by Sarah Graves
Torn between going and staying, he knew her too well. But there was a four-hundred-foot container vessel full of cargo and fuel out there in the bay right now, and if it didn't get back under way very efficiently it would be floating around like a bathtub toy, soon.
A large, potentially very destructive bathtub toy…"Maybe I should ask a couple of fellows from the marine terminal to come over," he began.
"No!" At her tone his eyebrows arched interestedly. "Please don't," she added more quietly "I'll be fine," she assured him.
Lonely as hell. And scared; no denying it. But there was an astringent comfort to be had in such solitary anguish, and at the moment it was the only sort of comfort she could tolerate.
"Okay," Wade relented. "Need anything from my shop?" Bigger guns than she already had access to, he meant, from among the ones he had stored under lock and key up there.
"No. I've got the Bisley and the twenty-two in the lockbox in the cellar." Her own guns, which she took care of herself: The .22 was only a target pistol but the Bisley was a .45-caliber six-shot revolver that Wade had given her and taught her to shoot.
She stepped into his embrace. "Which I won't. Need them, that is. You just go on and get the job done out there, and come home."
Safe, she didn't add aloud. Because to anyone who worked out on the water you never even whispered the idea that it might turn out otherwise.
You just didn't. "She'll be okay, Jake," he reassured her. "Both of them will: everyone in town is working on it, and now the feds.…They'll find Lee. Helen, too, I know they will, even if…"
Even if you're right and Campbell's got her. She swallowed hard, held him another moment, and stepped back.
"Sure. Sure they will," she managed to reply.
In the hall she watched him pull on his windbreaker and grab his duffel bag; waving him out, she waited for him to go down the porch steps, then locked the door behind him. When the knock came a few minutes later she thought he'd forgotten something and returned for it, and hurried to answer.
But it was Bob Arnold, holding a flat, rectangular object in his hand. A VCR tape.
"Hey," she said. "What's—?"
Before she could finish he stepped inside, closing the door and waving the tape at her.
"You need to see this," he said, but what he really meant was that he needed her to see it.
She slotted the tape into the VCR in the living room, in the big TV where Wade watched sports, usually. But there was nothing sporting about what this tape showed: gray and grainy, shot from a high angle, like a security tape from a store camera.
Only it wasn't from any store. Instead it had been made outside Helen Nevelson's house. "Do you recognize either of those two?" Bob asked.
"No." The action was difficult to watch, first as Helen was muscled roughly into the driveway, her wrists bound. Next Lee was carried out struggling and tossed into a car behind Helen.
Then one drove away in Helen's car while his accomplice took the one the kidnappers had come in. "Where'd you get this?" Jake asked.
The worst part of the tape was the last few moments, Lee's small, white face pressed for an instant to the car window.
Scared. Frantic, even…
Bob looked grim. "It was on my desk when I got downtown. I'd just stopped in to check with the state cops on my way home, see if there were any new developments. Which there weren't."
He waved at the TV in disgust. "Look again." He hit the rewind button on the remote.
"Stop," she said. He paused the tape; she squinted hard at the men on it. One was smaller, with dark, curly hair, wearing a leather jacket… a cocky-looking guy with a strutting walk.
"Bastard," she whispered. The other one, tall and beak-nosed with a pointy Adam's apple and big ears, wore a jacket with…
"What's that?" Bob asked, pointing. "Some kind of a logo?"
"Yes." Excitement seized her; she leaned toward the screen. "It's the logo of the New Jersey Devils. Supposed to be a linked N and J. Plus a stylized pair of horns and forked tail…"
"A hockey team," she added; Bob wasn't a sports fan. "Run the tape again, will you? That's right, keep it going until—there. Watch the car, now. When it goes around the circle on its way out you can see…oh, my God. Did you get it? Run it back."
"The plate," Bob said, but not happily. He'd seen it before, she realized. "You can almost read the tag number."
He ran it back and forth a few more times, but with the same result. The license plate on the old blue Monte Carlo was unreadable. "You want to see it again?"
She felt her shoulders sag. "No. You're right, it's just not there, and looking at it over and over won't make it be."
