Ocean Burning (10 page)

“Because I never come back.” She couldn’t look at me.

“And poor Ben Hawking is just a patsy, the victim in all this, and walks away scot free.”

She said nothing.

“But you’d have to be dead. Killed by your unscrupulous associates who took off with the cash, that would be my guess about the planned ending to the story. The money’s insured, they don’t really care about that. But someone needs to be caught. Justice must be served.”

All the blood had drained from her face. I wanted to stop talking. But she had to understand.

“And that’s the beauty of it, Carmen. As long as you’re dead, they’ll never look for the culprit. Nobody looks for what’s already found.”

She wrapped her arms around me, squeezed me hard, buried her face in my chest. “Stop it, Frank. Stop talking already. I get it. I’m the scapegoat. The very dead scapegoat.” She let go of me, sank into the couch again, and just like that started to cry.

“Do you love him?” I asked again.

“We worked together, and he was charming, and handsome, and it was going so well, right up until he hit me the first time. Even then, Frank, he could be so…loving, you know?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Do you remember El Paso?” she asked. “The cat caller?”

I smiled again, thinking of old times. It had been our one and only visit to the States together, a weekend jaunt across the border. The weather had turned deadly hot and Carmen had dressed accordingly. We got lost, and an hour later we both looked like we’d jumped in the Rio Grande. Carmen in particular looked like she’d just won first place at a wet t-shirt contest. A man in snakeskin boots and a cowboy hat had the gall to ask her “how much?” And when she’d asked him to repeat himself, he’d said it again. Before I could get a word in edgewise the man was on the ground, clutching his groin and moaning into the concrete. “First one’s free,” Carmen had said. Before I could do or say anything she’d lashed out with a foot and connected with his face, snapping his head back against a newspaper box. Then she did it again. I ended up having to drag her away before she killed him.

“Yeah,” I said, “you were always a firecracker.”

Her lips turned up when I called her that, my private nickname for her after that day on the streets of El Paso. I sunk into the couch next to her, turned so that I could see her face.

“That’s just how I’m built, I guess. Be angry at me and I get angry. Send some disgusting, perverted crap at me, and I fire it right back. But love me…spoon feed it to me, day after day, and I’ll love you right back.” She wiped tears from the corners of her eyes. “Even if he’s a murdering scumbag, apparently.”

“Sounds just like you,” I said.

She laughed. Then we were both laughing, the crazy adrenaline-fueled laugh we used to laugh with each other after we had fought and made up. It felt all-consuming, and cleansing, and when it was over we were just comfortably silent with each other for a moment. Our legs were pressed together. Heat was radiating off her, flowing into me through that small patch of connected skin.

“Do you love him?” I asked.

“I thought I did.”

“Do you love him?” I asked again.

“No,” she said. “It was never like what you and I had, never made me feel—” I cut her off with a kiss. My lips pressed hers, hard and desperate, and I made myself slow down. We explored each other slowly, softly, making all the proper reintroductions. Clothes came off. She was even more beautiful than I remembered.

Afterward, we lay on the deck wrapped in my cheap flannel blanket, staring up at the stars. Neither of us said anything. I wanted to take that moment of afterglow and stretch it out for as long as I could. Silence seemed the best way to avoid shattering it.

Finally, she spoke. “Frank, what do we do now?”

“I’m working on it,” I said, and pulled her close. Some time after that sleep took me. She must have dropped mutely over the rail and swum back to shore, because when I woke up and reached out for her, she had already gone.

But I should have stayed awake.

I should have stopped her.

Chapter 10

CAUGHT UP IN the moment, I’d failed to arrive at the simplest solution: raise the anchors, fire up the engine, and put out to sea. Just leave. Strand them all and take off. Instead, I fell asleep with Carmen in my arms and she left before I could shake away the fog our encounter had pulled over my mind.

I understood why she thought she had to leave. I’d made Ben’s probable plans for the two of us more than clear, and Ben waking up and finding her gone (or worse, with me) would upset the very delicate balance of our little group. We needed to play this one very close to the chest indeed.

Clearly, Carmen thought likewise.

