by John Case
Three shots in the same second, a panicked fusillade that slapped harmlessly into the ceiling, wall, and door. Lassiter launched himself at the gun and, in the darkness, crashed into Grimaldi’s side, sending the Beretta flying. Like child psychopaths bent on murder, they scrambled through the smoke and gloom on their knees, sweeping their hands across the floor in search of the gun.
A moment later lightning showed them where it was, and seeing it, they dove, landing side by side. Lassiter’s reach was longer. But as the American’s hand closed painfully around the grip, Grimaldi slammed him in the mouth with his elbow and rolled onto Lassiter’s back. In an instant the Italian had the American’s throat in the crook of his arm and, flexing with all his strength, slowly began to crush his windpipe.
He was incredibly strong.
Lassiter resisted, and resisted, thrashing beneath Grimaldi’s weight. But it was no use. The tension began to fade from his muscles; his vision was flaring; he knew that any second the life would go out of him. So he pulled his arm back in an arc across the floor, and when the gun stopped against something hard, he fired.
Grimaldi screamed as the bullet exploded through his knee, and Lassiter rolled away, scrambling toward the wall, trying to breathe. Then the lightning blazed and Lassiter saw him as if he were on a stage, sitting on the burning floor with his knee in his hands, rocking back and forth, almost keening.
Seeing him that way, with his face contorted in so much pain, Lassiter was reminded of St. Sebastian in the famous painting by what’s-his-name.
He shot him anyway, a single shot that made a small, wet hole just above his left eye.
Then Marie called to him, and turning, he saw that the fire was only a few feet from her chair. Jesse was beside her, doing his best to untie the knots, but his fingers were too small and weak. Going to her side, Lassiter undid the knots and, skirting the fire, led them outside.
Where a smoldering bundle lay in the rain on the path below the cabin, quivering.
‘Jesse – don’t look,’ Marie said, pulling the boy close to her.
Lassiter knelt beside the priest, and winced to see that della Torre’s face was a carbonized ruin. His hair and eyelids were entirely gone, and a strange fluid leaked from the orbits of his eyes. Lassiter was certain he must be dead – until he stirred, and groaned.
‘We have to get him to a hospital,’ Marie said. ‘We can use their boat. C’mon!’
Lassiter looked at her as if she were insane. ‘We can’t do that,’ he said.
‘He’ll die!’
‘Of course he’ll die! I want him to die.’
‘Well, you can’t leave him like that. It’s freezing. He’s burned!’
Lassiter stood up. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if we take him to a hospital . . . it won’t stop there. There are a million people – they think just like he does. And when they find out you and Jesse are alive – and they will – they’ll come after you. We can’t take him to a hospital. We have to get out of here.’
Marie shook her head. ‘He’s a person,’ she said.
Lassiter stared at her for a long time. Finally, he said, ‘Okay. Take Jesse to the boat. I’ll bring him along.’
Taking Jesse by the hand, Marie turned and started running toward the motor launch. She was almost to the dock when she heard a shot on the path behind her and, without turning, knew they wouldn’t be going to the hospital.
EPILOGUE
She wouldn’t talk to him for days afterward, and in the end it was a month before she finally agreed that the coup de grace had been just that – as merciful as it had been necessary. By then the three of them were traveling as a family, while Lassiter worked all the magic that he knew to establish new identities for each of them.
It wasn’t just a question of changing names, but of creating a legend – a fully backstopped past, replete with job and medical histories, school and credit records, legitimate passports and social security numbers that seemed to have been issued years before. The entire process took three weeks, and $50,000, to complete, and when it was done, he didn’t want to tell her.
‘I’ll be out of your hair in a couple of days,’ he promised, ‘as soon as the bank signatory card comes through from Liechtenstein.’ That was where their money had finally come to rest, after bouncing like a roulette ball from one funny venue to another, courtesy of Max Lang.
‘A couple of days’ turned into a couple of weeks, as Lassiter knew they would – and then it was spring, and then he kissed her.
The name on the mailbox was Shepherd.
