About the Author (26 page)

I picked up my office phone. I had already started to punch in the Blakesons’ number when I paused. Thinking now like a true killer, I realized the danger of calling Les from my home. A police investigation into her death might involve inspection of the phone records. I had of course expressly forbade her ever to call my house, a rule that she had, with that one recent exception, obeyed; her call I could explain away as a wrong number. But could I explain a phone call emanating from
my
place to
hers
in the time shortly before her demise? No. I hung up and decided to call her from a pay phone. I splashed cold water on my face, patted down my unruly hair, and headed outside.

I was surprised to discover that it was now morning. Eschewing my car in the hope of getting a little restorative exercise and fresh air, I decided to peddle into town on my bike. On my trip through the village, I saw a few heads turn at the sight of me, smiles frozen, mouths dropping open, upraised hands arrested in midwave. Obviously I was looking a little worse for wear after my three- or four- (or five-?) day bender. But I was beyond worrying about that now. Let ’em think I had been up for five nights wrestling with a recalcitrant chapter. Let ’em think that the face of creativity was not necessarily a pretty one. Let ’em think anything they fucking wanted to think, the bourgeois. I sailed on, shirttails flapping.

The pay phone was located in an old-fashioned glass booth perched a few feet from the Snak Shak picnic tables. I fumbled a quarter into the slot and dialed the number.

Her phone rang once, twice, and then her strident voice fell like a guillotine blade across the third ring: “
Yeah
?”

“Okay,” I muttered, holding the receiver close to my lips. (A crowd of sullen adolescents was slouched at one of the picnic tables just a few feet beyond my glass cell.) “I’m willing to help you out.”

“I got caller ID, jerk-off, so don’t even bother to—”

I cleared the catarrh from my throat and tried again. “It’s
me
,” I rasped. “I’m ready to help you out. On your
canoe
trip.”

“Dude! It’s ESP. I was just gonna phone you. We’re on!”

“On?” My entire body underwent a kind of molecular shift, as if every cell had suddenly been nudged one space to the left.

“Alain just made the drop,” she continued. “That’s how come I’m fucking
awake
so early in the morning. Usually I sleep in till, like, past one, or sometimes—”

“You’re saying,” I interrupted, “that we’re on for—”

“Tonight. You got it.”

I craned around to look over my shoulder. The teens were morosely feeding their sebaceous glands with grease-permeated cartons of French fries. I could’ve sworn they were eavesdropping on me, but this might have been drink- and insomnia-induced paranoia. I cupped my hand over the receiver: “To
night
?”

“Get here at eight-thirty. And wear something dark.”

“Wait,” I said. It was happening too fast. I could feel my lovingly oiled plot starting to grind its gears, ratcheting up into a frightening acceleration that threatened to hurl the entire machine to pieces. “What boat are we going to use?” I gibbered, trying to invent excuses for delay. “We can’t use mine because—”
Because I intend to kill you and leave the boat at the scene of the tragedy. . . 
.

“I got a boat here,” she said. “I just manhandled the fucker into the water, so I
know
.”

“But what if it—”

“See you soon,” she said. And hung up.

I replaced the phone in its holster. I took a long, deep breath.

Fine. Maybe it was all to the good that it was happening so fast. Delay could hardly aid me now. Despite my aforementioned determination, there was always the disconcerting example of that archprevaricator Hamlet. How did he put it when he soliloquized about a decided-upon action dwindling into interminable interior debate? Something about resolve “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” Right. The trick was not to think about the act at any point prior to its swift and merciless execution. And the way to do that, of course, was to keep drinking.

It was night now, and I was stumbling blindly downhill in a world of blackness. My body, deprived of any visual clues around which to orient its upright position, found itself leaning either too far forward or too far back in the elastic dark. More than once already, the uneven ground had swung up from under my sneakers to strike me in the chin or on the back of the head. But luckily the world and everything on it had grown rubbery and incapable of inflicting injury—for instance, the tree trunk that wandered into my path and struck me a comical blow before wheeling away, humming like a huge tuning fork, into the surrounding woods. I paused, extracted the flask from the pocket of my black jeans, and took a long, thirst-quenching guzzle. The overflow coursed warmly over my face and poured over my gulping Adam’s apple into the top of my dark turtleneck. I carried on, greatly refreshed.

