Envy the Night

by Michael Koryta

  The rain was driving hard now, blowing into their faces and speckling the surface of the lake. Water ran down Frank’s neck and under his shirt, dripped into his eyes. After they were around the sandbar, into the middle of the lake, AJ leaned over the side of the boat and there was a flash of silver from his knife and then the anchor line parted and slipped overboard and Atkins’s body drifted away. His white face was turned up as the anchor tugged it slowly beneath the lake, a ghostly sinking shadow. It was probably twenty-five or thirty feet deep out here. He might surface soon, he might not. If the body stayed wrapped in the anchor line and tangled in any of the stumps that lined the bottom, Agent Atkins might be a resident of the Willow Flowage for a long time.

  “Go on!” AJ yelled, and Frank increased the speed, hardly aware that he’d slowed to watch the body.

  Devin wanted AJ to have hostages, had made that clear before he’d sent them off without him. Hostages gave AJ a bargaining chip for use with Ezra, leverage to force the situation into his favor. One thing was certain, though: AJ had never had a hostage like Frank Temple III.

  Frank held tight to that idea as he squinted against the wind and the spray, pushing the boat ahead fast and hard. All those lessons his father had offered, those violent skills that he’d provided and that Frank had spent seven years trying to suppress, they were about to have a purpose. These assholes might have known Frank’s father, but they didn’t know him well enough. Contract killer or not, Frank Temple II was at heart a teacher—and his son had excelled at the lessons.

  There wasn’t a real road within two miles of where Ezra sat. A couple of trails led up to the Nekoosa Kennedy Fire Lane, but even if Ezra got them out of the boat and through the woods to the fire lane, what would he have accomplished? They’d still be a long, long walk from safety, with the boat marking their entrance point into the woods. Find the boat, and it wouldn’t be hard to understand where they were headed if you had a map. He had a feeling these boys would have a map.

  “We’re just going to sit here?” Vaughn said. “We left the cabin to come up here and sit in a boat? If they don’t kill us, the lightning will!”

  The lightning was a concern, although Ezra didn’t admit it, or even bother to respond to Vaughn at all. The rain was falling now, and the dark thunderheads were on top of them. They needed to get out of the boat and on land for the duration of the storm if nothing else, even though that wasn’t what he wanted. Not for the first time since they’d left, he wondered if he’d made a mistake by coming north. Frank could have made that call from Tomahawk, more than thirty minutes away. With time like that, they could have gotten to Ezra’s truck.

  It was a risk he couldn’t have chanced, though. You planned for the worst-case scenario, and the worst-case scenario put these bastards close and coming closer. Circumstance like that, you had to run away from them, not into them. So he’d run, taken the boat into the deepest reaches of Langley Bay, one of the most secluded spots on the lake, with the only approach coming from the water. That meant going back required crossing a hell of a lot of water, too. He turned and looked at the motor on the stern. Stupid little outboard, nine-point-nine horse. It would take them five times as long to get across the lake with it as Ezra’s boat, with the two-twenty-five knocking away.

  “If they’re out here to find us, they’ll search the whole lake,” Renee said. She was sitting in the middle seat of the little aluminum boat, and it rocked as she leaned toward him. She was wearing one of the ponchos Ezra kept in the boat, but there was rain on her neck, sliding slowly down to her collarbone. “They won’t get discouraged and give up.”

  He understood that, didn’t need it told to him. Truth was, Ezra had some doubts now, and he wasn’t used to doubts. There was a time when something like this, combat preparations and a retreat into the woods, felt as natural to him as a trip to the movies, simple and almost fun. Hell, back then it felt more natural than a trip to the movies, but that time was long ago. Today, shaken out of years of a peaceful existence, maybe he’d slipped. Maybe he’d made a mistake. What the hell were they accomplishing, really, sitting out here in a boat with no idea what was happening on land? Even if his worst suspicions were accurate, then the real concerns were Frank and Nora. These two were at least temporarily safe. The others might not be.

