Devour (24 page)

“Yes,” Brian said, looking above him as footsteps thudded across the deck above them. “I think we better find a place to hide while we’re at it.”

* * *

They heard the men inside the day care as they went past, Prower’s voice booming about something with his cards. There was no guard outside the door and they went past silently, padding down the hallway to the corner room. The lights had begun to flicker, and the air felt stagnant and damp. The HVAC system wasn’t working, and Brian supposed it had either shorted out, or they were trying to conserve as much power as possible.

Destiny led him to C-85 and pressed her ear against the door. She had only listened for a moment when they heard the day-care door open behind them. Brian twisted the knob and they slid inside the room, which was deserted.

“Now what?” Brian whispered.

She pointed to the back door. “That’s the batcave entrance,” she said. “It sounds like they moved up here, but we need to be careful.”

Destiny pressed her ear to the flimsy hollow-core door, her hand splayed out for silence. “Okay,” she said after minute. “I thought I heard a voice. Must have been from someplace else on the ship.”

He allowed her to drag him into the stairwell. The
Nokomis
felt different, sluggish in the big rollers, and the way it was tipping suggested a new hole must have been opened in its hull. The bilges had been losing the battle inch by inch before; now he suspected the battle was turning into a rout, the water pouring into the hold. The room below was dark, and he could hear water sloshing back and forth as the ship rolled with the waves.

“Is that someone walking?” he asked. His voice was magnified in the hallway and Destiny winced at the noise.

“Shhh. It’s probably just the water slopping back and forth.”

“This is like going into the lion’s den,” he whispered.

“They’re gone,” she said. “Come on.”

They descended the stairs. The water was up to their waists by the time they reached the bottom, and the room was littered with playing cards and liquor bottles. Several wooden chairs bobbed in the water, which was covered with a rainbow-colored sheen. The air smelled like low tide in summer, a rank and oily odor that wasn’t the sea; it was the smell of flooded toilets, of men who had been cramped in a small space for too long, the sour reek of tension and fear. The only light was from the exit signs, which cast a baleful red light over the water.

“Who’s that?” he said, pointing toward the bar.

Destiny followed his gaze and sucked in her breath, then let go of his arm and waded toward the bar. The body was facedown, the shoulders hunched out of the water, dressed in a white shirt, stained pink around the collar.

“No,” she whispered. “Oh, Remy, no.”

She could only turn him over halfway. Brian knelt beside her, feeling the coldness of the flesh as he sought purchase in the bartender’s clothes, the unmoving limpness of the body already starting to harden. It was the coldness that unnerved him; he had never realized how quickly the human body lost its warmth.

“On three,” he said.

Remy’s face was a pulpy mess when they flipped him over, the lips split and his two front teeth broken off at angles. His left eye was blood filled, the pupil milky, and a thin serum of watery blood oozed from a laceration that split his eyebrow in half lengthwise. His throat looked strangely concave.

“Jesus,” Brian said. “Was he one of Frankie’s guys?”

She looked at him, her eyes wide. “He was like me,” she said. “Hired help.”

“Not a bodyguard.”

“For who, a fucking Pomeranian? He was just a bartender.”

He pulled her to her feet. “Whatever this was about,” he said, gesturing around the room, “it’s gone sour. I don’t know what’s worse, the thing in the water—the kronosaur—or Frankie’s guys, but I don’t think either group would think twice about slitting our throats.”

“You’re wrong,” a thick voice said from behind them. He whirled around to face Kharkov, standing between them and the back doorway. He was pointing a pistol at them, his thin lips revealing a wedge of small, even teeth. “I have been thinking about it a lot.”

“Easy,” Frankie said from behind them, stepping out of the stairwell. He was flanked by Thor and Hornaday, the latter with his own pistol drawn. Frankie slid his radio back into his belt holster and gave Destiny a reproachful look. “You coming back to work?”

Brian cast his eyes from Frankie to Kharkov, then back to Frankie.

“You got a gun?” Frankie said.

“I’m not a gunfighter,” Brian said. “I catch fish for a living.”

