“It’s too high,” Debs said petulantly. “I’m not a fucking chimp—we can’t climb up the anchor line.”
“There’s a boarding ladder in the locker back there,” I said, nodding toward the rear of my boat. “Go get it.” And the first confirmation of my new authority came when Debs turned quickly away and got the ladder from the locker. She returned just as quickly and held it out to me.
The ladder had six wooden steps and two hooks at the top end. I needed it because my boat has high gunwales for offshore use, and if ever I wanted to swim or snorkel, I hooked the ladder on.
“You have a plan, brother?” Brian asked.
“I do,” I said, still sounding very much in charge. “We glide up from the front. You”—I nodded at Brian—“climb onto the gunwale of this boat, and hook the ladder to the yacht’s rail.”
“It’s still too high,” Deborah said.
“Then you and I, Brian,” I said, ignoring Debs and her negativity, “climb up the ladder onto the deck. Debs, you wait with the boat and—”
“Fuck you—I’m not waiting in the boat like some fucking cheerleader!” she said.
I skipped over the obvious fact that neither boats nor execution squads are generally equipped with cheerleaders, and instead just told her, “Deborah, we have to take the kids off at the stern. So you have to bring the boat around after Brian and I take out the deck watch, okay?” She set her face in a fierce, dark pout, and so even though it wasn’t quite playing fair, I added, “It’s got to be done quietly—it’s
knife
work, Debs.”
She glared a little more, but then she nodded. “Fine,” she said. “But you call me up there right away or so help me—”
“Good, that’s settled,” I said. For the next few minutes nobody had anything to say. I had to think that was a good thing, considering the blather they’d been spouting so far. I didn’t need the distraction and arguments, and I didn’t need anybody objecting that it was
still
an insane, suicidal plan. Because it was; I was sure there would be somebody on the bridge, and he would certainly be looking out over the bow from time to time. It was just barely possible that we could get ridiculously lucky and time it so that he was looking away when we climbed on board—but I didn’t feel lucky. Nothing about this whole absurd expedition felt lucky. I had only a heavy sick feeling of dread and a cold lump in my stomach and a totally unshakable conviction that we were all about to die—or at least that I was, which is just as bad, as far as I’m concerned.
Still, I was here, and I had to go through with it. So I steered south until the yacht was only a very dim anchor light again, and then I turned around, cut the throttle to idle, and headed straight back at the little light. And back, I was sure, to a very nasty death.
Just at the point where I could barely make out the yacht’s bow and I had started to screw myself up to the point of being ready to commit suicide by leaping on board, I felt a small, chill drop of water on my cheek. I ignored it at first, thinking that it was just more proof that this whole trip was stupid and doomed. I’m as good as dead; why not make me wet, too? I pushed it away; killing yourself is serious business and one really should concentrate fully. But I felt another drop, and then two more, then five, and it was really much too cool to be salt spray, and finally, in my first bright moment all evening, I realized what it might be, and I looked up.
Racing straight at us a few hundred feet overhead was a low dark line of clouds—the squall I had seen out over the ocean toward Bimini. As these little stormlets often do, this one had sprinted across the water and come down on us, and I don’t think I have ever been quite so happy about anything to do with weather as I was when I saw the thick sheet of rain hurrying across the water at my boat.
In another few seconds it was on us, a furious icy deluge of water. And even as I was applauding the fact that we were now invisible from the yacht, it occurred to me that the yacht was just as invisible to us, and if I didn’t want to ram our target I had to be careful.
I turned to Brian, who was still standing next to me, anxiously clutching the boarding ladder. “Get up in the bow,” I told him. “Don’t let us bump the yacht.” He nodded, put the ladder down carefully, and went forward.
Just as I was beginning to think we’d missed our mark, Brian waved at me urgently. I cut the engine, letting us drift forward, and a moment later, looming up out of the heavy shower of rain, I saw the bow of the yacht towering over us.
“Take the wheel,” I said to Debs. She just nodded and grabbed the steering wheel, and I picked up the ladder and went forward to join Brian. He said something I couldn’t hear over the thumping of the rain. He leaned close to my ear and repeated it: “Hold my belt.” I nodded and, as he stepped up onto the gunwale of my boat, I grabbed his belt and held him steady.
When he got his balance Brian stuck his hand out to me and wiggled his fingers. It took me a moment to understand: the ladder, of course. I passed it to him and he stretched up on tiptoes with the ladder held above him. He wobbled, teetered, and shot down to a crouch to recover his balance, but then slowly and carefully he stretched back up again. I couldn’t see much, standing more or less under him, but I could feel him moving around up there. After a few moments, he squatted down again. “Got it,” he said.
