How It Happened

by Michael Koryta

  32

  I hadn’t even thought of you guys yet, to be honest. Hadn’t thought about anything bigger than that little stretch of road. That was the whole world right then. The world was gone and it was just that road and the truck and Mathias. That’s all that was left.

  People won’t understand that.

  Kimberly Crepeaux was sitting in the backseat, the legs of her orange prison pants soaked. If the water bothered her, she didn’t show it. Barrett looked at her and tried to tell her that she was wrong, that he did understand. He couldn’t seem to find his voice, though, and then he remembered that was the point, that he was just supposed to listen. Don’t think, don’t speak, just listen. That was his job.

  All we would have had to do was drag them down to the tidal flats and let the current do what it does, she told him. Instead, we went back to that camp, and that pond. We waded out until it was up to my neck and then he swam a little farther, dragging her out toward the raft. Then he let her go. She sank pretty easily. I remember you could see some blood in the water, but it was gone fast.

  Barrett was trying to concentrate but her words were becoming hard to follow. She wasn’t making any sense. Even the way she was sitting didn’t make sense; the floor of the car was above her head, and that was confusing.

  He knew that she had to be cold, but she didn’t show it, didn’t react even as the water rose, covering the baggy orange prison pants and plastering them against her legs. The water was murky with silt and mud. A broken cattail floated right past her, an empty beer can behind it, but Kimberly didn’t so much as glance at them. Her eyes were locked on Barrett’s, even as the water rose and flattened the baggy prison orange against her, giving her body shape, like a slowly developing photograph.

  The rest of it, I don’t know about. What he did after, and what happened to the truck, I don’t know. I can’t even make guesses about that stuff, no matter how many ways you try to get me to.

  He didn’t know how she kept talking through the cold. There wasn’t so much as a tremble to her fine-boned jaw as she spoke. The water rose higher, and her breasts showed beneath the wet fabric, small and taut as closed fists, and then the water reached the base of her throat, and her thin red lips parted in a smile. Her lips were the only touch of color on her pale face other than the splash of freckles across her nose and high on her cheeks, like flecks of rust.

  Barrett didn’t like that smile.

  That is how it happened, Kimberly told him. Can we stop now?

  Barrett wanted to tell her to stop smiling. Why was she smiling?

  When she moved for him, it was without so much as a tensed muscle of warning. Just a flash of motion in the water and the silver glint of something in her hand as she lunged for his belly. He felt the sharp bite of pain when the knife found him. For an instant he was face-to-face with Kimberly, her smiling lips so close to his that he could feel her breath on his mouth. Then he looked down and saw the handle of the knife.

  She’d buried the long, glistening blade in the middle of his chest. He knew his life would end quickly, and he opened his mouth to scream, but cold, dank water filled it before he could make a sound.

  33

  He came to consciousness coughing and choking, his legs pinned in the backseat, his torso jammed over the center console in the front. The car was three-quarters submerged, water seeping in from all directions, and he’d woken only when it reached his lips. Kimberly was gone—of course she was gone—but there was still the eerie droning of her voice, and when Barrett lifted his head, the digital recorder slid away from him. He’d come to rest with his head against it, Kimberly whispering into his ear as the car filled with water.

  The recorder slid down his body and entered the water and then Kimberly’s voice vanished. Disoriented, he watched the recorder sink with fascination. It settled by his feet, which were braced against the headrests of the backseat. The world was pain and confusion, and he wanted to sink like that recorder, twirling gracefully into the peacefulness of the dark water.

  He was fading again when a piece of the roof gave way with a snap and a stream of cold water poured onto his neck. He blinked and coughed and clawed back against the pain and the fog.

  Have to get out. Have to get out fast.

  The problem was how to get out. He could see the sunroof below him, crushed against black mud and weeds, and the doors above the sunroof were buckled. Not options.

  Look above, then. Go higher.

