Fishing for a Killer

by Glenn Ickler

  I looked at Sheila and nodded toward the stepstool in her hand. “You clobbered me with that?” I said.

  Sheila smiled and nodded. “It was the only thing I could find in the bathroom.”

  “Old Smokey here pulled the gun out of somewhere before I could move,” Al said.

  “I always keep it handy,” Ross said. “You never know when you might have to do away with some varmint.”

  “I hope you’ve got a permit,” I said. “Or you’ll have one more crime on your record.”

  “Always the comedian, aren’t you?” Ross said. “Well you’re not going to joke your ass out of this one.”

  I had started the mini-recorder in my shirt pocket when we’d walked in the front door. It only had a thirty-minute capacity so I decided to get down to business before it ran out. “You said you hit Alex too hard. Tell us about that. The whole story.”

  “Sure, why not?” Ross said. “You won’t be around to write about it. And Mr. Paparazzi’s camera with these pictures in it will be long gone.” What he didn’t know was that they would still be around in Al’s laptop, which was locked in the car outside.

  Ross put the gun down on the coffee table before starting his story. “Anyhow, you want to hear about how we took care of Alex. Well, you know, him and I have been coming along on this fishing opener thing for two terms—this was the eighth one—and right from the start Alex has been going out after walleyes at five o’clock Friday morning. It was some kind of ritual with him to get out on the lake before sunrise. So this year on Friday morning I was waiting by his boat, all decked out with fishing gear, when he got there, and I asked if I could go along. He wasn’t real pleased to see me but I mentioned that I’d just seen him say goodbye to somebody who looked a lot like Ann Rogers at the other end of the dock so he said sure, come on along.

  “I got in the middle seat and he was in the stern running the motor. He turned his back to me to fiddle with the throttle on the motor when we got out in the middle of the bay, so it was easy for me to pull an oar out of its lock and whack him across the back of the head. I just wanted to knock him out so I could take his lifejacket off to make it look like he hadn’t worn one before I dumped him in the drink and let him drown. But like I said, I hit him a little too hard and he was too far gone to inhale any water.

  “Anyhow, after I dumped Alex overboard, Sheila pulled alongside the boat with a boat she’d checked out here at Crabtree’s. I moved over to her boat, put the rudder to one side on the empty boat so it would go in circles, and we went around to the other side of the island and buried the lifejacket. Which reminds me, why the hell were you guys on the island when you found that lifejacket?”

  “Piss call for me,” Al said. “When you gotta go, you gotta go.”

  “You goddamn weenie, if you’d pissed over the side like a man the lifejacket wouldn’t ever have been found. All the sheriff would have had was the bump on the head and eventually the whole thing would have gone away for lack of evidence. It’s all your damn fault that everything went viral like a freak show on YouTube.”

  “Best laid schemes o’ mice and men, et cetera,” Al said.

  “Yeah, well, I got a scheme for you two that’s not going to go a-gley,” Ross said.

  “Hey, our killer is a Bobby Burns fan,” I said.

  Sheila was shifting her weight from side to side, looking like she wanted to move. “We can’t stand here bullshitting forever, Aaron honey,” she said. “They said the sheriff is coming.”

  “Okay, okay,” Ross said. “I’m just waiting for the sun to go all the way down so it’s good and dark. We don’t want anybody to see us dragging these weenies down to the boat.”

  Boat? That didn’t sound like a cruise I wanted to take. And I had more questions. “Okay, you’ve told us how you killed Alex. Now how about you tell us why?”

  “Politics and blackmail, Mitch old boy,” Ross said. “Politics and blackmail. Alex didn’t want me to run for governor and he knew I’d been having a little fun on the side with Sheila for quite a while. He’d had a photographer trailing us, like you guys, so he had pictures of us together. He told me if I entered the primary he would spill the beans to my wife and the press. I couldn’t let that happen.”

  “Why didn’t he want you to run?” I said. Then the light bulb came on in my brain. “Oh, I get it. Alex was planning to run.”

