Peel Back the Skin

by Anthony Rivera

“Put it on the Cypress Point account,” Jack replied automatically.

  “I’m sorry, mister, we no longer run tabs here,” the owner explained, gesturing to the digital credit card reader attached to the checkout counter. “Cash, debit or credit card only.”

  Jack grunted again as he fished his platinum card out of his wallet. So much for the good old days.

  “Hey, mister, are you renting out Cypress Point?” The question came from one of the redheads.

  “No, I own Cypress Point,” he replied stiffly. “At least until I sell it.”

  The teens exchanged glances but said nothing. Jack gathered up his groceries and headed out the door without looking back. However, as he pulled away from the store, he saw the teens standing beside their dirt bikes, glowering at his Lexus. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen resentment in the eyes of the local rednecks. Mammon Creek’s existence might be tied to those who vacationed on the lake, but that didn’t mean they enjoyed catering to rich city slickers.

  “Screw these hicks,” he said to himself as he stomped on the gas, sending up a spray of dust and gravel as he left the parking lot. “Who cares what they think, anyway?”

  * * *

  The cabin smelled of dust and closed air, and appeared untouched since his last visit nearly two years ago. He strode into the kitchen, intent on putting his frozen pizza and two six-packs of beer on ice as quickly as possible. As he reached for the refrigerator door, a photograph pinned to it caught his eye.

  It was a picture of Ginnie taken before they got married. She was standing on the deck overlooking the lake, dressed in cut-offs and a crop top. She was laughing as she held aloft a plastic cup as red as her hair, toasting the good life and good times. Of course, she had to go and ruin everything. Even now he still had a hard time believing she chose Nolan over him. He yanked the photo free of the magnet and crumpled it into a ball.

  After stowing his beer in the fridge and the frozen pizza in the freezer, Jack opened up the windows and turned on the ceiling fans to get rid of the stale air. While doing so, he conducted a mental inventory of what needed to go back to Little Rock with him. He considered calling his brother and asking him if he wanted any of the furnishings, then shook his head. Dad left the place to him, so it was his call to make.

  Save for a few odds and ends, he didn’t have any real attachment to most of it. His parents had filled the place with stuff they thought was too out-of-style to stay in their main home in Maumelle but still too decent to throw away. This was a good thing because the realtor said she could move the property a lot faster if it came furnished, no matter how “retro” it looked.

  However, one thing he wanted to make sure didn’t get included in the sale were his mother’s quilts. She stitched them herself over the course of three decades, one for each bedroom, until the arthritis in her hands got too bad. They all had names like Double Wedding Ring, Hourglass, Touching Stars and crap like that. In any case, he knew they were actually worth something as folk art. His plans were to keep one and sell the rest to a collector.

  Upon checking the sixth bedroom, he found the bed stripped down to its mattress cover. A quick search, however, revealed the final quilt in the closet behind the door, draped over a child’s car-seat, the kind that also doubled as a baby carrier. He stared at it for a long moment before picking it up. Upon returning downstairs, he folded the quilt and placed it with the others, then took the baby carrier and threw it in the big green garbage bin behind the house.

  He spent the rest of the evening sorting things into keep, stay and throw-away piles while enjoying the pizza and beer he bought earlier. As he was going through the cabinets, he stumbled across a bottle of good bourbon. He recognized the label as being Ginnie’s favorite brand, at least before Nolan came along. Three boilermakers later, he was stretched out on the sofa in the living room, watching a World Series playoff game on the satellite dish. He briefly contemplated getting undressed and going to bed, or at least closing the windows, but he was too comfortable—and drunk—to bother with such niceties. He drifted off to sleep to the sound of the sports announcer calling the play-by-play.

  He wasn’t sure what, exactly, woke him up, or how long he’d been asleep, but he instantly recognized the intruders standing on either side of the sofa as the redheaded teens he’d seen earlier. As he drew in a sharp, panicked breath to shout for help, one of the two lunged forward, fist raised, and Jack returned to the darkness.

