by Stuart Woods
“Would the picnic boat make it up that creek?” Stone asked. “It only draws a foot and a half.”
“It wouldn’t be the depth that’s the problem,” Seth replied. “You’d have to make your way through a lot of brush.”
“Is there a way to the boathouse by road?” Sergeant Young asked.
“There’s an old gate about here on the main road,” Seth said, pointing to a place on the map. “There was a dirt track down to the boathouse—I delivered some sails there once—but that would be overgrown, too. You could make it through there in a four-by-four, I expect.”
“My Range Rover would do it,” Rawls said. “It’s got a lot of ground clearance.”
Young looked at his watch. “I’m going to have to get search warrants for the two buildings, and I’ll have trouble getting people over here before tomorrow morning, when the ferry starts running again.”
“Can you get a search warrant this time of night?”
“I can call a judge I know and send somebody over to his house with a warrant, then he can fax it to me here. But there’s still the matter of people.”
“We’ve got enough people right here,” Stone said.
“You’re not law enforcement.”
“You’ve got one cop, two ex-cops, a couple of federal agents, and a retired army NCO,” Stone said.
Ham flashed a badge. “It says here I’m a police lieutenant in Florida, even if I am a dollar-a-year man.”
“Deputize us,” Stone said. “We’re all armed, and we know how to handle it. We ought to go in there just before dawn, by land and by sea.”
“You want to try the creek with the picnic boat?” Young asked.
“Yes; we can always get out and walk if the going gets too rough.”
Young nodded.
“Wait a minute,” Holly said. “There’s not going to be anybody in the boathouse.”
“Why not?” Young asked.
“I don’t think anybody lives there. When I was using the computer, the only other light in the room seemed to be candles, and the computer was working on battery power. The place smells disused: no cooking odors, no cleaning fluids or furniture polish recently used.”
“She’s right,” Stone said. “We ought to go into Caleb Stone’s house first. The twins have left Nantucket; they might be back home.”
“I keep telling you, it’s not the twins,” Holly said. “It’s one man.”
“Maybe it’s both,” Stone said.
Young looked doubtful. “You think it’s credible for a father to conspire with his twin sons in a string of murders?”
“Maybe not, but it’s credible for a father to protect his sons, even from the law.”
“All right, this is what we’ll do,” Young said. “Stone, you and Dino and Seth take the picnic boat up the creek to the boathouse. Seth, I don’t want you going in there. You stay in the boat.”
“All right,” Seth said.
“Ham, Lance and I will go with Ed in the Range Rover, and the four of us will take the main residence.”
“What about me?” Holly said. “I’m going.”
“Holly, are you sure you’re up to this?”
“Try and stop me.”
“All right, you go in the boat with Stone and Dino.”
“Good.”
“Now, all of you listen to me: Nobody shoots anybody unless he’s shot at first or is about to be shot at. Is that perfectly clear? If any shooting happens there’ll be a very thorough inquiry, and each of us will be held responsible for any action outside the legal use of firearms.”
Everybody nodded.
“We’ll keep in touch by cell phone. We’ll set them to vibrate, and they’ll make less noise than radios. I want everybody to have loaded weapons and two spare magazines. I’ll have an assault rifle, in case we need more firepower, and I have a shotgun in my car.”
“So do I,” Rawls said.
“What I don’t have is more than one armored vest. I’m required by regulation to wear that, and the rest of you will be going in bare chested.”
“So to speak,” Holly said.
“And I don’t want anybody to get shot, so you must all use extreme caution. We may be up against three men, and we don’t know what kind of weapons, if any, they have. We’ll make simultaneous entry to both buildings, entering front and back.”
Seth spoke up. “There’s no back entrance to the boathouse, just stairs going up from the dock underneath.”
“Good. All right, everybody check your weapons and ammo,” Young said, looking at his watch. “We have a long day up here, and it gets light early. We should be in position by three-thirty a.m. In the meantime, get some rest, and we’ll leave here at three.”
Chapter 59
STONE, DINO, HOLLY AND SETH went out to the dock and got the picnic boat ready for departure. The skies had clouded up, and darkness was complete. Seth got the engine started, and the lights from the dashboard instruments and the GPS plotter offered a little light in the cockpit.
“Look,” Seth said, pointing to the plotter screen. “The creek is on the electronic chart; that will make it a piece of cake to find, even in the dark. All we have to worry about is moored boats and rocks, and I pretty much know where those are.”
“Let’s go,” Stone said. “It’s going to start to get light soon, and I want to at least be in position off the creek before that happens.”
Seth moved the boat away from the dock, and at idle speed they began moving up the inlet, away from the harbor. They could hear nothing, except the rumble of the engine. Seth increased power a little. “We could go faster, if we use the spotlight,” he said.
