The light rises back up but Kim doesn’t raise her head to meet it.
Fast says almost sadly, “You brought it on yourself, you know. Haunting me all these years around town. Trying to stir up trouble.”
Burgermeister steps forward, his oversized mass rocking the boat. With the muzzle of the gun, he probes between Sunny’s arms and presses the barrels into the sweatshirt covering her chest. “That’s soft,” he says. “And don’t that gun feel hard?” He takes one of Sunny’s unresisting hands and pulls it against his pants. “Just like me.”
Sunny makes another noise. This time it’s more of a whimper. Then he turns the twin barrels to Kim. My breath begins to hiss from my lips and I have to struggle to contain it.
Kim looks up and my heart sinks. There’s no defiance in her good eye. No hope. Only terror.
Her face slides out of my view as I kick closer to the side of the vacant ski boat.
“We don’t need to do that, Alf,” Fast says.
“Shut up, Dave! You can blow yourself for all I care. Me, I’m gonna have some fun.”
“Not here, not now.” Fast tries to put him off. “There’s too much to do.”
Burgermeister grunts and the flashlight sweeps out over the water. “All right. I don’t like it that Scarface and his dog have disappeared. We need to get these sweet little bitches up to the valley so they can show us that fucking cave. After we dynamite it, we’ll have all the time in the world.”
The flashlight keeps playing in random patterns over the water and the canyon’s walls. It searches on my side of their boat now, but I’m protected from view by the hull’s overhang at the bow end.
“What about the boats, Alf? How are we going to make sure no one finds them?”
The light shifts to the Sea Ray and my rental. “I’m gonna blow some holes in the bottoms. They’ll go down quick enough. I wish I knew where that scar-faced bastard is, though. I don’t want that ugly fucker floating up for a few days.”
I’m glad he’s worried about me. The way I’m feeling, he’d better be worried.
The boat rocks and the bow dips down as Alf moves forward. “He’s got to be on the bottom with his ugly dog. The boats’ll land right on top of them. Just watch the cunts, Dave.”
Treading water, I slide down the vacant ski boat’s side to about where the steering wheel should be. I’ve got to move fast—I can hear Rent-a-Riot ramming more shells into the shotgun. I look up at the boat’s rail and realize that I’ll have to pull myself all the way out of the water to reach the gun under the steering wheel. I risk discovery by backing a little ways away for a better view. That’s when I notice the windscreen. I’d forgotten about it. A windscreen wraps around the boat’s side to protect the driver from spray. There’s no way I can get over that without the shotgun blowing a very large hole in me. I might as well have left the gun in my truck.
Stupid.
As if to punctuate the realization, a shotgun blast explodes in the night. I flinch and almost shout—there’s no time to dive. My ears ring, deafened. But when my head doesn’t blow apart, I figure out that the shot had been aimed into the floor of the ski boat. Burgermeister is just doing as he’d said and sinking the boats by shooting the bottoms out.
I dive, then swim underwater until I feel the hull of Fast’s ski boat above my hands. I slide my hands down to the straight edge of the stern careful to avoid the churning propellor, then slowly raise my head out of the water, my cheek pressed close to the fiberglass. Another explosion rips and flashes in the night. The ignition of the compressed gasses light up the canyon wall like a lightning strike. Very cautiously, I lift myself high enough so that I can see Fast standing by the stern, in front of Kim and Sunny. His head is turned away—he appears momentarily entranced by the sinking of the boats. In one hand he holds the small gun that’s still pointed at the deck. With the other hand he’s aiming the flashlight on the two boats in order to assist his partner. I can’t see Burgermeister but I assume he’s still on the bow. It feels like it, anyway, due to the way the swim step is lifted a few inches out of the water.
The idling motor just inches from my hip keeps the men from hearing a faint splash as I pull myself higher with one hand on the rear rail and a knee on the step. I reach in and grab Kim’s wrist. Over the ringing in my ears from the shotgun blasts, I hear a sharp intake of breath. But she is able to stifle whatever shout had almost risen in her throat. Her face jerks toward mine. Her single eye is huge. I know I must look like some sort of monster, sliding suddenly out of the black water like a giant eel, my hair plastered to my head and with the vivid scar on my face. Fast is still turned away.
