The Water's Edge

by Daniel Judson

  He felt it begin, the shift in the center of gravity, like the pull at the start of some carnival ride. Then he felt the Jeep pitch to a degree that told him the driver’s side tires had given up the road. Within seconds the vehicle—he and Bechet trapped inside it—was well past the point of no return. Miller was flung against the passenger door, his hands torn from the safety handle. In an instant he was upside down, had no sense at all of the movement that had to have occurred between those two positions. As the roll continued, Miller was flung in the other direction, his shoulder colliding with Bechet’s, and then, an instant later, their heads smacked together, hard skull against hard skull. Miller had never felt anything like it. Pulled back into his seat as the Jeep came over and onto its wheels again, Miller still had enough sense at this point to know that the ride had only just begun, that this one roll hadn’t come close to expending all the energy that had been built up. The Jeep turned over once more, with the same speed as before, and then again, three rolls in as many seconds, maybe less. Miller’s seat belt held him in place, but his limbs and head flailed as if he were in the midst of some violent fit. He couldn’t hope to control them, felt as if the centrifugal force generated as the Jeep spun and spun and spun might at any minute tear his arms from their sockets.

  When finally the Jeep had slowed enough that the rolling came to a stop, it was resting on its top, in a cluster of young trees a distance from the road. Miller, Bechet beside him, was hanging upside down, folded almost in half by the seat belt that held him suspended. His mind, still back in the terrible spin, was on the verge of tumbling off into darkness. He fought the unconsciousness, though, reached up and followed the seat belt to its buckle and pressed the release button. He was instantly let go, fell like a child dropped to the ceiling below. He landed hard, in a slump, little more than a pile of body parts, and it was then that he first felt the pain.

  His knee, his bad knee, had already begun to swell. He could barely move it. Even when he kept it still, cradling it with two hands, pain radiated from it like heat. The pain was so severe that he gasped, then winced, drawing a breath deep into his lungs through clenched teeth. When he finally let it out, the breath quivered as if he were in extreme cold.

  He looked through the windshield, cracks running through it like branches of lightning across a stark sky, tried to orient himself. His head was throbbing, from deep inside, his vision blurred, but still he managed to see through the young trees back to the road. Barton’s Volvo was now at the muddy shoulder, not far beyond the curve where the Jeep had begun its roll into the woods, but it wasn’t parked. Its driver, too, must have lost control on the wet pavement, or in the mud running alongside it, and had slid sideways into a tree. Miller could see enough to see this, could see, too, someone climbing out from behind the wheel of the Volvo. Barton? If not, then who? That person didn’t waste any time, started running toward the Jeep. By the way the masked person ran, and by the shape of him as he got closer, Miller could tell that this was in fact a man, not a woman, not Barton. Running to help them? No, that wasn’t likely; he had just run them off the road with a degree of expertise. As the masked man got nearer still, Miller could see that he was holding something in his right hand. A blur at first, but then Miller focused hard and was able to make out what that something was, knew once he saw it clearly what it was the man was rushing toward them to do.

  Handgun in hand, the man was coming to finish the job.

  He reached the overturned Jeep in a matter of seconds, stopped and looked at Miller through the cracked windshield. They made eye contact. The masked man was breathing hard. He took a few steps closer, raised the handgun, aimed at Miller. The gun was fitted with a silencer. The masked man glanced over at Bechet—still hanging upside down in his seat, unconscious, as far as Miller could tell—then back at Miller. Slumped on the roof of the Jeep, unable to move in the confined space, Miller just stared at the masked man. He saw the man’s eyes narrow, but it looked to Miller more like he was wincing than taking aim. The man lowered his gun, then raised it again. His hand was shaking. He lowered the gun once more, only a few inches this time. It was obvious to Miller that the masked man was trying to summon the guts to kill in cold blood but was unable to. The man raised the gun once more, took aim, then all but closed his eyes. He remained that way for several long seconds before suddenly turning his head, looking back toward the road.

