The Water Keeper(50)

Both the sound of the shot and the speed with which I moved stunned little Napoleon, who paused. Asking himself who I thought I was. His hesitation gave me the second I needed to slide in underneath and hip-toss him overboard. This dramatic movement brought the two circus bears running, and they weren’t as stupid.

When the first charged me, I slid the glass door more toward the closed position. With as much mass as he was carrying, it was tough to slow down, so his head went through the glass—which was good for me and not so good for him. While he bled across the aft deck and cussed my entire lineage, starting with my mother, the remaining muscle, who looked more like a block of granite than a human, saw that the commotion had gained the attention of some deckhands walking our direction. Figuring gunplay was not wise, he pulled a knife.

I hate knives.

Almost as much as guns.

Sixty seconds later, we were still standing. I was bleeding, but he was both bleeding and broken. I finally shattered his left knee, he dropped the knife, and I hopped off the aft deck and onto the boardwalk where Summer waited. Shaking. Sirens sounded in the distance. Incidentally, the man I threw overboard had not landed in the water. He’d landed on a smaller boat. Somewhere between the T-top and the polling platform. He had yet to move, but judging from the twisted look of his legs, plus the unnatural sight of bone sticking through his pant leg, moving wouldn’t be fun.

The whole mess would be reported. If we weren’t on their radar before, we were certainly on it now.

I grabbed Summer’s hand and started to return up the dock when we saw that our four friends had driven a golf cart. Which we stole. The last thing I wanted was for any of them to see us getting into Gone Fiction, so I drove past the dock house, under the nose of the harbormaster, and out into the parking lot while Summer clutched both the tool bag and me. We crossed Lakeshore Drive, sped through another parking lot, and abandoned the cart next to the fence, which Summer hopped and I fell over. I made it through the grass and into Gone Fiction about the time my adrenaline dump ended.

Over the last few minutes, I’d paid little attention to my body, but apparently the guy with the knife had been a surgeon in a former life. I was swiss cheese, bleeding everywhere. I cranked the engine, turned the wheel, and we pulled out of the cul-de-sac and back under US1. A glance behind us showed no one, but I had to assume someone was watching us leave.

Fortunately, the marina had been positioned at the end of a no-wake zone, so I put Gone Fiction up on plane—and only then took a look at myself. He had cut me six times that I could count, and I wasn’t sure about my back. The deck of Gone Fiction was running red. Summer was about to hyperventilate when I asked her to hold pressure on two gushers as we made our way north.

In the delirium of moments of high stress, I often focus on the comical. I can’t explain that, but it’s how my body deals with stress. As Summer held pressure on my wounds, I had an odd sensation that she was playing whack-a-mole. Every time she stopped the bleeding at one spot, it would surface at another.

We passed under PGA Boulevard and around Seminole Marina and then wound our way a few miles north to the Jupiter Yacht Club and Best Western Intracoastal Inn. I pulled on my Gore-Tex rain jacket so I wouldn’t scare people, and we walked to the office. Summer paid, got two room keys, and, carrying my first aid kit, led me to a room facing the Intracoastal. Had I not been leaking like a sieve, it would have been a nice room. We could step out our door and right into the IC.





Chapter 21


Standing in the shower, I pulled off my jacket and shirt and let the warm water wash the red off me while Summer found the source of each wound. Then she began pouring hydrogen peroxide on my hands, forearms, biceps, and chest. Evidently I had more than six cuts. When I turned my back to her, she gasped, covered her mouth, and recoiled in both horror and surprise.

In the several days we’d known each other, she’d never seen me without a shirt. I had some explaining to do.

She was crying, so I turned and held her hands with mine while I bled into the drain.

Her eyes were darting, tears were falling, and she was shaking her head slowly from side to side. On the verge of cracking. I cupped her hands in mine, took the bloody rag from her, and said, “Hey.”

She looked at me, but she wasn’t really looking.

“It would be really nice, before I bleed to death in this hotel room, if you could help me out.”

Her eyes were wide and she made no response.

“If I turn back around, do you think you could try to stop the bleeding?”

She bit her lip and nodded. When I turned, she sucked in another involuntary breath of air and attempted to compose herself. After a moment, I felt her touching my back. Moving from point of pain to point of pain. “Did I do this?”

I shook my head and smiled. “No, the guy with the knife did.” I rinsed the rag and handed it to her. She whispered, “And the scars?”

A forced laugh. “They were there before. It’s the nature of a scar.”

She washed over them with the rag. “What caused them?”

I weighed my head side to side, trying to decide how to answer. “Remember that price we were talking about?”

She nodded, slowly touching each of the scars. “But . . . ?”

I spoke slowly. “Bullets . . . exiting my body.”

I could feel her fingers tracing the lines on my back. “And . . . the tattoos?”