Still Heartless: The Thrilling Conclusion to Heartless (Derek Cole Suspense Thrillers Book 5)

by T Patrick Phelps

  Alexander gunned the engines and tore farther out on Lake Michigan. Though the crescent moon which had afforded me just enough light to navigate my way through the woods when I was making my approach to the cabin had slipped behind some stratus clouds, I could see Alexander was holding a six-inch knife in his left hand. I recognized the knife as a Gerber LF II. Though not standard military issue, it was the same knife I carried during my years as an MP. Sharp as a laser at the top three inches of the blade and ugly, gut-tearing serrations at the bottom three inches. With his strength driving that blade, I had no chance in any hand-to-hand combat situation.

  I had to come up with a Plan C and had to do it, quickly.

  ________________________

  After a solid ten minutes, Alexander throttled back the engine. He put the engine into neutral, then, holding the knife up to make sure I could see it, he walked up to the open bow. He stood over us, leaned forward, and said, “Your name was on my brother’s list. I would have been content in letting you slip away, or Ralph; but not both of you. Chief Fox is, I’m afraid, not available. Leaving you as his alternate.”

  I wasn’t trying to be a smart ass, but it was really difficult to hear what Alexander was saying. Though I was able to make out his words, I acted as if I heard nothing.

  “I’m really sorry, Alexander. But with the engine noise and the water lapping against the hull, I couldn’t hear what you said. Mind repeating it? A bit louder this time, if you can manage.”

  He leaned in closer and put the point of the knife against my Adam’s apple. “I am tired of you,” he said. “And tired of your games. You could have left me alone, but you chose to play Superman and fly off the dock. You are nothing but a stowaway on this cruise. Do you know what they used to do with stowaways?”

  “Give them a warm blanket, a shot of whiskey and something to eat?”

  I’ve been punched plenty of times. It’s not that I like getting punched nor enjoy getting into fights. It’s just in my line of work, fists seem to find my face more often than had I chosen any other occupation. I had already taken two shots across the chin from Thomas and a doozy of a blow to my forehead from Alexander, but the punch he landed directly on my nose as I was lying in the open bow of the twenty-foot Sea Ray was, by far, the worst of all.

  Again, I didn’t lose consciousness, but I did lose awareness for a bit. By the time I remembered my name, Alexander was back at the Captain’s chair and was again gunning the engines. I tried to sit up, but felt Michelle’s hand press me back. She looked at me, her eyes no longer damp with tears, and whispered, “Get him to come back up here.” She shot her eyes to her left, indicating my eyes should follow hers.

  I haven’t been on too many boats in my day. Not because I am afraid of water, but that I’m afraid of being under the water. But every boat I had been on had an anchor or two. This boat was no exception. Michelle’s left hand was gripping a rusty length of chain. I followed the chain’s winding stretch and saw what looked to be about a fifteen pound lead anchor. I nodded my understanding to Michelle. I wasn’t sure how she was going to pull off what I expected she was planning, but I decided I would be better off outsourcing my Plan C.

  Now, I just needed the get Alexander back in the front of the boat.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  I drew my legs up, placed my hands on the floor boards, and pushed myself up into a standing position. The lake was still, but standing up in a boat moving at twenty knots is never easy, especially after getting clocked in the head by a freaking monster a couple of times. I was able to steady myself. Alexander just glared at me. With my foot, I tapped Michelle on her leg. She took the hint and started moving herself into a more upright position. I heard the anchor’s chain dragging across the floor and prayed the engine’s noise and Alexander’s proximity to it, masked the chain’s noise.

  I held up both fists in a classic, “I’m gonna knock your block off” gesture. It was now or never.

  The problem with my plan, or more precisely, with my execution of Michelle’s plan, was that I was still a bit unsteady on my feet. And I was mistaken when I believed Alexander had pegged the throttle and was pushing the outboard motor to its limit. So when Alexander slammed the throttle all the way forward, lurching the boat faster much too quickly for my jeopardized balance to account for, I went tumbling forward. Right at Alexander.

  As I neared his position at the helm, he raised his left hand—the one holding the Gerber survival knife—grabbed hold of my shoulder and shoved me forward. I was already way off balance so all I could do is crash into the back of the boat; my head banging against the Mercury outboard’s hard plastic shell. Once again, I didn’t lose consciousness but I knew if I survived, I was going to have one bitch of a headache before long.

  I flipped over onto my back, just in time to see Alexander reaching for me. He picked me up like I was a fifty pound sack of potatoes, then stared into my eyes.

  That’s when it hit me: he was going to kill me and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to stop it.

  But Michelle could.

  ________________________

  I saw Michelle over Alexander’s shoulder. She was moving as fast as someone could with an injured shoulder and carrying a heavy chain with an anchor attached. She held the chain up to her side; the anchor dangling a foot or two beneath her grip. I smiled at Alexander, and said, “Did you ever learn how to swim?”

  He looked at me, his eyes drawing thin until they looked like slits cut into his pale gray face. Then, he must have heard the chain dragging behind him. He loosened his grip on me, turned and saw Michelle swinging the heavy anchor directly at his head.

