Bait: A Novel (12 page)

“Kenny!”
screamed Nash.

Felix and Ginger saw only ripples circling out from where Kenny went down. They waited, frantically looking for any sign of boy or shark. Suddenly, a third of Kenny’s body shot out of the water, his mouth agape in a silent scream, sucking in needed air. His left arm was gone, severed below the elbow, blood ejaculating from a ragged stump and reddening the sea around him. Kenny’s eyes, wide and terrified, fell on the drapes of serrated flesh hanging from what was left of his arm. Skin and sinew, muscle and bone, all washed clean, looking like something displayed in a butcher’s window. Kenny’s screams grew hoarse.

“Help me, for Christ’s sake!”

Nash bared teeth. The sight of the kid begging in the water tore at his heart. He wanted more than anything to go back, but a rescue attempt was suicide with the sharks encircling and Kenny reduced to a piece of profusely bleeding bait. More splashing sounds came—from what, Nash didn’t see—but it made the decision for him to abandon the boy for good. As he put more distance between them, Kenny’s pitiful cries became enraged.

“Don’t leave me, you fuck!”

Nash looked back one last time, tears in his eyes. Kenny was trying to paddle after them using his ravaged stump, splashing and dipping in the water like a panicked pup, breath coming in high-pitched wheezes. His mouth hung in an upturned crescent, whitened lips trembling. Nash could see it in the boy’s eyes, the realization that his time was up.

“I’m so fucking sorry,” Nash sobbed.

Kenny shut his eyes and thrashed blindly, streaming tears obsolete in the seawater. Nearby, Felix and Ginger watched helplessly, unable to bring themselves to aid the young man. Another splash nearby, a white-tipped fin glimpsed between the waves.

“Nash, we gotta go,” said Felix. “Right fucking now—”

His lips trembled, unable to form more words. The tiger shark came again. The tip of its fin cut toward Kenny, quickly climbing to full height before the shark’s back broke the surface. It raced for him, the sudden speed astonishing before it raised its snout above the water in a topside assault. From the side profile, Nash saw one jet-black eye roll back as a protective layer of white flesh slid over it. Jaws opened to their apex before clamping onto Kenny’s shoulder, sinking multiple rows of sickle-shaped teeth into his flesh, penetrating to bone. Kenny’s cry of pain barely registered as the shark’s weight pushed him under. The others waited as long as they dared, hoping he would resurface again. He did not.

“Kenny?” Ginger said, searching the waves in shock. “Sweetheart?”

Loud cheers came from the yacht. Two of the figures pumped fists in the air, while the others swigged from bottles in their hands.

“We got company,” Felix said, his eyes locking on something new.

Two smaller fins broke the surface in a succession of quick thrashes above the blood-clouded spot. Oceanic white-tipped sharks had arrived, drawn by their ability to smell a single drop of blood in the water from over a football field away, and they wanted in on the action. A third fin of the same species joined, but suddenly veered away, rushing through the water as the much larger tiger chased it off.

“Kenny’s a goner,” Nash said. “Nothing we can do for him now.”

Ginger shook her head, bewildered. “We can’t leave him out here, he needs us—”

Nash shook her fiercely. “Snap out of it. He’s fucking fish food now and we’ll be next if we stay here another second.”

“But, Kenny—”

The slap he delivered across her cheek returned Ginger to her senses. They resumed their desperate swim, bloody water splashing tumultuously behind them as fins and tails lashed the surface, tiger and white-tips fighting over the fresh kill. Felix looked back and saw something pink and ripped float to the surface, where it bobbed for a few seconds before being rammed by a gray torpedo nose and taken back under.

“Swim faster!” he shouted. “It’s a feeding frenzy back there!”

They clawed the water until their muscles burned, the last hundred yards threatening to break them. Hoots and jeers sounded from the nearby yacht. Nash dared not look back, dared not even open his eyes as he swam. As they neared the beach Felix stopped long enough to check the depth, his toes skimming the bottom. In another six strokes he was able to stand in four feet of water, less than thirty yards from the shore. A wide, giddy grin split his face.

“It’s shallow!” he cried. “We’re safe.”

Ginger and Nash checked for themselves, both letting out a hysterical laugh as their feet touched down on the sandy bottom.

“We made it,” Felix laughed. “We—”

Felix’s grin fell away. He pointed a finger in the direction they had come. Nash and Ginger turned to see a white-tipped fin cruising toward them, the shallow water not deterring its pursuit one iota.

“Get to shore.”

