Dead Wood (20 page)

Forty-five

T
here was now a raging storm on the water. Gray clouds obscured the stars and white foam whipped off the waves.

With the man’s gun trained on my head at all times, I backed the boat out of its slip, then pushed it toward the harbor opening where I could see Lake St. Clair in all its glorious frenzy. It had begun to rain and the water came down in sheets, as if poured from the black sky. Chain lightning flashed on the horizon across the lake, over Canada.

I toyed with the idea of jumping overboard but something told me I’d get as far as one step, maybe two before my head was fully vented.

As I steered the Air Fare, I thought about how appropriate this was. The boy entrusted to me, Benjamin Collins, had been sliced up and found floating in Lake St. Clair. A lot of people blamed me, including myself, for what had happened. Although I hadn’t actually been the one to kill him, I’d had the opportunity to save him, and I’d blown it.

So now here I was with his real killer, and I was faced with the same fate. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be able to save myself from him, either. I could imagine the story in the newspaper. ‘Cop Killed In Same Manner as Earlier Victim.’ They’d have a field day with it. Or maybe the man here had a plan to make it look like a suicide. I’m sure he had a plan.

“Where to?” I shouted as the rain whipped directly into my face.

“Out,” he said.

Maybe he was going to conk me over the head and toss me overboard. Even in good shape, I’d have trouble swimming in this shit. Knocked unconscious, I wouldn’t have a chance.

The Air Fare was a good-sized boat, twenty-nine feet long. However, Lake St. Clair was some 300 square miles and waves commonly got as big as they do on Huron or even Lake Michigan. Right now, my boat was being tossed around pretty good. In fact, I’d never been out in water this rough. Wave after wave bashed into the prow and we rode the water like a mechanical bull.

“Why?” I shouted to the man who had now moved around directly behind me. He seemed a bit unsteady. If he killed me, how was he planning to get back to shore? Somehow, I was sure he would manage.

I glanced back at him and he shook his head, then gestured with the gun for me to look back to where I was going.

In my mind, some questions were starting to get answered. I’d always assumed that the man who’d killed Benjamin Collins had been a psychopath. Not a jilted lover. But now I knew for sure. My guess was that when I’d killed Erma and Freda, Teddy had brought in someone new. Or someone old, in this case.

The man was a hired killer.

So why had he killed Benjamin Collins? As soon as I thought about it, I realized it wasn’t the right question.

“Who hired you to kill Benjamin Collins?”

I looked back and he had a smirk on his face. He shook his head.

I turned back just as a giant wave washed over the front of the boat. Water hit me in the chest and I staggered back. I didn’t know what to be more afraid of. Being murdered by a contract killer. Or being washed overboard and drowning. Same result, different paths.

Did he plan on taking me over by the yacht club? Where he’d left the butchered body of Benjamin Collins? Right now, we were pointing straight out to the middle of the lake.

I heard the man singing behind me. Over the din of the wind and the rain and the crashing waves, this fucker was singing. I recognized the tune. Let It Bleed, from the Rolling Stones. Wonderful.

It pissed me off. Here I was, about to die. My two daughters were about to lose their father, Anna was about to lose her husband, and my killer was singing. Having a grand old time. Well, fuck him, I thought.

I let go of the wheel and faced him. “You’re the scum of the earth – just so you know,” I shouted at him.

He continued his little musical number.

“You can kill me,” I said. “But you’re a coward. A rotten, murdering piece of dogshit.”

The anger choked up inside me and I realized there was no point in waiting. If I was going to die, I was going to die the way I wanted.

He seemed to read my mind.

He brought his gun up, and now held it straight out from his body pointing at me.

“Come on you rotten sonofabitch—” I started to say.

A resounding crash screamed in my ears and the boat’s deck slipped out from underneath me. The splintering of wood shattered the sounds of the storm and I landed on my side, pain slicing up my back and I saw the prow of another boat bisecting the Air Fare. Cut it right in fucking half.

The ship’s prow was white, and I saw the line of blue down the side along with the word POLICE.

I struggled to get to my feet as water rushed all around me. The Air Fare was sagging, nearly broken in half.

A weight pressed on my back and hands grasped the side of my head. My head was wrenched to the side and the pain shot up my neck. He was on top of me, trying to break my neck. Unbelievable. How had he moved that fast? How had he gotten behind me again so soon after we were rammed?

Pain shot through my body and I twisted beneath him. Just as I wondered why he wasn’t shooting me, I realized he must have lost his gun.

