“You do look tired.”
“There was an emergency call made to the Coast Guard,” Moore said.
“You been downstairs lately?” Frankie said. “Half the damn passengers are calling in to the mainland, someone musta got through. You should go down there, tell ’em they’re gonna be fine.” He paused, studied Moore’s pallid face. “On second thought, send one of your crew members instead. Vanders, maybe.”
“The call,” Moore said. “You know what it means?”
“I don’t think a civilian call means much of anything,” he said. “Pull yourself together, Donny. You already made a distress call, the authorities know about it, and as long as it isn’t a pure-D emergency . . . they gotta be used to people getting panicky, making their own calls. Right?”
“It was more than that,” Moore said. “Somebody radioed in that we were under attack by an underwater vessel. They said the crew was compromised. That the captain and his crew might even be complicit in the attacks. They called in from a marine radio, not a cell phone.”
Frankie cocked his head. “Complicit?”
“That was the word he used.”
“Hawkins?”
“Who else?”
Frankie closed his eyes. “He say anything about the thing out in the ocean?”
“He said it was an underwater vessel. You know, like a submarine?”
Frankie ran a hand through his hair. Until now, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, they were just a casino ship experiencing mechanical problems on the open seas. With the Coast Guard resources stretched thin from all the issues, they had received only a moderate amount of attention. A deliberate attack on an American ship from a sub, though . . . shit, that would trigger a massive response. Air support, too, he supposed, a total lockdown of the air and seas. There would be no chopper to rescue them, nowhere to flee.
“You’re starting to understand,” Moore said. “The light finally comes on. Amen.”
“Jesus Christ,” Frankie said. “How’d he commandeer your radio?”
“He didn’t. He disabled our system, and used a portable radio to make the call.”
“You still heard him, though?”
“Oh,” Moore said. “We all did, didn’t we folks?” None of the crew responded, but Moore nodded nonetheless. “Yes, our good friend Mr. Hawkins was perfectly loud and clear.”
Frankie took a deep breath, inhaling until he could feel his lungs stretching. There it was, that damned scratchy feeling, the one of being trapped inside his own devices, caught inside his own skin. Made him want to do something violent. Not chew off his own leg, no, not that. Chew off someone else’s leg, maybe.
“What was the Coast Guard’s response?”
Moore smiled slowly. “That’s the question, isn’t it? It’s what the rest of the world does that matters.”
“Snap out of it,” Frankie said, clicking his fingers in front of Moore’s eyes. “Are they sending that cutter? Choppers? What?” In his mind he could see them launching everything they had, scrambling aircraft, contacting submarines, a fleet of gunships headed their way. The loss of American life might get them interested, but an attack
on
Americans? Frankie wasn’t a military man, but figured that would get the whole world moving against them. Goddamn Hawkins. It was a pretty nice move.
“What’d you say?” Frankie asked.
“I said, they’re not sending
anything
,” Moore repeated. “He broadcasted on an open channel, and
we
heard him just fine. The Coast Guard didn’t respond, and the only reason for that is—”
“They didn’t hear him,” Frankie said, leaning over the top of Moore. “You could have told me that first.”
Moore looked up. “Does it matter? He keeps hailing them every few minutes. The transmission is weak, but it’s not that weak. Sooner or later the
Santa Maria
is going to hear him, and they are going to radio in his message to the Coast Guard.”
“So call the fuckin’ tug!” Frankie shouted. “Tell them you have a rogue man on board, that we just bumped up against a whale and this Hawkins guy is just wigging out. Jesus, man, do something!”
“Hawkins snipped our transmit line,” Moore said. “The receive line runs on a separate cable on this ship, and he missed it. We can’t radio out, just receive.”
“You can’t fix it?”
“I sent Wright up there to check. Hawkins snipped off a ten-foot piece of wire, probably threw it in the ocean. We don’t carry spares for those types of things.”
“Call in to the mainland, then,” Frankie said. “You got a satellite phone.”
“I considered that,” Moore said, his words coming slow, deliberate. “But if we call in on the satellite phone, we’re going to have to explain what happened to our radio wire. They’ll know things are out of control. The end result . . .”
“Is somebody all up in our business,” Frankie said softly. Moore had a point; as soon as they acknowledged they had a rogue man on board, someone who had commandeered the radio, any semblance of things being under control was gone. Piracy would get them plenty of attention, too.
“Does he know we heard him?”
“Probably not.”
“You don’t carry handhelds?”
Moore shrugged. “Not on a ship like this. Unless there’s sabotage, the main radio is bulletproof.”
“And how far off is the
Santa Maria
?”
“Ten kilometers,” Moore replied. Then, speaking carefully, he added: “Most handheld marine radios have a range of less than five kilometers. In these seas, at the rate the
Santa Maria
is approaching, that gives you maybe a half hour.”
Frankie started for the door. Thirty minutes. It would be tight but there was time. Finish the game, let Christie do his thing, then hop onto the chopper. From the Atlantic Ocean to Boston Harbor to Ohio to Mexico. In three days, this would be a good story, nothing more. This one time, I was out on the ocean, and this damn thing kept attacking us, busted a hole in the side of the ship, and then these other assholes show up. . . .
