Diamond Head (13 page)

Read Diamond Head Online

Authors: Charles Knief

BOOK: Diamond Head
11.31Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
I wondered what Max would say. Shot again in the same damned leg. I hoped I'd get the chance to find out.
The sharks that took the girl had vanished as soon as I hit the water. All the commotion and the engine noise may have scared them off. But they'd be back. There was no question in my mind they'd be back.
It would be dark before I made it to shore. I was alone, bleeding and exhausted. My hands were cuffed. Even the most desperate life insurance salesman would not solicit me now. I was just what sharks like the best: a wounded, weak swimmer, far from home, leaking blood and splashing around on the surface. If I didn't ring their dinner bell, nothing would.
All I could do was swim toward Oahu and hope for the best. There wasn't another choice. Giving up was not a part of my repertoire. I was not in the best place, but I still had two rounds left in my bangstick, and if they were going to come for me I'd take as many of the beasts as I could before I became shark dinner.
All things considered, though, I preferred the company of the monsters in the ocean to the real ones aboard
Pele.
 
 
I
made steady progress for over two hours before the first predator came to investigate. There was still enough light in the sky to navigate and I saw the dorsal fin about twenty yards off, running parallel to my course. It was a big one. From the size of the fin I estimated it at close to fifteen feet. I ducked my head underwater and watched its approach.
It was a tiger, a big female. She sported scratches along her flanks, evidence of a recent mating.
I readied my weapon, making certain both safeties were off. The shark continued her circumspect approach. She was now ten feet away and edging closer. I could see the eye the size of a hen's egg watching me. It was a predator's eye, measuring everything it saw as a possible meal. It reminded me of Thompson. She swam in front of me and sounded, her dorsal fin slipping beneath my feet. I stopped swimming and treaded water, spinning, watching her circle, keeping her in sight.
I didn't like this at all. I was still miles from shore and there was no way home but to swim. This could be a very long night. Or a short one.
This shark looked determined to have me. There was an excitement in her movements as she circled. I watched for her to hunch her back. That would be the sign of imminent attack.
She orbited again, traveling slowly in a complete perimeter of vision. She was cautious. I watched the monster shark swim closer, feeling more calm than I had a right to feel. For some reason my fear had fled with the shark's approach. She was something tangible, a brutal opponent who intended me harm. I'd seen her kind before and knew what had to be done.
I planned to hit her with the bangstick the first time she came within range again. It was my only hope. If she made a determined attack, the 44 magnum would have little effect. The round would eventually kill her, but it wouldn't stop her from opening those terrible jaws and taking me with her. My only chance was to kill the shark before she attacked.
Suddenly she swam away, retreating to the extreme range of visibility. She was only a faint shadow, moving slowly, circling me. She was spooked and she wasn't afraid of me. Something else was out there. I wondered what could scare something the size of this monster. That potential wasn't something I wanted to contemplate.
If she had recently mated, the male might still be around. Sharks may be as promiscuous as Californians, but the males stay around for a few weeks. As big as she was, the male would be bigger. And more aggressive.
I started swimming again, slowly gliding with my best combat stroke, simultaneously looking in all directions, swiveling my head. I knew something was there, but I couldn't see it. I felt it, though. There was a feeling in the water of some massive presence.
The biggest shark I had ever seen swam directly in front of me, not fifteen feet away. He must have been tracking me for some time, hanging back, stalking the weak surface swimmer. This one looked bigger than twenty feet and it was probably the one that had eaten Jasmine. If so, it must have followed me from the time I'd been thrown into the water.
The beast circled once, getting the sense of what I was, and then closed in. There was no time to do anything but react. I
hit the shark on the top of the head, just in front of the dorsal fin. The .44 magnum projectile and the expanding gases exploded through the brain chamber of the creature. The bullet exited the thorax, spewing blood and offal into the water. The giant shark shuddered, jinxed right and swam away, trailing bloody white strings of tissue. He started a wide circle, aimed back toward his original angle of attack and closed in.
I reloaded my last round, the surcharge of adrenaline overcoming the handicap of the cuffs.
The shark turned, exertion pumping black blood from its wounds, and came directly at me. I raised the bangstick, my last line of defense. It felt totally ineffectual, like aiming a camera at a charging elephant.
The shark hunched its back, his huge jaws open, teeth spread outward toward me, jagged horizontal armament leading the charge like lances. As he approached, he began to list to one side, as if my first shot had damaged some control mechanism somewhere deep in his prehistoric brain. Pectoral fins failed to stabilize him and he continued to roll, his great gaping mouth moving away from me. When he got close he hit me with the top of his head, shoving me back through the water. His jaws snapped shut and I could hear the crack of gristle like a hammer blow as lower and upper teeth slammed together. I rode the creature's snout, pinned against his dorsal fin while I was pushed backward through the water, his powerful tail pushing him onward toward an unknown destination.
I got my legs around the shark's body and dug in, trying to gain some balance so I could use my last round. I raised the bangstick and smashed it down against the head of the shark, just above the great eye. The bullet blew out the remainder of the brain case.
The great beast heeled over, turning away. I released my grip on the flanks of the shark and then I was violently shoved aside. The female tiger rocketed past me and hit the big wounded fish in the belly, tearing away a great mouthful of meat.
She had been behind the big shark, waiting for an opening. I'd lost sight of her while her mate attacked.
She turned in a tight circle that would have made an F-14 pilot proud and struck the other shark again, descending with it as the huge body spiraled into the depths, hitting the beast repeatedly until both animals were lost from sight.
So much for shark love.
I began swimming as carefully and as quietly as I could. The two sharks were deep and getting deeper every minute and I wanted to put as much distance as I could between them and me. I didn't know what else was out there.
I was so tired I almost didn't care.
 
