THE PRICE OF VENGEANCE

Chapter 9: THE WHITE HULL

The sun in Tivat felt personal.

It came off the water in sheets and off the hulls in blades, and Zale had to put his sunglasses on twice, because the first time his hand missed his face. Three nights ago he had been eleven degrees and shaking on a cold floor. Now he stood on a pontoon walkway at one o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon, warm to the marrow, with the smell of suncream and teak oil and somebody's gin riding the breeze, and the contrast was so complete it made his stomach turn.

Brecken's boat was the third from the end. A hundred and sixty feet of white, with a name in brushed-gold script on the stern: *SEROTONIN.* Three decks of glass and pale wood stacked like a wedding cake, a crane on the foredeck holding a jet ski, a crew in white polos lined up at the gangway like they had been stamped out of the same sheet. Chrome rails threw the light back so hard he squinted.

He adjusted his stride. Looser. A little drag in the left foot, a little too much swing in the arms. He had a canvas weekend bag over one shoulder and a paper cup of café crème in the other hand, and he let the coffee slop over the rim and onto his wrist, and winced, and shook it off with a lazy yelp.

"ZALE!"

Brecken Aldous came down the passerelle in swim trunks and an open linen shirt, tanned the color of toast, arms wide. He was twenty-six and had never once been told no by anyone he couldn't bribe. Zale had spent a week at his family's lodge in Gstaad when they were both nineteen, a job Marcus had arranged. The friendship was real in the sense that Brecken believed in it.

"Bro. *Bro.* You look like death."

"I feel like death." Zale let himself be hugged. Brecken smelled of coconut and expensive tequila. "I think I might actually be on a different time zone. Like, spiritually."

"Perfect. We've got a whole day to fix it." Brecken threw an arm around his shoulders and steered him up the passerelle. "Stefan! Take Mr. Alden's bag. Gently. He's fragile."

A steward in white took the canvas bag. Zale's fingers did not want to let go of it. It held nothing important, a change of shirts and a razor, but the grip was automatic, and for a half-second his hand locked on the strap and the steward looked at him.

He opened the hand, laughed, and said, "Sorry, man, I'm super attached to my socks."

The steward smiled politely and carried them off.

The deck was a field of white. White cushions, white umbrellas, white glass balustrades with nothing between them and the water. The air under the awning was thick and cool, smelling of mint and citrus and the faint sweet note of cigars. A dozen people lay or lounged across the aft sundeck, all of them tan, all of them thin, all of them talking at once.

"...so I said to him, I said, if it isn't carbon fiber I'm *not* interested—"

"...Courchevel was dead this year, honestly, everyone's moved to—"

"...his mother's literally in the Caymans—"

Zale walked through it with a blank, happy face and took a flute of something cold off a tray. Pink. He sipped it, grimaced, and said "Whoa," to nobody, and a woman in a white one-piece laughed at him.

*Eleven names. Nine of them are noise.*

He sat down on a deck chair with a soft thump and let his sunglasses slide down his nose. Behind them, his eyes did what they had done in the hangar. Left to right. Top to bottom. The stern. The tender garage. The gangway. A crewman in a navy polo with a radio clipped to his belt. A short man in a different uniform, white shirt with epaulettes, standing at the foot of the passerelle with a clipboard. The harbor master's liaison, if the cap badge was what he thought it was.

He took another sip and set the glass on the arm of the chair. The glass rocked. He caught it, badly. Pink liquid slopped across his wrist and the cushion.

"Oh my God, sorry. Sorry."

A stewardess was there in half a second with a cloth. She was young, perhaps twenty-three, with a blond ponytail and a Croatian accent, and she wiped the cushion without comment.

"It's no problem, sir."

"I'm so bad at boats," Zale told her. He widened his eyes. "I don't even know which end is the front."

She almost smiled. "The pointy one."

"See, that's what I thought." He dropped his voice, conspiratorial. "Hey, can I ask you something dumb? Brecken said there's a place around here with, like, the best breakfast? Somewhere the locals go. Up the coast, maybe. I don't want a hotel buffet."

"Perast, probably." She straightened up. "Or in Kotor, near the old town. There's a place by the fuel station on the south road. The drivers eat there. Very cheap, very good."

"Drivers?"

"Trucks. The big ones, from the port." She shrugged. "They all stop at the same place because it's the only fuel on that side before the tunnel."

*The only fuel.* Zale filed it, sealed it, and gave her a vague thumbs-up.

"You're a hero," he said. "Genuinely. I'm going to name a dog after you."

She laughed this time, a real one, and went away with the cloth, and he watched her go with the loose, grateful smile of a man who had received exactly what he wanted from a woman and noticed nothing else.

It took work. That was the thing no one told you about the soft face. His body had spent thirteen years learning to hold still, and now every muscle had to be taught to flop. He kept his shoulders curved forward, which strained his spine. He let his fingers hang. He let his stride falter on the teak. Under his sunglasses a muscle ticked near his left eye from the effort of keeping the lids half-lowered, and the pulse in his wrists wanted to settle at fifty and he made it run at ninety, jumpy and loose, the heartbeat of a young man who had never feared anything real.

