Bait: A Novel (14 page)

F
elix was lost in thought as he sat and watched the men on the boat. Ginger and Nash huddled together, waiting and worrying with full stomachs and frayed nerves. Maria stayed well away from everyone, unwelcome and unhappy. She hadn’t said one word to them since awakening, though they’d eventually allowed her to eat what food they couldn’t finish. Felix cupped a hand over his eyes and gauged the distance to the next island, wondering where the sharks were more likely to lurk.

“What are you thinking?” Nash asked.

Felix cast a glance at Maria. “You don’t want to know.”

“Think we’ll make it?”

“We’ll make it.”

Ginger grunted. “And if we don’t?”

Felix raised an eyebrow. “Any regrets?”

“Oh, plenty.”

“Yeah? What was your biggest?”

The question seemed to punch Ginger in the gut. Her demeanor soured more. She didn’t reply. Felix turned to her and cocked his head.

“Care to share, honey?”

“Maybe some other time.”

“All we got is time right now.”

Ginger’s lip quivered. She allowed her hair to fall in her face so her companions would not see the tears that were welling up. Felix felt bad, knowing he’d scratched the surface of something, but a confession seemed timely. He breathed deep, taking in the oxygen needed to lift a certain weight off his chest.

“I killed a guy once,” he confessed. “That is my biggest regret.”

Ginger looked up, brushing her hair away to reveal tear tracks running down each cheek. Her face was a strange mix of relief and anguish.

“Tell me about it,” she said. “Please.”

Felix sighed and drew circles in the sand with a finger, letting his dreadlocks hang to hide his face. Nash and Ginger stared at him, but he wouldn’t look at either of them.

“Wasn’t completely my fault,” he said, voice strained. “I was young and stupid. Twenty-two years old and out to do some damage.”

“What happened?” Nash asked.

Felix didn’t speak for a while. He simply sat and mulled over the worst memory in his collection, motionless except for the breeze that swayed his matted hair. Just when Nash thought he might have turned to stone, the man’s lips began moving.

“I was twenty-two years old,” he repeated. “Twenty-fucking-two with a knack for fighting that I’d built up from a bad childhood and even worse adolescence. I had too much to be angry about, and what did they go and do? They put me in a goddamn boxing ring and told me to take out all my rage on the guy in the opposite corner.”

“You killed a guy in the ring?”

The flinch was slight, but Nash saw it. The words bit Felix, just as they had gnawed at him every single day of his life since the fateful one.

“I beat Tommy ‘the Sweeney’ Todd to death in a clusterfuck of a fight,” Felix said. “Some Limey bastard, tough as nails with a cocky mouth and a great right hook. He came over for an exhibition match and I sent him home in a body bag.”

Nash and Ginger gawked at Felix, mouths unable to respond, minds processing the revelation. Felix peeked at them through his dangling hair, then closed his eyes and hung his head even lower.

“It happened in the eighth round. Tommy had gone toe-to-toe with me every second of the fight, but I’d landed a couple of stunners in the fourth and sixth and dropped him to the canvas. That damn Englishman beat the count every time.”

“All fighters step into the ring knowing the risks,” Nash said. “Fatalities are a reality of the sport.”

“This one is on me, though. Tommy could have survived it if I hadn’t kept putting him in his place. Stubborn fucker just wouldn’t stay down and the damn ref kept letting him get to his feet.”

Felix’s hands balled into fists and shook as his voice rose. Ginger and Nash scooted back, frightened by the man’s volatility.

“If he’d just stayed the fuck down, all that would’ve been hurt was his pride.”

“Wasn’t your fault,” Nash said. “The fight should have been stopped.”

“But it was my fault,” Felix corrected. “I beat him until he didn’t know where he was anymore. I beat him until the light in his eyes began to go out. Then I beat him some more. I was beating the poor fucker to death and I knew exactly what I was doing the whole time.”

Nash said nothing. Ginger tried to say something comforting, but the words caught in her throat. She mumbled a sentence, none of it coherent.

“I hit the bottle hard after that,” Felix continued. “When that failed to numb me anymore, I graduated to prescription pills and then smack in order to dull my demons.”

“I abandoned my son,” Ginger blurted out, fresh tears coming. “I gave him up for adoption. I let someone take him away from me.”

She dropped her face into her hands and began to sob. The men exchanged glances, unsure of what to say or do. Even Maria looked up from where she sat, edge of her mouth curling with satisfaction at the other woman’s despair. Nash tried to put an arm around Ginger. It was instantly shrugged off.

“Your son?” asked Felix, voice uncharacteristically soft. “What was his name?”

“Justin,” she said. “I named him Justin.”

