Ashes and Bones (24 page)

Was this what it felt like when you were losing your mind?

It took a long time to get myself together, changed, bag, keys. It took a physical effort to will myself to do something so simple, and I almost decided to postpone it for the next day, on my way to work.

But that was nuts; I shook myself. It was simple. A six pack. A quick stop by the restaurant to drop off the books. There was nothing sinister, nothing overwhelming about any of that, but faced with the prospect, it still took me about a half hour of dawdling before I got into the car.

I waited too long to pull onto Lawton’s main drag—too busy searching for the fake police car that had chased me, despite the fact I knew it was gone—and someone honked at me. It wasn’t an impatient honk, just a little tap of the horn, a woof, to let me know I should stop woolgathering, but the adrenaline almost launched me into orbit.

Take a pill, Em, I told myself. Maybe it had come to that….

I pulled into the Yacht Club’s parking lot, which was empty. That made me try to remember what day it was—I kept losing track of time in the past weeks—but I knew that it was Friday. Something must be wrong; Lawton Yacht Club was one of the most popular places around and should be just gearing up this time of a weekend night. The closed sign was visible from the edge of the parking lot, but I figured I’d just try the back door, and if no one was in, leave the books for the kids there with a note.

The door opened even as I raised my hand to knock. Tiny Raylene was pale, her eyes wide.

“Emma…how did you know?”

“What do you mean? Know what? I just came over to drop off the books I told you about. For the kids. What’s going on?”

She shook her head, her long black hair was knotted in a big braid. “I was just about to call you, tell you to come over.”

“Raylene, what’s wrong?”

“I’m telling people that we had a problem with the electric, we’re closed tonight.”

“Telling people?”

She hugged herself, and looked away. “Do you trust me? Trust Erik?”

“Uh. Yeah, I do.” And the funny thing was, I did trust them, despite our slight acquaintance. We knew them from the bar, of course, and we’d gone out on their boat with them and other guests a couple of times. They weren’t our best friends—it was too soon for that—but my instincts told me that they were okay.

She nodded. “I need you to go down to the docks, meet Erik. Something’s…happened. Happening. I think between the two of you, we’ll get some answers.”

The skin of my scalp prickled. Oh God, no. “Okay. Can you tell me what it is?”

She hesitated before she said, “It’s serious.”

I swallowed. “I get that. Where’s Erik? Is he okay?”

“Everyone’s fine, as far as I know. There was a man here. He came in the back and attacked me—no, I’m okay! The kids are fine, and so is Erik. But Emma, he had a picture of your house and one of the bar with him. His license said his name was Tony Markham.”

“What!”

“Do you know the name?”

“Raylene, he’s the guy who’s been…I think he shot my friend, Nolan! Is he here?”

Her face was a blank. “No, Erik has him. Down at the boat.”

“Why on earth—?”

Still, Raylene’s face gave nothing away. “You need to see Erik. Take our truck, it’s out back, and no one will think anything of it if they see it going down to the harbor. We’re always going out to the boat.”

“Right.” Then I frowned. “What did Erik drive?”

“He…he took another car.” She nodded, tight lipped, and I knew she wouldn’t say anything more.

“I’ll take the truck.”

Raylene nodded, turned, and led me through the dining room, out through the kitchen, to a back hallway. She handed me the keys to the truck, and handed me a coat, too. Probably one of Erik’s, as it was too big, but one of Raylene’s wouldn’t have fit me in a million years. “Gonna be cold out on the water.”

“I’m going out on the water?”

“Yes. Emma, please hurry. Erik will tell you everything.” She opened the back door, anxious to have me on my way.

I hesitated again, shrugged and nodded, pulled on the coat, and rolled up the sleeves and got into the truck. It took me a minute to rearrange the mirrors and find the lights, but I was down at the harbor five minutes later. My heart was pounding fit to burst out of my chest. I was at a loss to explain what was going on, and Raylene’s strange orders truly scared me, but if there was any chance that Tony was there…

Erik was down there, as advertised, and he looked like grim death. Erik is medium height, and doesn’t look like anything special, but something about his eyes is hard and watchful and I get the impression that hitting him would be like punching a pallet of cement blocks. Close-cropped hair that made me think he’d never gotten over the habit from the navy, and a blurry tattoo on his arm that might also be a souvenir of those years. He has a hint of a mustache and chin
whiskers that are never quite shaved, never fully grown in, and makes him look youthful. But there’s a hardness to his face that speaks of experience. He walks with a rolling gait, whether from some injury or too many years on deck, at sea, I don’t know.

