handle that pulls the anchor up when she hears his scream of rage.
She manages one more crank on the handle and then has to stop, gasping for breath. She sees Howard sprint toward her across the rock and then arc out, his body straight and arrow-true, and he hits the water and begins to swim.
He swims very fast.
She manages one more turn of the handle, and then she spins and runs to the wheel. Turn ignition. She twists the key, and nothing happens. She wants to scream again, but she can't seem to draw enough air. Press ignition, she thinks, and there it is, the button. She pushes it hard enough to shove it through the panel, and the engine powers on. The boat begins to move but then jolts to a stop, and she is flung into the wheel, her forehead hitting the Plexiglas of the windscreen. The anchor has caught on something.
She runs back and tries to turn the handle on the anchor crank, but she hasn't got the strength. She puts all her weight behind it, and yet she might as well be a breeze. It won't turn.
She can hear Howard knifing through the water. He can't be far.
She has no idea how to back the boat up, which would probably free the anchor. She knows how to do one thing, and she does it: She throttles to full power. The motor churns up a tremendous amount of water, but the boat doesn't move. There's a terrifying creaking from behind her, as if the anchor assembly is going to be ripped through the rear of the boat, and she has an instantaneous vision of it taking the motor with it, so she reduces speed and then powers up again, repeating the pattern several times, trying to rock the anchor free.
She can't hear Howard swimming.
She powers down again, and the anchor snaps the boat back, and something jolts forward on the cabin floor and strikes her bare foot. It's cold and it's hard.
The boat tilts sideways, toward the rocks. The rope-why didn't she pull in the rope? — goes taut.
From the water Howard says, 'Ahhhh, Rosie.'
She looks down at her foot. The thing that slid into her is an automatic pistol, short and black. The one he fired at the rock. So the thing in his hand had to be-
Howard's hand slaps the top edge of the deck. Then his left hand appears, holding the knife he'd flashed before. He heaves himself upward and puts both arms inside, hanging there by his underarms. He grins at her beneath the silly-looking bathing cap.
'Baaad girl,' he says. He begins to pull himself the rest of the way in, and Rose stoops down and picks up the gun and pulls the trigger.
It jumps in her hand, so hard she thinks she'll drop it, and wood chips fly up from the edge of the deck. Howard freezes, his face all eyes, and he raises a hand to stop her.
And she takes the gun in both hands this time and aims and very deliberately squeezes off two shots, and one of them hits him somewhere, because he's flung back, away from the boat, and an instant later she hears a splash. She runs to the edge of the deck, pointing the gun down, but she can't see him, so she yanks the rope out of the water with her free hand and goes back to the wheel. She powers down one more time and then gives the engine full throttle, and with a screech of wood being stretched the boat strains forward, and the anchor pulls free, and the vessel takes a leap that puts her on her back on the floor of the cabin, but she's up instantly, grabbing the wheel and cranking it all the way to the right, watching the rocks grow nearer and nearer and then begin to slide aside, and she leans there, all her weight on the wheel, sobbing and coughing, until the boat is pointed out into the empty sea. Only when she's been in motion for several minutes does she throttle down and go back to the stern to wind in the rest of the anchor chain.
Once that's done, she has to sit. Her breaths feel like they can be measured in millimeters, as though her lungs are shrinking into nothing. A band of numbness squeezes her chest. She sits on the floor of the cabin, gasping, as the boat glides slowly forward. She needs both hands to stand, one pushing down on the cabin floor and one pulling on the edge of the bench. As soon as she's up and heaving for breath, she goes back to the wheel, and in the clamp that had held the rubberized flashlight, she sees the cell phone, open and blinking. She picks it up and listens. Nothing.
Her voice an almost breathless whisper, she says, 'Hello?'
A man's voice says, 'Did you get the bitch?'
Rose's arm straightens automatically, as though she's just realized there's a tarantula crawling on her wrist, and the phone flies out of her hand and over the side of the boat. She's hanging on to the wheel, shuddering, when she hears it hit the water.
Fighting for air, she turns and squints back at the rocks. The rain is still coming down, but she can see him standing on the biggest stone, the wet suit a black vertical against the pale of the rocks. She thinks, with a jolt of joy that literally makes her grind her teeth, Tide's coming in. And then the rain grows heavier, and it all disappears- the rocks, the man, everything.
But she can still see the floating fire of the squid boats, and she steers directly toward it.
Two days later she checks out of the hospital in Phuket Town, where she's been treated for the sea-wasp venom, and gets on a bus to Bangkok. Her breathing has improved, although it will be months before she draws a breath without thinking about it. She has all of Howard's money and the extra clothes she had packed in the suitcase she took aboard the boat. Except for the money, everything that belonged to Howard, including the wallet and the gun, are at the bottom of the Andaman. She had given one of the squid fishermen two hundred dollars U.S., plucked from Howard's wallet, to lead her back to Phuket. He'd taken one look at her arm and poured vinegar on it, and the sting had eased a bit, but her breathing was still labored. One of his crew had piloted her as she lay in the bottom of the cabin, gasping like a fish, across the dark sea to the lights of Phuket.
Once in Bangkok, she checks into a cheap hotel miles from anywhere and sleeps for twenty hours. When she wakes, she takes the longest shower of her life and then goes down to the hotel's overpriced shop to buy tourist clothes, including a hat into which she can tuck her hair. There's no way to disguise her height, but at least she can change how she looks from a distance. A taxi delivers her to her bank, where she withdraws every penny she has deposited. Back in her room, she adds it to Howard's money and finds she has almost four thousand dollars, nearly 160,000 baht. That night, at 5:00 A.M., she is waiting across the street from her apartment when Fon and the other girls come home.
Twelve hours later, around 5:00 in the evening, she gets off a bus in Fon's village in Isaan, where she will stay for nearly four years. She pays a small amount every month to Fon's parents and mails a little money to her own. She calls Fon every week to see whether Howard has come into the bar. She asks her mother in letters to tell her whether he ever comes to her village.
He never does.
After four years, Fon calls to say she's moved to the King's Castle. When Rose returns to Bangkok, she joins her friend on the stage of the biggest bar in Patpong. Three years later Poke Rafferty walks into the place.
Chapter 20
It's been light for a couple of hours. The apartment is getting hot.
At some point-he has no idea when-Rafferty apparently pushed the glass coffee table away from the couch so he could sit at Rose's feet and lean back against her knees; her words seemed to flow more freely when she couldn't see his face. So he's facing away from her now, in the long moments after she's finished talking, and across the room he sees the morning light picking out glittering splinters of glass in the carpet near the sliding door.
Eight stories above the morning traffic, all he can hear is breathing.
He twists around, getting a message from his lower back to slow down. He ignores it and rises to his knees, then turns to face Rose, accidentally bending the injured elbow and sucking breath through his teeth.
She is sitting limply, sunk into the cushions, with her head tilted back and her eyes closed. He wants to put his arms around her, but it would be awkward with her sitting as she is, and he's also reluctant to break in on her, wherever she may be. Her face looks bleached out and tissue-thin, as though it's been scoured from the inside and
