Island in the Sea of Time (46 page)

Walker went to stand beside the Tartessian. “I see you brought Rosita,” he said to the adventurer . . .
other adventurer,
he thought. Freedom was like wings, like striding over the earth, omnipotent.

“But of course,” Isketerol said, looking down at where she huddled against the rail. “I promised her that I would take her as a wife. And so I will. Third wife, to be sure—but when we are finished, my third wife will be more than Pharaoh’s great queen.” He jerked his chin without looking around. “Your Alice, as well.”

Hong got to her feet. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Will? This tame goon of yours comes along and strong-arms us—”

He swung around, still grinning, and pointed a finger. It didn’t quite touch the young doctor’s nose, but she jarred to a halt. “Shut up,” he said. “You’re along because I don’t intend to entrust my precious personal body to the local witch doctors if I get sick. But I’m a healthy guy, so your value isn’t infinite.” She froze, clasping her arms around her nightgown.

Restoring order and setting watches took a few minutes. It left him still full of energy, bouncing on his toes, sleep out of the question, like a hit of cocaine—something he’d tried once or twice, on confiscated material that went missing. No more than that—William Walker wasn’t going to wreck himself to make a bunch of Colombian greaseballs rich—but the sensation was pretty much the same. Except that this high was free, and high as the gleaming moon above him. The thudding diesel drove the schooner’s sharp prow eastward at a steady ten knots, water curling back from it in opalescent wings. He grabbed Alice Hong by one arm and pushed her ahead of him down the stairs before the wheel, then sternward and into the captain’s cabin. There were two big bunks on either side of a table, with a semicircle of padded seats under the fantail windows. Out of them he could see the
Yare
’s wake disappearing behind him.

The woman rounded on him. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, you son of a bitch?” she began.

Crack.
His hand took her across the face, just hard enough to leave a red imprint. She staggered back a step and caught herself against the edge of the table.

“Hey, Will—” Her voice was tremulous. “No need to get rough.”

“But you
like
it rough, don’t you, Alice?” he said, sliding off his belt.

A combination of fear and queasy excitement brightened her eyes and made her moisten her lips. She did; he’d discovered Alice Hong had more kinks than a corkscrew, which made her more interesting . . . and more useful, in some respects. Leather whistled in his hand.

“Please, Will . . . what are you doing?”

“Whatever I want, from now on,” he said. “I told you about it, remember?”

“I thought you were just bullshitting me, fantasies to get me hot!”

“No, Alice. I’m going to be a king . . . and those who follow me are going to have wealth and power beyond their dreams. As long as they obey me. Turn around.”

She obeyed. He gripped the back of her nightgown and ripped it off with a single yank that brought a gasp from her. A hand between the shoulder blades bent her over the table.

Smack
. The leather raised a welt across her buttocks. “Isn’t that right, Alice? Anything I want.”
Smack.

“Yes, God, yes!”

He laughed and unzipped. “There are a lot of things you’d like, aren’t there, Alice?” he said, and thrust into her. She yelped and gripped the edges of the table.
Wet,
he thought.
This is one sick bitch puppy.
Wet tightness around him. He began to move, eyes on the moonlit road across the waters behind the ship.

“You’d like to have a place where you could dish it out, too, when you felt like it,” he said. “Gold and silk, wealth, girls, boys, do some
real
rough stuff of your own, with no laws and no place you had to stop. Real whips, real knives.”

“Yes,” she hissed, pushing back to meet him. “Yes, you bastard—you weren’t just—
Jesus!—
you weren’t just daydreaming.”

He laughed, one hand gripping the back of her neck with painful force, thrusting into her with a savagery that battered her thighs against the edge of the table.

“I’m the man who makes dreams come true.”

 

“S
he’s coming ’round,” Coleman said.

Cofflin rolled his wheelchair closer. The left leg was straight out before him, the wound a dull ache under the anesthetic. The other pain couldn’t be dulled—he could feel it nibbling at the edges of his mind, roiling with a killing rage. But there was no time for it, not if he was to do what had to be done.

