“Por favor,” Tracy pleaded. “Mi hija . . .”
“Si hagas eso, no vas a la cárcel. Te ahorcarán,” the young man said quietly.
“What are you telling them?” Tracy asked.
“That if he kills Americans, he’s going to hang, because people already know you’re out here.”
Ernesto squatted as if to think. He mumbled to the young man.
“Tell your daughter to get undressed,” the young man told Tracy. “I promise you, I won’t let him touch her.”
“No!”
“I promise you.”
Tracy looked down the length of the deck at Cammie, impossibly small, wedged into the corner. She walked over and knelt down. “You heard what he said,” Tracy whispered, touching Cammie’s shoulder.
Cammie pulled away. “Mom, you’d let them see me? You’d let them touch me?”
“Honestly, yes. I would to save your life, Camille. It would be a disgusting, filthy memory. But—”
“He probably has AIDS, Mom!”
“Oh, my God. Yes. You’re right. But it won’t come to that. The boy promises he won’t let them touch you.”
“How do you know he won’t? I would rather die, Mama.”
“No, you would not rather die, Camille. No, you would not. You can survive humiliation. You’re not going to have to survive rape. It’s our only chance, my precious. I won’t let them touch you. They’ll have to kill me first, darling.”
Her eyes streaming, Tracy helped Camille to her feet. As she had when Cammie dressed for preschool, she held her daughter’s arms over her head and pulled off her sweatshirt. Behind her, she heard Ernesto’s lascivious yodel of appreciation. “Let Mama help,” Tracy, sobbing, told Cammie. Tracy undid the belt on Cammie’s jeans and lowered them, helping Cammie step out one leg at a time.
“Why are we doing this, then?” Cammie whispered.
“To buy time for him to convince them. He’s trying to tell them that they could . . . sell you.” She stopped and held Cammie, who was now wearing only her bra and underpants, against her, with her back to the men, shielding her as she listened to a dispute that seemed to have erupted between Ernesto and the young man. Carlo, still asleep, only moaned as they raised their voices. The young man said, “Nunca nos van a ver de nuevo.”
Ernesto replied, “Muerta.”
The young man spoke again, this time roughly, pointing at Olivia. Ernesto’s eyes widened. He nodded.
“¡Joyas y relojes! Díles.”
The young man said, “He needs you to give him your jewelry. This can stop right here if you do. I’m pretty sure.”
Tracy took Cammie’s hand and unfastened her bracelet of sapphires. Leaving Cammie bent double, arms across her breasts, fumbling with one hand for the towel, Tracy brought the bracelet to Ernesto.
“Okay?” the young man asked. “This is muy—”
“Okay,” Ernesto said. “¡Traela y ven aquí! Rápido.”
“No vale la pena,” the young man repeated. “No americanos. My father . . . Chief will shoot you down like . . . un perro.”
“Haz lo que digo,” Ernesto said, motioning at Cammie again. He pointed to the gun barrel.
“We have opals!” Tracy shouted. “Thousands of dollars of opals!”
“All of it, then,” the young man pleaded. “Right now. ¡Rápido! He has to think I’m ordering you around.” The young man made a motion with his hands, miming precious stones, in a ring, in a necklace.
“I’ll get them!” She leapt down the stairs and tore open Olivia’s door. “Olivia! Come in here. Give me the opals you bought,” she said.
She grabbed Olivia’s purse and ran out onto the deck, dumping over the contents, sending lipsticks rolling like tubular marbles. The velvet bag was in a zipped pocket.
“Here they are. Give me your ring.” Olivia stared. “Give me . . . Are your earrings real?” Olivia, motionless, nodded. “Give me the earrings,” Tracy told her. Olivia, tears spilling from her eyes though her face remained expressionless, removed them from her ears and dropped them into Tracy’s callused hand.
Quick in the deceptive way that a bear is quick, Ernesto crossed the deck and pulled Cammie against him, dragging her backward across the planking. She was insubstantial to him, light as a bundle of rags. He did not like these skinny women. But she was beautiful. And all women had the same holes.
