“Watch!” I yelled as I grabbed his hair and forced him to look. I held him there as the man struggled. It took about two minutes but finally he twitched for the last time.
I cut the remainder off the first rope and began to tie another noose. The man screamed at me as I placed it around his neck and dragged him over to the pole.
I leaned down to his ear and whispered: “How does it feel, you piece of shit?”
I waited for a response, and none came. I punched him in the face, and he grunted and struggled as blood trickled from his nose. Then I grabbed his broken arm and twisted. He screamed in pain and nearly fainted. I slapped him back to reality.
“He was for my wife and daughters,” I said, pointing to the man swinging slowly from the light pole. “You are for all the other women.”
“I’ll see you in hell!” he screamed.
“There has to be a different hell for people like you,” I replied.
I looked over the Jeff and Sonny. They stared in shocked silence. My anger began to drain away. Having had all the suffering I could stand, I took out my gun and shot the man in the back of the head. He fell dead on the street. Then I strung him up the pole and tied it off. The rope creaked as he swung back and forth.
“I should have let him hang too,” I said as I passed Sonny and Jeff on my way back into the store. “But I’m not like them.” They didn’t say a word.
Jeff and Sonny dragged the third man out of the store and strung him up as I fashioned a sign that read “this is what happens to rapists in this town.” I held the sign to the chest of the man in the middle and plunged his own knife through the sign and into his chest.
It was done—revenge had been exacted. I had expected to feel some closure, but I felt nothing.
Sonny checked their clothes for useful items while Jeff and I went to the truck. Music still blared from the stereo. The lights and noise made me suddenly self-conscious, so I walked around to the driver’s side and killed the lights and ignition.
I used my flashlight to collect all the firearms, ammunition, and other useful items from the truck and piled them in the street. Sonny took two handguns and a hunting knife off the men and added them to the pile.
“How are we going to carry all this stuff?” Jeff asked.
“We could take their truck,” Sonny offered.
“There are a lot more animals in this pack,” I said. “I don’t want that truck anywhere near Shadow Beach when they come looking for these three.”
We turned our attention back to the task at hand. I walked over to Langley Drug and swept the store with my flashlight. All that remained of the front windows of Langley Drug was a small triangle of glass with the letter L on it. The aisles were oriented lengthwise in the narrow store allowing us to see all the way to the back. Debris was everywhere, but there were no bodies inside.
Langley Drug was one of many businesses in Langley that were owned by the Rajcik family. The Rajciks were Russians that had immigrated to the United States less than a generation earlier. They established businesses on Whidbey Island, mostly in Langley, and were thought to have been involved with the Russian mafia before coming to America. They were nice people, but had a bit of a mysterious side which only fueled people's suspicions of them. Nevertheless, within just a few years, they owned half of Langley, and so all people could really do was to try to get along with them.
I stepped through the broken window into Langley Drug whilst Sonny and Jeff covered the front. As with every other place I had been, the store had been savaged. Everything not edible or intoxicating was smashed on the floor, and all that remained upright were the shelves too heavy to move.
I clicked on my flashlight and scanned the floor for anything useful as I moved down the aisle toward the back. I moved quietly but quickly to the pharmacy. The metal security fence over the “submit prescriptions here” window had been forced open. I crawled through and to my surprise, there were many prescription medications strewn across the floor. I saw bottles of injectable insulin, heart medications, and pills for male sexual dysfunction. Sonny and Jeff came in behind me and went right to picking through the medications.
“Look at this,” said Sonny.
He held up a box with the word Oxycodone on the side.
“Empty,” he commented.
“I think that's all they were after,” I said. “The painkillers. See, here's some more amoxicillin.”
“Yep,” Jeff said. “Vicodin, empty.”
“Hey guys!” Sonny exclaimed. “Here is something. Cipro!”
“How much is there?” I asked.
“A whole big-assed bottle!”
“Ok,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Wait a minute,” Jeff said. “Grab as much of these other antibiotics as you can.”