  * * *

  When he next regained consciousness all he saw was utter blackness. The smell of exhaust and gas fumes told him he was in the trunk of a car. Wherever his captors were taking him, it wasn’t on a paved road, judging by the rough ride. He groped about blindly in hopes of finding a tire tool he could use as a weapon, to no avail.

  The car came to a halt, and he heard matching thuds as the driver and passenger side doors slammed shut. As Jack listened to the approaching footsteps, his mind spun about on itself, like a dog chasing its tail, as he tried to figure a way out of his predicament. When the trunk lid popped open, he instinctively cringed, pressing his spine tight against the spare tire.

  The two youths stood shoulder to shoulder, their faces dyed crimson by the taillights. They were dressed the same as when he saw them at the store, save now they both wore matching trucker caps emblazoned with SKI GATOR LAKE. Neither grinned or smirked, but instead displayed a solemnity that suggested their motivations ran far deeper than mere thrill-seeking. For some reason, this frightened Jack even more.

  “Please, let me go,” he pleaded, holding up his hands in a desperate attempt to both assuage and fend off his kidnappers. “I’ve got money.”

  “Yeah, we know that, rich boy,” one of them sneered as the other yanked Jack out of the trunk.

  As he was frogmarched to the front of the car, he saw they were at the end of a dirt road in the middle of the woods, surrounded by impenetrable darkness. Jack turned to face his captors, who stood silhouetted against the glare of the headlights.

  “Please, I’ll give you anything you want, just name it!”

  “Mister, what we want, you can’t give us,” one of them said. “Ain’t that right?” The other one nodded his head. “So I reckon we’ll have to make do.” The one that had nodded his head opened the rear passenger seat of the car and pulled out something large and heavy.

  As the chainsaw started up, Jack gave a strangled shout of horror and fled into the woods. The night was so dark he might as well have been running with his eyes shut. The adrenalin coursing through his system helped numb the stinging slap of the unseen branches striking his face as he crashed through the underbrush. The canopy of trees overhead was so thick he couldn’t see the sky, making it impossible to get his bearings. The only thing he could be certain of was that the terrain beneath his feet was gradually sloping downward. That meant they were still on the lake, but as to exactly where, he had no clue.

  After what seemed like an eternity of blindly stumbling over exposed tree roots and colliding into tree trunks, Jack emerged from the woods to find himself standing on the shoreline. He was on the northeast side of the lake, near the cypress swamp. He sobbed in relief at the sight of the moon’s reflection on the still, black surface of the water. Although he was now totally exposed, at least he could see where he was going. He desperately scanned the shore in the hopes of spotting a flicker of light, but the only thing he saw was the faint glow on the horizon he knew to be Mammon Creek.

  His brief respite was punctuated by the approaching growl of the chainsaw. From the sound of it, they were a hundred yards away. He turned and saw twin beams of light cutting through the darkness at eye level. His stomach cinched as he realized his pursuers had LED headlamps clipped to the brims of their trucker hats.

  Jack started to run again, trying to ignore the cramps in his calf muscles and the burning in his chest. Maybe he could lose them in the swamp, possibly even double around behind them. In any case, he would rather take his chances with Old Wink. He hadn�
��t spent the last two years fighting to stay free to die at the hands of a couple of redheaded psychos with a power tool fetish.

  As he rounded the curve on the shoreline, he spotted a boathouse sitting on a floating dock. A well-beaten path led into the tree line, but he couldn’t see where it went. In any case, the cabin on the other end was no doubt empty and locked up tighter than a drum. He clambered up the wooden gangway that tethered the boathouse to the shore, praying the door was unsecured. If he was lucky, whatever boat moored inside still had gas in its tank. Hell, he’d settle for a rubber raft and a canoe paddle at this point—anything that would take him beyond the reach of his tormentors.

  His luck held as the knob turned in his sweaty hand. Once inside he slammed the door behind him and locked it. The interior of the boathouse was dark and smelled of diesel fuel, new paint and the lake. He could hear the gentle lapping of the water against the dock behind him. He leaned his head against the jamb, gulping in deep, ragged breaths. The door might not stop a couple of determined lunatics with a chainsaw, but it would at least slow them down long enough for him to make his getaway.

