I read many a stern. Most were written in Spanish, although a few were in English. None said La Bonita.
I continued on to the second floating pier. Sanchez, I saw, was still working his way down the pier closest to his side. Slacker. Water slapped the floating bridge, which swayed under my feet and created a general state of nausea in my stomach. Either that or I had eaten a bad batch of corn chips and salsa.
I continued on, pushing through the nausea and the seagull crap, dismissing boat after boat until a sound reached me.
I paused, listening hard.
There it was again.
The whining of a dog. Stray dogs in Mexico are nothing new. Stray dogs whining several hundred feet out on a pier was something else entirely.
I picked up my pace, following the sound. And the closer I got to it, the more emphatic the whining got. Someone shouted at the dog and the whining briefly stopped.
Now I was running, feet pounding on the wobbling pier, which juked and jived with each step. My nausea was long forgotten. The pain in my bad leg was alarming. On the pier next to me, in my peripheral vision, I saw Sanchez turn toward me. Peripheral because I had to keep my eyes focused on the narrow pier. Wouldn’t do to take a wrong step and dive into the filthy muck. Without looking at him, I waved him over. Emphatically.
He must have gotten the hint because he disappeared out of my vision. I picked up my pace.
And there it was, just a few feet away. Son-of-a-bitch.
It had to be it. The length and general size felt right, and the name on the stern said it all. La Bonita.
The whining turned to yelping.
Another shout, followed by the stomping of feet going up a wooden flight of stairs. The boat shook with each step. I leaped from the pier, over the bulwark and landed awkwardly on the deck, my bad leg nearly giving out.
And what I found there, I would never forget.
Ever.
Chapter Twenty-nine
J. R. Rain
Hail Mary
A man appeared from the lower cabin.
The man, who hadn’t looked very happy to start with, blinked once. His mouth dropped open. He looked utterly perplexed to see a massive Caucasian standing in his boat. His perplexity might have been comical if he hadn’t been holding a very long carving knife.
I couldn’t tell if he was the same guy who’d sported the neat part down the center of his head-since this guy’s hair was in current disarray-but if I was a betting man, I would bet that he was.
Just as his shock turned to rage, he launched himself out of the lower cabin, bringing the knife up in a gutting motion. Unlike the helpless sharks he was used to carving up, I could fight back.
And I wasn’t so helpless.
Before the knife got very far, my fist flashed through the small space between us and hit him under his left eye. His head snapped back. His feet flew out from under him. Where the knife went, I didn’t know. One moment he was attacking me and the next, he was tumbling back down the stairs from whence he came.
I followed him down, jumping down just behind him. The interior cabin was surprisingly big and roomy enough even for me. But that didn’t mean the place wasn’t trashed. It was. Disgustingly so. Cots lined one wall. The opposite had a small but filthy futon. A TV was in one corner. Trash was everywhere. Wadded-up, greasy tinfoils. Wadded up, greasy burger wrappers. Wadded up paper bags. Ironically, a trash can-apparently bolted to the floor-stood empty nearby. Somebody around here was a shitty shot.
Still lying in the center of the floor, bleeding profusely from a humdinger of a cut under his eye, was a Grade-A asshole. Beyond, a woman peeked out at me from behind a cabin door. I motioned for her to get back into the room and she did, slamming the door shut.
It was about then that Sanchez appeared behind me, breathing hard. He ducked his head into the cabin, saw the scene, and leaped down smoothly.
“ Is he the only one?” he asked, pointing to the dirt bag on the floor.
“ A woman’s in there,” I said, pointing.
“ That’s it?”
“ Far as I know. Boat isn’t that big.”
Sanchez nodded once. “I’ll look around.”
As Sanchez ducked away, the man lying on the floor began waking up. The boat rocked as Sanchez moved around above deck. The man on the floor groaned and sat up on an elbow.
“ Hola, motherfucker,” I said. “You speak English?”
The man said nothing. His eyes still looked a little crossed. His hands, I saw, were crisscrossed with scars. Fishing lines? Shark bites? Zipper malfunctions?
Sanchez appeared again.
“ Clean,” he said. “Except…”
My friend looked away and pressed his teeth together. His jawline rippled.
“ Except what?”
“ I think you should see this.” He didn’t look at me.
I reached down and grabbed the guy by the shoulders and pulled him up to his feet. He was bigger than I realized, easily over six feet. Paunchy around the middle. Muscular shoulders. He came willingly enough but there was still some fight in him. I shoved him in front of me, up the stairs, where Sanchez briefly took over, grabbing him from me.
On the deck, Sanchez pointed to what had once been covered under a tarp. Now one corner of the tarp was pulled up.
Something with bright, sad eyes was watching me from inside.
Chapter Thirty
Watching me…and whimpering.
I knew it was there. I had heard it, after all. But seeing the little guy inside the cage, watching me, was a different story altogether.
With Sanchez holding the shark hunter back, I slowly approached the cage. Once there, I knelt down, took one corner of the tarp…steeled myself…and lifted.
There wasn’t much light in this godforsaken place, but there was enough for me to see the scruffy dog inside. It was a mutt through and through. Curly, entangled hair. Eye goop caked from the corner of its eyes all the way down its muzzle.
Its muzzle. Oh, sweet Jesus.
I leaned down closer toward the dog, and as I did so, the man behind me made a move, but Sanchez slammed him hard back against the cabin wall.
The dog. Something was gleaming from his muzzle. Something metallic and curved and reddish. Then again, my eyes have always played tricks on me, at least when it came to color.
But the smell that wafted up to me was unmistakable.
The rotten fish was a given. Hell, the whole damn marina smelled like rotten fish. No, what I was smelling now was blood. Fresh blood. Coppery, sharp, pungent.
I pulled the tarp all the way off. The mangy mutt shrank back. Or tried to. Something was wrong with his little paws. Something clank and even seemed to catch on the cage. Not its nails. No. Again, something metal. I was sure of it.
The shark hunter continued to struggle with Sanchez, who promptly slammed him once more against the cabin’s exterior. This time, the entire boat shuddered with the impact. Water slapped the hull. I heard the woman crying from below deck.
The mangy dog, which probably weighed about thirty pounds, shrank down into a small, tangled ball of fur. It shook violently. Its shaking vibrated down through the wooden deck. The metal cage shook, as well.
I moved in closer. “It’s okay, boy.”
Now I could smell the urine and see the piles of crap littering the cage. Much of the crap looked like diarrhea.
Where the dog had once been standing were fresh paw prints. Bloody paw prints, and now I could clearly see why. Massive, rusted hooks protruded from its front paws. It made walking or standing for the creature not only torturous but nearly impossible. It huddled low, shaking uncontrollably, alternately whining and growling.
There was, of course, another hook. And this was the one that threw me into a blind rage. Another hook, as big or bigger than the ones in its front paws, protruded through its upper lip, hanging down like a metallic mustache. The world’s sickest joke.