Barely a Crime

by Robert Ovies

  Crawl looked at his hand. “He stuck me like a pig.”

  “No veins or arteries, though.” Brenna bit a long piece of surgical gauze and tore it from its roll. She wound it slowly over the bandage.

  “I’m going to go and get them,” Crawl said. His eyes looked dead.

  She struggled to think. “Why get them? It’s over, isn’t it?”

  “We have fingerprints all over the house.” His voice was mechanical and distant. “You stay and wipe them.”

  She stared at him. “Isn’t it over now? Why do you have to go and get them?”

  “Keep going,” he said, jiggling his hand slowly.

  “We can’t get the money now.”

  “Finish me.”

  She rubbed the loose end of tape against his palm and reached again for the roll of bandage. Tears slid down her cheeks. “But we can’t get any money now, can we?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “All this. And no money.” When he didn’t answer, she looked at him and said, “Then no more hurt, okay? Don’t hurt him, Crawl. And don’t hurt the girl.”

  “He turned on me, Bren.”

  “Please. Make it stop now.”

  “A traitor, after all our time together.”

  “But what good will it do?”

  “He’s a traitor to you too,” he said coldly.

  “You’re his only brother. And he’s your only brother now.” Her eyes filled with tears.

  “He’s not my brother. He never has been. And he’s a killer. You didn’t know that, did you?”

  “He was just afraid it might really be Jesus.”

  “He killed his sister. He killed Colleen, and he killed her baby too.”

  Brenna froze. “No,” she gasped. Her mouth fell open. She shook her head. “He couldn’t have done that.”

  “He killed them. He says he set Willy Doyle on fire for getting Colleen pregnant, but most of all, it was just trying to smash somebody because of what he did to her himself. I know that much.”

  Brenna stared and said, “Don’t, Crawl.”

  “Doyle was a motley faced hood. Hustled drugs. Sick all the time. Must’ve been fifteen years older than Colleen. Kieran goes nuts when he finds out Colleen’s pregnant by him. Temper takes over. Knocked the hell out of her. Then he goes over and sets Willy Doyle on fire. Next thing she knows, she’s lost the baby. It was Kieran that did it, so she runs off. Time they find her, four weeks later, she’s dying of pneumonia down in Banbridge, where she’s been trying to live in the streets. Middle of winter. Didn’t even get her home. She died on the way.”

  Brenna’s eyes were closed. She was shaking.

  “So cry for Michael,” Crawl said. “But he’s the only one.” Slowly, he moved to the table to kiss his brother again, this time on the forehead. “You’re the one to cry for,” he said to his brother quietly. Then he stood up again and pulled his lips tight.

  “But Kieran’s been like your own brother, even if he isn’t blood,” Brenna said, her lips quivering, her eyes filling with tears. “And I love him, Crawl.”

  “That’s two good reasons he shouldn’t have turned on us. That’s why he’s the last one should be a traitor to me and you, both. But he is.”

  She said, now in a soft whine, “He said you wanted to kill the girl. You don’t want to kill the girl, do you?” She backed away from him.

  Crawl turned. He looked at the doctor’s body, at the way his arms were spread out wide, and the legs, long, like a spider’s.

  “Crawl?”

  Turning again to Michael, very slowly, Crawl murmured, “I’m going now, Michael.”

  Brenna had backed into the corner of the room. She was pale and shaken and sobbing. “Please don’t kill him, Crawl. And don’t kill the girl, for God’s sake. She doesn’t deserve that.”

  Crawl looked at her with a quizzical expression. “It’s not the girl, Bren. It’s the baby.”

  Her lips twisted. She folded her hands over her heart.

  “It’s the baby I’ll be killing,” Crawl said. “The girl is just there.”

  Brenna slid slowly down the wall to a sitting position, her knees propped up in front of her. She moaned, “I don’t understand.”

  Crawl looked around as if he had forgotten something. Moving like a sleepwalker, he crossed the room and retrieved his automatic from the floor near the doctor’s right hand. “If he were to wake up, and you had to shoot him again, Bren,” he said, “you’d do it like this.”

