“DROP THE DAMNED GUN!”
Christopher stood paralyzed. The bright light had come up from nowhere, and now voices were shouting. He looked down at the gun in his hand. It looked alien and alive. He opened his hand slowly and the creature slipped from his grip.
It was a shocking sensation, the emptiness of his hand, just fingers again. He shook his head, feeling like he’d been sleepwalking.
Strong hands grabbed him, a leg swept his feet from under him, and he was facedown in the gravel. Sharp rocks cutting into his cheek. Dirt in his mouth. His arms were twisted roughly behind his back. He didn’t resist. He stared at the gun lying a few feet away, still more than just another artifact. Still like something living that had become a part of him.
Or was it the other way around? Was it he who had become a part of the gun?
He was jerked to his feet and pushed, staggering back against the hood of the car, blinking again in the lights.
“Christopher!”
Aisha. Her arms around him, her wet cheek pressed against his. Was she crying? Was he?
“I’m making the weapon safe,” a far-off voice said.
Sirens and wildly swinging blue lights were coming down the road at breakneck speed. One by one they skidded to a halt in a shower of gravel.
“This weapon has not been fired,” the first voice said.
“Oh, thank God,” Aisha said. “Oh, thank you, God.”
“I couldn’t do it,” Christopher admitted, feeling embarrassed and defeated.
“Check around the back of the house,” a second voice ordered. “I . . . Look, if the kid back there is in one piece, I don’t need any formal statements from him at this time. You understand me?”
“Your call, Dave,” the first man said, sounding doubtful.
“I couldn’t do it,” Christopher told Aisha.
“I know. I prayed so hard . . . I knew you wouldn’t.”
“I had him. I mean, he was scared, he was crawling and begging and all I had to do was pull the trigger—”
“But you didn’t.”
“I couldn’t, Eesh.”
Uniformed policemen were everywhere now. At least a half-dozen cars were spread out across and on both sides of the road.
The first cop was back. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the dark backyard, back to the sound of a frantically barking dog and a high-pitched, almost hysterical voice crying for revenge, screaming obscene threats now that the danger was past. “He’ll live. Just shaken up pretty badly.”
“Any evidence of shots fired?” Sergeant Winokur asked.
“No shots. No witnesses aside from the victim and this clown.” He indicated Christopher.
“All right, Curt, see if you can’t break up this party while I have a little talk with the tough guy here. All right, tough guy, come with me,” the sergeant said to Christopher. He hauled Christopher by his pinioned arm, pulling him, stumbling, down the dark road, away from the barking and the flash of blue lights and the wailing threats.
“Where are you taking him?” Aisha cried.
“See this?” the cop demanded angrily. “Do you see what you’ve done to this girl who cares about you? She has to call us and come racing over here scared half to death?”
Christopher shook his head in confusion. It was all happening in a blur. They were in darkness now, walking across dead leaves and fallen pine needles. A branch scratched his cheek. A sound was growing louder. Water. The river.
“Sergeant, what are you doing?” Aisha cried again, still keeping pace, clutching at Christopher’s other arm.
They stopped beside the river, an almost unseen but definite presence, running fast and loud, swollen with new rain and too-early snowfalls melting off the mountains.
Christopher was turned around. There was a metallic click and suddenly his arms were free of the handcuffs. He was aware of the police sergeant standing no more than a foot away. He could feel Aisha wrapped around his right arm.
“That punk back there is named Jesse Simms. He was the third individual involved in the attack on you. Within about twelve hours of the incident, we’d rolled this kid over on his buddies. We’ve been trying to use the other two to identify additional members of this particular skinhead organization.”
“You knew?” Christopher asked.
“Yeah. Oddly enough, that’s our job.” The cop’s tone was coldly sarcastic. “Sometimes we actually succeed. What was your job? What the hell were you doing here tonight with a gun?”
Christopher shrugged. “I . . . Look, they put me in the hospital, man.”
“And the penalty for assault and battery is death now? Someone beats you up, you kill them? I’m curious, you know, since you’re making all the laws now.”
Christopher shrugged again. The sergeant was clearly angry and growing more so. Christopher felt too drained to say much in his own defense.
“So you were going to kill him,” the policeman accused.
“He didn’t, though,” Aisha said fiercely.
“No. What he did was commit assault with a deadly weapon. We could probably also call it kidnapping since he held the poor bastard with a gun to his head. But I don’t think Mr. Simms will be wanting to press charges, because I’m going to tell him not to.”
Christopher exhaled and for the first time realized he had been holding his breath.
“So. Tough guy. Why didn’t you shoot him?” the policeman asked more gently.
“I don’t know.”
“It would have been easy. You had the gun. He was helpless.”
Christopher felt a wave of nausea at the memory. Yes, he’d been helpless, crying, begging. “It made me sick.”
“What made you sick? That he was scared? That he was begging for his life?” the sergeant bored in relentlessly.
“No,” Christopher said sharply. “It made me sick that I made him beg.”
“You enjoyed it. The rush of all that power from that little gun.”
“No. Yeah, at first,” Christopher admitted. “And then . . . Look, he deserved it. He’s a racist piece of crap.”
Surprisingly, the policeman laughed. “You know what? Lots of people deserve lots of things, kid. Sometimes they even get what’s coming to them. Not all the time, but sometimes.”
“And now what? Him and his friends will maybe spend ninety days in jail? Then it’s right back out on the streets.”
“That’s about right.”
“Maybe I should have killed him,” Christopher said, but without conviction.
“And now you’re ashamed because you didn’t? You think you’d be proud if you had? You think you’d be standing here feeling like a big man because you took a life?”
“No,” Christopher admitted.
