by Ed McBain
She nodded. Her eyes closed. A second later Ransome shot her. Blood and bits of bone from the hole in her forehead splattered Peter’s face. She hung in his grip as Echo screamed. Still holding Taja up, Peter turned to Ransome, speechless with rage.
Ransome lowered his .38, taking a deep breath. “My responsibility. Sorry. Now will you put her down?”
Peter let Taja fall and went for his own gun, brought it up in both hands inches from Ransome’s face.
“Drop your piece! So help me God I’ll cap you right here!”
“Peter, no—!”
Ransome took another breath, his gun hand moving slowly toward the worktable, his finger off the trigger. “It’s all right.” He sounded eerily calm. I’m putting the gun down. Just don’t let your emotions get the best of you. No accidents, Peter.” The .38 was on the table. He lifted his hand slowly away from it, looked at Taja’s body between them. Peter moved him at gunpoint back from the table.
“You’re under arrest for murder! You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to be represented by an attorney. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. Do you understand what I’ve just said to you?”
Ransome nodded. “Peter, it was self-defense.”
“Shut up, damn you! You don’t get away with that!”
“You’re out of your jurisdiction here. One more thing. I own this island.”
“On your knees, hands behind your head.”
“I think we need to talk when you’re in a more rational—”
Peter took his finger off the trigger of the 9mm Colt and bounced it off the top of Ransome’s head. Ransome staggered and dropped to one knee. He slowly raised his hands.
Peter glanced at Echo, who had pulled the sleeve of her sweater down over the hand that Taja had slashed. She’d made a fist to try to stop the bleeding. She shook from fear.
“Oh Peter, oh God! What are you going to do?”
“You own the island?” Peter said to Ransome. “Who cares? This is where we get off.”
FIFTEEN
The boat Taja had used getting back and forth was a twenty-eight-foot Rockport-built island cruiser. Peter had John Ransome in the wheelhouse attached to a safety line with his hands lashed together in front of him. Echo was trying to hold the muzzle of the Colt 9mm on him while Peter battled wind gusts up to fifty knots and heavy seas once they left the shelter of Kincairn cove. In addition to the safety lines they all wore life vests. They were bucked all over the place. Peter found he could get only about eighteen knots from the Volvo diesel, and that it was nearly impossible to keep the wind on his stern unless he wanted to sail to Portugal. The wind chill was near zero. They were shipping a lot of water with a temperature of only a few degrees above freezing. The pounding went on without letup. Under reasonably good conditions it was thirty minutes to the mainland. Peter wasn’t at all sure he had half an hour before hypothermia rendered him helpless.
John Ransome knew it. Watching Peter try to steer with one good hand, seeing Echo shaking with vomit on the front of her life vest, he said, “We won’t make it. Breathe through your nose, Mary Catherine, or you’ll freeze your lungs. You know I don’t want you to die like this! Talk sense to Peter! Best of times it’s like threading a needle through all the little islands. In a blow you can lose your boat on the rocks.”
“Peter’s s-sailed b-boats all his life!”
Ransome shook his head. “Not under these conditions.”
A vicious gust heeled them to port; the bow was buried in a cornering wave. Water cascaded off the back of the overhead as the cruiser righted itself sluggishly.
“Peter!”
“We’re okay!” he yelled, leaning on the helm.
Ransome smiled in sympathy with Echo’s terror.
“We’re not okay.” He turned to Peter. “There is a way out of this dilemma, Peter! If you’d only give me a chance to make things right for all of us! But you must turn back now!”
“I told you, I don’t have dilemmas! Echo, keep that gun on him!”
Ransome said, his eyes on the shivering girl, “I don’t think Peter knows you as well as I’ve come to know you, Mary Catherine! You couldn’t shoot me. No matter what you think I’ve done.”
Echo, her eyes red from salt, raised the muzzle of the Colt unsteadily as she tried to keep from slipping off the bench opposite Ransome.
“Which one—are you tonight?” she said bitterly. “The g-god who creates, or the god who destroys?”
