Part 5 (2/2)

And they would have been right. His face was contorted, locked in the horror of his final conflict: teeth bared, eyes wide, wolflike. Quickly, I moved the woman away from the body, over by the built-in couch.

”It's awful,” she said. Her hands still covered her mouth.

”Feel like you're going to be sick?”

She shook her head and braced one elbow on the box of s.h.i.+p's hardware that had never quite made it to the Mako. ”No,” she said. ”I'll be okay. Just give me a second.”

With my foot, I rolled the corpse over. It was already bloated, spongy.

I was looking for a bullet wound, but found none.

It didn't make sense. Why had the black man slit the throat of his own partner?

Or maybe it wasn't his partner. Maybe it was the guy who had owned the boat. And maybe some drug runners had gotten to him first. . . .

I opened the narrow compartment below the wheel where the s.h.i.+p's papers should have been kept.

Empty.

Somebody had beat me to them.

I decided to check the skiff.

I took the woman gently by the arm. ”We've got to get out of here,” I said. ”This boat isn't going to last much longer. One good wave and she'll turn turtle.”

She seemed to be still in a daze. Shooting the pirate hadn't seemed to bother her. But the way this guy died, it even made me a little queasy myself.

”Let's go,” I said again. ”We'll cut the Mako loose and call the Coast Guard-”

The moment I said it, the couch seat I had not gotten around to checking came flying off. It knocked me back against the wall and, in slow-motion realization, I knew what was happening. The pirate's partner was hiding in there, hoping to h.e.l.l we'd just leave. But I had forced his hand-said I wanted to free the Mako, his only means of escape from this sinking boat.

I didn't see him or his pistol, but I heard the first shot-and saw the woman drop to a heap on the water-slick floor.

”Hold it right there, or I'll kill you, too!”

High voice, on the edge of hysterics. It was a kid. Not much older than twenty. Blond hair, tan face with a sneer that showed a row of bad teeth. When your life is on the line, you don't take time to reason. The instincts take over and the brain digests visual information at near superhuman speed all in a glance: Androsa Santarun was not dead-slightest movement of chest, no blood; the kid wasn't comfortable with a weapon-held it awkwardly, like a snake; whether I halted or not, the kid would kill us both. He had to.

I tossed the couch seat at him and dove for his feet, hearing, as I dove, the pistol explode and the crash of window gla.s.s. I jerked his feet out from under him and tried to smother his arms.

Didn't do a very good job. He got another shot off, right by my face. It made my ears ring and my head roar. But it missed.

”Watch out!”

It was the woman, on her feet again. There was a thin trickle of blood down her left cheek. She had recovered her .38 and had it leveled at the kid's head.

”What the h.e.l.l are you doing?”

I saw her pull back the hammer, a strange, starry look in her eyes. But before she had a chance to fire, I hit the kid's blanched face with a heavy overhand right, knocking him cold.

I stood up, pointing at him. ”There you go-an easy shot. Go ahead and shoot if you want to kill someone else so bad!”

She lowered the handgun slowly, trembling.

”I'm sorry,” she said. ”I just . . . just . . .”

I took her by the arm and steered her back out onto the deck.

”Do you know how to use a radio?”

She nodded.

”Good. I'm going to tie up the kid and stick him and the other guy in the Mako. You call the Coast Guard. Don't give my call letters. Just tell them there's a vessel in trouble. The Loran is beside the radio. Just tell them the numbers you see flas.h.i.+ng. They'll understand. Got it?”

She shook her head stoically. ”And then what?”

”And then I'm taking you back to Key West-”

”No!”

”We have to have someone look at your cheek.”

She touched her face, then studied the blood on her hand, as if she had forgotten the wound. ”He didn't shoot me-I hit my head when I dove to the floor, dammit! No, don't say another word. We're going on to the Mariel Harbor-that's the agreement!”

There was something almost pathetic about her fierceness. She looked like a Spanish version of one of television's Angels, determined as h.e.l.l to solve the obligatory ”mystery,” fake blood and all.

But there was nothing fake about this woman-blood or mission or anything else.

”Okay,” I said. ”Fine. But when we get back, you do the explaining to the authorities.”

Her firmness was edged with contempt. ”Don't worry, Mr. MacMorgan. I'll see that you don't lose your precious boat.”

She turned then, back toward Sniper. But before she did, she cast one more look into the wheelhouse of the trawler, at the dead man, at the kid-and at something else, too. The life ring. It had been knocked out of the box during the fight, and now floated right-side up in the shallow blood and water on the cabin floor. It explained the new determination in her. I knew the name from my conversation with Norm Fizer.

In black block letters, the life ring boasted the name of the trawler which now sank beneath us: Storm Nest.

7.

The first thing you raise approaching Cuba from open sea is a low bank of c.u.mulus clouds appearing, on the curve of horizon, like a sudden Dakota windscape. The sea is a mile deep, purple-black in shafts of clear light, and flying fish lift in coveys before you, skimming cresting waves and luminous sarga.s.sum weed like locusts.

It was dawn.

Clouds were fire-laced to the southeast, and, later, the bleak facades of factories and pre-Castro highrise hotels below Havana caught the light in a blaze of geometrics. Mariel Harbor, already demarcation point for more than sixty thousand refugees, was just twenty miles to the west, a surge of dark cliffs.

The Coast Guard had held us up.

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