“THE TUNA WAS DELICIOUS, BUT I DIDN’T ENJOY IT. STARTED WITH BEER and finished with coffee, watching the screen the whole time, and finally I couldn’t stand it any more. I fired up the engines and headed for Charley. Slowly. I helmed from the flying bridge, which put my eyeballs maybe twenty-five feet above the water. Higher than this thing.” He indicated the overhead. “All things being equal, I might have managed a glimpse of him sternwise, and, what with rising and dipping and the sun behind me, he might not notice me at all.
“But the closer I got to his signal the more fucked up I knew things were. At a range of about thirteen miles I should have been able to see the top of his mast—that’s nautical miles, about fifteen statute or land miles. It’s a long way to see the tip of a mast but it should have been easy. There would have been sails attached to it. Big white sails. I knew what direction to look, and I had stabilized binoculars. It was a typical Caribbean day, clear as a bell with passing pods of low cumulus. There’s tables that tell you what’s visible at such and such distances and heights above the water and so forth. All I had to do was look it up and I did. Like the mast of Vellela Vellela was, says right here in this book, forty-one feet six inches above the waterline, to which Charlie had added a couple of feet, and my eyeball was maybe twenty-one feet above the water, so the tables allowed for a sighting of Charley’s main trucks at 17.73 nautical miles. Round up to eighteen. I remember it clearly. It’s like I’m looking at the figures as I speak.
“A pretty fair swell was running, maybe seven feet, so there was the added plus and minus of a glimpse of her from atop a swell, then losing her in the trough. That would be cool. If I could get a gander and all looked well, I could just fall off and lie over the horizon with Charley none the wiser. But I had to be careful. Charley was good, like I say. If he was on deck, he would be sweeping the horizon, albeit likely with the naked eye unless he spotted something particular he wanted to study, like for instance the glint of a stainless tuna tower with a hank of red hair under a straw hat contrasting nicely against the blue sky. But more likely he’d be on the lookout for an official-looking vessel, or a freighter or a tanker.
“I didn’t go straight in on the eighteen-mile vector. I worked a tangent. But not a mast tip, VHF antenna, windex, not the wink of a stainless tang or halyard shackle, not a rag of sail were to be seen. Not at seventeen point seventy-five, anyway. Nor at seventeen, sixteen and a half, sixteen, fifteen and a half …
“I kept looking at my instruments like I was going crazy. But they had to be telling the truth. The instruments said Charley was right over the horizon and getting closer, just a few points off the port bow, but the horizon showed no sign of him.
“I eased off the tangent until I was headed straight in. Cautiously, but straight in.
“Then I had a dark thought. What if Charley had figured out what I was doing? What if he had found the transponder? But that was almost impossible, for it was inside this brick of cocaine which was under that zinc which was below Vellela Vellela’s waterline, and the cover plate was secured with Torx screws. Of course, he may have dived the hull. He didn’t have a good reason to do so, but suppose he had done it? Suppose Charley dove on the hull, got the hatch open with a Torx driver he’d professed not to have, retrieved the payload, and discovered the DNA and the transponder as well? That’s two surprises. What would he have done?
“The same thing I would have done. Dropped the transponder into a mayonnaise jar with an airtight lid so it would float, dropped the jar into the drink, and changed course toward any of the 359 points on the compass rose that had little or nothing to do with the one vector parallel to the Gulf Stream that the jar would follow, which current, in that vicinity, sets nearly two knots per hour to the northeast. And then I would keep on sailing until I got caught or changed oceans, whichever came first. If, indeed, that’s what Charley had been paranoid enough to do, which is what I might have done too, with a fair wind he could be a good seventy, eighty, ninety miles away, and right next to impossible to find.
“But I was fantasizing about the unthinkable. What good reason could Charley give himself for suspicioning me? Me, of all people. Me who had given him his start and staked him again after he got out of the joint, and had handed him this recent job as well? Why would he think I didn’t have his best interest at heart? It didn’t make sense that way. Maybe Charley had concluded that some third party was interested in him. So something was wrong with what was wrong—you hear what I’m saying?
“Still I crept up on him, because I just couldn’t bring myself to admit that this operation even had a chance of going sour. I was in denial. I continued to cautiously motor, closing up with the position of the transponder the while, continued to glass the horizon, and continued to see nothing. Eleven miles, ten, nine …
“An hour and a half later, I motored directly over the transponder signal, and there was not a sign of a boat. Nothing but empty ocean.
