Flashback (51 page)

In the dark, "these" meant nothing. Teddy must have realized it. "I found some cardboard-three by five cards. There's scotch tape in the desk. Let me-move over, Daniel-tape them on like ear muffs so you won't cut your ears up."

Anna felt soft hands patting up her leg. She took Teddy's wrists and bowed down to guide the other woman's hands to her head. She stayed still and quiet while Teddy held first one card then another over her ears and wrapped a couple of yards of tape around her head to hold them in place.

Teddy's idea and the quick execution of it would save an inexpressible amount of pain. Still she didn't give Teddy any words of thanks or encouragement. The firing slit was not just narrow; it was deep, many feet to crawl through. Maybe six or seven. It wasn't as if she would get stuck with her head out over the moat and her fanny in the office. She could get trapped tight between the immense walls of Fort Jefferson. Maybe eight inches were enough. Maybe not. And maybe the whole slit wasn't eight inches. In a hundred and fifty years, things go out of plumb. She was afraid if she opened her mouth her fears about getting stuck in tight places, how afraid she was under the engine on the bottom of the ocean, how she'd been lost once in a cave and only wanted to die someplace she was free to move under the sun, would come spilling out.

"There," Teddy said.

Anna felt her ears. Teddy's nursing skills showed. In the dark with strange materials she'd managed to bandage the ear protectors firmly in place. A good bit of hair would undoubtedly come off when the tape was removed, but at the moment hair was the least of the things Anna had to lose.

"Okay. Good," she said. "Thanks." Pleased she'd managed that, Anna turned her back on them. They could not see her face, nor could she really see theirs. With only the firing slit, the office was cave-like in its capacity for darkness. Still, she didn't want to think about anything but her immediate task.

She took off everything she didn't need, that could catch or bunch or drag: belt, shoes, badge, watch, earrings, shorts.

The shirt she kept to protect her skin and because should any piece of it hang up on a bit of mortar or brick, she could easily rip free. Not so with the pockets and waistband of pants. Her underpants she retained because a woman requires at least a shred of common dignity under even the most bizarre of circumstances. Besides, should she become wedged and not die of fright or suffocation, without her panties she would assuredly die of embarrassment during what would have to be a prolonged rescue scenario.

Before she could come to her senses, she began. She had to go through on her side, one arm and leg up, one down, her face toward the sky, or what would be sky after several thousand tons of brick were cleared away and her bones found wedged in this man-made crack. She didn't enter the slot at the bottom with her weight crushing down on the brick sill. The opening was narrow but nearly four feet in height. Elbows bent slightly, legs vaguely froglike, she crept in like she'd seen a thousand lizards do in a thousand crevices in the Rocky Mountains. Like she'd seen Dracula do in his castle in Transylvania in some old black-and-white movie.

Squashed flat, fingers, hands and toes were her best method of propulsion. There was no room to bend her joints to use the bigger muscles. Head went in easily. The racket the brick made on Teddy's impromptu ear protectors sounded like a landslide, and Anna wondered that so much noise took up so little space. Surely there wasn't room for even something as noncorporeal as a sound wave between her ear and the brick. The cardboard-covered sides of her head slipped along easily, and she was grateful her face wouldn't take a beating. Should she survive, she had a wedding to attend. A couple of feet of space were above her eyes, the top of the slot, but in the darkness it could have been inches or miles away.

The nether half of her body was still in the office. Her hips had to be turned sideways. With her torso twisted and already in the slot, she couldn't manage.

"Daniel," she called.

"I'm on it."

Thumping ensued, then she felt her lower body being lifted up, turned gently and held level and in alignment with her lizard-on-a-wall stance.

Things grew easier. Using her fingertips, she "walked" her hands ahead, found mortar cracks to grip and pulled herself along as Daniel fed her body into the firing slit from the office side. Skin was scraped from knees, elbows, ankles. Her neck would hurt for a month from having her chin on her shoulder so long. Breasts, belly and bum were squashed into a neat line, but it went far more quickly than Anna had anticipated. When the wall had swallowed all of her up, Daniel pushed his arm in the slot so she could use his hand to push against with her feet.