It stood at the end of a long driveway in the North Carolina Piedmont, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The drive wound through a hundred acres of rolling pastures, ending at a stone barn not far from a big, old farmhouse that needed work. About a mile of white board fencing enclosed the property, which was patrolled by an Arabian mare and her foal.
It was a beautiful part of the country, but a little too far from Raleigh, or anywhere else, to commute. So most of the people who lived in the area were self-employed, one way or another.
Mr. Shepherd was no exception: he bought and sold rare books and first editions, conducting his business entirely by mail. It was yet another odd profession among many in the area, and so drew little notice from the neighbors. Indeed, within a mile of the Shepherds’ place, there lived: a world-famous mandolin maker, a couple that raised ostriches, a woman who made culinary wreaths for Smith & Hawken, and a man who built dry stone walls. There were also a (suspected) marijuana grower, two novelists, and a game designer.
The Shepherds lived modestly, at least for the moment, slowly improving their house, and doing much of the work themselves. The plan had been that they would stay together for a while, divorce, and go their separate ways. It was a sensible plan, and one that would go a long way toward bolstering the legends they’d created. But the plan came undone as their affection for one another grew amid the pleasures of simple country life. Within a short time their proverbial marriage of convenience seemed more like a marriage made in Heaven.
The past intruded only once. Two years after they’d left Maine, ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ ran a docudrama called ‘Doom Island.’ Lassiter and Marie watched in horror as Robert Stack took the audience through a lurid reenactment of the events leading up to their flight from the island.
It began with a blue Taurus driving into fog-shrouded Cundys Harbor. An actor who looked nothing like Lassiter was seen negotiating with an actor who looked nothing like Roger Bowker – after which, the two men boarded a boat that looked a lot like the Go-4-It. The real Maude was interviewed, as was the real harbormaster: ‘We knew there was a storm comin’,’ he recalled. ‘Rog-ah was stubborn!’
The boat’s spectacular crash was not reenacted, but reprised by Stack’s narration. This was followed in rapid succession by photos of Lassiter Associates’ Washington office, Lassiter’s home in McLean – ‘Nice,’ Marie remarked – and Lassiter himself. This last photo was a copy of the one that he kept in his office as a joke.
‘It doesn’t look like you,’ Marie said. ‘Not at all.’
‘I know.’
The narrator explained that Lassiter’s disappearance coincided with the takeover of his company, and then asked, ‘Why did Joe Lassiter come to the island? Was he investigating something? Yes, he was.’
This remark was not immediately explained. There were three commercials, and then another reenactment. A black Mercedes pulled into the marina on Bailey Island, and three men stepped out. Soon, the men were poring over nautical charts and muttering in Italian as they traced a route from the marina to Rag Island.
Then the narrator was on the island, standing in front of the burned-out cabin. This was followed by a series of shots – the boathouse, the dock, the rocks on which the Go-4-It had crashed, ending in a close-up of the sun, sinking into the water.
Interviews with the Brunswick police chief, a Coast Guard captain, and an attaché from the Italian embassy led Stack to ask, �
��What were these men doing here?’ Photographs of della Torre, Grimaldi, and the Mattress filled the screen. ‘One – a prominent Catholic cleric. Another – a triple murderer. The third – a thug, well known for violent mischief in his own country. Why were they together? Why did they all come to this remote island? These questions await answers.
‘And what of the mysterious woman, who lived with her child on the island? Curiously, no photographs exist of either.’ A sketch artist’s drawing came on camera, as Maude clucked about Marie’s decision to live ‘out they-ah.’ Happily, the drawing was entirely generic, resembling Marie only in that she had the correct number of eyes and ears.
The narrator concluded the piece standing on the dock. ‘The fire that destroyed Marie Sanders’s cabin wasn’t the only one that night. Witnesses report that a second fire was seen at sea, later that same night. Police are convinced this second fire consumed the boat that Father della Torre had rented earlier that same morning. If so, experts agree that no one could have survived a swim to shore at that time of the year. And yet, when forensic experts combed the island, the remains of a single individual were recovered: and that individual was Franco Grimaldi.
