Better Than This (45 page)

“Tha’s right, man. Been waitin’ for you to show up somewhere.”

As we talked I dropped my right hand which had rested on the throttle control and it now hung against my side. Pepe was on my left. He was leaning against the control panel, his gun held loosely in his hand. His eyes had taken on a vaguely dreamlike quality, as if he was coming down from his high, though they remained fixed on me. There was something indolent in the way he half leaned, half stood. I wondered if I could reach around and get my hand on my gun before he noticed. I shifted my body a little, making it seem like I was simply adjusting my balance. I couldn’t hear anything from below above the sound of the engine and the unfurling bow wave on either side of the boat. A deep white foaming wake marked our progress across the dark ocean. The swell was very slight, the night clear and calm and a pale moon looked over us.

My heart started beating faster. I rehearsed in my mind what I had to do. Grasp the gun. Slip my finger through the trigger guard as I brought the barrel to bear. Pull the trigger. I remembered from somewhere that you’re supposed to aim for the middle of a target to increase your chances of hitting it, though I didn’t see how I could miss at this distance. I knew once I started to move I was committed. I couldn’t hesitate, not for an instant. Pull and shoot. No warning. No hands up. No drop your gun routine. If I gave him an instant I would be dead. And though I was nervous I thought I could do it. After that I would have to go down for the other two, which I thought might be harder. They would hear the shot and know something was up which gave me very little time to surprise them. I thought I could wait for them to come to me, but then there was Alice. They would use her to get to me, of that there was no doubt. The only plan I had was to get down there as quickly as I could. There would be no time for thought. No time to hesitate.

Shoot. Turn. Run for the stairs. I’d be there in three steps. Leap down and hope it all happened too fast for them to react. There was a certain sense of unreality about all of this, despite my very real fear. I felt like some bumbling idiot dropped among a cast of very bad characters. I had been led to this. I had crossed the line where decent ordinary people lived their lives and now I was way, way out of my depth.

Pepe was still watching me. Though he appeared relaxed, kind of loose limbed and floppy, I knew he could move quickly and he never took his eyes off me. I needed something to put him off balance. Just for a second. Think! I told myself. Think! Then I had an idea.

“How much did Morgan say he would pay you for the disc?” I said.

“A lot, man.”

“How much? Half a million.”

Pepe’s eyes widened a little. “Haifa million?”

I almost laughed. All this for what? “How much then? A couple of hundred thousand dollars? A hundred?” I could see I wasn’t far off the mark. These hoods had tortured a man to death, and shot another in the head without a thought, and they planned to kill Alice and me and dump us in the ocean. All for a few hundred thousand dollars.

“You know what he was going to pay me?” I said.

“How much?” Pepe said suspiciously.

“Thirty-five million dollars.”

I saw two things at once. One was that he didn’t believe me, and the other was that the reason he didn’t was because thirty-five million dollars was an incomprehensible amount to him. He simply couldn’t grasp that anybody would pay such an enormous sum of money for something that looked like an ordinary music disc. No matter what was on it. But it didn’t matter whether he entirely believed me. What mattered was that he at least partly believed me, and he knew Morgan had planned to cheat him. For a second he was so outraged he took his focus off me. And it was then that I moved.

He was quick. Even quicker than I’d been afraid he would be. As I began to reach for the gun, twisting my body around as I did, his expression altered in a flash. His eyes narrowed and glittered as he tried to stand straight and swing his gun arm towards me at the same time. Even though it happened in the blink of an eye it was still frightening. He didn’t delay for even the briefest time. I moved. He reacted. That was it. He didn’t know I had a gun. He didn’t know what I planned to do, but it didn’t matter. He looked directly into my eye and in that instant I knew that whoever was fastest would be alive a second from now.

