How It Happened

by Michael Koryta

  Barrett’s vision was clouded and he was choking on the fuel-tinged salt water and he couldn’t make sense of Johansson’s words.

  “George is watching?” he asked.

  “Oh, no. The real boss is watching. And we’re going to see him.” Johansson was using his gun hand to shield his mouth. His posture was aggressive, and if you were watching him from afar—or on a video stream—you’d certainly believe he was making threats, but his eyes were imploring Barrett for trust. For help.

  “Who’s the real boss?”

  “You’ve always known who. You just don’t understand how.”

  Barrett stared at him. Johansson gave a sickly smile.

  “Yeah. And if you help me, you might even live to talk about it.”

  Johansson shifted position and smacked Barrett hard with an open palm. A fresh cut opened up on his lip, and Barrett sucked in the blood and tried to tell himself that Johansson was playing a role. That was easier to accept when you weren’t handcuffed and taking blows to the face, though.

  “Anything you said to George on that deck, Mathias probably heard,” Johansson whispered. “Just remember that. You’re totally exposed to him. That’s how he works.”

  His eyes were nearly desperate now, begging for Barrett to understand.

  “It was George’s money,” Barrett whispered. “That’s who paid you.”

  “George rents. Mathias owns. And only one guy needs to spend any money to do it.”

  “You need to make a little more sense,” Barrett said, and when Don winced as if he’d shouted the words, he lowered his voice and asked, “When did Mathias come at you?”

  “After I took the money. That’s when I got my first video. He has a perfect recording of George making his pitch to me. He knew I was going to get paid, and once it happened, he was ready. Everything you learned about Florida, he’s known for months. That’s how I ended up working for the big boss.”

  He had the motors running hard and loud, and his voice was low, but even so he kept glancing around as if there were a listening ear nearby.

  “He understands how to own people,” Johansson said. “He finds their secrets and threatens to share them with the people they love the most.”

  He slapped Barrett once more, then whispered, “Can’t chat too much.”

  He wanted Barrett to put on a show of anger and hate, and that wasn’t hard to achieve when you kept getting hit in the face. Johansson leaned over him again, switched the gun from one hand to the other, and jammed it into Barrett’s ear this time.

  “You’ve got to stay in the bracelets, okay?” he whispered. “Whatever he’s seeing now, it has to look right. I’ll cut you loose when I can. I don’t know when that will be. But when it happens? You better be ready to move fast and shoot straight.”

  He shifted and said, “Take this,” and Barrett saw that he was pressing a hypodermic syringe into Barrett’s jacket pocket, blocking the gesture with his body. “Naloxone.”

  Naloxone was what police and paramedics carried to reverse opiate overdoses.

  “What am I going to need that for?”

  “Stay down,” Johansson shouted, his voice too loud, another performance for the camera, then he smacked Barrett twice more in the face with his free hand and returned to the wheel.

  He took the boat farther out, weaving around a few brightly colored buoys that marked the lobster traps down below. The high fog was descending and thickening, and the buoys were visible for only twenty or thirty feet before they vanished in the gray mist.

  Barrett fought into a sitting position in the bottom of the boat, recognition of all Johansson had said seeping slowly into reality. Move fast and shoot straight, he’d said.

  Shoot with what?

  If Johansson thought there were cameras and microphones on the boat, then Barrett needed to make it look right. That wasn’t hard—he was hurting, he was bleeding, and his hands were bound behind his back. He let his head sag and watched drops of blood fall from his lips and diffuse in the puddled seawater. He wanted to look beaten, defeated, but there was also a gain to keeping his head down—it helped his shoulders and neck stay as loose as possible, stretching the upper back so that when he did have his hands free, he’d be ready to use them. He was desperate to ask Johansson for more information, for some idea of where they were bound and what waited there, but he knew he couldn’t speak, so he continued to watch his blood fall in fat droplets that thinned around the edges first before losing their center and fanning out into the water, and he tried to reverse the visualization skill his father had taught him all those years earlier, the pages of the book of rage, reviewed and then closed. This time, he flipped back and forth through the pages—images of Mathias Burke smiling at him and saying, Don’t get your feet wet; images of the reward-for-information posters with photos of Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly that had plastered the Maine coast, images of Kimberly Crepeaux wading into the pond and Kimberly Crepeaux lying dead in a child’s bed, cell phone pressed to her ear, syringe at her side. Back further, then, back to the image of an eight-year-old boy opening the cellar door and finding his mother crumpled on the steps.

