by G A Chase
The blue plastic tarp draped over the boat was covered in mud. A pond filled with mosquito larvae nestled in the hull’s depression like an aquatic feature in a mobile-home park. This is going to be a mess. With her knife, she cut the vines away from the tongue of the trailer. The boat’s rotted painter was covered in slime, but the cable that wrapped around the winch at the front was still flexible. She unhooked the shackle and turned the crank to release a good ten feet of plastic-coated line. By climbing onto the boat’s bow, she was able to reach the limb of a pine tree. She wrapped the end of the cable around the trunk above the branch and secured it with the shackle. Turning the crank of the trailer, she lifted the bow of the boat and dumped most of the water out the back. With the nose of the boat still in the air, she pulled off the tarp. The look of the salvaged boat was less than encouraging. The center thwart was rotted nearly in half, and whatever paint had covered the interior of the hull had long ago peeled away.
Cody’s wreck of a truck struggled around the corner of the building like an asthmatic wandering outside for another cigarette. As he passed the boat hanging from the tree, he shook his head. “That’s not a boat. It’s a couple of sheets of decaying plywood held together with shards of fiberglass. I’m surprised it held together long enough for you to lift the bow off the ground.”
She didn’t have much more hope than he did, but she wasn’t about to admit it. “So long as there’s a motor connected to a flat surface that doesn’t sink to the bottom of the river, I’m going.”
He again shook his head and swung the truck around so that the tailgate wedged under the tongue of the trailer. “There’s no point trying to drag that rusty frame on those dry-rotted tires. We’ll have to load the boat into the back of my truck.”
After an hour of pushing, winching, and swearing, they had the hull perched over the back end of the truck. “They make a nice pair,” Sere said as she looked at the combination.
“I told you before, don’t talk shit about my truck if you expect my help.”
She patted the front fender. “My apologies.” As she opened the passenger door, the squealing metal fell at a precarious angle to the cab. “Is it supposed to do that?”
Cody jumped out of the driver’s seat. “Just get your bony ass inside. I’ll take care of the door.” He lifted the panel like it was a sack of groceries and shoved it back into the frame.
“If we actually make it onto the water, finding a serial killer should be a snap compared to hauling this hull out to the river.”
He got back behind the wheel and threw the truck in gear. “You are a snarky-ass bitch. You know that?”
“So I’ve been told.”
A polite person would have offered thanks for his help in the night’s endeavors, but Sere decided Cody would probably see such a comment as a sign of weakness. The way he looked her over made her wonder if being alone with the brute was such a good idea.
“What?” she asked.
He turned back to the windshield and coaxed the truck into gear. “I’ve got my rifle, but I was just wondering what you plan on using against the murderer once you find him.”
She leaned back against what was left of the vinyl bench seat and thrust her hand into the pocket of Joe’s riding jacket to count the half dozen shells she’d pulled from her bag. The exposed springs groaned under the butt of her gun. “If I’m right, that rifle of yours in the back window won’t do much good.”
“I’ll take it with me just the same. And your little venomous friends? I’m not moving another inch until I know they aren’t with you.”
She pulled open the sides of the jacket. “No snakes. You are, of course, free to check the saddlebags on my bike to make sure they’re still standing guard if you don’t believe me.”
“No, thanks.” He punched the accelerator to get the heap of metal moving.
“I’ll be damned—she floats.” Cody held the bow of the boat so firmly Sere suspected he was preparing to wrench in out of the river if it started gushing water.
“Never doubted it for a minute.” She hopped in and headed for the outboard motor.
“I can promise you that motor is never going to start.”
We’ll see. Though wireless communications refused to find a signal around Sere, most mechanical machinery bowed to her desires. On the third firm tug of the rope, the two-cylinder engine fired to life. “Don’t look so surprised. Everyone has to have skills with something. For me, it’s engines.”
“Sure as hell ain’t people.” He jumped on board and shoved off from the dock with the butt of his rifle. Sere held her breath as the fiberglass flexed under his weight, but only a trickle of water seeped in around the seams.
