Nail Biter (32 page)

Hauling the engine up in an easy, practiced way, Jenna hopped out and ran a heavy line through the eyebolt jutting from the prow of Ellie's craft.

“Seen the rest of it yet?” she asked conversationally as she worked.

Metal strands threaded into the line glinted dully. So much for the Swiss Army knife I'd slipped into my inside jacket pocket along with the five grand before we left home. Mac hadn't taken the knife or the money, either. But neither would help us now.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “The rest of what?”

In answer she angled her head sharply toward the inlet we'd walked across the night before. Something white showed there on the other side but I couldn't quite distinguish what it was.

Jenna dug into her own jacket and came up with a small pair of binoculars, tossed them at me. “Have a gander,” she invited.

So I did, and for an instant I thought it was as Victor had said at my kitchen table a few days—it felt like a few years—earlier: that they were all in it together. What else could explain the tenants' white van sitting there as if someone in it was watching?

But as I turned the focusing wheel on the glasses I realized it was worse than that. Greg Brand sat slumped over to one side in the driver's seat, and I was pretty sure he wasn't asleep.

“Are you crazy?” I asked Jenna in stunned disbelief. Because for someone who wasn't she was racking up quite a body count.

“Oh, no,” she replied casually, putting a knot in the line and hauling it tight. “Just . . . careful.”

Then she fastened something to the line, tightening it with a small screwdriver. I didn't know what it was, but from our point of view I doubted it could be anything good.

“For one thing, I don't want Greg to ever be able to testify against me about anything,” she explained.

She finished tightening the gadget. “Aside, I mean, from the pleasure it gave me to finally put a bullet in his head.”

She slid off the bow of our boat, onto the beach. “Best case,” she added, brightening, “they'll blame the whole thing on him after I go back and put the gun in his hand.”

I had the feeling it might not quite work out the way she expected; even for someone as well versed in the nuts and bolts as Jenna, what with modern lab techniques and so on, suicide's a harder thing to fake than it used to be.

But she was doing okay so far. And self-doubt didn't seem to be a big feature of her personality.

I let my breath out. “Jenna, you're a hard woman,” I said.

Her face flattened until it looked barely human. “You have,” she replied expressionlessly, “absolutely no idea.”

With that she reboarded her own boat, lowering the engine and starting it in a brisk, confident series of motions.

Then we were
floating
. Jenna had our boat under her power.

And she was towing us out to sea.

Jenna Durrell motored steadily into deeper water, towing us
behind.

She'd taken our life vests. “We should just jump in anyway,” I said as Tall Island receded behind us. “At least we'd have a chance.”

“No we wouldn't,” Ellie replied. “Please don't. It doesn't matter how badly you
want
to swim in it, Jake. It's just too . . .”

Cold
. The memory of it won Ellie's argument; reluctantly I sat as Wanda uttered a mute sound of distress from where she sat by Rickert, her hand groping up for Ellie's hair.

It was coming out of its pins, red wisps flying. “It's okay, honey,” Ellie tried reassuring the girl.

But it wasn't. A wave smacked the boat, nearly capsizing us as Wanda went on insisting, her small fingers fastening on two of the loosened hairpins and yanking them out.

She thrust them at Ellie urgently. “Thank you,” Ellie began as if humoring a younger child, then stopped and stared at them.

“You know,” she told the girl, “you might just have a . . .”

And then, carefully, she slid the hairpins together through the hole in the propeller where the cotter pin belonged.

Ahead, unaware of the navigational hazards, Jenna barely missed a clutch of jagged rocks local mariners called the Boar's Tits. My heart clogged my throat as she skimmed their tops.

But she probably wouldn't miss the next bunch, or maybe the ones after that. And if we were still tied to her when it happened, sooner or later neither would we.

“Okay,” said Ellie decisively. Sliding into the stern, she stood up and reached out to the rear of the upraised engine, and fit the propeller onto its stem.

“Ellie, what're you . . .” Next she squeezed hairpins together and stuck their ends through the hole in the propeller stem, to hold the propeller on.

“. . .
doing
?” I demanded. A puddle of bloody water had pooled around Mac Rickert's head.

