A Superior Death (41 page)

Patience was not lulled, convinced, or amused. “You won’t last till daylight, Anna. I will. You’re hurt. I hurt you. You’re sick. The bends. Maybe an embolism. I can see it in your face. Your lungs are filling up with blood. Blood is pouring from where the boat hook got you. You’ll be dead long before the sun comes up and I’ll still be here.”

“Okay,” Anna agreed. “Then I haven’t got all night.” Hand over hand she began working her way down the wooden handle. “How about this then: I’m taller, stronger, outweigh you by ten pounds and am really pissed off?”

Anna’s hand reached Patience’s. The other woman gripped the haft of the fish gaff more tightly but the battle for that was over. Laying one hand across Patience’s wrist, Anna began to peel her thumb off the wood in what must have seemed a childish gesture until the pain set in. By the time Patience realized what was happening agony had become paralysis. Pain has a way of taking the place of thought. Finally, like the animals humans pretend to be above, people will do anything to get away from it.

“Down,” Anna suggested, pushing Patience’s thumb back toward her wrist. “Lie down.”

Patience complied.

“Stay still. Soon it will be over. Stay still.” Anna looped the dive line around Patience’s slender wrists and pulled the plastic rope tight. The rope would bite deep, perhaps cut off the blood to her prisoner’s hands. To cripple the graceful little woman would be a shame.

“Not a crying shame,” Anna said aloud. The meaningless words scared her. Her mind was not in top working order, her vision was fogged. Knowing her condition was worsening, she tied Patience’s slim ankles together and anchored the woman to both the stern and midship cleats so she couldn’t wriggle around the deck.

“Carrie Ann!” Patience yelled. “Come out, honey.”

“Stay put,” Anna ordered.

No sound came from within the cabin.

“Smash the radio,” Patience screamed.

“Jesus!” Anna jerked at the door.

“I’ll get you your own phone,” Patience cried. Immediately there followed the sound of electronic equipment being pulverized. Patience laughed. “It’s an unnatural mother who does not know her own offspring.”

Dizziness took Anna then. She put her back against the cabin door and allowed herself to slide down till her butt met the deck. For an instant she thought her clarity of vision was returning but realized it was the fog, the real fog, the fog outside her brain. It was lifting.

“You’re dying,” Patience said. “Drowning in your own blood. You’re dizzy, aren’t you? Eyes playing tricks?”

Anna shook her head but the motion made the deck spin and she stopped.

“Your joints hurt, don’t they? This is only the beginning.”

“Quiet,” Anna said wearily and let her head rest against the cabin door. Overhead, through moving tendrils of fog, she thought she saw a star, but as she watched, it vanished.

“Bleeding inside and out,” Patience continued. “Lungs and chest. The gaff got you. Soon you will faint. Carrie will come out then. Trust me. A mother’s plea and all that. I’ll throw you to the fishes, Anna. Untie me now and I’ll put you ashore somewhere close, where they can find you and get you to treatment. I can do it. You’re too far gone to be any danger to me. Untie me, Anna. I don’t want you to die.”

Another star. Then it, too, was gone. “Did you want Denny to die?” Anna asked in an effort to keep her mind from wandering, consciousness from dripping away.

“God!” Patience exploded. Thrashing sounds forced Anna to turn her head. Bittner was fighting but the rope held secure.

“Did you?” Anna pressed.

“Denny was a fool.”

“He grabbed an oversized single with a Y valve out of the
Third Sister
and followed you in the
Blackduck,
” Anna prompted.

“Denny was a diver. He’d dived all over the world. Australia. Mexico. He’d dived caves. He knew how I’d gotten into the captain’s cabin. He took off his tank, fed it through the porthole.”

Two stars now. Anna could feel herself losing touch and she tried to focus her eyes on the distant points of light. “While you were inside the cabin?” she pursued.

“I was inside. What did he think I’d do? He’d jerk his thumb and I’d follow him docilely up to prison? A fool. I grabbed the tank, pulled it through, yanked the regulator out of his mouth and slammed the port. Two seconds, three at most.”

