I glanced at Eric. It was a bad idea. A really bad one. A rookie kind of mistake to agree to something like that. But I had decided I liked Donald Cormier, and his knowledge of these people might be useful so I spoke before Eric could. “Ok, but you listen to us, no arguing or hesitating because that can get you killed. And one day, you’ll tell me about Lottie as a child.”
Don tried to hide the smile threatening to pull at his lips. “Deal.”
Chapter 18
We were back in Lake Charles, standing outside a sprawling house on River Road that belonged to a business property investor named Perry Dennison. Across the street was a private slip. The small yacht that should have been docked there was gone. “This is like the fucking alien mafia,” Eric mumbled. If Don was offended, he didn’t show it. I’m pretty sure “alien” wouldn’t be politically correct.
“Maybe we should have taken my boat,” Don offered. I looked out at the lake beyond him and shook my head. “I’m not a goddamned pirate. I don’t know how to board a moving boat. Although Eric was most likely a horticulturalist ninja in his past life.”
Eric liked his new title. Don just looked confused. Eric was going to perhaps bestow a new title on me when my phone vibrated in my pocket; it was Mark. Someone had finally contacted Lottie.
“That David guy, the all-muscle-man, called her. Wants her to meet you in Lake Charles.” I should have fucking killed him when I was in Waco.
“We all figured they’d know you were there,” Mark continued, “but you’d better wait until some others show up anyway before you do anything. They’re on their way from Houston. It shouldn’t be long now.”
I didn’t want to tell him we didn’t really have anything to do right now anyway. Instead, I asked, “Can I talk to Lottie?” The phone went silent as he handed it over, then her sweet, melodious voice, rich like honey, was on the other end. God, I couldn’t believe how much I missed her already. “Dietrich … please come back soon.”
“I will. I met a friend of yours.”
She only had to think about it for a second. “Don?”
“Yeah, probably would’ve been helpful to know about him before we came down here, but you’re so damn adorable, I’ll forgive you.”
Lottie snickered and I could picture the smile she was giving me now. If I were there with her, I’d be getting laid soon. “Hm, sorry the whole shock of having my best friend kidnapped was messing with my head.”
She wanted to ask about her, but she already knew I would have nothing to tell her. So I told her, “I love you. And I will be back soon.” We disconnected just as a boat appeared on the horizon.
“Maybe we should get outta here,” Don suggested.
Eric and I watched the boat. It was getting closer. If it belonged to Perry, they were most likely coming back for us. “Well,” I thought aloud, “it’s a trap, but it’d get us on board without playing pirates.”
Eric joined in. “And it’s an easy way to get in touch with Perry and hopefully McGrath.”
“And with any luck, Lydia’s on board.”
“They’ll search us. If David lays a hand on me, I’ll snap.”
I thought about that. “You don’t think David’s more handsome than me?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Don hadn’t said a word. He had just watched us with a kind of surprised curiosity and apprehension. He probably still thought we were cops. We could hear the motor of the boat now; we needed to make a decision. “Let’s meet them,” I proposed. “We don’t have to board. No one will do anything stupid while we’re on the side of the street in the middle of the day.”
Eric agreed. Don looked uncomfortable but kept his word to keep his mouth shut and listen to us. We waited in silence as the small yacht pulled into its slip and docked. River Road wasn’t a very busy road. Only a few cars passed us and no one looked twice at the strange group of men, one of whom looked suspiciously like Paul Bunyan reincarnated in the 1960s, standing in front of a gated house like a group of would-be burglars. So much for community watch here. As the motor cut off, the only sounds around us were the waves slapping against the side of the iridescent white boat and the occasional mosquito buzzing past my ear. Whoever was on board was taking his time. It was part of his game.
