She made it back to Antigua Yacht Club, parked underneath the orange and yellow sign in front of Sunseakers, sat on her scooter facing the row of multimillion-dollar superyachts resting comfortably in the marina.
Red Stripe, weed, and E were dancing in her system. All senses magnified.
The wind was blowing hard now, so hard that the national flag that stood over the docks was flapping with a fervor that made noises, echoes like people running across a wooden floor.
She took a thousand deep breaths, did her best to shake off the buzz.
The boy.
She thought about the boy.
And she thought about her husband, the man she wanted to get home to.
Then she called Matthew. She called the assassin known as El Matador.
He answered, “Where the fuck are you? I’ve been calling you for hours.”
His voice was deeper than most, very masculine, very powerful, always threatening.
She said, “I was asleep. Just woke up. What’s the problem?”
“Don’t tell me you’re still in your hotel room in your bed.”
“Didn’t I say I just woke up? Still in bed. Needed some sleep. Just waking up. Was up all night doing that job over in Falmouth Harbour. Had to hide out. Closed that contract at the crack of dawn.”
“Is that right?”
“Where are you? I called you and got no answer.”
“I was at the airport. Was getting on a plane.”
“Where did you go?”
“Antigua. It’s in the damn West Indies. You heard of that place? Island about an hour south of Puerto Rico. Three hundred and sixty-five beaches. That’s where my wife has been all damn week.”
She paused, then let out a nervous chuckle. “You’re . . . joking, right?”
“I’m here. Been here walking around in Falmouth Harbour for hours.”
“Where are you right now?”
“Antigua
motherfucking
Yacht Club. Room twenty-
fucking
-nine. Sitting on a
goddamn
four-poster bed that has a
damn
mosquito net pulled back so I know I can see what the
fuck
I see. And I see an
empty
four-poster bed, an
empty
bathroom, an
empty
patio, and an
empty
kitchen. But hell, maybe I’m wrong, because I know I didn’t marry a
goddamn
liar. So I guess if I’m in your room and
you’re in the goddamn bed,
just waking up, then either I am blind as a
fucking
bat or you must be
fucking
invisible.”
Fifteen
the world gone mad
Cuts and bruises
were on my swollen hands.
Pain in my ribs, wondered if one was cracked. Or if a lung was punctured. An abrupt wave of chills arrived to keep my pains from feeling lonely. My weakness was both abrupt and intense, only magnified a thousand times. Red streaks and pus, a lot of swelling on my injuries.
I looked over at my passenger. My contract. A man I had captured in Birmingham. He moved like he was waking up. In my lap was a stun gun. I zapped him again. He jerked and his lights went out.
Somewhere between Georgia and Alabama, I was a bird in a $140,000 plane. Skies smooth, stepping at ninety-five knots, airspeed that translated to about a dime over the century mark on a car’s speedometer, but with the tailwind I could easily add forty miles per hour to that number.
I took my eyes away from the instrument panel long enough to glance at the terrain; snow, winter-brown grass, and barren trees down below. Weather at about forty Fahrenheit on the ground. Up here at twelve thousand feet, much colder. I was flying a Cessna Skyhawk, one of the few things in life that gave me joy.
My passenger was stirring again, disoriented, moaning like he was in severe pain.
My chills were getting worse, the pain doing the same; both had me in a bear hug. Sweat dampened my clothes. Underneath my jeans and sweatshirt I had enough bruises to show that my life had been a war. No matter how many B.C. Powders I took, the pain wouldn’t let me go.
I didn’t zap him again. He could wake up now. He groaned like a bear coming out of hibernation.
My attention went back to the Cessna. The Lycoming engine was running perfectly. I kept the two-seater straight and level, identified waypoints, kept track of timing the distance between them. Had been a while since I took to the air. Had been too long. I loved the way the 172 responded to my whims, like a woman after she was two drinks deep, willing and ready to do whatever I asked.
Smooth moans, very responsive, like Hawks after a glass of Johnnie Walker Blue.