“I can't put the engine down,” Ellie said, “while she's towing us. But in a minute . . .”

Finally I understood. The makeshift cotter pin wouldn't last forever, but it might just be enough for now. And now was all we had; once Jenna towed us far enough out to satisfy herself, she'd cut us loose. After that, the rocks around Tall Island would rip our boat's guts out, if the waves didn't overturn us first.

Jenna's boat slowed, came around facing us. The line went slack; we were effectively adrift. Instantly wind and currents captured us, slewing us sideways.

“Brace yourselves,” Ellie shouted.

No kidding. But suddenly . . .
whack!
A hole sprang open in the side of the boat. A round hole, as if someone were . . .

Smack! Another hole, spurting water. “Hey, she's
shooting
at us!” I shouted.

“Bail,” Ellie ordered Wanda grimly, tossing a coffee can at her. Wanda complied as Ellie's green eyes narrowed coolly and in a way I knew very well. The rest was bad enough, that look said.

But now she was
mad
. “Whoa,” she said, peering ahead. “Jenna doesn't know about the Nun's Head.”

It was a boulder shaped like a head and upper torso, rising at low tide twenty feet over the surrounding water. Now only a low dark mound revealed where it lurked.

And only if you already knew where it was. Jenna's course aimed her straight for it. “Okay,” Ellie said, “get ready . . .”

The prow of Jenna's boat lurched up suddenly. “Now,” Ellie grated out. Dropping the engine down over the stern, she gave its ignition button a mighty push.

“Start, damn you,” she implored it, and it roared to life.

Whereupon
we
were the ones under power while Jenna's boat, still tied to ours, zigzagged in a wild, impossible attempt to climb the Nun's Head.

“Yes!” Ellie shouted exultantly, and dropped the outboard into reverse. The gear engaged hard, drawing the line taut. In response Jenna's boat slithered at a sharp angle backwards into the roiling water, swamping the transom instantly.

The impact knocked Jenna off her feet. Her head smacked the rail with a dull, melon-thumping sound I could hear even over the rising storm. She went over the side.

Simultaneously Ellie cursed. “I can't get the engine out of reverse,” she snarled, struggling with the shift mechanism.

Not a good development, because maybe we'd dealt with Jenna but we were still tied to her boat. If Ellie didn't get our engine back in gear in the next ten seconds it would seize up and quit and after that Jenna's boat would just keep towing us until it ran out of gas.

“Damn you,
move!
” Ellie screamed, throwing her weight on the shifter.

The lever popped free, the engine howl quieting and the boat nosing forward again under a steadily darkening sky, the clouds sullen purple and the wind snatching the whitecaps' foam off the wave tops.

Quietly, Wanda began to weep. Me too, but on the inside; the actual outward sobbing, I figured, would start any time now.

“Ellie, can you get us to . . . ?”

Shore, I was about to ask. But she just pointed at the eyebolt in our prow, where the line was still clipped.

The line connecting us to Jenna's boat. Which, it suddenly came to my attention, had begun sinking. And night was falling fast; soon we'd be lucky even to find Jenna's boat in the dark, much less get the tow line unhitched from it.

We could unclip it from our end, except that clever Jenna had put a line lock on the cable. That was the little gadget she had attached, I saw as I scrambled to it on my belly, the wind lashing my face. The kind of lock that took a key. . . .

I looked around wildly. No key. She'd taken it with her.

“Bail faster,” Ellie snapped at Wanda, who struggled to obey, scooping up canfuls of the bloody water around Rickert.

By skillful steering, Ellie kept as much slack on the line as possible, postponing the moment when the other boat's weight would drag us under. Too bad this maneuver took us farther from land, the touch of which I now desired more than I craved heaven and more than I feared hell.

One of which I might be seeing in close-up, in the very near future. Ellie aimed us sharply to starboard.

“What are you doing?”

For an answer she just pointed, and in the encroaching gloom I spotted Jenna's face, her desperate hands clinging to the top of the Nun's Head.

Then a wave washed over her and she was gone. The boat, too, gave a swaying little shudder, then sank.

“Grab it!” Ellie shouted, waving at something. “Jake, get out there and . . .”

