Johansson throttled down as they approached the Jackie II, letting the Whaler ride the waves.
“Grab hold of her,” he called. Mathias didn’t move, but another man emerged from the fog. He was wearing a sweatshirt with the hood up, and it took Barrett a moment to place him—it was Ronnie Lord.
The sterns thumped against each other, the fenders preventing damage, and then Ronnie looped a line over the cleat and drew it taut, binding the two boats together.
Mathias was silent, his eyes locked on Barrett’s, a hint of a smile playing across his face. Behind him the fog crawled up from the water and moved over the rocks as if in search of something. The world beyond the immediate radius of the two boats and the rocks was lost to webs of white and gray. You could have pointed in any direction and promised a mountain or open sea, and Barrett would no longer have been able to dispute it. If he made it out of this place, he’d never be able to come back and identify it. The weather seemed to have come in at Mathias’s instruction.
Johansson cut the engine on the Whaler and turned back to Barrett, gun in hand.
“Get up, asshole.” There was such emptiness in his eyes now that the words he’d whispered to Barrett earlier were hard to keep faith in.
Johansson pressed the gun against the side of Barrett’s head as he helped him to his feet. The swells were running higher and faster out here, and with his hands bound behind his back, Barrett struggled to keep his balance. Johansson shoved him forward.
“Give me a hand,” he called, and Ronnie Lord helped drag Barrett out of the Whaler and into the lobster boat. When they had him inside, Ronnie picked up a twin of the shotgun Johansson had used and stepped toward the cockpit. Mathias was holding a revolver in one gloved hand. Barrett turned to him and was about to speak when his eyes caught motion in the bow.
Howard Pelletier was bound at the wrists and ankles, his hands tied over his head to the anchor line. Each time the boat rocked, it pulled at his shoulders cruelly. Both of his eyes were swollen and blackened, and dried blood crusted over the duct tape that covered his lips.
Barrett started for him instinctively, but both Ronnie Lord and Don Johansson grabbed him and held him back. Mathias watched with a languid grin.
“The bruises are his own fault. For an old bastard, Howard can put up a tussle.”
Howard’s eyes searched Barrett’s with no trace of hope.
“You have a story ready for it,” Barrett said. “I’m sure of that. Am I supposed to be the one who did that to him? You really think you can sell that, Mathias?”
“I think there will be competing theories. Maybe you killed him, sure. Maybe you both died when the boat ran aground, and it was nothing more than bad luck. It happens on days like this. But I think the more popular theory will be that he killed you. It’s no secret that Howard Pelletier hasn’t been a well man since his daughter died.”
“You won’t be able to sell that one.”
“No?” Mathias raised one eyebrow. “Time will tell, but I think once they search Howard’s garage and find tapes of the two of you plotting a murder, it might make him seem a little less stable.”
He finds their secrets and threatens to share them with the people they love the most, Johansson had said.
“The security business has been good to you.” Barrett was talking largely to buy Johansson time. Johansson was standing behind Barrett, but the promise that he’d cut him loose wasn’t so reassuring now—with the shotgun in Ronnie Lord’s hands, the revolver in Mathias’s, and his own hands still cuffed behind him, Barrett wasn’t loving the odds.
“All business has been good to me,” Mathias said.
“I wouldn’t have figured you for a Bitcoin guy,” Barrett said. “And, clearly, George Kelly hasn’t either.”
For the first time, there was the flash of some anger in Mathias.
“That’s why it works,” he said. “What you figured about me, what everyone like you did, that is why it works.” He dropped to one knee and withdrew a plastic case with a clear lid from beneath one of the stern cushions. The case had once held drill bits; now it held five hypodermic syringes.
“Wouldn’t want any swimmers,” he said. “It’s a long way to shore, but you hear crazy stories sometimes. Some people just don’t know when to die. We’ll make it smooth and sweet, Barrett. Hell, you’ll enjoy it.”
He removed one of the syringes and set his revolver down to take off the cap.
Barrett was thinking, Now, Don, do it now, with such intensity that he almost didn’t realize that the pressure on his wrists had loosened.