They were taking on water faster than the pump could empty the boat. The cruiser wallowed, nearly directionless.
“Remember the rogue wave, Mary Catherine? You saved me then. Am I worth saving now?”
“Don’t listen to him!” Peter rubbed his eyes, trying to focus through the spume on the wheelhouse window. What he saw momentarily and some distance away were the running lights of a large yacht or even a cutter. Because of the cold he had only limited use of his left hand. His wrist had begun bleeding again during his fight with Taja at the lighthouse. With numbed fingers he was able to open a locker in front of him. “Echo, this guy has fucked up every life he ever touched!”
“There’s no truth in that! It was Taja, no matter what she wanted you to believe. Her revenge on me. And I was the only one who ever cared about her! Mary Catherine, last night I tried to stop her from going after Silkie MacKenzie! You know what happened. But the story of Taja and myself is not easy to explain. You understand, though, don’t you?”
“You should have seen what I’ve seen the last forty-eight hours, Echo! The faces of Ransome’s women. Slashed, burned, broken! Two that I know of are dead! Nan McLaren O.D.’d, Ransome—you hear about that?”
“Yes. Poor Nan—but I—”
“Last night Valerie Angelus went off the roof of her building! You set her up for that, you son of a bitch!”
Ransome lifted his head.
“But you could’ve stopped her. A year, two years ago, it wouldn’t have been too late for Valerie! You didn’t want her. Don’t talk about caring, it makes me sick!”
Ransome lunged off his bench toward Echo and easily took the automatic from her half-frozen hands. He turned toward Peter with it but lost his footing. Peter abandoned the helm, kicked the Colt into the stern of the boat, then pointed a Kilgore flare pistol, loaded with a twenty-thousand-candlepower parachute flare, at Ransome’s head.
“I think the Coast Guard’s out there to starboard,” Peter said. “If you make a big enough bonfire they’ll see it.”
“The flare will only destroy my face,” Ransome said calmly. “I suppose you would consider that to be justice.” On his knees, Ransome held up his bound hands suppliantly. “We could have settled this among ourselves. Now it’s too late.” He looked at Echo. “Is it too late, Mary Catherine?”
She was sitting in a foot of water on the deck, exhausted, just trying to hold on as the boat rolled violently. She looked at him, and looked away. “Oh God, John.”
Ransome struggled to his feet. “Take the helm, Peter, or she’ll roll over! And the two of you may still have a life together.”
“Just shut up, Ransome!”
He smiled. “You’re both very young. Some day I hope you will learn that the greater part of wisdom is . . . forgiveness.”
He undipped his safety line from the vest as the bow of the cruiser rose, letting the motion carry him backwards to the transom railing. Where he threw himself overboard, vanishing into the pitch-dark water.
Echo cried out, a wail of despair, then sobbed. Peter felt nothing other than a cold indifference to the fate the artist had chosen. He raised the flare pistol and fired it, then returned to the helm as the flare shed its light upon the water, bringing nearby islands into jagged relief. A few moments later they heard siren through the low scream of wind; a searchlight probed the darkness and found them. Peter closed his eyes in the glare and leaned against the helm with Echo laid against his back, arms around him.
______<
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Below decks of the Coast Guard cutter as it returned to the station on Mount Desert Island with the cruiser in tow, a change in pitch in the cutter’s engine and a shudder that ran through the vessel caused Echo to wake up in a cocoon of blankets. She jerked violently.
“Easy,” Peter said. He was sitting beside her on the sick bay rack, holding her hand.
“Where are we?”
“Coming in, I guess. You okay?”
She licked her chapped lips. “I think so. Peter, are we in trouble?”
“No. I mean, there’s gonna be a hell of an inquiry. We’ll take what comes and say what is. Want coffee?”
“No. Just want to sleep.”
“Echo, I have to know—”
“Can’t talk now,” she protested wanly.
“Maybe we should. Get it out of the way, you know? Just say what is. Either way, I promise I can deal with it.”