 
K
ate's voice was groggy and indistinct.
“Who is this?”
“It's John Caine.”
“What do you want?”
Kate's was an uncharitable but understandable reaction to being awakened by a pager's call in the early morning hours. I didn't have her telephone number, but she had given me her beeper, and I tried it. It was a shot in the dark, but I needed help and I needed the kind of help she could provide. There were others I could have called, but she was keyed into this case and she would understand more quickly than most.
“Can you come get me?”
I could hear her moving around on the other end of the line, adjusting to the transition from sleep to wakefulness. As tired as I was, a transitory vision of what she might look like in her bed flashed across my mind. “Jesus! Do you know what time it is?”
“Midnight.”
“Try three!”
“Didn't know. Sorry. I hate to bother you but you're the only one I know who has a key to handcuffs.”
“Playing games? I didn't think you went for that kind of stuff.”
“I don't.”
There was a silence while she digested the tone of my voice. My answer had been much harsher than I'd intended.
“Are you in trouble?”
“I'm in handcuffs. I've been shot in the leg. I've been hit on the head and left for dead ten miles at sea. I just made it to shore. I'm at a pay phone near the lighthouse below Diamond Head. You know where it is?”
“Jesus! Do you need an ambulance?”
“I need to talk to you. I need clean clothes and I need a place to hide.”
“Stay right there. I'll call for a uniform to get you out of the cuffs—”
“No! You come. I'll hide until I see your car.”
“It's serious.”
“As bone cancer,” I said.
“Give me twenty minutes,” she said and hung up.
The telephone booth had a light over it and it was working. I moved away from the light toward the kiawe scrub at the top of the cliff. Nothing moved. The night was balmy, but I was chilled by my swim and the loss of blood, and felt nauseous from the pain. The bullet wound had finally stopped bleeding while I was in the water but now it was welling blood again, slowly weeping what was left of my precious supply down the back of my leg.
I'd made it to shore without finding any more sharks, or having any more sharks find me. I kept the bangstick in my hand all the way. I still held it, a talisman. Even empty, it gave me a sense of security.
I squatted in the bushes and used the tip of my buckle knife to cut the poison sacs of the Portuguese man-of-war from my stomach and chest, where I could reach. I'd blundered into a
pod of jellyfish about a hundred yards from shore, just after crossing the reef. Hot burning pokers jabbing into my flesh cut through my exhaustion, hundreds of barbs lighting up all at once. My body was so close to total shutdown that all my circuits weren't reporting in. I ignored the pain and swam through them. I wasn't going back out
there!
Hundreds of long, piercing strings, tough as monofilament, wrapped my body. Only Portuguese man-of-war have those long, terrible tentacles. I jammed my mouth tight and screamed as quietly as I could. I screamed all the way to the beach.
I kept digging at my flesh until I saw the familiar lines of Kate's blue Mustang stop at the rock wall. She blinked her lights and I stepped out of the darkness.
“Jesus!”
“Just John,” I said. I felt lightheaded, close to shock. I fought it, and kept fighting it. She opened the car door and I leaned in. “I'm going to mess up your upholstery.” Blood trickled down my chest. More wounds had been opened by my digging out the jellyfish sacs.
“Just a minute.” Kate spread a blue beach towel over the seat. It had the word HAWAII printed on it in black capital letters. I collapsed into the sports car.
She started asking questions but I smiled and held up my cuffed hands. “First things first,” I said.
“From what I know about you that kind of fits. They should be in back, though.”
“They were,” I said. “I found a way to get them to the front.”
She shook her head and unlocked the handcuffs. They fell to the carpet.
“Do you feel up to a little surgery?”
She shook her head. “You've got to see a doctor. You've been shot?”
