Race to World's End (Rowan and Ella Book 3) (15 page)

Rowan’s death certificate.

“I didn’t tell
you,” Ella said as Halima handed her the official looking letter from the
United States, “because it was…morbid and there was no point. I knew it would
take forever for them to get back to me. If I just had five minutes with an
Internet connection and a smartphone I could’ve found it out for myself.”

“You want to know
if he survived the voyage.”

Ella held the
envelope in her hand and brushed the tips of her fingers across the postal
mark. The paper felt so much heavier than it did in 2013. “Well there’s really
no point in my going to Florida if he doesn’t. Bottom line. I mean, if he
doesn’t
survive the trip there won’t
be
a death certificate,” Ella said. “And
we’ll never know what happened to him. But if this envelope contains a death
certificate for Rowan, as gruesome as that sounds, it means he made it.”

“Open it.” Halima
handed her a thin letter opener from a pocket in her day dress.

Ella nodded
grimly and ripped open the envelope. She extricated a single piece of paper and
recognized that her fingers were trembling. She was sure Halima could see too. She
read the letter and looked up at Halima, her eyes full of emotion.

“Dearest?” Halima
asked.
 

“It…it’s his
death certificate.” She swallowed hard and read out loud, “Rowan Pierce,
birthdate unknown. Thompson Island. Date of death…November 1, 1825.” Ella’s
face flushed with emotion to read the words and she fanned herself to bring
herself back in hand.

Halima shook her
head in confusion. “November first? What does that mean?”

“It means, Halima,
that Rowan did survive the trip from Casablanca, but depending on when his ship
reached Florida, he died approximately two weeks later.”

Halima took the
sheet from Ella. “It doesn’t say how? Illness? Murder?”

“No.”

Halima looked at
her. Ella knew she was putting it together as fast as she was. She reached for
her drink but it was already empty.

“I need to get to
Key West
now
,” Ella said looking at Halima
and trying to keep a calmness in her voice she did not feel. “And I need to
pray I recover quickly because if I don’t, I’m not going to prevent him from dying
on the first of November.”

Halima reached
over and gripped her hand. “You’re strong enough to do this, Ella.”

“I know.” Ella
took a long breath and let it out. “But this time, I’m going to need a few
things.”

Halima stood up
and held out her hand. “Come. Let’s go have dessert with the young man, and
then later I’ll help you pack.”

 
 
14

“Well,
naturally, the monster was incensed at having to ride on the wing of the
airplane—”

“Tell
us again,
mkubwa
, what’s a
hairplane?”

“Oy,
ye git! He’s already told ye twice! It’s a machine what flies in the air.”

“Without
horses?”

“Kin
horses fly, ye idiot?”

“Go
on with the story,
mkubwa
.”

“Right.
So the monster is hunched on the wing and the only person who can see him is
this one passenger who already has a history of mental illness.”

“Cor
blimey, that sounds desperate bad.”

“And
the monster begins to rip apart the wing—”

“The
wing what keeps ‘em in the sky?” The pirates looked at Rowan with horror.

“Exactly
right, so—”

Two
pirates stood up in agitation, one slamming his fist into his hand as if
imagining the monster right in front of him. It took all of Rowan’s powers of
self-restraint not to laugh.

One
of the pirates spoke, shaking his head and looking away as if seeing the whole
story being performed in his mind. “God’s blood! And nobody believes him!
They’re all to die because no one believes he’s seeing it!”

“So
then the pilot says over the intercom that they’re having mechanical
difficulties and the passenger feels the airplane drop in altitude—”

“Hell
and furies, man! Whatever that is sounds powerful bad!”

“The
monster’s killing the hairplane! Then what,
mkubwa
?”

“Well,
there’s this mighty gust of wind—”

“The
hand of God Almighty!”

“Very
likely. And this wind blows the monster off the wing and the hair, er airplane
sorts itself out and the captain comes on the intercom again and says,
basically, no worries, we’re fine so the passenger begins to wonder, naturally—”

“Whether
he’s really mad or no? He doesn’t know if it really happened?”

“That’s
it. He thinks it was all in his head.”

“Well,
was it?”

“You
tell me. The story ends with the passenger falling peacefully asleep for the
rest of the trip, but if you were to look closely at the airplane as it flew
through the night sky, you would see panels of metal twisted and ripped as if a
powerful being—a monster from another world—had attempted to
destroy the airplane wing.”

“I’ll
be sworn,
mkubwa
, I got chills when
ye said that. Fecking chills!”

“Aye,
me, too,” the little cabin boy, Kip, said. “I’m not be sleeping tonight, I’ll
be bound.”

Rowan
grinned at his shipmates. They were all young, none yet thirty, and he found
them, for the most part, friendly and simple. There were times when he found it
difficult to differentiate them from some of the friendships he’d developed at
Quantico. The fact that he’d seen this lot in action—attacking a ship and
stealing what wasn’t theirs—strangely didn’t, as the months went by, seem
to matter as much as he knew it probably should.

The fact was that
the months of life aboard the
Die Hard
had fallen into a nearly comfortable monotony for Rowan. His dreams always
included Ella at night, and by day he plotted how to retrieve his property from
the captain when he was close enough to land to make it worth the risk. The
second beating had been severe, but the terror of coming so close to losing his
hand had initially mitigated it—that is, until he spent the next five
days recovering from the thrashing.

He cursed himself
for his stupidity, his clumsiness in getting caught—he’d been too eager
to get the lighter—but his fierce intention to try again wasn’t dampened
for a minute by what might have happened, by what nearly did happen.

