Circle of Bones - Kling Christine (полная версия книги txt) 📗

“I’ve never driven one of these before,” she shouted when they’d made it through the narrow cut and the boat started to rock and roll. The motion was very different from a sailboat.

“I drove it myself from Trois Rivieres to the Saintes. It’s not that complicated. Shove those things forward.” He pointed the gun at the throttles.

She pushed them forward until they were doing about ten knots, rising and falling into the troughs between the waves.

“Faster,” he said.

“I’m afraid I’ll lose control.” She had to shout over the roar of the engines.

“Stop stalling, Riley.”

She increased the speed a little more, but they were still doing less than half of what the boat could do. The boat would start to pound if she speeded it up.

“You’re hurt,” she said. “The pounding won’t do you any good.”

“More,” he yelled.

Maybe she could take him in the wrong direction. Did Dig know where the Iles de la Petite Terre were located?

“Turn on the charts.” He pointed the gun at the dark screen of the GPS chart plotter. “The guy who rented me the boat showed me how to use that.”

So much for trying to take them off course.

As the chart plotter was going through its warm up sequence, she turned to look at his face. She saw that the lines on either side of his mouth were etched deeper now, and there were strands of gray hair around his temples.

“What happened to you, Diggory?” Her voice was barely loud enough to be heard over the engines.

He reared his head back then spoke into the wind. “Some idiot shot me.”

“That’s not what I meant. How did you get to be like this?”

He looked at her. “Like what?”

“A monster.”

He leaned back and barked a single laugh at the sky. “Monster?” he shouted. “If that’s what I am, then that’s what your father was too, Riley.”

I don’t doubt that, she thought. But I have found your favorite topic: you.

“Your father molded me who and what I am. We’re just men. Men who were born to rule other men.”

“Amoral men, you mean.”

“And women. You’ve played your part in this, Riley.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Riley, the good soldier. The dutiful Marine. That’s still how you see yourself, isn’t it?”

She turned away from him and looked across the tops of the waves that marched to the horizon. The sun was shining, the sea breeze smelled clean and pure, but she felt the menace in the air. It was how you felt when you were diving a lush coral reef and from the corner of your eye, you saw the dark shadow of a cruising shark.

“You’re talking about Lima, aren’t you?”

“Ah, well done. You always were good. Even when it was against regulations.”

“Everything about our affair was against regulations, Diggory.” She spoke more for herself than him.

“Ha! Touche. More than you know.”

She turned around and those dazzling blue eyes were so close, watching her with amusement. She didn’t look away this time. “Dig, I’m sick of playing these games. Tell me.”

“You’ve already figured it out, Riley. You simply can’t admit it.”

“That’s not true,” she said, but she felt the twisting blackness in her growing.

“Of course, it’s true. It was you. You remember. That morning, you came by my apartment. We had sex and you were all moony-eyed. What the fuck were you thinking? That what we had was true love?”

“You said it was,” she said. And I believed you.

The corner of his mouth lifted in a half smile and he gave that half-cough, half-laugh again. “I wanted to get laid.”

The boat rose up on a large swell then dropped with a jarring slam into the trough.

“There were others you could have chosen for that. It was my father you wanted to fuck with. Killing Michael wasn’t enough for you.”

She felt the sourness trying to crawl up her throat. She’d never been seasick in her life, but this time, she wasn’t sure she could swallow it down.

Dig laughed. “I can’t argue with that. It was time to add you to the list of Yorick paybacks. I gave you that package to deliver to Hutchinson at the Marine House. I knew you could get it through security. I told you it was a radio. It wasn’t, of course.”

“You’re lying.”

“You keep telling yourself that, but inside, you know this is the truth, Riley.” He leaned his head back against his seat and looked up at the sky again, as though he were struggling to remember one of hundreds of similar missions. “We had a problem with the Peruvians concerning a free trade agreement and certain mining rights. We believed that the Peruvians would see things our way if they feared a reemergence of Shining Path and felt indebted to the Americans for their sacrifice. And I was finished with you — in fact, you were becoming a liability. I couldn’t resist the delicious irony of taking out Yorick’s daughter among the Marines. I had everything worked out until you had to screw it all up by delivering the package, then leaving the Marine House. I wasn’t rid of you after all.”

She remembered again standing in the little bodega, buying a bottle of wine for that night after her shift. Then she felt the concussion as the old man placed her change in her palm, and she was running toward the smoke. Later, when they’d told her the blast had originated in Hutch’s room, she kept pushing back at the blackness.

But she couldn’t push it back any longer. Riley throttled back, pulled herself up out of the seat, hung her body over the rail, and vomited until her body was wracked with dry heaves.

“So I watched you,” Dig continued as if nothing had happened. As if he couldn’t hear her retching. “Granted, from a distance. You kept your mouth shut. It was remarkable, really. I knew a part of you suspected, but I suppose another part refused to believe that you could have been responsible for all that death and destruction.”

Her mind hung like a broken record, repeating over and over, Oh Danny, sweet funny Danny. I’m so sorry.

“You’ve been a loose end for many years now, and I’ve never been certain you wouldn’t find Jesus and decide to confess.”

No, she hadn’t known. Had she? In her nightmares when the flames burned around her and she carried Danny on her shoulder again, she’d felt the guilt. And told herself it was survivor’s guilt.

She was spent, empty. Still hanging over the side, she stared down into the white foam sliding by the black hull. She could kick with her legs and slide over the side into the dark cool water. Deny him this pleasure. Put out the flames for good.

A long silver object streaked out from under the hull, startling her, and then it disappeared out into the dark water. She heard a splash in the distance. Then another silver torpedo shape raced by right under her face, a long jagged scar visible on her back. In a few seconds, the dolphin returned and swam alongside in the shadow of the boat, swinging her course from side to side with effortless pumps of her flukes, keeping perfect pace with the big black powerboat.

Riley was aware that Diggory was still speaking, but she couldn’t hear him any longer. She reached her arm toward the water, her fingertips inches from the surface. She remembered Cole and his crazy talk of luck and dolphins. And again, she felt that vibration of connecting to another being. Was it a shark that had inflicted the wound that stretched from the dolphin’s head to past the dorsal fin?

The sleek animal twisted her body round so that she was swimming on her side, her dark eye staring up, her mouth curving up into that natural smile. Then she rolled back over and when her fin broke through the surface, Riley’s fingers touched the rough white scar. In the next instant, with one mighty thrust of her flukes, she was gone.

Seconds later, she shot out of the water off the bow and arced up in a high leap streaming water.

“Shit,” Dig said. “Did you see that? Get back up here and drive. You almost hit a dolphin.”