I began filling my backpack with anything that sounded familiar. Jeff and Sonny did the same.
“As long as we don't need a tooth pulled we'll be fine,” Sonny said. “Everything else you can think of is still here.”
Jeff moved further back into the shelves of medications. His light flicked about as he scanned the products.
“Hey, look at this.”
Jeff held up a huge ring of keys.
“It says Langley Motors on it.”
“The people who owned this drug store also owned a car dealership here,” I explained.
“We can’t take their truck,” Jeff said. “But I don’t think anybody’s going to miss one of these.”
“Yeah. I'm getting tired of walking,” agreed Sonny.
We gathered up all the pharmaceuticals we could hold and made for the back door. Since the back door entered directly into the pharmacy, it was solid steel and dead-bolted. Jeff unbolted the door and kicked it, and it swung open to the alley behind the row of stores. A Cadillac Escalade sat vandalized in the alley. The windows were broken out, and the body was severely dented. The interior smelled of alcohol. The gas door had been pried and was severely mangled, but it had thwarted the gasoline thieves.
“I suppose it still has gas,” I said to Sonny.
“I guess there were so many targets that if it didn't give up easily, they moved on,” Sonny replied.
“These keys are mostly for Fords and Dodges,” Jeff said. “There are only a few Beamer keys on here and, oh yeah, only two Cadillac keys.” Jeff jumped into the driver’s seat and tried the first key. Nothing happened. Jeff inserted the second key and turned it and the dash board lit up.
“You've got to be kidding me,” Sonny said, racing around to the passenger door.
Jeff started the Escalade and music poured out of the speakers, bass thumping.
Sonny began to pump his head in rhythm, smiling. I let the armload of drugs I had fall through the window into the back seat and I climbed in.
Jeff turned down the stereo.
“No point in drawing more attention to ourselves than we already have.”
“If there is anybody else here, they know we're here now,” I said.
“Screw it!” said Jeff. “Let's see them stop us.”
Jeff put the SUV in gear and gunned it down the alley. We rounded the corner and covered the half block to Main Street in a split second. We drove back up to the truck and loaded all the other supplies we had gathered into the Escalade. We piled back in. Jeff slammed it in reverse and gunned it. We screamed down the street backwards and then Jeff attempted one of those rolling U-turn maneuvers we’d seen in the movies. It didn’t go as planned and we ended up crashing backwards through one of the store fronts.
“Oops!” Jeff yelled.
He put it in drive and tore out of the store, dragging debris all the way. We screeched back onto the street, and Jeff floored it up Main Street. The headlights suddenly illuminated two vandalized cars blocking the exit to town.
“Hold on!” yelled Jeff.
He stomped on the accelerator again, and we plowed into the parked cars, hurtling them off into the ditches. The impact barely fazed the Caddy.
We
screamed out of town and turned onto a straightaway that extended almost all the way to Shadow Beach. Jeff opened it up, and within a few seconds, we were careening down the road at a hundred and ten miles an hour. The wind poured through the broken out windows, and it felt exhilarating.
Just as we approached the end of the straightaway, a raccoon jumped out in front of us. Out of habit, Jeff turned slightly and avoided it, but he could not avoid the deer that had stepped out into the road right in front of us. We smashed into the deer at about eighty miles per hour and sent it sprawling thirty or forty yards down the road. We came to a stop just before we ran over it again.
The deer lay lifeless in the road, blood pooling near its head. The Cadillac sat idling in the road with its only unbroken headlight on the deer.
We got out of the SUV to look at the damage. We heard a rustling in the brush and immediately crouched down for cover.
Two spotted fawns came bounding awkwardly out of the thicket, and seemingly oblivious to our presence, walked over and stood by their mother.
I began to feel sick as one of the fawns licked the blood from its mother's head. The other knelt down on her front elbows and began nuzzling at her mother's belly.
Paralyzed with sadness for what seemed like an eternity, we stood speechless. I was the first to act. I drew my handgun and pulled back the hammer. The click caused the fawns to look up. Jeff followed suit, slowly, so as not to scare them off. As they stared at the headlights, we put them out of the misery that we had caused them.
