Even my eardrums were sensitive. The nausea began in my toes and crawled its way up my legs until it erupted in my stomach. Vomit spewed. I was happy to let it out all over Jermaine’s loafers.
The man started vibrating. He kicked me away as an endless stream of brown liquid and pizza plastered the carpet.
Luckily, it was my vomit, and I couldn’t smell anything. The car swerved to the shoulder and shuddered to a halt as red dust billowed in the faint half-moonlight.
I was sprawled across the backseat, my face planted in the leather, moaning, writhing. My feet pistoned into the door frame as if trying to run from the pain. Sweat poured from my hot brow, but with the pain down to a manageable seven my thoughts cleared a little more. Gilroy and Jermaine hadn’t killed me yet. There must be a reason. Probably they wanted to know what I knew and who I’d told. I recalled that I had texted Dana about these two. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to my friend, but I was grateful that someone with balls knew about my suspicions.
Another assumption I’d been trained to make: if two were involved, there could be more. It was similar to the cop rule that you always assumed a suspect had one more weapon hiding somewhere on their person. Find a gun in the belt, check the ankle. Find a gun in the ankle and belt, check for a knife. Find a knife ... well, you get the idea. Were these two the whole thing or could they be working with others who were among the people looking to inherit more from Francine than they deserved? Could they be working with someone in the Bacon family?
A push-up got me to a slumping, yet seated position. Outside, the men argued, Jermaine jabbing the air with exclamations about ripping my guts out and eating my heart, while Gilroy coolly stated the obvious: not worth it. We need this fool alive, for now.
Jermaine muttered a derisive “fine” and marched over, leaned in the open door, closed his eyes against the stench and punched me in the face. I lulled, barely maintaining consciousness. Gilroy pulled him out and told him I’d be harmless for the remainder of the ten-minute drive to the boat.
“Sit up front with me and lean out the window. Listen.” They were on either side of the hood now, moving to get in. “I need you to keep it under control. We’re almost home free. You okay? You took what you need, right?”
Jermaine slapped the roof.
“Yeah? How you know? If we almost home, why we keepin’ him breathing?”
The lunatic had a valid point. They lacked all the information, otherwise why keep me alive.
After we’d been driving for ten or fifteen minutes, we bumped to a stop. The dirty-white awning of a storefront peeked down through the window. Jermaine dragged me to my feet. Red Hook Marina. The stinging had been going on long enough to become background noise. I was the guy who had driven drunk so many times, being sober made me more dangerous. Come to think of it, I was still a little drunk, which maybe lessened the effect of the pepper spray. Score one for the drunken. Then again, if I hadn’t passed out in the yard from boozing, I wouldn’t be in this mess. If I weaseled out of this disaster, I’d try sobriety.
Yeah, right. Evelyn tried to make me get sober. If I couldn’t do it for her, I certainly wasn’t doing it for myself.
Everything hurt. My face, my chest where Jermaine stuck his foot into me, my shoulder, and my knee. A welter of blows. At thirty-three, I felt like I had the body of a retired pro wrestler who’d been whacked with chairs and slammed to the mat hundreds of times. Except none of mine got me any fame or fortune. All my injuries came from stupid mistakes.
I was so out of it, I hadn’t even checked to see if my phone was still in my pocket. I patted the back of my shorts where I stashed it earlier that night.
Gilroy held it in front of my eyes. “You looking for this? You are going to unlock it, now.”
Jermaine seized my hand and pressed my thumb to the home button. The screen glowed. Gilroy walked ahead, scrolling through my logs, probably searching for a starting point.
The filthy marina water lapped gently against the boats, whap, whap, whap. Street lights crouched on the hillsides like fireflies waiting to take flight. One house in the distance had a light on in the window. I’d always loved to imagine what those distant home-dwellers did in the light, while outside, darkness concealed their transgressions.
I thought of screaming. No doubt someone would hear. There had to be someone who slept on their boat in this marina. But what could they do for me, except get killed?
Be patient. Wait for an opening.