  Suddenly, a familiar voice spoke from the darkness.

  “Hello, Jack.”

  The overhead lights abruptly flipped on, revealing an older man dressed in forest camo and a pair of mud-spattered work boots. A green trucker’s cap with the slogan SKI GATOR LAKE was pulled down over his iron-gray hair. Jack recognized the hawk-like nose and dark, deep-set eyes. They were the same eyes that had bored a hole into his back the entire time he was in court.

  “Nice of you to drop by,” his father-in-law said. And then he shot Jack in the kneecap.

  * * *

  Everything was gray and smelled strongly of algae and lake water. As he struggled to bring his surroundings into focus, he could feel pressure against his buttocks and heels and a tight discomfort in his shoulders and wrists. He was sitting on a chair, his arms bound behind him.

  “Is he dead?” The voice belonged to one of the redheaded twins, it didn’t matter which.

  “Ain’t no one ever died from gettin’ shot in the knee cap, boy.”

  Jack’s vision abruptly cleared, revealing a twenty-foot fiberglass ski boat moored in the single bay of the boathouse’s wet dock. As the last foggy tendrils of shock fell away from his brain, an excruciating stab of agony from his shattered knee caused him to moan.

  “See? He’s alive.” A hand roughly grabbed Jack by the hair, yanking his head back, forcing him to gaze at the pair of hundred-watt bulbs dangling from the rafters. Lucas Adcock stared down into his face, as if studying a rare species of cockroach found scuttling across his kitchen floor. “You got some balls comin’ back here, boy. You should have stayed in Little Rock.”

  “I have every right to be here. I’m innocent. The jury said so. You were there.”

  “Yes, I was,” Adcock agreed as his fist smashed into Jack’s mouth. “Every damn day. And they didn’t say you were innocent, they said you were not guilty. And I was willin’ to let that stand, even though it tore me up inside.” He let go of Jack’s hair and wiped the blood and spittle from his knuckles with an old bandana. “But then you showed up again. No man should be tempted like that, after what you done.”

  “I didn’t do anything!”

  One of the redheaded boys stepped forward and brought a small ball-peen hammer down on Jack’s uninjured kneecap, cracking it like an egg. He screamed so loud, blood vessels in his throat popped.

  “Thank ye kindly, Matt,” Adcock said, favoring the boy with a smile.

  “You’re welcome, Uncle Luke.”

  “Matthew and Mark here are my brother John’s boys,” Adcock explained in the same folksy, conversational tone of voice he used to sell fishing rods and bass boats to the tourists. “I pretty much took ‘em to raise after their daddy died of cancer a couple years back. I’m not surprised you didn’t recognize ‘em at the store. You never did care about her side of the family, did you? That’s why you talked her into elopin’ instead of a church weddin’. God knows you tried to keep her from us as much as you could. She came back to us, in the end, but she was never the same after what you done. How could she be?”

  Jack coughed and spat out a mouthful of bright red blood. “What do you want from me, Lucas?”

  “I want you to confess.”

  “What good will that do you?” he asked with a humorless laugh. “They can’t try me again. But they’ll sure as fuck throw you under the jail.”

  “Son, do I look like a man who gives a rat’s ass about the law?” As Adcock leaned forward, Jack noticed for the first time how sallow the skin was around the older man’s eyes and mouth, and how his flesh seemed to hang from his face. “I got the Big C, just like my brother and Ginnie’s mama. The doctors wanted me to do chemo, but what’s the point? I ain’t got nothin’ to look forward to now—you saw to that.”

  “Don’t you put that on me, old man! I didn’t kill her!”

  “I beg to differ,” Adcock replied as he punched Jack again, this time breaking his son-in-law’s nose. “You smashed her heart into a million little pieces and took everything away from her that made her life worth livin’. You as good as poured the booze and pills down her throat. She was always fragile that way. Even as a child. But you knew that, didn’t you? That’s why your lawyer played up the fact she took antidepressants, tryin’ to make her look crazy. It didn’t matter what got said, as long as it got you off the hook. And it worked. He took the blame off you and put it on her. And it fuckin’ worked. You turned yourself into the victim and walked out of that courtroom without a care in the world. But not my Genevieve. No, not her.”

