Red Tide (21 page)

The rest of the stuff in their pockets was uninteresting: money, cough drops; the man from the bench had a large ring of keys and a blackjack. The wheelman had a few polaroid pictures of naked women, tied up and begging for mercy. I could make out a background with a couple of ringbolts, a mop hanging, and a shelf next to a rusting porthole. It looked like the shots had been taken on board a ship, probably this one.

It was nice to get a reminder of who these guys were and why I was here. These were not simple, honest merchant seamen. They were concentration camp guards, sadistic killers who enjoyed throwing people by the dozens into the ocean to die.

The world has come a long way since the Nazis, we tell ourselves with little pats on the back. Sure. Tell it to the Khmer Rouge. Mention it in Bosnia and wait for the laugh. The fact is, there have always been and always will be plenty of work for the kind of guy who likes to hurt people. Many governments recognize that and quietly round them up for official work. Other people, like these two, prefer to operate in the private sector, where they could torture somebody without a lot of red tape.

The pictures showed that this guy was pretty good at his work. Had spent a lot of time getting it right. Even thought about it in his off time. He’d go far. Maybe I could help send him there.

I dropped the pictures and wiped my hands on my pants. I felt unclean. I wished I’d hit him harder.

I stood and looked out over the wheel. The squall I had come through was gone without a trace, like it never had been at all. There was a moon now and the reflected light rippled on the water of the Gulf Stream.

According to the compass we were headed south-southeast, straight down the corridor to Haiti. I put the wheel over, just a few points. I wanted the ship to swing back towards Miami—but so slowly that no one on board would feel it swing.

If I managed to get Anna and get away, I would still call the Coast Guard as soon as I was clear of the freighter. The closer the ship was to US coastal waters, the better.

And if things went bad and I didn’t make it, it wouldn’t hurt to have the sweat start when they found themselves off Miami again, instead of Port-au-Prince. I would check through the ship quickly and then come back and re-set the course.

I stood and counted to thirty as the ship turned maybe two degrees east. Good. It would take at least five minutes to turn 180 degrees. That was too slow for anybody to feel it turning. I locked on the auto-steering and moved out the door and onto the stairs.

The deck was quiet in the moonlight. Nothing moved across it and there was no sound except for the slap of the water against the hull, and the hum of the wind in the ropes holding the deck cargo in place. I watched for a moment to be sure, then went down the stairs and to the door leading down into the ship.

I searched the top level quickly and found nothing. The crew areas were deserted. I guessed they must all be down below, leaving only the two men of the watch up in the wheelhouse. Still, it was spooky to find everything deserted.

The last door was locked. It might have been a storeroom—but it also might be where they were keeping Anna. I put an ear to the door. I didn’t hear anything, but that didn’t mean much.

I leaned my weight against the door. There was no give to it. Maybe I could bust it open—and maybe I would just break an arm trying. And in any case just trying would make enough noise to bring the entire crew on a dead run.

I stood there for a minute trying to think. I wasn’t doing very well at this. I realized my heart was pounding and my stomach still felt full of sand. I’d had this feeling of hopeless dread since I’d started out and it wasn’t going away. And if I kept making simple, stupid mistakes—

I remembered the big key ring on the man in the wheelhouse and called myself a handful of bad names. I should have brought it. Of course they would have Anna locked up.

I took a deep breath and turned around. I went carefully back outside and up the stairs. I opened the wheelhouse door and stopped in the doorway with no breath.

I had left the two sailors unconscious and securely taped only five minutes ago.

Now they were gone.

The wheelhouse was empty.

A lot of things went through my mind in the half second before reflexes took over. Then I was inside the door, crouching out of sight with the greasy little gun in my hand.

I followed the gun all around the room with my eyes. Nothing moved. Nothing was out of place. There was no way anybody else could be hidden anywhere in the room.

I spun around to cover the door. I counted to one hundred and nothing happened. I duck-walked quietly to the doorway and looked out.

There was still no sign of life anywhere on deck. Nothing moved, nothing had changed.

