“Go,” he said to Wells. “I’ll hang out for a bit, see if you can get him to see reason. Good luck.”
“Same to you,” Wells said. “And don’t do anything stupid.”
Wells went down the deck way, scanned the interior hallway, and then disappeared around the corner. Brian clutched his arms tight to his chest, starting to shiver, as he tried to figure out the best route. Destiny was watching him, and he noticed her forearms were covered in goosebumps.
He glanced at her. “Maybe you should get back to your job. I don’t want to get you in any trouble.”
She stepped forward, her eyes tracing the same route he was navigating in his mind. “You’ll never make it. They’re watching the ocean, mostly, but they aren’t that blind. You’re lucky, they’ll just knock you around some and throw you in a room.”
“If I’m not lucky?”
She shrugged. “I don’t see any of them too upset about their buddies getting killed. You happen to fall overboard, nobody watching? Oops.”
“Nice guys you work for.”
“It’s a one-off,” she said absently. “You can’t tap into the line, why do you want to get up there?”
* * *
It had been a lot of mistakes, especially for a man who didn’t make them very often.
Frankie leaned over the side of the
Nokomis
, peering into the gray water as Adrian tried to climb a rope back up to the deck. The rope was one of four currently holding a lifeboat halfway between the deck and the water. Adrian had volunteered to captain the lifeboat on a little reconnoiter mission, see if he could pick up Hawkins and get back in the good graces of his bosses. That, of course, was before the creature had attacked Hawkins forty yards down the flank of the ship. After that, Adrian didn’t want to go down anymore.
Frankie didn’t blame him. He watched as Adrian climbed hand over hand back up to the main deck, hauling his bulk up an inch at a time. The lifeboat went down easily on the pulley system, but it wouldn’t come back up. They hadn’t known that, couldn’t have known it, but it had still been a mistake.
The first mistake, though, even before agreeing to let Adrian be a lifeboat captain, was letting Moore handle Hawkins. That kinda shit worked on punks, applying pressure until you saw a crack appear. That was your way in, that crack, and once it appeared the rest of it opened up. But this guy, Hawkins, out here in the middle of the fuckin’ ocean with a little boat that Frankie wouldn’t have used to cross Boston Harbor, he wasn’t a punk. Even when his little boat gets ripped to shreds by, well, goddamn
something
, instead of curling into a ball Hawkins shoots it with a flare gun. And actually hits the, well . . . the goddamn
something
.
And in the eye? Hawkins was either a deadeye, or he had a horseshoe up his ass. Either way, you apply pressure to a guy like that, he’s gonna apply it right back.
So that was mistake number one, applying pressure to Hawkins. They might have been able to cool him down if it had been done the right way, if you knew the right sorta pressure, but he had let Moore do the work, and Moore was, well. He was goddamn something, too, and Frankie thought he could probably put his finger on Moore a lot easier than he could describe what was swimming below them. Moore was soft, rotten somewhere in the middle like an old peach. Moore was, well, a goddamned pussy.
“
Chef
?”
Frankie ignored Thor for the moment. Okay, mistake number two was his, too, and it was as simple as letting Latham buy back in. It was a lot more money, but now that he’d seen the creature clearly, it wasn’t nearly enough. He should just cut the game off right now, but then Latham would . . . Frankie snorted. Not
protest
. Latham would
erupt
.
“Frankie?” Thor’s big fingers plucked at Frankie’s sleeve.
And mistake number three?
He wasn’t sure, maybe it was ignoring the hint of panic in Thor’s voice right now. Frankie turned slowly to the big man. His brain was working over the mistakes but there weren’t any fixes coming out, no product at all, just the feeling of a big smooth wheel turning over and over, not catching, not grinding.
“It’s here.”
He turned to follow Thor’s gaze. At first he didn’t see it and then he did, a darker shape beneath the swells. One of the ends was pointed toward them. Not an end. A head. He could see fins behind the massive head, two pectoral fins moving languidly. Then it shifted, a slight bend in the bulk of it. A subtle movement he equated with the tremble that passed through a cat before it pounced.
