Текст книги "Circle of Bones"

Автор книги: Christine Kling

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Bourges des Saintes

March 26, 2008

5:20 p.m.

Spyder Brewster sat on the side of the hill thinking that the bitch was pretty dumb if she thought she could kick his ass. Hell, he’d been in more fights in bars and on boats than she’d had pairs of shoes. But all the while he’d sat hiding in the bushes along the side of the road outside the fort, waiting for the cops to cart her off to jail, he’d been thinking hard about what that dude had said in the bar the night before.

Keep an eye on her. Covertly. Report every morning and night to his cell number, and so this morning he had called him, but only after Pinky woke him up to tell him the chick’s sailboat was gone. They’d upped anchor and hauled ass out of the town anchorage in time to see a small white sail on the horizon. That was when he called the dude. Told the man she was headed for the islands called the Saintes. The man said to stick to her and they had. Though when they got here to the islands, they’d just watched for a while and then Pinky had stayed on the boat on account of his condition, and he don’t do too good out in the noontime sun.

That Bertram was a great old boat but she sucked fuel like a thirsty bitch, and they didn’t have the bucks to refuel her. It had been easy enough to steal the boat in St. John’s, Antigua. Him and Pinky had just gone in and chartered her for a day. They put half down, told the guy they’d give him the other half after they got back with fish. Said they wanted to give him an incentive. They caught a mahi and when the captain was leaning over the transom to gaff the fish, Spyder nailed him in the back of the head with the fish billy.

The mate was the captain’s seventeen-year-old kid, and he jumped in after they pushed the old man overboard. Saved them the trouble. Seeing as they were about ten miles offshore and the old man’s head was bleeding, Spyder figured there weren’t any witnesses left to worry about.

Him and Pinky found an anchorage off a place called Great Bird Island. They tore off the tuna tower and slapped some epoxy over the holes where all that tubing had been bolted to the bridge deck. They beached her, changed the color of the boot stripe and repainted the name: Fish n’ Chicks. He’d seen another boat with that name and thought is sounded pretty good.

Whilst he was sitting there remembering how cool it felt to have his own sportsfish, he almost missed the cop car. They didn’t have the siren going like they did on the way up. After they passed, he stood up and stuck his neck out as the little car slowed to make the last switchback. Yup, that was her in the back seat. The little cop car entered the main drag along the beach and speeded up in the straightaway. Spyder stretched, brushed the dirt off his shorts and felt where the pocket had been ripped off.

“Bitch,” he said. “I liked these fuckin’ shorts.”

After they had repainted and renamed the boat, they’d explored all the lockers, and he’d found that he was almost the same size as the kid who’d jumped overboard. He’d been wearing the kid’s clothes, even his shoes, ever since.

He stepped onto the road and started down the last hill. He limped because his knee hurt where she’d twisted his leg, and he felt a blister forming on the big toe. He’d been able to grab his shoes before he ran out of the fort, but his bare feet in the kid’s Crocs didn’t do so good at running.

She’d anchored her sailboat around noon and gone ashore in her dinghy right away, and that was the first time him and his brother had got a look at this chick they’d been sent to follow. He was surprised to find she was a hottie, and he wondered why in hell a woman who looked like that couldn’t find a man to sail with her. He wouldn’t mind getting a little piece of that, and he hoped it would come to that before this business was over.

Shit. He was sweating like a stuck pig and people was starting to look at him funny as he passed the fancy restaurants and tourist shops. He stopped to look at his reflection in a shop window. His shirt was covered with dirt. He slowed his pace and started pulling the tank top away from his sweat-slick chest, fanning it like to try to let some air in there. The damn shirt was already soaked through. His feet were sliding around on the soles of the plastic shoes and every once in a while the raw skin on the top of his toe would make contact with something hard.

Okay, bitch, this ain’t funny no more. Spyder stopped in the shade of a bright blue awning with French words on it. He looked both ways on the street and he didn’t see anyone who resembled the woman. Maybe they really were gonna put her in jail. Just for fightin’? He doubted it. She looked like money anyway. People like that never went to jail. Leastwise, he’d never seen any when he was on the inside.

He never done this kind of work before. Covert work. Back home in Buxton, he’d done just about every job a man of his many talents could do from fishing, shrimping, running dope or working in town at stuff like construction or selling shit to tourists on the streets. But this kind of detective thing was a new one for him. He’d been having fun earlier up at the fort sneaking around watching the bitch, but now he was hot, tired and his feet hurt.

