Tropical Depression (33 page)

My eyes flicked from Nancy to the bow and my heart thumped with a small spark of hope.

The boat was headed straight for a shoal.

Keep him talking…just a moment longer…

“You can’t sail through a manhunt. Every port in the Caribbean, Central and South America will be looking for you. You’ll never slip through.”

His gentle smile widened. He was a very fond grownup, proud of a child’s cleverness. “Of course not, Billy. That’s why I’m sailing to South Africa.”

I blinked. Why not? If he was half as good as he seemed to think, if he had a little luck and missed the big storms, a boat like this could make South Africa easily. And he would certainly find friends there.

He nodded again. “I can see you agree. It’s not a problem, really, is it?” The lightning and thunder blasted again. The rain blew at us in blinding sheets. Doyle sighed regretfully. “There’s really only one problem left, and that’s you, Billy. I’m afraid I can’t wait to drop you into the Gulf Stream, so—”

The loudest sound I ever heard, far louder to me than the thunder, was Doyle working the slide on his pistol with it still in my ear.

“I really am sorry about this, you know,” he said. I thought I could hear his finger contracting on the trigger. And then—

There was a terrible, crusty grinding sound and the boat slammed to a stop, hard aground on the shoal.

Doyle lurched, dropped me, and fell to his knees. I landed on my feet, knees braced. Moving as quickly as I ever had in my life, I took a half-step and kicked into Doyle’s face as hard as I could.

He straightened. Blood spurted from his nose. Through the blood he smiled at me. I kicked again.

Doyle caught my foot and threw me backwards. I hit the frame of the companionway and lost my breath.

As Doyle stood I rushed him. My shoulder caught him in the sternum and he grunted, but then he had those terrible hands on my neck.

I slammed my head forward with all my strength. My forehead smashed into his already broken nose. I did it again, and again.

Doyle grunted and threw me down, hard. He raised a foot to stomp down on me and I rolled in the crowded cockpit, just enough to make him miss. The deck rang as his foot slammed down.

I clawed my way up the steering wheel to my feet. Doyle paused, looking at me. Lightning flashed behind him, outlining him in fire. The blood ran across his mouth and his fair hair stood out, giving him an eerie corona.

Very deliberately, Doyle placed his gun on the seat. Then he stepped forward.

Okay, he was saying. He’d give himself a little challenge. Test his limits. That’s all I was to him, a light workout before dinner.

It was not even arrogant. It was a statement of how things were. If he got those hands on me again, I knew it would be over. I had to stay away, find some way to even the odds.

My thoughts flickered to the
Windshadow.
I had a couple of good knives on board, and some other tools that could do damage. For that matter, even a sturdy fishing pole could cut him up.

So as Doyle crouched and moved in on me, I jumped for the transom. One hand on the edge, I vaulted over the side into my battered skiff.

Quicker than I would have thought possible, Doyle followed, and the skiff lurched under his weight as I scrabbled for my tackle box.

The sailboat’s engine was still grinding away, kicking up a small surge of water and sand, which had pushed the
Windshadow
up onto the shoal in about a foot and a half of water. Even though the sailboat was hard aground, it was deep enough for the skiff, and we bobbed and pitched as we scrambled for position.

I had one hand on my tackle box when Doyle jumped. I stumbled back just ahead of him, falling backward over something that shouldn’t have been there.

My hand closed on the obstacle—my guide’s pole. Carl had not secured it properly. It was lying loose on the deck, one end of its eighteen-foot boron length sticking over the transom beside the ruined engine.

I jumped up, holding the pole. Doyle grinned and waited for my move. It was a savage grin this time, the blood from his nose turning his teeth dark.

I swung. Doyle ducked easily and the pole whistled past him. I brought it around again in a backhand as fast as I could, but he was ready.

He caught the pole and got both hands onto it. Grunting slightly, he lifted and my feet left the deck. Before I could let go he flipped me straight up into the air.

I was ten feet up, over the water. I let go. As I fell towards the shallow shoal water, Doyle swung the pole and smacked me in the head, hard.

