Mona was on the rooftop deck reclining in a plastic chair that was propped against a stanchion. I staggered along the canted deck using the rail partly as banister, partly as crutch, like negotiating the lopsided floor of a fun house.
I stood beside her for a moment and together we watched the busy sky.
The scattered droves of terns and snowy egrets, herons and gallinules, were taking hasty shortcuts back to the safety of their roosts before the next wave of weather set in. A single great blue heron cranked by, as gawky and improbable as some wired-together grade-school project.
In the west the sun was a silver halo muffled behind gloomy clouds. Maybe two hours left before twilight.
Mona registered my presence with a sigh.
“We’re a little exposed up here, don’t you think?” I said.
“Who cares? We’re sunk anyway.” She flashed a mock smile at the sky.
“Oh, I think there’s still hope.”
“None,” she said. “Any way you look at it. We’re sunk.”
“That’s pretty dark for a mitigation person. I thought you guys were famous for finding the middle way.”
“Doesn’t always work that way,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Plenty of times the parties get crazy, harden their position. Then it’s win or lose. One side gets the trophy, the other gets screwed.”
I fingered the torn cotton of my shirt.
“Tell me something, Mona. How long have you known what was going on?”
“I still don’t.”
“Give me some reason to believe that.”
“Don’t believe it. I don’t care. You’re not the sheriff.”
She watched a single roseate spoonbill flaunt its pink across the sky.
“Sasha Olsen,” I said. “She a friend of yours?”
“Never met her.”
“But you’ve seen her around Summerland. You know who she is.”
“Her husband was an activist. Pretty hard to miss, especially in my line of work. I never sat down with him one-on-one, but I went to some of his rallies at Pine Tree School. He was good. Had an appealing manner, very understated, smart. I wouldn’t call him charismatic, but for a backwater town, he was impressive.”
“He died, the son’s sick. The Olsen woman blames it on phosphate mining. Now she’s killing off the Bates family as revenge? That’s what this is?”
“Apparently.”
“You knew who it was from the start, Mona. I saw it in your eyes the first time you heard her voice on the walkietalkie.”
“My cousin the clairvoyant.”
“You’re lying, Mona. You’re in this up to your chin. That’s why you can sit up here on the roof, exposed. You know she won’t shoot you.”
I wasn’t sure of that. Wasn’t sure of anything. I was only trying to provoke her, see if she’d stumble.
She turned her head just enough to rake me with a look. In the breeze her auburn hair looped and twisted and I remembered my first impression—hair whipping like a warning flag, a warning I’d ignored. Swayed instead by the scent of her, the sulky way she moved, her shape, her smart-ass cutting tone.
“Jesus, Thorn, how does anybody put up with your shit?”
“Not many do.”
My polygraph was registering nothing. I couldn’t tell if Mona was for real or if I just wanted her to be.
While she continued to admire the sky, I shaped the words to tell her about her dad.
“So, I take it you didn’t get through on the cell phone?”
“It went overboard before I got the chance.”
“I’m surrounded by fuck-ups,” she said. “Total, complete fuck-ups.”
She tipped forward and stood up. The plastic chair tumbled over and the wind took it for a ride up the railing.
“And Dad? Any sign of him?”
I was silent, staring out at the choppy bay.
“You hear me, Thorn? Dad, any sign of him?”
“Tell me something, Mona.”
I could feel her eyes on my face.
“Do you have an image in your head, someplace you go back to over and over? When you’re feeling shitty I mean, need something to balance you out. Something from your past.”
“Of course I do.”
“You’ve been back a hundred times to that same place, and squeezed more and more juice out of the moment, but it’s still ripe, still has the power.”
“They’re called memories, I believe.”
“Okay, memories then. But special ones.”
“I have a few of those. A few that hold their heat.”
“Are there any of those that include your dad?”
“Sure,” she said faintly. “One or two.”
“Good. You’re going to need them.”
I turned to her. The wind kicked her hair across her face. She drew the straggling strands out of her eyes and changed her angle, bearing down on me.
“He’s dead. That’s what you’re saying. Dad’s dead?”
She read the answer in my eyes.
“You’re guessing. You didn’t actually see his body.”
“I’m not guessing.”
She looked up at the sky and inhaled through gritted teeth. “Goddammit. Goddamn this whole twisted fucked-up mess.”
She looked me in the eye and drew back a fist and punched my chest, knocked enough breath from my lungs to make the light waver.
She squeezed her eyes tight and was about to let go of a wail when Rusty called out from below a single “No!” that lasted longer than a word ever should.
From my angle I couldn’t see the span of bay, so I pitched headlong up the sharply inclined deck, scaling the pebbled surface on all fours like a chimp up the side of a pyramid. I made it to the top, took hold of the rail, and pulled upright.
About forty yards north the yellow bass boat was idling toward us. The tall black-haired woman was at the wheel. Thirty feet or so behind her boat, at the end of a taut red line, my wooden skiff was bouncing along in tow. Someone was hunched behind the wheel. A boy, a teenage boy.