If the numbers weren't visible, they weren't. "But why would Jody and Jerrilyn Pierce want to be taping their…oh. On account of Tim Barnard?"
Bob nodded. "Jody worked on video gear sometimes. I'll bet he set this camera up. Figured like we did, that even with Tim out of commission his buddies might be trouble."
Jake recalled Jody Pierce's workroom, the electronics in it. "So once Jerrilyn calmed down, she remembered it?"
"Nope. I already asked, she says she never even knew about the camera."
He rolled his head around, trying to work the kinks out of his neck. "I think Jody must've slipped into town while we were all out at the gravel pit, left the tape for me, and vamoosed."
He ejected the tape from the player. "So I couldn't arrest him for assault, not to mention those state boys'd like to talk to him, too. Anyone else, I would not believe it was possible."
Jody sneaking into what Sam would've called the cop shop, he meant, right under everyone's nose. But Wade had gone out hunting with Jody once and when he came back he'd said Jody Pierce was so smooth in the woods, he could've walked right up to a moose and pinned a target on its hide, and the moose wouldn't have noticed.
"So what're you going to do with it? The tape, that is?" she asked.
"Copy it, show it around to everyone. And when the feds get here, maybe they'll be able to enhance it enough to…"
Maybe. But probably not. The numbers weren't just blurred, they were absent, as if someone had deliberately smeared them up heavily with mud.
Bob slid the tape into its cardboard holder. "Listen, Jake. I'm sorry about before. I mean, the way I…"
"What, that you didn't treat my story like it came on stone tablets? Forget it."
She got up. A few months earlier when Sam was deep in his most recent troubles with the bottle, Bob could have arrested him any number of times. Drunk and disorderly, public nuisance, all sorts of things—But he hadn't. Again and again he'd delivered Sam into the care of his family.
Sometimes he'd even sobered him up first. She thought for a moment. "This tape doesn't get me off the hook, though, does it?"
"Nope. It does not." He zipped his jacket; the earlier rain had dragged a cold front in.
"Just the opposite, ‘cause a guy from New Jersey that you think's got a grudge against you either has showed up, just the way you say. Or he hasn't, and you're putting yourself in the middle of this for some reason. Putting a story together."
A story some bits of which now had confirmation, courtesy of a videotape and a guy in it wearing a Devils jacket. Because Campbell was from New Jersey, too, so there was a link.
But it was still a flimsy one. At the door Bob asked, "Jake, have you given any thought to who might be helping this fellow?" He moved his shoulders around in his jacket. "I mean, if Campbell is here and he is doing these things like you say, somebody's got to have shown him around. So have you given any thought to that at all?"
He looked out to the silent street, where one by one all the neighboring houses were going dark. "Somebody local, giving him a place to stay and so on. Or suggesting one. You thought of that?"
"Sure, I have." When I wasn't busy thinking about getting crushed to death in a buried car, she added silently "But I haven't come up with anything. It's hard to imagine anyone from around here doing that knowingly."
"Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is." He stepped outside. "All right, then, but if you get lonesome, later, come on down to the house. Never mind what time it is. Meanwhile, if you get any more calls, you call me up right away on Clarissa's line."
It was the only phone their household answered twenty-four seven. "But if I get yanked back here tonight for anything else," he finished, "there'd better be a burglar coming in the window. You got that?"
"Yes. Thanks, Bob," she said again as he made his way under the maple tree to his car at the end of the blockaded sidewalk.
She waited until he'd driven away, then closed and locked the door and returned to the kitchen. She was spooning in the Maxwell House—if Bella were here now, she'd be grinding fresh beans and rubbing the already sparkling carafe with a suds-laden scrubber—when the telephone rang. Dropping the coffee scoop, her heart clamoring painfully in her chest, she scrambled to answer.
"All right, now," said a voice. "You better freakin’ listen to me ‘cause I ain't sayin’ it twice. Got it?"
Not Campbell this time. Someone else. Her throat closed with fright. "Yes. Are they all right?" she whispered.
"Shut up. You do this thing the way you're supposed to, you won't have to worry about that."
