SIXTY

THERE PASSED A WEARY TIME

Ashley sets up a chair for her inside the boat’s cabin. Then he sits across from her on a small captain’s stool.

Behind him, flies orbit the bodies of the boat’s original owners. A couple Ashley introduces as “Bob Taylor and his mistress, Carla Pilotti.” They lie, supine, bodies cocked halfway down the steps toward the below-deck cabin, a black puckered crater in the center of each forehead.

Ashley swats at any flies that come near him.

The flies must irritate him. Every swat comes with a frustrated growl and a narrow-eyed wince.

The inside of the cabin is destroyed. As if by ax or hammer. The console is mostly shattered. The windows, boarded up.

“Your mother’s below deck,” he says. “Resting. You ought to rest, too—”

“Mom!” she cries out, but he grabs her face and squeezes hard enough to shut her up.

“No,” he says. “No speaking to her. Your time with her is done. She’s unconscious anyway and gagged so that she cannot speak to you. Don’t make me gag you, too.” He again relaxes. “Tomorrow is a very big day.”

“It is.” Tomorrow’s the day I kill you. But she doesn’t know how. And she’s not even sure she believes it anymore. Every move she makes, he knows it. Big and small.

He wheels the stool through a dried puddle of blood—the blood of Bob, or Carla, or her own mother, she doesn’t know—and heads to the console, where he starts the boat. The engine growls. Beneath them, a propeller churns the dark, glassy waters and they begin to slide away from the marina, from the shore, from the land Miriam knows and trusts.

His back is to her.

While he’s facing away, she begins to look for a weapon.

She looks for something— anything—to use against him. A screwdriver. A piece of window glass. A long splinter. Nothing.

Goddamnit.

She’ll use her hands. Her feet. Her teeth.

No. Then she sees it.

The leg. The prosthetic leg. I’m going to beat you to death with your own leg, you motherfucker.

But even as that thought lands, even as she plans her first strike—

He turns his head toward her. The front of him is facing forward, his elbow casually resting on the wheel like he’s out here ready for a fun day of fishing with his half-dead family. He rests his chin on his own shoulder and makes a pouty face. “You’re thinking of hurting me, Miriam. And while I guess it’s understandable, it damn sure isn’t very nice.”

“I . . . I wasn’t.”

That wolfish grin. “You were. They told me you were. I saw the words drift across the wheel as I turned it. A warning from my friends.”

“Is that what they are? Your friends?”

“They’ve done me a lot of good. Given me a lot of purpose. They’re my bosses. My masters. My parents. But they’re also my friends. Because they take care of me. Like good friends should.”

“I took care of you that day in the SUV. With Ingersoll. I got you free. They would’ve cut more of you away. I did you a favor that day.”

“You should have never left me.” He clearly doesn’t want to talk about that because all he says next is, “You’re welcome to try to hurt me again but it will only bring you more pain. It’s like that old Pee-Wee Herman playground taunt: I’m rubber and you’re glue. Whatever you do to me bounces off and sticks to you. And right now I bet you’re in a lot of pain. You look like shit, if I’m being honest.”

A lone, betraying tear crawls down her cheek. She swiftly wipes it away with the back of her hand and tries to scowl past it.

They stare at each other like that, not saying a thing. Him smirking. Her glowering, hoping she can hold back her tears—hoping she can figure out how to kill him with just her look.

Eventually, he winks and turns back to piloting the boat.

He steers it out into open water.

The fishing boat chugs along.

Outside, the squawks of gulls. The occasional thump above their heads. He looks up. “Fisher birds like gulls and gannets. They follow after boats. Looking for bait. Looking for the catch. We’re all just looking for the catch, I guess, right?” He shrugs. “It’s good you’re giving up,” he says. “Giving in. This thing you do has just brought you a lot of suck, hasn’t it? A big old misery sandwich.” He swats at his neck. “God. These fucking flies. I should’ve sprayed or something.”

Guess you’re not so psychic after all.