Somewhere below I heard a muffled thump. I held my breath. And then, as if to make sure I didn’t miss it, the sound came again, 
THUMP
.

Then quiet.

The seconds stretched into minutes and nothing else happened. My knees were aching from staying in a crouch for so long. My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth and I was panting in breath through clenched teeth, but nothing happened.

I don’t know how long I stayed like that. It must have been several minutes. All my muscles had knotted, my shirt was soaked with sweat and my throat was almost closed from the dryness in my mouth. My heart had settled into a steady pulse of 175. I was close to the point where I would scream just from waiting for something to happen. And then it happened.

The drums started.

At first it was no more than a faint vibration in the deck. I thought it might even be soft footsteps and I flexed my fingers on the pistol, getting ready.

But the volume grew slowly, steadily, and soon it was a soft throbbing; urgent but patient, so overwhelming that I felt my heartbeat start to keep time with the drums.

BOOM-ba-de-THUMP-ity-BOOM-ba-de—

A little louder, a little more urgent. The hair on the back of my neck stood straight out. I still couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from. It was everywhere without being centered in any one spot. It seemed to be in the steel of the deck. I could feel it in the soles of my feet as much as I heard it.

BOOM-ba-de-THUMP-ity-BOOM-ba-de—

I have faced junkies with knives, cold killers with guns, drunks with broken beer bottles in their hands, and I had not felt as helpless as I did listening to those drums. For a gun or a knife there is a direct threat and a way to deal with it. You can plan a response or an attack.

None of my instructors in the Rangers or at the L.A.P.D. Academy had ever had anything to say about how to deal with voodoo drums. You can’t put a restraining hold on a sound. You can’t punch it or kick it or slap handcuffs onto it.

But it is just as aggressive, just as dangerous, as much a threat to your health and sanity as a stiff hand to the solar plexus. Because it gets inside you and tells you to 
do
 something, anything, just get up and do it and make the drums stop.

Which was exactly the wrong thing, the stupid thing, to do. When you have no idea how many enemies you’re facing or how they’re armed, or even what they intend to do, you find a secure spot with cover and elevation and stay there. A place like the wheelhouse, where I was now. I could see anybody who tried to approach me from any direction and probably shoot them before they shot me. I was fine where I was. Couldn’t be better.

No matter what the sound made me want to do, I was not going to charge down the stairs and try to find the drums, make them stop, do something stupid. I was going to stay right where I was and make them come to me. That was my best chance. No doubt about it. Forget the damn drums.

So I took a deep breath, looked carefully around the deck, and started down the stairs with the gun ready.

I moved across the deck in a crouch, as quiet and smooth and ready as I could be.

The drums were louder now. Not faster, but more persistent, overwhelming the other sounds of wind and water. I could hear three separate drums, blending together, keeping one rhythm, but playing with it around the edges. The sound pressed itself on me, blotted out everything else. I couldn’t think, could hardly swallow. The rhythm was taking over everything. I felt like I was breathing drums.

BOOM-ba-de-TRUMP-ity-BOOM-ba-de—

There were several large outdoor loudspeakers on the deck. I hadn’t noticed them before. Maybe because they hadn’t been blasting out voodoo drums before. A pair of them were bolted to the top of the wheelhouse. As I saw them the volume seemed to go up another notch, and the rhythm got more demanding.

BOOM-ba-de-THUMP-ity-BOOM-ba-de—

I slid behind a crate. Were they watching me? Trying to startle me into something? Because it might work. It 
was
 working. I scanned the deck again and moved quickly across the open space to the door.

The door below wasn’t latched. It slid open without sound. Not that I could have heard anything over the drums. I stepped into a darkened hallway and moved quickly to one side of the doorway, then dropped to a knee, closing the door behind me. A doorway makes a great frame for a target, especially when you are backlit by moonlight. I was being stupid, yes, but cautiously stupid.

My eyes adjusted to the darkness. The hallway was empty. There was one faint light shining, coming from under a closed door at the far end of the hall.