  He had no time to duck, which was good for me. If he had, the anchor had a direct path to my face.

  Michelle swung the anchor as hard as she could, but her strength wasn’t enough to move the anchor fast enough to crack open Alexander’s skull. It bounced off his head in sickening thump, dropping him straight to the floor.

  “Quick,” I said, “wrap the chain around his body.”

  Michelle paused, her eyes wide with terror.

  “It’s the only way to stop him,” I said.

  But she was paralyzed with fear. I grabbed the chain from her hand and wrapped it around Alexanders’s neck. He was beginning to stir as I wrapped more of the chain around his legs, arms and torso. By the time his eyes snapped open, the chain was wrapped around his body at least seven times.

  ________________________

  I grabbed the Gerber knife that had fallen to the floor and held it as I gestured to Alexander to stand up. Never taking my eyes off him, I told Michelle to cut the engine. If Alexander was going to say anything to me, I wanted to be able to hear every last one of his twisted, sick words.

  The depth of the quietness was oppressive. The stillness of the lake’s surface couldn’t even muster a ripple to lap against the side of the boat. All I could hear was my own breathing and the breaths of Michelle.

  “It didn’t have to end this way, Alexander. I gave you the option.”

  “And yet, now it does have to end. But I fear the ending will not be as you believe it will be.”

  I took a small step away from him, raised the knife; its point aimed directly at his right eye.

  “Are you going to push me over the side of this boat or do you expect me to jump off? I will tell you, I will not comply if the latter is your expected outcome. If I am going to die in this water, it will be by the push of your hands.”

  “I can’t trust you, Alexander,” I said. “Turning you over to the authorities just won’t work. You’ll just play dead again and they’ll never believe the story I would tell them about you not having a heart.”

  “But I do have a heart,” he said. “Didn’t you read the folder my brother told me about? The one he conveniently left in the bottom drawer of Straus’s desk? I believe he wrote in the margin, ‘I am a heart.’”

  “I read it. Won’t make trying to explain your condition any easier.”r />
  “Then who shall it be?”

  Michelle was standing near the Captain’s chair, her eyes wide with terror. I risked a glance at her, smiled, then nodded my head. I couldn’t have sooner expected Michelle to push Alexander off into the lake as I could have asked my wife to have turned her face away from me a second before she was killed in that bank in Columbus. No. Killing Alexander Black was my role in this play. Though I had never killed anyone before in my life, even during my years in the Army, I knew what needed to be done and I knew I was the one who had to do it.

  Alexander must have sensed my resolve building. He knew from whom the attack would come. And he had his own Plan C.

  ________________________

  I turned my gaze away from Michelle just in time to see Alexander charging towards me. I thrust the knife forward and felt the blade burry itself into his face. But his momentum was still too great, despite the chains hindering the movement of his legs. He crashed into me, knocking me backwards. As my legs pressed against the gunwale, I felt Alexander’s arms wrapping themselves around me. In my haste, I neglected to make sure the anchor chain was wrapped tightly across his torso.

  Secured in his powerful arms, I fell backwards off the boat, into the water and felt the anchor’s weight dragging us both down.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  We were dropping fast. The weights of the anchor leading our decent. The added weight of the chain, ensuring our fall deeper, and deeper beneath the water’s surface. I remember being able to see Alexander’s face for the first few feet of our decent. The moon’s light was strong enough to penetrate the growing darkness of the water. Our faces were inches apart; our bodies held firmly together by his unbreakable grip.

  We were both going to die at the bottom of Lake Michigan and there was no Plan D, E, F or Z I had prepared which could prevent it from happening. I remember a flash of a thought about the only way my situation could have been worse is if I was stuck inside a bus with Alexander, plummeting to the bottom of Lake Michigan.

  But then our decent halted abruptly. At first, I thought the anchor had hit the bottom, but quickly realized if the anchor had hit bottom, Alexander and I would still plummet to the same depth as the anchor; the weights of the chain would see to that. There was only one possible reason we stopped: Michelle, still standing on the boat, had grabbed the chain and had stopped it from spilling out from the boat.

  The jolting stop did two things for me; it gave me a bit of an emotional burst, believing if I could shake free of Alexander’s grip, I could swim to the surface before my lungs exploded and I was forced to do something I don’t think any human had thus far done: Breathe underwater.

  The second thing the jolting stop did for my benefit was my body slipped several inches down Alexander’s body. Far enough to free my right arm.

  “What would Reacher do?” I heard myself asking. That question never really did anything for me besides getting me outside of my own thoughts for a second or two. But that time, Reacher answered.

  “The knife. It’s still stuck into his face.”

  I reached up my free hand and, had I not been underwater, I would have breathed a deep sigh of relief when my fingers grasped around the hard plastic handle. I felt Alexander’s body twisting as he certainly became aware of my hand’s intentions. But the chain wrapped around his body prevented his arms getting high enough to wrestle my hands off the butt of the knife.

  I increased my grip, then pushed the knife in deeper. When the bolster reached his face, I twisted the blade with all the strength I had left. I felt Alexander’s body began to vibrate, then his grip slightly released. I pulled the knife out a few inches then slammed it back into his face. Twisting and rocking the blade back and forth until his body grew still and his grip’s strength evaporated.