“So now the unthinkable was fully engaged, and it was one shitty feeling, I can tell you.
“There was no debris. I glassed circle after circle. Wherever that transponder signal was coming from, I couldn’t see it. I had no idea of the accuracy of my gear, a detail I should have known, but hell, I was looking for a thirty-foot boat, not a two-inch electronic gadget. Even if you’re ten miles away from the damn boat, you should be able to see it.
“Had the boat gone down and the transponder was still working? The guy I bought it from told me it might transmit through maybe half an atmosphere, or about sixteen feet of water, maximum—in which subject I was very interested, of course, because it would be stashed below the water line. But he also told me that, deeper than about a quarter of an atmosphere, its range would be severely curtailed. This led me to suppose that Vellela Vellela may have swamped and now lingered, just under the surface.
“If the transponder was still aboard, that is.
“At that point I got so annoyed by the screen that told me I was right on top of the transponder signal, I turned the damned thing off.
“Now my overworked brain was really ginning up the scenarios. I probably hadn’t expended that many neurons since I sat for my 100-ton license, forty-something years ago. I turned the engines off and listened. I randomly stabbed the binoculars at empty stretches of ocean. I looked high for flares. I looked low for debris. I tuned and studied the radar. Nothing. I fiddled with range and sensitivity, setting both at their maximum. Nothing. I went back upstairs with the binoculars, if only because all that fresh air and sunshine on the fly bridge made me feel better. Nothing. And I had no patience for any of it.
“At some point I finally admitted that I was bobbing around in an empty seascape and I had to do something, even if it was wrong.
“So I consulted the chart. I’d been plotting Charley’s course as well as my own. I’ve never been able to break the habit of a paper chart, and now it came in handy. I knew where Charley had turned north. I knew where the transponder signal had started moving at the same speed as the current in the Gulf Stream. And, in fact, I wasn’t all that far away from that point.
“I plotted the route from Charley’s course change to Boca Chica Key. I did a careful job, too. I knew how much time had elapsed since the course change, since the transponder signal had slowed. I knew that Charley would steer a westward course to allow for being set eastward by the Gulf Stream. And so forth.
“It seemed to take forever. But I worked it through, picked a course, and headed out.
“A mere half an hour later, the longest half-hour I’ve ever spent, the radar acquired a very small target. Strangely enough, it was a fifteen miles away, well within the limit of Tunacide’s radar range, which is twenty-five miles. The image came and went, it was well north and east of the course I’d set, but it was the only target I’d seen all day, so I steered for it.
“Another hour, and the unthinkable happened again. Tunacide topped a swell, and the eyepiece of the binoculars filled with the one sight I didn’t want to see: a naked stump of mast, its upper end a jagged flare of an aluminum splinter not five feet above the deck. And then it was gone.
“We were in the trough and all I could see was water. I took a bearing and passed it to the autopilot. The swell was too big for full speed ahead, but I fed her some throttle anyway. Not too much, though, because if you jam into heavy seas, the autopilot gets confused, and I needed the autopilot. While she labored for the derelict I sprang to the deck and broke out everything I could think of. A messenger line, a grappling iron, a couple of life vests, a boat hook. Flippers, mask, snorkel, tank, weight belt, buoyancy conserver. A coil of fat towing line. I put fenders over. There’s a compressor aboard Tunacide for topping off scuba tanks or running a hookah or sandblasting or painting, whatever, and I jumped on deck and fired it up.
“Then I clambered back up the ladder and glassed the bow from port to starboard and back. As we crested a swell I caught another glimpse and, I don’t mind telling you, I almost lost heart. At first I thought she was hull down, of course. The mast was stripped of rigging, except for a thickness of sail clutched in the track, below the fracture. Everything else was a tangle on deck and spilling off the starboard side. Charlie sat back of the stub facing aft, right in the thick of a snarl of rigging and canvas, and he was throwing fistfuls of paper into the air.
“What in the hell, I said aloud under the binoculars, is going on?
“A trough swallowed the freeboard of Tunacide, and Vellela Vellela was lost from sight. I went to manual helm, but when I gave her some more throttle the seas wouldn’t allow it. She was just digging a hole, as the sailors say. I throttled back. Four miles. Atop the next sea I brought the glass to bear again. These are high-tech binoculars I’m using, with a built-in gyroscope to steady the image. One thousand bucks. You know what “boat” stands for, don’t you? “Break Out Another Thousand.” Sure it’s not funny. It’s a context thing. I almost puked. Vellela Vellela wasn’t hull down over the horizon at all. She was decks awash. What I was seeing—the stub of mast, Charley’s head and a bit of his shoulders—was all of Vellela Vellela that remained above water.