“Mama!” Cammie screamed, thrashing, her feet lifted off the deck. The welts her nails raised along Ernesto’s forearms popped forth beads of blood. This seemed to affect him no more than it would have had Cammie stroked his arm with a feather.
“We have gems!” Tracy called, holding up the opals and allowing them to sift through from one hand to the other, letting the light flash through them, displaying their miniature rainbows. “But tell him I won’t give him these diamonds and gems until he lets my daughter come over to me. I’ll throw every fucking one of them over the side of this boat, right now! I’m talking tens of thousands of dollars here. I’m holding that in my hand.”
“Let her go,” the young man said to Ernesto.
“No. Dije no,” Ernesto said. “Haz lo que te mando, ahora mismo.”
The young man pulled Cammie away from Ernesto. She stumbled, and he jerked her to her feet. “Fool,” he said to the older man. “I’m pretending we can have her and the opals, too, you see?” His voice was harsh but his words imperative. He crossed the few feet between him and Tracy and took the bag from her hand, scraping the jewels from her palm into the sack. For Ernesto, he opened it and spilled the opals onto a deck chair. He let Ernesto paw them, showing how many and varied they were. He saw as Ernesto’s eyes lighted up.
“He likes this,” the young man said cautiously. “Diamante grande. What is a big diamond like that one in the earring worth?”
“Five, ten thousand dollars,” Tracy said. She had no idea.
Ernesto said, “Bueno. Ven aquí.”
He put the jewels back into their sack, pulled the strings tight, and stuck them into the ragged pocket of his pants. Then with the rifle he struck the young man under the chin, not a hard blow, but enough that the young man staggered. He put his thick arm around Cammie’s neck.
“Mama!” Cammie cried, writhing, kicking backward with her hard soccer player’s nimble heels.
Ernesto spat on the deck. In English, he said, “Kick balls.” He pushed Cammie back at the young man, who held her loosely while she tried to reach his arms, her mouth open to bite.
“¡Carlo, que cochino eres! Ven aquí,” Ernesto called. When Carlo did not stir, Ernesto grabbed a jug of water from the shelf and poured all of it onto his cousin’s head. When Carlo, spluttering, hit the floor of the saloon, Ernesto kicked him in the stomach. Slowly, as though he had been awakened for school by his own father, Carlo got to his feet and climbed the stairs. He shook back his wet hair and grinned. Ernesto heaved himself down, heavily, into the yola. “Vamanos!” he muttered to Carlos. “Ven aquí,” he told the young man, gesturing at Cammie. “Fuck tu papá.”
“¡Ya!” Carlos grunted, attempting to mimic his cousin’s tone, as he slipped down into the boat.
“No es, uh, necesario . . . ,” said the young man.
He thought, I promised them. I promised the mother. The mother was fused in his mind with his own mother. All of the bitter, good feelings that bringing the drugs had briefly given him last time, feelings of victory because his father bowed every day to the man who had involved his son in this business, were depleted, released like air leaking from a child’s water toy. It was as though the young man could see it deflated, spinning beneath him. Ernesto would leave this girl ripped and bleeding. None of it had ever been meant to come to this. He had known how deficient these men were, how savage. He had seen them fight, seen the young whores they punished. But he had never imagined himself part of a murder. The young man had counted on their fear of Chief and the man above him. He had known them to be rapacious but had not counted on greed making them so fearless. Like
all bullies, Ernesto and Carlo were cowards. They would not, in his experience, have taken such risks before.
The young man realized that he had still somehow believed that being his father’s son, with his blond hair and his well-brought-up accent, would act as an invisible shield, keep him from being truly befouled. Now he saw himself for what he was—a blue-eyed, soft-cheeked monster who would soil his family now so absolutely, his character turned inside out to show what had grown inside him, that he could never again enter anyone’s heart.
He pointed out at the ocean and made a gesture to Ernesto that encompassed the horizon. He still believed that Ernesto would not kill him, but he had run out of ways to keep his promise to his mother to never do anything really wrong. “¡Policía!” he cried. The gun lay on the deck, its magazine loaded. Ernesto ignored him. He reached up awkwardly from the yola and motioned for the young man to give him the gun.
The young man hesitated. He told Ernesto in Spanish that they needed to leave now.
