Close Reach (19 page)

Now she was in a makeshift kitchen. Hand-pumped kerosene camp stoves sat atop shoddily built wooden tables. A wooden shelf held pots and pans. Another bowed under the weight of hundreds of cans. Mostly stew and beans. She thought of Lena, the bowl of stew they’d promised her. She remembered her own promises to the girl and to Dean. She aimed to keep them. There was a white plastic cooler on the floor. She lifted its lid with her foot and
looked in. Slabs of meat and chickens floated in pink brine with chunks of sea ice.

The last room was just storage. This was the largest part of the building, yet she could hardly get in. There were too many boxes and crates to count. She saw dismantled marine electronics, scientific instruments. Vast stores of food. There were sea chests and waterproof duffel bags and even suitcases whose contents she couldn’t guess. She got as far as she could into the room and checked the corners to be sure no one was hiding there.

Back in the kitchen, she found a six-pack of tomato juice on the shelf. She took a can and shook it. It wasn’t frozen. She popped the top and stood there drinking it. It was thick and salty. She drank the whole can and put it down, her fingertips tapping the table.

It was just the three of them here on the island.

If David had known there was someone left to help him, he’d have been shouting from the cage. The other men—and Lena—were aboard
La Araña,
probably heading north to Tierra del Fuego. She opened a second can of tomato juice and drank it and then set the empty next to the first one. She came out of the hut quietly, shutting the door without a sound. She took the flensing knife and tiptoed in her socks back to the other building. When she got to it, she stood outside the door and listened.

From inside there was a steady, rhythmic grinding noise. She knew immediately what it was, because she and Lena had tried it, too. She looked around on the ground and found a rusted footlong scrap of iron rebar. She tucked the gun into her waistband and set the flensing knife down and went quietly into the building.

David tossed the rock aside when he saw her. He pulled the blanket around himself and moved to the middle of the trap.

“That won’t work,” she said. “Sawing at the latch with a rock. These rocks, they crumble.”

She came the rest of the way up to the trap. She was holding the iron bar in her left hand, close to her hip, where he couldn’t see it. David looked up at her and didn’t say anything. A slowly bleeding wound ran from the bridge of his nose to the right side of his chin. Both of his eyes were black, and she thought he was lucky. If she’d hit him with the other side of the blade, he’d be missing half his face.

“I told you to take everything off,” Kelly said.

David looked at her without blinking. His eyes were like a raccoon’s. Dark and welling with distrust.

“But you didn’t. You’ve still got something on. Something of Dean’s,” she said. She was whispering so quietly that he’d have to lean close to hear her. She didn’t want any part of this to be easy for him. Even listening to her speak would have to be work. A struggle. And there’d be consequences if he missed something.

She squatted near the wall of the trap, gathering her hair to one side so it wouldn’t hang within his reach.

“So you’re going to give it back to me. Hand it through the funnel. Or I’ll come in there with the flensing knife and cut off your hand. Then I’ll take it off the stump.”

Nothing happened right away. David was taking a while to process things. Maybe he was in shock. Then, after about ten seconds, he got it. He understood. He raised his left hand from the blanket and showed her the watch. The one she’d given Dean.

“Take it off,” she said. “Hand it through the funnel with your right hand. Don’t drop it.”

He did what she told him to, his right hand sticking through the small hole in the side of the trap, the watch’s stainless steel band looped on his index finger. She watched him. He was trembling, waiting for her to take it. She flashed out with her right hand, grabbed hold of his wrist, and pulled his arm until his shoulder was flush against the wall of the trap. He cried out and tried to haul his arm back, but she had the advantage of leverage.

The watch fell to the ground. She bent his arm backward until he screamed, and then she started to hammer on his fist with the piece of rebar, pounding his knuckles until her arm muscles burned. He wrenched and twisted his arm, but she wouldn’t let him get away. She clamped on to him and bent his arm back, wanting to hear his shoulder pop. When his fingers were a bleeding pulp, she started on his forearm, savaging it with the iron bar until it was bleeding from wrist to elbow.

Finally she let him go. He pulled his arm into the cage and hugged it to his chest, sucking on his bloodied fist. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet and moaned. The blanket had fallen off him, and he was naked. Ash and grime covered his thighs where he’d wet himself. He looked so small now that he was caged and hurt. Like he’d shrunken to the size of a child, a forest animal. It didn’t make her pity him, this diminution.

“Good,” she said. She picked up the watch and dusted it off. “I catch you with another rock, we’ll do your left hand, too.”

She didn’t think she’d find him with a rock again. He wouldn’t be doing much except nursing his wounds. Rocking back and forth under the blanket to stay warm. Still, she checked the latch to make sure he’d done no damage. There were fresh scratches in the metal, but it was barely worse than he could have done with his fingernails.

Before she left, she knelt and looked at him. He wouldn’t meet her stare.

“I’ll be back later,” she said. “You don’t give me what I need, it’ll get pretty hot in here. You remember saying that to me? So think about it. You’ll want to tell me everything. In a hurry.”

She left then and walked back to the flensing house, where Dean was waiting. On the way down, she thought she heard David screaming her name, but she didn’t turn. It was good he
wanted to talk. He’d want to even more later. That would make it easier on all of them. She was exhausted but couldn’t let him see it. Forcing it out of him would wear her down. She’d listen to him when she was ready.

Dean came first, though.

* * *

His face was purple, and he was curled in a ball and coughing when she came into the flensing house. She ran to him and knelt over him, checking his pulse with her fingers. He was burning up, and his heart was hammering. And the fissure had expanded in her short absence. Loose rubble at the top had collapsed into the widening crack. Dean was closer to the lip now, and the wheelbarrow was about to fall in. She dragged it back from the edge and righted it.

