“I thought you’d been poisoned,” I said from the living room, next to the dining table. Mac pulled the barrel of the gun to the ceiling, then pointed it back down aiming at my chest.
“I’m not an idiot, my dear enterprising Indian girl,” he said. “I figured out some antidotes of my own in case you or Randy or Madonna or Laura, or one of you little sneaks was trying to poison me.”
“You goddamn son of a bitch,” I said.
“Now, don’t be cursing like that in front of the children, LaRue,” he said. “You don’t want to be waking them up right now. They’ll find your bodies eventually, lying in the bottom on that boat out there, which happened because of a big argument between star-crossed lovers. Now get moving,” he said. “To the sliding glass door.”
“Did you try to kill Mary?” I said. I didn’t move my legs. “She knew, didn’t she? She knew Fletch killed her baby, the one with the birth defect, and that you disposed of the body. You knew she was pregnant again, and again and again, and this time, she might spill the beans on you two. And whoever might get sick and die from your projects, from the poison that spills into the water. You know damn well nitrates in the water can cause spontaneous abortions, cancers, respiratory and skin problems, all out there in the swamps and the rivers. You knew Mary and Trina had talked just before you killed Trina.” I stood still so he wouldn’t shoot immediately, bringing the kids out of the room.
Mac stood with a thin smile, unfazed. I should have shut up, but I didn’t. “Mary threatened you, didn’t she? She knew there was hard evidence of the burials. She was going to try to put a stop to ECOL, she was going to try to frame you and Fletch for the murders.” I hoped my questions would deflect him from concentrating next on my children.
“Curiosity, curiosity,” he said, wagging the gun. Then he pointed it at the glass doors.
I kept talking to stall him, hoping Randy would think of some way to distract him so I could reach down into my boot. He’d be as dead as I was, I decided. “We found the knife you or someone used to kill Trina,” I said. “On your boat. It’s been turned in as evidence.” He smirked. I ignored him and went on. “Fletch has had Preston Edwards terrified since he was a boy. You’re a terrorist. An environmental terrorist.”
He gave me a faux surprised look. “Why LaRue, after all the business I’ve given you over the years. What kind of thanks is that?”
“Okay, Mac,” Randy said. “You can have all these letters. It’s too late. You don’t need to kill us. Enough have died already.”
“My dear boy, after all the business I’ve given you. That day in my office, when you showed up to remind me of the ways you hysterical environmentalists think everything is killing you all,” he mocked. “Weeping over your wife dying of cancer in the hospital.” He laughed.
Why hadn’t I noticed this about Mac before? I imagined him in a straight jacket, pacing padded walls saying, you hysterical environmentalists.
“Mac, what are you going to do? You’re wearing a silver Neptune outfit,” Randy reasoned. “You’ll be easy to spot. They’ll be able to pick you out, of course, anywhere.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “It’s all worked out. I have connections in Veracruz, and from there I have a little retirement gig worked out in Mexico. Right on the ocean. A surfer’s haven. Low maintenance, affordable for someone from the States.” He laughed again and pointed us towards the sliding glass door.
“What about Mary?” I said, as we opened the door to a strong wind. “The law found hairs in the trailer that they can identify. They’ve done an analysis and they’ll figure out you OD’d her.” We were walking across the deck now, Randy frowning and staring down as he stepped beside me in front of Mac.
“They won’t figure out anything but that your hair was also there, LaRue,” Mac said. “And I’m tired of listening to you ramble. Now walk. To the boat.” I glanced back towards the house for a split second. I said the most earnest prayer of my life.
Outside, the wind moaned, cutting cold around us. The Gulf waves were crashing onshore, like muffled explosions. Mac gave commands. “First go around the front of the house and stand by my car. Not behind it, beside it where I can see you. If you two are going to shoot each other, we need two guns.” He laughed that deep heh heh heh that slowed my blood.
He fished around in the trunk with one hand, the gun in the other. The moon illuminated the front yard for a second out of the cloud cover, then disappeared again. I realized I would really miss everything. The beach, the lantana, the monarch butterflies in the fall winging all the way across the Gulf in pairs to Mexico. Wild irises in late spring. How the fish gather at the surface when the mosquitoes hover there in summer.
