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  Escobar pulled his hands back and felt and then saw the blood on them. He looked at Cale’s arms and saw the clawing on the triceps, which had begun to ooze anew.

  Escobar shouted, “Mátenlo ya.”

  Cale recognized the command before its intended recipient did. His left foot was wedged against the side of the plane in the doorway, his right foot on the top step. He transferred his weight instantly to his left foot and pushed off, lunging toward the hit man. The Cuban, delayed by his reaction time to the command, likewise moved forward, spreading something between his hands, with his face up and soulless eyes.

  Cale closed the space quicker than the Cuban expected and led with the top of his head, which was also unexpected. It caught the Cuban in the nose, and his head snapped back. Cale drove through him, wrapping his arms around the man’s back. The Cuban’s head rocked backward between his shoulder blades as he hit the wall forehead first, then nose, then chin, then chest as Cale tried to drive the body through the bulkhead. When the Cuban’s neck bent backward at an angle that didn’t support life, Cale knew he would cause no more trouble and released him.

  He pushed off the Cuban and scrambled back into a crouch. His mind registered that Ashley had stood up and was leaning forward between the pilot and copilot seats. Without pause, he lunged for Escobar but lacked the force or leverage he’d had with the Cuban. Escobar moved away from his seat, toward the seat that faced forward. Cale got a hand on his shirt. As he jerked it down, the buttons popped off, and Cale’s knees landed on the cabin carpet. His right elbow dented Escobar’s former seat, and his left arm held the tail of the buttonless shirt. This was too vulnerable a position, but, at least for the moment, he was between Escobar and Ashley.

  Cale released the shirt and pulled his arm back. Escobar’s right hand swept toward Cale’s back as Cale rotated away. Cale hadn’t realized that Escobar held a knife until it nicked his shoulder. Escobar overextended on the swing, but Cale’s weight was all wrong, and he couldn’t counter the attack. It was all he could do to get on his feet. But he did know now that Escobar was not good with a knife. Then again, how good did you have to be?

  Both men reset their ready positions and stood crouched forward on the balls of their feet with their heels off the ground. Escobar swayed, the knife in front of his body, the blade pointed up. The distance separating the men was too small for either to reach for their guns, and there was no space for them to circle each other in the narrow cabin aisle. They each made small feints and shifts of weight. Cale did quick stutter steps and half-arm pumps, trying to get Escobar to make a mistake.

  The speed of Cale’s feints put Escobar slightly off balance, despite his advantage of holding the knife. Cale adjusted positions to get his left leg in front of his right, his natural attack position. The knife was in Escobar’s right hand. Cale could likely swat it with his left hand without stepping but chose to wait for Escobar to swing the knife wide of his body.

  Reacting to a feint, Escobar attacked, his hand drifting wide, and Cale shot in on him, visualizing his high school wrestling coach’s proud eyes. He drove off his right foot. His right knee dropped to the ground first, his left leg bent in front. His right arm swung up into Escobar’s groin. The bend in his elbow exploded upward against Escobar’s testicles. Cale’s left arm blocked Escobar’s knife hand wide of his body, and he noted another nick from the blade, this time on the forearm. Cale’s feet lifted off the ground, and he dumped Escobar over. Escobar landed on his right side knocking himself in the ribs with his own elbow.

  Escobar held onto the knife, but his knife hand was on the carpet. Cale could see that the knife arm bore all Escobar’s weight. Before Escobar could shift that weight, Cale pinned Escobar’s right forearm to the carpet and began smashing Escobar’s chin with his right fist. Again. Again. Again. Escobar’s body slackened, and the knife left his fingers as his consciousness drained. Cale pushed Escobar’s mouth closed, pinched his nose shut. He leaned all of his weight onto him. Escobar half consciously tried to fight. He lost. Cale won.

  EPILOGUE

  CALE NEEDED TO remove himself as far from the killings as possible. The US justice system was not the primary concern, although that would entail a long, burdensome process. Ashley had heard the order to kill. All three men carried handguns and knives. The youngest man’s hands also contained a very nasty wire. Cale’s concern was about the next set of family members taking their attempt at vengeance.

  With that in mind, his decision was clear. Concern number one: Ashley. She just witnessed two murders within ten feet of herself. Self-defense killings was perhaps a more appropriate description, but the result was the same: There were two fewer souls breathing. Working in a hospital, she had the psychological advantage of having watched multiple people breathe their last breaths. And although he was concerned for her mental health, the truth was less noble and more pragmatic: He needed her cooperation to restore his unfettered freedom—not freedom from prison but freedom from an overhanging vendetta.