We dragged the fawns off into the ditch and wrestled the deer onto the hood of the Cadillac. We drove to the log across Shadow Beach Road and walked the rest of the way to the house.
When we got back, Jill said she thought Charlie's fever was beginning to break. Maybe Charlie was starting to win the battle, or maybe the antibiotics had started to work. I was glad either way.
The adrenaline long gone, sadness settled over me. I had no specific remorse for what I had done, but just a general feeling of sadness that the guy was right: that’s just how it is now.
I awoke the next morning with Brenda sitting next to me. I pretended to still be asleep as she grabbed my hand and looked at my scabby, blood-crusted knuckles. She began to cry as she stroked my hand. She leaned over and kissed my cheek for an uncomfortably long period of time and then got up. I heard Kelly walk in and ask Brenda what was wrong. “Nothing, honey. Everything is going to be just fine,” Brenda said.
Brenda’s brothers collected the stuff from the Caddy and slaughtered the deer we killed. We ate venison that day and thanked our lucky stars for what we had. I knew Jeff spilled the secret to Brenda, as spouses will do, but we never discussed the men in town or the fawns with the group. The world was different and not everything needed to be discussed.
26
Shadow Beach/Port Angeles, WA
“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” -Orson Welles.
It was very painful to leave my wife and daughter at Shadow Beach, knowing I may never return. Deep down, I knew that they weren’t really there at all. Those were just shells in the ground, but, yet, that gravesite represented half of my life. It was a similar feeling to the one I had when they left on vacation, only no place on the calendar marked their return. I struggled by the graves for some time, before the other half of my life helped me to summon the courage to walk away. If it hadn’t been for them, I think I would have sat there with Kate and Elaine until I died.
It took half the day to sail back to Port Angeles. We found a small, secluded inlet and anchored the RY inside. It didn't offer much protection, but Sonny, Jeff, and his brothers-in-law had done a good job painting the RY black which helped it blend in. There was nothing around there on land, and it would have been hard to spot the RY from the open water with the sails down. And it was the best we could do.
The target spot was fifteen miles inland by my recollection. A small group of adults could make at least two or three miles an hour, and as such we could get close by nightfall. We would camp until daybreak, check out Sean’s place, and be back to the RY by mid-morning the next day no matter what we found.
A large group would be slower, and the children would drag us down considerably. As obvious as it was that there would be no sense in taking everyone with us, it was a hard sell—especially to the children. Nevertheless, sometimes adults have to make hard decisions, and we decided that the traveling party would consist of me, Sonny, and Josh.
Since it was my plan and only I knew the way, I had to go. I trusted Sonny with my life, and Josh's military training and understanding of tactical operations could come in handy. So they were both natural choices. That left Joe, Jeff, Dean, and Jimmy to protect the women and children on the RY until we returned.
We took minimal supplies: two MREs each, weapons and ammo, and canteens. Water would not be an issue, but we needed something to treat it in. We didn't even bother with sleeping arrangements. We needed to travel lightly and quickly.
The mountains loomed in the background, each distinct set taller than its predecessor and gradually decreasing in clarity—different shades of blue all. First the crystal clear ridge that rose from the water to the main plateau and then the hazy but still distinct foothills with their top most, snow-covered trees rimming the ridge like jagged saw teeth. Taking up the rear were the distant snow-capped peaks. They were still distinct against the overcast skies, but lacked detail when compared to the features in the foreground.
We crossed over the main highway west of town. We considered walking straight down the highway for several miles to shave time off our trip, but it would have taken us straight through town. I knew the back roads, so we opted to stay out of sight as much as possible.
We crossed a surprisingly traversable stretch of forest. Due to the moist, mild climate of the Pacific Northwest, most of the forest was impenetrable, choked with thorny and stinging underbrush that would have been the envy of any tropical jungle. But the stretch we happened upon was mostly pine and fir, and the needle fall prohibited much undergrowth. We had to duck under branches often, but we walked along most of the time on a soft, cushioned needle bed—a nice reprieve for our feet and knees.
