Solitary Dancer by John Lawrence Reynolds Page B

ex-welders and ex-mechanics, and eventually they accepted the common bond although they still moved past McGuire warily. None chose to sit with him and offer to buy him a beer, or cadge enough money from him for a draft and a hamburger.
    McGuire swallowed another Demerol. He waited for the fresh wave of relaxation and numbness to creep through him. It would displace the tension in his body, dissolve the furrows between his eyes.
    Soon, he lied to himself. Soon he would turn things around, get himself organized, go back to the Bahamas . . .
    He lowered his head to his hand, rested it there.
    They almost killed him.
    They would have left his body rotting among the mangroves or being flayed apart in the surf. He heard them discussing it between the blows of the heavy boots striking his back, his groin, his head, talking about it in the casual tones of shade-tree mechanics pondering a reluctant car engine.
    â€œTake the son of a bitch out past the reef, throw him in.” That was Charlie, Patty’s husband, the industrial mineral king from Chicago.
    â€œWe can work him over a little more, you give us the word.” The taller of Henshaw’s two employees who had flown down with their boss on a chartered jet that afternoon drew his foot back and drove it into McGuire’s side, and pain like a rapier shot through McGuire’s abdomen.
    â€œYou start her up, Mr. Henshaw, take us out to deep water and we’ll drop-kick the prick over the side.” The smaller man, the more vicious of the two, seized McGuire’s hair and yanked his head up. “See what happens when you fuck around where you shouldn’t, asshole?” he spat in McGuire’s face.
    The yacht was anchored in the middle of the harbour. Music drifted across the water from the bar of the Horizon Club where McGuire had promised to meet Patty Henshaw and where, half an hour earlier, the taller of Charlie Henshaw’s men had found him sitting on a bench at the water’s edge. “You McGuire?” the man asked and when McGuire nodded he said, “The missus wants you to join her on board.” He jerked a thumb behind him. “I got a whaler over near the dive shop to take you across.”
    â€œWho are you?” McGuire asked.
    â€œNew crew member in from Man O’ War Cay for the week,” the tall man replied. He thrust a calloused hand at McGuire. “Name’s Unsworth. Came down from Chicago last month and lucked out. Got a crew job’ll take me through the summer.”
    McGuire followed Unsworth, stepping aboard the motorized flat-bottomed skiff to join Patty Henshaw, the shattered wife of a domineering and abusive husband. For the past two weeks she and McGuire had been a diversion for each other, McGuire living alone in a cabin overlooking the harbour, Patty spending the winter aboard
Savarin
, her husband’s eighty-five-foot yacht.
    â€œThis boat and me are the same thing to Charlie,” she once smiled at McGuire. “We both wait down here for him to climb on and enjoy himself.”
    As soon as McGuire stepped aboard, Charlie Henshaw and the other man emerged from a cabin, Henshaw with a brass chain wrapped around one fist, the smaller man beside him and one step behind, his teeth gleaming in a broad smile, and the beating began.
    â€œGet up!” Henshaw screamed at McGuire when the small man offered to throw McGuire overboard in deep water. “On your feet, you scum-sucking bastard!”
    McGuire pulled himself to his hands and knees, retched once and rolled onto his back.
    â€œPull him up,” Henshaw muttered and Unsworth, his back to the low railing, rolled McGuire facedown on the deck and gripped his collar, yanking him to his feet. McGuire held back, waiting for Unsworth to apply more strength and when he did McGuire flew at him. Surprised, Unsworth stepped aside, prepared to deflect a punch, but McGuire continued his forward motion and dove over the railing and down,