“In the ass,” I confirmed. “Or close enough. I can feel the bullet just under the skin. If you can pull it out and pour hydrogen peroxide in the wound I'm sure it'll be all right.”
“Jesus!”
“Come on, Kate. You're supposed to be tough.”
“Nothing like this!”
“I'll make you a deal. I'll tell you all about it if you get the bullet out and let me stay at your place.”
She snorted. “That's your approach to lonely women at three in the morning? ′Hey, baby! If you let me come home with you I'll tell you a story and let you pull a bullet out of my ass!' No thank you.”
“Do you have access to missing persons files?” I asked. “How about a plain blond girl, midteens, with a tattoo of a red heart on her right hip and keloid surgery scars on her right knee?”
“Carolyn Hammel. She's a missing person case. She's been on milk cartons. Where have you been?”
“I don't drink milk. I know what happened to her.”
She eyed me intently, unblinking.
“You do.” It was affirmation of my truth.
“I saw a video of her death. Two men who appeared to be Japanese nationals raped and murdered her and got it all on videotape as a souvenir. I think they're Japanese nationals—they spoke the language. I have reason to believe Thompson was the photographer. He claimed to be the producer. Said he had more of them, quote, nearly enough to retire, unquote. He showed me this film just before another little girl, the one you knew as Jasmine, was fed to the sharks off Makapu'u Point and I have reason to believe he filmed her death as a special order for a customer. I was tossed in after her but the sharks didn't like me.”
“Close the door,” she said.
“I can't go home.”
“Close the door.”
“I am not going to the hospital.”
“Close the door, put on your seat belt and shut up,” she ordered.
We spent the next ten minutes traveling through a dark and
silent Honolulu. Even Waikiki is quiet at three in the morning. But nothing matched the silence inside Kate's Mustang.
She pulled into the parking structure of her building and hustled me out of the car and into the elevator. I wore the bloody blue towel around my shoulders, my bare feet and sodden khaki trousers strikingly out of place in the Marco Polo, a high-rise condominium along the Ala Wai Canal. Kate's apartment was a one-bedroom unit facing the mountains.
“Do you want to shower?”
I nodded.
“Probably be best before. Get that salt off you. That way I can clean your wounds.” She was pawing through her medicine cabinet. “Shit! Rubbing alcohol. No peroxide. Can I use alcohol? It'll burn like hell.”
“Might as well,” I said. “Everything else hurts.”
“I'll look in the kitchen.” She left the door open.
I undressed, shucking the towel and my wet trousers. I got a look at myself in the mirror. The Phrobis knife sheath was still strapped to my calf, and a single strand of duct tape adorned my upper thigh. Blood caked the hair behind my ear; the seawater hadn't completely dissolved the clot. My chest and arms were covered with long, wandering welts. My back still had tentacles and the purple poison sacs sticking to my skin. Blood ran freely down my leg and dripped on the tile floor. My eyes wore a haunted, exhausted look, the kind of expression you see on people who have raised the cover of hell and have taken a good, long look into one of the far corners. Most of the time they sleep in parks or on the street and ask you for money as you pass by. Most of them talk to themselves.
I leaned in and turned on the shower. I waited for the water to warm.
As I stood there on unsteady legs, Kate came in. She appraised my condition, ignoring my nakedness. Her appraisal was clinical. As tired as I was, I was still mildly disappointed.
“Jesus! Did they horsewhip you, too?”
“Jellyfish. You got any meat tenderizer?”
“I'll look.”
She came back quickly with a small brown bottle. There was concern in her eyes I hadn't seen before. “Turn around.” She had tweezers and a steak knife.
I turned around and leaned against the wall while she plucked the poison sacs from my back with the steak knife and picked them up with the tweezers, one by one. It was a slow, tedious process.
“Ouch! Shit! These things hurt!”
“I know,” I said. I was used to the pain. I was surprised how well the body could adjust.
