Buzz Cut (42 page)

"You make noises," she said.

"Was that me?"

"You're very loud," she said. "You're embarrassing."

"Maybe I'm celebrating," he said. "Maybe this is a national holiday. A day to cheer. The king of the assholes is in jail."

"Okay, then, fine. As loud as you want. A holiday."

There was toweling off. There was movement into the cool twilight of the cabin and a moment of straightening the sheets and then they were there again. Passing the milk back and forth. His jar, hers. Warming each of them, finding the right rhythm so none of the fluid splashed.

The gentle rocking of a ship at anchor. The bright daylight knocked down to dusk by curtains. The smell of her soapy clean flesh. He made observations about her body and promptly forgot them. The specifics of her flesh didn't matter. Although the specifics were very good. He noted them but could not hold them in his mind. Nipples, breasts, hips and waist, the fit of their parts, her lips. Her natural aroma. It wasn't something he wanted to trap with words. So he let it all go. He would think about it later. This was one of those moments that was more than he had prepared himself for. Better than his vocabulary.

Afterward they lay still and listened to each other breathe. "You're not so quiet yourself," he said.

She nuzzled in. Thorn counted her ribs, made sure she was human.

"I'm a lady. I don't scream."

"That must have been our neighbors then."

The wrong words. The game was suddenly over. He had invoked the world a few feet beyond their walls and destroyed their isolation. Their fingers lost the grip on the cliff they'd climbed. He felt them dropping side by side back into the moment.

"Where are we?"

"In what sense?" he said.

"Physical," she said. "The physical sense."

"I'd say we're in a good place."

"I mean, have we docked?"

"Oh."

"I feel like we've docked."

"Then we must have. Then we must be there. We should get up, get dressed, go out, do whatever you do when you go to Nassau. Dance the local dances, drink the local brews."

She drew away, took a deep breath, which seemed to bring an instant chill to her flesh.

"I should go find my father," she said. "I should apologize for what I did. It wasn't fair. I ambushed him. He's a bad man. He did everything I said he did, treated my mother horribly, but what I did this morning, that wasn't right."

Thorn didn't join the conversation. She seemed to be handling it just fine. He lay still and listened to her voice mingling with voices passing in the hallway, and that blending with a breezy tune from the PA, its volume set just loud enough so it insinuated itself through the cabin walls, floated there on the margins of hearing.

"Those posters my father made, the ones you saw with my photograph, I always hated him for that. Making our problems public. Putting my face out there, on TV, plastered on bulletin boards. Exposing our family. I always thought he was doing it for self-promotion. He'd found a way to get a whole lot of free advertising, get his name and face in front of the cameras. That's what I thought.

"But now I don't know. I heard something in his voice this morning. It was there in his face too. Not what I expected. Shock, yeah. Anger, hurt. Sure. But there was something else I'd never seen in him. Even when I was slamming him, even when I was putting it all out there, all the brutal details, hurting him as much as I could, there was something in his eyes. Staring at me like he was pleased. I'm cutting him open, tearing out his goddamn liver, and he's looking at his little girl, full of fucking pride and respect."

"The bastard," said Thorn. "How dare he love his daughter."

She turned her head, cheek against the pillow, squinting at him with perplexity as if he had just parachuted into the room, landed in the bed beside her. "Now all of a sudden you're on Morton's side?"

"He's your father," Thorn said. "He probably can't help how he feels about you."

"He made me wipe up my mother's blood."

"That was a terrible thing to do to a child. To anybody."

"But I'm supposed to forgive him? That's what you're saying?"

"Either that or you could go on finding new and creative ways to punish him."

"Is this what you do? You go to bed with someone, then you stick them on the rotisserie and have some fun?"

"Not usually."

"I hate that man," she said, and rolled her head away. "I do. I hate him."

"I believe you."

"I'm supposed to forgive what he did to my mother? Just sweep all that away? It drove her to suicide, for christ sakes. He killed her. Belittling her, humiliating her, freezing her out."

"Are you sure?"

"I saw it. I was there."

"Okay."

"Jesus Christ, Thorn. Quit fucking with me."

