Dead Level

by Sarah Graves

  Carol glanced pityingly at Sam. “You really don’t get it, do you?” Then Richard spoke up again, impatiently.

  “Hey, I bought it, okay? I didn’t adopt the thing.” He made a face as if Sam’s question had been obtuse. “I wanted to see what it was like. We were here, there’s plenty of water, I wanted to try it.”

  And now I don’t anymore, his shrug added. Easy come, easy go. As if Sam had been stupid ever to think otherwise, which was what caused him to push his luck, to tweak Richard a little bit.

  “Yeah, well, I hope you left your credit card on file at the boatyard. That salvage crew doesn’t come cheap.”

  But then he saw instantly that he’d made a mistake; at the mention of a credit card, Richard’s look darkened. So that’s what this is all about, Sam thought. The card, someone’s already after them about it.

  Richard stuck his hand out; Carol took a roll of silvery duct tape from her duffel and tossed it to him without comment, as if they had done all this before, to someone else.

  Maybe a few times, Sam thought. Or things like it. Richard himself looked different to Sam, too, his confidence more like impulsiveness, his energy a kind of jumpiness, an inability to be still. Richard had bashed those holes in Courtesan, Sam thought now, not to save her but because in his frustration, he couldn’t stand not hitting something.

  The one thing Richard did seem calm about was the gun, holding it in an easy, competent-looking way with his right hand as with his left he began wrapping the duct tape around Sam, securing him to the chair.

  “You and your great ideas,” Richard told Carol. “You had to go get a crush on Mr. Country Boy here.” He wound more tape. “ ‘Ooh, he’s cute, let’s get him to come with us,’ ” Richard mimicked nastily.

  In answer, Carol only huffed out a breath. When he finished wrapping the duct tape a dozen or so more times, Richard tucked the gun away, sliding it into the nylon shoulder holster that he wore under his jacket.

  Sam let out a sigh of relief. In response Richard ripped off another piece of tape and slapped it over Sam’s mouth. “Sorry.”

  Yeah, but not sorry enough. Sam wished intensely that his hands were free so he could show Richard just how very sorry a person could get. The clearest thought in his head at the moment, though, was gratitude: that somehow, he hadn’t sunk so low as to have a drink with these people.

  Or a drink at all. Thank you, he thought to whichever god had been in charge of granting him this bit of undeserved luck; he’d done everything but lie down openmouthed under a beer keg’s spigot, he knew, to ensure having a slip.

  “Last night at the restaurant, there was a wedding dinner,” said Richard, apropos of nothing. “And do you know who’s always at a wedding dinner, Sam?”

  He turned slowly. “A photographer, that’s who. And to get the candle glow in the pictures, the atmosphere,” Richard grated the word out, “he used available light. Which means no flash, and that means I didn’t know pictures were being taken.”

  He turned to Carol. “Pictures of us. There’s one taped in the window of the Rusty Rudder right now. So, are you ready?”

  Hoisting the duffel, Carol indicated that she was. “Go on, get in the car, then,” he told her. “Silver Saab,” he added. “I found it with the keys in it, can you believe that?”

  But when she’d gone, he paused once more. “Look, you seem like a nice guy,” he told Sam, and then at the look Sam gave him in reply, added, “Yeah, and I’m not. But that’s the thing, see.”

  Sam shook his head, to indicate that he didn’t give a flying Fig Newton what Richard had to say. But Richard kept on talking:

  “The thing about you is, you live in a fairy-tale world.”

  Yeah, yeah. The only thing Sam wanted out of Richard’s mouth was his teeth, knocked out by Sam’s fist.

  “But out in the real world, it’s not like here,” Richard said. “So take this as a lesson, you know? You’re too trusting. People here in Eastport seem decent, from what I can tell—”

  Yeah? And how would you know? Sam thought viciously at him. All you did here was sink a boat.

  And what that had been all about, Sam couldn’t imagine; just a whim, probably, something to pass the time. Another adventure, as Carol had put it, combined with another way to put something over on someone. Some guy somewhere was almost certainly counting stolen money at the moment, Sam realized, or trying to cash a bad check.

