New Year Island (66 page)

• • •

The scuba tank lay, forgotten, where it had fallen yesterday. Camilla stood it upright and dusted off the hoses.

“How does this work?” she asked.

JT rotated the valve at the top. With a slight hiss, the hoses stiffened. He looked at Camilla, a question in his eyes.

She gestured at the mouthpiece. “There’s going to be something wrong with it. Be careful.”

JT held the regulator away from his face and pressed the purge valve. There was a loud hiss as air escaped. He sniffed at the vented gas, then moved the valve closer and did it again. Opening his mouth, he bit down on the mouthpiece.

He took a shallow breath. Then a deeper one.

Speaking through the mouthpiece, his voice was muffled. “Whatever you thought this would prove, you were wrong.”

“It’s working fine?” She sagged in disappointment.

“Tank air always tastes stale,” he said. “I did quite a bit of diving during my training. I should know.”

“I was so certain,” she said. “Let me try.” Taking the mouthpiece from JT, she drew a tentative breath from it, and then another, fuller one. It tasted a little funny. The air seemed normal, but she found the taste strangely familiar. Taking a deep breath, she held it in her lungs.

“I can use it to go get help.” JT took the regulator back and put it in his mouth, breathing deeply. “I’ll stay deep, avoid the sharks.” He giggled.

Camilla sat down hard. Her head buzzed, and her vision darkened around the edges. A ringing noise filled her ears, and she tumbled sideways, catching herself with one hand. She felt like laughing, too. Then she felt alarm.

“Take the mouthpiece out right now,” she said.

“Regulator.” JT giggled again and sat down fast. “It’s called a regulator.”

Camilla grabbed the hose and yanked the regulator out of his mouth.

“Hey,” he protested. He took a few deep lungfuls of air, and his face turned serious. “My head’s spinning.”

She recognized the dry, pasty taste in her mouth now. “That’s nitrous!”

“What?”

“Nitrous oxide. Laughing gas. In college, we did whippets at parties sometimes—you know, those little metal nitrous canisters cooks use in whipped-cream dispensers? They were popular.”

JT was silent, breathing heavily.

She poked him in the chest. “Juan wouldn’t have gotten very far with this tank. If he had actually tried to use it, he would have passed out underwater. Drowned.”

“That’s messed up.”

“Somebody planted this tank on the island for Juan to find. Now, because of it, he’s hurt and Jordan is dead.” She held his eye. “Please come back with me, JT. Juan’s not the one. We need your help, or we’re all going to die.”

“Who do you think it is?” he asked.

“Mason or Brent. It’s got to be.”

“I’m not so sure what a rigged scuba tank proves. Person who did all this is one tricky motherfucker.”

“None of us are going to last long on our own.”

JT shook his head. “I survived five days alone in enemy territory, hunted through the Korengal like an animal, in hundred-and-thirty-degree heat, with a busted arm swollen up like a sausage. This is nothing compared to that. I’ll take my chances.”

T
he sun was setting. Its rays painted the seals with a mellow gold light as they jostled each other on the rocks around Juan. A chilly breeze made him squint.

He stood in front of the pyramid of rocks he had piled over Jordan. The red team’s flag waved above, planted at the head of her grave.

He placed a hand on the cairn and silently bowed his head.

Squeezing his eyes shut, he remembered a long-ago conversation with his father. Juan was in his late teens. They were on the veranda of the summer villa in Cartagena, which overlooked the water. Juan was eagerly awaiting his own departure for Malpelo Island in the morning. He planned to dive with Malpelo’s hammerhead sharks.

Usually, he felt that the less he knew about family business the better. But this particular question had nagged at him for weeks.

“
Discúlpame, papá
,” he said. “What Gaviria says, that we killed his niece…”

“It is of no consequence.” Roberto Martín Antonio y Gabriel lit a cigar and picked up a coca leaf that lay beside the crystal ashtray. A courier had brought the leaf earlier. White fungus coated its underside.

