierra and Mason were both good swimmers. He had seen them go under and come back up and had gone inside for a moment to grab the life ring and then . . .
He hadn’t been able to free the ring for a moment and by the time he freed it and jumped overboard they were gone. He had called and then screamed their names as the sailboat turned on its side and drifted away and he had swum after it, thinking perhaps they were clinging to the far side, and by the time the fishing boat found him forty-five minutes later he had screamed for them so long and so hard he could not even speak his own name.
Gone. The water was warm and they should have washed ashore but they never did.
It took a very long time to accept the fact they were dead. A period of denial punctuated by a startling sudden despair, more acute than even the grief-drenched days after the capsizing.
Then, more than a year later, the phone call in the middle of the night. Months after he had started to accept the idea he would never see them again. He did not have caller ID but could tell the call was from some great distance, the line scratchy, the voice a faint echo. He had been still quite drunk from a night at the Riff-Raff and he shouted into the phone.
What?
A thin crackle of static. And then the voice, the sound of a young boy. Perhaps ten or twelve.
¿Hola?
The rustle of the phone being switched to the other ear.
¿Hola, padre?
Who is this?
Brian asked. There was a moment of silence and then the phone clicked and there was only the vacuum of the empty line.
In the morning he had been quite sure it was a dream. That lasted for half of his breakfast—oatmeal, all he could stomach after the previous night’s tap beer and mid-shelf whiskey—and then he had called the phone company and requested his records. The lady from AT&T e-mailed the records and ten minutes later he had printed it out and was looking at the phone number, tracing his finger along it over and over again. It had come at 2:47
A.M.
, a phone call from Juliaca, in the Puno region of Peru. Almost completely across the continent from where their boat had capsized. Across the breadth and width of a huge continent of almost half a billion people.
But the boy had said
padre
. The boy had been ten or twelve.
His mind seized upon the potential immediately and fiercely. A boy with amnesia. Washed ashore. Wandering aimlessly through the vile dirt roads and streets and then finally, after months of begging, discovering the number tucked in the back of his mind and knowing that it was a link to the home he sometimes remembered. Brian did not so much see this sequence of events as feel it, a dizzying rush of horror and desperate protectiveness and in that moment what had been dead in him sprung once again to life and he started making phone calls to the local travel agent, his oatmeal congealing on the kitchen table.
Two days later he stepped into the scorching tarmac of the Inco Manco Capac airport and for the next three months endured dysentery and corrupt civil service men who offered useless information for Brian’s dwindling supply of
sol
. Many of the police and census takers and civil servants saw him at once, saw his purpose and took an air of familiarity with him.
Sí
, there was a foreign boy who had moved here. How long ago? It was hard to remember,
señor
. He spoke English, yes. Of course, he was with a woman. Or no, I do not remember if he was with a woman,
amigo
. It was possible.
Sí
, it was very possible.
Where was the boy staying? I do not know but there are records that are sometimes taken, along with photos. During registration for housing and other events.
Sí
, they are available but only to officials, to citizens, to me.
Always the conduit to the information he sought ran through the person he was speaking to at that moment, in that village or city or just a collection of miserable shacks. The conversations taking place in the slanting shadows of houses and shacks and trees, the men there squatting and smoking as the blistering heat baked into the dust of the streets.
He preferred to deal with the ones who held out for more
sol
. It cost him more, twice as much at least, but if they were shrewd enough to bargain he thought they might be shrewd enough to at least do some research, understanding this
nortamericano
would spend more money the harder they worked. Those who refused his money and cautioned against the frantic hope they saw in his eyes he despised, hating them more than even the cops who took his money without offering even a pretense of services actually being rendered. In these cautious, pitying people he saw the reflection of who he was, of what he clung to as the village children clung to their grimy homemade dolls.
When he returned home, he was broke, thirty pounds lighter, hollow-eyed. When he looked in the mirror he saw a man still lost, his hopelessness stamped on his face like ink.
My tattoo
, he had thought.
One that will never go away
.
* * *
Someone was yelling. He stirred himself as the water boiled and swirled near the bow. Another muffled yell from a man on the deck way, then an order from another man to get back from the edge. Then another shout behind him, sharper and much closer, and when he turned he saw the girl, Destiny, standing on the recessed deck way above the row of portholes. She was leaning over the guardrail, waving. Her neat white dress shirt had become untucked and was flapping in the wind.
“Hurry!” she said. “It’s coming back!”
A wave rolled over him and the rope dug cruelly into his waist. He paused, thinking, and then released Gilly’s body and swam against the current, the rope curling back behind him. After he had battled the current for twenty feet, he reached down and pulled in the slack he had managed to create and cut himself free.
He was swept back, riding the waves. Gilly’s body was swirling in the slack current next to the ship and he grabbed Gilly’s shirt collar, taking the main force of the waves on his right shoulder. Destiny leaned over the railing, her eyes flitting from them to the water near the front of the ship.
Once they were underneath her, he tucked back into the slower, shipside water and slid the rope around his stomach free. Then he worked the noose down and over Gilly’s shoulders and heaved the remainder over the railing for Destiny. A moment later, the rope tightened. He banged on the hull, and to his surprise the body began to jerk upward, pausing for only a moment when it cleared the water and the full weight hit the rope. He heard a sharp word by Destiny, and then the body continued upward, moving steadily. Someone helping her, he thought. Frankie’s men?
He glanced behind him. He could hear shouting from the bow, but there was nothing to see.