I point toward the gap in the canyon wall with my free hand. Then I nod my head at Sunny before twice making a fist and opening it to show her all five fingers twice. Ten seconds. Kim’s eye is still huge and wide. Her mouth flinches.
What?
I make the motions again and whisper, “Ten seconds. Count now.” Then she gives me a quick, short nod. She whispers in Sunny’s ear, then looks back at me.
Fast’s head is turning back, swinging the flashlight with it. He’s aiming the beam high, so I’m able to slip lower in the water and closer to the hull where he can’t see me.
Burgermeister apparently looks over, too. “Looking for your boyfriend, honey? He’ll probably float on up in a few hours. I can guarantee you he’s dead—I don’t miss.”
Alf is a moron, I think. He only grazed Oso and missed me entirely.
Counting the seconds off in my head, I slide around the rear corner of the boat to where Fast had been standing.
Nine. Eight. Seven.
Treading water with my feet whirling like eggbeaters, I touch the side of the rail with my fingertips. At
Two
I grab the rail. Then with the power of the noradrenaline shrieking in my blood, I lunge up out of the water and reach for Fast.
The fingers of one hand get a handful of shirt. The others find his belt. He cries out, “Alf!” as he drops both the gun and the flashlight. The surprise makes his legs fall out from under him. I try with all my strength to wrestle his greater mass out of the boat. But I have no leverage—my hips are on the rail and my feet are kicking in the air over the water. And Fast’s legs are entangled beneath the steering wheel as he tears at my fingers and beats at my face. Burgermeister is standing on the bow, whirling, the shotgun swinging around with him.
“Go! Go!” I yell at Kim and Sunny.
The command is unnecessary for Kim. She’s already in a dive, arcing her body over the stern to my side. I barely hear the splash. But Sunny doesn’t move. She doesn’t even flinch. As Fast and I fight, as Burgermeister leans over the side and aims the shotgun at my waist and legs from an angle that won’t hit his partner, she just sits huddled and sobbing. I shove Fast away, using his weight to propel me back into the black water, and take a huge, sucking breath.
TWENTY-NINE
T
HE WATER
’
S SURFACE
over my head explodes with a thunderous crash. I look up and see an orange flash of light before everything again turns black. Swimming away from the boat in an upside-down breaststroke, I watch the flashlight’s beam probe the water. I feel a fresh rush of fear when it plays over my chest—the surface explodes with another flash—but the shotgun pellets ricochet off the water. There’s the relatively quieter crack of shots fired from Fast’s pistol. I roll, change directions, and dive deeper where the depth will diffuse the light to better hide me.
I somehow find Kim in that strange, cold world. A passing wave of pressure brushing against one of my legs alerts me to another swimmer’s presence. In the shifting glow of Fast’s flashlight, I can make out just a slender shadow and a billow of hair. I reach up, grab what appears to be an ankle, and feel a hand clasp around my wrist. I pull her to me for a moment, finding her jean-clad hips with my hands. Then I push her away in the direction of the gap. I feel a fluttering, fading caress on my chest from the force of her kicks.
I wait a while longer ten feet below the surface and hope to feel the presence of a second swimming body. I wait until my lungs scream for air and the darkness begins to leap and spark at the edges of my vision. Sunny’s not coming. She might even be dead. More shotgun blasts splash the surface not far from me, and the flashlight continues to search the water. When I can’t last any longer, I kick until I’m under the Sea Ray’s white hull. I feel my way up to the bow, my lips almost kissing the fiberglass, and take three long, quiet breaths before diving deep again and kicking off in the direction of the gap.
Kim is waiting for me there, treading water just inside the narrow walls. She’s breathing loudly, loud enough for me to fear that the men in the boat will hear her over the low rumble of the idling engine. But it sounds as if they are too busy arguing now to notice us just fifty feet away. I am almost sorry they’ve stopped shooting—I’d allowed myself to hope that a ricochet would catch one of them in the chest. The beam of the flashlight dances madly off the canyon’s walls but never comes to rest on the skinny fissure.
“Where’s Sunny?” she whispers.
“She didn’t jump.” I’m breathing too fast and too loud myself.