Mona struggled up beside me.
“Oh fucking Jesus,” she said. “He’s on fire.”
Her eyes were better than mine, for it took me several seconds to catch the blue waffling flame on the boy’s clothes.
“That’s the son,” Mona said. “Sasha’s kid.”
As the procession closed in on us, I saw the boy’s hands were lashed to the wheel, and his body was bound by ropes to the seat. His jeans and shirt were aflame, and his bare arms were black and blistered, his face becoming a charred ruin.
Then I noticed a shiny object thumping against the starboard hull, close to the waterline. I craned forward and squinted until I made out the aluminum gas cap bouncing on the end of its safety chain.
The fuel spout where the cap belonged was plugged instead with a white fluttering length of cloth. Its tip end was scorched, the bluish yellow flame snaking up that makeshift fuse.
I turned and dropped to my butt and slid down the slope of deck. Got to the spiral stairway, thudded to the main deck. Rusty was there.
“She’s some kind of fucking lunatic,” she said. “That’s a Norse funeral. Lighting the dead on fire, setting them adrift.”
“Our funeral,” I said and pushed past her and jumped down to the loading dock. “She’s towing a goddamn bomb.”
I unlashed the kayak, got the paddle out, and pushed off.
“Thorn? What’re you doing?”
“Fuck if I know.”
And I didn’t. But I dug the paddle in and drove forward, floundering in the rough water. The one crude idea forming in my head was to lure her away from the Mothership, offer her the next dance.
I swung around the stern of the houseboat and sliced the paddle in as deep as I could go, then dug it in on the other side. The clotted gouges on my palms came open and the blood formed an oily slick on the grip.
Sasha Olsen had closed to a few hundred feet, the wind muscling her along and whipping at the flames.
I knew the tank on my skiff was at least half full, maybe twenty gallons left, and the rag could ignite the fumes at any second and the bloom of fire would turn everything inside its span to brimstone.
She eyed me with disinterest as I paddled toward her. She put her engine in reverse and turned the wheel to hold her position against the wind. The helpless skiff swung out around her.
Moving dreamily, she went to her stern cleat and unfastened the knot and flicked the tow line off. She watched the boy’s death barge separate from her boat, drifting past her on the open water.
My old fishing craft was gripped by the wind and turned, then driven toward me at such a clip that I had only a handful of seconds to cut the kayak left, then swing back to the skiff as it bore down. The wind pushed the stench ahead of it, a gagging cocktail of charred flesh and gasoline.
Back on the Mothership voices were shouting. I kept my focus on that T-shirt, the raveling flame. I made two hard digs of the paddle forward, then swung my boat parallel to the skiff as it came surfing closer. Paddling one-handed to hold position, I managed a single snatch at the white cloth, but the wind whipped it past me a foot beyond my reach.
As it scooted by, I saw she’d knotted the cloth at intervals to keep the fuse from burning too fast. Only two knots left before a quick spurt to the finish.
More voices came from the houseboat: Rusty’s commanding shout, and a bleat from Holland that sounded like some cheap threat.
I churned hard, chasing the skiff into the shadow of the Mothership. Three hard pulls brought me alongside. I was putting myself in the eye of the fireball, but not out of any selfless valor. I was pissed off to my core, blind with cold fury to have lost so much so quickly and for nothing that mattered.
I drove on, eyes fixed on the burnt tail of the T-shirt flirting close to the sloppy bay, the final knot turning black, flakes of crisp cloth sailing past me. I could never recall being suicidal, but I suppose at that moment I was close. Not seeking death, but not trying to duck it.
Pulling alongside, I set my butt at a hard angle to the seat, took aim, then pitched toward the white cotton. It grazed my fingertips, but at that instant I was thumped by a roller, tossed up and out of the kayak, taken under, then instantly spit back out.
From the left another wave battered me. I lifted over it, coughed out a slug of the bay, and swung left and right till I located the skiff.
Chin above the water, I began to crawl toward the boat, but a sloggy weight dragged my arm to a stop. Wrapped around my right hand I found the tattered remains of the white cloth, a half-burnt T-shirt. I’d hooked it somehow in my flailing, disarming the bomb with blind luck.
I shook it off and let it sink. I treaded water and rode up one side of a swell and down its back and when the next one lifted me, I shot a glance back to where the yellow bass boat hovered. So close I could read the lifeless look on Sasha Olsen’s face. Her eyes were aimed above me and behind.
Nestled deep beneath the Mothership, my wooden skiff banged against her uplifted hull, jarred by every gust. The ropes holding the corpse in place had burned through and as I watched, the body spilled onto the deck. Smoldering, it sent its foul whorls of smoke spinning off. The boy’s face was a black and shriveled mess, his mouth open wide like some raving ghoul.
Above me on the Mothership, the clamor of voices rose. Working my way toward the kayak, staying low and keeping the green boat between me and Sasha, I got hold of its stern, swung it alongside, and heaved myself aboard.