She blinked, looked at him with ghostly eyes, raised her other hand to gently touch his face.
“I posed for him—well, you saw the work Taja took a knife to.”
“Yeah.”
She took a deep breath. Peter was like stone.
“I didn’t sleep with him, Peter.”
After a few moments he shrugged. “Okay.”
“But—no—I want to tell you all of it. Peter, I was getting ready to. Another couple of days, a week—it would’ve happened.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“I just needed to be with him. But I didn’t love him. It’s something I—I don’t think I’ll ever understand about myself. I’m sorry.”
Peter shook his head, perplexed, dismayed. She waited tensely for the anger. Instead he put his arms around her.
“You don’t have to be sorry. I know what he was. And I know what I saw—in the eyes of those other women. I don’t see it in your eyes.” He kissed her. “He’s gone. And that’s all I care about.”
A second kiss, and her glum face lost its anxiety, she began to lighten up.
“I do love you. Infinity.”
“Infinity,” he repeated solemnly. “Echo?”
“Yes?”
“I looked at a sublet before I left the city a few days ago. Fully furnished loft in Williamsburg. Probably still available. Fifteen hundred a month. We can move in by Christmas.”
“Hey. Fifteen? We can swing that.” She smiled slightly, teasing. “Live in sin for a little while, that what you mean?”
“Just live,” he said.
On a Sunday in mid April, four weeks before their wedding, Peter and Echo, enjoying each other’s company and one of life’s minor enchantments, which was to laze with no purpose, heard the elevator in their building start up.
“Company?” Peter said. He was watching the Knicks on TV.
“Mom and Julia aren’t coming until four,” Echo said. She was doing tai chi exercises on a floor mat, barefoot, wearing only gym shorts. The weather in Brooklyn was unseasonably warm.
“Then it’s nobody, Peter said. “But maybe you should pull on a top anyhow.”
He walked across the painted floor of the loft they shared and watched the elevator rising toward them. In the dimness of the shaft he couldn’t make out anyone in the cage.
When it stopped he pulled up the gate and looked inside. A wrapped package leaned against one side of the elevator. About three feet by five. Brown paper, tape, twine.
“Hey, Echo?”
She wriggled into a halter top and came over to look. Her lips parted in astonishment.
“It’s a painting. Omigod!”
“What?”
“Get it! Open it!”
Peter lugged the wrapped painting, which seemed to be framed, to the table in their kitchen. Echo followed with scissors and cut the twine.
“But it can’t be! There’s no way—! No, be careful, let me do this!”
She removed the thick paper and laid the painting flat on the table.
“Oh no,” Peter groaned. “I don’t believe this. He’s back.”
The painting was John Ransome’s self-portrait that had been hanging in the artist’s library on Kincairn when Echo had last seen it.
Echo turned it over. On the back Ransome had inscribed, “Given to Mary Catherine Halloran as a remembrance of our friendship.” It was signed and dated two days before Ransome’s disappearance.
She turned suddenly, shoving Peter aside, and ran to the loft windows that overlooked a cobbled mews and afforded a partial view of the Brooklyn Bridge, with lower Manhattan beyond.
“Peterrrr!”
He caught up to her, looked over her shoulder and down at the mews. There were kids playing, a couple of women with strollers. And a man in a black topcoat getting into a cab on the corner where the fruit and vegetable stand was doing brisk business. The man had shoulder-length gray hair and wore dark glasses. That was all they could see of him.
Peter looked at Echo as the cab drove away. Touched her shoulder until she focused on him, on the here and now.
“He drowned, Echo.”
She turned with a broad gesture in the direction of the portrait. “But—”
“Maybe his body never turned up, but the water—we nearly froze ourselves on the boat. His hands were tied. Telling you, no way he survived.”
“John told me he swam the Hellespont once. The Dardanelles Strait. That’s at least a couple miles across. And hypothermia—everybody’s tolerance of cold is different. Sailors have survived for hours in seas that probably would kill you or me in fifteen minutes.” She gestured again, excited. “Peter—who else?”
