“Come on, man!” Kevonne screamed. “You can make it. Take my hand!”
Bone reached for him, still a few feet away. Kevonne hung lower, hope in his eyes. Then Bone stopped short, grunting with sudden pain, and he was tugged backward and down. His hands broke the surface, thrashing, and he bucked against what held him, his face emerging from the water.
A long hand snaked up from the water and clasped his face, suckers attaching to his flesh. Those fingers began to burn in the sun, even as they dragged Bone down into the darkness of the ocean.
For a few seconds, none of them spoke or moved. Then, as one, Tori, Gabe, Pang, and Kevonne dragged themselves farther up the wreckage of the trawler, as high out of the water as they could manage. They came together at what had once been the bow of the boat, staring at each other.
“What are they?” Tori asked.
Kevonne hung his head. “Does it matter?”
Tori stared at him, angry for a moment, then her shoulders sagged. “No. I guess it doesn’t.”
She looked at Gabe, but the captain wouldn’t meet her gaze. Pang slid down the deck a little to stand on the peak of the portion of the wheelhouse that was still above water.
“Watch your step,” Tori told him.
Pang gave a sick laugh. “You think?” Then he pointed out across the alleyway they’d been trying to travel through to get back out into open water. “I see the chief.”
That woke Gabe up. He blinked, a fierce determination flickering to life in his eyes. He looked at Tori, then slid down to join Pang. Tori didn’t need to get that close to the water to see Boggs, who stood framed in the broken wheelhouse window of a scuttled cabin cruiser just across from them. His wreck was separated from theirs by maybe thirty yards of ocean. It lay canted to one side, and Boggs perched inside the lower half of the wheelhouse, almost underneath the ship, ten feet above the water.
“Chief!” Gabe shouted. “We need to figure out a way to get you over here with us!” His voice echoed off the hulls and decks of dead men’s ships.
Boggs cocked his head, listening, and then shouted in return. “Why? You’re just as stranded as I am!”
Gabe sat back a bit and looked around. He didn’t say it, but he didn’t have to. Tori had eyes, and so did the others. Boggs was right. They were all stranded. It was only a matter of time, now.
“We were right, weren’t we?” she said.
The captain looked at her. “About what?”
“The sunlight. You saw them burn. They’re, like, some kind of underwater vampires. They like it down there, dark and cool, but they don’t need to stay in the water. Not once the sun goes down.”
Pang and Kevonne stared at her, but Gabe nodded.
“Yeah. I think that’s exactly what they are,” he said.
The Antoinette was close, but not nearly close enough. Tori glanced at the horizon, where the sun had dropped even farther in the sky.
“We have to think of something,” she said. “And fast.”
Gabe unclipped the radio from his belt. Its leather holster had been dampened, but when he thumbed the button, the radio crackled.
“Miguel? Listen up, brother.”
48
“Oh, my God,” Angie said, barely aware she’d spoken.
She stared out the wheelhouse window, watching the people from the lifeboat climb onto a half-sunken fishing trawler. A few feet away, Josh and Miguel shuffled into new positions so both of them could glance out at the island, even as they kept their guns aimed at each other. Suarez and Dwyer stood by the instrument panel. Dwyer had positioned himself near the wheel and the radio, as though he thought that gave him some kind of control, but now he tried to get a look as well.
“Can you see who made it out of the water?” Miguel asked.
It took Angie a second to realize he’d meant the question for her. Josh didn’t even glance at her, so she looked out the window again, counting heads.
“The captain, for sure,” she said.
Miguel exhaled, bright eyes going dull, closing off whatever emotion he might have felt.
“Tori and what’s his name, Pang, too,” Angie went on. She glanced at Josh, but if Tori’s survival meant anything to him, he didn’t show it. “Someone else is there, hanging on a net, but I can’t …” She let the words drift, but then the man on the net climbed higher and she saw he was black. “Kevonne. The other one’s Kevonne.”
“So the one in the water, that was Bone?” Josh asked.
“Had to be,” Angie said.
“That sucks. He was a good kid.”
Miguel spat on the ground, raised the barrel of his pistol. “Fuck you. Good kid? You’d have put him in prison.”
“It’s not up to me who goes to jail, Miguel. But you can bet you and Gabe will end up there. Maybe you could be cellmates?”
Miguel’s hand trembled and his lips pressed into a tight line. “If I’m going to prison anyway, tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you.”
“Hang on,” Suarez started, but Miguel silenced him with a glance.
Angie tensed. She didn’t know how much Josh knew about the Rio brothers, but he must at least realize that pushing Miguel would be unwise. Angie looked at Dwyer, trying to plead with him with her eyes. But his gaze had turned bitter, and she knew there would be no help from him.
Josh’s shoulders rose and fell as he took a long breath. He cocked his head, cracking the bones in his neck. His aim never wavered and he had stopped glancing out at the survivors stranded on those ruined ships.
“You don’t want to go to prison,” Josh said. “I get it. But I’m guessing your brother’s life might be worth it.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Miguel sneered.
Josh tilted his head, gesturing toward the personal locator beacon, where it still sat on the instrument panel, right by the wheel.
“Give that to me. I set it off. FBI and Coast Guard come and get us. We get your brother and the others out of there, kill whatever’s in the water—”
“And Gabe and me go to prison,” Miguel finished.
Josh shrugged, gun barrel bobbing. “You can pick what happens next in this story, Mr. Rio, but you can’t choose how it ends. That’s going to be up to a judge and jury.”
Miguel fixed him with a glare of such hatred that Angie flinched and turned away. But when she looked back, a strange calm had come over him, as though he might actually be listening to reason.
The radio crackled. Captain Rio’s voice filled the wheelhouse. “Miguel? Listen up, brother.”
Nobody moved. Frozen, they stared at one another, locked in the paralysis wrought by the presence of guns.
“Josh, let him answer,” Angie said. “You can’t leave them out there.”
Miguel, Suarez, and Dwyer all stared at the FBI agent.
“I don’t intend to,” Josh said, after a moment. He gestured toward the radio with his gun. “Go ahead. Tell him you’re trying to decide between going to prison and keeping him alive.”
Miguel actually laughed. “You don’t know shit. Gabe would rather be dead.”
“You want to give him his wish?” Josh replied.
“Idiots,” Suarez muttered. He picked up the radio and thumbed the button. “Glad to hear your voice, Captain. You had us worried.”
The radio crackled again. “Had myself worried, mi amigo. Miguel there?”
Suarez held out the radio and Miguel took it from him, using his left hand, keeping the gun in his right as steady as he could. He kept it pointed at Josh. Angie glanced at the PLB, sitting there on the panel, no one paying it any attention at all, though it might be the one thing that could save them all. She could try for it, but Dwyer and Suarez were both in the way.