Hell of a Mess, page 15
part #4 of A Love & Bullets Hookup Series
Thrashing in the water, she looked around.
The boat was gone.
The assassin was gone.
Her guns were gone.
The backpack with the grenades and night-vision goggles was gone.
Her shoes, phone, wallet—all of it headed for the bottom of Long Island Sound.
She needed to swim as hard as she could for the black island where men with guns awaited her. At least the current carried her in the right direction. She could angle her body and ride it toward the faint swath of rocky beach.
To her right, a shout—the assassin splashing in her direction, soaking wet but strong enough to swim. He was alive, at least, but she bet Anthony was dead.
Her knees scraped rock. She sank her fingers deep into mud and pulled herself forward, coughing out seawater and stinging vomit. She crawled across the beach until she was well past the breakers and sank down, her forehead resting on her knees. Every part of her ached—not an unfamiliar feeling. As she focused on her breathing, she made a list in her head:
Find shoes.
Find a gun.
Find Bill.
And if Bill says so much as one sarcastic word to you, slap the almighty shit out of him.
TWENTY-FOUR
The hospital loomed, three stories of vine-covered brick lined with shattered windows. The storm had uprooted several of the larger trees in front. Bill climbed over the trunks, the rough bark snagging his sodden suit pants, the explosive belt tapping against his collarbone.
When he reached the far side of the treefall, he turned to watch the other cops struggling over the trees. He almost offered a hand to help Crew Cut. If the man tripped and fell wrong, it might set off the detonator in his pocket, and wouldn’t that be a hilarious and awful way to go?
Once on the hospital side of the pile, the cops had to pause to suck down oxygen. None of them were in good shape, especially with thick mud sucking at their feet with every step. Their clothes already pricked and torn by the thorny bushes growing waist-high along the path from the jetty to here. Get weaker, Bill told them in his mind. Get slower, get dumber.
People could mock the power of positive thinking all they wanted, but he figured it couldn’t hurt at this juncture.
Crew Cut flicked his light across the front of the hospital. A short flight of stairs led onto a crumbling concrete terrace and the jagged hole of the hospital’s front doorway. To Bill’s overactive imagination, it looked like a monster’s mouth.
“Lead the way,” Hardaway said, her grip tightening on the shovel in her hands. “You don’t have much time.”
“None of us do,” Bill said, smiling into the flashlight’s blinding beam.
Now comes the tricky part, Bill thought. I’m all out of tricks. I’ve spent tonight trying to buy time—all for nothing. If this was a con, and it wasn’t going well, this would be the opportunity to slip out the back. Alas, no such option on an island. Not when you’re surrounded by people like this.
“Move it,” Shark said.
Bill stepped through the doorway. The flashlights illuminated an oval room, broad window-frames with wooden benches on either side. The ceiling and its ornate molding chipped and cracking in places, the floor piled high with chunks of paint and plaster. A few dusty chairs and a tipped-over cart in one corner. From his internet research, he knew this was the lobby of the Tuberculosis Pavilion, where patients could cough their lungs out in relative isolation. Typhoid Mary had died here, right?
Tattoo swept his flashlight in a circle, huge corridors disappearing into the murk. The ceiling of the Pavilion, still largely intact, had spared the room from the wrath of the storm, but Bill heard rushing water, along with a distressed creaking that could have been anything—trees scraping against the walls, soggy floors threatening to give way.
“To the right,” Bill said, anticipating Crew Cut’s next question.
“What’s that way?”
“Stairs to the basement,” Bill said. “One guy told me it’s buried down there, below an old iron lung.”
“You believed him?”
Bill shrugged. “Good a place to start as any.”
They took the right corridor, the cops’ flashlights playing over rusted spiral staircases leading to higher floors, wet brick walls covered in moss and the stark slashes of graffiti. The ceiling had collapsed in places, strewing piles of rubble everywhere. Bill tested each new step before committing his weight, fearful as he envisioned the floor crumbling.
They arrived at an intersection. On the wall to their right, a rusted metal sign, torn in half, announced ‘Base—’. Their flashlights, shining through the doorway, swept over a spiral staircase curling into nothingness. The stair risers more rust than metal. Bill wondered whether it would hold more than a few pounds of anyone’s weight.
“Yeah, you’re leading off,” Crew Cut told Bill.
“Keep that light on me,” Bill said, stepping to the head of the stairs. He toed the first riser. With a terrible groan, the staircase shifted an inch to the left. Rust rained into the abyss.
Holding his breath, Bill settled his weight more firmly.
Nothing happened.
Both feet now. He stood there, craning his head for a view beyond the staircase into the void below. From this angle, Crew Cut’s flashlight cut off at a black line maybe ten feet further down.
Bill took the next step. The riser creaked but held.
Drops of water glittered in the flashlight beams. It sounded like it was raining down here.
Another step. Above him, Crew Cut shifted positions so he could shine the light past Bill to the bottom of the staircase. The light played over muddy water maybe three or four feet deep. Paint chips and bark and leaves floated in it, carried by a powerful current into a maze of rooms.
Crew Cut cursed.