  “Wrong again, dummy,” Ross said. “Alex’s wife was going to run.”

  “His wife? Would she have had a chance to win the primary over you?”

  “She’d have had Governor Anderson’s endorsement.”

  “Why would she get his endorsement instead of you?”

  “Jeez, don’t you know anything about what’s going on in state politics? Mari Gordon is the governor’s niece.”

  The light bulb in my brain burned brighter. The whole screwy thing made sense in a perverse and evil way.

  “Okay, boys, it’s dark out. Time to go for a little one-way boat ride,” Ross said.

  “They’ll nail you for this,” I said. “The sheriff is coming to this cabin. You’ll be his prime suspect if we disappear.”

  “I’ll tell him I must have been out when you boys arrived. I don’t remember seeing you.”

  “How about their car?” Sheila said. “Where’s your car parked?”

  “Gee, I forgot,” I said.

  “Me, too,” Al said.

  “Get their keys and look for a car marked Daily Dispatch,” Ross said to Sheila. “I’ll get these boys ready for the ride.”

  “Okay, boys, which one’s got the keys?” Sheila asked. Neither of us answered.

  “You look like a driver,” she said to Al. She reached into his right front pants pocket and moved her hand around.

  “Hey!” Al said. “That isn’t keys you’re grabbing.”

  Sheila laughed. “Not a bad package for a weenie who can’t hang it over the side of a boat,” she said. She pulled her hand out of Al’s pocket with the key to the Ford dangling between her fingers. “See you later,” she said on her way out the door.

  “Park it way down by the main office so it looks like they were waiting for the sheriff there,” Ross said. “Then come back here and help me move these clowns.”

  “Now I’m going to give you boys a choice,” Ross said when Sheila was gone. “You can either cooperate and walk along with us or I can duct tape your ankles together and we can drag you by the feet down the hill to where the boat is tied up. Which will it be?”

  “Walk,” Al said without hesitation.

  “Being in drag sounds kind of kinky,” I said. “But I’ll walk.”

  “Always the comedian,” Ross said. “Well, this will keep that smart trap shut.” He picked up the roll of duct tape and tore off a strip.

  The drummer was still banging away inside my skull and I was looking for every possible way to stall. “Wait, I’ve got one more question.”

  “Make it a quick one.”

  “Your wife told me you’ve been sending her pictures from different campaign stops. How did you do that?”

  “You talked to my wife?”

  “I did. Don’t worry, she still doesn’t know what a cheating asshole you are.” She would, though, when the sheriff found the pictures in our car after . . . after what? Just how was this evil bastard planning to dispose of us?

  “You little shit, I wish Sheila had broken your skull in a hundred pieces.”

  Maybe I could keep him going. “She’s going to find out about Sheila, though. I’ve got a fail-safe plan.”

  “What you’ve got is a smart-ass mouth,” Ross said. He swung his hand way back, slapped me hard across that mouth and pressed the strip of duct tape across my lips with far more force than necessary to make it stick. Now I had the taste of blood to go along with the hammering in my
head.

  “Mmmm!” I said.

  “Anyhow, to answer your stupid question, I had the pictures still in my camera from the last four or five fishing openers. Bemidji, Alexandria, Waconia, like that.”

  “Waconia’s not up north,” Al said.

  “Franny’s from Maryland, she don’t know the difference,” Ross said. “Now we’ll take care of your big mouth, too.” He tore off a strip of tape and stuck it in place across Al’s mouth. That’s not fair, I thought. Al didn’t get slapped first.

  Thirty-Six

  Splashdown

  While we waited for Sheila, Aaron Ross took a sheet off the bed, cut through the binding in several places with a pair of scissors from the bathroom and tore the sheet into strips. He rolled the strips up into balls and stuffed them into his pants pockets.

  “Car’s down by the main office,” Sheila said when she returned. “I threw the key way back into the woods.”

