Off the Chart. James Hall

sat up, pressed her back flat against the wall, and was fumbling with the Mac-10, trying to find the right grip, when she made out the shadow of a man moving to the rail. Then saw the bright flashes as he unleashed on Sal and the rest of her crew following her up the ladder.

      The man got off a dozen rounds before Anne Bonny could raise her weapon. Sal screamed and one of the Nicaraguans cursed in Spanish and went silent. Anne Bonny aimed at the center of the body armor sheathing the man’s back and curled her finger against the cool metal and the tall man bucked forward and tumbled over the side.

      She blew out a breath, but before she could move again, dozens of spotlights bathed the deck in staggering brightness and in the same instant the whup and blare of a helicopter sounded from the north.

      ‘Stay down, Anne. Stay down!’

      All around her, automatic weapons erupted, the raw thuds and clangs of bullets slamming the ship’s tough hide.

      Daniel’s voice had come from her right, roughly fifty feet away. She rose from her crouch and craned around the edge of the wall, which she could see in the blue-white glare was not a wall at all but a yellow cargo container emblazoned with the logo of the Maersk shipping line.

      ‘Anne, flat on the deck! Stay down.’

      A staccato chain of blasts cut him off. Louder ones answered back and a dozen more of the muffled shots replied. Then it was silent. To the north she saw the helicopter searchlight prowling the dark waters on the starboard side of the ship. Again and again, a large-caliber machine gun unloaded on men in the water. One of their speedboats exploded, the fireball blooming against the black sky.

      Facedown, she wormed to the edge of the yellow container and peered toward the spot where she’d last heard Daniel’s voice.

      Two men in camouflage pants and black T-shirts were standing over Daniel’s body. They gripped silenced weapons. The taller of the two men said something to the other and the man unloaded his weapon at Daniel’s body. She thought she saw Daniel twist aside in time to avoid the gunfire; then both men scrambled out of view.

      A wail broke from Anne’s throat, but before she could rise to fire, she was staring at a pair of black boots not more than a yard from her nose.

      ‘Fuckin’ move and you’re dead.’ His growl was all New York, the nasal bray of a street punk. ‘Shove it out slow, that fucking gun. You hear me, cunt? Twitch and you’re dead.’

      A year before, she would have obeyed instantly, raising her hands in relief that this long and terrifying dream was done. But that was before Daniel. Before he led her to the edge of the precipice, took her hand in his, and looked past the surface of her eyes into regions of her self she had barely sensed were there and the two of them leaped over the brink, dropping and dropping in one long ecstatic rush, only to land in the black heart of this moment.

      Anne Bonny Joy nudged the Mac-10 forward along the deck, inch by inch until it was fully exposed; then without a flicker of hesitation she slid her hand down the stock and squeezed off a half-dozen rounds at the toes of the black boots and watched them jerk and dance for a half-second; then she spun to the right, came to her feet and sprinted to the rail, and dived into the bottomless dark.

      In the choppy sea she stripped a life jacket from one of the Nicaraguans. She ducked away from the spotlights, stroking slowly and steadily beyond the perimeter of their search zone. Through the night, she paddled and drifted in a swoon of dehydration, rage, and despair. She was carried by the current mile after mile northward until an hour after sunrise she was spotted by a Panamanian fishing boat and plucked from the sea.

      They put her ashore on a beach at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, and she used some of the American dollars she was carrying to work her way south by bus down the Mosquito Coast. Campesinos on the bus turned to stare at her. As Anne slumped in her seat, an old woman nudged her shoulder, checking for life. At Punta Castillo Anne chartered a skiff to the Barra de Colorado. In a deadened haze, she left the boat behind and trekked through fifteen miles of rain forest and made it to the lodge late in the afternoon four full days after the disaster on the Rainmaker.

      Taking cover in a gully on the outskirts of the camp, she spent an hour listening to the shrieks of parrots and howler monkeys. She sniffed the air but detected neither foreign aromas nor the charred ruin of the camp. Until dusk she waited; then finally she rose and entered the camp.

      In the gathering darkness she inched along the shadowy edges of the buildings, a pocketknife her only weapon. The sour stench of the staff latrine, a can of garbage overturned and raided by jungle creatures. The cigarette reek of the bunkhouse where the Sandinistas slept, and at every step there were the vaporous echoes of voices.

      She slipped into the main cabin that she and Daniel had shared the last weeks. Their bed was neatly made. She stared at his comb lying on the dresser and her brush, which lay beside it. She wiped her eyes clear and stepped over to the bathroom mirror and took it down from its hook. She calmed the jitter in her fingers and dialed the numbers and swung open the steel door. For a moment in the gloom she thought all was well, then she reached out and ran her hands across the bare shelves and a low groan rose from her chest. Someone had beaten her back to the camp and looted the reserves.

      The journey back to Florida took two weeks. Riding Greyhounds through the long nights, exiting at dawn, eyes down, speaking to no one. Staying in cheap motels along the coast, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida. Blinds shut tight against the daylight, drinking herself to oblivion while she spent the impossibly long days staring at the pitted walls and the blank screens of televisions. Paranoid, grieving, so twitchy she couldn’t sleep. Not even in those desperate weeks after her parents’ deaths had she felt so hopeless.

      Somewhere east of Pensacola she woke from a drowse, jerked upright in her bus seat, and startled the teenage kid in a cowboy hat beside her.

      ‘You okay, ma’am?’ The kid had taken his Stetson off and set it in his lap. ‘Bad dream?’

      Anne looked at the boy for a moment, then turned her eyes to her window, at the palm trees and scrub brush flashing past.

      ‘I wish it were,’ she said. ‘I wish to hell it were.’

       5

      Oh, come on, Thorn. Even a guy like you could find a use for two million bucks.’

      ‘Not really, Marty.’

      Marty Messina shook his head and groaned. He was a big man with a blocky head and coarse black hair that he wore in a military flattop. An inch of hair across the front was greased into a small curl like a perfect wave rolling off the black ocean of his skull. He was several inches above six feet. In the years since Thorn had seen him last, Marty had chunked up, and now dangerous muscles flared in his shoulders and arms. His neck was so thick, he probably had to custom-order his flowered shirts. He wore white high-top tennis shoes with a complicated lacing system, and skintight blue jeans and a black rayon shirt printed with yellow hibiscus blooms. The shirt was opened to the sternum, showing off a pad of black hair that rose to his throat. Five, six years ago when he’d been sent away to prison, Marty had been fond of heavy gold jewelry, but they must’ve had a fashion class up there, because now he wore only a single diamond stud pinned to the top of his right ear.

      Marty shook his head and made a show of sighing and marching over to the wood stairway of Thorn’s stilt house and planting his butt on the fourth step with such resolve, it appeared he meant to stay as long as it took for Thorn to cave in.

      Resetting his grip on the pine slat, Thorn pressed it against the sawhorse, then drew the handsaw back and forth through the last inch of softwood. When the excess piece dropped in the grass, he smoothed away a couple of brittle ends on the slat and stepped over to the shade of a tamarind tree and set it on the bench that was three-quarters complete. He brushed the sawdust from his hands and wrists and looked out at Lawton Collins, who was napping in a hammock strung between two coconut palms a few yards from the rocky shore of Blackwater Sound.