Well, shit, she got to come back to her boat sometime. Spyder turned and headed back to the dinghy dock.

Pinky was sitting in front of a laptop computer at the table in the Bertram’s main salon, headphones on his head, the generator running and the AC cranking the temperature down to sixty-five degrees. He looked up when Spyder slid the aft door open.

“So?” Pinky said sliding the big headphones down and hooking them around his neck.

Spyder stepped into the cabin and crossed the carpet concentrating so he wouldn’t limp. He turned his face away so his brother couldn’t see him mimic his whiny-ass voice saying the word “So?” like he was his old lady. “Bitch walked all over the fuckin’ fort.  Didn’t meet with anybody or do nothing special.  I got tired of playing tourist with her. What you doing?”

“Checking her out. I got on a local wi-fi network and checked the Coast Guard documentation database for her boat name. She’s Marguerite Riley, from Washington, DC. Found some stories about her and her family. Her old man’s some kind of big cheese with the government, like a ambassador or something, or leastwise, he was. Nothing recent on him.”

“I don’t give a fuck who she is. She’s nothin’.” Spyder walked over to the coffee table in front of the couch and stared at the little black and stainless gun sitting there. When they’d first searched the boat, they found the little Ruger 22 in the owner’s cabin along with a couple of magazines of ammo. He’d hid it in a towel drawer in the forward head so it would be easy to get at without being seen. “What you get that out for?”

“Just lookin’ at it.”

“You don’t know shit about guns.”

“Like you do?”

“More’n you, dumbass. Enough to know we don’t want anybody seeing we got a gun.” He lifted the gun up and pointed it out the back window of the yacht. He sighted down the barrel, imagining he was pointing it at the bitch on her sailboat. He made a soft “Pkew” noise and bounced his hand up in recoil from the imagined shot. The day would come when he would show her. With a curt nod, he bent down and scooped up the ammunition and returned it and the gun to the bottom of the towel drawer in the head. Then, he went into the kid’s cabin and grabbed some clean clothes before his brother had a chance to notice the torn shorts and dirty shirt.

“There’s something here, Spyder,” Pinky hollered so his brother could hear him down in the master cabin. “Something bigger’n just getting paid a few extra bucks to follow this chick. First, they pay us to go for the doc, a guy we know from back home is after some kind of treasure. They want some gold coin. Then they change and it’s this woman. There is something here, brother. This one might be the jackpot. We do not want to mess this one up.”

Spyder stepped back into the salon zipping up the new clean shorts. “What ch’you talking about. We ain’t gonna mess up nothing.”

Pinky stared at him without blinking, looking at the clean shorts and shirt. Spyder had to turn away. He didn’t want to look at that ugly face. His brother knew he could always win in a stare down. The little fucker looked like a tarpon his underbite was so bad and with all those pink patches on his brown skin and the clumps of frizzy white hair – sometimes Spyder just wanted to smash his fist into his brother’s face.

“I’m just saying,” Pinky continued, “that sometimes you don’t listen to me and when you go off and try to do things your way, it don’t always turn out so good. Like back in Oriental.”

“Fuck that shit, you little freak. You’re always making out like I’m the stupid one. Like I’m the fuck up. You just wish you was me, that you wasn’t some raggedy-ass, patchy-lookin’ nigger. You just lookin’ up that shit on that woman ‘cuz you seen her and you want to fuck her. Shit. You never touched a woman in your life, ‘cept maybe Crazy Matilda back home and she don’t count.” Spyder crossed to the galley, grabbed a beer and stole a quick glance at his brother to see if his words were having any effect. As usual, Pinky was ignoring him which pissed him off even more.

The little freak lived in his own world with that computer and his headphones. Spyder collapsed onto the couch. Fact was, he knew his brother was a whole lot smarter than him, but he’d never admit it out loud. Though they looked nothing alike, Spyder was barely a year older than his half-brother, and growing up with that crack-head they called Mama, they’d learned to depend on each other for survival.

 Spyder chugged his beer and then squashed the can in his fist and threw it behind the settee. “I ain’t no dummy. I figure, why walk all over town? She’ll be back to her boat soon.” Spyder leaned forward and examined his blistered toes. He wasn’t about to tell his brother that the bitch had jumped him, and he’d had to bolt before she kicked his ass.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Îles des Saintes

March 26, 2008

6:25 p.m.

