Huckleberry Finished

by Livia J. Washburn

  Maybe the same way Melissa had, I thought. Maybe he had searched around enough on the Internet to stumble over Webster’s deception.

  But it was the phony billing address on the credit card that had tipped Melissa off in the first place, and Rafferty wouldn’t have had that information, I reminded myself. Whatever Rafferty had uncovered, it was something new.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll take a look at it.”

  He smiled. “Good. Come with me.”

  Go below decks alone with a man whom Charles Gallister had just likened to a Vegas gangster, a man I strongly suspected might have had something to do with at least one murder and maybe two? I wasn’t born yesterday. I smiled at Rafferty and said, “Fine, but let’s get the captain to go down there with us.”

  Rafferty shook his head. “I don’t want to bother the captain with this. Let’s figure out first if it really means anything.”

  “Sorry,” I told him. “I’m not goin’ anywhere with you unless somebody comes with us.” I started to turn back toward the door of the suite. “I’ll see if Mr. Gallister would like to be part of this.”

  “You’ve talked to Gallister enough,” Rafferty said.

  The tone of his voice warned me, but I didn’t have time to react. As he spoke, his hand came down hard on my left shoulder. I tried to twist away and opened my mouth to yell, but before any sound could emerge, his other hand clamped over the whole lower half of my face. He jerked me back against him, which was sort of like being jerked against a brick wall.

  “You’ve stirred up enough trouble,” he rasped into my ear as he put his head close to mine. “You and your damn partner are gonna be sorry you came after me.”

  Partner? What in the world was he talking about? I didn’t have a partner on this boat, in the business sense or any other.

  I didn’t really spend a lot of time pondering that, though, because I was too busy panicking and fighting, trying to get away from him. I twisted and writhed, stomped on his feet, kicked back at his shins, tried to elbow him in the stomach. None of it did a bit of good. I couldn’t get away, couldn’t yell, couldn’t even bite Rafferty’s hand, because he was holding me too tightly. I lifted a leg and tried to kick Gallister’s door, but Rafferty pulled me away so that the kick fell short.

  My heart pounded so wildly in my chest it felt like it was about to burst right through my skin. I knew now that the initial dislike and distrust I’d felt toward Rafferty were justified. So was the outright suspicion that he was a killer. I felt his murderous intent in his big, strong hands as he backed onto the deck and dragged me with him.

  He paused when he was just outside the door. I felt his chin brush the back of my hair as he quickly turned his head from one side to the other and then back. Checking to see if the coast was clear, I thought. He didn’t want anybody to see him dragging me to wherever he planned to take me.

  Wherever he planned to get rid of me.

  If I had cooperated and gone with him without raising a fuss, I’m sure he would have taken me to some isolated spot below decks and then broken my neck, too. As it was, I didn’t think he would try to negotiate several flights of stairs and a couple of decks with a struggling woman. So I wasn’t all that surprised when he hauled me toward the stairs leading up to the pilothouse. Shocked in one way, maybe, but not really surprised. He craned his neck to look over the railing along the edge of the deck, checking below to see if anyone was watching, then started dragging me up the stairs.

  I was scared, mad, and determined, all at the same time, but even though I kept fighting I was no match for Rafferty’s strength and brutality. I winced in pain as his hands tightened even more. I got both feet planted against one of the steps above him and shoved with them as hard as I could, hoping that would force him to topple over backward, but he didn’t budge. I knew I might be hurt if we both fell down the stairs, but that seemed less dangerous than letting him take me wherever he wanted.

  There was no “wherever” about it, I realized. There could be only one destination.

  The pilothouse.

  We reached the top of the stairs. Rafferty obviously didn’t want to let go of me with either hand, so he kicked the door, just like I’d tried to kick Gallister’s door. This one opened a second later, and Captain L. B. Williams looked out with a puzzled expression on his face that turned into one of pure shock when he recognized me and Rafferty.

  “What the hell—” he began.

  “Get out of the way,” Rafferty growled.