The voice told her where to be and when. Alone, of course. "Don't be early, don't be late. You tell anybody, I'll know. Had a chat with your dad, today? And your kid? That was your husband, I guess, with the cop there, tonight. Both of them gone now."
He paused to let it sink in, that he knew who'd called and who'd been at the house.
And that she was alone. "So, you understand?"
Before she could reply, a shriek of mingled pain and fear erupted from the phone, so terrible it forced a sob from her.
"No! Stop, please don't hurt her—"
"Do. You. Understand?"
"Yes," she replied dully. "I understand."
Click.
Anthony Colapietro had eaten an oyster once, on a dare. One of the working guys had taken some kids from the ju-vie home out on a job, to a restaurant out by the airport. To work on the air-conditioning, the job was, and while they were in the cellar the joint's owner came down with a platter of raw oysters.
White fluted paper cups full of the hot sauce that went with them were on the platter, and some lemon slices. "Don't just gulp it," the HVAC guy had told Anthony. "Bite in."
So Anthony had, finding that a raw oyster tasted like what he imagined would happen if he fell facedown on a beach like the ones he'd watched dreamily on TV shows, and let the water roll into his mouth. The rich, somehow primitive-tasting saltiness of it seemed to explode in his head, scouring it from the inside.
He'd laughed in surprise, and the working guy had laughed, too. But Anthony wasn't laughing now, in the doorway of the small room with the empty kid's bed in it.
No kid. Not under the bed, or in the closet…Well, he'd told her to hide, hadn't he? But he'd thought she'd do it in the room, not—
"Check the boat," Marky yelled. He'd started yelling it as soon as he hung up from making the call, on the cell given to him to use just for this by the guy who had hired them.
"What boat?" Anthony called back to Marky, playing for time, Marky pacing back and forth in front of the sliding glass door he'd broken earlier. Marky didn't know the kid was missing yet; Anthony had only just now discovered that worrisome fact.
Anthony moved to the hall, peeked out just as Marky pulled the cell phone from his jacket, glowered at it, and answered. He listened briefly, saying, "Yup. Yup. Got it. Okay." Snapping the phone shut, he shoved it back into his pocket.
"Nobody told me anything about a boat," Anthony said.
"Yeah, well, now I'm tellin’ you." On the earlier call it had been Marky doing all the talking. It hadn't sounded as if whoever was on the other end gave Marky any argument, either.
Which was, Anthony thought, smart. He hoped whoever it was went on being smart. But all the brilliance in the world wouldn't save this situation if he couldn't find the kid.
"Down by the water, there," Marky said now, "tied up to a freakin’ rock. The life jackets and oars, too. We'll be needin’ ‘em on our voyage."
Marky's mouth twisted viciously on the word, causing Anthony further alarm. "Now? We're going on a boat in the…?"
Dark. "Got a problem with it?" Marky inquired. " ‘Cause if you do…"
Eyeing Anthony darkly, he fingered his black leather lapel in a suggestive manner. Suggestive of the gun…Anthony noticed that the tape player he'd seen on the table earlier was gone, as was the telescope-ish item whose purpose he'd decided not to pursue.
He had enough on his plate. "No problem," he said hastily. "Good idea with the sound effects," he added, hoping to get Marky into a better mood.
The scream, he meant. It had come out of the little tape machine while Marky was on the phone, the first time. Marky grinned. "Yeah, huh? I thought of that. Got my sister's kid to do it, my niece. Kid screams like you're murderin’ her."
Then he saw Anthony's expression, which Anthony had not been quick enough to hide. "What, you don't think I got a family like anyone else?" Marky asked insultedly " ‘Course I do; everyone's got a family, you moron."
Anthony changed the subject. "So they're gonna trade for the kid? Money, or—?"
Because that had to be it, didn't it? Some kind of a ransom thing. But Marky's eyes narrowed at this, too.
"Hey, Anthony? Why'n't you mind your own freakin’ business? You just go do exactly what the freak I tell you, then you don't have to worry."
"Okay, okay," Anthony replied resentfully. For one thing, he didn't see why he couldn't know as much as Marky, being as Marky was obviously no genius. And for another, he was already worried.
