When the Killing's Done (14 page)

Stretching, her bare legs canted away from the sleeping bag and that warm, fleshy odor rising to him: “We almost there?”

He nods, already in motion. “Yeah,” he says. “And coffee’s in the galley, hot, fresh and ready. I’m going to wake Wilson, okay?”

Breakfast consists of bagels, peanut butter and a fruit medley Anise put together the night before. They eat at the helm, she perched beside him on the seat, her bare legs tucked under her, spooning up fruit while he pushes the throttle forward and the boat skips over the waves. Wilson is down below, rattling around, singing snatches of something unrecognizable in a clear tuneless voice. The sun hovers and fades. Birds skew away from them and fall back in their wake. Full throttle, a bit of chop now, the bagels rubbery, too moist, the coffee setting fire to his stomach, each sliver of fruit dropping down his throat like a stone thrown from a cliff—is he going to be sick, is that it?—and then the island’s right there in front of them, big as a continent.

The anchorage is on the north shore, near the eastern tip of the island, and as they motor into the mouth of the cove—rock right to the water, the cliffs wrapped around so tightly it’s like heading into a cave with the top lifted off—they can see the Park Service boat moored to one of the buoys there, buoys reserved for the NPS and the Coast Guard, while the dock beyond them is for the exclusive use of the concessionaire that brings day-trippers out to the island. Everybody else has to drop anchor farther out and take a dinghy into shore. All right. Fine. He has no argument with that—or maybe he does, because these sons of bitches act as if the place is their own private reserve when in fact it’s a public resource, but that’s moot now. What matters—what heartens him as he drops anchor and scans the cove—is that nobody seems to be around. No recreational boaters, no Park Service types, no Ph.D.s or bird-watchers. Just the mute black cliffs and a scurf of parched brown vegetation. And the dock, with its iron steps and railings winding up onto the plateau above.

Anise will stay with the boat, that’s what he’s decided. She’s not going to be happy about it, but the breeze is picking up and even after he puts out the second anchor he realizes somebody’s going to have to stay aboard in case of emergency—the anchorage isn’t as protected as he’d like, and the last thing he wants is to come back to a boat blown onto the rocks. And he needs Wilson with him to spread the stuff, because Wilson has the mind-set and stamina to get the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible—before anybody shows up to ask what they’re doing, that is—while Anise, for all her commitment to the cause, tends to dawdle, making a fuss over this plant or that or stopping to admire the view or a butterfly or the way a hawk soars and dips over the cliffs on wings of fire, already composing the song in her head. Besides, she’s the most recognizable, especially with that hair and the long smooth white run of her legs no man could ignore, unless he’s blind, and there aren’t all that many blind park rangers, at least as far as he knows. All this comes to him as he stands on deck, scanning the shore with his Leica. Off in the distance, he can hear the barking of seals. The sea begins to slap at the hull. If it was flat-calm, dead-calm, it would be different.

Inside, in the cabin, Anise and Wilson are busy twisting open plastic bottles and upending them in the depths of the backpacks, along with a judicious measure of cat food, out of the twenty-five-pound bag, the tabs and kibble intermingled like chicken feed, not that he’s ever seen chicken feed, but it’s the principle, the scattering principle, he’s interested in. Reach in and fling—that’s what he’s after. Vitamin K happens to be the antidote to brodifacoum and other anticoagulant baits, and the idea is that if the rats consume the poison pellets, well, then they’ll eat the vitamins too—they’ll want them, need them—and, once ingested, the vitamins will go to work neutralizing the blood-thinning properties of the bait. That’s the hope, at any rate, because he’s seen what the poison does and it’s as cruel as anything he can conceive of—heartless, sickening—and people think nothing of it, not on the islands or in their own backyards.

He’s never caught any of them at it, but his neighbors must sow d-CON like grass seed, judging from all the sick and dying animals he’s found along the roads, birds especially. Jays, crows, sparrows, even a hawk. Any number of times, walking down to the post office or the beach or to have a drink in one of the bars along Coast Village Road, he’s come across rats huddled on the side of the pavement, their eyes red, a bright blooming spot of blood in each nostril, quaking, suffering, unaware of him or anything else, and what of the raccoon or opossum—or dog—that comes along and scavenges the dying animal or even its corpse? They call that secondary poisoning, and he doubts if that’s very pretty either.