I nodded and started to climb up onto the gunwale. Brian put a hand out to stop me. “If you don’t mind, brother,” he said. “I’ll go first.” He cocked his head at me, as if waiting for an objection. I didn’t give him one. He smiled, the same awful fake display of teeth without emotion, and straightened up. He gave a little hop, and then disappeared up the boarding ladder onto the deck of the yacht. I followed as quickly as I could, waving a hand at Debs and pushing the boat away with my feet as I climbed.
I didn’t hear anything at all as I clambered up onto the deck, and that seemed like a very good thing. I crouched down; there was a kind of gently curved upward slope in the deck here at the bow, a sort of half cone painted a dark blue so it stood out from the white deck around it. It was probably intended to make headroom for Raul’s cabin. I climbed up onto the blue strip and crouched low, hoping my dark clothing would blend in. Raul would be directly below me now, in his cabin. I wondered if he had his
mujeres
with him. I hoped they were keeping him busy.
The rain was starting to slacken. I looked up toward where Brian had disappeared. At first I didn’t see him. I looked farther up to where the easy slope stopped and jagged upward at a sharper angle to the bridge. There was a darker blotch right in the middle of it, more than halfway up to the windscreen that marked the bridge. It was Brian, crawling upward carefully but rapidly. As I watched, he glanced back to me. He had his fillet knife clenched in his teeth like a pirate. It was a very sharp knife, and if he wasn’t careful, he’d get a new smile, probably better than the one he had now. Brian motioned me to wait, and then slowly lifted his head up to peer over the windscreen.
For a moment he froze like that, no more than half his head showing above the windscreen. Then he gathered himself and half pulled, half jumped upward and out of sight.
And I was all alone, crouched in the rain, on a boat filled with well-armed men who wanted to kill me.
I
waited. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. I could imagine a thousand things happening up on the bridge, and only one of them was good. What was taking so much time? Was there a guard up there? There must have been or Brian wouldn’t have jumped over like that. Did Brian surprise him? If so, why was it taking so long? Maybe he was enjoying himself, making it last a little longer than necessary. Maybe the guard had surprised Brian. It could be that the boat was about to explode with shouts and shots, and here I was crouching at the bow like an idiot.
And if that did happen, I wasn’t ready to offer even token resistance. I’d left my fillet knife in its sheath, so I wouldn’t cut myself climbing up. It was still there. I pulled it out and held it ready. It didn’t seem very dangerous, not compared to six or seven men with assault rifles. And why did the grip feel so slippery? Almost as if my hands were sweating, which was silly. I was Dark Dexter, Cold Killer. My hands didn’t sweat, even now, when Brian was really taking far too long and it was almost certain that something had gone drastically wrong.
Just when I had persuaded myself to follow Brian and take a look, he appeared again, waving happily, the fillet knife in his hand still dripping red. He motioned me up; clutching my knife anxiously, I crawled up the slope and onto the bridge as quickly as I could, grumbling the whole way. He didn’t have to look so pleased with himself. One guard, big deal—and he had clearly taken his time and had a little fun, while I huddled abjectly below.
I pulled myself up and over the bridge windscreen. It really wouldn’t screen out much wind; it was only around a foot high. But at least that made it easier to climb over, and I did. Brian stood a few feet away, looking fondly down at a crumpled body. It had fallen onto a cushioned area about knee-high off the deck that was, astonishingly, right next to an actual honest-to-god hot tub, big enough for four people at a time. I was still gaping at it when Brian leaned over and took my elbow.
“There’s only one guard outside below us,” he whispered, nodding toward the stern of the yacht. “He’s standing right at the foot of the stairs.” He dropped to his knees and motioned me down with him, and together we crawled to the edge of the bridge, where a flight of molded steps led to the main deck ten feet below.
I dropped to my belly and peeked over. At first I didn’t see anything. Maybe he’d gone inside to pee or something. Then he coughed, shuffled his feet, and I saw him—right below me, hugging the shadows and looking around vigilantly.
I pulled back and put my head next to Brian’s. “I thought there’d be
two,
” I whispered.
Brian shrugged, very difficult when you’re lying flat on your stomach. “Raul must be very overconfident,” he whispered back.
I looked over again. There was still only one guard. I slid back and Brian raised an eyebrow at me. My eyes fell on the padded bench beside the hot tub. I crawled over and stood up, grabbing one of the cushions, a heavy, canvas-covered thing about three feet square. I beckoned to Brian and handed it to him. “Drop this over here, onto the main deck,” I whispered, pointing to my left.
He understood right away, taking the cushion and moving silently over to the rail. He looked at me expectantly and I once more dropped to my belly and slid forward to the steps. I held my knife ready, took a deep breath, and waved to Brian.