  He leveled his gun at the doctor’s chest and fired twice.

  Brenna slapped her hands to her ears and buried her face on her knees with a muffled scream.

  He heard her wail softly from the corner.

  She raised her eyes. “Please don’t kill me,” she whined.

  He walked back to stand at her feet, looking down at her, the gun hanging at his side.

  Sobbing, she pressed her eyes shut and buried her face in her hands.

  “Oh, Christ, Brenna,” he said. “Why didn’t you stay home?”

  18

  It took Kieran and Marie another seven minutes to reach the house. Gasping for breath and soaked with rain they tried the door. It was locked.

  Kieran pulled a cushion from the swing on the porch, pressed it against the window in the door and hammered it with his fist, smashing the glass.

  Two more tiny explosions, badly muffled in the distance, sounded down the beach.

  Marie’s eyes widened with alarm. She put her hand on Kieran’s arm and drew closer.

  Kieran reached through the broken glass and unlocked the door. “Don’t turn on the light,” he said, still struggling to catch his breath. “Not if we don’t have to. It’ll just show Crawl for sure where we are.”

  Marie was already at the kitchen counter, trying to see the walls in the dark, feeling for wherever the phone might be. Her mind was still pounding with the last two shots they heard from back at her house. Was her uncle still alive? She doubted it. But maybe. She thought, whoever fired those last two shots was the one who was alive. Maybe it was her uncle, after all.

  Even if it wasn’t, Crawl couldn’t cover the ground nearly as fast as she and Kieran had, not with his limp, so they still had time.

  But her heart refused to slow down.

  “Where do they keep the bloody phones?” Kieran demanded, flashing anger. “You’ve been in here before, haven’t you?”

  “They use satellite,” she said. “They could be anywhere.” She felt a light switch, a framed picture. She knocked over a blender on the kitchen counter, near the sink. “Try the drawers. Anybody with a boat and an outside generator has to have flashlights around.”

  “I give this three minutes,” Kieran said. “Then we’re turning on the lights.”

  They groped the kitchen counter, but as they found the drawers to the right and left of the sink, Marie spun suddenly and rushed to the door. “The boat!” she exclaimed. “They had their boat put in the water. They’ll have flares on board.”

  Kieran said, “Good. But let’s be quick!” and he joined her at the door.

  Marie pressed her hand against his chest, holding him back. “I can get them,” she said. “You keep looking through the drawers just in case.” She ran outside. “I’ll be right back.”

  There were fifty yards of lawn between the house and the boat, all of it sloping toward the water. To her right, the grass and shallow beach ended, giving way to shelves of gray rock that rose sharply into a thickly wooded mountainside with jagged cliffs overlooking the southern end of the lake.

  The rain had nearly stopped. A thick slice of moon was emerging from behind its cover of clouds, making visibility easier. But the wind had not diminished. It drove off the lake hard, blowing straight into Marie’s face and swallowing the words she spoke loudly and in cadence as her legs pumped and her breath came in sharp bursts. “And maybe keys. Get the keys. Find the keys. Take the boat.”

  She raced onto the dock, her footsteps pounding.

  Reaching
the pontoon boat, she swung open the aluminum-tubing gate and rushed to feel for a key in the empty ignition. Nothing. She tried to think clearly. There may not be a key on board, but if there was, where would it be?

  She felt in the ashtray and over the awning by the wheel and in the beverage deck, then looked again, terrified, at the dark house, where nothing had changed. She tried around the base of the pilot’s console and under the cushion of the pilot’s chair, still talking out loud to herself, now saying breathlessly, “Where? Where? Find the keys. Did they hide the keys? Find the keys.”

  But she didn’t find them, and she realized she was out of time.

  Moving to the back of the boat, she flung open the panel doors under the rear seats and pulled out the emergency kit that was beside the spare five-gallon fuel drum. The kit held five flares. She grabbed two of them and rushed back onto the dock.

  Then she stopped.