  When Cale rolled off Escobar, Ashley was watching him, still standing frozen in the same spot. He raised his index finger, indicating he needed a moment. Adrenaline pulsed through him in such doses that physically he didn’t need a moment. Physically he could have jumped through the plane’s metal roof. He needed a moment to get his words together. Fortunately, the adrenaline helped his brain, and his ideas came together quickly.

  When he was gathered, Cale, with a slow, steady speech rhythm, described his “clients” to her. Who they were. Why they wanted him dead. He mentioned the third dead guy in the bathroom.

  Not shockingly, these words alone didn’t put her at ease. If he wasn’t physically between her and the door, he thought she would have left the plane at a full sprint. He then made the hard pitch of explaining why he didn’t want to alert the authorities.

  “Ashley, for me, my children, and my grandkids to not live in fear every day, no one can know what happened here this morning.” He hated to play the grandkid card but was willing to use all the tools at his disposal. Particularly since it was the truth.

  Slowly, she answered, “You killed this man when he was already unconscious.”

  “Ashley, what choice did I truly have.” He wanted to say he’d done the world a favor but refrained. “I haven’t faced an Escobar in over twenty years, and they came to kill me. The leader of the entire cartel came to kill me. This was personal and not business for them.”

  She grew silent, then asked, “Would those men have killed me after they killed you?”

  Her focus shifted from his behavior to her self-preservation. Gordon Gecko was wrong when he said greed is good as it relates to interpreting the works of Adam Smith, but Adam Smith was right: Self-interest was a force for good. In this case, as Ashley’s brain was beginning to register, hers and Cale’s self-interests were in alignment.

  Cale nodded yes in response to her question.

  “If they know what happened, and they know I was here, will they try to find me?”

  “Ashley, I don’t know. They will certainly try to kill me again if this comes to light. If this gets reported to the authorities, your name will be known around the world by tonight, and if they want to find you, they’ll be able to. They waited twenty years to find me.”

  Silence again overtook them. They sat, breathing in the plane’s cabin, in the presence of two impossible-to-ignore warm dead bodies when Wikipedia came to Cale’s rescue. He flipped Escobar around until he found his passport and handed it to Ashley. On her phone, she Googled his name and explored the various links describing his life. While she was occupied, he retrieved Escobar’s cell phone. There was a third number in his text history, this one with a 702 area code. All the texts concerned travel schedules, and Cale felt confident this was the number for his plane’s pilot. The last message indicated the plane was here and ready for travel when Escobar was ready. The texts were a mix of English and Spanish. Cale chose English for Francisco’s response.

  �
�Making alternative travel plans. Go to Miami this morning. We will meet you Thur.” Before delivering, he changed “alternative” to “other” then hit send. Within a minute, there was a return text acknowledging the new itinerary.

  Cale again sat quietly watching Ashley read and learn. She started nodding her head, and Cale took this as a good sign. After ten minutes of reading, he slipped his phone into her hands. He had pulled up Radcliffe’s Facebook page. There were hundreds of sympathy posts from DEA colleagues. He then took her to his own page. There were dozens of new posts from DEA colleagues saying simple messages like, “CC be careful,” “Cale take a vacation,” “Don’t be a hero (moron); please get some protection,” and “Coleman, want me to come house sit with you this week?”

  When she looked up and said, “OK, what do we need to do?” he realized he’d been holding his breath. As he started to thank her, the big Gulfstream’s engines overpowered his vocal cords, but she knew what he was saying.

  With some ingenuity, two oversized black garbage bags, and a roll of duct tape, Cale retrieved Alberto from the men’s room. Ashley kept the FBO’s shift manager occupied as Cale carried the last piece of luggage over his shoulder, fireman-style, to the King Air.

  He then registered a change of flight plan for the Abacos, and reduced the passenger list to one. Before reaching Abacos air traffic control, he made a stop at an old runway known from his DEA days. The strip was on an uninhabited piece of sand and crushed coral. Circling low, they could see submerged planes in the clear water on either end of the runway. The planes had slid off the runway, been blown off in a hurricane, or were pushed off by a rival. This was one of hundreds of no-name strips in the Bahamas. This one, like most, appropriately enough, had been constructed by the Colombians or their accessories in Panama during the 1980s. It was a fitting final resting place for these three.

  So Cale landed with more bumps than he would have liked, but he’d had worse runways (just not with his own plane). Cale unloaded the three men while Ashley gazed into the water. He stripped the bodies, dumped them near a reef, and pocketed their money. It was more than the fuel would cost but not enough to retire on. He kept Escobar’s cell phone and piled the rest of the stuff in an oyster-shell fire pit. With the help of a little jet fuel, the belongings ignited nicely. Ashley walked back and sat in silence with Cale while everything turned to ash. With the ashes still smoldering, they boarded and took off for the Abacos.