Gilroy, apparently satisfied with whatever he’d found in my phone, dropped it into his pocket as he stepped onto a boat. I couldn’t make out the name of the vessel, but took a quick look around to ascertain its location. Third dock to the left of the dockmaster’s shed, second from the last slip. A fishing boat, in the thirty-foot range, white, two-tiered.
Jermaine shoved me onto a cushioned bench and plopped next to me. This time he pulled out a gun.
“I thought you only used arrows,” I said.
The cyclops abyss gazed at me, unblinking. A short trip to a long goodbye. Glocks were so sinister. No style, all business. Typical Austrian attitude.
I needed to piss. Badly.
“Hey, Gilroy, can I at least piss over the side here?”
“Let him piss,” he said to Jermaine, clearly tired of my whining.
“You know, that gun is loud,” I said as I walked aft.
Jermaine stayed right behind me, the gun trained at the back of my neck. When I tried to piss, nothing came. My full bladder could not overcome my fear.
“Hey Gil!”
“I told you not to call me that,” Gilroy said through clenched teeth.
“Can I shoot him, for being disrespectful to you?” Jermaine asked.
“Jermaine, stick to the plan. I don’t need the respect of such a man.”
Holding up the gun, Jermaine continued to complain. “He’s right, this gun is loud. Inelegant. I want to use my proper weapon.”
Gilroy sighed. “Fine. Give me the gun. Your precious weapon is under the seat.”
Gilroy trained the gun on me with one hand and held the steering wheel with the other.
From under the seat, Jermaine pulled out a crossbow and loaded it. Gilroy returned his full attention to steering the boat, setting the gun next to the steering wheel.
Jermaine moved the arrow inches from my head.
“Hey, could you back up? You’re making me nervous.”
He didn’t move. I stood a while, the wind whipping my shirt. Finally, I started to flow. I made sure some of my urine blew onto the side of the boat.
“Nice ride,” I said, working hard to sound nonchalant, despite my shaking hand and still stinging face. My legs banged against the rail.
Jumping was an option. I could swim, but in my state, I wasn’t sure I’d make it. Even in the half-light I could make out foam on the tips of the waves. We were already far from shore, as Gilroy didn’t seem too interested in following the posted speed limits or the “no wake” signs. We passed the first marker, and tilted to starboard, heading to the same place Francine was found.
“You taking me to the harbor like you did Francine?”
Jermaine attempted to remain impassive, but islanders aren’t naturally poker-faced, especially homicidal-maniac islanders. What I needed to know showed in the glint of his eyes. The man wanted to kill me so badly, he had the giddiness of a teenaged boy on the way to getting laid for the first time.
Right there, standing on the edge of the boat after urinating, I had a quick image of me and Yarey. Her tongue probing my lips as we kissed, wet and passionate.
“Hey! What da fuck, man!” Jermaine was not happy. “Put dat thing away. Hey, Gilroy, dis man got a coconut tree.”
Gilroy grunted. Did he ever laugh? The quip made me chuckle. It relaxed me. Jump-started my mind. I began churning through new possibilities.
Always act as if you’ll get
away; that was one of Henry’s rules. If you got away, you still had a case to solve, which meant you kept working the case. Was this the same boat they’d taken Francine on across the River Styx? Had to be.
Everything shimmered in the iridescent light of the setting half-moon. One spot in particular on the rim of the boat glowed like bleach had been used there recently.
Although I’d never been a homicide investigator, Evelyn’s death had motivated me to learn a bit about covering up a murder. If you were going to get bloody, you kept bleach handy. Otherwise, you made it easy on the cops. Jermaine stared at me and didn’t waiver. I was getting more comfortable having a crossbow trained on me. Henry used to say the reaper’s always there, waiting around every corner and every decision. Waiting for his job to matter.
Although diving off a moving boat had its advantages, mostly it had disadvantages, like drowning, predators who loved to eat at night, and drowning. Did I mention drowning? If my mother’s biggest fear was collapsed lungs, mine was drowning. I didn’t much like holding my breath. A fear of drowning made jumping off a boat into deep water very challenging.