The group half ran, half swam toward the beach. Nash could feel the shark gaining on him with every struggling lurch he took through the shallows. Small waves pushed at his back, but didn’t seem to help him forward. In three feet of water he looked over his shoulder, eyes connecting with the dorsal fin of the determined hunter, still advancing despite the decreasing depth.

“He’s still coming!” Nash yelled. “Felix, watch out!”

Felix stumbled and fell into the water with a splash. Nash went to him, grabbing his arm and helping him to his feet. The extra seconds counted against them. The shark was too close.

“We’ve run out of road,” Felix panted.

He rose to full height, water lapping against his stomach, fists at the ready. Nash decided to keep the promise he’d made and held his position. The white-tip closed in, racing through the shallows with a sudden burst of speed, snout targeting Nash specifically. Instinctively, he grabbed for it as it lunged, palm forcing snout upward as the shark’s weight pushed him back. Nash held on, staring in terror at what was in his grip. Beady eyes rolled blindly. Jaws snapped and body thrashed. Hundreds of teeth, designed to shred flesh, came within inches of Nash’s face.

“Get this thing off of me!”

In an instant Felix brought a heavy fist down on the shark’s right eye, clobbering it with enough force to knock it sideways. The white-tip jarred in the water and froze, momentarily stunned. Felix stepped forward and tried to land another, but the beast came to, firing itself away with a swish of its tail, its refracted image disappearing under the waves.

As soon as Nash and Felix lost sight of it they made for the beach. Ginger and Maria were already collapsed on the shore, waves washing against their legs. Maria vomited into the surf. Ginger sobbed, beating the beach with a fist, dirty matted hair strung across her face. The men dropped to their knees beside the women. Nash planted his face into the wet sand and kissed it. He turned caked lips toward Felix and forced a smile.

“Teamwork,” he said, panting. “What did I tell you?”

Felix couldn’t catch his breath. He gave a nod of approval, offering a thumb in the air and a pat on Nash’s back.

“Teamwork,” Ginger snarled. “I was just thinking about that.”

Maria looked up, eyes glassy, string of saliva hanging from her chin. Ginger lunged, her full weight crashing into the smaller woman and sending her sprawling. In a flash she was straddling her, pulling hair and scratching skin.

“You made a
sacrifice
out of that poor boy, you cunt!”

Ginger’s fingernails raked over Maria’s cheek as she tried to gouge her eyes. Screams and Spanish filled the air. Felix pulled the women apart and hauled them to their feet. He let Ginger go, but held on to Maria.

“Here’s what we’re going to do, ladies,” Felix started, voice rising. “We’re the ones who made it. So, we’re gonna open that trunk, divide up some drugs, and fucking celebrate. We’re gonna enjoy our share, and Tal’s share, and Kenny’s share, and . . .”

He turned a wry smile on Nash and Ginger, which fast became a sneer. They barely saw the punch that Felix delivered to Maria’s jaw. She dropped like a stone and hit the beach, out cold, fresh blood in her mouth. Felix watched it dribble from her open lips onto the sand.

“And we’re gonna enjoy
that
bitch’s share too.”

A clamor of claps and cheers arose, drawing their attention out to the water. The yacht had dropped anchor a couple hundred yards from the island, the four figures on the bow applauding and waving. Nash noticed one of them holding what looked like a video camera.

“Think you were right, Ginger. We are on
Candid Camera
.”

Ginger saw it too. “Sick fucks.”

Felix extended his middle finger, holding it high for them to see. Laughs and boos exploded from the boat, chiding his gesture.

“Go to hell, you limp-dick bastards!” Ginger shouted.

More jeers crossed the water. Nash and Felix sank to the sand, nursing the aches in their bodies, heaving air into overworked lungs. Adrenaline quickly drained from their systems. Withdrawal symptoms filled the space. Ginger rolled Maria into a position where she wouldn’t choke on her own blood. After a minute Felix staggered to his feet.

“How about we break out the party favors?”

He trudged up the beach toward the second box lying on the sand, Nash and Ginger hounding him the whole way, heroin the only thing on their minds. Felix unlatched the trunk and flipped the lid open to reveal a scene similar to the first box. He rummaged inside, pushing past the food and water until he found a small metal container. He lifted it out, shaky hands gripping it tight.

“Open it already,” Ginger pressed.

They huddled together, holding their breath with pained anticipation. Felix removed the lid, exposing a baggie of fine white powder and several thin metal straws. Nash’s heart sank a little at the sight. He’d expected a different modus operandi: needles, spoons, a lighter. Injecting was invariably better than snorting, but they weren’t being given the choice.

