Close Reach (18 page)

She watched herself kick and batter this cowering man, who shrieked with pain and fear at each blow. She watched as she took the flensing knife and used the flat of the blade to sweep him toward the crack, kicking and pushing him an inch at a time toward the edge. She knew she could tell herself later that she’d been brought to this. That the men’s actions led her to this place and this precipice and they’d called her own hand. But memory was a rendering fire, and she knew it would reduce these days to just this moment, so that she’d see it by the greasy flame of one circumstance: she was going to kill this naked and wounded man because he’d tried to steal a blanket.

That’s all this was.

He was at the lip of the crack now, clawing at the loose dirt and crying as she stomped on his fingers. This would haunt her. The petty squalor of it. He’d brought her to this. But she didn’t stop.

She couldn’t have stopped it if she’d wanted to.

She watched herself step back once more and raise the flensing knife over her shoulder and swing it in a hard arc so the flat side of the blade caught Sour Breath’s rib cage and sent him over the edge.

He fell into the crack and disappeared into the steam. She heard the tumble of his body, the spill of rocks and loose dirt that caved from the crack’s walls and followed him into the darkness. He hit the boiling seawater with a splash.

The screaming started almost right away.

He screeched and wailed as he boiled to death, his agony a hook in her gut that pulled her to the crack’s edge to look down. She saw nothing but steam rising from shadows. It was only a minute until he died, but she heard him a long time afterward, the way the wind in the rigging became Dean’s cries during the long storm at sea.

Every sound was the ghost of some past wrong.

She sat beside Dean then and took his hand. She buried her face in the blanket over his chest and began to sob.

Part Three

The Flensing; the Harvest

When Kelly exited the flensing house, her skin was hot and flushed from the steam, and the leftover makeup from her call with Annie was smeared from the heat and from her tears. Her sweater smelled like death. She knew it was just the smell of the earth itself. Sulfur and brimstone. Scalding seawater. But she imagined it was the smell of the man she’d killed, the man cooking beneath the ground where Dean lay. In a day, his skin and muscles would slide off his bones, and he would dissolve into the earth as if it had eaten him.

She stood in the wind and watched the ash and mist blow down the beach, and she saw that the Zodiac was still tied up alongside
Freefall.
While she had the chance, she ran back to the building where she’d been caged, covering the ground faster without the wheelbarrow. As she ducked behind the building, she heard the outboard start.

She’d have less than a minute now.

She ran across the room, took Dean’s exposure suit, and carried it to the cage. Lena’s blanket was still in there. The exposure suit was bulky, stiff with dried blood and urine. She knelt and put it in the cage and put the blanket over it. Then she shut the cage and locked it, feeling the key in her pants pocket. She ran to the corner of the room and stood pressed against the two walls, the flensing knife held out in both hands.

She heard the Zodiac run aground on the rough gravel beach, heard the electric whine as David raised the outboard’s leg from the water. His footsteps crunched on the rocks as he approached.

When he stepped into the building, she pressed harder into the corner on his far left. He was looking at the cage. As he came farther inside, she saw how lucky she’d been: he was carrying an armload of electronic equipment he’d stripped from
Freefall.
He held the Inmarsat satellite transceiver with the SSB radio stacked over it and the ICOM antenna tuner and navigation laptop balanced against his chest. Fifty thousand dollars, right there in his arms. No wonder he was smiling.

She waited until he was ten paces into the room, and then she came at him fast, the oversized wool socks keeping her feet quiet. David stopped abruptly when he saw that Dean was missing. He dropped the gear in his hands and went for the pistol in his cargo pocket, but by then Kelly was within striking distance.

“David,” she said.

He twisted toward her, his hands still fumbling for the pistol. She slashed him diagonally across the face with the blunt side of the blade, knocking him screaming to the ground. The
pistol fell out of his hands, and she kicked it. She spun the flensing knife so that its sharpened edge faced out, and she raised it over her shoulders.

“Don’t move! Or I’ll chop your fucking head off!”

David was digging his heels and elbows into the dirt, scooting backward away from her. His face was pure panic. She brought the blade whistling down at his neck and stopped it six inches short of his skin.

“Don’t. Fucking. Move.”

His khaki pants darkened at his crotch. He looked up at her and went limp. And then he started to cry like a child.

“Sit up.”

He just lay there, propped on his elbows, looking at her and blubbering.

“The Colonel—he made me—I didn’t want to, and—”

She swung the flensing knife and smacked him hard on the cheek with the flat side of the blade. He fell back, his hands holding his face.

“I said sit up.”

He sat, still holding his face, his chest heaving with sobs she couldn’t hear.

“Take off your clothes. All of them.”

He looked up at her and shook his head. It was a small gesture and would have been imperceptible if she hadn’t been looking for it. She drew back the flensing knife and tensed to swing it again.

“Take them off.”

Instead, he went for the gun.

He flipped onto his hands and knees and leaped toward it. Kelly swung the flensing knife at his neck, but he was fast: the dull side of the blade clipped his ankles instead. He landed within an inch of the gun. Kelly brought the flensing knife around and swung a second time just as he got his hand on the pistol’s grip. This time she hit him squarely in the back of the head with the flat side of the blade. His face went into the rocks so that his scream was choked and muffled.