  It took her just three seconds to think it through.

  Laying the flares on the dock, she jumped back into the boat and dragged the spare fuel tank out from under the rear seat. She lifted it onto the seat, took off the cap, and wrestled the tank upside down. As fuel poured over the seats and onto the deck, she took the fuel line from the five-gallon tank that was tucked beside the pilot’s console and tipped it over, making sure that it, too, settled on its top, not on its side.

  Fuel covered the soles of her shoes and filled the air with fumes.

  She climbed back onto the dock, tucked one of the flares into her belt like a knife and ripped the cap from the second one, striking the tip and the core together for ignition. It popped and spit a tongue of hissing orange into the air. She threw it onto the deck of the boat and turned in the same motion to pound back up the dock toward the grass.

  The air thumped behind her and the lawn pulsed with orange from the fire that suddenly filled the deck of the boat.

  She didn’t look back. She focused on the door to the house, and on pulling the second flare from her belt. She slowed only once, and then only barely, halfway between the boat and the house, as she tore the cap from the second flare and ignited it. It would be their flashlight. It would help them find the phone. If there was a phone.

  Kieran was already coming out the door as she leapt onto the porch.

  He shouted, “What happened?”

  “It’ll bring the state police, or rangers, or somebody,” she panted. “Everyone can see it from any of these mountains. The lake pinpoints it. They’ll call for help. They’re panicked about fire up here. Did you find the phone?”

  “No,” Kieran said, stepping aside to avoid her flare as she rushed past him, back into the house. “But we might as well turn on the lights now. We can’t tell Crawl where we are any clearer than we’ve just done.”

  Crawl drove the truck slowly, staying at the water’s edge, showing no lights. He was steering with his left hand. His bandaged right hand lay limply in his lap. His eyes were half-closed but his mind was fiercely focused.

  When he saw the boat ignite, he slowed instinctively, easing down to twenty miles an hour, wondering if Kieran and the girl had been caught in the explosion. He thought of one of the Bible stories he had heard as a child, the one about Moses seeing a pillar of fire in the desert and knowing from the fire which way he should go, and he smirked.

  Then he saw the second flare pop to life in Marie’s hand in the middle of the lawn and let out a low chuckle. He could see her plainly as she ran with it. She was glowing at the edges, even from three hundred yards away.

  He brought the pickup back up to thirty miles an hour, then began to sing the same words over and over again, very slowly and methodically, in a deep, rolling cadence: “Run, Mary, run, Mary, run, Mary, run. Herod’s gonna kill your baaaaby.”

  The house lights went on.

  “Run, Mary, run, Mary, run, Mary, run. Herod’s gonna kill your baaaaby.”

  Even with the lights, they couldn’t find a phone.

  They raced through the lower rooms and then the second story while Kieran said over and over again, “They took ‘em. They took ‘em.” And finally, “We’re out of here. No more time.”

  “We should head for the road, out the front door,” Marie said. She was out of breath from racing through the rooms. The flare was still blazing in her hand.

  “Get rid of that out back, then,” Kieran said. “He’ll see us a mile away if we take it with us.”

  Marie ran for the back door.

  “Just toss it!” Kieran shouted. “Quick!”

  And she did. She took three long strides onto the porch and threw the flame onto the grass.

  Then her breath froze in her throat.

  Crawl’s truck was parked right next to the porch, twenty feet to her left.

  It had been pulled up and parked, and the engine was already off, and the door was hanging open. The truck was empty.

  She inhaled a sudden burst of air. For three excruciating seconds she stood too frightened to move. Then she wheeled suddenly to look behind her, and the air she had inhaled exploded in a sharp, high cry.

  Crawl’s right hand was wrapped in bandages and blotched with red. His gun was in his left hand, already raised and pointing at her waist from less than four feet away.

  “That’s a good scream,” he said with a grim whisper. “That’ll bring him.”

  Taking a step backward, she shouted out the beginning of a warning, but she got no farther than, “Look out—” before Kieran charged through the door, drawn by her cry.

