Eighteen minutes. Eighteen minutes to make a simple purchase because customer service is a notion as foreign to these people as paying an honest price for an honest product. He loathes places like this—as a small-business owner, he ought to, what with Costco and Best Buy and all the rest undercutting him twenty-four/seven—and he would have gone to the locally owned hardware store in the upper village instead of driving all the way out here to park in the middle of this paved wasteland except for the fact that they know him there, know him well, and for this purchase what he wants above all else is anonymity. Yes, and Welcome to Home Depot, shoppers.
In the car, on the way back to the marina, he’s making mental lists, running through the details to be sure he hasn’t forgotten anything. The black cap is on the seat beside him, the shades clamped over his eyes, the sunblock in his daypack—along with a sweatshirt in the event it turns cold and a plastic poncho to keep the rain off him because rain is in the forecast, always in the forecast for February, the one month out of the year you can count on it. For food, he’s made up three sandwiches, two peanut butter, one Swiss and tomato, and he’s got a baggie of trail mix and two PowerBars for energy, plus a liter bottle of water—you can’t trust what’s out there on the island, especially when you’ve got pig carcasses rotting all over the place. A compass, though he isn’t exactly sure how to use it and won’t need it in any case—stick to the canyon and the fence line, that’s his plan, and that’s what he’s going to tell everybody else too. Because whatever you do, don’t get lost. You get lost and you’ll be swimming home.
He parks in his usual place, across the lot from the close-in spots where people ding your doors and fenders without thinking twice about it and well away from the eucalyptus trees along the fringes, which tend to lose their branches this time of year (that’s all he needs, a smashed windshield waiting for him when he comes dragging in off the boat). Wilson has his card key—he didn’t want people attracting notice waiting for him outside the gate, so Wilson has already ushered them in—and he flips open his cell to call him as he digs out the daypack and pulls the cap down over his eyes. It’s just past ten, the weather holding steady. There’s a breeze off the ocean, clouds riding past to eradicate the sun and bring it back again like a bad connection, and he’s hitting Wilson’s number and thinking rain can only benefit them because it’ll keep the pig killers under wraps and mask any boat making its way out to the island, so yes, let it rain. Let it rain like holy hell.
Wilson answers on the first ring: “Yeah?”
“I’ll be at the gate in two minutes. Everybody there?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Pretty much? What the fuck you mean, pretty much? Are they there or not?” He’s chopping along, in a hurry now, the sea black and oily-looking, running up the boat ramp at the edge of the lot in a pissing yellow foam, which means it’s going to be rough beyond the breakwater. “The reporter, right? Don’t tell me—”
“She called. Says she’s running late.”
“Shit. I told her. I warned her—” And he’s just working himself up when he turns the corner by the restrooms and there she is—Toni Walsh, in an Easter-egg-pink slicker and matching sandals, her flayed quasi-red hair beating at her face like sea drift, standing there at the locked gate, looking puzzled. “Hey,” he calls out, snatching a quick look round him to make sure no one’s watching (nobody is: the place is all but deserted because there’s weather coming down and everybody knows it). “Toni, hi.” And then, working up a smile as he closes the distance between them, he finds a harmless enough phrase to toss at her: “All set?”
The look she gives him, as if she’s never laid eyes on him before, as if they haven’t planned all this out on the phone and met twice on the back deck at Longboards to trade information about the progress of the killing and the temporary restraining order Phil Schwartz filed for him (which apparently did nothing more than raise the judge’s eyebrows), makes him wonder. The wind whips her hair and he sees she’s attached a seasickness patch to the side of her neck, just under her earlobe, as if it’s a piece of flesh-colored jewelry. Is she going to be all right with this? Her irises are the color of silt, the sclera cracked and veined, last night’s mascara clumped in her lashes. She’s clutching her cell phone in one hand, a pink designer bag the size of a suitcase in the other.
For a long moment, she just stares at him, a strand of salmon-colored hair caught in the corner of her mouth.
“You brought your camera, right?” he says, skipping the formalities. “Because you’re going to want to take pictures, to document some of this . . .”
“You said we’d be back by seven, isn’t that what you said?”
