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I felt a small rush of wind on my face and I turned to where the stairs had been a few minutes ago. I still couldn’t hear anything but the ringing noise, and I couldn’t see the stairs anymore. Instead there was just a lot of smoke. A few tiny flames flickered under it, down very low. They were pretty. I watched them for a while. My head was pounding and it felt like it was full of thick dark mud, and I couldn’t think of anything at all, not right now, so I just watched the small twitching flames under the great bloom of smoke.
Then something moved out of the smoke.
At first it was just a dim shape in the hall below, a slightly darker shadow in the surrounding darkness. It moved slowly toward me, gradually taking on the shape of a person. Slowly, one careful big cat step at a time, the shape came out of the smoke until I could see what it was.
It was a man. He was average height and build. He had dark black hair and a smooth olive complexion. It didn’t make sense, but he was wearing only a pair of dark green boxer shorts. Why would somebody dress like that? I frowned and shook my head to clear it, but it didn’t work, and it didn’t change the picture. The man still wore nothing but green boxers, and he still came forward. He had several pounds of gold chain around his neck, some of it with large and gaudy gems attached. He looked at me, and then he smiled. That didn’t make sense, either. I didn’t know this man. Why would he smile?
But slowly, as he took one more tiger-smooth step toward me, another word formed in my brain: Raul.
I thought that over. It was hard to do, but I tried, and I thought of something about Raul. That word was a name. I knew something about that name, but I didn’t know this man. Was it his name?
And then he raised his hand. It had a pistol in it, and I remembered, and I knew why he was smiling. And I was right, because as he aimed the pistol right at me his smile got bigger. I watched him, trying to remember what I was supposed to do. I knew I should do something, but with the pounding in my head I couldn’t think of it. Say something? Maybe ask him not to shoot me? Or did it involve movement of some kind? So hard to think…
Just before the man pulled the trigger, I remembered something else. Guns can hurt you. Stay away from them. And at the very last instant I thought, Run!
I couldn’t run. I was still sitting down. But I rolled to one side and somewhere very far away I heard a tiny muffled bang!
Something hit my shoulder very hard, as hard as if somebody had smashed me with a metal baseball bat. I felt my mouth go open, but if I made a sound I couldn’t hear it. But the pain did something. It made my brain start to work just a little. I knew I had to move again, get away from the man with the gun, and I began to crawl away from the stairway.
It was very hard. The shoulder that had been hit didn’t work. Neither did the arm hanging from it. I pulled myself along the floor with the other arm, and my brain was working even better, because I remembered that I had guns, too. If I could find one I could shoot Raul. That way he couldn’t shoot me again.
I raised my head and looked. The big explosion had flung everything back, away from the stairs. Far away, over by the door that led out onto the deck, I saw the heavy canvas bag that had caused so much trouble, and beside it I saw what had to be the shotgun. If I could get that, I could shoot the man.
I crawled harder, faster. But I hadn’t gone very far when something grabbed my ankle and yanked and flipped me onto my back.
The man with the gun stood above me, pointing at me. Raul. He was staring down at me like I was a stain on the carpet. He looked very dangerous for somebody wearing only green boxers and a lot of gold chains. And then he smiled again. He squatted down beside me. I could see his mouth moving, but I couldn’t hear anything. He cocked his head, waiting for me to say something. When I didn’t, he frowned and poked my hurt shoulder with his gun.
The pain was enormous. I opened my mouth and I heard a strange, animal noise coming from far away that matched the shape of my mouth. It was a horrible, inhuman sound, but the man liked it. He poked me again, much harder, and this time he twisted the gun barrel inside my shoulder and I felt something inside where he touched it give way with a kind of snip and I made the noise again.
But Raul must have gotten tired of my noises. He stood and stared down at me with a look of complete contempt. He raised the gun and looked at me like he could make me vanish just by staring at me hard. And then he nodded and pointed the gun directly at a spot between my eyes.
And then he vanished.
Dimly and distant I felt a huge roaring percussive bang. It slapped the air in the room into a sharp jerking bump, and it was so loud that I could hear it too, just a little. It blasted out once and took Raul away and then it stopped. I lay still for a moment, in case it happened again. Before I could decide to move a new person appeared and knelt beside me and I knew who this was right away.
