“Don’t worry about the fucking dog, Dave,” a man’s voice says from the darkness behind the flashlight beam. It’s Burgermeister’s voice, deep as a bass drum. I remember him threatening Roberto and me that day in the meadow, after Dad had prevented my brother from braining the big man with his own tire iron. “It can’t get up on the boat. It’ll drown or bleed out in a minute. Shine the light over there. Look for Scarface. I want to make sure he’s dead before we fetch the cunts.”
I try to keep my thoughts from focusing on a single-minded desire to make them pay—I need to concentrate on somehow getting Oso and Sunny and Kim out of harm’s way first.
“I don’t see him,” says the man who started all this twelve years ago, when he’d humiliated Kim, taking her pride and causing her to lose the eye. Fast’s voice sounds dull and tired. From what Sunny had said, I know Fast never expected things would go this far. He didn’t want to be a killer. But I feel no sympathy.
The light swings away to the other side, leaving Oso grunting in the darkness.
“I think I nailed him, right as he went over,” the man called Rent-a-Riot tells his partner.
“I don’t see any body. Or any blood,” Fast responds.
Now the light passes over the back of the Sea Ray. A piece of the cabin’s rear wall is a mess of splintered wood. Right where I’d been standing.
“Forget him. I nailed him. Blew his ass right off the boat.”
“A body should float.”
“Not a dead one. Not in fresh water, anyway. They sink for a few hours until they fill up with gas. Then they come up.”
“How long’s it take one to gas up?”
“Shit, Dave, I don’t know. Don’t worry ’bout it.”
I breaststroke silently through the water. The big dog is surprised when I grab his collar. He twists his head violently to the side with the speed of a rattlesnake’s strike and sinks his teeth into my forearm. The beast is capable of snapping through bone, but he doesn’t. He smells my scent before biting down all the way. I grit my teeth and hiss, “Oso.” The pressure fades until it releases all together. I begin sidestroking, pulling the beast behind me, toward where I hope is the narrow gap at the far end of the cove. I remember Sunny telling us it was by swimming up the gap that she’d been able to climb the cliff.
Behind me I hear Burgermeister’s voice booming off the walls. “You girls come on up out of there. Come up with your hands over your heads and you won’t get shot.” The light is still on the back of the Sea Ray.
With my forward hand I touch cool rock. I swim to the side for ten feet until I reach what feels like a corner. The gap. I edge into it, still tugging Oso behind me, not knowing where the gap goes but praying it leads to dry land. In the darkness behind me I can hear Sunny crying and Kim’s scared voice calling, “Anton? Anton!” I have to will myself not to go back. At least not until Oso is safe from drowning.
“I’m afraid he got his head blown clean off,” Burgermeister explains with a hoarse laugh. Then the voices fade out behind me.
At what I guess is about fifty feet into the gap, my knees touch sand. The gap here is no more than five feet wide and the high walls block out all the starlight. Climbing to my feet, I pull Oso toward what feels like a narrow, sandy shelf. Oso tries to walk up on his own but one of his hind legs collapses under him and he staggers in the shallow water. It takes both my hands on the dog’s collar to drag his waterlogged mass up onto the sand. I don’t have time to check his wounds but I do take just a second to whisper, “I’ll be back, Oso. Wait here. Stay. Stay, damn it,” and I rap his muzzle with the palm of my hand.
After stripping off my wet shirt, jeans, and shoes, I soundlessly reenter the cold water. I pray to a god I don’t believe in that for once the contrary beast will listen. I pray for Sunny and Kim to have strength and courage. I pray for a lot of other things, too, like for my gun to be somehow within reach over the side of the ski boat. That’s an unlikely wish, though. I recall that the sides of the ski boat are high and that I placed the gun well out of both sight and reach below the steering column in the center of the boat.
Breaststroking hard, my hands brush both walls most of the way back out of the gap. When I’m close to the cove again, some of the starlight returns. The wider walls ahead allow it to illuminate the three boats there. Fast has nosed his boat up to the Sea Ray’s stern, right next to my rental boat. His isn’t tied to anything, though, and it seems to drift a few feet away from the others as I watch. Somehow they’ve gotten Kim and Sunny aboard it.