Although I was a competent swimmer, ever since I’d been caught in an undertow and held down until I passed out, drowning had come in at number one on my top-forty list of least favorite ways to die. A fellow surfer had pulled me to the surface, because my father had been drunk and unaware of his ten-year-old son. I forget what my mother was doing, probably yelling at dear old dad.
Diving off the boat drifted into the “last recourse” column. For now, they weren’t questioning or physically harming me, so the status quo wasn’t all bad. I slowed my breathing. After sitting back down for two minutes, my jack-hammering knee took its place.
“Stop that,” Jermaine snapped.
“What?” I asked.
“That.” He pointed the tip of the nocked arrow at my knee and poked me in the knee cap. A dot of blood bloomed on my skin. I stopped.
“You guys make me nervous.” I immediately regretted the revelation. This was no time to overshare.
“So, how’s your niece coming along getting ready for her competition?”
“You trying to be funny?” Jermaine asked.
Keep him talking.
“Sure, I guess. Is that funny?”
“I’m her trainer. Since I got her away from that Bacon fool, I’m finally getting her technique right. Six months of focus and she’s unbeatable at all of it.”
“All of it? Is there more than archery?”
The boat bounded over the wake from a cruise ship churning to port. The moon was all the way gone, leaving us alone with the dark water and the white stars and the floating hotel.
The few times I’d gone sailing in Los Angeles, the air always had a nip because the water was so goddamned cold year-round. It actually pissed me off. I’d slept comfortably on the deck of boats all my life. You couldn’t do that on the Pacific coast of the U.S. The salt smell and the warm coolness of the tropics at night couldn’t be matched. It made me like being on the water again. My seasickness dissipated the more I sailed. This would have been a welcome sojourn, if not for the weapon pointed at my head.
“Yeah, I’ve got plans for Isabelle.”
“What kind of plans?”
“Big plans. She’s going to do special t’ings in this world.”
“Wow, sounds super important. You must be proud.”
He slid closer, his pants like sandpaper against the vinyl seat. He pressed the arrowhead against my temple until my ear touched my other shoulder. A trickle of blood or anxious sweat snaked from the point of contact. I was beginning to feel like a pin cushion. An ache rose in my skull as I squeezed my eyes shut. I hoped to see something promising in the blackness. Gilroy didn’t seem to care much what Jermaine did.
“What are you doing?” Gilroy yelled. I opened my eyes. He stood right behind Jermaine. “You crazy bastard, I need him alive. I need to know who he talked to and what he knows. I told you to control yourself. Just like at Kendal’s house, you are too loud, too uncouth, making all of this more difficult.”
“You just want to know if he doing something with Yarey. Your precious Yarey.”
Gilroy started to reach for Jermaine’s shoulder, then thought better of it as Jermaine bared his teeth. I expected him to growl like a sabretooth beast, but he only made a soundless face, which somehow made it more menacing. A flicker of madness lit his eyes as he pulled away. Gilroy returned to the wheel.
“I be proud when she do as she told,” Jermaine said, shaking his head as if he were trying to shake water out of his ear.
Making it out of this night was beginning to look about as likely as a bloody cat out-swimming a hungry shark.
We stopped dead in the water. Streetlights and houselights twinkled from Charlotte Amalie, but the place seemed as distant as the stars above.
“You see him?” Gilroy pointed at the still twitching head of Jermaine. “This is what he lives for. He does the dirty work. Oh, yes. He does that.”
“He killed Kendal?”
“The reporter? ‘Course. I don’t go in for that sort of thing.”
“You aren’t worried about controlling him?” I asked, genuinely concerned, but also wanting to drop an ounce of doubt on the deck for later should things go that way.
“Control is an illusion. Just ask Francine. All that money and good intentions didn’t save her, did it?”
“Did he kill Francine?”
Jermaine piped up, “Yeah, I kill she.”