“And why did you have to let him go?”

“I was only eighteen,” Ginger moaned, drying her tears. “Eighteen and too young and stupid to know what to do with a baby. More than anything I was too fucking selfish to even care. He was such a healthy, happy child. The kind anyone else would think was a blessing, but not me. Oh, no, Ginger had her own life to live, and it wasn’t going to be tied down by the gift of some beautiful baby boy—”

Her throat bucked and she lost her words again. The stone in her chest that had replaced her heart years before was cracked through and through. The confession ground pieces of it into dust, which thickened with her blood into clay. That clay could patch her heart if only she would allow it. If only she could see her son one more time, hold him in her arms for just a moment and whisper to him how sorry she was, then maybe she could find some respite. That was what she wanted, more than heroin, more than anything: just another minute with her son.

She would speak no more of her biggest regret to the others. In the ensuing silence Nash knew it was his turn. He swallowed hard and spoke quietly.

“I took this girl home after a gig once . . . sweet little thing had been giving me the shy eye from the side of the stage all night, and I thought I’d capitalize on it.”

Felix chuckled. “That doesn’t sound too bad.”

“Turned out she was fifteen years old.”

Ginger gave Nash a horrified look and he matched it. He held out his hands to her in apology, guilt quickening his heart.

“I had absolutely no idea,” he said. “She didn’t look that young. She was in a club late at night with a drink in her hand. I thought she’d been carded at the door, figured she was legal.”

Ginger shook her head. “So you took an underage girl home to your bed?”

Nash sighed. “I did more than that. I introduced her to heroin. Gave the poor girl her first taste that night and sent her on her way next morning.”

Felix chewed that over. “And how did that work out for her?”

Nash’s voice was barely a whisper. “She died.”

“Overdose?”

Nash nodded. “About a year later, in some dive motel off the interstate where she’d been turning tricks for money and dope. Someone shot her up and left her alone in a room. Body was there for days before anyone found it.”

He spoke no more, heart twisting in his chest the same as the others. They were beyond fucked up, emotionally wrecked and chemically imbalanced to the point where they were toxic to the hearts and souls of others they came in contact with. Their personal demons had come to roost with the skeletons in their closets, resulting in a rape that produced a broken bastard love-child in each of them. This love-child, born of heroin and regret, needed constant feeding. Sacrifice was the only thing it would eat.

They looked over their shoulders at Maria, wondering what her story was. There was something much darker about her, as if regrets weren’t part of her makeup. The way she had pulled the sharp stone on Kenny and slashed at him without a second thought—it unnerved them all, even Felix. There were certainly skeletons in her closet, and they figured she’d dumped each and every one of them in there.

An idea came to Felix. He gathered himself up and marched into the wooded area in the middle of the island. Ginger and Nash watched with mild interest as he poked around the trees and bushes. He returned a few minutes later with three short, thick sticks and a flat rock.

“What are you doing?” Ginger asked.

“Improvising.”

He took one of the sticks and rubbed its tip vigorously against the rock face at an angle. Soon a point began to form.

“I’m not going back in that water without a weapon.”

“Those are pretty big fish you’re looking to skewer,” Ginger said with a smirk. “It’ll be like sticking a thumbtack in them.”

“Better than nothing,” Nash said. “You saw Felix coldcock that shark near the shore. They don’t like being attacked any more than we do.”

“Not going down without a fight,” Felix said, grinning hellishly. “And if we make them bleed instead of us . . .”

Ginger’s smirk dropped and she nodded. Felix sharpened the end of the first stick to a fine point and handed it to Nash, then set to work on the remaining two. With the makeshift dagger’s tip Nash wrote the word
fuck
over and over in the sand beside him.

“Not going down without a fight. . . .”

“T
hey’ve definitely got some fight in them,” said Greer. “I’m starting to like these scabs.”

Greer and Turk stood on the bow of the yacht, watching the survivors closely with their binoculars, wondering if the next leg of the game might require some motivation. Seeing three out of four moving toward the water with stick daggers in hand gave Greer hope.

“Hey, boys, come take a look.”

Buchanan and Reposo appeared in the cabin doorway and stepped out onto the deck, each holding a beer. In Buchanan’s other hand was his camcorder.

“Let me see,” said Reposo.

Greer handed him the binoculars. Buchanan put down his camera and beer and climbed up into the cockpit of the boat to retrieve something, returning moments later carrying a .50-caliber Barrett M107. He shouldered the sniper rifle and raised the barrel. Defined biceps locked it into place, supporting the weight easily. He used its powerful scope to survey the situation.

“Why is the spic chick staying away from the others?” he asked.