Right away I heard the cushion thump onto the deck below. It was followed immediately by a muffled,
“Conyo,”
from the guard, directly below me—all according to plan. And now the plan said the guard would step around the corner of the cabin to the deck along the rail, and look to see what had made the sound, and I would be down and on him.
But the idiot on the main deck clearly didn’t know the script; he leaned forward instead and stared upward, right at me, and I barely pulled back in time to escape being seen. “ ’Tonio,
pendejo,
” he whispered loudly.
“¿Qué es eso?”
’Tonio, of course, did not answer, since he was fully occupied with being dead at the moment. I waited, feeling my palms sweat again. Until tonight I’d never had sweaty palms, and now twice. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like being the kind of nervous Nellie who had sweaty palms. But I also didn’t seem to have a choice. I waited, feeling my hands go slick and disliking myself. At last I heard
“Conyo”
again, and then a light shuffling of feet—moving
away
from me.
I inched forward. The shadowed spot below was empty. I rose to a crouch and slid down the stairs as quickly as possible, stepping into the darkness at the corner of the cabin. A moment later I heard a few more whispered syllables of what was probably profanity, and then the cushion Brian had dropped came marching around the corner.
In a fit of tidy pique, the sentry had picked up the cushion, probably to carry it back up to the hot tub and, in the process, berate ’Tonio for his sloppiness. But alas for Neatness and Tongue-lashing everywhere, he did not make it up the stairs. Because by holding the cushion in front of him like that he had provided the ideal blind spot for Dexter, and before the guard could do more than blink twice I slipped behind him and then I was on him, one arm tight around his throat and my knife diving into him.
He was very strong, and he nearly broke loose, but I held on tight, twisting the blade out and plunging it back in, and he gave out only a single croak, muffled by my forearm on his throat, and then he went limp.
I held him tight until I was very sure he was absolutely no-kidding dead. Then I lowered him carefully to the deck and straightened slowly, quite pleased with myself. I had taken my turn, and I had done it just as well as my brother—a little better, in fact, since I hadn’t dawdled to enjoy myself like he had. No, I had been pure lethal efficiency, and a true shining example of how these things should be done.
I was only halfway up to a standing position and still congratulating myself when the cabin door beside me opened outward and I heard a new male voice whisper,
“Ah. Una meada buena es como—¿Qué?”
A shame I never learned what a good piss was like. But as the new man stepped out from the cabin and closed the door, he saw me, and all thoughts of poetic rhapsody on the subject of piss left him. Luckily for me, he spent a full two seconds gaping, which would have been more than enough time for me to silence him forever—
—except that as I stepped forward to do that I stumbled on the body at my feet and dropped to one knee, and I could only watch as the pisser scrabbled at the assault rifle that hung from his shoulder on a sling.
All the guard had to do was move the rifle into firing position and pull the trigger, and Dexter was as dead as the dodo. But Time slid down into a sludge-muddled crawl and the sentry seemed to be taking forever at this oh-so-simple task. It was like watching an old silent comedy run in slow motion as he fumbled with the strap, broke a fingernail on the stock, and smacked his own forehead with the gun barrel, jittering the whole time with a sluggish but frenzied stiff-fingered anxiety, his tongue stuck out one side of his mouth, and I watched helplessly as he awkwardly but finally brought the gun slowly around and scrabbled for the trigger, and just before he found it a dark shape dropped from above and drove him down to the deck and a moment later he found his voice at last, just in time to give a final gurgle, kick his legs, and go still.
“Well,” Brian whispered from his crouch above the newly dead sentry. “Apparently there were three guards after all.”
“So it seems,” I whispered back crossly. “You sure it isn’t four?”
We crouched there like that for a minute, just to be sure no one had heard the
thump
of Brian and the guard hitting the deck. It had seemed awfully loud, even in my slow-motion stupefaction. But apparently Raul and the rest of his crew were sound sleepers. There was no outcry, rush of feet, sound of the trumpet, nothing. So we left the two late members of the night watch where they’d fallen and took a quick and silent tour of the deck, avoiding the windows—they were too big to call them portholes. When we were done I stepped over to the rail and leaned out. The little rainstorm that had made all this possible was fading now, and I could see Deborah quite clearly, a few feet off the bow and hanging on to the anchor line with my boathook. I waved to her and she let go of the line, put the boathook down, and pulled herself along the side of the boat, back to the stern.
I stepped down onto the diving platform on the back end of the boat. Brian was just behind me on the deck, watching for signs of unwanted life. The superyacht’s launch was already there, tied to a cleat and bobbing gently behind us, and I peeked into the cockpit. It looked like it cost more than a three-bedroom, two-bath house. It had a control panel that Captain Kirk would have felt at home with, plush seats, and even a small step-down cabin. The keys were in it, dangling from the ignition beside the wheel. Maybe Raul really was overconfident. Maybe having a boat filled with heavily armed men did that.