After more than an hour in a hot, airless room, the Gendarmes finally came in to talk to her. Turned out she was a “person of interest” thanks to the still-missing Bob. Seemed they’d decided Bob was the fellow she had been rolling in the dirt with. After repeating the same questions over and over hoping for different answers, they cut her loose with a fifty euro fine for disturbing the peace. She stomped her way through the streets of the quaint village headed toward the quay, muttering half sentences to her brother.

“French flics are even worse than in New Haven. Mikey, you know.”

When she’d enlisted, before heading off to boot camp at Parris Island, she’d spent a couple of weeks in New Haven talking to the cops about what really happened to Yale student Michael Riley. The way the local and campus police stonewalled her made her certain they helped cover up the whole thing due to prestigious old family names (some of which were on campus buildings). One piece of evidence had pointed toward another on-campus organization, but every time she tried to get someone to talk, her inquiries were blocked. Riley hadn’t had a high opinion of cops ever since.

Now, she was worried about her boat. When she’d left it around noon, thinking that she would be in view of the anchorage most of the day, she hadn’t bothered to lock it. She also had left no anchor light on, nor did she have a flashlight in her dinghy. It was late enough that several shops were closed, but the restaurants she passed were full of talking, laughing people, and their waterfront patios were strung with colored lights and vibrating with music. Along the main street, couples strolled arm in arm reading the menus posted in the front windows of all the restaurants. God, the food smelled good. She hadn’t even stopped for the lunch she’d dreamed of while sailing over here.

The sky was still a pale, whitish blue when she arrived at the waterfront, but the boats in the anchorage were mere dark silhouettes against the lighter sky. She searched the fleet for the familiar outline of her Bonefish, and she almost looked right past it because something wasn’t right. She looked back at the cutter rig with two roller furling headsails. She had been searching for an empty boat, but there was a dark shadow moving under the bimini in that cockpit. Someone was on her boat.

Riley ran for her dinghy but decided against using the outboard. Though she couldn’t make out the features of the person, she was certain it had to be Ponytail. She was finished messing around with this guy. She wanted to confront him, talk to him, and she wouldn’t mind knocking him on the side of the head a few times as payback. As she untied the dinghy painter and stepped into the little boat, she saw the figure open the double doors, slide open the main hatch, and proceed down the ladder into the cabin. He was lucky she didn’t have any firearms on her, because though she hadn’t been to a range in months, she’d once been able to outshoot every Marine at every post she’d been assigned to. She shoved the boat away from the dock, fitted the oars into the oarlocks and began to pull.

As she rowed out, the inflatable bounced over the wind chop. She remembered that she had left the forward hatch over her berth open. She decided to go in that way. As she pulled alongside the Bonefish, she noticed that the intruder hadn’t brought a dinghy. What did he do? Bum a ride? Swim out? She headed her own inflatable to the anchor chain.

Her boat’s foot-wide teak platform extended out from the bow, supported beneath by stainless steel tubing called a dolphin striker that ran from the platform down to the hull at the waterline. Riley tied her dinghy to the anchor chain with a quick bowline, then stepped up onto the rubber boat’s seat. Bonefish was rocking gently in the swell that wrapped around the point, and she used the boat’s natural motion to help her as she boosted her belly onto the anchor platform by stepping on the striker. She slid under the bow pulpit and pulled herself to a stand with her hand on the roller furled sail. She stood for a moment waiting to see if the intruder noticed the change in the boat’s balance as she came aboard. After several seconds, she figured she was in the clear.

By now the night had grown dark, and she no longer had to worry about the man seeing her outlined against the sky. She squatted on the foredeck, and her line of sight through the forward hatch showed a cabin that was dimly lit at the aft end. He had a small flashlight. She got down on all fours, then crawled on her belly to the hatch and lowered her head inside for a better look.

She couldn’t make out the man, only the dark bulk facing outboard, seated at her chart table. She could see the flashlight’s beam dancing around under the lifted lid, searching the contents. She almost yelled out in her fury, but she didn’t want him to get away this time. She slid her feet through the narrow hatch and eased her deck shoes onto the berth. Then ducking inside, she slid to the floor and stood just inside the cabin door.