“We might as well check the other spots,” Bill said, hoping their desperation wouldn’t push them into descending any further. Even if the money was down here, buried beneath some massive piece of machinery, there was no way they could dig it up.
Crew Cut sighed. “Right.”
Bill took his time on the ascent, the staircase shuddering with his every movement. It was sweet relief when his feet reached the top again. Back to the corridor, where a fresh burst of wind scattered a storm of wet leaves and plaster bits. For the first time, Bill noticed how the exterior wall had collapsed at the end of the corridor to the right. The hole framed the dripping woods to the island’s south; on a clear day, you would have seen Manhattan’s skyscrapers piercing the sky in the distance. With the grid down, the world was shadows—except for fifty yards distant, deep in the brush, where an orange flame spat sparks into the wind.
“What the hell?” Tattoo said.
TWENTY-FIVE
I’d been through a lot in the past several months. Getting shot in the back while wearing an Elvis costume. Stealing a car from a serial killer. Trying to figure out how to use my limited skills to pay for a New York apartment, a task that placed me in unfortunate proximity with someone nicknamed the Lube King. But almost drowning was perhaps the capstone humiliation of it all, if only because there was no way for my brain to rationalize or make a joke out of it.
When you plunge into the ocean, cold water rushing down your nose and throat and filling your lungs, your panicked lizard brain wipes out all conscious thought. You become a jerking puppet, all reactions, nothing but panic.
Fortunately, the saner part of my brain—what little of it was left—managed to assert control after a few seconds. I needed buoyancy or I was going to sink straight to the bottom, where I should rot forever among the discarded gun parts and rusted cars littering the bottom of Long Island Sound.
I kicked off my shoes.
I stripped off my jacket.
I’d already lost my gun.
Opening my eyes in the stinging murk, I spied a faint trail of bubbles from my mouth streaming upward. I lashed my body that way, crashing above the surface as a fresh wave smashed me in the face. At least I was only a few yards from the island’s rocky shore.
I spied the faint shape of Fiona crawling ashore and kicked for her as hard as I could. The current tugged at my legs, threatening to pull me away, but within a few yards I passed a massive pile of concrete and rusted metal half-submerged in the surf. It blocked the worst of the waves, and after another few moments of paddling my feet scraped the bottom.
I stood.
Ashore, Fiona crouched behind a leaning trunk of a tree. This side of the island was all thick brush and stubby trees. Impossible to see far inland. I stumbled toward her, and my bare foot rammed against something hard and wet. I looked down. It was one of the backpacks from the boat.
Excellent. Things were finally looking up—which guns were in here? But when I unzipped the pack, I found only a few flares, a first aid kit, and a collapsible shovel with a dull blade. With the shovel in my left hand, I zipped the pack closed again.
“The boat’s just gone,” Fiona said.
“We must have hit something big,” I said. “I’m betting Anthony’s dead.” I felt a little bad about the guy, but he also knew the risks. The last ride is always the greatest. How the hell were we going to get off this miserable rock?
“We should move,” she said. “We’ll freeze otherwise.”
“Yeah, but where?”
She nodded. “Based off Bill’s maps, the hospital is up and to our right, I think. It’s the biggest structure on the island. I bet they’ll head there first.”
“And then?”
“And then what?”
“That’s what I’m asking you,” I said. “In case you didn’t notice, we don’t have guns. We don’t even have shoes. Just some flares and a first-aid kit in this stupid pack. By the way, if I’m killed, I want you to launch my ashes into space on one of those rockets. Leave this shit-box completely—”
“Aren’t you a badass assassin?” she said. “Isn’t that a shovel in your hand? We’ll improvise.”
“You have a point,” I said. “You know, one time I was stuck in this bar in Mexico, surrounded by these cartel dudes, and I only had a toothpick—”
“I’m sure it’s an interesting story that ends with you yanking out a dude’s liver with your teeth,” she said, moving around the tree, careful to step on larger stones and avoid the brush. “But something tells me we need to hurry.”
Once we punched inland, it was much easier going. Thick trees, their trunks wrapped in ivy, lined up with pleasing symmetry as we passed through shin-high grass. Even before my feet touched brick beneath a thin layer of mud, I realized we were on a road only partially swallowed up by nature. The dim shapes of buildings to our left and right. How many people had once lived on this island?
How many ghosts live here now?
Okay, Mister Melodramatic. You’re crazy enough without jumping at shadows like a virgin in a Victorian horror novel. Fiona drifted to the left, attempting to use the thicker trees as a screen from whatever might lie ahead, and I followed. The storm had knocked down crazy tangles of branches, so many it was impossible to avoid cracking over one or two, the noise loud as gunshots over the wind whispering through the trees.
Fiona paused and raised a fist. I stopped behind her.
She pointed ahead, toward a clearing, beyond it the hulk of a huge building. The thin white lines of flashlights slicing against the darkness: a group heading up the stone steps toward the crumbled remains of a pavilion. Even at this distance, I recognized Bill, dressed in a gray suit, with a thick and shiny necklace around his neck—a restraint of some sort? I didn’t recognize any of the people with him.