His hands were the worst. They kept finding things. The edge of a chair. The rail. A butter knife on a tray. Each time they closed on something solid, the tendons in his forearm set like cables, and he had to stop them, deliberately, one finger at a time.

He took off his sunglasses to rub his eyes and, in the same motion, dropped them. They hit the deck and skidded under the lounger. He lunged for them, too fast, nearly went over, and came up laughing at himself.

Three people had turned to watch. Good.

"I'll get you more of the pink," Brecken said, passing with two bottles. "Stay there. Don't die."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

The man with the clipboard was still at the foot of the passerelle. He was talking to a deckhand now, a local in a faded cap, and as Zale slid off the chair and wandered toward the rail with his drink held out in front of him like a candle, he heard a little of it. Port Authority Montenegrin, thick and quick. A complaint about berth fees. A joke about someone's brother. Zale had learned the language at fifteen from a man who would only speak it to him, and it came back as cleanly as if he'd never left.

"...the colonel's people again," the deckhand muttered. "Three weeks now. They don't pay the f*e. They don't sign the book."

"Don't say that word," the harbor man said. "Not here."

"What word?"

"You know."

The deckhand spat discreetly over the side and said nothing more.

Zale kept walking. He reached the rail, leaned on it with both forearms the way a man leans who has no bones, and let the sun take his face. Below him, the marina spread out in a long blue-white curve: gleaming hulls, bobbing fenders, a boy washing a deck with a hose. Beyond the breakwater, the bay lay flat and bright, and past it the mountains rose in layers of hazy gray, one behind another, to the place where Kotor sat in the fold.

*The colonel's people.* Here, in the luxury quarter, in daylight, bleeding through a berth-f*e dispute.

He rested his chin on his folded arms. He kept his smile slack and sleepy, the grin of a boy with nowhere to be.

A sound came across the water, low and flat, a diesel purr under a fast hull.

He did not turn his head at once. He let his eyes go lazily along the breakwater first, the way a tourist's would, and then rest, and then widen.

A black rigid-hull boat rounded the end of the mole at speed. Twelve meters, matte gray-black, no name on the bow, no flag, twin outboards throwing a white rooster tail. It slowed as it passed the harbor office, dropped its nose, and slid in toward the visitors' pontoon with perfect, practiced economy. Three men in dark jackets and caps stood braced in the stern, rifles absent, hands loose at their sides, weight forward on the balls of their feet.

The nearest man turned his head and scanned the marina in one slow even sweep, left to right. At the end of it his thumb touched the side of his leg.

Zale knew the man's face. He had seen it at 3:41 on Tuesday morning, fifteen meters from the pilings, pivoting clean at the end of a beat.

Zale kept his chin on his forearms for a count of five. Then he pushed off the rail too hard and let his drink slop over the top of the glass balustrade.

"Oops." He said it to the sea.

On the pontoon below, the man from the quay stepped off the rib with a line in one hand and made it fast to a cleat in a single motion. A figure-eight, flat and tight. He had changed clothes. The dark jacket and cap were gone, and in their place he wore a navy blazer, a white shirt open at the throat, gray trousers, rubber-soled loafers. A small enamel shield was pinned to his lapel. It was the kind of outfit a villa-management company issued to men who stood at gates in the sun, and it fit him well, except across the right hip, where the cloth hung a quarter inch off the line of his body and a hard straight edge pressed against the lining.

Five-ten. A hundred and eighty pounds. Narrow waist, thick forearms, a faint hitch in the left knee. Right-handed. The other two stayed in the boat with the engines burbling, and neither of them looked at the yachts. They looked at the water.

At the head of the pontoon a black Mercedes sat at the curb with its engine running and its windows dark. A tall square wagon, the kind with a price you didn't ask. Plate KO 418 MK. A driver in a gray suit leaned against the fender with a phone in his hand, not using it.

*Go now. Before he's gone.*

Zale pushed off the rail and went for the gangway.

"Where you going?" Brecken called from the bar, a bottle in each fist.

"Beach club!" Zale waved his empty glass in a vague arc. "Somebody said there's a beach club!"

"It's the *other* way!"

"I'm exploring!"

The gangway tilted under his feet and he let it. One hand skated along the rope rail, the other swung loose with the glass, and he took the last three steps in a long stagger and came down on the pontoon with a slap of loafer on wet teak. The heat of the afternoon hit him from below, rising off the boards. He let his head loll. Behind the sunglasses his eyes were already counting.

Forty feet to the head of the pontoon. The guard walking it, unhurried, hands loose. The driver straightening off the fender.

The smell reached him first.

It cut across the suncream and the gin and the warm teak oil like a blade drawn through silk. Raw marine fuel, sharp and sweet at once. Under it, wet wool, a damp ripe animal smell, the stink of a jacket that had spent the night in the fog. He knew it the way he knew the taste of the harbor. For one half-second the sun was gone and he was chest-deep in black water with a piling against his cheek.

