by Gerry Boyle
And the motor stopped. The boat settled. Clutch cranked the starter. Nothing.
The tank, Brandon thought. It’s drained and he doesn’t know how to switch over.
They were drifting at the edge of the channel, the outgoing tide swinging the bow to the east. Clutch was clicking switches, hammering at the controls. “Goddamn it,” he bellowed.
He came down the steps, into the cabin.
“Goddamn piece of crap is out of gas, Blake,” Clutch said. “You stupid shit.”
He cuffed Brandon on the side of the head, said, “Is there a gas tank on here?”
Brandon shook his head. A disabled boat drifting into the channel. Someone would notice. Someone would check. Call the Coast Guard.
Clutch hit him again, said to Danni, “Watch him.” He moved out of the cabin, out to the stern deck. The boat was drifting but moving closer to the moorings. Danni looked out between the curtains, saw the top of a sailboat mast.
Brandon couldn’t feel his finger, some nerve thing that relieved him of the pain. Clutch was still flicking switches, trying the starter. The switch to the tanks was amid all the others, the markings long worn off. Brandon held his hands out to Danni, and she looked away.
They heard the motor rumble to life. Clutch thrust the boat into gear and they motored for 20 seconds, then slowed. The motor cut out and they saw Clutch moving onto the deck, his legs passing the window. He was scrambling forward, boat hook in hand. They heard him on the bow deck, grunting and saying, “Goddamn thing.” And then they felt the boat swing, the stern coming around. Clutch had hooked something. Brandon glanced out. They were at the outer edge of the mooring field of the Portland Yacht Basin, tied up to an empty mooring.
Clutch came by the window again, carrying the boat hook. And then he clumped down onto the stern deck, threw the hook aside and stepped back up to the helm. They heard the VHF radio blare, channel 16, the hailing emergency channel. Static, scratchy voices. A tanker hailing a pilot boat, a lobsterman telling Miss Betsy to go to channel 9. Brandon listened with a sinking feeling. The radio was cover for any sound he might make.
Clutch was back, bending and bumping his head on the bulkhead as he entered the cabin. “Goddamn piece of junk,” he said. “But we’re good now. Nobody gonna hear you out here, Blake. Nobody out here but the seagulls, peck your goddamn eyes out. Maybe that’s what I should do. Scrape your nosy eyes out with a friggin’ spoon, feed ’em to the fish.”
He pulled the gun out again, jammed it against Brandon’s throat.
“Gonna ask again. Still being a nice guy.”
Brandon looked at him, blinked against the coagulating blood.
“Where is it?”
Brandon shook his head slowly.
“Okay,” Clutch said. “Let’s see what other toys you got on this tub.”
He tucked the gun in his jeans, moved to the galley, started opening cupboards. Brandon heard the drawer slide open, the utensils and knives. “Here we go,” he said. “Slice and dice time.”
“Clutch, what if he’s telling the truth?” Danni said. “What if he threw the stupid thing away? He can’t snap his fingers and make it just appear.”
Brandon felt the pliers on his finger, his hand numb. He wasn’t snapping anything.
“Then it sucks to be him,” Clutch said, coming back into the cabin.
He had a fileting knife, a butcher knife, a propane torch. He held the torch up.
“I figure we’re out here, might as well do some grilling,” he said.
“No,” Danni said.
“Shut up,” Clutch said. “Trouble you started, just shut your mouth.”
She did. Clutch turned the valve on the torch and the gas hissed. He fished in his pocket for a lighter. Snapped the flame on and the torch lit, the flame a blue-white point.
Brandon heard the radio crackle, the pilot and tanker talking. A sailboat looking for U.S. Customs. A woman’s voice say, “Motor vessel Bay Witch, motor vessel Bay Witch. This is Munjoy dinghy. Go to channel 9.”
Mia.
Clutch was adjusting the flame. Danni said, “Please, Brandon. Just tell him. Let’s end this right here.”
It would be the end of him, Brandon knew. Nothing to sell, he was dead. And once they had it, he was dead anyway.
“Motor vessel Bay Witch, motor vessel Bay Witch. This is Munjoy dinghy. Go to channel 9, captain.”
