Flashback (44 page)

"I know." Either he didn't believe me or he was enjoying the condescension. I didn't interrupt. A man behind bars must wield power however he can.

"A doppelganger is a look-alike, someone who looks exactly like you in every aspect. Some theorize that each man has, somewhere in this world, his own doppelganger. I know I have mine. It was this man and not myself who was seen meeting in Washington with Sam Arnold and with John Booth. It was this man and not I who conspired to assassinate or kidnap the president."

Dr. Mudd had gone as mad as I felt I was at that moment.

He spoke as if he addressed a court of law and not one angry woman dressed in her husband's britches.

"What has this to do with my sister?" I asked and none too politely.

"I was getting to your sister, Mrs. Coleman. Your sister was kind enough or perspicacious enough to believe me. When I came into possession of proof of this, I felt she was the only person at this prison whom I could trust to carry this proof outside to my lawyer. Anyone else within these walls would possibly destroy it, preferring to punish an innocent man than to admit their blessed union had been duped."

The document, the letter, the secret proof. I had come to be sick to death of this game of hints and possibilities. "What did yon give my sister?"

"A photograph of this man who looks like me. He is standing with Samuel Arnold and members of Mr. Arnold's family. A photographer who travels to events where people gather took the picture. The place and date as well as the name of the photographer are on the back of the picture, put there with the man's own stamp. It was taken at a cattle sale held in Richmond, Virginia, several months before John Booth killed Mr. Lincoln. The cattle sale was three days long, days I can prove that I was with a very ill patient more than a hundred miles from where that photograph was taken."

This news staggered me. If it were the truth, then Dr. Mudd was an innocent man and he had put the rest of his life into the hands of a sixteen-year-old girl because none of us could be trusted. Strength left me. Where I had been clinging to the prison bars in anger I now clung to keep from falling. The weariness of the past days caught up to me. If I'd let myself slide to the floor, the guard bringing Mudd's breakfast would have found me still there.

25

Only when air hit her lungs was Anna sure she'd been taken up and not down by the god of her understanding, as AA would have it. Bits of spray entered with the first breath and a fit of coughing alternately racked her then paralyzed her. The upward journey continued. Her arms and legs dangled down; water poured from her. She was flipped over and the powers that be-not gods as she would have pictured them but two heavily armed white guys with the power of life and death-landed her like a witless fish. Goggle-eyed and breathless she stared up at them without even a fish's ability to flop or flounder.

"She's not dead," one of them said. He bent down to peer into her face. Along with his disappointed utterance came a poke in her side from the barrel of his weapon.

Anna'd never seen him before. He was maybe thirty, dark brown hair, chin-length and plastered unbecomingly over a high forehead and sunken cheeks. His flesh had the worn, papery look of a longtime drug user, but his eyes were normal. Either he'd straightened up for the job or was "in recovery" at the moment.

"She sure as hell got Jose," the second white guy said and laughed. He was heftier than the one passing judgment on Anna's lamentable survival, and a good ten years older. Me, too, wore his hair long, but it had grown thin. What might once have held a certain piratical charm was now sad and stringy.

"His name is Rick. For Christ's sake help me. There was to be no killing. This is a goddamn mess."

Anna rolled her eyes. The speaker was William Macintyre, Mack, lean as a whippet, voice angry. The white guys were hired help. Mack leaned over the gunwale, his skinny butt and scarred legs all she could see of him.

"Help me, damn it," he shouted.

The man scrutinizing and prodding Anna straightened up. "Watch her, Butch. She's not dead," he said.

Butch. Maybe thug number one was named Lefty or Spike. Anna felt herself smile. She'd realized a great truth. Life did mirror art. These two had surely patterned themselves after movie bad guys. Probably John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. It made them no less deadly. She thought better about the smile.

Behind Butch, Mack and Thug Number One were hauling in another human catch. The Cuban man Anna had shot at. Rick.

