Yes!
Staying as deep as possible, I shoved a hand into my pocket and dug out the razor. I slid the razor under the top of my right sock. Then I tugged the shorts down and off.
After missing its chance at me, the boat had slowed down and resumed its casual circling.
I wadded the shorts.
Holding them in both hands, I started toward the surface.
Probably lose a few fingers, I thought.
Might be worth it, if it works.
I watched the gliding black belly of the boat. Slowed my climb. Watched. Waited. Felt the push of water as the bow passed over my head.
And suddenly shot both arms up, ramming my shorts into the propeller. In an instant, they were ripped from my grip. I jerked my arms down.
Fingers and hands intact.
Above me, the motor groaned, coughed and quit.
Yes, yes, yes!
Motor dead, the dinghy glided on by. I started swimming underwater to stay with it.
In a few seconds, I managed to get underneath it again.
A few seconds after that, the dinghy wobbled. Then the entire submerged portion of the motor swung up and broke the surface - taking along the remains of my shorts.
You can swing these outboard motors up on their hinges to get at the props. I’d done it myself a few times. So I knew that Thelma had to be standing at the stem, bent over the motor, both her hands busy.
A good, precarious position.
I lunged for the surface.
Reached high.
As my face cleared the water, I grabbed the gunnel with both hands and jerked down on it like a guy desperate to climb aboard.
My side of the dinghy lurched downward.
The other side jumped up.
Thelma, looming above me, was bent over the raised motor just as I’d hoped. Both her hands were on it. By the time I saw her, she had already turned her head to see what had gone wrong.
Already lost any chance of staying on her feet.
Crying out with alarm, she flung up her arms. She swayed sideways, shoulder first. For a moment, she stood on her right leg while her left leg lifted like a boy dog about to wet a tree. But her left leg kept rising higher. Then she was plunging down over the side of the dinghy. The gunnel jerked out of my grip and the dinghy scooted off. I kicked to keep my head up.
Thelma’s right shoulder struck the water.
The rest of her followed.
Then came a concussion that buffeted me, shoved at me, and slapped a load of water into my face.
Blind from the drenching, I began to swim after the dinghy.
My goal was to reach it, climb aboard, and take control of the machetes. Once I had them, Thelma wouldn’t dare give me any more trouble.
I’d have nothing more to fear from her or Wesley.
As I swam, I blinked the water out of my eyes. The dinghy was about twenty feet away.
No sweat.
I glanced back. No sign of Thelma. She still hadn’t come up. Though glad she wasn’t hot on my tail, I felt a twist of worry.
Maybe she’d drowned.
I actually thought about going back to see if she needed help. Which sounds nuts. But I had this idea that she might be grateful, might even change her tune and decide to stop fighting me. Maybe we would join forces, be a team ...
She grabbed my left ankle.
Stopped me cold and jerked me down.
When her other hand clutched the back of my right leg, it gripped me above the top of my sock - missing the razor, thank God.
I felt myself being dragged backward.
A hand released me, grabbed me higher on the leg.
Knowing Thelma, she’d be going for my nuts. So I squeezed my legs together to stop her from reaching between them. Just in the nick of time, too.
She shoved a hand between my thighs. As she drove it in, prying her way deeper into the crevice, I suddenly tried to fling myself over. Her one hand stayed trapped between my thighs. Her other let go of my calf. I twisted, flung myself about, and kicked with both legs. In seconds, Thelma no longer had me.
I clawed to the surface. Gasping to fill my lungs, I whirled around as her head popped out of the water. She sucked in a single big breath. Then I clutched her shoulders with both my hands and drove her down.
She didn’t go straight down - she went over backward, me on top.
She fought me. When I lost hold of her slippery shoulders, she wrapped her arms around my back. She gave me a hug as if trying to crush my ribcage. My arms were free, so I grabbed her by the hair and one ear, and twisted her head.
Both of us kicked and squirmed.
I quickly lost track of who was on top - or where the top might be. We both stayed underwater, though. Neither of us could breathe.
And neither of us let go.
We stayed in our clinch as if each of us figured we had the upper hand.
It seemed like hours that we struggled under the water in that fierce embrace. It might’ve been as long as a minute.
Finally, Thelma seemed to tire out. Her thrashing and writhing and kicking slowed down. Her arms no longer squeezed my ribcage so hard. Soon after that, she ceased all her struggles. Her arms loosened their hold, then slid away from my back.
I let go of her ear. With the hand that clutched her hair, I eased her away from me.
She seemed limp.
Unconscious, maybe dead.
Maybe faking.
Keeping my grip on her hair, I rose to the surface. I breathed, but held her head under - at arm’s length, just in case she was playing ‘possum.
I had to tread water furiously to keep my own head up. With so much motion on my part, I might not be able to detect movements by Thelma. Until it was too late.
Unnerving.
I felt like a murderer and a sitting duck.
It became very difficult to keep on holding her down. I thought she might already be dead. But I also half expected to feel her suddenly slide the razor out of my sock. Scared of both things, I gave her head a shove backward and let go.
