Dead Level

by Sarah Graves

  A drop leaked down her lip; she licked it away with the tip of her tongue. “That precious sobriety of yours must be pretty flimsy if one drink is all it takes to ruin it.”

  He’d had to tell her, of course. The night before, while they were out walking all over town until long after midnight, it seemed they’d discussed so many things, it had finally felt natural to confide to her that at one time he’d been pretty much the definition of a falling-down drunk.

  A kiss or two later, it seemed, and they’d been at the motel, and it was only Sam’s nervous feeling that Richard could show up again any minute to defend his sister’s honor that had kept Sam from going in with her.

  Now Carol glanced at him, so invitingly that he was sure it couldn’t be a mistake, what he thought that smile promised. That dark, lustrous hair and sun-kissed skin, her red lips wet with the wine’s grapey tartness …

  “Sam.” The clear-polished nail of her index finger engraved parallel lines on the motel bedspread. “Don’t be mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad.” He was, but he didn’t feel like showing her that. “I’m just wondering what else you’ve lied to me about.”

  She looked coyly at him. “Well … how about that Richard’s not coming? He’s on his own tonight. Also, he’s not my brother.”

  Confused, Sam sat on the edge of the bed. “But I thought—”

  She leaned back against the pillows. “I know. It’s just so much easier when we’re traveling together, to let people think so. It gives them a story, one they can think they understand so they trust us more.”

  She touched his arm, idly letting her nail graze along it. “Until we know them. Until we know we can trust them.”

  The alarm bells going off in his head got a lot louder all of a sudden; still, he could barely hear them through the desire engulfing him. But when he turned his head, the mirror behind the room’s dresser gave him his answer; who would know, indeed?

  He managed a laugh, got up hastily before he could change his mind. “So you travel around ripping people off, basically. Is that it? Like Bonnie and Clyde, sort of?”

  Her lips curved with the confidential sweetness that had so captured him the night before. “Uh-huh. And having adventures.”

  She sipped more wine, visibly savoring it, watching him.

  But the moment had passed when he might have succumbed, and when she saw this, she put the glass down, slid off the bed.

  At the mirror she picked up a hairbrush. “You were good at the boatyard yesterday,” she said as she ran the brush through her hair. “Are you always so decisive?”

  Apparently not, he thought. She’d put no hint of irony into the question, but he still felt the dig. Whatever invitation she had been extending was withdrawn, at least for now.

  “Depends on the situation,” he replied. “When things happen that fast, there’s no time to think. I went on autopilot.”

  And nearly got my damn fool head knocked off, he thought but didn’t add. Somehow he was beginning to believe that might be a frequent risk, hanging out with Richard and Carol.

  “I still don’t understand why you’re telling me all this about yourself, though.”

  Through the sliding glass door, he could see the towering lights of a huge freighter sliding up the bay. At night, when all you could see were the lights and not the superstructure beneath them, these freighters’ slowness was eerie and their size exaggerated by the optical illusion; it was as if the theme from Close Encounters ought to be playing.

  “Why did you?” he repeated. “Tell me, I mean?”

  The car they drove, he realized. The truck, too. All stolen. But not the boat; that, they’d almost surely had to pay cash for.

  He wondered where they’d gotten the money. She laughed and leaned in toward the mirror to check her eye makeup.

  “What can I say, we’re criminals.” Her reflection dared him to believe her. “We rob from the rich and give to the poor. The poor being us. And we wanted you to join us.”

  She batted her lashes comically at him, making fun of him and herself. “I did, anyway. Do.”

  “Come on.” But he did believe her, and he couldn’t help liking her self-mockery; she was good at it.

  “So where’s Richard now?”

  She came over to him, barefoot and so pretty in her little red tank top and jean shorts. “Getting another car. He heard in the diner that the one we were driving might be trouble now.”

  “What, you mean the cops are looking for it? As in actively looking?” At this, the reality of what she’d been telling him washed over him with a shock, but she just nodded.

