Vanishing games a novel, p.17
Vanishing Games: A novel, page 17
“It’s a fucking tracking device,” I said. “We just walked into a trap.”
Angela said, “Are you okay?”
“I’m still breathing,” I said, climbing into the passenger seat. I touched the wound in my arm and my fingers came away covered in blood. Violence is like a drug. We’d almost been killed and I’d been shot, but for some strange reason I was thrilled. My heart was going a mile a minute. When I looked over, Angela was grinning ear to ear.
The boat had been shot to shit. There were bullet holes everywhere and fiberglass all over the deck. The windshield was shattered. We were lucky we weren’t taking on water, at least, and the engines were still working. My wound was going to be a problem, though. I was bleeding fast. Worse, no marina would take us in this condition. Once our description went out to the marine police, every dock for a hundred miles would be on the lookout for us. We couldn’t just beach the boat somewhere, either. This region was densely populated and the shore was thick with skyscrapers. I didn’t know how much the cops saw, but I knew it was probably enough. How many other robin’s-egg-blue racing catamarans could there be out here? One, maybe?
I started tending to my wound while Angela handled the boat, going as fast as she could without being conspicuous. We hugged the shoreline of the smaller islands, steering clear of the big ships off in the distance. The rain helped, too. I could see lightning on the horizon. As long as the water remained relatively still, we’d be fine. I kept pressure on my wound and rummaged around under my seat for that first-aid kit, but it must’ve slid away somewhere during the firefight.
“How are you doing?” Angela said. “Talk to me.”
“I could use a Band-Aid,” I said. “How quickly can we get back to Macau?”
“I’m taking the long route. Maybe half an hour. Can you hold on that long?”
“Only if I find that goddamn first-aid kit.”
“Let me take a look,” she said.
I forced a smile, then slowly took off my suit jacket. I winced in pain as I rolled up what was left of my shirtsleeve. The fabric was soaked with seawater, so it strung quite a bit. Salt in the wound, right? But it wasn’t too bad, considering. The bullet had gone straight through the fatty part of my upper arm and torn off a fair bit of flesh with it. Skin and fat. While there was no major muscle damage, the gash had to be three inches long and a half-inch wide, which was too big for me to stitch up with dental floss and sterilize with a splash of scotch. The wound would be hard to clean. Worse, a small piece of plastic or metal shrapnel was stuck in there. I could see it shining in the half-light. It was probably just a shard of fiberglass, but it could be a bullet fragment or some other bad news. Whatever it was, every time I touched the wound I ran the chance of injuring myself further. If I pulled it out, there was a good chance I’d rupture something and end up bleeding even faster.
The pain wasn’t too bad, at least. I’d seen a lot worse, and I’d been lucky. Another few inches to the right and I’d be floating facedown in the harbor. The bullet had barely clipped my arm. Nothing vital. The bone was intact. Any doctor could treat it. As long as I controlled the bleeding and watched out for that shrapnel, I’d be fine.
Maybe. Hopefully.
Angela whistled when she saw the blood. She throttled back, then wiped her hands off on her dress and helped me look for the first-aid kit. She found it a minute later, lodged somewhere under the controls. Once she opened the top, she unzipped the medical supplies and strapped on a pair of blue latex gloves. She tossed the empty iodine packets overboard and said, “You used all the disinfectant?”
“To be fair, I didn’t think we’d need it.”
Angela shook her head. I knew there wasn’t anything she could do to help me, but I understood why she had to try. I could see it in her eyes. It was part of a wordless agreement we’d made years ago, back when we were partners—we’d never leave the other one to die, even if it meant getting ourselves killed in the process. I would do the same for her in an instant and not even blink an eye. If the best Angela could do was to clean the wound and try to stop the bleeding, that’s what she’d do. I closed my eyes and tried to block out the pain.