Kelly stomped on his hand and then kicked the gun away again.

“Try it again, David. Just fucking try it again. I’m a surgeon—you think I can’t do anything I want with a knife?”

“Kelly—”

She swung the flensing knife so close to the top of his head that a clump of his brown hair flew off in an arc. David shrieked, but she hadn’t even nicked him. His fingers flew up and covered a white patch of scalp the size of a silver dollar.

“Shut the fuck up. And strip.”

He rolled over and stared at her for thirty seconds. His face swarmed with hatred, but she didn’t look away. She tensed, ready to swing the knife and put an end to him. Then his lips started to twitch, and she knew she had him. That with a few hard blows she’d cracked through and found him.

“You fucking pansy,” she said. “The Colonel, he doesn’t really trust you, does he? You think you impressed him, showed him you’re a man. But he knows, doesn’t he? That you’re a coward. That’s why the others got to take Lena. Why you had to stay here.”

“He said—”

She swung at his face, and he fell back screaming. She brought up the knife’s handle so that the blade missed him but sang through his hair again, leaving a second bald patch at the top of his head.

“I don’t care what he said,” Kelly said. “I told you to strip.”

He started with his boots and his socks. Then he pulled off his sweater and the flannel shirt he wore beneath it. He stopped and looked up at her.

“Your pants.”

He looked up at her, his face red, and not just where she’d hit him.

“Please.”

“Please? Fuck you. Say that to Dean. Say it to Lena and see where it gets you. Take them off. Now.”

His hands slowly went to his belt buckle, his fingers trembling. He undid the belt and unbuttoned his pants, sliding them down past his legs. He wore thermal underwear beneath the pants. They were stained and stank of urine. When he took them off, he brought his knees up to his chest and hugged his legs close to himself to hide his nakedness. But she wasn’t about to let him have that.

“Stand up. And put your hands on your head.”

He stood, shivering and cringing, and she didn’t say anything for a while. She wanted him to stand there and feel it. The cold and the humiliation. She let him tremble as her eyes passed over him, head to toe. Judging the worth of his life by the shape of his skin.

“No wonder you never got circumcised. There’d be nothing left.”

She jabbed the flensing knife at his pelvis, and he flinched away.

“Go to the cage. You cockless piece of shit.”

He went, and she followed, the knife blade tapping his spine hard enough to draw blood. She took the key from her pocket and tossed it on the ground by his feet.

“Open it up.”

He knelt and unlocked the trapdoor, then opened it and crawled inside. He was shivering hard, rubbing his upper arms with his hands.

“Toss out the soup pot,” she said. She didn’t want him to have the chicken bones. “And Dean’s exposure suit. You can keep the blanket.”

When he’d thrown everything out, he went to the back of the cage and wrapped himself in the blanket. His dark eyes were already bruising from the blows he’d taken. Kelly picked up the lock, ran it through the hasp, and clicked it shut. She pulled out the key and put it in her pocket. She looked at David for a long time, staring at his wounded face and at the cage that held him.

It was a solid, heavy trap. Welded of iron and chain link. The lock was made of brass and chrome-plated steel. There were funnel-shaped holes in two of the walls for the crabs to enter, but they were too small for a person to get through and were lined with welded steel. There was no way out. She knew that. She’d escaped only because they’d made the mistake of taking her out. She had no intention of ever letting him out of the cage alive. She stared at him until she was sure he understood that, and then she went to get his pistol.

When Kelly left David, she figured
La Araña
had an hour’s head start. It was probably ten or fifteen miles from the island and would draw farther away the longer she spent getting ready. But it would do her no good to leave too soon. If she sailed
Freefall
through the pass and into the open ocean when
La Araña
was within radar range, it might pick her up and swing around to deal with her. She’d been beaten at that game once and didn’t want to try it again. If she gave it a fifty-mile lead, she could leave without fear of it seeing her. To follow it beyond radar range, she’d need to know where it was going.

She needed two things from David: a longitude and a latitude. Coordinates to intercept
La Araña
before the Colonel’s men could get started with Lena.

After that, David’s life was worth nothing to her.

She went out the back door, walking to the closest hut. This one had been fixed up a little, with tarps over the broken windows and a door that opened and shut. Earlier, she’d guessed the men were living in a building nearby. If there were things to learn, they’d be in here. And if one of them had stayed behind, this would be the place to look for him. She leaned the flensing knife against the wall, blade up. Though she didn’t know how to use the pistol, she drew it and held it in her left hand, her finger curled over the trigger. She opened the door with her right hand and stepped inside.

The first thing she noticed was that the room was warm. A propane space heater sat in the middle of the dirt floor, the radiant cone atop the tank glowing orange. Around it there were seven cots. On one of them there was a waterproof plastic bag that held a spiral-bound ship’s log and folded charts. She picked it up and rolled it to fit in the cargo pocket of her pants. This must have been David’s cot. The satellite phone was on the pillow. She took it and put it in her other pocket. Then she stepped past the cots and past the heater, the gun held out in both hands. On the far side of the room was a doorway covered with a blue plastic tarp. She used the barrel of the gun to push the tarp aside, then stepped into the next room, sweeping the gun left and then right to clear the corners.