“I gotta move you, honey,” she said. “But we’re good now. I took care of David.”

Dean was still coughing. If he heard her, he didn’t show it. She brought the wheelbarrow beside him and tipped it again. When she knelt to roll Dean to the sidewall of the wheelbarrow’s metal holding tray, she could feel the earth rumbling beneath her knees. A steady thrum, like
Freefall
’s engines. She pushed Dean into the tray, braced the wheelbarrow’s lower skid with a rock, and then righted it. She was glad she didn’t have to lift Dean directly. He was too weak to help, and she was getting very tired. She balanced the flensing knife across the wheelbarrow’s handles and stood for a moment, resting. She needed to get out of the flensing house before the whole place fell into the ground, but she was breathing so hard, she couldn’t see straight.

* * *

Five minutes later, she rolled Dean down the beach, toward the Zodiac. She was still dizzy. The tomato juice hadn’t been much. When they were even with David’s building, she stopped.

“I’ll be back in a sec,” she said. Dean didn’t respond, but at least he wasn’t coughing.

She crept up the slope and peeked around the door. David was leaning against the wall of the trap with his back to her. He was watching the door on the other side of the building, the one she’d last used as an exit. She picked up a stone, hefted it to judge its weight, and then pelted it at him. It bounced off the back side of his head, and he cried out, turning as he fell. The only thing on his face was fear. Distilled and refined, like something you could draw into a syringe, shoot into a vein. And it was possible he was getting even smaller. Collapsing like a star at the end of time.

She raised her hand.

“Be back in a minute.”

She went to the wheelbarrow, feeling David watch her till she was out of sight.

It was dangerous to let him stay alive. If he got out, he’d be deadly. There’d be other guns on the island, things worse than flensing knives. He might find a way to call back
La Araña.
She needed him, though, so she would keep him cold and wounded until she had what she wanted. After that, she’d have to make a decision. It wouldn’t be easy after what she’d seen and done in the flensing house.

But she’d made vows to Dean and Lena, and those were obligations as real and as sharp as the stones stabbing her frozen feet. She pushed Dean the rest of the way to the Zodiac.

Getting Dean into the Zodiac from the wheelbarrow had been hard. She’d had to drag him by his wounded shoulders out of the tray while standing up to her knees in freezing water. Then she’d had no choice but to drop him into the bow section of the boat. The blanket had fallen off him and he’d cried out, his purple and naked body curling in pain and shock. She climbed in and covered him again, shushing his cries and kissing his tightly closed eyes, wrapping the blanket as tightly as she could get it. Then she’d lowered the outboard shaft and revved the motor in reverse to pull off the beach.

Moving Dean onto
Freefall
had been infinitely harder. The side decks were six feet above her when she stood on the floor of the Zodiac and tossed the painter line around a deck stanchion.
Freefall
was not a small boat. In the end, she’d had to get him into the bosun’s harness they used for climbing the mast and then raise him on a sail halyard that led to a deck winch.

By the time she got him aboard, he was blue and shivering, and she still had to rig a way to lower him into the salon. That had taken another thirty minutes of frantic work. At least there was a heater in here, which she’d turned on as soon as she arrived. When she finally had him tucked into the pilot berth and wrapped in down blankets, the real work of tending to him began.

* * *

She put on water to boil in the galley and went to the cabinet and drawers where she kept the yacht’s medical supplies. She began with iodine and alcohol, uncovering him bit by bit to clean the wounds from the harpoon and the landing hook. They each had gone all the way through his legs, both of which were grievously infected. When the water had boiled, she used some of it to clean him and the rest for hot water bottles, which she put under the down blankets to raise his temperature while she rubbed antibiotic ointment into the wounds and bandaged them.

Freefall
had more medical supplies aboard than some of the countries they’d sailed to, but she knew even they might not be enough. She put a catheter into his left arm and injected him with intravenous antibiotics and then put him on a glucose drip for his dehydration and hunger. She gave him codeine for the pain and used splints and cloth bandages to set his legs roughly so they wouldn’t bang around when
Freefall
rolled in the storms of the Drake Passage.

Through all this Dean barely moved. His lips were still blue even though his skin had
warmed. It was the pneumonia that scared her the most. She could deal with the infections, the broken bones, until they got to Chile. But if his pneumonia didn’t improve, it could kill him before they finished the passage. She used her stethoscope to listen to the wet rattle in his lungs, his full-throttled heart. His shoulders were so swollen and bruised, the muscles probably were compressing his lungs. That couldn’t be helping any.

When he’d rested and could stand it, she’d have to do chest therapy: pounding on his chest and his back to loosen the layers of mucus clinging to his lungs while coaxing him to cough no matter how much it hurt him.

But for now she just sat with him. His watchband was too small for his swollen wrist, so she took it and put it on the little shelf above the pilot berth. It would be safe for him until he could wear it again. She smoothed his black and gray hair back from his forehead and kissed him.

He was asleep. Warm and clean, in a bed. He was flying on codeine and wouldn’t be hurting for a while. If she heard the man’s dying screams when the wind blew through the rigging, if she saw him collapsing with the bone in his ear and seizing up as she ripped his pants off to steal them, she could look at Dean in this place of warmth and comfort and know what she’d bought with that death. And that might make it better.

* * *

She went to the galley and made a bowl of canned soup and ate it while sitting across from Dean. Then she bathed quickly with hot water and a washcloth and changed into her own clothes. When she was done and Dean was still sleeping, she lit the pair of brass oil lamps on the teak bulkhead behind the navigation table, wanting their warm glow for the cold work of tracing David’s wake. She put a tartan blanket across her lap and poured a half shot of Bunnahabhain into her coffee, stirring in sweetened condensed milk from a can.