I landed on my back and went under. It was only eighteen inches to the bottom and I scrabbled sideways hard and fast to get away from the grinding propeller of the sailboat. But before I could make it to the surface the pole came down on my chest and pinned me to the bottom.

I looked up through the wavering haze of the water and saw Doyle standing far above me like some nightmare giant, rippling as the water churned. He was backlit by flashes of lightning as the storm moved closer.

I fought to get clear but he leaned forward, putting all his weight on the pole until I felt sure it would burst through my ribs and pin me to the bottom.

I knew I was fading fast. I had maybe one last chance. Doyle weighed about two twenty-five. The pole was no more than ten pounds. I could bench-press two fifty, three or four times on a good day. Simple. I told my hands to swim over and grab the pole just above where it was grinding my chest into dim gravel. My hands fluttered, a pale imitation of a breaststroke.
Come on,
I told them, mildly annoyed.
This is for all the marbles.

The lightning flickered around nightmare Doyle. He was leaning harder now, probably bored and wanting it to end so he could pull the wings off some other fly.

My hands were very close to the pole now, but they were telling me they didn’t much feel like gripping. I was losing consciousness, fighting to keep the blackness back—

But why fight, really? One small part of me was screaming not to give in, but the rest wasn’t listening, was telling me to relax, let it go.

After all, wasn’t it better this way? Wasn’t it better to admit I had totally screwed up my life and just let it go, move to the back of the line, start over again? Besides, if there really was anything at all to this afterlife stuff, I’d get to see Jennifer and Melissa again. They’d be waiting for me, just the far side of the beautiful blue light.

I thought I could see the blue light now. It was flickering around Doyle. I raised up my arms to move closer to the blue light.
I’m coming, Jenny.
My arms drifted slowly away from the pole. I opened my mouth to let in a long deep breath of beautiful, life-taking water.

The weight lifted off my chest and I frowned.
That’s funny,
I thought. I focused on the flickering figure far above me, the dim outline of Doyle-as-God. He was raising the pole straight up. He held it like a spear, ready to slice down through the water and end me once and for all, and I thought,
okay.
This solves everything. The pole started down.

And the world ended.

Lightning slammed into the pole. There was a tremendous explosion that I could hear even a foot and a half under the water, and Doyle disappeared. For one unbearably bright moment I saw him outlined in fire, and then he was gone.

I was thrown up out of the water, jolted back into choking, retching consciousness.

Up into life.

I stood in the shallow water with the storm howling around me for a full minute before I could make my body move towards the boarding ladder up into the sailboat. Small pieces of charred, blackened something littered the surface of the water nearby. I couldn’t tell if it was Doyle or boat pole and I didn’t want to know. I sloshed through to the boarding ladder.

I didn’t think there was strength enough left in my hands for them to tremble, but that’s what they did as I reached to feel for Nancy’s pulse.

She had one. She was breathing. I killed the engine, moved Nancy below to a bunk. I found a spare anchor in a locker and managed to drop it off the bow. It would at least keep us from drifting away into worse trouble. It was all I could manage.

I dogged the hatch and fell down beside Nancy.

There was nothing left in me. I felt as weak as a baby. The boat shook in the storm, but I couldn’t have done anything no matter how bad it got.

It didn’t get much worse. The blast of lightning that had wiped away Doyle had been the peak of the storm. We rocked and lurched for another hour and then things began to get noticeably better.

I checked on Nancy one more time. Her breathing was regular, her pulse strong and steady. By then I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, even if it meant that the boat would sink.

Just before I closed my eyes, completely drained of all energy and feeling, the last crash of thunder blasted in the distance and the pitch of the wind in the rigging dropped an octave.

I fell into sleep.

Art had grumbled. He’d called me a dick-brained butt-sucker. Said it was very bad for business to bring the charter back dead. I said at least I’d brought them back, and he’d grumbled some more, but it was just for appearances. He was impressed.

