Without Warning (52 page)

Zood opened his mouth to speak and Pieraro suddenly pistoned out one booted foot and kicked him in the face. The man’s head flew back with a nasty click and he flipped over, landing on his back. The vaquero turned a stone face on Cesky, who was glaring at him murderously, reminding Jules of an enraged bull. Pieraro absorbed the full force of the man’s enmity, never breaking eye contact. Eventually Cesky folded, crabbing away from the table on all fours until he felt that he was at a safe enough distance to stand up.

Two security guards appeared, pushing their way through the throng, which had momentarily turned away from the television, but they stopped in their tracks at a single glance from the Mexican.

“Man,” said Phoebe, a little breathlessly. “That was so fucking hot.”

“Do you wish to come on the boat, young lady? To escape?” Pieraro asked her.

She flushed noticeably at his attention. Jules recognized it as a purely sexual response.

“Yes,” she said.

“Then you will shut the fuck up!” he barked. “And do what you are told when you are told. All of you! Understand?”

The girl flinched but nodded. The others all muttered and mumbled their assent.

Back at the bar, with the prospect of personal violence abated, the crowd reluctantly turned back to the television.

Jules saw Shah acknowledge the vaquero’s handling of the situation with the slightest dip of his head.

She had to admit, it
was
pretty fucking cool. None of these rich bastards would give them another moment’s trouble. She was sure of it.

And she was wrong.

Fifi liked Mr. Lee. He reminded her of old Lenny Wah, who rescued her when she’d fled her stepfather’s dream of a family threesome and cable TV fame via the agency of Jerry Springer. Lenny ran a supercheap Chinese takeout in East Bay, where she’d wound up looking for a cheap meal after running out of money. The meal she got was a comforting fried rice/chow mein combo with a rock-hard spring roll for three-fifty. She also got a job offer, washing dishes in a huge claw-foot tub standing out of view of the customers, in a weed-choked yard out the back of the café. The last dish-monkey had quit two days earlier and Lenny had let the washing build up under a layer of cold, gray, fat-caked water.

“But Lenny was kinda nice,” she told Lee. “He had real soft skin, and he smelled of jasmine rice.”

“Lenny sounds like a bum, Miss Fifi. He try to make jiggy-jig for dishwashing?”

She snickered.

“Only every fucking day. But he was real nice about it. He didn’t get upset when I said no.”

“You always said no?”

“Not always.”

The old Chinese sea dog rolled his eyes as Thapa showed the next man through to see them. They sat behind a folding card table on the dock of the marina where Jules had berthed the sports fisher while the
Rules
lay offshore, guarded by the remainder of Shah’s men. The hasty patch-up work occasioned by the gunfight with Shoeless Dan stood out on the fiberglass hull, and more than a few of their potential recruits spent their interviews nervously eyeing the damage.

The next guy through, an older, potbellied American with a dense map of
broken blood vessels coloring his swollen nose, and a fat cigar perched in one corner of his mouth, snorted when he saw it.

“Hot damn! I guess I wouldn’t want to see the other guy, eh?”

Fifi glanced over her shoulder to where he’d nodded at the scorch marks and bullet holes. She tried to find the man’s name on the list Thapa had provided, but it seemed to have blown away, leaving her with nothing but a cup of flat ginger beer and a bowl of pretzels in front of her.

“The other guy is dead. And who’re you, Salty Sam?”

The man grinned, showing off uneven yellow teeth, but his smile seemed warm enough and contained none of the leering suggestion in Zood’s eyes back at the hotel.

“Rhino Ross, young lady. Chief petty officer, United States Coast Guard, once upon a time. Nowadays, I run a fishing charter round these parts, or I used to anyway. And whom might I have the pleasure of addressing?”

“Fifi’ll do. And this is Mr. Lee. Who’s
our
chief… petty … guy. So we already got one a them. What else can you do for us,
Rhino?”
She paused and regarded him through narrowed eyes. “And did your parents really name you that, or something really gay that you just changed to Rhino?”

Ross smiled again and blew a perfect smoke ring.

“Rhino A. Ross. It’s on my passport and birth certificate. Makes me kinda unique, don’t you think?” He leaned forward. “And lest you have any doubt whatsoever, it is
good
to be the Rhino. Now, let’s get down to brass tacks. A little birdie told me you were looking to crew an oceangoing vessel. Bridge crew in particular, am I right?”

