I winked at Neal. “Of course I’m helping, Stuart. Neal is an ex-paramedic, and I do happen to care deeply about humanity in crisis. Just tell us what to do and we’ll cheerfully be your slaves.”
Stuart gave me a moral X-ray, which he clearly found inconclusive. Still, he said, “Okay, then. Get in the boat and come with me. There are some people clinging to the reef who need to get to shore.”
“Bob’s your uncle.” God, this was going to be easy.
We were about halfway between the shore and the reef when I said, “Stuart! Stop the boat a second.” I pointed urgently over the side.
He did so.
“I think it’s … a … a drowning woman … and she’s holding a child!”
“Seriously?” He left the engine on idle and got up to look at my fictitious victim, at which point Neal whacked him on the back with an oar, sending him off into the churn. I took over the tiller and—ta-da! We were out of there, leaving Stuart dog-paddling and screaming unspeakable things at us. He was, pardon my French, totalement fucké.
I looked at my watch: it was midnight. “Now let’s go find Sarah.”
50
“I must say, Neal, being a pirate is a total fucking rush.” I was at the Zodiac’s prow, feeling like the king of the world.
“I see its attraction, Ray.”
“Plunder and killing!”
“Swagger and pillaging!”
Neal had taken over the driving, and he was making foamy, lusty figure eights in the Zodiac, all overseen by stars as bright as a drunken Piccadilly night. Our short-term plan was to stash the boat in a small cove Neal knew of a few miles away, but then we found a bale of cash about the size of a loaf of bread inside a jumbo plastic Ziploc bag—finally, a decent reason to not want a nuclear war. “About time I got properly pimped out in some new threads on Jermyn Street. And just imagine the cardboard box you can buy with all this, Neal!”
I was in such a good mood that I even forgot about Neal’s unwillingness to shit out my piece of red plastic, and then it hit me: the Cure T-shirt.
Fuck.
“Neal, we’re going to have to go back to the tent city.”
“Whyzzat, Ray?”
“The Cure T-shirt.”
Neal took on the look of someone who’s just been shot. “Where is it?”
“I told you. It’s hidden under a corner of Fiona’s tent.”
“Is it clean and bagged?”
“It is.”
“All right, I have a plan.”
Neal having a plan is about as complex as Neal finding a parking spot.
“We’ll hide the boat in these mangrove roots,” he said, “and then we’ll sneak in and get it.”
I stared at him in silence. “That’s it? That’s your plan?”
“Do you want the shirt or not, Ray?”
“Let’s not dilly-dally, then.”
After we camouflaged the Zodiac among the mangroves, we entered some palmetto scrub. It was maybe a ten-minute walk to the tent city, and we were unsure of what our reception would be there. I didn’t think Stuart would have drowned, but a loudmouth like him would probably make a big deal out of our whacking him out of the boat. Fuck it: it was our word against his. He fell out of the boat. End of story.
Neal hissed, “Ray, look at this.”
I glanced down to where he pointed: a creature in a shell was plodding across the sand.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a hermit crab of the superfamily Paguroidea.”
“I’ve heard of the Paguroidea family. Almost 1,100 subspecies in it.”
“Indeed there are. They have an asymmetrical abdomen concealed in an empty signature gastropod shell.”
“Remarkable.”
“Indeed. And now look up at the sky.”
I did so.
“Orion’s Belt. It’s very clear tonight.”
“You mean those three stars in a row? Tell me more about Orion’s Belt, Neal.”
“Certainly. The Belt of Orion is what is called a small ‘asterism’ in the constellation Orion. It consists of the three bright stars Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. These stars are more or less evenly spaced in a straight line, and so can be visualized as the belt of the hunter’s clothing. In the northern hemisphere, they are most visible in the early night sky during the winter, in particular during the month of January at around nine p.m.”
“The natural world really is amazing, isn’t it, Neal?”
“It certainly is, Ray.”
“I find it relaxing to observe the small things that we, in our hectic lives, tend to overlook.” I pointed out a shrub. “That’s the Coccoloba uvifera, more commonly known as the sea grape. It’s a species of flowering plant in the buckwheat family, of all things.”