I immediately stopped twisting and instead, pulled him in the direction he was trying to make me go.

We both rolled and crashed against the side of the boat as another wave broke over us. It knocked him off me and I thought I heard other voices shouting.

I got to my feet and whirled around just as he came at me. He hit me in the face and then in the stomach. My breath flew out of me in a gush and then he whirled, a karate kick that would’ve finished the job of taking off my head had I not ducked at just the right moment. I slipped as another wave caught me full in the face and my feet flew out from under me. I crashed into the Air Fare’s stern, which had become the receptacle for the damage done in the boat’s middle.

I slumped to the deck, water up to my waist and felt sharp fragments of wood scrape my back. I looked up and saw the impossible.

He was coming at me, full bore, with a steadiness and animal grace that made me look on in awe.

As I watched him come with the inevitability of Death itself, my hands wrapped around something that felt like a wooden bat. Just as he got close enough and I could see him winding up for another killer kick, I lashed out. The blow caught him in the side of the neck at just the right time. Off balance, he fell to the deck as another wave crashed over us. I was knocked down and the pole, which I now saw was the jib’s handle, had broken in half. A nasty, jagged break with a long sliver of wood jutting from the middle.

The Air Fare tilted, the weight of the water in the stern sending the bow up. The man slid down the deck toward me, blood in his mouth either from my blow or from being knocked down by a wave.

I raised the pole over my head with both hands and fell on top of him, driving the pole straight into him like a pile driver. My mind was on autopilot, just a raw, savage fury and a fear of dying pounding in my head.

I felt the pole plunge through his chest and bury itself in the softer wood of the deck. He reached for me, but I saw his eyes glaze and his arms went instead to the wooden spear, now rammed firmly into the sinking boat’s deck. He tugged at it, but it didn’t move.

Blood gushed from his mouth.

“Who are you?” I screamed at him. His eyes were open and I thought he was going to speak.

Instead, he laughed.

There was another loud crack, but this time it wasn’t thunder or another ship. It was the Air Fare. The boat seemed to break in half and suddenly black water was below me and then I was sinking. There was an explosion and a bright orange flame licked the air and I was under, trying to kick off my shoes and pants, my ribs and back and neck screaming in agony. I kicked toward the surface, my lungs on fire.

I broke through the surface only to have a wave slam into my face with such force that my head snapped back and I saw black, and then green again as I was forced back underwater. I bobbed to the surface and heard voices. Something hit me in the face. It wasn’t rain or wood debris from the boat.

It was rope.

I got my hands around it and felt myself being pulled.

The blackness came again.

And this time, it stayed.

Forty-six

T
his is what it must be like to go insane. Black sky. Flashes of brilliant white. Ear-shattering cracks of thunder. A roaring motor. And the voices. The voices that shout your name. That shout nonsense. The voices that keep shouting long after you’ve tried to stop hearing them.

I went out and when I came back, all I could tell was that everything felt soft. I felt a needle go in my arm.

And then more blackness.

•  •  •

“Laying around in bed,” I heard a voice say. “How typical.”

I struggled to open my eyes, but it was like jerking open an old garage door. The hinges felt rusty. The light that poured in was bright and stabbing. I closed my eyes again to try to stop the pain that seemed to pierce the middle of my head.

“Gross, look at how much he drooled on his pillow,” the voice said again. This time I recognized the bemused irony.

“Ellen,” I said. My throat felt like 60-grit sandpaper.

“Yeah?”

“Shut up,” I managed.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “I let you saw logs all night. I know how much you need your beauty sleep, but it’s time to make your statement.”

“I already did. I said shut up. That’s my statement.”

She sighed and I heard the scrape of a chair across the floor. Now the voice was next to me. I opened my eyes and she was handing me a glass with orange juice in it.

“Drink up, Gilligan,” she said.

I took a drink and tried to sit up. My ribs ached and I had a few thousand sore spots on my body. I took another drink and turned a small corner toward feeling human again.

“Start with when you left the scene of Molly’s murder,” she said.

It took me the better part of a half hour, with plenty of breaks, to describe the shootout with Erma and Freda, the connection I made between Rufus Coltraine and Memphis Bornais and then my decision to meet Shannon on my boat.

When I got to the part about Teddy and his hired killer showing up, I said, “It was him, Ellen.”

“Who?”

“The guy with Teddy. It was him. The guy who killed Benjamin Collins.”

“Come again?” she said.

“I haven’t lost my mind, Ellen.”

“You need to rest,” she said.

