“Really?”
“Her head’d be the first thing to go. It’d wobble off in a week, faster if I snapped it before her tragic loss of balance. Then the ankle joints give way. That’s why you find so many feet on beaches. I expect a shark’ll snip off something. You told me once about a guy in Australia catching a fourteen-foot tiger shark that vomited up a bird, a rat, and a whole human arm, which still had identifiable fingerprints and a tattoo so the police were able to identify the guy. His murderers were found but released—an arm’s not a body. You taught me that. And you need a body to accuse somebody of murder. Cut up a body—no murder!”
“That was in 1935.”
“The law’s still the same now, though, isn’t it?” The engine kept softly chugging and the sea opened up around us. “I could put images in your head, Max. Things you don’t want there and you’ll never get them out. Just think.”
“I have been thinking, Ricky.”
“Remember your telling me about the poet Yasayori? You said that a thousand years ago he was banished to a remote island by his emperor. He wrote hundreds of poems on little wooden planks and threw them into the sea, hoping some would reach his parents. One washed up near the palace and a guy took it to the emperor, who loved it. He sprang that guy—sent a boat right out to fetch him back to civilization. I remember every single thing you’ve ever said to me. Can you imagine having your head refuse to let anything just go? It fills up. It’s like this enormous pressure, pushing, pushing, pushing.”
I had gone utterly still, struggling not to telegraph any sensation at all to the man with the firm grip on my neck. He kept talking. “Let’s say a shark gets one arm, and the torso lands on a beach in Ireland. That would be almost a year from now, wouldn’t it? Do I have the times and currents right?”
“Pretty much.”
“The way you’re looking at me right now, Max? It’s how Mommy used to look at me. She knew. She knew what I was.”
“That must have felt terrible, Ricky.”
“No. It’s a warm buzz. I’d stare at her until I could feel it, like I’m staring at you now. I can feel it starting. Feels great. Nothing in the world like it.”
“Let her go.” Max took a step toward us and Ricky twisted me around, tightening the grip and reaching behind his belt. When he brought his hand in sight again it held a knife. Max stopped.
“You understand that I have to discipline her. You can’t let them just do what they do. Then they think they can do whatever they want. You have to control that. Correct them.”
Max’s eyes flicked to the left and I understood that to mean that a moment had come, that Ricky’s attention had lost its focus. I lifted my heel and drove it upward behind me as fast and hard as I could. I connected exactly where I’d aimed, and Ricky fell back. Max charged forward and into him, catching his shoulder and spinning him to the deck. Ricky rolled away. I saw the gleam of the blade but Max kept moving directly into him and when they came down together Ricky had laid open Max’s thigh from hip to kneecap.
But I was free, and I knew the toolbox was only yards away. As Max crumpled onto the deck and Ricky scrambled to his feet, I flipped it open and pushed aside a caulking tool. A double-bladed bolt cutter lay beneath it. Also a bolt. Ricky straddled Max, breathing hard. He raised the hand holding the knife high, looking blind now with something that might have been rage but wasn’t. He was happy.
Max swiveled his head, searching for me, and there I was, one hand gripping the five-pound metal tool, the other holding a bolt. I stood behind Ricky and to his right. I flicked the bolt into the shadows behind Ricky, to his left. His head twisted around to follow the sound. I closed on him and brought the bolt cutter to bear in a hard, fast sweep.
I caught him in the jaw. The blow whipped his head back and around, and the body followed the head. I’d heard bone crack. He hit the rail and I could see his eyes go wild when he understood what was about to happen to him. His arms flailed out in a panic and he managed to get a loose grip on the rail with his right hand. I brought the bolt cutter down again, heard cracking bone again. The broken hand flew up and away from the rail. He went over.
Max struggled to get to his feet and grab the tumbling body but he slipped in his own blood and fell again. To my astonishment I saw him try to throw his good leg over the rail and follow Ricky into freezing water that would give him about two minutes before hypothermia killed him. I knocked him down, yanked his T-shirt over his head, and started ripping it into strips to tie up the thigh.
“You can’t go after him,” I said grimly. “You can’t, and I won’t.”
“He’ll drown!”
“Hopefully. Maybe the propellers will catch him when he rolls under the hull.”
I had to keep pushing Max back down on the deck while the Rubber Duck chugged along steadily at three or four knots and I gained enough pressure around the thigh to stop the bleeding. By then we were beyond the place where Ricky had gone in, and even with starlight the ocean surface was all glistening black skin broken by lacy chop. A human head bobbing above that great expanse would be almost impossible to find. Clouds had thickened and the wind had picked up. The freshening wind, the waves, the chugging engines swallowed any hope of hearing a man calling for help even if he were still alive and yelling, which was unlikely. He was lost. Still I did what Max insisted we do and turned the boat around. We flipped on searchlights and swept the water carefully, left to right, close to far, right to left. Nothing. What was left of Max’s pants leg was soaked through with blood, red where the wound seeped and then began to openly bleed again, purple and crusty farther from the cut. His hands whitened, and then his face.
“You’re going to bleed to death if you don’t lie down,” I insisted. The Rubber Duck lurched and he lost his balance. Max was not a small man and I had a firm grip on him. We came down on the deck in a tangle, me on top of him, holding him down.
“Enough,” I said. “Max, I gave him a massive whack with that bolt cutter. He’s been in freezing water for a long time. He’s not alive, and you won’t be alive for long either if we don’t stop that bleeding. We’re going in.”
Max could navigate around the islands as easily as around the furniture in his office, and he guided us back past Graves, past Spectacle, then Peddocks and Georges and Thompson, back to Charlestown and the docks. We cut the engines and tied up.