“Yeah, thereabouts. Seven, seven-thirty. I figure we get there by maybe twelve-thirty or so, you come up the canyon with us and see what’s what, snap a few photos—and then we do what we have to do and we’re back on board by dark. Then it’s two and a half hours across. Give or take.”
“Good,” she says, “good.” No smile, no hello, no thanks for the hot tip, no hiking boots for Christ’s sake. “Because I have a date”—and here’s the smile, finally, a compression of the lips and an erratic flicker of the eyes to suggest there’s a brain working in there after all—“like at eight? And I’m going to need to get home and clean up, you know?”
He’s wondering what to say to this, coaxing and cajoling not really his strong suits, or being pleasant and making small talk when he’s under the gun, but here’s Wilson loping up the ramp on the other side of the gate, and in the next moment the gate’s pushing open to receive them and they’re inside, click, Boat Owners Only Beyond This Point. Wilson gives him a thumbs-up, as if pink-slickered reporters with nicotine-stained fingers and open-toed sandals are the usual comrades in arms, and then they’re working their way down the ramp to the boat, where the rest of the crew’s already hunkered down in the cabin, sipping coffee, lying low. Waiting.
“You know Wilson,” he says, making the introductions in the cramped cabin while the boat bobs and weaves underfoot, “and this is Josh, Kelly, Cameron—Cammy, I mean—and Suzanne.”
Toni Walsh stands there awkwardly, her shoulders slumped, nodding in turn at each of the crew—the volunteers, as he likes to call them, all of them in their late teens or early twenties, Josh an apprentice tattoo artist and whole-foods advocate, the girls members of the same environmental studies class at City College—before she unbuttons the slicker to reveal a black cashmere sweater, low-cut, with a black bra underneath. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I won’t use any real names.”
Josh—he’s wearing a wife beater to show off his sleeves, some sort of dragon motif that looks like intertwined earthworms running up both arms—scoots up to the table on the overturned bucket he’s been perched on and gives her a long annihilating look. He can’t be more than five-six or -seven, pumped but in the stringy way of the body type that’s too lean to put on real muscle, and you can see at a glance he thinks of himself as a hard case—which just makes him all the easier to manipulate. “Shit,” he says, “I don’t care if you blow my name up right across the headline of the paper, biggest blackest type you got—it’s Joshua Holyrood Miller, with two o’s—because I’m ready to lay it all on the line to stop the slaughter. We all are. Right, Cammy?”
None of the girls is much to look at, not that he’s interested—they’re kids, basically, and he’s got Anise and Anise is more than enough for him, too much really—but Cameron, Cammy, an emaciated brown-eyed blonde with her hair kinked out to her shoulders and the look of somebody who knows a whole lot more than she’s revealing, has her moments. “Right,” she says, darting a glance round the cabin, “right. But don’t use my name.”
And that’s it: the cabin falls silent. When they were coming down the ramp, he could hear voices raised in animation, laughter, the giddiness of those about to go into battle, but Toni Walsh has managed to kill it. No matter. They can make their peace on the run out and whether or not they wind
up finding common ground is nothing to him—he’s no social director and this is no cruise ship. He watches dispassionately as Toni Walsh sets her bag on the table and warily eases herself down on the bench beside Cammy.
“So,” he says, “all good, right? Everybody good to go?” And he’s on his way up the steps to the cockpit when he catches himself. “Oh, yeah, before I forget”—and here he extracts the wire cutters from the plastic Home Depot bag and fans them out on the table, one to a person, except for Toni Walsh, that is, who’s along as an observer only—“put these where you can get at them. And, what? Just kick back—it’ll be a two-and-a-half-hour run out there. And if it’s rough, you puke outside, right, and not in the cabin . . .”
