Chapter Text
A sudden string of marimba tones, a vibration against his thigh, then—
“This is Will.”
“Hey.”
A beat.
Very few people call anymore. Jack calls when he needs something, when he’s buzzed and reminiscing, asking questions Will doesn’t want to think about the answers to. Will is used to it—ever since Jack retired, he’s had nothing to do but reflect, like the classic disgruntled detective in every bad thriller. He’s always one glass of wine away from a wistful diatribe about the one that got away. The elusive whale who swallowed up his leg for lunch.
When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?
Molly called fairly regularly until the divorce was finalized. Something about needing space.
This is new.
Strange.
“Hi, Molly,” Will says, a bit softer.
An awkward, lengthy pause. An incensed sigh on the other end of the line.
When they were Will and Molly Graham, Molly spoke for two. She did the leg work between them to tend and feed the easy flow of conversation. Keep it alive.
Dinner parties, PTA meetings, small talk with cashiers—a dust mote might’ve been a more charismatic partner than the man she presented as her husband. A shadow of a man with a smile that would have been convincing if it had only reached his eyes.
That, evidently, hasn’t changed. That grievance still irks her.
“You all settled in yet?”
It’s a five minute walk to Ponce Food Mart. He’ll give it five, then he’ll end the call. He’ll blame it on Yves—the tall, lanky store clerk with the heavy hands and gnarly scars across his nose. Yves likes to talk.
“Four boxes left.”
“Which boxes?”
“Kitchen stuff,” Will says, sliding the balcony door closed and flipping the lock. He passes the taped-up boxes of slotted spoons and cutting boards and old stock pots. All the little bits and bobs of a kitchen that can’t be considered silverware or dishware but belong in the back of a junk drawer nonetheless. “Office stuff. Crap that went on my desk. Things like that.”
“You’re fast,” Molly says, the way you might flatter a child.
Will grabs his keys from a small dish on the coffee table. There’s a stack of short wooden posts and bundled up chicken wire leaning against the door, which he hauls over his good shoulder, which is really the shoulder that’s been shot through but doesn’t sport a titanium socket, minding the sharp burrs where the spindly, half-hexagonal wires poke and point. He checks his pockets for his wallet, gives Winston a parting glance, and leaves.
The sun assaults his eyes as soon as the door opens, and Will raises a hand to shield his face through shaky fingers. He waits a moment for his eyes to acclimate to the bright, blinding light, then makes his way through the front gate.
The world smells like sulfur and the slightly tangy rot of hot, wet coconut husks.
“Anyway, just checking in on you two,” Molly says, not quite exasperated but getting there. “How’s Winston?”
“Adjusting.”
“You? Or Winston?”
“Zoe got picked up—”
“On the eleventh. Yeah, she did. Single mom with three kids and a huge backyard thirty minutes from Glenborn. Gonna make me ask again?”
The humidity in Florida takes no prisoners, Will learned that quickly. He wipes beads of sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and sighs.
“He’s good, Molly. The house is fine. Neighbors are quiet enough. They’re all retired, anyway. I’ll probably run through my savings by the end of the year paying for flood insurance.”
“I bet marina fees are worse.”
Will chuffs a laugh through his nose. “It’s still hitched to the truck.”
Will meant to sell the Nola. He never got around to listing it.
“Will Graham making his life harder? Unheard of.”
“Not harder. Simpler,” Will says, then clears his throat. It’s easy to fall back into routine, into normalcy, with Molly. Gentle teasing and warm-but-hollow niceties. “There’s a difference.”
He rounds the corner onto Crane boulevard and walks south toward the docks. He passes Canal, Acosta, Caloosa, the residential roads bisecting Crane lined with mangroves and blistered Gumbo-Limbos.
Will lives in a two-story bungalow on Oleander Lane, tucked between Lookdown and La Fitte. He wasn’t in a rush to buy, but he was picky about the yard. It’s difficult to find homes in South Florida whose yards aren’t dwarfed by unkempt fiberglass pools. The maintenance fees were hard to justify, and the guilt of shrinking Winston’s usable acres to measly grassy borders would’ve taken its slow but certain toll.