I thought I detected movement in the second bedroom where the kids were sleeping. Mac was muttering and chuckling to himself.
Randy moved slowly towards me, eyeing Mac, then whispered in my ear. “I’ll try to hit him when we get to the boat. Or push him in. You run. Get the kids, and take off—the keys are on the dining room table.”
“But what about—” I said.
“What are you two lovers quarreling about now?” Mac said. He pulled up out of the trunk with a gun in each hand like some kind of gun-slinging cowboy he’d seen on a scratched-up Western. “Now move! Down to the boat!”
I walked without feeling my feet, one step at a time across the sandy lot, trying to think of how to reach for the gun in my shoe. The sand squeaked under our feet, muffled by ocean.
Suddenly I saw movement by the water on the other side of the house, ghostly walking towards the Gulf. Two figures, one tall and slim as a young pine, the other two-thirds that size looking like a T-shirt with small legs. Good god. They both carried something. The box of letters? What? I could not accept what I saw.
CHAPTER 32
AS WE APPROACHED THE DOCK, Mac told us to climb down into the boat one at a time, Randy first. Mac had the gun pointed at my skull. The boat rocked like a washing machine sloshing. Slowly Randy stepped down into the tottering boat, the wind and waves high. The moon appeared from behind clouds, and I saw the box of medications in the boat just next to the throttle on the deck.
“Why’s that there?” I asked Randy softly as I stepped down into the boat. I squinted to scan the stacks and saw a big bottle of Percodan. I was going to die, sure, but the betrayal hit me like falling face first in the water. Why hadn’t I noticed this earlier? It was Randy who’d tried to poison Mac.
“Stop talking now, you two!” Mac said as he stepped in, aiming both guns again at me, steadying himself and walking backwards towards the motor. The metal tip of the barrel was six feet away. I stood at the throttle starboard side. Even though I was already dead, I was pissed off at Randy, the poisoner. Across from me and closer to Mac stood Randy. “LaRue, you move over to the middle farther from the wheel. Randy, you stand—”
Suddenly a loud clap like thunder exploded on the port side of the boat five feet from where Randy and Mac stood. The two of them fell to the deck of the boat, and a giant cloud of smoke pushed right into us. The wind was blowing just that direction. We coughed, the smoke completely fogging the boat. I could barely see, and my eyes stung shut. Then the black smoke began to lift.
“Hey!” Mac said, scrambling for the guns that had slid starboard side and back towards the motor. I barely made out his silver Neptune arms waving smoke away from his eyes. Then he was rubbing his eyes, coughing. Randy swooped towards me in one motion, grabbed me around the waist and heaved me up onto the dock where I fell. “Run!” he said, jumping nearly on top of me. Mac was still struggling to see and to grab the gun. I scrambled to my feet on the dock, tearing towards the house. I stopped only for a second to grab the gun from my shoe, and I screamed, “Daisy! Taylor!” Then I was running headlong, the house in front of me. Randy had veered towards the car. I slid the glass door open and snatched the keys. The kids were outside, but I checked the bedroom anyway. Rumpled sleeping bags and no kids. The gun shook in my hands. I ran outside to hea
r an explosion from the boat.
Its force was so strong, a reverberating kaboom, that I fell down on Randy’s driveway not far from the docked boat. “Daisy! Taylor!” I screamed, scrambling up, looking around. A bloodcurdling scream went up, a deep horrible animal sound. I ran for Randy’s car, calling the kids, kneeling behind it.
Randy ran over beside me, breathing hard. “Tay bombed the gas tank open. Mac’s burning.” Then we heard a splash. He must have thrown himself into the water.
“Daisy! Taylor!” I screamed again. Randy and I both stood up. The fire blew up into the fast-moving fierce air, taking on a life of its own in the strong wind. I could hear myself sobbing, unharmed, but where the hell were my kids? The air around us suddenly felt desert hot. I heard a whoosh as the pine branch hanging above the boat caught fire.
“Mom!” Daisy yelled. She peered out from behind Mac’s truck in the road.