I didn't see what she meant but at her gesture I crawled out on the prow again anyway, then spotted a small plastic tackle box bobbing in the waves.

It had floated out of Jenna's boat. Tools, I thought. Maybe even the key to the cable lock. I scrabbled madly for it, the cold water numbing my hands instantly.

“Jake!” Ellie cried behind me. “Jake, please hurry!”

“I am!” I shouted. Or tried; all that came out of my mouth was the icy salt water that had just splashed into it.

And all I could think of was Wade reading the note I'd left. Not knowing—yet—that it contained my last words to him.

The prow was slippery, every roll of the vessel threatening to wash me off. My body trembled uncontrollably, partly from cold, partly in the kind of fear that turns your brain to mush.

But finally my fingers closed around the tackle box handle. I threw it behind me, sliding back desperately into the boat as the sunken craft's cable shortened inexorably. When it tightened, it would drag us down. . . .

Fumbling with the latch, I got the box open. A small box of .22-caliber ammunition, a really quite enormous hunting knife . . .

I shuddered, not wanting to think of what Jenna might've had planned for that. Around it lay the usual snarl of fishing stuff that always litters the inside of a tackle box: lures, sinkers. But nothing I could
use
. . .

A light somewhere on shore caught my eye briefly. Then it vanished, and I was too intent on the box's contents to pay much attention.

“Get away, will you?” I told Wanda as she leaned in to where I rummaged in a mess of bagged hooks and other such small items. But she kept crowding me.

“Wanda, cut it out. Can't you see I'm trying?”

The boat jolted, stiffening as the last of the cable's slack went dangerously straight. The prow dipped abruptly. It was over; as Jenna's boat went down, we were inexorably being dragged under with it.

Suddenly Wanda's fingers shot out, dipped into the box, and reappeared with . . .

A key. Nimbly she scampered out onto the prow, now slanted down thirty degrees or more toward the water. As I watched openmouthed she dropped to her belly, slid forward, and grasped the cable with a small, utterly helpless-appearing hand.

Only it wasn't helpless.
You've got to stop underestimating this child,
I thought as she slotted the key into the lock, then turned it. . . .
Click!

The cable loop snapped away with the mass of the sunken boat pulling on it, and it whiplashed nastily before sliding into the water like an evil genie vanishing back into its bottle. Freed, the prow popped sharply up again, nearly sending Wanda into the water.

But she clung on, sliding backwards to get her feet and then the rest of herself into the boat again.

I threw my arms around her. “You did it! Oh, you wonderful girl . . .”

She shrugged me off, dropping to her knees by Mac's body. I couldn't tell if he was alive or dead.

Dead, probably. Ellie brought us around, motoring us toward land, which was now barely distinguishable from the dark water . . .

. . . except for the light. It was there again, bright yellow-white, and moving. A flashlight, and as we approached the shore a car's headlights appeared. An ambulance was there, too.

Silhouetted against them: moving figures. A hundred yards off we began to hear their voices shouting.

I looked back, straining through the rain and wind to catch sight of Jenna again. But only the night and wild water were out there now, accompanied by a roar like a train bearing down on us.

The real storm had arrived. Rickert stirred, moaned weakly; Wanda bent to him again.

Then the makeshift cotter pin broke, the engine revving uselessly. But the waves carried us in; moments later, stones scraped on the boat bottom. Faces appeared; strong hands reached out to us as we trudged ashore through the slippery shallows.

Wade lunged at me. “Jesus,” he moaned in relief.

“I g-guess you g-got my nuh-note,” I said into his shoulder. His head moved, his arms tightening around me.

“Yeah,” he said. There were tears of angry joy in his eyes. “I got it, all right.”

“Let her go with him,” Bob Arnold ordered the ambulance guys when they'd loaded Rickert into the waiting vehicle. Even before he spoke, Wanda made a beeline for the open bay doors and scrambled in.

“Now, George,” Ellie began as rain began hammering down. “It wasn't as bad as it seems.”

The hell it wasn't. Everybody here knew that this time Ellie and I had pushed the envelope too far, us most of all. That we had gotten away with it—barely—didn't make me feel any better about it.

Especially when George opened the door of his truck and the cab light went on, revealing the infant car seat strapped inside.