Dead Level (14 page)

So on the night when a guy wasn’t there at all, they didn’t notice. Not that he’d taken
that
for granted, though, either. On the night in question, he’d made sure that the pod staff thought he was supposed to be at work in the infirmary, and the infirmary guards thought he was supposed to be in his bed. That gained him a block of time when no one expected to see him.…

Without warning, Marianne’s face loomed up before him; with a yelp he backpedaled in the darkness, then realized it wasn’t real and stormed forward angrily again.
That face …

It was the face of a woman who couldn’t keep her yap shut, who’d gone on choking out threats and curses at him even as her face turned blue and her eyes rolled up in her head.
I’ll be back for you
, she’d gagged at him, and Dewey had laughed.

Only now it was starting to look to him as if maybe she really would. As if she
had;
after all, he thought nervously as he recalled her threat, what else could explain what he’d seen?

There was just no getting around it, he realized. She was here, and if her big mouth had been trouble before, that was nothing compared to what it might turn into now, because the manslaughter he’d been convicted of was bad enough.

But if she opened her mouth to tell what’d really happened, well, that could be a whole lot more trouble. First-degree-murder trouble, because she could reveal—in fact, she was the
only
one who could—that he’d been planning it before he did it.

Threatening her, describing it to her, how he’d do it, what he’d do and why. And she hadn’t dared leave him, either, since by then she’d figured out a few things.

About her parents’ deaths, for instance: both accidental and unwitnessed, one right after the other. And that wild animals, in season or out, weren’t the only things Dewey knew how to track.

That he could track
her …
Yeah, he’d scared her, all right. Shut that mouth of hers … just not quite enough, apparently. Not
permanently
enough. So now … now he’d have to finish the job.

When he figured he was far enough from the cottage to risk it, he snapped on the penlight he’d filched from one of the cars he’d stolen just after his escape. The woods appeared around him, spooky and silent, like ghosts of trees in a haunted forest.

No doubt she was pretty mad. No doubt she would do what she could to hurt him, just as she’d promised.

No doubt she’d tell. And although he didn’t intend to get caught—he planned to stay in the woods for a while, then sneak across the border to Canada—if he did get sent back to prison, she could make sure he stayed there for the rest of his life.

Because dead or alive, he knew people would believe her. You couldn’t see that face and
not
believe.…

Then it hit him. Of course; the answer was simple. He only wondered
why he hadn’t thought of it sooner; man, being in jail had messed him up, head-wise. But his frown changed to a smile as he sauntered a hundred more yards down the dirt road, nearly to the place where the unfortunate hiker from the city had ended up.

Dewey had dropped out of the dead tree like a bag of rocks, piggybacking the guy before he knew what hit him, the shock on the guy’s face barely getting time to change into something else before his expression faded entirely. There’d been food in his pack and money in his wallet, though Dewey hadn’t taken it all in case someone might think an empty wallet looked suspicious.

After that he’d clothed poor old Bentley Hodell decently and arranged both bodies by the edge of the nearby stream that ran to the beaver pond; that way, both land- and water-dwelling animals could get at them.

Flesh eaten, bones gnawed and scattered … in a short while it would be almost as if neither of them had been here at all.

Or so Dewey had thought. Instead, those two meddling women had unblocked the culvert. He hadn’t dared stick his head up to see them doing it, but he’d heard them; worse yet, before Dewey could scramble back to undo the body arrangement he’d worked so hard on, the sudden draining away of so much water had collapsed the stream’s soft bank. After that, an upstream blockage of sticks and leaves washed in by the recent heavy rains had given way, and the next thing Dewey knew …

Damn
, Dewey thought, fingering the rabbit’s foot he’d found in Bentley’s pants pocket and shrugging Bentley’s warm jacket up around his shoulders. Squinting in the penlight’s thin glow, he searched around by the side of the dirt road for the place he’d seen earlier … 
there
.

Then, stepping carefully in the gloom, he sank into a bed of leaves and pine needles, where he settled down in relative comfort. This was a lot better than getting into that damned body bag, back at the prison; closing his eyes, he let his mind drift.

