Fifty Mice: A Novel (25 page)

“It’s okay,” she says after a moment, over the outboard’s dull whine. A blade of moonlight traces one edge of her face, exposes one intent eye gleaming, black beneath the fence of her rowdy bangs, lips slightly parted: settled, serene: no one has ever looked at Jay the way Ginger is looking at him now.

“What?”

It’s less a question than a confusion.

Ginger declines and shakes her head ever so slightly, turning so that he can’t read her expression anymore, her fingers tangled in Helen’s hair, and Jay, rudderless, riding the waves, wondering for the first time what new hell he’s found.

FOAMING ROLLERS
reel the empty husk of the Boston whaler, abandoned just shy of Perdition Cave, throwing it against the rocks and back again, and again, and again, while up on the steep incline of black sage and beard grass, in the shadow of West Summit, Jay and Ginger and Helen are moving as fast as they can.

They’re due east of Two Harbors, the narrow strip of land separating the two shores of Catalina, perhaps two hundred yards wide. The bright cold blade of pale white from the Ship Rock lighthouse flickers across the fugitives and continues clockwise past them, and the night wind shoves the grass flat. Helen stumbles, but Jay catches her, and lifts her into his arms.

Scattered dim luster of houses and campgrounds limned around the two bays wink behind high scrawny manzanita and clumped stands of trees listing in the windy darkness as Jay leads them over the high ground, skirting the narrow isthmus and the orphaned weekender fishing trawlers and sailboats moored in the shallow water on the Pacific side, one of which the waitress Penny’s husband cares for while its owners, according to Cody, “are chillin’ in, like, Cyprus,” which is how Jay knows it won’t be quickly missed, and—yes, it’s that
simple—Jay is planning to borrow the boat and head out into the open Pacific where Public and Doe will never think to look for them.

He’s learned from YouTube how to hot-wire an onboard engine. Or at least he hopes he has: there were several slightly conflicting demonstrations. With any luck, they can sail farther north, to Oxnard, Ventura, or Santa Maria, where the Feds shouldn’t think to intercept them. And from there? Jay will improvise.

Ginger hasn’t said anything since they landed. Sensing a change in her, a hardening, a vigilant rigidness, Jay can only hope it isn’t buyer’s remorse: a snowballing apprehension about what he’s asked her to commit to—but there’s no time for them to sort this out. Approaching the crest of the bluff, the wind seems to tremble and gain resonance, and suddenly a helicopter thunders up on island thermals and soars over them, searchlight sweeping the terrain, surreal.

“Down!” Jay barks. “Get down!”

Collapsing as one, the lump of Jay and Ginger and Helen waits, afraid to breathe, traced briefly by the edge of its twitching, probing light, and then left adrift in darkness as the chopper hurries north. They rise, run, summit, and—thunk, foom!—are caught short and stunned by a blind-dazzling of teal sparks when a Roman candle explodes above their heads to scattered cheers from below.

Thunk. Foom!

Another burst blooms crimson. Helen shudders and covers her head, Ginger shouts sharply down at a gathering of shadows, and a voice replies, “SORRY! We didn’t know anyone would be up there . . .” And then asks, “. . . are you LOST?”

A campfire flares in the wind and spits sparks at the hillock’s base, feathering with hellish light the youth church group and counselors gathered around it wreathed in an inky smoke. Thunk—the Roman candle—foom!—pitches another missile out, slitting the night sky, to explode golden, farther away, re-aimed.

The distant helicopter brooms the hills on the other side of Two Harbors.

Jay takes Helen’s hand and starts moving again.

“WE HAVE PLENTY OF POPCORN . . . and cocoa.” The woman’s voice, contrite, followed by glittering entrails of a bottle rocket, the sharp bang of its report, and in the instant of its bright eruption the face of Sam Dunn stares up at Jay from among the church group, smiling, bookended by tweens with stars-and-stripes face paint staring skyward.

Jay falters, spooked. Looking back—

Ginger, disquieted, “What is it?”

—But now there’s nothing but darkness where Jay saw Dunn. He wants it to be a phantasm: free-falling paranoia working his nerves.

“I don’t know,” he says.

Bait,
he thinks.
Fuck.

Toward the lowlands near the water, setting their legs stiff against the slope, slip-sliding down, they put the thrown spasms of fireworks behind them: the underbrush gets thicker: the soughing of sea on shore louder. Crashing through neck-high weeds, Jay scissors his arms out in front of himself to clear a path in his wake for Ginger and Helen, feeling their breathing and stumbling behind him, until without warning his feet lose contact with solid ground, it simply drops away, and Jay goes windmilling straight down into the fetid waist-deep water of a tidal swamp.

“Careful!” he shouts, too late, because Helen and Ginger tumble after him. He gropes for Helen first, but she comes up on her own, spitting, eyes stinging, blinking, wide, too surprised to cry. The brackish smell of salt and decay embraces them. Jay’s lost all sense of direction, the weeds are too high, or the water too deep.

