Ocean Burning (16 page)

I watched in horror as it seared the flesh from my bones, ate through the muscles of my hand like acid mixed with napalm, melting me away until only a charred stump was left. Defying gravity, the rose/flame started crawling up my arm. I fell to my knees, drove what was left of the arm deep into the sand, like I was returning Excalibur to the stone.

“It’s crazy,” Ben Hawking said, and abruptly, in the way of dreams, I was on a different beach. It was noon here, the sun high in the sky. Ben and I were lying on the sand, doodling in it, discussing all the possible scenarios our plan might present, balancing the risks and the rewards. This part of the dream was nearly lucid, like watching a movie, and played out exactly as it had in life.

“Yeah, it is crazy, but also necessary,” I was saying.

“Necessary like a kamikaze,” Ben said.

“Let’s be sure. That’s the point: even if everything goes to shit, you and I won’t be the only ones to get fucked.”

Ben traced a shape in the sand, thinking.

“They tried to kill us,” I said. “
She
tried to kill you. And to be honest, there’s a pretty good chance she still will.”

He stopped doodling. I had his attention.

“Let’s make sure—even if we lose, so do they.”

“Mutually assured destruction,” he muttered.

“Exactly. There’s a bag stowed on the starboard side. It’s got a knife it in. But more importantly, an egg timer, wire, blasting caps, and a flare gun.”

“Why do you even have blasting caps?”

I grinned. “Don’t ask. And don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. The only hitch is that they’re old, and they’ve been sitting on a boat, and boats are wet. We have to hope they’re still good. I tape the flare gun to the cap, tape the wire to the flare gun, and rig the wire to the timer. Then I’ll just take off the fuel caps.”

“So?”

“So, if something happens to us, if we’re not there to stop the timer…”

Ben stabbed his stick into the sand, just like I had done with my charred stump.

“Does that mean you’ll do it?” I asked.

He nodded. “Wake up,” he said. “Wake up, you son of a bitch,” and slapped me across the face.

LIGHT POURED INTO my pupils. They had dilated even farther, and it hurt like hell. I winced, then groaned, and closed my eyes all together.

“No you don’t,” Carmen said, and slapped me across the face again. “Franky. It’s time to wake up.”

Hands grabbed me roughly under the arms, hauled me to my feet. I swayed in place, and tried to shield my eyes from the sun.

The sun.

It was well above the horizon now, and still rising. The jarring sensation of time lost shook me. So did the seemingly abrupt teleportation from place to place. I realized I was sprawled on deck, up near the bow.

God, the timer!

The thought of it skittered across the back of my mind, a rat peeking out of its hole. I’d set it place just as Ben and I had planned, and had set it for ninety minutes. I looked at the sun again, trying to estimate the time by dead reckoning. By now I had planned to be either dead or well out of this mess.

The best laid plans of mice and men,
I thought.

“You know, it’s really not healthy to be unconscious for…how long was I out?” I said.

No one said anything.

I decided to check my watch under the pretense of getting the glare out of my eyes. It had a stopwatch function, and I’d set it along with the egg timer.

I could feel my heart pounding, could feel it jetting the blood around my body. The burning rose from my dream came back to me, and suddenly I knew exactly what it meant.
Victims of our own success, both of us
, I thought. I shielded my eyes, looked down. Tried to make it seem casual.

The watch read
71:23
in blinking numbers. As I watched, it kept counting up, seventy-one minutes and twenty-three seconds…twenty-four seconds…twenty-five seconds.

I let out a breath. When it read
90:00
, all hell would break loose.

I had been imagining the worst, something like eighty-nine minutes having passed. I did some quick mental subtraction, and realized that despite my luck in waking up before the
Purple
blew all to hell, things weren’t exactly looking good.

Eighteen minutes and change. Better make the most of it.

“Seriously, after being out that long, I think I need to see a doctor,” I said.

Carmen hit me on the side of the head with something heavy, and I cried out.

“Sure you do,” she said.

I opened my eyes and checked her hands. One gripped a small but sturdy-looking silver revolver. It winked at me in the morning light.

“Where did you get that?”

