The Water Keeper(94)

I had climbed to my feet and was on the way to help when a single gunshot sounded. Gunner tumbled to the floor, only to try to rise but then fall again. One leg was limp, cocked at a weird angle, and he winced and fell over when he tried to place weight on it. When he stood up a third time, his white chest was painted red. He tried to crawl his way over to me but couldn’t. The man stood and kicked Gunner’s body, then his pistol flashed again, sending something piercing hot into my hip.

Looking at the man, I had a singular thought: You killed my dog.

Two seconds later, I stepped over the man, stared down at Gunner’s unmoving body, and moved farther inside toward the main deck lounge, where three men were coming toward me. I wasn’t in the mood for conversation, so our interaction was short. Having stepped over them, I climbed the spiral staircase up one level to the bridge-deck lounge, finding two more men. After another short conversation, I kicked open the ship’s office door, tripped over a sixth man, and ran into the bridge, which was deserted because of the fire. Either the fire or the tank explosion had blown out the front glass, and a gentle breeze of salt spray cooled my face—which suggested I might have earned some burns from the blast.

I climbed to the top floor and onto the owner’s-deck lounge, where I was met by a large man with an enormous belly and a foul mouth wearing only his underwear. As he screamed at me, I almost laughed at the enormous tattoo of a hundred-dollar bill across his hairy chest. Below the bill, the words “Cash Money” had been tattooed in script. I laid him out, used the curtain cords to hog-tie him, and was able to learn that Cash Money was a frequent customer from Cuba. Owned an oil company. He offered me a lot of money to cut him loose. I told him to hush or I’d cut off his masculinity. When he didn’t hush, I broke his jaw.

A young girl lay on the bed, unconscious but breathing. I pulled an ax off the wall and cut through the Honduran mahogany doors and into the larger stateroom where I found another man holding a knife to another girl’s throat. He was skinny, not dressed, his face smeared with white powder, and he was screaming nonsense.

The amazing thing about the cerebral cortex is how quickly and immediately it controls our movements. It’s the area of our body where we think something and our body moves as a result of that thought. It’s also amazing how quickly it ceases to function when a hard copper object passes through it traveling over three thousand feet per second. With his lights turned out, he dropped the knife and let go of the girl, who stood screaming at the top of her lungs.

Beneath us, Pluto rocked forward suddenly, telling me she was taking on more water than I’d initially thought. She was, in fact, sinking. That told me I had only moments to find Summer, Angel, and anyone else held here against their will, and get off this thing before we all drowned. In the air, I smelled smoke, suggesting the fire had restarted, probably in the engine room because something had disabled the sprinklers. I descended the stairs and turned aft into the engine room, but the bottom half was flooded and the top half was engulfed in flames and the smell of burning diesel fuel, so I waded fore through waist-deep water into the crew cabins, past some sort of prayer shrine, and toward the door of the anchor room, where the water had turned red.

And there I found Summer.

I was in the process of reaching for her when I felt the familiar impact of the sledgehammer lifting and slamming me into the wall in front of me. I tried to lift myself off the floor, but whoever had just shot me in the back did so again. This time the bullet missed the plate but passed back to front through my shoulder—then another passed through the flesh on the outside of my left thigh.

He was coming at me when I heard myself say, “Front sight, front sight, press.” He dropped in a pile in front of me and Summer, who had completely lost her mind. She was alive, awake, and screaming at the top of her lungs.

The water around us had turned red, and I wasn’t sure if I was the cause or something beyond the door. Water poured through the crack beneath the door, proving the room had flooded. I pulled on the latch, but pressure from inside made opening the door impossible. I waded back into the engine room, ducked beneath the flames, and swam to the far side, trying not to breathe the smoke. I lifted a wedge bar off the wall and returned to the anchor hold. I slid the tip in against the lock mechanism and pulled, using my legs as leverage. Or at least one leg. The leg that had been shot wasn’t working right. Fearing her daughter was drowning as I fumbled with the pry bar, Summer stood alongside me and pulled, screaming something incoherent. I felt myself growing faint and knew if I didn’t stop the blood running out of me, I’d bleed out in the bottom of this boat.

With one last effort, I pulled with everything Fingers once had. When the pressure from the inside and my leverage on the outside broke the lock, the door slammed open, pinning Summer and me against the wall until the water levels balanced out. I could hear girls screaming, but the sound was muted by the water. My eyes fell on a scuba tank hanging just inside the door. Next to it hung an assortment of weights and gear, including an underwater spotlight. I checked the regulator, fed my arms through the straps of the tank, clicked on the light, and swam down the stairs leading into the dark belly of the ship.

There I found eleven scared girls in a tight group breathing the last of a trapped air bubble. With a little prompting and a quick comment about the Titanic, we formed a daisy chain, and I led them through the dark water and up the stairs. When they saw the flashing orange emergency lights of the yacht above, the girls swam out and started climbing up the now-inclining keel toward the main-deck lounge. My problem was how to get them off this boat and over to Gone Fiction, which was more than a half mile away. I needed the Tortuga park ranger.