She poured some bottled water over my arm to wash off the blood. The bandages at the bottom of the kit were still mostly dry. Angela was very gentle and wrapped my wound as tightly as she could without disturbing the shrapnel. She applied medical tape to hold the bandage in place, then put a layer of plastic wrap around the wound to keep it dry. I sat back while she finished the dressing. I was still bleeding, but at least we’d stemmed the flow. Once Angela was done, she went through her pack until she found a dry cigarette and lit it up. Said, “Think you can make it another twenty minutes?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Don’t pass out on me now.”
“What, from this scratch?” I forced a smile. “I’ve done worse to myself shaving.”
She gave me a withering look. “You’re starting to soak through the bandage already. There could be shrapnel—well, more shrapnel—that I didn’t see. You’re going to need a doctor for this one, kid.”
“It’ll be okay,” I said. “I’ll find a croak.”
“You know one?”
“I can find one,” I said. “I know a guy who knows a guy. You’ve got to stop worrying about me. Drop me off on the coast. Someplace quiet. I’ll take it from there. In the meantime, go hide the money and take care of this boat. If it gets spotted, my arm won’t matter. I’ll end up getting my stitches in a Chinese labor camp.”
“You know a guy who knows a guy,” Angela said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Don’t act surprised. When you were gone, I learned to survive without your help. I’m good at it now.”
Angela sniffed and looked away.
—
Our boat came to a slow crawl near the shoreline on the northern border of Macau. At first I was nervous about getting this close. Macau isn’t a big city and its coasts are well protected. I didn’t have much of a choice, though. I could either get off the boat here and wade ashore, or Angela could skim the docks and I could take my chances there. With the police looking for us everywhere, I figured that wading would be less conspicuous. Still, I wasn’t too happy about it. These coastal waters were full of waste and floating garbage. I cradled my wounded arm and swore.
Angela turned off the engines as we came close to the slums. We glided along until we were just a few feet from the shore. I checked the place over real quick. There were no other boats around as far as I could see. Most of the commercial traffic went south, and the rain had chased off the pleasure boats. There were several abandoned factories on the waterfront. Most were boarded up, but a few had been converted to squatter housing with tents and television antennas on the roof. I could see a few lights. The closest building looked like it had once been some sort of shipping yard. There were concrete beams sticking out from the water near the levee. If I could climb those rocks, I could slip between two of the old factory buildings and get to the street. In this rain, nobody would even notice.
“Get ready,” Angela said. “Once we come to a stop, I can’t idle here long. The garrison keeps a lookout for border jumpers. Are you sure you’ll be okay?”
“I can manage,” I said.
Angela nodded, then took out her smokes and patted one out, but to her dismay it was soaking wet and falling apart. She swore and tossed the pack into the ocean.
“I’m going to try to make this as fast as possible,” I said. “It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. Four, at the most. Once I’m done, I’ll call one of your burner phones. I’ll try to make it to the Grand Lisboa, but if I can’t you should send Johnnie to pick me up.”
“Then I’ll see you in four hours, kid.”
“I’ll see you then,” I said. I smiled, then climbed overboard and jumped into the shallow water. I held my bag over my head so my things wouldn’t get wet. When the saltwater hit my wound, I stifled a shout and nearly lost my balance. Once I found my footing again, I started wading to shore. Angela drifted for a few more feet until she was clear, then started the engine and took off. By the time I reached the levee, she was gone.
I crawled up the rocks very slowly. The footing was steep and slippery. Sludge was pouring out of an open drainage pipe next to me. I tried to grab it, but my left arm wouldn’t bear any weight. Instead I pushed myself up with my legs and sat down whenever I could on the black, muddy rocks.
It took a few minutes to reach the top, and then there was a short chain-link fence. There was no easy way around it, so I gave myself a running start and tried to throw my leg over. I managed to make it over, but on the far side I landed on some loose gravel and slipped down a short rubble incline, and came to a stop against the wall of one of the factories. I probably didn’t slide more than three or four meters, but it still hurt like hell. I suppressed another shout and rolled onto my back. I pulled a strand of seaweed out of my hair and swore. Breathe, Jack.