I was stumbling down Les’s long, unlit driveway. I emerged into the glow of moonlight at the back of the house and consulted my watch: ten. One hour late. Not too bad. I took another pull from the flask, draining it. I tossed the empty bottle into the woods, then proceeded around to the front of her place.

I charged up over her springy veranda and knocked on the door. “Les!” I whispered through the screen. “ ’Sme.”

The shadows to my right quivered, and a figure darted into the light. I was turning to say a cheerful “Hello” when my visual field was filled by what looked like the twin barrels of a shotgun. I blinked and pulled back my head. I refocused. No—it was just the single barrel of Les’s now-familiar revolver. Her triangular face, furiously frowning, was visible behind the pistol’s carousel of shining bullets. She sighted down the barrel.

“You’re fucking
late
,” she snarled.

I giggled, pushing the gun away. “Geez, watch that thing.”

She poked the barrel under my chin and brutally tilted my face into the light. “You’re fucking
drunk
!”

“Naw drunk,” I thickly corrected her. “I had a cogtail or two, steady my nerves. But lizzen,” I said, “d’you think a novelist of my reputation should be druggling smugs?” I laughed at the unintentional spoonerism.

“Fuck!” she said. “You’re fucking
wasted
.”

As I regarded her, and she regarded me, I saw her face develop a ghostly semitransparent double that floated out over one of her shoulders—a two-headed woman. With effort, I was able to slide both images back into register. Les. She’d been so many things to me during our long association: first a one-night stand, then a burglar, then a blackmailer, then my cuckolder, and now my prey. My soon-to-be victim. The thought, like the tree that had brained me on her driveway, had a curious lack of impact.

Although I did feel, suddenly, surprisingly tired. I leaned back against the shingled wall. This felt so good that I decided to sit down just for a second, to take some of the pressure off my wobbly legs. I began to slide down into a squat. She caught my throat with her free hand and hauled me back up to my feet. She squeezed hard on my larynx. I gasped for air. She jammed the gun barrel into my mouth.

“Listen,” she whispered, her face just inches from mine, the gun barrel clattering against my wooden-feeling molars, “I don’t give
two fucks
what kind of shape you’re in. You’re gonna row that fucking canoe. And you are gonna get us into Canada by three in the morning. Because
that’s
when Alain’s expecting me. And I don’t plan to let him down. Understand?”

I nodded as best I could with a mouthful of death between my teeth. She retracted the gun, then slapped me hard across the face. The contact was loud but painless, except for a warm tingling in the aftermath that at least helped to dispel, if only briefly, a certain fogginess in my perceptions.

She spun me around and shoved me down the veranda stairs. I stumbled, ending up on all fours on the minty coolness of the lawn, but I was back up instantaneously, perhaps before she’d even noticed. She followed a few paces behind as I proceeded over the spongy grass down to the lake. I tried to keep to a straight line, but a couple of times she had to nudge me with a rough push on whichever shoulder blade would steer me back on course.

Dimly, I began to wonder if maybe I hadn’t allowed myself to get a little too drunk.

We arrived at the edge of the lake. A breeze reeking of dead fish and stewing algae brushed my face. Sickening. But because I was suffering a terrible dryness of the mouth, I nonetheless felt a compulsion to get down on the sand and lap at the water’s edge like a dog. I might even have done it had Les not pushed me up the rude wooden stairs onto the dock.

In my present condition, the dock seemed as resilient as a trampoline that at any moment might bounce me overboard into the oil-black lake. But I made my way to the end. There I found a canoe tethered to the upright support of a ladder. The canoe was one of those war horses dating from the 1950s, its wooden interior heavily lacquered, its red canvas hull patched with fiberglass. Two splintered paddles lay inside. A bundle wrapped in layers of foil and clear plastic was stuffed into the prow. Les’s delivery, I presumed.

“Get in,” she said, jabbing the gun, rather painfully, into the small of my back.

Very carefully indeed, I climbed down into the boat.