In her mind’s eyes, Anna saw Denny scrabbling at the porthole with his dive knife. The movements growing jerky as his lungs began to burst. The gush of bubbles, the frantic breath that filled him with water. Drowning. Dead.

“I’d’ve bolted for the surface,” Anna said. “So would Denny. So would anybody.”

“Denny got the porthole open.”

Anna forced her eyes open. Patience was looking at her, one cheek pressed against the deck, hair falling in strands across her eyes. She looked like a caged animal. “I grabbed his arm when he reached in, cranked it up against the bulkhead, and braced my feet on either side till he stopped struggling.” Patience spoke with deliberation. The threat in her words was unmistakable.

Fear stirred Anna’s torpor. Patience was telling her of Denny’s death. She tried to pull herself up straighter, look alive, formidable. “Then you put the tanks back on his body, surfaced, and cut the
Blackduck
adrift.” Anna tried to take back control of the conversation.

“Rest,” Patience said. “Lie back, Anna. Let yourself sleep for just a second. Nothing bad can happen in a second.”

“Fuck you,” Anna whispered. Taking a fold of flesh from the inside of her cheek, Anna bit down till she tasted salt, hoping this new pain would focus her mind, but it was lost in myriad others.

White light came, surrounded her, surrounded the
Venture.
Tendrils of fog glowed like fingers lifting her to the stars.

“Anna. Anna.” A sweet and gentle voice filled the illumined air; a voice bigger than anything human, a voice booming from all directions at once. A voice so kind Anna knew now, finally, she could let go of this world and glide into the next.

“Damn,” she said. “I’m in for it now.”

CHAPTER 28

“
C
ut nearly in half. Look: it’s blood, blood in the sawdust.”

“Immortality is in your hands . . .”

“A needle and thread is all.”

“And a Dustbuster.”

“Put her down there, Dave.”

“Carrie . . .”

Anna’s mind tuned in and out of the world around her. Twice she’d asked: “Whose blood?”

Tinker was there somehow. She’d answered, “Yours. Mixed with his.”

“Sawdust,” Damien had corrected his wife and Anna had lost the thread. She’d felt herself lifted easily, as easily as if she were a kitten, and knew it was not by Damien. Once she’d forced open her eyes and thought she’d seen Pizza Dave’s face, big as a harvest moon, floating above her.

“That can’t be right,” she’d said and heard vaguely someone saying, “Hush. Rest now.”

Somewhere in the distance she thought she heard Patience’s low voice pitched in persuasive tones as if selling something. “Don’t buy it,” she had mumbled, wishing she could speak more clearly.

Then there was Ralph’s voice and engines roaring. Anna came fully awake in a small compartment made up of equal parts of noise and darkness. She stared up through a window. The sky was glittering with stars and a halfmoon. Her feet were raised and stretched toward a panel lit by subdued, green, circular lights. She lay on her left side, her head lower than her feet.

Every part of her hurt. Her chest burned and sharp points of pain pierced her shoulder and knees. Tentatively, she wriggled her toes. They worked just fine. Over the years she had taken a few tumbles; bones had broken, muscles torn. The terror was always for the spine—paralysis. Again she’d gotten off lightly.

Then she remembered she’d not fallen off a Texas mountain, not been tossed from a horse. The lake had crushed her in its dark embrace. The damage would be internal, as dangerous and inexorable as the deep. “Oh dear . . .” she whispered.

“ ’Bout time,” came a friendly voice.

Carefully, so as not to dislodge it from her shoulders, Anna turned her head to see who had spoken. “Ralph.” The District Ranger sat in the seat next to the board she was lashed to. She was glad to see him and felt bad that her voice sounded so dull. To let him know how welcome a sight he was, she tried to pat his knee, but her arm was tied down. “Ralph.” She repeated his name. It was all she could manage.