Danni said, “Isn’t that the name of this boat? Who’s that?”
She looked to Clutch. He nodded and she ripped the tape from Brandon’s mouth. He grimaced and Danni said, “Sorry.” Brandon flexed his jaw, said, “Melissa. She and her husband Lowell have a boat at the marina,” Brandon said. “I have the keys to the fuel dock.”
“They can call you way over here?” Danni said.
“Three or four miles, depending on the height of the antenna.”
“Motor vessel Bay Witch, motor vessel Bay Witch. This is Munjoy dinghy. Go to channel 9, please.” Mia’s voice was more clear. She was getting closer.
“They can call all day,” Clutch said. “You’re all tied up.”
The torch sputtered out. He tried to relight it but the gas canister was empty.
“Christ,” Clutch said, throwing it aside, clanging off the hull. “Does anything work on this piece of junk?”
He took the filet knife off of the berth, the blade long and thin and razor sharp. He reached out and drew it hard across Brandon’s knuckles, the left hand. Brandon gasped as the flesh parted to the bone and blood began to seep.
“Whoa, that’s sharp. We can cut your balls off, one slice.”
“Please, no,” Danni said. “Just stop.”
“Motor vessel Bay Witch, motor vessel Bay Witch. This is Munjoy dinghy. Go to channel 9.” Mia, the signal strong now. She was close. Brandon had to warn her. He had to get them topsides where they could be seen.
“Bitch won’t take no for answer,” Clutch said.
Brandon looked at Danni and nodded.
“What?” she said. “Are we done?”
He nodded again.
“Oh, thank god,” Danni said. “Let’s get the goddam paper and get out of here.”
* * *
“Spill it before I cut your tongue out,” Clutch said. He pressed the point of the knife into the flesh under Brandon’s chin. Brandon felt the warmth of blood running. He took a deep breath through his mouth, his nose clogged with more blood, now drying. The boat rocked, almost imperceptibly.
“The helm,” he said.
“Where’s that?” Clutch said. “Speak goddamn English.”
“Where the wheel is. Where you were driving.”
“Okay.”
“There’s a chart book in the cupboard to the left of the wheel. It’s tucked in there. The chart for Muscongus Bay. It’s about halfway in.”
“Get it,” Clutch said to Danni, and she slipped behind him and out of the cabin. They heard her footsteps as she started up the ladder. And then there were other footsteps. And then none at all.
Danni came back into the cabin, walking backwards slowly, her hands up.
“What the—“Clutch said.
He reached for the revolver. Brandon lunged at him, swung his arms, the pliers yanking on his finger. The tape on his neck jerked him back and Clutch shoved him off and he fell back onto the berth. Tried again, the tape snapping his head backwards.
And then Mia was in the doorway. She was holding the Glock, Brandon’s Glock from the closet, in front of her with both hands. Clutch reached for the handle of the revolver and she screamed, “Don’t.”
Danni backed past him, said, “It wasn’t me. It was him. He did it.”
Mia glanced at Brandon, his bloody head and face and hands. Clutch smiled at her, kept his hand on the butt of his gun. “No harm done,” he said. “Just a little dickering. Your boyfriend here delivered his end of the deal, so now we can just move along.”
“Put your hands up,” Mia said. “Or I’ll kill you.”
C
lutch grinned, kept his hand on the gun. “Jesus, must run in the family, shooting people. Ever fired that thing, honey? Got the safety off? Don’t want to—”
His arm tensed and he started to jerk the gun out but it caught on the denim. He looked down, shook it loose, had it halfway out when Mia fired.
One, two, three, four shots.
Danni screamed, kept screaming. Clutch staggered backwards, looked up at Mia, his mouth agape. Back down at the holes in his shirt. Brandon saw Thatcher Rawlings and Joel Fuller. Clutch dropped to his knees, wobbled, and then pitched forward, flat on his face, blood running from underneath him like the boat had sprung a terrible leak.
Mia trained the gun on Danni. She stopped screaming, put her hands back up.
“Take that thing off him,” Mia said, “or I swear to god I’ll kill you, too.”