In less than five minutes, with the loss of only a pound or two of flesh, Anna's hands felt the rain. There was no graceful way to crawl out, no way to bend her knees to get her feet under her, no place to grab or brace to alleviate the pressures. She cared about none of it. When her face hit the night air and she could once again turn her head, see, hear something besides the threatening scrape of brick, she placed a hand on either side of the slot and shoved. Her center of gravity moved over open air. Her legs wrenched and dragged as they twisted from the firing slit. She fell fifteen feet to strike the shallow water of the moat with all the class of a crumpled beer can tossed overboard.

When she found her feet and stood, the water was only thigh deep. Voices in her brain, shrill with urgency, shouted orders. For half a dozen heartbeats she ignored them. She was shaking like a newborn moose calf and as wet with warm salt water and blood. The joints in her legs felt like they were made of soft rubber, incapable of holding her should she move. The vicious scrapes left by her passage through Fort Jefferson's cruel birth canal, anesthetized at the time of the happening by fear and determination, were stinging. The glossy magazines were right. Beach resorts were hell on a girl's skin. Between brick, coral and an engine, Anna doubted she had much epidermis left to worry about.

She ripped Teddy's makeshift car protectors from her head and dropped them. Littering: how low adversity had brought her. Pushing her body's complaints to the back of her mind, she opened herself to the night. The black hole of her office, the lizard crawl, the tumble to the moat, had conspired to confuse her mind. Rain and good air would cleanse it. Letting herself stand in stasis, she listened and watched and did not think. Muted by wind and distance, she could hear voices, many voices, from the other side of the fort, some sharp with command. Beneath was the guttural murmur of diesel engines. From what little she could see from down in the moat, this side of the fort was deserted: no one on the moat walls, no one on the bridge to the sally port.

Her gray matter realigned to the upright and free world, she pushed her shaking legs through the water to the moat's wall. Here by the drawbridge the wall raised a mere four feet above water level. It took her several tries to haul herself up. Her arms were as rubbery as her legs.

Wet, flayed, barefoot and in her underpants, Anna felt staggeringly vulnerable. Like one of her dad's metaphorical rabbits, she wanted nothing so much as to hop away and hide. Having just sacrificed time and epithelial cells to escape one snug burrow, she wasn't going to give in to the urge to bolt into another.

Wrapping the darkness and rain about her like a cloak, she padded quickly across the drawbridge and into the sally port.

The parade ground appeared as deserted as the harbor side of Garden Key. Anna let herself back into the office. On Teddy's desk there had been a flashlight in a charger. She felt for, found it, and clicked it on. The beam was so weak the surrounding darkness bled into the light, turning it brown.

Better than nothing. Hating the childlike slap of her little bare feet on the floor, she moved to the offices at the back. "It's me," she said, then tuned out the excited babble from behind the door. A quick survey let her know she wasn't going to be freeing them anytime soon. Six-penny nails had been driven through the solid wood of the old door and into the frame with such force the nail heads were imbedded in craters. A hatchet, left over from some chore or another, had been kicking around the office since she'd come on as acting Supervisory Ranger. For a moment she thought about trying to chop the door down but quickly gave it up. A small woman wielding a small hatchet; it would take too long.

"Sorry," she called through the wood. "I'll be back as soon as I can." Voices of protest, encouragement and advice trailed after her as she left, but she had no mental room for them. Bob was next. A radio. And, if she could squeeze it in, pants and shoes. The feeling of her wet hind end flapping in the breeze was unsettling. Even Superman needed at least tights.

With a sense of being absurdly young, she ran around the parade ground. Across the open space would have been quicker but without shoes she didn't want to risk it. Coming up lame on top of everything wouldn't help the situation.

Full dark had come. With rain and no lights from windows or security lights, the fort was in true darkness. Like many a helpless, unarmed scampering creature, Anna was glad of it though her ears were attuned to the possibility of predators.

