Shepherd's Watch

by Angie Counios

  By the time he realizes, he’s almost completely on the wrong side of the road and overcorrects.

  The truck shoots back into the proper lane, front right tire dropping off the edge of the pavement to sink into the soft dirt of the shoulder. The wheel yanks out of his hand and the whole truck slides into the ditch. He hits the brakes, but it’s not soon enough and he rams into a tree.

  The jolt hits him hard—thankfully he has his seatbelt on—but he knows his truck isn’t as lucky. He climbs out of the cab and surveys the damage. The bumper is crumpled, the radiator cracked, and coolant is pouring everywhere.

  “Well, hell’s bells,” he grumbles as he jumps back in and throws the vehicle in reverse.

  The metal bumper grips the splintered tree, and the whole front end squeals in protest before tearing off as he pulls away.

  He aims the truck back onto the highway and guns it, not bothering to look if anyone’s coming, not caring that his truck is shooting out of the ditch like a wild animal.

  The temperature gauge rises immediately, but he ignores it, hoping that he’ll get to the marina at the lake before it burns out his whole engine.

  It just hasn’t been his day.

  8

  At the resort area, Terry drives straight for the dock, steam hissing from the hood of his truck. His bumperless front end bonks off the wood posts that string steel cable around the parking lot, and empty beer cans and food wrappers fly off his seat onto the floor in response. He no longer cares.

  He grabs a convenience store bag off the floor, jams the cheques inside, and ties it tight. He climbs out and hauls the three blue coolers from the truck box. He sticks the bag with the cheques into the bottom of one and, from the passenger side, grabs the bags of ice he bought, tearing them open, and spilling them into the coolers. As a finishing touch, he tosses a few cans of beer on top of the one with the cheques before slamming the lids shut.

  “There you go, Cousin Rachel. That should keep you and yours happy ’til next month.”

  He can’t quite reach his fishing equipment, so he climbs into the back of the truck and grabs the tackle box, rod, and a bag of bait. On the way down, he loses his footing and catches himself, but the tackle box falls to the ground, spilling hooks, floaters, and sinkers everywhere.

  He shakes his head, laughing ruefully. “Nice move, Terry.”

  He gathers it all up as best he can, leaving several hooks on the ground in his haste. He’s more interested in looking like a fisherman than actually catching a fish.

  He stacks everything on top of the coolers, hoicks the lot up in his arms, and winds his way over the uneven gravel to the dock to the most beautiful thing he owns, his powerboat, Jolene, Jolene. All the early wages from his side job went into a down payment on this 135-horsepower, 18-foot beauty, complete with optional fishing package, bow-mounted wireless trolling motor, and casting platform—and she was worth every penny.

  He scrambles from the dock to the deck and it’s dicey for a second, but he pulls it off unscathed. He sets his gear down by the pedestal seat and the coolers at the foot of the portside bench. Looks like he’s ready to go.

  It’s a five-kilometre run to the meet-up and it will likely take half an hour to get across the lake. The sun hangs over the spruce trees and he needs to get his ass in gear, but he’s sure there’s still time before everyone shows up.

  He opens one of the coolers and pulls out a beer, cracking the can to raise it in a victory sip. “Hurray for me!”

  Things seem to be finally turning around.

  He turns the key and the engine thunders to life.

  9

  Terry glances at his watch.

  “Crap.”

  It’s almost night and the sun is hiding behind the woods, painting the sky orange, red and pink, and he can’t separate the trees from the dark shadows reaching across the water toward him. He’s certain he missed the cove where he’s supposed to meet Cousin Rachel… or he hasn’t gone far enough. He isn’t positive about anything anymore and is sure-as-shit lost.

  When he first started these runs, he would aim for the remains of the fire tower that stood across the lake, but the government came and knocked it down when they replaced it with computers and satellites, so now he just points Jolene, Jolene in the general direction and hopes for the best.

  But this only works in the daytime when you can see where you’re going and what the hell is in front of you. It also doesn’t help that the beer has got the better of him. He grabs a handful of potato chips and jerky and stuffs them into his mouth, hoping the carbs and salt will clear the cobwebs from his muddy, drifting mind.

  He looks back, searching for the marina, but there are no lights on the horizon behind him and the night sky creeps toward him with long fingers of deep indigo. He considers pulling back to the centre of the lake, working his way back toward where he thinks the truck is, and hoping something will click, but that would only take more time.

  He throttles the boat to half and rides parallel to the shore, eyes darting back and forth along the shoreline, trying to find some discernible detail, trying to recognize something—anything—that will guide him. He’s never missed an exchange, has no idea what will happen if he does—the only thing he’s confident of is that it probably won’t be good.

  Then he sees it—he’s sure he sees it—a brief flicker of light in the mass of darkness.

  He yanks the wheel beachward, ripping a large wake behind him, and powers the engine up, not wanting to keep Cousin Rachel waiting any longer, her or the guys with guns who always accompany her. But he regrets it immediately.

  Whump.

