Cross Current - Kling Christine - Страница 60

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The first thing I became aware of was the motion—that feeling that the deck beneath you is suddenly falling and you are falling, only your stomach has decided not to fall, and then you are rising, and your stomach is trying to relocate somewhere down in your bowels.

I moaned aloud when I tried to move. I was all twisted up and my neck was cramped and hurt like hell. As soon as I tried to move, however, I forgot all about my neck as my head started throbbing from the inside out. It felt like a cartoon character’s thumb after he’s banged it and it’s ballooned to three times its normal size. I wondered if my head was three times its normal size.

I felt a lump the size of a walnut just back from my hairline above my left temple. My hair was encrusted with dried blood.

A small hand brushed across my forehead and pushed the stray hairs out of my face. Although the room was pitch dark, I didn’t need to see her to feel her fear.

“Solange?”

“Oui," she said, pronouncing it as an inhaled gulp of air.

“They didn’t hurt you, did they?”

“No.” I felt her hand on my head again. “You hurt.” It wasn’t a question. She knew.

“I’m okay. How long have I been sleeping?” Through the ship’s deck I could feel the vibration of the engine and the sudden surge of the RPMs as a wave lifted the stem of the ship, causing the prop to spin faster. Waves would have to be at least ten feet high to do that. We were out in the Gulf Stream already.

“Long time,” she said.

It was a stupid question for me to have asked her. She had no way of measuring the time. Ten minutes alone in the dark, not knowing if I was dead or alive, would seem like an eternity. She didn’t even sound like she’d been crying. But I guess it wouldn’t have been the first time she’d ended up on a boat with a dead woman.

I felt around my surroundings and realized that I was sitting on the floor of a crewman’s cabin, my back against the bunk—probably the same bunk I had hit my head on when I fell. When I got to my feet, my legs almost gave way again from the wave of dizziness that grabbed hold of me. I reached out and placed my palms on the wall, bent my knees to the corkscrew motion of the ship, and waited to get control of my body again. When I opened my eyes and turned around to face the bunk, I wasn’t expecting to see anything. I was surprised to make out a dim light from what looked like a porthole in the hull just above the bunk. In the faint glow, I felt around the cabin to familiarize myself with the space.

The door was locked; no surprise there. There were a couple of built-in drawers under the bunk, and they were filled with men’s clothes, neatly folded. I felt under and around everywhere, but there were no shaving articles with razor blades, no pocketknives—nothing we could use as a weapon. I crawled onto the bunk, feeling for Solange, and put my face to the porthole.

The cabin we were in was on the starboard side of the ship, and in the distance, a bit off our aft quarter, I could make out the horizon with a bright glow above it. There were only a couple of places where actual building lights were visible; the lights of the city had just dipped below the horizon. The ceiling of clouds hung very low, and it looked like it might be raining out there. If we were headed for Bimini, that would put us on a southeast heading and that would be the North Miami skyline I was looking at. Judging from the brightness of the skyglow, we were probably ten miles offshore, about fifteen miles out of Lauderdale.

“I guess I really was out a long time, wasn’t I?” I said as I reached for Solange and pulled her over onto my lap. I remembered the rough way Malheur had been treating her, and I was terrified to think of what he could have done to her while I was unconscious. “You’re sure no one hurt you?” Although I couldn’t see her in the dark, I felt her nod. “Boy, have I ever gotten us into a mess.” I pushed her away for a minute, tried to see her in the dark. “How’d you get here, anyway? I suppose you hid on Rusty’s boat when I went out to the Jeep?”

Again I felt her nod.

There was something else I wanted to ask her, but I wasn’t sure her English would be good enough, or even if I was ready to hear the answer. “Did you understand what Capitaine and that other man were saying in Creole?”

Her head bobbed up and down.

“Can you tell me?”

She didn’t answer right away. “He say Bwon Samedi going to take you over.”

I’d heard the phrase before, I just couldn’t remember what it meant. “What is Bwon Samedi?”

“He is a lwa. Capitaine say when we get to the island, Bwon Samedi, he going to take you over.”

After she said this, she began to cry softly. I had no idea what it meant to her, the phrase “take you over,” but it was obvious she thought it was pretty bad.

“Okay, kiddo, listen. I’m not going to let the Capitaine or this Samedi guy or anybody else hurt us. I’m going to figure out a way to get us out of this mess. Okay?” I gave her a quick tight hug, and she squeezed back so hard I thought my pounding head would explode. “I reckon this little ship does about ten knots.” It didn’t matter that she didn’t understand ninety percent of what I was saying, I had to talk out loud to convince myself, since it was wildly improbable that I was going to come up with any sort of workable plan. “It’s roughly fifty miles across to Bimini, not taking the Gulf Stream into consideration.” I reached for my wrist to illuminate my watch, but it wasn’t there. I’d forgotten that I’d given it to Pit. “So let’s figure this out. We got to the restaurant around seven. The Bimini Express probably left after eight, and it’s about ten now. I’d say, given this weather, we should get there in about four hours, maybe a little more. That will be two a.m. There’s really nothing we can do now. The best thing for us is to try to get some sleep.”

There were bedclothes on the bunk, and though the room was hot and stuffy, I pulled back the sheet and tucked Solange in, kissing her lightly on the forehead as my mother used to do to me. I lay down next to her on top of the covers, though I didn’t intend to sleep. I thought I might have a concussion, and I couldn’t remember whether it was good or bad to sleep. The fact that I couldn’t remember didn’t make me feel so great about the health of my head.

“Solange ...” I spoke softly in the darkness, not sure she was even still awake. “What happened on the big boat with Erzulie?”

She didn’t speak right away. I’d about given up when she whispered, “Le Capitaine and Erzulie fight.”

“Why?”

“Erzulie mambo, le Capitaine bokor."

“Oh, she was a mambo. Okay, I see. She didn’t like what was happening on board the boat. She challenged him.”

I heard the covers rustle as she pushed herself up to a sitting position. I could barely make her out in the thick darkness. “Le Capitaine make—” I felt her hand give me a soft judo chop to the side of the head. It didn’t help the pounding inside, but I knew what she was trying to say.

“The captain hit her in the head with a machete.”

“Oui.”

“So how did you both get in that boat?”

“Le Capitaine go inside. People put Erzulie in boat.”

“The other people on board the Miss Agnes put her into the boat’s tender to save her from the captain?”

"Oui.”

“And she was still alive?”

"Oui."

“And you, how did you get into the boat?”

“Erzulie say come. People make me go.”

She lay back down and rolled onto her side, and her breathing started to deepen its rhythm.

“Miss?”

I thought she had fallen asleep, and her whispered voice surprised me. “Yes?”

“Don’t cross over.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t cross over,” she repeated.

“Solange, it’s not like we have a whole lot of choice. If you mean the Gulf Stream, this boat is crossing the current, and we’ve got to go where the boat goes.”

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