Ocean Burning (7 page)

The face was a man’s, a man with a bristly black mustache. He was dressed in a three-piece suit. As the light scanned down his length, I paused to study the hole through his vest. It was the size of my fist and had been opened up through the center of the chest.

As I watched, it wept blood and tissue. I reached out, touched a finger to it. Even in cold rain, I could feel the heat radiating out of his core.

It didn’t take a pathologist to figure time of death; this man had been walking and talking just hours ago.

I shoved the body away from me, and it caught in some loose ropes. It swung away from me and back towards me, the lips fixed into a terrible grin. The stern of the fishing boat lifted still higher, the nose of it went under. The boat started to slip into the sea like an arrow into flesh.

That was enough of a sign for me. Without looking, I flipped myself over the rail, bounced off a wave, went under, then bobbed to the surface and started swimming. The black duffel threatened to drag me down, but I was in a frenzy, scooping water with my hands and shoving against it with my feet. I could feel the suck of the boat at it took the water nearby down with it.

At the last possible second, I stopped and turned. The stormed pulled me up to a wave crest, lightning cracked, the universe gifted me a moment with a perfect view. The grinning rose-chested man in the ropes piloted the boat down down down until it slipped between two waves and disappeared.

Chapter 7

MEMORIES OF THE swim blurred in my mind. That lead weight of a bag must have been dragging me down; the waves must have thrashed me; the wind must have buffeted me off course. And I must have kept attacking the water until I slammed against the
Purple’s
hull.

I couldn’t remember any of that, but it must have happened, because I lay sprawled on the deck, alive.

The first thing that registered was Carmen’s face right above me. She grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me hard. A combination of sea water and bile spilled out of my throat. The image of it staining the white deck a sickly brown stuck out vividly in my mind.

Carmen was shouting something, but someone had pressed her mute button.

I pulled myself up on her shirt, pushed towards the ladder, started climbing. The hand-holds carried me up and across the thin carpeting of the bridge. I flopped into the captain’s chair, searched out the two ends of the airplane-style seat belt, clicked them together, and cinched the strap across my waist. The deck rolled from side to side. The urge to vomit again felt overpowering.

Rivulets of water cascaded endlessly down the glass windows. Visibility was zero. We were sitting in open water, and the ocean was in open revolt.

“What now?” The voice came from behind me.

I didn’t turn my head, couldn’t possibly turn it without throwing up. Ben Hawking must have followed me up the ladder.

“No choice but to make for the island. We head south, get a bit on the lee side, see if we can get close and find an inlet.”

Ben must have sensed some small bit of equivocation in my voice. “So what’s the problem?”

“The problem is if we too close, the waves will smash us on the rocks and we’ll all die.”

Ben went silent, and I didn’t say I word. The throttle lever ratcheted smoothly up to three-quarter power, and the dual props began to push us across the hills out there. Riding across a stormy sea is a bit like riding an old-fashioned roller coaster—no loops, just ups and downs, drops followed by trembling anticipation of the drops to come.

I got us headed south, judging the distance based on dead reckoning.

After fifteen minutes the tenor of the whitecaps began to shift. Their height and ferocity decreased, and I knew we must be close. The throttle lever clicked into the one-quarter power slot. I turned on the spotlight attached to the side of the boat, scanned from side to side. My mouth had gone dry; my tongue stuck to gums.

“There.” Ben pointed into the murk.

My eyes barely detected wet black rock shining against the matte black background of the night. I nodded at him.

I forced the
Purple
to come about, drifted her through the gap in the shoreline and into a very small inlet, then dropped every anchor she had. The waves still battered us—no escaping that—but we were well-placed to weather the night. I could feel the anchors bite, and a breath escaped my lips.

I hadn’t realized I’d been holding it.

Ben didn’t need to ask. I answered before he could. “Now we wait,” I said, slipped past him, climbed shakily down the ladder and the stairs to get below. Carmen said something about taking care of our new arrivals. I mumbled my assent, pushed past her into the captain’s quarters, closed and locked the door behind me.

The bed beckoned. I swallowed a handful of ibuprofen tablets, and let the satin sheets swallow me up.

