“We are headed toward this election at home, and though I cannot say any more about what exactly is at stake here, I can stress to you that this project is of the utmost importance to our future.”

“I understand,” he said. He closed the phone before the other man could answer.

In the dark room, her body was an undistinguished lump under the sheet and comforter. Her dark brown hair splayed out across the pillow. The snoring had resumed. He sat on the side of the bed and she stirred. She murmured to him in German, “Who was that on your phone?”

He said nothing.

She rolled over to face him. “Is something wrong?”

He reached out his hand and traced his fingers along the side of her face, gently tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “My phone was inside my jacket.”

“Yes, but I didn’t see anything. I just got out the phone.”

Of course she would not be so quick to say she had not seen anything unless she had. She would not have been able to miss the heft of the gun.

“You should not have answered that phone.”

 “I’m sorry.”  She ran her tongue around her lips, her intentions bare. “It’s just that you were outside, and I thought it might be important. I was a bad girl, but that’s what I like about you. You’re a bad boy and you like bad girls, don’t you?”

He looked away from her, out the window, and thought about what she did know about him. The gun. The phone. And she’d called him Thor. He looked at the open sliding door. The hour was late. He wondered how much noise she would make.

“I won’t do it again,” she said and squirmed her body to press her breasts through the sheet against his thigh.

He placed his left hand on the mattress on the far side of her body, then he pulled down the sheet to admire her long neck and the heavy breasts with large pink areolae. He leaned down close, pressing his rib cage against her naked skin and watching her eyes as his fingers traced the line of her jaw then slid up under her chin. “No,” he said. “You won’t do it again.”

She was an athletic woman and the tendons in her neck were strong. He saw it in her eyes when the pressure registered, when the last vestiges of sleep were ushered out by the arrival of terror. She began flailing at his back with her fists, trying to reach his head, but he fended off her blows by pinning her arms with his elbows. Her feet were tangled in the bed clothes and she arched her back, her eyes growing wider, her face starting to darken. She tried to kick her legs free.

He increased the pressure on the carotid and her eyes flicked and darted around in their sockets, panic driving out all reason. But the lack of oxygen and the blood that continued to pump into her head slowed her struggles. When her eyelids drooped, he released his grip on her throat. He heard the intake of air and was pleased. He needed to see her eyes to watch for that exquisite moment. Her eyelids fluttered, and he watched as the eyes rolled and began to focus and the realization flooded back into her that he was still there.

He felt her chest expand as she made ready to scream, and her eyes locked on his with a hatred so vile he imagined he could feel the heat. Once they were resigned to what was going to happen, they always turned from terror to a venomous enmity. They wanted to let him know what they thought with their last thoughts, and he found a strength in that. With his powerful right hand he squeezed hard, cutting her scream so that she only emitted a feeble squeak before her face darkened again and her eyes began to bulge. This time he reached over with his left hand and held her eyelids open as she lost consciousness and the life drained out of her.

He watched, wondering if there would be a moment when he would see the change in her, when she would see if there was something beyond this world or not. There were so many stories of visions, of a light, a tunnel, of people seeing the other side, and he always watched for that moment when he might learn if it was so. But like all the other times, she merely departed. One second, she was there, then came the instant when he knew that even if he released his grip, she would not breathe again. When she was gone, he moved his face close to hers and tried to find the words to explain how different the eyes looked without that inner light. Dull, glassy, inert. The eyes were now all these things, but none of those words got to the essence of what had changed.

Heaven, Hades, angels, Lucifer — all that seemed quite preposterous if you thought about it. The only way people could possibly believe in that was to force themselves to suspend their reason and disbelief – and that he could not do. As Hegel said, “The rational alone is real.” Saints, sinners, miracles, the Bible. It was all as fantastic as something made up by Poe or Disney. Ludicrous. And if it didn’t exist, then what on earth would drive men to act except their own desires and appetites and self interest? If the whole structure that defined good and evil was based on falsehoods, then his life made perfect sense. As did her death, he thought as he flexed the fingers of his right hand, remembering the feel of her smooth, warm skin as she struggled. 

But in the back of his mind, there was always that little niggling doubt that said, yes, but, what if it all were true? 

He went to work with the precision of a Broadway set dresser. From another pocket of his jacket, he removed a pair of latex gloves and a small microfiber cloth. He cleaned the room, flushed the spent condom and then stood, one gloved hand on his chin and stared at the corpse. Her clothes, underwear, bra and pantyhose were draped over the armchair where she had left them. He looked up at the ceiling fan still turning over the center of the room — then back at the pantyhose, and he nodded. They’d started this back in England, and it would be amusing to repeat it. Tying the pantyhose around her neck, he gave her one last smile, even though the blank eyes showed no appreciation for his charm.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Aboard the Bonefish

March 26, 2008

10:05 a.m.

The volcano stood off to starboard, invisible beneath its cloak of snagged trade wind clouds. The lower, gentler slope of the mountain was dotted with red-roofed homes, towns, and farms. Riley hummed to herself as she sailed the Bonefish hard on the wind bound for the Iles des Saintes. The wind was from the east-southeast and she was sailing due south to clear Capesterre Belle-Eau.  In truth, the autopilot did most of the steering leaving her free to play with the lines, adjusting the trim of the sails, trying to eek out an extra half knot from each wind shift. She moved from one side of the cockpit to the other, her yellow oilskins streaming water from the waves that smashed against the small boat’s bow and the wind-blown spray that stung her cheeks.

She shook her head like a dog whipping the water off his fur. The hood of her jacket was pulled tight round her face, cinched in by the drawstring under her chin, so it was only her face that got wet. The salt water streamed into her eyes. She didn’t care. The stout little boat smashed into another wave and spray reached nearly to her mast’s first cross-trees.

She whooped like a rodeo cowboy, ducked under the dodger and patted the boat’s closed main hatch. “Atta girl,” she said aloud. Her Caliber 40 was no racing boat, but she was making a solid seven and half knots punching through the seas, rarely slowing down. This was the kind of adrenelin-pumping sailing Riley loved, with the lee rail almost underwater and the lower edge of the genoa dripping seawater. Off her stern, the quarter wave rose up with a whoosh as the Bonefish slipped through the water pushing to reach beyond her own hull speed. She was a sweet boat all right, and Riley had grown to trust her, aware that the boat was tougher than she was. This morning Bonefish was over-powered with full jenny in the eighteen to twenty knots of wind, but she was pounding her way through the Caribbean chop without a care. All the hatches and port lights were closed down tight, and Riley was proud of the fact that her boat never leaked a drop in bad weather. The only seawater that made its way below would be what she tracked in once she arrived.