The Catch: A Novel (20 page)

She no longer had a way to pay for pain medication, and in the agony of that realization, despair and defeat crept toward the corners of her soul. Tears of desperation seeped out and she shoved them away; would have swiped an angry hand against her cheek if she could have found the strength to move it.

She would push through.

Despair was a mind killer.

Pain was temporary.

For two years she’d fought through the nights in the jungle, fought to kill before she was killed, fought the torment and the hopelessness; she had become faster, keener, and she had won. The enemy today was not stronger or smarter than the ones she’d already destroyed. She would win again.

Talking seeped into her awareness and she turned her head. There was a half-wall and an empty space where a door would have been if this had been the type of house to have doors, and from the other side the low voices passed through. She listened; focused on the sound and drew into it until gradually she could separate syllables from white noise: Swahili spoken by two men in the room next door.

Eyes closed, Munroe worked her fingers, her toes, each movement
made in screaming rebellion, but nothing was so broken she couldn’t force it into submission.

Slid her legs over the mattress to the floor.

Managed to roll over and get to her knees before the darkness overtook her. She woke again with her face in the dirt.

She pulled back to her knees and, in a slow crawl, one painful limb movement at a time, got to the half-wall, and with the wall as support, pulled herself to her feet. Made it upright and into a stand before two shadows filled the doorway.

One caught her before she blacked out again. One of the beach boys that Sami had befriended, one who’d been there after the killing and who had fought in the circle of bystanders. “What you do? What you do?” he said. “You sleep. You no money, no go doctor. You rest. You drink. You eat. You sleep.”

“I need to go to the hotel,” she whispered. “Please help me?”

He and the other man tried to take her back to the bed. She fought them and then went dark again. Woke on the mattress with the two men standing over her.

She whispered her request again. Had to get to the hotel. Had to find out what was left behind when the room was ransacked. Was the only way to get to a weapon and cash—if anything had survived—the only way to get pain medication and medical care. She couldn’t wait until new guests had taken over the room. Had to try the hotel first before she broke down and called Dallas to beg for help from the man she hadn’t spoken to in nearly a year.

The energy between the men shifted. She understood pieces of their conversation: true concern for her condition. She would die trying to get back if they didn’t help her, it would be better to take her.

In English the one she didn’t recognize said, “Gabriel go get car. You wait. You sleep,” and she let go again, and it was dark when she next opened her eyes.

S
OUND IN THE
front room drew her around again. A man and a woman were talking, and though it seemed as if she imagined it, a car’s engine rattled somewhere outside. Sami’s friend returned
and she struggled off the bed. Hand to her elbow, he helped her up and her body screamed in protest and darkness returned and she passed out.

He must have caught her. She came to with her feet still on the ground and her back against his chest. Just to the car, she could hear the engine outside, she only had to get that far.

The other man opened the rear door. Sami’s friend, Gabriel, supported her, walked her from the room to the outside. She bent to get into the backseat and a scream escaped her head, shattered the relative silence. She lay on the cushion with her face to the car roof, panting past the pain.

Gabriel shifted gears. The car moved. They were on the highway. She didn’t give directions. Didn’t know where she was. They knew where to take her. How they knew she wasn’t sure exactly—from where they’d found her on the beach, or from Sami—the sense of it was out there somewhere in the fog, and with each lurch of the car with its worn shocks and struts as it dipped in and out of potholes, she screamed inside her head.

And then there was nothing.

Gabriel helped her from the car to the lobby, where she found her voice in a faint whisper, and he explained to the front desk what she could not. Munroe gave her name and room number, and with no strength to stand, collapsed again.

Gabriel propped her up. Was careful to use his chest to support her and didn’t touch her with his hands, as if afraid to hurt her, afraid she would scream. She bit back the tumult and the shrieks; clung to him for balance.

The manager gave Gabriel a key.

The darkness descended and Munroe began to fall. Gabriel was there. And somehow she was in front of the room. He unlocked the door. The manager peered inside and confirmed what Munroe had described. The room was trashed, as she’d last seen through the curtains, the bed tossed and the lamp atop the dresser smashed. Damage that she shouldn’t be held responsible for, but might.