“Helen!?” Ginger sounds to be somewhere to his left.

“Over here,” Jay calls out. “She’s okay, she’s okay, I’ve got her—”

“—Mommy?”

Shielded from the wind, an eerie quiet: the insistent lap of standing water disturbed, the hush of their breathing: a dire augur of ruin.

“So what’s the plan?” Ginger’s voice is fragile with fatigue and impatience. “I mean, this isn’t exactly . . .” The rest is erased by the wind. A string of firecrackers pops, far away. “I mean, what the hell are we—”

“He doesn’t have one.” Dunn. Icy, grim, inevitable. “A plan.” Jay draws Helen closer to him, and a blinding beam of light ignites the swamp; the grass goes translucent in its path. “He’s a rat, running,” Dunn says. “Isn’t that right, Jay?” The light, Dunn’s flashlight, darts off to pin Ginger, mired in a sinkhole fifty feet distant from Jay and Helen, and soaking wet.

“Mouse,” Jay says.

“Plunging onward,” Dunn adds.

Jay’s eyes finally find him, on a far bank of the swamp, thirty yards away. Gun in one hand, and the flashlight in the other. Standing between Jay and their escape. The light swings back.

“What’d you tell the Feds?”

“Nothing they didn’t know,” Ginger says coldly.

“Ha.” Dunn laughs. “They.” He looks sidelong into the shadows where Ginger is. “You.” Then, to Jay, asking again what he told Magonis: “The truth?”

Jay says, “Whose truth?” while stepping protectively in front of Helen.

“Yeah, yeah.” Dunn kills his light, and Jay, momentarily night blind from its absence, has to use the splashing sounds he hears to calculate the pilot’s movement, closing the distance between them, left to right. “I guess you’ve gone into business for yourself,” Dunn says.

“Okay, sure. What about you?”

The search helicopter, skimming the slope of Howland Peak on
the other side of the harbor, disappears behind a ridge, headed for the West End Light. If Jay can just keep Dunn talking—sure, then what? His mind screams:
What am I doing here? What have I done?

“
Grudge of the Moon Lady.
1980,” Dunn’s voice declaims. “Chin Bong Chin gets caught and held captive in a swamp by the Evil White Cat Spirit: Amy Yip in satin hot pants and a halter top—who wants to”—more staggering sloshing sounds—“shit,” then silence, then, as if he never stopped talking, “—who wants to know Bong Chin’s secret.”

The swamp grass blazes again, revealing Vaughn, waist deep in the swamp water ten yards off Jay’s right shoulder; Vaughn is sharply, almost comically, uplit by Dunn’s flashlight, Nosferatu-ish, duct tape stretched across his mouth, arms bound behind him at the elbows and his eyes wide and scared.

“At first, of course, he stonewalls her.”

Jay’s pulse hammers in his throat. A reverb of church-group laughter strays through the swamp, disembodied. Another string of firecrackers goes off to a chorus of mock shrieks, and bottle rockets streak skyward to explode, their flash momentarily revealing Dunn again, arm outstretched, gun in his hand pointed at Vaughn’s heart.

“So the Cat Spirit kills the best friend,” Dunn says. “To get everyone’s attention.”

Jay shouts, “NO—”

The muzzle flash sears a ragged scar in the darkness between Dunn and Vaughn, and Vaughn jerks backward, coughs, and the night swallows them both.

Jay lunges across the water, leaving (he hopes) Helen to Ginger—lunges to where he (correctly) guesses Vaughn will fall, spun wildly by the bullet that just hit him. And sure enough, Vaughn sags into Jay’s arms, a look of astonishment, nothing to say. “Oh, shit,” Jay whispers, lost. “Oh, shit, Vaughnie. Oh, shit.” It’s Halloween night, it’s his sister’s doleful cry, it’s the voices in the kitchen, his father’s weight
hitting the floor, the mermaid all over again, flowing, reeling, the mermaid, in onrushing water, roiling and flowing into his arms like this, like Vaughn, flesh and blood—

—into the liquid void.

Dunn’s light rakes the swamp, its beam making reeds blush and blackwater ripplets shimmer, but it can’t locate Jay or Vaughn, because Jay has moved them both.

“Hey, now,” Dunn says.

He wags the beam back around and catches just a glimpse of Helen and Ginger crashing away through the thicket of the far bank. “Hey, now.” He raises his gun under the flashlight’s reveal, one on top of the other, intending to shoot them.

But Jay won’t abide it, defying his terror, the water around him erupting and sheeting off as Jay rises out of it and crashes into Dunn, clawing the flashlight into the mire, where it sinks, throwing its sickly light through the turbid shallows.