"I said okay. You were there. You saw what you saw. You heard what you heard. Okay. Fine."

"But you're implying I could be wrong. I was a child. I might have misunderstood. There might've been more going on between them than what I saw. Two people collaborating on their mutual unhappiness. That's what you're trying to say?"

Thorn saw a seam of blue at the curtain. The beckoning sky.

He took a second to savor the sensation again, the warm delight of his morning revelation on the Sun Deck. He knew what he had to do. He knew what had been missing for months. And even though it was still missing and would be for a while, everything was okay now. Everything was fine. He knew how to get there. He knew how to return.

"This year I've been rereading books I read when I was a kid. A project, an experiment. Books I liked. Books that scared me. Some that filled me up with what I used to think of as white light. Inspirational books. I have a whole stack of them that have been on my shelf for thirty years. All that time dusting them, rearranging them, looking at their covers. Books I saved because they'd meant a lot to me once, helped shape my values, gave me ideas I would've never had otherwise. I've read maybe ten of them so far. Just scratched the surface. And it's been pretty disappointing. They aren't much good.

"It's sad. I don't want to be wrong about those books. I want them to still matter. I've got a lot invested in my memory of them, how it felt when I was reading them the first time, the sea stories, the adventures. I can even remember specific afternoons, raining outside, thunder, lightning, and I'm curled up in bed reading Frank Buck,
Bring 'Em Back Alive,
stalking rhinos in Asia. And when I go back to that time in my head, when I think about who I was, how the things I believe are anchored in those books, it bothers me.

"I wanted them to be as true and profound as they were back then. I don't want to tear it all apart, start to doubt my own history. But now what I see is, the only way they're going to stay as wonderful as they were when I read them the first time, as poignant and thrilling, is to leave them sitting on my shelf. That way I can play with all those pleasant memories as much as I want, not risk losing them. But if I go back and take what I know now, who I am now, get right up in the face of that kid curled up in bed, I'll see it all different than he did. Those books turned me into somebody who doesn't need those books. I'm past that. I'm over it."

"So throw them away," she said. "So burn them."

"No need for that. I don't hate them. Just because they aren't what I thought they were, it doesn't make them bad."

"So that's what you think? I'm stunted? I'm still reading the same book I read as a kid. Reading it over and over, stuck right there?"

He watched a breeze belly out the curtains, the crack of blue becoming a bright wedge. Something out there firing a shaft of excruciating light through the opening, etching itself onto his cornea. Thorn shifted his gaze to Monica, her right breast lit with the fierce daylight, her left in shadow.

"I don't know you, Monica. I'm just talking about myself."

"What bullshit"

She shook her head, pointed her finger at him and was midword when the PA crackled out in the corridor.

Butler lack's voice was a hoarse echo of itself. As if the pain had hollowed him out, taken the resonance from his words. He was brisk. No time for bogus eloquence. He wanted fifty-eight million dollars in hundred-dollar bills delivered to the Sun Deck by helicopter. It should be placed in a footlocker and lowered by the chopper. Either the fifty-eight arrived by midnight tonight or the
Eclipse
would be destroyed.

The burnished point of the dagger poked from the right side of McDaniels' neck cocking his head awkwardly toward his chest as if he were trying to hear his own last heartbeats. The chrome hilt was jammed hard against the left side of his throat, six inches of flat steel dissecting his windpipe.

A deep gash curved from his temple to the back of his neck, cutting his ear almost in half, and another more shallow cut ran horizontally between the shoulder blades of his pink hula girl shirt. Apparently someone had surprised him from behind, taken a couple of quick slashes, put him on the ground, then he'd been finished off with the blade hammered through his throat.

The cell door was ajar. McDaniels lay on his back, his body blocking the corridor, his eyes open, fixed on a spot an incalculable distance beyond the ceiling. His red-striped drinking straw was clamped in his lips as though he had sucked one last lungful of air from this world before he sank below the surface of the rice paddy.

Sugarman was staring down at the body when Thorn arrived. Thorn halted abruptly, almost stumbled across the body, then swiveled away to lean against the wall, breathing hard from his run.