“Get up there,” Johansson said. He’d been standing close to Barrett, and now he shoved him forward, then made a show of stumbling, saying “Shit!” just as the Taurus fell to the deck, as if he’d dropped it.
The gun clattered out into the bulkhead, into the middle of a triangle between Barrett, Ronnie, and Mathias. Absolutely perfect position—somebody was going to have to reach for it, and only two parties thought they were in the mix.
Mathias started to rise, then seemed to think better of it on the rolling boat with the deadly syringe in his hand. He nodded at Ronnie instead.
Ronnie had to break his shooter’s stance to move for it. When the shotgun muzzle swung toward the deck, Johansson gave Barrett a nudge and then stepped sideways.
Johansson had cut the flex cuffs while he stood close to Barrett, and Barrett’s hands were finally free as he dove for the Taurus. He landed on the deck boards and used his left hand to knock the Taurus toward his right, all of his focus on coming up shooting. He was convinced that the pistol was their last hope, only hope, right up until he heard the staccato claps from above.
He looked up in time to see twin roses bloom in the center of Ronnie Lord’s chest. Ronnie staggered backward and lifted the shotgun, and Barrett reached for it with a desperate, grasping hand, trying to keep the muzzle down as Ronnie’s finger landed on the trigger.
He missed.
The blast of the shotgun was cacophonous, a thunderclap inches from Barrett’s ear, and it felt as if the force of the sound itself drove him down.
Ronnie Lord stood for a moment with odd rigidity, then looked down at his chest, wobbled like the last pin between a spare and a strike, and went over backward, the shotgun tumbling from his grasp.
Barrett rose to his knees with his ears ringing and the nine-millimeter in his hands. He spun toward the stern, thinking that he was moving too slow—Move fast and shoot straight, Johansson had said—and by the time he turned, he saw Mathias closing on him with the revolver in his left hand, the muzzle rising.
Barrett pulled the trigger on the nine.
The gun fired with a sound that seemed soft after the shotgun blast, but Mathias Burke’s body kicked sideways as a wave hit the boat and knocked him down on top of Barrett. Barrett rolled onto his left shoulder and brought the muzzle of the Taurus to Ma-thias’s face, but he could already feel the warm rush of the other man’s blood against his own belly, and Mathias dropped his gun and rolled onto his back, both hands going to his belly, trying to compress the wound, to hold himself together.
Barrett staggered up and kicked Mathias’s revolver away. He nearly fell from the motion; the deck was already slick with blood. He got his balance back and turned to help Johansson.
Johansson was draped over the gunwale, nearly knocked off the boat by the shotgun blast. The shell’s scatter pattern had left his torso crisscrossed with bloody gashes, like the laces on a baseball. His pants were hiked up on his left calf, showing the empty ankle holster he’d drawn his backup gun from. The gun was nowhere to be seen—probably on the ocean floor by now.
“Got ’em,” Johansson said softly.
“Yeah.”
“Thought Mathias had you. You shot fast, though.”
He spat blood onto the deck and took a breath that made the chest wounds bubble. Barrett knew he should be trying to help, but he felt numb and unsteady, disembodied.
“Real firefight that time,” Johansson murmured. “Right guys too.”
“Yes,” Barrett said.
Johansson nodded weakly and glanced down at his lacerated, bloody chest with near disinterest.
“Cleaner now,” he said, and his words were slurred. “Clean as I can get.”
When he heaved himself up, Barrett thought he was attempting to stand. “Stay there,” he said, but then he realized that Johansson was trying to fight over the gunwale, into the water. He was too weak to make it all the way, and for an instant he was half in the boat and half off, but then the next wave hit and gravity claimed him.
He went over the side and into the sea, and the spray from the wave washed his blood down as if the ocean were determined to remove all traces of him as quickly as possible.
Barrett moved after him, looking for a line or a life ring or a boat hook, but he couldn’t find anything. He was struggling to focus suddenly, and as he turned, the horizon rose and fell and took the vertical axis with it and then he was down on his knees without much idea how he’d gotten there.
It wasn’t until he set the Taurus down and used his hands to help push strangely disobliging legs into action that he saw the hypodermic syringe buried just under his rib cage.