Flashback (45 page)

"No killing," Mack said.

"She's a pain in the ass. You get rid of her or she's going to be trouble."

"No I won't," said Anna. "I'll be good. I promise."

"See?" said Rick again. Rick and Paulo believed her. They really were very young.

Butch ignored her. "We don't need trouble," he said.

"You shoot a federal law-enforcement officer and all of a sudden it gets personal. They won't give up," Mack told him.

"They don't find the body so nobody got shot so they're short one pain-in-the-ass bitch. Nobody's going to look too hard."

"No killing."

"Yeah. Right," Perry said and smirked.

Butch shut him up with a look. "You got it, Mack. But the vest goes. I don't want any supergirl shit."

"Sure," Mack said.

"Lose the vest," Butch said.

"I can't," Anna said. "I don't have anything on under it." Butch was unmoved by the argument, but Anna figured anything was worth a try.

The shakes that threatened earlier had migrated and her fingers trembled and fumbled with the buttons of her shirt and the Velcro tabs on the Kevlar vest underneath. For the first time in a while she wished she were in the habit of wearing a bra. The rain had let up to a gentle, wind-born drizzle, but when Anna removed the heavy vest she felt cold. Colder. Fear, consciously admitted or not, had shut down much of the blood flow to her extremities.

Because she needed to know them, Anna watched the men watching her. Rick and Paulo averted their eyes. Perry saw the vest come off with a leer in his eye, looking for a cheap thrill. Butch looked on only for treachery and concealed weapons. Mack's face registered something very like pain or maybe hatred.

"Toss it," Butch said.

Anna did as she was told, but as the hot, miserable, uncomfortable thing had saved her life, she hated to see it go. She put her shirt back on. The back of it was in shreds. Both bullets had struck her at an angle. Without the vest the lead would have cut tunnels the width of her body.

"Are we set?" Mack asked.

Butch was still focused on Anna. "Cuff yourself."

Anna took the cuffs from her pouch on her duty belt and put one loosely around her left wrist. It was funny how much louder the ratcheting was to the one being cuffed. In various law-enforcement training sessions Anna and countless others in the field had been warned of how deadly a weapon unsecured cuffs can be, or cuffs secured only on one side. Properly used, the metal, the hook, the chain, the teeth on the locking mechanism, could maim and kill. Fleetingly, Anna wished she'd paid more attention in class. Probably when she was drawing cartoons or writing her sister under the guise of note-taking, one small middle-aged woman armed with half a pair of handcuffs facing five grown men, two armed with automatic weapons, had been covered.

"Other side."

Fantasies of morphing into Jean Claude Van Damme evaporated. Anna closed the cuff over her right wrist. Secure enough to come closer, Butch leaned down and squeezed the cuffs, tightening them to where she wouldn't be able to wriggle out.

"Where's the key?"

"It's on the key chain in the Reef Ranger's ignition," she told him.

Butch gave her a few seconds to recant her lie, and Anna fought the urge to say Honest, really, go look and settled for sullenness. One cuff key was on her key ring. Like many law-enforcement people, she kept a spare key-they were tiny things, like the key to a girl's jewelry box-in the watch pocket of her trousers. As women's uniform shorts lacked this amenity, she carried it in the breast pocket of her shirt. Had Butch cuffed her hands behind her back she'd have been out of luck.

Mack watched the exchange with growing impatience. Anna wondered if he regretted his decision not to let Butch shoot her. Cuffed, she sat timidly back in the stern by the wounded Rick.

"We're set," Butch said.

Before Mack could power up, Anna said: "Hey, Mack, could you put one of these goons on the Reef Ranger? Drive it back? I lose another boat here and I'll be writing reports till you guys get out of the penitentiary."

For a bleak while he stared at her. Then he smiled, a mere cracking of the wrinkles on his cheeks. "Sure."

Perry started to say something rude, but Butch cut him off. "Anybody sees an NPS boat adrift's going to raise an alarm."