They were herding me. There was no question about it. The drums had come out of the silence to make me move and there was only one place to go. Now there was only one spot of light and in the darkness of the hall it seemed to me that the drums were coming from there, from somewhere in that faint bar of light, and it pulled me forward like a candle pulls a moth.

Even knowing that, knowing that somebody wanted me to do just what I was doing, I did it anyway.

Part of it was that I couldn’t stop myself. I had to get to the drums, make them stop, get that crazy rhythm out of my head.

But the other part was what Deacon would have called Rambo pride. I wanted to face this son of a bitch and say all right. You want me? You got me. And then I wanted to get my fingers around his throat and squeeze until his evil God damned eyes popped out.

I had never met this Patrice du Sinueux, never seen him face to face. And I had never wanted so badly to kill somebody.

It looked like I was going to get my chance. The idea of sneaking quietly onto the freighter, grabbing Anna, and sneaking away, was gone. It had died when the drums started. Or earlier, when the two guys in the wheelhouse had vanished.

Now it was face to face. Step into the monster’s lair and slay the dragon, or end up as just another pile of bones outside the cave.

I straightened to a crouch and moved down the hall toward the light.

Even here in the interior of the ship the sound of the drums was overwhelming. The road company of 
Chorus Line
 could be coming up behind me wearing their tap shoes, and I wouldn’t have heard them.

BOOM-ba-de-THUMP-ity-BOOM-ba-de
—

I took my time moving along the hall. I paused carefully at each door, watching for any kind of set-up. But the hallway was empty, except for me and my invisible herdsman.

I could feel the sweat on my palm around the pistol’s grip. I stood still for a moment, just two steps away from the lighted door, and wiped my hands on my pants. I took a deep breath and tried to concentrate.

This was it. Behind that door was the big spider, and I had come here to squash him. I’d thought I could tiptoe past his web and take away one of his bugs. He’d let me know that wasn’t possible.

Of course, there might be no one there. Maybe they were all down in the hold, playing the drums and drinking rum and this was all my imagination working overtime.

But I didn’t think so. I was mortally sure that I would open the door and come face to face with Patrice du Sinueux. That’s what he wanted. He had driven me down here to this meeting as surely as if he’d taken me by the hand and led me.

I was going to open that door and come face to face with a truly evil man, and I was going to kill him. That was the only way now.

I took another deep breath, held the gun ready, and kicked open the door.

The drums stopped.

A man sat behind the desk in a circle of light. Just one man. There was no one else in the room, just him and me and he was sitting, unarmed. He was either stupid or so confident in his magic he didn’t think he’d need any help.

He was a light-skinned black man, with a slender build and close-cropped hair. His hands were resting in front of him on the desk. They were clean, strong-looking, manicured, and the fingers were much too long.

A deck of oversized cards stood on the desk at his elbow and as I entered he was stroking it with the fingertips of one hand.

Behind him was a steel coat rack. A black silk top hat was perched on top. A pair of white gloves was thrown over one branch and an elegant black cane hung from another.

And wound around the rack was the biggest snake I have ever seen.

It was twenty feet long and it was thicker around the middle than my leg. It had a pale yellow color with soft grey markings and a huge, wedge-shaped head that it lifted at me, its tongue flicking in and out.

The man at the desk moved. He opened a drawer of the desk. My eyes and my gun snapped over to cover him. He looked up at me and smiled. His eyes were a startling light green and they locked onto mine.

“
Bon soir
, Billy,” he said in a voice like the silk of the hat. He waved one of those long elegant hands. “Come in. Sit.”

“Let me see your hands,” I said.

He took his hand out of the desk, with mocking slowness. He was holding a small saucer and a razor blade. “This will not harm you,” he said, sounding like somebody I couldn’t see was tickling him.

I couldn’t think of much to say to that. I watched him as he placed the saucer on the desk and, as he began to speak, calmly slashed his arm and begin to drip blood into the saucer.