Control was returning to her torso. She was breathing more or less regularly, and the paralyzing blows to her back had morphed from numb to an ache so deep she worried for her spine.

"Butch, I'd like to sit up, if I may," she said. Unarmed in the enemy's camp, it was good to be polite whenever possible.

"I hit you," he said. He sounded annoyed.

"You did," Anna assured him kindly. "Kevlar vest."

He knelt and reached toward her. At first she thought it was to help her to her feet and was about to decide this Miss Manners approach wasn't half bad. Butch, however, wasn't cut of gentlemanly cloth. He punched at her chest, a professional's interest in her vest.

"These things are a lot lighter 'n I remember. Handy. You'll be sore as hell."

He seemed to want that, and it was true so Anna gave it to him: "I already am. Feels like my back's busted in two places. Mind if I sit up?"

He held his firearm in his left hand. Up close Anna could see it was indeed an Uzi, an old one manufactured in the late eighties and not kept in mint condition. Probably a hand-me-down or a piece lifted in another job. Across the knuckles of Butch's right hand a crude H and an A had been tattooed. Undoubtedly meant to be "Hate" but would forever read "HA."

"Get paroled before they finished the job?" She nodded toward the aborted chuckle in flesh and ink.

"Yeah. Well..."

"Butch is scared of needles." The younger man said from where he pulled a bleeding Cuban gunman over the side.

"Shut the fuck up, Perry."

Perry. So much for the movies.

"'Ha' is nice," Anna said, but their moment of blossoming rapport had been nipped in the bud.

"You shut the fuck up." This time Butch was talking to her. He backed up a foot or two and allowed the muzzle of his gun to veer away from her chest to a more benign position.

Anna took this as permission to sit up. It was harder than she'd expected and hurt a lot worse. She got her back against the hull and her knees pulled up just in time to avoid being landed on by Rick. Perry and Mack flopped him onto the deck with the same lack of gentleness with which they'd managed her landing.

Rick had lost his weapon. Blood trickled from a neat round hole a couple of inches above his kneecap. Salt water had washed it clean. It was seeping not spurting. He would live. Anna wasn't sure how she felt about that.

He wasn't much more than a boy, and when he talked he sounded just enough like Ricky Ricardo that Anna wondered if his name wasn't a cruel joke laid upon him by uncaring parents. His hair was a perfect black with water but would have reddish hues when dry. The face was square and boyish, innocence only marred by a bad case of acne and the fact that he'd tried to kill her. He was dressed in khaki shorts and a white polo shirt complete with tiny alligator and web belt. Anna guessed he'd had Weejuns but lost them while floundering around in the water.

"You didn't have to shoot me," he said to her in a lilt millions of Americans would find comedic.

"You were going to shoot me," she said reasonably.

Butch, Perry and Mack crowded back to the gunwale to help the last gunman onboard. Anna looked around for something that might better her odds but saw nothing. Going over the side wouldn't do her much good, and at the moment her back was a plank of stiff hard-core pain. She doubted she could move very fast.

"I was not," Rick said. "Nobody's supposed to get shot."

"You play with guns, accidents happen," Anna said unsympathetically.

The gunman from shore was brought aboard, cursing-or so it sounded to Anna-in rapid-fire Spanish. He, too, was young and Cuban and as clean-cut as a fellow could be dragged from the surf carrying an automatic weapon. He held it by the barrel the way a drunk might hold a bottle of Johnny Walker. Once he had both feet in the boat he threw it down.

"Hey! Watch it, Jose."

That was from Butch. A chill shivered through the two Cuban boys and Mack. "Paulo," the boy said, then spoke angrily in Spanish while the boat rocked, Rick bled and Anna watched.

Mack cut him off with a few words Anna didn't understand-her Spanish running a short gamut from hola to cervesa. Then Mack turned to Butch. "Leave it alone," he said.

"Si, senor" Butch said.

In her mind Anna was chanting fight! fight! but they didn't.