“Over here,” Taylor followed up, his voice coming from the same place. “Behind Mr. Mac’s truck!” I put the safety back on. I’ve never run so fast. They stood together panting behind the truck, both with eyes wide. I grabbed them both by the shoulders and held them hard to my chest. Taylor had gotten rid of his mask.
“Oh, my god,” I said, my whole body shaking.
“It’s okay, Mom,” Tay said. Then his eyes grew round, soft. “Where’d you get that gun?” He was looking over his shoulder at the .38 shaking in my hand, the safety still on. I shoved the gun back into my boot.
Then I heard the whining of a fire truck. “Oh, my god,” I said.
“Mom, is Mr. Mac going to live?” Tay asked. Daisy started to cry quietly.
“I don’t know. But sounds like help is coming.” We stood huddled, panting, trembling, watching the fire truck’s lights flying towards us from town. Several volunteers jumped off, talking, and then shouting, headed down to the boat with large hoses. Randy ran out and said to them, “There’s a burning man in the water!”
“What were you doing?” I said to the kids as I turned, leaned back on the car and slid down to sit on the ground, still gasping. “You two. At the water.”
“I was just trying to scare Mr. Mac,” Tay said, standing and shrugging. “He had gotten really scary, like a bipolar or something. I didn’t mean to set anybody on fire. Mom, do you think he’s crazy?”
I nodded and tried a frozen smile. “You could say that.” I wrapped my arms around Daisy, who had crawled into my lap.
“Is he dying?” Tay said, trying to look at the scene. “Am I a murderer?”
“Don’t move,” I said, grabbing his arm and pulling him down. “Sit. He’s a murderer. He killed Trina, and he tried to kill Mary. No telling who else. Stay here. The firemen can handle this. They’re used to saving people who are burned.”
We all three sat, our breath coming slower, listening to the roar and the shouts of firemen, something plunging into the water.
“Taylor is so smart!” Daisy finally said. “He gave me the smoke bomb that Grandma taught him how to make.”
I turned to Taylor. “Grandma was teaching you this when you were out at the pit?” I said.
“Yeah,” said Daisy, “and he taught me how to use it, too!”
“Daisy, you’re smart, too,” I said. “Brave. But damn it, this is too dangerous.”
“See, it was a decoy,” Tay said excitedly, standing up again. “Mac looked the wrong way while you guys got off the boat, and then I threw the flammable bomb—just to scare him—to keep him from following you. I didn’t mean to hit the gas tank.” He sounded regretful.
I shook my head, breathing a little hard still. I pulled him back down and put my arms around them both.
“It’s okay, Mom,” Daisy said in a most grownup voice, like the voice that had said, “Actually, it’s a very dark night” just hours ago.
“So you called the cops?” I said to Tay.
“Of course. Your cell phone was sitting on the desk in the bedroom. Jackson’s number was on your speed dial, so I called him. He must have called the fire department, ’cause he knows Cooter’s not worth a damn.”
“Daisy,” Tay said. “Good job with the decoy.”
“Thanks, kids. I’m sure you know you saved my life. And Mr. Randy’s.” They said nothing, just looked at each other. Then a high five. The fire truck took off again to get Mac to town, I expected. The helicopter would take him to Tallahassee Memorial’s burn unit. “But you know, I’ve been so worried about you, Tay. Your alarm systems, your knife at school, your skull shirts.” I pointed at his shirt. “Revenge is not a good thing. People just keep trying to get revenge. It causes—”
“Mom!” Daisy suddenly said. “Chill out, will ya?” I sat back, leaning my head on Mac’s car tire. We all three sat for another minute shivering, the wind roaring, the hoses hissing.
When we walked back to the house, there was Jackson. He stood in the kitchen and relief washed over his face as the three of us piled in, scraggly, through the sliding glass doors. An ambulance whined in the distance. Another cop with Jackson held his ear to a phone, calling to make sure the emergency Memorial Hospital helicopter had been launched from Tallahassee to pick Mac up.
Jackson’s face was serious. “Good work, Tay,” he said, meeting us in the living room, slapping Tay on the back. “You all okay?” He glanced from smudged face to smudged face. Nobody said anything. “Everybody okay?” We all mumbled yes. “Let’s all sit down, shall we?” he said, inviting us to the floor. We stood numb.