“Jesus,” he said to Thor. “It’s going to—”
Thor yanked him back and then they were backpedaling, tripping over an access hatch and crashing to the deck, Thor’s body smashing into him. Frankie rolled out from under him and saw that Brimson and Culver, Prower’s other two men who had been lowering the lifeboat, were still near the railing. At that moment there was a single human cry below them and then the rope snapped tight and jerked Brimson into the guardrail; he had wrapped the rope around his hands to improve his grip, and the rope was cinched fast around his wrist.
Brimson uttered a gargled scream as the rope pulled his arm straight down. His shoulder popped, and his scream deepened, took on a rougher edge.
Frankie pulled the knife from his belt, took a single step forward, but before he could move toward Brimson the rope made a whipping motion, a millisecond of slack followed by a tremendous lurch. Brimson’s arm pulled free in a cloud of red mist, settling over him. Blood began to pour from his shoulder in thick red torrents as he tipped over the railing.
From somewhere down the length of the boat a woman screamed. She had been screaming for a while, Frankie realized. There was a pause as she took a breath, and then the screaming resumed. He thought about joining her.
“Get back!” Thor bellowed. Culver had gone to Brimson’s aid and was staring over the side.
Culver’s head turned, his mouth open. One hand pointing vaguely to the ocean:
Did you see that?
Then Culver disappeared. There was a moment when the empty space behind him was blotted out, filled with a massive head, with teeth, not so much puncturing Culver as crushing him, jellying his upper body. Then Culver flipped over the side, his knee ticking against the railing. By the time they heard the splash below them, Frankie and Thor were already running, sprinting back toward the center of the ship.
Moore met them at the entry door to the main deck. He opened his mouth to say something and Thor hit him in the chest with his forearm, sending the shocked captain flying. Frankie followed his fullback through the doorway, down the dimly lit hallway, and up the stairs to the wheelhouse. Graves was there, peering down at the deck with a pair of binoculars shaking in his hands.
Frankie and Thor came to a stop, hands on their knees. The ship shook as something struck it on the port side. A pause, and then another deep shiver ran through the hull. Alarms were klaxoning, three or four different ones.
Frankie was trying hard to get his breath. He hadn’t run like that in years. Decades, maybe.
Thor looked at him, something in the huge man’s eyes changed now. Not threatening, perhaps, but not as loyal as they had been.
“I didn’t know,” Frankie said.
The ship shuddered harder, listing to the starboard side. There was a pause of ten seconds when they all waited, watching the deck roll back, and then it hit again, colliding so hard that Graves lost his footing and Thor and Frankie clutched each other to keep afoot. The ship bucked again, and they heard a series of thuds and curses as Moore fell down the stairs.
“There,” Graves said. It was circling off to the starboard side, just below the surface. It turned hard, the wake from its passage sending up two foot waves, and came barreling back at the side of the ship. “Brace yourself!”
It crashed into them again. The ship shuddered, and another set of alarms sounded. Graves shut them off with the side of his hand.
“We’re breached,” he said. “Again.”
“How bad?” Moore asked from the wheelhouse entry. He had a gash on his forehead, blood running down the side of his face, soaking into the fabric of his collar. Frankie felt an odd sort of relief. Moore looked like a captain for the first time.
Graves studied the bank of screens. “It’s contained to cells P3 and P4.”
“How many in total?”
“Too many. We’re two or three cells away from neutral buoyancy.”
Moore walked unsteadily toward them, supporting himself along the wall and then reaching out for the control console. The ship shuddered again. Graves watched the instrument readings, scanning them, and entering in some of the numbers into the keyboard.
“It keeps hitting the same spot,” Graves said at last. “It’s concentrating on that one area.”
Frankie gripped Moore’s upper arm. “Any weaponry on board?”
“Nothing,” he said. “We don’t even have deck mounts for firehoses.”
“Small arms?”
“There’s a .38 snub nose in my safe,” Moore said. “It’s all yours.”