“It is like this.” Roberto jabbed a finger of his cigar hand at the white fuzz on the leaf. “
Fusarium oxysporum.
The
norteamericano
DEA plans to spray our fields with this, César. Our
presidente
—Pastrana, that weak woman—is colluding with them. This fungus rots the leaf from the inside out, leaving the plant vulnerable to insects and other diseases.”

“Perdóname, papá.”
Juan slouched in his chair and looked out over the water, wishing he hadn’t said anything, wishing he were already on the boat, miles away from here. “I don’t understand.”

“Sentimentality is like this fungus. If you let it rule your actions, it will rot you from inside. Your enemies will smell your weakness and take everything from you.”

Juan’s mouth tightened. “But surely, if we are seen to target women and the innocent, then how can we ensure that
mamá
and Constancia…”

Roberto grabbed Juan’s wrist. “This is my fault. When I was your age I was poor, living on the street, fighting to make a name. I built this…” He waved the cigar at the walls around them. “…all of this, from nothing. But you, César, you have always been given everything. I have raised a spoiled playboy who talks to me about the ‘innocent.’”

Roberto leaned toward him, and Juan looked down, wishing he had never spoken.

“Tell me, who among us is innocent? Is this something you have learned from those
chocha
sisters of San Bartolomé I pay to teach you?” Roberto spat on the tile floor of the veranda and looked away.

“All these fine, fancy manners and intellectual
mierda,
and you haven’t learned a thing about how to be a man.”

“
Papá,
if something were to happen to
mamá
or Constancia—”

“Then we would exact vengeance—a terrible vengeance. But we cannot allow fear to make us weak.”

“Keyser Söse…” Juan muttered it under his breath.

“Listen to me, César, instead of mocking the father who loves you. Listen well. The nonstop holiday you live—this endless vacation—will end one day, I promise you. You will be the head of this family after I am gone. We must never,
NEVER
allow sentimentality to prevent us from doing what we must to survive. I will not have a weak son.”

Standing in front of Jordan’s cairn, head still bowed, Juan fought to control his emotions. Sharp pain pierced his chest. He was truly his father’s son: he had destroyed everyone he loved.

He lifted the broken
megalodon
tooth—the pendant his brother Álvaro had given him—from around his neck and laid it on the mounded rocks of Jordan’s grave. She had never learned to hold a part of herself back. Her ability to manipulate others had always protected her. Confident in her own dominance, she had approached her world with a childlike innocence. She had opened her heart to him, and he had killed her for it. Better that, instead, he had never been born.

The back of Juan’s neck prickled in warning. He spun around and dropped into a crouch, raising his hands.

Veronica had already managed to get quite close. She hunched ten yards away. Seeing her quarry had spotted her, she straightened up and stepped closer. Juan matched her pace with a backward step toward the water.

“Where’s Natalie?” she asked. Her large, pale eyes glowed luminous orange in the dying light of sunset. “I expected to find her with you.”

Juan’s pulse quickened, sending a stabbing throb through his side. “How long has she been gone?”

“I told her it’s not safe around here.” Veronica’s eyes gleamed like a predator’s as she moved toward him, but her voice held sad resignation. “She wouldn’t listen to me. She’s an adult, Juan. I can’t make her do anything.”

Juan stepped backward, into the water. “Julian is dead. One of
us
set this all up.”

“I figured as much,” she said.

“Who do you think did this?”

She stopped for a moment and tilted her head to the side, regarding him with her icy cobra’s gaze.

“I don’t know. Maybe Mason. He was a banker, and money clearly isn’t an issue for whoever put this circus together.”

“What about JT?”

She snorted. “I can’t see it. He’s a big, frightened kid, underneath all that tough-guy posturing. He’s hiding, afraid of his own shadow right now, Juan…”

She licked her teeth. “…scared shitless.”

Veronica’s disturbing gaze crawled over his face. Her breathing sped up. “But we both know there’s someone else here with that kind of money; I’m looking at him right now.”

Her pupils flared visibly.

“Did
you
take Natalie? Maybe the first time, you brought her back just to fuck with us.”

Waist-deep in the water now, Juan shook his head. “I don’t have that money anymore. I didn’t want it; it was filth. I took only what I needed to escape, and when I came to California I got rid of that, too. Donated it to drug rehab programs.”