Slipping out through the loading dock and into the ambulance had
taken a mere thirty seconds. It was the only time he’d been worried at all about getting caught, but just as he expected, the guard and the ambulance guy sneaked out into the driveway for a smoke instead of sticking to the rule: no door or gate unlocked without a guard standing ready by it.

But then, jeeze, what a fright he’d had. Because the thing he hadn’t thought of while he was planning was that there was no room in the coffin for him and the dead guy together, because there was no coffin. Instead it was a body bag they’d shoved the guy into, and Sonny Sawtelle was a big guy, not an inch left to spare. So Dewey had needed to improvise on the spot:

While the guys were still smoking and yakking at the far end of the row of Dumpsters, he’d lugged the dead body to the nearest of the big metal bins and rolled it in. A soft thud was the only sound as the body landed in heaps of food waste, paper from wastebaskets, and who knew what else.

In the next moment, Dewey trotted back to the ambulance, hopped in, and zipped himself into the bag. After that and a ride in the ambulance—that’s what they used at the prison, not a hearse—getting out of the hospital morgue had been a snap; who worries about an escaping corpse?

One car stolen out of the hospital’s parking lot, a panel truck from Portland, finally a mommy van with the keys hanging in it outside a convenience store in Scarborough and bingo, he’d laid a trail of breadcrumbs for them to follow.

All the vehicles had some money in them: change, a few stray dollar bills. Food, too, and to his delight the mommy van had contained a nearly full fifth of vodka plus the orange juice to go with it.

Finally, after cutting his hair and shaving—the panel truck had been loaded with health-and-beauty products bound, he supposed, for supermarkets and drugstores—he’d poured the vodka into the orange juice and brought it along with him, on the bus back up here to his familiar stomping grounds in downeast Maine.

Easy-peasy. And taking care of the Marianne problem was going
to be equally trouble-free, he reassured himself as he settled to sleep. The only hard part would be making it look like an accident, so no one would realize he’d been here at all.

But a night’s rest and a little more thought, he felt sure, would take care of that. Breathing in the cool night air
—free
air, he realized, luxuriating in the smell of damp leaves, pine sap, and the dank mineral fragrance of the nearby lake—he gazed up at the sky through an inky-black lacework of bare branches.

He would come up with a plan, a simple plan that would work flawlessly, the way he’d done getting out of prison. And then—

Without warning, Marianne rose before him once more, against his closed eyelids: tall and slender, her wavy red hair softly glowing in the lamplight, warm and alive.

Alive, alive, oh … Dewey shuddered, his memories of Sonny’s corpse all mingled up dreadfully with this phantasm, this …

This impossibly living
thing
she’d become. And however she’d managed it, there was only one thing to do about it.

He’d just have to kill her again.

“Hey! Hey, buddy, are you all right?”

Sam Tiptree blinked startledly as fingers snapped in front of his face. “Huh? Oh, yeah …”

Sitting at a table in the Rusty Rudder café in Eastport, he shook his head to clear away the fog of daydreaming that had overcome him. Night-dreaming, rather; evening came early here in autumn, and although it was only 6 p.m., outside the restaurant’s big plate-glass front window, it was dark.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he told the pair sitting with him: Richard Stedman, owner of the ill-fated
Courtesan
, and his beautiful sister, Carol, had insisted on bringing him here to express their gratitude for his help—and their contrition over nearly getting him killed—by buying him dinner. They’d both gone back to their motel rooms to change clothes while he finished up at work.

So now Richard wore a loosened silk tie with a collared shirt and blue blazer, his sister an elegant long tunic-type thing over leggings and metallic sandals, and even in decent chinos and the clean sweatshirt he’d pulled on, Sam felt seriously underdressed. Under-everything, in fact, with these two elegantly turned-out young people he’d somehow fallen in with sitting across from him.

“What you need,” Richard pronounced, “is a drink.”

“Uh,” Sam began, but before he could go on, Richard had done whatever it was that made waiters appear at his side as if by magic, ordered a double gin-and-lemon—“It’ll fix you right up,” Richard declared as Sam went on protesting—and whisked his hands in a “done and dusted” gesture as the waiter scurried off.

