Dead Reckoning (15 page)

             
I already knew that we were no Navy Seals, but I expected us to do better than that. We were also not gunfighters. “Stick your gun back in your pants and get ready to jump,” I whispered to Sonny. We concealed our guns.

             
Spike came around the corner and started laughing.

             
“Well, well. What do we have here? More fisheries people? I thought we got you all the first time.”

             
We said nothing. Desperation rose within me. I smelled the vomit and heard the waves bouncing off the hull. My mind scrambled for an idea. Every thought that occurred to me was more dangerous and less likely to succeed than the previous. My original thought—which was to jump and swim for it—still seemed like the best idea.

             
“So, how do you like my new boat? Beautiful, eh?”

             
We just stared at him. I thought of Kate and the kids and knew that they were doomed. I screwed up.

             
“Would you like to meet my new wife?” Spike asked. “Her name is fuck you. At least that’s what she says every time I ask her name.” He laughed. “I found papers though. Her name is Jill.”

             
“Of course, maybe you already know her. Maybe she is why you have come.”

             
Spike waited for our response, and none came.

             
“Chang. Where is Sulu?” Spike asked, looking toward the other man.

             
“He fucked up. No good,” Chang replied.

             
The black man walked up behind Chang. Spike motioned at him to come over to him.

             
“Sundance. What do you think we can do with these two, huh? Be a good boy and go check them for weapons.”

             
Sundance hesitated, and Spike raised his hand to backhand him. Sundance cowered and then scrambled over to us to frisk us.

             
I turned to Sonny and said “Go.”

             
We both sprinted for the rail. Spike fired in front of us, stopping us cold.

             
“Yes, by all means, do that,” he said. “But first I would like to warn you: these waters are infested with sharks. We’ve been feeding them for days.” Spike turned to Chang, and they both laughed. I shuddered at the thought of sharks circling below us as we swam to the yacht.

Sundance checked us over. He ran his hand over the gun in my pants, but he said nothing. His frightened eyes tried to tell me something, but I couldn’t understand. He walked back and heeled at Spike’s hip.

“How did you get here, anyway?” Spike asked, squinting out over the water through the ink-black night. “I’m surprised you made it all the way from the island. The sharks are usually very hungry.”

I studied Spike’s face for any hint of humanity. I found none. His right eye looked at me, and the other looked up
and left. His taut, weathered face showed no hint of emotion except desire—a desire to watch me die. I imagined little difference between him and the sharks circling below. At that moment, I knew our only chance was to fight it out. I would have rather died with guns blazing than in whatever sadistic way Spike could dream up. It’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees, as they say. As I prepared to go for my gun, I hoped that Sonny saw the same thing I did.

I looked at Sundance. He stared oddly at me, as if he were trying to look through me. He shook his head as if to discourage me from what I was about to do. He shifted his eyes to the right and tilted his head, motioning. I casually glanced that way and saw a triangle emerging from the darkness and heard a puttering engine.

Spike turned to fire and got off one round before the bow of the RY crashed into the side of the yacht. The yacht lurched heavily to port. At that same moment, Sundance punched Chang and sent him tumbling. Spike stumbled and fired up into the black. I fumbled for my gun and drew it, but it slipped from my grasp and skittered away along the tilted deck. As Spike righted himself and took aim again at the RY, the football player inside me kicked in. I sprinted toward Spike and drove my shoulder into his mid-section with every bit of force I could muster. Spike was just as solid as I imagined, but he went down hard and in the process, hit his head on the railing.

As I got to my knees and knelt over Spike and prepared to finish the job with my fists, I heard two gunshots in rapid succession from the other side of the boat. I looked over just as Sonny fell backwards. My heart sank. I scrambled over to Sonny and began to pat at his torso. He stared at me, stunned but all right. I looked at the other two men. A dark pool formed between Chang and the rail. He was dead. Sundance stared straight ahead, clutching his chest.

Sonny leaned in toward Sundance and said: “Thank you.” Then he moved toward Spike.

I grabbed him. “We don’t have time for that, and we don’t know who’s on the other boat. Let’s get the woman and get out of here.”

Sonny and I retrieved our guns and then scrambled into the yacht. I untied the woman and told Sonny to check the rest of the cabin for other victims. I checked for a pulse and breathing and found both.

Sonny came back. “No one. How do we know they don’t have hostages on the other boat?”

I slapped lightly at the woman’s face. “Jill. Wake up. Are there other hostages?” She moaned. Her injuries were terrible. I repeated the question twice. She finally managed to say no.

“Let’s get out of here before the other one wakes up,” I said.

Sonny hoisted Jill onto his back and ran from the cabin. I followed, keeping my eye on the other boat and in the direction where we left Spike. I had seen enough movies to know that I should go back and kill him. But I had already done the fight part and was now focused solely on flight.

             
Jeff had already put the RY in position at the stern of the yacht. We carefully transferred Jill onto the RY and hopped aboard. Jeff gunned the engine, and we pulled away at a break-neck eight knots.

             
We took her below and laid her on one of the bunks. Sonny prepared an IV for her, and I began to clean and dress her wounds the best I could. I applied some alcohol to a small pad and dabbed it on one of her leg wounds. She winced and moaned in pain. It became obvious that she would not be able to tolerate the pain of our touching her.