They waited for the next impact. The ship moved slowly with the waves, rocking as the swells broke around her bow. “It stopped,” Frankie said after a few minutes. “It gave up.”
Behind them, Vanders was busy answering calls from passengers, logging entries, nodding as he said the same message, over and over:
Please remain calm. Everything is under control.
Moore turned to Graves. “How far off is the
Santa Maria
?”
Graves consulted the radar screen. “Approximately twelve kilometers, sir. Anticipated arrival time is one hour, give or take fifteen minutes. Seas are real sloppy.”
Moore tapped the screen that showed the water level in the hold. “Can we stay afloat for another hour or two?”
“Maybe,” Graves said. “There’s six inches of water on D-deck. It’s coming up fast.”
“The extra submersibles we requested?”
Graves nodded. “Onboard the
Santa Maria
. They might help a little, but the end result—”
Moore held up hand. “Easy on that. How are the passengers, Vanders?”
“Freaked out,” Vanders said. “We’re also logging outgoing calls at very high rates, Captain. We’re still well out of range, but I’m still tracking very high cellular usage.”
“No satellite phones?”
“We can’t track that, but I doubt it. We’d have heard something from somebody by now.”
Moore turned to Frankie. “The tug isn’t going to be enough. We’ve got to call in for a passenger transfer, there’s no way around it. I’m not putting the passengers into lifeboats unless we have no other choice. There is no debate on this, Frankie—go make your arrangements.”
“What kind of transfer ship? You’re not going to call in the damn Coast Guard—”
“I’m going to call whatever is available,” Moore said. “But I’ll keep it as low key as I can.” He picked up the marine radio and turned it to Channel 16, then jerked his head toward the door. “Go, Frankie. You’ve got no more than an hour.”
* * *
They watched as the creature rose up out of the ocean, first destroying the lifeboat, then plucking the men off the railing. Wells was right; it was learning, adjusting to its lack of depth perception, not making the same mistake twice. He knew now, for the first time, that it would never let them leave the ship alive.
“Destiny? You’ve got to relax.”
She was breathing rapidly, so fast he couldn’t see how she had time to inhale. Watching her, he realized he was breathing fast himself
“Inhale three times in one breath, ah, ah, ah,” he said, demonstrating. “Yeah, that’s it. Now let it out slow in one long one, then do it again. No slower, three big breaths in, one out. There you go. Ah, ah, ah.”
She sucked in a long draught of air, held it, and let it out. “It’s . . .
hunting
us.”
“I know. Breathe, Destiny.”
“We need to get off the boat.”
Brian reached down and pulled Gilly’s body back against the wall. Safe and sound and . . . what? Hell, just as dead as he had been. There was nothing left to save, just a waterlogged corpse . . . and Brian knew that if he could go back in time he would have done the exact same thing. But from now on, it was time to concentrate on the living.
“Listen,” he said. “They aren’t ever going to be more distracted than they are now. Find a place on the ship, high up as you can go, in the middle somewhere. You’ll be fine.”
“But he made the call,” she said. “He asked for help. He asked for the Coast Guard.”
“I know,” Brian said. “But it wasn’t a Mayday, and he didn’t say ship was being attacked. Whatever shows up, if anything does, won’t know what hit them.”
“Then why did he—”
He hesitated, then put a hand on her shoulder, feeling her muscles trembling. “They don’t want any authorities, the Coast Guard, nothing. They’ve seen the creature, seen what it can do. I’m pretty stubborn myself, and I would have been calling for the Coast Guard a long time ago.” He watched her breathing. “Slow down.”
“I’m trying,” she said, her breath still coming in hitches. “Jesus, it’s so damned
big
.”
“Destiny? What kind of deal does your boss have going on?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “And quit calling him that.”
“Who?”
“Frankie. He’s not my boss,” she said. “Not anymore.”
Chapter 20
I
t was more like a foot of water, Frankie saw when he got down to D-deck, not the six inches Graves had seen on his digital readout. Well, the electronics were soaked, the sensors waterlogged. There were probably lots of things that weren’t what they were supposed to be.