  “So I can see how you might get the idea that most everyone is on the up-and-up,” the man standing in the doorway said. “But away from here, out in the real world …”

  Richard’s voice took on a patronizing, let-this-be-a-lesson-to-you tone that Sam somehow found more infuriating than anything else so far. He hoped what showed of his face conveyed to this lying piece of scum that there were two men in this motel room at the moment, and the wrong one had duct tape over his mouth.

  “… in the real world—and it’s important that you remember this, Sam—in the real world, there are real bad guys. Like me.”

  Richard walked out, closing the motel room door behind him.

  Half a block away in his office in the old Frontier Bank building, Bob Arnold settled his duty belt loaded with his gear around his middle, which he noted ruefully was expanding again. He’d been living on Hungry Man frozen dinners and takeout since six weeks earlier, when his wife and daughter had gone to stay with his in-laws in Boston so the child could get treatment for her asthma.

  The wheezing had been getting worse, despite everything that Maine doctors had been able to do for her. Bob was afraid the Boston specialists would end up recommending a warm, dry climate, someplace where the ice crystals didn’t freeze in your nose hairs in late November and stay there until May.

  Arizona, maybe, or the Southern California desert. All new crimes, all new criminals and informants, after a long career of being so familiar with all the crooks around here that if one so much as sniffled at one end of town, Bob reached for a tissue at the other.

  Not that he wouldn’t have moved to Mars if it would help, but he didn’t know how to make a living there, either. Policing, he reflected as he buckled his weapon into its holster, was like being a salesman; you had to know the territory.

  Sighing, he pushed open the big glass front door of the old bank. By next week he’d be in the department’s new quarters.

  The thought, he admitted to himself as he stepped out into the night, depressed him. New facilities, new equipment … it all seemed to be shoving him toward an unwelcome realization: that he was up against new crimes and new, much more technology-savvy criminals, too.

  More and more—with identity theft, electronic stalking, email scams, and who knew what other varieties of illegal stuff he didn’t even know about yet—just rounding up the usual suspects was a thing of the past. Even this latest situation with the two credit card criminals proved it: nothing, not even Eastport, was as far off the beaten track as it used to be, and ready or not, criminal behaviors he’d never had to worry about before were now coming soon to a crime scene near him.

  He inhaled a deep breath of the night air, smelling of the storm that was coming, the breeze laden with seaweed, creosote, and the french fryer bubbling in the kitchen of the Happy Crab sports bar, across the street. A plate of fried haddock would go good for dinner later, he decided; better than chef’s salad with “lite” dressing out of a packet, that was for sure.

  But for now, he’d take a spin around town before packing it in for the night. Calories must be what the Almighty put in food to make it taste good, he reflected as he got into the squad car, noting with sorrow the way his belly nearly touched the steering wheel; if his wife, Clarissa, were at home now, he’d be on his way to having dinner with his family.

  Instead it would be another solitary evening of sports on the TV with the scanner on low on the coffee table, just in case. Thinking this, he drove up Washington Street past the post office and, straight across from it, the remodeled A&P building where his own n
ew professional quarters would be, once he’d moved in.

  As he drove he watched for young Sam Tiptree, who’d been at work today according to the boatyard guys but hadn’t shown up here in town yet. Not that Sam was at the top of their worry list at the boatyard; as if Bob didn’t have enough to concern him tonight, there’d been a break-in at the yard’s office just a few hours ago, and a whole lot of money was missing along with a customer’s car.

  Bob hoped Sam hadn’t fallen off the wagon too hard; the kid had been sober for quite a while, and Bob would’ve bet by now that he wasn’t going to fall off at all. So in the gloomy back of his mind he was beginning to wonder what else might’ve happened, and whether or not recent events—Sam’s slip, the credit card thing, and the boatyard break-in—were somehow all connected.