Rowan thought it
odd Sully didn’t ask him about the lighter.

Was it possible the bastard knew what it was?

More than once
Rowan wondered if Sully was a fellow time traveler. He had nothing to go on to
think that except for the lighter—and the fact Sully seemed to regard him
in a particularly guarded way.

It’s as if he knows. And he wonders if I know, too.

The morning that the
Dry Tortugas came into view was a hot one, with the sky cerulean blue and
cloudless. Rowan had snorkeled around the islands that made up the Dry Tortugas
during college spring break many years ago. Now, as he stood at the deck
railing of an 1825 pirate’s schooner, he found it impossible to believe that a
glass bottom boat or catamaran complete with blaring rap music and bikini-clad
tourists wouldn’t intrude on the scene at any moment.

What he wouldn’t
give to see that right now.

“Oy,
mkubwa
, ye feeling alright? Ye look
sick, like.” Ansel peered around a man between them to look at Rowan.

Rowan smiled.
“Just looking forward to getting on dry land.”
 

“Nay, mate. The cap’n
won’t let ye off tonight, nor any of us, to be sure.”

The man between
them snarled. “We ain’t his to be ordered about,” he said. But Rowan knew
they’d obey just the same.

By the time the
Die Hard
dropped anchor in the cove,
Rowan saw no fewer than three other sloops already moored.

Every one a
pirate ship.

Rowan watched a
bonfire on the beach, and as night fell he heard the sounds of the other
pirates as they drank and danced and fought with each other.

Sully kept
everyone on
Die Hard
on board.

“Cor, it ain’t
half bad,” Ansel said after dinner as he and Rowan sat, smoking and playing cards
in the galley. “The Dry Tortugas is a bog of mosquitoes, sea snakes and hungry
crocs. Wait’ll we get to
Cayo Hueso
.”

Whether they went
ashore or not mattered little to Rowan. Sully out of his cabin was another
opportunity to search it for the lighter. And now that he was at the end of his
journey, once he got his hands on it, he could escape with it into the throngs
and crowds of Key West.

That was, of
course, assuming he survived the four-hour sail from the Dry Tortugas to Key
West with the lighter’s theft undiscovered. He drummed his fingers against his
knee.
Perhaps it would be smarter to look
for it once they arrived in Key West?

“Oy,
mkubwa
, it’s your draw. What’s on your
mind, lad?”

Rowan had to
grin. Ansel was easily ten years his junior, but half the time he treated Rowan
like an addled younger brother. Probably because in this world, Ansel
definitely had the advantage.

“Well, if you
really want to know,” Rowan said impulsively, the thought of Ella and the imminent
prospect of his return to her after so long spinning in his head, “I asked the
Dutchman to post a letter to my wife from Casablanca. I have hopes of a
response from her waiting for me in Key West.”

Ansel’s face
fell. “But she wouldn’t know to write to ye there, would she?”

He had a point of
course, but it wasn’t really a response that Rowan was waiting for. Now that
the long journey was nearly done, he would be with her soon.

“I mean, ye
didn’t even know we were heading this way ‘til the Dutchman left the ship.”

Rowan shrugged. “Doesn’t
matter,” he said. “The letter told her I was alive and that I’ll find my way
back to her. That’s all that matters.”

They played
another hand in silence, which Rowan thought very odd for Ansel who was usually
as chatty as Kip’s captured Rosella parrot.

“Something on
your mind, Ansel?” Rowan prompted. Even from below decks, he could hear the
shouts as the pirates on the beach took their drinking and dancing to the next
level.

“Look, lad,”
Ansel said, tossing down the hand he held and rubbing his long, filthy fingers
on the worn knees of his trousers. “I know ye were mates with him so I didn’t
want to say nothing before now, but I heard it from someone who knows that
Sully murdered the poor bastard in a field outside of Casablanca. I’m that
sorry fer ye, lad.”

***

Sully knew he was
going to have a fight on his hands. But he’d had four months to figure out how
to handle it.

Thanks to good
weather and few storms of consequence they’d made the trip faster than they
ever had before. The crew was convinced the giant had brought them good luck.

 
Sully needed to go ashore alone in order
to hide what the Dutchman had given him. He knew that was strange behavior no
matter how anyone looked at it, and in his case he had a crew of thirty-five
men desperate for shore leave and a very suspicious quartermaster looking at it
from every angle.

It couldn’t be
helped.

Just
having
the thing on board was a risk,
and he certainly couldn’t carry it into Key West.
 

A harsh knock on
his door as he was tugging on his jacket could only be that idiot Toad. If he
wasn’t so good at handling the men, it wouldn’t be worth putting up with
everything else about him.

Sully opened the
door. “I was just leaving,” he said, pushing past his quartermaster.

“I’ve arranged a
small detail of men to accompany ye, Cap’n,” Toad said.

“As I said, Toad.
That won’t be necessary.”

“The crew from
the
Craven Monkey
is wound up.
There’s been pistol shots.”

“I heard.”

“And the crocs? Ye
move very far from the fire on the beach—”

“I appreciate
your concern, Edward,” Sully said, motioning for the sailor at the gangway to
lower the rope ladder to the waiting dinghy in the water next to the ship. “I’m
armed. Double the guard on board, but otherwise, let the men sleep. I’ll want
to lift anchor the minute I’m back.”

“When will that
be if I may make so bold?”

Sully grabbed the
handle on the rope ladder and swung his legs over the side to begin his
descent. He could feel the boxy shape of the treasure box snug inside his vest.
If Toad looked closely enough, he could probably make it out.