I edge back around the corner of rock and look in the direction of the voices. The flashlight beam cuts over the two other boats—my rental and the Sea Ray. Both of them are sinking tail-end first. I can hear the gurgling water through the shattered hulls. The weight of their rear-mounted engines is dragging them down. When the light flashes across the stern of Fast’s boat, for just a moment Sunny is illuminated on the rear bench seat. She is still hunched there, holding herself and staring at the deck.
“I’m sorry, Kim. There’s nothing we can do. She didn’t jump,” I say when I’m safely back inside the gap. “Come on.”
I swim up into the narrow throat of rock. Kim follows close behind me. My snapping feet graze her chest with each kick as we move away from the engine noise, the gurgling, and the raised voices. My hands touch the sheer sandstone walls on each side.
Behind us there is another shotgun blast.
I don’t feel Kim with my feet, so I stop and turn. I hear her say too loud, “Sunny!”
Grabbing her shoulder to prevent her from swimming back out into the cove, I whisper, “She’s okay. They’re just finishing off the boats.”
“No—”
“They can’t shoot her, Kim. Not yet. They need her to find the cave.”
She struggles against my grip for a moment until her mind digests my words. They’ll need her alive to find the tiny, hidden hole in the cliff wall that Sunny had described. Then Kim begins swimming behind me once again. After a few strokes the engine roars louder. Because of the echoes off the walls, it sounds like a hundred boats are racing their motors. My fingers brush sand. Solid ground.
I hurriedly splash up to where I’d left Oso on the powdery sand. The beast is still there, lying on one side and panting heavily. A deep growl is steady from his chest. I suspect he’s in shock. When I stroke his muzzle he takes my hand in his jaws for a moment. He squeezes it gently, letting me know he’s in pain.
The engine noise gets quieter, fading in the distance. But I can still feel its pulsing vibration reverberating off the canyon walls. I kneel beside my dog and feel his haunches for wounds while Kim splashes out of the water.
“What’s wrong with him? Is he shot?” she asks, breathing hard from the cold swim.
“I don’t know yet. I think so.”
My hand comes away from Oso’s right hip feeling warm and sticky. “Yeah, he was shot.”
“Let me feel.”
Together we explore every bit of fur on Oso’s body. The beast is compliant, not whimpering and just barely growling. But he continues to pant as if he’s just run miles through the woods. The only wound we can find is an absent piece of his right hamstring. The chunk that’s missing feels to be about the size of a tennis ball. He’s lucky to have been so close to the shotgun when he was hit—more than ten feet away and the pellets would have spread wide enough to blow off his entire rear end.
“Shit,” I still say, feeling the amount of sticky wet stuff spilling into the sand from beneath my dog’s leg. “It’s bad, but I don’t think he’s bleeding out.” Some of the blood feels reassuringly clumpy, as if it’s coagulating, but I can’t be certain it’s not just mixing with the powdery sand.
Kim pulls off her wet T-shirt and squeezes it over the wound. Then she dips the shirt back into the water and does it again. I hope the dripping water will wash out the sand. After several washings she shoves the shirt into my hands. I squash it into a tight ball and press it into the wound. This finally draws a low whimper of pain from Oso.
“I need something to tie it off with. Go in the water and see if you can find my pants.” I vaguely remember having kicked them off after leaving Oso here.
She splashes around for a moment, then says, “Take mine.” In the darkness I can see Kim’s gray form writhing in an odd dance as she struggles out of her wet jeans. I take them and tie them tightly around the dog’s leg to hold the shirt packed in the wound.
“Is he going to be okay?”
“I think so. The wound’s already starting to clot. But there are probably pellets still in the leg, so infection is the real danger. And I’m worried there might me some serious damage to his tendons or bone. I need to get him to a vet.” I wonder for a moment if Kim’s one of those people to whom a dog is just another animal. To such a person it would sound strange to be so worried about a gunshot dog when your friend has been kidnapped and is probably being assaulted as we speak. But Kim is crouched by the beast’s head, gently massaging his ears. When he groans she gently shushes him, her voice more tender than I’ve ever heard it.
“He’s really hurting.”
“He’s tough,” I tell her. “Before I adopted him he’d been neglected, starved, tortured, and maced. He’s probably just pissed. He’ll want a piece of those two.” And so do I.
