Ridley Pearson - The First Victim

Stevie heard the clap of quickened footsteps approaching from down the hallway behind her. Rodriguez’s thickly Hispanic voice, not twenty feet away and closing, spoke with a chilling authority. ‘‘Three of them charges go forward, two in the back. . We flood both them holds. Set the trip on the starboard door. You got that? Only the starboard door. That’s important.’’

He stepped out onto the balcony not three feet away from her-so close she could have reached out and touched him-a huge man with wide shoulders and a sour smell. She cowered on the far side of the steel hatch as he leaned over the rail to watch the work progressing below. She knew that smell: It was the same man who had invaded her apartment. The temperature in the hold was in the low nineties. Stevie McNeal shuddered.

He said, ‘‘Only the starboard door. Make sure them others are sealed tight as a ten-year-old.’’ As he spoke, great gushes of water began to pour into the hold from all four corners. The cold seawater rushed toward the feet of the women who stood at attention without saying a word. That power cord she had followed was strung along the floor like a snake. Its electricity wouldn’t mix well with water.

Rodriguez said, ‘‘With them holds flooded she’ll go down fast. Our guy’ll be the first aboard when they get here-he’ll make certain it trips. Get ’em in that truck. Fast. Hurry!’’

‘‘The machines,’’ a guttural Asian voice objected. ‘‘What about the machines?’’ Hidden by the door, this man went unseen by her.

‘‘He said lose ’em,’’ Rodriguez replied. ‘‘It don’t look right otherwise. With the mud down there it’ll be a mess. We buy ourselves a day at least, maybe a week or more. That’s all that matters. He thunk it through, I’m telling ya. It’s sweet.’’

‘‘Expensive.’’

‘‘Not your worry. Not mine. His decision. He’ll live with it.’’

‘‘Maybe not,’’ that Oriental voice replied.

Rodriguez coughed out an uptight laugh. ‘‘You got that right.’’

He turned and ducked through the hatch. She heard their footsteps fade down the hallway. She exhaled and grabbed for air, soaked in sweat.

Huge conveyors hung suspended overhead and attached to the wall, apparently to lift the dead fish to the processing area where they would have been cleaned before being frozen while still out at sea. A metal wall ladder ran up to them. An enormous hatch half the size of a tennis court occupied the center of the ceiling-the deck hatch through which the catch was initially deposited. A catwalk ran alongside this hatch as well, maintenance access perhaps. She could make out only two other doors to the giant hold-steel hatches-both directly below her: one on the ground level through which the women now passed in groups of six, and another that suddenly swung open at the middle landing. Seawater continued to flood the chamber. With the hatches left open, the entire ship would flood.

She heard a sound below and looked down to see Rodriguez step out onto the middle balcony directly below her, again leaning his head over to inspect the progress. He was a man charged with a particular task, and she could feel his impatience to see it through. Standing alongside him was an Asian with hands the size of oven mitts.

The plan was a simple one, she thought: evacuate the illegals- protect the investment-and then later let Coughlie raid the ship himself, acting as an INS agent. If she had it right, Coughlie intended to scuttle the ship while he was aboard-another ploy intended to buy him both support and sympathy and to mislead any subsequent investigations.

She looked down at her right hand: All this time the camcorder had been recording. She hadn’t realized it, too caught up in Rodriguez’s proximity, but his voice had been recorded on tape as he issued his instructions. This camcorder had the man dead to rights.

But it was all worthless if she didn’t get to Boldt immediately. She had to move fast.

She stepped toward the hatch door, but in the process the strap to the camera case snagged behind her on a metal spur and tilted the case over, dumping its contents. Before she could react, a power cable, a blank tape and a spare battery spilled out noisily onto the steel landing, sounding like a drawer of kitchen utensils hitting the floor.

Stevie, who reached to catch the contents of the case a moment too late, found herself looking straight down through the slats under her feet and into the eyes of Rodriguez, directly below.

As the contents banged off the lower landing and rained down to the floor of the hold, every eye lifted up to look at her.

For a moment Stevie’s heart simply seemed to stop. She was the center of attention-the very place she had made the focus of her professional life-and she suddenly wanted anonymity. Everything, everyone, stood still. She couldn’t breathe; the pain was so great in her chest. Rodriguez, too, seemed frozen by the discovery of her. But then he moved to climb the stairs, taking them two at a time, and Stevie understood she was a dead woman.

The one thought that flashed before her was that Rodriguez controlled these women with fear. He and his men were grossly outnumbered. To disrupt that control-regardless of what happened to her and her tape-was all she had left. Rodriguez could offer them only fear; she had a far stronger weapon.

He had twenty or more feet to climb as Stevie stepped up to the rail and shouted in her best Mandarin. ‘‘Little Sisters! I am with the American press! The police are on their way! You are free!’’

For a thousandth of a second there was absolute silence. Rodriguez stopped his climb and looked down below. But then their cheer arose-a unified cry of salvation-so loud as to be deafening, so exuberant as to bring tears to Stevie’s eyes. The women broke ranks and charged the one guard. There was a great male scream from within them and the distinctive sound of bones breaking, like tree limbs in a storm.

As a group they made for the one door, but as the crowd bunched, others jumped onto the same metal stairs that ended at Stevie’s landing, and they climbed as quickly as spreading fire. Rodriguez turned the corner to her, now only a few short stairsteps below.

Stevie rounded the hatch, jumped through into the hallway and pulled with all her strength, the camcorder dangling from the strap around her right forearm. The damn door was far heavier than she had expected. She knew that to seal that door was to seal Rodriguez’s fate at the hands of his captives. She pulled and pulled, one eye cast through the slowly shrinking crack as the huge man grew ever larger with his approach. He bounded the final steps.

The screams of the excited women filled the ship now, shrill and electric. They came from every corner. Their feet shook the steel with a growing rumble. She heard two claps of gunfire, but then no more- that guard overwhelmed as well. Rodriguez had let loose the water, but Stevie had let loose the tide.

Her final tug pulled the door to closing, but it bumped and wouldn’t catch, and it wasn’t until she looked down that she saw the four stubby fingers-all broken and at odd angles, caught in the steel jamb-that she understood the impediment. Those fingers clenched and pulled despite their pain, and then four more appeared in the crack along with a pair of thumbs, and he overpowered her with his strength and slowly increased the gap, forcing the door back open.

Stevie held on tight and then let go the door all at once. Rodriguez, unprepared for this, flew back off balance and Stevie stepped forward and kicked him in the face, feeling the bone and gristle of his nose give way. Blood poured out. Rodriguez skidded face down along the metal stairs, his head rising and falling with each step.