“Tactical nightmare,” I whispered, nodding at the building. “Unless you want to play movie slasher, try to pick them off one by one?”
“Let me guess, you’ve done something like that?”
I snorted. “Of course not. That’s why the mask-wearing slasher in those movies is always invulnerable to bullets—otherwise they’d be dead in the first five minutes.”
“Come up with a better idea.” Fiona squinted at the group as the last of them disappeared inside. “I leave Bill alone for a couple of hours and he gets into this shit.”
“Welcome to marriage.” I raised one of my feet, twisting it for a better look at the sole. During the trek inland, I had stepped on a few burrs or twigs, but nothing felt like it had penetrated the skin—or so I thought, until I saw the blood smeared on my skin. If we were going to make it much farther, we would need something to cover our feet.
Shrugging out of my rainproof jacket, I hooked the edge of the shovel into the sleeve and pulled until the fabric ripped. Repeated the action at three other spots, dividing the sleeve into four pieces of jagged cloth.
“Put these around your feet,” I said, tossing her two of the strips. “It’s not exactly a pair of Nike trainers, but it might protect your skin a little.”
“Smart,” she said, wrapping her feet.
As I clinched waterproof nylon over my aching soles, I examined the area around us. A low brick structure to our right, maybe a shed of some kind. Time and weather had demolished two of its walls into piles of brick, revealing a concrete foundation piled with years’ worth of branches, wet leaves, and rubble. I skittered that way, stepping as carefully as I could over the remains of the outer wall.
I peeled back a few of the larger branches atop the pile, revealing the tangle of wood chips and bark and assorted crap. Moist, but not soaking wet. From the backpack, I extracted one of the flares and scraped it to life, red flames and smoke blooming from its tip. The heat felt good on my wet skin. Fiona made wordless sounds of protest behind me, but I didn’t care. I shoved the sparking flare deep into the pile and returned to the brush, doing my best to suppress a grin.
“What’s the point of that?” she asked. “You just like setting fires?”
“Think about it and it’ll come to you,” I said.
The flare ignited the wood. Thick smoke poured from the shed. The surviving walls blocked some of the wind, giving the flames a better chance to take hold.
Fiona nodded. “Oh, okay.”
“Right?”
“You want to stay here?”
“Let’s get back a bit,” I said, nodding behind us. “If they come in force and spread out, I want a little more space.”
“More left,” she said, pointing at a thicker patch of brush. “Room to hide.”
As we scuttled low, I picked up a thick piece of brick in the path. We had shoddy weapons at our disposal, but we were professionals, right? We knew how to use cover. We would hide out at the intersection of a low brick wall and the overhanging trees, waiting like tigers until our idiotic prey wandered too close.
I held onto that vision for another three minutes, until the first rifle-shot blasted apart a branch six inches above my head.
Someone screamed in the distance. I couldn’t pick out the words over the wind. Based on how Fiona’s face tightened with fear as we hit the mud, I bet it was Bill.
TWENTY-SIX
The flame reminded Bill of the old stories his grandmama used to tell him about will o’ wisps in the swamp, burning spirits that led the unsuspecting to their doom. A perfect thought for a haunted setting like this.
“Lightning?” Hardaway asked.
“What?” Crew Cut pressed himself against a wall.
“Like, lightning set something on fire over there,” Hardaway said. “There can’t be anyone else on this island, can there?”
“Sure, just some dude in a hockey mask with a machete,” Tattoo said, and giggled. “He’s been on this island here forever. And he’s really happy we’re here.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Soul Patch said, kneeling to unzip the massive duffel bag at his feet. “There’s a quick way to figure this out.”
“Oh shit,” Crew Cut said, sounding elated. “You bring the thermal?”
“Hell yeah I did,” Soul Patch said. From the bag he drew out a long bundle of waterproof fabric, which he unrolled on the wet floor, revealing the parts of a rifle. He assembled the weapon with expert precision, then clipped on a bipod and an oversized scope. Bill guessed the man could do it blindfolded.
Soul Patch lowered the rifle to the floor and settled himself behind it, peering through the scope’s eyepiece.
“What’s that?” Bill asked.
“It’s a thermal scope,” Crew Cut said. “If there’s anything out there larger than an ant, the scope will pick it up.”
“Got two shapes,” Soul Patch said, adjusting his stance slightly. “Looks like people. To the right of the fire, maybe ten yards.”
“What are they doing?” Tattoo asked. Kneeling beside Crew Cut, he reached into the bag and extracted a double-barreled shotgun, sawed off close to the stock. Breaking the weapon open revealed two shells. He snapped it closed again and retreated to the wall.
Soul Patch squinted. “Staying still. One of them has what maybe looks like a backpack or something. I don’t see any weapons.”
“Anyone from Parks on this island?” Hardaway said, pressing herself against the wall beside Crew Cut. “Someone riding out the storm, maybe?”
“Maybe, but that doesn’t make sense. They had plenty of time to evacuate.” Crew Cut’s head swiveled, his gaze finding Bill. “You have anything to tell us?”
