I took over a minute to open the door, letting the pressure from my hand increase a little at a time until it had swung out. I heard the sound again, sharper and briefer and louder.
She was twisted on the mattress, her legs drawn up almost fetal, the thin sheet tangled around her. She slept topless, wearing shorts, and a bandanna was tied around her neck, loose, as if it had slipped from her forehead. Her expression was pained.
Miata trotted over to where I was standing, pressed the side of his face to my thigh.
Her breath was ragged, deep nightmare breathing, and she made another short cry, then twisted again, her leg straightening suddenly as if kicking in her dream. Her breathing quickened, and Miata turned his head to look her way. She was waking up, would break the surface in a few seconds. I thought about trying to retreat, to keep her from seeing me. I wished I hadn't come through the door, regretted switching on a light, and I wondered what I had thought I would find when I had.
She stopped moving, her breathing calmer. In the ambient light, I saw her eyes open. Her legs straightened, and she sat up. We stared at one another for several seconds.
She hooked the bandanna at her neck with her thumbs, lifted it up over her chin, fitted it back into her mouth. Then she put her head back on the pillow and shut her eyes again.
I closed the door, went back through the bathroom, and climbed into my own bed.
She didn't offer and I didn't ask.
The next day was marked for rest, and after yoga and a swim, we rode the motorcycle into Port Elizabeth late in the morning. We did some general grocery shopping at the S W Supermarket and then restocked on fruits and veggies at the produce market. We hit a couple of the shops along the shoreline walkway, passing the windows filled with batik and silk-screened clothing, model boats, and the like, getting some extra supplies. We also picked up my new identities, false papers. Alena had informed me that I would need false papers in case we had to move quickly, and I had agreed without argument; I hadn't needed a passport to get this far, but neither of us knew when or how we'd be leaving.
She knew the right people, of course, and the same day I'd gone to the optometrist to be fitted for contacts, we'd met with a couple who owned a yacht named The Lutra. They were a man and a woman in their early thirties, with the look of healthy Euro-trash, and knew Alena as Giselle Roux. In exchange for fifty thousand dollars in cash, they were more than delighted to take the passport-sized photographs of me and to promise a speedy return.
Today, almost eight weeks later, The Lutra was back in the harbor. I parked the motorcycle at the edge of the Shoreline Road, near the Bequia Marina, thinking we'd head aboard together, but Alena told me to wait while she headed down the pier. Scattered vendors were working on the beach, selling T-shirts and handmade dolls. The storm had left humidity in the air, but the heat, still in the high seventies, had already evaporated most every puddle. What little tourist season there was to Bequia seemed to have ended, though there were a couple of other yachts at anchor, mostly manned by European Old Money dilettantes who couldn't make landfall in Mustique, to the south. A couple kids were splashing in the waves.
If we were being surveilled, it was happening from a distance and via optics, or perhaps from a more direct concealment. But in watching the movement of those people around me, there was nothing to give me alarm. One of the results of my becoming more attuned to my own movement and carriage was that I could now more easily see it in others, who had good posture, who carried their weight in their hips and pelvis or in their back or at their knees.
Alena came off the boat and back down the pier, a brown envelope tucked under her arm. She handed the envelope to me to hold while we did our shopping. I kept my eyes on the crowd as she picked fruit, bantering with the peddlers in the French-English patois that served as Bequia's unofficial language. She took almost fifteen minutes to fill the two bags we'd brought.
A uniformed policeman from the station by the ferry dock was examining the motorcycle as we made our way back to it, though he moved away from it as we approached, giving us a smile and a wave of his hand. We smiled and waved back, and pretended to be sorting the contents of the two bags until he was out of sight. Then I got down on my haunches and gave the bike a good looking-over while Alena covered my back, watching our surroundings.
"Nothing," I said.
"Check the oil cap."
"I did. Nothing."
I straightened up and started the bike without climbing aboard, and the engine ran just as it had, and so I swung my leg over and got the stand up. Alena climbed on the back, and I pulled out, heading north.
"You're going the wrong way on purpose?" she asked in my ear.
I nodded, checking the mirrors and accelerating. The roads weren't in the best shape for high-speed anything, and I knew I was taking it a little fast, but I figured it was an effective way of flushing any possible tails. The road ran along the edge of the island, uphill, with the ocean on our right. After putting a couple of miles between us and Port Elizabeth, I took a turn and slowed down, taking us onto a dirt track that cut through a lemon grove. Behind me, Alena made an approving noise. We'd taken the route before, but only on foot while running.
The track forked and I turned us south, following it another quarter of a mile before breaking direction and cutting down a hillside to the road that ran along the west side of the island. When I got to the bottom I put in the clutch and stopped, craning my head to look back and around.
There was a lens flare from the trees, sunlight hitting glass.
"Fuck," I said.
"We should double back, try to flank him."
I gave it a couple seconds of thought before I said, "If it's him and he's trying to kill you, the worst thing we can do is split up here out in the open."
"If it's him."
"We're going back to the house." I put the bike into gear and opened the throttle, heading down the road. The acceleration was sudden enough that she tightened her grip around my waist, and I felt her lean back.
"Anything?" I asked.
"Nothing. No one following." She had to shout, and then I felt her turn, put her mouth closer to my ear. "Could have been a false alarm. Did you see anyone in Port Elizabeth?"
"Aside from the cop, no one suspicious."
"That was just your paranoia, the cop was honest. He's been here since before I arrived."
"You could have told me that," I said.
"I wanted for you to feel useful."
I nodded and put on more speed, making for the house, hoping that she was right, that it was just my paranoia.
Miata greeted us when we got back, and Alena took the bags into the kitchen while I headed to the basement to check the monitors and the laptop. No breaches had been recorded anywhere, and everything on the system was still running as it had been designed to. Electronic assurance notwithstanding, I took a pair of binoculars and headed upstairs to the veranda, where I spent the next half an hour surveying the surrounding terrain all along the hillside and out onto the water.
I had just finished the full three hundred and sixty degrees when I felt her at my elbow. She took the binoculars from me without comment, handing over the envelope we'd collected in Port Elizabeth. While she made her own survey of the area, I moved back inside to the bed, and dumped the contents.
There were three complete sets of papers, two U.S. and one Canadian. All gave me a driver's license, a passport, and various other sundry bits of identity and detail – library cards, Social Security cards for the U.S. identities. The Canadian I.D. also included a membership card in the Ducatti Rider Program, and I noted that all of the licenses had motorcycle endorsements. The U.S. papers contained membership cards to Blockbuster Video.