Boar Island Page 13

  Paulette had timed the walk during the day, over country that was as familiar to her as the floor plan of her house. Denise should have timed it for herself, in the dark, with her lack of familiarity. There had been time to pace it off half a dozen times. Instead, she’d sat in the hot darkness of the nursery and toyed with the wicked imp called Hope.

  The crunching stopped before she’d traveled thirty feet. Kurt’s truck door screeched open, then slammed shut. One hand on a tree, a foot not yet fallen, Denise froze. The truck engine ticked as it cooled. A night bird called. She had no idea which one. She was law enforcement, not interpretation. An image of the Indians in old Westerns imitating birds to signal an attack struck her as horrifically funny. Hysterical. She held the laughter in with an effort, her chest twitching and her throat clenching.

  No more sounds from the soon-to-be dead man. Was Kurt lighting a cigarette or checking his cell phone? Did he stand by the truck listening, sensing danger? Had Paulette accidentally tipped him off, and he was waiting for Denise with a knife or a pistol? Laughter dried up in her lungs, tickling like ashes when she breathed too deeply.

  Denise really had to pee.

  Crunch, crunch, crunch: gravel tread under heavy boots. He was coming for her. Fear paralyzed her mind, and Denise could not run. She could not even lower her raised foot, or draw in breath. Clomp, clomp, clomp: ascending the three wooden steps to the front door.

  All was well.

  Home, to the shower, to his death, just like it was supposed to be. As Kurt banged the screen and front doors, Denise sucked in a lungful of air, then ran lightly toward the lamp on the porch, her light in the darkness, her star of Bethlehem. The flame the moth incinerated itself in.

  Panting as if she’d sprinted a hundred yards rather than crept thirty, she stopped short of the circle of light leaching into the dirt-bare yard.

  Kurt was inside the house.

  Maybe Kurt was inside. Denise had heard the front door slam. Was it possible he’d quietly opened it again, gone back to the truck for something? No, he wasn’t the quiet type; she would have heard him. Maybe he’d only pretended to go inside. Maybe he’d heard her and slammed the doors to make her think he was inside when, all the while, he was sneaking around the side of the shack with an axe raised over his head.

  Don’t even think that, Denise commanded herself silently. They’d been careful. He suspected nothing.

  He was in the house. That was the end of it.

  The end of Kurt the baby killer.

  Denise breathed in slowly to settle her nerves. Everything was as it was supposed to be. No muss, no fuss, like clockwork. That was the plan. So the trek from nursery to house had cost Denise a few minutes they hadn’t counted on. There were plenty of minutes left to blow Kurt Duffy into the next world. Bullets were fast, just short of Superman-fast. Three seconds. Bang. Bang. Bang. Kurt is dead. Denise is headed for Otter Cove. Paulette is making eyes at the bartender miles away. Everyone lives happily ever after.

  Stiffly, she started across the dusty yard. The scratch of her sneakered feet on the sand was as the grinding of boulders in the surf, an internal cacophony more sensation than sound. Step and step and step and no matter how many steps she took, the light didn’t get any closer, the kitchen door looked tiny, wrong-end-of-a-telescope tiny, Alice in Wonderland tiny. Denise noticed her hands had balled into fists. Her vision was blurring, and sweat ran from her forehead in rivulets.

  Suck it up, she ordered herself. It wasn’t like Duffy didn’t need killing. It wasn’t like anybody would miss him. Killing him would be no worse than dropping a rock on a black widow or stomping a brown recluse. A spider, that’s all Duffy was, spinning a web that caught her sister and held her paralyzed while it fed off her soul. It needed to be removed from the world. It needed to be crushed.

  The porch, a couple of rickety steps up from the bare dirt of the backyard, cracked into her shins. Shocked, she blinked twice, confused by how she had closed the distance from not possible to bruising her legs. It was as if she’d gone to sleep for a while, her brain in Zombie Land while her body traversed the ground. How long had it taken her? How much racket had she made? Was Kurt in the shower yet? Paulette hadn’t timed his showers. She’d just said he’d come home around nine, take a shower, and go out around ten.

  Had he showered already and left to go bowling?