  Terry bounces forward as the boat catches on the lake bottom. His tackle box flies off the seat, smashing everywhere. Water and mud kicks out behind the boat and the engine’s temperature warning buzzes. He kills the throttle and pops the engine into neutral, but he knows it’s not going to be good.

  He shines a light starboard. Silt clouds the water—he can’t see anything.

  He lifts the propeller out of the water and it’s worse than he imagined. One prop blade is bent and he’s sure he’s messed up the shaft, the strut, and possibly the rudder. After flushing the engine, changing the impeller, and fixing the rest, this trip is going to cost him more than it’s worth.

  His gaze swivels back to the trees, hoping to finally spot his people but can’t see anything anymore. No flickering light at all. At the bow, a thick, fallen tree presses low against the keel. He sighs, rubbing his head.

  “Well, dammit, Terry.” He cracks open a fresh can of brew, taking a long chug, and considers his options.

  “Well, quitters is for shitters,” he tells himself. “I’ve got this.”

  He jumps over the gunwale into the cold, dark water and is instantly sober. He moves along the hull, grabs hold of the bowline, and kicks his foot hard to move the boat out of the shallows and away from the tree. He tugs it around the rotting, gnarled roots and navigates it back to deeper waters.

  Terry moves by touch and feel, placing one foot ahead of the other, tripping over slippery rocks, his legs entangled in seaweed.

  The ground slips away beneath him and he sinks quickly downward, barely keeping his breath as he goes under. His clothes pull him down and he kicks wildly with inefficient strokes, grasping the bowline to pull himself back up to the surface. When he breaks the surface, he gasps for breath then splashes toward shore, dragging the boat with him until the hull catches loosely on the sand.

  Giving it one last, hard tug until it’s solid, Terry catches his breath before struggling back to lift out one of the coolers and haul it up the beach. He heads back one last time to Jolene, Jolene, shivering, hands numb, to get the final container, and drags it and his sorry ass back to the beach.

  He dumps it beside the other and plops down in a heap. He’s freezing, exhausted, and his body aches. He really wan
ts this night to be done.

  Someone comes out of the trees.

  “You won’t believe the day I’ve had.”

  He turns—

  Crack.

  One lens of his glasses shatters and white light pops along Terry’s optic nerve as he careens backward, tumbling down the beach’s sandy incline. His head splashes into the water, flinging the glasses from his face.

  A woman towers blurrily above him in the dark, a thick branch hanging from her hand. She moves down the shore toward him.

  He touches his forehead and feels gushing blood and the tight pinch of torn, swollen skin. He’ll have a hell of a goose egg tomorrow. He tries to stand, but his legs won’t stay solid beneath him.

  “Can you help me?” he asks, reaching out an arm, hoping she’ll grab hold. “I’ve got a couple of beers left in the boat I can share.”

  She moves past him, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt as she goes, and pulls him farther out into the water.

  “Wait. Help—”

  The woman doesn’t listen.

  He’s floating and can’t quite get a grip.

  She stops and Terry drifts past her and he’s sure it’s Cousin Rachel. He wants to ask her what she’s doing, but she takes the stick and lays it across his chest and pushes him down beneath the lapping waves.

  He tries to fight, but the cold and the beer and the crack on the head all stop his brain and body from working together.

  He can see her now, up through the water, watching him, and he tries to kick himself away, to grab her arms, but his hands are tight and numb, and she pushes down too hard for him to do anything.

  He yells, but all he can manage are muffled bubbles beneath the water. His vision blurs more and he can’t see the woman very well at all now, but her long hair hangs above him, spreading out like feathers across the surface.

  He struggles to turn, to push away, to slip from beneath her, but nothing works. He needs to inhale and tries to fight it, but the feeling is coming from deep down and he knows he can’t prevent it any longer.

  His body quits listening to his rational brain and inhales. Water pours down his throat and into his lungs and his whole body seizes. In a mighty effort to save itself, his body forces the water out but in its desperate attempt to breathe, it sucks in another lungful of lake water, sand, sediment, algae, and fish excrement.

  Only then does Terry realize he’s not going to survive this.

  10

  Cousin Rachel shines her flashlight down at Terry’s waterlogged corpse, hung up in the tangled roots of a log beached by wind and waves.

  This hasn’t exactly gone as planned.

  She glances back at her crew, four hired muscles loaded with enough concealed pistols and knives to kill a bear, and knows they won’t be pleased with what comes next. She doesn’t care if they don’t want to do it—this is the drug business, not summer camp.

  She waves two of them over while the other two head for the van to get shovels.

  “Get down there and pull him out.”

  She watches the two men—Amos and Daniel—go down to the shoreline and pull off their boots and socks. Amos, the heavier of the two, rolls up his loose-fitting jeans as high as he can, while Daniel strips down to his underwear.

  Cousin Rachel takes a seat on a large rock, turns halfway and peers through the night toward the path. She’s worked with these guys for two years now, but she never keeps her back to any of them for too long. It’s hard to trust anyone in this line of work—someone somewhere is always scheming for a better position—and this cautious attitude has kept her around longer than most.