Usually he’s in the background of things, quiet, happy to let Raylene run the show with the customers. Once, however, some drunk mouthed off when she told him she was calling a cab. Things escalated and he smashed a glass. Erik came out of nowhere. The guy was outside before anyone could move to help Erik, and people who were there swear that the next noise they heard was the guy’s head bouncing off the outside wall of the bar. When they came back in, Erik frog-marched the drunk up to the bar, where he stammered an apology to Raylene, and then asked her to call an ambulance. Erik made him wait outside so that Raylene didn’t have to clean up anything else besides the glass.

I learned from that incident that Erik’s nickname, “the Red,” came not from his hair color, his politics, or his bank account.

It was his temper. Quiet or no, no one screwed around with Erik twice.

He extended his hand to me; it was rough, knotted, and strong. “Emma. Thanks for coming so quick.”

“I just showed up at the restaurant, Raylene said she was going to call. What is all this?”

He shook his head. “Wait until we get out a ways.”

We went down to his dinghy. After I hopped in, he cast off, and we were off. Erik is one of the smoothest, strongest rowers I know, and we cut across the water swiftly, more quietly than I could have imagined. The lights from the docks diminished as we moved out toward his boat,
Belle Jeanne-Marie,
and we were nearly in darkness.

“Now?”

“Noise carries too easily. Let’s get under way.”

We tied up, and I hopped onto the deck of the cabin cruiser. Erik flicked on the running lights, and got us under power. We motored out a ways beyond the breakwater, and up the coast a little bit. Then he cut the power and we were nearly in silence. The coast above Lawton is sparsely populated and most folks would have been watching television about now, not looking at us, had they been there to see us. Pity; if I had that view, in one of those houses, I would be staring out the window, myself.

“I’ve got someone below,” Erik began. “I think he’s trouble.”

“What? He’s in trouble?”

“No, Em. Trouble for
us.
You see, he came to the bar tonight. Looking for us. Looking for trouble. He threatened Raylene.” That last statement that sounded like a jury’s sentence to me.

And yet…“You didn’t call the cops? Why is he out here?”

“He’s out here because I think he has some information you might be able to use. I think he’s part of the trouble we’ve been having around here recently.”

“What?”

“You said that someone’s been following you, stalking you? Making trouble for you and yours?”

“Yes.” I felt a bitter taste in my mouth, one that came from feeling like I was being mocked. “Tony Markham.”

“Well, I think he’s a part of it.”

My eyes suddenly filled and my throat closed up. Erik actually believed me about Tony. It was a moment before I could speak. “How do you know?”

“I turned his pockets out. He had pictures. He had your address.” Erik flicked another switch on the console—the faint lights reflected up on his face—and then looked directly at me. “And a few other things. Like I said, trouble. I wanted you here when I found out exactly what kind.”

“Jesus, Erik.”

He shrugged. “I don’t think the Man has anything to do with it. But there’s this, too.”

He showed me a thin leather wallet.

“Erik?” My throat closed up again, for an entirely different reason this time.

“We can go through all of the stuff in it later. For now, I think I’ve got your Tony Markham down below. Don’t worry. He’s trussed up tighter than my Aunt Gert in her Sunday girdle.”

I found myself dizzy, and I held on to the table until the world stopped spinning. Then I found myself turning around, looking for something I couldn’t put a name to.

Frustrated, I turned to Erik. “I feel like I need…something. Something to have in my hands.”

Erik laughed, and it scared me. “Like a piece of pipe?”

I nodded, relieved to have identified what it was that was driving me. “I guess. Silly, huh?”

“Not at all.” Erik leaned over, but he didn’t bring out a chunk of lead pipe. He pulled out a shotgun. “Perfectly natural urge.”

I stared at it.

“Shall we?”

He led the way down to the cabin, and paused before the door. “Ready? Only…just so’s you know. There might be some blood. I had to hit him a couple of times to get him compliant.”

I nodded, not smiling, thinking of how Tony could be. “Perfectly natural urge.”

I thought I saw wolf ’s teeth by the moonlight, but I’m sure it was too dark to see whether Erik was really smiling. He opened the door.

We stepped in, turned on a light, and while I waited for my eyes to adjust, I heard a moan, somewhere ahead of me in the cabin.

“Hey, butthead,” Erik said, striding into the cabin. “Wake up. Time for answers.”