She settled in next to the antique motor. “You’re the navigator. Where would you head if you wanted to kill someone without being heard and dump their body where no one would find it?”
“You make it sound like an everyday occurrence for me.” In spite of his protest, he pointed toward a fork in the river. “Head north. There are a couple of abandoned fishing cabins along a stretch of river that got hit hard during the last hurricane. If I was looking for a little privacy, that’s where I’d head.”
Sere followed Cody’s directions. Instead of heading for the deep swamp as she would have expected, the waterway he indicated paralleled the road. Fishing camps sat on stilts high above the river like gigantic water bugs. This can’t be right. If she were looking to commit murder, she’d head for the most deserted section of swamp she could find. But she hadn’t brought Cody along for his good looks or shining personality. Not everyone had been raised deep in the bayou as she had. And a city slicker like Monty wouldn’t see the rivers and marshes as inviting—more like good areas for getting hopelessly lost.
“Take that left bend, and kill the motor.” Cody leaned forward over the bow like an overweight pit bull that thought it had retained some instinctual hunting skills.
She swung the boat to the left, straightened it up to the river, and hit the kill switch. “What do you see?”
He kept low in the boat, no easy feat for a man who filled the pointed bow from gunnel to gunnel. “There’s a light in that second cabin. It belongs to a buddy of mine. No one’s supposed to be up there. I also thought I heard a voice.” He rose up out of his stealthy position. “Fuck. And there’s my boat.” He reached under him and pulled out a paddle. With two long strokes, he had the battered motorboat alongside the weathered dock. He grabbed his rifle, hopped out without bothering to tie the boat to the dock, and made a beeline for his aluminum skiff nestled in the weeds.
“What are you doing?” Sere whispered. “You’re going to give us away.”
“You said you’d get me to my boat, and I said I’d find you your murderer. We’re square as far as I’m concerned.”
“You’re not going to help me save Kelly?” Sere couldn’t believe Cody was just going to jump in his boat and leave.
“I’m no fool. That crazy son of a bitch already dismembered one person.” Cody untied his boat, gave it a hard shove in the direction they’d come from, and jumped in before Sere could stop him. “I’ll do you the favor of drifting to the end of the river before firing up my motor.”
Fuck! Sere watched helplessly as Cody floated off. She jumped out of the small boat and did what she could to tie it off with the rotted painter. If Monty was holding Kelly in the cabin above her head, he’d have to be pretty unobservant not to have noticed the action on the river.
“What do you plan on doing to me?” Kelly’s plea rang out across the water. Though Sere didn’t doubt the woman’s fear, the sudden outburst could have been a message to Sere that Monty was still oblivious to her approach. Thank you, Kelly.
“I’m going to kill you.” The man’s voice lacked the firm sincerity Sere had expected. He sounded more confused than afraid, as if he didn’t fully know what he was doing.
“The way you did Larry? Because you did a piss-poor job of it. What did either of us ever do to you?”
>
Sere did her best to keep her weight evenly distributed on the aluminum ladder to prevent any noise announcing her approach. So long as Monty was focused on Kelly, Sere might be able to sneak up on him before things turned violent.
“This has nothing to do with you,” Monty said. “Does the bug ask the shoe why it’s being stomped on? I need to learn how best to decapitate a person.”
Sere peeked over the edge of the deck. Through the open sliding glass door, she could see Kelly tied to a yellow-vinyl and metal kitchen chair. She was struggling against the ropes. The intense look on her face still displayed the last vestiges of fear, but anger was quickly taking hold. Hang in there, Kelly. I’m just about in position.
“So you’re some wannabe mass murderer trying to figure out how it’s done? You don’t look the type—or is that heavyset-frumpy-businessman look part of the act?”
Monty stood in profile to the door and ran his finger over the edge of a meat cleaver. From the worn wooden handle and pitted blade, Sere suspected it had come from the fish-cleaning station on the dock below. “Why do you care what I do? I’d think you would be pleading for your life, not trying to figure me out.”