His heartbeat dropped toward fifty. He yanked it back up to ninety.

He started walking, aimed vaguely at the beach club on the far side of the marina, which put him on a line that would cross the guard's at the third bollard. A tourist's line. An idiot's line. Halfway there he stepped on a dock line coiled across the boards, and the rope rolled under his shoe, and his ankle went.

He fell forward with his arms flung out and shouted "Whoa," and the glass left his hand and sailed in a pink arc across the pontoon.

His shoulder hit the guard in the chest.

It was like running into a post. The man didn't move, didn't give an inch, just took the impact on his planted feet and let it pass through him. Zale's palm slapped flat against the front of the blazer and slid down it, and under the cloth, against the heel of his hand, he felt the cool hard slab of a holster, the shape of a compact pistol, the slight flare of a rear sight. Right hip, strong side, a quarter inch of retention strap undone.

Every nerve in his body screamed to close the hand. Wrist, thumb, twist. Eleven different ways to be holding that weapon in the next second.

He let his fingers go limp and slid them off the cloth like a drunk groping for a handrail.

"Oh my God. Sorry. Sorry, bro." He caught himself on the man's sleeve, a wet pink hand on pressed navy, and the slurring came out perfect, soft at the edges. "I didn't. There was a rope. I swear to God there was a rope."

The guard's right hand had moved. Just an inch. Zale saw it settle, saw the fingers uncurl against his thigh. The man looked down at the wet stain spreading across his lapel, and then at Zale's face, and Zale looked back through two dark lenses with the slack, apologetic grin of a boy who had been told no precisely once in his life and had not enjoyed it.

The gray eyes went down his body. Linen shirt. Expensive watch, a gold one, Brecken's idea. Loafers. Arms. The sleeves were rolled to the elbow and the knuckles of his right hand showed beneath them, white and ridged, and Zale curled the fingers around a button of the guard's cuff as if for balance and then pulled the hand away to scrub at his own face with it.

The eyes moved on. Not a flicker. A man who had been counted and found to weigh nothing.

"Nema problema," the guard said, flat. Then, in English, grudging: "Go back to your boat."

"Right. Totally. I'm going." Zale held up both palms. "Hey. Hey, do you guys know where the bar is? The, like, beach thing? There's supposed to be a beach thing."

"Not here."

"But it's—"

"*Not here.*"

The guard stepped around him and kept walking.

Zale stayed where he was, bent forward with his hands on his knees, laughing at himself in short wet breaths. He heard the footsteps go. He heard the rubber soles on the boards, then the harder click of them on the concrete at the head of the pier, then the driver's voice, low and dry.

"Kako je Pukovnik?"

How is the Colonel?

He did not lift his head. He bent lower and fumbled in his pocket for his sunglasses, which were already on his face, and swore softly in English at himself.

"Spava u Perastu večeras," the guard said. Sleeps in Perast tonight. "Vila Kamelija. Ispod zvonika." Under the bell tower. A pause, the click of a door. "Sutra rano ide s prvim kamionom. Pumpa u pet."

Tomorrow early he rides with the first truck. The pump at five.

"Nikad ne spava dvaput na istom mjestu," the driver muttered.

"Zato i jeste živ."

The Mercedes door shut with a soft, heavy thud. A dull click of locks. Zale straightened up in time to see the boxy black shape pull away from the curb and slide into the traffic along the harbor road, and the plate went by him at forty feet, KO 418 MK, and into the sun.

*Never sleeps twice in the same place. That's why he's alive.*

But he had to buy fuel like anyone else, and the only pump on the south road before the tunnel sat at the end of a long straight stretch where the road ran between a rock wall and the sea.

The rib-boat's engines rose to a growl and the boat peeled away from the pontoon. He did not look at it. He lifted his arms, stretched, yawned, and lurched back toward the yacht with a hand at his temple like a man whose head had finally caught up with him.

"ZALE!" The woman in the white one-piece was leaning over the rail with a flute in each hand, laughing. "Where's your drink? Come back, we're doing shots!"

"Be right up!" He waved at her with a floppy, cheerful hand. "I fell over a rope!"

"You're *such* an idiot!"

"I know!" He grinned up at her and the grin held, warm and loose and stupid, as he climbed the gangway with one palm trailing along the rail. At the top he turned and called back to the empty pontoon, waving at nothing, a boy saying goodbye to a day. Behind him the harbor shimmered, white hulls and blue water and a thousand spots of hard bright light.

He reached the deck, stepped into the shade of the awning, and lifted the sunglasses to his forehead for exactly one second.

The smile dropped.

It went the way it always went, the loose mouth emptying, the whole face flattening to bone. Then the glasses came down again and covered it, and he was a hungover boy rubbing his eyes.

*Vila Kamelija. Perast. Sleeping there tonight.* A villa under a bell tower on a narrow road between water and stone, with no way in but one. A man too careful to sleep twice in one place, riding out at dawn with the first truck, because trucks needed fuel and the pump at the tunnel was the only fuel for eleven kilometers.

He would not go into the villa. Voss expected the villa.

He would go to the pump.