I saw a man stretched out on the bunk, feet bound together with duct tape, his hands raised above his head and secured to the wall with a rope looped through a tiedown. Another moan, and Erik turned him over.

It wasn’t Tony at all.

I
T
’
S NOT HIM,
” I
SAID
. I
COULDN
’
T STOP STARING AT
the guy. He was about the right build and coloring—well, coloring last time I thought I saw Tony close up, at any rate—but he seemed too old. Not that I could be sure about his age, the guy wasn’t looking his best. His face was gray, where it wasn’t streaked with dried blood, a piece of gray duct tape slapped haphazardly across most of his mouth, and his nose probably hadn’t started out the day at that odd angle—I remembered a quote:
his nose is executed and his fire’s out.

I shook myself. I didn’t have the luxury of retreating into Shakespeare. “Who are you? Why did you go into the bar? Why do you have my address?”

The guy tried to sit up, as well as he could with no free arms to support himself and his feet stretched out in front of him. He just glared at me, his breathing ragged because his mouth was nearly sealed shut and his nose wasn’t working properly.

Holy snappers. “Erik, I’ve seen him before! He was working at Caldwell!” It took some effort, what with all the blood
and all, to see the resemblance. I told him about seeing “Tony” while I was in the lab, our chance meeting in Duffy’s office.

“That so? Well, that makes sense, and I’ll tell you why,” Erik said. “This one…he came into the back of the kitchen.” He pulled out several shells and began loading them into the shotgun. The man’s eyes followed every precise movement.

“He walked in, looked around, saw it was just Raylene, just walked up and slapped her a couple of times. She’s clever, my woman, she grabbed a knife and cut at him, but he slapped the knife out of her hand, too. That’s when I came in. I was in the walk-in. I soon put a stop to it. Wasted a good bottle of Riesling on him.”

There was no trace of sarcasm in Erik’s voice. He put the last shell into the shotgun. “You’ve got a lot to answer for, mister. Bad enough you dared touch my wife, but what if one of my kids came downstairs and saw that?” He turned back to me. “Ray stopped me before…well, we needed to find out what he knows. Got the duct tape and we emptied his pockets. And this is what I found.”

He spread out the wallet and its meager contents on the table. The license was from Florida, and was indeed made out to Tony Markham. I frowned: Tony’s first name was Anthony. This couldn’t be a coincidence, though. There was a credit card, too, in the same name. Then I found the license and Caldwell ID with the name “E. Fishbeck” on them. There were also two pictures. One was of the Lawton Yacht Club, the other was of the Funny Farm.

I felt the world swim around me, and I clutched at the side of the table to keep from keeling over.

“Don’t worry,” Erik said quickly. “Don’t worry. I was careful to only touch the corners and edges. When we hand the wallet over to the police, we’ll ask them to dust for other fingerprints.”

I had the sense that he was speaking to my panic rather than concerns about fingerprints. Why was he thinking
about fingerprints anyway? “When we hand the
wallet
over.” I repeated.

“Don’t know if our friend here is going to make it as far as that.” Erik reached over and yanked the tape off the man’s mouth. I flinched and the guy screamed. Then he started cursing, and Erik reached over and backhanded him hard in the face. In spite of all I’d seen so far, my mouth fell open in shock.

“Stop that, there’s a lady present. Or have you forgotten that you’re not the only one who knows how to hit people? My Raylene’s a nice girl, a good mother, she stopped me from…And she was right: What if the kids had come down?”

He leaned into the guy, and I could see him trying to back away from Erik as much as his bonds would allow. “But I could have gone all night long.” He paused. “Still could, Ray’s not here. You don’t mind, do you, Emma?”

I shrugged. “Whatever. I’d rather get our answers,” I said, hoping like hell that Erik was just talking. He had me convinced at any rate.

“Let’s start with that and see where we go from there. What’s your name? Your real name.”

“Tony…Tony Markham,” the guy said.

“I don’t believe you,” Erik said. “I’ve been tending bar far too long not to recognize a fake license, no matter how good it is. I’m betting the name on the Caldwell ID is fake, too.”

I’d seen the license and thought it genuine. How was Erik so sure?

He turned to me. “Emma, what do you do when you don’t believe people?”

I leaned against the cabin wall and crossed my arms. I didn’t say anything for fear of ruining whatever plan Erik had, or betraying my own fear of this guy, this situation. I hoped I looked tougher than I felt.