The two women are huddled beside each other on the stern bench seat. Sunny has her face buried in her hands. Burgermeister stands near the steering wheel. He has the shotgun in one hand and the flashlight in the other. Its beam is pointed toward the women’s faces. In the refracted light I see Fast standing there, too, with a pistol pointed loosely at the deck.
Closer still, I can hear Kim talking over Sunny’s sobs and the drone of the idling engine. Her voice is low and brittle. “You aren’t going to get away with this, you motherfucker,” she says without much outrage, as if she’s in shock. She’s speaking to Fast alone and ignoring the greater danger. “The Forest Service knows about the cave. The sheriff knows you killed Cal. He knows you’re stalking Sunny here in the lake. He’s going to know what you did to Anton. It’s all over.” For just a moment I’m proud of her as I swim and listen to her valiant bluffing.
But the bluff is going nowhere. “Unfortunately for you, Miss Walsh, you’re full of shit. The sheriff is a friend of mine, and he’s got nothing to tie me to Cal’s death. And all the Forest Service knows is that some whacked-out kid keeps sending them cheap photos of a ruin that could be anywhere. They think it’s something you hippies made up just to keep me from making a living.” Then he says, more softly, “You should’ve let it go, Kim. You should’ve let it go twelve years ago. It was just a stupid prank. No one got hurt, at least no one was supposed to. What happened to you later was an accident. I never even touched you, girl.”
“Just like what you did to Cal was an accident?”
Fast shakes his head but doesn’t reply.
Kim stares at him for a second, trying to keep up the pretense that she’s in control, then I see her bow her head. Don’t give up, Kim, I think. I’m coming. I stroke closer, ready to duck beneath the surface if the light swings my way. But it doesn’t. Instead it moves down from Kim’s face to play over her shirt. Burgermeister makes it swirl around where her breasts push against the fabric of her damp T-shirt. Then it drops to her crotch and pauses there before disappearing from my view as it slides over her legs.
“He may not have touched you,” Burgermeister says, laughing, “but I sure as hell am.”
The light rises back up but Kim doesn’t raise her head to meet it.
Fast says almost sadly, “You brought it on yourself, you know. Haunting me all these years around town. Trying to stir up trouble.”
Burgermeister steps forward, his oversized mass rocking the boat. With the muzzle of the gun, he probes between Sunny’s arms and presses the barrels into the sweatshirt covering her chest. “That’s soft,” he says. “And don’t that gun feel hard?” He takes one of Sunny’s unresisting hands and pulls it against his pants. “Just like me.”
Sunny makes another noise. This time it’s more of a whimper. Then he turns the twin barrels to Kim. My breath begins to hiss from my lips and I have to struggle to contain it.
Kim looks up and my heart sinks. There’s no defiance in her good eye. No hope. Only terror.
Her face slides out of my view as I kick closer to the side of the vacant ski boat.
“We don’t need to do that, Alf,” Fast says.
“Shut up, Dave! You can blow yourself for all I care. Me, I’m gonna have some fun.”
“Not here, not now.” Fast tries to put him off. “There’s too much to do.”
Burgermeister grunts and the flashlight sweeps out over the water. “All right. I don’t like it that Scarface
and his dog have disappeared. We need to get these sweet little bitches up to the valley so they can show us that fucking cave. After we dynamite it, we’ll have all the time in the world.”
The flashlight keeps playing in random patterns over the water and the canyon’s walls. It searches on my side of their boat now, but I’m protected from view by the hull’s overhang at the bow end.
“What about the boats, Alf? How are we going to make sure no one finds them?”
The light shifts to the Sea Ray and my rental. “I’m gonna blow some holes in the bottoms. They’ll go down quick enough. I wish I knew where that scar-faced bastard is, though. I don’t want that ugly fucker floating up for a few days.”
I’m glad he’s worried about me. The way I’m feeling, he’d better be worried.
The boat rocks and the bow dips down as Alf moves forward. “He’s got to be on the bottom with his ugly dog. The boats’ll land right on top of them. Just watch the cunts, Dave.”
