The Catch: A Novel (21 page)

“You friend sick?”

“Hurt. Like me. But he can’t stay at the hospital anymore. I need to bring him. I can pay you, like a hotel, if we can stay for a few days.”

“How you go get him?”

“Help me with the car,” she said. “I can pay.”

The woman smiled again, a rich flash of bright white teeth. “Maybe,” she said, and waved Munroe toward the house of wooden sticks. “You rest, I go ask.”

T
HE SKY WAS
fully dark, the inside of the house even more so, when Mary returned, her arrival announced by the
put-put
rumble of an old car with muffler issues, probably the same car that they’d used to take her to the hotel.

Munroe was in the doorway when the car shuddered to a stop and Mary stepped from the passenger side, laughing and joking with the driver. He was younger than she, taller, thin in the same way that most men in the area seemed to be. “This Gabriel, my brother,” Mary said. “You know him. You remember?”

Munroe nodded.

“He take you Mombasa.”

Munroe paused for a moment at the combination of names. Gabriel and Mary. Had the parents had any idea how strange those names played out when paired as brother and sister? The world tilted at an odd angle, and Munroe wrote off playing a biblical name game as the drugs talking. She shook hands with Gabriel, and whatever he said entered her head through a funny slow-motion haze that left her feeling far happier than the situation warranted. She limped back to the room to collect the money and weapon and drugs on the off chance she wouldn’t return, left the few thousand shillings that had come as change for the prescription purchase; and with Mary already on the other side of the compound untethering the goats and talking to three of the children who’d returned home, Munroe eased into the passenger side of the car, and Gabriel shut her door.

The vehicle was a Toyota, spray-painted light blue, and twenty years old at the least, with bald tires, a missing window, and doors that had been dented and reshaped several times, one of them latched closed with wire. For a family at this end of the socioeconomic scale, the car was an incredible and costly luxury.

They crawled from the compound entrance to the highway, where buses,
matatus
, overladen trucks, and an array of cars from luxury vehicles to those decrepit like this one moved past, and Gabriel waited a long, long time for the road to clear. With emergency flashers going, he pulled out onto the highway. The vehicle gained
speed slowly and only after he was up over thirty kilometers an hour did he turn off the flashers. The car never got much faster than that, but it was better than walking, and unlike many of the other cars on the so-called highway, the headlights worked, which limited the chance of hitting someone along the side of the road. Even if Munroe had had access to her own vehicle, she wouldn’t have driven it. Not in the condition she was in, not driving on the left-hand side, everything opposite, and where in a road accident, no matter the circumstances or who was at fault, the white one was always to blame.

Gabriel glanced at Munroe several times along the way, and finally, when she in her chemical daze offered nothing to fill the silence, he said, “You very lucky.”

She turned just enough to briefly catch his eye.

“I watch when they come,” he said. Both of his hands gripped the steering wheel and he focused on the windshield and the taillights of the truck belching black smoke in front of them. “Six men. Seven men. Eight men. Three dead now. Three. Four.”

Munroe tipped her head back against the cracked vinyl headrest. “I don’t remember anything,” she said.

Gabriel glanced at her again. “Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

He sighed, and after a weighty pause the story unfolded in halting, measured, and broken English, and with his words flashes of memory returned, and then imagined memories rose to re-create what she could never have known unless he’d told her; that she’d fought for the kill, to die killing, unwilling to go to the grave in brutality or alone, that she’d fought until overpowered and bludgeoned, beaten unconscious and dragged toward the ocean to die.

“They want kill you,” he said. “And then come light and shout from the houses, many
askari
from houses, maybe they hear and they come and the men, they scared. They run away.” He paused. “You a very dangerous woman. I think you die,” he said. “Me and Johnny get the boat. We are Sami friend, we think you die and we carry you to the boat, but you live and you scream in you sleep. Bring
you to my sister house. You have very much pain, but we have no money for doctor. Sorry.”

Munroe touched his shoulder, whispered, “Thank you for giving me help.”

He smiled. “Very welcome,” he said. “You think you be okay?”

“In a few days,” she said. “Do you know the people who did this?”

He shook his head.

“Do you know who killed Sami?”

He shook his head again. “Maybe same people who try kill you.”

“Do you know why?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But very bad for business, very bad. Nobody come to beach, nobody buy when trouble come.”

“You didn’t see them do it?”

“I find Sami after.”

“Thank you,” she said again. Took fifty dollars from her pocket and offered it to him. He looked up, surprised.

“No,” he said.

“For petrol,” she said. “For the car.”

He nodded and took the money.

The hospital gates were closed when they arrived, and Gabriel honked the horn. An
askari
stepped from the pedestrian opening, scanned the car, acknowledged Munroe in the front seat, and opened to allow them entry. Gabriel waited in the car, and Munroe, grimy and hair still matted from the blood and the beating, eased out onto the pavement and walked barefoot through the front doors.

The receptionist did a double take and let out a small gasp.

“It’s bad?” Munroe said, and the woman nodded.

She hadn’t seen herself in a mirror. Could only imagine. “I’m here to collect John Doe,” she said. “Dr. Patel wanted him released.”

With her focus never leaving Munroe’s face, the woman picked up a phone and punched a number for the doctor. It took him a few minutes to arrive, and he, too, stopped short when he saw her. She said, “I got mugged.”

“I see,” he said. “Are you here for yourself or for your friend?”

“I’m here to get him.”

“Have you had any medical attention?”

She shook her head.

“Your friend is still resting,” he said, and studied her face, his eyes tracking from her jawline to her hairline, as if he wasn’t sure she was all there. “I want to look at you before I release him to you.”