“My luggage, silly,” she said, putting on a little girl voice, complete with giggle. Then she let the act drop. A switch flipped somewhere inside her. Her face went slack, and her eyes went dead. I think she wanted me to see it.

“Ballsy,” I said.

“I wrapped it in my panties. Ben would never look through there. He’s very…proper like that.”

Ben was missing from the deck, I noticed. Carlos slouched behind Carmen, present but seemingly unhappy for some reason. Rigger was there too, but he couldn’t be happier. Happy on Rigger looked like a rabid dog. His eyes glinted, too wet, never blinking. One finger traced his scar up and down, pressing hard. His other hand sported my fillet knife, held loose and ready. He looked like a man with professional-level knowledge of what to do with it.

“Where’s Ben?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s so sweet,” Carmen said, suddenly back in her sweetness-and-light character. “You made a little friend. Well, your little friend is down below, locked in a guestroom. I wanted us to be able to talk alone. Don’t you want to talk to me alone, Frank?”

“You sick bitch,” I said.

She reached out with the gun hand again, and I winced. She didn’t hit me, though. Instead, she started stroking my hair.

“My, my. What language. Don’t you want to hear what I’ve planned for you?”

I risked a glance at my watch.
73:51
blinked back at me.

“I think I already know the plan,” I said. “Use your bank access—better yet, your access to Ben Hawking—to get some undocumented money in the vault down here. Introduce a small error into their paperwork. By the time they discovered the mistake, you’d be down here on ‘vacation’ with the bank vice president. Hmm, I wonder who they’ll look to? Then you used Ben’s access to get your goons in to take the money.”

She nodded encouragingly, her green eyes smiling.

“Meanwhile, you track me down, a man with both a record for counterfeiting and ownership of a boat. Book a trip. Make a casual suggestion that we be here, near this island, and what do you know, your friends just happen to be at the same spot. A rendezvous. Only I don’t think they were supposed to sink the boat.”

She laughed, high and tight, the tinkling of a crystal chandelier. “No, that wasn’t part of the plan.” Her eyes slid sideways, towards Rigger. He still stared at me, unblinking. Now he was flexing and unflexing his good arm, the veins bulging like high tension wires.

“Assuming Rigger hadn’t blown it,” I continued, “the plan would have been to kill me, kill Ben, deliver this boat to some port, or hell, even set her adrift. You go back to the mainland, call the police from the hotel and say, ‘oh, my finance is missing, I’m so worried.’ Turn on those doe eyes of yours for anyone who questions you.”

She grinned wolfishly at me. Rigger was gripping the knife much too tightly now.

“And they spend the next few years looking for Ben Hawking and Frank Conway. But they never find them, do they?”

“No,” she said, “they never do.”

She raised the gun, thumbed the hammer back until it gave a sickening click.

“One thing I couldn’t figure, though,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“The third guy, the one on the boat—the grinning man. Why’d you kill him?”

Something slithered behind those dead eyes of hers. I sensed I’d touched a nerve.

“Nice little group,” I said, “and you kill the one guy.”

“It was an accident,” Rigger said, a little too quickly I thought.

“What, like he slipped and fell on thousand pieces of buckshot?”

Carlos took two big steps forward, reached out, and pushed Carmen’s gun barrel down towards the ground. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the third guy,” I said.

“My brother,” he said.

“Ah, I see,” I said.

And I did.

I glanced at Rigger. He twitched visibly. The point of the fillet knife, previously directed downward, now pointed at Carlos’s back like a laser.

“He drowned,” Carlos said. “It was an accident.”

“That’s what Rigger told you?” I directed it right at Carlos. He wouldn’t meet my eye.

“Yes,” he said under his breath. “We split up after the bank, just in case. They were supposed to pick me up at a different dock. They were supposed to pick up Marco first. He took care of the cleaning crew that night. Only Rigger showed. Said the police had tried to catch up with them. Said my brother hit his head, went over, that there was no way he could have made it.”

“You’re lying,” Rigger shouted at me. “He’s lying.”

Carlos said nothing.

“Carlos,” I said, “how would I even know he exists? Because his body was stuffed into the locker on your boat. It popped open before the boat went down, and I got a great look at the big gaping hole in his chest. Who was carrying a shotgun? Maybe a sawn off one?”

