Past Crimes (26 page)

I
WATCHED THE TINY CRAB,
no bigger than a nickel, inch cautiously around the shape of a hand that was unfamiliar to both of us. I’d been watching the crab and the hand for a very long time, it seemed. The crab came closer to my nose. When I exhaled, it scuttled hastily away.

There was something behind me splashing, playing in the gentle waves. I wanted to look in that direction, but I wasn’t sure how to do that. There was something important about the idea, though.

After a lot of thinking, I worked out how to stand up. Arm there, knee there. Easy as pie. I was twelve feet tall, and as thin as a drinking straw.

The world was very bright, except for the huge patch of shade a few yards away from where I tottered. The shadow of the beached
Francesca
.

She was completely out of the water, tilted pitifully on the rocks and sand. Looming above me like a church, thirty feet high. Behind her was the broad stripe she had gouged through the rock and sand, up from the sea.

My brain laboriously assembled the pieces. She’d been running nearly parallel to the shore when she’d hit. Another few degrees to starboard and she’d have missed the island completely. Instead the boat had beached itself at top speed. A fifty-foot-long, thirty-ton craft traveling at
nearly twenty knots, crushing the brittle rock of the tidal pools in her path as efficiently as a diesel locomotive. She had massive holes in her fiberglass bottom, as if a gigantic mallet had splintered her sides.

I heard another splash. I staggered to my right, around the stern of the wounded cruiser. There was a big seal in the shallows, its black fins flapping, beating against the water.

I waded in shin-deep for a closer look. The sand moved treacherously under my feet.

The seal was Boone, lying on his belly in eighteen inches of water. He was half in and half out of the path that the boat had carved in the island. My brain vaguely warned me of danger, until I spotted his carbine. It was thirty feet from where Boone lay. The waves splashed around it, trying to push the weapon farther up onto the beach.

That was just about where the boat hit him,
Dono’s voice said,
and knocked his ass all the way to where you see him now
. The voice sounded joyous.

Boone ponderously raised his right arm and let it fall to slap the surface. His other arm was underneath him, pushing to keep his head just above the water. His legs were mostly buried in the shifting sand. They didn’t move, even as his upper body twisted.

Again his arm rose and fell. A wave broke over him, and he coughed violently, flecks of something darker than salt water flying from his mouth.

I didn’t think he knew I was there until his eyes rolled to meet mine. His mouth went wide in a horrible stained smile.

“Here,” he said, so softly that the sound blended with the next wave. “Here. Burt. I’m here.” He kept on saying it. “Here.”

I walked forward and bent down, my mouth close to his ear.

“It’s okay, brother,” I said thickly. “I’m with you now.”

He rasped something that sounded like relief. His supporting arm was trembling. Failing. The right arm rose once more, not even clearing the water this time. He sank a little lower, as another wave washed over the useless legs. His head dipped under, rose, dipped, and his long body gave a cruel, thrashing tremor that turned him halfway onto his side before it ended.

With Boone still, the only sound was the lulling wash of the surf. I was tired. I wanted to lie back down on the sand and sleep for days and days. I thought about lying next to Luce, and the memory made me turn and retrace my steps, following the gashed stripe of the
Francesca
’s trail back out of the water.

Beached and tilted as the boat was, the swim platform at her stern was almost chest-high and canted like a playground slide for a small child. I crawled up onto it, on my hands and knees. My left hand wasn’t right. Two of its fingers felt numb, and I couldn’t make them squeeze the platform rungs very hard. Something under the fresh surgical scars on my forearm had twisted and broken again. The
Francesca
’s transom had been unscathed by the disaster, and the gold paint of the boat’s name sparkled cheerily in the sun. I carefully made my way over the transom into the cockpit.

I’d forgotten about Alec.

His pale body lay against the leeward side of the cockpit, face turned to the wall as if in shame. Most of the teakwood on the floor was stained a dark wine color that carried over into pink on the white fiberglass edges. The sandflies had already found the feast. They flew into a small, frenzied tornado as I stepped past the body.