Twenty-Nine
It was the phone-finder app on Brandon’s old laptop, Mia told O’Farrell and the CID detectives. The GPS showed his phone out in the harbor. She took the handheld radio and gun from the apartment, drove down the hill to the docks. When Brandon didn’t answer her first call, she called 911, then took a dinghy and motored out to Bay Witch. Fifty yards off, she switched to oars. She knew something was wrong because Brandon would never leave the boat’s fenders hanging.
“What was Mr. Tedeschi doing when you shot him?” O’Farrell said.
“He was trying to pull that big gun out of his pants,” Mia said. “It got stuck.”
“So that gave you time?”
“I would have shot him first anyway,” she said.
The cops looked at her.
“I know this is hard,” a CID detective named Liegner said.
“No, it isn’t,” Mia said, her voice cold as steel. “I’m a writer. It’s what we call a happy ending.”
The interviews lasted hours. They first talked to Brandon outside the ER at Maine Med, where they used metal clamps to close the cut on his knuckles and splinted his broken fingers. Later he’d need surgery.
Brandon told the whole story, from reading the diary to the dead bikers, and Clutch’s friend. He’d later find that Danni had filled in the gaps, saying all three guys were wounded, but Clutch, who had run when the shooting started, went back and finished them off. He took the money and Danni, who’d been waiting in the truck, helped him count it. Clutch told her she was a murderer, too, that this was their secret. She’d kept it, except for the time she wrote that stuff down. Brandon said Danni had been forced to help with his abduction and torture. As near as he could tell.
Mia’s parents called from Alexandria, said they were coming that night. Mia told them to wait, she needed time. She was with Brandon. She’d call.
A day passed, then another. Brandon and Mia holed up in her apartment, friends bringing meals like someone had died. Which was true.
No one stayed to visit, just dropped casserole dishes covered with foil, takeout from food trucks, bottles of wine. They flashed sad, awkward smiles, said to call if there was anything they could do. A couple of the old cops, day-shift guys consigned to the airport and the mall, brought whiskey, nodded and left. Brandon lined up the unopened bottles on the counter beside the laptops, which were unopened, too.
Brandon and Mia slept like it was the only possible escape. They sat on the couch, Brandon’s bandaged hand on his lap, and looked out at the harbor like it was infinitely interesting. They took naps. Mia very occasionally cried silently but mostly just stared. Brandon took her hand and said, “I know.”
On the morning of the third day, O’Farrell called and said he was coming over. He came with Kat. They sat in chairs in front of the couch. They looked like they had bad news.
“It’s gonna take some time, sorry to say,” O’Farrell said. “D.A. says Kelly will fight tooth and nail to keep that video away from a jury. You have a right to confront your accuser, and all that.”
“What if you caused his death, too?” Brandon said.
“Oh, we’ll fight like hell, too. But she wants to have some stuff to back it up. They’re redoing the toxicology. Interviewing the nursing home people about her state of mind. And her physical abilities. It may be that she not only wasn’t demented, but she wasn’t strong enough to get that medicine cabinet open. Heard they had to dress her because she couldn’t do buttons or zippers.”
“Or child-proof pill bottles,” Mia said.
O’Farrell smiled.
“They’re building a case,” Kat said. “First you line up the zippers and bottles. Then you introduce the video because it has relevance.”
“How much time?” Brandon said.
“Weeks. A couple of months,” O’Farrell said.
“And what about the protests and all that?” Brandon said. “They just go on, them strutting around like they’re the victims.”
“They got word to Kelly and the Rawlingses, back channel. That there may be new evidence in the old lady’s death,” Kat said.
“How’d they do that?”
“Estusa,” Kat said. “The turd ran right over to tell them. Hasn’t been a peep about a protest since. Or a story.”
“And Tedeschi?” Mia said.
“Self-defense,” O’Farrell said. “Slam dunk.”
He looked at Mia. She had her tough face back on as she said, “Yeah, it was.”