Of course, given the look of the sky and the way the boats are shifting in their berths, chances are about a hundred percent it will be rough—just how rough becomes apparent as soon as they leave the shelter of the breakwater. The wind’s coming down-channel from the west and it’s kicking up whitecaps out there as far as he can see, the boat rocking pretty aggressively through the full range of its motion, left to right and back again, and then slapping through the creases with a weightless rise and a hard drop down. For Wilson, it’s nothing, because he’s off in dreamland before they’re even out of the harbor, but the others are looking pretty green around the gills (and where did that expression come from, he’s wondering, because people aren’t fish and if they were they wouldn’t be seasick but wriggling and flapping and happy as clams, and really, how happy can clams be when they just lie there in the mud all day waiting for something to come along and pry them open to get at what they are, which is basically just animated slime?). Anyway, he’s got to fight it down himself, the feeling of something alien creeping up his throat while his stomach sinks and sinks lower still, but the good news is that by the time the island heaves into sight the rain has started in, and this is no drizzle but a good gray pelting rain sweeping across the water in rippling sheets that rise up like mythical beings, like gods and angels and devils, to erase everything. Sure. Fine. Anybody want to go pig-hunting today? I don’t think so.
The cabin stirs to life when he cuts the engine and drops anchor. They’ve put in at Willows, on the far side of the island, a place he’s picked because it’s out of the way and because he knows it as well as any other. It was here that he liberated the raccoons in broad daylight three months back, anchoring the Paladin at just this spot and ferrying them across in the inflatable. They’d come to life when he lifted the cage down, thrashing from side to side under the tarp, and thank God it was calm that day or he might have had two drowned raccoons on his hands. They couldn’t know what was happening to them, couldn’t imagine being at sea or even what the sea was, couldn’t know that he meant them no harm and that they were going to virgin territory, mother and son, and maybe they’d breed and start a new genetic line, inbred or not, or maybe, and he had this thought once he’d got the cage ashore and hidden in the willows that lent the canyon its name, maybe he’d trap more. A big male, another female, who knew? That would confound Dr. Alma, wouldn’t it? A whole new race of animals out here on the island, and why not? Her precious foxes and skunks and lizards and the three types of snake had got here at random, washed down out of the canyons on the mainland in a storm like this and riding debris out to sea, and it was nothing more than an accident of fate that raccoons hadn’t been part of the mix.
He’d pulled back the tarp to see them huddled there, their eyes fastened on him, expecting the worst, and then he flipped open the door of the cage and backed off—actually got behind a bush so as to hide himself—and watched as they put their noses to the air, stiffened, and made a break for it. Two patches of fur, gone so fast and so completely it was as if they’d never been there at all. That was random too. But he—Dave LaJoy, citizen, homeowner, activist, defeated in court and ignored on the picket line—was the deliberate agent of release, nothing random about it. He was a life-giver, that was what he was, the rescuer of these creatures Animal Control had all but told him to eliminate while they looked the other way.
“So, two trips?” Wilson wants to know.
Everybody’s out on deck now, the dinghy in the water and jerking at its tether, the rain steady. They’re all watching him because he’s in charge, he’s the captain here, he’s got the map showing the fence lines (courtesy of Alicia) and he’s the one who knows the way up the canyon. He takes a moment, looking past them to where the beach cuts a dark slash out of the foam, and they all turn their heads to follow his gaze. It’s a wild scene: the indented beach cut off at either end by massive pillars of slick wet rock rising up to the ridges beyond, rain riveting the water, the sky fallen in, nothing moving, not even the gulls.
“Yeah, sure,” he hears himself say for the benefit of the group, though in his mind he’s already leapt ashore and started up the canyon. “Good idea. Don’t want to overload the thing, not in this weather.”
This is all for show, because he and Wilson worked out the details as they humped round the headland and into Willows Cove. Somebody’s got to stay with the boat in weather like this, and that’s going to be Wilson because he’s the only reliable hand in this group of amateurs. Which means that Wilson will have to ferry them in, three in one group, three in the next, and then haul the dinghy back aboard just in case anybody comes nosing around.
“I’ll just tell them I’m sightseeing,” Wilson joked while the others were fumbling with their gear below. “Or no, I’m looking for a nice quiet place to commit suicide. What do you think? Think that’ll grab them?”
He was too keyed up to play games. “Just keep it straight, all right? And watch for us—I mean, the minute we come back out on the beach you drop that dinghy and hammer it like it’s a drill, like every second counts.”
“What am I supposed to say, ‘Aye-aye, sir’?”
“Don’t fuck with me. Not here. Not now.”
“You know I wouldn’t fuck with you, Dave,” Wilson said, doing exactly that. “But no worries, man, everything’s cool. I want this to happen as much as you do—or did you forget that?”
