Hangman

by Michael Slade

  The Yardarm was moored on the west shore of Lake Washington. Seattle sits between the Pacific waterway of Puget Sound and the inland lake. The glacier-gouged basin is nineteen and a half miles long and generally one and three-quarters miles wide. Lake Washington is overlooked by towering, snow-capped Mount Rainier. Its more than fifty miles of shoreline are fairly smooth, and only a few bays indent it here and there. Its beaches are narrow and the shore drops off quickly, plunging to the lake bottom at two hundred feet. Two pontoon bridges cross it in the middle, one of which joins southern Mercer Island to both shores. Seattle owns the west shore, but not the east. That belongs to Bellevue, Renton, and numerous small towns. The northern reaches of Lake Washington offer fine sailing, so here is where Bart moored the sloop that he called home.

  When Bart returned from a selling trip he liked to go for a sail. There was something about venturing out on the lake at night that satisfied the bully’s insatiable need for control. At night, Lake Washington was his alone. Wuss sailors, who took their boats out only in daylight, were safely tucked in bed with their teddy bears.

  Having parked his car onshore behind the long-term moorage, Bart lugged his suitcase down the ramp and out onto the deserted dock under a moonless, starlit sky. The clouds of the last storm were scudding away, clearing the air for the next storm, which was already brewing at sea. At ten to fifteen knots, the chill night wind rippled the black depths of the beckoning lake sparkling with reflected city lights. As Bart hoofed along the finger to which The Yardarm was tied, halyards slapping her mast and waves lapping her hull welcomed the skipper aboard.

  Aye-aye, Captain, thought Bart.

  Starboard to the finger, his sailboat was moored stern in. Unhooking the lifeline to climb aboard, Bart heaved his suitcase over the gunwale and stepped down into the sunken cockpit. “Center cockpit” meant the steering area of the sloop was between two cabins, the main cabin forward and a private cabin aft. With his sea legs compensating for the rocking hull, Bart unlocked the companionway doors to the forward cabin, sliding open the overhead hatch before he entered. Inside, he flipped a switch to ALL to juice both batteries so he could fire up the diesel engine.

  Climbing back out to the open cockpit between the cabins, Bart raised the cover of a hatch built into the floor and reached in to turn on the light in the engine compartment. First, he checked the oil with a dipstick; then he unscrewed the cap on the heat exchanger to confirm the coolant level; and finally, he opened the seacock so brine could flood the cooling system. Satisfied with the engine, Bart switched off the light and closed the hatch.

  In the center of the cockpit stood the binnacle, a vertical mount with the steering wheel on its aft side, a black transmission lever on its port side, a red throttle lever on its starboard side, and a glowing compass on top. After removing the canvas cover protecting it, Bart inserted a key into the instrument panel. He checked the transmission with one hand to make sure it was in neutral, pumped the throttle several times with his other hand, then cranked the key in the binnacle to fire up the engine.

  Like a newborn babe whacked on its bottom, the thirteen-horsepower Volvo diesel coughed itself into life. As it chug-chug-chugged in the dock slip, again Bart swung down into the main cabin to turn on the running lights and the autopilot. From a recess in the cabin wall, he withdrew a flashlight and the winch handle, then, jack-in-the-box that a single crewman was, he popped back up to The Yardarm’s cockpit.

  Dropping the winch handle into a side pocket on the binnacle, Bart flicked the flashlight on to see if the batteries were still strong, and that’s when the sudden beam caught the clue.

  Illuminated by the torch was a fresh scratch on the lock of the aft cabin.

  * * *

  Bart unlocked the aft cabin and shone the beam of the flashlight in. Like a spotlight on a theater stage, the beam plucked details out of the dark. It caught the rudderpost angling up dead center from the cabin floor to the ceiling, the metal tube wrapped with manila hemp rope for a nautical look. It caught the maritime junk on the shelf across the transom, a clutter of shackles, stainless-steel bolts, bungee cords, a whistle, and an empty wine glass. It caught the twenty-dollar bill Bart had dropped on the quarter-berth when, before the selling trip, he had searched his wallet for a business card.