Treading water, I slide down the vacant ski boat’s side to about where the steering wheel should be. I’ve got to move fast—I can hear Rent-a-Riot ramming more shells into the shotgun. I look up at the boat’s rail and realize that I’ll have to pull myself all the way out of the water to reach the gun under the steering wheel. I risk discovery by backing a little ways away for a better view. That’s when I notice the windscreen. I’d forgotten about it. A windscreen wraps around the boat’s side to protect the driver from spray. There’s no way I can get over that without the shotgun blowing a very large hole in me. I might as well have left the gun in my truck. Stupid.
As if to punctuate the realization, a shotgun blast explodes in the night. I flinch and almost shout—there’s no time to dive. My ears ring, deafened. But when my head doesn’t blow apart, I figure out that the shot had been aimed into the floor of the ski boat. Burgermeister is just doing as he’d said and sinking the boats by shooting the bottoms out.
I dive, then swim underwater until I feel the hull of Fast’s ski boat above my hands. I slide my hands down to the straight edge of the stern careful to avoid the churning propellor, then slowly raise my head out of the water, my cheek pressed close to the fiberglass. Another explosion rips and flashes in the night. The ignition of the compressed gasses light up the canyon wall like a lightning strike. Very cautiously, I lift myself high enough so that I can see Fast standing by the stern, in front of Kim and Sunny. His head is turned away—he appears momentarily entranced by the sinking of the boats. In one hand he holds the small gun that’s still pointed at the deck. With the other hand he’s aiming the flashlight on the two boats in order to assist his partner. I can’t see Burgermeister but I assume he’s still on the bow. It feels like it, anyway, due to the way the swim step is lifted a few inches out of the water.
The idling motor just inches from my hip keeps the men from hearing a faint splash as I pull myself higher with one hand on the rear rail and a knee on the step. I reach in and grab Kim’s wrist. Over the ringing in my ears from the shotgun blasts, I hear a sharp intake of breath. But she is able to stifle whatever shout had almost risen in her throat. Her face jerks toward mine. Her single eye is huge. I know I must look like some sort of monster, sliding suddenly out of the black water like a giant eel, my hair plastered to my head and with the vivid scar on my face. Fast is still turned away.
I point toward the gap in the canyon wall with my free hand. Then I nod my head at Sunny before twice making a fist and opening it to show her all five fingers twice. Ten seconds. Kim’s eye is still huge and wide. Her mouth flinches. What? I make the motions again and whisper, “Ten seconds. Count now.” Then she gives me a quick, short nod. She whispers in Sunny’s ear, then looks back at me.
Fast’s head is turning back, swinging the flashlight with it. He’s aiming the beam high, so I’m able to slip lower in the water and closer to the hull where he can’t see me.
Burgermeister apparently looks over, too. “Looking for your boyfriend, honey? He’ll probably float on up in a few hours. I can guarantee you he’s dead—I don’t miss.”
Alf is a moron, I think. He only grazed Oso and missed me entirely.
Counting the seconds off in my head, I slide around the rear corner of the boat to where Fast had been standing. Nine. Eight. Seven. Treading water with my feet whirling like eggbeaters, I touch the side of the rail with my fingertips. At Two I grab the rail. Then with the power of the noradrenaline shrieking in my blood, I lunge up out of the water and reach for Fast.
The fingers of one hand get a handful of shirt. The others find his belt. He cries out, “Alf!” as he drops both the gun and the flashlight. The surprise makes his legs fall out from under him. I try with all my strength to wrestle his greater mass out of the boat. But I have no leverage—my hips are on the rail and my feet are kicking in the air over the water. And Fast’s legs are entangled beneath the steering wheel as he tears at my fingers and beats at my face. Burgermeister is standing on the bow, whirling, the shotgun swinging around with him.
“Go! Go!” I yell at Kim and Sunny.
The command is unnecessary for Kim. She’s already in a dive, arcing her body over the stern to my side. I barely hear the splash. But Sunny doesn’t move. She doesn’t even flinch. As Fast and I fight, as Burgermeister leans over the side and aims the shotgun at my waist and legs from an angle that won’t hit his partner, she just sits huddled and sobbing. I shove Fast away, using his weight to propel me back into the black water, and take a huge, sucking breath.