"Shit, shit, shit."

"Add mine to the pile," Sugarman said.

"How'd the fucker do it? McDaniels wouldn't open the door for him. How, goddamn it?"

Sugarman stared into McDaniels' eyes with some slender, half-assed hope that he might get a refracted glimpse of the last clip of film still playing in there behind the foggy hazel irises. But whatever flitter of light he imagined seeing in the dead man's eyes vanished when Gavini's voice sounded overhead.

In a tightly measured tone, the captain recited the words he must have memorized for just such a dreaded occasion as this. He instructed passengers and crew to proceed to their assigned life raft stations. Disembarking procedures would begin forthwith. While there was no fire, no immediate danger, and absolutely no reason to panic, all passengers should gather their family members at once and proceed without luggage or other encumbrances as efficiently and quickly as possible to their designated evacuation zones. Patrol boats and other harbor craft had been summoned from Nassau to meet the lifeboats, so Gavini could assure the passengers they would not have a long duration in the water.

"The instruments are dead again," Sugar murmured. "They've been up there tearing the bridge apart. Gauges, screens, everything's blank, just like Sunday afternoon. Ship-to-shore still works, telephone and PA, all the communications, but everything else is down. Sampson and Gavini wrangled about making that announcement. But after Butler Jack came on the PA, the captain must've won."

Thorn turned away from the body, stared up at the round perforated lid of the PA speaker. Gavini was repeating his announcement, assuring the passengers that there was no danger. No danger whatsoever. "Well, it's over now," Thorn said. "We can turn in our truncheons. Every law enforcement officer within a thousand miles is going to be crawling on the
Eclipse
within an hour."

Sugar lifted his head, gave Thorn a weary look. "Sampson won't give them access. Still in full denial." Sugarman bent down, drew the straw from McDaniels' teeth.

Gavini continued to speak, soothing Uncle Gavini, though Sugar could hear the quaver growing in his words.

When all passengers had completed disembarkation, then and only then were crew members to follow. Engineering staff, kitchen workers, cabin stewards, engine room mechanics, everyone in the entire ship. Please proceed quickly to assigned assembly points. There were plenty of boats for everyone. No need to rush. Above all an orderly evacuation was crucial for everyone's safety.

"Where is she?" Sugarman said. He stood up again, tucked the straw in his shirt pocket. "Monica. Where is she?"

"Getting dressed."

"What, in your room? She's there alone?"

"Christ, Sugar. She's all right."

"She's number eleven, Thorn. She's on his fucking list. What the hell were you thinking?"

He shook his head. "The cabin door's locked. She's fine." Sugar dragged in a breath, squeezed his mouth into a sour smile. "The door's locked? The fucking door, Thorn?"

Thorn rocked forward and back. His face tensed, he stared down at McDaniels' body. Then with a growl he spun around and ran.

***

Thorn sprinted to the Crew Deck foyer, but all the elevators were in use, and moving slow, so he took the stairs. Panicked passengers were flooding in both directions. Thorn fought the flow for nine floors, legs weak, breath burning.

When he arrived on the Verandah Deck, the doors to all the cabins on the hall were standing open. Including his. Monica gone. No note, no sign of struggle. He studied the lock, the doorknob. No scrapes on the metal. He looked in the closet, the shower, ran back out into the hall, called her name. His voice joining the chorus. Bill and Dorothy, Hector and Jean. Bill, Bill, Bill, where are you?

He worked his way to the outside deck, began to circle the railing. He peered down at the lifeboats, all those shocked vacationers in their orange vests already beginning to lower to the harbor. He searched for her golden buzz cut. Twice he thought he saw her but both times it turned out to be teenage boys.

He found a position near the stern rail where he could watch the lifeboats from the starboard side coming round the stern and still catch the port ones going down. Ten stories away it was nearly impossible to be sure, but he thought he spotted her blond burr head, her faded blue work shirt beneath the puffy orange vest. A group of teenage girls were packed in on either side of her. He made a megaphone of his hands and called her name but his voice was lost in the welter, dozens of people still singing out for their loved ones.