Endgame
They said I almost died that day in Delavane’s barn. They’re wrong. I died, and I came back to life. The new Sippy understood that people were bad, and happy endings happened in the middle of the story because smart storytellers know when to shut up. Maybe that’s why I was in the hospital the day your mother overdosed. Maybe I was meant to be there. Our stories are connected. They’re one story. Don’t let it stop in the middle. You say it’s time for action. Let’s act together. There’s work to do! Let’s work together. You want a High School Military Tribunal?
Let’s make one. Together.
—From Sippy Bascomb’s deleted blog
“No phones, no engines, no cross talk. Three men, three kayaks, three guns. I figure a fifteen-minute paddle—the tide is rising, so once we get past the cut it will carry us up-harbor. That’s a break. We hit the shore, Dimo secures the shack, the chief takes the gallows, I neutralize the Frakers. Aim to kill, center mass, or keep that gun packed. No fancy shooting. This is not a movie or a Wild West show. We hit the beach, spread out, and sprint. The shack is twenty yards from the Third Point waterline. That’s a twelve-second run on soft sand with no cover. Keep low, stay sharp, and get ready to wing it.”
I looked up from Mitch Stone’s hastily drawn map. “That’s the plan?”
He gave me a cold stare. “That’s always the plan, Chief. Things go sideways the second you engage. Set your strategy and stick to it? You wind up dead. Guaranteed. No one winds up dead today, all right? That’s the plan.”
We were standing in the harbormaster’s office on Washington Street. The kayaks were bobbing in the water at the end of the pier. Mike Henderson hovered by the door. He had overheard my phone call with Mitch; they were working on the same jobsite, and he tagged along, hoping to join the rescue team. I had to tell him no. Secretly, I think he was relieved. He would have been a liability in combat, and he knew it.
I looked at Dimo Tabachev.
He nodded. “We go. We do.”
Mitch touched his shoulder. “This is a rescue mission. The man who killed your brother, Roy Elkins? He’s dead already. So is the animal who put him up to it. The man out there killed Sippy Bascomb, himself.”
“The newspaper reported that as a suicide,” I said.
Mitch gave me a cheerless smile. “But we both know better.” He turned back to Dimo. “We cool?”
Dimo nodded. “As cucumber.”
“Revenge is like booze. It makes you aggressive—and it makes you sloppy.”
Dimo grinned—a flash of his old self. “Plus hangover is bitch!”
“Ain’t it the truth? Ready, Chief?”
“Ready.”
I almost capsized the narrow little boat lowering myself into it from the dock, but once I was seated comfortably with the double paddle in my hands, I got the feel for it quickly. The little craft was light on the water, and it shot ahead with every stroke. I could feel the tug of the current pushing me toward Monomoy at first, but Mitch was right—soon the pulse of water released us and we were riding the flow away from town, paddling hard north by northeast, Dimo beside me, both of us following Mitch Stone’s lead, fighting to keep up. It was hard work. If I was physically exhausted by the time we crossed the water, I’d be no use to anyone. But the adrenaline kicked in, as it always does. The best drugs are the ones we make ourselves right there in the suprarenal glands, conveniently located above a kidney near you.
We had reached the shallows at Third Point when we heard the shots. Had the Staties and the FBI decided to launch their attack? But I trusted Dave Carmichael. Then what? Was Todd Fraker just shooting people now? Had he come totally unhinged? All I could do at that moment was paddle harder.
Three more strokes, and the nose of the boat hit the sand.
When I looked up from dragging my kayak onto the beach, I could see Jane, naked, standing on the gallows platform with the noose around her neck.
Then Fraker yanked his arm down, and she dropped out of sight.
I went insane, as insane as Fraker himself, bellowing as I pounded across the soft sand into the dune grass, skirted the shack past the Delavane brothers, Ed inert and Billy pulling on the belt he had wrapped around his thigh as a makeshift tourniquet. I took the steps to the platform two at a time.
Then Fraker was standing in front of me. I charged into him, slamming him with my shoulder, and he staggered back two steps, pinwheeling his arms. On the third step, he ran out of platform. He fell, squealing, and I saw his knife lying next to the open trap door. I grabbed it and started sawing through the rope. Jane dangled below me, trying to lift herself, her hands slipping on the greasy rope, over and over, the noose jabbing into her throat each time. Fraker had smeared something on the hemp, some kind of oil, and then left her hands free so she could struggle before she died.
The hate rose up in me like vomit.
Jane cried out: “Henry!”
The hemp was dense, the knife was dull. It seemed to shred one filament at a time.
“Henry! I can’t hold on! I—”
Her voice turned into a strangled cry as she lost her grip again and the noose tightened around her neck.
I kept sawing at the rope—I was getting through it. I screamed at Dimo, “Get under the scaffold,” but he was already there. Finally, the last sinew of twine shredded, and Jane fell into his arms. He already had his jacket off, and he wrapped her in it.
I bounded down the stairs, jumped the last three steps, my gun in my hand as I hit the ground.
