part0049

If he thought the guy was going to react, attack him in the limited space of the salon, maybe create an opportunity, he was disappointed. The insult washed over him if he even understood.

‘C’mon Hitch,’ he said. ‘What difference does it make anyway? Let’s get this over with and get out of here. Someone might have heard that shot.’

Hitch hesitated for a moment, saw the sense in what his partner was saying.

‘You get the gas can, I’ll deal with this asshole.’

The big guy lumbered off, the whole boat rocking under his heavy footsteps. Hitch motioned towards the stairs leading down to the master stateroom.

‘Downstairs, seeing as you’re so interested in Lockhart. He’s waiting for you down there.’

Evan turned towards the steps behind him, saw bloodstains leading down the stairs, an image of the bloody filleting knife in his mind. He saw something else too. A loaded flare gun on the seat on the other side of the salon. With the mention of the gas can, it was easy to guess what they had in mind—another fatal fire, this time at sea.

Hitch saw him looking. He darted quickly across the floor, grabbed the flare gun.

‘Uh-uh. Now get downstairs.’

The boat dipped slightly as, behind them, the big guy jumped down onto the stern deck like an excited kid. Hitch didn’t pay it any attention. Which was a big mistake. As was his over-confidence, the confidence of a man with a forty-five automatic in one hand and a loaded flare gun in the other.

Evan hesitated at the top of the stairs, his hand on the bulkhead to steady himself. It didn’t matter if they planned to douse the whole salon with gasoline and set it alight with the flare gun, or just the downstairs staterooms, concentrate the fire in those small rooms. Either way, if he went down the stairs he wasn’t coming back up.

A grim smile flickered across his lips as he reflected that the man’s cruelty would be his undoing. If he simply shot him in the back now and pushed him down the stairs, it would be all over. But where was the fun in that? He wanted to burn him alive.

That wasn’t why he hesitated. Because he wasn’t hesitating. He was waiting for something he knew would happen any second.

Hitch was impatient as well as over-confident. It’s a bad combination. Even if you’re the one with the pistol and the flare gun. So he made things easier for Evan. At the same time as his partner outside—who was a lot fitter and more athletic than his bulk and over-developed muscle would suggest—leapt up onto the gunwale, he raised his leg to give Evan a helping foot down the stairs.

Then the big guy did what Evan was waiting for.

He leapt from the gunwale onto the boat tied up alongside. He was a big man, weighed two hundred and thirty pounds. When his bulk suddenly came off the Dead or Alive , it dipped forwards and rocked to the port side. Evan tipped sideways. Not by much. But it was enough. Off-balance on one leg, Hitch didn’t so much kick Evan’s butt as topple forwards.

His foot went straight past Evan’s thigh into empty air. Evan slapped his hand on the bulkhead to steady himself, grabbed Hitch’s leg. Yanked it forwards. Hard. Threw himself backwards into him, arm pumping out like a piston as he pushed off the bulkhead. Drove the back of his head into Hitch’s face, felt his nose flatten and crack with the impact.

Hitch’s arms flew up and backwards like he’d been hit in the chest by a shotgun blast. He kept hold of the pistol in his right hand. The flare gun in his left sailed up and over his head, landed on the floor behind him. He crashed on top of it, pinned it to the floor between his shoulder blades. Then Evan landed on top of him like the roof just fell in, the back of his head smashing into Hitch’s face.

With his arms splayed on the floor, Hitch curled his right arm and the gun in his hand in towards Evan’s head. Evan threw his arm out. Clamped his fingers around Hitch’s wrist, pushed back. Bigger and stronger than Hitch, he bent his arm open wide while Hitch punched at the side of his head with his left. Evan grabbed that one too, straightened his arm. With Evan on top, they lay on their backs on the floor looking like two men nailed to a cross together to save on nails.

Evan dipped his chin to his chest, drove his head backwards into Hitch’s face, felt bone and cartilage give way. Over and over he powered his head backwards turning Hitch’s face into a bloody pulp as the man struggled underneath him, a regular grunting in Evan’s ear like a fat man fucking.

Then a loud bang. Just not loud enough. And not from the gun at the end of Hitch’s outstretched arm.

The grunting had stopped, replaced by a high hysterical scream as the flare gun went off, an incandescent orange-white fire blazing up between Hitch’s shoulders and around his neck and head like a halo straight from the burning pits of hell.

