by J. S. James
“Delia—”
“Shush.” She cocked her head one way, then another.
“Hope you have your trusty forty-four.” Still on his back, Jerzy gazed up into her face and she down into his, not liking the implication.
What if it was Bastida? Back to finish the job?
Her .44 was gone. She didn’t know when she and the revolver had parted company. Probably when she’d gotten yanked over Jackie’s back end. If she and Jerzy survived, the sheriff was going to be super pissed. No doubt he’d make an IA case out of losing her weapon.
The humming and buzzing grew, separating into distinct motor whines.
She grinned at Jerzy. He flashed teeth. The sound had to be coming from Marion or Yamhill County patrol boats.
Delia wished she had a signal light, something brighter than Indiglo blue.
* * *
She caught only glimpses of their rescuers. Lights winked past the opening where the slough joined the main river a tantalizing quarter mile away. Flashing blues, whites, reds.
She pinched on the Indiglo and lifted the watch face as high as her leg grip permitted. She waved and shouted, and waved some more. All Jerzy could do was hang on and conserve energy.
The patrol boats never slowed or varied their course. She kept on yelling and waving, until she felt Jerzy’s head nudge her thigh.
“Save your breath,” he croaked.
The lower end of Grand Island swallowed the lights. All traces of engine noise died away. Darkness and gloom tightened in around the snag pile and the tree trunk they clung to.
She lowered her arm, then her head, burying her nose into the spongy fabric of Jerzy’s vest collar, his hair smelling of damp leaves, wet man, and fear. Cold seeped into her bones. Morbid thoughts into her head.
He tipped his chin back, his cheer-up expression inches below her face. “They’re bound to check the backwaters.”
She couldn’t keep the gloomy sarcasm out of her voice. “Before or after we’re facedown floaters?”
“Before or after we … swim with the fish?” he asked. A one-up game.
Delia warmed to the challenge. “Dance with the crawdads?”
“Wear pine overcoats?”
“Juggle halos?” That one got a breathy chuckle from him.
“Circle the drain?”
“Bait the hook?” she countered.
“Slip the cable?” He was slowing down.
“Win two for the reaper?” Her best and close to final.
His head turned away. If he had to think about it, she had him on the ropes.
He’d fallen silent.
To keep her teeth from chattering, she clamped her mouth shut. Never before had she felt so close to … kicking the oxygen habit.
Well, at least she wouldn’t die alone.
His head nudged the inside of her leg again.
“We’ve got company.”
From somewhere out beyond, she heard another rhythmic thrumming—a purring, like her cat, only mechanical. She peered into the murk. At first she saw nothing. Jerzy’s night eyes must be better than hers. Then she saw movement. An inky outline glided past their midchannel woodpile. It dodged the branchy end of their little water ride and kept moving upstream.
“It’s the Zodiac. It’s Bastida.” Her glance met Jerzy’s, the whites of his eyes echoing her unease. Her hand slipped inside her life vest, reaffirming the shoulder holster’s emptiness.
No running lights, of course. The long, dark blob plowed farther up the slough, cross-skated to their right, then drifted back toward them, stern first. Memorizing what features she could identify in the winter twilight—the driver’s broad-brimmed hat and tall, slicker-clad frame—it struck her that a horse seemed a better fit than a boat.
A scant ten feet above them, the boat slowed, then held steady in the current. The man who stood beside the control console was a faceless outline backlit by the Zodiac’s instrument panel.
Silent and unmoving.
“What’s he doing?” On his back and facing downstream, Jerzy saw none of what she saw upstream.
She replied to his muttered question with a muttered answer. “Looking us over.”
For the moment, Bastida seemed content to size them up.
Every couple of seconds, he’d reach to his right and tweak the steering, or adjust engine speed. Once, his body shifted to his left, and Delia noticed the silhouette of a riot-style pump shotgun propped against the console. Buckshot seemed a comedown after the gruesome way he’d killed the last four. If he was the killer.
Another bout of shivers made the rounds through her body. Should she feel relief the gun wasn’t a crossbow, or some other weapon that shot razor-sharp pointy things?
Was he just taking his time thinking up a new way to finish them off?