  Denise dropped to her knees, hiding in the shadow of the raised porch. She rubbed her palms against the dirt, drying the sweat and working feeling back into her fingers. Forcing her lungs to obey, she began breathing slowly in and out through her nose. Sweat wiped from her brow with dirt-smeared hands, she put her brain back in its skull case and sat back on her heels. Nerve returned—or at least motivation. She pushed the tiny button on her watch.

  Nine eleven. A good number for terrorists. A bad number for innocents. Was she both? Neither? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but that she focused, stay on point. Back in the days when the government dared to let its officers shoot for scores, she’d been one of the best. Now there were no scores. Too many juries would want to know why an officer with a perfect score on the range didn’t just shoot the gun out of the bad guy’s hand since she was such an Annie Oakley.

  With an act of will, Denise got to her feet. She unzipped the black nylon pack on her belt where she carried car keys and water when she went running. With two fingers she lifted out her .22 caliber Smith and Wesson revolver. The gun was untraceable. It had belonged to a foster mother’s boyfriend. Denise had stolen it when she was thirteen. Ever since she’d had a nightstand that wouldn’t be searched by some interfering do-gooder or rotten foster “family” member, she’d kept it in her bedside drawer.

  As she eased the .22 from the rip-stop nylon, her wrist jerked as if hit by an electrical shock. Her fingers flew open, and the gun thudded into to the weeds beside the steps. For a moment she stared at the offending hand.

  Nerves.

  After she’d killed Kurt, when she and her sister were free of the spider, her nerves would heal. When they were free of the park and the state of Maine and settled in their cottage far away somewhere warm, the spastic nervous movements would stop.

  She picked up the revolver, then checked the barrel to make sure it hadn’t become jammed with detritus. Having squeegeed muddy sweat from her forehead with the side of her palm, she dried her hand on her jeans. Mentally she began singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” On each syllable she took a small silent step. By the time the spider was up the waterspout, Denise was between the kitchen door and the bathroom window, her back pressed against the wood. Kurt was in the house, and was in the shower; she could see the water running through the clouded glass, and hear it through the thin walls of the shack.

  Back on track. Back on point. Nerves back in alignment.

  Once more she dried the palm of her gun hand on her trousers, then crept to the kitchen door and turned the knob. Bless Paulette! Not only was it unlocked, it was ajar. Not enough anyone could see, just enough the closing mechanism wouldn’t catch. A gentle push and she was inside.

  The kitchen was small, the linoleum old—real linoleum, not vinyl. Paulette had moved the scarred table—no bigger than most TV trays—and the two wooden ladder-backed chairs against the wall between stove and refrigerator.

  Clearing the way for the exterminator coming to kill the spider.

  Denise loved having a sister, a twin. Nobody, but nobody, had ever looked out for her the way Paulette did. Peter had pretended for a long time. Denise had been fooled for a long time. No more. Blood was the only thing you could count on. Family.

  The door to the bedroom was open, the bedroom light off. Holding the gun at her side, Denise walked in. She didn’t crouch, come in low or high, sweep the room, or step back against the wall. This wasn’t like that. This was straightforward. A simple task: You walk in, you dispose of the spider, you walk out. She would touch nothing. When she’d been here before, she’d touched things. At the time she hadn’t known fing
erprints would matter.

  Today Paulette had cleaned the house, scrubbed every surface, then touched them. No fingerprints was fishy. The wife’s fingerprints were expected. Did twins have identical fingerprints? Denise would have to Google that.

  The bathroom door stood half open. Light spilled onto the double bed, drawing up the one bit of color in the dim room, peach blossoms on a white background, branches cutting across in slashes of black. Denise moved to the foot of the bed, shoved the door to the bathroom open with the toe of her shoe, stepped over the sill, and, holding it with both hands, raised the .22.

  The shower curtain wasn’t the kind you could see through. Colorful fishes swam on a dark blue sea. The spider was big, though, and Denise could see his bulk where he elbowed and shouldered the curtain as he scrubbed himself.

