“I see that,” Henry replied. “We’re not going to be staying. I need your help. We need a flats boat. It’s very important.”
“We’re rationing fuel here,” the ranger said. “Started to pool our resources right away.”
“Like I said,” Henry said, keeping his voice calm, “Very important.”
“Where are you headed?”
“I’d prefer not to say. Please, we just need a boat.”
The ranger gave Henry a quiet stare, then nodded his head. “All right. I can give you a lift.”
“I appreciate that, but it’s better if you just lend me your boat.”
“Hmm.”
“Safer for you,” Henry said.
There was a crowd forming around them.
Henry lowered his voice. “People might get hurt. We need to be gone.”
“All right,” the ranger sighed. “I’m too old to put myself smack dab in the middle of whatever it is you’ve got yourselves into. I hope it’s worth it.”
“It is.”
“Boat’s got better than a half tank. That gonna be enough?”
“How far will that get me?”
“Fifty miles or so, give or take.”
“That’ll do. Thank you.”
The boat was a well-maintained Fish and Game craft, ideal for crossing into Hells Bay. Henry pulled away from the dock with a final wave at the ranger and was up on a plane in seconds. He was almost home.
He grinned into the wind as it whipped through his hair, and the sun was warm and good on his face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
There’s Dying, and Then There’s Dying
Jack Stryker made himself at home. He sat in a comfortable chair at the dock and fished, letting the sun warm his face through the dappled shade of the mangrove canopy. He munched on dried venison jerky and dozed, torpid and satisfied, glad of his dry clothes and the AK-47 that Coyote McCloud had so generously left him.
The incision he’d made on his neck hurt, and was infected. Stryker was not concerned, though, and helped himself to the box of antibiotics McCloud had bequeathed him.
This was the life he should have made for himself to begin with, he decided. No people, no nonsense. He saw that he had been wronged by the world from his first breath. He’d been herded along every step of the way, prodded and poked and made to do things he would not have done. It wasn’t his fault. The world was mean and evil, and the only way to live was to kill or be killed by it. This forgotten place was as close to paradise as he would ever get.
He was sure his propensity for violence stemmed from others, not from within himself. If he’d been left unmolested, he could have been anything. A surgeon, perhaps. Or just a quiet hermit minding his own business here in the middle of nowhere. But they’d hurt him until he couldn’t hurt anymore, couldn’t feel anymore. The blood was on their hands, not his.
Maybe now, he could feel alive in the way others seemed to. He could fish and hunt and kill alligators with his bare hands if that’s what lit him up. He didn’t really need the private island and the yacht.
He’d never been in the game for those things in the first place. It was all about finding a reason to draw the next breath. A flickering moment of interest to extinguish a lifetime of lassitude and pain and numbness. He’d been a survivor for this long, and he was confident in his ability to continue an existence characterized by a flat horizon. He was intrigued by the possibility of something better and more meaningful. A way of living on the fringes of death and society without going through the motions of fitting in.
He’d never cared about the Directors or their money. That he’d never been taught how to fish did not worry him. He was a Ranger. He’d learn.
He daydreamed through the afternoon, content and in no hurry for anything in particular.
Jack Stryker’s eyes flashed open at the burble of an engine coming up the channel, and he grabbed the AK-47.
He’d never understood the expression “shooting ducks in a barrel,” because he’d never hunted ducks, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have thought to shoot them in a barrel. But he did anticipate killing Suzanne Wilkins and starting his life over again without anyone making him react or hurt again.
He put a knee to the dock and brought the solid wooden stock of the Kalashnikov to his shoulder, aiming down steel sights.
“McCloud,” a wrecked voice shouted, “Friendlies inbound. Don’t shoot! Ya hear? I’ve got some folks with me. So put that damn AK down.”
He already did. He gave it to me.
Suzanne was elated by the glimpse of Coyote McCloud’s fish camp through the tangle of branches swatting her face. The straight lines of order and humanity stood out in stark contrast to the twisted chaos of the swamp.
Bobby walked to the bow, shouting, while Suzanne slid over to the helm. She put the boat into neutral, allowing it to glide over the shallow water.
Beowulf stood and shimmied. The old dog was probably about to burst, since he’d steadfastly refused to urinate in the boat. Malamutes were not water dogs.
Taylor sat in Suzanne’s lap, perched on the captain’s chair with small hands tight on the wheel. She’s got to be exhausted. What a joy she is, a marvel. Through the bugs and the cold and the bullets, still smiling.
Ginnie, with an uncharacteristic burst of energy, and perhaps the desire to be the first in line, stepped around the center console to join Bobby. Ginnie’s face was streaked with mud and her hair caked with salt and silt, and she squeezed Suzanne’s shoulder in the way of an old friend who had been through the mud and the crud. She smiled a faint smile, as if to say ‘I can’t believe we made it.’
There were rapid shots then, angry terrible things, but not as awful as the spatter of blood and brains on the deck of the boat. It happened so fast.
Bobby was shouting, Ginnie standing just behind his shoulder. Bobby coughed and pirouetted, bullets tearing through his chest. Ginnie didn’t have time to swear. A round tore through her throat and she fl backwards onto the deck of the boat. There was blood on the deck and the snap of rounds around Suzanne’s head. She reached for the .38 on the console and she swept her daughter up in her arms and tumbled backwards over the side of the vessel. She was sure she heard hysterical laughter.
Taylor was screaming when Suzanne took her over the side of the boat. There was no way to calm a four-year-old child being spattered with brain matter.
Bullets popped against the boat and swarmed through the air. Suzanne was terrified and enraged. She pulled Taylor into the mangroves stroking backwards.
“You stay right here,” Suzanne told Taylor. “No matter what happens, right?”
Taylor nodded, blue eyes sad and grave in the way a child’s eyes should never be, and Suzanne kissed her on the forehead, cradling her face.
“I’m your momma, and I’ll always love you.” There was no time for a proper good-bye.
Suzanne took a deep breath and swam under the black water toward the dock with the revolver in her hand.
There was a rage and fury in Suzanne as she stroked to her doom, terrible and scathing and powerful. Instinct to protect her child propelled her forward.
The assault rifle hammered again and Suzanne could hear rounds zipping through the water. She pressed her belly into to the silt at the bottom of the pond.
She didn’t know who was shooting, but she was sure it wasn’t McCloud.
He would have recognized Bobby’s voice.
She swam to the stern of the boat and surfaced. There was no sound other than her breathing and distant splashes.