The house has charm though—plenty of windows, vaulted ceilings, and a screened-in porch attached to the primary bedroom that’s encouraged a smoking habit. It’s sparsely furnished, with enough hand-me-down decor abandoned by the previous owners to feel cared for—a bronze casted sunfish hanging above the stove, a small oil painting of white, tattered curtains billowing through a dormer window, and a large chunk of twisted driftwood by the downstairs bathroom sink.
The rest will come with time, Will reminds himself, like it did in Wolf Trap and even the temporary homes of his youth. He took Winston, his fly tying materials, and his books. After everything (after Hannibal) that feels like enough.
Or, it has to be enough, because it’s all that’s left. Hannibal Lecter is dead, said the Maryland coast guard, and the local, national, and international news.
Said Jack Crawford, too.
Every property in the surrounding neighborhood has a shallow ditch out front piled high with dead palm fronds and other landscape trimmings. The driveways are covered in white gravel and stone chippings. Hot pink bougainvillea bushes swallow mailboxes, telephone wires tangle with the swaying aerial roots of Banyan trees—but for all the diverse, tropical greenery, there doesn’t seem to be an ounce of shade. The sun beats down from morning to night, save the relief from a sudden sunshower or scattering of clouds.
Heat radiates from the asphalt and seeps through the soles of Will’s shoes as he walks. It warms his toes. His socks are damp, and he can feel blisters forming by his ankles from the slippery friction. He hikes up the wood and chicken wire bundle and slings the weight of it to his bad shoulder.
Good shoulder, bad shoulder, there used to be a difference.
Four minutes left.
“My coworker’s got a nephew or something down there. A cousin, maybe? I can ask for his number,” Molly says. Will hears the shuffling of papers, the soft close of a desk drawer. A pen hits the floor. “Shit. I wrote it down somewhere. He’s not in Sugarloaf but somewhere nearby.”
“Big Pine—”
“Here it is. Big Pine Key! Works at some fancy resort.”
“Yeah. Big Pine’s close.”
“I can text you his number. How far’s the drive?”
Will chews at the inside of his cheek. Takes a deep breath. “Fifteen minutes give or take. I’m more North than South. Upper Sugarloaf.”
“The upper loaf. Fancy.”
“Only one of the loaves with homes under half a million.”
“That aren’t houseboats.”
“Right,” Will says, nodding to himself, but something’s off. The last time he and Molly spoke was months ago, and mostly about what to do with the dogs. Will had agreed to take Winston and rehome the rest before his move. Zoe was the last to go.
They’ve managed to keep things amicable, light, even, through the fallout of that night at the cliff house—the legal proceedings, the interrogations, the media frenzy.
I have a pretty damning recording of your voice I have to defend against a committee of agents who’d love to see you behind bars again. Care to explain?
I said what I needed to in order to survive.
You said, and I quote, “it’s beautiful,” Graham. You didn’t mean the goddamn scenery.
He needed to hear it.
To free you?
To let me go.
Did Lecter need to hear it or did you say it because you needed him to hear it? You sound lovesick in that tape, Will. You sound resigned.
Survival thrives when she masquerades as defeat.
Molly brought food and old magazines to the hospital twice a month while he recovered. She kicked Freddie Lounds and every other sorry reporter out of the lobby like it was her job, and kept Jack company while Will slept the pain away.
His cheek took the longest to heal. The nightmares made it worse, the screaming, the waking-up-gasping. It slowed his recovery from an estimate of two months to four. Molly only yelled when he was well enough to respond, but he never yelled back.
But Molly has no reason to call anymore. Molly’s nice, but she isn’t a fool. She didn’t need to hear the recordings of Dolarhyde’s tape to know that she didn’t lose Will. She never had him to begin with.
Three minutes left to Ponce. Ten segments in an orange. Eumillipes persephone can have as many as 1,306 legs—
“Jack still call you?” Molly asks. Will’s not sure she really wants to know. A ‘Yes’ or a ‘No’ would be equally damning. Will’s either too lonely, too nostalgic, or too used.
“Sometimes.”
Jack called Will on his drive down to Florida a few weeks earlier. They made small talk about new beginnings and property taxes before Jack asked Will if he thought it was true—if he really thought Hannibal Lecter was dead.