Mack expressed his anger mechanically. He shoved the cigarette boat's throttles ahead, and the powerful engines all but stood the narrow boat on its stern. Anna and the Cubans were sitting on the deck and only slid. Butch grabbed onto Perry and both fell, landing on young Rick's wounded leg.

The engines roared. Rick screamed. Perry lost his gun. It and Paulo's discarded weapon slid down the deck. The pain in her back anesthetized by hope and adrenaline, Anna pounced on the first one that came her way, rolled and, still lying on her side, hugged the butt close to her ribs, muzzle pointed at the tangle of blood, water and men.

"Shit."

"Fuck."

"My leg."

"Watch it, Jose."

"Jesus."

Anna waited as this intellectual exchange sorted itself out. Over the sound of engine, wind and waves, any shouted commands would be lost.

Perry was the first to extricate and right himself and the first to notice the balance of power had slid into Anna's court during the impromptu skirmish.

"Holy fuck, she's got a gun," he announced.

The men stopped mid-scramble. Had Anna been in a cheerier frame of mind she would have found it funny.

"Stop the goddamn boat," Butch yelled.

Mack looked back for the first time. He cut power and the boat's bow fell into the ocean with a jar that sent a numbing pain up Anna's arm from where her elbow connected with the deck. She didn't drop the Uzi, nor would she. She and Charlton Heston. They would have to pry the thing from her cold dead hands.

Before the others could recover, she snatched the second weapon and threw it over the side, then sat up. Two automatic weapons remained to her kidnappers. Rick was all but sitting on one. Butch's Uzi was still in his hands.

"Put it down, Butch," Anna said into the relative quiet of the engine's idle. Without forward drive, the boat pitched and heaved sickeningly. Anna had her elbows braced on her knees, butt and feet firmly on the deck so it bothered her not at all. Rick looked as if he was about to be sick. Given pain, shock and rough seas, Anna wasn't surprised. Butch, Perry and Mack were clearly used to the water. They rode the deck without effort.

"See what you've done with your stupid fucking around," Perry yelled at Mack. "If you'd driven the boat like a goddamn white man she wouldn't've gotten it."

"Leave it alone," Butch said. He never looked away from Anna. Perry was dangerous but Butch was the powerbase. Kidnap, killing: Anna guessed he'd done it before. Unlike his young prot‚g‚, when things went bad he became calm.

Butch twitched the gun.

"Down," Anna said sharply, and he stopped but he didn't let go of it. "I haven't the patience to screw around with you. Throw it over the side." The ache in her back, near drowning, maybe shock, came over her in a palpable wave. She was too wired up to feel afraid, but shaking started behind her breastbone and began spreading outward. Before it reached her hands, she needed compliance.

Mack watched her, an odd mixture of admiration and stunned disappointment on his weathered face.

"The gun," Anna said quietly, and she moved the barrel of hers till it pointed at the middle of Butch.

"Oh, wait," Rick said, his voice light and young all of a sudden. "That gun's got no bullets."

"Shall I test out Rick's assertion on you?" Anna asked Butch. "Throw it over the side."

Careful not to turn the automatic in such a way Anna might mistake it for aggression, Butch held the Uzi out over the gunwale.

"No. Really," Rick insisted. "She got my gun. I used all the ammo. See, it's got my initials on the barrel. I used my sister's fingernail polish because it won't come off."

Anna didn't look but the ring of truth and the childish detail of the name shook her.

"Drop it," she yelled at Butch, but he'd believed Rick. He swung the gun toward her. Anna pulled the trigger.

"See?" Rick said.

Before it could be retrieved and reloaded Anna threw it overboard to join its fellow. Diving around East Key was going to be exciting for somebody.

"No!" and the rattle of machine gun fire so close it hurt the eardrums. Anna flattened into the bottom of the boat. At this range a bullet would go through her body and the boat's hull. If they shot her, at least they'd sink their own damn boat. Nobody shot her, though it had been a genuine attempt. Mack had hit Butch's arm and the shots had gone high.