“Mac’s got burns all over his body,” he said. “But he’ll survive. He jumped into the Gulf quickly enough. And he’ll have a long prison sentence waiting on him when he gets out of the hospital. I’ve got the knife with his fingerprints, and, as it turns out, his hair in the trailer. Fletch’s fingerprints were on the glass and the narcotic bottle. He’d started Mary drinking early and put the drugs in her first drink that morning.” He paused to see if I was watching. “And Mary. Mary is doing a Lazarus, rising from near death. She’s been talking from the ICU bed. To Laura. Seems she’s suspicious of Fletch’s having killed a couple of kids along the way, too.”
“So where’s Fletch?” I said.
“In St. Annes County lock-up,” he said. “Along with Tiffany, who admitted to forging narcotic prescriptions and the death certificate for Mac.”
“Finally,” Randy said, hands in his back pockets. I hadn’t seen him come in from the back of the house. I sat down on the floor and dragged the kids with me. I wanted them next to me. Then, exhausted, we all lay down flat on the floor.
“You’re in big trouble,” Jackson said to me, with his eyes taking the tricky shape they did when I wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not. He pointed at me. “For making punch, for having the tea antidote, for—”
“I explained that to you before,” I said, sharp, if weary. “I never did anything wrong in the first place. And I didn’t bring the tea.”
“Sorry, Mom,” Tay said. “Mom told me to leave the potion at home. My Grandma told me Mom needed it, and no matter what Mom said, I should take it anyway.”
“Take this box of letters, too,” I said, too tired to argue.
“Good work,” Jackson said, paging through the letters. “These should help. With the ECOL situation, too. Unfortunate that Mac and Fletch had to get arrested for two human murders alone. Yep, you finally gathered some real evidence,” Jackson said. Always the joker.
“The knife?” I said, in no mood for banter.
Jackson ignored me. “How about that. Good work.” I remained lying down. The kids were yawning as they sat up.
“I think that’s what Trina finally threatened him with,” I said, pointing to the letters. “And Mary—I think Mary was coming to her senses before the poisoning. Both women were scared enough not to say anything. All these years. I think Trina was afraid Fletch and the redneck mafia would go after her living son, Preston.”
“Well, after all this work I ought to at least rate a dinner with you,” he suggested. He glanc
ed at Randy, who was standing by the glass doors, hardly seeming engaged, hands in his pockets. “Or breakfast. Especially since we were so rudely interrupted at the party.”
Coral curves of clouds were now beginning to light up the gray sky as the sun began to show its rays over the horizon. Like commas, or fish hooks, or curls on a girl’s head.
“Let’s do it. Breakfast. Make it now,” I said to Jackson, glancing at Randy. “Or almost now. And you have to be willing to have these two along,” I said, pulling the kids in towards me. “If they stay awake long enough. But first I need to have a talk with my lawyer friend here. In private.”
Randy turned around and looked at me guiltily, and said, “Okay, where to?” I pointed to the hallway. I wasn’t going to get out of visible range of my kids.
We stood in the hall. I was too tired for subtlety. “I saw the Percodan in your boat. Right?”
“Right,” he said. His arms were folded in front of him.
“And the night, the very night I was first accused of poisoning Mac, which you had done, never meaning to frame me, you brought a big pretty fern to sit on the outside of my apartment with a note that said that Mac deserved it, right?” I said. “You got the hibiscus you planted out front at the same time.”
“LaRue, I wasn’t trying to kill him,” Randy said. “I was trying to scare him, to terrify him. I wanted him really worried about all the things he was doing.”
“Right. And you spoke to my son about revenge. How to get revenge on people who had done bad things to other people. You told Tay that Mac and Fletch had not liked Trina,” I said. “I don’t like you teaching revenge to my kid.”
“Nobody ever thought about me in this whole thing,” Randy said. He looked beat, defeated. He no longer looked cute. “My wife died of ovarian cancer. Do you have any idea what it’s like to watch someone die slowly of cancer? Then one of my best friends died because of those men and what they were doing, and nobody was doing anything about it,” he said, his whispering voice rising.
Cutting Loose in Paradise Page 32