“We wanted to make sure you got a look at these dead guys first,” Pang said.
Tori made a face, eyes wide. “Gee, thanks.”
No one so much as smiled.
“Let’s go, then,” Gabe said.
Without another word, Pang and Kevonne stepped into the trees, trampling more sea grass themselves. Tori followed, with the captain coming last. When she looked back she saw Gabe glancing around, taking in their surroundings, eyes narrowed. He seemed to be searching for some indication as to what had happened here. Tori ignored him after that, focused on the sailors in front of her. If something in their surroundings was odd or out of place, she wouldn’t notice it unless it was ridiculously hard to miss.
Like the two dead men crumpled on the ground amidst their own blood, for instance.
“Oh,” Tori said, more a sound than a word. She covered her mouth and stepped to one side to let Gabe pass by. Instead, he came to a stop right next to her, eight or nine feet from the dead men.
One of them had been heavyset and bald, with tattoos on his back and arms, and snaking up one side of his neck into a serpentine design over his left ear. He had no shirt, and his copper-hued skin was flecked with dark spots of dry blood. The other corpse belonged to a man short and thin enough to have been a thirteen-year-old boy. Only the sagging of his skin and the roughness of his hands gave away his age. They couldn’t tell anything by his features, because he had no face to speak of.
The little man still held a pistol in his right hand. His heavyset shipmate must have dropped his own gun, for it lay in the brush a foot from his left hand, which was open, palm up, though in death the fingers had curled in like the legs of a crab. They had been dead no more than two days, but already their remains had begun to stink.
Tori looked away.
“These weren’t suicides,” she said quietly. “Not really.”
“What?” Kevonne asked. “You think someone set it up to look that way, like in some cop show, out here on this island in the middle of goddamn nowhere?”
“She’s right,” Gabe said.
Tori glanced at him, saw him pointing at the dead men, but didn’t look herself. She had seen enough.
“Same end result, though,” the captain said. “They must have counted to three or something, then shot each other in the face. Either way, they were set on dying.”
Pang cleared his throat, drawing Tori’s attention. He was nodding. “Okay,” he said, “but why? They didn’t even hold out for a rescue? Couple of wrecks we’ve seen still had lifeboats on ’em, but these dudes didn’t even try to get to them.”
Tori thought about the skulls she and Gabe had seen rolling in the surf in the hidden grotto. She glanced at the captain and saw from his eyes that he must have been thinking the same thing.
“Maybe they were saving each other from something worse than getting shot,” she said.
Kevonne swore. Pang whistled and took off his sunglasses, studying the bodies more closely. Wide-eyed denial was in both their faces.
“Come on, now,” Kevonne said. “Don’t start shit like that. What are you even talking about?”
Pang ran both hands through his hair, glasses dangling from the fingers of his right. “Save the last two bullets for us.”
Gabe crouched and picked up the pistol the tattooed corpse had dropped. He racked the slide, checked the magazine, and popped it back in before he stood.
“They didn’t wait for the last two bullets,” he said. “These guys were in a hurry.” The captain clicked on the safety and slid the gun into his waistband, then gestured to the other pistol, still clutched in the hand of the tiny dead man. “Pang, take that one.”
Pang hesitated, gaze shifting all around, so much fear in his eyes that Tori was glad when he slid his glasses back on. He smiled nervously, but now that she knew the smiles were a mask, looking at him made a little trickle of dread run down the back of her neck.
“I’d rather not, Captain.”
Kevonne swore, bent down, and pulled the other pistol out of the dead man’s hand. The fingers were stiff enough to resist, but Kevonne twisted the gun until it came free. He followed Gabe’s lead, checking the clip, then putting on the safety, but he didn’t bother putting the gun away.
“Can we get the hell away from the dead guys now?” he asked.
Gabe took one more look at the corpses, then nodded. Tori let out a sigh of relief and started back through the trees, leading the way to the beach. The others followed her, but by the time she reached the sand she was nearly running. When she hit the beach, she had expected some of her anxiety to abate, but it did not fade at all. Her pulse throbbed in her ears and she breathed evenly, getting control of herself as best she could. Offshore, a bit more of the sunken ships was visible — the tide had started to go down. Above their heads, the sun had reached, or perhaps passed, its apex.
Tori kept walking, and the guys followed her.
Gabe grabbed his radio off his belt. “Chief, you read me?” he asked.
In a soft whisper of static, Boggs’s voice came back. “I’m here.”
“Any luck?”
“Still checking caves.”
“Come out to the beach, pretty much right opposite the cove where we came in. We’ve got tracks. Should be able to narrow down the search.”
“On the way.”
Tori, Gabe, Kevonne, and Pang waited, adding their own footprints to the ones the crew of the Mariposa had left behind. They talked about trying to go into the trees to meet Boggs and the others halfway, but the captain shut them down. The last thing they needed to do was waste their time wandering around the island looking for one another.
Perhaps fifteen minutes passed before they heard someone approaching, and moments later, Bone emerged from among the trees. He had a thin scratch on his face from a sharp branch or thorn, and he dabbed at the little drips of blood on his cheek with his shirt, as though they were tears.
“Bone?” Gabe said.
The surfer’s eyes had darkened to grim acceptance, his fear not gone but apparently put aside for now.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Captain,” Bone said. “But good news. We crossed their path on our way to you. The chief’s tracking it back with the other guys right now.”
Before Gabe could reply, his radio crackled.
It was Boggs, announcing that they’d found the guns.
Tori felt a surge of relief and started toward Bone. “Show us the way.”
35
Gabe wasn’t happy when they found the guns. The crew of the Mariposa had tramped through the brush, sometimes carrying and sometimes dragging the thick plastic trunks loaded with assault rifles, illegal ammunition, and exquisitely manufactured semiauto pistols made from nonmetals, which would not be picked up by the typical security scan. The latter weren’t likely to get on airplanes in the U.S. — not after 9/11—but there were plenty of other places where metal detectors were still the safeguard of choice.
Boggs had found the cave directly inland from where the men of the Mariposa had come ashore, maybe a hundred and fifty yards from the beach. According to the chief, this particular cave had no features that distinguished it from the others on the island, so it had to have been chosen for its proximity to the place they’d made landfall. Having never seen the other caves, Gabe only had the grotto to compare it to. This cleft in the base of the hill looked to have been formed by a shifting of the earth — some kind of underground tremor, maybe even a quake. Not that he knew the first thing about earthquakes, really. But since it was more a split in the face of the hill than the sort of cave he thought of, that felt reasonable. More than anything, it looked like the gleaming ebony rock that formed the foundation of the island had cracked open. And if the number of caves was any evidence, it seemed to have cracked open in a great many places.