Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

If we are this alone, she wanted to know, then what is the point?

And she tipped back and fell through the ocean.

She turned on her flashlight and soon discerned the one she’d dropped. It winked up at her from the floor of the bay. As she descended, she saw that it had landed in the sand about twenty yards from the boulder where Brian lay. She trained her light on the top of the boulder and moved the shaft down and down some more until she reached the sand.

There was no body there.

So she’d gotten the boulders mixed up. She turned her beam to the left and saw another boulder about twenty yards away. She swam halfway to it but then grew certain it was the wrong shape and color. She’d left Brian against a tall, conical rock. Just like the one she’d landed near. She swam back, moving her flashlight continually left and then right. Then farther left. Then farther right. No boulders that looked anything like the one where she’d left him. The one in front of which she now floated.

This was the boulder where she’d left him. She was sure of it. She could tell by the depth of its craters and the conical shape.

Had he been carried off by the current? Or worse, a shark? She kicked her way over to exactly where she’d last seen him. She checked the sand for signs of indentation, an impression of his legs or buttocks, but it had been worn smooth by the water.

She caught a glimpse of black that was blacker than the boulder. It was just a flicker of it, like a flaking of skin along the left edge of the rock. She kicked to her left and shone her light around the corner and at first she saw nothing.

But then she saw everything.

It was a mouthpiece.

She swam around to the back of the rock. The mouthpiece was attached to a tube that was attached to an oxygen tank.

She looked back up through the dark water to the hull of the boat.

You’re alive.

She kicked for the surface.

Until I find you.

She motored out to Thompson Island and found the dock within four hundred yards of where Brian had fallen in. There was no boat there, of course. Whatever boat had been there was long gone.

And he was on it.

She had to wait a long time for the cab. It was four in the morning and the dispatcher didn’t know where the Point Norfolk Marina was. She heard him tap his computer keyboard for about half a minute before he grumbled, “Twenty minutes,” into the phone and hung up.

She stood in the dark parking lot and imagined all the things that could be going wrong right now. Trayvon Kessler could have gotten his warrant. (No, Rachel, he’d have to go back to Providence, find a judge, deal with jurisdiction issues. Maybe by sunup, but probably not even then. Breathe. Breathe.)

Breathe? Brian was alive. Ned had shot Caleb in the face. She could see the older man’s face as he did it, lupine somehow, wholly comfortable with predatory dominance. He’d looked at a fellow human being sitting four feet away from him and killed that human being as easily as a hawk would spear a chipmunk with its talons. There was no pleasure to be had in the killing for Ned but no regret either.

Brian was out there, eluding her. Alive. (Had she always known somewhere deep in her lizard brain that he’d never died?) But vengeance on Brian was, at this immediate moment as she stood in an empty parking at the witching hour, a luxury.

Ned and Lars were out there, hunting her.

Smartphones could be hacked. Turned quite easily into tracking devices and listening devices for hostile parties or government snoops. If Ned or Lars knew how to hack into hers, they’d know where she was.

Headlights appeared two hundred yards away, at the beginning of the rutted street that led from the edge of Tenean Beach to here. The two lights bounced and canted and glowed brighter as they neared. Could be a cab. Could be Ned. She wrapped her hand around the gun in her bag, the gun her husband had tried to kill her with. Or acted as if he were trying to kill her. She wrapped her finger around the trigger and thumbed off the safety even as it occurred to her that it wouldn’t matter. If the car belonged to Ned and Lars, they could just accelerate at the last possible second and run her over. Not a thing she could do about it.

The headlights swept the parking lot and the car turned in an arc to pull in front of her. It was brown and white and had BOSTON CAB painted on the doors. The driver was a middle-aged white woman with a beige afro. Rachel climbed in, and they pulled out of the marina.

She had the cab drop her two blocks south of her apartment and walked up through an alley as a false dawn grayed the lower edges of the sky. She crossed Fairfield and walked down the ramp to the garage grate. She entered her code in the keypad to the right of the grate and the grate rose and she entered the garage. She took the elevator to eleven, got out, and walked up the stairs to fifteen. Soon she stood outside her door.

This was the step she’d agonized over. If either Ned or Lars had remained behind, she was dead as soon as she entered the apartment. But if — no, when — Trayvon Kessler returned with that warrant and broke down this door, she needed to know what he’d find on the other side. The ride back from the bay to the marina, she’d debated if it was worth the risk and decided that Ned and Lars would assume she’d never return. It made no sense. Then again, she mused as she stood outside the door with the key in her hand, maybe they were counting on her to do the stupid thing. She had no experience dealing with people like them, but they had plenty of experience dealing with rubes like her. On the other side of that door was either death or knowledge. Plus a stash of cash Brian kept in a floor safe. Not much, a couple thousand, but enough to run on if Kessler had already taken the step of shutting down her credit cards. She doubted, on one hand, that he had the power to do so, but then, on the other, what did she know about police procedure when dealing with a murder suspect? And by now that’s what she could be, a murder suspect. By midmorning, she could be a suspect in two murders.

She looked at the lock. At the key in her hand. She took a breath. Her hand shook when she raised it, so she lowered it again. Took several more breaths.

Brian was alive. Brian had put her in this situation. Somehow, some way, she was going to find him and make him pay.

Or she was going to die in the next thirty seconds.

She inserted the key in the lock. But she didn’t turn it. She imagined a fusillade of bullets punching through the door and into her head, neck, and chest. She closed her eyes and tried to will herself to turn the key, turn the key, but once she did, the only step to take would be forward. Into the apartment. And she wasn’t ready. She wasn’t.

If they were on the other side and if they were close enough to the door to have heard her insert the key, they could simply shoot her through the door. But just because they hadn’t didn’t mean they weren’t in there. They could be waiting patiently on the other side of the door, exchanging glances, maybe even smirks, screwing their silencers onto their pistols, taking careful aim at the doorway, and waiting for the moment when she opened the door.

She’d wait them out. If they were in there, they’d heard the key enter the lock. Sooner or later, if she didn’t enter, they’d open the door.

Then again, Rachel, you dumb fuck, they could be watching you through the spyhole right now. She stepped to the right of the door, pulled the pistol from her bag, thumbed off the safety yet again. Waited.

She waited five minutes. Felt like fifty. Checked her watch again. Nope. Five.

In some time continuum, we’re all dead as soon as we’re born. By that logic, she was long dead somewhere, looking back through the portals of time at this very moment and smiling at all the fuss Corporeal Rachel was putting herself through.