“I gunned it. Equipment on deck, hatches and companionways open, to hell with it. Tunacide rose to the challenge and did better for herself than I expected. Old sailors always bear a prejudice against the stinkpot. We never think a stinkpot can handle a sea like a well-founded sailboat. She took green water over the foredeck but Tunacide did well until she took a tanker load down the companionway, too, and I had to back her off, bilge pumps whining. I mean, Tunacide isn’t one of those speedboats that can go from wave top to wave top, at a speed limited only by how tight you can hold on. Nothing was lost overboard except a deck chair, which I didn’t even miss until I wanted to sit down much, much later.
“Sometimes, at sea, things happen so quickly you can’t grasp the sequence of events. Other times a single event will take an eternity to happen, and this was one of them. We closed the gap at eight knots. Three miles, two, one, a half, a quarter … It took at least twenty minutes, maybe a few more, but it seemed like forever. By the time we got there only the shredded tip of the mast was above water. Charley’s head was lifting up out of the swell and dropping back under.
“A hundred yards away I forced myself to put the engine in neutral. There was a lot of stuff floating around the wreck—bottles and cans, clothing, a boat hook, books, all that paper, a blue plastic jerry can, a long spiral of yellow polypropylene line, to which was attached the deflated remains of an orange liferaft—all of that, plus mast and rigging. Not to mention that the simplest and least paranoid scenario was that Vellela Vellela had been holed by a submerged object, and, if so, where was it? The current was with us, and there was way on Tunacide. Best to drift down on Vellela Vellela. Best not to let the prop get involved with what surely was a tangle of lines and gear and canvas, not to mention a live skipper. Who knows, maybe he had a tank on, or a snorkle, or something. I couldn’t tell, but as we closed that last hundred yards at the rate of one year per yard, I could see the hair on the top of Charley’s head, right against the mast, rising and dipping, rising and dipping. Occasionally his whole head submerged, then he’d come up spouting. So he hadn’t drowned yet. His back was to me, but I couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t paid me any attention, let alone, how he’d managed to trash his own liferaft. But a lot of smart money will tell you that abandoning a vessel at sea is strictly a last ditch effort, because many’s the abandoned vessel found still afloat weeks, months or years after anyone has last heard from her crew. Of course, if you’ve holed your raft too, that’s all kinda irrelevant. And need I mention a nice big fin circling the wreck? It disappeared as Tunacide bore down, but still …
“For Charley even to be in this pickle, something had gone mighty wrong.
“Well, and maybe I was his guardian angel, although, if so, it was going to be a close thing and, anyway, I didn’t have time to be digesting details. I sprang to the after deck and hefted the single scuba tank. Put it down, donned the BC. Resumed with the tank. And then I thought, sonofabitch, what am I doing, there’s work to be done. I sprang below and dumped a whole drawer of tools onto the sole of engine room until I found the air wrench, a No. 2 Torx bit, and a goddamn half-inch to three-eighths drive adapter, and it had to be a half-inch female to three-eighths inch male adapter at that. If you haven’t gone pawing through boxes of greasy tools looking for three things without one or another of which you will fail from square one, with no time to lose, well, you haven’t really been nervous.
“A hose, too. Two hoses, I should say, for I had two fifty-foot lengths of 3/8” pneumatic hose aboard, for a total of one hundred feet, and why not? The entire damn boat is only fifty-three feet, and the compressor sits amidships, belayed to the back of the house, its thirty-gallon tank red as a new nun. Fifty feet of hose would reach anywhere on the boat, double up for backup or two tools, and break out another thousand.
“But you see what that meant. I had maybe eighty, eighty-five feet of hose and who knew how little time to dive the hull of Vellela Vellela and back out eight Torx screws on the—what was it, the port side? Hell, I didn’t even know. Port or starboard, toss the coin, but aft for sure. But there was Charley, too. I had to see to Charley as well as the payload.