  When he twisted his head, pain rose like a choir in full voice. Blood dripped off the dashboard and into the water around him, where it diffused and lost its color. He wondered what was bleeding and how badly.

  Doesn’t matter. Not yet. Won’t matter at all if you don’t get out.

  He twisted his head again, the pain overwhelming him temporarily, and when his vision cleared he realized that he could see the sky through the driver’s window. The glass was fractured and the metal frame was bent, but the sky was there.

  I can’t make it. Not all the way up there, and not alone. I need help from above. Need someone to…

  To what? Drop a net? Nobody was going to cast for him from above. He had to do some of the work, at least.

  He reached up and wrapped his hand around the steering wheel. His right arm worked. It hurt, but it worked. He gripped the wheel tightly and pulled himself forward, using the wheel like a chin-up bar to haul his legs out of the backseat and draw closer to that one window where the sky remained.

  When he flopped into the front seat, the car shifted, and for one terrible second he thought it would tip and then he would be underwater and out of time. The car didn’t overbalance, though. It just settled deeper into the mud at the bottom of the marsh, like an old man adjusting in a recliner, getting comfortable. The water rose but didn’t fill the car. Behind the front seats, there was no air, only water, but up here, balanced on the driver’s seat as if he were sitting on the top step of a ladder, he could breathe, and he would be able to unless the car tipped. The marsh was shallow, which was the only reason he was alive.

  He leaned over to try the door handle, and that brought his face closer to the driver’s window, and he saw the man in the black mask.

  The man was standing on the embankment below the road, almost at the water’s edge, and he held a shotgun at belt level, the muzzle pointed at Barrett. They were no more than ten feet apart. Point-blank range. The man in the black mask had his finger on the trigger, and if he pulled it, he would not miss. Not from there. Barrett thought vaguely of the handgun he’d been trying to draw before he’d gone into the water, but he knew there was no point in trying to find it now. He was trapped and he was helpless, so he just looked at the man and waited. There was a row of cattails between them, and they swayed left and right, like a crowd turning to watch the action.

  The man in the black mask glanced up at the road, then back at Barrett. He lifted the stock of the gun a little, bringing the muzzle down for a better firing angle.

  Then he slipped his gloved finger off the trigger.

  He lowered the shotgun, still looking at Barrett, who had to blink blood out of his eyes to see him, and then he shifted the shotgun to his left hand, turned, and scrambled up the embankment and out of sight.

  A few seconds later, an engine roared to life, then disappeared.

  It was very quiet then. Barrett lifted his right hand to his face to clear his eyes and when he lowered it, his palm was filled with blood. He tried the door handle. The door didn’t move.

  He pondered this as he looked at the bent metal and broken glass. It seemed unlikely to him that the door would ever move again. He thought about the window, and he knew that wasn’t going to open without a little help. His vision clouded with blood and he palmed it away again and thought about making a fist and punching that window. He needed to get something open somehow, and that was the best option he could come up with, but he would have to hit it very hard, and any violent motion might tip the car.

  If h
e could find his gun, he could shoot the window. Logic said that the gun was below him, claimed by gravity and drawn to the back of the car, which was filled with water. He could make it there, but he wasn’t sure he could make it back up here. Not quickly, at least, and not without tipping the car.

  When the voice said Don’t move, buddy, he thought it might be coming from inside his head. His grandfather, or his father, maybe. Then he heard it again and understood that someone was up on the road. He heard a series of splashes, and then a gray-haired man in jeans and a shirt with cutoff sleeves was up against the window, his face stricken with fear. He reached for the door handle tentatively, and Barrett whispered, “Careful.”

  It was the first word he’d spoken, and it brought blood onto his lips, but it also came out clearly, and the gray-haired man nodded and withdrew his hand.

  “I don’t want her to tip,” he said.

  “No,” Barrett agreed, licking the blood from his lips. “Do not want to tip.”

  The gray-haired man looked at him. “Can you hang on? Just for a minute, fella?”