             
“We will probably need to dope her up to get through this,” I said to Sonny. “We’ve got to clean these. And she’ll need stitches here and here.” I pointed to a spot on her chest and another on her abdomen. “What do we have in there?”

             
Sonny fumbled through the various medications in our first aid kit and came up with a bottle of liquid morphine.

“Look at this,” he said as he held up the bottle. The name of the drug was written across the bottle in big letters.

              “Good!” I said. “Do we have any syringes?”

             
“Yes,” said Sonny. “But we might as well put it right in the IV,” he pointed to the little injection port on the IV tube that was used for administering additional medications.

             
“While you’re at it, don’t you think we should put some antibiotics in that IV?” I asked. “Some of these are starting to look infected.”

“I don’t see any liquid antibiotics in here. Just pills.”

              “How much of this do you think we should use?” asked Sonny, holding up the morphine.

             
“What does it say on the bottle?”

             
“Morphine. Single-use Vial. 10 milligrams per milliliter.”

             
“Well, single use vial would mean just that, wouldn’t it?”

             
“I don’t know.”

“Neither do
I.”

             
Jill drifted into consciousness and mumbled: “Three milligrams.”

             
“How do you know that?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

             
But she was already out again.

             
“She sure sounded like she knew what she was talking about,” said Sonny.

             
Jeff stuck his head in from above. “We’ve got company.”

             
I rushed topside to see the yacht bearing down on us from behind, Spike at the helm. I drew my weapon and began to fire at him. Spike was a hundred yards and closing, but in rough seas, I was lucky to hit the boat, much less anything meaningful.

             
As the boat drew nearer, Spike began to fire at us, which sent me under cover. He was going to ram us, and at a top speed of eight knots, there was little we could do about it. That was when I noticed Sundance, still on deck and propped up against the rail in the position we’d left him. His face was calm and unflinching. Blood soaked his shirt. He had Chang’s gun and fired rhythmically at something. He fired one round, then rested, took aim, and fired again. Sundance made a half dozen such attempts, and for attempt number seven, we hit a patch of smooth water. This steadied him just enough—he squeezed the trigger and the yacht erupted into a fireball. Even at some distance, the concussion from the explosion nearly knocked me over. An intense heat wafted over us and then subsided. Flaming debris rained down behind us.

             
Finally safe, Sonny and I went back to tending to Jill. We gave her the three milligrams of morphine as she suggested and then another dose as she began to arouse before we were finished. I stitched her larger wounds as best as I could from the memory of watching my own finger being stitched after losing a battle with a soup can. We cleaned and dressed her smaller abrasions. We checked her for broken bones. It looked to our untrained eyes as if most of the damage had been done on the outside; time would tell about the inside. We decided she would probably heal physically, but we had no idea how she would be mentally.

. . .

Two days later, she awoke screaming. Jeff and I raced below to see if she was all right. We had placed her in the forward berth, and by the time we entered, she had backed well up into the cubby hole of the bow. She looked like a frightened animal. She ripped the IV needle from her arm and pointed it at us. “What do you want?” she asked frantically. “Who are you? Where am I?”

“Jill, it’s ok,” I said. “You’re aboard the RY, and you’ve been here for two days. We rescued you from your yacht, the Hawaii 5 oh.”

Her eyes flitted back and forth between Jeff and me.

“It’s ok. We are not going to hurt you. We know what you’ve been through.”

“Just let me out of here,” she said.

Jeff and I backed up. “Ok, you can get out, but we’re in the middle of the Pacific,” Jeff told her. “There is nowhere to go.”

She began to shake and cry. “Where is my boat? Where is my…” She lowered her head and sobbed in her hands. The memories were starting to come back. I felt terrible for her.

We weren’t sure what to do for her, so we told her we’d be topside if she needed anything and left her alone.

It was at least an hour before she came up. She emerged tentatively at first. Her head poked through the deck and she looked around. She reminded me of a wary cat on the first day in its new home. She didn’t say anything and we went about our tasks without speaking.

After a few minutes she came all the way up and stood on the deck. She began to cry and said: “Can somebody please tell me what’s going on?”

She sobbed through my entire explanation. Without saying a word, she went below again.

Several hours later, she came topside again. She sat next to me as I wound some rope. The cool breeze flowed through her hair.

“Thank you for all that you did,” she said.

I nodded.

She looked at Jeff and Sonny and said: “Thank you all.”

She ran her fingers through her hair, looked at her hands, and then felt her hair again. She shook her head back and forth allowing her hair to whip around as she might have after releasing it from a pony tail.

“Who washed my hair?” she asked.

“I did,” I said.

“Thank you so much. You don’t know how much that means to me.”

“Yes I do,” I said. “That’s why I did it.”

She looked at me, puzzled.

“Fifteen years of marriage,” I said smiling. “I’ve learned that women only really want three things in this world: someone to talk to, massages, and clean hair.”

“I don’t know if that’s all, but those are high on the list,” she said.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Seattle,” I said. “If it’s still there, that is. Is that ok?”

“Good as any other place, I guess,” she said, staring straight ahead.

              She pulled down on the sweatshirt we had put her in and looked at the stitches on her chest.

             
“Who did these stitches?” she asked.