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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 disappointm
ent. 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.
And lying next to the two babies, also asleep, was a stocky young woman. She had dark hair and wore a pink flannel nightgown, which I thought was an odd touch for a drug lord’s nanny. But it would be far too much to hope that she would remain asleep for long. I could think of only one sure way to keep her quiet while we took the children and ran for home. So as Deborah carefully scooped up Nicholas, I took my fillet knife from its sheath and stepped forward—and an iron hand clamped onto my arm.
“No!” Debs said in a ferocious whisper. “Not like that!”
I looked at her with exasperation. Of all the times to be saddled with empathy, this was one of the worst. One tiny peep from the sleeping woman and we were all dead—but no, I couldn’t make her permanently quiet. “Then how?” I whispered back.
She just shook her head and nodded at Cody and Astor. “Wake them,” she said softly.
I stepped around Deborah to the bed where Cody and Astor lay sleeping. I leaned the shotgun against the wall beside the bed and put a hand on Astor’s shoulder, shaking her gently. She grumbled, frowned, and then opened her eyes. She blinked at me several times, then shot straight up in bed.