“She’s been avoiding them since the black one knocked her out,” Turk replied. “There’s some serious animosity going on. I think they might do her more harm if she gets too close.”

Turk watched as Maria suddenly began walking toward the other three. There was rigidity in her posture and anger in her stride. Reposo took note.

“Hey, I think there might be another scuffle coming. Shit, do we want any of them bleeding before they get back in the water?”

“No,” said Greer. “Not yet.”

“Gotta keep them apart, then,” Buchanan said and chambered a round in the M107. “Want me to fire off a warning shot, boss?”

Greer took a swig of beer and considered it. “Hold off for now, but keep them targeted. If anyone takes a swing, then yeah, give them a scare.”

Buchanan fixed the crosshairs on Felix’s torso, watching and waiting for any sign of violence. He noticed the sharpened stick in Felix’s hand.

“Damn, look at those pokers,” he said with a smirk. “They’re starting to get innovative, aren’t they?”

“Getting a little smarter too,” Reposo mused, checking the sun’s position overhead. “Good time to try and swim for the next island. There’s a lot less shark activity this hour. I wonder if they know what they’re doing.”

Greer grinned. “I wonder what they’re saying right now.”

The four men watched as Maria began arguing with the others. Greer sat down in his deck chair, placing a pair of aviator sunglasses over his eyes. He polished off his beer before firing up a fresh cigar.

“Raise anchor,” Greer ordered, puffing thick smoke. “Let’s pull around and get a better view. This is going to get interesting.”

“T
his might get ugly,” Ginger whispered to Nash.

Maria stood defiantly before Felix, close enough to be struck again, spittle on her weathered lips and traces of blood on her bared teeth. Ginger couldn’t believe the girl had the balls to get in Felix’s face after what he’d done to her the day before.

“Why you not make sharp stick for me?” accused Maria.

“You won’t need one,” Felix growled.

“I am to swim without?”

“Not exactly.”

Maria looked at Felix’s newly forged weapon, its crude tip telling her all she needed to know. She took a step back as horrible thoughts entered her mind.

“You . . . you are planning to stab me.”

“What?”

“With that.” She pointed. “You will stab me out there. Make me bleed in the water so sharks will come.”

Felix threw his head back and laughed. “You mean, like you did to Kenny?”

Maria didn’t answer. The wooden point had her attention fixed. She wished she still had the sharp stone that had been lost at sea. Felix tucked the dagger into his waistband and wagged a finger at her.

“No, I won’t stab you,” said Felix. “Despite what you may think, I ain’t like you.”

“Then why I no have?”

“Like I said before, you won’t need one,” Felix said, shaking his head. “Because you’re staying here.”

“¿Qué?”

“You’re not coming with us, honey. And if you try to, I
will
cut you up out there and spill that bad blood of yours for the sharks.”

Maria hitched in a breath of shocked air. Ginger and Nash said nothing, though they too were caught off guard by Felix’s decision.

“But I will die if I stay!” Maria protested.

Maria went to step even closer, but a subtle shake from Nash’s head stopped her. They exchanged a look between them, one which spoke volumes. They both knew Felix was as good as his word. If the man said he would cut her, he would cut her deep. Felix walked away and waded into the shallows.

“You’ll die quicker if you try to follow me,” he said over his shoulder. “I can guarantee that much.”

Ginger and Nash hesitated at the water’s edge, pointed sticks tucked in their waistbands as if they were players in some cheap pirate pantomime. If their situation hadn’t been so dire, they would have looked comical.

“We’re just going to leave her behind?” Ginger asked.

Felix was resolute. “We’re just going to leave her behind.”

“We can’t do that.”

“Yes, we can. She’s earned her abandonment.”

Nash waded through the water toward Felix, noticing that the yacht was in motion, closer than ever. Three men were on deck, watching and waiting. The fourth stood in the cockpit, piloting the vessel. Nash got the unshakable feeling they were about to do something drastic. He put a hand gently on Felix’s shoulder and whispered in his ear.

“Felix, what’s going on?”

“An experiment.”

“An experiment for what?”

Felix held a finger to his lips. “Wait and see.”

He beckoned for Ginger to join them in the water. She went reluctantly, casting a worried glance at Maria. Again, Maria tried to take a step in their direction. Felix wagged another finger at her.

“Don’t even think about it. Stay right where you are.”

Maria stayed, fixed in her spot with both fear and frustration. Nash looked upon her with pity and saw what he’d missed before. In her own way the young woman loved life. She was a survivor, one who beat the odds, clawing ahead constantly to keep from slipping back. Failing to go with them defied every instinct she had. Maria began to yell at the others, voice panicked and enraged at once. They backed away, moving deeper and deeper into the water, leaving the woman on the beach to a different fate.

