Free The Catch: A Novel by Taylor Stevens Page A

first, and then the other. “Two thousand, two thousand,” she said, and the English speaker stuck out a hand.
    “I am Sami,” he said, and Munroe shook on the understanding that she’d just been robbed. She turned to glance at the setting sun. “I have no shillings,” she said. “Does Lamu Island have a bank?”
    “Yes, closed now,” Sami said. “I have friend, he buy dollars, give good price.”
    She had enough fuel to get through the night, and hotels would probably accept dollars.
    Munroe turned toward the boat, toward the captain, still unconscious, deteriorating from heat and dehydration. There hardly seemed a point in trying to get him medical care, but if she didn’t, she might as well just slit his throat.
    Munroe clenched her fists, pushed back the invisible blood that stained her palms, and said, “Where is your friend?”
    “In Lamu Town.”
    “Do we take a taxi? Bus?”
    “No car on island, only donkey. We go your boat.”
    “I need a hospital first,” she said. “Do you have one of those?”
    “We have.”
    She nodded toward Mohamed. “You take me to the hospital and he brings the friend with the good price to meet us.”
    Sami turned to interpret for Mohamed, their dickering started up again, and after a minute of back and forth Sami said, “He show you hospital, I bring my friend,” and so Munroe swung her arm wide toward the pier, gestured Mohamed to the boat, and to Sami said, “Bring a liter of drinking water with you when you come.”

CHAPTER 8
    Munroe followed Mohamed’s guidance back to the waterway and farther up the island’s coastline until they passed a collection of small resorts and hotels. Mohamed waved toward the beach and in a tone that was more explanation than instruction said, “Shela,” as if it had some importance, and perhaps to him it did because he believed she was a tourist.
    She acknowledged him with a nod.
    In an area this remote, where there were resorts there also had to be a landing strip and a place where commerce and money changed hands and where she could buy fuel and supplies. Beyond the hotels the shoreline thickened into foliage again, and by the time Mohamed pointed and nodded, waved and urged Munroe toward the shore, she’d still seen nothing that could stand in for what Sami had referred to as Lamu Town.
    They coasted on momentum into the shallows. Mohamed hopped out, waded ahead, and used the lines to drag the boat until the bottom scraped.
    Munroe unlaced her boots and pulled them off. Draped them over her shoulder, nudged her vest out from beneath the captain’s head, picked up her pack, took everything with her over the bow, and trudged up the beach toward a building that backed up to the sand.
    Around the front under the last of the day’s sunlight, Lamu District Hospital greeted Munroe in big painted letters. The area was quiet, no crowds milling about the main entrance, and she continued on through an open walkway with dirty whitewashed walls and patterned brick that allowed the ocean breeze to circulate and keep the smell of rot, sickness, and overripe body odor to a minimum.
    In a layout similar to that of so many provincial hospitals and clinics on the continent, the structure was courtyard-style, with concrete floors where there wasn’t dirt, and under the porticoes on rough-hewn benches women in color-splashed
abayas
and in tribal wraps held sickly babies and small children.
    Munroe found a nurse who spoke English well enough to understand her problem and mediate in locating a doctor; then she sat on the concrete and pulled her socks and boots back on. The nurse returned with a man Munroe pegged for a volunteer. Light-skinned, dark-haired, and with several days of beard stubble, he wore faded scrubs and the look of numbness that often attached to foreigners who, working too long in impoverished conditions without supplies and equipment, were forced to witness sickness and death they would otherwise have been able to prevent. He