  Instantly, the masked man took off, not in the direction of the road but away from it, deeper into the woods. Miller watched him go, could barely see more than a blur by now, a dark blur—dark pants, dark jacket, dark ski mask—moving away, disappearing finally from his line of sight. When Miller looked toward the road, what he saw made even less sense than what he had just seen, what had just occurred. He saw his own pickup parked behind the Volvo, its driver’s door open and someone running down the path of overrun saplings the Jeep had formed during its roll. That person yelled something—stop, Miller thought, but he couldn’t be sure, there was ringing in his ears now—then stopped by the Jeep, where the masked man had stood, and assumed a shooter’s stance, aimed a .45 Colt in the direction of the fleeing driver.

  But that second person, whoever he was, didn’t fire. Instead, he lowered his weapon, then dropped to his knees and looked at Miller through the windshield.

  This wasn’t a man at all, Miller saw. This was Barton.

  “I’m here,” she said. Miller could barely hear it over the sound of the ringing. “Everything’s going to be okay. Just hang on, okay?”

  Miller looked at Bechet then. The man was conscious now but only just. One hand was pressing against the roof below him, the other searching for his seat belt, fumbling for the buckle. There was blood running down the side of his face, and the steering wheel was little more now than a crescent moon. Bechet must have slammed into it at one point, done so with enough force to break it into pieces.

  “Hang on,” Miller said. But he didn’t think Bechet even heard him. The man continued to fumble about, his thick arms all but useless, his eyes glazed over as though he were drunk.

  Miller’s eyes fluttered as he was hit with a powerful wave of nausea. It came from deep within him, ran ice-cold, overwhelmed him fast. Suddenly there was nothing to hear but silence, nothing to see but blackness, nothing at all to feel but a sickening lightness as he at last lost his hold on precious consciousness.

  Part Four

  Day

  Nine

  BECHET AWOKE IN A ROOM HE DIDN’T IMMEDIATELY RECOGnize, looked toward a shaded window beyond which glared a light that was to his straining eyes both somber and harsh.

  His head hurt, a dull, throbbing ache that made every inch of his skull all but vibrate. After a moment he realized that his left hand hurt as well, this pain the sharp, pinching pain that meant damaged bone, though to what degree the damage was he didn’t know. He closed his left hand into a fist, or tried to anyway, had to stop just past halfway when he felt the pain increase suddenly from pinching to blinding. Broken, then, or maybe fractured or just splintered, but the exact nature of the injury didn’t matter, the fact that he couldn’t make a fist was all Bechet needed to know.

  His first thought was that he should wrap the hand up—he was in a strange place, couldn’t remember how he had gotten there, didn’t know yet what he might need to do to get out, so an injured hand was a disadvantage he didn’t really need right now. He looked around the room for his Alice pack—there was duct tape in it, he was able to remember that. Duct tape would do, hold his fragile bones in place and prevent him from inadvertently closing his hand into a fist and triggering yet more blinding pain. But Bechet didn’t see the shoulder bag anywhere, nor did he see anything at all that was familiar. He looked at his watch—if not where he was, then he could at least know when he was—and saw in the gloomy light that it, like his left hand, was busted. The crystal was shattered, the cracks like frosted veins, the luminous hands beneath frozen at 7:32. What the hell had happened at 7:32, he wondere
d, to stop his watch and mess up his hand and cause such a steady pain to radiate against his aching skull like an echo that would not dissipate?

  When he finally tried to sit up and felt a flash of yet more pain from deep inside his chest—a real pain that stopped him dead—Bechet suddenly remembered the cause of his injuries. He was shirtless, and as he lay back down he saw a sickly bruise across his broad chest, a shocking stain of purple and black and green—inhuman colors—where his sternum had struck the steering wheel as his Jeep had begun its roll into the woods. It took him several moments—he moved in stages, carefully—but Bechet finally managed to sit up and swing his legs off the bed and place his feet on the floor. Once there, once seated, on the verge of standing, he took another look around Tommy Miller’s bedroom.