The cops took a up a collection that netted $3,800. Brandon and Mia left town. First stop was a cabin they found online. It was near the New Hampshire border, at the edge of the White Mountains. It had a view of Mt. Washington, which was already snow-capped, and a big fieldstone fireplace. They hiked during the day and Brandon built fires at night. They sat side by side on a different couch and read books set in another century and watched the flames. For the first couple of days they said almost nothing.
And then on the third day, it was raining. They stayed in bed and held hands and listened to the patter on the roof. Finally, Brandon said, “Are we okay?”
“No,” Mia said. “But we’re not okay together.”
“Some couples share a hobby. Like bowling or riding a Harley.”
“Motorcycles scare me.”
“I don’t think much scares you.”
“Yeah, one thing really does,” Mia said. “The idea of losing you scares the heck out of me.”
Brandon thought for a moment.
“We have to make the best of what we’ve got. Time, I mean.”
“Yeah.”
They lay there, and Mia said, “Why is life such a big mess sometimes?”
“The nature of it,” Brandon said. “Always has been. I was just reading about the battle of Argonne Forest in World War I. More than fifty thousand people killed. Most people today have never heard of it.”
Mia considered that and said, “It’s this big random spinning thing—the world I mean. We try to make sense of it but there really isn’t any. And some people don’t make it.”
“Amanda Shakespeare.”
“You don’t think she killed herself.”
“I don’t know. But if she did, if they take the Rawlingses down, for her mother that’s some kind of justice.”
“Some,” Mia said. “Not much.”
“And they go to prison. With their secrets. Until one of them cracks.”
“And writes something down,” Mia said.
“In a diary or something,” Brandon said.
“Yes,” she said, squeezing his hand. “What goes around, comes around.”
“Sometimes,” Brandon said. “Sometimes.”
Epilogue
One year later:
There were no more sniper attacks on Portland police. The task force remained in place but, with no new leads, there wasn’t much to be done. The slugs from Brandon’s truck were in evidence bags. The ballistics were compared any time a 30.06 rifle was seized in connection with a crime.
The AG’s office investigated Crawford and Tiffanee Rawlings in the death of Alexandra Rawlings. They denied any role, said their son was distraught after
his grandmother’s death, and was given to flights of imagination. Investigators concluded the evidence—the video—wasn’t enough to move the case forward.
The threatened civil suit against Brandon Blake, the Portland Police Department, and the City of Portland never happened. The house in Moresby was sold. Tiff and Crawford Rawlings were said to have moved to Charleston, South Carolina. Brandon returned to duty, still working the night shift with his partner, Kat . Park was reassigned.
And then, a break.
Tiff Rawlings called Chief Garcia. She said she and her husband had split up. He had found someone else, a waitress in the U.S. on a work visa. Her name was Alina. She was twenty-eight, from Moldova, strikingly pretty. She quit her job at Tequila Sunrise, and they left the country. Tiff Rawlings hired a P.I. who tracked them to Tiraspol, in the wine country of Moldova. Crawford Rawlings had emptied all of their accounts, sold his Jeep for cash, and had taken all of the money with him.
He didn’t take his Remington Model 783 rifle, one of his favorite firearms. He kept it in a storage unit in Charleston but it was gone when he went to retrieve it. Tiff Rawlings had beaten him to it.
This was the rifle Crawford Rawlings had used to shoot at the cops, Tiff said. She’d provided him with an alibi on those nights, but she knew where he was, what he was doing. Hitting the cop hadn’t been the plan. The whole idea had been to create havoc, she said.
“What about Blake, in his truck?” she was asked.
“Him? Crawford just missed,” she said.
Detectives flew to Charleston, took custody of the Remington, and interviewed Tiff Rawlings. She said Crawford killed his mother with the overdose, threatened that she’d be next if she said anything. He made her put the light on Blake’s boat. She was glad he missed, not because she cared if Blake lived, but because she figured killing Blake would be like poking the bear one too many times. Which, it turned out, it almost was.
Tiff Rawlings came back to Portland with the detectives, was put up in Eastland Hotel. The Remington was a match. She told the story of the shootings over and over. Asked about Amanda Shakespeare, she said she didn’t know anything about her death. If that had been her husband, he’d kept it to himself.
