Will slumped down to one knee, then the second, his eyes wide, fingers slick with blood and flailing at the knife handle Merritt was firmly holding in place. His breaths sounded like a bike tire going flat.
“Shh,” Merritt whispered. “Don’t fight it. Cough.”
And Will did.
A rattling ugly thing with legs that scurried off with an echo deep into the trees.
Merritt carefully eased Will down, face first in the mud, and rubbed his back. “Shh. It’s going to be okay. You don’t have to watch a word you say where you’re going. You want to call the Horned Red Guy boss, I’m sure he won’t object.”
Will shuddered a final time. Merritt turned him over, planting a knee against Will’s gut for purchase, and wiggled the knife from his chest. He wiped the blade on Will’s shorts and stood and looked off in the distance.
“Don’t trust anyone on the island anymore,” he muttered, and started walking.
✽ ✽ ✽
“You ever have an occasion,” Shepherd asked, “to hear your voice on a recording?”
He stood with Aiden on the side of some dusty country road, the getaway truck idling not more than ten feet up ahead. A maritime forest crowded with live oak, loblolly pine, and shrub thicket—black needle rush and cordgrass standing just about waist high—grown out to the edge of the road. Same crop of forest Aiden and Lemon had approached in the johnboat they’d stolen from the island. And just as Aiden thought, during the light of day it looked burned out and desolate. Held none of the promise from the other night.
“It’s a curious thing,” Shepherd went on, as if Aiden had responded to his question. “You’ll notice that your voice sounds completely different on a recording than it does when you hear yourself talking aloud.”
Aiden managed a nod.
“Truth is,” Shepherd explained, “when you hear your recorded voice, you’re hearing it as it sounds to everyone else. The reason it sounds so different is because when you hear yourself talking aloud it’s conducted to your ears by the air surrounding you. That and you’re hearing it once it’s traveled through all the parts of your ear.”
“There’s a point to this?”
Shepherd smiled. “A wise man hears one word and understands two.”
Aiden waited him out.
Shepherd said, “You don’t like what’s happened at the island. You don’t like the idea of the island itself.”
“It’s an ugly place,” Aiden replied.
Shepherd nodded. “I hope you’ll recognize that’s a matter of perspective. For me, any mention of the island evokes something harmonious in my spirit. For you, it’s discordant.”
Aiden let out a short breath. “You asked me to step out here with you because…?”
“I’m hoping you’ll appreciate your freedom and never mention word of the island to anyone.”
“You’re going back?”
“I have to,” Shepherd told him. “There’s more work to be done.”
“And you’re up for it again? That’s a change of tune from yesterday.”
“My perspective shifted once again after…” The old man cleared his throat. “To give up on the island after all that’s happened would be…I don’t even know the word. An abomination?”
Lemon’s death had changed everything. For Shepherd and Aiden both.
Aiden said, “Lemon went through James Merritt’s tent and came across a number. When she mentioned the number to Merritt it stopped him cold.” He smiled. “She couldn’t wait to get off the island and call it. I’m going to make sure I do that for her.”
“You remember the digits?”
Aiden recited the numbers, and noticing the look on the old man’s face, asked, “You know it?”
“May of last year,” Shepherd said, speaking slowly, “the Pentagon issued a report estimating 26,000 troops had been assaulted in 2011, an increase of nearly forty percent since 2009. Everything from groping to rape. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called sexual assault in the military a crisis. It took almost a year of sifting and stirring, but in the end the Army suspended over fifty soldiers, forgoing reassignment for full discharge in a few cases. The worst offenders.”
It took Aiden just a moment to piece together what the old man was telling him. “Dmitri and his men?”
Shepherd nodded. “James had some kind of relationship with a woman who works for the government. She fed him the names and contact information of those who were fully discharged. The compound over here on the mainland was just supposed to be to protect our interests on the island. They could live on my farm and keep their eyes on the shore. Make sure no one untoward made a move to cross the sound. Somehow James convinced Dmitri to make it something more.”
“Your farm?”