“Right,” Erik said. “We increase the desire to reply.”

He raised the shotgun up, sighted on the guy’s chest, then drew a bead down his body. He lingered with the shotgun
aimed at the guy’s crotch, shook his head briefly, annoyed with the cliché of it, then paused at the kneecap.

“A lot of people like the kneecap for this sort of thing, Em,” Erik said, as if he was discussing the best way of carving a turkey. “But I think too many things can go wrong. It’s too close to the femoral artery. And with all the medical advances, these days, with our aging and yet more physically active population, it’s not as much of an issue as it used to be. Besides the pain, of course, which is excruciating. Myself, I like to think longer term. An ankle. Lots of fiddly little bones in the foot, ligaments, tendons, lots more difficult to fix up, if that’s still an option.”

It was then that I noticed that the guy was barefoot. I couldn’t help but feel the cold metal of the shotgun barrel as it pressed against his ankle. He jerked back too, and when Erik racked a round into the chamber, “Tony” began to scream again, this time for someone to come help him.

I almost stepped forward, convinced that Erik was going to do it, but then he glanced at me and the question Raylene had asked came back to me: Do you trust us, Em? I owed it to Erik to give him the credit of faking all this before I spoke up.

He had ten more seconds, I decided.

“Scream your head off if you like,” Erik said, “but if I’m far enough off the coast for the shotgun blast not to be an issue, you can be sure that I’m not going to sweat your little noises.” He turned slightly to me, nodded, winked suddenly.

That’s when I settled against the wall again, confident that Erik was bluffing. We hadn’t traveled that far, but the guy, tied up in the cabin, probably didn’t know that, and more than that, he didn’t know we’d hugged the coast rather than heading straight out to open water. With the door closed, no one would hear him, but the shotgun was another story. And Erik, if he used the shotgun, would not only blow off the guy’s foot, he’d open a hole in the hull.

Relief flowed over me. I tried not to let it show too much.

“I…shit…my name isn’t Tony…it really is Ernie Fishbeck. Damn! A guy hired me to do a couple of jobs for
him.” The words were practically tripping over themselves, he was so eager to get them out.

“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me about this guy. Tell me what jobs.”

“He told me…he wanted a couple of people paid back. Mess up a restaurant, make sure the owners had some trouble they wouldn’t forget. Stake out a house, figure out the best way in and out. Watch a guy, find out his movements.”

“What guy?” I said, a chill crawling down my spine.

“The guy with that house. There’s another picture…in my shirt, in the pocket.”

Erik reached over and fished it out carefully. He examined it, looked at me, paused, then handed it to me.

The image was grainy and out of focus, as well as smeared with Ernie’s blood. It was Brian. It was taken while we were in Hawaii, because he was grinning, showing off the rash he had on his belly from surfing. But the angle was off; it was different from the picture we had at home.

Someone had been watching us while we were on vacation.

As unreal as the rest of the evening had been, a cold numbness rushed into my joints now. My peripheral vision vanished and I could only see the filthy, broken face in front of me.

“Who told you to do these things?” I said. “Where is he, how do you contact him? How long have you been following us around?”

“Fuck off.” Ernie was smirking. In spite of the beating Erik had given him in the restaurant, the shotgun pointed at him, the son of a bitch still had it in him to be amused by me.

I grabbed him by the shirt. “Tell me, goddamn it!”

“Emma.” Erik’s voice was low.

“He needs to tell me—”

I didn’t realize I’d raised my hand to hit Ernie until I couldn’t move it: Erik had clamped his hand around my wrist. He was fast, he was strong, but he hadn’t hurt me.

“Emma. I have another idea.” He waited until I nodded, and then released me. “I don’t want to spend all night here, and neither do you. Let’s end this now. Go over to the other cabin. In the locker. There’s a spare anchor there. Bring it here. And some rope.”

The smirk was gone from Ernie’s face now. “What are you going to do?”

Erik shrugged. “You won’t talk, you’re no good to us.”

“You can’t…you’re not going to throw me overboard!”

“Why not?”

“I’ll drown!”

“You break into my home and place of business, lay hands on my wife, and you think I’m going to let you go? You’re out of your mind, mate. Furthermore—” He leaned over and began to whisper into Ernie’s ear; the other man blanched under the mask of blood.

I left. I was grateful to Erik for giving me a task to focus on. When I got to the cabin, I found the anchor and rope, but I also realized I was still clutching the picture of Brian in my hand. I looked at it for a moment, carefully smoothed it out, and put it into my pocket, then picked up the stuff Erik had asked for.