MY SLEEP WAS deep, but not restful. Dreams skittered furiously into and out of my head like tiny stones skipped along the surface of my mind, the ripples interacting, the images mixing into turbulent unreality.

Bars clamped down over my vision, and I was back in that Mexican holding cell from five years ago. My telling of the story to Carmen had left out the worst parts. I had excluded the cigarette burns and the tiny razor blades and the rubber truncheons across the soles of my feet until I cried and cried and would have told them anything.

In the dream, the jail cell was just as I remembered it except for a picture window in one wall. There had been no window in my cell, no light at all. Even if there had been, certainly there would have been a dirty alley on the other side of the brick.

I walked up to the dream window, pushed my face up against the bars. There was a meadow full of wild flowers in full bloom just outside. Snow-capped mountains loomed in the distance, and I could taste a fresh breeze.

Vise-like arms snatched me back from the window, pushed me to the floor, pinned me down. A thick cigar pressed ash-end first into my arm. I started screaming, scrambling away. Ben Hawking stood above me, a thick oily scar that he never wore in life lancing down his face and neck. He grabbed me by the wrist, pulled me to my feet, burned me again. Then he handed me the cigar, rolled up his sleeve, displaying the soft white inner side of his forearm.

He pointed at the spot. He wanted me to use it as an ashtray. He wanted me to burn him.

I puffed the cigar in my hand, sitting on the beach in Puerto Vallarta. Carmen handed me a freshly made Mai Thai. She wore a rose-colored string bikini, looked more beautiful than I had ever seen her. Horror dripped inexplicably down my spine. The Mai Thai transformed, suddenly a Bloody Mary. I looked again, and Carmen’s face had thinned until her cheekbones were blades. She grinned at me, and a red hole opened in her chest, clamped shut like a mouth, opened again and sucked wetly at the air.

Behind her sunset torpedoed the horizon, a slow-motion explosion in sickening tangerine. I watched it dance, the flames licking closer and closer until I could feel the heat on my face and hear the crackling of my fat. My face burst open; my sweet sticky juices finally ran clear.

I rolled over, clawing desperately at my face, cupping my hands to catch my insides and planning to stuff them back into my cheek. Something changed. My guts took on a dry quality. I looked down at them, and—

Sheets.

Sheets and a crumpled blanket soaked in sweat.

Carefully, I reached up to touch the hole in my face, but it had disappeared. The heat on me was real enough. Sunlight squirted through my small porthole and directly onto the head of the bed.

Someone banged on the door. My eyes had crusted shut during the night, and I picked at them, finally settling on the band-aid solution. I pulled them open quickly, ripping free a couple lashes in the process.

Someone banged again. The door rattled in its frame.

“Coming!” I shouted. Someone shouted something back that sounded like vaguely like the word breakfast.

I stood, expecting nausea, but was pleasantly surprised. I tested a few steps carefully, then slipped into a pair of well-worn jeans. Besides some muscle soreness, I felt great. And hungry.

I made my way out into the galley, but no one was there. The smell of cooking meat wafted down the stairs toward me, and I bounded up onto the deck.

All four of my passengers were tucked around the little fold-out table at the stern, the plates in front of them steaming. Carmen stood up and kissed me on the cheek, lingering just a bit too long. One chair was open, and I jumped into in, my mouth watering.

My fingers on one hand maneuvered the fork, and I used the fingers on my other hand as a guide, started to shovel eggs and bacon into my mouth.

“Sir, please, a moment,” Carlos said.

My fork paused in midair, the chunk of egg speared there jiggling gently. I closed my mouth, chewed, swallowed. “Don’t call me sir,” I said.

“I have to thank you. You saved our lives—I am in your debt.”

“Oh hell yes, mate,” Rigger spoke up. “Here, let me shake your hand.” One of his arms had been tied up in a sling, but he extended the other, meaty and slick and covered in crude tattoos, and we shook.

I studied his face. He was smiling hard, squeezing my hand, pounding me on the shoulder like we had been friends forever. Carlos had come off as humbly grateful, but Rigger’s eyes seemed dead back behind the irises, and I wondered about him.

“So, tell us what happened already!” Ben had found himself in an adventure, and had no intention of missing the gory details.

“Not much to tell,” Rigger said.

“Come on,” Ben pressed him.

