Chapter 37 - The Ghost Speaks
A voice boomed across the water, echoing off the steel hulls of the tugboats and freezing every contractor on the deck.
"Evelyn, you miserable parasite! Tell those boats to cut the cables before I have the FBI kick your door in!"
It was Brendan Morrison.
Raspy, furious, breathing heavily, but undeniably, unmistakably alive.
On the tugboat deck, Evelyn Cross froze. The yellow megaphone slipped slightly in her grip, her mouth opening in stunned, paralyzed disbelief. "B-Brendan?"
"Did you really think I was that stupid, Evelyn?!" Brendan’s voice thundered through the megaphone speakers, drowning out the diesel engines. "You called me three days ago offering a fake settlement from a Swiss bank! You told me to drive to Flagstaff in that rental car with the malfunctioning brake line! Did you think I didn't recognize the smell of severed hydraulic fluid?!"
The contractors on the tugboats looked at one another in confusion. The winch operator on the lead vessel slowed the throttle, the steel cables slacking slightly.
"I didn't get in that car, Evelyn!" Brendan raged, his voice raw with years of bitter regret and newfound survival instinct. "I paid a hitchhiker fifty bucks to take a Greyhound bus, and I shoved that rental sedan down the ravine in neutral! I’ve been sitting in the Flagstaff federal courthouse for the last three hours signing a full deposition with the Assistant United States Attorney!"
"Brendan, listen to me—" Evelyn attempted to raise the megaphone, her hand trembling violently.
"No, you listen to me!" Brendan roared. "For twenty years, you helped my mother rob my father! You helped Victoria rob me! You kept quiet while they treated Sarah like dirt, and then you tried to incinerate me to cash in an insurance policy! Well, guess what, Evelyn? I just executed my final legal act as a Morrison!"
Liam looked at me, stunned. "What did he do?"
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Brendan’s voice cleared the air like a lightning strike.
"I signed a complete, irrevocable assignment of all Morrison family rights, sub-soil trusts, and corporate remnants to the one person who actually built something good with our dirty money. Everything belongs to Sarah. Every brick. Every nail. Every gallon of water in that bay. Cut the damn cables, or spend the rest of your life in the cell next to my mother!"