Latham was sitting on the lone couch, his feet on the cushions and his bony ass perched on the backrest. Remy was still behind the bar. He looked taller, and when Frankie splashed his way over he saw the little swamp monkey had found an empty milk cart to stand on, the bottles of booze stacked in front of him for easy access. Probably used to getting flooded out, Frankie thought. Maybe a man to watch if things got any wetter.
“They’re calling in a transport ship,” Frankie said to Latham. “We’re going to have to cut this one short. Go make your call.”
Latham was already shaking his head. “The money went into your account, Frankie. We’re finishing.”
“Look at the goddamn water. We only got an hour, tops. Not enough time to finish a second game.”
“It’s more than enough,” Latham said. “My chopper is already scrambled and ready to go. Ten, fifteen minutes for it to touch down, fuck the waves and fuck the fog. Prower’s arrangements are similar. We’re going to play this one out.”
Frankie smoothed the front of his jacket. His cowboy boots were holding back most of the water, but his slacks were wicking the moisture up his pants legs. “We’ll finish the game back in Boston.”
“No-ooo,” Latham said. “We’re going to finish it here, the winner is going to take his prize here. Your job, Frankie, is to give your clients as much time as possible. When time runs out, fine. We’ll get in the chopper, discuss next steps.”
“The passengers aren’t going to be able to get on a chopper.”
“Fuck the passengers, too.”
“No.”
Latham looked up sharply. Frankie heard the whisper of movement from Latham’s bodyguard, Kharkov cocking his head to the side like a dog hearing the sound of a rabbit in a brush pile. Prower’s remaining two men, Hornaday and the one called Stillson, did not move.
“Did you say something?” Latham asked.
“Listen,” Frankie said. “You gotta realize, something’s out in the water, and it keeps ramming—”
“I don’t give a shit!” Latham screamed, the spit spraying out of his mouth. “I’m not leaving this ship until the game is over.” He took a breath, and his eyes narrowed. “Go get me some time.”
Frankie stared at him, feeling the coldness working into him, colder than the water. Latham sitting there with his prissy little feet up on the cushions barking his orders. Frankie could see him tipping backwards, his shiny shoes showing the scuffed soles, could hear the splash he’d make, the squawking—
“
Chef
?”
Thor’s hand was on his shoulder, shaking him, breaking up Frankie’s stare. Probably a good thing, because after Latham splashed down it would be two of them against five. And Thor was still technically on the other side; after the look he’d given Frankie on the deck, when he had seen creature in the water, Frankie had to wonder what was going through that big old Scandinavian brain.
“What, Thor?”
“You want me to move the . . . materials?”
Frankie thought about it. “Keep him down here, for now. Go upstairs and secure a couple rooms, one big enough for the game, another one for the rest of our guys. Bring the cards up, the chips. Grab a few bottles and glasses, we don’t need the bartender anymore. Where’s the girl?”
“Girl?”
“Destiny. She ever come back down here?”
“I was with you,
chef
.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” He turned to the bartender. “You seen her?”
Remy shook his head. “She went up to find you, boss. You sure she didn’t fall over, the ship bouncing around like that?”
“Fall over?” Frankie said. “No, I’m pretty sure she can stick when she wants to. You see her, tell her to find me.”
He walked past Latham, past the little bar, and down to Prower’s room. His bodyguards were standing at the door, still at attention with water halfway up their shins. Good men, Frankie thought. I could use a couple more, maybe just Hornaday.
Frankie glanced at him, the impassive face starting to show a bit of stubble. “You doing okay?”
“He wants to see you,” Hornaday said. “Later, I want to see you. Talk about your idea, sending my men over the side of the boat.”
“You can talk now,” Thor said. “You got something you need to say.”
“Later,” Hornaday promised, opening the door. “Go on in.”
Prower was sitting in his office chair, his feet up on the bed. The room smelled of seawater and diesel.
“Mr. Rollins,” Prower said. “I’m glad you—”
“Yeah,” Frankie said. “Pleased as punch myself. Listen, looks like we’re going to have to play this one out. You got your chopper dialed in?”