  “It and us, actually.” She cocked a hip, gazing pertly up at him. “So Richard ditched the car and he’s getting a new one.”

  As she said this, another realization hit him: the credit card. They’d been talking about it that morning in the boatyard office just before he left for Bangor; a customer had called and said he thought his card had been stolen and used.

  And Carol had been there in the office yesterday. “Sam,” she said. Then, before he could do anything to stop her, she took his face in her two hands and kissed him, a rich, deep kiss that he did nothing to abbreviate.

  “Oh,” he said stupidly when it was over, feeling his heart thudding and his blood percolating.

  Behind him the room’s door burst open. A man stood in the doorway, which led straight outside. Sam could see cars going by, across the motel parking lot on Water Street. Suddenly he wanted to be out of there more than anything in the world.

  But it was too late for that. The man in the doorway was Richard, Carol’s brother or accomplice or whatever he was.

  Richard didn’t look happy. “We’ve had,” he told Carol, “a change of plan.”

  And that thing in his hand, Sam saw with no real surprise at all …

  That thing in his hand was a gun.

  CHAPTER 7

  Late on an autumn evening in a cottage in the Maine woods, the floor is ice cold, while the stove is so hot that accidentally brushing up against it raises blisters. And don’t get me started again on the bathroom, located in another building entirely. Ours was large, airy, freshly painted, and pine paneled, its door traditionally pierced by a half-moon shape. With two windows and a stainless-steel washstand like the one in an airplane restroom, it had a faucet that ran gravity-fed cold water from a roof tank, or you could pour hot water from a kettle into the sink.

  In fact, except for the no-flush portion of the program, it was as nice as our bathroom at home: curtains on the windows, bright rag rugs on the floor. Decades-old Reader’s Digests in the magazine rack harkened back to a time when “Humor in Uniform” wasn’t yet an oxymoron.

  But the place had one drawback: after sunset, a visit meant a brisk walk uphill in the dark via a path known for (a) its variety of tripping hazards, and (b) have I mentioned that it was cold and dark outside?

  The walk back downhill, though, was enlivened by the cheery sight of the cabin itself, with yellow lamplight shining from its windows and the tang of woodsmoke hanging in the damp air. The starless sky suggested more rain to come, but right now we were between showers; a breeze sent pine-scented drops pattering down from the sodden branches as I made my way from the path to the clearing where the truck sat parked, and finally to the cottage door.

  Ellie was at the table near the stove with her glasses on, frowning at her cellphone. “Dead battery,” she reported.

  I dug in the satchel where I kept necessities: ChapStick, a tube of hand cream, nail clippers, hair comb, Swiss Army knife … “Try this one,” I said, and while she left a message on her home phone to say she was staying another night, I got out my to-do list, noting unhappily that fewer things were crossed off it than I had hoped.

  Still, we had accomplished a lot: measuring, check, I noted mentally; digging, likewise. We’d gotten the concrete-block foundations lugged over and squared up in the holes, too, and filled them in with the gravel we’d hauled.

  And
finally, we’d enclosed the space underneath the deck by nailing up sheets of wooden lattice. The job was much easier when one person held the sheet in place while the other did the hammering, so I’d been eager to complete it while Ellie was still here to help.

  But the road-repair guys had never arrived, and as a result, it seemed the lattice could’ve waited. “I could still drive you out to your car, though,” I offered. “By now the road must’ve dried up a lot. We could get over the washed-out place if we were careful, and you could go home tonight.”

  “Forget it,” Ellie replied, not even looking up.

  That thumping we’d heard in the gravel pit, I now felt sure, had been the dead pine tree’s enormous roots snapping one by one as the earth gave way beneath them, not someone trying to start an avalanche. But Ellie still wasn’t so certain.

  “I’ll go if you will,” she added. “But I’m not leaving you here alone.”

  Retreat wasn’t in my plans, though; leaving aside the big bet I’d made with Wade, Bella’s need for a little quiet time, and that newspaper piece I’d said I would write, I could just hear my family when they heard I’d been too scared to stay alone at the cottage. The phrase “never live it down” didn’t even begin to cover the kind of razzing I would get.