A few seconds later, her head popped up. I glimpsed her face in the moonlight - eyes abulge, lips tight. I felt sure she must be alive, after all. But she didn’t start gasping and huffing for air. In silence except for the slurping sounds of the water, her head tilted back and the rest of her body came sliding to the surface.
The next thing I knew, she was floating on her back. Sprawled out loose and open, arms spread, legs wide. She looked as if she’d maybe zonked out while relaxing in her back-yard swimming pool.
She sure didn’t look dead.
It was uncanny.
It gave me the willies.
Treading water, I watched her for signs of life.
She just drifted lazily, being lifted and turned a little, now and then, by the motions of the water under her back. After gazing at her for a while, I noticed she was farther off than before.
I didn’t want her to get away.
Not yet.
I wasn’t about to swim after her, though. So I twisted myself around and swam to the dinghy.
I made a stop at its stem. Reaching up, I spent a minute or two untangling my shorts from the propeller. They’d gotten torn up pretty good. I tossed them into the boat, anyway. Then I managed to throw myself aboard without capsizing the thing.
While I put on the shredded remains of my shorts, I checked on Thelma. She was pretty far off, but still spread out on her back, the same as before.
It didn’t seem right.
If I’d drowned her, she should’ve sunk. If I hadn’t drowned her, she ought to be either swimming somewhere or floundering in the water, gasping and coughing.
Just didn’t make any sense for her to be floating like that, as if asleep.
I lowered the outboard back into the water and got it started. Keeping it throttled down, I turned the dinghy toward Thelma. I puttered toward her very slowly.
The prow was aimed between her legs.
I steered
to the side a little earlier than I needed to, just to avoid temptation.
I tried to miss her completely.
But the port side of the dinghy gave her left foot a gentle nudge. She didn’t so much as flinch. She simply remained sprawled on her back, and began to swivel counterclockwise.
She reminded me of the knife thrower’s assistant in a circus act. The beautiful gal in a skimpy outfit who gets strapped to a wheel, gets twirled, gets the fun of being the knife target.
Except Thelma wasn’t beautiful and she didn’t have a skimpy outfit on. She was naked. Her huge breasts, shiny and pale in the moonlight, sort of drooped off the sides of her chest like a couple of seasick voyagers getting ready to woops.
The bump by the dinghy made her spin half a turn.
She appeared to resume spinning when I started to circle around her with the boat.
The waves of my wake made her tilt and bob.
She seemed oblivious of it all.
Reaching down between my knees, I grabbed one of the machetes. I picked it up and waved it overhead. ‘Hey!’ I shouted. ‘Thelma! Look what I’ve got?’
She just lay there in the middle of my wave-circles.
I threw the machete at her.
It was supposed to be more of a toss, really. A gentle, underhand toss - the way you might throw a ball to a little kid.
Intended to startle her, make her flinch or try to dodge out of the way.
It wasn’t even meant, actually, to hit her.
For some reason, the toss went haywire. For some reason, I swung my arm up with more force than I’d planned on. Instead of making a shallow arc through the air so it would fall fairly harmlessly on or near Thelma, the machete went high.
Maybe all ‘Freudian slips’ aren’t verbal.
Maybe this was a slip-of-the-arm.
Who knows? Maybe there was no subconscious intent, and it just happened because my coordination was loused up from all the running and swimming and stuff.
Anyway, I was surprised and shocked to see that I hadn’t given the machete such a gentle toss, after all.
It flew almost straight up, tumbling end over end.
I said, ‘Oh, shit.’
As it flipped higher and higher, I had no idea where it might come down. For all I knew, it might land on me.
We’re talking a very large knife, built for whacking its way through sugar cane or jungle or something. The blade didn’t have much of a point, but it must’ve been two feet long - broad and heavy.
It tumbled blade over handle on the way up.
To a height of at least thirty feet.
At the very top, it made a tight U-turn. Then it started down, still tumbling.
Right away, I saw that I was no longer in danger of being Ground Zero.
Thelma was.
‘Thelma!’ I shouted. ‘Watch out!’
She didn’t react - just floated spread-eagled on her back like a naked and unlovely knife thrower’s assistant.
She’s dead, I told myself. Don’t worry about it.
But I yelled ‘Thelma!’ again, anyway.
And watched the machete fall, whipping end over end.
Maybe it would miss her, after all. Or maybe she would be struck by its handle, not its blade.
It struck blade first. It caught her just below the navel. It sank in almost to the handle.
Thelma screamed.
She was punched underwater by the blow. Her scream went gurgly, then silent.
She vanished, swallowed by the black.
My own scream ended when I ran out of breath. Gasping and whimpering, I gave the motor full throttle and sped away at top speed - which seemed way too slow.
I glanced back.
No sign of Thelma.
After that, I didn’t look back any more. I was scared of what I might see.
I sort of thought she might be swimming after me.
One To Go
I took the other machete with me, climbed onto the dock, and tied up the dinghy. Still feeling creeped out, I wouldn’t look behind me at the cove as I hurried to the foot of the dock. Nor when I walked through the thick grass at the rear of the mansion.
The whole thing had been too damn weird.
Also, I’d never killed anyone before.
I felt pretty strange about killing Thelma.
