Bitter End (Seychelle Sullivan #3) (31 page)

He jerked his arm into the air, away from her touch, and glared through the plastic windows at the deserted island off our bow.

The wind was picking up as the day grew lighter. The big Hatteras, with all her windage, was sailing around on her anchor line. At times, when we’d sail up on the anchor, then turn sideways to the wind just as a gust hit, the boat would heel over at about a twenty-degree angle. And because I could see the black clouds and curtains of rain of at least two squalls on the horizon, I hoped the anchor was well set.

I wondered about the way Richard reacted to comments about his sister. He was definitely close to the edge there. I figured Anna for a pretty sensible person, and now that I thought about it, the preppy-looking guy down in the main salon was the guy who had wanded me and Mike before we’d boarded the
TropiCruz IV
. Those two seemed to have thrown their lots in with Richard, but maybe if they realized he was a total nutcase, which seemed obvious enough to me, I could inspire a little mutiny here.

“So, Richard, I don’t get it. If the kid’s the only one who knows where it is, why’d you try to shoot him out at the Big Cypress yesterday? That was you, right?”

“I didn’t try to shoot him.”

“So that wasn’t you out at Big Cypress last night? Sure it was.” I turned to the woman, remembering the smaller figure in black. “You were there, too.”

She turned away from me and sucked her teeth, as though she couldn’t believe I was so stupid I hadn’t figured all this out yet. But I hadn’t.

“We weren’t trying to kill him,” Richard said. “I’d wanted him dead, he’d be dead. I don’t miss. We were trying to grab him.”

“Why? Anna, did you know this guy was getting you involved in this? Kidnapping, at the very least. Something tells me he doesn’t really plan to let us go, either. So that’s murder. Did he tell you that’s what he was planning?”

She wouldn’t look at me. She’d pulled her long hair into her hands and was twisting it in a coil so the wind wouldn’t whip it into knots.

Richard sighed and plucked a little riff on the guitar. “I
told
you. Leon says the kid knows where Nick hid it. Janet asked me to find out. You tell us that and you can go.”

So, Jeannie and I both were so very wrong about Janet. Molly had known all along. And she’d tried to tell us. And now we were on this boat with this lunatic.

Anna had to see that he was planning to kill us and perhaps she wouldn’t be willing to go that far.

“Okay, but then why out here? Why take us all the way down here to deserted Elliot Key just to ask us some questions? You could have done this back at the dock.”
 

“That’s enough. You don’t ask the questions. I decide when or where I want to go or stay. I am the captain.” Anna rubbed her fingers along the side of his head. He ignored her and continued to fiddle with the strings of the guitar, tuning the instrument, trying out chords.

“Did you know gambling’s a sin?” he asked without looking up from the instrument.

“No, I’m not real up on religious stuff.”

“Preacher says so. I can’t find the place in the Bible where it says so, but I’ll keep looking. The scripture does say ‘Thou shalt not covet,’ and I figure gambling’s coveting. All them Russians, they’re going to hell. And now that Janet’s gonna get her money, I’m done with them. I figured it was time to get out of that sinful business.”
 

“So were you the one who was running the slots scam? Stealing from the Russians? That wasn’t too smart.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “You know about that, too? How does everybody know about that all of a sudden? Jesus Christ.” He glanced heavenward, then said, “Forgive me, Lord.”

A bigger-than-average gust heeled the boat over, and when we hit the end of the anchor rode, I could feel the rumble of the chain over the anchor bed through the deck.

“Jason!” he yelled. “Jason, go let out some more scope,” he yelled. The younger man ran up onto the foredeck and went forward to the windlass. In order to walk, he had to bend his body into the wind. I figured we probably had almost thirty knots sustained, and if one of those squalls hit us, it was going to get much worse.

He strummed a chord and sang, “
I walk through this valley on my knees, and I pray till I feel Him close to me
.” He stopped and put his hand across the strings to quiet the instrument. “Were you lying when you said you thought I had talent?”

“No. I like your voice. And, while I’m no expert, your guitar-picking sounds pretty good to me.”

“I picked that up overseas. We didn’t have much else to do most of the time. Buddy who taught me? He drove over a mine a week before he was due to ship back home.” He threw back his head and shouted, “The Lord works in mysterious ways!”