  And anyway, tomorrow I planned to put the deck’s floor on, so in the evenings I could sit out there, and after that just the railings and steps would be left to finish.

  If you could call that “just.” “I ache all over,” Ellie reported.

  “Me too.” It occurred to me that I ought to phone home, as well. It wouldn’t kill me to let Wade know I hadn’t thrown my back out by lifting the lumber or cut my arm off with the chain saw. Speaking of my back …

  “Oof,” I said, wincing as another twinge from my sacroiliac pulsed up toward my neck.

  “Roger that,” Ellie agreed with a grimace as she handed me the phone. “I never knew building a deck was so … exertional.”

  No one answered at my house, so I left a message saying I was fine; then, after another good dinner made by Ellie—fried steaks and mashed potatoes with canned butter beans, a veritable feast—we dosed ourselves with whiskey and two aspirin apiece.

  An hour later we were tucked into the daybeds, propped up with pillows and wrapped in down quilts while the fire crinkled softly in the woodstove, and the radio, tuned to a jazz station out of Montreal, played old Dave Brubeck tunes and torch songs whose lyrics sounded especially good when crooned in French.

  Rain tapped the windows; mice scampered in the walls before settling, finally, into the nests they’d made of old newspapers and torn-up insulation. A boom of thunder rolled and deepened; then another one nearer by. A lightning flash lit the lake, making skeleton arms of the tree branches and turning the water’s surface briefly to silver.

  Ellie looked up contentedly from her Kindle, a dandy little electronic gadget on whose bright screen she was reading an eight-hundred-page novel about life in suburbia.

  Personally, I like paper books with bindings and cover art and different typefaces, and the smell all books have, even the bad ones, like a cross between libraries and print shops with a little bit of glue-scented perfume thrown in.

  On the other hand, eight-hundred-page books are heavy, even if they are about life in suburbia, and Ellie’s Kindle was light. Also, if she decided she didn’t like the book, she could download some other one, even from way out here in the woods.

  “Nice that the storm can’t take our power out,” she said a little drowsily.

  “Yeah.” From my snug nest of pillows and quilts in the daybed, I looked around through eyelids that I could barely manage to keep open. Only the intense pleasure of lying there not having to do a single thing kept me awake; it felt too good to end it by going to sleep.

  “Solar power,” she said and sighed. “It’s fabulous.” She’d had just a teensy bit more Bushmills than she was used to.

  But she was right; in its wooden stand by the door, the small electrical converter that turned the sun’s collected rays into something our lamps could use hummed quietly to itself. The solar-collecting panel was way uphill on the outhouse roof, next to the water tank, but even if the wires linking it with the cabin got torn down by high wind or falling branches, the battery we used for a power reservoir held plenty.

  That meant we’d be fine for the night, or so I was thinking—a bit smugly, for it was a sizable storm coming, and here we were all this way out in the woods with no so-called modern conveniences, yet we were as snug as bugs in a rug, as Bella would’ve put it—when without any warning at all, the percussive boom of a shotgun being fired right outside was followed by a deadly sounding crack! and the bright, sharp tinkling of falling glass pieces as the windowpane by my head exploded inward.

  At the same instant I felt a quick zzzt! of pain in my right cheek, and the lamp on my table went out with a hot pop!

  Ellie sat up fast. “What the—”

  But before she could finish, another crash blew in, this one through the window behind her, and we were suddenly in the dark.

  Very dark.

  Sam spread his hands. “Hey, man,” he began placatingly, but he could already tell that in his present mood, Richard Stedman was not to be reasoned with.

  Richard was still aiming the gun at Sam from the motel room doorway, looking very different from the guy who’d accidentally poked a hole in his own boat the day before.

  Then he’d been genial, friendly, and fumbling, a fellow who was trying hard but who was clearly out of his element. Now with the gun in his hand, though, he seemed comfortable: angry but calm, as if maybe this wasn’t the first time he’d ever pointed a weapon at someone.