Finally, a door opened and an unfamiliar man stepped out on deck. He was probably in his late 50s, average build and height with nothing remarkable about his features at all. He was one of those people that would have blended completely into a crowd, capable of disappearing entirely. A few more tense seconds passed and the door opened again. David joined him on deck, looking cheerful as ever. I really hated that fucker. Perry, at least I was assuming it was Perry, was staring at Don. “What are you doing here?” he asked him, his voice raised to carry across the street but otherwise as colorless and bland as his features. Don was livid. He made his first mistake then and acted on his own; he crossed the street. Eric and I could do nothing except follow him.
“Where is she, Perry?” Don asked, his teeth gritted. Perry just kept staring at him. David wouldn’t take his eyes off of me. Here’s one of the worst things about having an eidetic memory: it’s impossible to forget anything. I cringed as a flashback of David masturbating in his motel bathroom replayed in my head. I would need a lobotomy to get that out of there.
“Don,” I said cautiously, “this isn’t your circus.” I wanted to remind him he needed to let Eric and me handle things, but I also wanted Perry to think he had been unwittingly dragged into this. I didn’t want anyone else’s life ruined because of these assholes. Whether it worked or not, at least I got Perry’s attention.
“Dietrich,” he looked me over in a way I didn’t like. It was a weird mixture of loathing and … attraction. It made my stomach turn, not in a because-I-can’t-cry kind of way, but in an I’m-actually-nauseated-by-you kind of way. I was really hoping Eric hadn’t noticed, but I knew better. Eric, like me, noticed everything.
“Should we wait for Lottie?” he asked. By the way he asked me, he already knew she wasn’t coming.
“Sure,” I answered, “assuming Lydia’s still alive, otherwise we might as well all go home.”
Perry almost smiled at me. I preferred his usual vapid expression. Now that both men on the boat were staring at me, I felt like I was an onion skin under a microscope; why couldn’t Eric say anything? “So we’re at a stand-off, then,” Perry responded.
This was news? “Is it just a body you want? Fine, take mine,” Eric suddenly said. Goddamn it. I had wanted him to speak, but what the hell did he think he was doing? This apparently caught Perry and David by surprise too because they finally looked away from me and turned to Eric.
“Why?” Perry asked. He was still startled. So was I, actually.
“Why not? I think she deserves to live, and I’ll take my chances with you assholes.”
I really wanted him to shut up now. Perry looked Eric over, but in a different way than he had examined me; he had his business investor air about him, weighing the value of one transaction against another. It made my skin crawl. “And why should I trust you?” Perry finally asked. Greed was winning out over logic.
“Why the hell should I trust you?” Eric shot back. “Leave Lydia with Don and Dietrich. I’ll come with you. What else could you want?”
“No,” I said automatically. I didn’t know what was going on in Eric’s head, but I was convinced he had lost his fucking mind without David ever having to lay a hand on him. If he was just trying to stall them until our coworkers arrived from Houston, then there were better ways than bartering with his body.
But Perry was a businessman. “Don comes too. As collateral. We’ll let him go afterward. You have my word; at his age, he wouldn’t be worth much anyway.”
I could tell Eric was about to agree. Seriously, what the fuck was he thinking? “I’ll go,” I heard myself saying. What the fuck was I thinking? Eric hadn’t planned on this. Hell, I hadn’t planned on this.
Perry was looking at
me again in that way that made my stomach turn, and I willed myself to keep my lunch down. “Too bad you didn’t make this offer. They could make a killing on you.” And he actually smiled at his own bad pun.
“You know we’re not … if you fuck with us, every single one of you will be hunted down and exterminated,” I warned.
“We assumed as much. But as you can see, most people wouldn’t deserve that,” Perry nodded toward Don. He was right. They wouldn’t. But that wouldn’t stop it from happening. “It doesn’t matter,” Perry continued, “behave, and you’ll be fine, Dietrich.”
Behave? What was I? Seven?
“Alright, enough already, where’s Lydia?” Eric asked. Why couldn’t he keep his mouth shut?
“David, go get her,” Perry instructed. “You two,” he turned his attention back to Eric and me, “will need to be searched.” I was ok with that as long as Perry wasn’t the one searching me.