  One of the nephews kicked at the chair Jack was tied to, sending him crashing to the floor. The bullet wound in his right knee began to bleed anew.

  “Confess, Jack!”

  “I didn’t do anything!”

  “Bullshit! Because of you, my Ginnie’s dead. She couldn’t stand bein’ in a world that would let a soulless monster like you walk away scot-free. Worst of all, she still loved you, despite everything. She died lovin’ you, you piece of filth.”

  Jack tried to turn his head away as Adcock drew back his booted foot. Then everything went black again.

  * * *

  Jack awoke to the throbbing of twin outboard motors. He was lying on the bottom of a boat, his arms still bound behind him. He lifted his head and looked around, but there was something red and sticky gumming up his eyelids. He saw Lucas steering the ski boat while the nephews sat behind him. The teenagers watched Jack with bored expressions on their face, as if they were accompanying their uncle to a nursing home to visit an elderly relative.

  “This should do,” Adcock said, shutting off the motors. “Get ‘im ready, boys.”

  One of the nephews picked up a length of rope that lay coiled on the floor of the boat and made a bowline, threading the bitter end through the tow ring on the stern of the boat, while his brother busied himself with tying the other end around Jack’s waist. Once they were finished tethering him to the boat, the nephews moved as one, lifting Jack and placing him on the stern gunwale, directly between the huge Evinrudes. Jack could tell by the surrounding cypress trees that they were near the swamp, far beyond earshot of any potential witness who might have a cabin on the lake. Adcock cut the motors and got up from the captain’s chair. Both he and his nephews were wearing headlamps affixed to the brims of their caps.

  “You’re not going to get away with this, old man,” Jack snarled, squinting as the bright LED scorched his eyeballs.

  “I’m not plannin’ on it,” Ginnie’s father replied matter-of-factly. “When all this is over and done with, I’m headin’ to my place and sendin’ an email to the state troopers, lettin’ them know what I done. I’ll say I walked into your place while you was passed out drunk and took you out on the lake. Hell, that’s pretty much the truth of it, anyway. I’ll take all the blame and make sure the boys are left out of it. Then I’m gonna put a shotgun
in my mouth and pull the trigger. What difference does it make? I ain’t gonna be a good-looking corpse, no matter how I go. And then I’ll join my family, assumin’ the Good Lord will have me. And if He won’t, I’m prepared for that as well. As for you, well, this is your last chance to come clean.”

  “I didn’t kill the baby, I swear!”

  “He wasn’t just the baby. He had a name. Say it.”

  “But—”

  “Say it. Say your son’s name!”

  Jack hesitated. It had been so long since he had last spoken it out loud, the word felt alien on his tongue. “Nolan,” he whispered.

  “Why’d you do it? He was just three months old. ”

  “Because the brat wouldn’t stop crying, that’s why.” The confession spilled out like water from a broken dam. What was the point of lying now? After nearly two years of denying what happened, it was a relief not to pretend.

  “He was crying because he had an ear infection,” Adcock said in stunned disbelief. “He was in pain.”

  “I told her to take the baby with her to the drug store, but she didn’t listen,” Jack continued. The truth was freeing itself, and he was merely its conduit. He couldn’t stop himself now, even if he wanted to. “Just like she didn’t listen when I said I didn’t want kids. The baby kept screaming and screaming. I just wanted him to stop, that’s all. But he wouldn’t shut up. He just kept going on and on. So I picked him up and shook him like a fucking maraca. That shut him up. It’s not my fault. She shouldn’t have left me alone with—”

  Before he could finish his sentence, Adcock struck him in the chest with an open palm, pushing Jack backwards into the lake.

  As the water closed around him, the outboards switched back on. Despite the agony from his ruined knees, Jack frantically frog-kicked his way back to the surface, desperate to keep from being pulled into the spinning propellers. He spat out a mouthful of brackish lake water, only to have the ski boat shoot forward, dragging him along behind it. He screamed as the towline sprang tight, violently dislocating both his shoulders, the wake from the motors filling his mouth again.