The young man did not want to die. He did not want the girl to die. He pulled Cammie to him with a show of great roughness.
“When I tell you to, run,” he said into Cammie’s ear. “Run and pull your mother down into the cabin. The man is fat and old. I can stop him, I think, if I kick the control of the motor out of his hands. And I will shoot him if I have to. But you have to move fast.” Loudly he said, “¿Comprendes?” Cammie nodded.
He could kill Ernesto. If Ernesto killed the young man, Chief would shoot him in the mouth like a dog. But Chief would not kill the young man over Ernesto. There were hundreds more like him to take his place. He thought that he knew this for a certainty.
The young man pulled Cammie backward, as if to take her over the side onto the ladder, down into the yola, where Ernesto stood, reaching out to steady the rocking ladder. The wind was ruffling the water. Ernesto told the young man to hurry. He turned to position himself to make the step down, dragging Cammie.
“I’m going to take one single step onto the ladder and then let you go,” the young man whispered, pretending to grab Cammie harder around the waist, as if about to lift her.
A crash from the stern of Opus made him jerk his head and look up.
The blast took him full in the left chest. His shoulder burst, festooning the deck, and Cammie’s face and hair, with bright ribbons of blood. He fell backward, his blue eyes open as the sea, thinking for a moment of a poster he had kept above his bed as a boy, a big photo of Wayne Gretzky, then of his sister’s first lost tooth, and then nothing more. His head hit the stern of the yola with a hollow thwack before his body slipped slowly beneath the surface. Cammie keened like a rabbit as she knelt.
Ernesto leapt and caught the gun before it fell.
“Throw your gun over,” Holly told Ernesto, stepping up to the side of the boat and gesturing with Lenny’s rifle. Tracy loosened the rope, and the yola began to drift. Holly fired again, opening a hole in the side of the yola. Water sprang into the hull of the smaller boat. Carlo slipped across to plug the hole with rags. Ernesto began to raise his gun, but Holly did not move. She fired again, grazing Ernesto’s shoulder, and said, “Muerto.”
Ernesto let the big blue automatic gun drop into the water. Holly saw him motion with his hand for Carlo to give him something else. She took aim and shot Carlo in the thigh. Carlo wailed, his voice louder and higher than Cammie’s cries. “Pistola,” Holly said, sending another bullet into the hull of the yola. Tracy counted.
Holly had a single bullet left.
Ernesto sprang for the motor, and the yola lifted nearly vertical as he wheeled it up and away from Opus.
Fewer than two miles away from the yacht, when he could barely see it, he pushed Carlo, still sobbing and drenched in blood, over the side of the boat. Carlo begged as he flailed and finally sank below the surface. Ernesto quickly left him behind. He would be lucky to make it to the rendezvous. Now he was alone. He knew that Chief’s boss had something to do with the father of the blond boy. This was bad business. He would say the boy was gone, a coward, that he had not been able to find him at the boardinghouse. He tucked the bag of gems into his shirt for safety and wondered if he should go on at all or simply turn back and run for home.
Swinging wide of the Opus, with the murderous bitch aboard it, he chose to do just this. He would slice the packages so they would splatter into pieces and then sink. The blood was bad enough. But he could swim to shore with the jewels in his mouth. There were times when the best a man could try to do was defeated by fate. He would save what he could. This blood-covered and useless boat would disappear, like all the others.
Day Thirteen
They had not slept or spoken since the shooting.
Through the dark hours, Tracy watched as Cammie, her eyes wide, stared at the wall of the saloon. Olivia steered, and Holly gave herself a shot of painkiller and slept.
The gun lay on the deck like a serpent until Tracy carried it down and set it quietly on the floor in Holly’s cabin.
The moon had set, and the tincture of the darkness changed, slightly, toward gray. Finally Olivia called, “I’ve got to lie down for a little while, Trace. This took a lot out of me, too. It wasn’t you they were after.”
“I don’t want to leave her alone,” Tracy said.
“I don’t think she’s going to do anything,” Olivia remarked. “We have to clean her up, though. Do you think that would help?”
“We can try,” said Tracy.