Will turns the corner onto the main boulevard, where there’s a small yellow-and-aqua painted seafood shack that serves decent cracked conch and has an okay selection of rum. The waitstaff are all fairly young, lively, and fit. They’re so tan they’re orange, and their teeth shine bright white like beacons of light drawing lost tourists to happy hour deals.
He’s been four times since he moved, more out of convenience than enjoyment.
Sugarloaf is pretty, but there’s not much to do outside of fishing, boating, and rotting out on the sand. You can take US1 north to Miami or south to Key West. One way in, one way out.
Nothing but the roiling Atlantic from the east to the west.
912 nautical miles from the keys to the Chesapeake Bay.
Two minutes. Will can see Ponce Food Mart through a heat mirage at the end of the road.
“He called me last night,” Molly says, suggestively, but Will’s too busy squinting into the distance, trying to make out a silhouette in the parking lot. It looks like Yves, except Yves has to be a foot and a half taller. Whoever it is, they’re smoking.
Maybe it is Yves, then. A trick of the eye.
Maybe it’s someone else.
He knew exactly how to cut you. They said it was—
“Will?”
“Sorry, sorry. What’d Jack say?”
A screen door slams. Molly’s on the porch now. Will can hear her weight settle into that shitty wicker chair she loved so much. It’s late afternoon, which means school is out, which means Walter’s home. Whatever Jack said, Molly can’t repeat it inside the house. “I’m a bit surprised he didn’t run it by you first.”
Will switches the phone from his right hand to his left, squishing it between his cheek and his collarbone. The wood and chicken wire rattle near the receiver. “Jack’s new year’s resolution was respecting boundaries.”
Molly snorts. “A little late for that.” The wicker chair squeaks. She’s shifting her weight again. Molly used to tug on her bangs when she was nervous. Will wonders if she’s doing it now. “He sent me an article and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t spook me.”
“Oh yeah?” Will says, with a lilt that feigns interest.
Prosody—the pitch, timbre, and lexical stresses of the voice. Have you ever spoken to your boss the way you would your dog?
One minute.
It is Yves in the parking lot. He’s got one hand pressing a flip phone to his ear and the other waving around in the air.
“Some guy found dead in Pensacola,” Molly says. “I didn’t read all of it. Will, I—”
“Florida is a hot bed for depravity and mildew, Molly. It would hardly alarm me if something caught Jack’s eye down here. Jack is—” frothing at the mouth to find something sick enough to pull him out of retirement. Roping me back in at the cost of my ex-wife’s sanity. “Don’t waste your time on this. I’ll handle Jack.”
Will sets his materials down and tilts the speaker away from his lips. Yves turns around and drops his half-mad gesturing for a second to nod at Will.
Will nods back with a tight-lipped smile that pulls at the tight scar tissue on his cheek. He taps his front shirt pocket and points to his mouth.
Yves shoves a hand into his back pocket, searching for his pack of cigarettes.
“Sa dwòl, Marie,” Yves roars into the phone, brows knit together in an expression of anguish that can only mean he’s arguing with his wife again. He hands Will a cigarette. “Li pa gen pwoblèm! Don’t call again. Bye.”
Yves shuts his flip phone with a loud clack, scattering a flock of pigeons into the sky. They disperse and merge again to land right back on the dock, pecking at their own shit and rotting bait.
Will pinches the filter between his lips, but Yves is stomping into the shop with the lighter.
“I wouldn’t call if I thought it was a waste of your time, Will,” Molly says, with a stern edge. Will can hear the crunch of her boots on dry leaves. She’s pacing, making small circles around the front yard now. Walter must be watching her through the window. She sighs, and the air crackles through the receiver.
Will runs a hand through his sweaty hair. He takes the unlit cigarette out of his mouth and shuffles forward, pressing his forehead against the front wall of the shop. The thick, unevenly applied stucco pinches his skin. He presses in harder. “Look, Molly, I’ve gotta go. I—”
“Just promise me you’ll read it.”
Will grips his phone so hard he thinks the screen will crack. It doesn’t, so he tilts his head to the side and cracks his neck instead. He pulls a deep breath through his nose. “I’ll take a look. I promise.”
“I’ll email it to you,” Molly says.
The sharp creaking of wood. Molly’s back on the porch. He lets himself drift to Maine.