I settled myself in the stern, loosened my desperate, double-armed grip on the ladder, and surrendered myself to the canoe’s rocking, aqueous, unsteady wobble. This motion, and something about the way the dull moon stretched and trembled on the water’s surface, had a peculiar effect on my stomach, which began to undulate in sympathy with the lake’s queasy roll. I might have been able to swallow down the bubbling nausea if given just a few seconds to concentrate. Unfortunately, though, Les chose that moment to climb impatiently into the prow. The accelerated lurch and rock of the vessel proved too much. I felt a familiar, ominous squirt of thin saliva from the back of my tongue, and suddenly I was gripping the gunnel, pouring a flood of bile and spirits into the startled lake.

I energetically puked for some minutes. Then I sat up. Through teary lashes, I looked at Les. She sat facing me in the prow.

“Feel better?” she asked, sneering.

In fact, I did—if feeling more clear headed, less drunk, meant “feeling better.” I wasn’t sure that it did, under the circumstances. For the first time, I was assailed by the enormity of my mission. Was I
ready
to commit murder? I was visited by a bowel-loosening qualm of doubt—and not just doubt, but
incredulity
. Incredulity at the very idea that I was in the situation I was in. It was like that nightmare where you’re starring in a play. It’s opening night, you’re in full costume and makeup, the houselights have gone down, and yet somehow you haven’t learned a single line of your part. Random snippets circulate in your head (“. . . slings and arrows of outrageous fortune . . .” “. . . thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to . . .”), but you’re sure that these fragments will not get you through the entire two-hour production. Standing in the wings, you feel the stage manager prod you in the back, into the spotlight, and all you can think, as you cower there in your greasepaint and hose, is:
How did I let things go this far
? I’m talking about
that
kind of incredulity.

“All right,” Les said. “Let’s go.”

Her scratchy, nasty voice brought me back to myself. I had a job to do. I
did
know this simple script. It was the same one that Montgomery Clift had enacted for me the night before in that movie. Time to get to it. I picked up the paddle, tested its heft, and then, taking care not to disturb the continent of vomit that still floated just inches from the canoe, I dug the blade into the water. I pulled. The boat moved sluggishly away from the dock. The waterlogged, broad-bottomed old boat was nothing like the sleek and nimble aluminum canoes I was used to. Still, my skills as a paddler were enough to compensate for the boat’s limitations, and I soon overcame its inertia. We glided through the water. I aimed the prow at the tip of Black Point, which lay on the horizon like the snout of a slumbering whale.

I did not want to look at Les, but in spite of myself, I could not prevent my eyes from straying back to her. She seemed compressed and essentialized in my vision, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. She was hunched forward a little on her seat, the pistol held tightly in her right hand, the barrel pointed at my lower abdomen. She was dressed in a black jean jacket over a dark T-shirt and dark jeans, her hair tucked under a dark baseball cap. Her pale face, rimmed in moonlight, seemed to float, detached, against the night’s black background, her expression the usual disdainful smirk of avarice and cunning. Yet every now and again, her eyes would stray toward the outline of the black hills, or slide down and sideways to stare into the puddle of moonlight that kept abreast of us. In those moments, her face looked almost innocent as it reflected back the night’s dark, lustrous beauty. Or maybe it was just me. Maybe her face retained all its hardness, cynicism, and opportunism; maybe, to the assassin, every face looks blameless when caught, unsuspecting, in the crosshairs.

We glided on in silence, save for the rhythmic gurgle of my J-stroke, the hammering of my heart. Above, a thin membrane of charcoal clouds had begun to draw itself over the meaningless stars. I could feel the soaked cotton of my turtleneck adhering to my back each time I leaned forward to stab my blade into the water. I was utterly sober by now. My stomach churned with butterflies. My brain clamored with injunctions:
Wait until she’s not looking! Don’t hit her too hard! Stun her first, then finish her off with drowning! Make sure she’s actually dead! Act natural! Act natural! Act natural
! I longed for another swig from my flask. Then I remembered the empty bottle’s twirling into the woods beside Les’s driveway.

The wooded shore of Black Point came into view, condensing out of the grainy, pointillistic darkness. I followed the curving shoreline, where a granite cliff face loomed above us like a terrible premonition. Wind-blasted pines twisted from between fissures in the rock. Then the shore softened as we came into a bay. Reeds brushed and crackled against the sides of our boat. A low branch fumbled at the back of Les’s head, its twigs entangling the ponytail that sprouted from her baseball cap. Without lowering the gun, she extricated her hair from the branches, then wiped her hand on her jeans. “Fuckin’ spiderwebs,” she muttered.