  “You should have waited and dropped the key into the lake,” Ross said. “But there’s no way anybody will find it in the woods. We can get started now. The boys have elected to be cooperative and walk down instead of having us drag them.”

  “Too bad,” Sheila said. “I was looking forward to dragging the short one by the nuts.” She could have done it, too; she was three inches taller and probably fifteen pounds heavier than Al, with biceps that looked like her hobby was lifting weights. She looked so strong that I was thinking I was lucky she hadn’t killed me with that clout from the stepstool. Then again, maybe not so lucky. That might have been an easier death than what Aaron Ross was planning for me. Where the hell was the sheriff?

  “Okay, on your feet,” Ross said. He grabbed my shoulders and hoisted me out of the chair, sending a red-hot rocket through my throbbing head and a stab of pain through my tender ribs. Sheila grabbed Al by front of his shirt and hauled him up out of the chair with one hand. If I survived this night I promised myself that I would never challenge that woman to an arm wrestling contest.

  Gripping us tightly, with their right arms around our shoulders and their left hands clamped on our left arms, they guided us through the trees and down the steep hill to a small strip of sandy beach. The moon that had shone so brightly on Ann Rogers and Alex Gordon the previous Friday had been reduced to less than gibbous and provided minimal light, making each step on the uneven ground an adventure. Every jolt reverberated through my head and ripped through my rib cage. I nearly fell several times and Al did take a tumble despite Sheila’s grip on him. This earned him a kick in the belly before he was hauled back onto his feet.

  Bobbing in the water at the end of a line fastened to an anchor dug into the beach was a Crabtree’s boat. I wondered if it was the boat used in the Gordon murder, which could be traced back to Sheila.

  As if reading my mind, Ross said, “This ain’t the same boat we had last week. I bribed the marina guy to give us this without signing for it, just like I bribed the kitchen crew to make us meals and deliver them. You see, contrary to that old saying, money can buy happiness.”

  “Okay, now we do the feet,” Ross said, throwing me to the ground without warning. My poor throbbing head hit the sand hard enough to produce a shower of visible stars and my ribs felt like they’d been separated with knives. Ross immediately sat on my knees and wrapped my ankles with duct tape before I could gather my scattered wits and start kicking.

  He left me lying there and turned his attention to Al, who had tried to run and was in a no-arms wrestling match with Sheila. Sheila, who had arms, won the battle, using her weight to bear Al to the sand. She sat down hard on his chest, knocking the air out of his lungs and making it easy for Ross to grab Al’s feet and tape the ankles together.

  The demonic duo pulled the bow of the boat onto the sand and then came back to me. Ross grabbed my feet and Sheila picked up my shoulders. They carried me the boat and dumped me in, sending another volley of pain through my head and ribs. I almost blacked out again, and for a moment I wished I could black out. Next thing I knew, they dumped Al in on top of me and we lay like two immobile dummies in the bottom of the boat.

  “Be right back,” Ross said. I couldn’t see anything but a patch of sky peeking between Al’s shoulder and neck but I heard Ross trot away. When he came back he leaned over the boat, holding a cement block in each hand. “I spotted these yesterday in the construction site where they’re building a new cottage,” Ross said. “I thought they’d make cute necklaces for you two nosy little weenies.”

  Now I knew what the torn strips of sheet were for.

  Aaron Ross stepped on our feet as he clambered into the stern and Sheila put her wet feet on our shoulders after she plopped the anchor on Al’s right foot, pushed us off from the beach and jumped aboard with a splash that soaked us both. Ross got the motor going and backed us a little farther from the beach before spinning us around and heading off into the empty darkness of the lake. My range of vision was still limited to a patch of sky with a few stars beginning to shine and I began to wonder if the last thing I would see on this earth would be a black, star-studded sky.

  Another thought struck me as we roared across the slightly bumpy water. Would Ross pull the tape off our mouths before sending us to swim with the walleyes? If he did, should we try to stave off the final plunge by telling him that he would be convicted by evidence still in our car? This was risky. He would be sure to go after that evidence. Would he kill us first or would he stash us somewhere—somewhere where we would have a chance to escape—while he broke into the car?

