Ken Douglas - Gecko

How did they know? Could they read his mind?

After a time that could have been ten hours or thirty he heard the sound of the deadbolt snapping open. He grabbed the IV pole and moved through the blinding black to where he imagined the center of the room was. He was weak and his grip on the chrome tube sent flaming stabs of white hot hurt shooting up from his mangled wrist, but the clicking of the turning doorknob grabbed all his attention. A man stepped through, backlit by the light flooding through the doorway.

“ Hey,” Jim heard a startled voice say as he swung the tube at the man’s head the way a home run hitter swings at a fat pitch coming down the pipe. He felt himself connect, but the tube slipped out of his hands as his eyes fought against the light.

“ Son of a bitch,” another voice screamed.

Jim squinted as the overhead light came on.

“ Get back or I’ll shoot.” It was the second man in black. The first lay dead on the floor. His face bashed in, the chrome IV stand at his side. “You killed him.” The man pointed a gun at Jim. His pockmarked face was flushing deep red and Jim could feel the heat of his anger. “The boss wants you alive, but I don’t think so.” He raised the gun and held it away from his body, pointing it at Jim’s heart as the black marble fell from the ceiling and landed on the man’s face.

The man screamed, because he knew what had just bit him on the cheek. The gun flew out of his hand as he flattened both palms to slap the spider off, but before his hands reached his face, Jim’s right foot connected with his balls. The man doubled over and the spider went flying. Jim moved in, grabbed the man by the hair, forced his head against the cold tile as the spider scooted away.

“ Where is she?” Jim demanded.

“ Fuck you,” the man said. Jim held his head fast against the floor, forcing him to face the retreating spider. The man shivered when it stopped and screamed when it turned and headed back toward him. “Get it away!”

“ Not a chance.”

“ You’re supposed to be terrified of it,” the man whined. “The boss said it’d scare the shit out of you.”

“ He was wrong. Now where is she?” The spider moved closer. The man’s eyes were open wide with fright and they turned cross-eyed as she came to a stop mere millimeters from his crooked nose.

“ She’s on the boat,” he croaked, an instant before his heart exploded. He died before he could say which boat. Frightened to death.

“ Jim, Jim Monday, are you in there?” Jim recognized the voice of Mohi Tuhiwai.

“ Here,” he called out. “I’m here.”

Mohi Tuhiwai burst in the room as he collapsed.

“ Thank you, girl,” he whispered and the black widow scooted away, hiding under the bed.

“ It’s 10:00, we only have two hours,” Mohi said, breathing hard.

“ No, we have a whole day.”

“ It’s Saturday night,” Mohi said, and Jim was crushed. He had been asleep and under the influence of the drugs for a whole day. He was almost out of time and he wasn’t any closer to finding Donna than before he’d been captured.

“ I know where she is,” Mohi exclaimed, breathless. “Reptil Rache, Linda figured it out. It means, Reptile Revenge. In German!”

Jim checked his damaged wrist in the light. It was already starting to scab over. He turned to Mohi. “I need clothes.”

“ The one without all the blood looks your size.”

They stripped him, leaving the body clad only in underwear.

“ The wool itches,” Jim said.

“ New Zealand wool doesn’t itch.” Mohi looked at the black sweater. “Comes from Germany, not New Zealand. That explains it.”

Jim finished dressing by putting on the dead man’s work boots, thankful that they fit. It was time something went right. Then he picked up the gun, a thirty-eight police special.

“ This thing is older than God.” Jim jammed it between his belly and the pants, under the sweater.

“ Guns are hard to come by in New Zealand,” Mohi said.

“ Apparently.” Then, “What took you so long?”

“ I got home okay,” Mohi said, “but I passed out in the driveway. Linda dragged me into the house and called an ambulance. I’d lost a lot of blood and when I came to I was delirious. They took me to the hospital, gave me blood and antibiotics. I’ve been drugged up for the last twenty-four hours.” He grimaced. “They got the bullet out, but they kept me on pain killers. It took me a whole day to remember what that guy at the motel said about this place, then I called Linda and snuck out of the hospital. Sorry, I did my best.”

“ You did good enough, we still have time. How’s the shoulder now?”

“ Not bad. I’ll be all right.” But the sweat running down his forehead told Jim that he was in serious pain.

“ Linda’s outside, in the car,” Mohi said. “Follow me.”

“ How did you get in?”

“ Door wasn’t locked.” Mohi led him through the house to the dark night outside. Linda Tuhiwai was waiting in the parked car out front. She got out when she saw them coming.

“ I was getting worried,” she whispered.

“ It’s okay, you don’t have to whisper anymore,” Mohi said.

“ How did you know to translate the boat’s name?” Jim asked Linda as he climbed into the backseat.

“ Mohi told me the man at the motel said they were German.” Linda got back in and started the car. “German bad guys, boat with a German name, it wasn’t hard to put together. After I figured out the Reptil Rache was the boat we were looking for, I went down to the port and did a little asking around while Mohi was in the hospital.”

“ But the boat we’re looking for is fitted out with cheap pine. We saw that boat. It’s first rate,” Jim said.

“ On the outside,” Linda said. “The inside is pretty, but not practical.”

“ How do you know?”

“ I talked to the man who installed the new air-conditioning unit below,” Linda said. “He’s married to a friend of mine. He told me the boat had been completely refitted last year. That’s why she looks so good. A German named Manfred Penn bought it two months ago and gutted the inside. He didn’t like the boat toilets and showers. He wanted the kind he was used to, never mind that they’ll flood as soon as he hits rough seas. The plumber tried to tell him, but he didn’t listen. He also wanted larger staterooms and he didn’t like the look of teak. He wanted light, knotty pine. He thinks it’s prettier. The carpenter tried to tell him you need hard wood on a boat, but he still didn’t listen. After a while people stopped trying to tell him.”

“ That sounds like the boat,” Jim said.

“ There’s more,” Linda said. “The boat sails with the dawn. Nobody seems to know for where.”

“ You learned a lot,” Jim said.

“ She’s a smart woman,” Mohi said.

“ What’s this Manfred Penn look like?”

“ Bald and ugly as my husband’s mother.”

“ Linda!” Mohi chastised.

“ Uglier,” Linda said.

“ We’re here.” Linda parked the car at the end of a pair of long twin piers. The pier on the left had a small oil tanker tied to its left side. There was nothing tied to its right. The pier on the right had a cargo ship moored to its right. Pallets of bagged cement, six feet high, were stacked on the twenty-foot wide pier, four abreast and over thirty deep.

Two forklifts were busy scooping up the pallets and delivering them to a crane that bent down from the cargo ship. On the left side of the right pier was the old Dutch schooner, Reptil Rache. She was a hundred and twenty-five feet long, but sandwiched between the cargo ship and oil tanker, she looked small.