Gabriel closed the door behind them and Munroe slid to the floor. Through half-shut eyelids, she took stock of the damage. Her backpack missing, everything gone.

She dragged herself to the foot of the bed and turned to Gabriel for help. “Please,” she said, and tapped the frame. “Please lift the bed.”

He knelt beside her, lifted the frame up high enough that she could run her fingers beneath the base of the bamboo bedposts. Felt the tug of plastic stuffed up inside the hollow footing, and with the plastic, relief. Her passport had been left undisturbed, as had the pictures in the ziplock, and with one bag secured she pulled herself to the opposite leg while the screams of agony chased each other in circles inside her chest. Or maybe out of her mouth.

She didn’t know. Was delirious. Couldn’t breathe.

She motioned to Gabriel again and he lifted again and Munroe tugged out the several thousand dollars she’d stashed. Gripped the money tight in one hand and pushed from the floor to her knees, and from her knees to her feet. Made the few steps to the bathroom and, hand to the wall for balance and support, fought the ever-present dizziness and the need to vomit.

Slid to the floor beside the toilet and, head tipped back against the wall, tapped the tank lid, and Gabriel lifted it off and his eyes grew wide when he peeked inside. The handgun and ammunition were still waterproofed in their bag. Munroe pushed to her knees to collect them, and woke with her face on the tiles and Gabriel beside her with a hotel washcloth in his hand and water from it dripping into her hair and down her face. Weapon retrieved, cash gripped tightly, she found Gabriel’s face and whispered, “Thank you. I’m finished here. Please take me away.”

Somewhere in between spells of darkness were flashes of clarity: They’d returned to the car, she’d been brought back to the place with the dirt floor and was on the mattress again. During one of the brief moments when she was fully cognizant, she tugged a fifty-dollar bill off the wad she’d shoved inside her pants and handed it to the woman of the house, who’d come to check on her. Asked for
Kapanol—morphine sulfate—she’d seen it on the shelf at the pharmacy in Lamu, and if it was available there, so far away from civilization, it would be easy to find here, even without a prescription. And ibuprofen. They called it Hedex here. She’d seen that, too.

“Everything is closed,” the woman said. “When morning is come, we get.”

Munroe woke to a hand behind her head and plastic to her lips, and the instinct to strike died before she could give birth to it. She struggled to lift her hands and fought against motionless limbs. Understanding gradually replaced violence, and she grasped that in kindness someone meant to give her water.

Lips pressed together, she turned her head to refuse, and the plastic went away. Without knowing the source, it was too dangerous to drink. Fingers returned with a tablet and pressed it up against her mouth, and when Munroe struggled to keep free of this thing, a woman’s voice said, “It is what you ask for, take it to help you pain.”

Munroe winced and dry swallowed; strained to open her eyes. The face of the woman blurred into a halo of orange and purple, a cloth that wrapped her hair. Her eyes and the lines of concern etched across her forehead came into focus, and when Munroe’s eyes opened fully and connected with hers, the woman nodded approval; she sat back on her heels, attentive nurse hovering over her patient, and beamed a smile.

She was possibly late twenties, skin soft and cared for, wore a knee-length skirt and button-down shirt, but was barefoot and held a dirty plastic cup. She put the cup to Munroe’s face offering water
again, and Munroe pressed fingertips to the cup and nudged it away, as gently as possible to avoid giving offense.

The woman stood and left and Munroe lifted a hand, studied her fingers, struggled to control joints and muscles, stretching one tight limb after another until she had some control over movement, and finally found a way to shift up onto an elbow. Her thoughts were a little clearer than the last time she’d been awake and the headache a little less nausea-inducing. How long had it been?

The woman returned with a sealed bottle of water, held it toward Munroe, another offer of a drink. Munroe reached for it, cried out from the stab that went through her, and the woman knelt and placed a hand behind her head again, helped her sit, and with water dribbling down her chin Munroe drank until the bottle was nearly empty and she could hold no more.