‘What happened to the others?’ A montage of faces flashed across the screen: Joe, Roger, the Mattress, Jesse, Marie, and della Torre. ‘Maybe the water has claimed them; maybe they’re buried on the island. Or maybe . . . just maybe . . . Marie Sanders and her child escaped in this little boat’ – a picture of Marie’s dinghy filled the screen – ‘found the next morning, beached on the mainland.’
The piece ended with an aerial shot, and Robert Stack intoning, ‘All we know for certain is that seven people came to Doom Island – and none were ever seen alive again.’
Nothing came of the show. If anyone saw it, they didn’t connect it to the Shepherd family. Which wasn’t surprising: By then the Shepherds were a part of the community, and there were some who would have sworn that they’d always lived in the area. Marie took classes in speech therapy at the local community college, and Joe coached a seven-and-under soccer team.
As for Jesse, his was the only first name that they hadn’t changed. They called him Jay most of the time, though, and his friends had doubled that to ‘J.J.’
He had a lot of friends, as it turned out, and was well liked at school. At the parent-teacher conference his teacher remarked that he seemed to be a natural leader – and something of a peacekeeper, too. ‘Maybe he’ll work for the U.N. someday.’
At the moment, his diplomatic skills were being put to use on the school bus, where he was a safety patrol.
Joe liked to watch him, from the window of his study on the second floor, as Jesse walked up the long drive to where the school bus picked him up – the Day-Glo orange band of his patrol belt visible even when he was mostly obscured by the willow tree. On this day, Joe was surprised to see Jesse stop halfway, set down his lunchbox, and race back toward the house. He pushed in through the front door.
‘What’d you forget?’ Marie called out from the kitchen.
‘I forgot to feed the fish!’ Jesse yelled, pounding up the stairs.
The fish were only the first of what Jesse promised would be a menagerie, soon to include one of the puppies recently born to Pickle, itself a chocolate Lab and coon-hound mix that belonged to Jesse’s friend Ethan. Jesse had already acquired a red plaid dog bed from the bus driver, whose own dog was ‘too spoiled – he’ll only sleep on the couch.’ After that – another dog, ‘so they can be friends,’ and then a cat and a goat.
Jesse took care of the fish all by himself except when it was time to empty the aquarium – which was too heavy. He did clean the aquarium, and rinse off the rocks, and every day he fed the fish and checked the temperature in the winter to make sure it was warm enough.
Jesse loved the fish. There were seven of them, and they all had names. He was allowed to keep the aquarium light on at night, and he especially liked to watch them then, from his bed. He liked the way they glided around in the water, smoothly curving in and out of the castle, hiding behind the wavy green plants. He even liked to watch the silver chain of bubbles rising from the aerator. He pushed into his room, feeling a little guilty even if he didn’t forget, because he almost forgot.
‘You guys hungry?’ He carefully removed the top from the aquarium, set it aside, then got the little box of food from the bookcase below. He meticulously tapped the food into a plastic teaspoon. He’d been told many times how important it was to feed them just enough but not too much. He distributed the multicolored flakes evenly, across the surface of the water, and then knelt down. He liked to watch the fish eat, rising up and nipping the food from the surface and then diving back down with it. Sometimes he talked to them, and he did now. ‘Hey, don’t fight about it, there’s lots of food.’ Then he frowned. One of the striped ones – half hidden by the plant – wasn’t moving at all, even to eat. He stood up and looked down from the top. The striped fish looked sick. He was on his side, his belly was bloated, and his tail seemed too white and kind of slimy. He was definitely not moving. And his fancy tail looked all raggedy, too. And then! Jesse saw one of the gouramis come over and take a little nibble out of the tail!
‘Hey!’ Instinctively, Jesse plunged his hands into the tank and cupped them under the dead fish and lifted it out. The water drained away and he cradled it in one hand and stroked its side with his fingertip a few times. ‘You’re all right,’ he said, then cupped it in both hands again, lowering them slowly into the water until they were just under the surface. Then he drew his hands aside and watched.
As the fish swam away.
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Copyright © John Case, 1997
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First published in the United Kingdom in 1997 by Century
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ISBN 9780099184126