Then I thought about her. The one I had tried to get a million dollars for.
I’d never been able to control a grifter named Arizona the way I could control a Cessna.
Garmin G1000 flat-panel avionics suite. Leather seats. Air bags.
Was like being inside a BMW Z4 with wings. Defying gravity, the ultimate high.
My passenger struggled, finally opening his eyes, opened them with a dreamy surprise.
I struggled with my pain, fought back, and stayed focused.
My passenger coughed and spoke in disbelief.
“I’m in a goddamn airplane.”
“Don’t scream.”
“This is unlawful kidnapping.”
My passenger was an actor, short and thin-framed, old enough to be my father. Not a movie star, one of those Broadway actors. His last and greatest work being the lead in a play based on Steinbeck’s novel
Of Mice and Men.
I’d never heard of him, but most people hadn’t heard of those working on Broadway. He’d left New York in a hurry, left ahead of the police. I’d trailed him to Birmingham, where he had gone to hide after committing his crime; found him walking in Five Points, his smooth face now covered in a beard, his black hair now dyed blond; trailed him into a pool hall on Twentieth Street. He was with friends but stepped outside to smoke, went outside alone. I had walked up behind him and introduced him to a stun gun, lugged him to the car I had waiting. Before I could dump him inside two of his friends had come out. We battled a short and brutal battle. They took me to the ground in the alley, but in the end, after a flurry of elbows and knees, they were both left in that alley, neither alive. My passenger in the car, I had headed for the airport where Konstantin had this plane ready, my exit strategy to get me out of the epicenter of the area that held some of North America’s most heinous history. Bringing the passenger was improvisation. He was secured; duct tape was on his wrists and feet. And between the duct tape on his feet and hands was more duct tape, enough to keep him immobile.
He said, “They sent you to find me.”
I told him his sins. “Sexual abuse and sodomy.”
“Fine.” He shifted in his discomfort, almost smiling. “Take me back to New York.”
“Rape by use of drugs, rape of an unconscious person, sodomy by anesthesia or controlled substance, and sodomy of an unconscious victim.”
“Don’t believe all you read in the funny papers. Doesn’t matter. I will do like James Barbour, strike a deal, enter a plea of misdemeanor counts of endangering the welfare of a minor.”
I opened and closed my aching hands. “Is that right?”
“Precedence has been set. I’ll get two months in jail. If I go to jail at all.”
“Over twenty counts of having sex with a minor.”
He huffed. “Reduced to soliciting a minor for child pornography.”
“Ten counts of videotaping the acts.”
“All thrown out.”
I echoed what he said. “Two months.”
“Two months in jail and a few years of probation.”
“The girl was fourteen.”
“I’ll make a public allocution. We had a relationship, for Christ’s sake.”
“You’re forty-five. How could you possibly have a
relationship
with a fourteen-year-old?”
“She gave me the clap. Did you know that? The whore was a walking communicable disease.”
“You have no shame.”
“Christ, you make it sound like I urinated on the girl.”
“Answer my question. How can a forty-five-year-old man—”
“Oh, spare me. They are inhaling shoe polish, rubber cement, getting high before they make it to middle school. Kids from the suburbs are having oral sex before they learn how to French kiss. Blacks and Latinos are in the backseats of cars smoking weed and copulating before they can spell
condom.
”
“With each other.” Sweat rolled down my face. “Not with old men.”
“Kidnapping me. You think this little stunt will matter?”
“You think it won’t?”
“I have money. Jail is for the poor. I’ll be out of New York before the week is up.”
“That kid . . . what you did fucked that kid up.” I panted. “Self-esteem issues. Panic attacks. You abuse a kid and you never know what the kid will turn out to be. Are you listening to me?”
“All this will go away as if it never happened. It’s not like I’m a damn politician.”
I whispered, “You have no remorse.”
He scoffed.
I said, “I’m going to do you a big favor.”
“Is this the part where you tell me your outrageous price to let me go free?”