“Right here on the side of the road?” I asked.
Perry just shrugged. “You’d be surprised by what people don’t notice.” For the first time, Perry had said something I agreed with. The door opened and David came out with Lydia. Aside from being tired and scared, she seemed fine. All three of us exhaled. I realized we had all been holding our breath. David handed something to Perry behind Lydia’s back – I didn’t need to see it to know it was a gun. David stepped out onto the dock and strolled toward us.
“Wait,” Eric said, and for a brief moment, I allowed myself to hope he had come to his senses, “the car keys are in my left pocket. Give them to Don. Take her wherever you want, just make sure it’s somewhere they won’t think to look for you. Dietrich will know how to find you.”
I think right then I really did hate him.
Don just agreed, his eyes glued to Lydia, relief etched profoundly throughout his posture. David finished with Eric and brought the weapons he had taken off of him over to the boat then came back toward me. I half expected him to take a swing at me, both out of personal animosity and having a strong suspicion I had been the one to kill Jackson but he only glared at me, then frisked me too. At least he was quick and efficient. I doubt Perry would have been. Actually, by the way Perry was watching us, I know he wouldn’t have been.
“Alright, boys,” there it was again; even Perry couldn’t resist calling us boys. Eric still didn’t seem to mind. “One at a time, then.” Eric went first and stood on the starboard side of the yacht, opposite from Perry and Lydia. I followed and stood by him.
“Wrists,” Perry instructed, and David, for once, looked happy. He produced a fistful of zip ties, not unlike the ones I had used on Jackson, to bound our wrists behind our backs. At least he didn’t pull them tightly enough to break the skin. If I hadn’t had so much adrenaline coursing through my body, I would have noticed it still hurt though. “Take them below deck.”
“Wait, let me stay out here until I see Don and Lydia drive off,” I suggested. It only seemed fair, and to my surprise, considering we were already disarmed and tied up, Perry agreed. I probably wouldn’t have. I met Lydia’s eyes for the first time. She was trying so hard to be brave and only the tears and her trembling lip betrayed her. She wouldn’t look at Eric. “It’ll be ok, Lydia,” I told her. Apparently, I could lie to people I just really liked. There were probably a hundred things she wanted to say, especially to Eric, but she wouldn’t tarnish his sacrifice for her by voicing them. I could have traveled from one end of the universe to the other and not found a spirit as gentle and good as hers.
Eric was already below deck when Don and Lydia drove off, and Perry let me watch them until they disappeared around a bend in River Road. “Ok, Dietrich, I’m sure you have friends who will be trying to join us soon. Let’s go.” The motor of the yacht had already started. There was nothing I could do except let him take me below.
Chapter 19
I wasn’t overly surprised to find myself sitting across from Judge Willis McGrath. I was still trying to think of a way out of this for Eric but we were heading back out onto the lake now, and Eric and I were restrained and disarmed. Struggling against zip ties wasn’t a good idea – the plastic would only dig into your flesh. So Eric and I both sat as still as we could, occasionally being jostled by a wave from a passing boat. I glanced down at his wrists and noticed a thin red line where he was starting to bleed. Eric had been right. We were fucked. I figured I couldn’t make this any worse.
“So Willis,” I asked, “we’ve apparently got some time to kill.” I bit my lip. Maybe I could make it worse. Eric just snorted. “How did Lottie do what she did? The mechanics of it, how’d she do it?”
Willis raised an eyebrow at me and I fully expected him to play dumb again, to tell me the same bullshit we had heard in her apartment in Baton Rouge. But Willis McGrath was full of surprises. He told me the truth. “She didn’t do anything. We can’t control something like this.”
What the hell? I swallowed. I really wanted some water. I would have even settled for a Budweiser. “Then how did this happen?” my voice sounded small. I hoped it only sounded that way in my head. Jesus, how pathetic.