“Fuck, I guess we’re not cooking, then.”

“They wouldn’t trust us for a second with an open flame,” Felix said. “No signal fires, remember?”

Nash remembered. The yacht men were adamant about covering all bases for their little game. Felix lifted the baggie out and discovered a plain white envelope underneath. He tossed it back in the box without opening it, uninterested in its contents.

“Let’s get our snort on.”

Felix shut the lid of the trunk and prepared the dope on the flat of it, pouring out the heroin and dividing it into three piles. There was more of the stuff than they’d anticipated, a hell of a hit for each of them. Ginger and Nash each drew a straw from the container and waited for Felix to finish. He finally raised his eyes to those of his companions, a quivering smile beckoning them closer. The little mounds of pale dust hypnotized them. They stared, wide-eyed and grinning as they scratched at their skin.

“Dig in,” Felix whispered.

They dropped to their knees around the trunk and bent over their allotted piles, straws jammed up nostrils, sucking opiate powder into nasal cavities. They felt a mule’s kick the moment the drug dusted membranes.

“Oh, my God,” Nash gasped.

The note on the previous island hadn’t lied. The junk was the finest he’d ever consumed. Nash fell back onto the sand, feeling a cool worm twist and turn through his gray matter. The heroin’s rush washed every one of his cares away. It was heaven.

T
hey looked to the heavens where the first stars of emerging night glinted. Such beauty was rare, a horizon of embers shimmering on the sea, the setting sun the color of backlit blood. When dusk came to the Keys, prime feeding time came with it. The sharks would be back on the hunt soon if not already. Greer sat in a deck chair on the bow of the yacht, puffing a Cuban cigar and watching the four bodies on the beach through a pair of binoculars. The stranded had been indulging in their prize for hours now, writhing and squirming on the sand like unearthed worms, too high to care about the sunburns covering their bodies. Even Maria, recovered from Felix’s punch, had been allowed to sample some leftovers from the others.

Without taking his eyes from the lens, Greer grabbed a bottle of beer from the deck and took a swig, cigar still locked in the corner of his mouth. An amber trickle escaped his lips, dribbling past a chin of mottled skin once melted by white phosphorus. He wiped away the line of liquid with a grunt.

“Sharks aren’t on the ball,” he grumbled. “We should have lost two today.”

Buchanan leaned against the rail beside him, picking at a plate of steak and rice, watching the beach with mild interest.

“Mr. Jones last night makes up for it,” he said between mouthfuls. “I didn’t realize he was so starved when we picked him up. He went downhill so fast, kinda jumped the gun.”

“Ah, you never know with these maggots.”

Buchanan nodded. “Still, I wish I’d seen that coming. We could have gotten great footage from it. It looked like he really got torn apart out there.”

“Yeah,” said Greer. “What a waste.”

“Not for me.”

Buchanan’s smug smile annoyed Greer. Tallahassee Jones’s unexpected death early in the proceedings favored the odds that Buchanan had put his money on. A correct first pick paid out an automatic thousand-dollar bonus from the pool. Greer was now tied with him in light of Kenny’s demise, whom he had correctly selected as the second fatality. Neither of them had picked two for two so far, both betting that one of the women would have died in the early stages. Turk and Reposo were fishing at the stern of the yacht, the current winner and loser respectively. Reposo was zero for two, neither the heavyset Felix nor the waif-thin Ginger coming up a corpse. Turk led the group. Both his picks had turned out perfect.

“That feeding frenzy toward the end should have snagged another body,” said Greer. “I can’t believe they escaped that. At least
four
sharks picked up their scent, for Christ’s sake.”

“That was a close call in the shallows,” replied Buchanan. “I tell ya, that Felix must have been one hell of a boxer back in his day.”

“You would know.” Greer chuckled. “I hear he got a punch over on you a few days ago.”

“That was dumb luck,” Buchanan replied. “And he barely grazed me.”

“Sure, sure,” Greer said with a smirk and looked to the beach again. “They’ve all got some fight in them, I’ll give them that. And they’re trying to stick together out there. That’s . . . unusual.”

