The Catch: A Novel by Taylor Stevens Page B

from being disturbed for a night or two she was fine with that. She paid the few hundred shillings he wanted and then, with business settled, pulled her pack and vest off the boat and left Sami to stand guard over the captain and her supplies.
    On Mombasa’s North Shore, the hotels were larger, more spread out, covered far more length of beach apiece than they had in Shela, and in the search for a place that suited her purpose, Munroe walked a kilometer or two.
    She settled finally on a hotel that was a cross between one of the larger block-style monstrosities and the smaller boutique locations and, in a repeat of what had happened in Lamu when she’d come strolling in after the hard journey at sea, hotel patrons stopped and gawked. She passed through to the front desk and languages started up behind her.
    H ER ROOM WAS on the first floor of a three-story building, one of five in the complex, at the far end of a wide tiled hallway and with a porch that opened to the manicured gardens and the ocean. Munroe drew the curtains, though they didn’t close completely. Turned the air conditioner down a notch. Eventually she’d shut it off altogether because the cool air would only make it harder to stay adjusted to the climate.
    She dumped her belongings on the bed and pulled the irreplaceables from the vest and the backpack. The toilet tank, a ziplock bag,and duct tape became her storage for the handgun, and the bottom pockets of the legs on the bamboo bedframe safekeeping for the money and documents that she didn’t want to carry. Munroe stayed long enough to rinse off the ocean spray and change her clothes, and then with the help of the front desk staff called for a taxi, and the driver took her to the hotel that fronted the pier where she’d docked. She instructed him to wait and then walked through the hotel grounds back to the boat.
    Until she knew the area better, had gotten friendly with the eyes of the beach—the
askaris
and the beach boys who spent each day hawking wares and attempting to separate tourists from their money, those who felt the pulse of their own strip of sand—she couldn’t leave the boat alone. Not unless she was willing to return to a stripped-down empty shell. So she waited with the boat and sent Sami to find a boy who’d be willing, for a small fee, to help carry the captain.
    He returned fifteen minutes later with two men about his age.
    They got the still damp and stinking captain from the boat and to the pier, carried him up the beach to a dirt track that ran between houses and hotels, and finally to the coast highway—if it could be called a highway—where the taxi waited.
    She didn’t need to know the city to understand that the viable options for medical facilities narrowed into two choices. Easiest and cheapest would be a government hospital, which, for whatever modern medical equipment it might boast, was still the place to take the captain when she was ready for him to die. In a city this size there would have to be private facilities, smaller and more expensive, that catered to expatriates and tourists and the local population of rich: The doctors would treat first and bill later and save her the hassle of making a daily visit to a pharmacy to replace stolen items or to buy whatever the captain might need next, and this is what she asked for.
    T HE HIGHWAY TOWARD the city was a two-lane patchwork of asphalt, potholes, and worn-off edges, and in both directions cars, dilapidated trucks, and brightly painted vans blew by in a treacherous danceof road share with overladen bicycles, pedestrians, and animals. An orange spray-painted van with metallic stickers on the rear window spelling TOTAL INSANITY crossed into oncoming traffic, cut off the taxi, then rushed to the side of the road to let off passengers.
    The taxi driver muttered words that couldn’t have been polite in any language, and Munroe thumbed toward the van. “What is that?” she said.
    “
Matatu
,” the driver said,