“All right,” he says now, one eye on the beach, where the surf isn’t all that bad because the storm’s pushing the waves lengthwise down the flank of the island, “Toni, it’s going to be you and Cammy and me on the first run, then Josh, Kelly and Suzanne. And when the dinghy hits the beach you jump out and run for those willows over there, see where I’m pointing? Don’t worry about getting your feet wet or anything else, just duck out of sight as quick as you can so Wilson can get the dinghy out of there and back on board. I don’t have to tell you, if they see us on the water, we’re screwed.”
Then they’re in the inflatable and beating across the waves, the shore coming to them as if pulled on a string, the engine growling, spray spitting in their faces. Wilson brings them in just fine, tipping back the engine and riding in on the surge, but Toni Walsh is a little shaky on the concept of springing lightly from boat to shore and she’s already wet to the knees and in danger of getting creamed by the next wave when Dave catches her by the arm and jerks her up the crest of the beach. By contrast, Cammy hits the sand like a Marine and makes for the bushes without breaking stride, her hair wet and streaming beneath the black cap, the transparent rain gear molded to her thighs. She’s gone before he can blink.
In the next moment—two minutes, a hundred twenty seconds—he and Toni Walsh are in the willows with her, not even breathing hard. Or at least he’s not breathing hard—for her part, Toni seems to be hyperventilating. He listens to her suck air in a choppy smoker’s wheeze, water running noisily over the stones, tree frogs shrilling, the rain hissing in the leaves. There’s an intense odor of greenery, of muck and rot. Everything seems to be drooping. The sky, flexing overhead, is more black than gray, his socks are sodden and he can feel the cold pelt of the rain leaching through the cap to sponge his hair and slip down his collar, drip by drip.
He’s watching the boat through a scrim of r
ain, Wilson maneuvering the dinghy in against the stern of the Paladin while Josh leans forward to take hold of the line. Without thinking, he hoists himself up atop a cluster of water-run boulders for a better view while Toni Walsh, wet through, heaving for breath and fumbling in her big wet pink purse for a cigarette, levels a look of irritation on him. The boulders are slick and ovoid, like the eggs of dinosaurs, and Cammy, long-legged and gaunt and looking satisfied with herself, suddenly appears on the one beside him, but not Toni Walsh. Toni Walsh is standing down there below them, in water up to her calves—flowing water, brown and braided and quick—and he comes to himself long enough to reach down a hand and haul her up like so much baggage, which is what she is. Which is why Anise refused to come, though he blustered and threatened and pulled every guilt trip he could think of on her.
This is when he begins to realize there may be a problem here, a situation he hasn’t taken into account—namely, that Willows Creek, normally a gurgling little rill you can jump across, isn’t so much a creek as a river right now. Roiled and hissing, bristling with debris and loud with the sucking clamor of dislodged rock, it fans out across the mouth of the canyon in a muddy sheet, carving its way through the sand to send snaking brown tentacles out into the sea. The plan is to take the easy foot trail along the sandbars that wind through the reeds and willows, following it up along the streambed to higher ground where they’ll eventually intercept the fence line and cut as much wire as they can while Toni Walsh, with his help, collects photographic evidence of the slaughter, carcasses piled up like dead leaves, like charnel—just follow the ravens and that’s where they’ll be. That’s the plan. But the foot trail is gone and so are the sandbars. And the reeds and willows are neck-deep in a rush of swirling dark water.
No matter. Even as Wilson swings the dinghy in against the beach and the others struggle out into the surf, he’s improvising—too late to turn back now, because from the look of Toni Walsh they’ll never get her out here again, and if they don’t do something soon, the pigs will have gone the way of Anacapa’s rats. He swings round to study the canyon walls, thinking they’ll have to make their way up at an angle, above the level of the creek, hard going but manageable, not a problem, not a problem at all, because he’s up for it, and the kids would jump off the edge of a cliff if he told them to, and Toni Walsh—Toni Walsh is just going to have to tough it out. If she wants her story. And she does, she must, or she wouldn’t be here. When he turns round again, the boat is right there and two of the slickered figures—the girls—are leaping out and sprinting across the beach, but Josh, flailing for balance, goes down in the surf, not once, but twice, before he rights himself and starts off after them.