“Okay, I’ll get some clothes and you steer. Just leave her there for a moment.”
Opus, broken, floated in sunny silence through a sea that would never have a shore. The surface, tufted only by the occasional tiny wave, white over turquoise over green over gray over white over turquoise, was objectively so divine, which made their state all the more repugnant. They knew only from the compass that they were now pointed west, and the sun burned in the sky like the business end of a soldering iron.
Sadly, Tracy wakened Holly, who dragged herself up to take the wheel. “We won’t be long,” she promised.
Cammie did not speak while Tracy and Olivia slipped off her clothes and burned them. They washed her with soap and shampooed her hair until no traces of blood or blue tissue remained on her anywhere, Tracy standing beside Cammie in the trickling shower. She was as pliant as a doll when they dressed her, in Olivia’s own delicate embossed underwear and cotton gaucho pants, under a clean green T-shirt that had been Michel’s. Cammie spat into the sink when Tracy brushed her teeth. Tracy braided Cammie’s long, tangled hair as best she could. Finally she sat on one of the deck seats, with one of Olivia’s huge hats tied over her face.
To avoid looking at the unbroken water, Tracy tried reading to Cammie. She read aloud from Rebecca. She read aloud from The Once and Future King. Holly glanced back and watched Tracy read aloud to her child. She was reminded of the faces and postures of the impossibly elderly women she had changed and dressed, propped and bathed, crooning cheerfully to them, at her first job. She had sat them out in the sun just this way, and they let themselves be put into chairs, with eyes that gazed serenely back into time. When an arm of their sunglasses fell askew from one ear, Holly put it gently back in place. Their hands were as beautiful as lilies and as fragile as the pages of a Bible.
“Leave her alone,” Holly said finally. “Give her one of the shots.”
“You need those,” Tracy said.
Tracy and Holly looked at each other. In Holly’s eyes was only regret, no fear; and a dart of anguish pierced Tracy’s exhaustion.
“Give her a shot,” Holly repeated. “She needs it now.”
Although she clung wordlessly to her mother’s hand until consciousness slipped away, the shot knocked Cammie out. It must not have been lidocaine, Holly reasoned, but something stronger. She wondered about Cammie’s weight and the dosage but . . . Cammie would not die now.
When Olivia woke from her nap, Holly and Tracy sat in the captain’s chairs. Olivia steered.
“This must be what post-traumatic stress feels like,” said Tracy. “I can’t stop replaying the whole thing.”
“Yes, and you can talk to your physician about it, but the remedy has been shown in studies to result in possible side effects such as dizziness, insomnia, flulike symptoms, joint pain, nausea, headaches, stomach inflammation, occasionally severe—”
“How can you joke?”
“Because that’s how you get through a trauma. That’s what soldiers do in hospitals. And crime victims. And cops who shoot the wrong person.”
“You didn’t shoot the wrong person.”
“I didn’t shoot a person at all.”
Tracy chose not to bring up the young man’s grief and confusion. “How’d you learn to shoot?” she asked instead. “Or even load a gun?”
“Chris taught me, in his macho period. We went pheasant hunting. No pheasants ever suffered.”
“But you were so good.”
“That was adrenaline. It was building all that time in the ama, while I was trying to break the lock on Lenny’s locker. It was a bitch.”
“You’re not taking credit. You saved our lives.”
“I’m taking credit,” Holly said. “I’m a good credit taker. I’m just describing a biological fact. Things you can do under the influence of adrenaline, you can’t otherwise. I’ve seen it, in hospitals. Wheelchair-bound patients who get up and walk to their son when he comes back from a combat zone. Mothers who have lifted cars off their kids’ chests.”
Tracy put her hand on Holly’s and was amazed how light-boned and small it felt. “I love you, Hols. I loved you before. But now I owe you my daughter’s life.”
Holly smiled. She looked out at the twinkling water. “You’ll make sure that they knew I wasn’t a chicken?” she asked softly. She laughed. “I just want my boys to know I wasn’t a chicken.”
Tracy saw how yellow her friend’s skin had gone, how slack the skin under her solid jaw. “That’s not going to happen. We’ll tell them this story ourselves,” she asserted stoutly.