  Had Bart been an Alex Hunt when it came to clues, he might have searched further in his response to the scratch. The money, however, was enough for him, because surely a thief would have stolen it had someone broken in. Convinced the scratch on the lock resulted from a thwarted theft, Bart extinguished the flashlight beam and locked the aft cabin.

  The Hangman was left in the dark.

  * * *

  Barnacle Bart was ready to sail.

  From the cockpit, he sprang back onto the dock to untie the fore, aft, and spring lines; then, after shoving the boat away from the finger and slightly ahead, he leaped back on and put her in gear by pushing the transmission lever from NEUTRAL to FORWARD. His other hand advanced the throttle, and slowly The Yardarm chugged out of the dock slip toward the open expanse of Seattle’s largest lake.

  Once the sloop was clear of the west shore marina, Bart crabbed along the starboard side to gather in the fenders, clipping the lifeline back in place before he returned to the wheel. More throttle and Bart left the big city behind.

  Waves made the wheel kick, and wind tossed Bart’s thinning hair. Headlights crossing the Evergreen Point Bridge to the south were a noose of pearls around the neck of the dark lake. Venus glimmered bright between galleon clouds sailing the black beyond of outer space, and a shooting star streaked green as it burned itself to death. Seen through the tracery of rigging overhead, the stars seemed to swing in time with the swells buffeting the boat. Glittering with pinpricks of reflected light, the bow wave pitched and splashed as the stem rose and fell, biting the fathomless water so a billion bubbles streamed by to join the wake that frothed astern. Hoist the sail and its silhouette against the starry sky would stand aloft like a monstrous shark’s fin.

  Time for a bracer, thought Bart.

  * * *

  A quarter-berth is a much-needed space-saver on a boat. The aft cabin of The Yardarm had less depth than the height of an average man, which meant such a guest would have to sleep curled up in a berth shorter than he was if the cabin ended at the companionway doors. What a quarter-berth did was add length to a cabin’s depth by extending itself as a cubbyhole past the doors and under the cockpit floor. With head to the transom and feet in the hole, a man could sleep full-length in quarters shorter than he was.

  When Bart had shone the flashlight into the aft cabin, the Hangman was curled up knees to chin in the quarter-berth cubbyhole beside and behind the doors. Had Bart entered to peer around into the nook, he would have faced the business end of a 9mm Glock.

  Now, as Bart engaged the autopilot to slip below, the killer listened intently through the doors.

  Once the skipper was off the deck and the cockpit was clear, the Hangman crept out of the aft cabin into the chill night. A gloved hand closed on the winch handle stored in the binnacle pocket as the Scream-masked killer took up an ambush position beside the main cabin companionway.

  * * *

  Having hit a button to engage the autopilot to the cockpit steering wheel, Barnacle Bart slipped below for a tot or two of rum. From its hiding place in the bilge of the bow, he fetched a bottle of Mount Gay sugar-cane brandy. The finest rum there is comes from Barbados, and having bullied that Jew into buying a machine he didn’t need, Bart was in a party mood.

  Straight from the bottle, three slugs of Mount Gay warmed his gullet.

  “Yo-ho-ho,” Bart sang to what, unknown to him, was his wraith in the cabin mirror.

  The festive mood was broken by two interruptions in a row. The first was the jangling of The Yardarm’s phone. Bart let the machine answer the call with the greeting he’d recorded before his selling trip.

  “You’ve reached Bart Busby. I’m on the road until the ni
ght of November 9. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”

  “Mr. Busby, this is Nate Frank. I’m canceling that copier you strong-armed me into.”

  The line went dead.

  Fucking kike, thought Bart. I’ll tear the bra from your wife’s tits in front of you.

  There was a time, back in the good old days, when he could do that without worry. Bully a wuss and Bart knew the wuss would cringe away. But not anymore. The world was topsy-turvy. Bully a wuss at school or work today, the chances were, judging from stories in the news, the guy would pull a machine gun and mow you down along with a hundred other people.