“Something’s up, fellas,” Buchanan said, squinting behind the scope of the M107. “Take a look.”

Greer signaled to Turk in the boat’s cockpit. Turk eased up on the throttle and slowed the boat down as Greer and Reposo raised their binoculars.

“Well, well, what do we have here?” Greer said, focusing on Maria.

Maria stood fast on the beach, face red and neck strained, her mouth a flapping hole as she shouted at the three others wading out to sea.

“What on earth is she yelling about?”

“Not sure,” replied Reposo. “It’s all in Spanish and I can’t hear it too well.”

“Looks to me like she’s refusing to participate,” Buchanan said. “She ain’t budging from the beach. I think she’s decided not to go with them.”

Greer’s cruel smile returned. “Is that so?”

He raised a closed fist and Turk slowed the boat to a full stop. Then he turned to Buchanan and nodded. Buchanan folded out the M107’s bipod and lay down on the deck.

When the water was chest high, Felix, Nash, and Ginger began swimming. Fifty yards out Maria’s angry shouts behind them became broken by the wind and waves, but the woman still spat every ounce of venom she had their way.

“Hijo de puta! Me cago en tu madre—”

The retort of the M107 echoed across the water a split second after the .50-caliber bullet struck Maria center mass.

“Jesus—”

Nash stopped swimming and looked back. He thought he saw Maria lying on the beach, but was sure he was mistaken. He wiped salt water from his eyes and looked again. It couldn’t be her. What was on the beach was in two separate pieces.

“Felix!”

Felix and Ginger were already watching. The M107’s .50-caliber antimaterial round, capable of putting a hole in an armored vehicle, had ripped Maria’s body clean in half. Her top portion continued living for almost a half minute, eyes opening and closing, mouth moving, still trying to spew the last of the profanity her brain had formed into speech.

“We have to go back,” said Nash.

Felix stared with a trembling jaw at the two halves of the woman on the sand. He’d thought a warning shot might have been in the cards, something to motivate her into the water. Not this.

“Felix?”

“F-f-forget it,” Felix stammered. “She’s dead. They took her out.”

“They did? Why?”

Felix gulped. “Because they thought she was refusing to participate.”

Nash turned on him. “That was your goddamn experiment?”

“We had to know what would happen if we didn’t follow their instructions—”

“Fuck me, Felix. You’re as bad as they are.”

“Me? You saw what that callous bitch did to Kenny. She would have done that to any one of us this time if we gave her half the chance.”

Nash figured he was right, but wasn’t going to give Felix the satisfaction. He turned to swim back, wanting to get a closer look, to see if Maria really was dead. Ginger’s trembling voice stopped him before he started.

“I need you, Nash.”

They were the last words he ever expected to hear from her. The desperation in her tone forced him to turn back and face her.

“Don’t go,” she pleaded. “I can’t do this alone.”

“Do what alone?”

“Abandon another person like we just did.”

Nash looked into her eyes and saw more fear there than he’d seen since waking up beside her two days before. It was the idea of being left behind that terrified her most, more than hungry sharks, psychotic men, or the ocean itself. Left to the mercy of such things meant you’d been abandoned. It was out of your hands, and that was the most awful part. Someone else made the decision to forsake you, leave you behind, alone and out of your element to deal with monsters in theirs.

“I won’t leave you,” Nash said. “I promise, Ginger.”

“Hell, nobody gets left back,” said Felix. “The three of us are . . .”

His mouth gaped as he watched the yacht slowly propel itself into view behind Nash’s head. The buzz of an outboard engine came to their ears. Seconds later a Zodiac pulled away from the yacht’s stern with a full-throttled whine, two men riding it. It seemed to be headed straight for the beach, though Felix wondered if it would veer around and head for them instead.

“Watch these guys,” he said. “Don’t take your eyes off them.”

The Zodiac pulled into the shallows and beached itself. Both men jumped out and hit the sand, Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns slung over their shoulders. Nash finally got a good look at them, focusing on the one with the cropped blond hair.

“That’s one of the guys that tailed me in Opa-locka, I’m sure of it.”

Felix peered, straining his neck. “Yeah, looks like the redneck who winded me outside my apartment door.”

The men made their way to Maria’s two halves and stood over them. They talked briefly, prodding at her corpse with their combat boots. Then one of the men dragged her lower half by the legs back to the boat. The other man followed, dragging her top half by her curly black hair.

“What are they doing?” Ginger asked.

“Cleaning up evidence,” Felix replied.