I heard a soft swirl of water and Debs came around the corner. She pulled my boat in beside the launch and I grabbed the bowline from her and tied off so my boat would drift about ten feet back, where it wouldn’t bump the yacht and send an unwanted alarm.
Debs grabbed her shotgun and scurried up and onto the yacht’s deck like she was famished and late for dinner. “What the fuck took you so long,” she whispered fiercely.
“Traffic,” I told her.
She didn’t seem to think that was funny, and she kept her scowl. But before she could charge up onto the yacht and start shooting everyone, Brian made a
psst!
sound from his spot above us on the deck. I turned to him and he pointed. “The bag,” he whispered. I must have looked blank, because he stepped quickly down and pulled my boat back in. He hopped into it and grabbed a heavy canvas bag from the bow, next to where he’d been standing as we approached the yacht. He slung it over a shoulder and brushed past me again, murmuring, “Ee-bahng’s toys.”
I wasn’t sure what he wanted with Ivan’s bomb bag at this point. It seemed to me that we should save the explosions for the cleanup, after we’d found the kids. As I now knew quite well, bombs are loud, messy things, and I didn’t like them. I also didn’t trust them—they might go off at any moment for no rational reason, and it seemed foolish to carry them into a situation where shots might well be fired in anger.
But Brian had made up his mind, and anyway he was already gone, up onto the yacht’s deck. So I shrugged it off and climbed up after him, and Debs followed me back to the door that led into the main cabin, where Brian waited impatiently. He pulled open the door and stepped carefully inside, and a moment later I followed.
The room was lit with only a couple of very dim lights, but even so, I had a very strange moment in which I thought I’d gone through a wormhole instead of a door, and ended up miles away in the penthouse of a luxury hotel. The room seemed too big to fit on the boat, and it was impossibly opulent. Except for the long heavily tinted window along the sides, the walls were lined with gilded mirrors. As Brian had said, there was a kitchenette in the corner at the far end of the room and the stairs down to the cabins beside it. But there was also a formal dining area, with low-hanging candelabra and a heavy golden table and chairs, and an absurd number of overstuffed glove-leather couches and chairs, and a huge flat-screen TV.
There was more rich furnishing than I could possibly take in at one glance, and I turned slowly to see it all, but Brian saw me gawking and grabbed my arm, shaking his head at me with disappointment. We cat-footed toward the stairs, Brian in the lead, Debs jostling me for second place.
At the head of the stairs Brian paused, peering downward intently. He motioned with one hand for us to wait and carefully put the canvas bag of Toys to one side. Then he drew his pistol and slunk silently down the steps. There were only five or six stairs and I could see my brother’s head and shoulders quite clearly as he edged forward a few feet, paused, and then backed up again. He glanced up and beckoned, and before I could move Deborah bolted past me and onto the stairs with her gun out and pointed up.
As I joined them in the hallway at the foot of the stairs, Debs and Brian were having an animated mime argument. Debs was pointing to the door on the right, and Brian was making slow-down gestures and apparently urging caution. Debs screwed her face into a determined frown, lowered her head, and stepped to the right-side door, hand out to open it. I stepped over quickly and grabbed her arm and she looked up at me with fierce resentment. But I just held up one finger, then used it to tap my ear. She stared at me with blank hostility, until I leaned forward and placed my ear on the door.
As I listened intently for some kind of telltale sound, Debs put her own ear on the door beside me. As if that had been the cue, we were rewarded by the sound of a thunderous snore from the other side of the door, followed almost immediately by another, softer and higher-pitched.
Debs jerked her head back from the door, and I straightened, too, in time to see her crossing the hall and putting her ear on the door opposite. She listened for only a second and then jerked upright so suddenly that I thought someone had poked her through the keyhole with a knife. But her face, even more frighteningly, was covered with a huge smile. She pointed excitedly at the door and mouthed,
Nicholas!
And then, without waiting to explain what she’d heard that made her think her son was in the room, she shoved her shotgun into my hands, grabbed the doorknob, and pushed the door open.
Brian looked at me with a face full of panic and jumped forward to stop her, but he was too late. Debs was already in the room and moving rapidly across a thick shag carpet. My brother stepped back from the door, glancing about wildly. I followed Debs into the room.
The kids were there, all of them. Cody and Astor were on the nearest bed, sound asleep and snuggled up together. Lily Anne and Nicholas, the babies, were on the other bed. Nicholas was kicking his feet and gurgling, the sound that had clued his mother in that he was here.