A quickened disarray of arms and fists; bodies slur and Jay is already almost out of ideas. Momentarily back on his heels, Dunn throws up defensive elbows and forearms, letting Jay’s inexpert blows roll off his shoulders while lashing out with his left and trying to re-grip and bring to bear the gun clutched awkwardly in his right.

Behind them, Vaughn surfaces, ungainly, upended, an ugly black-red shine slick across his side, face thrown skyward, sucking the humid air, unable to find his feet and probably drowning if he doesn’t. Jay blinks the acid burn of salt mud from his eyes and hears a thrumming sound swelling transcendent like rage itself. He thinks it’s in his head. He wants Vaughn to live, he wants Ginger and Helen to have run back to the church camp for help. He vomits swamp water and clutches desperately as Dunn spins and bucks, trying to shake him, and gain the advantage his training should make inevitable.

A warm gust of air hits them and blows Jay loose: the search
helicopter, dull rotor thrum visceral, seizes overhead, turning in circles, stabbing the swamp with the bright narrow shaft of its searchlight. Vague in the faint nimbus cast backward, leaning from the open cockpit doorway, there is the suggestion of Jane Doe looking down at them like Vaughn does at test subjects: alert, emotionless, evaluating—

Bait,
Jay remembers.
Ginger said I was. But—

—salt grasses, cattails and reeds humbled sideways by angry turbulence, the down current upends Vaughn, from the shallow berm of solid ground where he’s found momentary purchase, and he disappears again under foaming water crusted with mosquito fern—

—Jay helpless as Dunn braces himself, priming the chamber of his gun, glancing away distracted only for that instant when the helicopter’s landing skid judders through his peripheral vision (Doe is flying that low), flinching his head and turning his shoulders, and when he looks back for Jay? The soggy length of driftwood in Jay’s hands crushes Dunn across the ribs, spitting bark and water, continuing up under Dunn’s chin and leveling him.

The handgun disappears.

Jay wheels around to where he thinks Vaughn went under and plunges his arms in the water, desperate to find his friend.

But another voice, not Dunn, not Doe, cuts through, above the rotors’ howl, “JAY!” It’s Public, neatly bisected by the helicopter’s cone of light, half in, half out, holding a gun on Dunn, and Vaughn motionless at Public’s feet, where he’s dragged him to dry land. “WE’LL TAKE IT FROM HERE!” he shouts.

Dunn looks to Jay, incensed, “You told them—me? Christ Almighty. That was the best you could do? Oh, man—fuck—YOU TOLD THEM YOU SAW
ME
!” Jay sloshes sideways, frantically groping now for Dunn’s gun in the shallows, coming up with handfuls of muck and fern.

“JAY!”

The chopper’s tail twists, and the searchlight corkscrews with it, fluid. Freezing Jay in bright relief.

Dunn roars, “YOU FUCKING—LYING—SACK OF SHIT! You have no idea. Fuck. DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT THIS IS ABOUT!? DO YOU HAVE ANY—YOU AND YOUR FUCKING LAB-RAT FRIEND, DID YOU THINK YOU COULD JUST—” His face is flushed, his hair flayed by wind shear. “IF I WAS WORRIED ABOUT WHAT YOU SAW I WOULD HAVE KILLED YOU A LONG TIME AGO!” Dunn points at Public, his hand shaking. “HE’S THE ONE WHO’S FUCKING WORRIED, MAN! YOU
NEVER
SAW ME. He knows it. I WASN’T THERE!”

Jay’s fingers curl around a blunt suggestion of steel, he straightens up with the gun, dripping wet, and points it shivering straight-armed uncertainly at the unarmed Dunn the way he’s seen people do it in the movies. His finger fumbles for the trigger guard, wondering if there’s a safety he has to flick. “Then why did you kill the stripper?”

Dunn’s empty hands float out from his sides and he stares back at Jay with a careless look that says:
I don’t know.
“Girls,” he says, finally. “With all their . . .”

“And why,” Jay asks, the nausea of exhaustion overtaking him, “did you just shoot my friend?”

Dunn is incurious, defensive, matter-of-fact. Almost apologetic. “Extortion—I thought you guys, the two of you, had the list and you were . . .” But it’s as if saying it out loud, here, in front of Jay, causes Dunn to finally understand the absurdity of the statement, of all of his assumptions, and he just stops talking.

“No,” Jay tells him. “You made up a story. So did they. So did I—”

—A bladed reflection stares back at him (or he thinks it does), cropped, distorted (as it has to be), as if illusory (in distinct relief from the motionless moil of the strip bar), a face caught, for one impossible timeless instant in—

“—But I don’t know anything, really,” Jay says. “Neither do you. Neither do they. You don’t know.” Jay’s found the safety with his thumb, but has no idea whether he’s sliding it on or off. “Nobody knows anything.”

“Jay,” Public says, closer, but Jay’s afraid to look away from Dunn to see just how close, “step away and let us—”