“Okay,” he says, bracing himself against the table as the boat rocks on the swell, “I don’t see any helicopters, or not yet anyway—when they do the drop they’re going to close off the island, and if we don’t hustle out there, who knows how long before some Park Service honcho comes along and tells us we can’t land at all.” He hefts one of the backpacks experimentally. “Oh, and we’re going to need to fit everything in just two of the packs.” He glances at Anise, then drops his eyes. “The wind’s up, baby. You’re going to have to stay aboard. Like we discussed.”

“Uh-uh. No way.”

“Sorry.”

“Shit,” she explodes, jerking her pack across the table as if it’s come to sudden vicious life before snatching it up and slamming it to the floor. “I don’t want to be cooped up in here while you’re out there, I don’t know,
doing
things. I want to do my part. Why you think I even came?”

This is the kind of thing that goes right by him, because there aren’t going to be any arguments, not here, not today, and he doesn’t bother to answer. He props his own pack between table and bench, folding back the flap to expose the interior, which, he sees, is a little better than half-full. Without looking up, he bends wordlessly to retrieve her pack and invert it over his. There’s a dry rattle as the tablets tick against the nylon interior, Wilson gliding forward to offer up his own pack so as to balance out the load. When they’re done, when they’ve shrugged into the packs and adjusted their identical black baseball caps—Anise’s idea, as are the black jeans and hoodies, a way of confusing their identities in the event anyone should spot them on the trail—he digs out a tube of sunblock and extends it to her. “It’s not fair,” she mutters, squirting a dab of the stuff in one palm and leaning forward to work it into his face and neck in a firm circular motion, her hands cold, fingers wooden, making her displeasure known.

What can he say? That he’s sorry, that he’ll make it up to her, that someone has to be in charge? That life is imperfect? That’s she’s not in kindergarten anymore and neither is he? He gets to his feet while she’s still applying the stuff, impatient, nervous now, in danger of losing it, and all he can say is, “If the boat breaks anchor, you just start the engine and keep her away from the rocks till we get back. All right? You got it?”

Then they’re in the dinghy, the waves jarring them like incoming rounds even though they’re in the lee of the boat, and Anise is handing down the backpacks while he yanks at the starter cord on the little 20-horsepower Merc, thinking
Please God, do not let them get wet
.
Not now. Not after all this
. He can picture the thing flipping, the vividest image, the shock of the water, the crippling waves, he and Wilson clawing and blowing while the swamped boat slews away from them, a thousand bucks’ worth of vitamin K
₂
spread across the bottom of the bay and every rat on the island bleeding out its mouth and ears and anus. The wind tastes like failure, like defeat and humiliation.
It’s over
, he’s thinking,
over before we start
. But Wilson is sure-handed, Anise adept, and the engine catches on the second try. He shifts into gear as the dinghy drifts free on a whiff of exhaust, twists the accelerator and noses the boat toward shore.

Because of the cliffs, the only place to land is at the dock, where they’ll be plainly visible, but the dock is deserted and the sky is closing in, and he wonders if the Park Service will risk flying their helicopters in weather like this. Maybe not. Maybe he and Wilson can get out in advance of the poisoners, give the rats a head start. Save them. Rescue them. Champion them. Nobody else is going to do it, that’s for sure, nobody but him and Wilson and Anise, FPA, For the Protection of Animals. All animals, big and small. No exceptions. The wind’s in his face, flapping the hood of the sweatshirt round his throat, the dock coming up fast—action, he’s taking action while all the rest of them just sit around and whine—and he can feel the giddiness rising in him, the surge of power and triumph that rides up out of nowhere to replace the bafflement and rage and depression Dr. Reiser and his pharmaceuticals can’t begin to touch. This is who he is.
This
.

There are something like a hundred and fifty steps up the cliff and onto the plateau above, and his hours on the StairMaster hold him in good stead here, he and Wilson climbing stride for stride and flinging out handfuls of kibble and rat vitamins as they go, taking pains to hit even the most inaccessible spots, and so what if the tabs tend to dribble down the rock faces? No place is off-limits to a rat. When they get to the top—humped and treeless, nothing in sight but the lighthouse and a couple of whitewashed outbuildings, one of which features a plaque that says
Ranger Residence
—they decide to split up, Wilson taking the loop trail to the right and he to the left. “Okay,” he says, the wind beating at him and the blood surging through him till he feels as if he could take right off and hover overhead with the gulls, “remember to hit the cliffs all along the way, not just the trail—”

Wilson is watching him from beneath the pulled-down brim of his cap, looking as if he’s just heard a good joke. Or told one. “Yeah, you already said that. About six hundred times.”