  She fell into this career while working part-time at a clothing store, one of those chain outlets in a mall, with a husband who’d been recently laid-off, an adorable nine-year-old son, and ever-increasing debt. She’d kept asking for more hours but there were never enough to go around and eventually her manager, a young woman who’d work all day and party all night, pulled her aside and told her she knew ways to make extra money—as either an escort or a dealer in the clubs. Cousin Rachel was desperate but not interested; that is, until she told her husband and they found themselves considering the possibility of drug trafficking. She’d gone back the next day and agreed, and very quickly thereafter discovered she had a real knack for the business.

  As she was promoted and the business got messier, she told her husband less and less. The first body she saw was an od, and then a cleanup after a hit. Eventually, she herself had to use violence as a management tool and found that killing another human being didn’t bother her as much as she thought it would. She treated each death with clinical detachment, a way to make things happen or to remove a difficulty. Now that she was in management, her bosses didn’t expect her to kill anyone, but she liked to be hands-on, to leverage people’s fears and remind them what she was capable of.

  Gil comes over the rise, Jacob following behind, and Cousin Rachel gestures with her flashlight away from the beach. “Go about ten yards that way. Find someplace far from these spruce roots—they’ll only cause you hell—and start digging a hole.”

  “Like six feet?”

  “Nah, two or three at the most. Just enough to keep the scavengers from digging him up.”

  Gil shines his light into the dark trees, uncertain.

  She points her light at him. “Go on, you big baby. Not like a bear is going to jump out and eat you.”

  This was the essence of her job—managing the team. It was a business. She had to solve problems, run the day-to-day operations, and keep the lines of communication and product flowing to the northern part of the province.

  She looks back to Amos and Daniel as they splosh back to shore, dragging the body behind them. None of their names are real—she doesn’t even know the identity of the floater in the water—and she preferred it that way. She couldn’t remember who had picked her moniker, only that someone had introduced her as their cousin in the early days and the nickname had stuck.

  She kneels down beside the bloated body, examining him, feeling his pockets and shirt for a cell phone or wallet. She never knew the guy except for the monthly exchanges, but she knows he must’ve crossed somebody because he sure got what was coming to him. Sleeping on this job, making mistakes—you’d only end up getting yourself killed. Everyone has a role to play and if you fail, this is the penalty.

  “No trace of the money?” Amos asks.

  “Nah.” She studies his face. “And he’s missing his glasses.”

  “He wore glasses?”

  Daniel pipes up, “You worked on this line for a year, you don’t remember?”

  “Did you?”

  “Enough!” Rachel shouts, cutting Daniel short. These two can get into the stupidest fights. “Take him to Gil and Jacob and help them finish up. And no more arguments.” Sometimes these guys behave worse than her kid.

  The men lift the body up like they’re moving a dresser and haul him into the trees, Rachel lighting the way. Once over the rise, she swings her light back over the water, sweeping the beam over the choppy, uneven surface, searching for the man’s boat. The wind must’ve got ahold of it and pulled it out into the lake, or the currents carried it away even farther.

  She sighs, pulling out her phone.

  Yup, this business is all about solving problems—and she’s got a hell of a big one to deal with now.

  chapter 1

  “Where are you going, Anthony?”

  I’m halfway down the beach when my sister, Heather, calls out to me. She’s lying on a blanket by our stuff, looking up from a book that’s finally not something from college.

  “Worried I might run off?”

  She’s my big sister, but I think we’re way past this babysitting stage.

  “No, just thinking we should go back soon.”

  “Give me a few more minutes.”


  I go down to the water. It’s a beautiful summer day, but the sun beats down hot and I need to cool off.

  I wade into the lake, and as expected, it’s freaking cold. I hope to get used to it before my legs go numb, but either way, I intend to enjoy a quick swim before we drive back to our cabin on Dyson’s Point. I dive in, the freezing water leaving me breathless, and I force a shout beneath the surface to get through the shock. Strong, fast strokes get my blood pumping before I finally surface and swim out toward the buoys.

  The whole lake is buzzing with action. The beach around Heather is packed with families, teenagers, kids, old people, weekend visitors, and the lifers, like my family. Sailboats and windsurfers are out on the water, cutting over the lake where the wind funnels across its surface. Boats zip past near the buoys, water-skiers and jet skis chasing behind, and down where the lake dumps into the river, there’s a bunch of boats gathered under the bridge and I figure the fishermen must have found themselves a good spot for northern pike or walleye.

  I roll over onto my back and let the gentle waves carry me, staring at a single cloud drifting on its lonesome journey high above. I could lie here all day, soaking up the moment, caught between the frigid, refreshing water and the warm air and hot sun. However, my mind has other plans and a memory of my dead girlfriend, Sheri, floats to its surface. I shake it off and try not to dwell, but it lingers for a moment longer than I wish.

  I pull myself up again and locate Heather on the beach; she signals that she wants to go. I take a deep breath and dive down, swimming beneath the surface, moving back toward the shore.