Sure as hell wouldn’t take much.
Maybe it was the acrid waft of outboard exhaust that acted like smelling salts, but the impulse seized Delia to just get on with it.
Instead of a forceful command, her croaks mimicked a frog with hiccups. “Robert Ba-Bastida, y-you have the r-right to remain silent. Anything you s-say—”
“Oh shit.” That came from her partner’s mouth by way of interruption.
“—c-can and will be used against you.”
A guffaw came from the man in the boat. His arms lowered to his sides. The fingers on the hand nearest the riot gun started flexing.
Delia sat up straighter, again flipping her crucifix chain out of the way. Of what, she wasn’t sure. In case she had to dive under the damned tree? Swim for it?
The Zodiac started to scuttle sideways. Bastida was at the controls, resetting the boat’s position closer, now a few feet upstream of them. Its position stabilized, he turned his attention back to them.
Again, she felt that unseen glower. Still not word one from the guy.
Some killers could care less about offing a cop. Others balked. She hoped he was one of the others. “Don’t do anything stupid. I’m a Polk County Sheriff’s detective, and this is my partner.”
After all she and Jerzy had been through, partner sounded right.
A blinding light forced her to glance away. She squinted back into the flashlight’s glare.
Bastida had knelt at the boat’s rear corner and was leaning toward them. The light cone briefly skimmed Jerzy’s inert form. It zeroed in on her, and she felt her breath catch. The focused beam traveled along her neckline, down the cleft of her chest, where it stopped, then bounced up, retracing its path. On a protective instinct, her free hand rose to her throat, her fingers closing around the chain that draped her shoulder. For a moment she wondered whether Bastida’s intimidation by flashlight was some kind of sexual get-off. Or prekilling fetish.
He jumped up, stepped to the controls, and maneuvered the inflatable closer, until the Zodiac’s back end rested against an upstream limb of the log they were marooned on. Getting within striking range.
Again, he knelt and leaned toward them. Again, he zeroed the light in on her. Mainly her shoulders and back. Delia stiffened, afraid his confusion was nearly over.
She sensed Jerzy’s head lift toward hers, felt his whispered breath in her ear. “Get ready to let go of me. Might divert him.”
She blinked, stunned. Let go? After what she’d gone through, hauling him onto this goddamn log in the first place? Her grip tightened around his chest, and she answered him through clicking teeth. “N-no way, José.”
Bastida’s light was back on her face in eye-dazzling brightness.
“Get that fucking light out of my eyes.”
He redirected the beam and sat back on his haunches. But she had a head of steam built up. “Lean over me once more, you son of a bitch, and you’ll find out what it’s like to choke on river water.”
Bastida’s hand plunged inside his coat. Unholstering or unsheathing? She’d gone too far. Racked her brain for anything that might throw him off tempo.
“S-so, what’s it going to be? Emerson Viper? Ka-Bar
Lockback? A serrated blade, right?”
In the gloom, he pulled out an object much smaller than a knife and cupped it in his palm. She fell silent, her pulse pounding in her ears. Delia had no idea what Bastida had there, or why, but when he tilted his hand toward the lighted instrument panel, she noticed something cordlike stretching back inside his coat. He seemed hesitant. Undecided.
Enrique had always said she was ballsy for a chica. Well, here goes.
“If you’re not going to kill us, how about rescuing us?”
“Jesus, Delia.” Down in the crux of her lap, she felt Jerzy’s shifting discomfort.
She looked up to see Bastida behind the controls with his back to them, his hand resting on the throttle. All he had to do was punch it and the dual-engine backwash would swamp their half-sunk tree and wash them downriver.
She was surprised when the boat moved quietly away, gliding upstream without so much as a ripple. Nearly swallowed by darkness, the Zodiac arced out and around their backwater snag pile, then coasted downriver. Soon, the muffled thrumming of the outboards died away, leaving Delia and Jerzy as Bastida had found them, clinging to limbs and branches, and to each other.
A grayish moon edged out from behind the overcast. It occurred to Delia that smart-mouthing a serial killer might have gained them a simpler, less bloody death option.
Bastida had decided to leave them out there.