“Yeah, and now you’re gonna feed them, you don’t watch yourself.” His eyes flickered to Kharkov. “He screws around, shoot him in the belly.” Frankie holstered his pistol. “What’re you doing down here, Destiny?”

Before she could answer, Kharkov stepped forward, then nudged Remy’s corpse with the toe of his boot. “They were murdering this poor little man,” Kharkov said.

I
t was one of those situations, things had gone bad for so long Frankie supposed he was due for a stroke of luck. First the weather, then the . . . .well, the fucking creature . . . and then Brian Hawkins jumping onto the boat, off the boat, then back on, morphing from a res-cuee into a saboteur. Latham playing cards like an old drunk bully, so used to things going this own way that he allowed a bad hand to turn into a bad game. But that run of bad luck finally turned when Kharkov, already on his way to meet them in the manhunt, had seen the very people they wanted coming down the stairwell. He had radioed Frankie, and they had caught the two neatly between them. Now they had Hawkins in custody, which was good, and they had the girl, which was, well, not as easy to define.

Frankie sat in Moore’s cabin, scratching his face and thinking.

She didn’t seem to be real happy with the situation, either. Nice little jab on her, too, her fist raising a mouse on Hornaday’s cheek when they took them into custody. Hawkins hadn’t resisted, he knew the game was up. Had simply looked at Frankie, his eyes framed by those thick black eyebrows, a cold fire there that Frankie knew wasn’t going out anytime soon. The decision on Hawkins wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t that hard, either. You didn’t want a guy like that around, burning holes in things with his eyes.

Hawkins had to go, but they couldn’t just drop him over the side. The time had come to be sure, and Christie had everything they needed for that in his little hypodermic case. All Frankie had to do was pay the fee.

Frankie pretended to think about it. Putting out Hawkins’s fire for the price of a cheap imported car? Shit. That was a bargain, pure and simple.

The girl, though, Frankie could almost explain her actions. Could feel where she was coming from, how she had ended up where she was. Caught up in the current, unable to swim against it, and now it had turned into a riptide. Frankie had done the same thing once, had ended up in the desert with the stumps of his fingers shooting jets of blood into the sand.

Funny the way things turned out. Not just for her, but for him as well, sitting here, considering fates. For the first time in a long time with some degree of, what was it called? Latitude, that was it. Like the lines on a globe, the ones that showed you where you were, where you might wanna go.

He knew what Christie’s advice would be regarding the girl. And it would be good advice, the kind that both Latham and Prower would expect he follow. A couple quick injections, one for Hawkins and one for her, then over the side, let the sea wash away their troubles. Or let the bigmouthed critter circling them take care of it.

Frankie had paid Christie already, digging out the bills from the duffel bag now stashed in Moore’s desk drawer. The captain was in the first mate’s room along with Wells, the two of them locked up for their own good. Now Frankie went over to the desk and opened the bag, running his fingers across the packets of bills. Plenty of money here, even after he had paid Christie for the needles.

Twenty grand per needle. Forty grand for both, and Frankie wasn’t sure he wanted to pay that kind of money to get rid of Destiny Boudreaux. Some of that was affection; some portion, he had to admit, was his reluctance to pay for something he saw no benefit in. But he couldn’t just let her go, either.

And that gave Frankie an idea.

He stood, a few hairs he had rubbed off his scalp drifting down onto his pants. Thor was standing a few paces from the doorway, keeping guard like the good soldier he was. He turned when he heard Frankie, his expression calm, but there was a tightness to his features now, an edginess to his eyes.

“Yes,
chef
?”

“Bring the girl up here,” he said. “Untie her first, case anybody sees you. Hawkins gives you any trouble, tap him on the head.”

Frankie watched in admiration as Thor left without another word. He moved quietly for a big man, listened to instructions, and then, more important, followed through. Probably the only man Frankie had met that he could remotely imagine having for a partner. He was going to have to get rid of the big Swede, of course, but he didn’t like that idea, either. It would be like putting down a faithful Labrador.