Shepherd smiled sadly. “I have great means, Aiden. Unfortunately, they’ve been exploited in ways I never intended.”
“Great means?”
“Started investing back in the late 70’s—Eaton Vance, Kansas City Southern, Walmart. Warren Buffet’s outfit. Some of the best-performing stocks over the last twenty-five years. I was never opposed to reinvesting my dividend disbursements. Which led to over thirty percent annualized returns.”
“So why would Dmitri go against you?”
Shepherd smiled sadly. “James has access to the money, as well, I’m afraid.”
“Why would you let him?”
“I trusted him,” the old man said.
“Why?”
“I just did.”
Aiden absorbed that and then looked deep into Shepherd’s eyes. “I’m going to ask something of you that changes everything.”
He could tell that Shepherd knew exactly what he would ask. The old man looked none too pleased about it, either.
✽ ✽ ✽
Behind Shepherd’s house, in the slight backyard enclosed inside of an eight foot bamboo fence, Merritt could see Deborah’s boy, Noah, stretching the elastic strip between the prongs of a slingshot; testing exactly how far it could expand before coiling back at him like the angry hissing head of a snake. He didn’t have a rock in hand, and didn’t seem phased by that. As Merritt circled around the house unnoticed and slid in through the front door he could hear the little boy giggling.
Miss Amelia was bundled under blankets, snoring softly. Merritt moved to her quickly and reached down, closing off her nostrils with his left hand, sealing her mouth with his right. She was too weak to put up much of a struggle. A faint little wiggle, a quiet line of tears silvering her cheekbones, a feeble last gasp that tickled his palm.
He continued holding his hands over her nose and mouth even after she went still. Looked down at her and shook his head and sighed. After some time, he pulled the blankets up so they covered her face. Then he sighed once more and moved to the back door, hesitating a moment before opening it wide.
Noah looked up and, clearly startled, released the elastic strip of his slingshot. It snapped back against his fingers. But he didn’t flinch or in any way show signs that it had stung him.
Merritt somehow managed a smile, found his voice, and said, “Care if I join in the fun, little man?”
✽ ✽ ✽
“Is this an effort to reconfigure your Weltanschauung?”
“I could better answer,” Aiden said, “if I knew what a Weltanschauung is.”
“It’s German,” Shepherd explained, shaking his head as if it should be part of everyone’s lexicon. “Means your world-view.”
“In that case,” Aiden replied, “no.”
“That was a quick answer. You’re certain?”
“Merritt has brought nothing but heartache to my doorstep. I want to make sure he pays for it.”
“With his life,” the old man said.
Aiden didn’t respond.
Shepherd sighed. “I appreciate your anger, your passion. I have plenty of my own. But I can’t let you go back to the island with me. And I’ll ask again that you never utter a word of it to anyone.”
; “Lemon told me Merritt guards the beach. Is there another approach?”
“It would be irresponsible of me to take you back there.”
“And irresponsible of me to never mention the place to anyone if you don’t.”
Shepherd shook his head. “What you’re suggesting is something from a Pete Dexter novel. Wild Bill Hickok and Charlie Utter. Saloons soaking in whiskey and besotted second-floor girls with busts like Jayne Mansfield. But you’re forgetting it ends with a quick draw in the street.”
“Actually that’s the part I’m most focused on.”
“James Merritt is a trained soldier.”
“Good thing you’re going to figure out a way for me to catch him by surprise with”—Aiden reached forward and caressed the SIG 716 Shepherd was carrying, taken off one of the guards back at the farm—“one of these bad boys.” Several more in the idling truck.
“Do you even know how to shoot one?”
“Figure if I aim for Merritt’s feet I’ll hit him square in the head.”
Shepherd blew out a breath. “You’ve put me in an impossible position, Aiden.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t hold you responsible if Merritt takes me out.”
“I’m just as worried you’ll get to him first. I don’t like that death seems to be dogging my trail. Israel and Montae will haunt my dreams.”
“I didn’t get the impression it was the first time you’ve ordered someone dead, Shepherd.”
“That kind of thing blackens a man’s soul.”