“I plugged the male end of the hose into the air tank. With a hundred and ten pounds of air on it the hose went stiff as a rusted cable. I plugged the male fitting on the air-wrench into the female end of the hose and pulled the trigger twice, vroom vroom. A second time, vroom vroom, and the compressor bore down under the governor until the pop-off valve popped off. So far so good, but would it work under water? Who the fuck knew. Good question though. I sprang below and pawed through tools again until I found a No. 2 Torx driver, manual version. It looks just like a screwdriver. Sure to god I’d be down three or four atmospheres, 90 or 120 feet, with my back to the sharkosphere, before I got eight screws backed out by hand. I grabbed a roll of duct tape, too.
“Gaining the after deck once more I opened the valve on the single tank and fumbled into its harness. Nervous as a cat. Then I remembered the swim ladder. I scrambled aft and put over the swim ladder so I could climb back aboard my own goddamn boat. Don’t laugh, the swim ladder has been forgotten by better sailors than me on boats with less freeboard than Tunacide, and they did not live to tell the tale. I buckled on the weight belt, sat on the fighting chair to put on the fins, and, bethinking of it at the last minute, I strapped on the sheath of a dive knife a guy named Cedric Osawa gave me years ago. That’s right, Charley knew him too. Biggest dive knife you ever saw, a blade sharp as a serpent’s tooth and a serrated spine fit to limb oaks with. Cedric’s a fucking idiot. I laughed at it when he gave it to me but was reassured to hold it at that particular moment, on the bounding main. I left the spear gun. I had enough stuff. And there, on deck, was the duct tape. I stared at it. What the hell was the duct tape for? I ran through every move I could foresee having to make on the dive until I remembered. I tore a couple of inches off the roll and wrapped it two or three times around the Torx tip, the female-to-male adapter and the chuck, too. Those rigs fall apart all the time in thin air, you know, let alone under water.
“By then Tunacide had drifted down on the wreck, as if this were a perfect man-overboard drill. Vellela Vellela lay downwind and down current, so Tunacide covered her. A fin reappeared in the old peripheral vision. There was a rifle aboard, a shotgun too, but it’s counterproductive to have blood in the water if you’re going for a swim. Peaceful coexistence is the key. I spit in the mask, centered it on my face, cleared the regulator and fell overboard backwards, the mask clasped to my face by the ruined hand, impact wrench in the other.
“I fell right down past a maze of rigging and torn canvas, a fucking miracle I missed it. I didn’t even think about it. If I’d hit the middle of that stuff, that would have been the end of the job. Best case scenario, I might have gotten myself untangled before it took me to the bottom.
“The hull lay close aboard, just above me, and right off I spotted the zinc. A stroke of luck. Now for Charley. I flippered through a loop and exhausted the BC a little. The belt dropped me amidships, and there he was, chained to the goddamned mast.
“Charley had chained himself to the goddamned mast.
“Or had somebody else done it?
“I couldn’t believe my eyes, I didn’t know what to think, but there it was, some kind of harness of chains. Right out of an S&M catalog with a padlock, yet.
“I floated there, incredulous. My eyes must have bugged sufficient to fill the mask. Charley was still alive and he noticed. Plus I was holding an air wrench, for chrissakes. An air wrench! I must have looked just like I was fixing to rotate his tires. It’s like that test they give you to see whether you’re dumb enough to join the army. What’s wrong with this picture? My mind was nearly blanked by the image of a big pair of red-handled bolt cutters I happen to own, red handles with black rubber grips and black jaws to hold the blades, and they were aboard Tunacide, too. I had just seen them in a cubby below the tool bench in the engine room, right next to the drawers I’d rifled for the other gear.
“Why the hell hadn’t I brought those bolt cutters! Fucking lot of good an air wrench was going to do Charley.
“But the bolt cutters wouldn’t have made any difference either. The links looked to be at least 5/8”, and case-hardened, end of story—too much for my bolt cutters, too much for most bolt cutters. Too much for one man to handle. …
“Charley pointed. Did he think the joke was on me? I glanced away, as if to work up a good curse, only to look straight into the starboard eyeball of the biggest hammerhead shark I ever saw.
“It was the shark Charley was pointing at, and if I hadn’t looked I might have been the creature’s lunch. Do hammerheads attack people? I don’t know what possessed me. The wrench was more or less floating there, right between us. All I had to do was pull the trigger and ratchet the cartilaginous motherfucker right between the eyes. Actually, I’m not even sure the wrench came in contact with the shark at all. With the sound, with the eruption of bubbles, it simply vanished.
