They either knew nothing about boats or didn’t plan to stay long.
Then I watched Cordero shove Ransom backward over the side into the water and Tomlinson leap immediately to help her, lifting her to her feet in the slow surf, her tie-dye T-shirt, red and blue, clinging to her body, her expression dazed as she touched her own face experimentally, then looked at her fingertips. A familiar interrogative: Was her nose bleeding?
I was already climbing down the tree, not even thinking about it, the Sig in the back of my pants, checkered grip secure against my spine, my brain scanning to make sense of what I was seeing. I remembered saying to Tomlinson that I might rent a boat in Chokoloskee; remembered him pressing for us to make the trip together, then Ransom’s dark assertion that they should not let me go alone.
“I’ve got a feeling someone’s going to die,” she’d told me, fingering her beads and her little bag of magic.
I’d done it. I’d put the idea of a rental boat into their heads and, somehow, the two groups had met on that tiny island and at that tiny marina. Ransom was a talker; so was Tomlinson. Both of them were easy sources of information; both easily followed. Both also easily overpowered.
I guessed that somewhere between here and Chokoloskee, probably hidden away in some small backwater, was a second tri-hull.
It was the boat Tomlinson and Ransom had rented before Cordero and his men had followed them, stopped them, then kidnapped them.
Halfway down the tree, I could still see the beach. I watched as Goatee, still holding the little palm computer, pointed toward the red tent. Saw Cordero make an impatient waving gesture with his right hand until the man with the pumpkin-sized head tossed him what looked to be an Uzi.
Under any other circumstances, it would have been an absurdly amusing sight: A distinguished-looking gentleman in gray slacks, black glossy shoes, and an expensive dress shirt holding a submachine gun at waist level. I watched him as he ripped the top-mounted cocking handle back and fired into the tent, holding the trigger on full automatic, the muzzle climbing high enough to spray stray rounds into the trees near me as the nylon of the red tent shuddered.
Reflexively, I pressed myself against the mangrove’s trunk, waiting. Then my ears strained in the abrupt silence of an empty magazine. I watched Cordero change magazines as Goatee walked cautiously to the tent, drew a nine-millimeter semiautomatic and fired several more rounds into it before he ripped the screen door open and peered inside. Then he kicked the tent and kept kicking it until the stakes finally pulled free, and the little red dome tumbled down the beach in the wind like tumbleweed.
I couldn’t hear, then, what Goatee said to Cordero. But I heard Cordero’s voice clearly as he grabbed Ransom and yanked her to his chest like a shield, then touched the barrel of the Uzi to her temple. I saw her jerk her face away from that hot flash arrestor as he called out in English, “You come out now or I kill your sister! You hear me? I blow her fucking head right off you don’t come out!” Then he screamed my name: “FORD!”
Feeling numb, helpless, I dropped down onto the sand and walked toward the beach, hands high over my head.
I still had the Sig Sauer in the back of my pants. Why not? What was the worst they could do if they found it?
They were going to kill us all anyway.
I watched the expression on Edgar Cordero’s face change when he saw me. Watched it change from rage to a slow demonic delight. He shoved Ransom roughly to the ground, absolutely focused on me, lifting the muzzle of the Uzi to chest level as he called, “So! The cockroach finally comes crawling into the sunlight! You are so seldom alone”-he turned and kicked Ransom viciously in the thigh-“that we brought you company! Does that please you, cabron? How does it feel to see a member of your own family in pain?”
I’d never seen Tomlinson attempt violence. Now he did. He went charging at Cordero as if to tackle him, all arms and jeans and Hawiian shirt, but Goatee intercepted. Hit him behind the shoulders with the butt of his pistol once… twice… then kneed him to the ground.
I continued to walk toward the little group, my mind working frantically, seeing the white beach and broad ocean beyond them, their rental boat rolling beam to the waves now, my skiff bucking at anchor nearby.
I had to come up with something. I had to at least try.
The pit I’d dug was about twenty meters to Cordero’s right. Still covered with palmettos, too. If Tomlinson or Ransom created some kind of diversion, maybe I could dive into the pit and come up firing. Take my chances because, the way things looked, it was the only chance we had. It might be even better to let Cordero’s men disarm me first, give them a false sense of safety. Dive and grab Tucker’s old revolver that I’d hidden in there. I could use the big. 44 to take out at least one of them. Then, hopefully, in the confusion, get off a couple more shots.
“Come closer! I want to look into the eyes of the filthy scum who attacked my son Amador when he wasn’t looking. Attacked him when he was not ready, like a woman fights!”
I kept walking. Watched as Cordero handed the Uzi to Pumpkin-head and, in Spanish, asked him for a knife.
I remembered Harrington saying that Edgar collected ears from his adversaries.
Kept them like trophies behind the bar to show his friends.
Now Cordero was walking toward me, opening the knife as he approached, his eyes glittering. I stopped, waited. I began to lower my hands, wanting to get into position to grab my pistol, but raised them again when Pumpkin-head poked the Uzi at me and yelled, “Hands up! I shoot!”
Edgar Cordero was a few inches shorter than me. He had a pocked face beneath carefully sculpted hair. He stood close enough that I could smell the cologne he wore and the metallic stink of nicotine. He stood there, face up, his eyes boring into mine as if we were two boxers at a weigh-in, and then he touched the knife to my cheek… then placed the blade on the top of my left ear. He was probably expecting me to flinch, but I didn’t flinch because I knew there was no escaping what he was going to do.
I heard him say, “You attacked my son from behind, like a dog, and now he will never walk again.”
Feeling the strange and eerie calm of total resignation, I replied, “Sometimes the only way to catch a coward is from behind.”
I watched the man’s face go momentarily blank… then contort with rage as, behind him, Ransom yelled, “Don’t you hurt my brother!” and she lunged toward me… me feeling a searing pain in my ear as Edgar began to saw with the knife… and then I heard one booming gunshot… then a second gunshot as Ransom dropped to the sand.
Then, oddly and without reason, Cordero was on the ground near her, screaming, swearing in Spanish and holding his neck, which was gushing blood. Pumpkin-head was down, too. Motionless. He’d flung the Uzi far from him before burying his face in black sand.
What the hell had happened?
Goatee was suddenly in front of me, waving the pistol in my direction as he backed away toward the boats, yelling in Spanish, “What is doing this? Who is there?” but then he spoke no more as his head seemed to vaporize in a scarlet mist, his legs managing two more steps before his body collapsed near the water.
A microsecond later, I heard a third booming gunshot, the sound arriving long after the heavy grain cartridge, and I turned just in time to see a puff of smoke drift out of a royal palm canopy that had to be a half mile away.
“Doc, she’s bleeding!” Tomlinson was on his feet, kneeling over Ransom, who had her face covered with her hands. There was lots of blood there and she wasn’t moving.
I rushed to help, feeling a surreal and shuddering grief, but then she did move as Tomlinson lifted her, and Ransom stood shakily, hand still holding her bleeding nose. She was wide-eyed, trembling with shock, looking at Cordero who was now silent, eyes empty, staring at the sky, dead. Then she considered the other two faceless corpses before she touched fingers to her sacred beads and whispered, “God strike them dead, just like I pray for Him to do. It happened, my brother, it really happened. Don’t be telling me no more about what ain’t magic!”