  The rest came to him, or much of it, he couldn’t be certain; it was all as elusive and fragmented as bits of a dream close to fading from memory. He remembered a woman helping him out of the overturned Jeep, and that at first he’d been barely been able to stand. Then he remembered the woman—in her thirties, pretty in a plain way, moving fast but not frantically, not panicked—telling him to help her drag Miller free of the wreckage. Bechet, his blood still surging with adrenaline, was more or less oblivious at that point to his injuries and did what he could. Though Miller was unconscious, the rain on his face, once they had gotten him clear of the vehicle, brought him around long enough for Bechet and the woman to get him to his feet and help him back to a pickup waiting on the side of road, behind the Volvo that had rammed them and then itself crashed. Miller was limping, significantly favoring one leg, the woman and Bechet propped beside him like crutches, his arms wrapped around their necks. Bechet remembered asking where the driver of the Volvo was and the woman telling him that he had taken off on foot. The next thing he knew after that the three of them were in the front seat of the truck—its only seat—Miller slumped over between them. The woman drove them straight to Miller’s apartment. Miller was unconscious again by then, and the woman had been unable to awaken him. He was too big and too heavy for even Bechet to carry—the injuries Bechet had sustained had finally begun then to register—so the woman got help from the restaurant below, a dishwasher and someone else. The owner, Bechet had gathered. These two men carried Miller up to the second floor and laid him out on a couch. Bechet remembered then being in a bed—Miller’s bed—and the woman leaning over him, tending to a cut on his head. She said something, but Bechet now couldn’t remember what. He looked down at the pillow upon which he had rested his head, saw a bloodied towel covering it. His blood, of course. His first thought upon seeing it was that he shouldn’t forget to take the towel with him when he left. His blood was proof, should anyone need it, that he had been there.

  Despite what he had been through, he was at least thinking with some degree of clarity now. That, Bechet told himself, was something.

  He stood then, in stages again. Boxers work to develop an instinct that is contrary to human nature, an instinct to remain standing no matter what, and Bechet was running on that contradiction now. In the bathroom he splashed his face with cold water, moving only as much as his injuries would allow. He leaned against the sink, bracing himself with his good hand, and looked in the mirror, first at his face and then at the cut on the side his head. His left side, so he had probably struck the window or the door frame above it during the crash, had more than likely brought his hand up to his head at some point, as if to cover himself against a right hook. Another boxer’s instinct, that particular motion. He’d been cut enough times to know that scalp wounds bleed like crazy, which was probably why he was without his sweatshirt now. Covered with his blood, someone—that woman?—had removed it so he could rest comfortably. He would need to find that, too, and take it with him. He would need to find his mechanic’s jacket as well; bloodied or not, there was part of his five grand in one of its pockets.

  Bechet dried his face and hands, then returned to the bedroom. The clock on the table beside Miller’s bed said 9:16. It must have taken them twenty minutes or so to reach to the apartment and get Miller inside, and the accident had occurred at 7:32, so Bechet must have been unconscious on Miller’s bed for about an hour, maybe a little more. Not a lot of time, but still the clock was ticking, he had less than seven hours left till he was supposed to check in with Castello, tell him something, give him something, anything that would serve as a reason for Castello to believe that Bechet was in fact doing what he’d been ordered to do, what Castello needed him to do.

  That something, Bechet realized now, was right here in this very apartment.

  He found a T-shirt in Miller’s bureau, pulled it on. There wasn’t anything about the motions involved that didn’t cause pain. He found his socks and work boots, pulled them on as well, each task taking time, certainly longer than usual, though he got better at it toward the end, as he grew familiar with his various pains, recognized their specific patterns, which movement would hurt where. There were, he knew, ways around pain. When he was finally done, he stepped into Miller’s kitchen, beyond which was a large front room, rows of tall windows at its far end, a few support beams down its center. Bechet saw Miller stretched out on the couch, a garbage bag filled with ice draped over his knee. Motionless, Miller was either asleep or unconscious.

  Bechet looked for the woman but didn’t see her anywhere. He listened, too, but heard only the rain. The exit—the only door that he could see in the entire place other than the bedroom door—was off the kitchen, opened to a set of steep stairs that led down to the street door. He remembered coming up them, someone helping him. Since there were no doors except these, there were no other rooms for that woman to be in, which meant she had left. Where she had gone and why, Bechet didn’t know, but he assumed she probably wouldn’t be gone for long. He needed to look around while he could.

