I could hear Edwin’s ragged breath behind me, but I was only faintly worried that the run up the beach was going to be too much for the old man. After forty years on the other island and the stories that he had regaled me with over another pot of the potent tea, I had my doubts that something as simple as a Baywatching it into the middle of a fight was going to do anything to wipe him out.
It turns out that you have to be very specific with Edwin and Sophie. They hadn’t been lying when they told me that they didn’t have a boat. They didn’t. Sophie said they had spent too much time floating around in boats before they moved to the island and she didn’t have any interest in keeping one around, especially considering how bad the storms were around here. One of those storms could just suck a boat right on down into the ocean.
Didn’t I know it.
What they hadn’t told me was that they kept a seaplane tucked up in the jungle so they could make their yearly supply runs to the mainland and for emergencies. Such as when somebody gets stranded on a nearby island and needs them to get him back to another island to kick a couple of people’s asses and save a woman who he didn’t particularly like but didn’t deserve to get taken out by a psychopath. As you do.
So, Edwin and I had piled into the plane and set off on a somewhat tilty flight back to this island. Now I was running up the beach toward Lucille, my eyes locked on the gun that she was holding in her hand. Behind her I could see Hunter wrestling a man and noticed several other people who hadn’t been there before swarming the beach. A huge man was holding another, but seemed distracted by my approach and loosened his arms, resulting in the man he was holding getting out of his grip and punching him, knocking him out cold in one hit.
What the hell was going on here?
Lucille’s eyes cut into me across the sand and I had to force myself to slow down as I approached.
“Put down the gun,” I demanded.
Lucille lifted her arm, directing the barrel at me.
“No,” she said.
“Lucille, I’ve done a lot of things and I’m sure that there are plenty of others that I’m going to do, but please don’t tempt me. I’d like to think that I’m above hitting a woman.”
There was a creaking sound, a loud Carol Burnette-style Tarzan yell, and something came swinging out of the tree line. I saw a man kick Lucille in the back, flattening her to her belly on the sand. The man jumped down from the vine that he had been swinging on to land beside her and glared down at Lucille with his hands planted on his hips.
“I’m not,” he said.
“Me, either.”
A dark-haired woman around Hunter’s age leapt into the air and landed over Lucille, pinning her to the ground. The man who had kicked her flung himself over the woman. Edwin had made it up to us and toppled over forward, stretching himself across the man’s back.
“Does that count as a geodesic dome?” Eleanor asked.
I looked over my shoulder and saw the man that Hunter had been fighting lying flat on his face. He wasn’t moving, but I could see his back rising and falling with breaths so I knew that he wasn’t dead. Hunter stepped up beside Eleanor and wrapped an arm around her waist, cuddling her close.
“I’ll count it.”
“We need to get her somewhere secure until we can turn her over to the police,” I said.
“You can’t do that,” Lucille said, her voice strained by the weight of the people still laying on her. “If you hand me over to the police, then you’re going down, too.”
“Gavin?” Eleanor said.
I turned to look at her and Hunter and saw them staring back at me with questions in their eyes. There was nothing that I could say. I wanted to. I wanted to defend myself, but I knew that I couldn’t. What Lucille said was right. Making sure that she got what she deserved meant having to tell them what I had done, but right then it seemed worth it. Just as I had told Lucille, I didn’t want to be a part of this anymore. Any of it. It was time that I put this part of my career behind me, and if that meant answering for what I had done, then that was what I was going to have to do.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know you. It was just a job.”
“So, we made it easy for you,” Hunter spat.
I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t realize who Eleanor was when you climbed up on my boat. By the time that I did…”
I trailed off. There was really nothing that I could say to justify what I had done. I looked at Eleanor and saw tears trickling down her cheeks. Right then I knew that I had been completely wrong about her, and that it wasn’t that I couldn’t like her, it was that I wouldn’t allow myself to. Now I was seeing her without the perceptions that had colored me for so long, but it was too late. The damage had already been done.
“What do we do with her?” Hunter asked, gesturing at Lucille. “And with them?”
His jaw was set firmly and I could see that he was just trying to get through this, ignoring the reality of what he had just learned. I looked behind me and saw the three men still lying on the ground. One was starting to groan, but none was looking like they were ready to jump up and start fighting again any time soon. That didn’t mean, however, that they wouldn’t be eventually. We needed to make sure that they were somewhere where they wouldn’t be a danger to us until we could get the police to the island.
“Help me move them,” I said. I dangled upside down to look at the people piled on top of Lucille. “You just stay right there. We’ll be back for her.”
****
Eleanor
He came back.
That’s all I could think about as I helped drag Virgil’s two cronies up the rocks toward the small cavern.
He came back.
I knew that Gavin had been hired by Lucille to kidnap me and that as soon as he had the opportunity to, he abandoned Hunter and me on the island to fend for ourselves, but somehow that didn’t impact me as much as the simple fact that he had come back. He didn’t have to. He had found Edwin on the other island and had the technology that he needed to get back to the mainland and just put all of it behind him. But he hadn’t. Instead, he chose to come back to the island for us. That meant far more.
I knew what it was like to be put into a situation that seemed impossible. It occurred to me that I knew nothing about Gavin, and had put no effort into knowing anything about Gavin. I didn’t know what had happened to him in his past or what he could have been going through that would have brought him to this place in his life, yet I had judged the living hell out of him. If there was anything that I should understand, it would be the feeling of desperation knowing that your past was still completely controlling your life. I felt a sense of sympathy toward Gavin and it made my heart ache to think about what was going to happen to him when the police came for Lucille and Virgil.
We tucked the men into the cavern and started back down the rocks for Lucille and Virgil. The pile climbed off of Lucille and she immediately jumped to her feet, ready to run. Noah and Hunter grabbed onto her arms and Gavin scooped her legs up to keep control of her as they carried her up toward the cavern. The men were piled in the small space in such a way that she wouldn’t be able to climb over or around them to get to the entrance to the tunnels and even if she did, we had taken away all of her electronics, meaning that she would be trying to get through the cavern in the dark. The plan was to shove Virgil into the front of the space, effectively sandwiching her in. It had its functional benefits, but I preferred to think that it was just a little bit of torture to carry her over until she got to jail.