LITMIR.BIZ

       THREE

      Teach emptied the magazine. Fired until the pistol was hot in his hand, and the night was a hellish carnival of flash and roar. He was not sure how many times Esteban fired back. After his first trigger pull, Teach heard only his own shots and felt the rock and roll of the pistol in his hand. When it was over and he lay back again on the deck, gasping for air, his hand sweaty on the pistol grip, he felt the sting begin in his right side.

      Touching himself, he found the ragged furrow that cut through the outer plane of his left pectoral muscle and passed through his armpit. He was bleeding. He took off his shirt and balled it under his arm, removed his belt, and wrapped it around his chest. He waited, counting to fifty, before going down to look for Esteban.

      Any of the four wounds could have killed the man. Two in the upper chest, one just below the right eye, and one at the base of the throat. Teach found superficial wounds in Esteban’s right wrist and left forearm. The winch housing and deck around Esteban’s body were covered with bullet holes. The nine-millimeter’s magazine held fifteen rounds.

      Teach backed the shrimper off the bank, then up the canal to retrieve the Whaler. He carried the three dead men down and put them in the bilge, a fetid crawl space above the keel. It was hard, dirty work, but he took his time and did it right, stopping occasionally to reposition the bandage he had fashioned with his shirt and belt. The wound Esteban had given him hurt, but he knew it wouldn’t kill him. After filling the bilge with human flesh and three weapons, he lay on his side above the dead men and poured Wild Turkey onto the shirt wadded in his armpit. Then he howled rage and pain into the belly of the boat.

      Back in the wheelhouse, Teach did what he had meant to do when he had turned right and not left. A hundred yards down the canal was the deep hole where thousands of gallons of water boiled up from a spring sweeping a channel deep enough for a shrimper.

      Teach crawled down into the engine compartment at the stern. The shrimper was of Central American design—even Frank Deeks had recognized her as foreign—but her engine was a Caterpillar twelve-cylinder diesel. Teach smiled, looking at the works. A truck engine modified for marine use. He found the raw-water intake and cut the hose at the intake side of the strainer.

      When he stuffed the severed end of the hose under a motor mount below the waterline, saltwater poured in. There were through-hulls in the head and galley Teach could have opened, but he knew this would do the trick and do it quickly. He crawled out of the tight, hot space that held the big diesel and went topside.

      Starting in the wheelhouse, he searched for anything that might identify him. He scoured the lazarette, the decks fore and aft, found nothing. Finished, he sat on the transom watching the shrimper settle. Her mast was thirty feet above her waterline, and Teach wasn’t sure she’d sink far enough into the spring to be completely obscured. He would hope and wait.

      When the Santa Maria was ready to take water over her rails, Teach jumped into the Whaler, untied her, and sat drinking the rest of his whiskey. Water poured onto the shrimper’s decks, and she listed to starboard and sank with a sigh, an explosion of gases from her hot muffler and stack, and a groan of timbers taking the enormous weight of the water that pushed her down.

      Teach raised the whiskey bottle to her as her mast-top slid under. “Goodbye, old witch,” he whispered. Then he hovered above her on the dark surface, shining his flashlight down into the roiling spring. He could see her mast-top twenty feet down, and so would anyone else who came here. And they would come until years later she rotted and disintegrated into the mouth of the spring. But only the locals, and only a few of them, knew this place, and Teach knew that any man finding a shrimper sunk here would likely keep it to himself. Likely leave well enough alone.

      Teach raced home in the Whaler, tossing Naylor’s pistol on the way. At three a.m., he climbed the stairs to the room he rented in the Island Hotel. He dressed his wound, but found that he could not sleep. He walked to the bar he kept, unlocked the door, and sat in the dark, drinking whiskey and thinking. Blood Naylor would come the next night to meet him, and Teach knew what he would say. He would tell Naylor that he, Teach, was going to disappear. He would advise Naylor to do the same thing. Naylor would have to close his distribution business in Gainesville in a hurry. Time, Teach would say, was of the essence. And that was all. To Naylor’s questions he would answer only that it was better not to know more. Naylor could like it or not—that was up to him.

      At sunrise, Teach had drunk enough whiskey to numb the pain under his arm. He went out and stood on the Cedar Key docks looking west to the Gulf. Out there somewhere was a mother ship steaming in circles, searching for the offspring she had birthed six hours ago, a black-sided shrimper carrying a saint’s name and three men with calm smiles and big pistols.