“Richard, why is your sister making you do all the dirty work? She’s the one who’s coveting this money, not you.”

He jumped to his feet, handed Anna the guitar, and pulled the knife from the sheath on his leg. He grabbed my ponytail and held the knife under my chin. “I told you not to talk about her. I came back from Kuwait sick as a dog, coughing up all that black shit from the stinkin’ oil well fires, and my baby sister took care of me. She held me through all the night tremors. You have no idea what that baby angel did for me. You don’t even say her name, you hear me?”

He pulled my head so far back, all I could see was the white canvas of the overhead. I felt the tip of the knife pressing hard against my throat. I opened my mouth and tried to speak, but my chin shook with spasms. I knew he was crazy enough to kill me, and all I could see was an image of the knife slicing through the skin of my throat. I couldn’t speak. Even if I had been able to dredge up the courage or could figure out what to say at that moment, I physically could not speak.

“Uncle Richard,” Zale said. “Please, Uncle Richard, don’t hurt her.”

The pressure against my throat eased, and I rasped air into my lungs.

He let go of my hair, slid the knife back into the sheath, and flopped back down into the helmsman’s seat. I stared down at my knees, tears streaming from my eyes, not wanting him to see how frightened I was.

“Kid, I’m gonna write a song about my life someday. ’Bout how I found Jesus. It wasn’t easy. None of it. You have no idea what it’s like to grow up with an old lady who’s a whore. We had to find our own food, get our own selves to school. She made us get her cigarettes, cook her food, change her filthy sheets with the cum and condoms from all them johns. Soon as I turned eighteen, I got out. Joined the Marines. Baby sister was only eight, but she was already good at steering clear of the old lady and stealing enough food and money to stay alive.”

He pointed his finger in my face. “Don’t you say she’s coveting something that ain’t hers. She deserves every penny after all she’s been through. All those dirty hands on her—coveting her body. God wants her to have the peace all that money can buy.” He looked at Anna. “And if she wants to put up the dough for me to cut a CD, then it was the least I could do for her, right, baby?” He laughed.

Zale was staring at his clenched hands, and I could feel the tension in every muscle of his body. I knew we were both thinking it, and one of us was going to have to say it aloud. It was too much to ask of the boy.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” I said. “You shot Nick.”

He pantomimed holding a rifle, closing one eye, and sighting through the scope, and then he made these popping sounds with his lips and jerked with the imaginary recoil, “
Powp, powp, powp
.” Then he threw back that big head and laughed again.

Zale leaped up with an animal cry and swung and beat at him with mostly ineffectual punches. Richard never stopped smiling, but he got his hands around the boy’s wrists and lifted him up until his feet left the deck.

“You gotta learn to fight better than that, boy. You’re looking at a trained U.S. Marine scout sniper. When Janet told me what your mama yelled out so’s everybody could hear—about wanting to kill your daddy? That was an opportunity the Lord had provided, and I just couldn’t pass it up. I’d been wanting to put a bullet in your daddy’s head since the first time he fucked my sister on a blackjack table on the
TropiCruz IV.
I watched the whole thing, thanks to the eye in the sky. She only did it so’s we could get enough money to get ourselves some peace. That’s what she says. I’m gonna cut my CD and she’s gonna run a business where she can get some peace from all those dirty hands. My sister’s smart. It was her idea to use a Russian gun. And she put it in your mama’s garage. Those cops didn’t know what to think. Now, once you tell me what your daddy told you, then Janet will be through with all these other men. This time it’ll be enough for her.”

Zale hung from Richard’s grip like a limp marionette, his head slumped forward on his chest. He had been sobbing when he first struck out at the man, but he was quiet now—too quiet. Richard shook him hard. “Your daddy told you where he hid it,” he yelled, and he pushed him away. The boy collapsed against me as though all the life had been wrung from his body. “It won’t do you any good. I’ll find out eventually. No food, no mama, and if it comes to it, I’ll start working on her with my blade. You’ll tell me. Janet’s been tearing up the house for days looking everywhere, but I don’t think it’s there. Doesn’t matter. You’ll tell me.”

