Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

And then Howard calls, "Gotcha!" and the light shines right down the side of the boat, and Howard's face dangles down, pale in the reflection of the flashlight. He's managed to anchor his feet somehow so he can hang over the side, but the light is hitting nothing. It's focused straight down, near the motor, but Rose knows he can turn it toward her at any second, and she grabs a breath and ducks under.

If the sea wasps are like the jellyfish she dodged in Pattaya, she thinks, they usually stay on the surface or in the meter or so just below it. She forces herself down into the darkness, fighting against her buoyancy, until she can't hold her breath anymore, and she stops her stroke and lets her body right itself to the vertical again. Rising, she bends her head forward at the sharpest possible angle as her shoulders slide up the curvature of the boat, hoping that her hair will protect her if she's coming up beneath a sea wasp. When she breaks the surface, she lifts her head and grabs the biggest breath of her life, mouth wide open to make it as quiet as possible. Howard is banging around on the other side, and then she hears him go forward, probably to climb up near the spotlight and look down from the prow.

She wants to get to the stern. She pictures the stretch of black water between her and it, and suddenly she has a strategy. She pulls her hand back into the sleeve of her jacket so no skin is exposed, extends her right arm along the side of the boat, and then sweeps it stiffly away, elbow straight, toward the bright pinpoint of the squid boats. She's careful to stop when her arm is straight in front of her, terrified of sweeping a cluster of jellyfish into her face. Only when she's finished the maneuver does she ease herself right, almost as far as her arm had reached, and repeat the action.

The fourth time her arm encounters resistance, as though the water has suddenly thickened, and then she feels the dead, soft weight against her inner arm, just below the elbow. Her gasp is reflexive and, to her, deafening. She clamps her teeth together and keeps the arm moving, sweeping the cold, heavy, yielding mass aside. Then she pulls her arm down and holds her breath, shuddering violently and listening. It isn't until she hears Howard still lumbering around on the prow, not rushing toward the sound she'd made, that she moves into the space she's just cleared with her arm.

She's dizzy with fear, but there's a hard little bit of knowledge gleaming inside her: The sea wasps can't sting her through her clothes.

With three more swipes of her arm-finding nothing more floating in the water-she's at the corner, with her back still to the boat. The rain, which had lightened, begins to come down harder again, making the sea around her hiss as the drops strike. For several minutes, Howard remains relatively still, except for a couple of changes in weight, shifting from foot to foot, moving a few feet to one side or the other.

He grunts.

Grunting? Why? Lifting something? Lifting what? What's so heavy? And then she hears a sharp snap, and she knows what it is. It's the cuff of the rubber wet suit. It's not for the cold, he'd said. It's for something else. A second later there's a loud splash as he strikes the sea's surface on the other side of the boat.

The only direction that makes sense is the one she's most afraid to take: outward, away from the boat, away from the rocks, toward the fiery glow of the squid boats, maybe three or four kilometers away. She's sure he'll circle the boat first and then maybe swim toward the rocks to see whether she's clinging to the far side of one of them.

She can't endure the thought of swimming facedown, eyes and mouth open to the jellyfish coming out of the darkness, and she can't stay underwater for more than a few yards at a time. So she rolls onto her back and pulls herself away from the boat, looking up at the sky, the rain pelting her face, hoping once again that her thick, heavy hair and the jacket with its turned-up collar will protect her head and neck if she swims into anything. The rain is colder than the seawater, and she opens her mouth, letting it land sweet and cool on her tongue, closing her eyes against it and feeling it tap gently against her eyelids. She counts her heartbeats, since she has no other way to measure time.

When her heart has beaten two hundred times, she stops swimming and lets her feet dangle down into the cooler water below. Then she pulls some of her hair forward, to cover her face, which she knows will look pale above the water. She clears just enough hair from her eyes to see.

About a meter and a half from her are two or more sea wasps. She starts to move away from them but stops, reversing her arms underwater. Howard has come around the boat, swimming quietly from the bow toward the stern. She can see the light-colored bathing cap he's wearing-one of hers, taken from the suitcase-to protect his head. Halfway along the bow, he stops, apparently treading water, and then the flashlight comes on, and she realizes it's the rubber-coated one that had been upright in a bracket beside the wheel. Howard angles the light along the boat, pointing at the stern, and then slowly turns it in a half circle, and Rose pulls herself down.

Thirty heartbeats later, when she surfaces to look, Howard is gone.

She treads water, feeling the rain on her hair. He'll finish his circuit of the ship. She decides he won't swim to the rocks, as she thought at first, because it would take him too far from the boat. If she got aboard, it would be easy for her to keep him in the water-there are long poles with hooks on them, and she could swing one of those at him whenever he gets near. No, she thinks, he'll get back on board.

Through the rain she sees his head, still in the pale cap, on the deck of the boat. She hears the metallic, teeth-grating sound of the chain being wound in as he retrieves the anchor, and then the motor catches and purrs and then purrs more urgently, and the boat starts to move. Within seconds the spotlight comes on, and Rose's hopes die.

There's no way she can hide from the spotlight. Even if she were a foot underwater, he could probably pick out the bright pink of her jacket. If the spotlight hits her, he'll have her.

But the spotlight can't point behind the boat. She needs to swim behind the boat, following the man who's hunting her. At the moment he's heading to her right, parallel to the rocks, and she sees what he's going to do. He's going to make a circuit of the rocks, make sure she's not on them or behind them, and then he'll search the surrounding waters, probably in a spiral, until he catches her in the spotlight or until she's stung by a sea wasp and he finds her floating facedown.

She orients herself toward the biggest rock, closes her eyes, and starts to swim, expecting the fiery lash across her forehead and cheeks with every stroke. She's surprised at how clearly she can hear the motor when one ear is in the water. She's paying a lot of attention to it as a way of knowing how far from the boat she is, when the volume suddenly drops. She stops and orients herself again, feet downward, dark hair pulled over her face, and looks.

She's about halfway to the big rock. Howard has taken the boat behind the one to the right, which has intercepted the underwater sound of the outboard. There were three rocks, he'd said, the third hidden behind the other two. She closes her eyes and tries to visualize it. If she can get between them without swimming into a jellyfish, she might be able to stay out of sight. Even Howard can't see through rocks.

She follows the boat's route, knowing that Howard is glued to the wheel, eyes on the spotlight, carefully steering around the massive stones. He's going slowly, obviously dividing his attention between navigation and scanning the water in front of him. She realizes, as she lifts her head for a breath and looks ahead, that following the boat gives her an unexpected advantage: The wake directly behind the boat is free of sea wasps, pushed to the sides by the boat's prow.