Very worried. But since the kid still wasn't showing up, he might as well go find the boat; probably she was hiding somewhere like he'd told her and would show up when she realized he'd quit looking, that she was no longer the focus of his attention.
On his way out he heard Marky cursing the broken lamp again, shouting obscenities like he could scare it into doing what he wanted. Which was another thing starting to frost Anthony, the amount of cursing Marky seemed to feel it was necessary to do.
Freaking this, freaking that and the other as if he couldn't think of any other words to use, and so had to rely on that one. Anthony wondered if Marky knew how stupid it made him sound.
Anyway, the boat. Waving a flashlight he'd grabbed out of the cardboard box—Marky scowling but not saying anything about it—Anthony spotted a boatlike shape down on the beach. Making his way to it carefully, because the stones here were slippery and he didn't want to break his neck, he found it tied by a rope looped through an iron ring that was bolted into a boulder.
No lock. Just the knot. Seeing that made him wonder again about how different it must be living here, if you could leave a boat sitting around unlocked. All anybody had to do was untie it.
But that turned out not to be quite as easy as he expected. Time and moisture had compressed the sodden rope until it was as solid as concrete. He had a junky little jackknife in his pocket, though, so he used that to saw away at the rope until he felt frayed ends separating.
The boat was a wooden one, pointy-shaped at the front end, broad at the middle, and flat at the rear, with three wooden seats and a pair of oarlocks. The flat rear end must be so you could mount an engine on it if you wanted, Anthony figured. Along with a large coffee can that he supposed uneasily must be for bailing, the oars and life jackets were in a wooden lean-to nearby on the shore.
He figured out how to get the oars into their oarlocks and did it. But they weren't going to be rowing anywhere tonight, he knew right away, no matter how mad Marky decided to get about it. Only a little ways out from the beach, the water moved violently, racing like a river. Shove that boat in there and you were going where the water wanted to go, nowhere else.
But it would be better to let Marky come to that conclusion himself. Anthony hau
led the boat around until the pointed end aimed at the waves, then crouched to examine its flat end. Deep grooves on it said an engine had been clamped to it at some time or another, but no engine had been in the lean-to.
He hoped it was locked up somewhere up at the house, and that they would find it. Then without warning he found himself wondering about the girl he hadn't shot, whether or not she was still alive out there in the woods.
He'd felt bad about even leaving her there, but he hadn't had much choice. Shoot her. Or not shoot her. Those had been his choices, and of the two he wasn't sure now which one had really been better. A cold, salty wind off the water cut through these musings, filling his head with the same scoured-clean sensation that the long-ago raw oyster had given him. But he didn't know now what to do with the feeling any more than he had back then.
Suddenly his foot slipped and the next thing he knew, both feet were in the air; landing hard on his back he felt the air get smacked out of him with a thudding whoosh while the side of his head connected painfully with the boulder the wooden boat had been tied to.
"Ugh," he said, mostly just to see if he still could. Cold, wet, and hurting, he lay there for a moment gathering his wits and processing what had happened. Then he tried struggling up, discovering that the slippery seaweed all around him made this difficult, too. But at last he managed to crawl.
Amazingly, nothing felt broken. Through the damp, chilly darkness he heard Marky ranting and raving again, up in the house. Anthony couldn't hear the words, only their tone, like an engine revving uncontrollably higher and higher. It meant that once again, Marky was angry about something.
And that he was nuts. Listening, Anthony felt a needle of fear dig into the place in his mind where the oyster memory had been. From the needle's tip came a shining drop of clarity:
Marky really was crazy. Loony tunes. Wackola. And what they were doing here—the girl, the kid, most of all the idea of going out there on that water in a boat equipped with a pair of wooden oars and a couple of life jackets—all that was crazy, too. And there was nothing Anthony could do about it.
He hoped to hell Marky hadn't started looking for the kid. She couldn't get outside; the chain on the only door she could get to without being seen immediately was too high. So if he was methodical about it he would locate her, Anthony felt certain. If Marky found out she was missing, though…well, he'd better get back up there and eliminate that possibility, Anthony decided as he struggled miserably to his knees. But into the midst of this thought came a bright, sharp crack!