I kicked myself for the duration of the sunrise, letting new light suffuse the smooth morning water and pour some heat into the incoming waves. When the sun was two widths above the horizon, I rolled over the rail and struck out for shore. My ball joints creaked in their sockets, and I pushed down toward the sandy bottom of the lagoon, bending and twisting, trying to limber up on my way toward the beach.

Rigger was snoring out in the open, stretched on a smooth patch of sand. Carlos was gone, off in the woods somewhere. The door to one tent was zipped open and I could see Hawking stirring in his sheets. It only took me another moment to locate Carmen walking down the beach toward the encampment. I jogged out to meet her.

“We didn’t get a chance to talk last night,” I said.

“Sorry for leaving.” She stole a glance at the camp, then pecked me on the lips.

“Don’t worry, I get it. We’ve got to keep the status quo.”

“Exactly.”

“But we made a mistake. We should have left when we had the chance.”

“I know, Frank. I thought about waking you up last night.”

“You should have. We could have been long gone by now.”

“Yeah, long gone,” she said, and stared out at the sea. “But I couldn’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“The money,” she said simply.

My grin faded. I stared at her.

“Don’t look at me like that, Frank. Don’t even pretend you haven’t thought about it.” She reached out with a finger, traced it down my sternum, down across my stomach. “I know you. Remember?”

“There’s no way. If we’re careful, we can escape before anything else happens. But not with the money. Never with the money. We won’t make it.”

“We can’t leave it. Think of the life we could have together. Don’t you want that?”

I swallowed, nodded.

“I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about you,” she said. “With the money, we can be together again. Besides, if we just leave, those three will end up burning it all just for the warmth.”

“Good. Let them.”

Our course had drifted and we’d walked back into the palms a bit, out of sight. She circled her arms around my waist and pulled me close. “What about our warmth?”

I reached behind me and unclasped her hands, took a step back. “Don’t be stupid.”

She didn’t say anything. Her eyes were the color of palm leaves, narrow and shiny.

“They’re already planning to kill us,” I said. “They must be. Hell, I wonder why they haven’t already. It’s too dangerous. We should focus on escaping with our lives. Forget the bag.”

“I can’t. Do you know what it’s like, working as a secretary?”

“Administrative assistant,” I corrected her.

“Fuck you, Frank, I’m a fucking secretary, toeing a line on the straight and narrow, and it’s awful. And look at Ben, taking home some enormous banker’s salary, plus bonus, and it still isn’t enough for him, is it? No, he wants more. He fucking takes it.”

“You’re enough for me.”

“No, that’s the point. The world belongs to the takers. People like Ben Hawking scam and connive their way into powerful positions, and then we wonder why they can’t stop themselves from taking a little bit more. We’re the dupes for being shocked, for expecting them to do anything other than what they’ve always done. And what’s left for people like you and me? The crumbs.” She reached out and ran her fingers through my still-damp hair. “I’m tired of living on crumbs, Frank.”

“It’s a risk,” I said.

“What isn’t?” she asked, and kissed me. I kissed her back, wrapped her in my arms, ran my hands all over her body.

She licked one of my earlobes, whispered “I’m still in love with you, you know.”

I kissed her again. A tent unzipped on the other side of the sand dune and we both took a step back, conscious that we shouldn’t ever be too close to one another, not where someone might see us. Carmen’s eyes flickered; the sun made her freckled shoulders glow. Just looking at her hurt me, and I never wanted the hurt to stop. The small forbidden distance between us, so soon after I’d tasted her lips, made me ache in places I didn’t know I had.

“I suppose,” I said slowly, “that since we’re already back here on the island, let’s see if we can think something up. But we should get back. You go first. I’ll come later.”

I USED MY time in the palms to think, balancing probability against probability, trying to predict the moves of an opponent I hardly knew. There were too many moving pieces, too many uncertainties, but I managed to come to one hard and fast decision about what to do next.

I broke the news at breakfast

The five of us ate arrayed around the small fire. Carlos built it, and it had been kept burning here on the beach ever since we arrived at this little notch in the shore line of Maria Cleofas.

When I said what I planned to say, I expected to get some kind of reaction. What exactly, I couldn’t be sure. After pouring a second cup of coffee, I spoke up.