They'd intended to rescue the boat all along. The strength Anna's tiny victory afforded her soaked into the ache in her back and was absorbed. Mack circled the little key. Perry jumped ship to pilot the Reef Ranger back to the fort. Butch watched Anna. When Mack got the go-fast boat up to speed and the howl of the engine and pounding of the hull on the waves created a solid wall of noise between the stern and where Butch leaned near the pilot's console, Anna spoke to Rick.

"I'm an emergency medical technician," she said over the racket. "I've seen a lot of wounds. That's a bad one. It could have nicked the femoral artery."

Rick looked up, his ashen face growing perhaps a shade paler. "Butch said it wasn't spurting. I was okay if it wasn't spurting. It's hardly bleeding at all."

Anna studied the red-black hole for a moment. "I hate to say it but the placement's bad. You could be bleeding to death inside. Never know it, then bang. Lights out."

The pupils of Rick's eyes grew larger, blacker. "No," he said. "That's crap. It's not spurting."

"Easy enough to tell," Anna said, then leaned back and pretended to lose interest.

The Cuban boy stood it as long as he could-about forty-five seconds-before he blurted out "How can you tell?"

The boy was too easy. Looking at the pale and sweating face, the too-wide eyes, Anna knew she ran the risk of putting him into deeper shock. People died of shock. Guilt prodded her insides. Handcuffed and aching, she found it fairly easy to ignore.

Starting with questions to which the answers had to be yes, she asked: "Arc yon feeling lightheaded?" Then she went through the litany of shock: "Dizzy, sweating, nauseous, anxious?"

Rick, growing more panicked by the moment, answered yes to them all.

"Internal bleeding," Anna said matter-of-factly. "If we don't get you to a doctor soon... Maybe I should call for the medevac helicopter when we get back to a phone."

"Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus. Mary Mother of God."

Anna didn't know if the boy prayed or swore. She just knew she needed help. To justify the caching of fuel, the kidnapping of a ranger and probably at least one murder, Mack and his cronies must be planning on importing a whole hell of a lot of "product."

Mack cut power so he wouldn't cause a wake. He was too clever to call attention to himself by rude or illegal boating practices. A shrimper had arrived and rocked at anchor.

Butch left his place by the helm and stepped back to where Anna sat terrifying Rick. The moment the roar of the engines died, the wounded man began babbling. "Look you guys, you got to get me to a doctor. This lady says I got bleeding inside. Please. I don't maybe have long. Oh God. Oh Jesus."

"Shut up, you'll live," Butch snapped. "What she been telling you?" he demanded. The boy repeated the dire forecast Anna had outlined.

"It's crap. She's lying. No calls." He leaned down and backhanded Anna hard across the face, moving so quickly she scarcely saw it coming and had no time to duck. The blow caught her ear and the pain made tears start. Before her head cleared she was aware of a rough voice near her ringing ear and hot breath on her cheek. "You're a sneaky bitch, I'll give you that, but I ain't got time for your shit. You talk to anybody and I kill you. Got that?"

"Got it," Anna said. This time she saw it coming but could do nothing about it. The back of Butch's hand smashed into her temple with such force it loosed the pains in her back. If she hadn't been so pissed off, she would have screamed.

"You got that?" he asked again.

Anna nodded, no sound.

"You may stay alive, but don't count on it."

He took a blue plastic tarp from storage beneath a bench seat, shook it out and threw it over her. "You move and I crush your skull."

Anna didn't nod. The first time had been enough to loose her neck hinges, again and her head might topple off into her lap. Being smuggled into her own harbor beneath an old tarpaulin as if she were a shipment of something so vile the public mustn't be affronted by having to look upon it wasn't the indignity it could have been. Hidden in the tent made by head and knees, she was free to fish the tiny handcuff key out of her shirt pocket. Blinded, the leap and crash of the cigarette boat was more disconcerting than when she could brace herself, but in the harbor, the water was considerably flatter and she managed her task. Having unlocked both cuffs, she didn't remove them but loosened them to the point where, with a little effort, she could wriggle her hands free. That done, she put the key back in her pocket and waited.

