“Must be the maid’s day off,” Clete said.
Shondell’s face looked maniacal. “Secure the yacht,” he said to Bell.
“We’re at sea, sir,” Bell said. “We’re secured already.”
“Get Adonis Balangie down here.”
“Yes, sir. Should I tell him about this?”
“I told you to get him down here. So go do it.”
Shondell’s rage and indignation were feigned. I’ve seen fear in men’s faces when the 105s were coming in short, and I’ve seen the desperation in the eyes of men who knew the dust-off wasn’t coming and the Great Shade was about to pass over their faces; but I had never seen terror greater than I saw in Shondell’s eyes during that moment. It was my belief then, and my belief now, that he saw the future and was terrified and would have traded his soul to avoid it.
Unfortunately for him, he had probably bartered away his soul many years ago.
Bell took us back to our compartment. He didn’t turn out the light. “This doesn’t change anything. You guys know that, don’t you?”
Surprisingly, Carroll LeBlanc spoke up. “Adonis Balangie wanted to cut us a break. I want to take him up on it. I can’t go through this shit again.”
“What break?” Bell said.
“A break. What do you care?” Carroll said. “Show some mercy.”
Bell closed and locked down the hatch.
“What are you doing, Carroll?” I said.
“You said we needed a weapon,” he replied.
Fifteen minutes later, Adonis opened the hatch and stepped into the compartment. One of the men in silver overalls stayed outside. Adonis was wearing a light overcoat, damp with sea spray. “What’s this about a break?”
Clete and I lowered our heads. Our hands were still bound behind us.
“You said you’d shoot us up,” Carroll said. “I got no illusions. I’d like to take you up on that.”
“You’re not out for the Medal of Honor?” Adonis said.
“Don’t make fun of the guy, Adonis,” I said.
He reached into his coat pocket and removed the tin box that contained the syringe and the ampoules of morphine.
“Before you give him that, can you answer a question?” I said.
“What’s the question?”
“I don’t get this stuff about a black sail and a white sail.”
“If this deal is worked out and most of what we own is transferred to a bank in Malta, Isolde will be on her way to us in a boat with white sails. If not, the sails will be black.”
“Why not use a radio?” Clete said.
“Because other people can pull the transmission out of the air,” Adonis said. “Because Mark Shondell likes to pretend he’s a man for the ages.”
Clete’s green eyes were half-lidded, his shoulders humped; he resembled a contemporary Quasimodo brought down from the bell tower. But as always, Clete’s externals were misleading, his intelligence and complexity silently at work in a gargantuan body he had spent a lifetime abusing with weed, pills, cigarettes, trough-loads of deep-fried food, and oceans of booze. Put more simply, Clete Purcel was the human equivalent of an M-1 tank plowing through a stucco building.
I could see his upper arms expanding like a firehose swelling with pressurized water. In the corner of my eye, I saw him twisting the ligatures on his wrists, working them over the heels of his hands, ignoring the broken vessels and torn flesh, blood slipping off the ends of his fingers, all of this with his eyes straight ahead, like a brain-dead man gazing at empty space.
Suddenly, his hands were free. He clamped one on Adonis’s mouth and the other on the back of his neck and drove his skull into the bulkhead, then dropped him to the deck as though he were a rag doll. He opened the tin box and removed the syringe. It was already loaded.
“Hey, guy out there!” he called through the hatchway. “Balangie is having a seizure! Get him out of here! We got enough problems!”
The man in overalls came through the hatch. “Seizure?”
Clete hooked his arm under the man’s chin and peeled it back, then jabbed the needle into the carotid and plunged down the piston with his thumb. “How you like it, shit breath?”
The man’s mouth fell open and his eyes rolled. Clete eased him to the deck and went through his pockets. He found a box cutter but no firearm. He sliced the ligatures on my wrists, then Carroll’s.
“We’ve got to get a gun,” he said.
I went through Adonis’s pockets while Clete stood by the hatchway. “Nothing,” I said.
“Got any idea what time of day it is?” Clete said.
“No,” I said.
Clete chewed his lip. “You call it, Streak.”
“When we were up the passageway, I thought I could feel the screws behind us,” I said. “If there’s an armory, it’s probably aft.”
“What about these two guys?” he said.
“What about them?” I said.
“What if they wake up?”
I knew what he was thinking. “Lock them in and leave them alone.”
“Okie-dokie, big mon,” he replied. “How you feeling, LeBlanc?”
“No matter how this comes out, I think you’re a righteous dude, Purcel,” he said.
“Don’t tell anybody,” Clete said.
I suspected we were two decks down. We walked in the direction opposite the torture compartment and could hear the screws turning louder and louder under the hull. We found no armory, only a refrigerator unit and two compartments full of canned goods and a ladder at the end of the passageway. I went up first. As I got to the top, I saw a man twenty yards away, his back to me. He was dressed like a ship’s officer and seemed to be guarding the entrance to a cabin. I ducked down below the level of the deck.
What? Clete mouthed.
Bogey at twelve o’clock, I answered.
He hooked his hand in the back of my belt and tugged gently, then squeezed past me up the ladder, the syringe clenched in his right hand. He paused briefly, then sprang down the passageway, garroted the sentinel, and jabbed him in the throat with the needle. I motioned for Carroll to follow me.
Clete opened the hatch to the cabin the ship’s officer had been guarding. Father Julian was sitting on one bunk and Leslie Rosenberg on another. Elizabeth lay on a third. The word “angelic” would probably apply to Elizabeth, with her blue eyes and golden hair, but I don’t like to think in those terms. We dragged the unconscious sentinel inside the cabin and closed the hatch behind him.
“Y’all doin’ all right?” I said.
“What the fuck does it look like?” Leslie said.
“You know how to say it, Leslie,” I replied. “How about you, Julian?”
“I think Leslie put it well,” he replied. The purple and yellow bruises and lesions and burns patterned on his face by Delmer Pickins were still there, but he actually managed to laugh. I take back my comment about the use of words such as “angelic.” I think there are people who have auras that could light the darkest dungeon on earth.
“No one saw y’all kidnapped?” I said. “You didn’t get a message out?”
“You think we’d be here now?” Leslie said.
“Bingo!” Carroll said. He was squatted down next to the ship’s officer. He held up a .25-caliber semi-auto, then eased back the slide to confirm that a round was in the chamber. He felt in the officer’s other coat pocket and found two spare magazines, both loaded.
“How many people are on board?” Clete said.
“We were blindfolded,” Leslie said.