  Williams stepped back, and Rafferty all but threw me into the pilothouse. He came in fast right behind me, heeling the door closed as he did so, and put both hands on my shoulders to force me down into a chair.

  “What are you doing?” Williams demanded.

  “Cleaning up a mess,” Rafferty snapped.

  Then he did something I didn’t really expect, even though I knew how much danger I was in.

  He drew back a fist and punched me in the face.

  I went out like the proverbial light.

  Funny thing about being knocked out. It’s not at all like being asleep. You don’t dream. There’s no sense of time passing. It’s just nothing. It’s not even blackness, because that implies the possibility of something other than blackness.

  The moments when you’re regaining consciousness are the only ones that even remotely resemble sleep. You begin to be aware of things, but only vaguely, like when you start to come out of a deep, almost drugged slumber. Gradually you figure out that you’re lying down and you can’t see anything because your eyes are closed. You hear distorted noises that make no sense. You feel the surface underneath you—a nice, soft bed if you’re lucky.

  The hard wooden floor of a riverboat pilothouse if you’re not.

  The harsh noises that filtered into my ears slowly became voices. The part of my brain that was beginning to function again recognized them after a while. They belonged to Logan Rafferty and Captain Williams. And the captain, bless his heart, was saying, “…won’t allow you to kill her.”

  “You don’t have any choice in the matter,” Rafferty told him. “She’s a danger to us.”

  “And having yet another dead body show up won’t endanger us?” Williams asked.

  It was a logical question, I thought. I knew they were talking about me, but at that point I wasn’t quite able to grasp that my continued survival depended on what they were saying. My brain hadn’t come that far back yet.

  “Look, I overheard Gallister talking to his lawyers. He said something about a PI. It’s got to be this Dickinson broad. She’s been poking around and asking questions practically ever since she came on board. Then I caught her coming out of Gallister’s suite. She’s got to be working for him.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that she’s really a travel agent and was just concerned because one of her clients had been killed?”

  “Webster?” Rafferty snorted. “I’ll bet he was a PI, too. They were probably working together.”

  He was way off on that, I thought. Or was he? Since “Ben Webster” was a phony identity, maybe the dead man, whatever his name really was, had been working undercover, too, just like Mark. And, for that matter, Vince Mallory.

  One thing I’ve learned running tours is that if you take any group of people, anywhere, among them will be plenty of secrets, most of which the folks who hold them don’t want revealed. Most of those secrets aren’t that important to the world at large. Chances are, anybody who found out about them wouldn’t really care. Certainly some secrets are more shameful than others. Occasionally somebody might actually get into trouble with the law if the things that person was hiding were brought out into the open. Mostly, though, the secrets that people hide are harmless.

  Boy, that wasn’t true on this cruise. False identities, private detectives working undercover, mistresses, murders, crooked gambling…Obviously, what went on aboard the Southern Belle wasn’t nearly as genteel as the boat’s name might lead you to expect.

 
; But Rafferty was sure wrong about one thing: I wasn’t a private eye. I didn’t think Webster had been, either, but I didn’t know for sure about that.

  “Did you find anything on her computer?” Williams asked.

  “Just travel agency stuff. It’s a good cover. I’ll bet there are some hidden files on there somewhere, though. I’ll keep looking.”

  So Rafferty was the one who had taken my computer! The ransacking of my cabin hadn’t been a simple burglary after all. He’d been looking for proof that I was a private detective, possibly working with Ben Webster.

  I might have laughed if I hadn’t wanted them to think I was still unconscious. Rafferty and Williams were worried that a private eye might be on the boat looking into their activities. They had no idea that Mark Lansing really was a PI, but the case that had brought him here had nothing to do with the rigged gambling going on in the casino. Rafferty had suspected me before Gallister ever came aboard and said something that Rafferty had overheard and taken as confirmation of his suspicions. In truth, Gallister had been talking about Mark, but Rafferty had no way of knowing that. He had just jumped to the conclusion that he’d been right about me all along.