It isn’t cold there yet, it’s only August, but just the thought of sitting out by the lake in wintertime cools his bones.
“Sure,” Will exhales.
“And Will?”
There’s a pause. Will leans back from the wall and feels for the dents in his skin, brushing away the tiny specks of old paint, sand, and chipped stucco. “Hm?”
“Don’t call back,” Molly says, then hangs up the phone.
Half bait shack, half quick stop, Ponce Food Mart is small and cramped inside, with aisles narrow enough that you’re bound to swipe something to the floor just passing through. It’s quaint, almost charming, in the way that anything subpar tends to be.
There’s a three-tiered basket stand with gently bruised fruit right at the front—sour oranges, too-ripe bananas, and long, bright green avocados. There are rows and rows of bags of chips, sweets, pork rinds and plastic-wrapped sandwich cookies, packs of cigarettes and small, definitely illegal, flavored cigarillos for sale behind the counter. Near the refrigerators at the back are four or five plastic tubs filled with minnows, dillyworms, pilchards, and shrimp.
It’s dingy but reliable, located right on the docks which keeps business stable. And with Yves at the helm, a fast-talking, smart-mouthed man too friendly for his own good, there’d probably be a riot if it ever closed.
“Are you mad, Graham? It’s 98 degrees out,” Yves yells from the back, squatting with his hands plunged deep into a cardboard box. Styrofoam peanuts pour out from the sides, littering the floor like marshmallow maggots.
Yves speaks with a thick Haitian Creole accent that warmed Will the moment he heard it. It's nearly unintelligible compared to the Cajun French Will grew up with, but he can still make out a few words here and there, where the sounds and rhythmic stresses fall closer to French. Zanmi like ami, lapli like pluie, dezi like désir—everything that rolls off Yves’ tongue has a mesmeric flow. Even his insults, which he lobs freely and often at tourists and their spoiled children, but not without compassion.
Yves was a cop. Will was a cop. They talk about fishing and humanity, crime and hurricanes—Georges, Wilma, Katrina. They share lore about the wetlands of their hometowns and complain about the unrelenting heat.
Will fidgets with the cigarette between his fingers and leans against the wall. He sets his posts and chicken wire down, circling his shoulders forward to ease the aches. “It was this or flannel.”
Yves tuts and restocks a row of bagged pickles. Sour Sis’, Hot Mamas, Garlic Joes—there’s a whole nuclear family of soggy green pickles floating in their own lime green brine. “Buy clothes, Graham. You think it’s a joke, don’t you? This sun?” He tuts again, gesturing up at the ceiling, up at nothing. He mutters something under his breath. “You’re not in Maine anymore, baz.”
Will shrugs, tucking his chin to his chest to look at his gray, canvas button-down. “My wife called. Ex-wife.”
Yves' rustling and busybodying slows to a stop. He knows as much as the general public about Hannibal, about their…relationship. He knows a bit more about Molly. He looks over his shoulder, at Will’s downcast eyes. “For?”
“She read something that scared her. Some hapless man in Pensacola dies and somehow I’m still the one that gets the call.”
“Pensacola?” Yves blats, eyes wide with the beginnings of a big, toothsome smile on his face. He erupts into laughter, a kind of hollowed-out, choking cough and sways back, landing flat on his ass. “That’s Alabama, Graham. No one in Pensacola wants you, I promise.”
Will smiles, a rusty thing that’s more like a grimace. “That’s what I said. More or less.”
But do you ache for him?
Will pinches the skin over the bridge of his nose and squeezes his eyes shut. There’s no encephalitis to blame. These aren’t intrusive thoughts, phantoms, or hallucinations. Do I ache for him? He pulls a wry grin and clears his throat. “I have a project for you.” He picks up the posts and chicken wire and walks over to Yves’ side.
Hannibal Lecter is dead, he reminds himself. Lost to the sea, the Maryland coast guard said there was no—
“It’s too hot for projects, Graham. Get a light and go home,” Yves grumbles, swatting Will away with the lighter clutched in his hand. He turns and eyes the wooden posts and chicken wire, then looks up at Will. “Today?”
Will nods. He takes the lighter and slips it into his front shirt pocket. “I’m not sure they’ll make it through the night otherwise.”