  As with AIDS, you had to adapt.

  So that’s why Bart pushed the button to replay the message. This time, he’d concentrate on the Jew’s tone, to assess whether he was a wuss on the edge or merely a wuss with false courage once Bart was gone. In which case, he would crumble quickly when the bully returned next trip.

  The machine played ten messages before the Jew’s, one of which was a beep that marked the Hangman’s call last week from a public phone. No message, just a beep, because the call was made to ascertain when Bart would return to his boat.

  Bang!

  What was that?

  Bart turned from the machine.

  Bang!

  Outside.

  Something loose in the wind?

  Bart hurried to the companionway to scramble back out to the cockpit. As he scaled the stairs through the open hatch above, the bully saw a zillion stars up in heaven. Where he was going, there would be no stars at all.

  Ironically, Bart’s first thought was that the boom had somehow slipped off the gallows. A boom was the spar extending back from the mast at the foot of a sail, and a gallows was the notched support on the roof of the aft cabin that kept the boom from swinging when the sail was lowered.

  That gallows, however, wasn’t the gallows that he should be worried about.

  For what had caused the bangs that drew Bart out was the companionway doors of the aft cabin slamming shut. Strange, because Bart was certain that he had locked them before slipping below deck for a tot. With that mystery in mind, he poked his head up through the hatch into the starry night, his torso emerging from the main cabin like a snail forsaking its shell, until the Hangman smashed the winch handle down on his skull.

  Bart saw stars of another kind as the bully crumpled into the cockpit well.

  * * *

  With a knee on deck by the gunwale and leaning over the cabin roof just forward of the hatch, the killer waited in ambush for Bart to come up from below. Whap! The winch handle clubbed down on the bastard’s head to lay him out cold, giving the Hangman lots of time to truss him up.

  There were different ways this could be done. Free the boom from the gallows and it could be used to lynch Bart by noosing him with a line that ran up to the head of the mast and came back down. Fasten the loose end of the line to the stern end of the boom and Bart would be yanked up into the air if the boom was shoved to either side, out over the lake. The pull of that “jerk-’em-up” gallows, however, would not be that high, so the hanged man’s legs would probably dangle in the water, making it difficult to proceed with what the Hangman had planned for Bart.

  An alternative would be to fasten the loose end of the line to an anchor with lots of chain. Throw enough metal overboard to counter Bart’s weight and the anchor sinking down into the depths of the lake would yank him up the mast. That method, however, created a problem of logistics. How do you hide that much equipment on board without piquing suspicion?

  Better to use the winch.

  And hoist Bart like a sail.

  * * *

  The word “wuss” was a major term in Bart’s lexicon. “Wuss” was an amalgam of “wimp” and “pussy,” and for a man of Bart’s intellect, “wuss” fit poets to a T. The only poem Bart had liked before he dropped out of school was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

  Water, water, everywhere,

  And all the boards did shrink;

  Water, water, everywhere,

  Nor any drop to drink.

  In effect, the Mariner was a bully like Bart. The cocky seaman proved that to his shipmates by shooting their good omen, an albatross, with his crossbow. That brought a curse upon the ship, which killed all aboard except the Mariner. The seaman’s horror was seeing the crew come back to life.

  They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,

  Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;

  It had been strange, even in a dream,

  To have seen those dead men rise.

  The helmsman steered, the ship moved on;

  Yet never a breeze up-blew;

  The mariners all ’gan work the ropes,

  Where they were wont to do;

  They raised their limbs like lifeless tools—

  We were a ghastly crew.

  Bart had missed the point of that poem back when he was in school. What pleased him was that it presented a welcome break from all that wuss poetry about clouds, trees, and nature shit. But now, as he came back to consciousness from the clout on his head to find what seemed to be an animated corpse working the rigging of his ship, Bart recalled the Ancient Mariner and what had happened to him. Suddenly, fathoming the theme, this bully was deathly afraid.

