Buried At Sea (17 page)

A horn blast whipped their heads around. Jim tried to look in every direction at once. Some ways down the shoreline something large was emerging from a creek mouth overhung by mangrove trees. Salvation, he thought. Salvation in the form of an ungainly workboat like the offshore rig tenders he and Will had dodged as they motored through the oil fields.

The teens watched intently as the big boxy vessel lumbered into the lagoon. But when it swung toward the village, three of them backed hurriedly off the dock, calling to the fourth, who climbed out of Jim's dinghy but stayed defiantly on the dock. On the workboat's square bow stood a soldier in uniform cradling a rifle. When it was a hundred yards away, a loud-hailer boomed, "Hey, bud, you wanna move your dinghy ' fore we squash it?"

Jim jumped down, fumbled his painter from the piling, and inched into the shallows. The workboat, with Nellie H on her smoke-stained stern, rotated on her twin screws. Engines thundering, she frothed the water into muddy soup and backed into the dock, which leaned and trembled from the strain.Jim scanned Nellie H for a friendly face. But no one appeared on deck, as if waiting for the Nigerian soldier to swagger back from the bow and take up station on the stern. The kid who had stayed on the dock—the most stoned one—jumped aboard and demanded, "Landing fee." The soldier motioned him off with his rifle. The kid stood his ground. The gun butt whipped up and caught the kid full in the face, with an audible crunch. He fell backward into

the water, splashed feebly toward the shore, and dragged himself onto the muddy beach. A handful of black men trooped off the boat, looked around as if surprised to find the village empty, and wandered toward the huts. A heavily bulked-up white guy slid down the ladder from the wheelhouse and called after them, "Okay, boys, we'll be back for you in three days. Don't do anything I wouldn't."

"Three days," shouted one, without breaking stride. "Don't be late," yelled another, plodding toward the village. "Hey, what's happening?" said Jim.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

"Came in on that sailboat," said Jim, extending his hand. "Jim Leighton."

"Frank Perry." He looked Jim over. "You a lifter, Jim?" "A little," said Jim. "Not like you."

"Shit, man, I'm a mess. Haven't worked out in three months."

"Same thing on the boat. I've got a spinning bike and some free weights, but it's no gym."

"When I get home, it's going to take me six months to shape up for a pageant." Jim nodded in sympathy. Competing in a body builders' pageant required the classic Mr. Olympia dimensions, which meant that Frank had to bum forty pounds of fat into ten pounds of muscle to match his arms and calves to his twenty-inch neck.

"Cast off?" boomed the loud-hailer.

"Gotta go. You take care, dude."

"Where are you heading?"

"Port Harcourt:'

"Could I catch a rider'

"Up to the old man," the roustabout said dubiously.

"I'm trying to get home. I'd be really grateful for a ride. Who's the old man? The captain?"

"I gotta warn you, he is one pissed-off skipper. Come on, I'll take you up to him." Jim jumped onto the boat and hurried forward with Frank Perry.

"Why's he pissed off?"

"We blew two cylinder heads 'cause the chief got drunk and the company said we had to drop these boys in the middle of their fucking-nowhere home village for community service and the tide's going out and there's a tornado coming in—not our kind of tornado, but a hell of a squall, buckets of rain, sixty-knot wind."

"Let me talk to him."

The "old man" was about Jim's age. He was slumped at the steering wheel, staring at the southern sky where huge cumulonimbus clouds looked ready to develop the solid tops Will had warned him to watch out for. Bloodshot eyes and a veiny red nose suggested that the "chief' had not been drinking alone.

"No rides. Company policy?'

"I'll pay."

"You can't pay me enough to get fired."

"I'm really stuck, Captain."

"This ain't a goddamned ferry, just 'cause I gotta give the goddamned natives rides."

"Hey, Cap," said Perry. "Give the man a break. How'd you like to be a 'merican stuck in this shit hole?"

"Perry, get out of my face. You come in on that fancy sailboat?"

"Yes, sir."

"Where from?"

"We sailed from Barbados?'

"So now you're bored and you want to go home?"

"No, sir. I was supposed to crew to Rio, but the owner changed his mind."

"Rio in Brazil? I'll say he's changed his mind. What do you mean, 'crew'? You work for him?"

Jim decided that the workboat captain would not regard a personal trainer as a fellow working stiff. "It's a job." "What's he paying you?" Jim lied. "Fifty bucks a day and a ticket home. From Brazil."

