When the Killing's Done Read Online Free PDF Page A

it, huddled wet and shivering in the bow of the skiff, Till beside her, but she wasn’t clinging to him, not clinging at all because she was too rigid with the need to get out of this, to get away, to get to land. No regrets. Let the sea have the boat and all the time and money they’d lavished on her, so long as it spared them, so long as the island was out there in the gloom and it came to them in a rush of foam and black bleeding rock. They rode up over two waves, three, and they were on a wild ride now, wilder than anything the amusement park would ever dare offer, and all at once they were in a deep pit lined with walls of aquamarine glass, everything held suspended for a single shimmering moment before the walls collapsed on them. She felt the plunge, the force of it, and all of a sudden she was swimming free, the chill riveting her, and it was instinct that drove her away from the skiff and back to the Beverly B. for something to hold fast to—and there, there it was, rising up and plunging down, and she with it. The wind tore at her eyes. The salt blistered her throat.
    She didn’t see Warren, didn’t see where he was, but then she’d got turned around and he could be anywhere. And Till—she remembered him coming toward her, his good arm cutting the black sheet of the water, until he wasn’t coming anymore. Where was he? The waves threw up ramparts and she couldn’t see. He was calling her, she was sure of it, in the thinnest distant echo of a cracked and winnowed voice, Till’s voice, sucked away on the wind until it was gone. “Where are you?” she called. “Till? Till?”
    The waves took her breath away. Her bones ached. Her teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. A period of time elapsed—she couldn’t have said how long—and nothing changed. She clung to the heaving corpse of the Beverly B. because the Beverly B. was the only thing there was. At some point, because they were binding her feet, she ducked her head beneath the surface to tear off her tennis sneakers and release them into the void. Then she loosed her blue jeans, the cuffs as heavy as lead weights.
    When finally the Beverly B. cocked herself up on a wave as big as a continent and then sank down out of sight, she fought away from the vortex it left in its wake and found herself treading water. The waves lifted and released her, lifted and released her. She was alone. Deserted. The ship gone, Till gone, Warren. She could feel something flapping inside her like a set of wings, her own panic, the panic that whipped her into a sudden slashing breaststroke and as quickly subsided, and then she was treading water again and she went on treading water for some portion of eternity until there was nothing left in her arms. Till’s sweater dragged at her. It was too much, too heavy, and it gave her nothing, not warmth, not comfort, not Till or the feel or smell of him. She shrugged out of it, snatched a breath, and let it drift down and away from her like the exoskeleton of a creature new-made, born of water and salt and the penetrant chill.
    She tried floating on her back but the wind drove the sea up her nose and into her mouth so that she came up coughing and spewing. Had she drifted off? Was she drowning? Giving up? She fought the rising fear with her spent arms and the feeble wash of her spent legs. After a time, she lost all feeling in her limbs and she went down with a lungful of air and the air brought her back up, once, twice, again. She thrashed for a handhold, for anything, for substance, but there was no solid thing in all that transient medium where the dolphins grinned and the flying fish flew and the sharks came and went as they pleased.
    And Till? Where was Till? He could have been right there, ten feet away, and she wouldn’t have known it. She closed her eyes, snatched a breath, let herself drift down and let herself come back again. Once more. Could she do it once more? She’d never known despair, but it was in her now, colder than