  Nerves were quiet. No ringing or crashing in her ears; she could hear the water striking the spider’s skin. Her hands did not shake, and the sweat had dried on her face. Mind still and blank and clean, she aimed for center mass and squeezed off two neat rounds. The bullets cut so cleanly through the plastic they didn’t even disturb the curtain.

  The spider grunted.

  Denise had expected a scream of pain, or death. She hadn’t ever been shot. Probably what you’d feel first was the bullets punching you, like fists or a ball bat. It might be a while before the pain set in.

  There was a loud wet thud. The spider falling down or back against the wall. The curtain pushed out as if he grasped at it for support. Denise pulled the trigger again. A hole appeared in the middle of a bright yellow fish.

  Silence, roaring after the gunshots, filled the small space.

  It was done. Denise lowered the gun.

  The curtain exploded out. Kurt Duffy crashed into her with the force of a freight train. Air was knocked from her lungs. Plastic covered her face. Her spine cracked against the footboard of the bed. Kurt’s weight threatened to snap her in two. Plastic, and a naked wet man, trapped her legs. Her arms were forced up over her head, her face smashed against his chest.

  The only thought she could muster was that she should have brought the .357, something with stopping power. In the movies a .22 was the gun of choice for executions. The long bullets could spin, maximize brain damage. This was supposed to be an execution. She’d overlooked the fact that the man she was going to shoot wouldn’t be on his knees with his back to her, the muzzle of her pistol pressed up against his skull.

  Air rushed back into her lungs. The Smith and Wesson was still in her hand. She couldn’t fire down at such a sharp angle without danger of losing the gun. She brought the grip down hard, not knowing what part of him she hit, only that the shock felt good up her arm.

  He was grunting and pushing into her like a hog in rut. Disgust lent her strength. Bringing her right knee up into his groin with all the force she could muster, she simultaneously chopped down hard on his head with both elbows.

  A beefy thigh took the brunt of the knee, but the pain of the elbows distracted him. Like a snake from under a boot, she coiled from beneath him, slid the rest of the way off the bed to land on hands and knees. Water and blood slicked the floor.

  Blood was good. It had to be his. The more the merrier.

  He should be dead. “You should be dead,” she hissed.

  Rearing up from the mess of the curtain, naked, hair on his chest and back and arms, streaming water, blood seeping from his shoulder, chest, and side, he growled.

  Like a bear or a mad dog.

  Like a monster in a horror movie.

  Like a hog bent on eating long pig for lunch.

  Like a bull ready to gore, his head swaying from side to side, he pushed himself up until he was kneeling. More hair blackened his groin and legs, his penis a pale worm in the matted nest. He was huge. On his knees he reached nearly to Denise’s shoulder. His arms and legs were corded and muscled from a lifetime of working against the sea.

  Three holes decorated his body: shoulder, left side of his belly, and, the last, nearly invisible in the hair on the right side of his chest. All were seeping blood. Seeping, for Christ’s sake! They should be gushing. Great gouts of blood should be pouring out. Blood frothed on his lips. One had hit a lung. The big bastard could live to be ninety with those three bullets in him.

  “Die, God damn you,” Denise gasped. A paw the size of an oven mitt came up from the monster’s side. “Die,” she cried as she skittered sideways out of his reach. The corner of the bedpost banged her shoulder. The .22 flew from her hand and slid under the dressing table in front of which she and Paulette had so recently sat marveling at their twin features.

  This was wrong; things weren’t supposed to be this way. Spiders weren’t supposed to be this hard to kill. “God damn it!” Denise threw herself flat and groped under the dresser after the pistol. Her fingers touched the barrel. A beefy paw curled around her ankle. A bellow of rage; spittle and blood spattered the floor. In the faint glow of the bathroom light the blood was startlingly beautiful, rubies cast upon the ground. Another bestial roar, and Denise was yanked backward like a rag doll in the hands of a psychotic toddler.

  Hunching her shoulders and ducking her head, Denise rolled onto her side, stared into the bloodshot eyes of the spider, and kicked out with the force of thighs and butt. One foot connected with his hairy gut above the navel. She was rewarded with a woof! as the air was knocked out of him. Again she kicked, aiming higher, aiming for the bullet that had collapsed his right lung. Again she made a solid hit. He fell back on butt and heels, clutching at his chest as if he could force the lung to take in air. The next kick landed on the wound in his side. Screaming, he tried to sidle backward, escape her blows. The plastic shower curtain tangled between his feet and knees, and he fell back onto the plank flooring.