Just like a doppelgänger—he can’t think beyond his self-interest and sees attempted empathy as a weakness. Sere snuck onto the deck and worked her way behind a battered chest freezer with beer stickers plastered to its front. Reaching behind her, she slipped the shotgun out of its holster. With just the single shell loaded in the barrel and six more in her pocket, she wasn’t going to get many opportunities to put Monty down.
Sere’s heart rate doubled as she realized Kelly hadn’t responded to Monty’s latest taunt. Shit!
She jumped out from behind the metal icebox and held the gun at her hip. “Die, Doppelfucker!” she yelled from the back door.
To Sere’s horror, Monty lifted the butcher’s knife dripping with blood from the woman’s neck. Kelly’s eyes were unnaturally large. She didn’t move, as though the slightest turn of her head might make it fall from her shoulders. The sound of air gurgling through thick blood filled the small cabin.
Sere aimed high to avoid knocking Kelly’s head from her body, as if she were playing some demented arcade game. The shotgun blast didn’t even disturb a hair on Monty’s balding head.
“Fuck!” She quickly snapped the weapon open in desperation to reload, but she knew she’d blown her one good shot at taking out the killer.
He rushed at her with cleaver held high. Now we’re talking my kind of battle, she thought. She dropped the gun, grabbed the top of the doorframe, and kicked her boot heel at his bloated face. As if expecting the move, Monty dove for the floor like a baseball runner stealing home base. He slipped right under her, leaped back to his feet, and continued running for the edge of the deck.
“Oh, hell no.” She jumped down, retrieved her shotgun, and finished reloading the second shell. When she got to the railing, Monty had already bounded down to the dock. She tried calming her nerves to make the shot count, but every fraction of a second put him another stride away. The blast sent pellets bouncing along the wooden boards at his feet.
Without taking the time for self-recrimination, she loaded the third shell, lifted the gun to her shoulder, and took proper aim. All of Joe’s attempts at training Sere to go slowly and act deliberately came flooding back. She squeezed the trigger as Monty jumped into Riley’s boat. Small red dots speckled the back of the man’s blue-and-white seersucker suit. “Got you, asshole.”
She opened the breach for the fourth shell. Though she’d hit him, only a couple of the pellets had struck hard enough to penetrate his suit and skin—not nearly enough to adequately disrupt his connection to the real Montgomery Fisher.
As she took aim, she heard the last gasps from the woman behind her. Fuck! Her shot sprinkled the water, causing a dozen catfish to surface in response to the call, but Monty was well on his way up river. “God damn it!” Sere dropped the gun and rushed over to the woman who had been so kind—one of the few truly generous strangers that Sere had met in real life. She had to lean in close to Kelly’s mouth to hear her.
“He burst into the diner not five minutes after you left. Larry tried to stop him—”
“Don’t talk.” Sere untied the woman’s hands and feet. Neck artery severed. Nothing you can do to stop death. Make her comfortable. The loas will be coming. “I’m sorry.” For the first time in Sere’s life, she truly understood what the term meant. Had she not stopped off at the diner, Larry and Kelly would still be involved in their lifelong flirtation. Now he was dead, and Kelly was about to join him. Sere had never felt a stronger feeling of self-loathing. “I have to go.” She caressed the dying woman’s hair from her face. The light was quietly fading from Kelly’s eyes as tears filled Sere’s.
She turned and rushed back to the porch railing. “God fucking dammit!” The words rushed out of her mouth in one long scream across the water. She couldn’t bear to turn around. Though Sere wasn’t afraid of death, she had no idea how long she’d have before the loas turned up to claim the woman’s soul. Would they even notice me? It wasn’t a chance Sere could risk.
She slid down the ladder and ran to the fish-cleaning station below the porch. Under the sink, she found a box of large black trash bags. With no available boat in sight, she’d have to swim for it, but she wasn’t about to abandon her clothing for the sheriff to use as one more nail in her coffin. She stripped down completely and pulled one shotgun shell from her jacket before stuffing everything in the doubled-up plastic bags. With a six-foot length of rope, she tied the bag to her waist.
