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Lucinda was standing above the two deckhands, her weapon moving back and forth between them while she worked her cuffs off her belt. I took them from her hand, hooked up one man, pulled his arm through a rail on the gate to the steps, then snipped the loose cuff on the second man's wrist.
'Where's the old-timer?' I said.
One man was bald and wore a chin beard; the other had an empty eye socket that was puckered and sealed shut as though it had been touched with a hot instrument. The bald man twisted his head and looked indifferently toward the south, where lightning was pulsating amid muted thunder on the horizon.
'Look at me when I talk to you,' I said. 'Where's the old man?'
He slowly turned his head and let his eyes drift over both me and Lucinda.
'Fuck you, nigger lover,' he said.
Then I heard Clete's weight shift above me and looked up just as he threw the shotgun against his shoulder and aimed at a man in a canvas coat and rain hood who stood in silhouette by the stern with a blue-black automatic in his hand.
Clete fired twice. Part of the double-ought buckshot razored lines of paint off the bulkhead like dry confetti, then the man in the canvas coat was knocked backwards as though he had been jerked by an invisible cable wrapped around his chest.
Clete ejected the spent easing onto the deck, pumped a fresh round into the chamber, then pressed two more shells into the magazine with his thumb.
'Three down,' he said. 'Streak, you and Lucinda go around the bow. I'll come up the other side. Watch the bridge. Don't let 'em get behind you.'
He didn't wait for an answer. He moved toward the stern, bearlike, his shotgun back at port arms, his scalp showing white in the wind, his utilities stiff with salt.
Lucinda glanced down at the cabin cruiser, which was rolling in the swells while Zoot kept gunning the engines to keep the stern from swinging into the salvage ship's hull.
'He's all right,' I said. 'My dad used to always say, "Don't ever treat brave people as less than what they are."'
'Cover your own ass,' she said.
We moved toward the bow. I could feel the deck vibrating under me from the machinery roaring on the other side of the ship. I paused at the steps that led onto the pilothouse, worked my way up them until I could see inside, then moved quickly through the open hatch.
I looked at the shape in the corner and lowered my rifle. I heard Lucinda behind me.
'Oh God,' she said.
'Check the starboard side,' I said, and knelt next to Brother Oswald. He lay on top of an oil-grimed tarp, his poached, round face filled with the empty, stunned, disbelieving expression that I had seen once in the faces of villagers who had been killed by airbursts in a rice field.
A switchblade knife, a made-in-Korea gut-ripper that you can buy for five dollars in Laredo, had been driven to the hilt just above his right lung. He had pressed a rag around the wound, and the rag had become sodden and congealed as though it had been dipped in red paint. I put my ear to his mouth and felt his breath touch my skin.
'We're going to medevac you out of here, partner,' I said. 'You hear me? We're going to secure the ship, then have you on a chopper in no time.'
His tongue stuck to his mouth when he tried to speak. I leaned down close to his face again. His breath smelled like dried flowers.
'… after the wrong one,' he whispered.
'I don't understand,' I said.
'Hit's the woman… She can speak in tongues… I heard her talk on the radio…'
'Who did this to you, Reverend?'
His lips moved, but no sound came out. His pale eyes looked like they were drowning.
'I can't see anybody on the starboard side,' Lucinda said.
I raised Brother Oswald's head with my palm, bunched up the tarp like a pillow, then turned his head sideways so his mouth could drain. I picked up the AR-15. The plastic stock felt cold and light and smooth in my hands.
'You know how to get the Coast Guard on the radio?' I said to Lucinda.