“As long as we can navigate safely in the dark, I’d rather not announce our presence,” Stone said.
Then, without warning, they heard the whine of a big outboard engine, and a Boston Whaler flashed past them, rocking their boat with its wake.
“Shit,” Seth said. “I didn’t hear that coming; he must have been doing twenty knots.”
“Was that Caleb’s boat?” Stone asked.
“Hard to tell with no light,” Seth replied. “Lots of Whalers hereabouts.” They continued their way up the inlet, passing moored boats along the way, making seven knots, according to the speedometer. “Creek up ahead,” Seth said. “One o’clock and a hundred yards.” He throttled back to idle.
HAM BARKER WATCHED from the rear seat as Ed Rawls’s Range Rover turned into Caleb Stone’s driveway.
“Lights off,” said Sergeant Young from the front passenger seat. “I don’t want ”em to know we’re here until they open the door.“
“BMW convertible dead ahead,” Rawls said.
“That’s the twins’ car,” Young replied. “They’re back from Nantucket.”
The car stopped, and Ham and Lance got out of the backseat.
“Lance,” Young said, “you and Ham go around to the back door and make sure your cell phone is on. What’s the number?”
Lance gave it to him, and he tapped it into his own phone and pressed the send button. Lance opened the phone. “I’m on the line,” he said.
“Good,” Young replied. “If you hear any kind of commotion or yelling, kick in the back door and come in with your weapons drawn. You’ve got a flashlight; use it if you have to.”
“Right,” Lance said, and he and Ham began to walk to the rear of the house.
Ham drew his Colt .45 auto, racked the slide and flipped the safety on with his thumb, then he took a small Surefire flashlight loaded with high-powered batteries from a holster on his gun belt. That light, he knew, was enough to nearly disable a man when it hit his face in the dark. Once, he had seen a soldier throw up after such an experience.
They reached the back of the house, walked quietly up the back steps and waited on the landing by the door. Lance put the phone on speaker, and they could hear the footsteps of Young and Rawls as they came onto the front porch. Then, faintly, they heard a doorbell ring.
STONE, DINO AN D HOLLY
sat in the picnic boat off the mouth of the creek, while Seth kept it hovering in place, using the joystick to control the boat’s movement.
“I see a feint light,” Stone said, pointing. “There, through the trees.”
“Looks like a lantern or maybe a candle,” Dino said.
“We’ve got some light in the sky,” Stone said. “Let’s go slowly up the creek, Seth. Dino and I will go onto the foredeck and keep the brush and branches out of the way as much as possible. If you hit anything solid, back off.” Stone and Dino crept forward.
The going was easier than Stone had thought it would be. It was as if someone had trimmed the larger branches, leaving only the smaller stuff. For five minutes they moved on up the creek at the rate of a couple of knots, and then there were no more branches, only clear water ahead. The boathouse stood before them, twenty-five yards ahead, a soft glow coming from its windows. Stone looked back at Seth and drew a hand across his throat.
Seth turned off the engine, and they drifted forward, ghosting into the boat bay of the house. Stone and Dino hopped onto the catwalk and stopped the boat’s progress. Holly joined them, and they made the boat fast. They had made remarkably little noise.
Stone pressed the speed dial on his cell phone for Sergeant Young’s phone and got a busy signal. He closed his phone. “Somebody’s upstairs,” he whispered to Dino and Holly. “Come on, we’re going in.” He led the way to the stairs, and in single file they began to creep upward, keeping to the inside of the treads to avoid squeaks. They came to the door, which was ajar an inch. Stone looked inside but could see only a small slice of the room. He looked at Dino and Holly and pumped his fist twice; they were going in.
THE SOUND OF A woman’s voice raised in protest coming from the cell phone jerked Ham to attention. “No, you can’t come in!” she was saying.
“That’s it,” Lance said. He turned the doorknob, found it locked, then backed up a step and kicked the door open.
Ham was in the darkened house immediately, his flashlight on, his gun hand cradled on his left wrist. They were in a kitchen, and another door was ahead. He peeped through that and saw a light down a hallway. He could hear the voices clearly now, without the cell phone.
“We have a search warrant, Mrs. Stone,” Young was saying. “You sit down over there and don’t interfere, or I’ll arrest you and handcuff you.” The woman’s voice stopped. “Ham, you and Lance take the upstairs; Ed and I will take this floor.”
Ham went into the main entrance hall and ran lightly up the stairs, gun and flashlight at the ready. All he found were empty rooms, neatly kept. He switched on the ceiling light in what was obviously the twins’ room. It was as neat as all the others. He and Lance went through it, checking every closet or cabinet large enough to hold a man, until they were satisfied there was no one on the second floor. They went back downstairs.
