Randy White - Dead Silence

Now, feeling water moving near his ears, Will thought, He’s the devil. The real devil, picturing Metal-eyes. Then the boy began to buck, thrusting his abdomen upward, trying to crush the hard gray object against the coffin lid.

Instead, the thing bounced off his chest like a pinball, then came to rest between the side of the coffin and Will’s neck.

It was a human skull.

Water was still rising, and the density of old bone on young skin was maddening. Because there was nothing left to try, Will began using his own skull to hammer at the coffin’s lid, hoping to knock himself unconscious before he drowned.

When I peeked through a side window of the horse stable on the ten-acre Shelter Cottage estate, I wasn’t prepared for the shock of what the Cubans had done to Nelson Myles. The precision wounds, the surgical technique, told me it could have been no one else.

Beyond the windowpane, the source of the odd whirring sound Detective Palmer and I had heard was revealed. It was a power drill. Horror is commonly amplified by imagination, rarely mitigated, because the limits of our fears are boundaryless, or so I’d believed until that moment.

The scene-Nelson Myles, hanging by his feet from a rafter, hands bound behind him-expanded the reach of my secret fears and proved that I at least had found false refuge in my own limited imagination.

No, I wasn’t prepared. No one could have been, although I knew the Cubans were nearby when I saw Fred Gardiner’s cabin cruiser banging itself to pieces, grounded on the beach at the western edge of the property.

Rene Navarro and his partner, Angel Yanquez, had already killed one person, used a knife to stab a limo driver to death. Now, trapped in the U.S., they were becoming desperate. They were calling on their old skills, using Malvados techniques to help them escape into international waters or to Cuba before the deadline, in time for the C-130’s drop of the Castro Files.

Gardiner’s boat was as described: a boxy little tincan of a cruiser, aluminum hull, dented cowling, broken VHF antenna. The out drive was tilted upward like the stubby tail of a scorpion. The boat was a walleyed weekender out of its league in the Gulf Stream.

Navarro and Yanquez had run the cruiser up onto the beach, probably not long ago. I knew because of the tide. It was two hours before high, but the flood had only recently floated the boat enough to swing it sideways, beam to the sea. There was no ground tackle deployed, no attempt to secure the boat. The interrogators didn’t plan on coming back to use it again.

It told me their escape hadn’t gone well in the tricky backwaters of the Gulf Coast. Now they’d returned to strong-arm Nelson Myles into flying them out of the country or to commandeer his long-range yacht. I hoped Will Chaser was with them. Reason and instinct told me, however, the boy was either dead… or dying.

I was on the seaward side of the Myles property. A few minutes earlier, Detective Palmer and I had rung the front doorbell, then banged the knocker, until it became evident that the house either was empty or whoever was inside wasn’t going to answer. Through windows, the place appeared peaceful, no sign of a struggle, no indication of forced entry. It reinforced the detective’s suspicion that Myles had meant precisely what he’d told me on the phone: He was fine, stop calling, leave him alone.

When I’d suggested we break in, Palmer gave me an Are you nuts? look but told me she’d wait for a few more minutes while I circled the property, then added, “If you’re carrying a concealed weapon, I swear to God I’ll take you straight to jail.”

I didn’t ask if she planned on arresting me on a weapons charge, or for murder, because I didn’t want to force a decision. But I broke the old rule and lied.

There wasn’t an option. No competent cop would accompany an armed civilian onto private property. To Palmer, I was a vigilante first, a marine biologist second-nothing more. It was too much to ask of her. So I didn’t, even though, in the pockets of my foul-weather jacket, I was carrying items she wouldn’t have tolerated, including an old, fail-safe SIG Sauer 9mm pistol.

I had noticed the cabin cruiser as I circled near the beach onto the back lawn. It was visible beyond a stand of coconut palms, beneath a skull-gray moon, bucking and rolling in the random cadence of abandonment as waves rolled landward. The moon, half full, orbited above the Gulf horizon, casting a milky, funneled pathway to Mexico. It didn’t generate much light, but I didn’t need light to see. Something else concealed in my jacket was a night vision monocular mounted on headgear.

The monocular was a fifth-generation wonder made by Nivisys Industries. I wore it over my right eye like a surgical optic. Flip the little switch and the darkest night became lime-green day, bright as high noon.

Not only did it give me an edge over the Cubans, it provided a comforting safety factor. Palmer had told me she’d stay at the front while I looped the property. But if she got restless, changed her mind and came searching, there was no risk of mistaking her for one of the bad guys.

The interrogators had lied to Nelson Myles about smuggling illegal weapons. But that didn’t mean they weren’t carrying illegal weapons.

I got close enough to the cabin cruiser to convince myself no one was aboard-no one who was conscious anyway. The random seesaw banging would have made the cabin unbearable.

Behind the main house, near the pool, I’d seen two guest cottages and remembered there was a horse stable to the south. Before jogging toward the cottages, I drew the familiar weight of my SIG Sauer pistol and confirmed the magazine was full, a round in the chamber.

Lights were off in the cottages but the doors were unlocked. I did a quick search: Nothing.

Next, I headed to the stable. And there was Myles…

The Yale grad and multimillionaire was hanging by his feet, glasses gone, hair in suspended disarray as if he were adrift underwater.

The man was wearing fresh cotton slacks and a gray tailored shirt. He had probably scrubbed himself clean after I left with the police, then dressed in his cocktail-hour best to counter the humiliation he had suffered on the dirt road.

“I feel filthy,” he had told me, a psychological reaction to my bullying. Looking at the man now, I found no comfort in the fact that what I had done to him did not compare to the outrage the interrogators had inflicted.

Nelson’s head was four feet off the floor. The floor beneath was stained. On a nearby wall hung a phone that had been ripped from its mounting. Beneath it, on a bench, was the electric drill, plugged into an extension cord. They’d probably found the drill in the tool closet. The closet door was open.

The Cubans had done a poor job of duct-taping Myles’s hands. They hadn’t secured his thumbs, but clearly the Yale grad hadn’t realized the opportunity it could have afforded him.

They hadn’t bothered taping his mouth. Ten acres of seclusion and the percussion of waves from the nearby beach guaranteed privacy. To bind his feet, instead of tape the Malvados had skewered holes in the fleshy space between ankle bones and Achilles tendons to insert the cable hooks that now strained against the man’s suspended weight. It was the same technique used in meat lockers to hang beef.

I’m no carpenter, but I recognized the polished drill bit. It was stainless steel, the diameter finer than pencil lead but forged solid, designed to bore through tile or concrete. It, too, was stained.

Myles appeared to be dead. I couldn’t be sure.

The stable consisted of a half dozen stalls, doors open. There were also ancillary rooms, but I didn’t pause to weigh the possibility that Navarro and Yanquez were hiding inside. I crashed through bushes to the front entrance and kicked open the office door, pistol at eye level, flipping off lights as I hurried to the barn’s main area. Darkness was to my advantage.