Tampa Burn

THIRTY-SEVEN

With my free right hand, I grabbed him by the throat and dug my fingers into his carotid artery until he was woozy enough for me to pull my left hand free. Then, still holding Lourdes by the throat, I hit him across the bridge of the nose three times, as hard as I could, with the heel of my left hand.

The lighting here wasn’t good, but I could see him clearly enough to know that his face wasn’t as bad as the scorched teen I’d seen in the medical photographs. Lourdes had had a bunch of plastic surgery since then.

He would need another after what I did to his nose.

He screamed and dropped me, then bowed to put his face into his hands, yelling, “Don’t hit me in the face!”

I grabbed him by his ripped shirt, turned him, then slammed him against the ship’s house. I ducked through his arms, hit him with an undercut right, then held him up against the wall by the throat. “Where’s my son? What have you done to Lake? Take me to him now!”

“No fucking way, asswipe! You’ll hit me in the face again!”

“Tell me!”

“No.”

His nose was bleeding. He was trying to use his hands to cover his face, but I could see in his eyes that he suddenly realized who I was. I was the biologist; the stubborn man on the phone. I was the father of the child he’d abducted.

His pale, lidless eyeball seemed to grow wider.

I yelled, “You don’t want me to hit you? Then you better talk. Now! Because I’m going to keep hitting you until you take me to my son.”

I did; hit him beneath the eye with my broken right hand, and I didn’t feel it, so I hit him again.

He bowed his face into his hands once more, then shoved me away and sprinted down the stairs. For a man his size, he was an astonishing athlete. He’d apparently inherited the genes of his wrestler mother, the woman who could beat up men.

Even so, on the main deck I caught him from behind. I dragged him to a stop, then spun him against the ship’s railing, yelling, “Tell me, damn it! What have you done to my boy?”

“Fuck you! Stop following me, asswipe! You’re aboard my ship!”

This time, when I hit him, Lourdes went down in a heap, mouth wide, head bouncing on the deck, his lidless blue eye fluttering.

Unconscious.

We were near the fantail, where I’d boarded. I left him lying, hurried across the deck, and grabbed one of the empty 50-gallon drums. Hurried because I could see a helicopter working far inland. It was umbilicaled to the night sea by the beam of a searchlight.

The Coast Guard would be here soon.

I laid the drum on its side at Lourdes’ feet, using the guard rail as a stopper. Then I pushed and pulled until I had enough of his body inside the barrel to tip it upright again.

Breathing heavily, but not feeling the least bit spent, I hurried across the deck once more and returned with the drum’s steel lid. Oddly, there were holes punched into the lid.

Breathing holes?

Perhaps.

It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be able to benefit from the holes for long.

I shoved Lourdes fully into the barrel and started to seal the lid, but then stopped for a moment.

Because I had the drum braced beneath the outboard lights, I could see his face clearly for the first time. It was a mess. It was worse than I’d thought.

Along with the remaining burn scars, his face was a patchwork of skin colors and stitch scars. A patchwork doll-that’s what he reminded me of. The man’s cheeks, jaw, and lips were made up of strips of skin-rectangles and squares-all seemingly sewn together, but probably on different occasions, one small piece at a time. The skin color varied from place to place. There was brown skin, white skin, black skin, and a piece or two that had a jaundiced shade.

Did each piece represent a person that he’d murdered?

His nose had been hideous even before I smashed it. It was a discolored black flap, as if his body had rejected the thing. Now the cartilage that supported the dark skin was slowly peeling off his face.

I didn’t feel sorry for him. Not a bit. He’d done damage to someone I loved. How much damage, I didn’t yet know. I was still furious, and panicked, and it horrified me to think what I might find in that Igloo cooler.

I shoved his head down and banged the lid on tight. Then I dumped it on its side again, and was rolling it toward the ship’s accommodation ladder, where I planned to depth-charge the monster known throughout Masagua as the Man-Burner into the open Gulf of Mexico.

He’d have been headed for the bottom within less than a minute, if I hadn’t heard a voice behind me say, “Doc? Hey, Doc! What do you think you’re doing?”

I stopped and looked around slowly, terrified that I was imagining the voice, and his words.

But no, there he was, dressed in shorts and a blue chambray shirt very similar to the one I was wearing-both of us stained with blood, it appeared.

It was Lake. It was my son.