“It’s okay, Anna. You’re okay. We’re in the seaplane. Sid is flying low as he can so your decompression sickness won’t be made any worse. We’re almost to Duluth. There’s a medevac helicopter waiting there. They’ve got everything—even hot and cold running paramedics. They’ll be taking you to the hyperbaric chamber in Minneapolis. You’re going to be okay.”

“Backcountry . . .”

Ralph put a warm hand on her forehead to quiet her.

“Lucas and I heard your little radio drama,” he said. “We just couldn’t call out. I was for going to bed and letting you fight off the forces of evil alone, but you know Lucas, he’s a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy. Made us do a forced march out in the dark. We got there just as the kids were dragging the bodies back into Rock. Lucas got the perpetrator to take care of. I got you.”

For a second time Anna tried to touch him, to let him know she’d heard, understood, appreciated. “My arm,” she complained, encountering the bandages.

“Routine packaging,” Ralph reassured her. “There’s nothing wrong with your arm. I just bandaged it to keep you from moving it and opening the cut on your chest. Nothing too serious,” he went on. “You’ll still look terrific in a bathing suit. Just a scratch half an inch deep or so and about ten inches long. Looks worse than it is and it bled a lot. You were quite a mess of blood and sawdust when Lucas and I saw you.”

“Sawdust?” Anna remembered hearing the word before. It had made as little sense to her then as it did now.

“Yeah. What were you doing with a teddy bear stuffed down the front of your dry suit anyway? Patience cut it in half. The suit was full of stuffing. Worked, though. She would have done a lot more damage with that fish gaff, maybe killed you. The bear took the blow, then the sawdust stopped your bleeding. Tomorrow I’ll put in a wire to the LAPD. Body armor is out. Toy bears are in for officer safety.”

“Oscar.” Anna turned her head away, felt the tears stinging her eyes, rolling down into her hair.

 

 

 

T
he paramedics on the medevac helicopter were efficient and kind. Anna was unsurprised. In her brief stay in the northern Midwest, she had found most Minnesotans to be efficient and kind. The helicopter—an Augusta, she was proudly informed—hovered the distance between Duluth and Minneapolis in just over an hour.

Ralph stayed beside her. Demoted from primary care-giver to companion, he was strapped into a seat at the foot of her stretcher. “I feel like the mother of the bride,” he joked.

Anna’s mind could not make sense of the remark. “Why?” she demanded.

“Just something to say,” Ralph soothed her. “Seeing you all in white and fussed over, nobody knowing where to put me. Take it easy, Anna. I won’t try to be funny anymore.”

“Good.” As she drifted off, she heard him laughing.

When she reasserted herself in the conscious world, the helicopter was setting down.

“We’re there,” said one of the paramedics, a strong, handsome woman with big teeth and hair badly in need of reperming. “Ninth floor, Hennepin Medical Center. We’ll have you in Jo’s submarine shortly.”

“Lost my sense of humor,” Anna apologized wearily, guessing the paramedic, like Ralph, had made a joke. The woman just smiled and squeezed Anna’s shoulder gently.

“Don’t you worry about a thing,” she said.

“Submarine” was an apt description of the hyperbaric chamber. An oxygen mask on her face, Anna managed to sleep out most of her seven-hour stint as the pressure was dropped and slowly brought back up. The last thing she remembered clearly was a friendly smile and the woman behind it saying, “Relax. We work well under pressure.”

 

 

 

 

Hospital rooms always put Anna in a foul mood. Even more so when she was the inmate. Disconsolately, she stared out over the roofscape. Black asphalt sent up shimmering curtains of heat. Turkish-domed ventilators and galvanized aluminum excrescences completed the monotony. Minneapolis’s ultra-urban skyline blotted out most of the blue. A thin line of green trees advertised Marquette Avenue but so feeble an outpouring of life in the concrete only depressed Anna further.

To cheer herself, she contemplated a shopping spree when the doctors turned her loose. Cities were for Things. Anna began to list all the things she would buy. On a GS-7’s twenty-two thousand a year, the list was necessarily short and only kept her amused for a couple of minutes. Channels 4, 5, 9, and 11 didn’t hold her attention that long.