As she neared the west end of the parade ground and the Shaws' house, she began to hear a mute gabbling, the many voices kept low. Mack, Rick, Paulo and their two hired thugs would be overseeing the unloading of their human cargo.

Ideally they'd dump the refugees and go. Then only the care and feeding of three hundred people till the coast guard could get enough boats to take them to the INS detention center would fall to Anna's service. Ideally.

Bereft of power, the Shaws' house was as dark as all else in the fort. Anna listened outside the kitchen door. Nothing. Without knocking or otherwise betraying her presence, she slipped inside. The dying flashlight expired as she clicked it on. She left its corpse on the breakfast table. Indoors, bare feet were a boon. She made no noise. Cats, with more senses than mere hearing, came meowing into the kitchen. Usually they were skittish around non-Shaws. Nobody had fed them dinner.

Anna hurried over the stair landing and into the living room, walking on hands and feet over the dark steps lest she fall.

"Bob?" she called softly. Again nothing. She searched the tiny room by feel: no body, living or dead. Sharpish chunks of the broken cast were scattered near the sofa. One she picked up. It was sticky. Maybe blood.

Anna returned to the kitchen. Her feet made little sucking noises as she walked across a spill on the linoleum. She rifled through the drawers. No flashlight came to hand but she found candles and matches. Even the single flame seemed a nova after so much darkness. It flared into red as the light touched her hand. Blood. Bob's. Lifting her feet to the light, she saw the red was reprised on her soles and there were scuffs of it between the living room and the door. Bob had been dragged from the house for some reason. Possibly the body would be taken away, dumped at sea, in the hope murder would never be proved. Anna carried the candle upstairs. No Bob. No service weapon in the holster of his leather gear. The thugs had one more gun.

A defeating sadness at the thought of the proud and military little ranger's death and the death of soul that would happen in Teddy's eyes when she was told, slowed Anna's steps.

With a physical twist of the shoulders, she shrugged off this mental burden. Later there would be time for it, now she needed to be as light of foot and mind as she could get.

Forcing the deadening effects of sorrow into that padlocked compartment of her brain already crammed with things to grieve later, she ran upstairs to her apartment. So quickly Piedmont had time only to open one eye and note her existence, she grabbed shorts and shoes, dressed in the darkness and, armed with a working flashlight, hurried to the bastion said to have housed the chapel. A breach in the wall in its northern side overlooked the small beach where the boats would be unloading their cargo.

Because very few nights, even those cloaked in storm, are truly dark, she could make out the activity below. Several hundred yards out to sea half a dozen sportfishing boats idled, their great engines occasionally grunting and whining as they fought surge and prevailing winds to stay in one place. They were all alike, new models, three decks, the topmost housing the wheel and navigational equipment. Donations, no doubt, from Enrico's Marine in Miami. Even given their impressive size, the load they carried left them low in the water, wallowing like sows in a mudhole. The decks were black with humanity. Refugees crowded shoulder-to-shoulder, butt to belly. It was a wonder the boats had not gone down in the rough seas on the crossing from Cuba.

Three motorized Zodiacs, small rubber dinghies, ferried people from ship to shore. The sea, churning and angry-looking, was dotted with the heads of those gone overboard, those who could swim, making for the shore.

Four of the six boats trained floodlights on the beach. The beams were gray and sinuous with pelting rain. Their stark light caught the backs of the floundering swimmers and ignited the flame-orange of the tender boats. In the last wash of light the beach was illuminated. Five men waited on shore, one propped with his back against a block of concrete fallen away from the foundation structure of the old coaling dock. Rick. Anna'd been so wired from her scrapingly narrow escape from the office, she'd forgotten about the wounded smuggler. Had he remained behind with the.44 Butch had lent him, Anna would have walked into it. Either the thugs didn't trust Rick alone or, despite blood and pain, he wanted to be on hand to welcome his countrymen to the Promised Land.