“Well, it was a fishing trip,” Carlos said. “Rigger here and I are friends, from way back, and when I ran into him, and he found out I owned a fair-sized boat, we decided to catch up out here. The weather really snuck up on us.”

“Looked to me like you were foundering before that,” I said. “That bow had been taking on water even before we showed up.”

“Sure, I took us too close to the rocks, we hit something I guess. I would have been able to fix it, only the storm started brewing, and then we saw you. I guess you know the rest.”

“How about that arm, Rigger?”

“What about it?”

“Dislocated?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

He eyed me. “Trying to fix the boat, mate. I slipped.” Those dark eyes of his narrowed a bit, and I tried my best to look blankly curious. I was asking too many questions, I realized.

Carmen put a hand on Rigger’s shoulder. “You really were in a state last night. I hope we’ve managed to balance the pain and your awareness.”

“Thank you, ma’am. It still hurts, but I’ll get by.”

“And thank God,” I said, “that no one got seriously injured. Someone could have been killed.”

Rigger’s face formed quickly into an expression of thankfulness flavored with the pain of my hypothetical, a perish-the-thought type look. I was impressed. “You said it, Captain. Thank God.”

“Well, speaking of that arm, we’re a bit out of radio distance to call for help, but I think we can get you back on land by the end of the day.”

“Please,” Rigger said, “that isn’t necessary. I understand this is some kind of early honeymoon for you two,” he gestured with his fork in the general direction of Ben and Carmen, “and we wouldn’t feel right ruining it.”

“Nonsense. You’re hurt, and we’re happy to help,” Carmen said.

“No, no, no, it just doesn’t feel right. Am I right, Carlos?”

“Si,” Carlos said, his face blank.

“How long were you planning on being out here, anyway?”

“Oh, a couple more days,” Ben said.

“Let’s compromise,” Rigger said. “Maybe you could put up with two stowaways for the rest of the trip, and just drop us off on your way home. What do you say?”

Ben looked at Carmen. Carmen shrugged a kind of permission, and he looked excitedly back at the two men. “It would be our pleasure. I mean, what a story,” he said.

I watched Rigger make the appropriate thank yous, but it was Carlos’s face that worried me. It had gone dead as stone, and privately I thought he looked like a man dreading something but trying to hide it. Like a man resigned to it—whatever “it” was.

I shoveled the rest my eggs, pushed the chair back, declared I would be getting a drink on the sundeck in front of the bridge. “Sorry about your boat,” I said to Carlos.

He couldn’t look at me, but his face didn’t even flinch.

Chapter 8

WE SPENT THE day sunning ourselves, drinking cold beers out of the cooler, and talking. Rigger and Ben traded stories of the Australian outback and Las Vegas respectively. I listened to them laugh, fast friends already, and fished off the stern.

For lunch I presented las delicias del mar—delights from the sea—cabrilla, a kind of sea bass, grilled with new potatoes and asparagus. Ben revealed a hidden cache of expensive, chilled white wine. We ate and drank, and afterward I cracked the seal on one of my bottles of cheap scotch.

The storm had blown away some of the covers and awnings, and eventually the heat of midday drove us below decks. The chart table was the perfect place to talk and do belts of liquor. After the third one I reached into the overhead compartment and dug through dusty rolls of paper, came out with a map of the Islas Marias and the surrounding area. It refused to smooth out, always curling, until finally we had to weight down the corners with shot glasses.

Carmen picked an inlet off the map, one marked as having a sandy beach. I went above decks and motored in that direction, located the gap in the rocks, a natural breakwater, and anchored the
Purple
twenty yards off of a white sandy beach backed by swaying palms.

The boat horn blared at the touch of a button and everyone made their way above decks to see where we’d ended up. I could hear the
oohs
and
ahhs
from my chair on the bridge.

The day passed. Between the five of us, the level of amber fluid in my scotch bottle descended like an elevator.

Four in the afternoon, the hottest part of the day, hit everyone hard. Carmen and Ben were stretched on the beach. Carlos had disappeared into the palms half an hour before, muttering that only gringos would stay in the sun during siesta. Rigger was propped up in my dirty canvas deck chair, injured arm elevated, snoring loudly.