“Of course,” Prower said, holding up a canary yellow satellite phone. “He’s on speed dial, could be here in twenty minutes.”
“What’s his name?”
“Malvick Dierkes. Why?”
“I haven’t heard of him. He reliable?”
“For what I had to pay for him,” Prower said, shaking his head. “Yeah, he’s reliable.”
“Just make sure he’s ready to go. This ship is going to sink, and when it goes down the last place either you or me want to be is in the water in one of those little lifeboats. There’s something in the water, I don’t know what the hell it is, but it thinks we’re dinner.”
“The thing that’s been hitting the ship,” Prower said. “The, ah, creature.”
“You don’t believe me, go take a swim,” Frankie said. “The, ah, creature, is out there, sticking by us like one of those sharks on Discovery Channel follows a whale, takes bites out of it now and then? And we just gave it another three meals.”
“What kind of meals?”
“The bodyguard kind,” Frankie said. “Your numbers are going down a lot faster than Latham’s. You lost three men to that thing, and Latham is still full strength. You’re pretty good at cards, so you understand the odds, right?”
“You don’t think he would—”
Frankie raised his eyebrows. “We have to play this game out for the next sixty minutes. Then we’re getting the hell out of here—you, me, and Malvick.”
“Latham can’t win in an hour. He probably can’t win if he had eight hours.”
“No,” Frankie said. “Not if he plays by the rules.”
He held Prower’s gaze for a moment and then turned to go. The water seemed deeper than it was just minutes ago, and he was starting to feel a bit claustrophobic, the ceiling starting to shrink on them.
Prower called out before he could open the door. “The Mexican. Is he still . . . ?”
“Yes,” Frankie said. “Until the very last.”
“Ah.” Frankie turned, reevaluated Prower. His skin was mottled, his collar riding high over the ample double chin resting on the base of his neck. His cane was across his knees and Prower rolled it back and forth along his thighs, running it along his palms, then reversing course. A cane, Frankie thought. Mr. Hamilton Prower the old-fashioned gentleman, all he needs is a cigar and a fedora, replace the Yankee drawl with a dago accent, and he’d fit right in with the Coriolos.
“What’s his name?” Prower asked.
“It don’t matter.”
“I asked, didn’t I?”
“And I said it don’t matter.”
Prower looked up sharply, the cane coming around to point at him. “Really, that tone? You think those funds can’t come out of your account? Think I can’t find that little bit of cash you stored away? Come on, Frankie. I ask a question, you answer me, nice and polite.”
Yeah, he could be a Coriolos, Frankie thought. One of those old-timer mafioso types, he talked so nice and smooth, you barely felt the knife going in.
“His name is Cesar,” Frankie said.
* * *
Cesar Hierra, a minor player in a major cartel, a man of great ambition and modest talent. Like Frankie, he had been caught wetting his beak. Unlike Frankie, his punishment extended beyond a beating and some finger snipping.
But his boss, Alejandros Cappero, was a businessman, and through certain circles he knew Frankie Rollins was a man who might pay for a carcass before it cooled. Frankie paid for the blood typing, the tissue typing, all of it out of pocket. When it came back as a match, he knew his payday had come in. He made an offer, a high one, one that would be hard to refuse.
Cappero balked, Cappero contemplated, he talked about the dignity of human life, of his brother who had fallen from grace, and finally he spoke of another bidder. A bid the Sonoran had scoffed at but, at the same time, an offer he said he must give consideration to. A family offer, yes, but the amount not insignificant in that region. A place where a man’s life was often less than that of a dirt bike, of a Toyota truck with rusted quarter panels. Of a horse or dog who might place in one race out of twenty.
You must understand, Cappero said. I am a local man, with local reputations.
So Frankie had tacked that price onto that of his original offer, plus a small premium. Cappero accepted.
“Frankie?” Prower asked.
“He was supposed to die a month ago,” Frankie said. “The way these guys do it when you cross them, they put you in a cage. Let their dogs pull you apart, piece by piece. Then they leave you in there until the dogs are full, or the stink gets too bad.”