“Shut up, Jermaine. You got a big mouth. She wasn’t supposed to die. We were supposed to keep her alive and convince her to make a better ... dispensation. I wanted her to do what Dominic Bacon wanted, not some half-assed, two-hundred-years-too-late crap.”
“You could have dove in to save her,” Jermaine chirped. “She needed it to be real or she wasn’t gonna listen. You say to scare she.”
“Dumping an old woman into the ocean a mile out wasn’t what I had in mind, you idiot. Do you understand when you kill the person you are negotiating with, it defeats the whole fucking purpose! ‘Hold her’, not drop her is what I said,” Gilroy barked. “Enough. We’re asking questions, not you. Who else knows about us?”
Gilroy had wanted Francine alive long enough to get a better deal. To convince her to give him the distillery. That had to be it. Is that what Dominic had promised? It didn’t much matter that he didn’t intend to kill her, he’d still go down for felony murder.
“What is it Dominic Bacon wanted?” I asked Gilroy.
“Who else knows about us?”
“Are you two a couple?” I shot back. My bravado seemed to be swelling after moments ago thinking it was all over but the clean-up.
Gilroy snatched a handful of my shirt and yanked my head downward in a fierce arcing motion.
“You feel that? Control. I have it. The rest of them are fools. In the end they’ll get theirs. So will you. Now, talk. Who knows about you seeing us?”
“Harold, Herbie, Junior, Pickering, I think a cop named Leber. Oh, the sister, what’s her name? Hillary. She probably knows, too. You know what they say about secrets, right? Once two people know. Well, you know.”
He let go. As I straightened up I noticed a small, lightless vessel approaching from port. My captors were too busy interrogating me to notice anything else. Besides, who would expect to see a rowboat out here at this hour?
“You didn’t share with all those people, that’s bullshit. You’re the lonesome type who likes to gather before showing anyone anything.”
He was right. “Not true. I’m a sharer. Those people are paying me. They want constant updates. It’s brutal.”
I needed to keep their attention on me. Jermaine seemed preoccupied with his crossbow, not a good sign either. Was he talking to it?
“You know, Boise, you shouldn’t play cards, ever. You’re a terrible liar. Although I’d
like an excuse to torture you ... ”
“There’s no need for that.”
Torture wasn’t high on my list of fun activities either. Maybe it was time to reassess my negative opinion of drowning.
“Jermaine!” Gilroy said over his shoulder.
I threw another look to port. Nothing there. Maybe I was hallucinating. Maybe the grim reaper was in the row boat.
“Jermaine!” Gilroy repeated.
Jermaine reappeared in my line of sight, behind Gilroy. His mouth was still moving in that baring and unbaring dance between his lips, teeth, and nose. There was a rhythm, like a song played in his head. He had the crossbow held at the ready.
The gun. The gun wasn’t next to the steering wheel anymore.
Gilroy threw a disdainful look at Jermaine, asking, “What is wrong with you?”
Jermaine shot Gilroy through the eye. The feathered end of the arrow tilted up as Gilroy collapsed. Blood splatter bedazzled the white seat and the deck around the steering wheel as the body dropped in time with a swell. A gunshot resounded from somewhere in the darkness. I tensed my legs, feeling only a twinge in my bum knee before diving into the black ocean. I struck the chilly water. The waves battered my legs as I dove under the choppy surface.
Darkness swallowed my body. Images of seaworthy, nighttime predators flashed in my mind as I desperately breast-stroked under the boat. Twice I started to surface only to find I was still under the hull. The second time I scraped my scalp on a barnacle. I burst to the surface on the other side. The frantic need for air and my disorientation had sent me to the edge of panic. Although probably only a fifty-foot swim, it felt like I’d crossed the English Channel.
My head banged against the underside of something else in my panicked need for air. I stifled a yelp and flailed at the surface as crest after crest of the deep, relentless ocean battered my face. I twisted in a circle trying to find purchase.
After rotating hopelessly several times, something thumped me on the head again. In the dim, a snakelike object swirled in the water next to me as I dipped into a liquid valley between swells. The hull of a small vessel bobbed on a whitewashed wave above me.
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