After a few hours, we emerged from the forest into a clear cut. It was the first time I had ever appreciated that deplorable logging technique. We walked for a couple of miles over and around stumps and brush piles.
Finally, we climbed over a ridge, and the Elwha river valley opened up before us. The Elwha is the main river that empties snowmelt from the Olympic Mountains into the Strait of Juan De Fuca. It cuts a deep gorge through the foothills, but about ten miles upstream the gorge opens into one of the most beautiful valleys in the world. The federal government owned much of the valley, but private citizens—politicians’ friends, mostly—had snapped up a few of the tracts. We were heading for one of the private tracts.
We followed a forest service road that snaked along the river. It softened the hike through the gorge a bit, but it had grown over to a surprising degree in such a short time. I savored the thick smell of pine, a nostalgic smell from my youth in woods just like those.
When night fell we camped very close to the creek at a turnout in the road. The rumble of the creek was a change from the sound of the sea. But, after almost two months on the RY, I doubted I could have slept much in complete silence anyway.
That part of western Washington abounded with dry firewood for two reasons: first, it was in the rain shadow of the mountains; second, what rain did fall tended to be light and was quickly absorbed by the thick canopy above, leaving any wind fall to dry on the ground below. Unfortunately, we couldn't take advantage of the abundance since a fire would have been very conspicuous.
Josh insisted on taking first watch, and I was to take second followed by Sonny on third. I fell asleep shortly into my watch and thus never awakened Sonny. Sonny's morning wink let me know that he woke up first, and Josh was none the wiser.
br /> It took us a couple of hours to traverse the length of the gorge. By the time we neared the end, the rain began. It fell lightly at first and then came down uncharacteristically hard. We saw nothing unusual along the way, although it could be said that, by that time, it was unusual to see nothing unusual. Despite the thick overcast and rain, the gorge remained as beautiful as ever. The gorge was only a mile wide for most of its length, and shear walls jutted up at its edges. I thought it made the place pretty defensible, and I smiled at the thought.
We reached a major decision point three hours after daybreak. We could continue along the road or shave two hours off the trip with a short cut. The narrow dirt trail shortcut hugged a cliff and intersected the road just a half-mile along. The paved road looped around for at least three or four miles just to reach the same spot. The gorge loomed below, and while I had hiked the trail before, I remembered it to be dicey in spots—even when dry. Surely the pouring rain would make it worse. However, we were already behind schedule, so we chose the short cut.
We ambled carefully along the slick, muddy trail. What was a steep vegetated slope at first, turned into a vertical rock wall both above and below us within a few hundred yards. Josh led as we picked our way past miniature waterfalls that had formed in the heavy rain. Bits of the earth had washed out along the downhill edge of the trail. Roots stuck out of the uphill side, and we had to swing precariously out over the abyss to get by them.
About half-way across the short cut, some rocks came loose and tumbled down from above. Josh didn't see what was coming, but Sonny did. He pushed Josh out of the way just in time. The rocks cracked and snapped against the bank above our heads and then fell silently for a few seconds below us before shattering on the gorge bottom. I peered down and saw millions of shards of rock at the bottom—that was hardly the first rockslide there. I looked warily above and then caught up with Sonny and Josh.
We rounded a corner and saw the paved road a hundred yards ahead. The terrain flattened out into a meadow in less than fifty yards. We hurried along the trail to reach safety. I watched the rhythmic movement of Sonny’s feet as I kept my eyes on the trail in front of me. Sonny stepped oddly on a rock with his left foot, and in the attempt to catch his balance, he overcorrected, and his right foot slipped out from under him. He tumbled toward the edge of the cliff and clawed for purchase. I dropped to my knees and tried to grab him, but I missed. Sonny went slowly over the curved edge of the cliff, and Josh and I were powerless to stop him.