Young and Rawls came out of a bedroom. “Nobody but Mrs. Stone in the house. Where are your husband and your sons, Mrs. Stone?” She appeared to be drunk.
“I was sleeping,” she said.
“Where are they?”
“I don’t know. Aren’t they in bed? My boys flew into Rockland tonight.”
“Let’s get to the boathouse,” Young said, and they all headed for the Range Rover.
STONE PUSHED THE door open with his foot, gun before him, and stepped into the room. He saw a double bed, a table, an old sofa, a couple of seedy, overstuffed chairs and not much else. He could see the top of the head of what was apparently a sleeping man sitting in one of the armchairs, his back to them.
Stone switched on his flashlight and approached. “Wake up,” he said. “Keep your hands where I can see them.” Then he saw the pistol on the floor, near the man’s dangling right hand, and he knew what else he was going to see.
THEY WERE GATHERED in the boathouse, looking at the dead body of Caleb Stone, a bullet through his right temple.
“They did a better job on Caleb’s suicide than with Dick’s,” Stone said. “At least, the angle is right.”
“The computer was on that table in the corner,” Holly said, “along with a little printer and a briefcase.”
“The twins think they have a million two in a Singapore bank,” Stone said, “and that had to be them in the boat that passed us when we were on the way in. I wonder where they’re headed.”
Young spoke up. “Their mother said they flew into Rockland.”
“We’ll never catch them in the boat,” Stone said. “Come on, Dick, drive me to the Islesboro airstrip, and maybe we can beat them to Rockland.”
“I’ll call for backup,” Sergeant Young said, “but I don’t know where our cars are tonight, and I don’t know how long it will take them to get to Rockland Airport.”
“We don’t have time to wait for backup,” Stone said. “Once those boys are off the ground, it’s going to be hell to find them.” He ran for the stairs.
Chapter 60
THE RANGE ROVER skidded to a halt on the airstrip’s parking ramp, and Stone ran for the Malibu. There was no time for the usual preflight inspection. He got the door open and slid into the pilot’s seat, and felt the others boarding behind him. Sergeant Young squeezed his long frame into the copilot’s seat, and Stone looked behind him to find Lance, Rawls, Holly and Ham filling the other four seats. He flipped on the master switch and checked the fuel: Both tanks were less than a quarter full. Stone had not topped off the tanks at Teterboro, having four on board, and he was grateful for that because, with so much weight aboard, the airplane was going to eat up runway before it would fly. Rockland was no more than a fifteen- or twenty-minute flight, so the fuel on board would get them there.
“Everybody buckle up,” Stone said, then began cranking the engine. It coughed to life, and he checked the windsock: light wind, favoring runway one. The other direction, runway one-nine, was slightly downhill, but there were tall trees not far off the end of the runway. He taxied downhill and did a one-eighty turn at the end, watching the engine temperatures come slowly up; he couldn’t afford any hesitation or an engine failure today. The temperatures were edging into the green. He jammed his feet onto the brakes and put in twenty degrees of flaps; that would lower his takeoff speed from eighty to seventy knots. He eased up on the power until the throttle was at its stop and let the engine run up to full power. Now or never. With a scared feeling in his stomach he let the airplane go.
The Malibu began its roll all too slowly. Stone flicked his sight back and forth between the runway and the airspeed indicator, watching it inch up. Halfway down the runway, the needle began moving faster, but the end of the runway was rushing at them, where there were scrubby trees and a house. They were running out of pavement, and the ground beyond was rough.
“I want to fly now,” Sergeant Young said, his voice sounding strangled.
They were at sixty-nine knots when Stone eased the yoke back a fraction. The airplane left the ground in what seemed like the last yard of pavement, but it didn’t want to climb. Stone put the gear lever up and the flaps to zero, hoping for less drag, and held the airplane level, wanting to let it gain airspeed. At eighty knots, with the gear at about ten feet upand the house rushing at them, he tried for more altitude and cleared the roof by what seemed like inches.
“Sweet Jesus,” Young said. “Is this thing going to fly?”
Stone leveled off at a hundred feet, watching the treetops flashing past a few feet below them, dodging the taller ones as the airplane struggled to gain airspeed. Then they were over water, inching their way up to five hundred feet. An overcast was, maybe, a couple of hundred feet above them.
“I thought you were going to hit that boat’s mast,” Young said as they flew past a moored yacht.
“We’re going to do the rest of the flight at this altitude,” Stone said. “It’ll keep us out of clouds and get us down faster.” He leveled off at five hundred feet and eased the throttle back to keep the airspeed in the green. They were using a lot of fuel at this altitude an
d speed, but the distance was short.
Stone reached down between the seats and handed Young the airport directory. “Look up Rockland and give me the unicorn frequency,” he said. “There’s no tower on the field.”