Yves sighs and creaks to a stand. He towers over Will. He would tower over Jack, over—
“Don’t be shy, Graham. Be useful,” Yves quips, pointing his thick thumb over his shoulder toward the aisle of refrigerators. The scars across his nose crinkle and bulge as he smiles at Will’s sour face, cackling to himself.
Will has changed—or he really is lonely—or it’s a soft spot, or some combination of the three. But his patience for Yves seems more endless than Yves deserves.
Will purses his lips and chuffs a dry laugh through his nose. He opens the leftmost fridge and grabs a six pack of the cheapest beer he can find. He settles on a pack of Natty Light, which may as well be cans of bitter seltzer. Shore champagne, as Yves had called it once. He tangles his fingers through the plastic rings and sets it on the floor.
Something about the chill of the fridge gives him pause. He lifts his hand up and glides his cool-damp fingers across his cheek, over his scar. He feels for the sunken edges, small gaps, and tight clusters of skin pulled taut and asked to stay put. He closes his eyes and breathes out, shakily, following the slow curve of it up to his forehead, feeling for the scar there, too.
It shouldn’t feel this intimate, this pilgrimage of skin and wound and memory. He traces the raised, pink, thick line of skin from just above his temple to the center of his face.
The coast guard found remnants, but not a body. They said they’d found your—
“Staples in the green crate outside,” Yves calls over his shoulder.
Will’s eyes shoot open. He loses his balance and tips forward, slamming his palm against the glass of the fridge door to keep himself from falling. He mutters a curse under his breath, wipes his hands on his thighs and grabs the pack of beer off of the floor.
“Who wants them? The crabs?” Yves asks, driving the last wooden post deep into the sand. He lifts the bottom hem of his shirt and uses it to wipe away the sweat from his upper lip. Yves looks out toward the horizon. The sun is setting, a red pinhole in a tired sky.
Will staples the remainder of the unspooled chicken wire to the last post and tosses the staple gun into the sand. He sets his hands on his hips and squints at his handy work. It’s a shoddy job, but he’s been keeping tabs on this nest of sea turtle eggs for some time. They’re due to hatch soon, two days tops. “Crabs, iguanas,” he says, lowering himself to sit in the sand. “Racoons.”
Yves nods. “Not the big bad wolf of Pensacola?”
Will smirks, shakes his head. He takes a sip of his beer and leans back, resting his weight on his elbows. “You haven’t heard? The big bad wolf of Pensacola isn’t out for turtle eggs. He’s out for me.”
Yves clucks his tongue and digs his toes into the sand. He leans over and peers into the hatchery. He’s restless and curious like a child might be, at the ripe age of sixty-five. He hasn’t told Will how he got the scars across his nose, just that it hurt like a bitch when he did. “How many eggs you think are in here?”
“In this hatchery? Forty to fifty.”
“Very few will survive.”
“One in a thousand, but these will all make it to the ocean, at least. Then they’re in God’s hands.”
Yves swats the air, a dismissive, confident, and sarcastic yeah, sure. “God’s not watching over them, Graham. He’s barely watching you and me.”
Grab a gift by the blade, get cut. Whether the wound heals—or how it heals—is another question.
All of Will’s wounds are still open. The saltwater still stings. He was suspended over the roiling Atlantic, and then he was in it. He’s not sure what alchemy of blood, salt, and moonlight conjured a shore with him on it and not Hannibal, but it feels as inane as a trick of the eye.
And you were beside me, washed up on the shore. At least for a moment, weren’t you? I could've sworn I saw the glint of a ring between your—
Will woke up in a hospital bed days later, his face practically plastered over with gauze, a bulky sling strapping his arm snugly to his waist. Broken bones, severe dermal abrasions, contusions galore—the pain was indescribably unbearable, and yet only a fraction as bad as the abandonment.
Abandonment requires expectation, but the only expectation Will had was death. He hadn’t planned for loss. He’d planned even less for betrayal—but the universe is rarely sympathetic toward those who ignore its simple lessons. Gravity cares little for indecision. If you want to fall, you’ll fall. If you pull someone down with you, they’ll fall too.