  “We can’t just sit here,” Vaughn said again, and his voice made Ezra prickle, filled him with an urge to smack the gray-haired son of a bitch onto the floor of the boat. The hell they couldn’t just sit here. Ezra had sat in worse places than this. Spent nine hours—nine hours—on his face in a mud hole filled with water that smelled like piss, trying not to breathe while an entire battalion of Vietcong milled around the jungle not thirty yards from him. How well would Vaughn have handled that?

  Ezra’s stomach was clenched, his mind unsettled in a way it never had been before in a situation like this. It wasn’t fear that had him shaken up; no, it was something even more disturbing than that—uncertainty. It was a good way to get yourself, and others, killed. He needed his old mind back, the old instincts, the old moves. Everything he needed now had that word in front of it: old. He’d spent decades trying to become someone different than he was, and now he was afraid that he’d succeeded at the task.

  31

  __________

  The island showed itself as a dark silhouette against the gray sky, each tree taking on a gradual shape as they neared from the south. Frank was tempted to keep running, head straight into the shore. That’d change some things up, for sure. All four of them in the water, it’d be a matter of who surfaced fastest and who held on to their guns. Since he didn’t have any of the guns, though, probably wasn’t the wisest choice.

  “This is it?” AJ was leaning down to make his words heard over the wind, his face close to Frank’s, the gun within reaching distance. Frank looked at it and wondered if he could get his hands on it, whether he could move fast enough. He thought he probably could, but then there was the one they called King to worry about, and Nora directly behind him, in line to accept any bullet that passed through his body.

  “Well?” AJ pressed closer, raised the gun a few inches. “Is it?”

  Frank nodded, throttled down, the island maybe fifty yards away now, the cabin visible between the trees.

  “All right,” AJ said, and his voice was different now, softer and measured. “All right. Bring it in slow, kid. Everybody look happy. We’re all friends, remember.”

  He had the gun pressed into Frank’s chest.

  Thunder hammered through the sky again, and the darkness was such that the trees across the bay seemed to disappear into a night sky. It couldn’t be later than one in the afternoon.

  Frank was staring up at the house and the trees closest to it, trying to imagine where Ezra was. He’d be watching them approach, Frank was certain of that. The motor was loud, even over the thunder and wind, and Ezra wouldn’t ignore it. So where was he? Frank couldn’t see him anywhere in the trees, but they were dark and whipped by the wind, branches tossing. The beach was close now, twenty feet ahead, and Frank had the motor throttled all the way down.

  “Take us in,” AJ said.

  “All the way?”

  “Yes.”

  Frank gave the throttle a quick hit, goosing the motor enough to send them toward shore with a hard push, and then cut the engine, had the blades off by the time the boat scraped into the gravelly bank.

  “Get her out,” AJ said, speaking to King. “Get out her out fast and keep that gun in her back. Come on!”

  King rose awkwardly, a big man with land legs, then pulled Nora up, his gun in her back as instructed. He stepped out and got one foot down in the water, almost fell clearing the other one. Nora was submerged nearly up to her knees.

  “Move,” AJ said, giving Frank’s stomach an encouraging twist with the gun barrel. “Out and into the trees.”

  Frank went up to the front of the boat, passing AJ to do so, that familiar Smith & Wesson just inches from his hand f
or a second. He cleared the front of the boat with a jump, got almost out of the water, soaking only his shoes before joining King and Nora on the beach. Then AJ was out, and everyone was looking at him and waiting for instructions except for Frank, who kept his eyes on the trees by the cabin. Ezra was in there somewhere. Had to be. Why not shoot? Surely he saw the guns.

  Take them, Ezra, he thought. Damn it, take them!

  No shots came. No sound at all except for more thunder and the howl of the wind across the lake and AJ ordering everyone up to the house.

  Frank was shoved into the lead, and he climbed the trail with a cold fear sliding through his body, squeezing his chest. He’d put everything on Ezra, every chance any of them had left, and now Ezra was nowhere to be found. What if Frank had been wrong? What if Ezra hadn’t gotten the phone call or been alarmed by it, hadn’t heard the motor, was completely unprepared for any of this? If Ezra wasn’t ready, that left nobody but Frank for the job.