I panicked and fired early, before I had him dead centre, and it was lucky that I did. There was a loud report and the bullet hit him in the groin and doubled him over. He screamed and fell backwards and I think he fired a shot because I seemed to hear a faint popping, then his gun clattered across the deck somewhere. He ended up in the corner, leaning against the side, his legs apart and blood seeping through the hands that clasped his groin area. He wore a look of surprised horror.

There was no time to check if he was dead. I was already running for the steps. I leapt down to the stern deck and as I landed I glimpsed a shape move inside. Instinctively my eye followed the direction of the movement and I saw one of the hoods reaching for a gun on the counter with one hand while he clutched at his baggy trousers with the other. I fired twice in rapid succession and one of my shots took away half of his skull. A pink mist filled the air as he dropped but I was already looking for the other one. The youngest of them had his arm around Alice’s neck. She was barely conscious as he tried to pull her in front of him. She still wore her blood soaked shirt but it was twisted up around her neck and she was otherwise naked. I was momentarily shocked by the sight of her pale thighs and pubic hair. Then shock became rage. The kid was perhaps six teen. His pants were caught up around his ankles and I registered this fact along with his still half erect penis as he fought for purchase and scrabbled for his gun. He was the only one who looked scared before I shot him. The bullet hit him in the shoulder and he screamed and let go of Alice. The impact of the bullet threw him to one side. He started to scream again but seeing what they had done to Alice had made me cold to his pleas. My second shot hit him dead in the centre of his skinny chest and destroyed his heart. The light went out of his eyes as he crumpled. His gun was three feet away. Out of his reach.

In the aftermath of the shooting I crouched with Alice on the floor and held her in my arms as she drifted in and out of consciousness. Her eyes focused on me, and blurred with pain and shock though they were, she recognized me.

“It’s okay,” I told her gently.

The fear melted away a degree or two. I had covered her with a sheet I’d hastily ripped from a bed in one of the cabins. The boat was quiet, and rocked gently on the swell. I must have shut down the engine when I made my move against Pepe, though I didn’t remember doing so.

“I’ll get you to a hospital. You’re going to be fine,” I said. “It’s over.”

She understood what I was saying, and a pinprick of hope lit her eyes. She was badly hurt. The wound in her shoulder had hit a major artery judging by the amount of blood that soaked the carpet. I looked at the young hood I’d killed who was lying against the wall with his head on his chest and his now small limp penis curled against his thigh and I felt no pity for him. When Alice attempted to follow where I was looking I stopped her. I changed my position so I could cradle her head in my lap. She was very pale. I pressed a wadded towel into her shoulder but it wasn’t bleeding much any more. Her pulse was faint and as I spoke words of comfort her eyelids fluttered and closed and the hand that held mine fell limp.

For some time I stayed with her. I felt for her pulse, but I

knew she was dead. In the end I covered her and went up top where I got a bad case of the shakes and was violently ill over the side. Pepe remained where I’d left him, his staring eyes sightless but still full of horror at what had been done to him, which I got a closer look at when I went to retrieve the disc. It was broken into a handful of pieces. Shattered either by the bullet that had destroyed his manhood, or else when he’d fallen. Either way, it was useless. I stared at the remnants for a while, waiting to feel something, but by then I was beyond feeling.

I swam a hundred yards away from the boat before I stopped to look back. She was well alight by then. The surface of the sea reflected back the growing yellow and orange of the flames. I watched, treading water for five minutes or more. Then all at once there was an explosion as the cooking gas I’d turned on in the galley ignited and the launch became a giant flaming torch in the night. A mile or so away I could see the lights of a boat as it changed course to investigate. I turned and began swimming towards shore.

I figured it was about a mile and half back to the coast. The lights winked faintly in the distance, vanishing every now and then as I bobbed in the swell. The fire receded behind me, and as it did the night gathered me up and held me close. When I looked back the fire had died right down and the boat was sinking, though another had drawn near. I didn’t know what would be found. Perhaps a body or two, and enough wreckage to piece together who the boat belonged to. Sooner or later Morello would get involved and he would talk to Morgan and Sally and some kind of theory would be worked out. But Marcus and Alice were dead. And as far as the world was concerned I had met the same fate and I knew there was no other way it could be. Assuming I ever made it ashore. I hadn’t swum such a distance in a long time. The current was against me, and there seemed little incentive to try too hard. I went through the motions. My arms and legs doing the work while my mind drifted elsewhere.