  Quicker than she’d thought possible, Denise was on her feet. She caught up the bottom end of the plastic curtain and fell with it on top of the struggling man. He bucked, trying to throw her. Digging a thumb into the bullet hole in his shoulder, Denise rode him until pain and blood loss slowed his thrashing. Straddling him, knees on his upper arms, she shoved the plastic over his face, cramming what she could into his mouth as he screamed and fought for breath. Hands spread like starfish, pressing down on the plastic, Denise growled, “Die. Die, God damn you. Die. For God’s sake, fucking die!”

  Finally he grew still. Denise did not let up. Three minutes. She thought she remembered that from emergency medical training. Three minutes without air was enough. No. Couldn’t be. She knew divers who could hold their breath three minutes.

  Lights slashed across the room. Headlights from a car.

  “Shit.” Heart and lungs fought for ascendance, both in her throat.

  A horn honked.

  Denise rolled off Duffy, then stood, her legs shaking, knees wanting to fold. No time for feeling around. With one great heave she toppled the dressing table. Seven years of bad luck shattered around her feet. The Smith and Wesson was against the wall. She grabbed it up.

  “Duff! Hey, Duff!” Pounding at the front door loud as a battering ram.

  As the front door banged open, Denise was running through the kitchen.

  She kept running into the black woods.

  SIXTEEN

  “This is Anna Pigeon, district ranger from Rocky. We go back a long time,” Peter said, introducing Anna.

  “Yes, I know. The acting chief.” Denise’s voice had the flat amiability of old enmity. Was it a not-so-subtle reminder that she and Peter shared old stories, old times, old friends? Anna wondered. Peter used to live with a woman named Denise. This had to be her.

  “Denise Castle,” the ranger introduced herself before Peter could.

  Anna nodded. Gray-green circles, eerily matched to the Park Service uniform, puffed beneath Castle’s eyes, and her skin had the desiccated look of someone who’s just come off a three-day bender.

  “There was a murder in Otter Creek last night,” Peter went on. “The state has this one—not on federal land
—but we should go to show the colors, see if we can lend a hand. Anna will go with you. Anna is an aficionado of bullet-riddled bodies.”

  Anna was not amused. The people she’d killed west of the Fox River had needed killing.

  “Not exactly,” she replied dryly. “Although they do seem rather fond of me.”

  “She’s only acting chief,” Denise said, ignoring the exchange. “I doubt she wants to look at a corpse.”

  “Beats paperwork,” Anna said.

  To Peter, Denise said, “I don’t need help on this.”

  “Anna’s your boss,” Peter reminded her coolly. “Anna?”

  Despite herself, Anna was interested. When someone else saw to the dirty work, a murder could be quite entertaining. Rather like turning over stones or poking around tide pools, digging around a murder turned up all sorts of interesting flora and fauna.

  “Who knows,” Anna said to Denise. “I’ve never been the chief ranger before. I might turn out to be helpful.”

  Denise’s smile was on the watery side, as if she’d had to dredge it up from secret depths to meet the social norm. Then she said, “I’m retiring.”

  “Today?” Peter sounded confused.

  The statement appeared to be as great a surprise to Denise as it was to Peter. She gasped a tiny gasp, then gusted it out on a laugh. “Soon,” she said. The wavering smile firmed with what looked like smugness.

  “Hop in,” she said to Anna as she opened the door to her Crown Vic. “We might as well get this dog-and-pony show over with.”

  Anna slid into the passenger side of the patrol car, then buckled her seat belt. There was a reassuring sameness to Park Service vehicles, equipment, housing, even war stories. Six degrees of separation did not apply in the NPS. After a certain number of years, often there was scarcely one degree left. Everyone knew—or knew of—everyone, and had an opinion about them. Park people were like a hugely extended cantankerous family, complete with black sheep and heirs apparent. Some rangers felt claustrophobic in such an intrinsically small world. Anna felt at home.