  The rest of Tuesday was a day of rest and stony quiet. He and Ashley shared a room, but it contained an unspoken divider down the middle of the king bed. Cale soaked his flesh wounds in the patio hot tub.

  Wednesday, they ventured out. Conversation returned, and they rented a rigid inflatable dinghy and explored the giant and shallow Abaco Bay. Cale dove for conch and wet a line, Ashley read a book, and they both reinforced their tans. At sunset, they put their teetotaling days behind them with gin and coconut-water cocktails and watched the sun sink into the water. Just as the sun dipped below the horizon, Ashley stood and jumped.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Seeing the sunset for a second time,” she smiled.

  With that, he knew she had made her way back, was enjoying a silly little West Coast tradition on the west coast of the Abacos. This realization forced him into reflection.

  Six months after Maggie died, he started attending chicken dinners. And it was nice and necessary, but too soon. A year after Maggie died, he starting going on dates. After two years, he stuck his toe into nightlife, going out with single, mostly divorced friends to the places single people met each other, where alcoholic and musical lubricants featured prominently. Unfortunately, he found himself experiencing it as a sociologist did a previously unknown society—that is, with interest and awe but without engagement.

  Pretty women just out of college and starting new careers frequently approached Cale and, at first, he had difficulty understanding their interest. They had so many experiences waiting for them that would never be mind blowing for him again. He worried that by being with someone his age, they would be giving up too much for whatever they might gain in return. Eventually, he stopped viewing the real-life fantasy he’d lived with Maggie as attainable for most people. He accepted that, even with these women’s limited experiences, he had a lot to offer. He also knew some would call this rationalizing the trip to young skin.

  He left prudishness behind, but his growing number of experiences became, in a word, boring. So he became a snob. He no longer wondered why young women had an interest in him, but wondered instead why he had an interest in them. Beyond his appreciation of aesthetics and the sense of touch, how was the next dalliance going to nurture his brain and spirit?

  He came up with a challenge for himself. When he found himself falling into the date rhythm with a new woman nearer his daughters’ age than his own, he developed a trick of finding ways to carry on a conversation with his eyes closed and without physical contact. If, without aesthetics and touch, he enjoyed himself, then he would carry on with the relationship. He had yet to find one relationship that passed the test.

  So as Cale faced the darkening ocean, he held his cocktail in the hand nearest Ashley to stop himself from reaching over and touching her. He closed his eyes as they talked. And talked.

  Thursday morning, he texted the Gulfstream’s pilot, “Meet me in Vancouver Sunday.”

  Cale called Sheila on her office line. The call went to voice mail. The message he left said, “Sheila, hey, it’s Cale. I think your coworkers were right. Just too much stress. Getting some therapy. Not sure if it was post- or pretraumatic stress disorder they said I had. I don’t think I’ll be imagining those three guys breaking into my house ever again. Just wanted to let you know. No need to call back. Take care.”

  He hoped the message would bring a smile to her face.

  That afternoon, he and Ashley enjoyed a couples massage. The massage therapists draped different parts of Cale’s and Ashley’s bodies with sheets as they worked their fingers into the muscles. The oils’ scents were mint and jasmine. After the rubdown, they were dotted with hot stones, and Cale fell asleep. When the stones were put away, Cale and Ashley languorously drifted back to their room. For the first time, they experimented with their newly limbered bodies. The experimenting was loud and lasted longer than Cale could remember. In the late afternoon, the general manager knocked on the door and asked if they’d like to move to a private cabana, where there were—ahem—no guests below or to the sides. He mentioned this all with a smile buried below his professional demeanor.

  Thursday evening, they became acquainted with the new accommodations. The view was better, and the four-poster bed larger, although the decorative mosquito netting at times proved an encumbrance. The cabana was significantly more expensive than the room, but Cale was using Francisco’s cash and didn’t think he would mind the up-charge. Extravagance, he assumed, was Francisco’s style.

  The couple broke briefly for a late dinner of mahimahi sandwiches and bottled Caribs before returning to their cabana for another go. Finally, sleep overtook them.

  Friday morning came, and responsibility hung heavy in the air. Reality had set its hooks and was reeling them in. So, begrudgingly, they did their duty.

  Ashley called in and asked for the week off.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SETH COKER SPENDS his days developing and building apartments in North and South Carolina. He splits his time between Greensboro and Wilmington, North Carolina, and passes far too much time on the water. He freely acknowledges that his wife, Melissa, and their four children, Tyler, Sienna, Lexi, and Cale, are more patient with his pursuits than he deserves. Salty Sky is Seth’s first book.

 

 

 
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