“You ought to get in on this,” said Ray. “He’ll fold up and die soon. Come on — get some of that revenge we’ve been waiting for.”
“I’m ready,” said Jim.
“I’d think so.”
Jim, with surprising clarity of eye and heart, pulled the gun from his shoulder holster, stepped forward, gripped the handle tight, and swung it in a quick, vicious arc straight into the side of Raymond Cruz’s head. In the paralyzing moment that followed, Jim kicked away Ray’s gun, then slammed him against the bulkhead once, twice, three times before pinning him against the wall. He jammed the .45 into Ray’s neck. “It’s over, friend. You killed her and framed Cantrell. They were your prints, Ray — nobody else’s.”
Raymond’s head lolled and his eyes wouldn’t focus. Weir slammed a left hook into his ribs, dragged him back up, and pinned him to the bulkhead. “Robbins wouldn’t lie if you paid him ten million dollars — you know it and I know it. Cantrell won’t even lie to save his own life, and he knows it’s the only chance he’s got.”
Jim could see Raymond’s focus blurring again. A terrible energy spread through him. He slammed Ray up against the bulkhead again, and drove the gun up under his jaw. “Look at me, Ray. Look at me! Every time I played that scene in my mind — Annie down at the Back Bay — I knew there was something missing. Now I know what it was. She didn’t fight, did she? You know why? Because it was you who took her down there. You were the one who walked her along that path. Annie could believe a lot of things, but the one thing she couldn’t believe was that you’d hurt her. She’d have fought a kid like Goins, with that baby inside her. She’d have taken a piece of Cantrell with her. But she wouldn’t fight you. You were the only one she could trust that much.”
Raymond’s gaze swam toward focus now. “I’d never betray that trust. No.”
Weir jammed Raymond hard against the wall again. “You did more than betray it. You employed it. You took the batteries out of the controller so she couldn’t use his garage that night. You changed into street clothes right in your car, met her with the flowers you knew Cantrell had sent her. You were wearing a pair of Cantrell’s shoes. You’d already filled out your logs — making sure the times would cover midnight to one. So you begged her to get in the car — ‘Just for a minute, Ann, I have to talk to you.’ And she trusted you enough to get in.”
“No.”
“Yes. But she’d just been caught in someone else’s bed, hadn’t she? So she was scared. Too scared to realize you were giving Dispatch bogus fixes. Between the peninsula and the Back Bay, you had her trust back again. You had her right next to you on the path. No struggle at all. You had your arm around her. What did you tell her, Ray? How’d you make everything seem okay?”
Raymond tried to break away, but Weir’s grip was strong and the gun barrel was too hard against his jaw.
“How?”
“No.”
“How!”
Raymond’s knee shot up toward Weir’s groin, but Jim caught it on his own and threw a punch into Ray’s sternum. He slumped and Weir let him go. Ray settled on his hands and knees and looked up at Weir with a ferocity that Jim had never seen in him. He didn’t even look like himself. “I just told her I’d known about Cantrell all along. And that I... forgave her. She was always a sucker for that word.”
The last leaf of doubt broke away and blew from Jim’s mind, leaving nothing but a naked black branch. He felt like his heart was impaled on it. “Aw, shit, Ray. Oh Hell. No. No.”
Raymond looked toward his gun. Jim kicked it to a corner. A hopeless low groan came from Cantrell’s throat. Jim moved to the instrument panel, killed the autopilot, and pulled the throttle back to idle. Raymond slumped back against the wall and watched him the whole while, his face white and his mouth clenched. His eyes moved from Jim to the window to the floor as if looking for somewhere to hide.
“How long did you know about them, Ray?”
“I knew everything about her. She was my damned wife. For better or for worse — all that crap.”
“You broke into Cantrell’s house twice — once to take the tie tack and a pair of his shoes, and write the letter to yourself on his equipment. Once later, to plant Ann’s things.”
Raymond looked to Cantrell, then back to Jim. “Three times, really. The first time, I just wanted to see the bed she’d been in.”
It took Weir a long while to ask his next question. In the quiet, all he could hear was Cantrell’s shallow breathing, and the slosh of water on the big yacht’s hull. “You practiced, didn’t you? You practiced using a knife with your right hand.”
Raymond looked away. “That’s right. I practiced a lot. There was a heavy bag in my garage. I took it to the dump when it got too many holes.”
Jim followed Raymond’s stare out the window to the somber spring clouds. “She believed in you, Ray. And you fucking snuffed her out like a dog. I’d blow your sorry brains out if it would do any good.”
Raymond looked at him with a vacant expression. “Go ahead. I’m ready.”
But Weir couldn’t do it; he couldn’t even come close. This was too vast a thing to end now. There was so much of it he couldn’t understand. “Why, Ray? It was Annie. Why?”
“I explained it all in that letter to myself. I wrote it to ID Cantrell’s printer, but I also wrote to try to... clarify.”
The twisted sentiments of Mr. Night came back to Jim, this time in Raymond’s voice. Then I saw it on her face, finally, the surrender, the helplessness, and absolute dependence on me she never had before. If only for a moment!
“Surrender? Dependence? What shit is that? She was your woman. You had a life.”
An expression of genuine bewilderment came to Raymond’s face. “It’s like something laid an egg in my head, and it grew, Jim. I wanted to tell you so bad. I wanted you to take me out, once and for all. I wanted to keep on going when we were underwater — just never come back. You knew I wanted to end it, but you didn’t know why.”
Raymond turned Cantrell’s chin with a finger. “Still ticking, isn’t he?”
“Take off your shirt and plug him up.”
“Let him die.”
“Do it, Ray.”
Raymond worked off his bloody shirt, tore off some pieces, and jammed them into Cantrell’s wounds. Cantrell bellowed, arched, then fainted.
“This guy ruined my life,” said Ray. “Now I’m trying to save his. I knew from the beginning about them. Ann’s looks. Later, the clothes coming back from the cleaners that she hadn’t worn for me. The little come-ons when she tried to make me look like the father I knew I wasn’t. That stupid little boat and journal of hers. I tapped my own phone to get their pattern down, then took off the bug and chucked it in the bay the day I killed her. I kept wondering if a dead fish would wash up with it wrapped around its head.” Raymond looked straight at Jim for a second, then away. “Ann always thought just because she hid things from herself that she hid them from me, too. For all her cheating and sneaking, she really wasn’t careful. That first night — it was March twenty-third — I could smell him on her when I got home. She’d showered but it didn’t matter. I could always tell because she’d be showered and still have that smell. The baby was the last straw, Jim. It wasn’t mine — it was his. You know how bad that made me feel?”
“Made you feel?”
Ray beheld him for a long moment. There was a dullness coming into his eyes now, as if clarity and purpose were draining out as fast as Cantrell’s blood. “Yes. Me. I just couldn’t believe she’d do that to me.”