Flames licked at the back of Evan’s head, singed his hair. He let go of Hitch’s wrists, rolled off him and away. The flare was a magnesium inferno now, enveloping Hitch’s whole head, filling the room with white smoke. Evan pushed himself to his knees, saw Hitch’s gun on the floor. He snatched it up, was on his feet a second later, the gun pointed at Hitch’s writhing body.

Hitch slapped uselessly at his head and face, did nothing more than set his sleeves on fire. Evan looked down on him and thought of all the people he’d never met—George Winter and a young couple taking a selfie video and Vaughan Lockhart—all of whom had died at the hands of this man and his partner. Who, by the sound of it, was at this very moment motoring away now that the tables had turned.

Amid the broken plates and scattered flatware on the floor he saw the filleting knife and the fresh blood on it. He thought again of Lockhart’s dying moments and of the souvenir demanded by the man who had ordered his death. A man with teeth filed to points. A man who liked to wear a waistcoat made from small misshapen pieces of hide.

So he didn’t just watch him writhe. Nor did he shoot him. Not for the satisfaction of it or to put him out of his misery. Instead, he took hold of his feet as the heels beat futilely against the floor and spun him around so that the fireball that used to be his head was facing toward the stairs. Then he ran him along the floor like a man pushing a heavy broom, leaned into the rigid legs, pushed him down the stairs, watched him bump down step by step.

He didn’t feel an ounce of remorse.

Because Hitch had been a split second away from doing the same to him. And doing it deliberately. To add him to the list of those already dead. He had Hitch’s own partner to thank for that reprieve, his heavy-footed enthusiasm to get the gasoline in order to burn him alive. So he didn’t bother to even look for a fire extinguisher. What good would it have done anyway for a man whose flesh had melted from his face?

He stared down the stairs. The fire had already taken hold. Everything was made of wood, the stairs and doors and bunks and with the bedding to get things started. He couldn’t see the bottom of the stairs, just the soles of Hitch’s shoes poking out of the smoke climbing up towards him, the open stairwell the only way out for the developing inferno.

He turned away from the rush of heat and smoke, looked around for a lifesaver. Stupid. They wouldn’t be kept inside. Then he saw something through the smoke that stopped him dead, something more imperative than the sliding glass doors and the fresh air and freedom beyond them.

A framed photograph on the wall. Identical to the one in his pocket. The one given to him by Crow that showed Lockhart, now dead downstairs, with another man whose teeth were filed to points. Just as he knew that Crow would never write the names of the people photographed on the back of the print for fear that it was an admission of weakness, a failure of his memory, a vanity even after all these years, he knew without knowing how that the photograph on the wall would give him the name he wanted.

He pulled it from the wall, smashed the glass against the corner of the galley table. Beads of sweat ran down his face as the heat from downstairs increased, the billowing smoke growing ever thicker and more noxious. He knew nothing about the layout of a boat like this—or any other for that matter—had no idea where the gas tanks were in relation to the blazing living quarters below.

Not far enough was as accurate as he needed to be.

He shook the broken glass from the frame, worked the photograph free. Eyes streaming from the stinging smoke while hot air burned his breathing passages, he darted through the sliding glass doors and out onto the stern deck. Then slammed them firmly shut. He turned the photograph over, felt a warm glow of satisfaction as he coughed and blinked away the tears. He’d been right. Scrawled on the back in ink that was almost fifty years old were two names. Lockhart, he knew. The other meant nothing to him. Beyond the fact that it had a spiritual ring to it, a fitting name for a man who chose to file his teeth to points.

He folded the photograph in half and then half again, squeezed it into the waterproof case with his phone. The kayak was long gone. He looked around, saw it heading as if driven by a homing instinct towards the expensive yacht. All hell would break loose when it bumped into the side.

Behind him the salon was now completely filled with black smoke, the orange flames climbing the stairs from below the only light. The glass doors would blow any second, a ball of fire exploding outwards. The deck wasn’t the place to be when they did. There were no lifesavers in sight. Even with the adrenalin coursing through his veins, a seven-hundred-yard swim in clothes and shoes wasn’t the best of ideas.

He ripped through the storage cabinets around the deck, throwing open doors and lifting lids, slamming them shut in frustration. No lifesavers. No surprise. He ran towards the gunwale. He’d take his chances in the water. Then a thought. The BCD he’d found before he discovered Winter dead. It might still be in the day head.