Fraker was on his knees, both ankles broken, helpless and terrified. He wasn’t even human, just some bristling animal threat, a rat in your kitchen, a snake on your car seat, something you kill by instinct, in some panicked convulsion of the nerves. But this was a man, a helpless, injured man, and I killed him.
I murdered Todd Fraker.
But he didn’t die.
I aimed for his quaking chest and felt a grisly spurt of joy as I squeezed the trigger and put a .45 caliber round into his heart.
The bullet never reached him.
Mitchell Stone broke my wrist with some kind of karate kick. My shot went wide, and I dropped the gun. The pain was excruciating; I was trembling, hyperventilating. I clutched my wrist, swarming globules sparking in front of my eyes. I thought I was going to faint.
But I saw the truth. Mitch had saved Todd, but he had also saved me, pulled me back from the brink in the only way anyone could have. When my vision cleared, I looked up, and Jane had pulled loose from Dimo, charging me, leaping at my chest, throwing her arms around me.
“Oh, my God, Henry…thank God you came, you found me, you—he…I thought—oh, God, I thought I was going to—”
I held her tight, wrapping my good arm around her. “Shhhh. I’m here. It’s okay. You’re safe. It’s over.”
As I spoke, Todd got to his feet somehow and launched himself at me. Mitch caught him in mid-air, as a firefighter on the burn-line might catch a sandbag, and lowered him into the dune grass.
That was when Lonnie Fraker showed up, wild-eyed, piling out of a stolen SUV with a gun in his hand.
“LET HIM GO!”
Mitch straightened up and took a step away from Todd.
“Help him up, Todd! I’m getting us out of here.”
Todd pushed himself back up onto his knees. “Forget it, Lonnie. We’re through.”
“No, I just figured it out! We take the boat, but we don’t keep it! We hijack one of these sailboats in the Sound and make them take us down the coast. Once we’re aboard and we sink the Boston Whaler, we’re invisible! It’s protective coloration. They can’t search every boat on the East Coast.”
“I can’t even walk. I think I broke both my ankles.”
“I’ll carry you! It’s only fifty feet. Then we’re gone.”
“You’re not thinking. The Coast Guard is on alert by now. They have drones, too. I’ve seen them. We’d never make it.”
By this time I had picked up my gun and was gripping it in my left hand. Jane moved behind me, shivering uncontrollably, huddled into Dimo’s jacket. “Put the gun down, Lonnie. Todd is right.”
“You’re outgunned, friend,” Mitch added. His feet were set apart in a classic Weaver stance, his gun cupped in two hands, standing sideways to the target.
“You have no moves left,” I added.
“We can take hostages!” Lonnie shouted.
It took a moment for the idea to penetrate the fog, but then Todd’s face lit. “Hostages! Yes! You start shooting, the bullets go through those walls and cut those two in there apart. You just have to aim low, angle the shots down, right, Lonnie? You can’t miss at this range!” He turned back to me. “Call off the Coasties, we’re taking one of those prisoners with us. Maybe…Monica Terwilliger. You won’t let her get hurt!” He jammed his hand into his pocket and pulled out the handcuff key. “Take it! Get her out here.”
“No.”
“Ten seconds, and I start shooting.”
I cut my eyes toward Mitch. “Ready?”
He nodded.
“You won’t shoot until I start shooting! That’s the law! So someone’s gonna die. Make the call.” No one moved. “Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four.”
The shout came from behind him.
“You killed Cindy! I heard the shots, you fucking psycho!”
It was Mark Toland, charging across the dune grass with a jagged scrap of driftwood in his hands, raised like a club. He took on a bizarre stature as he ran, turning huge and primal, a black bear defending its turf, lumbering slowly and yet eating up the distance with those big strides. His wide, darting eyes told the story—his brain had short-circuited, overloading with hate and rage and blood lust.
I understood perfectly.
Lonnie wrenched himself around, his own face twisted with hate, more hate, bigger hate, long-fermented hate, and fired.
The shot took Toland in the chest and knocked him backward, sitting him down hard. Lonnie’s second shot flattened him, and Toland was dead before his head hit the sand. The echoes of gunfire boomed out over the water, and Lonnie stood staring, transfixed by the motionless pile of clothes and flesh fifty feet away, half-hidden in the dune grass. Lonnie’s wide-open face was transformed at that moment—transfigured, as if he’d seen God, or killed the devil.
Maybe he’d done both.
Then Dimo plowed into him, taking him down hard, and it was finally over.
Five minutes later the cavalry arrived: two boats full of Coast Guard troops, two medevac helicopters, and the Sikorsky Jayhawk that had just flown me to Boston. Pete Salros climbed out as three state police Ford Explorers pulled up. Dave Carmichael himself stepped out of the lead vehicle and walked up to me. An aide scurried behind him with a camera.
He reached out to shake my hand, saw the swollen wrist, and thought better of it. “Good work, Henry.”
I just stared at him. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I was late for my own marriage. I worked through the birth of both my sons. But I never miss a photo-op, and this is one for the history books.”
I ignored him. The narrow strip of land felt toxic, radioactive. Using the carnage and human misery of the place for some crass splinter of political gain dumbfounded me.
I hugged Jane and turned to Pete Salros. “Get us the hell out of here.”