There is a difference between a regular strong gust of wind and the first heavy gust of an approaching squall. The squall’s wind carries with it a colder chill and the clean smell of rain. It was at that moment that I felt the first gust, and only seconds later fat raindrops began to burst against the plastic windows. When I turned and looked behind me, it was like something out of
The Wizard of Oz
. Not a waterspout, thankfully, but the meanest, blackest-looking squall I’d ever seen was swallowing up the south tip of the island and heading our way.

“Jason!” Richard yelled. Then he turned to us. “You. Both of you. Down below.”

I helped Zale down the ladder, but he was listless and unseeing. When Richard yelled for him to hurry up, Jason reached up and pulled the boy off the ladder. I scrambled down and put my arm around the child’s waist. Jason, still carrying his gun, pointed the way inside.

In the main salon, I turned to him. “Jason, he’s nuts. What are you and Anna doing here?”

“Move,” he said, poking me in the ribs with the gun. Just before he closed the stateroom door, he said, “It’s just about the money. Nothing personal.” And then he locked the door.

Rain was now hammering the deck overhead, and the motion of the boat had become so rough that it was difficult to stand as she hobby-horsed in the wind chop kicked up by the squall. Just before the engine growled to life, I heard the anchor chain rumbling across the coral pan bottom, and I knew we had broken free and were dragging at a fast clip. I heard their feet pounding overhead and the grinding of the windlass trying to bring in the anchor rode against the force of that wind.

I wished I could see, wished they’d let me help. But since there was nothing I could do to help with the wild anchor drill on deck, I sat on the bunk, put a pillow on my lap, and rested Zale’s head on the pillow. I stroked his hair and told him that everything was going to be okay, that I was going to figure out how to get us out of that place, that he didn’t have to worry.
 

In other words, I lied.

XXV

It was only after the squall had passed and Richard and his gang had managed to re-anchor the boat that I slipped out from under the pillow and stood and stretched. Residual chop from the high winds still rocked the boat, but I was accustomed to moving around with that kind of motion. I switched on the reading light in the top bunk and found that it worked.

I started with a thorough search of the stateroom, including crawling up into the top bunk, checking out the types of screws on the dome lights, examining the twelve-volt bunk fans, and seeing if there wasn’t some way I could pull out the bar in the hanging locker. I tried to pull the decorative mirror off the bulkhead, but decided it must have been stuck on there with 5200 adhesive, and nothing was going to pull that damn thing down.

Although I didn’t come up with a whole lot of great ideas, the fact was, it felt good just to be doing something. I don’t take well to confinement, and after all those hours, I was beginning to feel as nuts as Richard Hunter. I wondered how Molly was handling it. Better than me, probably. Now if I could just get out of here in one piece, I could clear her, too.

Of course, Richard would not have told me so much if he had thought I was going to survive our little Keys trip. Nor Zale. I’m sure he intended to go a ways offshore and dump both our bodies. Right now it was three against two, and those weren’t the worst odds ever. I had no doubt that I could take care of skinny little Anna, but the other two? As if it weren’t bad enough that they were bigger and stronger and my partner was a seemingly catatonic thirteen-year-old boy, they were the ones who had all the guns.

But we had something they wanted. I figured there had to be some way we could use that.

It had been quiet for a couple of hours, and I had managed to take apart one of the bunk fans and extract the wooden bar out of the hanging locker. I now had a bat and had fashioned a nasty device out of the stainless steel cage that had covered the bunk fan. When I held it in my fist, steel prongs protruded between my fingers.

The quiet ended when somebody turned on the boat’s stereo full blast and Richard Hunter began singing along with the Oak Ridge Boys’ tune “Put Your Arms Around Me Blessed Jesus.” The music pounded from the speakers. I had no idea what time it was, but my guess was mid to late afternoon. The sustained wind had not let up after the squall, and judging from the whistling and flapping noises as well as the motion of the boat, I figured this nasty norther was going to blow like stink all night long. They lowered the volume on the music just enough so that I could hear their voices, but I could not understand what they were saying. In between songs I heard the microwave running, and I began to smell food. The generator wasn’t going, so I figured they were running stuff off an inverter, and from the sound of the laughter out there, they were starting to party. Maybe they’d get too drunk, flatten their batteries, and we’d all die out here.