“I just want to say, it’s nice to be with you again.” He suddenly wheels the stool back around to face her. “You know, I was a real fuck-up, and I never actually managed to apologize to you. When we met I was a . . . I was a man without a purpose. I think that’s what weakens us as people, when we drift through life without any kind of meaning. Idle hands, am I right? I was just some shitty two-bit con artist who thought he was the craftiest little trilobite the ocean floor ever did see. But real fish swam above my head. Sharks and barracuda. I had no idea. Then I saw you down there with me and I drew you in—I thought, Jesus, here’s a girl just like me, somebody smart but without purpose—so I did what I always did. I was a user. I used you like I used everybody. Then I starting using drugs and . . .” He whistles. “Ugly times. But us meeting was powerful. It was like . . . it was volcanic. Boom. Shook both of us up. Showed us both the way, but to fix something you have to break it first, so we had to lose things before we could begin.” He snaps his fingers. “It’s like losing your virginity. Right? Girl busts that cherry—” He thrusts his finger into his mouth and makes a cork-popping sound. “And there’s pain and blood but then a kind of clarity. And eventually, even pleasure. I have my clarity. And this is my pleasure. But when we met each other I didn’t have those things and so I am very, very sorry.”

She has nothing to say to any of that. To her, it’s all just noise.

Instead she asks, “The windows are boarded. How do you know where you’re going?”

He smiles. “I just do. You do, too. In a way.”

“The cops are going to find us. You killed people.”

“I did. And they won’t. I killed everybody there. Nobody to ID me. Nobody to even call the police. Too early for there to be other fishermen out at the boats. Eventually they’ll come looking. And I’ll be one step ahead. We’ll be gone. Your mother will be dead.”

“Will I?”

He laughs. “No, I’m not going to kill you. Not yet, anyway. I don’t even know if that’s on the menu. Depends on what They—” He points up toward the cabin ceiling. “Have to say about it. That’s their call. Not mine. I’m just their man on the ground.”

“You’re their little bitch.”

“Such a dirty mouth. You reduce everything to its components. You’re like the maggots these flies make. Breaking it all down to its basest, most . . . disgusting bits.” He’s angry. Good. Let him be angry. “I’m not their bitch. I’m their avatar. Gods used to have avatars. Krishna. Jesus. Human beings acting as the hand of the divine there in the dirt, here on the water.”

She sniffs and blinks her bleary, wet eyes. “That who you think you work for? God?”

“The gods. Plural. The gods of order. The gods of fate and destiny.”

“And who do I work for?”

He lowers his voice. “The other ones. The gods below. Gods of chaos and disorder. Free will. Free will.” He suddenly wheels close to her, thrusts his finger in her face. “See, you think that’s a good thing. Free will. Like you’re one of those patriot assholes who think it’s all about individual freedom. The freedom to carry a gun or not wear a helmet on a motorcycle or the freedom to just be an asshole. I used to think that way. But see, that’s the trick. Nobody uses that freedom to do good things. It’s just another way to say, I want the excuse to be a self-interested, self-absorbed monster. Fate is about keeping things in line. About marching us toward a destination. See? Destiny. Destination.” He laughs so hard his cheeks turn red. “It’s in there. The one word nested in the other.”

“Fate is nested in fatal, too,” she says quietly.

“It is at that. Because sometimes fate is about people dying whether you like it or not. But you wouldn’t understand that. You come along and you fuck things up. The people who are supposed to die—you save them from the edge of the pit. And the others standing there watching—you kick them into the darkness. You keep people in the pattern who aren’t supposed to be there anymore and you put others in their place. You’re damaging things. You can’t . . . you can’t go around doing that.”

“Like you said, we all have to find our purpose.”

That straight-razor smile flashes. “We do. And mine is to show you how wrong yours is. One day you’ll see. One day you’ll see because darkness is rolling toward us like a sky full of locusts. The death will be a great cloud of wings and teeth and it will rob from this world so many. People starving. People sick. People killing each other. The world goes through these transitional periods. Some worse than others, but people always die— and that’s necessary for the pattern. For all of the people to keep going, some of the people— sometimes a lot of the people—have to die. You misunderstand that now. You won’t, one day. Maybe one day soon you’ll see how necessary it is. You’ll see that sometimes to fix something, you first have to break it.”

“Maybe I’m the one doing the breaking,” she says.

He backhands her.

It rocks her head. She tastes blood.

A moment of chaos.

She seizes it. She launches herself toward him.

He grabs her as they fall backward.

Ashley uses her momentum and slams her forward into the console. Wood paneling shatters. He scrambles to stand and pistons a punch into her midsection— a boulder dropped in a lake, ripples of agony.

“You still have that fight in you,” he says, panting, licking his lips as he stands up and over her. “But we’ll squeeze those last drops out by morning. For now, I have a boat to captain, and this game is tiring.”