Cross Current - Kling Christine - Страница 67

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Joe reached his arms out for Solange, and she buried her sobbing face in my neck. He handed the line to Gil, who shoved his handgun under his belt at the small of his back, then pulled our boat in tight alongside theirs. I saw the Haitian man tying us together at the stem as well.

“Go to hell, D’Angelo,” I said. Gil stood back behind Joe, and his eyes flashed at me. He was trying to tell me not to push him, but I wasn’t going to give Joe the satisfaction of watching us just climb into his big ocean racer.

Joe laughed even louder that time. “Hell? Isn’t that where all us smugglers go? Like Red?”

I turned and opened my mouth, started to speak, when over Joe’s shoulder I saw Gil, frantically shaking his head.

Then Joe was right there, holding his arms out in my face.

“Hand her to me, Seychelle.”

“I don’t get it. She’s your daughter? And you left her in Port-au-Prince all these years as a restavek?”

Joe turned to the Haitian and pointed at the sinking boat. The man fired several rounds into the hull, only hurrying along the obvious.

“I said give her to me,” Joe said. He had his hands on her shoulders, yet she held tight to me, screaming as he pulled at her. “Seychelle, now.”

He was hurting her. “What do you want with her?” I yelled at him. “You left her once. Leave her again.” I struggled to hold on to the child, the water sloshing around my knees. I was sinking down, farther from his grasp, but he wasn’t letting go.

“No,” he shouted, and then he enunciated very clearly: “She belongs to me.”

In the end, he was stronger, and she was gone, yanked out of my arms, crying like a lost child, only she was in the arms of her father. I scrambled over the gunwale and across the upholstered white vinyl on the racer’s transom.

“I go wherever she goes, Joe.”

Gil and the Haitian untied the lines, and Rusty’s boat disappeared in a vortex of bubbles.

Joe turned away from the sight and looked at me with a half smile, then looked at Gil. “Shoot her,” he said.

Solange began kicking and screaming even louder as Joe tried to haul her toward the companionway leading to the cabin below decks.

Joe shook her tiny body hard. “Shut up,” he yelled. Solange sobbed, even as her head flopped on her shoulders as he bounced her body back and forth. Then he turned to Gil, who was standing next to me in the stem, head lowered, eyes fixed on the gun in his hand. Joe yelled, “I said shoot her.” Gil looked up, and his handlebar mustache was twitching. “Boss, let’s just leave her out here.”

“Son of a bitch,” Joe said, and nodded at the Haitian man, who had been watching the scene with a perplexed look. “Take this kid below and shut her up.” He handed the bawling child to the slender man, and the two disappeared below. Joe turned back to Gil. “When I tell you to do something, Gilbert Lynch, you damn well better do it.”

I watched Solange disappear into the cabin, and all I could think of was that I hadn’t said good-bye.

Gil said, “Just let her get in a raft. She probably won’t make it. Boss, she’s Red’s kid.”

“I don’t give a fuck whose kid she is.”

“Cartagena, Joe. Remember? I owe him.”

“You crazy son of a bitch. The only person you owe a damn bit of loyalty to is me. I own you. You’d be rotting in some federal cell right now if it weren’t for me. And now when I tell you to do something, you’re talking back to me about some piddly-ass tugboat captain?”

Gil was still holding the gun, but it was lowered, hanging at his side now. He turned to me. “Look, I’d been drinking and whoring down there. On my way back to the boat, a bunch of locals tried to rob me. They knifed me in the gut, left me for dead. Your daddy found me, woke up some local doc, saved my life.”

“Shut up, Gil,” Joe said, “nobody cares about that old story. It’s all a fabrication from that burnt-out brain of yours.”

Gil continued as though he hadn’t heard Joe. “I wanted to send your daddy back to the States—didn’t want him involved, but it turned out I’d cut one of them Colombians, too, and the Federales come looking for me. Joe told the Federales a pack of lies, and we sailed out of there that night, straight shot back to Florida. We never told Red what was under the floorboards. Red was such a straight shooter, he woulda turned hisself in if he knew—and us in the process.”

“Gil, shut your mouth and take care of business.”

Gil turned from me and raised the gun, his hand shaking, pointing it at Joe. “I ain’t gonna shoot her, Joe,” he said.

“Shit. First I lose Malheur, and you try to tell me he fell off the balcony, busted his head.” Joe’s voice remained steady, even calming, as though he were talking about taking out the trash.

Gil’s mustache started to twitch again, and his lips were bulging over his teeth, the hand holding the gun shaking wildly.

“And now you’re turning on me. Telling drug-induced lies about something that never even took place. I think you’ve finally gone off the deep end, Gil.”

When Joe made his move, it happened so fast, I didn’t realize what had gone down until I heard the shot. Joe had spun around, come up alongside Gil, and taken the gun from his hand. Then he’d stepped back in front of Gil, raised it to the man’s forehead, and fired. A spray of red spewed across the stern cushions seconds before Gil’s body fell backward onto the vinyl.

Joe squatted, lifted the man’s legs, and said, “The very deep end.” He slid the body into the water, then rubbed his hands on his pants. “Shoulda done that years ago,” he said, standing and surveying the blood-spattered stem. “Shit, what a mess. Sullivan, get a bucket out of that deck box and clean up my boat.”

A part of me wanted to scream and give in to the horror of what I’d just witnessed, but at the same time I felt numb to it. This whole thing couldn’t really be happening. I wasn’t really about to die.

I found the bucket and a scrub brush and dipped the bucket full of seawater. As I poured the water over the racing boat’s padded stem, I watched the red turn pink when the blood mixed with the sea. My arm was moving across the plastic, but I wasn’t aware of being in charge of that arm. It was as though I were watching someone else scrub away the streaks of Gil’s blood.

They had chased us out here, and now both Malheur and Gil were dead—and all for this little girl, Joe’s daughter. I remembered him shaking Solange, her head bouncing around on her shoulders. I had to know. “Joe, what do you really want with her?”

He waved the gun, motioning me to keep working while he sat down on the helmsman’s seat. “You’re as much of a pain in the ass as your old man was,” he said. “Maybe more. At least Red knew when to look the other way. Didn’t go butting into other people’s business, trying to save the fucking world.”

With the barrel of the gun, he pointed at a spot I’d missed. “The world’s a fucked-up place, Sullivan,” he continued, “and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. This was all supposed to be so simple. All I asked Malheur to do was to bring this kid into the States on one of our boats. I mean, shit, this is what we do for a living. No big deal, right? Ninety percent of our runs slip straight through, no problems. It’s not like I was gonna go to the embassy and claim the little shit and do the paperwork to try to get her in legally. Right, and wait years? Then some bitch on the boat gets Malheur pissed, he whacks her in the head, and when he’s not looking, the fuckin’ Haitians stick the two of them, my kid and the bitch, in their tender. Malheur doesn’t even realize the kid’s gone until the boat is off Hillsboro, ready to go in. He looks around for the dinghy and the kid—both are gone.” Joe spread his hands wide, still holding Gil’s gun. “I got nothing but fuck-ups working for me.”

I dropped the bucket into the ocean and pulled up another load of clean seawater, then sloshed it across the vinyl. I wanted to keep him talking, but I also really wanted to understand the how and the why of all this business. “Joe, she’s your daughter.”

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