This was her home, her bed, but for a moment she felt disoriented. Pressing her body against the drawers under the bunk, she was out of his line of sight, hidden by the bulk of the open door. She scanned the cabin, remembering more than seeing what was there. By her bunk, behind the door. She needed a weapon. She kept a ten-inch aluminum Maglite flashlight in a pocket on the bulkhead for nights when she had to get out of bed and on deck in a hurry. She reached in and eased the flashlight out, then gripped it in her right hand, bottom up, measuring the weight of it.

From aft, she heard the sound of the chart table top dropping into place. She eased to her left and saw his shadow pass in front of the open cockpit companionway. She ducked back behind the door. Would he see her outline in the dark? No, especially not after losing his night vision from the light he was using. After sliding her butt onto the bunk, she pivoted, then swung her legs up and crawled onto the mattress.

The floorboards between the settees in the main salon creaked. The thin beam of his light danced around the woodwork in her cabin. He was coming forward. The sound of the wind moaning in the rigging masked any noise she made as she shifted her legs across the mattress until she was kneeling on the bunk behind the open door.

She saw the flashlight appear from around the corner of the door and she knew his body would soon follow. She raised the Maglite over her head and waited. She sensed his bulk more than saw him, and that was when she struck.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The Atlantic south of Bermuda

February 12, 1942

After several seconds’ silence, all three men began shouting at once. McKay’s voice, the loudest of the lot, drowned out those of the captain and young Mullins.

“Bollocks. S’not true. There’s no bomb. He’s nothin’ but a shit stirrer,” he said.

The captain quieted them by turning off the torch and plunging the hold into darkness. When he had their attention, he clicked it back on, illuminating Woolsey in a column of light. “This is true, Lieutenant?”

Woolsey blinked and turned his face aside. He could hear the other men shuffling in the dark, moving in closer to hear him. “Captain, we don’t have time for the why and wherefore. Suffice it to say that this afternoon, on orders, I brought aboard and armed an explosive device that is set to go off within twenty-four hours of arming.” He tilted his wristwatch toward the torchlight. “That was roughly three hours ago.”

“Why you —” McKay started toward him but the captain reached out and shone the light on his face.

He barked, “Monsiuer McKay. Arrête. Stop.”

Woolsey was surprised that the big signalman followed the Frenchman’s orders.

The captain swung the torchlight back round on Woolsey’s face. “You say we don’t have time, but I say you have sufficient time to explain this to me. Who gave you your orders?”

“I am not at liberty to say, sir.”

“Non. Ça ne suffit pas. I will not accept that. It cannot be true that the British plan to destroy this magnificent boat.”

Woolsey tried to laugh, but it sounded more like a gasp. “Captain, do you have any idea of the gross tonnage of ships we’re losing daily in this Atlantic War? You’re nothing but a gnat in their eye. It’s all about money and goods, man. When the cost of her upkeep exceeded her usefulness to the Allies, Surcouf was doomed.”

“If this is true, Lieutenant, why not take her out of service?”

“Do you really think DeGaulle would let us? She’s become a bloody symbol for the Free French, sir. But a damned expensive one.”

The captain turned his back on the British officer and his torch lit the far side of the hold. Woolsey saw McKay glowering at him between slugs of drink, his cheeks reddening with each swallow. He was seated atop an enormous stack of crates of wine. Mullins sat on the floor not far from him, his head swiveling back and forth between his lieutenant and the angry telegraphist. Woolsey saw his lips move, but he couldn’t hear what he was saying. Either he was trying to calm McKay or he was praying.

Captain Lamoreaux turned back to face Woolsey. “You were ordered to place this bomb, and then leave this boat and your own men to die?”

Woolsey spread his hands, palms upward. “Men are dying every day in this war. Ordered to do so. This isn’t personal. You see, there are some critically important documents aboard this boat. The Americans need them. My orders were to set the explosives so the world would think Surcouf was the victim of a U-boat, and then to get the documents to the Americans.” Woolsey hoped the captain would leave it at that. If he started asking him any more questions about who had issued the orders, he would have to lie. And he knew he was a piss poor liar.

“How convenient for you that you were the one man who was supposed to survive.”

 Woolsey wiped his palms on his pants leg. There was no heat in the hold, and his hands were cold, yet wet with sweat. “Just following orders, sir.”