“A little birdie?” said Fifi.

“Yup. Ran his mouth right up to the point I ran a stick through his ass, and toasted him up medium well over some hickory coals. A little scrawny but good eatin’; beak was a little crunchy, though.” Another smoke ring punctuated the comment.

Mr. Lee said nothing, contenting himself with a kretek cigarette and a contemplative air. He gazed past Ross, away down the marina, where Fifi could see Thapa standing watch over a dozen men who’d turned up to apply for berths on the
Rules.

Something about the Rhino’s demeanor changed in an instant; his eyes hardened and his voice took on a commanding, almost military tone. “Now, given the size of that sports fisher you got all shot up over there, I figure you’ve got yourself a real ocean liner stowed away somewhere. And it’s gonna have all manner of sensors, radar, communications gear, and other assorted and sundry technological doodads, none of which you know a damn
thing about, am I right? Looks more like the starship
Enterprise
than a sailboat to you, right? No. Don’t answer. The Rhino is always right. And of course, given all the holes some douche bag has already shot in your runabout, you know what sort of trouble is waiting for you up ahead. So here’s the Rhino’s iron-clad guaran-goddamned-tee. You take me out to your boat, I’ll prove to you that I can run your systems, and then you can get me the hell out of here before this joint blows up. I need to get out of Acapulco, and you need a pro out there, Miss Fifi. Someone who knows these waters and the sort of low-life scum that swims in ‘em sometimes. Seems to me that the last thing you need to be worrying about is which button to press when a bunch of bad guys come charging over the horizon with knives between their teeth.” With that the Rhino sat back and puffed contentedly on his cigar, releasing a swirling cloud of thick white smoke with a self-satisfied whoosh.

Fifi leaned forward, bunching her boobs up between her arms, to see if the Rhino would drop his gaze. He didn’t.

“Would I be right in assuming you’d know one end of a gun from the other, Rhino?”

“Twenty years in service, ma’am. You can assume away, but you know what they say about people who ‘assume.’ “

She nodded.

“So you said you ran charters. What happened to your boat? Why don’t you just get the hell out under your own power?”

The Rhino folded his massive forearms and nodded at her vessel.

“See all the holes in your hull? The ones in mine were a lot bigger. I ran a legitimate business, miss. I don’t know what you did before all this, but the fact that you’re sitting here tells me it probably wasn’t legit, and you had the guns and the balls to fight off whoever came after you. I wasn’t so lucky.”

Lee exhaled a thin stream of fragrant smoke.

“Mr. Rhino. Your lost boat. Do you know who attacked you?”

The former coast guard chief nodded.

“I do. A local peckerhead, working for a toothfish poacher down south. Said he was recruiting for his bossman. Wouldn’t take no for an answer, so he shot up my boat when that’s the only answer I had for him.”

“Why didn’t he shoot you?” asked Fifi.

“Shooting my boat hurt more,” he said, quite honestly, she believed.

A lot of folks made the error of mistaking Fifi for some kind of life-sized Sluttymuch Barbie. But she’d been looking out for herself long enough to have developed a wild dog’s instinct for sniffing out troublesome men. The
job at Lenny’s takeout, which quickly morphed into cooking as well as cleaning, had scored her a spot on a catering-industry training course run by a Bay Area businessmen’s charity—”guilty fags,” she called them—sponsoring college degrees for homeless kids. Her army-surplus cot in the storeroom at Lenny’s counted as homeless. Fifi had graduated in the top five of her class, and landed a gig with an LA-based catering firm that specialized in providing “nutritional services” for the military in shitholes-of-the-week like Bosnia and Mogadishu.

She moved a lot more easily through that sort of crowd than the chichi ghetto of West Coast fine dining, and after shacking up with an army ranger for twelve months in the Balkans she could field strip an M4 carbine blindfolded. She also had a lot of experience with men like the Rhino—hard, uncompromising, and occasionally stupid men who were nonetheless decent at heart.

She leaned over to Mr. Lee.

“What d’you think?” she whispered.

“He’ll eat too much, but he’s okay,” replied the Chinaman. “Mr. Pete would have liked him.”