  If my head hadn’t hurt already from being punched, it probably would have ached from trying to follow all the crazy thoughts whirling around in my head. Too many murders, too many motives…

  “You always jump the gun,” Williams complained with a note of bitter resentment in his voice. “If you hadn’t panicked when that Kramer girl figured out what Garvey was doing—”

  “If I hadn’t taken care of her, she would have told Gallister. Who do you think he would have believed? Us or her?”

  “Her, I suppose,” Williams said. “He was sleeping with her, after all.” He sighed. “Still, you didn’t have to kill her. You didn’t have to kill that young man yesterday.”

  “I didn’t,” Rafferty snapped. “I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Webster.”

  “What?” I heard the surprise in Williams’s voice. “I just assumed—”

  “Well, you were wrong.”

  I bit back a groan. Not only did I hurt, but the revelations were coming fast and furious now. Rafferty had just admitted killing Hannah Kramer. Not to protect his boss, Gallister, though. From the sound of it, Gallister hadn’t known anything about Hannah’s death. He might be guilty of a lot of things, but evidently murder wasn’t one of them.

  At the same time, Rafferty denied killing Ben Webster, and as far as I could see, he wouldn’t have any reason to lie about that to his own partner in crime, which Williams obviously was. If that was true, who had killed Webster?

  I lay there trying to keep my breathing even so they’d think I was still out cold, and as I did I thought back over everything that had happened since I came on board the Southern Belle. I would have said that as much as I’d mulled over all the facts of both cases during the past day and a half, I must have considered every conceivable possibility, every theory no matter how far-fetched….

  But then I realized there was one theory that had never crossed my mind. One question with an obvious answer that I had overlooked. One answer that tied everything together while, unfortunately, raising even more questions.

  Those new questions would never be answered unless I could get out of here somehow. A part of me still wanted to panic, to start crying and begging for mercy, but I knew Rafferty didn’t have any mercy to give. He had proven that with the callous way he had gotten rid of Hannah Kramer once she realized that the roulette wheel in the casino was crooked. Had she tried to cut herself in on the action? That didn’t seem likely to me, but I didn’t know. Maybe she had thought Garvey was working the scheme on his own and had reported him to Rafferty, never realizing until it was too late that Garvey was working for Rafferty. At this late date, that didn’t really matter. All that was important was that Rafferty was a killer—and he planned on getting rid of me next.

  So, no, I couldn’t beg for mercy. I had to get away somehow, or get help to come to me.

  All those thoughts had gone through my head in a matter of seconds. Williams said, “If you didn’t kill Webster, who did?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care, except that it got that bitch cop nosing around. Still, she’s got no idea what’s really been going on, and as long as the casino’s closed down, she won’t find out.”

  Williams snapped, “The casino can stay closed down, as far as I’m concerned. It’s bad enough that this beautiful old boat was turned into Gallister’s own private, floating brothel.”

  Yeah, he was old-fashioned, all right. Old-fashioned enough to let his resentment over Gallister using the riverboat for philandering justify his own involvement in Rafferty’s crooked gambling operation. I had wanted to like and respect Captain Williams, but not anymore. He couldn’t justify Hannah Kramer’s murder.

  Rafferty gave a harsh laugh. “You weren’t too proud to take your cut from the money we made,” he said, echoing the sentiment that had just gone through my head. I can’t tell you how much it bothered me that Logan Rafferty and I would think alike about anything. “Look, keep your head in the sand if you want to,” he went on. “I don’t care. Just let me take care of things.”

  “What are you…what are you going to do with her?”

  “I haven’t decided yet, but I’ll make it look like an accident, you can count on that.”

  “Like you did with Hannah Kramer?”

  “That would have looked like an accident, damn it, if that nosy passenger hadn’t spotted her in the water too soon. That wasn’t my fault.”

  “No,” Williams said. “Nothing is ever your fault, is it?”