No time to worry that the day head was adjacent to the glass doors. He raced for it through the heat radiating off them, wrenched open the door, saw it under all of the rest of the diving gear. He pulled it out, pulled it on. Didn’t bother clipping it on properly. Two fast paces and up onto the gunwale, legs tensing, momentum carrying him forwards and over the side.

He was already falling. Arms windmilling. Trying to stop himself from toppling in. Clawing frantically at the BCD. Had to get the damn thing off. One arm out. Twisting in the air. His back hit the water with a massive slap, his weight taking him under despite the BCD. He popped to the surface. Wrenched his other arm out. Held the BCD above his head, kicking furiously. Then hurled it far out into the ocean.

Because when the glass doors exploded and rained down a shower of super-heated glass fragments on everything within a quarter mile, he wanted to be under the water, not suspended on the surface by the BCD.

Not waiting to see it land, he duck-dived under the surface, stroked strongly for the bottom. His feet were still in the air above the water when the doors blew, six feet under it when the shattered glass rained down on the surface then slowly sank, twisting and glinting, reflecting the sunlight, like a shoal of some strange new species of fish racing each other to the sea bed.

Thirty seconds later he broke water a few yards short of the glass-peppered BCD. He sucked the clean salty air deep into his lungs, floating on his back, spread-eagled under the hot sun until the weight of his sodden clothes threatened to sink him. He twisted in the water and swam to the BCD, pulled it on and stuffed his shoes in the storage pockets.

Then, on his back again, he sculled himself back to shore. He looked like an upside-down turtle enjoying the sun on the bottom of its shell. It was more comfortable than trying to swim in the BCD. And he could watch the Dead or Alive as it burned, the National Parks Service boats tearing across the water to investigate. Seven hundred yards later with all official personnel in the vicinity fully occupied he clambered up the gently-sloping beach to the astonished stares of the two teenagers.

‘You lost my kayak,’ the boy complained.

Evan shook his head, couldn’t help laughing.

‘No. Last I saw of it, it was headed straight for your dad’s yacht. He’d probably have the park rangers out looking for you now if they weren’t so tied up.’

The boy looked across the water at the floating pyre that used to be the Dead or Alive . Evan was tempted to say, try to find a game that exciting to play on your precious phone, thought better of it. Instead, he shrugged off the BCD, dropped it on the ground next to the boy.

‘Here, you can keep this as compensation.’

Then he made his way to Fort Jefferson where he fished the soggy, crumpled admission ticket that was included in the price of his ferry ticket out of his pocket. He ignored the look the attendant gave him as it was suspiciously and reluctantly accepted. On top of the fort’s walls he found himself a nice warm spot in the sun. There, with his back to some of the sixteen million bricks, he waited patiently for the return ferry and his clothes to dry out.

Or at least he tried to. Because although he was good at a lot of things, patience was not one of them.

He stared at it a long while. The object in the man’s left hand didn’t hold such a fascination for him now that he knew what it was. It was the man himself that he was interested in. Now that he knew the sort of man he was. He turned the photograph over to read the faded words again, hoping that maybe the smoke had gotten in his eyes when he’d glanced quickly at it on the boat. It hadn’t. The names were the same—if the second one was a name at all.

What had happened between the two men who had posed together for a photograph with all the camaraderie of men whose friendship is forged in blood, that one of them should send two killers to murder the other on his boat? And after almost fifty years.

He closed his eyes, angled his face towards the sun to ward off the feelings of trepidation growing inside him. Elwood Crow had the answers. And he would be unable to stop himself from asking Crow about it. Then Crow would demand that he go after the man called Pentecost and his murderous gum-chewing lackey.

He almost laughed as the meaning of the name Pentecost came to him as a memory from long ago.

The day on which, according to Christian doctrine, the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles, manifesting itself as a strong wind and looking like tongues of fire. With the smoke from the Dead or Alive still visible in the distance and the image of Hitch’s head engulfed in a ball of flame it was a little too reminiscent of the day he’d had so far.

But what put a chill in his bones that had nothing to do with the wet clothes drying on his skin was the knowledge that he wasn’t done yet with the man who had filed his teeth to points. A man who cut a swathe through anybody who stood in his way with all the merciless efficiency and righteousness of an avenging angel.

An avenging angel who, as Crow would later tell him when pressed, had learned his trade in the jungles of South East Asia before Evan was born.

And something Evan could figure out on his own without help from Crow or anybody else, just his experience of the past days to guide him—an avenging angel with a loose end to tidy up.