“You look bad. You're not going to go into shock or something? I don't want you dying on me.”
I assured her I had no intention of either going into shock or dying. I wasn't about to survive the previous twelve hours just to die in her bathroom.
“I found some peroxide in the kitchen and I'm going to sacrifice a clean white sheet. I don't have many bandages here. I can get some in the morning, but these will have to do for now.”
I stepped into the shower and closed the sliding glass door. “Thank you, Kate. I mean it.” She offered no response. She stood there, staring at me through the frosted glass for a moment, then she turned and left the bathroom.
I removed the tape and the knife sheath and finished my shower, avoiding the places where there were holes in my hide. That covered a lot of territory. The soap stung the raw flesh. The water hurt the jellyfish stings. Kate came back with clean towels and helped me climb out, then dried me gently. The towels felt as if they'd been kept in the oven. Even after the warm shower I still felt chilled.
When she finished drying me the towels were streaked red with my blood.
“Jesus, you look bad,” she said, her voice low with concern.
“Come here.” She led me to her bedroom where she had prepared her surgery. A bright tensor desk lamp was positioned over the sheet, the bedclothes turned back. Tweezers, towels and other implements were professionally laid out on a nearby table. “Lie down,” said Kate. It was a command.
I lay facedown on the bed, staring out the window at the lights of Manoa and the University of Hawaii across the valley. The thought of being stretched out naked on Kate's bed at four in the morning had never occurred to me. If it had, the present circumstances would not have been in that particular fantasy.
“Tell me everything,” she ordered as she began working on the bullet wound. “I'll try not to hurt you, John, but I don't see how that's possible.”
While she worked I told her everything, even the things I'd planned on withholding. You can't very well lie to a woman who is pulling a bullet out of your backside. You have to trust her. She finished and put a dressing on the wound. I heard the clink of heavy metal falling into a glass.
“Two-twenty-three Remington,” she said. “You'd probably call it a five point five—six millimeter. I've sent a few bullets to the lab before but this is the first one I've ever removed from the victim myself. No problem with the chain of evidence here. Right from your butt to the bag. If we can find the weapon we'll get a match. No distortion, either. I thought you were tough.”
“The water cut the velocity. I haven't got to that part of the story yet.”
“Go ahead. I'm going to work on your scalp now. Is there a bullet in there, too? If you shake your head will it rattle?”
“No. Somebody hit me from behind. I haven't got to that part, either.”
“Should I be recording this?”
“No. Listen to the whole story. Then we'll decide what to do.”
“We? I don't think so. This is out of your hands now. I'll decide what to do.”
“Once you've heard the story. Hear me out.”
She moved to the other side of the bed and began working on my head wound. “Let me see your eyes,” she said. Painfully I raised my head while she checked the pupils. “Doesn't look like a concussion, but you've got about an inch of scalp gone back there.” She cleaned the wound and made concerned sounds deep in her throat.
When she finished, she handed me a robe and I followed her to the living room. We sat on the couch while I finished my story. There was a feeling of intimacy I hadn't noticed before. Kate made coffee and microwaved croissants from her freezer. They tasted good, but food did not appeal. I ate them covered with strawberry preserves. I know I had burned a huge amount of calories and they needed replenishment. She made me drink a lot of water. I was thirsty and obeyed.

Other books

A Pack of Lies by Geraldine McCaughrean
Wind in the Wires by Joy Dettman
Death Come Quickly by Susan Wittig Albert
Letters by Saul Bellow
My Tattered Bonds by Courtney Cole
Jerusalem's Hope by Brock Thoene
Limbo by Melania G. Mazzucco
The Emerald Key by Vicky Burkholder