Boar Island Page 23

  “Are you okay?” she asked softly.

  “I have to pee,” Paulette said. A nervous titter escaped her lips.

  “Because you’re scared?” Denise asked.

  “I guess.” To Denise’s surprise, tears started cutting white stripes through the powder on Paulette’s face. All her irritation was blown away on a gust of pity. Paulette was the softer Denise, the gentle Denise she could have been if not for the foster homes and other bullshit. Tonight was going to be hard on Paulette because of her tender heart. As soon as she could afford the luxury, Denise decided, she would have the compassion Paulette had. For now, she was grateful that her heart was hard as flint, that it had been pounded and tormented until it barely beat. Right now, tonight, that hardening was going to pay off. Paulette would understand how it had to be, if not right away, then when they were in their new house and their new lives.

  Sitting on the keel of the boat, Denise patted the wet fiberglass beside her. Obediently, Paulette came around the stern to sit next to her. Denise took her sister’s hand between both of her own.

  “This isn’t like it was with Kurt,” Paulette snuffled. “It’s hard to take someone when you don’t want to hurt them, when they’re not bad, just too smart and in the way.”

  “It is,” Denise admitted. “I can do it without you if you like,” she offered, though, in truth, she didn’t think she could. “We’re not doing alibis or anything.”

  “No alibis because we both live alone, it’s the middle of the night, and no one will suspect us anyway,” Paulette said, repeating exactly the words and intonations Denise had used when they discussed the venture in the boat. Denise looked at her hard, trying to figure out if she was being mocked.

  No, of course she wasn’t. Paulette would never do that. Twin souls would sound the same, would speak as one. Of course. Same DNA.

  “Can’t we just not do it? Turn around and go home?” Paulette pleaded, glancing up at Denise from under the ball cap.

  Denise felt as if she towered over her sister, like a Goliath, a monster. This was as much for Paulette as it was for her. More. Compassion burned out on sudden unexpected anger. Jolted by the intensity of the fury, Denise’s tongue clove to the roof of her mouth.

  They had been through this. “It’s just for a couple of days.” Denise forced herself to go through it again. “She’ll sleep through most of it. Then we tell somebody where to find her. No harm, no foul.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” Paulette said before Denise could say any wrong words and ruin everything forever. “Of course we can’t just not do it. Let’s do it. Let’s go. Right now.”

  “Don’t have to pee anymore?” Denise asked as Paulette rose.

  “I couldn’t if I wanted to. All my sphincters are slammed shut,” Paulette said, and produced a wan smile.

  Denise smiled back. Paulette was trying. Paulette was a trouper.

  “We’ll be fine,” Denise promised. “Do you have the stuff?”

  Paulette unzipped her waist pack and checked the contents as Denise had seen her do half a dozen times since the boat left Somes Sound.

  Paulette lifted out a syringe with a plastic safety cap over the needle. Holding it near her ear, she shook it. Paulette had crushed the rufies to powder using the bowl of a teaspoon to mash the tablets against the bowl of a soup spoon. Denise had thrown in a Valium for good measure. When the powder was as fine as they could make it, they mixed it with tap water and drew the resulting liquid into a syringe.

  Denise remembered how Paulette’s hands shook, setting up a tiny tempest in the spoon, how her own had shaken so much they lost some of the precious stuff.

  Two street-made rufies, 1.0 mg of Valium. There wasn’t anything on the Internet about the mix, but enough Rohypnol could cause unconsciousness and even coma. Coma would be good, Denise thought, startling herself. She didn’t want to kill the pigeon any more than Paulette did. Still, a coma would be a whole lot easier for everybody concerned.

  “Two rufies and a Valium is a lot,” Paulette said. “Maybe too much.”

  “You should know. You’re the RN,” Denise said. She’d meant to sound complimentary. It came out waspish.

  “LPN,” Paulette said in a barely audible voice.

  For a moment the letters made no sense to Denise. Paulette was a nurse. Nurses were RNs, registered nurses. Then she remembered. LPN meant licensed practical nurse. No better than an EMT.