Alston’s eyes fluttered open. They were bloodshot, wandering. Coleman leaned over her and shone a light into one and the other. A long-fingered black hand came up; Swindapa gripped it in hers and bent close. Alston’s eyes closed again for a moment, and she sighed. Cofflin fought down a moment of sickening envy; it wasn’t Alston’s fault that he was the one left alone.

“Water.”

A nurse cranked the hospital bed up. “Hospital” was a bit too grand for the little forty-bed clinic that was all the island had—all it had needed, when the mainland’s hospitals and specialists were close. Morning sunlight shone through the open windows, and a breath of sea and flowers. The garden outside was heedlessly, cruelly beautiful with roses.

Swindapa held a cup to Alston’s lips. The officer felt at the bandages above her left ear. When she spoke, it was quiet but coherent. “Hurts like hell.”

“You’re a very lucky woman,” Coleman said, in the semi-scolding tone doctors always used in these situations.

“Ah’m lucky . . . the bitch was usin’ a popgun,” she said. “Concussion?”

“It skipped around the bone,” Coleman said. “Light bullet, as you guessed. Some blood loss, minor concussion”—which was better than a serious one, but that was all you could say for it—“and you’ll have a small scar. White streak through your hair, maybe. It didn’t even need a stitch.”

Alston sighed again. Her eyes swiveled around to Cofflin. “Fill me in.”

“It was Lisketter and her gang,” he said. “They took a boat—the schooner,
Bentley
—and kidnapped Martha. And I couldn’t do a God
damned
thing.” His fist pounded the arm of the chair, once, twice.

“Not . . . with a bullet through your knee,” Alston responded. “That the whole of it?”

Cofflin shook his head. “Your . . . formerly your Lieutenant Walker was in on it. We got a couple of prisoners, Lisketter’s people who jumped ship. Evidently he and Isketerol, the Tartessian, scammed Lisketter—got her to help them hijack the town’s weapons and create a diversion. Meanwhile Walker got a gang of his own together, some Coast Guard, most townies, and took the weapons from the
Eagle
’s armory, together with the
Yare,
its cargo, and John Martins and his lady Barbara. They were kidnapped too, evidently. Lisketter thought Walker was going down to San Lorenzo, Mexico, up the Coatzacoalcos River, to help her, some crazy scheme to arm the Indians there to protect them from big bad us. Then when the
Yare
and the
Bentley
were both out beyond the breakwaters, Walker gave her the finger and sailed east.”

“I’m . . . extremely sorry, Chief Cofflin.” Alston said softly. “Extremely.”

“You did better than any of the rest of us,” Cofflin said roughly.
Which isn’t very fucking good.
“We got overconfident. We got lazy.”

Alston nodded and winced. “How long?” she said to Coleman.

“I will not let you out of that bed for another two days,” he said. “I’d
like
to have you under observation for another week after that.”

“Not possible. Is
Eagle
still here?”

Cofflin cleared his throat and jerked his chin toward the next bed. Alston rolled her head slowly and carefully. Sandy Rapczewicz was there, her lower face immobilized in a brace. She held up a slate, marked in chalk:

Cofflin saw something in her eyes that answered his. He nodded. “Can you catch them?”

“Which ones?” Alston said. “
Eagle’s
got more hull speed than either, but they can both cut closer to the wind. If
Yare
’s gone east, and she has, I can probably catch him. Those are following winds—best for a square-rigger.
Bentley
will be beating to windward most of the way down.
Eagle
’d be traveling three sea miles to her two. Plus it’s a big ocean and we don’t have spotter planes.
Eagle
’s radar is short-range.”

“And besides, if you did run
Yare
down, he’s got the machine gun, and most of the rifles. Unless you could ram him”—as a former fisherman he knew how nearly impossible that would be, especially for two ships under sail—“it would be a . . . hairy proposition.”

Cofflin waited; he saw with some amazement that Alston was suppressing a laugh. At last she spoke:

“Not all that bad . . . I’ve got a nasty paranoid mind. The firin’ pin, bolt, and return spring for that Browning are in a box under my bed at Guard House. Plus the pins fo’ the rifles, although he might be able to make more of those. Various other crucial parts, too.”

This time she did laugh, a snarling chuckle which ended with a wince. Cofflin grinned, a baring of teeth. He had a score to settle with Lieutenant Walker, someday. But first . . .