“I turned back to Charley. What could I do? The thought occurred to me that the mast was aluminum. Maybe I could prize off enough fittings to slide Charley up the mast? I drew the knife …
“That’s when Charley laughed. Charley saves my life, I’m trying to save his, and he thinks it’s funny.
“I yelled ‘fuck you’ so sincerely I spat out the mouthpiece.
“Charley got the last laugh, all right, but then he drowned. Right in front of me. I think it must be a horrible death. At first you realize you better not breathe. Then you realize you won’t be able to breathe. Then you realize you have to breathe but you better not breathe, then you realize you’re going to try to breathe anyway and it’s not going to work but you have to inhale, it’s too painful not to breathe, and anyway, that’s it, you’re not a fish, you’re drowned.
“It’s the realizing ahead of time that makes it painful. The more realizing you do, the more painful you think it’s going to be. That’s the horror. The more imagination you have, the worse the anticipation. In the event it’s not so bad. That’s the way it looked to me anyway. Charley’s eyes got big. He looked scared. He also looked amused. Then the bubbles stopped. He gaped like a fish out of water, which kind of makes sense, then he relaxed, and then his eyes stopped moving. He was gone.
“I attacked the chain and lock and mast and gooseneck. I clambered at the first fitting I could get the point of the knife to do something to, which was a deadeye that captured the becket on the downhaul block. Stupid. I cut the lines between the two blocks. Next came the gooseneck, a serious obstacle, and I worked at it, too. Eventually the head popped off a screw, but not before I broke the point off the knife. This was not progress. I watched the triangle of stainless steel and the head of the screw bounce off the deck in slow motion, through little somersaults like they were pursuing one another, and slowly accelerate into a plunge as if with every intention of spiraling straight through the 821 charted fathoms yet to go before they beat Vellela Vellela to the bottom. Four thousand seven hundred and twenty-six feet. A hundred and forty-three atmospheres. If you sent a styrofoam coffee cup to that depth, the pressure would compress it to the size of a thimble.
“How much time passed, I don’t know. Finally, working behind him, I realized that Charley’s bald head was slowly bobbing from one shoulder to the other, the strands of his tonsure wallowing willy-nilly. Then the tank gauge floated up in front of my mask. I seized it and had a look. After all of this exertion, my air was better than two-thirds gone. That was it.
“I gut-stabbed the mast hard, so hard that the pointless blade penetrated it up to half its length. And it got hung up in there, naturally. Think of a lobster trap. I used up a lot of air trying to get it back before I gave up.
“And then I bethought of the hundred feet. I looked up. There wasn’t so much light as there once had been, and this is the Caribbean, where the water is clear and light penetrates deep.
“The half inch or so of water in my face mask had turned pink. Pressure was forcing blood through my sinuses and out my nose.
“One atmosphere is thirty-three feet. The hose was one hundred feet, at least fifteen or twenty of which were involved with the compressor, the freeboard of Tunacide, and the nice overhand knot I’d taken the precaution of tying around the handrail.
“I breaststroked my way over the deck and down along the hull of Vellela Vellela. No zinc. Where’s the zinc? I had become disoriented. It was on the other side. I had to swim back up the hull, over the foredeck and back down the side of the hull, tugging the hose free of various trailing lengths of line and rigging. There it was. Screw number one. Whoops. Put the tool in reverse, stupid, and be glad you didn’t cam out the head. Screw number one. Okay. Screws number two, three and four … And just as I spun the next-to-last Torx screw loose, holding onto the rudder with the fucked up hand and the wrench with the other, the descending Vellela Vellela tore the air wrench out of my grip. End of hose. Beginning of third atmosphere.
“I retrieved the manual Torx driver from the knife sheath and backed out the last screw by hand. This is a lot harder than it sounds, in weightless conditions, but by and by, screw and cover plate soon followed the others to the bottom, and the brick was mine. No sign of the transponder, of course or the DNA. This didn’t surprise me at that point, but there wasn’t time to be brooding about it, either.
“I keep a small game bag, a kind of net purse, on the weight belt, for spear fishing. I shoved the vacuum-packed brick into it.
“I cleared the blood from the mask and blew some air into the BC. The hull descended past me, bearing with it Charley’s corpse. The sharks would be tending to it soon enough—maybe sooner, if their brains could comprehend the fact that I no longer had the ability to change their tires for them. I looked up. The impact wrench dangled about thirty feet above my head.