  “I can wait,” Barrett said, though he wasn’t sure of this. His head was pounding and the blood kept clouding his vision.

  “I’m gonna get some help,” the gray-haired man said. “It’ll come fast, buddy, I promise. You just hang on. You stay as calm as you are right now, and you’ll be fine.”

  “Yes,” Barrett said, because it seemed like a good idea to keep agreeing with the gray-haired man. He was very nervous and Barrett didn’t think it was good to have anyone that nervous around the car.

  “I’ll be right back, and you’ll be fine,” the man said, and then he was gone, and this time when the blood got into Barrett’s eyes, he just closed them instead of wiping it away.

  With his eyes closed, all that was left was the smell of the water and the blood and the sounds beyond the darkness. He could hear a faint voice, and he thought there was a siren behind it, but he wasn’t sure. He could hear a cricket trilling. He tried to count the trills, thinking it would be a good idea to have a task, something to keep him awake and alert. His grandfather had told him that you could tell the temperature by counting the number of times a cricket trilled in a minute. Or was it thirty seconds? He couldn’t remember. But his grandfather had told him that the number of trills increased with the temperature. Barrett wasn’t sure if that was accurate.

  As the siren grew louder and he lost the sound of the cricket to it, he thought that he should try to find someone to ask about that old story about crickets. As the red tide carried him toward blackness again, he wanted very badly to know if the story was true.

  34

  When consciousness returned, it was driven by an urgency of memory, a sense that he had forgotten something critical and needed to remember it fast.

  The memory did not come, though, and awareness of his surroundings pushed it down the ladder of priorities. He saw the hospital room and felt how dry his mouth was and knew from the creaky, ponderous way his mind worked to put these things together that there must be a drug involved—and a damn fine one at that. He felt no pain, and he was pretty sure he should be feeling pain.

  He looked himself over as best he could, taking inventory, but he lost track of the inventory a few times and had to start over. Tubes in right arm, leading to intravenous fluids or medications. Legs bandaged, but functional. Toes wiggled, knees flexed. All good. There was something strange that he wasn’t catching, though. Some odd feeling along his skull that had nothing to do with whatever painkiller was dripping into his blood. When he touched his head gingerly with his right hand, he discovered nothing but stubble.

  He was pondering that when the doctor came in. He was a tall and thin man with very dark black skin, and he had a trace of British diction in his voice when he introduced himself as Dr. Abeo and asked how Barrett was feeling.

  “Bald,” Barrett said. “And thirsty.”

  Dr. Abeo smiled and brought him water and said he was sorry about the baldness.

  “We were in a bit of a hurry,” he said as Barrett sipped the water. “There are thirty-seven stitches and five staples and some glue in your scalp. It’s hard to do that and keep the hair.”

  Barrett acknowledged that was likely true and said he did not blame anyone for the bad haircut. The doctor was watching him with both compassion and curiosity, and Barrett had the sense that he was not expressing himself as articulately as he believed.

  “There are some drugs,” he said carefully. “Right?”

  “You are on medications, correct.”

  “Well. That’s the reason.”

  Dr. Abeo nodded patiently. “You will be good as new soon. No worries now. When you came in? The liver scared me.”

  Barrett thought that was harsh. Sure, he drank a little more than he should, but how bad could his liver have been? He tried to inquire, missed the proper phrasing a few times, and finally got the word whiskey out. The doctor laughed a beautiful, rich laugh that made Barrett smile. This was not so bad. With these drugs and that laugh, why would any man need hair?

  “You have a healthy liver,” Dr. Abeo told him. “I wouldn’t have guessed at the whiskey. I was afraid your liver was lacerated. Do you understand?”

  Barrett said that he knew lacerations, yes. Dr. Abeo told him all was well now. The liver was fine. There hadn’t been any surgery. He’d been given a few units of blood, and then they’d closed his scalp wound. Barrett was tired and he liked the sound of the man’s voice and particularly the sound of his laugh. Dr. Abeo talked some more and laughed some more and adjusted a dial on a monitor.

