Chapter 23 #2
The helicopter passed over the forest, back and forth, coming closer and closer. It was almost as if someone guided it, pointing the pilot in the right direction to search without knowing an exact destination.
This way, this way, this way.
Was Dad flying that helicopter?
There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to be there for you, Reece. Please remember that.
Was Charlie with him, serving as a compass?
Suddenly, like a part of him really was with me after all and heard my thoughts, the spotlight dancing back and forth below the helicopter swung forward, pointing straight over the lake.
I squinted against the glare, the light reflecting brightly off the glacial-blue water.
Sapphire blue water.
Oh, no. We were on Lake Sapphire.
One of the deepest, coldest bodies of water in the whole country, my academic-fact-filled mind added unhelpfully, like a doll with dying batteries repeating the same phrase over and over.
If I tumbled over the side of this boat now, I’d never be found. Not even by the body recovery SCUBA team.
Leonard swore again, his calm, collected facade breaking as we both realized the helicopter wasn’t searching anymore.
Its pilot knew where to go.
Leonard yanked me by the shoulder. “Let’s go!” he shouted. I fought back, half-wondering why he hadn’t shot me already, but it was obvious that standing grew more and more difficult for him with his busted-up knee.
Maybe he couldn’t lift me overboard if he shot me while I was still in the boat?
I kicked out one last time, jamming my foot right into his bloody kneecap.
He groaned, and something wild came over his face. “It doesn’t matter anymore, anyway,” he said, detached, before he aimed the barrel right at my face.
“REECE!”
The yell came from the woods, distant, but echoing across the water.
“REECE! H—D ON!”
Charlie. That was Charlie’s voice. Was he in my head, still? Or was I hallucinating? Or maybe Leonard had already shot me dead?
He swore, attention pulled away to scan the trees surrounding the lake, swinging the gun around wildly. The helicopter closed in, nearly to the break in the trees.
“REECE?” Charlie yelled again. I could barely hear him now over the sound of the blades.
“CHARLIE?” I yelled back.
And then I saw him.
If he were alive, I wouldn’t have. In his ghost form, though, he glowed a faint, opaque white and appeared on the shore, just ahead of us.
“What the fuck?” Leonard asked, shaken.
Charlie blinked away, reappearing right in the middle of the boat, protectively standing over me while he faced off with Leonard.
He was barely visible at all—the outline of his body more of a suggestion of a person than anything else, and his face twisted in anger, flickering in and out of view.
Like this, standing face-to-face with his killer, he looked like a true harbinger of death.
Leonard went still. “It’s you,” he said, pointing the gun at Charlie.
“Charlie!” I yelled, struggling to stand on my one good foot.
The helicopter bore down on us, propellers spraying water outward in waves from where it hovered above.
A loud, artificially amplified voice echoed across the lake. “Leonard Mandich, drop the weapon and put your hands in the air. You’re under arrest.”
Tate? He’d come with Charlie and Dad, too?
Leonard didn’t react to the arrival of the helicopter or the order; his attention still focused on Charlie. He shuffled back, heels knocking against the edge of the boat. “I thought I had to be seeing things, but it really is you. How’d you get on this boat?”
Charlie still didn’t reply.
“Drop the weapon!” Tate hollered over the speaker again. “We won’t give you another warning!”
Shaking his head back and forth rapidly, Leonard ignored the order again. “It’s not possible. You’re dead. You’re rotting at the bottom of this lake.”
“So will you.”
And then Charlie rushed him.
Leonard tried to back away, lifting the gun to shoot, realizing too late he was already at the edge of the boat.
A shot rang out. With stunned surprise, he tipped backwards, a bullet hole in the center of his forehead.
He was dead before he hit the water.
“Charlie!” I yelled, lunging for him.
Except something was wrong.
Very, very wrong.
As exhausted as I’d been just a few seconds ago, it was nearly impossible to move now. In fact, it was difficult to breathe at all.
My one good foot collapsed beneath me. I barely caught myself in time to sit on the edge of the boat, rocking it violently.
I looked down, perplexed, still noting my oozing, bloody, shattered ankle.
Huh. Why couldn’t I feel it anymore? And where’d all the blood on my shirt come from?
“Reece?” Charlie turned toward me, sounding more horrified than I’d ever heard him.
He had every right to be scared. There was a perfectly round hole in his stomach, exiting out the back of his see-through jacket, shot right through the center of him.
Leonard must’ve fired at the same time he was gunned down by someone in the helicopter.
Charlie’s hands hovered over the hole, shocked, before he looked up at me, and his face morphed from stunned terror to downright devastation.
“Reece!” Charlie screamed, anguished.
I didn’t have time to ask what was wrong before I, too, tumbled over backwards into the cold, blue water.
With a gunshot wound ripped straight through my chest.