  “A Candy Striper?” Denise demanded, aghast.

  “It takes a year to get accredited. RNs take four or five years.” Paulette hung her head so low her forehead nearly touched her knees. “Some of us do injections, but there’s always a doctor’s okay, or an RN to help. I don’t know whether injecting Rohypnol instead of swallowing it will make a difference. What if she ODs?”

  “Shit.” Denise forced herself not to roll her eyes. What if she did OD? Would it be worse than if she didn’t? Worse, of course, in the sense of murder, but worse all around? For her and Paulette?

  “It can’t kill her,” Denise said firmly. “I Googled it.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Anna’s sleeping mind conjured up a wasp. The insect was stinging her bicep. Instantly she was awake, but, for a moment, she couldn’t remember where she was. Not Rocky. Acadia. No Paul, no roommates, yet a shadow, as wide as it was tall, clotted the vague light between her eyes and the ceiling.

  “Hey!” Anna barked. Squeaking like a colony of bats, the shadow changed shape and squeezed toward the door. Not a shadow—this invader was corporeal in nature. Shadows were the stuff of silence. This apparition was making a hell of a racket.

  “Who are you?” Anna yelled as she threw off her covers. There was a brief scuffle as the night creature tried to shove itself through an opening half its size.

  Leaping free of the bedclothes, Anna yelled: “Stop!”

  The black shape wrestled with itself for a moment, then popped through the bedroom door into the living room. Anna scrambled for the light switch. In the unfamiliar room, she was slow. By the time she’d flicked the light on, she could hear the sound of feet pounding down wooden stairs. More than one person, two, maybe three. A wave of dizziness overtook her; sound was behaving oddly; the light seemed to shimmer. She brushed her wrist over her eyes.

  Hers was one of four apartments in the building used for employee housing on Schoodic Peninsula. The structure was divided in half, two floors on each side, an apartment on each floor, the two halves connected by an open-air breezeway and stairs. Though it often happened in cookie-cutter dwellings, these weren’t drunken neighbors wandering in the wrong door. Drunken neighbors wouldn’t run; besides, at present, Anna’s was the only apartment occupied.

  It could be park visitors. As far as vacationers were concerned, rangers were always on duty, always there to stanch the bleeding or lend a cup of sugar. Since Anna—like a lot of the old guard—still refused to lock her doors, a couple might have wandered in and been scared into running when she awakened.

  “Hey!” she shouted again. “Hold up.”

  In three strides she’d crossed the small living room. As she reached the head of the stairs, two humanoid shapes careened through the downstairs breezeway, running out into the parking lot with more speed than grace.

  Not tourists with bad manners. Sinister miscreants. “Damn!” Anna muttered. She staggered, caught herself on the railing, then turned and ran back into her apartment. For an instant, she stood beside her bed, trying to remember why she’d come back. “Intruders,” she said, and she pulled on her cordovan boots, grabbed her SIG Sauer from the drawer in the nightstand, and, stark naked but for boots and gun, hurtled out of the apartment, down the stairs, and into the night.

  In the middle of the employee-housing parking lot, she stopped, eyes wide, ears open. Without warning a blackness as heavy and dark as igneous rock rolled over her brain, crushed her vision, and clogged her ears. Anna’s joints turned to water. She fell hard on her knees.

  Pain cleared her mind. She could h
ear sneakered feet scratching on pavement; the intruders were headed across the access road toward the renovated Rockefeller building used as the Schoodic Education and Research Center. Beyond the Rockefeller building were the crumbling ruins of an old navy base’s housing wings.

  Currently the research center was home to granite sculptors doing a summer workshop. Possibly her wee-hours visitation was from feral artists, but Anna was more worried about the artists as victims or hostages than as perpetrators. Though one or two of the huge, labor-intensive granite monoliths did look like the work of troubled minds.

  As her vision cleared, she saw the two figures running hard toward the plaza where the sculptures were being carved. She heaved herself to her feet and, boots ringing on the asphalt, sprinted after them.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot!” she yelled. She wouldn’t shoot. Rangers didn’t shoot fleeing suspects even if they had slithered up to one’s bedside in the dead of night.

