Christopher Buckley - Wet Work

"It's stuck, boss."

"Just give it a yank." Charley took another pull off the bottle. His mouth went numb. A pleasant, warm feeling spread through him. He said, "He liked to play the violin and be outside painting cows and blue skies. Instead he spent the whole time indoors with old Augustus here and ladies with long white necks. I bet he ended up hating rich people. I would have."

"I'm going to-hold on."

"You notice how they're all gray, the people he painted? I have a theory about that… he was saving his colors for the landscapes. Felix!"

"What, boss?"

"I killed Bundy. There was a girl on the porch. What have I done?"

"Just hold on, boss. It's coming."

"She had this tooth wouldn't come out, you remember that?"

"Yeah."

"Tried everything, string to the doorknob, crust of bread… oh ."

Felix applied a pressure bandage. When Charley opened his eyes again he saw the pillow she'd embroidered for him that said AGE AND TREACHERY WILL OVERCOME YOUTH AND VIRTUE EVERY TIME, all soaked. He could hear Margaret. She was saying, "Oh, Charley, not my pillow ."

He had the throttle opened up all the way. He was going dangerously fast. It was night. The river was a cafe con leche blur in the searchlight. Virgilio's and Mirko's boats were a quarter mile behind, struggling to keep up with him as he slalomed past logs and floating islands of canarana grass.

"Niño," said Virgilio over the VHP, "please, slow down. It's dangerous."

He could not tell Virgilio the reason for his speed. It had nothing to do with chasing the billonario . The truth was that he was trying to get away from the dead monkey. It had taken hold of his brain; he couldn't shake it loose. Even at sixty miles an hour it held on, jeering, chattering, smashing him with fists, pelting him with sapodilla fruit.

Large insects flew into his face, disintegrating, stinging. He felt the jolt as the boat hit the back of a crocodile, heard the whine of the propeller as it raced in air. The boat landed with a thud, engines churning.

Charley stood at Esmeralda 's wheel. The current was running eight miles an hour, so he had to maintain at ten miles an hour for steerage. The riverbank was rushing past him at nearly twenty miles an hour. He was kayaking in an ocean liner.

His head was wrapped tightly. The morphine and Jack Daniel's gave him confidence. He could feel everything the ship was doing through his hands on the wheel; the water rushing by under her hull, the cushion between it and the bank, the propellers digging in when he increased speed, logs bouncing off. Most of all he felt the river carrying him to the sea. The sea was 3,500 miles away but the river would carry him. The river that began in a trickle of crystalline water in Lake Mismi, high up in the Andes, swiftly gathering mass and momentum, becoming a great brown snowball, seven million cubic feet by the time it reached the ocean; it could fill Lake Ontario in three hours. A river that could fill Lake Ontario in three hours could easily carry them to-

"Boss," said Felix. They were on the radar screen-three green specks astern, one ahead of the other. They appeared closer with each Stardust sweep of the cursor.

His bow light washed her transom with its beam. There she was. He throttled back. Eusebio, next to him, reached beneath the dashboard for the RPG-7 cradled in its box. It was Soviet-made, fired an 85-millimeter, 18.7-pound grenade 500 meters. Sendero used them against truck convoys and tanks.

Eusebio shouldered it and aimed.

"Aim for the stern. Low, right above the water."

" Si , Niño."

He imagined it clearly: the explosion, the boat going dead in the water, the billonario surrendering; saw the fuel tanks igniting, Baudelaire's eyes blazing at him from underneath Collardet's top hat as the paint melted.

He shouted at Eusebio, "No!" and knocked his arm upward at the moment of firing. The rocket arced over the boat in a feckless parabola, landing in the jungle and sending aloft a choir of outraged cockatoos screeching into the night.

Eusebio turned to him and said, "Why did you do that?" He was about to tell him when Mac's bullet hit Eusebio in the chest.

The river narrowed. Charley steered by radar, trying to keep the center in the middle of the green phosphorescent couloir. Felix shouted, "Starboard!"

Charley swung the wheel to the right. As he did, he looked to the left and saw the riverbank, revealed starkly in the bright halogen glow of the searchlight. He saw striations of red clay. It was beautiful.

Esmeralda struck the riverbank. She took it on the chine, a loud, hollow thunnng . Charley held on to the wheel, his feet went out from under him. When he pulled himself back up he could no longer see out the window. A large tree had crashed down onto the foredeck. He saw flailing in its branches. An arm emerged, then Mac, swearing. He'd been thrown from the top deck into the tree.

Charley looked at the radar screen. As he did, the windows on the right side of the bridge all shattered into a blizzard of Plexiglas.

The boat, pinned against the riverbank by the current, scraped forward slowly. Charley pushed the throttle to "full ahead." As she moved forward, she made a greasy squeaking noise against the clay bank. Felix appeared in the starboard doorway on his hands and knees. He held the Uzi over the railing and fired blindly. Grenades went off in the water with a whump sound, followed by plumes of water. Rostow was in the bows, tossing them. Mac disentangled himself from the tree and jumped back up onto the top deck and fired the M-60 machine gun. Charley kept his hand on the throttle. He became aware of something that did not belong. He could not see in the dark. He removed his hand from the throttle and the feeling came with it.

They followed in the dark. He looked up and saw the Southern Cross, the Magellanic Cloud. The riverbanks blazed with pulsations of fireflies. Virgilio shouted from his boat over the VHF, "Niño, they're shooting!"

Mirko's voice came on: "Niño! Why doesn't Eusebio shoot with the RPG?"

"Eusebio is dead. Keep firing. No grenades, do you hear?"

"But they're-why?"

"Just do it, Virgilio."

"Fire the RPG, Niño. Please!"

"Virgilio, you don't realize what they have on board."

"Gasto is dead, Niño! Davilo is wounded. I think one of my engines is hit. Shoot, please!"

"The boat is full of gold."

The beautiful word hung there, suspended in radio silence between the boats. He regretted it. The lie. To hold out the promise of gold, here , where his ancestors had slaughtered Virgilio's and Mirko's-but how else, what else would they understand?

"Gold?" said Virgilio.

"He has gold on board?" said Mirko.

"Yes."

"How much?"

"A fortune, Mirko!" he shouted angrily. "More than you can carry. Now move forward! Concentrate your fire on the bridge."

"Okay, Niño."

"Mirko," he said, "you go up the right side. Virgilio, you go up the left. Together now!"

It was moving up his arm. He said, "Felix."

"What?"

"Shine your light on my arm, would you?"

"Jesus," said Felix.

It was clinging to his upper arm, fans flared out, moving back and forth slowly like elephant ears. What was God thinking when he made these creatures? Charley wondered. It opened its mouth wider than a church door. Charley could see all the way down its throat, translucent in Felix's flashlight beam, a green tunnel that seemed to extend all the way down to its tail.