“This charter is over,” I said.

“We planned for longer than this,” Ben said. “We paid for longer than this.”

“It’s not all about the money, Benny.”

He frowned, slicked a stray hair back into place, and his eyes narrowed in suspicion. “So its about me and Carmen then?”

“Get over yourself.” I felt like smiling as I said it. I wanted to throw sand in his face and trumpet my victory from the nonexistent rooftops. Instead, I carefully crafted my face into a mixture of anger and despair. I embraced the part of the jilted ex—and played it to the hilt.

“No, it’s not that,” I said, my voice cracking slightly.

Carmen gave me a look, and I tried to turn the act down a notch. “Look, it’s nothing personal. We planned for three people. Five people eat more, drink more, go to the bathroom more. And the math is the math. If we don’t leave soon, you’re going to be very thirsty.”

“We’re sorry to cause this kind of trouble,” Rigger said.

“I’ll be happy to restock and come back out, but for now we’ve got to head home.”

I knew the three of them had something planned. I suspected there must be some kind of time table, a time table I had just dismantled in front of them. Whatever they were planning, things had just changed. There’s no arguing with a lack of water. Whatever end they had sketched out for us, I’d rather meet it out on the ocean.

I glanced out past the rocks, over the lagoon, to the sea. My childhood was spent near the sea; I grew up wrestling in the breakers, fishing and swimming and skin diving. And now I’d worked the ocean for years. The situation was three on one. Considering Rigger’s bulk and Carlos’s quickness, and the sly machinations of Ben Hawking, open ocean seemed to be the only thing around resembling home field advantage.

Inside of three hours the tents were packed, the sleeping bags stowed, and everything floated across the cove on our cheap pool rafts.

Even Rigger, his arm still in a sling, helped roll things up and hand them off. At one point he even lifted a pack with his one good arm, veins bulging, and handed it to me. I accepted it with one hand, and it dragged itself down into the sand. It must have weighed nearly eighty pounds. Rigger just smiled, patted my shoulder, walked away toward the water.

With everything aboard, we got Rigger onto one of the pool floats and I dragged him twenty yards to the
Purple.
Glancing back between strokes, his face seemed white, as though all the blood had drained out it. He was right to be scared. One spill, one wrong shift in weight, and he might roll off the raft and go under. As heavy as he was, it might be a while before anyone could get him to the surface, if ever.

I’d gotten my ankle trapped free diving once and I could still remember the lull of the ocean, how soft the currents felt, and the unrelenting temptation to just give in and breathe, even though I knew I’d be breathing water. Even though I knew it would kill me. If Rigger slipped under, there was a good chance he’d succumb to the temptation long before any of us could help.

The absurdity of the situation wasn’t lost on me. Here I was, ensuring the safe passage of a man plotting to kill me, but this was the best of a collection of bad options. And I had to admit, it was comforting to be out here with him. The ocean created a kind of forced detente; I couldn’t harm Rigger for fear of what Carlos and Hawking might do, and he wouldn’t touch me unless he was suicidal. Dragging the raft across the waves, I felt as safe as I had in a while.

The water ran clear and cold off Carmen’s body as she pulled herself up and over stern in front of me. Carlos, still a fish in the water, made it next. He slid up over the edge effortlessly, the black duffel strapped securely to his back. I yanked myself up, got Rigger close, and he got hold of the edge and rolled himself onto the deck, careful not to put any weight on the arm.

I heard the sound of coughing came from a few yards behind me, and I turned.

Hawking hadn’t been kidding—the man was a terrible swimmer.

He dog-paddled his way up and down the tiny swells, his head barely above water. Briefly I considered the idea that he was faking it. Why arrange a rendezvous in the middle of the ocean if you can’t swim? As I watched, he caught a mouthful of seawater and started coughing again. If it was fake, he was a hell of an actor. I felt a bit sorry for him, and then caught myself, nearly laughed.

Frank Conway: shepherd to wolves.

Ben got close, and Rigger reached down with his good arm, hooked him around the wrist, lifted him out of the water completely, and tossed him on the deck. He stayed motionless on deck, perched on his hands and knees, sputtering water.