After rubbing his chest and murmuring in Spanish about what a
buen viejo perro
he is, I finally sit up. For the first time I notice how cold I am. The water that’s still beaded on my naked skin feels like it might turn to ice. My teeth are making rapid clicking sounds. I reach out an arm and put it around Kim’s shoulders, noticing that she is also shaking uncontrollably, still wet in just her underwear. I pull her to me.
“Curl up with Oso. You know, spoon him. Use each other’s warmth. I’m going to see if I can find a way out of here. Or some sort of shelter. We’re going to get hypo-thermic if we stay here.” I sense more than see Kim nod beside me.
I march away from the water like a zombie, holding my hands outstretched before me and stepping high with my feet so that I won’t break a toe on any unseen rocks. In the dim starlight that reaches into the gap, I can see only the two dark walls on either side, close enough so that if I stretch my arms to the sides I can feel them both, and the strip of sky above. I remember Sunny saying something about there being a place where you could climb out but it being too hard to climb back down. That was why she’d jumped in the lake from above when she’d recognized us in the late afternoon.
The canyon twists and turns several times but heads for the most part in the same direction. I keep my eyes on the sky, looking for where the line of stars might open or branch. I guess I walk for several hundred yards on the mercifully smooth floor without seeing any change before I give up and turn back. We will have to wait for more light before we can find Sunny’s climb. My brain only then remembers that this is wild land—I remember the map showing nothing but canyons and buttes for miles and miles. Even if we find a way to climb out, it’s unlikely it will lead anywhere. Our best chance of finding help is on the lake.
As I near the place where I’d left Oso and Kim curled on the sand, I can still hear tiny waves spilling on the sand at the water’s edge. It worries me for a moment. I don’t know if the water’s disturbance is due to wind on the lake or the reflection of the speedboat’s wake off the canyon walls. Conceivably, they could come back. But a boat won’t fit in the gap and I don’t think they’d take the trouble to swim in. I worry about it, though, to keep from worrying about what they’re doing to Sunny. It’s easier that way.
“Kim?” I call, my voice barely louder than a whisper.
“Here,” she answers, almost at my feet.
I stare at the ground and in a moment am able to make out the dark shape of Oso prostrate on the sand and the lighter shadow of Kim beside him. Her arms are wrapped around his chest. She is pressed against the big dog’s back.
Kneeling, I put my hand on Oso’s head. The dog flinches at the touch, then snuffs at my scent. A hot, dry tongue rasps against my palm. “Easy, Oso. Easy.” He continues to growl.
“What’s the plan?”
“We have to wait for light—I can’t find a way out. When it gets light I’ll swim for help.” I try to recall the beach where we’d had lunch. Hopefully the kids in the houseboat will still be there.
I touch Kim’s bare shoulder. Her skin jerks and twitches like Oso’s had. She is shivering violently. I consider getting her back in the water, which is surely a lot warmer than the nighttime desert air, but I know it will suck the heat from our cores much quicker than the air and leave us hypothermic in minutes. So I lie down beside her. I curl myself against her body, pressing my own half-frozen flesh hard against hers. One arm I slip under her head, then Oso’s. The other I put across her chest. Unable to stop myself, I put my lips against the back of her neck and blow gently, letting the warmth of my lungs seep into her skin.
“What are you doing?”
“Warming you up.”
And suddenly, despite it all, she laughs. But within seconds that laugh turns heartbreakingly cheerless. She begins to sniffle.
“I did it again. I let it happen. No, I made it happen. And I didn’t even fight for her. Oh God, Anton.”
“You waited for your chance and you got the hell out of there. There was nothing else you could do.”
“No, I ran. I ran and left a friend. I’ll never forgive myself.”
“You did the only thing you could. They had guns—you didn’t. And we’ll get Sunny back.”
“How? They’ll take her back to the valley, make her show them the cave, and then they’ll kill her.”
“We’ve got some time. It will take them most of the night just to find their way back to the marina. And then they’ll have an eight-hour drive to Tomichi. They won’t dare march her around the valley in the daylight because someone might see them. So we have until tomorrow night. If we don’t freeze to death tonight.” I scoot closer, fitting my bare legs tight against hers, my hips to her buttocks, my chest to her back. I don’t mention and try not to think about what Sunny will have to endure until then. It would probably be better if they killed her outright.