It was bad enough that I’d ended the life of a human being. But she was a woman, too. You’re not supposed to hurt women, much less kill them. Also, she was Kimberly’s sister; I didn’t feel good at all about that.
On the other hand, it wasn’t as if Thelma hadn’t deserved what she got. She’d thrown in with Wesley, who’d murdered her own father and her own sister’s husband. Along with Wesley, she’d done some vicious, sick things to Billie, Connie and Kimberly. To those kids, too - Erin and Alice - not to mention helping Wesley murder their parents.
If that weren’t enough, she’d tried to kill me a few times - including the attempt at the lagoon that had nearly wiped out Connie. I was damn lucky to still be alive.
Also, it wasn’t as if I’d murdered her in cold blood. Our struggle in the cove had been self-defense, on my part. I’d only been trying to stay alive.
And the final deal with the machete had been sort of an accident. Which wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t been playing dead, or whatever the hell she’d been up to.
She had nobody to blame but herself.
In a way, I felt sort of angry at Thelma for making me kill her.
In another way, though ...
Maybe I’d better not write it.
Oh, why the hell not? Who am I trying to impress? The whole idea is to tell what happened - accurately, without any phoney stuff...
It’s not that I didn’t feel sort of rotten in some ways about killing Thelma. Especially because she was Kimberly’s sister, and I hated the idea of causing Kimberly any more grief.
But here’s the deal.
There was part of me that felt absolutely great about killing Thelma.
We’d gone one-on-one, her or me, a fight to the finish, and I’d wasted her ass.
Sure, I felt sort of horrified and disgusted and guilty and spooked and very tired - but holy Jesus I was so excited by it that I felt all trembly inside. As I walked through the grass of the back lawn, I clenched my teeth and pumped my machete at the sky and hissed, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’
One down, one to go.
And with any luck, the ‘one to go’ might already be out of the picture. Wesley’d taken a major fall down those stairs. At the very least, he’d been injured so badly that Thelma’d gone after me without him. Maybe he’d broken a leg. Maybe his neck.
In a way, I hoped the fall hadn’t killed him.
Just busted him up enough to make him easy for me.
Even from the back yard, I could see light in a few of the mansion’s windows. Wesley or Thelma had turned on some lights to help them chase me down. From the look of things, nobody’d gotten around, yet, to turning them off.
A good sign.
It might mean that Wesley was at least disabled.
I planned to enter by the front door, so I walked through the yard alongside the house, past the window where I’d watched Wesley and Thelma brutalize Erin, and on past the comer of the veranda. The front area was still brightly illuminated by the spotlights.
On my way to the veranda stairs, I spotted my book bag under the bush where I’d left it. It could stay there until I’d finished with Wesley.
I also happened to catch a look at myself. My shorts had been so demolished by the outboard motor that they no longer had pockets. I’d lost Andrew’s lighter, Billie’s sunblock, and the snacks of smoked fish that I’d never gotten around to eating. A good thing I’d transferred the straight razor to my sock. The razor was still in place.
So little remained of my shorts after their run-in with the prop that they’d hardly been worth putting back on. Andrew’s belt was scarred but intact. Most of the area below the belt, however, was
either shredded or completely missing. A few flaps hung here and there. Otherwise, there was nothing much save fringe and gaps and me.
Which I sort of liked.
I wouldn’t want to walk down Broadway wearing them, but hell, this was a tropical island. A wilderness. Nobody here but me and my women.
And Wesley.
Can’t forget Wesley.
Not quite yet.
Machete in one hand, razor still in my sock, I trotted up the veranda stairs. The front door stood wide open. Was that how Thelma had left it? Of course. She sure hadn’t slowed down to shut it after her mad dash onto the veranda.
I stepped through the doorway.
Looked all around, fast, to make sure nobody was coming.
Then turned my attention to the stairway. I could see to the top of it. But not to the place where Wesley had landed after tumbling down from the top story.
I sure hoped he was still there.
Very slowly, I made my way to the foot of the stairs.
There, I stopped and listened. My heart was thumping awfully loud and fast. That was about all I heard other than the outside sounds - the usual jungle noises - squeals and screeches and twitters and stuff.
Nothing inside the house.
Nothing that might come from Wesley.
I switched the machete to my left hand so I could use my right to hold the banister. Then I started to climb. I set each foot down with great care. Silently. Once in a while, a stair creaked under my weight. Each time that happened, I halted, waited and listened.
Nothing from Wesley.
Maybe he is dead, I thought.
Or just sleeping.
No, not sleeping. Not where I’d last seen him. I should’ve been able to hear his snores.
Which left three possibilities:1. He was dead where he’d fallen.
2. He was too hurt to move, lying very still and silent, aware of my approach.
3. He was gone.
Number one would’ve been okay with me, but I was pulling for number two. Still pumped from my encounter with Thelma, I looked forward to dealing with him.
I did not want possibility number three.
But that’s what I got.
After all that slow sneaking up the stairs, I finally climbed high enough to see the next floor. I wanted - expected - really thought for sure that I would find Wesley’s naked body sprawled out there on the hardwood floor.