Munroe didn’t argue; she followed him down the hall. The doctor opened a door, motioned her inward, and she inched up onto an exam table, went through his questions and prodding. He disinfected and stitched up the deepest of the lacerations that hugged the hairline at the back of her neck, and when he’d finished, he held up the needle and motioned to her body. “Do you have any others?”

“I think so,” she said, and with effort inched out of the shirt. The doctor stared at her torso and it was difficult to tell if he was more shocked by the scars or the realization that she was a woman. “You get in a lot of fights?” he said.

She glanced down. “Those are old.”

He didn’t say anything, just numbed and disinfected the wound that ran from the side of her rib cage down toward her hip, a gouge considered superficial but which hurt like hell. He counted out the stitches as he tied each one off. Stopped when he reached thirty-three.

He wanted X-rays, and she went along with the request; fell asleep on the exam table while he checked the prognosis. Woke to the door opening. Fuzzy and without much concept of passing time, she smiled at the news, which was about as she expected: concussion, two fractured ribs, and a whole body’s worth of bruising. “It could have been worse,” he said. “Are you taking pain medication?”

Munroe nodded.

“I thought so,” he said. “What are you on?”

“Kapanol and Hedex.”

He shook his head in disapproval. “The anti-inflammatory is good; the morphine is a problem. Do you know what you’re doing?”

She nodded, and he didn’t say more. Between the scars and her odd request to sedate the captain—and now the fighting and self-medicating—he probably figured that whatever she was mixed up in was something he should stay far, far away from. He stretched a hand to help her sit.

“Take a deep breath,” he said, and when she did, he wrapped tape around the upper portion of her torso and she winced. Even with the morphine, the pain was brutal. When he’d finished, he handed her
the roll. “Keep it,” he said. “You need to unwrap for a bit every day to make sure you’re breathing deeply enough. The tape compresses the lungs, invites pneumonia.”

“I’ve had broken ribs before,” she said, and then she smiled, her way of apologizing for having bullied him into sedating the captain. “Thank you,” she said.

He smiled back. Apology accepted.

“They’re hairline fractures,” he said. “Should be easy compared to the broken ribs. I’ll write you a prescription for antibiotics.” Motioned a finger toward her abdomen. “You don’t want to take a chance with that.” When she smiled again, he offered his arm as leverage so she could inch off the table. “Your friend is starting to come around,” he said. “I think he’ll make a full recovery.”

Munroe nodded. That was good. As soon as the morphine was out of her system and she was back to being angry, she’d start asking the captain a lot of very pointed questions.

Munroe fell asleep in the lobby; woke when a nurse wheeled the captain in. He was back in his original clothes, which had, she was grateful, been laundered, and his facial hair had grown to the point that he had an aging, wild, crazy-man look to him. He sat slouched over, hands limp in his lap, and when the wheelchair turned to face her, his half-open eyes met hers and there was recognition on his face.

T
HEY TRAVELED OUT
of Mombasa, routing around the city one wrong turn to the next while Munroe watched mirrors and traffic, until finally, convinced they’d not been followed, she asked Gabriel to take them home.

He didn’t question when she’d made the requests for misdirection, and asked no questions now as he headed for the Nyali Bridge. Having witnessed Sami’s death and then Munroe’s beating, he knew as well as Munroe did the risk of bringing the captain home—and, of course, there was always Hollywood. Movies were the only examples that most in Africa would ever see of average daily American life, and this fit right in.

Gabriel pulled the car from the highway onto the dirt shoulder, slowed to turn into his family’s compound, and Munroe asked him to switch off the engine and lights and wait awhile. Even medicated as she was, she could think clearly enough to see that there was little that the killers could have used to follow them to this hideaway: If they’d been able to trace her to the hospital and had found the captain, then they would simply have taken him, not laid a trap to find her—he was what they wanted, and as far as they knew, she was dead.

But being dependent on the kindness of others made the guilt burn inside. Her hosts were simple people who had done right by a stranger at their own inconvenience and expense with no expectation of anything in return, and all she could offer in exchange was the risk of bringing death and killing to their families.

Munroe checked the mirrors one last time and to Gabriel whispered, “We can go now.”

He started the engine again but didn’t turn on the lights; the car crept into the compound. Uncertainty tore at her. Painkillers made for poor choices, made for missing things that should be obvious. She watched the mirrors again, chasing phantoms. The car shuddered to a stop and Munroe waited in the passenger seat, eyes closed, head tipped back, while Gabriel went in search of his cousin. There was no sound or movement from the captain, and at some point she must have fallen asleep again, because she startled awake at the sound of laughter and conversation, and then Gabriel opened her door.

Johnny was with him, the other man who’d rescued her from the beach and gone with her to the hotel. He knelt to eye level. “Everything is good?” he said, and Munroe forced a weak smile for answer.

She watched and then followed inside the house as the cousins worked through the effort of hauling the captain’s dead weight from car to mattress, and when he was situated, Munroe gave Gabriel another fifty dollars and asked him to find rope. This far into the evening she didn’t expect he’d show up with anything new, so she wasn’t disappointed when he returned an hour later with a twenty-foot segment that, from the smell and texture, had to have once been part of a longer line used to keep a boat moored to the shore.

Munroe knelt by the bed and grasped the captain’s wrist, and his eyes snapped open. He had little strength to struggle as she wound between his hands a tight figure eight that he wouldn’t easily slip free from, and his eyes shut and he said not a word as she tied the rope tail around her own waist and strung it through her belt buckle.