  That being another of the chronic side effects of small-town policing: actually caring about what happened to the people whose welfare you’d sworn to guard. Turning left onto High Street past the old wood-frame city hall building with the flags—American, Canadian, and State of Maine—flapping in the floodlights in front of it, Bob wondered if he would feel the same way about the people of Phoenix or San Diego, once he had gotten to know them.

  Probably not. Eastport, with its saltwater-soaked air and its stubborn pride, rah-rah boosterism staggering companionably along beside pockets of crushing poverty, was in his blood as surely as the fat globules that floated off his meals of fried fish.

  Left on High Street, left on Battery Street, out to South End and back, then out County Road to the town garage … when he’d finished his routine, he decided on the spur of the moment to do it over again. But even on the second go-round, there was no sign of Sam anywhere, or of Wade Sorenson, either, and no one seemed to at be home when Bob drove by their house on Key Street.

  Jake and Ellie were probably still up at the cabin. So maybe the two old people who lived there—Jake’s father, Jacob, and his wife, Bella—had gone somewhere, too: shopping in the market town of Calais, maybe, thirty miles distant. Lousy night for it, the smears of rain on Bob’s windshield alternating with streaming downpours as he drove, but it was the simplest explanation, and so probably the correct one.

  Bob hoped that later when he went to the Happy Crab he would find Sam and Wade enjoying their own deep-fried dinners. Probably he would; thinking this, he reached for one of the sugar-free candies he kept in the car’s cup holder, unwrapped it, and popped it into his mouth.

  The sour watermelon taste had begun spreading on his tongue when the squad’s radio blatted out a burst of static. Then a tinny voice out of county dispatch began relaying the information that there was a vehicle off the road, back in among the trees on Route 190.

  Bob recognized the location, a mile or so past where he had just turned around and driven back into town. A passing motorist had called it in, the dispatcher said. Bob depressed the speaker button, bit down on the watermelon candy, swallowed the pieces, and hit the gas pedal, swinging the car around hard and flooring it as he spoke, identifying himself.

  “On it,” he added, thumbing on his light bars and siren as the car’s speedometer leapt to sixty, wondering as he swung into the curve past the Mobil station whose family he would be either calling or visiting later this evening, depending on how bad the news was that he would be obliged to deliver.

  The last thing Jacob Tiptree remembered clearly was seeing a deer step out of the brush by the side of the road. It was a doe, plump after a summer of garden grazing, mowing down lettuces and nipping off dahlias; now in autumn the deer herd had mostly moved to their wintering grounds, out here along the highway.

  He might not have seen her at all if she hadn’t turned, her eyes reflecting redly in his pickup’s headlights in the moment before she leapt.

  He didn’t know how long ago that had been. Someone moaned in the darkness beside him. Bella …

  He couldn’t speak, understood distantly that it was because his face was jammed up against the steering wheel. It was cold in the truck’s cab, which felt unnaturally small and closed in, so they might’ve been here awhile.

  Crushed in here … He tried to reach out for his wife, with him in the demolished pickup truck. But when he tried to move, a pain like a lightning bolt shot across his shoulder and into his chest. Something held him tightly between the wheel and the seatback; after a moment he realized that it was the engine, halfway into the passenger compartment.

  Now he could smell motor oil, the sweet chemical stink of antifreeze, and the acrid reek of burnt electrical insulation. But not gasoline, thankfully. When he wiggled his face to try to free his lips, at least, he felt stuff crinkle from his forehead. A bit of it fell to his mouth, and when he tasted it he realized it was dried blood.

  So they had been here awhile. Hours, maybe … There’d been no one in sight when they went off the road.

  “Bella,” he whispered.

  Silence. He couldn’t tell if she was breathing or not. Fear poleaxed him, turning his blood to cold sludge and his gut to a lump of ice. Then:

  “I’m here, old man,” she whispered “But I can’t …”

  “Don’t try to move.” Talking set something inside his mouth to bleeding again; he tried to spit, couldn’t, and swallowed the blood instead, felt he was going to vomit and knew he mustn’t.