He sighed. That was the thing about caring about people; it was like a contagion. Pretty soon you were caring about people who weren’t your immediate family, people who didn’t even technically work for you, and the symptoms were painful. Short-term side effects included getting screwed over, usually by the people you cared about, the assholes not reciprocating your feelings. Keep going down that path, keep caring, and eventually you ended up with things like wars, trying to save whole nations of people from being miserable.

He knew better, damn it. There were only a few people you allowed in, and those people were ideally both
a
, ignorant of what you did, and
b
, located somewhere far, far away from where you did your business. Like Ohio, for instance, in a little trailer park outside Akron. A dusty place where the air smelled of burn barrel smoke on Saturday evenings, a cement pad where mobile homes mass-produced in the 1970s sat slumped and peeling. Inside, dim interiors with blocky nineteen-inch televisions streaming out local talk shows and soaps, the air inside smelling of cat food and moldy insulation.

You could get people out of those places, even if they had set down roots. But only if you were smart, if you limited the rest of your caring to the bare minimum.

Thor arrived a few minutes later, pulling Destiny with him. He had one hand on the back of her neck—typical Thor-hold—his other hand hanging at his side, red and swollen.

“Trouble?”

Thor pushed Destiny into the captain’s cabin. “Hawkins tried to stand up, I tell him sit. Hard head, that one.”

“Lotsa hard heads on this ship,” Frankie said, turning to Destiny. “You gonna behave?”

She stared at Frankie and he motioned Thor away and closed the door. Okay, go ahead and be a shit, he thought; it would make his decision easier. It was uncharted territory for him anyway, and he could feel the sweat starting on his forehead, under his arms. The same discomfort he always struggled with, whether it was jokes or jobs or the few relationships that didn’t include a toll-free number and a tip for good service at the end of the night: How to get started?

“You want to die?” he asked.

She studied his face, hers still defiant, but after a minute she must have seen something in his eyes or the set of his mouth, and realized the question wasn’t rhetorical.

“No.”

“I thought so,” he said. “Others have. Died.”

“From that thing in the water, right?”

He held up a hand. “Let’s go easy. Listen, you know there’s something a little . . . heavy . . . going on, don’t you? We got people getting killed left and right, and the ship ain’t in the best of shape.”

She nodded. “We didn’t kill Remy.”

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “I’m not. At the same time, there is absolutely no way I can just let you go on your way, you see? You’ve seen . . . things. And don’t even start with the ‘I’ll never say a word’ thing. Even if I believed you, and I don’t, my business partners wouldn’t.”

She breathed slowly, her eyes never leaving his face.

“We have a situation on board,” Frankie said. “And we also got a planned set of actions, which still gotta occur. You might be able to help me out. If you can, I might be able to help you out.”

She looked away, toward the windows, and Frankie studied the lines on her face. She couldn’t be much more than thirty, but there was something about the way she talked, or didn’t talk when a younger woman might have, that made him wonder if she wasn’t older. Then there was that little streak of green hair. Most of the girls he knew, they had color in their hair it meant there was a piercing in some sensitive area, maybe a few tattoos. Trying to create an aura of what, independence? Jesus. With Destiny, though, it was different.

Fuck
, he thought.
I’m not thinking about her the right way at all
.

“Destiny?”

She turned back to him, her voice calm. “Yes, Frankie?”

“What do you want? I mean, outta life? It’s a weird question, I know. But it matters.”

She pushed a lock of hair out of her face and leaned forward. “One, I don’t ever want to be on a boat again,” she said. “Or stuck in a casino, or even in a restaurant where I have to put a little number sign up on my table so they know where to bring my food. Two, I want to be outside, make my own food, or have someone make it that cares about it. Three, I want to work my muscles, get dirty, and then take a long bath at the end of the day. Four, look at beautiful paintings and pictures and places and drink cold white wine on a warm spring night.”

He nodded. “That sounds pretty good,” he said. “You been waiting for someone to ask, I can tell. Anything else?” He was thinking about her in a clawfoot tub now, bathroom windows open with the curtains blowing with a nice spring breeze.

“I want to deal with my own trouble, not everyone else’s.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s kinda where my own mind is. I got a proposition for you. I think it matches up okay with what you’re thinking. But it ain’t gonna be a free ride, Destiny. Not even close.”