Once I was inside the boat’s main cabin, I closed the sliding glass door to the cockpit. The quiet was better. There was enough to think about without hearing the flies buzzing.

It looked like a bomb had gone off in the interior of the
Francesca
. The thirty-degree tilt to port gave the cabin the appearance of a place in a fever dream. Every object that was loose had been thrown around, repeatedly. Everything breakable was broken. There was a foot-wide hole punched right through a thick cabinet door, maybe by one of Boone’s bullets.

I needed to concentrate, to find where Hollis kept his satellite phone.

Guerin. It would have to be the detective.

All at once I was laughing. I’d found a fortune in diamonds, left it on the ocean floor, and wound up with two corpses and a demolished hulk for my trouble. The
Francesca
was a pretty fair representation of my life.

I started rummaging through the drawers nearest the boat’s interior controls. Then I heard it. A light scuffling sound, like pieces of paper rubbing together. As I listened, I heard it again. It was coming from the bow of the boat, past the short flight of stairs leading down to the forward staterooms.

There was an old diving knife with a red rubberized handle in one of the drawers. I unsheathed the knife and took it with me.

I walked very slowly down the tilted stairs. There was the noise again, and something else with it. A grunt. It was coming from behind the closed door of the head, the boat’s single bathroom. I reached out and twisted the knob—unlocked—and let the door swing open.

Hollis was lying curled up on his side on the cramped floor of the head, bound almost rigid with silver duct tape. Loops of the tape were wound around his ankles and calves and thighs and upper arms. His forearms clasped the toilet, and his wrists and hands were completely mummified on the far side of the porcelain basin.

“Hollis?” I said.

The lower half of his face was swathed in tight loops as well. He could still turn his neck, however, and he craned it to try to look back toward the doorway. His skin above the bandit’s mask of tape was a furious red, striped with maroon splotches of blood.

One of Hollis’s bright blueberry eyes went wide as I stepped into the head and started sawing at the tape around his arms. His other eye was puffed shut. Even with the serrated back edge of the dive knife, it took me a few minutes to get his arms and encased hands loose from the toilet.

He pushed himself into a seated position and pointed angrily with one mittenlike hand at his face—do this first—and then sat very still as I unwound the tape from his head. When I peeled the last bit of tape from his mouth, it took strips of skin with it, and his lips gushed blood.

“Wher ah dey?” he said as thick dribbles of red fell down the front of his sweat-drenched shirt. The same yellow shirt he’d been wearing when he and I had shared drinks and toasted Dono.

“Hang on,” I said. I gathered a wad of toilet paper from the roll
on the wall and pressed it to Hollis’s mouth. He held it in place with one wrapped hand while I worked on cutting the tape off his legs. Finally everything was free except his hands. He took the pink mass of tissue away from his mouth and said, “’M cramping like fugg. I have to moob.”

He couldn’t stand on his own. The muscles in his legs were shaking like leaves in a strong wind, and I wasn’t strong enough at the moment to lift him. Together we got him onto his knees and then fully upright and leaning back against the sink counter of the head. I started unwrapping his hands.

“Oh, Jesus, Van,” he said.

He started weeping. I let him. I handed him another wad of toilet paper, and he dabbed at his eyes and his lips until the shaking finally stopped and his breath was even again.

“Tell me,” Hollis said.

“Alec and Boone are dead. So is your boat. Sorry.”

“Yeah, I figured tha’ part. I mean you. What happened to you?”

“You first.”

“You lef’ in the speedboat. About two minutes later, that fucker Boone came jumping over the side and pistol-whipped me. He and Alec must have been hiding out in one of the boats nearby on the dock. They didn’t ask me shit. Boone just got his rocks off beating on me while his boyfriend played with some computer gadget.”

“They were tracking the speedboat. My stupidity in action. I’m sorry, Hollis. They needed your boat to follow me.”

He frowned at me, and the blood welled up on his lip again. “And if they hadn’t? They’d have killed me outright. They told me as much. The only reason I’m still drawing breath is because the fuckers wanted a backup plan, in case you didn’t lead them to Dono’s score. They’d get in touch with you and offer to trade me for the diamonds. Not that you’d be that much of an idiot.”