“Black is beautiful,” Aiden said, smiling.
Shepherd said, “Not even Merritt deserves to be shot in the back like a ten-point buck.”
“You’d go on protecting him? You do realize your wife is dead because of him?”
“A lot of things conspired toward that outcome,” Shepherd said.
Aiden narrowed his eyes to slits. “Take me, or the Marine Corps will be storming the island before nightfall.”
Shepherd wordlessly watched him for a long time. Then, nodding at the idling truck: “Let them know they can go on without you.”
Aiden ran over and had a word with the nameless men sitting inside. One of the SIG 716s was passed down to him through the side window. He hefted the rifle and nodded, then banged the side of the truck with his open palm, the window rolling up and the truck rolling off down the lonely road.
When he turned back, Shepherd was already clomping through the forest.
Aiden rushed to catch up.
✽ ✽ ✽
Merritt heard Pleasant before he saw him, grunting like old machinery, sandpaper breaths exploding from deep in his chest, the quiet man muttering a succession of numerals—one, two, three, four…twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two…forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty. He wore his sweat like a shirt, dirty long basketball shorts, sneakers but no socks; the hard muscles rippled beneath his skin like the first domino tipping over the second, then third, fourth, and...
“Bicycle crunches,” Merritt called as he moved into the clearing. The maple handle of his knife warm in his hand. Wiped clean but in his mind still sopping with Will’s blood. Plus, there was Miss Amelia still wiggling beneath his hand, breaths puffing into his palm, her wrinkled cheeks swelling like bags of microwave popcorn. Noah still looking at Merritt with those big doe eyes, a saggy slingshot in his little hands. Merritt could feel himself trembling and hoped Pleasant didn’t hear it in his voice.
Pleasant grunted and resumed the crunches. Lying on the ground, then rising up, hands clasped behind his head, pedaling his legs, right elbow reaching to touch his left knee, left elbow his right. The six-pack patterned into his stomach clenching. Merritt moved closer.
“How many push-ups you get in most days?”
Pleasant said, “Top out at five hundred,” without breaking stride or looking Merritt’s way.
“And these crunches?”
Frustration clear in Pleasant’s tone: “Double that.”
Merritt flexed his fingers around the knife. Pleasant was a man of few words so there was no pressure on Merritt to hold up a conversation as he inched ever closer.
He glanced at Pleasant’s tree stub of a neck, thick like a boxer’s or a football player’s. There are two carotid arteries on either side of the windpipe, charged with carrying blood from the heart to the brain. Suppliers, in fact, of most of the brain’s blood, the rest coming from the arteries along the spine and the back of the brain. Slicing the carotids was like cutting a puppet’s strings. Making it sag and the theater go dark.
A much better play, Merritt decided, than trying to sink his knife through muscle as tough as gristle in Pleasant’s chest. He moved within a few feet of Pleasant as the quiet man reared back for the start of another crunch.
And their eyes met.
And Pleasant’s eyes—tinged red and nicotine-yellow, as always—fell on Merritt’s T-shirt. By reflex, Merritt glanced at the shirt as well. An eruption of Will’s blood covering most of it.
Shit.
Pleasant bounded up as Merritt lunged.
They crashed into one another, a concussive explosion of force that sent them both tumbling toward the ground, Merritt gathering his feet first, Pleasant a hair’s breadth behind, and then the two bulls immediately charging one another a second time. Pleasant managed to wrap his fingers around Merritt’s knife hand, ground into the tendons of Merritt’s wrist with his thumb. Merritt could feel his fingers loosening around the handle. A disaster.
He reared back his head and butted Pleasant’s mouth, felt it go swishy, teeth uprooted from the gums, Pleasant spitting them out and taking a step back. He smiled at Merritt. An ugly smile. Swollen lips and blood dribbling down his chin like an infant’s first try at juice.
They charged each other again.
Merritt managed to cut up Pleasant’s hands—defensive wounds from the quiet man raising them to protect himself—before losing his grip on the knife, dropping it in the dirt. Pleasant’s foot came down on Merritt’s hand as he reached to pick it up. And in the next moment his enemy had the long blade.