“They do horrible things to child molesters in jail. Fuck you like you’re a bitch. Shove brooms up your ass. You’re a small man. They might turn you into a bitch and pass your asshole around.”
“Is that threat supposed to terrify me?”
“It should. If you had any sense it would.”
“I will never see the inside of a jail. Do you not understand that?”
“God will judge you.”
“God judges no one because there is no God.”
“In your bio from the Broadway play, I read it, read the last line, read where you thanked God.”
“That, my friend, is mockery at its best. Why? Because it means nothing.
Everyone thanks God.
Actors do coke and rappers do drive-bys, then get onstage and thank God.”
“I see. Mockery at its best.”
“The best way to pull the wool over the public’s eyes, the best way to get a world of fans, the best way to get the sheep into that ludicrous cult and buying tickets, is to pretend you’re one of them.”
“So it was a business move.”
“A wise business move. A
brilliant
business move. The same way politicians claim God in order to get votes. Mentioning a fictitious God makes me money.” He chuckled, his chortle ostentatious. “I know the Bible better than many Christians and I enjoy pointing out the cruelty and caprices of the Old Testament Jehovah, as well as the side-show carnival nature of Jesus’s supposed miracles.”
“You make Jesus sound like David Blaine.”
“Blaine has
more
talent. If Blaine had existed two thousand years ago, existed and did the same carnival tricks he does now, rose from being underwater for fifteen minutes, he’d be praised by the masses and those barbaric soldiers would capture him and leave him stuck on a cross.” He chuckled, laughed as if his words, his diatribe, were sheer brilliance. He added, “Quote me on that if you must.”
“You thanked God.”
“That line in my bio, that’s me flicking a booger at religion.”
“I see. You were flicking a booger at God.”
“At the stupidity of religion. ‘There is no God. There’s no heaven. There are no angels. There’s no hell. When you die, you go in the ground, the worms eat you.’ ” He smiled. “Madalyn Murray O’Hair said that.”
I coughed. “Never heard of her.”
“The most hated woman in America.”
“Hadn’t heard about her. Will Google her first chance I get.”
“Well, you have heard of Albert Einstein?”
“I have.”
“Would you not say he was brilliant?”
“Goes without saying.”
“A letter in which Albert Einstein dismissed the idea of God as the product of human weakness and the Bible as pretty childish was sold at auction for more than four hundred thousand dollars.”
“What’s your point?”
“One day they will pull the cover back on religion, the same way the cover gets pulled back on Santa. Adults will once again realize how they have been bamboozled and hoodwinked, deceived, all in the name of collecting ten percent of their beloved income, all to help finance the greatest lie ever told.”
I was talking to him so I could remain alert, my pain and illness magnifying with my every word, sweat draining down my back and face, licking my lips, dying of thirst, maybe just dying. Tried to remember all I had eaten, all fluids I had ingested, head was too foggy to remember what I had done, the world cold and opaque, my body feverish and weakening, like I had been poisoned.
I asked, “Have you heard of Newton’s Second Law?”
“I never studied law.”
“It’s physics, not a law in the legal sense.”
“
I’m a goddamn actor
. You son of a bitch.”
I nodded. “His Second Law . . . force equals mass times—”
“Who are you?”
he barked.
I paused. “My name is Gideon.”
“Well,
Gid-e-on, you will regret this moment.
”
He struggled in vain. I wondered if pedophiles ever stopped being pedophiles.
“You mocked my name. You haven’t heard of me.”
“What does that mean?”
“Means that if you had, then your tone would be different.”
“Whoever you are, you are nothing, nobody, zilch, nada, bullshit on a saltine cracker.”
Male or female, I wondered if they ever changed or just became better at hiding their sickness. Or if they all went off and carved out spaces, cults where they could brainwash and impregnate children.
He growled out his pain.
“Who are you working for?”
“
Pentkovski
. Konstantin
Pentkovski
.”
“Konstantin Pentkovski. Konstantin?” That name brought fear into his eyes, paused him in a way that made me think he had died instantly, eyes wide open. “The man in the white shoes?”