Suddenly the engine starts to cough and sputter. Yes! Good work, Jeannie. Whatever you did.
“What’s going on?” says Chokehold. “Did you pull the choke out? Push it back in, lady.”
The engine dies. Chokehold whips out his phone and hits the flashlight app, illuminating Jeannie. One of her hands is holding the engine tiller, the other is holding a now-empty bottle of spring water. She grins. Bless her pirate soul. The cap of the gas tank is off and Danny’s emergency kit is open, revealing the source of the water bottle.
“Did you just dump water in the gas tank?” Choke asks Jeannie, aghast.
“Sure the fuck did, asshole,” replies Jeannie.
Chapter 44
“All right, everyone calm down!” shouts Miles, the least calm person on the high seas tonight. He has drawn the skiff up aside the crippled inflatable. “I need to think.”
“Yes, you really should do that,” I say, turning on my phone’s flashlight and shining it in his face. I need to engage his attention before he settles on a course of action that might be unstoppable. “Think about what you’re about to do, Miles. Do you really want to murder—murder—your best friend and the mother of your child?”
“I don’t want to do any of this! Things are out of control! Things have been set in motion. And now what needs to happen needs to happen.”
“You’re not thinking clearly, Miles. You’re in panic mode and your lizard brain has taken over. Step back and take a deep breath. You still have options.”
“Like what?”
“Speak the truth. Come clean. About everything. About the accident. About Fish Pier. About Bree. About this sleazy puppet show your father-in-law is trying to orchestrate. Hold your head up high, look people in the eye, take accountability for whatever you’ve done, and then push the restart button on a new life. A better life, a freer life.”
“Ha!”
“You haven’t done anything irredeemable yet. You won’t go to jail for those highway deaths. It was an accident. There’ll be consequences, but you can handle them.”
“That’s easy for you to say, Finn. You don’t know what it’s like to have as much to lose as I do.”
“Ah, there it is.”
“What? There what is?”
“The premise of our friendship, in black and white.” Part of me is trying to stall, buy some time, but part of me is also saying what needs to be said.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. You just said it yourself.”
Now he shines his phone-beam on me. “Enlighten me, Finn. What premise?”
“That Miles Sutcliffe, scion of the Old Greenwich, Connecticut Sutcliffes, carrier of destiny’s torch, has more to lose than crooked-toothed, working-class Finnian Carroll from Wentworth, Massachusetts.”
“That’s ridiculous. That’s your own low self-esteem talking, not me.”
“It’s been our story since day one, Miles. When you got pulled over for that DUI and begged me to slide behind the wheel of your van, why did we both agree to that? Because I could afford to have an arrest record, you couldn’t. Same with the cheating thing on our philosophy final and that bio paper I wrote for you. When you got caught with that high school girl in senior year, I said she was with me. Why? Because you were about to get married and couldn’t afford to fuck that up.” I’m surprised he’s letting me carry on like this; maybe he’s trying to stall the inevitable too. “We never talked about the underlying premise, but we both understood it.”
“Maybe you did; I sure the hell didn’t. I don’t even remember this stuff. None of it. It’s gone. It has no foothold in my mind.”
“What about Fish Pier? Does that have a foothold in your mind? I know what happened the night Fishermen’s Court paid you a visit. You threw me under the bus again.”
“You’re full of shit.”
“You told them I never gave you their letters!”
“I said no such thing!” he fumes with overblown indignation.
“You promised me you would pass those letters on to your partners. Those letters were important, Miles. They had people’s lives bound up in them. Their hopes, their pride, their stories.”
“Those letters were a joke. They weren’t going to do a damn bit of good. Simon Fischer had already made up his mind that the pier had to go. And Simon Fischer always gets his way. Our other partners were going to rubber-stamp it. Period.”
“That’s not the fucking point, Miles. Those letters mattered to the fishermen who wrote them. They mattered a lot. And you told those guys I sold them out!”
Miles’ eyeballs lose focus and start dancing from side to side. I know the look. “You had left the island and you weren’t coming back,” he says. “I still had a home here. I had to live with these people.”
“So that makes it okay? Expediency trumps truth? These people were my friends. And for the past four years they’ve hated me, all because of a lie you told them.”
“Those letters were a stupid idea. Your stupid idea. All they did was create false hope. You deserve to take the blame for that.”
Time has frozen by this point, and no one exists but the two of us. We’re going to finish this thing—despite the insane circumstances—and nothing is going to stop us now.
“Fuck you,” I say. “From the day I made the mistake of inviting you here, you have taken the one thing of value I ever built for myself—my life on this island—and shat all over it. In every conceivable way. And all because of that one lifelong belief.”
“Which is?”
“That Miles Sutcliffe’s life is more valuable than Finn Carroll’s. That you matter more than I do!”
“You’re wrong, Finn.” Miles laughs glumly and shines his light into my eyes. “That’s what you believe. That’s always been the real story of our friendship.”