"Jeeez-sus ... Okay. Okay. Give Perry a hand casting off." "Thank you, Captain. Thanks a lot—can I get my stuff?" "What?"

"His gear, Cap," Perry interjected. "His clothes and stuff." "It'll just take a minute."

"We're outta here in ten minutes. No way I'm crossing that bar at low tide."

"I'll be right back."

"Ten minutes."

Jim scrambled down the wheelhouse ladder, off the workboat, jumped into the rubber dinghy, and rowed as fast as he could across the lagoon. Streaming sweat, his heart pounding, his head swimming from the heat, he pulled himself onto Hustle, hurriedly tied on the dinghy, and leaped down the companionway.

Margaret lay on the cabin floor.

Jim was stunned again by her raw beauty. Her dress had hitched up her thighs. For a crazy instant he wondered if she had changed her clothes. Changed from the tight white dress into a combination white skirt and red blouse. But he was dreaming. Wishing. The red was her blood. So much blood that she had to be dead.

WILL?"

The only sound he could hear was the distant rumble of the Nellie H's engines. Her captain was revving them, chafing to get under way.

The woman's mouth was wide open as if to scream and yell or shriek with surprise. Her front teeth were as straight and white as a model's. But she was missing several deeper in her mouth.

"Will?"

What had the old man done? "my „

"In here, kid" came the answer from Will's stateroom in the back of the boat. Jim backed fearfully from the dead girl, past the nav station and the galley, where he noticed belatedly that the teakettle was whistling, and down the narrow corridor to Will's door. He glanced in and quickly stepped back.

Will was lying on his bunk, pointing a short-barreled gun at the door. Where, Jim wondered, had Will gotten the weapon? A sawed-off shotgun, he realized, as a crazy thought careened through his mind: Who would murder a beautiful young girl with a shotgun?

"Can you give me a hand, Jim?'

"Put down the gun."

"Can't. My fingers are locked. Help me off of here. Get me loose."

"I'm not walking in front of that gun," Jim said, even as his mind fastened on the absurdity. Will's shotgun would shred the thin teak bulkhead as it had shredded the African girl's chest.

"Oh Jesus, Jim, are you nuts? I won't hurt you. Pull the knife out." Will was nearly sobbing. Jim looked into the cabin again and this time saw the long knife sticking out of Will's chest.

"What?" He lunged through the door and bent over the old man. Will was dead white from shock or blood loss. His pupils were dilated and he was gasping for air.

"I can't believe I fell for the oldest trick in the book." "I'll get a doctor."

"Pull the knife out."

"I'll get a doctor."

"There's no time."

"I can't just pull it out. What if I cut an artery?" The blade had pierced him where his breast met his shoulder.

Will bit his lips. "I'll take the chance, for Christ's sake. Pull it out. Pull it out. It's killing me. I can't breathe:'

Left side. An inch from his heart? A quarter inch? "I can't—there's an oil rig tender in the lagoon. Americans. They can radio in a helicopter. Fly you to a hospital."

"No! They'll find me in the hospital. They'll kill me." The Nellie H blew her horn, the blast racing across the lagoon and reverberating off the walls of mangroves.

Jim whirled from Will's bunk, pushed out of his cabin, and scrambled up the companionway. He could hear the engines start to thunder and he thrust his head out of the hatch just as the rig tender began to depart from the dock. Perry waved frantically from the wheelhouse.

"Jim," Will called.

There was just time to jump into the dinghy. The hell with his stuff. Leave it and get out of here. The hell with

crazy Will. When they saw him rowing, the rig tender would pick him up.

"Jim," Will called again. His voice sounded as if it were clawing the hot, still air, as if he had channeled every last remnant of his strength into one final, desperate bid to be heard. Jim prayed to Shannon, prayed for her advice. She had a clearer eye than he did behind her ready smile: a survivor's eye.

"Jim!"

They said you saw your past flash by when you died; what Jim Leighton saw was his life plowing across the lagoon, trailing a heavy wake, and vanishing into the narrow creek that led to the Calabar River and the Atlantic beyond if he didn't run now.

"Run for it, Jim," Will yelled. "I'm a goner." Jim slumped halfway out of the hatch and whispered, "Oh my God." He clung to the cockpit sill, watching the ponderous curl of the Nellie H's big wake roll toward the anchored sailboat. It wasn't guilt that held him, nor fear that he would hate himself later. But the much more powerful and insidious grip of need—need that he had to serve.