  The dreamlike sensation of running ever slower through air viscous as mud dragged at her legs. Distance—or her perception of it—underwent a sea change. The ruined barracks wavered, retreating in an undulating wreck of roof lines. The Rockefeller building, no more than two hundred yards from her apartment, refused to move closer as she ran; then, suddenly, the immense granite sculptures were looming over her.

  Anna didn’t so much stop with intent as simply cease to move because her body chose stagnation regardless of what her mind ordered it to do. The retreating human-shaped fragments of darkness had run past the sculptures. Immobile, she watched as they reached the barracks where the wings of the ruined building came together. Her eyes told her they vanished like smoke; her mind suggested they’d probably run down one of the stairwells that let into the basement level.

  Even if her legs had not ceased to function properly, and the night had not broken all the laws of physics to become a nauseating, undulating mess, Anna would not have given chase. Nothing short of a shrieking child or a mewling kitten could induce her to pursue bad guys into that haunted hulk in the dark.

  The abandoned barracks was two stories of smashed desks, shattered walls, mirror shards, falling staircases, and other sharp-edged detritus. In that place, if fleeing felons didn’t kill you, tumbling down stairs or broken glass would.

  Broken glass would what?

  With sudden alarm, Anna wondered why she was naked, why she was standing in the shadow of lowering chunks of granite with her gun in her hand. She had no recollection of kneeling, yet she was on her knees on the stone.

  Stinging in her upper arm claimed her attention.

  Clumsily, she brushed at it. Something clinked to the paving stones of the sculpture yard. Stupidly, Anna stared down at it, eyes and mind disconnected. Part of her brain knew she should recognize the shape. Most of her brain was atomized, loose dust blowing in a windy night.

  A syringe. The item that fell from her arm was a syringe. There was quarter of an inch of liquid in it.

  Evidence of something.

  She picked it up, holding it like a dagger. Forget evidence. Two weapons were better than one. Weapons against what?

  People were hiding in the old barracks; she’d been chasing them. They had stuck the needle in her arm while she was sleeping.

  Light. She needed light if she was going to go into the garbage- and rat-infested derelict building. Light and backup; she had to get a flashlight and a radio and a pair of underpants.

  First she had to get up off of her knees. At one time she knew how human legs bent and flexed to execute this intricate maneuver. No more. She wasn’t even sure where her feet were. She could neither see nor feel them.

  A clunk startled her in a vague way. Rolling her head carefully to the side, she looked down. Somebody had dropped a gun—a SIG Sauer—beside her right knee. Careless bastard. What kind of idiot dropped a gun?

  Me, she thought. My gun. Bending at the waist to pick it up, she fell face-first onto the granite paving. A cracking jarred the interior of her skull. Nothing hurt. Her skull felt as if it had been hurled against a wall, but nothing hurt. Or if it did, she couldn’t feel it.

  Straightening her arms, she forced her head and shoulders up from the ground. Sculpted works in progress, high as houses and cut into fantastic shapes, moved slowly around her, waving and leaning like grasses in a breeze. The brick and stone facade of the beautiful old building beyond rose as high as Half Dome, its many windows blank and lifeless.

  “Help,” she creaked. The noise she made was so thin and tiny she thought of the Woozy in The Patchwork Girl of Oz, the creature whose roar was supposed to bring down mountains but in reality was a teeny squeak. It didn’t matter. Sculptors were artists. Artists didn’t go around rescuing people. When the shit hit the proverbial, nobody ever yelled, “Is there an artist in the house!”

  Anna pulled her knees under her to sit on her heels. In an attempt to scrape off the toxic fog devouring her brain, she scrubbed at her face. Pain that should have come when she fell blindsided her. She cried out feebly. One hand came away black and wet. Blood was pouring down over her left eye, blinding her.

  Paul will still love me, even if the corner of my head is smashed, she thought. The image of her husband, Paul, in all his strength and calm, centered her. She was able to find her feet and push to a standing position. Her pistol was still on the ground, an infinite distance from her eyes. Teetering sickeningly back and forth in her boots, she tried to decide if it would be worse to leave her gun and go find a radio or stay with her gun and … what?

