The planks resounded to my footsteps as I pounded along the dock, and the smells of creosote and brine hit me like smelling salts. When I reached the Mystery Girl, I laid Jo in the stern. She moaned, but didn’t wake. I climbed the ladder to the pilot deck, keyed the ignition, and was exultant when the engine turned over. The needle on the fuel gauge swung up to register an almost-full tank. I pulled away from the dock and opened up the throttle. There was a light chop on the water close to shore, but farther out, beyond the sandbar, the surface was smooth and glassy, with gentle swells. Crumbling banks of fog blanketed the sea ahead. Once inside them we’d be safe for a while. I wondered what had gotten into Pellerin, whether it was Ogun Badagris or simply a madness attached to having been brought back to life by bacteria that infested your brain and let you use more of it. Maybe there wasn’t any difference between the two conditions. Jo’s first slow-burner had gone out in much the same way, in the midst of a huge veve, so you were led to conclude that some pathology was involved… and yet it might be the pathology of a god trapped in a human body. I remembered how he’d smiled, leering at his fiery work, and how that smile had planed seamlessly down into a human expression, as if the man he was had merely been the god diminished by the limitations of the flesh.
I cleared my mind of ontological speculation and focused on practical matters, but when I tried to think about what we were going to do once we reached Tampa, it was like trying to walk on black ice and I wound up staring at the flat gray sea, listening to the pitch of the engine. I zoned out and began to think about Pellerin again. Formless thoughts, the kind you have when you’re puzzled by something to the point that you can’t even come up with a question to ask and are reduced to searching the database, hoping that some fact will provoke one.
I had all but forgotten about Jo and when she called out to me, I turned toward the sound of her voice, full of concern. She came scrambling up the ladder and, once she had solid footing, told me to cut the engines, having to shout to make herself heard. The wind lashed her hair about, and she held it in place with one hand.
“Are you crazy?” I gestured at the fog bank. “Once we’re into the fog, we’ll be okay.”
“We’ll never get away! If I thought we could, I’d go with you. You know that, don’t you?”
“You are going with me,” I said. “What’s the problem?”
She didn’t answer, and I glanced over at her.
She had moved away from me and was standing with her legs apart, aiming a small automatic with a silver finish. A .25 caliber Beretta. With that black cocktail dress on, she might have stepped out of a Bond movie. She had to be wearing a thigh holster. The unreality of it all tickled me and I couldn’t repress a laugh.
“Where’d you get that thing?” I asked her. “Out of a cereal box?”
She fired, and a bullet dug a furrow in the control console an inch from my hand.
I recoiled from the console. “Christ!”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
She looked sorry. Her make-up was mussed. The heat of the fire had caused her to sweat, and sweat had dragged a mascara shadow from the corner of her eye, simulating a tear. She told me again to cut the engines, and this time I complied. The boat lifted on a light swell. I heard the faint cries of seagulls—they sounded like the baying of tiny, trebly hounds. I heard another noise, then. Two dark blue helicopters were approaching from the south.
“Who the hell is that?” I shouted.
“Calm down. Please! This is…” The wind drifted hair across her face; she brushed it aside and said weakly, “It’s the only way. They’re relentless, they keep coming after you.”
“You did this? You told them where we were?”
“They always knew! They never went away! Don’t you get it?”
“You knew the whole time? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t know. Not for sure, not at first. And what good would it have done? You didn’t listen to Doctor Crain.”
“I would have listened to you,” I said.
One of the helicopters positioned itself off the port side of the Mystery Girl; the side door had been slid back and someone in harness sat in the opening. I couldn’t see what he was doing. The other helicopter hovered above the boat. A gilt script D was painted on the nacelle.
“I love you, Jack,” Jo said.
“Yeah, uh-huh.”
“I do! Back at the hotel… they contacted me. They were going to step in, but I convinced them to keep the experiment going.”
“The experiment. This was an experiment?”
“I told them we might learn more about Josey if he went through with the game. Maybe that was wrong of me, but I wanted some time with you.”
I was unable to line up all the trash she’d told me about her mother, how it had warped her, with her capacity for betrayal. Yet what she had said smacked of a childish willfulness and a clinical dispatch that, I realized, functioned as a tag-team in her personality. Until that moment, I had not understood how dangerous these qualities made her.
“I can lose them in the fog,” I said.
“You can’t. You don’t know them.”
“I’m damn well going to try. You think they’ll let me go after what I’ve seen? They just wiped out twenty people!”
“I’m sure they didn’t kill them all.”
“Oh… well. Fuck! That’s all right, then.”
I punched in the ignition; the engine sputtered and caught, rumbling smoothly.
“Don’t, Jack! Please!”
“I’m fucking dead if they catch me. Do you understand? I am dead!”
The barrel of the automatic wavered.
“You’re not going to shoot me,” I said.
I pushed the throttle forward. Jo said again, “Don’t,” and I felt a blow to my back, a wash of pain. I was out of it for a while, and when I was able to gather my senses, I found myself lying on the deck, with my head jammed up against the base of the control console. I knew I’d been shot, but it felt like the bullet had come from something larger than a.25. The guy in the harness, maybe. I was hurting some, but a numb feeling was setting in. It was a chore to concentrate. My thoughts kept slipping away. Jo knelt beside me. I locked on to her face. Looking at her steadied me. “Did you…” I said. “Did you shoot…?”
“Don’t talk,” she said.
Silhouetted against the gray sky, a man was being lowered from the helicopter overhead, along with a metal case that dangled from a hook beside him. It seemed as big as a coffin. The sight confused me visually, and in other ways as well. I closed my eyes against it.
Jo laid a hand on my cheek. The touch cooled the embers of my anger, my disappointment with her, and I was overwhelmed with sentiment. Bits of memory surfaced, whirled, dissolved. She lay down on the deck beside me. She became my sky. Her face hanging above me blotted out the chopper and the man descending.
“I’ll take care of you, I promise,” she said.
Her brown eyes were all that was holding me.
A gurgling came from inside my chest. She started raving, then. Getting angry, swearing vengeance, weeping. It was like she thought I’d passed out, like I wasn’t there. Half of it, I didn’t understand. She said they would regret what they’d made her do, she’d make certain I remembered everything, and I would help her make them pay. I didn’t recognize her, she was so possessed by pain and fury. She laid her head on my chest. I wanted to tell her the weight was oppressive, but I couldn’t form the words. The lengths of her hair were drowning me. Her voice, the helicopter rotors, and the fading light merged into a gray tumult, an incoherence.