“Okay,” she said, turning back to the old chief, who had heard everything. “If you brought any gear with you, stow it over there by the ramp. You can start out by helping load stores while we finish talking to those guys.”

Fifi waved at the small crowd of hopefuls gathered by the marina gate and watched over by Thapa. The Rhino nodded brusquely and said, “Thanks,” before looking around. “You said you wanted some stores loaded?”

“Inside,” she said, gesturing to the wooden shed in front of which they sat. “Bags of rice, beans, lots of canned foods. Heavy work. But that won’t bother you. You’re the Rhino.”

“No,” he agreed, flashing a stagy grin, and tucked his cigar firmly into the corner of his mouth. He pointed at one of his massive biceps and said around the cigar, “Yeah, it’ll be no bother at all since I didn’t get these from pettin’ kitty cats.”

The Rhino paused before ducking his head into the shed. “Oh, one other thing, you got a humidor on that boat?”

Fifi gave a quizzical look.

“Like a hot tub?”

“No darlin’, it’s a little storage compartment for my Cuban friends here.”

The Rhino blew a thin stream of blue smoke into the sky.

Fifi shrugged. “I reckon so. It has everything else.”

The last thing she heard as the Rhino nodded his approval and disappeared into the shed was “Oh yeah, it’s good to be the Rhino.”

The lambent glow of Acapulco at night, a soft dome of light defining a horizon at the edge of the world in the absolute blackness of night at sea, had changed character, to Jules’s eye. It looked less artificial now, less fixed. Suffused by a burnt orange tincture, it flickered and even flared at times.

“Another high-rise, going up,” said Fifi.

“I imagine so,” Jules agreed.

They worked by starlight and the pale illumination of a red moon. It had been that bloodstained color since the Wave had appeared.
The Aussie Rules
remained blacked out, a precaution against more attacks as the new crew members Fifi and Mr. Lee had chosen helped move supplies from the sports fisher to its mother ship.

Jules was generally pleased with the haul of men and cargo. She’d been a bit taken aback by the Rhino when she’d first met him, especially by the perpetual wreath of cigar smoke that preceded and followed him like London fog, but had quickly come to accept his bluster and bullshit as a well-polished routine. He’d probably been practicing it on tourists for years and had forgotten how not to be in character. She couldn’t fault his work ethic or his skill sets, however. He’d fired up whole suites of sensors and arrays in the bridge that had proven completely impenetrable to everyone else. And having done so, he’d gone right back to hauling sacks of rice and fresh-killed meat—very expensive fresh-killed meat—onto the boat deck of the
Rules
and from there off to the freezers. Another odd thing: Every so often he would stop one of the other workers, point to one of his enormous biceps, and say, “You don’t get these from pettin’ kitty cats,” whatever that meant. Odd, very odd.

He stayed out of the ice room with Pete’s body in it, though.

For now, that was sealed off.

“I’m glad Pieraro kicked the shit out of those assholes,” said Fifi as she picked up an LNG canister and hoisted it over her shoulder. Jules grunted as she caught a sack of potatoes thrown up to her by Thapa as though it were no heavier than a bag of cotton candy.

“Bloody hell,” she said, struggling not to fall over.

A German man, short but powerful-looking, caught her gently by the elbow.

“Not so good to be falling overboard, no?” He grinned, his teeth standing out in the wine-red light.

“No, thank you …” said Jules, reaching for his name. The yacht was beginning to fill up with strangers, and although she tried to commit all of their
names and potted histories to memory, there was just so much for her to do each day that she never really felt as if she was getting on top of any one job.

Fifi rescued her. “This is Dietmar. He’s German, you know, like hot dogs originally used to be. Anyway, he’s our navigator now. He used to work on a container ship.”

The German, who looked to be about thirty-something, nodded enthusiastically as he wrestled the heavy bag of potatoes off Jules before flinging it over his shoulder with as little apparent trouble as Thapa had experienced tossing it at Jules like a feather pillow.

“Okay,” she said. “You’ll do.”

“Yo, Boss Jules!” called out a hoarse, rasping voice. The Rhino. “Where do you want me to stow your boom sticks?”

Jules smiled and nodded at Dietmar again, to thank him for his help. She peered down onto the boat deck, swarming with Gurkhas and new crew-mates, and found the Rhino shouldering a wooden box of Mexican army rifles that Shah had secured from somewhere.