  Just stay with her gun.

  Besides, she was naked. She’d been reminded of that when she looked way, way down at the gun. No clothes. Naked outside in the weird with no clothes. This had to be a dream. That was a relief. Peculiar dreams were not strangers to Anna. There was a foolproof test to see whether one was dreaming or not. It wasn’t pinching. That was silly. It was flying. If she could fly, that was proof positive she was dreaming.

  Anna tried to lift her arms. They did not reach Superman-in-flight position, only zombie-seeking-edible-brain position.

  No flying.

  Not a dream.

  Again she looked toward the ruins. The stairwell was disgorging its recent meal, bipedal shapes bulging forth to be delineated by the faint light of the stars. The creatures who’d put a wasp in her dream, a drug in her veins.

  Anna raised her gun hand. “No further,” she said. “Move and I soowt.” She’d meant to say “shoot.” The bonk on the head, or the chemical they’d injected, turned her lips to rubber. The figures halted, murmured, then came toward her.

  Anna pulled the trigger. Nothing. Her hand was empty, the gun ever so far away on the ground by her foot.

  The figures separated, moving slowly in her direction. Ninjas, black clothes and hoods and faces, with four white hands, fake as plastic mannequins’ hands, floating along beside them. They were wearing surgical gloves.

  Coming to butcher the kill, Anna thought as she tipped into nothingness.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Denise couldn’t take her eyes off the fallen woman. In the starlight, Anna Pigeon was faintly luminescent, as if she’d been swimming in phosphorescent plankton. The boots, incongruously dark, made it appear as if her legs had been lopped off just below the knee, leaving white stumps. Anna’s hair, always in a single fat braid, was spread out around her in a dark fan shot with silver, a protective cape that reached to her waist.

  Denise didn’t know what she had expected to happen when they’d set out on this venture, but this wasn’t it. Despite the fact that three of her bullets were in him, Kurt Duffy had roared and fought. That made it self-defense in a way. Killing should be a positive or negative choice, not made in hot blood, necessarily—cold blood was fine—but with a real sense of commitment. One committed murder; murder didn’t just happen. The gun didn’t just go off; the victim didn’t just run into the knife seven times.

  Since she wasn’t murdering Anna Pigeon, just removing an obstacle for a while, sh
e’d pictured it happening in a prosaic, workaday kind of way. Or peacefully, like taking out the garbage on a Sunday afternoon. The unconscious body would lie in its own snug little bed, drifting quietly into deeper and deeper sleep. Then Denise and Paulette would wrap her tidily in one of her blankets and haul her to the runabout.

  Not this blood-and-snot-filled gun-toting drama.

  Also, in her mental picture, Anna Pigeon would wear a pair of pajamas, for Christ’s sake, or a T-shirt and panties. What kind of lunatic leaps up and gives chase wearing nothing but a pair of cordovan NPS boots, even if she is drugged?

  Naked was bad in an unsettling way. Naked was vulnerable and very female. Naked gave a body a gender and an age. “She should wear fucking pajamas,” Denise hissed. “Rangers get called out at night.”

  Paulette said nothing.

  The shushing sibilance of the sea washed between Denise and her sister. Usually the sounds of the ocean soothed Denise. These rasped. The clacking of rocks as they were rolled by the receding waves clattered like a plague of demented cicadas.

  Anna Pigeon’s hand twitched. Passed out on major drugs, the woman seemed to still be reaching for her gun.

  “Oh God,” Paulette whispered. “What do we do now?”

  Trained to the call of “Gun!” Denise ran forward quickly and kicked the SIG out of the reach of the weak and groping hand. At a safe distance from the moribund ranger, she retrieved the weapon and shoved it into the waistband of her pants at the small of her back. Unlike Paulette, Denise had opted for black Levi’s instead of sweatpants. The denim waistband held the gun firmly.

  “We get her to the boat,” Denise said.