  He called them all up, the pages in the book of rage, and this time he did not close the book.

  His breathing steadied and his pulse slowed and he began to take pleasure from the pain and enjoy the sight of his blood in the water.

  Suddenly Johansson was back with the gun in Barrett’s face, whispering.

  “I thought we had it right,” he said. His eyes were fevered. “I thought we had it right, and so…so all the rest came from that. The things I shouldn’t have allowed to happen, I did because I believed it was Girard.”

  Barrett said, “I know.”

  Johansson stared at him for a few seconds as if assessing the truth of the statement, and then he gave a short nod and returned to the helm. He was blinking and muttering about the fog, and he kept staring at a GPS unit mounted near the wheel.

  “Rocks all around us, and I can’t see a damned thing.”

  They cruised past Little Spruce on the northern side of the island, the Pelletier cottage and Jackie’s dream studio obscured by mist. Johansson changed course once they were past the island, angling north by northeast, farther into the bay. The granite cliffs looked like broken bones, the reason that the Maine coast was lined with lighthouse after lighthouse, erected following shipwreck after shipwreck. A freighter was way out on the eastern horizon, headed north, probably toward Halifax, and a single, distant sailboat cut through the water off the stern, visible only briefly, then gone into the gray.

  They motored along for another twenty or thirty minutes in absolute silence and thickening fog, the world closing in on them like a tightening fist. Johansson changed course again, cutting the wheel hard to starboard, eyes on the GPS. Spray flew over the side and soaked Barrett, the salt stinging his bloodied lips. The morning sun now seemed like an impossibility; this was a land of gray, water and sky and fog all the color of gunmetal. He had no idea where they were, just that they were well out into the bay. Somewhere with deep water.

  When the rocks appeared off the starboard bow, he was surprised by how close they were. For a moment he thought he’d lost his bearings and that they were coming in to shore, but then he realized it was a barren island. There were more than a thousand islands in Penobscot Bay, but most were of this breed—a stretch of cruel, cold rock, uninhabitable and absent vegetation. They were islands only for navigation purposes, but not for sustaining life. Rather, they took lives, claiming ships and sending sailors spinning toward the depths.

  Johansson swore and slowed the boat, the rocks evidently coming up on him with as little warning as they had for Barrett.

  Johansson looked at the GPS, then cut the wheel again, and suddenly a narrow, V-shaped cove appeared in the rocks. At the far end of it, another boat rested at anchor.

  It was the Jackie II.

  Howard Pelletier’s boat waited for them, and Mathias Burke was standing
in the stern.

  53

  Johansson throttled down as they approached the Jackie II, letting the Whaler ride the waves.

  “Grab hold of her,” he called. Mathias didn’t move, but another man emerged from the fog. He was wearing a sweatshirt with the hood up, and it took Barrett a moment to place him—it was Ronnie Lord.

  The sterns thumped against each other, the fenders preventing damage, and then Ronnie looped a line over the cleat and drew it taut, binding the two boats together.

  Mathias was silent, his eyes locked on Barrett’s, a hint of a smile playing across his face. Behind him the fog crawled up from the water and moved over the rocks as if in search of something. The world beyond the immediate radius of the two boats and the rocks was lost to webs of white and gray. You could have pointed in any direction and promised a mountain or open sea, and Barrett would no longer have been able to dispute it. If he made it out of this place, he’d never be able to come back and identify it. The weather seemed to have come in at Mathias’s instruction.

  Johansson cut the engine on the Whaler and turned back to Barrett, gun in hand.

