T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

“I’m going to bury you!” he shouts, and she would have laughed at the cliché, but there’s nothing funny about this sick and hateful man and his agenda and the battle to come. “You’ll never get away with it on Santa Cruz! We’ll fight you in court, you wait and see!”

And now she swings round. He’s standing there, pumped up in his T-shirt, bristling, red-faced, taunting her like a bully on the playground. The dogs have drifted away from him, sniffing at an exposed rock at water’s edge, preparatory to marking their territory. A pair of female joggers — matching white shorts and sunshades, their limbs blurred, faces annulled by the sun — close on him from behind while their own dog, a shaggy white-whiskered golden, bolts on ahead of them to confront the greyhounds. She shouldn’t get into this, she knows it, but she can’t help herself. The mention of court, that’s what does it. Court. He means to sue, just as he’d sued over the rat control on Anacapa, but it’s an empty threat because the justices know who’s in the right — who’s serving the public interest — and who’s the crank.

But she will see him in court, in two weeks’ time. And she won’t be the one squirming — she’ll be a spectator, there to watch Tim testify against him and see justice done. Because finally, after all the motions and delaying tactics his lawyer could dredge up out of the depths of the legal books, after every avenue has been closed to him and there’s no escaping the consequences of his actions, he will go up before the federal magistrate on the two misdemeanor charges against him and attempt to explain exactly what he was doing out on Anacapa Island on that gray wind-shorn day when Tim stopped him, and the park ranger, with the Coast Guard providing backup, stepped in to make the arrest.

“That’s right!” she shouts out, ignoring the startled looks the joggers give her and the way the dogs, all three of them, glance up sharply at the vehemence in her voice. “See you in court!”

O n the back side of Santa Cruz Island, the side that faces out to sea, there are any number of snug anchorages — Yellowbanks, Willows, Horqueta, Alamos, Pozo, Malva Real — but the one he prefers, especially on a weekday when nobody else is likely to show up, is a horseshoe-shaped cove with a buff sand beach called Coches Prietos. That’s where he’s heading now, Anise in the galley fresh-squeezing limes for a batch of margaritas (which he won’t even sample till they’re past the shipping lanes — he can’t count the times he’s been motoring along without a thought in the world only to glance up and see one of those big implacable seven-story container ships coming straight at him like a floating mountain), the chop moderate and the sun burned clear, for two days of R&R. He’s been making an effort to get the boat out of the harbor at least once a month, because what’s the use of owning the thing if you’re just going to park it in a slip like the Janovs and all the rest of the slip hogs who like the idea of having a boat a whole lot better than the reality of sailing it, but with one thing and another there are long stretches when the Paladin sits idle. The motor has been rebuilt, top to bottom, and he’s twice had her out of the water to be scraped, sealed and repainted, there’s a new refrigerator with an ice maker and a seriously upgraded stereo-video system (put in by his best installer from the Goleta store), and she handles beautifully, como un sueño , as Wilson would say. So yes, he is making the effort to get his sea legs under him and motor out to the islands whenever he can find the time.

It’s not that easy, actually. There’s always something in the house that needs fixing, he can’t seem to stay out of the stores no matter how much he’s paying Harley Meachum to do his fretting for him and the FPA business is staggeringly time-consuming, what with fund-raising, e-mail campaigns, mass mailings and the website. Then there are the endless meetings with his lawyers, not only over the various lawsuits going forward but the final and ultimate hassle of the upcoming bench trial to answer the charges from that fiasco two years back when the engine failed him and he had to sit there at anchor while the Coast Guard came aboard with Tim Sickafoose, bird-watcher and first-class snitch, and Ranger Rick Melman of the National Park Service. That was a sad day all around. Within minutes of getting back to the boat it had begun to rain hard, the sea coming up fast and nasty, and he’d had no choice but to radio for help. Help came, all right — the Coast Guard wound up towing them back to the harbor, but not before arresting him and Wilson on the utterly asinine charges of feeding wildlife and interfering with a federal agency.

Wilson had been ready to fight. He’d been opposed to radioing for the Coast Guard to begin with—“What do we need those motherfuckers for, because you know they’re going to want to poke through everything and how many life jackets do you have and like where’s the fire extinguisher and what’s with the empty cat food bags at the bottom of the trash when you don’t even have a cat aboard?”—but there was nothing either of them could do about the engine and even if they sat there for a day and a night and another day till the weather cleared, what were they going to do, paddle back to Santa Barbara? The champagne was in the refrigerator, untouched, and Wilson was fuming. Finally, he did come around — and Anise was vocal here, since she had a gig the following evening at the Night Owl and there was no way in hell she was going to miss it — but when the Coast Guard cutter pulled up alongside and he saw Sickafoose and Ranger Rick there, his eyes went hard. “Don’t let them on board,” Wilson kept saying. “Shove the motherfuckers right the fuck over the rail.”

When it came down to it, when they were actually standing there on the deck in a tight little crowd and poking their noses into the cockpit and the cabin, Anise had gotten hot too. Ranger Rick was tricked out in one of those big black leather belts beat cops wore, replete with nightstick, dangling handcuffs and firearm. She wanted to know what right the Park Service had to board a private boat in public waters off an island owned by the people of the United States — all the people, not just the ones in teal shirts with nameplates on them — and he had informed her, in the sober monitory tones of cops worldwide, that if she didn’t shut it he was going to have to think real hard about working up a conspiracy charge to go along with the misdemeanor counts against her boyfriend and his accomplice.

He was on the point of exploding himself — all this trouble and expense only to get arrested on his own boat in a bay eleven miles from the nearest reporter while the vitamin K was dissolving in the rain and he was utterly helpless to do anything about anything — but for once, he curbed himself. His focus was on keeping things from escalating. This was bad, sure it was, but he was already calculating how he could play it up for publicity, the charges clearly trumped-up, absurd — it’s against the law to feed animals and perfectly fine to poison them wholesale? All he said was, “We’re a vessel in distress, with a storm coming up. The rest of it, I never heard of. It’s crazy. We took a hike, that’s all. Tell me there’s a law against that?”

Today, though, it’s different. It’s been a long time since the incident, time enough for everybody to forget all about it — except the court, that is, and the Park Service and Alma Boyd Takesue and all the rest of the vengeful sons of bitches — and his lawyer has put things off with one motion or another till finally he can put them off no longer. The trial — or farce, as his lawyer calls it — isn’t till Monday next and at this point it’s nothing more than a formality. Or at least he’s ninety-nine percent sure it is. Or will be. Wilson’s already pled to the charges and received a suspended sentence and a $200 fine — and since it made no sense for both of them to go down, Wilson stepped forward and stated for the record that he’d acted alone, that Dave LaJoy had no knowledge whatever of what he planned to do to save the lives of innocent animals and protect the planet from the people who would rather kill than preserve, that his friend was along merely to take a hike that day. How they’d missed the sign at the trailhead, he couldn’t say. But it was windy, dust blowing in their faces, so they had their hoods up. And then it rained.