“I’m here, Gabriel,” Miguel said, ignoring Josh. “Just trying to figure out what we can do to help you. It doesn’t look like more lifeboats would do the job.”
The button clicked as he let it go. The radio hissed.
“You’re right. They might get here, but probably not back,” Gabe replied.
Miguel glared at Josh as he growled into the radio. “Our options are limited, hermano. We’ve got a situation in the wheelhouse.”
Click. Hiss. “Got a little situation out here, too, Mikey. What’s going on?”
“The cook’s up here, and he’s got a gun pointed at me right now. Fucker stabbed us in the back, and right now he’s standing in the way of me doing anything to help—”
Josh interrupted with a snort of laughter. “Right, so I’m the villain now? Who’s the bad guy, Captain?” he called. “The FBI agent doing his job, or the asshole who’s fucking his brother’s wife?”
Angie’s mouth dropped open. Dwyer and Suarez swiveled around to stare at Miguel. He’d been annoyed, waiting to finish what he’d been saying to Gabe, his thumb still on the button. Now it slipped off.
Click. Hiss. Nothing.
Then, Gabe’s voice. “What did he just say?”
Miguel’s face contorted into a mask of rage and shame. “You bastard! Why the fuck …?” But he couldn’t even finish. Instead he started to shake his head and he opened his mouth in an awful scream.
And pulled the trigger.
Angie yelped and threw herself against the window, cracking the glass. The bullet punched through Josh’s shoulder and exited his back in a spray of blood.
The gun flew out of Josh’s hand and clattered on the floor. Angie pushed off from the wall and ran for it, but Dwyer got there first, stamped his foot down on it, and backhanded her across the face. She staggered back, and all her fear evaporated in a burst of fury. Lunging, she punched him in the throat. As he tried to grapple with her, she slipped inside his reach and took a fistful of his red hair, then drove her knee up into his groin.
Angie had been hurt before, and she had learned how to hurt back.
Dwyer twisted just enough to block most of the strength of her knee-shot, but still let out a grunt of pain and staggered back, stepping off the gun. She reached for it, but a second gunshot rang out against the metal and glass inside the wheelhouse and she jerked back, looking up to see Miguel now leveling his gun at her.
“That’s enough,” he said.
Slightly bent, Dwyer walked gingerly toward her, lips upturned in a sneer. He reached for the gun.
“Not you, either,” Miguel said. He gestured for Dwyer to back up with a wave of the gun. “Suarez, pick it up.”
The old Cuban walked over, casual as ever, and picked up the gun. He clicked on the safety and tucked it into the front of his pants. On the ground, Josh lay bleeding, but conscious. He slid back to the wall, leaving a streak of blood on the floor, then sat up, staring expectantly at the officers of the Antoinette.
“What now?” he asked Miguel.
Miguel looked out at the island, and the graveyard of ships. Then he glanced out the front windows at the cargo and the ocean beyond, maybe trying to decide whether to leave his brother there after all.
He clicked the button on the radio. “Gabe, listen. If you can make it to the schooner, the way she’s laying, you can get across to that old freighter out there.”
He hesitated, then let go of the button. The hiss went on a few seconds.
“Miguel?” the captain asked, his voice full of pain and threat and uncertainty.
“I have a plan, bro,” Miguel said, ignoring the questions inherent in his brother’s tone. “It might take a while, but I have an idea.”
This time he did not hesitate before taking his thumb off the button, but the wait for the captain’s reply went on three times as long. Angie held her breath during the long, wordless hiss, and she felt certain Miguel did as well. Perhaps they all did.
“Make it fast,” Captain Rio said at last. “Whatever it is, it’s gotta happen before the sun goes down. Otherwise, you’ll be too late.”
The hiss returned to the radio.
Miguel looked around the wheelhouse. “Dwyer, come with me. Suarez, you watch the cook.”
Angie stepped forward. “What about me?”
Dwyer had one hand over his throat, and when he spoke, his voice was a rasp. “Feel free to shoot her.”
Suarez sniffed. “I don’t take orders from you, boy.”
Miguel laughed. “Just watch them, Hector.”
Then he and Dwyer were out the door. Josh sat against the wall, bleeding. Angie and Suarez stared at each other for a moment, and then the old Cuban rolled his eyes dismissively and went back to watching the radar screen.
49
Hank Boggs crouched inside the empty frame of a window in the cabin cruiser’s wheelhouse and watched Captain Rio, Kevonne, Pang, and that bitch, Tori, as they scrambled for better purchase on the tilted deck of the half-sunken fishing trawler. He’d watched as they’d set off from the island, praying that they’d stop and pick him up, or at least get back to the Antoinette and send help.
Then he’d seen the water rippling around them and he’d known his prayers fell on deaf ears. If God existed, up in the heavens, he wasn’t listening. Or perhaps this place — any place where things like this could exist — was in his blind spot.
Bone had died the same way Mitchell had, dragged down into a blossoming pool of his own blood. A goddamned shame. Bone had been a decent guy.
Now all five of them were stranded, but at least the captain and the others were together. Boggs was on his own, separated from them by a gap way too wide to even think about swimming while those things were in the water. And what about them? What are they, anyway? Boggs pushed the questions away, saving them for another time. He didn’t want to think about it, because the few answers that danced at the periphery of his thoughts only frightened him more.
The wreck he’d swum to lay at an angle in the water, maybe forty-five degrees, and he crouched inside, looking down through the open window frame at the water below. He might have been better off on top of the lopsided ship, but from here he had a better view of the island and of the others, stranded across from him.
Little shards of glass still in the window frame crunched under his shoes as Boggs straightened up, careful with his footing. If he fell, he would tumble into the water, and though he could see no disturbance on the water, he thought he could feel them there, waiting down in the dark.
He studied the arrangement of the wrecks near his position, as well as those on the other side of the alley they had sailed through to get to the beach. He needed to get to a higher vantage point to take a look at the sunken ships that were nearest to him. One of these boats must still have a working lifeboat on it, and much as he didn’t want to risk it, that might be his only shot at getting out to the Antoinette. The container ship’s draft was much too deep to get in this close.
Yet even as the thought crossed his mind, he saw something odd out of the corner of his eye, and turned to see that the Antoinette had begun to turn. Though slowly, the ship had begun to move toward shore.
“What the hell?” Boggs muttered to himself.
Then he got it. The Antoinette couldn’t come and get them, but Miguel could sure as hell get her closer, giving them all a better shot at reaching the ship alive.
A terrible thought filled him. Miguel wasn’t coming for Hank Boggs — he was coming for his brother, the goddamned captain. Whatever rescue efforts the crew of the Antoinette would be making, they were going to be focused on the other side of the gulf that separated his position from the others.