  “Get up, asshole.” There was such emptiness in his eyes now that the words he’d whispered to Barrett earlier were hard to keep faith in.

  Johansson pressed the gun against the side of Barrett’s head as he helped him to his feet. The swells were running higher and faster out here, and with his hands bound behind his back, Barrett struggled to keep his balance. Johansson shoved him forward.

  “Give me a hand,” he called, and Ronnie Lord helped drag Barrett out of the Whaler and into the lobster boat. When they had him inside, Ronnie picked up a twin of the shotgun Johansson had used and stepped toward the cockpit. Mathias was holding a revolver in one gloved hand. Barrett turned to him and was about to speak when his eyes caught motion in the bow.

  Howard Pelletier was bound at the wrists and ankles, his hands tied over his head to the anchor line. Each time the boat rocked, it pulled at his shoulders cruelly. Both of his eyes were swollen and blackened, and dried blood crusted over the duct tape that covered his lips.

  Barrett started for him instinctively, but both Ronnie Lord and Don Johansson grabbed him and held him back. Mathias watched with a languid grin.

  “The bruises are his own fault. For an old bastard, Howard can put up a tussle.”

  Howard’s eyes searched Barrett’s with no trace of hope.

  “You have a story ready for it,” Barrett said. “I’m sure of that. Am I supposed to be the one who did that to him? You really think you can sell that, Mathias?”

  “I think there will be competing theories. Maybe you killed him, sure. Maybe you both died when the boat ran aground, and it was nothing more than bad luck. It happens on days like this. But I think the more popular theory will be that he killed you. It’s no secret that Howard Pelletier hasn’t been a well man since his daughter died.”

  “You won’t be able to sell that one.”

  “No?” Mathias raised one eyebrow. “Time will tell, but I think once they search Howard’s garage and find tapes of the two of you plotting a murder, it might make him seem a little less stable.”

  He finds their secrets and threatens to share them with the people they love the most, Johansson had said.

  “The security business has been good to you.” Barrett was talking largely to buy Johansson time. Johansson was standing behind Barrett, but the promise that he’d cut him loose wasn’t so reassuring now—with the shotgun in Ronnie Lord’s hands, the revolver in Mathias’s, and his own hands still cuffed behind him, Barrett wasn’t loving the odds.

  “All business has been good to me,” Mathias said.

  “I wouldn’t have figured you for a Bitcoin guy,” Barrett said. “And, clearly, George Kelly hasn’t either.”

  For the first time, there was the flash of some anger in Mathias.

  “That’s why it works,” he said. “What you figured about me, what everyone like you did, that is why it works.” He dropped to one knee and withdrew a plastic case with a clear lid from beneath one of the stern cushions. The case had once held drill bits; now it held five hypodermic syringes.

  “Wouldn’t want any swimmers,” he said. “It’s a long way to shore, but you hear crazy stories sometimes. Some people just don’t know when to die. We’ll make it smooth and sweet, Barrett. Hell, you’ll enjoy it.”

  He removed one of the syringes and set his revolver down to take off the cap.

  Barrett was thinking, Now, Don, do it now, with such intensity that he almost didn’t realize that the pressure on his wrists had loosened.

  “Get up there,” Johansson said. He’d been standing close to Barrett, and now he shoved him forward, then made a show of stumbling, saying “Shit!” just as the Taurus fell to the deck, as if he’d dropped it.

  The gun clattered out into the bulkhead, into the middle of a triangle between Barrett, Ronnie, and Mathias. Absolutely perfect position—somebody was going to have to reach for it, and only two parties thought they were in the mix.

  Mathias started to rise, then seemed to think better of it on the rolling boat with the deadly syringe in his hand. He nodded at Ronnie instead.

  Ronnie had to break his shooter’s stance to move for it. When the shotgun muzzle swung toward the deck, Johansson gave Barrett a nudge and then stepped sideways.