Pay dirt.

I saw his resolve waver just for a second, then his eyes narrowed. Someone had been carrying a sawn off, for sure, and I had a pretty good guess of who it might be.

“Don’t listen to this piece of shit, Carlos,” Carmen said, “he just wants—”

Carlos spun on his, heel stalked towards Rigger.

“Did you do it?” he said.

Rigger made some small effort to look shocked, then seemed to come to some decision. He gave up the act, smirked at Carlos, then threw back he head and laughed.

“Fucking right I did, ya cunt. And the better we are for it. More money for everyone. Besides, your brother didn’t have the stomach to do what needed to be done.” He spit on the deck between them. “For that matter, neither do you.”

I stole a glance at my watch.
78:02
. Less than twelve minutes.

“Rigger, don’t,” Carmen said.

But it was too late. The moment the words left her mouth, everything happened all at once.

Carlos flicked his wrist, and a thin curved blade appeared there. Much faster than I would have thought possible, he closed the gap between Rigger and himself, his arm already moving in an upward slash.

Had he been coming at me like that, I would have been jumping backwards. But Rigger waited. He let Carlos get close. At the last second, just before the switchblade reached him, he swept his injured arm across and into Carlos’s wrist. It deflected the path of the blade just enough—it missed him by inches.

In the same breath, he brought my fillet knife down from above, hammer-style, and opened Carlos up. The blade caught him at the shoulder and traced a diagonal down across his chest to his hip. For a second there was only a tear in his shirt. Then the long, jagged tear bloomed red.

They both froze. Carlos looked like he was expecting to die. Rigger seemed to be expecting something similar.

It was my fillet knife, though, and while flexible and excellent for boning fish, it wasn’t very sharp. Rigger had delivered a hell of a blow, but it was a slash and not a stab. Without any internal organs pierced, I knew Carlos was only badly injured, not dead. I looked at Carmen, hoping for an opening, but she had backed away from all of us, the gun still carefully trained on me.

“Bloody hell,” Rigger muttered, and moved in again. Carlos, catching a second wind as his survival instincts kicked in, gave him a terrific shove, then slashed, and caught Rigger across the top of the hand. The fillet knife skittered across the deck, bounced through the scupper, and was lost to the sea. Rigger raised his hands, as though asking for a reprieve. He was at Carlos’s mercy, and for a tiny second Carlos lowered the tip of his blade, considering the situation.

Rigger dropped both hands, rotated on the ball of his foot, and shot his leg out sideways. The boot caught Carlos dead in the center of the chest, delivering all of Rigger’s momentum in a blow of tremendous force. Carlos and I locked eyes, a mixture of pain and shock written across his face, and then he flipped backwards over the rail and disappeared under the water.

I shot to my feet. Carmen kept her finger on the trigger of her gun, but didn’t tell me to sit. We both watched the surface.

“Let me do something,” I said weakly. “Let me help him.”

Carmen smiled at me, the pink sickle of her lips slicing across the bottom of her face. She was enjoying herself.

I knew what would happen to him out there in the water. The thought of it made me sick. But Carmen was
enjoying
this.

Carlos came sputtering out of a wave, tried to grab the edge of the fiberglass, slipped off again. There were no hand holds. Even from where I was standing, the dark fluid seeping out of Carlos was obvious. His blood stained sea. It would only be a matter of seconds.

“Rigger!” he cried. “Help me! For God’s sake, please, not the shar—”

One of them must have gotten his leg then, because he started to scream. It wasn’t terror—it was horror. He was about to be eaten alive. Worst of all, he knew it.

He looked at us with eyes that pleaded, that begged. Carmen laughed once, a short, horse bark. Then the sharks dragged him under, and he disappeared.

Chapter 18

“HOLY SHIT,” RIGGER said.

We all stood welded to the spot, staring at murky surface of the water. It roiled for another few seconds, bubbles escaping from somewhere in the deep. Then nothing.

I glanced over at Rigger, and he had moved over to one of the bow storage compartments. He reached inside and pulled out a sawn-off shot gun, pumped the action, gripped it in his good hand.