Willis was unconcerned, bored almost. “We don’t know. Some of you people are like that. The first few times it happened, we assumed it was our doing, and tried to reuse the bodies, with the same effect. There’s nothing to be done for it, unfortunately. Such a waste of an otherwise perfectly good body too.”
Holy shit. “So Lottie … my Lottie … I mean, my fiancée, it was her brain …?” I was stuttering. Willis was still bored by me; Perry was still leering at me. And I felt incredibly seasick.
“I suppose there may be something different about her brain. It’s been a long time since this has happened; we wanted to do an autopsy on Lottie, but I suppose, given your affiliation, we will just have to trust to keep each other’s secrets.” How could this asshole sit there and talk about cutting apart Lottie so calmly, casually, like she was a frog in a high school biology class?
“And who the hell did you think Lydia was going to tell?” Eric snapped.
Willis slightly raised a shoulder. In some ways, he reminded me of my mother. We didn’t even deserve a full physical response from him. “Lottie’s case is unusual for a number of reasons, not the least of which she sought out her past and you went along with it,” he was still directing this to me. Eric was already dead to him. “This is the kind of thing that would drive most people crazy. In the past, it often did. Even if we didn’t kill them, they typically didn’t live very long. As you can imagine, if people at home knew this was a possibility, well, would you pay to come here?”
“It’s my understanding you’re already doing quite a bit of lying.”
“It’s sales, Dietrich. Besides, losing one’s mind is far worse than losing one’s life.” Judge Willis McGrath was the kind of pretentious asshole who would use words like “one” instead of “you.” Kind of like using “whom” instead of “who.”
But I thought about what he’d said; Lottie had insisted she never intended to run into me but she had also given in so easily, had told me far more than she should have that day in Houston. And she also knew she had given me enough hints to find her if I’d wanted to. She may not have expected to see me in the coffeehouse that day, but once I caught up to her, she had gambled on me, on my love for her, on our love for each other. Those two years had been a Hell for her, too, but Lottie hadn’t gone crazy. Some part of her had clung to the hope that one day, somehow, we would be together again.
When I was seventeen years old, I met the most incredible girl on the planet at a college party I hadn’t wanted to go to; that night, I thought she was beautiful and smart and funny, with a sarcastic wit complemented by this unbelievably sexy smirk. As the years passed, I had often thought she was even a little weird like me, except in a much more endearing kind of way. When I was 27, two years after she was killed in a car accident and I had fallen into my own afterlife, my own personal Hell of a world deprived of her in it, I discovered ther
e always had been something unique and wonderful and extraordinary about the woman I had always known I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. It wasn’t so much that her mind had inexplicably resurrected itself; it was how deeply her faith in me ran that had allowed her to survive without losing her mind.
And I had nothing left to ask Willis McGrath. I didn’t care anymore about their world or their manipulation of people living here or even what he had tried to do; I only wanted to get home to Lottie. Preferably with Eric. But as we continued driving out farther onto the lake, I still had no solutions. Eric was going to die. Why had he done this? We could have waited. We should have waited for others to arrive. Surprised them. Negotiated with something other than another human life. Hell, surely someone knew how to be a pirate and could have boarded a moving boat had they taken off again. At this point, it probably didn’t matter what his motivations were, so I asked him, hoping he’d offer some clue, some hint that he’d had a plan all along.
“Eric, what were you thinking? Why would you do this?”
Eric looked at me, and typical Eric, with a serious, grave face, told me, “Did you know your wrists are bleeding? It looks kinda painful.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”
“You owe me a case of Budweiser, by the way.”
“Yeah, I’ll leave it on your grave. You want Bud Light?”
“Dude, I’ll be dead. I won’t give a shit about calories. Get me the full calorie crap beer.”
Even Willis, who I am certain didn’t even have a sense of humor, was watching us with a bemused expression. “I’ll bring you a good hefeweissbier too. You know, as an ‘I’m sorry you went and got yourself killed’ gesture.”
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