Shit.
Merritt didn’t give his brain, or Pleasant’s, a moment to process this change of course. He charged again.
Then a searing pain flared in his side, the blade sunk in a few inches, Pleasant trying to push it in farther. Merritt brought an elbow down on the back of the quiet man’s head. Pleasant dropped to his knees, gasping. Merritt kept his eyes open but squinted and grimaced as he eased the knife from his own flesh. His side burned like fire. He prayed a full rain would come soon and wash away the pain. His sins.
Surprisingly, Pleasant didn’t put up much fight as Merritt settled behind him, cradled the top of Pleasant’s head in the crook of his elbow, and ran the knife across the entire width of Pleasant’s throat. The slit in his skin spewed what looked like sangria.
A smile cut into the throat of a man Merritt had never actually seen flash his teeth in joy.
✽ ✽ ✽
Shepherd talked without cease as they drifted across the water. Mostly about the past. Aiden nodded when he thought it appropriate, occasionally asked a question, did his best to keep his fingers still on the stock of his rifle, which was propped between his legs like a cane, the muzzle down.
“…an apartment in Belo Horizonte, which means ‘beautiful horizon’ in Portuguese. At the time it was the third-largest city in Brazil.”
After saying that, the old man quieted and looked over at Aiden with a degree of expectancy. Aiden sat up straight, piecing together what he’d caught in the one-sided conversation. Apartment. Brazil. He cleared his throat and asked, “And you lived there for how long?”
“About three years,” Shepherd replied. “The city was built in a valley and expanded up into the mountains. Rained nearly every day, felt like. Mules wandering the streets, dogs howling at night, vultures like something from a Hitchcock film. Every other business a bar of some sort. I can’t say I enjoyed living there very much.”
“But you s
tayed three years?”
Shepherd nodded, smiled. “A novel to write. Plus I met a woman.”
“What happened?”
“With the novel or the woman?”
“Both.”
The old man sighed. “Well, the novel was about the rise and fall of a mythical town in South America, told through the history of one family.”
Aiden frowned.
“I wasn’t very learned at that time,” Shepherd admitted. “I hadn’t heard of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.”
“And the woman?”
Shepherd smiled again. “Roots in Guinea-Bissau. The Fulani people. The darkest, blue-black skin I’d ever seen—a drop of it would’ve overwhelmed a glass of milk. She smelled like raw vegetables dug out of the earth. A little space between her front teeth. Eyes that shone like the surface of this water. The healthiest breasts I’d ever seen. Nipples like small stones. A proud round buttocks. It would be an understatement to say I was enchanted by her.”
“But…?”
“I have no regrets,” Shepherd said, shaking his head and coming out of that long-ago memory. “My time with Anuli gave me the greatest of gifts.”
At that the old man smiled, and Aiden saw something in Shepherd’s eyes that he, Aiden, wished to further explore. But Shepherd used the support of his rifle to stand and pointed at a long strip in the water just up ahead, and said, “The island.”
✽ ✽ ✽
Merritt slumped against a tree, the fiery pain in his side igniting beads of sweat on his crinkled forehead. Strain etched into his face as he gingerly lifted his left arm and managed to squirm the T-shirt he was wearing over his head, snaring it with his teeth, gnashing it into three shreds he would tie together for a tourniquet, breathing heavy from exertion and then gradually settling into a much smoother respiration, fumbling then to knot the ribbons of shredded T-shirt together into one long infinity loop, belting this strip around his waist and tightening the ends until it bit into his skin, maneuvering this belt upward a few inches to apply steady pressure to his wound, hot searing pain shooting through him with the movement, but much of the throbbing in his side eased by the knotted rag, and bolstered by that, letting out the breath he’d been holding for the past minute, then another to clear his head, blinking through the stinging tears in his eyes, and looking out at the island, his island, and deciding that he couldn’t give up regardless of the pain, pushing up with his feet, back scraping against the supportive tree as he rose to his feet. Wobbly.
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