  By the time the boat stopped and Sheila dropped anchor, I had decided not to mention the evidence. I was sure he would go through with this execution and then head straight for our car. My hope was that the sheriff would get here first and find the car where Sheila had left it. Where was that damn sheriff, anyway?

  The boat was rocking gently at anchor with the motor idling as Ross rose from his perch in the stern and stood over us. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “We’re out over a really deep hole, so deep that nobody fishes it. We’re going to make you boys very stylish necklaces out of sheets and cement blocks and assist you in diving over the side. Maybe you’ll see some walleyes on the way to the bottom, but it’s awful dark out so probably you won’t. When we’re done, I’m going to turn this boat in to the guy I paid off and give him another nice tip to encourage him to keep his mouth shut if anybody asks any questions. You two will have mysteriously disappeared, never to float up and be seen again, and there will be no trace of you having been in our cabin. Now, let’s get you ready for your swim.”

  They dragged us into a side-by-side sitting position in the middle of the boat, leaning against the center seat. Ross sat down on the bow seat facing us, pulled a strip of sheet through one of the holes in a cement block and tied the ends with a square knot. He did the same with a second sheet, telling us this was for extra strength. “Wouldn’t want a knot to slip and leave you floating way out here all by yourself.”

  He rigged a second block-and-sheet combination and hung it around Al’s neck. The block dropped onto Al’s lap and the weight pulled his head down until his chin rested on the block. Then Ross reached over Al’s bowed head, pulled both sheets tight and tied them together behind Al’s neck so that his chin was permanently wedged against the cement block.

  They were rigging me the same way when I thought I heard a noise in the distance. Couldn’t be, I thought. We’re way the hell out in the middle of Gull Lake in the dark of the night. There could be no passing boat traffic.

  When Ross was satisfied with his work, he ripped the duct tape and some more of our facial hair off and asked if we had any last words.

  “I hope you rot in hell when they catch you,” Al said. “And I hope that happens very, very soon so you have more of eternity to rot in.”

  “I hope lightning strikes the boat on your way to shore and burns the skin of
f you both,” I said. “Then may the walleyes pick the roasted meat off your bones at the bottom of the lake.”

  Aaron Ross clapped his hands. “Bravo! Very eloquent,” he said. “Spoken like a true writer. Just because of that, you can go first, Mr. Bigmouth.”

  Ross and Sheila stood up, rocking the boat, and picked me up—Ross at my feet and Sheila at my head. As they hoisted me, sending more knives ripping into my ribcage, I was sure I heard a boat motor. As they turned me face down with the cement block dangling a few inches below my chin, the sound of the motor grew louder. As they swung me to the side, I took a deep breath and then wondered why. Why was I was trying to preserve another thirty or forty seconds of life—and life underwater, at that? As I hung suspended with my lungs full, a bright light illuminated us and a voice shouted, “Hold it right there.”

  At long last, the sheriff had arrived.

  At the sound of Sheriff Val Holmgren’s voice, Ross and Sheila let go and dropped me. The cement block attached to my neck landed on the gunnel, which is what sailors call the top edge of the side of a boat. When the cement block hit the gunnel, it bounced up, rapping me in the chin. When the cement block went down for the second time, the chances were an even 50/50 that it would tilt toward the boat and fall inside or that it would tilt away from the boat and go into the water.

  The cement block tipped outward and splashed into the water. My head was inches behind it.

  It’s amazing how fast a cement block sinks. It goes down much faster than a human body, even an anti-buoyant body like mine. I felt like I was on an express train zooming downward headfirst through a bottomless tunnel of cold water. I was surprised to find that I was still holding my breath when the super carnival ride stopped and my chin again was jammed against the cement block. I knew I couldn’t hang on much longer without taking a breath. A few seconds later my lights went out for the second time that day.