His light feels painfully bright.
“From the first time you met me,” he says, “you thought I had a big life, and you wanted in. But you didn’t think you were enough. On your own merits. You thought you had to buy your way in. Serve me in some way, make yourself indispensable.”
Fuck this guy. Fuck Miles Sutcliffe.
“You held yourself lower than me,” he continues. “I never asked that of you.”
“Come on, Miles, you know you never saw me as equal to your preppy friends and your Sugar Loaf friends and your Greenwich friends.” Something raw and primitive is being exposed in me, and I hate it. I feel on the verge of tears, and now I want someone to interrupt us, but no one does. “I was a sociology experiment for you: can people from different social castes be friends? But when you were with your real peers, I embarrassed you.”
“You did embarrass me. Not because of your cheap shoes or your crooked teeth, but because you tried so fucking hard. You felt you didn’t belong, so you were always auditioning—with your humor, with your intellectual gymnastics, with your willingness to be the fall guy—trying to win a spot on the varsity squad.”
He shines his light up and down my body, as if taking stock of the totality of me for the first time.
“I’m going to let you in on a little secret, Finn. The reason the rich get richer and the poor get poorer isn’t because the privileged have the key to some special club. It’s because life gives all of us what we expect. Most of my family’s fortune ran out two generations ago, but the Sutcliffes still expect great things of ourselves. That’s why I have a house in The Meadows and another in Cape Elizabeth, and you’re living in your parents’ house in Wentworth. You expect shit and you get shit.”
“You have two homes on the
ocean because you married money. You were too scared to follow your dreams. Don’t give me that ‘great expectations’ bullshit.”
“You’ve always been cleverer than me, Finn, but you’ve always eaten my table scraps. Why? Because you don’t think you belong at the table. Every bad thing that happens to you, you see it as confirmation of your essential worthlessness, punishment for the sin of being you.”
“Go to hell, Miles.”
“Whereas I view setbacks as speed bumps, aberrations. That’s why I can’t even remember those stupid incidents you mentioned. I don’t cling to the negative stuff, I let it go.”
“That’s because you’re never the one who pays the price!”
“That’s because you pay the price for things that aren’t even yours to pay for! Look at that bottle business. You’ve been letting it eat at you for eighteen years, and you didn’t even throw the stupid thing. Me, I took one look at those news stories, saw there was nothing that could be done about the situation, and purged it from my mind.”
“Wait. What?” It takes me second or two to process what I’ve just heard. “Are you telling me you knew you caused that accident? That you’ve known all along?”
His eyeballs start the dance routine again.
“Those are two different questions,” he says. “With two different answers. But all right, yes, I’ll admit, the night of the accident, I heard everything. I didn’t know what to do, so I just... shut down. Pulled the plug, checked out. The next day, I turned on the news. I saw what had gone down. But I asked myself a simple question: will my taking the blame change anything for the victims? The answer was no. So I pushed ‘delete file.’”
“And what, just erased it from your memory? Click, gone?”
“Absolutely. I had a lot to think about—the wedding, law school, finding a new place to live. I literally never gave that night another thought, never fed it another watt of mental energy. Not one. For eighteen years. Even when you came back here and started rehashing the whole thing, I honestly didn’t remember throwing the bottle. I’d purged it that thoroughly.
“It was only today, when Beth said it was me, that the actual memory came bubbling up. And it threw me for a loop for a minute, I’ll admit. But let me ask you something, Finn—and this is the point I’m making: who’s been better off for the last eighteen years, you or me?”
At that, my rational brain shuts down. Animal rage takes over. I launch myself off the inflatable boat, across a couple of feet of black water, and onto Miles’ skiff.
I take him down like a linebacker courting a penalty flag.
The second he hits the deck, I am on top of him, hammering his face and torso with my fists. I punch him for my father, for my sister, for Beth. I punch him for Jeannie and Bree and for his betrayal of our friendship. I punch him for Edgar Goslin. Most of all, I punch him for the Abelsens, an innocent family whose lives he wiped out by a careless act he decided he was never going to own. I’ve never struck Miles in my life before, but it feels so fucking good.
Am I wrong or does Bodyguard take his sweet time before intervening? After fifteen or twenty blows, though, I feel a hollow cylinder press against my temple.
“Enough,” orders Bodyguard, with no particular emotion.
“Get him out of here!” Miles shrieks at Bodyguard in a shaky voice. “Get him back on the other boat!”
Bodyguard presses the gun barrel to my ribs, forcing me to maneuver back into the inflatable.
“What are you going to do now?” I ask Miles from Danny’s boat. “Murder Jeannie and me? Then what? Click—delete file? On with your blissfully ignorant life?”
“No, you’re going to do it, fuckin’ smartass.”
The hairs go up on my neck and arms.
“What do you mean?” I ask, shining my phone-light on him. His eyes are wild with the fury of a wounded child. His nose is oozing blood.