  Johansson had cut the flex cuffs while he stood close to Barrett, and Barrett’s hands were finally free as he dove for the Taurus. He landed on the deck boards and used his left hand to knock the Taurus toward his right, all of his focus on coming up shooting. He was convinced that the pistol was their last hope, only hope, right up until he heard the staccato claps from above.

  He looked up in time to see twin roses bloom in the center of Ronnie Lord’s chest. Ronnie staggered backward and lifted the shotgun, and Barrett reached for it with a desperate, grasping hand, trying to keep the muzzle down as Ronnie’s finger landed on the trigger.

  He missed.

  The blast of the shotgun was cacophonous, a thunderclap inches from Barrett’s ear, and it felt as if the force of the sound itself drove him down.

  Ronnie Lord stood for a moment with odd rigidity, then looked down at his chest, wobbled like the last pin between a spare and a strike, and went over backward, the shotgun tumbling from his grasp.

  Barrett rose to his knees with his ears ringing and the nine-millimeter in his hands. He spun toward the stern, thinking that he was moving too slow—Move fast and shoot straight, Johansson had said—and by the time he turned, he saw Mathias closing on him with the revolver in his left hand, the muzzle rising.

  Barrett pulled the trigger on the nine.

  The gun fired with a sound that seemed soft after the shotgun blast, but Mathias Burke’s body kicked sideways as a wave hit the boat and knocked him down on top of Barrett. Barrett rolled onto his left shoulder and brought the muzzle of the Taurus to Ma-thias’s face, but he could already feel the warm rush of the other man’s blood against his own belly, and Mathias dropped his gun and rolled onto his back, both hands going to his belly, trying to compress the wound, to hold himself together.

  Barrett staggered up and kicked Mathias’s revolver away. He nearly fell from the motion; the deck was already slick with blood. He got his balance back and turned to help Johansson.

  Johansson was draped over the gunwale, nearly knocked off the boat by the shotgun blast. The shell’s scatter pattern had left his torso crisscrossed with bloody gashes, like the laces on a baseball. His pants were hiked up on his left calf, showing the empty ankle holster he’d drawn his backup gun from. The gun was nowhere to be seen—probably on the ocean floor by now.

  “Got ’em,” Johansson said softly.

  “Yeah.”

  “Thought Mathias had you. You shot fast, though.”

  He spat blood onto the deck and took a breath that made the chest wounds bubble. Barrett knew he should be trying to help, but he felt numb and unsteady, disembodied.
>
  “Real firefight that time,” Johansson murmured. “Right guys too.”

  “Yes,” Barrett said.

  Johansson nodded weakly and glanced down at his lacerated, bloody chest with near disinterest.

  “Cleaner now,” he said, and his words were slurred. “Clean as I can get.”

  When he heaved himself up, Barrett thought he was attempting to stand. “Stay there,” he said, but then he realized that Johansson was trying to fight over the gunwale, into the water. He was too weak to make it all the way, and for an instant he was half in the boat and half off, but then the next wave hit and gravity claimed him.

  He went over the side and into the sea, and the spray from the wave washed his blood down as if the ocean were determined to remove all traces of him as quickly as possible.

  Barrett moved after him, looking for a line or a life ring or a boat hook, but he couldn’t find anything. He was struggling to focus suddenly, and as he turned, the horizon rose and fell and took the vertical axis with it and then he was down on his knees without much idea how he’d gotten there.

  It wasn’t until he set the Taurus down and used his hands to help push strangely disobliging legs into action that he saw the hypodermic syringe buried just under his rib cage.

  54

  He pulled the syringe out with his right hand. The plunger was down, and the syringe was empty. The steel needle glinted and held his attention. He’d never seen a needle like this one before. It was captivating, gorgeous—

  Deadly.

  “Howard,” Barrett called weakly. “Howard, help.”

  But Howard Pelletier couldn’t answer, because there was duct tape over his mouth. Howard couldn’t help him unless Barrett freed him. Even then, what was Howard going to do? The old fisherman could not help him with this. If Johansson were alive, maybe. Maybe he would know…