  Maybe they would argue so much that a fight would break out between them, I thought desperately, even though I knew it was unlikely that Williams would want to take on a bruiser like Rafferty. But if that happened, maybe I could use the distraction to jump up and try to get away. If I could just get out of the pilothouse, I planned to start yelling my lungs out.

  They didn’t start fighting, though. Instead, Williams went on, “Ms. Dickinson has been spending quite a bit of time with Lansing, that actor who plays Mark Twain in the salon. If she disappears, he’s liable to start looking for her.”

  “I’m not worried about some damn actor,” Rafferty said with contempt in his voice. “If he gives us any trouble, he can disappear, too.”

  “Yes, just kill everyone. That’s an excellent solution to our problems.”

  Rafferty laughed again. “What’s that old saying? They can only hang me once.”

  Even though I like to think I’m not a violent person at heart, the mental image of Rafferty at the end of a rope was pretty appealing right then. But even stronger was the worry and fear I felt for Mark. Because Williams was right: Mark would try to find out what had happened to me. And even though Rafferty was underestimating him, I wasn’t convinced that Mark was really a match for him.

  Even as upset as I was, I heard the faint noise that came from somewhere nearby. I opened one eye the narrowest crack and found that my head was turned toward the door into the pilothouse. I saw the knob turning ever so slowly, as if somebody was trying to open it without Rafferty and Williams hearing.

  Mark! That thought leaped into my mind. He had figured out somehow that I was being held prisoner up here, and he had come to rescue me. Normally I would think that I could take care of myself, thank you very much, and wasn’t the sort of woman who needed rescuing—but under the circumstances I’d take any sort of knight right about now, even one in tinfoil armor.

  But then Rafferty said, “What the hell was that?” and started to turn toward the door.

  Without thinking too much about what I was doing, I groaned and pushed myself onto my hands and knees, like a person who has suddenly regained consciousness. I crawled toward the other side of the pilothouse, trying to draw their attention away from the door.

  It worked. Rafferty snapped, “Damn it, she’s awake! Grab her!”
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br />   “You grab her!” Williams said.

  Neither of them grabbed me, although Rafferty took a long step toward me. Still groaning to cover up any sounds the door made as it opened, I reached a chart table against the wall and took hold of it. I used it to steady myself as I climbed shakily to my feet. The shakiness wasn’t an act. I was dizzy from being knocked out. The room spun crazily around me.

  But I could see well enough to recognize not Mark, but rather Vince Mallory, as he stepped into the pilothouse, leveled a gun at Williams and Rafferty, and said, “Don’t move, either of you.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Relief didn’t exactly flood through me, but just then I was glad to see Vince anyway.

  The feeling didn’t last long, because Rafferty grabbed my arm, jerked me in front of him like a human shield, and rushed at Vince, who couldn’t fire without hitting me. We crashed together. The impact knocked Vince backward, and he almost toppled backward down the stairs. He flung out his free hand and grabbed the doorjamb just in time to keep from falling.

  I twisted out of the way, but unfortunately, that gave Rafferty the room he needed to throw a roundhouse punch. His fist slammed into Vince’s jaw. Somehow, Vince managed to hang on to the doorjamb. He lifted his leg and drove a kick into Rafferty’s belly.

  Earlier, I hadn’t been able to do any good hitting Rafferty’s stomach, which seemed as hard as a rock. Vince was stronger and trained for combat, though. His kick made Rafferty turn pale and stagger back a couple of steps. Vince leaped forward and swung the gun in his hand. It thudded hard against Rafferty’s skull. Rafferty’s eyes rolled up in his head as his knees unhinged. He crumpled to the pilothouse floor.

  I made a leap for the door, but Vince was too fast for me. He caught the collar of my blouse and swung me back inside. I crashed against the chart table. Pain shot through my hip where I ran into the table. I slapped my hands against the table to keep from falling.

  Vince leveled the gun at a stunned Captain Williams and said, “Call the engine room. Tell them to start getting up steam.”