From across the table, Carol smiled and reached over to touch Sam’s wrist briefly, a touch that lingered warmly on his skin. “Poor Sam. Take it a little easy on him, Richard, he’s not used to us.”

Her eyes twinkled confidentially at Sam in a way that made him think that maybe he could simply tell them, just blurt it out the way he always did: “I don’t drink.”

But somehow the moment passed. He looked around at the familiar dining room, glimmering with candlelight elegantly reflected in silver and stemware. Rarely anymore was he envious of people who could drink alcohol.

But he was now. “So, Sam, what’s fun around here?” Richard asked.

Sam felt Carol’s eyes on him as he fumbled for a reply. A minute ago Richard had been holding forth on the latest actions of the Federal Reserve, while Carol had mentioned the book she was reading, an eight-hundred-page novel that was all the rage, apparently.

Sam felt thick and stupid by comparison. He got up. “Uh, I’ll be right back.” Crossing the dining room, he continued past the guitarists playing jazz tunes near the hostess station, and on into the bar.

Instantly a feeling of déjà vu came over him. “Hey, Tony,” he said to the bartender, “leave the booze out of mine, will you? And be quiet about it?”

He put a five on the bar. But Tony, an old buddy of Sam’s from high school, shoved the bill back toward him, not missing a beat as he mixed a trayful of martinis.

“No prob, guy, I’ve already gotcha covered.”

Relieved, Sam stopped in the men’s room, washed his hands, and eyed himself in the mirror over the sink. He looked haunted, as hollow-eyed as if he’d been out on a bender last night instead of home in his own bed.

Nah. Never happened
, he told the guy in the mirror. But the guy in the mirror knew better:
Oh, yes, it did. You don’t want to believe it. But it most definitely did
. He returned to the table just as the waiter set down his virgin gin-and-lemon.

“You okay, Sam?” Richard asked again, and Carol tipped her head in concern. She’d taken her glossy, dark hair out of its elastic for the evening, and now it moved on her shoulders in a smooth, near-iridescent wave.

“Yeah, fine,” Sam said, taking a sip of his drink. But he wasn’t. Six hours earlier, after he had seen whatever it was he’d seen down in that bilge—

You know what it was. Or rather
, who
it was
.

—he’d woken, flat on his back on the dock. Peering down at him had been five worried faces: the three Nathans, their big ugly mugs pale with concern, and behind them Richard and Carol. Richard had been in the act of calling for help on his cellphone.

But when Sam sat up, then got to his feet shakily, Richard had put the phone away. Now Carol smiled at him, touching his hand again with her cool, neatly manicured fingertips.

“It was all I could do not to kiss you when I found out you were okay,” she said sweetly.

Sam felt a blush climbing his neck. “Uh, yeah,” he muttered stupidly, swallowing more lemonade to cover his confusion.

On the dock, she’d let him alone while he checked himself all over, finding no serious injury other than the bump on his head. The
Nathans had backed off, too, so Sam could walk around getting his legs back under him. At the same time, he’d eyed the trailer with the winch mounted on it and figured out what must have happened.

“Guess my idea wasn’t so great after all,” Richard said now a little shamefacedly, sipping his martini. “I thought bashing those holes in her stern would lighten her up enough, but …”

“Yeah.” Sam spread his hands in a “who knew?” gesture. The hauling equipment had simply been unequal to the massiveness of the task: the winch line, overloaded by the weight of the boat with a lot of water still in it, had snapped.

“Lucky it didn’t take my head off,” Sam added. A piece of the winch cable with a heavy steel clip attached to it had flown like a wrecking ball. Only the fact that he’d been crouched down, peering into the flooded bilge, had saved him.

“Live and learn,” he added.
But I should’ve checked
, he thought again as the food came: steak for Richard, baked haddock for Sam, and for Carol a plate-sized lobster pizza loaded with claw meat, which she immediately began devouring, the pleasure of the good food evident on her cherries-and-cream complexion.

I should’ve checked all the equipment
. It was, after all, his job. “Hey, Richard, I just want to apologize again for—”

But even though
Courtesan
had sunk like a rock and was now lying on her side underwater awaiting a crane big enough to lift her, Richard wasn’t having any of it.