Greer thought about the camaraderie that was starting to grow among the stranded. Violence and despair were bringing them together, as they had done with him and others many times before. His mind drifted. Memories came, of gunfire and explosions, of orders shouted and orders followed. Memories of men he was responsible for taken from him for all the wrong reasons. For years he’d been up to his eyeballs in drug interdiction operations, military sanctioned and CIA backed, combing the Afghan countryside for poppy crops and makeshift production facilities that in turn funded Taliban insurgents and terrorist cells.
Poisoning the wells
was how his superiors described his job.
Fucking them from behind
was how Greer viewed it. Hacking at the snake’s tail was supposedly easier than trying to cut the head off, but the danger didn’t diminish much. Given the opportunity, a snake’s strike was swift and sure from any angle.

What a waste,
Greer thought.

“Sir?”

He remembered trying to put Sergeant Sonnen’s head back together, split above the eyebrow by a sniper’s bullet a moment after Greer had ordered him to check a corner. He remembered the mortar round that came down on his squad a week later, shredding Specialist Wright’s body apart and leaving the rest of them untouched for some reason. He remembered Specialist Craddock disappearing in an IED explosion the following day. The only part of him they’d located afterward was a combat boot, foot still inside. Greer remembered the loss of each and every man who had ever been under his command. The ones he’d risked his own neck to save he remembered even better, dragging them injured and bleeding from an ambushed convoy to safety as machine-gun fire sprayed their position. Three of them were the very men who shared the boat with him now, and each would lay down his life for him. War was indiscriminate, but Greer was not. His men were never expendable, regardless of the “big picture” that the higher ranks loved to refer to whenever discussing the loss of his highly trained soldiers on the battlefield.

What a terrible waste.

And then there was Pike, the closest thing to a brother Greer had ever known. Sergeant Major Pike, Greer’s second in command since the start of the war, a career soldier who saved his captain’s life on more than one occasion, an operator who after years of brutal efficiency began to have trouble coming to terms with his actions, a man who returned home after his last tour and hit the bottle hard.

Two weeks after landing back in Miami on leave, Pike found himself in a dive bar in Opa-locka, downing cheap beer until he was slurring his speech and falling off his stool. At closing he was tossed out onto the street, where he staggered back and forth until a couple of addicts found and cornered him. They demanded his wallet, watch, wedding ring, even his dog tags. Sober, Pike could have killed both of them in seconds with his bare hands, but inebriated he was no match for two opponents. Still, he tried to fight his muggers off. They dragged him into an alley and beat him to death for his efforts.

After Greer beat the bar manager within an inch of his life for the security cam footage, he’d found the pawn shop where Pike’s effects had been fenced. It only took the severing of one finger before the shop owner gave up the sellers. The information led Greer to a shoddy vacant apartment strewn with drug paraphernalia. He waited, and when the junkies responsible for Pike’s death returned to cook up a score, Greer took his silenced Glock and put a .45 hollow-point in each of their stomachs to ensure a slow, agonizing death. With a framing hammer, he broke both of their jaws so they could not scream for help. Then he sat and watched them for some time as they tried to crawl away, punctured guts leaving blood trails on the filthy linoleum. He watched, ignoring their incoherent moans for mercy, until their bodies stilled, knowing that he’d done something right, something just.

“Captain?”

And when a crack whore had unexpectedly hammered on the junkies’ apartment door, demanding drugs and refusing to leave, Greer invited her inside and snapped her neck.

“Captain Greer?”

Greer snapped out of it. “Sorry, Sergeant, what did you say?”

“I was wondering which of our contacts you think is ready for retirement, once we get back to Miami.”

“You got an opinion on that?”

Buchanan nodded. “I think that Catraz guy is wasting our time now. I’m sure we can get more out of Curtis Moffat if we put the squeeze on him.”

“I agree.”

Greer took a heavy drag on his cigar and peered across the channel of water he and his men affectionately called “the Killing Lanes.” His eyes rested on a dark fin cutting through the shallows. It sailed parallel to the nearby beach, knowing the prey that had escaped it earlier was now just beyond reach. Soon another fin appeared. They were patrolling, waiting for another opportunity.

“Think these scabs will be as eager to continue after today?” Buchanan asked, stifling a yawn.

“Once that heroin gets its claws in them, they’ll be more inclined,” Greer replied. “They always deliver during the second leg.”

Greer finished off his beer. His hand slipped to his hip and patted the grip of the army-issue M11 holstered there, the gun that never left his side. Greer was not an emotional man, but the smile on his face implied a kind of gleeful satisfaction. He raised his binoculars again to look over the stranded on the beach, wondering who would be the last of the lot.

“I like it when it gets down to one,” he said. “Go get some rest, Sergeant. I’ll take first watch of the night.”