Chapter 36 Roberto Lobeira’s Big Problem
Roberto Lobeira’s Big Problem
The low hum of an outboard motor carried to Roberto on the wind. It could only mean one thing.
Varatorta was crossing to Ons, heading for one of the beaches at the south end of the island. The storm had abated somewhat, but the sea remained wild. You had to be either very stupid or very skillful to sail in such conditions.
Varatorta, Roberto suspected, had both qualities in spades.
Lifting himself out of the shaft with a final push, Roberto lay flat on his back, trying to catch his breath. Among the patches of cloud above, he caught the twinkling of an airplane at low altitude. He watched it traversing the sky, hypnotized, still unable to believe his good fortune.
He was alive, unbelievably enough. In the span of a few hours, he had been chased, shot at, had fallen from a very high cliff, and had survived an encounter with a serial killer. If he were a cat, that would be almost half his lives gone.
As far as he was concerned, his guardian angel would be well within its rights to ask for a raise. Or a promotion to archangel, for that matter. The only thing he couldn’t give it was a vacation, because this was all far from over.
Roberto, with a salty taste in his mouth, saw that this dance with death had at least one more song to go. He had to gamble his life blindly, and just cross his fingers for his color to come up again on the roulette wheel.
Get moving. You have to keep moving.
The pain shooting up from his knee mingled with that of his broken ribs, his dislocated right shoulder, and the dozens of cuts and bruises all over his body. He should be in the ER, being tended to by doctors, and not lying on some desolate rocky crag.
But you play the hand you’re dealt.
If he stayed lying down too long, he knew he’d never be able to get up. He forced himself to his feet, wincing, gritting his teeth, and started moving down to the shore.
What would normally have taken him five minutes took several times that, every excruciating step bringing tears to his eyes.
At last, he felt sand underfoot—the unreal white sand of Onza’s only beach, a narrow strip no more than thirty feet long.
He could see Varatorta’s footprints and the track left by the boat when it was dragged down to the water, but apart from that, there were only seaweed, the odd bit of plastic, and driftwood.
His spirits sank. There was no boat in sight. He was trapped on the islet. There was no way out.
To try to swim across, in his current state, was out of the question. In such treacherous waters, in the dark, he’d be sure to drown.
Unless . . .
Maybe there was a way. Something that was staring him in the face, and yet was at the same time too terrifying to consider. He shuddered.
He had caught sight of something at the back corner of the beach, half-hidden in some scrub: an empty, half-rusted oil drum like the one he’d knocked over in the cave. God only knew how long it had been there. Though rusty, it looked otherwise in decent enough shape—not full of holes.
Looking out across the channel, Roberto spotted a cove on the far side, into which the wind and tide appeared to be driving the waters. With the oil drum as a makeshift raft, he would surely get there—it was only a few hundred yards away.
In theory, it was simple.
But he couldn’t do it. The voice inside Roberto Lobeira’s head mocked him.
Forget it. You know it’s impossible, it whispered.
Roberto gulped. It was one thing to get in the water in daylight, as he had done to retrieve the bundle a few days earlier.
This was entirely another matter. To be out in dark waters, clinging to some ad hoc flotation device, would mean reliving the very trauma that kept him awake so many nights.
It would mean turning his recurring nightmare into a reality.
And he was seriously thinking of submitting to that torture.
No. No way . . .
Instinctively, he took a step backward, but then the image of Varatorta entering Antía’s room, a lazy smile on his face, jolted him.
Sometimes you have to take back control of your life, he’d told Varatorta. Which Varatorta had, in his idiosyncratic way, taken quite literally.
Now he had to follow his own advice. There was no other choice.
Roberto let out a roar, a mixture of fear, despair, and defiance.
Don’t think about it. Do it. Do it.
He rolled the drum down to the water’s edge. It was instantly snatched by the undertow, and he flung his arms around it. Before he knew it, he was out of his depth and being swept out across the channel.
There was no turning back.
Roberto gritted his teeth and concentrated on not letting go. Without the drum to keep him afloat, he knew he’d be a dead man. A wave crashed over his back, and he let out a shriek. He screwed his eyes shut, trying to control his breathing.
When he opened them again, it seemed that things were working in his favor for once, as the current was indeed taking him directly toward the main island. He just let himself be carried along, bobbing up and down at the mercy of the waves, while the landmass ahead loomed progressively larger.
But then, one of his hands slipped. As he regained a hold, he took a gash from one of the drum’s edges.
Inside his head, he heard drowning people all around him, flailing, battling with the waves.
Reality had turned blurry—his heart was pounding even harder on account of the amphetamines, while panic, that ravenous monster, was dragging him toward the seabed . . .
At that very moment, as he was doing battle with every single one of his inner demons, he saw something he hadn’t accounted for.
A few hundred feet away, a powerful spotlight and a pair of lights, one green and one red, were dancing across the waves. A speedboat was approaching Ons, in spite of the conditions.
There was no doubt about it. Someone was about to land on the island.
And in the midst of his nightmare, a spark of reality exploded in his head.
Because Roberto knew perfectly well who it was.
And what was about to happen.