“This has been a tough couple of days.” She tossed the shotgun shell into the water without bothering to crack it open and dove into the river. A snapping turtle the size of a manhole cover drifted up under her. Grabbing hold of its shell, she directed it toward Monty in the rapidly disappearing motorboat.
7
Sere pulled hard against the turtle’s shell to get her head above water. Surfacing reconnected Sere to her surroundings. The moment wasn’t just to satisfy her need to breathe. Fresh air was like a slap in the face to snap her out of her thoughts, but the cool night breeze—and the mental break it provided—lasted only a moment. As she lowered her head back behind the animal’s shell, memories of Kelly’s ordeal returned.
Sere had never seen someone die before. The event shook her. For nearly all of her life, the doppelgängers she’d lived with were little more than dolls without emotions. Even if one got hurt, it could regenerate any missing parts like a lizard whose tail got cut off, and if one died, it could easily be replaced. Kelly had been mortally wounded, and there hadn’t been a damn thing Sere could do to help—no magical bandage, no spiritual connection, nothing. She’d just stood there like a goddamned idiot. Even if Sere hadn’t seen the woman’s emotions displayed in her eyes, her feelings had worked like an energy tsunami that swept Sere up in its intensity. Like a swimmer doing the breaststroke, Sere lunged back to the surface for another cleansing breath of air before returning to her living nightmare of death.
Right at that moment, Kelly’s soul was somewhere in Guinee, trying to explain her life to paranormal beings who thought they had some divine authority over humanity. Godforsaken assholes, more like it. Sere’s own time with the loas had been mercifully short. Children seldom were forced to stay in purgatory for more than a day.
Why couldn’t Kendell have found someone else to watch over the devil? Even as a child, Sere had known the answer. Baron Malveaux had only shown complete and selfless love to one person: his daughter Serephine. Kendell needed the most powerful soul she could find to contain what Malveaux had become, and that was young Sere. What none of the gate guardians could have known was that the devil would pull young Sere out of Guinee and into his hell.
Fuck, this isn’t about me. She twisted the turtle’s shell toward the surface so she could stay above the water long enough to get a look at where they were headed. Hopefully, the animal was following the
vibrations from the outboard motor, but it could just as easily be looking to Sere for navigation. In the moonlight, tree limbs draped with Spanish moss cast shadows on the winding river.
“I have no idea where we are or where that asshole motored off to.” She looked down at the round shell. “If you can hear me, head toward civilization.”
Once back fully underwater, the turtle banked to the right while Sere continued her contemplations. That’s the difference between me and Monty. Though I could easily turn the murder into being about me, I feel the connection to Kelly. He never would. Kelly would find peace with the loas—of that, Sere had no doubt. Whatever minor harm Kelly and Larry might have caused in their lives, no one could fake the inherent decency they’d both shown Sere. Their deaths were true tragedies. Some might have said the same about Serephine Malveaux—the young daughter of the city’s most powerful banker who took her own life—but the loas took a dim view of people who cut their time short. And Sere’s life had been very short indeed. Rest easy, my friends. I hope you two share in the love you couldn’t quite find in life.
By daybreak, Sere had spotted the first hunting cabin. Though Riley’s boat was nowhere to be seen, she needed to get out of the river and start a more traditional hunt. She patted the thick shell as her goodbye and let go of the turtle to start her swim toward the dock. On reaching the foot of the aluminum swimming ladder, she wrapped in her hand the rope to the plastic bag filled with her belongings and climbed up to the deck that surrounded the cabin.
“We need to stop meeting like this.”
Bartender Smooth’s voice had her instinctively covering her body. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
He set aside his fishing pole. “So you’re a swamp mermaid. That explains a lot, like how you leave the water magically healed. You haven’t needed another swim after getting shot again, have you?”