Once I got up, I took a look around. This old factory was definitely abandoned. All the windows facing the sea were boarded up, except for a few broken ones that were taped over with foggy industrial plastic. When I got to the corner, I found a narrow alley that led up to the street. A dim neon sign cast long red shadows on the walls. I squeezed through, walking sideways, and made it to the street, which was empty except for a few parked cars. I looked back and forth for a sign in English, but there weren’t any. The lights at the nearest intersection blinked yellow. There were a few shops off in the distance, but they all had their shutters down. I had no idea where I was. My heart was racing from the blood loss and the climb, so I suddenly felt dizzy and my vision went white. I doubled over and grabbed my knees.
Goddamn. I could feel blood trickling down over my hand. I leaned up against the wall and took a moment to breathe. Focus. Put a plan together. I fished the plain white business card out of my wallet. It had nothing on it but the phone number and the imprint of a white lotus. I took out one of my burner phones and slowly punched in the numbers. It rang and rang and rang.
Then, after a few seconds, Bautista picked up. I could hear the low thump of electronic music in the background. He was in a nightclub.
“Hello,” he said. “Who is this?”
“It’s your customer,” I said. “Get me the butcher.”
Victoria Harbor, Hong Kong
At that moment, forty miles to the northeast, Laurence pulled open the doors to his shipping container and threw his duffel bag on the floor. He went over to the desk at the far end and swept everything off in one motion. When his computer monitor wouldn’t budge, he grabbed it with both hands, pulled until the power cord ripped free from the extension cord and threw it against the corrugated steel wall in frustration. Laurence had never been so angry in his life. Why?
Because a shard of fiberglass was lodged in his left eye.
The wound had been bleeding for more than forty minutes now. After the gunfight on the other side of the harbor, Laurence didn’t have time to bandage it up. Hell, he barely made it out alive, with the police all around him. He lost them eventually, but it took some time. He could feel the shrapnel dig deeper into his eyeball with every passing minute. Every little eye movement was total agony, every blink searing pain. He’d doubled back around Hong Kong Island behind a pack of antique junks, then scuttled his stolen cigarette boat off the coast. Half the cops in the region would be looking for him, so he couldn’t go to a hospital. Proper medical treatment would have to wait. He had to do it himself.
Laurence pulled the mirror off his wall and propped it up behind his desk. If he was going to take care of this, he had to be able to see what he was doing. His eye was starting to swell and his head felt like it was full of rocks. Corneal laceration. He tried to remember his training. Keep calm. Keep the wound clean. Keep still. Get the object out. Patch it up. Stop the bleeding. You call that a wound, you pussy? This is nothing.
Laurence plugged in the fluorescent lights that had been rigged to the ceiling, pulled one end down and propped up a lightbulb next to the mirror. He needed all the light he could get. Once that was done, he took a bag of cocaine from his trunk, brought it back to the desk and ripped it open with his teeth. The white powder spilled all over. He didn’t bother trying to cut the shit into lines. No time for that. He put his head down and sniffed hard, both nostrils. When he came up for air, his face was numb. The world snapped into focus. Cocaine is a topical anesthetic, just like novocaine. It would dull his pain long enough to do what came next.
The last thing he needed was in his top desk drawer—a small box of razor blades. He dumped them all out, chose one and peeled away the protective cardboard around the edge. He knew what he had to do. This would take all his willpower. He knew he had to do something that would make a lesser man scream in agony. He knew he had to do something that only a man of his fortitude could do.
He had to operate.
Laurence adjusted the light so it was shining right at him, then turned to look in the mirror. It was worse than he thought. His skin was stained with blood from his eyebrow down to his chin, and the eye itself was so red that he could hardly see the iris. His cheek had suffered some minor lacerations, and the whole area was beginning to turn black. He tilted his head back and moved his eye up and down, just to see if he could. Once he made sure there were no major obstructions, he pulled down his lower eyelid very gently to assess the damage.
There, just below his iris, was a shard of fiberglass less than a millimeter wide.