On shipboard, with men intent on keeping her in their control apparently at any price, was not the time to flaunt her freedom or attempt escape or coup. Maybe later when the odds were better. If there was to be a later. If the odds got better.

Bumping that caused Anna to fall into Rick, and Rick to cry out in pain, announced their arrival at the dock. The tarp was jerked off and rough hands hauled her to her feet.

Mack had taken the slip at the visitors' dock. Butch leaped offboard and began tying the boat to the cleats. The wind had slacked off but rain came down steadily, and low, thick skies brought an early dusk. Visibility was down to nearly nothing, and the beach was deserted. Two tents, campers huddled inside, remained in the small campground.

Butch grabbed a towel and threw it over Anna's cuffed wrists, then took her by the elbows. "Keep those handcuffs covered as if your life depended on nobody seeing them," he hissed in her ear.

Anna nodded, gently this time, keeping her head balanced on top of her spine. Butch half lifted her out of the boat. She stumbled on the dock and he hauled her upright. "None of your crap." His grip tightened above her elbow, squeezing till she could feel her fingers growing numb from lack of blood.

"No crap," Anna said. "Just clumsy. Loosen up before I get gangrene, for Pete's sake. You afraid I'm going to get the better of you in hand-to-hand combat?" Butch outweighed Anna by a hundred pounds and was a good ten inches taller.

"Shut the fuck up," he said, but he did loosen his grip somewhat.

Rick was next. Mack and Paulo helped him out of the boat and over to one of the pilings so he could support himself.

"You gotta walk, Jose," Perry said. He'd docked the Reef behind the red boat. "We aren't calling attention to ourselves because you got yourself shot by a girl ranger."

Rick looked to be fighting back tears. "I can't," he said. "You got to get me a doctor."

"You'll walk and you don't limp, neither," Perry growled. Anna'd not seen him pull it but Perry had a knife in his hands, a wicked-looking little number with a blade about three inches long and nearly that wide, both edges honed for cutting.

"Hey!" Mack yelled when he saw the blade. Both Perry and Butch turned dull, flat eyes on him. Eyes like carp Anna thought. Or shark. Eyes in which the windows to the soul were blacked out from within.

Mack looked from one to the other. His blue eyes, once too light and cold for Anna's taste, by comparison looked reassuringly human. There was an exchange between the three men, thug number one, thug number two and Mack, but Anna wasn't sure exactly what transpired. An understanding was reached, a balance of power shifted, a new card turned up on the table.

This moment of dark epiphany was over before Anna could swear it happened. "I'll get one of the carts," Mack said. "It'll be easier than herding her and holding up Rick."

"Give him a hand, Perry," Butch ordered. The two men walked off over the sand to be swallowed by the black maw of the sally port. Under hostile skies, brick dark with rain, the fort was a forbidding place. Anna found herself thinking not of the gunman at her elbow, the wounded Cuban boy or Mack's treachery, but of her ancestors, Raffia and Tilly, of the pressing company of warring men, innocence preyed upon and innocence lost. Though Anna would kill him if she had to-and if she got half a chance-William Macintyre had started out the innocent here. Maybe. Maybe it didn't matter, but she'd watch, ready to shove her fingers into any small crack that might appear in this little crime family.

"You got to get me to a doctor," Rick began again. Movement had started his leg bleeding. It was no more than a seep, but mixed with the rain, and the only true color in a gray landscape, it made a good show. The sight of it was renewing the boy's panic, pushing him deeper into shock. Anna wondered if she'd killed him with her lies.

"You keep crying and I'll give you something to cry about," Butch said.

The statement was so incongruous Anna said: "You got kids?" before she remembered the cuff her last spontaneous outburst had earned her.

"Shut the fuck up," Butch said. A man of few words.

Rick turned panicked eyes on Paulo. White showed around the dark irises. His skin was the color of the sky. "You'll be okay," Paulo said. "We'll get you to a doctor tomorrow."

Anna's plan to divide and conquer was probably doomed to failure. She might have literally scared Rick to death for nothing. She took pity on the boy.