  I pushed away from Alexander and swam towards the surface. I didn’t know if he was, at last, dead or if he could somehow survive having a six-inch blade invading his brain. But I didn’t care. I was going to live. And at that moment, that’s all I cared about.

  ________________________

  I exploded to the surface, gasping for air and feeling my body scream its relief. I was dazed and more than a bit confused but when I felt Michelle’s hand grab my wrist, a wonderful calmness washed over me. She had jumped into the water when she saw me emerge from the depths and was then leading me back to the boat. When I reached the boat, I threw my hands over the gunwale and pulled my body up and over. I fell onto the boat’s floor in a heap of grateful exhaustion.

  “Is he gone?” Michelle asked after giving me some time to collect myself.

  “He’s gone,” I said. She was kneeling in front of me, her hands raised to both sides of her face. I pulled her down and hugged her like I hadn’t hugged another. We lay there, cold and wet on the floor of the boat, and just cried.

  ________________________

  We stayed floating on the still lake for a long time, both silently reliving the past few days in our thoughts. What Michelle had been through seemed to be as much of an injustice as what Alexander Black’s life had been. His life was stolen from terrified and amazed doctors who had chosen what they believed to be the easier path of lying to grieving parents and hiding the heartless baby away. His life was stolen again by another set of doctors, more interested in fame than in caring for their patient.

  As we sat in the boat, I wondered what might have become of Alexander Black if Doctor Rinaldo made a different decision the day Jan O’Connell delivered conjoined twins. What if, instead of recruiting the other doctors to lie to the O’Connell’s and then smuggling the child who had no right or reason to be alive off to Hilburn, he had instead walked up to Ken and Jan, and said, “Something I can’t explain has happened.”

  How would Alexander been different? How would the lives of all those involved be different, mine included? I couldn’t say with any certainty, but as I sat on the boat, glancing occasionally at Michelle as she sat in the open bow, I believed she wouldn’t have had to bury a second husband. Stanley might still be alive, never having to live with the intense guilt of being part of what Mark Rinaldo planned that day in Chicago. Then again, if not for Alexander arriving at Hilburn, she and Stanley would have never met. Perhaps, in some strange working of destiny, Alexander Black was destined to bring Michelle and Stanley together. And if that were the case, I guess I was destined to end his life.

  I was numb sitting in the back of the boat. No judge or jury in the world would convict me of murder, yet Alexander was dead because of me. A cross of nausea washed over me as I remembered the muffled crunch the knife made when I twisted it deeper into Alexander’s face. I guess everyone has a sound or vision they can easily recall all too easily which follows them through the lives. I have two: The look in my wife’s eyes the moment before Leonard McClusky shot her and the sound of a watery death.

  As the sun continued its ascent and the shadows were scattered, I stood and walked over to where the anchor chain descended into the water. I peered though the water’s surface, hoping the water was clear and sun bright enough to allow a glimpse of Alexander’s body. But he and I had fallen too far. All I could see is the chain slowly disappearing as it led directly down.

  “You saved my life, Michelle,” I said as we both began to see and hear other boats leaving docks and marinas and heading for deeper waters. “More than once, actually.”

  “And you saved mine,” she replied. “In more ways than one. What you did for Stanley and I last year is something I will never be able to repay.”

  “Want to call us even?”

  “Even.”

  I reached over to the cleat holding the anchor chain to the boat. I pulled up on the chain releasing the tension, then unwound the chain from the cleat. I could feel the weight of the anchor and chain in my grip and knew it more than just lead my hand was supporting. I looked at Michelle then released my hold of the chain. After a few seconds of terrible, disrupting noise as the chain rubbed hard against the side of
the boat, the deep silence returned. I found the silence of death amazing.

  Alexander was gone. Dead at the bottom of Lake Michigan.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  I let Ralph handle the conversations with the local Sheriff’s department. He had plenty of explaining to do. Thomas O’Connell was lying dead on the floor, his mother, Janet, was most likely buried somewhere on the grounds of the cabin and then there was the difficult to explain story of Alexander Black. I had no idea what Ralph was going to say about him, and, in truth, I no longer cared.I made a pot of coffee for Michelle and me and we sat in the front room of the cabin, wrapped in blankets, saying nothing to each other. I could hear Ralph in other room, answering a litany of questions and found myself smiling at how brilliantly he was answering them.

  The lead detective did ask Michelle and I a series of questions after they were finished with Ralph. As expected, their questions were regarding Alexander and what had happened out on the boat. Our stories were actually easy to tell as they required no imagination. There were no “trip points” in her or my story since, despite slight variances in our viewpoints, our stories were exactly the same. We both told exactly what happened. I’m not sure if they ever went searching for Alexander’s body since neither Michelle nor I could give them any idea where we to direct any potential search. I suppose they had a responsibility to conduct a search but since I never heard anything from the sheriff’s department after that day, any search failed to produce any results.

  Ralph walked into the room Michelle and I were sitting in, smiled at us, and asked, “Y’all ready to head for home?”