Prower’s face was very still.
“Cesar used to do the work himself,” Frankie said. “It was his job for five years, he musta liked it.”
Prower pursed his lips. “You think it’s in his blood? The ability to do something like that?”
“I think it’s the result of living in a fucked-up place,” Frankie said. “Listen, I gotta walk a pretty fine line to turn this out right. You want to reconsider, tell me now.” He paused. “Please.”
“It might not be that fine of a line,” Prower said. “The men I have left are good, twice as good as Latham’s. Hornaday is ex-CIA, you know. The very best.”
Frankie rubbed at the corner of his mouth, feeling the stubble growing. “Just make sure old Malvick is ready to fly.”
* * *
Frankie had to laugh. The new room fit his clients perfectly, but he wished they could have kept the furniture, made the men scrunch up on the tiny chairs, knees drawn up, the row of cribs along the far wall a perfect backdrop. Maybe he coulda stood up front, lectured them on fairness and kindness and respect before they started playing.
“It is okay?” Thor asked.
He had set up a folding table in the day care, two chairs on either side, a deck of cards in the middle, a bottle of scotch on the changing table next to it. In the hallway a few of the remaining passengers were talking in urgent tones, lugging suitcases toward the stairwells to B-deck.
“You didn’t have to kick any kids out of here, did you?” Frankie asked.
“No,” Thor said. “Was already closed.”
“Okay,” Frankie said. “Get Latham up first, humor any bullshit requests he has, within reason. Then get Prower in here and start the game. You see an opportunity, you know, where he’s distracted? Shove that cane up his ass.”
“
Chef
?”
Frankie sighed. “Just start the game, Thor.”
“And the other?”
“I’ll take care of that,” Frankie said. Cesar was used to his little room, his habitat. He could stay down there for a while. The original plan was to transport him to the chopper, after the game was over. It would look like a med-evac for any passengers who happened to be watching, or wondering why a helicopter had landed on the ship. Maybe that was still the best way, or maybe they would just let him go down with the
Nokomis
in six hundred feet of water, let the crabs do their magic.
Frankie shouldered his way down the hall, getting wedged in the masses moving toward the stairwell. They didn’t want to let him through; everybody was jammed into the hallway, nobody wanting to give an inch. Hell, Frankie thought, it’s not even wet on this level yet.
The ship lurched under them, the passengers yelling and jostling as they surged forward, Frankie caught in their wake. He dropped his arms and threw a couple medium-hard elbows, catching a young punk in the ribs and a chubby woman with long dark hair in the upper arm. She squawked, turning to glare at him, but it gave him enough space to slide forward and duck into the stairwell.
He got out on B-deck with a surge of passengers. The gaming floor was filling fast, the card tables stacked with suitcases and duffel bags. Everybody was on their phones, trying to place calls and texts, but nobody seemed to be getting through.
Oh, it was going to be a big old shit sandwich, no doubt about it, and Moore was gonna have his mouth full. He turned and went back to the stairwell. One of Latham’s men, a fierce-looking man with a scar running diagonally across his forehead, was stationed in front of the stairs.
“Anybody get past?”
“Past?” Scar asked. “Me?”
“Okay, good man.”
Wright was in the wheelhouse, jabbing a finger at Graves as he spoke. Vanders had a pair of earphones clamped on his head, and as data came onto the screen, he scribbled furiously on scratch paper. He was trying to make eye contact with Moore, who was slumped behind the wheel. The old man from the fishing boat, Wells, was being escorted into Moore’s cabin by Kharkov. He was sputtering a protest.
Welcome to the loony bin,
Frankie thought.
I fit right in.
“What’s going on?”
Moore looked up, his eyes rimmed with dark purple circles Frankie hadn’t noticed before. His face had gone slack, and the liver spots seemed to have darkened on his hands. “He wanted me to send out a Mayday. Said we needed to warn the rescue ships.”
“And you said?”
“I told him to take a rest,” Moore said. “I think we all need one.”