Just Desserts

Reyes fell to his knees, eyes filled with confusion, his breathing somehow labored with a tell-tale gurgling sound, blood blossoming unexpectedly from the front of his shirt. He teetered there for a moment before falling forward into the sand.

Pablo, from his position in the hole, saw everything unfold in surrealistically slow motion. One moment they had all been reveling in their find, the next found poor Reyes shot dead, while his killer, Meringa, was swinging a still smoking gun to bear on the only other target for hundreds of miles. Pablo knew he was a dead man.

They had met a week earlier, strangers gambling in a dimly lit backroom of a bar on the southern coast of Tahiti, each trying to cheat the other. A fourth joined the game late, a strange old man with weathered skin, few words and even fewer dollars. He placed the chart on the table as his collateral.

By night’s end, the chart was theirs.

Days later, they dropped anchor at what appeared to be open, shark infested waters. Morning brought them an unexpected gift, a small island, no more than a hundred yards across, where none had been the night before. The ebb tide had revealed their treasure.

Now Reyes was dead and Pablo was next.

He lunged at Meringa, knocking the man back, taking a bullet in the chest for his trouble. Meringa stumbled backwards as Pablo’s limp body fell hard against him, the impact causing him to squeeze off one more random shot, striking the anchored boat in a most unfortunate location. The exploding fuel tank sank the boat in minutes.

Meringa sat down hard next to the unearthed treasure and the two dead men. The tide was coming in, shark fins cutting the water just yards off shore.

Word count 299