“The News at Nine team will call it a ‘tragic murder-suicide,’” he says. “You’ve explained it all in the note you wrote. The one we stuck in your pocket, in a waterproof bag. Leah outdid herself this time, I must say. The note says how you’ve been living a tortured life, wracked with depression, ever since you killed that family on route 495. But how things were looking up lately. You hooked up with your old flame again, and life was good. You trusted her so much, you even confessed to her what you’d done all those years ago, hoping it would make the two of you even closer. Whoops, major turn-off. She shut down the love train, and now she’s insisting you go to the police and admit what you did.
“She had to be dealt with, the meddlesome bitch,” he goes on. “So you lured her to your friend Danny’s boat, as your phone texts will show, and now it’s time to do the dark deed. Just like in that old folk song you used to sing...”
And then, most bizarrely, he begins to sing. “Polly, pretty Polly, come go along with me....” The look I see in his eyes tells me the Miles I’ve always known has left the building.
“Polly, pretty Polly, come go along with me.” He reaches under the seat of the skiff and drags out a heavy object. It’s an anchor, of navy design, with a curved bottom and two vertical up-posts, plastic-coated. A rope is attached to it. My God, he’s really thought this through.
“Before we get married, some pleasure to see...”
He lugs the anchor to the edge of the skiff, then heaves it across the gap onto the inflatable, where it lands with a dull thud. It must be a twenty-pounder.
“Tie the anchor rope around her ankles,” Miles orders me, no longer singing.
“No, I’m not going to do that, Miles,” I say, lighting his face with my beam.
“Tie. The rope. To. Her. FEET.”
“No.”
Miles, seething, shines his light on Choke and says, “You do it.” Choke grabs the anchor rope and, from a kneeling position, tries to tie it around Jeannie’s ankles.
“Don’t touch me!” Jeannie screams, kicking wildly at him with both feet. Choke reaches for the stun gun in his back pocket. I time my own kick perfectly. My shoe connects with the device and sends it flying out of his hand and into the coal-black water. He growls his rage at me, but what’s he going to do? It’s two against one, on a wobbly boat.
“Lie still, lady,” shouts a voice from the skiff—Bodyguard’s, “or I’m going to shoot your friend.” Bodyguard shines his light on me.
“Fuck you!” shouts Jeannie, still kicking frantically at Choke.
“I have a gun aimed at his head,” Bodyguard says, “and I will pull the trigger.”
I shine my light on Bodyguard. He is indeed aiming a pistol at me. As soon as Jeannie sees this, she goes perfectly still.
“Now, LET HIM TIE YOUR FEET,” shouts Miles at Jeannie. And then, as his next words—“YOU MISERABLE FUCKING BITCH”—come spewing out of his mouth, something astonishing and inexplicable happens.
His words boom out across the water at five or ten times their normal volume, crackly and distorted and with a slight, echoey time delay—they seem to be issuing from an electronic speaker of some kind.
“WHAT THE FUCK?” cries Miles. Again his voice is unexplainably amplified.
Suddenly we are all bathed in light, beaming from a dozen or more sources. From both sides of the channel. Searchlights, spotlights, heavy-duty flashlights.
“Put the gun down!” shouts a voice, issuing from the same loudspeaker as Miles’ voice did.
We hear the sound of multiple boat engines turning over in unison.
What the hell is happening?
Chapter 45
As my eyes try to adjust to the spotlight assault, I see boat headlights and red and green sidelights switching
on. Two rows of fishing boats begin closing in on us, one from the north, one from the south. They’ve been sitting there, lining the channel in the dark, their silhouettes subsumed by the larger silhouettes of Seal Point and George’s Knob.
As the two rows of boats churn closer to us, the searchlights and flashlights are lowered from our faces, with the exception of one that stays trained on Bodyguard and his gun. The whole area remains awash with light, though, from the headlights and crisscrossing beams. I see familiar faces at the wheels of most of the boats, other familiar faces manning the decks. Even Cliff Treadwell is here with his trawler. Some of the fishermen are holding rifles and harpoons. Some are holding phone cameras, recording everything that’s going down.
The two rows of boats stop, about twenty feet from us on either side, hemming us in.
My eyes are drawn to the Bourbons’ party fishing boat. It’s equipped with a loudspeaker the captain uses to talk to the passengers. I see Matt Bourbon standing at the helm on the upper deck and Enzo beside him, holding his cell phone up to the microphone. My phone call from the burner in my pocket must still be beaming live to his phone. That’s how Enzo has been blasting Miles’ voice across the water!
Standing on the lower deck of the Bourbons’ boat is Jim, the statie, now wearing his badge and holding his gun. This has become official police business.
“Drop your weapon and put your hands where I can see them,” Jim commands. “All of you. That’s a police order.”
Bodyguard drops his weapon.
“Miles, you’re under arrest,” Jim shouts, “and so are you two, whoever you are.” He points his gun at Bodyguard and Chokehold. Then he orders, “All of you, aboard this vessel.”
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