Well, he’d have to set it up better than that. He had never been real good at storytelling.
“What are you going to do?” Moore called out.
Frankie pushed through the door and kept walking, eyes already shifting to the shadows in the hallway. The
Nokomis
was a big ship, and finding a rat was going to take all the resources he had. He would need pushers, and posters. Drive Hawkins out into the light. And then, well, shit. He had hadn’t spent all those summers of his youth at the Summit County Landfill with a. 22 rifle for nothing. Settling crosshairs between those itty bitty evil eyes and
pop
, one less menace in the world.
Frankie broke into a trot.
Chapter 22
T
aylor shot up straight out of bed, the blankets falling down to her lap. She had been dreaming she was on a rowboat, pulling on the oars as she headed toward a little island marked by a coconut tree and a pink bicycle, when the rowboat shuddered hard under her.
She looked across the room to her parents’ bed and almost called out for them, then realized the tangle of blankets was just that—blankets, with nobody inside. She glanced toward the bathroom, a tiny room decorated with plastic seashells that smelled of Lysol. The door was open, the interior dim.
The ship rocked again, and she grabbed the headboard, stifling a shout. Or maybe a sob, she wasn’t sure. The clock on the bed stand read 3:18, and the light trickling through the porthole meant it was afternoon, not the middle of the night. Other than that, she didn’t know what was going on.
“Mom?”
She waited a moment, then swung her legs over the side of the bed. She was still dressed in the same clothes she’d worn the night before; dimly, she remembered falling asleep to the sound of her mother and father arguing. They were trying to decide whose fault it had been that she’d got lost—whose fault besides Taylor’s, that was—and she wanted to tell them to stop, that it was all okay now. That they could blame everything on her, she didn’t care. After all, she was the one who had disappeared, who had panicked when the ship had been...
She rubbed her eyes. Had been what? Nobody had told her, but whatever had happened wasn’t normal. When things were normal, her parents would talk about what they were going to do, what their plans were for the evening or the weekend, same boring old stuff. When things weren’t normal, like when there was bad news on the television news, or the time somebody in their neighborhood had been attacked, their parents talked about what they
weren’t
going to do.
Before she’d fallen asleep, she’d heard her mother’s words very clearly:
We are never, ever going on another cruise in my lifetime.
Which was more than okay with Taylor. It would’ve been nice, though, if her mom also would never ever leave Taylor alone again. Yet here she was, the only company her rumpled blankets, and now the ship was . . . tilted. And smelly, like the boatyard where her Uncle Cameron kept his old Chris-Craft, the watery reek of diesel and old seaweed. It was too quiet, too dark. She tried the lamp, then the remote. Nothing.
She stood and walked to the door, twisted the lock, and peered down the darkened hallway, still clutching her blankets.
“Mom? Dad?”
The boat shuddered again and she banged into the doorjamb. She looked back inside the room, rubbing her shoulder. She couldn’t just sit there and wait. Not in the darkness, not without knowing if her parents were okay. The problem, though, was that they had taken the key cards with them. She would have to leave the room unlocked.
“Their fault,” she said softly as she glanced around the room. “It’s not like there’s anything here to steal. . . .”
Even as she said it she realized it was true. Her mom’s purse, her dad’s wallet, even their phones were gone. That meant they had either gone to get something to eat, or they were gambling. Probably gambling. It was their way to blow off steam, they often said, and after the way her father had attacked that man, the way they were arguing . . . they were like a couple of teapots hissing and shaking on the stove.
One quick look into the gaming area, just enough to make sure they were okay, and she would come back to the room. They wouldn’t even know she was gone.
* * *
She was halfway up the stairs to B-Deck when she heard the door open above her. For a moment she felt a strong desire to turn around, run straight back to her room, and wrap herself in the blankets.
Don’t be silly. It might be Mom and Dad.
The thought was not entirely comforting. If it was her parents, they would be angry with her for leaving the room, perhaps even angrier than before. But they would also be
there
in front of her, where she could grab on to them the next time the ship shuddered.
The shadow of a man appeared above her on the dark stairwell. They regarded each other for a moment, their eyes adjusting to the gloom. He was the close-shaven man with the strange red eyes, except the upper ridge of his eye sockets were jutting out so all she could see were dark circles where his eyes should have been. He studied her back, lacing his fingers together and popping the joints slowly.
He took a step down. “You are lost?”
He took another step down, the dim light reflecting on his teeth in what she supposed was a smile. She wanted to turn around and run, but knew it would be silly.
“Little girls,” he said, “shouldn’t be alone.”
She watched, unable to move, as he drew closer to her. She started to say something and he grabbed her arm above the elbow, his fingers digging into her skin. “Where are your parents?”
“I . . . I think they’re gambling.”
“No,” he said, pulling her with him. “No one is gambling. Is no fun happening anywhere, this ship. Come.”
She pulled back. “I don’t want to go with you.”
He nodded. “But you will come.” He traced one finger down the side of her nose, ignoring her recoil. “Little girls should not be alone.”