  They came up over the hill, and the cabin came into view. AJ stepped closer to Frank, wrapped one hand in his shirt to keep them together, used the other to press the gun against Frank’s kidneys.

  “That door going to be locked?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If it is, you call out for Ballard.”

  Up the steps of the porch as the rain began to fall faster, pattering through the leaves and beading on the floorboards, then to the door, Frank’s hand closing around the knob as AJ released his shirt and reached back for his second gun. Locked.

  “Call his name,” AJ said, hissing it in Frank’s ear, and Frank opened his mouth and a laugh came out instead of a name.

  “The boat,” he said and laughed again, turning away from the door.

  “What?”

  “It’s gone. They’re gone.”

  How in the hell had he missed that? Staring at that island so intently as he’d brought them in, scanning the trees, double-checking every shadow, and he’d forgotten the damn boat. They were gone, all right, gone in the boat and into the storm, and that meant Ezra had understood the warning.

  “They took the boat and left,” he said. AJ shoved him aside and raised his foot and slammed it into the center of the door, tore the hasp out of the frame and burst into the dark house, calling for King to stay on the porch.

  They waited while he searched the place, found it as empty as Frank already knew it would be.

  “Where did they go?” AJ returned with a snarl, his hand so tight on his gun that the muscles and veins in his forearm stood out. All of the composure and calm were gone now, nothing but fury left behind.

  “They left in the boat,” Frank said again.

  “I know that!” AJ grabbed Frank’s throat and drove him backward, slammed him into the cabin wall and pressed the gun into his mouth, banging the muzzle through his teeth. Nora screamed, and King said something in a harsh whisper. Frank couldn’t see either of them, couldn’t see anything but AJ’s face and the gun. The metal was cold against his tongue.

  “You know where they are,” AJ said, the words slow and soft. “You know, and don’t lie again, do not lie again. You got one chance, and you tell it right this time. Did they go to the police?”

  Frank shook his head ever so slightly, not wanting to tamper with that gun.

  “He doesn’t know!” Nora shouted from somewhere behind AJ. “They were here when we left!”

  “Shut up.” AJ’s eyes never left Frank’s. “He knows, and he’s got one chance to tell me.”

  The voice was back then, Frank’s father’s voice, whispering again.

  Trust Ezra. You already did once, and that was a bigger risk than this, because you weren’t sure he’d gotten the warning. Now you know he did. He’s ready for them, son.

  “He doesn’t know,” Nora said again, her voice tight with tears.

  But you do know. Have a general idea, at least, because you know what I would have done. You learned from me. Don’t want to remember it now, but you learned from me, listened to all the old stories and remember every damn one and who did I learn from? Ezra.

  AJ pulled the gun back slowly, the spit-covered barrel sliding out of Frank’s mouth.

  “Where are they?” he said.

  “On the lake.”

  AJ’s head canted to the right, into a shadow. “Where on the lake?”

  Frank swallowed, worked his tongue around his mouth, still tasting the metal of the gun. The last taste his father had ever had in this life.

  “The north end. That’s as much as I can tell you. They were here when we left. They’re gone now, and they didn’t tell me where they were going. He knew you were coming, somehow.”

  AJ’s anger seemed barely tempered by a need to believe Frank.

  “Then why would they still be on the lake?”

  Frank looked past AJ’s shoulder, saw Nora watching him.

  “He wasn’t sure how much time he had before you got here. Couldn’t even know for sure that Nora and I had ever gotten away from my cabin. And since he wasn’t sure, he couldn’t risk going south to get back to the boat ramp or to the cabin. Too much of a chance he’d run straight into you. So he’d go north.”

  “What’s north?”

  “Nothing,” Frank said. “Nothing but water and woods.”

  Nine times Grady had called; nine times Atkins had failed to answer. What in the hell was going on?

  He’d driven past Wausau and into a rainstorm, cruise control set at ninety now and still nobody stopping him. All he could hope for at this point, as Tomahawk neared and his wipers slapped back and forth at the highest speed setting, was that Atkins couldn’t take his calls because he was too busy with Frank. Interviewing him in some safe room in a building far away from Vaughn Duncan and Devin Matteson, maybe. Or maybe it was already done; maybe Matteson and Duncan were both in handcuffs, and Atkins was preparing for the mountain of paperwork that lay ahead.