“And we’ll meet in the middle”—the trail was an easy hike, mainly flat, two miles or less—“and cut across on a diagonal, just to make sure we cover as much territory as we can.”

Wilson holds his grin, brings one fist up for a knuckle-to-knuckle rap of solidarity, and then they’re going their separate ways. The sun is in retreat now, the clouds twined across the horizon to the north like weathered rope, the wind coming in gusts strong enough to rake the pellets out of his hand, and before long he’s tossing the stuff as high as he can and letting the wind do the work. It’s exhilarating. Like being a kid at play. The vitamin tabs are a pale yellow, the kibble rust-colored, blood-colored, and he doesn’t want to know what it’s composed of, doesn’t want to think of offal, bone, the leavings of the slaughterhouse floor—it’s enough to watch the stuff fly from his hand to loop and twist away from him like confetti.

Up the path, head down against the wind. And what if it rains? Will they postpone the drop? Will the vitamins dissolve, the kibble rot, stink, fester? He doesn’t know enough about the properties of either compound to make that determination—besides which, it’s too late to go back now. And even if the mix does break down, the most likely scenario has the rats eating it anyway—they’re rats, after all, born to scrounge and hoard and eat till their stomachs swell like balloons—and it’ll stay with them, fat-soluble, buried deep in their tissues. Who knows, maybe they’ll find it so satisfying they’ll ignore the cascade of blue pellets the Park Service plans to unleash on them. That’s what he’s thinking as he makes his way along the ridge, detouring when necessary to heave the mixture right out to the edge of the cliffs, lost in the rhythm of it—clutch, lift, release—and he begins to feel better, begins to think everything will work out after all. He’s in the moment, breathing deep, working his legs, the scent of coastal sage in his nostrils, birds hovering, lizards licking along ahead of him. Before long, he finds he’s actually enjoying himself, twenty million people strung along the coast across from him and the island as deserted as it was when it rose up out of the sea. Except for Wilson, of course. And whatever Park Service types came out on that boat. And—lest he forget—the resident ranger, who’s no doubt sitting on his ass in his little white house with a view to die for, reading crime novels, boiling spaghetti, blinding himself with gin.

He’s off the path now—clutch, lift, release—thinking of the almost unimaginable degree of evil it must take to be a scientist in some big chemical company lab, Monsanto, Dow, Amvac, devoting all your talent and energy, your whole life, to coming up with a compound as deadly as brodifacoum and finding just the right mix of ingredients to make it irresistible, a kind of rat candy, rat cocaine, when his feet get tangled in the brush and the air goes suddenly still. It happens so fast he can’t get a grasp on it, the cracked and veined earth vanishing beneath the thrust of his elbows as he pitches forward, dust in his eyes and the stones sifting away from him, flying stones, stones raking down the length of the chasm that opens up before him like a movie gone to wide-screen.
Warning: The cliffs are unstable
.
Stay on the path
. And then what’s beneath him, beneath his torso and flailing legs, is going too, dropping away, and he with it. There’s a brief moment of weightlessness and the panic that seizes him with an electric jolt, and then the blow he catches from the ledge ten feet down.

He lands on his right side, on his rib cage, the air punched out of him and the backpack wrenched askew. At first he knows nothing, and then what does he know? That he has fallen from the cliff, the unstable cliff, the friable, loosely compacted and stony cliff, and that he has not plummeted—that’s the word that comes to him, a word he wouldn’t use in any other context—to his death. On the rocks below. Where the sea, riding in on the swell of the storm, thrashes and foams and pulverizes. For a long moment, he’s unable to move. And then, like a cat waking from sleep, he flexes each of his muscles in turn, reacquainting himself with the mode of their functioning, thinking,
Anise isn’t going to believe this
, thinking,
What if I have to be rescued? What if the helicopter, the Park Service helicopter, the poisoners’ helicopter—?