“Poor Natalie.” Veronica stood at the waterline, watching him intently. “She was so infatuated with you, Juan. I tried to tell her, but she didn’t listen. Tried to tell her what you were really like.”

Juan winced. “Come any closer and I’ll drown you.”

Veronica stopped advancing.

“You know what’s weird?” she said. “Travis’s body is gone.”

“Could he have still been alive?”

Her small, throaty laugh chilled him. “No chance. You didn’t see him, did you? I broke his hyoid bone, Juan. I
crushed
his trachea. He was dead before he hit the floor; he just hadn’t realized it yet. And then I sent the scalpel through his carotid artery.”

She shook her head. “No, somebody took him, which is kind of creepy if you ask me. But it’s not really all that important.”

The sunset reflected in her luminous irises, its glow now fading to red. Her tongue flicked her upper teeth.

“Sooner or later, I’ll find out which one of you took Natalie, Juan…”

Veronica’s grin was terrifying.

“…or maybe I never will. In the end, it probably doesn’t matter. I can still make sure that person doesn’t leave this island alive.”

With a last lingering look, she turned away.

Standing in the waist-deep water, Juan watched her retreat.

Saturday: December 29, 2012

C
amilla squatted beside Dmitry on the beach, looking at the four logs left over from the seal barricade. Dmitry had pushed them into an eight-foot-by-three-foot rectangle. He was shirtless, his broad back running sweat.

“A raft,” she said.

He swiped a forearm across his forehead and nodded.

“
Da.
But this is no good. We need more logs. Need to take them from barricade, but that crazy woman says she kill me if I try.”

She inspected the raft. It looked flimsy. It needed more logs, or it wouldn’t support even one person’s weight without rolling.

“So how will you finish it?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He raised his eyebrows and grinned crookedly at her. “Maybe tomorrow something changes; maybe not. This…” He waved a hand at the raft. “It is something to do, instead of sitting and waiting for somebody to kill me.”

Camilla smiled.

“We can use the chains to tie it together,” she said. “I’ll go get them.”

She pushed her hair behind her ear.

“Let me help.”

Sunday: December 30, 2012

M
orning. Mason was fairly sure it was December thirtieth. The days were blurring by. The island’s remaining inhabitants had retreated to their separate corners and were all doing the same thing, it seemed: nothing much. Resting, operating at reduced levels of physical activity to conserve their energy. He grinned, thinking about it. It was probably instinctive behavior.

For survivor types, anyway.

Mason himself spent long hours each day just sitting or lying on the beach in the meager shade provided by the bluffs. He stared at the mainland, beckoning from across the wave-churned channel, so tantalizingly close. Watching the far shore each day, his normally overactive mind blank, the hours would pass in what seemed to be minutes. The clouds would crawl silently across the sky and the teeming colonies of seals and hopping birds would churn on the beaches around him, until the shadows lengthened and the air grew cold. Even in his low-energy meditative state, Mason’s eyes were always alert for signs of human activity across the channel. But only black elephant seals moved on the distant beaches.

He found it hard to believe they had been on the island for only ten days. It seemed much longer, civilized life a fading, distant memory. Now, limping out of the station building to greet the morning, he raised his face to the sun. Despite the pain in his knee and not being able to sleep for more than an hour at a time, he felt refreshed. His original plan had been to stay awake all night again. But in the end he figured it wasn’t worth it. With his knee in the shape it was in, his odds of surviving another confrontation were not great. If anyone was going to come for him in the night, at least he would be better rested when they did.

Mason had slept with the bear spray hugged to his chest, though. A calculated risk was one thing; trusting oneself fully to the whims of fate was another.

Something near his feet caught his eye, and he grinned in surprise. A plastic jug of water sat in front of his door. It was intact and appeared to be full. He was very thirsty. He lowered himself, carefully sliding his left leg along the ground to avoid bending the damaged knee, and unscrewed the cap.

Raising the jug, he drank. The water tasted clean, refreshing. He screwed the cap back on and stood with awkward movements. Carrying the jug, he limped up the scattered boardwalk, passing the broken catchment basin and the cistern where Julian’s body lay.