25
Delia didn’t dare relax the cramped hands she held her partner with, but she tipped her head and stretched her back, gaining relief from the knots of torture in her shoulders and neck.
Icy starlight pierced the broken clouds above. A raggedy-ass moon glowered down, looking as cold as she felt. Finger-aching cold. Desperate-to-let-go cold.
Straddling the trunk of a moving tree, half in, half out of the water, while hanging on to the life vest of an injured man, had taken its toll. A man losing the struggle to keep his head above the river.
And back came the shakes. Big-time. Backed up by Spanish castanets when she forgot to clamp her mouth shut.
Apart from the nonstop sloshing and gurgling, their neck of the Willamette was so quiet they might as well be up on that moon. No patrol boats. No nothing. Had the river won?
Maybe rescue wasn’t in the cards. Maybe everybody, good guys and bad, had pulled up stakes and moved their operation somewhere else. Or called it off until daylight. Left them to fend for themselves and headed home to warm, dry beds.
God, but she’d never complain about her cheap bed again.
For just a moment, she closed her eyes and shut out the river. Sank herself into that saggy mattress, curled up between flannel sheets, and drew the faux down comforter to her chin.
Somewhere between a low murmur and a throbbing rumble, engine sounds bled into Delia’s dream, flushing her out of that warm, dry bed. Back into the wet and the cold, and the flesh-numbing river.
Jerzy’d heard them too, his twisting body straining her dicey grip on him.
She followed his moonlit gaze and was struck by confusion.
Beyond the whipsawing end-branches of the tree they clung to, an empty jet boat plodded upstream.
Jackie. Except it didn’t sound like her.
Jerzy’s boat skirted their personal water hell, heading upriver. When it veered inward, the moon backlit a second boat, lashed to Jackie’s far side.
That one had a driver. Bastida. His Zodiac had Jerzy’s under tow, but in tandem.
Lines flew off Jackie’s stern and bow. Reversed engines burbled as the Zodiac swung a one-eighty, pointed upstream, and accelerated away. Still sideways, Jackie free-floated back toward Delia and Jerzy’s snag pile.
Tree limbs bent, cracking and popping under the jet boat’s weight, which kept coming at them. Powerless except to watch, Delia imagined her right knee pulped like an orange.
Barely a foot shy of her, the boat scraped to an iffy stop. To her surprise, the constant water pressure slacked off. Jackie’s hull seemed to serve as a surface dam, diverting current around either end. But for how long?
Freeing a hand, she reached out and felt more than metal in the shadow of the hull—a wooden lattice, fastened over the side of the boat. The gate from Jerzy’s stakeout blind. She drew her hand back. Better not to budge. Better just to—
A tug at the back of her pants jerked her out of the fear freeze: Jerzy and his cheeky grip on her waistband.
“I’ve h-had enough water recreation for one day. Y-you?”
“Yeah. Oh hell yeah.”
* * *
Ten energy-sapping minutes later, Delia and Jerzy huddled over a boat heater, her at the edge of Jackie’s passenger seat, him on the driver’s side. Their knees overlapped in the aisle as they tented a pair of Indian-style wool blankets above their heads, capturing as much heat as possible.
The Coleman had been in the boat before they were raked out of it, but the stack of neatly folded Pendletons was new. Such consideration from a vicious serial killer. So why had he left? Where had he gone?
The lattice gate he’d lashed to Jackie’s hull had been the real lifesaver. Without it, she and Jerzy would never have made it into the boat. She flexed her fingers over the glowing dome. The skin behind her knuckles was diamond-pocked, souvenirs from the torture-grip she’d held on the webbing of her partner’s life jacket.
“Getting any feeling back in your arm?” she asked.
The overlapping blanket on his side moved up and down. “And then some. Right hand’s numb, but it burns like a bitch shoulder to neck. You’ll have to run us back up to the Wheatland ramp.”
“Sounds like a stinger. We need to get you to a med center.”
He nudged her with his knee. “Hey, forgot to say something.”
“What?”
“Muchas gracias.”
“De nada.” She nudged him back. “Yo también.”
“Huh?”
“Same here. If you hadn’t body-blocked that cable, it would’ve taken my head off.”
