Envy the Night

AJ’s head canted to the right, into a shadow. “Where on the lake?”

Frank swallowed, worked his tongue around his mouth, still tasting the metal of the gun. The last taste his father had ever had in this life.

“The north end. That’s as much as I can tell you. They were here when we left. They’re gone now, and they didn’t tell me where they were going. He knew you were coming, somehow.”

AJ’s anger seemed barely tempered by a need to believe Frank.

“Then why would they still be on the lake?”

Frank looked past AJ’s shoulder, saw Nora watching him.

“He wasn’t sure how much time he had before you got here. Couldn’t even know for sure that Nora and I had ever gotten away from my cabin. And since he wasn’t sure, he couldn’t risk going south to get back to the boat ramp or to the cabin. Too much of a chance he’d run straight into you. So he’d go north.”

“What’s north?”

“Nothing,” Frank said. “Nothing but water and woods.”

Nine times Grady had called; nine times Atkins had failed to answer. What in the hell was going on?

He’d driven past Wausau and into a rainstorm, cruise control set at ninety now and still nobody stopping him. All he could hope for at this point, as Tomahawk neared and his wipers slapped back and forth at the highest speed setting, was that Atkins couldn’t take his calls because he was too busy with Frank. Interviewing him in some safe room in a building far away from Vaughn Duncan and Devin Matteson, maybe. Or maybe it was already done; maybe Matteson and Duncan were both in handcuffs, and Atkins was preparing for the mountain of paperwork that lay ahead.

Maybe a lot of things. As many optimistic options as Grady could produce, he couldn’t believe any of them. Not today. Because it was a karmic world, Grady believed that in his heart, and he’d spent too many days and too many years telling himself that he could always make up for his lie, that there would always be time, somewhere down the road, to sit down with Frank Temple and set him straight, give him the truth and apologize and explain why he’d done it, explain that they’d wanted so badly to take Devin down that a little misdirection had seemed so, so insignificant.

The gambit hadn’t paid off, though, and so Grady kept that damn watch on Frank Temple out of a little fondness and a lot of guilt and reminded himself often of a personal pact that one day, if it ever seemed necessary, he would tell the kid that it hadn’t been Devin who gave up his father.

Grady had let seven years roll by, twenty-five hundred days, and had never said a word. Because it hadn’t mattered, not anymore—Frank had swallowed the lie, but it hadn’t hurt him, and now, after all this time, there was no way that it could.

Wrong. It was going to hurt him now. Frank and who knew how many others. And all Grady could do was streak up the interstate through the rain, destined to be too late.

As they had so many times in the past, Ezra’s ears warned of disaster before his eyes. For a moment he questioned it over the noise of the storm, but then the wind abated for just a moment, as if the lake were going to give him one break today, and that was enough to confirm his suspicions: There was a boat on the water.

He could hear the engine faintly, this one riding a lower and stronger pitch than the little outboard under his hand would create. It was a familiar sound, the growl of a Merc two-twenty-five pounding hard, the rhythm of his daily life in the summers.

“What?” Renee said, seeing his face.

“There’s a boat coming.”

“Could be anybody,” Vaughn said. “Let’s go, man. Faster we get back to the car, faster we’re out of here.”

The fear was returning to his voice now, that jerky panic that he’d talked with earlier in the day.

“No.” Ezra shook his head. It could be Frank, alone, but something told him it wasn’t, told him that the game was in play now.

“You don’t even know it’s them. I can’t see any boat—”

“It’s them,” Ezra said. “I know the sound of my own boat.”

He looked down at the throttle under his hand, knowing that it would dictate what happened next as much as anything would. His boat ate up the water faster than anything else on this lake. Trying to outrun them with the little nine-point-nine would be like a car chase between a Lamborghini and a dump truck.

“It could be that kid and the girl,” Vaughn said. “Just them.”

“Could be,” Ezra said, even though he knew it wasn’t. “If it is, we’ll know soon. Right now, we got to get ready.”

The best scenario would be to ditch the boat and take to the trees and get ready to do some shooting. If he were in his own boat, this bullshit would be over before it got started. He still had his rifle in the boat, with a night scope that would work just fine in this weather. Take that and head into the trees and then he could make damn sure these boys would have a rude welcome. Should never have left it in the boat. Damn. It was the little things that killed you, the missed details and slips of timing, and Ezra felt those stacking up on him now, things that he wouldn’t have missed in another time and another place. He was out of practice, had been happy to be out of practice, but now it was proving to be a dangerous thing.

When they got to the island and saw it was empty, the boat missing, they’d begin calculating the situation just as he was, and whoever came out ahead in this fight would be the one who thought it through the best, saw the moves before anybody made them. Combat was a thinking man’s game, always had been.

So think, then. Think hard and well and think fast damn it.

He looked back at Renee and Vaughn, saw them waiting on him with anxious faces, and nodded to himself. Step one, separate these two. It seemed like a bad idea at first blush, but that was almost a good thing, because it meant the boys in Ezra’s boat wouldn’t expect it. Generally you’d want to keep everyone together, protect one another, seek safety in numbers. The second layer of this move, and the one that probably meant the most, was that the men from Florida wanted Renee and Vaughn together, not separate. So if things played out poorly, if these men caught them, better to make it happen one at a time. That would slow things down, and when you slowed things down you had more time to come up with a countermeasure.

“Is there any way we can get help?” Renee said.

Ezra took his cell phone out to humor her. Nobody could get here fast enough, and anybody who might wasn’t going to be the sort of cop who could help with these guys. It’d be a Fish and Wildlife officer or a sheriff’s deputy or some other poor bastard who’d do nothing but add to the death toll.

“No signal,” Ezra said, the whitest of lies, because the phone showed just one tiny bar, the barest hint of a connection. “We got to get moving again. First thing we’re going to do is split up.”

Renee was silent. Vaughn said, his voice wary, “Split up how?”

“You and me are going to be on the shore,” Ezra said, gesturing north of where they sat, “and she’s going to stay on this island. Temporarily.”

“No way.” Vaughn shook his head. “No chance I’m leaving her alone. You’re a damn coward.”

“We’re splitting up to protect her,” he said, speaking to Vaughn and pointing at Renee. “She stays here while we go across to the main shore, and we’ll make sure they know that we’re going there. We’ll beach the boat in the open, make it obvious.”

“No,” Vaughn said, but Ezra ignored him and spoke to Renee.

“You’re a swimmer, right?”

“Yes.”

“How good?”

“Very.”

He pointed west across the water as lightning lit up the bay. “Can you make that shore?”

It was a hell of a swim, but she nodded.

“All right. Anything happens and you’re on your own, that’s the one to shoot for. Walk far enough, you’ll hit a fire lane.”

“I’m not leaving her!” Vaughn spun toward Ezra, leaning close. “You want to go on