“I might have made that trade.”

“Don’t be daft,” he said.

“I’ve already lost Dono. When I saw Alec and Boone on the
Francesca
, I thought you were dead, too. I didn’t care for the feeling.”

“Well, lad.” Hollis gave me a broken smile. “We’ve no worries about it now. You said the two bastards are where they belong?”

I let him try his legs. He eased past me, both hands on the downslope wall as he worked his way up the stairs into the fun-house tilt of the main cabin.

Hollis took a long moment to survey the damage. He shrugged. “Not so bad as all that.”

He made his slow way through the cabin. When he looked out the sliding glass door to the cockpit, he stopped short.

After a moment he turned back to me. “Alec?”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. I sat on a bench without bothering to clear the broken trash and papers off it.

He opened the door and looked down at Alec’s corpse and the charnel mess of the cockpit floor. The swarm of flies sounded like it had doubled in number.

“Where’s Boone?” Hollis said.

“Ten yards off the stern.”

Hollis paused and then carefully circled the high edge of the cockpit, holding on to the rail to keep from stumbling into the worst of it. He looked over the transom and down to the beach. The tide was going out, I knew. I wondered how much of Boone would be covered in sand by now.

Finally Hollis turned around and came back into the cabin. He closed the door and managed to get himself into the captain’s chair at the interior controls.

“And the day’s not half over yet,” he said.

“Maybe the island will sink.” I was very thirsty. I got up and lurched back down the crooked steps to the galley. Some of the cabinets hadn’t been latched and had swung open during the
Francesca
’s crash into the island. The sinks and counters and floor of the tiny alcove were dusted with a mixture of ground coffee and Quaker Oats.

In the icebox I found a six-pack of plastic water bottles and brought them back up to the cabin. Hollis was leaning forward in the chair, dabbing at his mouth.

“My tooth’s fucking broken,” he said.

I handed him one of the bottles. “Let this warm up before you take a swig, or you’ll really feel it.”

“I think the occasion calls for something stronger.” He got up and went to the liquor cabinet. “Put something on your shoulder. You’re making a butcher’s block of the place.”

He was right. Alec had torn a quarter-size chunk out of my deltoid with the fishing gaff. I had forgotten. The rest of my body was making enough thudding noise to drown the jangling sting of blood seeping out. There were little notes of it dotting the carpeted cabin floor.

I searched through the debris around the room and found two T-shirts, one dark blue and one bright orange with a faded stencil of a mermaid on it. Both shirts looked older than I was. I folded the orange one into a thick square and poured half of one of the bottles of water on it. I put the square on my shoulder. The trickles of water carved little canyons down my side through the layer of grime and sand. I put the blue T-shirt on over the makeshift bandage to hold it in place.

I downed the rest of the bottle of water and then another. A sugary cloud of liquor fumes wafted over from the cabinet that Hollis was gingerly poking through. “Anything survive?” I said.

“Not unless you have an unquenchable thirst for club soda. Jesus, why did I ever buy that?”

“Hollis, do you have a scuba tank? A full one.”

“Hmm? Yeah, of course. I keep the gear on board, in case the anchor rope snags on something. It’s been a while since I’ve checked it.” He stopped and looked up at me. “You going after the diamonds?”

I nodded. He hurried back to the stern of the boat, toward the engine room.

The image of the black hexagonal tubes spiraling out of sight into the ocean clouded every other thought. I’d let the bundle go in thirty feet of water, not far from the drop-off that fell ten times that depth to the floor of the strait. One storm, one surging current, and they’d be gone forever.

And I wanted to see the diamonds for myself. See what Dono had risked so much for.

See what had made him call me home.

“At least he can rest now,” I said out loud as Hollis came stumbling back to the stairs, treading uphill against the tilt of the cabin. A black rubber diving mask and a regulator set were draped around his neck. He dragged what looked like a stainless-steel tank up the steps toward me.

“You buy all that from Captain Nemo himself?” I said.

“What? Oh, funny man. It’s old, but it fucking well works. What was that you were mumbling as I came in?”