  Maybe a lot of things. As many optimistic options as Grady could produce, he couldn’t believe any of them. Not today. Because it was a karmic world, Grady believed that in his heart, and he’d spent too many days and too many years telling himself that he could always make up for his lie, that there would always be time, somewhere down the road, to sit down with Frank Temple and set him straight, give him the truth and apologize and explain why he’d done it, explain that they’d wanted so badly to take Devin down that a little misdirection had seemed so, so insignificant.

  The gambit hadn’t paid off, though, and so Grady kept that damn watch on Frank Temple out of a little fondness and a lot of guilt and reminded himself often of a personal pact that one day, if it ever seemed necessary, he would tell the kid that it hadn’t been Devin who gave up his father.

  Grady had let seven years roll by, twenty-five hundred days, and had never said a word. Because it hadn’t mattered, not anymore—Frank had swallowed the lie, but it hadn’t hurt him, and now, after all this time, there was no way that it could.

  Wrong. It was going to hurt him now. Frank and who knew how many others. And all Grady could do was streak up the interstate through the rain, destined to be too late.

  As they had so many times in the past, Ezra’s ears warned of disaster before his eyes. For a moment he questioned it over the noise of the storm, but then the wind abated for just a moment, as if the lake were going to give him one break today, and that was enough to confirm his suspicions: There was a boat on the water.

  He could hear the engine faintly, this one riding a lower and stronger pitch than the little outboard under his hand would create. It was a familiar sound, the growl of a Merc two-twenty-five pounding hard, the rhythm of his daily life in the summers.

  “What?” Renee said, seeing his face.

  “There’s a boat coming.”

  “Could be anybody,” Vaughn said. “Let’s go, man. Faster we get back to the car, faster we’re out of here.”

  The fear was returning to his voice now, that jerky panic that he’d talked with earlier in the
day.

  “No.” Ezra shook his head. It could be Frank, alone, but something told him it wasn’t, told him that the game was in play now.

  “You don’t even know it’s them. I can’t see any boat—”

  “It’s them,” Ezra said. “I know the sound of my own boat.”

  He looked down at the throttle under his hand, knowing that it would dictate what happened next as much as anything would. His boat ate up the water faster than anything else on this lake. Trying to outrun them with the little nine-point-nine would be like a car chase between a Lamborghini and a dump truck.

  “It could be that kid and the girl,” Vaughn said. “Just them.”

  “Could be,” Ezra said, even though he knew it wasn’t. “If it is, we’ll know soon. Right now, we got to get ready.”

  The best scenario would be to ditch the boat and take to the trees and get ready to do some shooting. If he were in his own boat, this bullshit would be over before it got started. He still had his rifle in the boat, with a night scope that would work just fine in this weather. Take that and head into the trees and then he could make damn sure these boys would have a rude welcome. Should never have left it in the boat. Damn. It was the little things that killed you, the missed details and slips of timing, and Ezra felt those stacking up on him now, things that he wouldn’t have missed in another time and another place. He was out of practice, had been happy to be out of practice, but now it was proving to be a dangerous thing.

  When they got to the island and saw it was empty, the boat missing, they’d begin calculating the situation just as he was, and whoever came out ahead in this fight would be the one who thought it through the best, saw the moves before anybody made them. Combat was a thinking man’s game, always had been.

  So think, then. Think hard and well and think fast damn it.

  He looked back at Renee and Vaughn, saw them waiting on him with anxious faces, and nodded to himself. Step one, separate these two. It seemed like a bad idea at first blush, but that was almost a good thing, because it meant the boys in Ezra’s boat wouldn’t expect it. Generally you’d want to keep everyone together, protect one another, seek safety in numbers. The second layer of this move, and the one that probably meant the most, was that the men from Florida wanted Renee and Vaughn together, not separate. So if things played out poorly, if these men caught them, better to make it happen one at a time. That would slow things down, and when you slowed things down you had more time to come up with a countermeasure.