TWENTY-NINE
THE WATER’S SURFACE over my head explodes with a thunderous crash. I look up and see an orange flash of light before everything again turns black. Swimming away from the boat in an upside-down breaststroke, I watch the flashlight’s beam probe the water. I feel a fresh rush of fear when it plays over my chest—the surface explodes with another flash—but the shotgun pellets ricochet off the water. There’s the relatively quieter crack of shots fired from Fast’s pistol. I roll, change directions, and dive deeper where the depth will diffuse the light to better hide me.
I somehow find Kim in that strange, cold world. A passing wave of pressure brushing against one of my legs alerts me to another swimmer’s presence. In the shifting glow of Fast’s flashlight, I can make out just a slender shadow and a billow of hair. I reach up, grab what appears to be an ankle, and feel a hand clasp around my wrist. I pull her to me for a moment, finding her jean-clad hips with my hands. Then I push her away in the direction of the gap. I feel a fluttering, fading caress on my chest from the force of her kicks.
I wait a while longer ten feet below the surface and hope to feel the presence of a second swimming body. I wait until my lungs scream for air and the darkness begins to leap and spark at the edges of my vision. Sunny’s not coming. She might even be dead. More shotgun blasts splash the surface not far from me, and the flashlight continues to search the water. When I can’t last any longer, I kick until I’m under the Sea Ray’s white hull. I feel my way up to the bow, my lips almost kissing the fiberglass, and take three long, quiet breaths before diving deep again and kicking off in the direction of the gap.
Kim is waiting for me there, treading water just inside the narrow walls. She’s breathing loudly, loud enough for me to fear that the men in the boat will hear her over the low rumble of the idling engine. But it sounds as if they are too busy arguing now to notice us just fifty feet away. I am almost sorry they’ve stopped shooting—I’d allowed myself to hope that a ricochet would catch one of them in the chest. The beam of the flashlight dances madly off the canyon’s walls but never comes to rest on the skinny fissure.
“Where’s Sunny?” she whispers.
“She didn’t jump.” I’m breathing too fast and too loud myself.
I edge back around the corner of rock and look in the direction of the voices. The flashlight beam cuts over the two other boats—my rental and the Sea Ray. Both of them are sinking tail-end first. I can hear the gurgling water through the shattered hulls. T
he weight of their rear-mounted engines is dragging them down. When the light flashes across the stern of Fast’s boat, for just a moment Sunny is illuminated on the rear bench seat. She is still hunched there, holding herself and staring at the deck.
“I’m sorry, Kim. There’s nothing we can do. She didn’t jump,” I say when I’m safely back inside the gap. “Come on.”
I swim up into the narrow throat of rock. Kim follows close behind me. My snapping feet graze her chest with each kick as we move away from the engine noise, the gurgling, and the raised voices. My hands touch the sheer sandstone walls on each side.
Behind us there is another shotgun blast.
I don’t feel Kim with my feet, so I stop and turn. I hear her say too loud, “Sunny!”
Grabbing her shoulder to prevent her from swimming back out into the cove, I whisper, “She’s okay. They’re just finishing off the boats.”
“No—”
“They can’t shoot her, Kim. Not yet. They need her to find the cave.”
She struggles against my grip for a moment until her mind digests my words. They’ll need her alive to find the tiny, hidden hole in the cliff wall that Sunny had described. Then Kim begins swimming behind me once again. After a few strokes the engine roars louder. Because of the echoes off the walls, it sounds like a hundred boats are racing their motors. My fingers brush sand. Solid ground.
I hurriedly splash up to where I’d left Oso on the powdery sand. The beast is still there, lying on one side and panting heavily. A deep growl is steady from his chest. I suspect he’s in shock. When I stroke his muzzle he takes my hand in his jaws for a moment. He squeezes it gently, letting me know he’s in pain.
The engine noise gets quieter, fading in the distance. But I can still feel its pulsing vibration reverberating off the canyon walls. I kneel beside my dog and feel his haunches for wounds while Kim splashes out of the water.
Point of Law Page 23