* * *
They went down to D-deck, the man named Kharkov pulling her close to his body, digging his knees into the back of her thighs when she slowed. The room was flooded up to her knees, and there was only one other person down here, a little rat-faced guy behind a bar stacking bottles into a duffel bag.
She tried to call out for help and barely got a sound out before Kharkov clamped his hand over her mouth.
The bartender looked up.
“Is a troublemaker,” Kharkov said. “She goes into the holding cell.”
“That little girl’s trouble?” the bartender said. “She looks like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Where’re her folks?”
“You will be little girl,” Kharkov said. “You say any more words.”
The bartender raised a single eyebrow, then leveled a finger at them. “Kharkov, right? Bring her to me, Kharkov. She doesn’t go anywhere until we talk to Frankie.”
Kharkov paused, and she felt his breath blowing over the top of her hair, fetid, and suddenly she could taste the sweat on the palm clamped over her mouth. She thought of biting, knew it would taste worse on the inside, knew it would cause retaliation that would be even more painful. Then they were moving toward the bartender, the cold water pushing against her shins. Kharkov shoved her onto a stool and faced the other man, giving her a look that seemed to shrivel up her insides.
“What is your name?”
The bartender ran a hand through his hair. “Where were you bringing her?”
“I told you this already. What is your name?”
“Remy. Why? I don’t care you wanna report me, asshole.”
“No,” Kharkov said, staring down at the water. “Is just I like to know the names, not just the number.”
“What’re you talking about—”
Kharkov leaped forward, encircling one hand behind Remy’s head and smashing it down on the bar. Remy’s forehead made a splat sound on the polished wood, his nose breaking with a sound like a popsicle stick bridge crunched underfoot. Kharkov wrapped his fingers through Remy’s hair, pushed it back up. Taylor caught a brief glimpse of Remy’s face, the nose pushed almost to the edge of his cheek, the left eyebrow split open to reveal the pink gleam of bone.
Then Kharkov slammed it down again.
And again.
By the fourth time, Taylor could tell there was no resistance left in Remy’s neck muscles, no control anywhere, just the strumming of his shoe against the interior of the bar. Finally, Kharkov quit slamming Remy’s head and just held it there, fingers twined through Remy’s long hair, Kharkov’s head cocked slightly to the side. After a moment he lifted the now-unrecognizable face up, popped his thumb out of his other hand, and jammed it into Remy’s trachea, smashing it flat. Remy didn’t resist. Remy didn’t move.
Remy, she realized, was dead.
“Come,” he said. “Or we do same thing with you.”
He pulled her off the stool and started toward the back hallway. “What?
“Why?” she asked, her voice little more than a croak. “Why did you do that?”
He looked at her and then shook his head. “Little girls,” he said, a new inflection in his voice, something she thought might be bemusement. Or, perhaps, some awful species of affection. “Little girls and their silly questions.”
He dragged her down the hallway, flung open a door, and pushed her onto the bed. She scrambled to the far corner, pulling a pillow up and over her chest. He watched her with that bemused expression on his face, then sat down on the edge of the bed. He ran the edge of his thumbnail under his other fingernails one by one, inspecting the detritus before wiping it on the sheets.
“Ever since I was little, girls would do this,” he said. “Act scared. Is silly game, I think, but one that is played often enough.”
Taylor swallowed hard. “I want my parents. Right now.”
“I don’t mind games,” Kharkov said. “There were no games when I was child except those I made myself. Is still this way. And a man must have . . . entertainment. Yes?”
“Mister, I don’t want to play a game. I just want—”
He nodded slowly. “A man must have something to take his mind off thoughts about what was done, of games others played with him. Without that, life would be . . .”
He turned to her, suddenly and completely focused. “It would not be fun at all.”
He moved forward, his presence seeming to fill the room, enveloping around her. She opened her mouth to scream, realizing that the only person on this entire level was likely poor dead Remy, that Kharkov was a full-grown man who did not care if she was hurt, much less upset. She would need to go for his eyes, but she was paralyzed with fear, filled with the terrible desire to do whatever he wanted, to not disappoint him. Because to disappoint a man such as Kharkov would mean her face would look just like Remy’s.
He reached out a hand, then paused as a voice said his name. The static-filled voice crackled again, and his hand, inches from her, drifted down to the radio on his belt. He turned down the volume knob until the radio clicked off, lifted his hand, and then sighed. He flipped the radio back on.
“Yes?”
“Get your ass up here, Kharkov. We got a man to find.”
“Five minutes, I will be there.”
A slight pause. “I don’t see your ugly mug at the roulette table in thirty seconds, Thor’s throwing your ass in the ocean and keeping your money as a bonus.”
The radio went silent. Kharkov stared at it for a moment, his head cocked to the side, and she waited to see if he would smash it against the wall. Instead, he carefully replaced it in his belt holster and gave her a conspiratorial wink. “A short break,” he said. “You will wait for me, yes?”
He unbuckled his belt and slid it out of the loops, then slid it around her wrists. “Yes, you will wait for me.”