For such a big man, McKay’s moves were both fast and silent. The first sound Woolsey heard came only a couple of seconds before the big man’s head and shoulders plowed into his gut.

The two of them went down in the pool of spilled red wine. He thought maybe the other men, Lamoreaux and Mullins, were yelling since their mouths were moving, but he couldn’t hear anything over the roaring in his ears.

McKay had him pinned to the floor. Woolsey tried to use his arms for protection, it was to no avail. The big man concentrated on his body and the blows to his ribs and abdomen made it impossible to breathe. As the darkness round the perimeter of his vision began to close in, Woolsey registered a different sort of look in McKay’s eyes. They changed from dull, unseeing brutish eyes, to green pools sparking with light and interest.

McKay froze with his fist drawn back, then he leaned down over Woolsey and reached out his arm. When he raised back up onto his knees, he held a dark round piece of glass. It was part of the wine bottle’s bottom and attached to it was a long slender shard, two inches wide at the base and tapering off to a perfect, razor sharp point.

“Gonna leave us to die, was you?” McKay asked, turning the glass in the torchlight, staring at it and grinning as he watched the faint emerald shadow dance across the deck.

Woolsey opened his mouth but nothing came out.

“Havin’ a little brown trouser moment here, eh Lieutenant?” McKay pressed the point against Woolsey’s neck and the lieutenant felt the sharp pain as it pierced the surface of the skin. “You yellow-bellied piece of shit, let’s see if you can take a little of what you was plannin’ for us. Them bombs dismember, ya know.”

At that moment, Woolsey found his voice, but to his profound embarrassment, what came out was a high-pitched scream. Or so he thought at first. Then, when a blur of a shadow knocked the big man off him, Woolsey realized his barely audible “Please!” had been drowned out by the screams of Walter Mullins as he had launched himself at the big telegraphist. The two of them disappeared into the shadows beyond the column of light and with them went the sounds of their scuffling. The captain’s voice was now penetrating the roaring in Woolsey’s ears, but the man seemed to have forgotten how to speak English. He was hollering “Arrête!” and other words the lieutenant could not comprehend.

Woolsey sat up and touched his neck where the point of glass had pierced his skin. His fingers slid, smearing the blood that trickled from the wound. But his whole arm felt wet inside his sleeve and when his fingers continued to probe the arm, he found another small shard of glass that protruded from the backside of his upper arm. When he touched it, pain shot down the length of his arm.

At once, all the yelling stopped and all Woolsey heard was the ever-present rumble of the big sub’s diesels.

Woolsey looked up as the captain played the light around the compartment. Finally, it found the two Englishmen, still and quiet and prone on the deck. Woolsey was surprised to see Mullins lying flat across the bigger man pinning him down. For a moment, a small smile played around Woolsey’s mouth until he saw the growing pool under McKay’s shoulder, soaking his sweater. For several seconds neither man moved, then McKay sat up, pushing the younger man away, rolling him onto his back. McKay leaped to his feet, his breathing hard and noisy in the cavernous compartment. The front of his heavy wool sweater was stained dark and his face was spotted with blood.

“Jesus,” he said, wrapping one of his big arms across the top of his head. “Jesus Christ.” He turned away and bent over from the waist, his hands on his knees.

McKay’s movements had settled the younger man in an awkward, splayed pose revealing a long gash that traveled from his jawbone across the front of Mullins’ throat, down his chest to its finish where the glass shard remained stuck in the body, its traverse stopped by the bunched fabric of the young man’s woolen shirt.

“What the fuck were you thinking, Wally?” McKay flung his arms wide, entreating the body on the floor. “Stupid kid. I wasn’t really gonna hurt him.”

McKay turned and faced the two officers, his head angled to one side as though he could no longer support the weight of it.  The tears on his face glinted in the torchlight. “He’s just a fuckin’ kid.”

A loud clank from the far side of the compartment startled them, and they turned to the entrance. Lamoreaux swung the torch away from the body. They saw the wheel turning on the watertight door. When the door swung open, Ensign Gohin peered into the darkness for a moment, then jerked his head to one side, indicating that someone should enter.

“Dix minutes,” he said.

It was Kewpie, the telegraphist, who entered carrying a tray of food, a big smile on his face.

“Ah, Michaut,” the captain murmured.

“Bon soir, mes amis,” the young man said as the door swung closed behind him. From outside, someone switched on the overhead lights, illuminating the entire hold.