He looked at Alston. There were two hostages on
Yare,
as opposed to one on
Bentley . . .
four on
Yare,
if Menendez and Hong hadn’t gone of their own wills; their rooms were suspiciously unpacked.

“Bentley,”
Alston said. “We go after
Bentley.
More difficult . . . do that first. Then run down
Yare.”

Cofflin closed his eyes for an instant, shuddering, then opened them and met hers. His nod held a promise:
I owe you one.
Whatever the reason, she’d go after Martha first.

“Did I get . . . what’s-his-name?”

“David Lisketter. We’re not sure; they didn’t leave a body, at least. They
did
leave the hand and the gun it was holding. They panicked, dropped any other plans and ran.”

Alston nodded, closing her eyes and laying her head back on the pillows. Coleman stood and made shooing motions. “Let her rest; she’ll recover faster that way. Out, all of you! Well, you can stay, young lady, if you’re very quiet. Out, the rest of you. Out!”

 

“You’re not just a prick, Rodriguez, you’re a
stupid
prick, you know that?”

The
Yare
was heeled over sharply, making twelve knots with a following wind. She was heading north by northeast, into the higher latitudes, and the raw wind was colder already over seas huge and ice gray. The schooner crested a rise, hesitated, then plunged downward with spray flying twice man-height from her bows. The others of her crew—twenty in all, not counting the women or Martins—were watching silently, except for the two at the wheel and a few more leaning over the rail, retching as the waves lashed their faces.

“I was just, like, trying to get some,” the sailor whined. He was visibly forcing himself not to cringe, but there was a cornered viciousness in his eyes. “You got your squeeze, so does the wog—why shouldn’t the rest of us get some?”

Crack. Rodriguez staggered back and grabbed at a rope, the imprint of Walker’s hand across his face. Behind him Bill Cuddy picked a spare belaying pin out of the rack around the foremast and stepped forward, with McAndrews just behind him. Walker waved them back. This had to be settled right. He went on:

“Because, you dumb fuck, I told you to keep your hands off the blacksmith’s woman. And you
do
what I
tell
you. What part of that is too complicated for you to understand?”

“You said we’d all get women!”

“You will . . . when you’ve earned it. Work to do first, fighting to do—and all of it when I say so. I say jump, you say ‘How high,
sir
!’ Got that?
Sabe?
” He grinned, slow and savage. “Or maybe you’d like to give the orders? Come on, Rodriguez, this isn’t the Coast Guard. You want a piece of me, come and get it.”

The Puerto Rican hesitated, wiping blood from his mouth, then whipped out his knife and lunged. Walker caught the wrist with a slap of flesh on flesh.
Let’s do this the simple, brute-strength, old-fashioned way.

He squeezed. Muscle stood out in cords along his forearm, and Rodriguez dropped the knife. It struck the deck point-down and the sharp point sank in enough to support it quivering by their feet. Walker kept up the pressure, until the bones in the smaller man’s wrist began to grate together. He screamed and lashed out with the other hand. Walker caught that as well, twisting both arms until the seaman rose up on his toes, face livid and writhing with the unbearable pressure on his joints.

“And incidentally, Rodriguez, Isketerol is XO of this ship. So you don’t call him ‘wog.’ You call him ‘sir.’
Capiche?
”

“Sir, yessir!” came out in a gasp.

“And the reason I’m not pulling your arms out by the roots is that you’re useful. But not that useful. So you’re not going to try disobeying my orders again, are you?”

“Sir, nossir!”

This time it was more like a scream. Walker released him and he dropped to his knees, arms quivering with the released strain. The former Coast Guard officer raised his voice:

“Let’s all get one thing straight. I’m in charge. Because I’m stronger and faster and meaner than any of you, but most of all because I’m smarter. I know the languages, I know the countries, I’ve got the plan. Without me you’d all be dead in a month—if you were lucky. Any arguments?”

There was a murmured chorus of agreement, a few grins and salutes. He went on: “And I don’t remember saying
stop working.
” The crew split like magnetized billiard balls, back to the duties he’d assigned. “Thanks, by the way,” he continued to McAndrews and Cuddy, nodding. “I’ll remember that.”