“I usually take a decongestant before I dive. Years of blow-induced nasal congestion make this necessary. Now I felt like I was about to lose an eardrum. I raised the mask, pinched my nostrils closed, and blew against them. This ear cleared. This one ruptured. And yes, it was painful.
“Another fuckup. I turned in the brine and watched a thin tendril of my own blood lift away from the side of my head. Maybe some shark would soon be interested in helping me feel sorry for myself.
“I added air to the BC and augmented my rise past the hull with the flippers.
“There Charley hung, slightly buoyant, belayed by his own hand to his own rigging. I could have saved the fuck. He knew I was out there. And then I thought I got it: Charley hadn’t wanted to get saved.
“Proof, I realized. Who or whatever caused this, I’m going to need proof that it happened, and a mere kilo of cocaine isn’t going to speak loud enough.
“It was about then that I noticed that the wreck wasn’t sinking anymore. Not rapidly, anyway. I blow out an eardrum and now I get time to think? We hung there, boat and I, in almost neutral buoyancy. I might have gotten a good daydream going, if for some reason I hadn’t looked up, and realized that the pneumatic wrench and maybe ten feet of hose had gotten tangled in the welter of rigging, and now this rubber thread was attempting to arrest the descent of this seven-ton boat. If I didn’t do something, there would be consequences. There are always consequences. When things go wrong at sea, things do not fuck around.
“And now I realize that not only is that fucking hundred-foot hose not going to part, it is not going to pull the fucking compressor over the side after it, either. And why not? Because two hoops of eighth-inch iron strap belay the compressor’s thirty-gallon tank to the back of the wheel house, that’s why. Not to mention, the hose is looped over the handrail. Therefore this setup has a damned excellent chance of capsizing Tunacide. Or, how about this: since her engines are still idling, maybe the load will list her sufficient to heave the intercooler intake above the surface, there to suck air instead of salt water. Either way, the weight of the sinking Vellela Vellela is well on the way to turning my fish boat into a turkey farm. All it would take after a certain point is a broach on a good swell or some green water aboard and the whole works would be underwater—two boats, Charley and me, with Charley suddenly the one better off.
“I won’t bore you with what it took to get that knife back. Suffice to say, it came away in my hands like that aluminum mast was a length of suet.
“I clawed frogwise straight up, ruptured eardrum and the bends be damned, till I was above the wreckage and all its tendrils, and slaughtered that air hose. Just get me back to Florida, I was thinking, and I’ll buy all the goddamn air hoses and pneumatic wrenches and synthetic eardrums money can buy. Break out another thousand.
“The severed hose belched air with a robustness sufficient as to be quite audible. The bubbles expanded in size, too, violently undulating until they disintegrated into smaller bubbles, as the mouth of the severed hose released them, which in turn drove the hose around in the water like it was a demented snake. The compressor would already have kicked in, trying to keep up with the demand, and unless somebody got aboard Tunacide to turn it off, the little three pony engine would burn itself up. And the air wrench? I caught a glimpse of it far below, going down, down, down, trailing twelve or fourteen feet of yellow rubber hose like it was a strand of bull kelp.
“Break out another thousand.
“But down the Y-axis is the negative direction. I looked up. Up is the positive direction. Tunacide was safe. Slowly but surely, the hull of Vellela Vellela was getting serious about resuming its descent, bow and Charley first, as if backlit by darkness. I looked down upon that sight with these very eyes, and I will not soon forget it.
“I sheathed the broken knife, exhausted the BC, and crawled straight down after her. It felt like somebody was trying to back a Torx screw out of my ear. You get on this side of me, now, you’re going to have to talk loud. But at the time I was thinking, I knew, that the testimony of a lousy water-stained kilo of cocaine was going to fall on nothing but deaf ears. No way it would speak loudly enough. Ever.
“Now I’m thinking, what about a head? Mute, loud, rude—I liked the idea. It didn’t even shock me. Why not give it a try? What is there to lose? A head might provide, how to say, incontrovertible evidence that the stakes had elevated. What the fuck. What the fuck, and why not?
“Just like that last Torx screw, the head wasn’t all that easy. Weightless conditions.
“What the fuck, I kept telling myself, as I sawed away, descending into darkness and running out of air, with my legs wrapped around the mast and a corpse, blood not pumping but leaking out of the jugular, a surprisingly thin thread of blood. What the fuck, I told myself, it’s not like Charley needs a head anymore. …”