“Maybe it was somebody works for Cy Mellichamp. That slick son of a bitch. Just having his little joke. Listen, I don’t want the damn picture in our house. I don’t want to be reminded, Echo. How you got short-changed on your contract. None of it.” He waited. “Do you?”
“Well—” She looked around their loft. Shrugged. “I guess it wouldn’t be, uh, appropriate. But obviously—it was meant as a wedding gift.” She smiled strangely. “All I did was say how much I admired his self-portrait. John told me all about it. There’s quite a story goes with it, which would make the painting especially valuable to a collector. It’s unique in the Ransome canon.”
“Yeah? How valuable?”
“Hard to say. I know a Ransome was knocked down recently at Christie’s for just under five million dollars.”
Peter didn’t say anything.
“The fact that his body hasn’t been recovered complicated matters for his estate. But,” Echo said judiciously, “as Stefan put it, ‘it certainly has done no harm to the value of his art.’ ”
“You want a beer?”
“I would love a beer.”
Echo remained by the windows looking out while Peter went to the refrigerator. While he was popping tops he said, “So—figure we just put the portrait away in a closet a couple years, then it could be worth a shitload?”
“Oh baby,” Echo replied.
“Then, also in a couple years,” Peter said, coming back to her and carefully fitting a can of Heineken into her hand, “when Ransome’s estate gets settled, that cottage in Bedford, which looks like a pretty nice investment, will go on the market?”
“Might.” Echo took a long drink of the beer and began laughing softly, ironically, to herself.
“All this could depend on, you know, he doesn’t turn up.” Peter looked out the window. “Again.”
The last Ransome woman was silent. Wondering, lost in a private rapture.
Peter said, “You want to order in Chinese for Rosemay and Julia tonight? I’ve still got a few bucks left on my MasterCard.”
“Yeah,” Echo said, and leaned her head on his shoulder. “Chinese. Sounds good.”
JEFFERY DEAVER
_________
Jeffery Deaver has had a rapid and much-deserved rise to the top of the bestseller lists. His novels have always been riveting reads, especially those he wrote about Rune, a woman living and working in New York City. Seen through her
eyes, the urban landscape is a wondrous—and sometimes frightening—place indeed. Fans of his work know that this is to be expected, or he can take the most commonplace career or event—news reporting, marriage—and turn it upside down with one of the surprising plot twists that have become his trademark. These days, he writes such bestsellers as Praying for Sleep, A Maiden’s Grave, Hard News, and The Bone Collector, featuring the brilliant quadriplegic detective Lincoln Rhyme and his assistant Amelia Sachs. The Bone Collector was the basis for the successful movie of the same name starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. His readership expands with each new novel, and with each new short story he writes. His most recent novel is Garden of Beasts, and a new collection of short stories, Twisted, came out in November 2004.
FOREVER
Jeffery Deaver
Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost.
—W. S. ANGLIN, “Mathematics and History”
∞
An old couple like that, the man thought, acting like kids.
Didn’t have a clue how crazy they looked.
Peering over the boxwood hedge he was trimming, the gardener was looking at Sy and Donald Benson on the wide, back deck of their house, sitting in a rocking love seat and drinking champagne. Which they’d had plenty of. That was for sure.
Giggling, laughing, loud.
Like kids, he thought contemptuously.
But enviously too a little. Not at their wealth—oh, he didn’t resent that; he made a good living tending the grounds of the Bensons’ neighbors, who were just as rich.
No, the envy was simply that even at this age they looked like they were way in love and happy.
The gardener tried to remember when he’d laughed like that with his wife. Must’ve been ten years. And holding hands like the Bensons were doing? Hardly ever since their first year together.
The electric hedge trimmer beckoned but the man lit a cigarette and continued to watch them. They poured the last of the champagne into their glasses and finished it. Then Donald leaned forward, whispering something in the woman’s ear and she laughed again. She said something back and kissed his cheek.