tape around her head. My throat hurt like hell and every breath felt rough going in and rough coming out. My coughing only made it worse. I stood up, still wanting to run away from Dennis, even though he was dead. I threw down Mario’s gun and backed away from the body.
Gretchen did her little small-step hunch walk down the stairs and over to my gun. She picked it up and nudged Dennis with her shoe. He didn’t move, but she shot him in the head, and was making some barely audible screaming sound from beneath the tape. I went to her and put my hand on her shoulder. “He’s dead.” I said.
I went to the drawer by the fridge and found a steak knife. I peeled back the lower edge of the tape on her cheek, and pushed the knife up there, gently, with the dull side against her skin. I ripped at the tape with the knife, and repeated it a couple of times, until I had finally cut through it all. I pulled it off, across her mouth and a wadded up sock came out. She winced and coughed, and I pulled another wet sock from her mouth. She coughed and spit and tried to wipe her mouth off on her shoulder. “You fuckin’ believe this shit?” She said. She turned to the corpse at her feet. “FUCK YOU!” She screamed. She looked at the one under the table. “I wish this were the ocean so we could feed them to the sharks.”
I didn’t know what to say. I guess I was crying.
“It’s okay.” She said. “We’ll figure out what to do, don’t worry. Hey, help me look for the keys, would you? I need to get out of these chains. Look through his pockets, -if they’re not there, they may be on the other guy.”
“Are we drifting?” I said.
“Yeah, I think so.” She said. “But it’s okay. We’re in the middle of nowhere. Here hand me your phone, I’ll try to call someone while you look for the keys.”
“I hear a motor.” I said.
“I hear it too.” She said. “Find those keys! If it’s some fishermen, they might call the coast guard on us.” I looked through Dennis’s pockets quickly as the sound of the motor got louder. There were only car keys and a wallet in there. I threw them on the table and was about to search Mario when I saw Dennis’s coat hanging behind the door. I found a set of small keys in the inside pocket. They fit the lock at Gretchen’s feet and I opened it and began taking the chain off. “Hello?” She said. “I can barely hear you.” When the chain was off she stood and held the phone against her ear with her shoulder while she presented her handcuffs to me.
I looked out the window and saw a small speedboat approaching with three people in it. “They’re coming right to us.” I said. I unlocked her hands and she took off the cuffs and flung them across the room.
“This is Gretchen.” She said. “Yes, I’m with him. We’re fine.” She looked at me with a relieved expression. “You are?” She said. “Yeah, that’s us.” I looked at the boat approaching and saw that John Marchin was at the helm and Reyes and Jessie were on board. The boat was called The Cavalier.
THIRTY-TWO
“Everyone’s dead.” Gretchen told Reyes, helping her up the ladder.
“What do you mean?” She asked.
“They were gonna kill me, but he shot them first.” She said. “He shot the both of ’em. I woulda got the one, but he beat me to it. They’re down in the cabin.”
Reyes didn’t answer, she just went down in the cabin to look for herself. Jessie got up the ladder and hugged me. “Are you okay? Did you get hurt?” She asked searching me with her eyes.
“No,” I said, wiping off my mouth. “The blood’s from Dennis. I bit a chunk off his wrist.”
“Oh my god.” She said. John had come up the ladder and he put a hand on my shoulder. Gretchen was peeling tape off of the back of her head when Reyes came back up. She was holding the three guns. She surveyed the horizon, looking for other boats.
When she was satisfied that we were alone she dumped the guns overboard and turned to us. “We gotta look for tarps or sheets or anything that we can wrap the bodies in.” She said. “We need to find something heavy to weigh the bodies down. We want them to stay at the bottom of the lake.”
“There’s bedclothes downstairs.” I said.
“Good, get them.” She said.
I got chills walking through the small room with the corpses in it, but I got the comforter and fitted sheet off the bed and brought them out. John was in the cabin and we laid out the comforter next to Dennis. He was still warm when we rolled him onto it. We wrapped him up with his arms crossed and watched blood seep through the fabric. It had pooled where his body had been and I was amazed at how much there was. Reyes came down the stairs with a tarp and I could see Jessie and Gretchen dump a bunch of rusty chain up on the deck before they followed Reyes down into the cabin.