If Hannibal survived the fall, he had, at most, hours before he bled out. If he survived the fall and the following day, then Will has more reckoning to do than he expected.
How deep does betrayal go? How far does its reach span? The edges of a wound can be everted by making the width of the suture bite greater at the deepest part than at the surface—but the skin will never look the same again.
Hannibal Lecter’s absence is a root maggot burrowed deep. The wilting, the yellowing, the slow but steady spread of unstoppable rot. A punctured photograph, like someone’s taken a scissor and cut the ever-smiling face out.
How quickly did I let you back in? How easy was I to fool? And what of it all, now that you’re gone?
It’s late when he gets Molly’s email. There’s no subject line, no additional body text. Just a link delivered with the perky chime of a digital bell.
He stares at the notification for too long before clicking his tongue at Winston and tossing his phone onto his bed. He needs a drink and a walk around the block. Isn’t that growth? Aren’t those called boundaries? He isn’t occupationally required to flit through manila folders filled with images of corpses anymore.
He toes on his boots and weaves through the boxes still left to unpack in the kitchen. There’s a new bottle of bourbon and a bag of pre-ground light roast on the counter, not much else in the fridge besides a carton of eggs and Winston’s food. He tears at the plastic seal around the neck of the bottle with a bitten thumb, pulls the stopper out, and pours himself a finger. It goes down quickly, with a warm, oaky sting. He pours a second and brings the glass to his lips, but he doesn’t drink.
Winston whines and paws at the screen door, eager for the opossums, rats, and lizards skittering about in the jungle of undergrowth out back. Will glares at the flurry of small moths and mosquitos illuminated under the porchlight, the way they dizzy themselves mad, patting against the screen.
Hofmannophila pseudospretella, various psychids, maybe a few small sphingids—they aren’t a cloud or a swarm or a horde, not all together like this.
They’re something else, more than their blurred sum. Creatures starved of starlight bound to circle and coil and whorl through the disorienting cast of Will’s shitty LED light.
They should be heralding some unfortunate soul’s eternal rest. Instead, they’re here. Fitting.
Will sighs through his nose and sets his glass back down on the counter. “Alright,” he mutters, walking toward the door where Winston sits, tracking his every step.
Will presses in the latch. The moths disperse. Mosquitos zip into the living room.
Winston waits for his command, tongue lolling and dripping hot onto the hardwood, until Will’s soft click releases him into the shadows of the backyard. He bolts into a bush just behind the parked Nola. Something squeaks, but all Will can see from the porch is the quick swish of his long tail batting against the philodendrons.
The screen door swings closed behind him and he walks, barefoot, over the stone chips. Not quite as pleasant as warm sand between his toes, but there’s something meditative and satisfying about enduring the gentle pinch of each razor-sharp edge against the tough skin of his soles.
He looks up into the night sky at the freckled moon, listening to the chirruping of the crickets and katydids, the not-so-distant slap of waves onto the shore.
There are no families to save, no pieces to puzzle together. Not tonight, even if the presence of the full moon argues otherwise. Even if Will’s freedom found feels like just another noose.
He can walk Winston down to the water, make his way over to the hatchery he built earlier and check in on the nest. He can go out for a drink at the bar, snack on a shrimp basket and drink a cold beer. He could, if he felt like it.
The problem is, he doesn’t.
Instead, Will marches back inside, leaves Winston to fight his own self-appointed battles with the rodents and the shadows of the palm fronds, and searches for his phone among the rumpled sheets.
His curiosity burns. It isn’t as much a siren’s call so much as it is a parasitic addiction. Molly didn’t say it outright, but the only reason she’d reach out is if—
He opens Molly’s email and taps on the link. It takes a second to load, and he has to tap through all the pesky barriers about cookies and data collection, and an additional one asking for his consent to view discomforting and harmful material.
He smirks and taps to confirm his acknowledgment. It’s more caution than Jack or the entire BAU ever afforded him, but that’s a gripe for another time.
When he’s finally through, the headline screams in all its bold glory:
FLORIDA MAN MARKS ANNIVERSARY BY KILLING FIANCE, FOUND BOUND AND MUTILATED ABOARD THE QUERENCIA
What’s obvious from the first photo, almost immediately, is that the perp in question isn’t guilty. His innocence is written all over his blotchy, tear-stained face. His mouth is wide open, screaming at the photographer, with an officer shoving him from behind, guiding him through the tall brush that separates a neighborhood cul-de-sac from the bayou.
