Jermaine moved the arrow inches from my head.
“Hey, could you back up? You’re making me nervous.”
He didn’t move. I stood a while, the wind whipping my shirt. Finally, I started to flow. I made sure some of my urine blew onto the side of the boat.
“Nice ride,” I said, working hard to sound nonchalant, despite my shaking hand and still stinging face. My legs banged against the rail.
Jumping was an option. I could swim, but in my state, I wasn’t sure I’d make it. Even in the half-light I could make out foam on the tips of the waves. We were already far from shore, as Gilroy didn’t seem too interested in following the posted speed limits or the “no wake” signs. We passed the first marker, and tilted to starboard, heading to the same place Francine was found.
“You taking me to the harbor like you did Francine?”
Jermaine attempted to remain impassive, but islanders aren’t naturally poker-faced, especially homicidal-maniac islanders. What I needed to know showed in the glint of his eyes. The man wanted to kill me so badly, he had the giddiness of a teenaged boy on the way to getting laid for the first time.
Right there, standing on the edge of the boat after urinating, I had a quick image of me and Yarey. Her tongue probing my lips as we kissed, wet and passionate.
“Hey! What da fuck, man!” Jermaine was not happy. “Put dat thing away. Hey, Gilroy, dis man got a coconut tree.”
Gilroy grunted. Did he ever laugh? The quip made me chuckle. It relaxed me. Jump-started my mind. I began churning through new possibilities.
Always act as if you’ll get away; that was one of Henry’s rules. If you got away, you still had a case to solve, which meant you kept working the case. Was this the same boat they’d taken Francine on across the River Styx? Had to be.
Everything shimmered in the iridescent light of the setting half-moon. One spot in particular on the rim of the boat glowed like bleach had been used there recently.
Although I’d never been a homicide investigator, Evelyn’s death had motivated me to learn a bit about covering up a murder. If you were going to get bloody, you kept bleach handy. Otherwise, you made it easy on the cops. Jermaine stared at me and didn’t waiver. I was getting more comfortable having a crossbow trained on me. Henry used to say the reaper’s always there, waiting around every corner and every decision. Waiting for his job to matter.
Although diving off a moving boat had its advantages, mostly it had disadvantages, like drowning, predators who loved to eat at night, and drowning. Did I mention drowning? If my mother’s biggest fear was collapsed lungs, mine was drowning. I didn’t much like holding my breath. A fear of drowning made jumping off a boat into deep water very challenging.
Although I was a competent swimmer, ever since I’d been caught in an undertow and held down until I passed out, drowning had come in at number one on my top-forty list of least favorite ways to die. A fellow surfer had pulled me to the surface, because my father had been drunk and unaware of his ten-year-old son. I forget what my mother was doing, probably yelling at dear old dad.
Diving off the boat drifted into the “last recourse” column. For now, they weren’t questioning or physically harming me, so the status quo wasn’t all bad. I slowed my breathing. After sitting back down for two minutes, my jack-hammering knee took its place.
“Stop that,” Jermaine snapped.
“What?” I asked.
“That.” He pointed the tip of the nocked arrow at my knee and poked me in the knee cap. A dot of blood bloomed on my skin. I stopped.
“You guys make me nervous.” I immediately regretted the revelation. This was no time to overshare.
“So, how’s your niece coming along getting ready for her competition?”
“You trying to be funny?” Jermaine asked.
Keep him talking.
“Sure, I guess. Is that funny?”
“I’m her trainer. Since I got her away from that Bacon fool, I’m finally getting her technique right. Six months of focus and she’s unbeatable at all of it.”
“All of it? Is there more than archery?”
The boat bounded over the wake from a cruise ship churning to port. The moon was all the way gone, leaving us alone with the dark water and the white stars and the floating hotel.
The few times I’d gone sailing in Los Angeles, the air always had a nip because the water was so goddamned cold year-round. It actually pissed me off. I’d slept comfortably on the deck of boats all my life. You couldn’t do that on the Pacific coast of the U.S. The salt smell and the warm coolness of the tropics at night couldn’t be matched. It made me like being on the water again. My seasickness dissipated the more I sailed. This would have been a welcome sojourn, if not for the weapon pointed at my head.
“Yeah, I’ve got plans for Isabelle.”
“What kind of plans?”
“Big plans. She’s going to do special t’ings in this world.”
“Wow, sounds super important. You must be proud.”
He slid closer, his pants like sandpaper against the vinyl seat. He pressed the arrowhead against my temple until my ear touched my other shoulder. A trickle of blood or anxious sweat snaked from the point of contact. I was beginning to feel like a pin cushion. An ache rose in my skull as I squeezed my eyes shut. I hoped to see something promising in the blackness. Gilroy didn’t seem to care much what Jermaine did.
“What are you doing?” Gilroy yelled. I opened my eyes. He stood right behind Jermaine. “You crazy bastard, I need him alive. I need to know who he talked to and what he knows. I told you to control yourself. Just like at Kendal’s house, you are too loud, too uncouth, making all of this more difficult.”
“You just want to know if he doing something with