  Then the blackness returned.

  The next time he woke, he was more coherent, and this was viewed as fine news by the doctor because the police had been waiting to talk to him.

  “Rather impatiently,” Dr. Abeo said.

  “I’ve known that type.”

  The cop wasn’t anyone Barrett had worked with before. He was a short but muscular Hispanic man with a shaved head and penetrating, intelligent eyes. He introduced himself as Nick Vizquel but did not share his department or title.

  “State police?” Barrett asked him.

  “No. DEA.”

  “MDEA?” Maine had its own drug enforcement agency.

  “Federal.”

  “You mind telling me why my attack has attracted a DEA investigation?”

  “Let’s talk about that attack. It’s a little murky to me right now.”

  Vizquel pulled up a chair and explained that the story Barrett had offered in the ambulance, before blood loss and painkillers knocked him out, hadn’t given them much to work with; he’d spoken only of a masked man and a truck with teeth.

  “I thought you might want to try that one about the truck again,” he said with a faint smile.

  Barrett gave him what he could. It wasn’t much. He could clarify that the truck did not in fact have teeth but a ranch-style grille protector, and that it was black, and so was the mask, and so was the shotgun. His memory was scattershot, which was logical because of his concussion and blood loss.

  Vizquel said, “And you’re back in Maine because…”

  Barrett shrugged, and Vizquel nodded as if this was the response he’d expected.

  “Sure. Just passing through, getting body-shop quotes from Bobby Girard.”

  “Want to explain why you’re here?” Barrett said. “Or am I supposed to believe that the locals were overstretched and you volunteered?”

  “I’d like you to talk to Crepeaux for me.”

  “The DEA wants to talk to Kimberly? About what?”

  “About the death of Cass Odom,” Vizquel said, and now Barrett felt more confused than he had when he’d first woken up.

  “What’s interesting about Cass?”

  “Where she bought her drugs, maybe.” Vizquel leaned forward, studied Barrett, and said, “You’re really still looking at those murders? That’s honestly what brought you back? If it’s a lie, I’ll find out, and that will become
a very big problem for you.”

  “It’s not a lie, and I don’t like to be threatened while I’m in a hospital bed.”

  “Fair enough. Your interest in Port Hope is certainly not mine. I’m not worried about Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly or any stories about them.”

  “Compassionate.”

  “Call it what you want. You’re losing sleep over two dead. I’m losing sleep over two hundred and fifty-seven and counting.”

  Barrett stared at him. “Want to say that number again?”

  “You heard it.”

  “Explain it, please,” Barrett said.

  Vizquel obliged. He was out of Miami originally and had been in New Hampshire by way of Dayton when he heard about Rob Barrett’s return to Maine. He was in these disparate places because he was following the spread of a deadly strain of heroin that had taken, to the best of his knowledge, more than 250 lives already.

  “Fentanyl?” Barrett asked.

  “Carfentanil, actually. Heard of it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s an elephant tranquilizer. I kid you not. Now it’s coming out of labs in Mexico and China and into the U.S., mixed with heroin. It crosses the blood-brain barrier with ease and produces an incredible euphoria—right before it kills you. Fentanyl can be fatal at minuscule levels. Two milligrams. The size of a few grains of sand, literally. Consider that. Now consider the fact that carfentanil is approximately one hundred times more potent.”

  Barrett said, “Devil’s cut?”

  Vizquel arched an eyebrow. “Pardon?”

  “Is that what it’s called? Or devil’s calling? I’ve heard those names.”

  “New to me, but drug names change often, and regionally.” He took out his iPhone and made a quick note. “Who told you those?”

  Barrett didn’t answer, and Vizquel sighed. “Come on,” he said. “Cooperate with me, Agent Barrett.”

  “Happy to, if it’s a two-way street. What’s this have to do with Kimberly Crepeaux and Mathias Burke?”