Deborah.
She was holding the shotgun in the crook of her arm and looking at me and moving her mouth urgently, but I still couldn’t hear. She put a hand under my shoulder and helped me sit up, still moving her mouth and looking at me with terrible concern. So I finally said, “I’m fine, Debs.” It was a strange sensation, knowing I had said something, and feeling the vibrations of it in my throat and my face, and still not actually hearing my own voice. So I added, “I can’t hear anything. The explosion.”
Debs looked at me intently a moment longer, but then she nodded. She moved her mouth in an exaggerated way and I am pretty sure she said, “Let’s go,” because she stood up and helped me stand up, too.
For a few seconds it was almost as bad as when I sat up right after the explosion. Huge and violent waves of dizzy nausea crashed through me, accompanied by a thundering pain in my head and my shoulder. But it didn’t last quite as long this time. Debs led me over to the door and I could walk okay. And oddly enough, even though everything inside me seemed to be much too loose and my legs felt tiny and far away, my brain started to work again. I saw the canvas bag beside the door and I remembered one last important thing. “Evidence,” I said. “Get rid of evidence.” Deborah shook her head and tugged at my arm, and it was the wrong arm, the one that was attached to the shoulder with the bullet in it. I made a sort of dumb spastic aaaakkh sound that I couldn’t hear and she jumped back.
The shoulder pain didn’t last. It dropped down into a kind of dull background agony. I looked at the wound. I was wearing a black shirt, of course, for nighttime stealth, so there wasn’t a lot to see other than a surprisingly small hole. But there seemed to be an awful lot of wet shirt around it. I patted it with a hand, gently, and looked. My hand was very, very wet with blood.
To be expected, of course. Gunshot wounds bleed. And when Raul had poked it the second time, I thought he might have broken a vein or something in there. It did seem like rather a lot of blood, though, and I don’t like blood. But that could wait until later, and anyway Debs wa
s tugging at my arm again. I shook her hand off. “We have to blow it up,” I said. I felt the words in my mouth without hearing them.
Deborah heard them. She shook her head and tried to pull me out the door, but I lurched away, back into the ruined cabin. “There’s too much evidence, Debs,” I said. “From the kids, from the guns, Brian’s body. It connects to you, Deborah. And to me.” She was still shaking her head, looking more scared than angry, but I knew I was right. “Have to blow it up,” I said. “Or we both go to jail. Kids all alone.” I knew I was speaking much too loud, and the words were taking too much work and they felt sort of wrong, too, as if I wasn’t quite shaping them properly.
But she clearly understood me, because she shook her head and tugged me toward the door, moving her mouth rapidly and urgently. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t hear her. “Have to blow it up,” I said in my hollow wrong-sounding unheard voice. “Have to.” I bent and picked up the canvas bag. For a moment everything spun in bright red circles. But I straightened at last. “Go,” I told her. “With the kids. I’ll be right there.”
Her mouth was still moving as I took the bag and stumbled back toward the stairs, but when I was halfway there I turned to look. Deborah was gone.
I paused for just a moment. The bomb that killed Brian had made a lot of noise, smoke, fire, but it had not made a hole in the boat big enough to sink it. I had to put this bomb in a better place. Someplace where it would take out the whole superyacht. Maybe next to the fuel tanks? But I didn’t know where they were, and I wasn’t sure I could move around until I found them. And the bag was much heavier than I remembered and I was very tired. And cold. I was suddenly feeling very cold. Why was that? It was a warm Miami night, and I didn’t think the air-conditioning could still be working. But a definite chill settled over me, all of me, and some of that bad red-tinged dizziness came back at me. I closed my eyes. It didn’t go away, so I opened my eyes again and looked at the stairway ahead. I could just put the bomb down there. It would probably do the job. And it couldn’t really be as far away as it looked. I could probably get there in just a few more steps.
I stepped. It was harder than it had been a moment ago. In fact, it was almost impossibly hard. I was so cold. And I needed to rest, just for a moment. I looked for a place to sit. None of the chairs or sofas had stayed upright in the explosion. There was still a built-in plush bench over at the wall. It seemed very far away. I couldn’t really go all that way just to sit, could I? No, of course not. But I did want to sit, and right there at my feet, there was the floor. It was still flat. I could sit there.