  Stepping into the kitchen, he first saw an amber-colored prescription bottle on the counter near the telephone. It was empty, the prescription, for painkillers, in Tommy Miller’s name. Bechet then caught sight of his sweatshirt, caked with dried blood, in the sink in the center of the counter. He saw his mechanic’s jacket, too, hanging on the back of a nearby chair, bloodstains on its collar and left shoulder. He could tell by the shape of its pocket that his money was still there.

  Moving into the front room, Bechet spotted right away what he was looking for, on a table just inside the wide doorway. A DVR and VCR, coupled by RCA cables. He went to them, found his microcamera beside the DVR, fought the urge to grab it right then. He noticed that the power lights of both units were lit. He glanced at Miller, saw that he was still out, then pressed the eject button on the VCR with the knuckle of his index finger. First the whirring of gears, then out came a cassette tape. Bechet glanced again at Miller. When he was satisfied that Miller was still asleep, Bechet removed the tape, using the end of Miller’s T-shirt like a glove. Could this actually be the tape Miller had agreed to give to him? It had to be. Bechet laid it on the table beside the microcamera—easy grabbing for when it came time to leave—then noticed two photographs near the edge of the table, by a pile of change and a stack of clothing. Women’s clothing. Using the T-shirt again to prevent leaving fingerprints, Bechet picked up the photos by their corners. It took effort for his eyes to focus, but finally he was able to see the images clearly enough.

  One photo showed an unknown man and woman, the next that same woman—dark, curly hair, an inviting smile—with another woman, the two of them sitting together on a couch. The other woman was, Bechet saw right away, Abby. He looked at her for a moment. White tank top, green cargo pants. He recalled the summer she had worked for him, remembered teaching her what he knew about guarding one’s identity in this age of information, and the way to escape this island without leaving so much as a trace. She listened casually yet closely, and he had quickly gotten the sense that this was more than just conversation to her, a means of passing the long hours of work. She was looking for nothing less than ways—any way, a
ll ways—to feel safe. She had, he had gathered over the weeks—talking while painting was something akin to therapy, or confession—always sought men out for the sense of security being with one gave her. These were her words. She had always needed someone—a man, once she reached a certain age—near, particularly at night. So afraid of the dark, of being left alone in it. There were worse reasons to keep someone near, Bechet thought, but he understood her conflict. He understood, too, that she simply didn’t want to do that anymore, to be that, didn’t want to have to rely on a man for anything since, in her experience, they couldn’t be relied on for anything. A cynical joke, especially from one so young, but Bechet had learned a long time ago not to argue with someone about their own experience. Leaving Miller had obviously caused her anguish, so the drive to feel safe, to have someone nearby at night, was for her greater than the need for love. That was, at that point in his life, something Bechet could easily understand.

  Still looking at her photo, he remembered the few Friday nights after work that he and Abby had gone to happy hour at Buckley’s, the Irish pub on Job’s Lane. Employer and employee at first, then finally close friends, but never anything more. They were that summer two people in flux, what would have been the point? She was beginning then to be drawn to men for what she believed they could teach her, that and nothing more than that, and he had always only seen women as temporary companions at best, so the temptation was there. But it was, that summer, for Bechet, time for more than just that, for something other than the less he had only known so far.

  He recalled, finally, one specific night in late August when they had found themselves in what is known as a pub crawl: starting at Buckley’s, then moving across the street to LeChef, then up Job’s and around the corner to 75 Main, ending the night at Red Bar a few blocks east of the village. Bechet had known better than to drive home that night, instead made his way to his storage unit next door, sacked out alone on a foldout cot he kept there. Was that the night, he wondered now, that Abby had learned where he kept the gear he had told her about over the summer, the devices necessary to ensure one’s safety? Was it shortly after that night that she had let herself in and helped herself to what she needed? Or had she done that recently, as recently as two weeks ago, when the camera, according to Miller, had been installed? Bechet hadn’t touched his gear since putting it away at the start of that summer, when he went “legit,” confident in his arrangement with Castello, Sr., and his habit of always taking the long way home, his eyes on his rearview mirror. There was, then, no way of knowing how long the camera had been missing, no way of knowing now if more than just that had been taken.