“No. And you didn’t get off on scaring that little punk. You know why? Because it takes a weak individual to enjoy causing fear. It takes a very small man to get pleasure out of another individual’s pain. Maybe you just aren’t a small enough man.”
Christopher realized he was trembling, barely understanding what the cop was saying. All he knew was that a wave of relief so powerful it rattled him to his bones was sweeping over him. He had been so close to pulling that trigger.
Something was in his hand again. The gun. Emptied of shells, harmless, and yet so seductive.
“We checked you out after you first filed the complaint,” Sergeant Winokur said in a quieter voice. “You work hard, kid. You have plans and you have a girlfriend here who is probably too damned good for you. And there was some provocation. So you’re going to walk away from this one.”
“Thank you,” Christopher said in a whisper.
“Don’t thank me,” Sergeant Winokur said sarcastically. “I want a nice, clean case when we bust the rest of these punks. I don’t want the jury having to deal with you playing vigilante. Now if you’d been found with a firearm, I wouldn’t have much choice but to bust you and pretty much flush your life down the toilet. Do you follow me?”
“No . . . I . . .”
“What I’m saying is, that river is surprisingly deep way out in the middle.”
Christopher nodded, comprehension penetrating his confusion. The sergeant gave him a long, thoughtful look. Then he turned his back deliberately and began to walk back toward the flashing blue lights.
“Thanks,” Christopher called out after him. “I won’t . . . you know.”
There was no response. Christopher realized Aisha was still there, almost holding him up while his legs felt watery, his knees threatened to buckle. He felt weak as a newborn.
Aisha stepped away, waiting.
Christopher drew back his arm and found that he still possessed a reservoir of strength. The gun flew invisibly through the night. Seconds later there was a splash far out in the river.
“Let’s go home,” Aisha said.
“We can’t do this, Lucas,” Claire said a little breathlessly. “Not that I don’t want to, but I think maybe it’s a little far to take payback.”
Lucas stopped his hand where it was but didn’t pull it away. For a fleeting moment Claire wondered if he would stop. She had let things go way too far.
His voice was challenging. “That’s all this is to you? Payback?”
“Oh, come on, Lucas, what is it to you?”
“It’s . . . ” He began cursing. He snatched his hand away, breaking contact.
Claire laughed. She used the button to raise her seat and began refastening everything Lucas had done such a good job of unfastening.
“You’re cold, you know that?” Lucas demanded, sliding back across the seat.
“Uh-huh. I’m cold, but you’ve suddenly fallen madly in love with me, right? It isn’t just that you’re horny and you’re mad at Zoey for refusing you. Or that you’re worried about that long, very long hug between her and Jake? It isn’t that you’re thinking, ‘well, I get laid, plus I get to pay Zoey back’?”
A semblance of humor returned to Lucas’s features. “As revenge goes, it would be pretty effective.”
“You and me. Could either of us have come up with a better way to piss off Jake and Zoey?”
Lucas laughed unwillingly, unable to resist the truth. “Still,” he said ruefully, “it’s not like I was just faking it.”
“No, me neither,” Claire admitted.
“You haven’t exactly turned into a gorgon.”
“We could definitely be dangerous together,” Claire admitted. “But you’re still in love with Zoey.”
He shrugged and looked away.
“I think Jake is, too, at least partly.”
Great, now she was feeling sorry for herself. Well, why not? Benjamin had obviously gotten over her a lot more completely than she’d ever expected. The level of affection between him and Nina was nauseating. And Lucas, and maybe even Jake, carried torches for Little Zoey Pureheart.
What did Jake feel for Zoey? What, if anything, did he feel for Claire? What, if anything, did anyone ever really feel for Claire?
Claire stole a glance at Lucas. Already the look of charged excitement was fading, replaced by a sober, worried expression. That worry was sure to grow. In a few minutes it would begin to occur to him that Claire now held his relationship with Zoey in the palm of her hand.
Claire turned the key in the ignition.
Claire
We all live on Chatham Island. Not a large island; in fact, it’s small even by Maine island standards. Some maps don’t even show it. It only has three hundred or so year-round residents. We get a lot more people in the summer, but the real, hard-core island population is just three hundred. North Harbor, which we jokingly refer to as our town, is really only a town when the tourists are in. Once September rolls around it starts to empty out, and by late October it’s reduced to a few active businesses, a small grocery store that’s only open a few hours a day, one year-round restaurant and bar, Passmores’, which belongs to Zoey and Benjamin’s parents, a hardware store, and an automatic teller machine.
All of which is swell. Weymouth, which is a nice little full-service city, is just a half-hour ferry ride away, and from there we can always drive down to Portland or even Boston. But on a day-in, day-out basis I live on the island. And this can be a problem, because there is no natural camouflage in a community this small. There’s none of that automatic invisibility you get in a real city, where no one knows anyone else and people on the street avoid making eye contact with each other. In a real city you can do what you want and be what you want, and if you don’t like what you were last week, you can just change to something new.
You can’t do that on an island where everyone knows you and your family and where you live and probably what you had for breakfast. It places some limitations on you. Because, see, if you start trouble with another islander, it never entirely goes away. And likewise, if you fall in love with another islander, that never entirely goes away, either.
I live on an island where I have gone out with three of the four guys my age. Anywhere else it would be no big deal. But imagine you have one boyfriend now, and two ex-boyfriends, and every morning and again every afternoon, you find yourself on a ferry with them. And one of the ex-boyfriends is now going out with your sister, and another is now going out with one of your friends, and that friend used to go out with the guy you are now seeing. You can’t develop a healthy hatred for your ex and just put him out of your life, because you’re going to be seeing him every single day. So relationships never seem to completely die.
It tends to make you cautious in some ways.