It could’ve been worse. If the fiberglass had hit him a couple of millimeters farther up, it would’ve gone right through his pupil and blinded him for sure. As it was, though, the glass had stopped in the white of his eye. Most of the damage was already done. Laurence’s eyes had snapped shut when the bullet shattered the windshield, but the tiny shard had cut right through his eyelid. His vision was blurry and red with blood, but in time it might heal. That’s what mattered.
He pinched the razor blade between his thumb and forefinger and pulled down his lower eyelid even farther. He breathed out and slowly guided the blade to his eye. He had to cut in just the right place, or else he’d blind himself.
Then, in one quick motion, he put the blade under the fiberglass and cut upward.
Pain. Indescribable. Fingernails on a chalkboard. Pulling toenails. Nuclear explosions. He tried to suppress his blink reflex, but couldn’t. His eyes watered up. Total agony. The glass, now floating freely on the surface of his eye, shifted up ever so slightly over his iris. Instead of screaming, he put the razor blade down and concentrated on taking long, deep breaths. Now the glass was dislodged, at least. The first step was over.
Now he just had to remove it.
Laurence took a moment to recover, adjusting the mirror and trying to clear his mind. The next part would be the most painful. He cracked his neck, then pulled down his eyelid again and picked up the blade. If he was lucky, he could scoop out the glass without further damage.
But before he could begin, his satellite phone started ringing.
It was still in his duffel bag, over by the door. He put the razor down and used a tissue to wipe the blood off his face. He hadn’t been expecting a call, but he could tell by the ringtone that it was his employer, who wouldn’t wait. He fished the phone out of his bag. The scramble box was still attached to the audio port, so all he had to do was put on the headphones and extend the antenna. He bent down to pick up a yellow legal pad and pen from the floor, then pressed the TALK button and sandwiched the phone between his shoulder and cheek.
“Operations control,” he said. “Do you have something for me?”
“Lotus Vale Apartments,” the voice said. “North Macau. One target. Filipino, late thirties.”
“And the target’s name?”
“Adrian Bautista,” the voice said. “Find him immediately. Push him as hard as you can.”
Taipa Island, Macau
Angela caught sight of Johnnie as soon as she cleared the rocks. He was leaning against the limousine at the top of the levee with an umbrella. She shouted his name, but the rain was so loud that it took him a moment to hear and see her, but then he waved his flashlight in the air. Angela grinned and cut the engines. She backed the boat alongside the pier as Johnnie ran out to greet her.
“Bring me the bags,” she shouted. “Then help me tie this thing down. We need to sink it.”
Johnnie nodded, ran back to the limo and pulled three plain roll-aboard luggage bags from the trunk. When he got to the edge of the levee, he tossed them to Angela one by one. She threw the bags on the deck and opened them up. The identification tags had been ripped off. Good. If the police found these bags, Angela didn’t want them to count as evidence. She took a long look around, in case anybody was watching, then started loading the bags with armfuls of money.
“Get the rope,” she shouted.
Johnnie dropped to his knees and tried to grab hold of the dock line. It took him a minute, but he tied the boat to the bollard at the end of the pier. There was a flash of lightning in the distance. Rolling thunder. Angela looked up and felt the rain start to sting her face. She knew she couldn’t just abandon the boat here. Someone would find it and report it to the police, even in this neighborhood. The boat was filthy with evidence. As if the bullet holes and brass assault-rifle casings weren’t enough, the controls were covered with her finger smudges and the deck was smeared with Jack’s blood. When Angela burned off her fingerprints, her fingertips had developed a unique scarring pattern that left behind skin oil smudges instead of prints. Most police officers didn’t know how to recognize those smudges, though, and seawater could cover a multitude of sins. Jack’s blood was a much more immediate problem. His wound wasn’t so terrible, all things considered, but the police can do amazing things with blood these days. A little bit of ammonia might work wonders at a crime scene, but Angela didn’t want to take that chance. Spraying the boat down with industrial cleaner and then scuttling it in the harbor wasn’t good enough.