The Zodiac pulled away from the beach, but did not return to the stern of the yacht. Instead, it sped into the open water and slowed to a stop, where it waited, the heads of both men turned in the direction of the survivors.

“Now what?” Ginger moaned.

“We swim for the next island as fast as we can,” Felix said. “And we don’t stop.”

They kept their heads above water this time, staying alert for any threat. Nash looked to the sky, taking in the beauty of the blue expanse crested with clouds, trying to distract himself from the darker blue that dominated below. His eyes slid over to Ginger and Felix, who to his surprise had overtaken him. The last thing Nash wanted to do was take up the rear. That hadn’t worked out so well for Kenny.

Forget about outrunning the sharks,
he thought, cowardice blooming inside him.
All you have to do is make sure you outrun these two.

Nash swam hard to catch up. He had never been so scared in all his squandered life. Now and then he dared to squint into the water below, but saw only a blur of unbroken blue. Every tenth stroke or so, Nash reached down to check that the dagger was still with him. The pointed stick tucked in his waistband provided little comfort. He had checked over a dozen times when Ginger’s pained voice suddenly rang out.

“Help!”

Nash and Felix wasted no time swimming to her side, ignoring as best they could the possible causes for her distress.

“What’s wrong?” Nash said, reaching her first.

“Leg cramp,” she squealed. “I can’t get it to go.”

“How bad?” Felix asked.

“Real fucking bad, all seized up. My leg is like a damn block of wood.”

“Don’t freak out,” Nash said. “Here, I’m going to lift my calf sideways. Put your arms around my neck and stomp your foot down on it as hard as you need until you work that cramp out.”

Ginger’s quivering mouth tried to smile for Nash. He was there for her, coming to her rescue, a rescue that deep down she had wanted since the beginning of the whole fucked-up ordeal. She slung her arms around his neck and pulled him close in the water for just a moment, pressing her slender body against his, feeling the warmth of his skin. In that moment she knew they could have been lovers in another time, another place. In another set of circumstances she might have met him one night after a gig at the Barracuda Room and let him buy her that drink that would lead to other things.

Ginger planted a kiss on Nash’s cheek, catching him off guard. Then she beat her foot down on his calf, jarring her cramp into submission. The force bobbed them below the surface of the water. When they came back up she was smiling.

“It’s all gone,” she gushed. “Thank you.”

Nash nodded, still feeling the touch of her lips on his cheek. “Good. You okay to continue on?”

His concern was genuine, the unexpected kiss softening something in him. It was the first sliver of sincere affection he had received from anyone in a long while, and he was thankful. For him, it couldn’t have come at a better time.

“I’m good to go,” Ginger said and released him from her embrace.

Nash let her lead, suddenly willing to take up the rear to protect her. They swam four hundred yards, almost halfway to the next island, with no sign of the tiger shark or scavenging white-tips. Adrenaline pumped their muscles harder and faster than they had ever been tested, yet minutes seemed like hours. Nash’s heart raced. His lungs begged for a break. Searing pain shot through his sinews, daring his body to give out. Even as it worsened, it was still more bearable than the withdrawal that had ravaged him on the last crossing. When they had completed two-thirds of the distance Felix called out for a breather. The three formed a huddle in the water.

“Look,” he said, pointing and panting. “They’re coming closer again.”

The Zodiac was less than a hundred yards to their left, moving slow, matching speed as it traveled parallel to them. The two men were crouched, one of them holding up what looked like a video camera.

“The sick bastards are just waiting for a show,” Nash said. “But I get the feeling they might not get one today—”

The Zodiac’s idling engine roared to life and it sped up on its trajectory, curving a hundred and fifty yards ahead to where it could stop directly between the swimmers and the next island. Felix strained his neck and peeled his eyes to try to get a better look.

“What the hell are they doing?”

The man in front was hurling stuff over the side of the boat with a small container, as if bailing water out of the hull. Felix could see that what was being chucked over the side was red.

“Oh, you fucking
cocksuckers
.”

“What?” Ginger moaned.

“They’re chumming the water, throwing blood and fish bits ahead of us to attract the sharks into our path.”

Nash gave a loud, sickly cough. “Oh, God, they’re doing more than that. Look.”

They watched as the man tossed both halves of Maria overboard, spilled intestines trailing over the side. Two large splashes and a single laugh sounded over the water. They could see the pieces of the woman floating on the waves.

“We should go back,” Nash said, holding back the urge to vomit.

“We
have
to go back,” Ginger insisted.

“That’s what they want us to do,” Felix replied. “When the sharks arrive they’ll have more time to lock onto us if we try and return. Fuck, we’re three-quarters of the way already, and I’m almost out of juice. I say we go forward.”