Then he saw the deadly threat of the rig tender's wake.

He plunged down the companionway ladder, picturing the effect on the knife when the track of the passing vessel seized Hustle and threw her violently from side to side. The sloop was already leaning into the cavity of the wake when he burst into the cabin. The old man was still conscious, eyes murky. He flinched at Jim's approach, pawed at the sheets, and struggled to lift the shotgun.

"It's Jim. Hang on."

He knelt beside the bunk and cradled Will in his arms, hoping to cushion him from the rocking. No good. As the boat leaned further, Will's body shifted hard and it was clear to Jim that nothing he did could prevent the man from rasping against the sharp steel in his shoulder.

He reached for the knife, closed his hand gingerly around the handle, which was wrapped in dirty cord, and forced

himself to tighten his grip when all he wanted to do was let it go. Still kneeling, he braced every muscle in his body, counted to three, and yanked up. Steel ground on bone. Will screamed.

The blade slid free. Jim flew backward and crashed into the bulkhead with the knife held high, dripping blood on his face. Before he could untangle his arms and legs, the rolling water tipped Hustle in the opposite direction and he fell facedown on Will's bunk. Fearfully, he pulled the sheet away and watched the blood flow from Will's chest. The skin around the one-inch wound puckered out where the knife had exited, oozing red like a lipstick kiss. Jim noticed with faint hope that the blood was not spewing in the rhythmic pumping from a sliced artery. The boat was still rocking violently. As gently as he could, he lifted Will to inspect his back.

His skin was unblemished. The knife hadn't gone through him. But God knew what was going on inside the man. "Jim," Will groaned. "Douse me with alcohol."

"What?"

"Goddamned Africa, every germ in the world. Douse me good before they get inside me. There's a bottle in the big medical kit."

He screamed when Jim dribbled the antiseptic onto his chest and struggled to break away. Appalled, Jim let go. The pain had turned Will into a frightened animal. But he moaned, "Sweet Jesus, get it over with. Do it! They probably cleaned fish with that goddamned thing. Do it!"

With a prayer that the old man would faint, Jim poured the alcohol into the wound. Will's scream pitched to a shriek. His whole body convulsed and he flipped onto his back and flailed out, pummeling Jim with his fists.

Jim took the weak blows, and as they subsided, he laid Will down again, wondering how to bandage the wound. Will lay still for a moment, his breath whistling through his teeth.

"I'm bleeding," he said. "You have to pack the wound. Go to the medical locker. Get Iodoform gauze."

Jim pawed frantically through the locker. "I got it!"

"Stuff it in—Oh, Christ! ... Good. Good. Well done. Well done. . . . Okay, we have to get out of here. Before her people come back."

"We have to find a doctor."

Will closed his eyes. "A doctor won't do us any good in a Nigerian jail." The words we and us forced Jim's thoughts along a predictable series of events: the dead woman's friends return; they call the police; the police—or, more likely, a squad of thug soldiers like the one on the rig tender—arrest both him and an unconscious or dying Will Spark; Jim claims he wasn't even on the boat; ask the boys at the dock. What boys? Four stoned teenagers with machetes who tried to rob me?

Will whispered, "Do you really want to defend yourself against murder charges in a lawless state?"

"Me? What about you?"

"I'll have worse problems. They will kidnap me out of a hospital in twenty-four hours—

listen to me. It was self-defense. They sent her to kidnap me—now help me up on deck. We've got to get out of here."

He raised his head and moved as if to swing his legs off his bunk, but fell back, sucking air. "I can't move, Jim. It's up to you."

THE TEENS WITH the machetes had returned to the dock. There was no time to waste booming the dinghy aboard. Jim tied it to a cleat on the stem, then hurried forward to the bow to figure out how to raise the anchor. Will had lowered it by stepping on a switch under a rubber jacket that controlled the electric windlass. But all that did was let the chain further out. A closer inspection revealed an up-down toggle that reversed the windlass. The chain began clanking aboard, dragging a stinking coat of mud and slime across the deck and into its locker below.

When the anchor itself finally emerged from the lagoon, stock and flukes trailing oily grass, it took Jim two tries to lock it into place and he still wasn't sure he had seated it correctly. But by then the boat was drifting toward the dock and he realized too late that he should have started the engine first.