“No, I don’t. It was him, Ellen. The guy I turned Benjamin Collins over to. The guy who cut him up and tossed him in the lake.”

She held up her hands. “Okay, okay, let’s finish talking about this later.”

“But—”

“Shannon Sparrow showed up at the station this morning,” Ellen said. “She has a little tape recorder she carries around for song ideas. She recorded her manager admitting to orchestrating the murders of Memphis and the others.”

“And Teddy?”

She shook her head. “Gone.”

That made sense to me. If he was connected, whether to the Mob or just the criminal underground in general, he’d probably have a way to hide. Who knew how much of Shannon’s money he had squirreled away?

Ellen left, then, and I retreated into my favorite hobby.

Sleeping.

Forty-seven

P
eople from across the border in Canada, people from Ohio, Indiana and as far away as Chicago began to show up as early as eight hours before the concert. Everyone was talking about the event on the radio. ‘Shannon Sparrow’s free concert!’ they boomed across the airwaves.

Coupled with the media attention the murders had created, Shannon’s name had been splashed across the public’s eye more times than could be counted. Some had even put forth a conspiracy theory that it was all a giant publicity stunt.

The show was being put on in the middle of the village. There were cop cars everywhere, roads had been blocked off, and the village was swarming with people.

I took Anna and the girls, and picked up Clarence Barre on the way. Shannon had given us all v.i.p. passes so we could watch the concert from off to the side of the stage.

One of Shannon’s roadies provided us with five chairs and we sat down, at least the adults did. The girls were singing and dancing around, too keyed up to sit.

“Is this what your shows were like?” I asked Clarence.

“Yeah,” he said. “I gave a lot of free shows, too – but only because no one would pay me.”

I had never really seen a happy Clarence before. Not that I would call him ‘happy’ per se, but it did seem that a giant weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He’d taken the news well when I told him that a songwriter, Memphis Bornais, had arranged to have Jesse killed. And that, ultimately, Shannon’s manager had tried to cover it all up.

He shook his head. It upset him that Jesse hadn’t told him she was beginning to write songs. It made sense to me, from what I’d learned about her through Nevada Hornsby. Jesse was independent. She didn’t want to tread on her father’s name. And knowing that if she told him, he’d probably call up producers and performers he knew, using his contacts to give her a break, she had decided to go her own way.

“Gosh, they’re beautiful,” he said, gesturing toward my daughters. Isabel and Nina now had their arms around each other and were doing some kind of chorus line. Christ, what a couple of hams. Take after their mother, obviously.

Anna put an arm around Clarence’s shoulders.

“I’m glad John could help you,” she said. “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through, but I can guess that it feels good to have it resolved.”

He nodded, his big silvery mane flowing like expensive silk. Damn, Kenny Rogers was back.

A local disc jockey appeared on stage and did the usual big introduction for Shannon, and then amid thunderous applause and a few pyrotechnics, she appeared.

Shannon wore a short skirt, cowboy boots, and a white blouse. I recognized her bandmates even though most of them now looked sober. I’d only seen them when they were drunk or getting stoned.

Anna, Clarence and I all applauded.

She slung the guitar over her shoulders.

It was a beautiful instrument, handmade by Jesse Barre. The cops eventually found it at Memphis Bornais’ farmhouse, in her music room. On public display. The cops actually gave it to Clarence, but he felt that it was intended all along for Shannon, so it was hers now.

Shannon stepped to the microphone.

“I’d like to dedicate this concert to a very special person,” Shannon said. “Her name is Jesse Barre. She had beauty inside her. And she created beauty in everything she did.”

I stole a glance at Clarence. He was already starting to cry.

“She made this guitar,” Shannon said, and she lifted it off her chest away from her toward the crowd. It truly looked spectacular under the lights. The very embodiment of beauty.

“She also had just begun to write songs, before her life was tragically taken from her.”

Clarence stood, and Shannon looked at him.

“I’m going to record her songs and put out a CD next year,” Shannon said. “The proceeds of which will go to the Jesse Barre Foundation.”

The crowd applauded and I admired Shannon. She was trying to do the right thing.

“Here’s a little something she wrote. I don’t know if she had her father in mind when she wrote it, but I had a feeling she did.”

Shannon put the pick to the strings and the song seemed to flow out of her. I thought of all the tragedy, the killing and lives wasted over the music I was hearing now.

I hugged Anna.

I hugged the girls

And I even hugged Clarence.

Shannon was right.

Jesse Barre created beauty.

I was seeing it right now.