On the lower deck of the Mothership, Holland aimed the 12-gauge flare pistol out to sea. A few feet away Rusty barked at him to drop it, but Annette blocked her passage down the narrow walkway.
“Somebody’s got to stand up to the bitch,” Holland yelled. “Nobody on this motherfucking boat has the guts.”
“Do it, Holland. Let her have it.” Annette thumped him on the shoulder. “Do it. What’re you waiting for?”
Holland sighted along the stumpy barrel of the flare gun and let one go.
The plug of spewing magnesium lofted high above the bay and trailed behind a shower of red sparks. On a windless day it had a range of 250 feet, but in such heavy weather it made less than half that. It was a bad shot all around, thirty yards to the right, with the wind pushing it even farther off course. Not that it mattered much, but the meteor was going to fall well short of the bass boat.
I tracked each of the dozen trails that sputtered behind the rocketing canister. Like flaming skeins of yarn they drizzled down around me. Red-hot slag and ash. Two or three landed dangerously close to the skiff. I didn’t know how much flammable material was still coating the decks of my small boat, or if the fumes rising from the open gas spout were sufficient for an explosion. I’d smelled gasoline earlier, or something in the same family. For all I knew the wooden decks were already smoldering and the boat was about to blow.
Above me Rusty made a lunge for the flare gun, but Annette put her shoulder down and butted into her, flashing her crimson claws at Rusty’s face. A full-fledged mutiny. Holland had reloaded and was taking aim.
I swung the kayak toward the skiff and paddled hard enough to ram its stern and knock it ahead two or three feet. Best hope was to thrust it out of range of the next set of fiery trails. Get it around the front edge of the Mothership and let the wind grab it and take it for a ride.
If the skiff was destined to explode, it was my only chance to spare us. That sixteen-footer had been mine since I was ten. My first, best boat. On its poling platform and behind its wheel, I’d learned my way around those waters. Studying the fish, their habits, the mysteries of tides, how to spot treacherous coral heads and shoals. On her deck, I’d learned to read the clouds, the fickle winds, acquired what water skills I had. It was the vessel I’d used to stalk fish from one stunning end of the Everglades to the other. Over the years it had proved more faithful than half my friends or lovers, and if it was doomed, then some part of me was doomed as well.
The rushing sea and north wind jammed the skiff hard against the underside of the Mothership. I butted the kayak’s bow into the skiff’s stern again, struck off-center against the engine casing. I plunged another stroke deep, pushing forward, then again, using what leverage I could rouse from arms, shoulders, and back, milking the maximum from each paddle stroke.
I’d driven the skiff ahead until it was five feet from the bow when Holland fired his second round and dozens more twisting threads of slag showered around me. I watched two streams of glowing sparks spiral down and separate from the others, then catch some malevolent gust that sent them corkscrewing toward the skiff.
One glowing shard landed on the poling platform and winked out, while the second hit the gunwale on the starboard side and began to dance and sizzle not more than a foot from the open gas spout.
I kept an eye on the red-gold sputter and banged the nose of the kayak hard against the port rear-quarter, dug in another paddle stroke and one more after that and sent the skiff around the bow of the Mothership, where the wind was ripping the tips of foam off the whitecaps. A gust caught the skiff, turned it on its fulcrum, and it went skidding away.
Breathing hard, I lingered in the shelter of the Mothership’s underbelly. Five seconds, ten seconds, then realized my mistake. The houseboat might be more precariously settled in the muddy bottom than she’d seemed, not able to withstand what was likely to happen. If she dropped even a few feet from her present perch, I’d be crushed beneath her keel.
Just as I began my backpaddle the blast sent a rush of scalding air around the corner of the bow. The concussion was short and deep, and its shock waves thumped me backward in the kayak. Overhead the big ship shuddered, rocked, and began to dip. I sat up, paddled two quick strokes, and scooted past the upraised pontoon, out of range, into the open bay.
The Mothership quivered but somehow held her lock on the bottom and absorbed the punishment without so much as a broken pane. In only a second or two the trembling died away and the big ship was still again.
I set the paddle across my lap and looked off at the rich blue smoke tearing south toward the Keys. I didn’t need a further look to know the skiff’s condition.
I took a breath and let it go, picked up the paddle, and swung the kayak back beneath the uplifted pontoon. Out in the yellow bass boat I watched Sasha Olsen bend down for a moment and come up with a rifle. She flicked its bolt and checked its readiness with practiced efficiency.
I was around the stern, about to tie up, when the first shot came. Then the second and the third, and from above, the bodies began to drop.
Sasha watched the blue smoke ripping south. Griffin flying off.
His atoms scattered toward the Gulf. Mingling already with the rest of what was out there. Becoming other. At last her boy was breathing easy, running loose in the wider world just as he’d wanted.
She aimed again and held her aim as she’d been instructed.
Held her breath and fired.