On my way out, I paused. Another object beckoned to me. I reached out, drew my hand back, then finally picked it up and stuck it through my belt.

By the time I got back to the cabin, Ernie was sobbing quietly on the bunk.

“Good job,” Erik said. “Now there’s got to be a certain order of operations here, and we should make sure we know what we’re doing before we get into the middle of it. Don’t want to find out we’ve done it backwards. I don’t want to untie him from the bunk until we’ve got the anchor around his ankles. But of course, that will make carrying him that much harder.”

Then Erik looked up at me. “Emma, we don’t need a hammer. The anchor will be plenty heavy enough.”

“It’s not for weight,” I said. “He’ll sink better with a few holes knocked into him first. Let the gases escape.”

“No! No, no…” Ernie, who had been sobbing quietly, made a sound that was a half-choked whisper, half mewling. “I’ll tell you whatever you want! Please, please don’t!”

“Emma?”

“If he’s convinced you at the end that he’s told us everything…we can discuss it then. Otherwise…” I turned to look at what was on the bunk, and swallowed. “I don’t much care if we knock the holes in him before or after he’s dead.”

Erik nodded. “The lady’s a clever one, Ernie. She’s righteously angry, she’s inventive, and she’s got a hammer. If I were you? I’d talk. And quick.”

“There’s…there’s this bar,” he began. “We only ever meet there.”

And at that point, I realized that Tony was doing what he’d always done: gotten weaker men than himself to do his work for him. Whether it was charisma or creditable threats or blackmail or whatever, Tony had always preferred being removed by one or two degrees of separation. After all, he’d tried it with me.

“Back up,” I said. “Who’s ‘we’?”

“A guy, only ever called himself Billy to me. About my height, my weight, age.” He frowned and I realized that he was figuring it out as well.

The story went on along like that. Met him outside the Salvation Army. Got Ernie the IDs, a job at Caldwell, told him how to fill out the forms the right way, told him how to answer the questions about, “you know, the stuff in my past.”

I didn’t even ask about that. “And sometimes…he’d borrow your uniform? Your keys and ID?”

“How did you know? He said he was trying to impress a lady, that he had a job. Not that he ever seemed short of cash. He’d ask me to buy things for him, using the fake license, the credit cards.”

“When do you have your next meeting with him?”

“I don’t; I haven’t seen him, not for a while. He always leaves me a note. I always have to give the note back to him at the meeting. He’s squirrelly about that; once I didn’t do it, I thought he was gonna flip his lid.”

Deniability, I thought. No fingerprints, no note, no nothing. Smart.

“What did he say about these ‘jobs’ you mention? Why would you do things like that?”

“Hey, I owed the guy. And these folks, Billy said they were keeping him from seeing his kids. You don’t do that to a guy, and what with the courts these days…”

His sudden, hot response told me that Ernie had kids that he wasn’t allowed to see. Tony had found what buttons to push.

“What do you think?” Erik asked me.

“I’m not convinced that he’s telling me everything. I’d like to find this ‘Billy.’”

The shotgun came up again, and Ernie shied away as far as he could, screaming.

Erik looked at me and shrugged. I nodded.

“Let’s bring her out to open water,” he suggested.

He went up and, despite what he said, got us under way back into port. After making sure that Ernie wasn’t going anywhere, I joined him up on the bridge. I paused, he glanced at me, and suddenly he frowned, grabbed my shoulders, and pulled me over to the side of the boat. I threw up over the side, even before I knew it was coming.

“Good girl, you’re okay, you’re okay….” He said it in that way that guys have of saying “it’s okay” when it’s really not, but they don’t want to believe it.

“—and I always appreciate a guest who can make it to the side in time.” He waited until I nodded I was okay—wasn’t going to go overboard, was done being sick—and he turned back to the wheel, made a slight adjustment to our course. “You did real good back there. Kept your head. The hammer was a nice touch.” He groped for a word. “Dramatic.”

I shrugged. I wasn’t at all convinced that it was a dramatic impulse that made me pick it up. Suddenly, it was there under
my hand and I was picking it up before I knew why I wanted it. But when I realized that I had it, I still brought it up to the cabin with me. The thought sent me to the side again, but I was done being sick for the moment. It scared the hell out of me, I thought as the damp sea air saturated my clothes in spite of the jacket. What was I turning into?