“We’re in luck.” Reyes said. “This boat is outfitted to sink bodies.”
John and I pulled Mario out from under the table and his arm got wedged between the bench and the table’s leg. It took me a long time to pull it free and I started to get sick to my stomach from looking at his purple face with the hole above the right eyebrow. I got him free and then I ran up on deck and puked over the side again.
When I came back down Jessie was standing to the side looking pale and scared. Gretchen and Reyes were wrapping up Mario in the tarp, and there was blood smeared everywhere. I helped John lift Dennis’ corpse as Gretchen and Reyes half-carried, half-dragged Mario up the stairs, onto deck. We followed them up with Dennis, while Jessie hovered nervously. We did all this without talking, which seemed to be adding to a growing sense of horror. I took a deep breath when we had the bodies on deck. “Nice day.” I said.
Reyes just looked at me. She untangled some chain and laid it out. We went about wrapping the bodies in the chain, feet first, being careful to wrap the ends in tight so the chain wouldn’t unravel on the way to the bottom of the lake. “Are you cold?” Reyes asked me when Jessie and Gretchen had finished wrapping up Mario.
“No, why?”
“Your teeth are chattering.” She said.
I realized she was right. “Weird, I, uh, I guess it must be nerves.” I said. I felt like crying again, but held it back. “This is really fucked up isn’t it?”
“No.” She said. “This is exactly what these men deserve. No one will ever know about this.”
Her words echoed what Dennis had said earlier -a coincidence that seemed frighteningly significant to me. John, Gretchen, Reyes and I lifted Dennis’ body and dropped it off the side while Jessie watched. It was gone instantly. We went over to the other side and lifted Mario, who was lighter. Jessie got the excess chain and dumped that in first, and then we pushed Mario over. I immediately felt a little better.
John looked in a compartment under the deck, near the engine. “Plenty of gas.” He said, pulling out a large orange container, and then another.
“We gonna torch it?” I asked. “Can’t we just sink it?”
“Scuttling a boat isn’t as easy as you think.” Reyes said. “This thing’s got a metal hull. We’re better off making sure all the evidence gets burned up and then when the coast guard finds it they’ll probably figure on some kind of accident. When a boat fire gets out of hand, people will usually jump overboard to avoid getting burned and then they drown. It happens all the time. Even if they think it might be arson, they won’t have much to go on. Where did you launch?”
“The Marina on 57th.”
“Good, they don’t have security cameras. Did you sign in?”
“No.” I said.
“Then we’re fine.”
“Okay.” I said. “But shouldn’t we move the boat so it’s not directly over the bodies?”
“A little paranoid, but probably a good idea.” Reyes said. “We’ll torch it and set it running. It could make it a few miles before the fire melts the engine housing.”
We stood on deck and watched Reyes and John douse the cabin with gasoline, spreading it liberally around on any surface that had blood. There was a lot of gas left over so they put a bunch in the bedroom, and then did some of the deck area, being
careful not to go too close to the engines, so the boat would run for a while. Reyes went upstairs to the steering column and called down to us to get in the other boat and follow. John went down first and helped Gretchen and Jessie climb down. As I climbed onto The Cavalier, the engines of the bigger boat coughed to life. I unhooked the rope and John started our motor. I waved up to Reyes, who jammed up the accelerator and spun The Menace around heading north, away from land while we followed along side. The wind was whipping through my hair, and my teeth were chattering again. I watched Reyes leave the helm and go down onto the main deck with the boat still speeding along and increasing its separation from us. I saw her throw something down into the cabin. She waited for a moment, watching intently. Finally she turned and ran for the back of the fast moving boat. She dove off the railing as the flames became visible through the windows of the cabin.
By the time John brought our boat to where she was treading water, The Menace was far off and smoke was pluming into the sky in a shocking black arc. We helped her in and John turned our boat in the opposite direction. It really was a beautiful day.
We docked at the Lakeview Pier and I asked John whose boat it was. I had to laugh when he told me they had commandeered Junior Pierson’s Boat from the docks at Lakeview. “I like the name.” I told him.
He smiled, knowing what I meant. “Cavalier Security? That might