‘Twenty years in service, ma’am. You can assume away, but you know what they say about people who “assume”.’
She nodded. ‘So, y’all said you ran charters. What happened to your boat? Why don’t you just get the hell out under your own power?’
The Rhino folded his massive forearms and gestured towards her vessel. ‘See all the holes in your hull? The ones in mine were a lot bigger. I ran a legitimate business, miss. I don’t know what you did before all this, but the fact that you’re sitting here tells me it probably wasn’t legit, and you had the guns and the balls to fight off whoever came after you. I wasn’t so lucky.’
Lee exhaled a thin stream of fragrant smoke. ‘Mr Rhino,’ he said. ‘Your lost boat, do you know who attacked you?’
The former Coast Guard chief nodded. ‘I do. A local pecker-head, working for a toothfish poacher down south. Said he was recruiting for his bossman. Wouldn’t take no for an answer, so he shot up my boat when that was the only answer I had for him.’
‘Why didn’t he shoot you?’ asked Fifi.
‘Shooting my boat hurt more,’ he said, quite honestly, she believed.
A lot of folks made the error of mistaking Fifi for some kind of life-sized Sluttymuch Barbie. But she’d been looking out for herself long enough to have developed a wild dog’s instinct for sniffing out troublesome men. The job at Lenny Wah’s take-out, which quickly morphed into cooking as well as cleaning, had scored her a spot on a catering-industry training course run by a Bay Area businessmen’s charity – ‘guilty fags’, she called them – sponsoring college degrees for homeless kids. Her army-surplus cot in the storeroom at Lenny’s counted as homeless. She graduated in the top five of her class, and landed a gig with an LA-based catering firm that specialised in providing ‘nutritional services’ for the military in shitholes-of-the-week like Bosnia and Mogadishu.
Fifi moved a lot more easily through that sort of crowd than the five-star ghetto of West Coast fine dining, and after shacking up with an Army Ranger for twelve months in the Balkans, she could field-strip an M4 carbine blindfolded. She’d also had a lot of experience with men like the Rhino; hard, uncompromising, and occasionally stupid men who were, nonetheless, decent at heart.
She leaned over to Mr Lee. ‘What d’you think?’ she whispered.
‘He’ll eat too much, but he’s okay,’ replied the Chinaman. ‘Mr Pete would have liked him.’
‘Okay, Rhino.’ She turned back to face the old chief, who had heard everything. ‘If you’ve brought any kit with you, stow it over there by the ramp. You can start out by helping to load some stores while we finish talking to these other guys.’ Fifi waved towards the small crowd of hopefuls gathered by the marina gate and watched over by Thapa.
The Rhino nodded brusquely and said ‘Thanks’ before looking around. ‘You said you wanted some stores loaded?’
‘Inside,’ she said, gesturing to the wooden shed in front of which they sat. ‘Bags of rice, beans, lots of canned foods. Heavy work. But that won’t bother you – you’re the Rhino.’
‘No,’ he agreed, flashing a stagy grin and tucking his cigar firmly into the corner of his mouth. He pointed at one of his massive biceps and said, around the cigar, ‘Yeah, it’ll be no bother at all since I didn’t get these from pettin’ kitty cats.’
Ross paused before ducking his head into the shed. ‘Oh, one other thing. You got a humidor on that boat?’
Fifi gave a quizzical look. ‘Like a hot tub, you mean?’
‘No, darlin’, it’s a little storage compartment for my Cuban friends here.’ The Rhino blew a thin stream of blue smoke into the sky.
Fifi shrugged. ‘I reckon so. It has everything else.’ The last thing she heard as the Rhino signified his approval and disappeared into the shed was, ‘Oh yeah, it’s good to be the Rhino.’
The lambent glow of Acapulco, a soft dome of light defining a horizon at the edge of the world in the absolute blackness of night at sea, had changed character to Jules’s eye. It looked less artificial now, less fixed. Suffused by a burnt-orange tincture, it flickered and even flared at times.
‘Another high-rise going up,’ said Fifi.
‘I imagine so.’
They worked by starlight and the pale illumination of a red moon. It had been that bloodstained colour since the Wave appeared. The Aussie Rules remained blacked out, a precaution against more attacks, as the new crew members that Fifi and Mr Lee had chosen helped to move supplies from the sport fisher to its mother ship.
Jules was generally pleased with the haul of men and cargo. She’d been a bit taken aback by the Rhino when she’d first met him, especially by the perpetual wreath of cigar smoke that preceded and followed him like London fog, but had quickly come to accept his bluster and bullshit as a well-polished routine. He’d probably been practising it on tourists for years and had forgotten how not to be in character. She couldn’t fault his work ethic or his skill sets, however. He’d fired up whole suites of sensors and arrays in the bridge that had proven completely impenetrable to everyone else. And having done so, he’d gone right back to hauling sacks of rice and freshly killed meat – very expensive, freshly killed meat – onto the boat deck of the Rules and from there off to the freezers. Another odd thing: every so often he would stop one of the other workers, point to one of his enormous biceps and say, ‘You don’t get these from pettin’ kitty cats’, whatever that meant. Odd, very odd.
He stayed out of the ice room with Pete’s body in, though. For now, that was sealed off.
‘I’m glad Miguel kicked the shit out of those assholes,’ said Fifi as she picked up an LNG canister and hoisted it over her shoulder.
Jules grunted after catching a sack of potatoes that had been tossed up by Thapa as though it was no heavier than a bag of fairy floss. ‘Bloody hell,’ she cursed, struggling not to fall over.
A German man, short but powerful-looking, caught her gently by the elbow. ‘Not so good to be falling overboard, no?’ He grinned, his teeth standing out in the wine-red light.
‘No. Thank you…’ replied Jules, reaching for his name. The yacht was beginning to fill up with strangers, and although she tried to commit all their names and potted histories to memory, there was just so much for her to do each day that she never really felt as if she was getting on top of any one job.
‘This is Dietmar,’ Fifi said, rescuing her. ‘He’s German, you know, like hot-dogs used to be. He’s our navigator now. Used to work on a container ship.’
The German, who looked to be in his thirties, nodded enthusiastically as he wrestled the heavy bag of potatoes off Jules, before flinging them over his shoulder with as little apparent trouble as Thapa had experienced.