  * * *

  With Bart laid out cold in the cockpit, the killer had crossed to the binnacle to put the transmission in neutral by easing back on the black handle. Flicking a switch in the main cabin had doused the running lights. Once The Yardarm no longer made way, the sloop creaked and groaned as it floundered on the choppy lake. Lit by little more than a canopy of stars, the drama unfolding beneath the mast was nothing but a shadow play against the dark of night.

  Injure your neck and a physiotherapist may “hang” you in traction. You will be seated in a chair with a halter supporting your head, one strap under your chin and another cradling the back of your skull. The halter will be connected to a hanging line, and your neck will be put in traction by adding weight of ten to fifteen pounds to the other end. The halter suspends without strangling.

  The Hangman cinched Bart’s unconscious head into such a halter. The winch for the main halyard used to hoist the sail up the mast was on top of the main cabin, just forward of the cockpit. The halyard line ran from the winch to a pulley at the foot of the mast, then up the mast to another pulley at the masthead, then down the mast to where it was snap-shackled near the foot. The Hangman loosened the halyard line looped around the winch and scrambled forward to unclasp the other end from the mast, pulling it back to the cockpit to snap the shackle to the halter webbing Bart’s head. A few turns of the line around the winch to tighten the free end and the killer was ready to hang Bart by inserting the bloody handle into the top notch of the winch to crank, crank, crank.

  As the winched halyard shortened, the cold-cocked bully was slowly hauled by the neck out of the cockpit well and forward over the roof of the main cabin until his head hit the foot of the mast. Crank, crank, crank and he began to rise as the halyard hoisted him like a sail toward the masthead pulley. When Bart’s feet were in the air a foot above the forward cabin, the Hangman secured the winched end of the halyard by dropping it into a pinch cleat. Nylon ties lashed the hanged man’s wrists and ankles to deck stanchions on both sides of the boat, so Bart returned to consciousness to find that he was dangling by the neck with his arms and legs spread-eagled as upside-down Vs.

  The animated corpse from the “Ancient Mariner” was a horrible sight. The face had a wonky eye and looked like a screaming skull, and by the faint light of the heavenly stars was as eerie as hell. Judging from the sheen, which could have been an astral aura, the rest of the body was sheathed in a coverall of black plastic. Were Bart not so groggy from the ambush clout to his brain, he might have deduced that was so the apparition would leave no forensic clues behind for the cops to trace. Touch a match to the second skin and—poof!—it would be gone.

 
Having hanged Bart from The Yardarm, the Hangman moved aft to lower the Zodiac with davits down onto the lake. The inflated rubber dinghy was powered by a Honda 9.9-horsepower outboard engine. The Zodiac, tied alongside the boat for now, would provide a getaway after this was over. The Hangman would put the sloop into gear by shoving the transmission handle to FORWARD, then would lock the autopilot on a collision course with the west shore. Advance the red handle for a touch of throttle, and long after the Hangman had fled in the Zodiac, The Yardarm would run aground in Seattle.

  But that would be later.

  After this revenge.

  Bart pissed himself when he saw the living corpse pull a knife from a carryall on the roof of the cabin. He tried to plead with the horror as the starlit blade slashed his piss-soaked pants away from the lower half of his body, but the halter strap under his chin had shut his yap. The demon cast the tattered garment into the lake. For a moment Bart feared the monster would go for the family jewels, but then he heard a sound below like the unzipping of a zipper. He strained his terrified eyes down to their lower lids in time to witness his stomach and intestines spill out through a horizontal cut across his belly just above the level of his navel.

  The pain hit like a torpedo.

  Bart screamed deep in his throat.

  “Bully,” snarled the Hangman through the muffle of the Scream mask. “That’s for what you did to an innocent man.”

  Below his heaving ribcage, Bart’s guts had tumbled out from their own weight, and they hung swaying between his legs with the rocking of the waves. The odor off them was as foul as Bart’s character, for the knife that had slit through skin, fat and the muscle of his abdominal wall had nicked the bowel as well. The yellowish fat on the coils glistened sickly. Because the small intestine doubled back on itself, the grisly mess dangled to his knees but didn’t hit the deck.