She looked at him again, eyebrows arching a bit. He could almost see what she was thinking, Frankie wants to get laid . . . no, wait, that doesn’t solve anything.

And that was the funny part, because what he wanted was, well, to help her. And to do it, he was going to have to ruin her.

“Listen close,” he said. “I’m going to be perfectly honest about what you need to do, and you better give me a perfectly honest answer whether you’re gonna do it. Got it?”

She nodded, concentrating now.

“Good. I’m going start with a guy, a real piece of shit, who’s on this boat right now. A guy named Cesar Hierra, who used to train dogs to eat human flesh.”

* * *

Twenty minutes later he was on his way back to the wheelhouse, thinking that of all the promises he’d ever heard, the ones that were kept and the ones that weren’t, hers had been the most convincing.

She got it, he could tell by the way her expression changed about halfway through. Right about the time he brought Latham and Prower into the picture, what they wanted, it was like she saw how the last few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fit together. She started weighing it in her mind, long before he came down to brass tacks, so he gave her some time, rambling on about his own reasons, his mother and sister back in Ohio struggling with a tiny Social Security payment and some welfare. Both of them sick, his sister with a degenerative arthritis the doctors thought had been caused by a tick bite years earlier. How he was going to help them, how he wasn’t in this just so he could be another rich asshole.

Framing himself as an example, how even a good person needed to get their hands dirty sometimes.

“So what do you say?” he’d asked. “You game?”

A single tear rolled down her cheek, and she nodded, causing it to fall off her cheek and land on her knee. And that tear was good, that was fine; it hurt him a little, drawing it out of her, but it was better than the alternative, shooting her full of whatever colorless poison Collins had in his bag and turning that lovely little body into chum.

It was sort of a lovely little mind, too, he thought as he went into the wheelhouse. Or at least it had been.

* * *

He shook Moore’s shoulder. “Wake up, Captain. You need to make some decisions.”

Moore roused himself. He was falling apart, Frankie knew, and that was a good thing in a way. A strong captain would have done all sorts of things that would have compromised this fucked-up cruise, would have sent different directives and communications, would have planned for not only emergencies but also . . . shit. Another word he loved, could never remember. Contingencies, that was it. He loved the sound of it; it was what he had planning for his whole life, without ever remembering the word.

“Been a long night?”

Moore rubbed his eyes, twisted around to see who was talking, then glanced at his watch.

“What’s the situation with the ship?” Frankie asked. “If you don’t know, point me to the person who does.”

“I was just resting my eyes.”

Frankie spotted Graves at the console and walked away from Moore. “How we doing, Captain?”

Graves looked up, the dark smudges under his eyes the only signs of trouble. “We’re taking on water in a serious way,” he said. “The tug isn’t going to have the juice to pull us in.”

“Then how are you going to get back to shore?”

“How are we getting back to shore?”

“That’s what I said.”

Graves glanced over to Moore, who appeared to be listening to them. “His call, technically. But I think we’re going to need to transfer everyone to a transport vehicle. If we can get a cutter out here, we’d be fine.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“We can’t radio them with the cable cut.”

“So what happens now?”

“I think we offload the kids onto the tug,” Graves said. “Pack in as many people as we can. We’ll have the tug call for a cutter, and get the rest of them off when it shows up.”

“And the
Nokomis
?”

Graves held his index finger out and made a descending see-sawing motion. “Down she goes.”

Frankie closed his eyes and tilted his head back. Best thing, from a pure logistical standpoint, was to maintain radio silence. “I got a guy on board,” he said, “who has a satellite phone we might be able to use. Think you could get in contact with a transport ship?”

“You’re telling me this now?”

“You want it or not?”

“Christ, yes.”

“I’ll be back,” Frankie said. Another complication, and Latham and Prower wouldn’t like it. But he would fall asleep a lot easier at night, listening to the waves pounding the Mexican beach, if he wasn’t carrying the weight of sending all these people to the bottom of the sea. Hell, he could end up looking like Moore, nodding off in his recliner and missing all those pretty sunsets.