The Catch: A Novel by Taylor Stevens

she’d get there faster if the boys assumed she was gullible and that money flowed freely.
    The three of them got the unconscious man off the boat, and Sami and Mohamed carried him inside. As promised the doctor had the list ready, and Munroe paid for admission, then followed Sami and Mohamed while they carried the captain to the assigned room. The windows were holes with wooden slats, and dirty mosquito netting hung over four low metal beds with sagging mattresses.
    There were four other people in the room, two of them sharing a bed, one of them in a hacking fit that racked his frail body and left blood on the cloth he held to his mouth. If the captain survived the night he’d be fortunate not to take with him the seeds of tuberculosis, but at least his own sheets were clean, and above the smells of spoiled food and body odor, the air hinted faintly of antiseptic.
    The pharmacy, on the other side of ill-fitting shutters that opened a window to the portico, was a room that held only a small wooden desk and chair, and along one wall were mostly empty shelves. Munroe handed the pharmacy tech the doctor’s list. Meticulously slow to the point of painfulness, he collected the items, and when he had everything, he wrote out the bill by hand with a well-worn sheet of carbon paper placed between two notebook pages.
    It took Munroe a hunt to find the cashier to pay for the items, and with a handwritten receipt she returned to the pharmacy, where the man exchanged her items for the paper.
    The receptionist sent a runner for the doctor. He arrived more quickly this time and Munroe suspected he’d never left. She gave him the IV bags, needle, tape, gauze, disinfecting wipes, and the rest of what he’d asked for, then followed him back to the captain’s room, though because of the coughing she waited outside the doorway, watching as the doctor inserted the port, hooked up the bag of fluid, and hung it off an ancient IV stand.
    If the captain lived, if she chose to take him rather than abandon him here, she’d be the one handling the medical routine: a burden she hadn’t anticipated when dragging him off the ship had seemed simple enough.
    She should have just left him there to die.
    B Y THE TIME Munroe returned to the boat, hunger and exhaustion had become a sharpened edge that made it difficult to play nice or play dumb. She arranged for Sami to accompany her as watchman for the night, and left him to sort out with Mohamed how and when the two would reconvene.
    A few kilometers along the shore, clusters of light began to peek out of the surrounding darkness. With Sami’s help Munroe found a jetty that she could tie off to, and before leaving him with the boat, she marked off and pointed out the last of the fuel so that he knew she was aware of the levels and he wouldn’t be tempted to steal from what little she had left. Her actions weren’t a judgment against him, nor an implied accusation, simply an acknowledgment of the waythe continent worked when it came to petty theft, notice that she wasn’t as gullible as he might believe. And then, even though he’d not worked a full day, she handed him two thousand shillings, told him that she wanted fuel and would add an extra two hundred if he found a way to get it to her before midmorning.
    “I get it, no problem,” he said, and so she patted him on the shoulder, left him for the night, and wandered up the darkened beach to the nearest cluster of lights.
    The hotel, when she reached it, was like pictures out of a magazine, with secluded thatch-roofed bungalows overlooking what would, in the daytime, be white sand beaches and crystalline turquoise water: the tourist version of East Africa. In the unwalled main house guests lounged on oversize rattan furniture under sweeping ceiling fans and gawked as she passed by, as if she were some swamp creature crawling in.
    A mixture of languages followed in her path, some unfamiliar, some that sent off flashes of illumination in her