  He saw Crawl and stopped, his hands in midair in front of his chest.

  He and Crawl stared at each other for several seconds in dead silence. Then Crawl said, “I came to tell you the bad news. Our big brother is dead.”

  Kieran said softly, “We heard a shot.”

  “You didn’t know that, did you?” Crawl said, speaking very slowly. “About Michael being dead? So I came to tell you. What’s a brother for?”

  “Is the doctor dead, too?”

  Marie held her breath.

  Crawl darted a glance at the fire in the boat, and at the flare burning in the grass ten yards away. “I was thinking of something important on the way here. I was thinking. . .” He stopped. “We should get that flare off the grass, don’t you think?” He eyed them both, giving time for an answer but not expecting one. Then he said with a slight wave of his automatic, “Let’s all three of us step out there on the lawn so I can pick it up. Burn a hole in the folk’s grass this way.”

  He jiggled his gun again and moved them onto the lawn, near the flare.

  “Just step back,” he said. “I’ll get this little beauty.” He picked up the flare and faced them; fire in one hand, gun in the other, all of them glowing orange. “My hand got hurt,” he said. “Did you notice that? But I can handle it.”

  “Where’s Brenna?” Kieran asked.

  “Brenna’s watching the doctor, as far as I know.”

  “Are they both all right?”

  The flare hissed in the wind.

  “You know what we forgot to do in all the fuss, little brother?” Crawl asked. “This is what I was thinking about on the way here. We forgot to have the mother of the Jesus baby, here, give her powers a try on Michael.”

  Marie took Kieran’s arm and held on tight. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you didn’t pray for him, darlin’, that God would come down and heal him.”

  She stared, waiting.

  “It was your hero’s idea,” Crawl said. “We were going to try it, but we didn’t, did we? It got lost in all the commotion. He decided he wouldn’t try it, after all.”

  Marie looked at Kieran.

  Kieran kept his eyes on Crawl.

  “Let’s have her say the holy prayer,” Crawl said. “Let’s have her kiss Michael on the eyes and tell him she’s sorry she killed him.”

  Kieran said, “Crawl.”

  “Let’s have her tell that little bit of God in her belly to bring him back, right, Kieran?”
>
  “I said make him better. I never said bring back the dead.”

  Crawl waved the flare from side to side. “But I’ve got a little problem if I want to test it now, don’t I? Because here we are, all the way down the beach. Your choice, not mine. But I wouldn’t want to have to drag her all the way back to the house just to find out what kind of power she has, would I? You see what I mean? We make that long trip back, and me with my hand hurting and all, and then we find out it doesn’t work anyway, what good is that?”

  Kieran said it again, this time with a growing edge of urgency, “Crawl.”

  “So I asked myself on the way over, how do I find out way down here by a burning boat on somebody else’s yard if she’s got that kind of power? Without going all the way back to the house, I mean.”

  Kieran felt Marie squeeze his arm tighter. He said in a loud whisper, “This gets you nothing, Crawl.” Fresh raindrops hit his cheek and forehead and hair. He didn’t feel them.

  “So then I thought, hey. I’ve got an idea. And you can help, Kieran.”

  “It gets you nothing, Crawl.”

  Crawl squinted at Marie, then shifted his gaze back to Kieran. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you, little brother? What’s done is done. How the hell can you be Irish and not know a thing like that? It’s the biggest hurt of all, Kieran: we can never go back.”

  And he fired.

  Kieran’s legs jerked as he stumbled backward, then locked like a mannequin’s.

  Marie jumped to the side instinctively, screaming, “Oh, God!”

  Crawl fired again. And then a third time.

  Kieran fell to the lawn in a sitting position, his hands resting limply in his lap.

  Marie rushed to his side and dropped to her knees. She tried to hold him up, putting one hand behind his head, grabbing his sleeve near his shoulder with the other.

  Kieran looked at the sixteen-year-old who was scared and not wanting to be pregnant. He saw her matted black hair and round dark eyes, and he saw she was crying.

  He whispered, “I’m so sorry.”