“Been thinking about that, wondering how long Bastida’s been booby-trapping the river.” He rotated the arm of his ailing shoulder and winced. “The guy doesn’t act like a fugitive. More like he’s on a campaign. I mean, why go to all the trouble? Is he still fighting a war with someone?”
That last got Delia thinking, too, back through all that had happened since the opening-day hunting protest, when she’d first noticed Bastida. There but not there. Watching that merry band of poop-flingers. Shadowing but not engaging hunters. Not at the time, anyway. Then came the escalation: sabotaged hunts, burned duck blinds, hunters overturned in their boats. Bastida could have done any or all of those. Dumping people in the river seemed a specialty. And of course, four murders. All done using stealth-kill tactics. Casualties of a disturbed mind? In a seriously messed up world where duck hunters were fair game but Bastida hunters had to be rescued? Which reminded her. They still had to get off this crappy river.
Trading seats, Delia delayed answering Jerzy’s question until she’d retrieved Jackie’s kill switch from his life preserver.
“If Bastida’s fighting a war, it’s with himself.”
26
Bundled in a Pendleton blanket, Delia warmed chilled hands between chilled thighs. She sat across from a series of medical intake bays. The ringed curtain opposite her was closed, drawn around an examining table. A thin veneer of privacy isolated Jerzy from the other emergency room alcoves at McMinnville Community Hospital. The attending physician and staff had crowded her out. Their ER was a small department smelling of the usual—plastic tubing and bloody bandages. Alcohol with overtones of puke.
Bernie, a Yamhill County reserve deputy, had transported them here after trailering Jerzy’s boat at Wheatland Ferry and stopping by his place for dry clothing. Jerzy’d kept his mouth zipped the whole trip. Probably stewing over the mess she’d made of the stakeout. The danger she’d put him through.
She squirmed on the plastic seating, feeling naked inside borrowed menswear
. No way would she put her underwear back on, or a wet suit steeped in river water. Or confront the sheriff in this getup. She thought she’d be okay until tomorrow, if Annie had gotten her phoned-in report transcribed and on Grice’s desk.
She hugged the blanket closer, her brain refusing to let go of the aftermath.
She’d found her Smith & Wesson lying on Jackie’s deck, right where they’d made their forced exit. The handgun stuck out like a sore thumb, visible to anyone for the taking.
So, not only had Bastida returned their boat and supplied them with a pile of blankets, he’d left the revolver for her to recover. The incident report she’d phoned in explained the unholstered weapon. Giving it up to a prime suspect would’ve been a final barb for the sheriff to jab into her professional hide. Maybe deserved.
She’d stuck to fundamentals on the incident report. That she and Jerzy had followed Bastida as ordered, until he’d made them. No need to mention her contingency plan to take after him. Her decision to run the inside of Grand Island without backup.
The shivers finally gone, she sloughed off the blanket and sat back.
She hadn’t reported on the unexplainable. Bastida’s freak-out flashlight inspection. Getting abandoned and then saved by their bushwhacker–slash–voyeur–slash–murder suspect. Nothing about her near-death experience with Jerzy: The shared closeness, when every drawn breath becomes precious. When cold slows the blood flow until the pulse of the partner you’re holding on to merges with yours.
A nurse in blue scrubs wheeled in a portable X-ray and reclosed Jerzy’s curtain.
Delia jumped up and started pacing the hallway. Not an easy task, shuffling around in Bernie’s XXLs, constantly hiking the waistband up over her hips.
She stopped and yanked at the belt. Already on its last notch, the end lolled like a cartoon dog’s tongue. The crotch of Bernie’s charcoal jeans hung on her at about knee level, and his black-and-white-checkered flannel shirt drooped below that. Draped over her five-ten frame, the getup aped her notions of LA homeboys.
Minutes later, rings slid on metal tubing. She stopped and turned. Nurses left, wheeling equipment away. Jerzy peered around the plastic curtain, a hello-again grin smeared across his face. He was naked from the waist up, except for a cold pack taped over his shoulder. Eyeing his ripped torso, she barely noticed him lifting the damaged right arm, rotating his wrist.