  He could feel her gathering herself beside him, getting her wits about her, her voice a little stronger when she spoke again. But what she said scared him more than anything so far:

  “There’s a lot of blood.” Then she coughed, a wet, bubbling sound that could not mean anything good, that went right through his heart like a sword. “Jacob …”

  “Shh. Just hang on now, old girl, we’ll be all right. We’re not far off the road; somebody will see us. People go by here all the time. Someone,” he promised, “will come.”

  But the truth was, he didn’t know how far off the road they might be. He didn’t remember swerving to avoid the deer, or if he had; he didn’t know whether they’d hit it or not, or how far the truck had traveled before striking something, a tree or a granite outcropping.

  The crash had burst the truck’s windows, scattering glass pellets. He could feel them in his hair and on his face, stuck to his skin. Rain began, slanting in coldly, drenching and chilling him to the bone, and when he shivered, the pain went through him once more, worse now that he was awake and alert.

  But the worst part was that Bella had fallen silent. Jacob couldn’t get an answer out of her anymore, and pretty soon he quit trying, fearing that any effort she made might be the thing that used up the last of her reserves, or nudged something wounded to bleed again when otherwise it might’ve stopped.

  Maybe she was unconscious, or maybe she was just saving her strength. He hoped it wasn’t anything worse, and he had no way of finding out. Eventually he let his neck relax, resting the bridge of his nose against the wreck of the steering wheel, letting the pain wash over him. The pain, really, was nothing to him if Bella didn’t make it all right.

  He still couldn’t move, though, and now his neck and back were stiffening up, freezing him rigidly into position. He sat that way for a long time in the cold and wet, in the darkness of the smashed-in truck cab. Thunder began rumbling, getting nearer; soon lightning flashes whitened the crazed safety glass of the truck’s windshield.

  If Bella had a cellphone in her bag, he didn’t know about it, and he wouldn’t have been able to reach it, much less work it—he couldn’t feel his fingers, and his feet seemed not to be down there below the busted dashboard anymore, either—if he had.

  He whispered her name again, and got no answer. Outside, the rain came down steadily. He lost consciousness once more, and sometime after that when he awoke to a siren’s wail and lights flashing, he hardly cared, certain that they were already too late.

  By the time glass had finished falling out of the cottage windows, Ellie and I were on the floor, crawling together toward the woodstove and the chimney behind it. From the chimney,
it was a quick scramble around and into the kitchen alcove.

  Neither of us could breathe right, we were so scared, and we couldn’t see, either; the lights were shot out, it was pitch dark and raining outside, so there was no moon, and we couldn’t turn on a flashlight even if we could find one, because then whoever was out there could see us, too.

  “Who?” Ellie whispered when she’d gotten her wind back.

  “No idea.” Except for the rain still pattering down, there was only silence out there now. “But if whoever is out there gets in here with the shotgun,” I said—from the way the windows blew in, I thought it must be one—“we’ll be sitting ducks.”

  I felt her nod beside me. “As small as this place is, just shooting randomly around a few times’ll do it,” she whispered.

  How, I wondered, could this be happening? Two minutes ago I’d been tucked into a bed, tired from a day’s work, and now …

  “Okay. My bag with the phone in it is on the counter,” I said.

  Because we had to get out, and we had to let somebody know what was happening. Toot sweet, as my son, Sam, would’ve put it.

  And the truck was right outside. “You run for the passenger door and I’ll jump in and start it,” I whispered.

  “Uh-huh.” A pause, then, “We should call someone before we go. I mean, so they know what happened in case …”

  In case we don’t make it. That feeling of unreality washed over me again. But: “No. My phone’s turned off.”

  I’d checked for messages after dinner, found none, and had planned to do so once more before I fell asleep, just in case someone from home really needed to talk to me. In between those times, though, I’d turned it completely off to save the battery.

  “It chimes when it powers up,” I added. Which we obviously couldn’t let happen. In all this quiet, the sound would be plenty loud enough to betray where we were.

  Ellie sighed. “Okay. We can do it on the way out.”