I was tempted to give up. Turn face down and wait until my lungs were bursting then open my mouth and swallow the sea. What else was there for me? Ashore I would have no money, no home, no identity even. I would be like a walking ghost. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it, and so I swam on and part of me hoped I couldn’t make it. When I grew weary and my muscles began to burn with fatigue I remembered the old people who swam in the slow lanes at the pool. Maybe they knew something. My arms rose and fell so slowly it was only just enough to keep me afloat and moving. The rhythm took over. Up down. No thought, no conscious effort. I could do this for ever it seemed. When my mind started to go blank and I wasn’t even sure of my direction I simply went on. My arms curved and dipped, and every third stroke I breathed and the water flowed around and across me and soon I didn’t know where I finished and the sea began. I started hallucinating, thinking that Alice and Marcus swam below me. I glimpsed ethereal shapes beckoning me down. I’m coming I told them. Just a little longer. Then I was sinking and weariness sapped the last fragments of my endurance. I gave myself up and embraced the sea but as I did my fingers scraped sand and I raised my head and breathed the air and I could smell the seaweed collected in the rock pools on the shore.

,

I passed through Oregon a year after I came ashore. I rode a freight train through the Pacific northwest from Seattle down to Portland where I spent a day in a camp with some other hobos like myself. We are a motley bunch. Nobody has a name, save the ones we give ourselves and by which we are known. There’s a guy I run into now and then who calls himself Iron Man, and there’re others like The Kid, Old Man, Princess and Runner, and one who is almost a legend that people call The Ghost. Most of the names are more colourful than the people to whom they belong. The latter day hobos, unlike the men and women who drifted across the country looking for work in the days of the depression, are for the most part misfits and escapees from society. They are the bag men and women of the open country, preferring a box car on the railroad and the camps that grow up near the sidings to a life on a street corner in some big city. Many are afraid of the city, and of each other. They should be too. A high proportion are either mentally ill or psychotic and killings happen more often than anybody knows or cares about. A lot, however, simply freeze to death in winter.

I don’t have a name. I talk to no one, and people have learned to stay clear of me. They are wary of me, in case I’m one of those who might be a serial killer, since there are a few of that type around. I know they call me Nobody, which is appropriate. I don’t exist.

Sally lives with her parents now. I went to the house in the spring and watched her for a while when she came outside with the baby. She looked good. Tired perhaps, but whether that was from the baby or the after effects of what happened I don’t know. A little of both probably. I was standing in the trees, close enough to see the child’s features. Hard to say who he looked like, but I think there was a little of me in him. Sally looked happy when she held him and kissed his cheek, though there were signs of tiredness around her eyes. Frank pottered in the garden, Sally and her baby sat on the grass in the warm sunlight. I wanted more than anything I have ever wanted in my life to go over and just be with them. Even for a little while. I wanted to hold the baby, have Sally put her arms around me. The pain of my emptiness was almost more than I could bear as I watched them. To be a part of that scene was worth more than all of the money in the world. I understood then that what I’d truly missed in my childhood was my dad after he died. It was that, nothing more. Money, security, none of that mattered. Tears fell unchecked across my cheeks.

After a while I turned and started away. I looked back and Sally stared towards the trees as if some movement caught her eye. For several long seconds I half hoped she would see me, that this loneliness would somehow end. But then she looked away again and I waited until she went back in the house before I went on my way.

I won’t return, because it’s too painful. Perhaps I won’t last another winter anyway. A couple of times I nearly froze when I was caught in the open last year and the snow came.

I think that would be a good thing. Anything would be better than this.