  As if maybe he’d done it a lot. Sam turned to Carol, whose sweet, wholesome-appearing face was surprised but not nearly as shocked at the sudden turn of events as Sam would’ve liked. He put his hands up higher in what he hoped was a calming gesture.

  “Look, Richard, I don’t know what’s going on here, but …”

  Richard looked past him at Carol. “Get your stuff together.”

  He twitched the gun barrel unpleasantly at Sam. “You. Go sit down over there.”

  And when Sam didn’t move right away, “Hey,” he added, “you think I’m kidding?”

  In three steps he was in the room with the gun’s barrel up under Sam’s chin. “I like you, Sam. I really do, you’re a good guy. But things haven’t gone well here. They just haven’t.”

  Behind them, Carol was throwing things into a duffel bag. “And now,” Richard went on, “we have to leave in a hurry.”

  The gun was a .38, the kind of weapon people had when they were in the habit of concealing the fact that they were carrying a gun at all. Sam knew that much from his stepfather, Wade, who was a firearms expert.

  Also he knew that from where it was lodged right now, the gun would blow half his face off if Richard fired it, and the half face he’d have remaining would be useless to him because he would die of blood loss, in the unlikely event that the bullet hadn’t bounced around inside his skull a few times before exiting the back of it, pulverizing his brain in the process.

  That part he’d learned from his biological father, the late Dr. Victor Tiptree. Thanks, Dad, he thought sardonically at the long-dead brain surgeon. It was just great of you to let a little kid like I was listen in on your shoptalk.

  He put a hand on the dresser to steady himself. “Richard, put the goddamned gun down, for Christ’s sake.”

  Because that was the other thing Victor had taught him. Sam could hear his father even now, all this time after the man’s death; all this time, too, after what seemed to Sam like a life on some other planet. Back then he’d been a surgeon’s son living in a fancy apartment in Manhattan, wealthy and privileged and so spoiled, hardly anything that anyone said to him ever sank in.

  But one thing had. He heard it again now: Victor’s voice, explaining to his young son how he dared cut into a human being’s head: Sam, you can do
a whole lot more than you think you can if you just never lose your nerve.

  “Put the gun down,” he repeated, and Richard appeared to be thinking about it while Carol went on hurriedly packing.

  Just don’t lose your nerve.… At the time, he’d thought his father’s words were a license to drink and run wild in the big city, a nonstop search-and-destroy mission for a teenaged misfit.

  But now … Slowly, Sam put a hand up to the weapon and pushed it away from his face. “Chill, buddy,” he said.

  Richard let the gun be moved. But when Sam took a step toward the motel room door, the weapon jerked up sharply again.

  “No. I’m sorry, Sam. You can’t leave yet. Over there.”

  Richard waved Sam to one of the chairs by the table near the sliding glass door. The big freighter had long gone by, and now all Sam could see were the tiny lights in the houses across the bay, on Campobello Island.

  “So, what’s all this about?” he asked. Carol hadn’t looked at him since Richard arrived. She didn’t now, either.

  “Look, I just about got my head knocked off helping you with your boat yesterday.” He thought for a moment, then added, “And I spent today working with the guys trying to get Courtesan off the bottom,” he lied. “Which was a job that I notice you didn’t stick around for,” he added, hoping he was right and Richard hadn’t.

  Nothing in Eastport was big enough to lift the vessel, full of water and heavy the way she was, and there was no way to seal her off well enough to pump her out, either, especially with all those ragged holes Richard had unwisely bashed in her. So the boatyard had called in a rig that specialized in bigger jobs.

  Its crew hadn’t needed supervising—fortunately, since Sam had been on the Bangor errand. But now he figured he needed all the moral high ground he could get, and from Richard’s face he saw that he’d guessed right in the you-weren’t-there department.

  “I don’t understand why you wanted a boat at all,” Sam went on, thinking Keep him talking, “if you’re not interested enough to stick around for that.”