Nicky had hopped around with relieved anxiety, alternating between rubbing his face and giving me huge bawdy winks as he looked at Nancy. “Good one, mate,” he’d said, looking her over with approval. “A keeper.”

I told him I thought so, too, but that it wasn’t up to me.

Nancy had a mild concussion and the hospital kept her overnight. I had three broken ribs and a number of sprains, cuts, and bruises. They didn’t keep me, and Nicky drove me home in my car.

The storm had given Key West a thorough cleaning and knocked down a couple of old trees, but that was all. It was nothing compared to the beating Miami had taken, as we were learning from the news.

Many of the trees were stripped of leaves. Odd chunks of flotsam showed on the shore: chunks of wood, half a small boat, a five-foot shark, a bookcase, most of a piano, three cushions that didn’t match. There was a strange, brand-new feeling to the world, as if everything before yesterday had been erased.

There was a sensation of hopefulness in the air. Driving through the strangely clean streets, people actually waved, spoke to one another, acted as though we were all in this together. The contrast to normal Key West was eerie.

I went back to the hospital on Stock Island the next morning to check on Nancy. She was sitting up in bed when I got there, chatting happily with one of the interns, a handsome black man from Jamaica. He grinned and sauntered off when I got there.

I sat beside Nancy. She was wearing one of those open-backed hospital gowns, and somehow she made it look glamorous. I wanted to take her hand but I felt oddly shy all of a sudden, as if the last few hours had wiped out what we had been through and left us the same people who had said goodbye in front of her apartment.

“Well,” I said, “you look—” And I stopped because what tried to come out was
edible,
or
stunning,
and to have that trail off into something like
better
didn’t seem right.

She seemed to understand. She gave me her second-best smile and said, “I am. They say the danger is past and I can leave today. Get back to my life.”

She said it in a funny way and I twisted my head to see her face a little better. She gave a half-shake. “I don’t think I want to get back to my life, Billy.”

“Whose life would you like?”

She frowned. “I’m serious.”

“So am I, Nancy.” I took her hand. She didn’t yank it away. “This is Key West. It has special magical properties. People come here all the time and live somebody else’s life.”

She smiled. “And whose life do you think I should take?”

“You can have mine.”

The words were out before I knew I was saying them. Nancy turned her head sharply and stared at me. All the blood Doyle hadn’t spilled out of me slammed into my face.

Nancy smiled. It was a little better than the number-two smile this time, with a touch of the devil in it. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I couldn’t take all that getting hit on the head.”

She had taken it as a joke, and maybe that was better. But now that it was out there, I felt I had to say it anyway. “Listen, Nancy—”

She squeezed my hand. “I know, Billy. But we both have some thinking to do. And some talking.”

“I guess I know that. But I want you to know how I feel.”

“I
do
know. And I’m not saying no to that, either. I’m just—” She shrugged and took her hand away. “I still don’t know if it’s possible for us to be together. If we want the same things.”

“I don’t know, either. But I’d like to try.”

She turned to the window, where the morning sun was coming in off the bright green of the trees and the blue of the sky and the water outside the window. For a moment she seemed lost in the view. “Welcome to paradise,” she whispered.

“Nancy, they would probably hire you here at the hospital. I asked.”

“I know,” she said. “I asked, too.”

I took her hand again, and she gave mine a good solid squeeze.

I thought about what we had been through, and I thought about Doyle—how he’d come so close to killing us both, and how it was maybe only luck that he hadn’t.

And I thought of all that had gone before, the trip back to my past. And the ghosts who lived there. I did not want to live with ghosts anymore. I wanted to live in the now, and I wanted that now to have Nancy in it.

And she might not be able to say yet whether she wanted that, too, but she was thinking about it. And as she turned back to me she was giving me her number-one smile.

I looked at that dazzling smile and felt alive, because for the first time in two years I had hope, and if hope was all there was, it was still better than living with ghosts.

“Penny for your thoughts?” she said.

I just shook my head and kissed her hand.

Sometimes hope is enough.