Will has seen it all—grieving mothers, bitter lovers, shifty loners—he knows how guilt sculpts the eyes. He’s seen the way it tugs tight lips into uneasy smiles, the way it announces itself in the most rehearsed testimonies.
There’s something gruesome about it, the way the man’s shoulders are twisted back, hands cuffed tight. He’s shirtless, with tan skin and a large, faded tattoo over one of his pectorals. He’s wearing light blue swim trunks, which means he found the body this morning, before he set out to sea.
His body is lithe and lean. He’s attractive, with a sharp jawline and cropped, well-kempt blonde hair. He looks young. Mid-twenties.
The tears squeezing out the sides of his tightly-shut eyes are real. The anguish is real. He’s been framed, and it’s one hell of a crime to be accused of. His lover is gagged and bound in the small boat behind him—the Querencia, it says in romantic script. He’s a blurry phantom in the background of this photo with pitch-black eyes that, upon swiping down to the second photo, Will realizes aren’t eyes at all—but empty sockets.
Well, not empty sockets.
Something’s been stuck in them, or poured into them, bright and shiny like platinum, or silver. A demented metalsmith’s solution to the ill-fitted drachma, but nothing about the treatment of the body suggests that the real killer respected the victim enough to pay its fare across the styx.
These aren’t inverted morals, this is humiliation. It’s performative, meant for an audience.
Will brings his phone closer to his face. His heart pounds in his ears. The breath spilling from his nose is hot and eager, an opaque cloud of fog spreading and fading across his screen with every quick exhale.
The victim is nude, bound in complex knots made of braided blue cord that hold his mauled torso upright against the bow, that keep his chest from collapsing in on itself, Will guesses, if the gaping hole of loose viscera and brown-black blood where his heart should be is anything to go by.
Will pinches his fingers against the screen to get a closer look at the knot slicing across the center of the victim’s chest, hovering taut above the punched-out cavity.
It isn’t a sailor’s knot, but a fisherman’s. It’s a blood knot, used to bind sections of line together as seamlessly as possible. A way to merge two into one.
Winston paws at the back door. Will jumps, his phone slipping through his clammy fingers onto the floor.
“Shit,” he mutters, scrambling to pick it up. His brain is ten steps ahead of his body, he’s practically stepping over his fingers trying to reach for the phone and head for the back door at the same time.
He lets Winston in, swinging the screen door wide—the moths whirl, the crickets chirp, the cicadas buzz, the distant waves roar—and then slams it shut. He doesn’t close the main door. The sticky breeze wafts in as it pleases, carrying the damp stench of mildew and rotting seaweed off-gassing after a day of baking in the sun.
He snags his abandoned glass of bourbon from the kitchen counter and plants himself flat on the floor, back resting against the cabinets, feet chilled by the cool tile.
Will has seen this before. His father used to crumple up balls of silver candy foil and superglue them stuck to the sides of shoddily whittled wooden minnows. A poor man’s Rapala.
Bourbon spice burns down his throat as he empties the glass into the nervous pit of his stomach in one fell swoop and glares at the second photo again.
A lure made from the dregs of a broken man. Brown, curly hair. Older than his partner by a decade, maybe less. Early Forties. Similarly fit, slender. No tattoos, but a 5 o’ clock shadow that’s closer to a beard and a trimmed mustache, not unlike—
The pounding in his ears has become a throbbing, the shrieking whistle as a kettle comes to boil.
Will squeezes his eyes shut and shudders. He digs a knuckle into his left eye and tries not to notice how the soft, cartilaginous ball beneath his eyelid squishes and squirms to make room for his hand. How easy it would be to reach in and pluck out.
He tosses his phone across the tile with a curse and a hiss.
There’s a corpse in Pensacola with molten silver for eyes.
And Goddammit, you were there, right beside me on the shore, Will thinks, head hanging between his hands, clutching fistfuls of his hair. You, smug even on death’s door, pinching my wedding ring between your thumb and forefinger, watching it glint in the white light of the moon.