The woman smiled, satisfied, set the bottle beside the mattress, and sat back on her heels again. The house was quiet. Traffic sounds filtered in faintly from the outside. Lengthening shadows converged with light and streamed in through cracks in walls made from wood and woven switches.

“What time is it?” Munroe said.

“It is afternoon,” the woman answered, as if that were all that mattered.

“What day?” Munroe whispered, and from the woman’s response she pieced together the timing.

Frustrated and working against a body that hurt everywhere, Munroe attempted to sit. The seventy-two hours for retrieving the captain had expired and she needed to get back to the hospital before they turned him loose and she lost him forever—assuming he hadn’t been hauled off and beaten to death at the same time that she’d been accosted.

“I need to go to the city,” she said.

The woman placed the boxes with the Kapanol and Hedex tabs and the change in shillings beside the mattress. “How do you go?” she said. “You don’t take
matatu
.”

“I can pay for a taxi.”

The woman shook her head. “You stay,” she said, and only after Munroe settled back did she stand and leave the room.

Left with silence and muddy thoughts that filled in for memories, Munroe placed a hand on the rags by the side of the bed; slashed and shredded, they’d once been her clothes. She had no recollection of how they’d come to be that way, no grasp of what had happened to the gang who’d set upon her. From outside the house the woman’s voice carried back with the tone of instruction, and when she returned she carried a steaming chipped ceramic bowl. She knelt and put the bowl in Munroe’s hands and said, “You need eat.”

The dish held broth with sparse chunks of vegetables floating about and some kind of meat or fat that Munroe didn’t recognize, all of it boiled, cooked well enough to be safe. She blew and sipped steadily while the woman watched with approval, and when Munroe had finished nearly half, the woman, satisfied, left her.

Munroe angled her legs off the mattress and her feet to the dirt. For the first time she truly saw the clothes she wore, an embarrassing getup of ill-fitting pants and a button-down shirt, most probably spare pieces from the men who’d brought her to the house. Even being clean, they were dirty and stank with body odor from overuse, the by-product of poverty, which made the kindness in the gesture of having put them on her all the more eloquent. She searched the pockets for the money she’d collected from the hotel room, all of which seemed still to be with her—the result of being a guest of the household rather than an employer or neighbor of it. The gun and ammunition were still in plastic beside the bed next to the fisherman’s knife.

Munroe made her way into the next room, a living area of sorts with mismatched furniture fitted so closely together there was barely room to stand. Every flat space was cluttered: a mixture of dishes, tattered books, a few towels and sheets, and a small TV with rabbit ears sandwiched between wooden cupboards with broken doors, as if all the family’s worldly possessions were stored here.

The woman wasn’t inside and so Munroe opened the front door, a solid piece of wood, overkill for what the rest of the place was built
from, and stepped out into a wide yard, squinting against light that made her head hurt.

The house sat on a compound of sorts, the property hedged by lush greenery that opened onto what seemed to be the Mombasa–Malindi road. Chickens ran freely chasing bugs, and three goats were tethered to a stake off on the edge where the ground was still green and not barren and caked mud. There was another house to the right, with cinder-block walls and a tin roof—had to belong to someone better off than her host family. Smoke rose and twisted from a small lean-to built against the house, and because it had no door, Munroe could see the back of the woman as she squatted near an aluminum pot boiling over an earthen-pit fire.

The woman stood and turned, and noticing Munroe she smiled again. Put hands to hips and scoldingly said, “You go rest.”

“I will soon,” Munroe said, and perhaps because of the morphine, she smiled back. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Mary. And you name?”

“Michael.”

“Michael a boy name,” Mary said, waving a finger toward the overworn slacks as if contradicting her own statement. “You no boy.”

“Not a boy,” Munroe repeated. “But Michael is my name.”

Eyes still hurting, Munroe squinted toward the sky and gauged maybe another hour of daylight. She needed to get to the captain and discover what had become of him. “I have to go to Mombasa,” she said. “I have to get a friend from the hospital.”