Dead Level (25 page)

Ellie ran one way for a fire extinguisher; I ran the other for something to help smother the fire. I got to the daybed, reaching out; then my foot caught the edge of the braided rug and I went sprawling, hitting my head so hard on the corner of the bed frame that I saw stars.

And that’s all I remember about that.

“Maybe we should go check on them.” Sam sat with Wade at a table in the otherwise empty hospital cafeteria, drinking the warm brown liquid that had come out of the vending machine.

“On Mom and Ellie, I mean. At the cabin, make sure they’re all right.” The powdered creamer had lightened the stuff in the paper cup without improving its vile taste.

Wade looked up. “You think something’s wrong there, too?”
On top of everything else?
his tone added.

Sam shrugged, both hands wrapped around the paper cup. If he had been home, Bella and his granddad might not have had to drive themselves wherever they’d been going. Or worse, his conscience added unhelpfully, maybe they’d gone out looking for him.

“I don’t know. Probably not. Just a feeling, that’s all.” A feeling,
Sam didn’t add, born of a nightmare apparition: his dead father, on a mission to warn him about something.

Something
bad …
Or maybe it was only his own twisted psyche trying to tell him something. Like
Don’t let that girl con you
.

He had, though. He’d been a complete sucker, and was now in the aftermath of it, suffering the consequences. So maybe his dad wouldn’t appear to him anymore, leering and dripping; maybe the worst had happened, and that last vision had been the final one.

Or maybe not. He felt … 
disturbed
, like his insides were a hornet’s nest somebody was stirring up with a stick. “I don’t know,” he repeated, and might’ve said more, but a familiar voice stopped him.

“You two boys mind company?” It was Eastport police chief Bob Arnold, plump and pink-faced in his cop uniform, with a ton of gear hanging from his duty belt as usual.

Equipment jangling and rattling around his ample waist, Bob pulled up a chair. “So. I guess you’ve had yourself quite a day.”

Sam nodded. “I didn’t fall off the wagon, Bob.”

The chief nodded. “Good. Glad to hear it. Guess I had that part wrong, then.”

No apology, though, and why would there be? Sam thought if he lived to be a hundred without ever taking another drink, there would still always be that little question about him.

A
deserved
little question. “You might want to know those two fair-weather friends of yours got nabbed,” he went on.

The cut on Bob’s forehead, held together by strips of surgical tape, looked fresh. Sam’s mind flashed to a mental picture of the metal clasp on Carol Stedman’s handbag.

Bob noticed Sam eyeing the cut, put two fingers to it and winced. “Yeah, she got me,” he confirmed Sam’s suspicion. “When I was helping her into the squad car, she …”

He stopped, apparently not liking this memory any more than Sam liked imagining the event. “Would have taped it myself, but I know when the wife comes home she’ll ask if I got it looked at.”

Sam thought about a woman who was so honest herself that you wouldn’t lie to her just on that basis, even about such a little thing. “Huh,” he said thoughtfully, and Bob nodded as if catching his thought, then went on:

“I guess they thought we were just a bunch of bumpkins, they could get away with just about anything.”

Sam regarded his paper cup. Yeah, and who was the biggest bumpkin of all? Thinking this, he felt suddenly like jumping up from the table, maybe even tipping it over on his way out.

But Wade spoke up and saved him. “Sounds to me like they were a pair of pretty smooth operators.”

Bob nodded. “Had enough warrants out on them to wallpaper a room. Made a career out of bamboozling people, charging whatever they could on stolen credit, maybe pulling a few burglaries and then skipping town, on to the next place.”

He looked up at Sam again. “Had the boatyard’s cashbox in their car, money and credit slips still in it. It’s on its way back here now.”

Sam sighed, a bigger weight lifting off him than he’d known was there. “Thanks.”

He managed a smile, got up from the table without tipping it over. The clock on the wall by the exit said it was 3:10 a.m.

“Guess I’ll head home, try for a nap,” said Bob.

“Yeah, sounds good,” Wade replied, lobbing a crumpled cup at one of the trash receptacles.

It went in. “You know,” Sam ventured, tossing his own cup, “on the way home, maybe we could …”

Stop in at the cabin. At this way-too-early hour, the idea was ridiculous, but he wanted to see his mother and Ellie.

He just … 
wanted
to, that was all. In the deserted hospital lobby, he pulled out his cellphone, tried his mother’s number, and again got its “leave a message” recording.

And that did it, somehow. Whether or not it made sense, whether he’d had some crazy otherworldly warning or had made it all up in his
own head, he was going out to the cottage at the lake whether his stepfather liked it or not.

He turned to Wade, striding along behind him, intending to suggest that Wade ride home with Bob in the squad car while he, Sam, took the truck down the dirt road. But before he could say that, Wade’s square, regular features went suddenly still and stunned-looking, as if in the shiny black reflectiveness of the hospital lobby’s plate-glass windows he was seeing something that wasn’t,
couldn’t
be there. Something or someone …

Then, from behind them both, an alarm began sounding shrilly, a high, abrasive beeping that obviously meant something had gone very wrong somewhere. Beyond the doors leading to the patient wards, people were running, doctors and nurses sprinting toward whatever the alarm was for.…

Toward where Sam’s grandfather and Bella lay injured and helpless. Wade turned from whatever he’d seen in the window, hurrying toward the alarm’s insistent summons, and after a frozen moment—what
had
Wade seen out there, anyway?—Sam ran, too.

CHAPTER
9

W
hen I came to, I thought I was at home in my bed, safe and sound. But then I realized: Ellie and I were in a cottage deep in the woods, a man with a shotgun was romping around outside, and we had no way to escape.

Or, anyway, I assumed he was still out there, the drowning plot he’d nearly pulled off and the firebomb he’d thrown tending to confirm my belief; if nothing else, the guy was persistent.

Now as I lay on the floor looking up, Ellie peered down at me, relief on her face as she noticed that I was awake again.

“Hi,” she said. She’d been fiddling with her Kindle, sitting by me
with the device in her lap, but the fire extinguisher stood right next to her on the floor, and when I saw it, I sat up fast, recalling even more of the recent events.

“Ouch.” I put my hand to the side of my head, felt a sticky, wet lump the size of a robin’s egg that hurt like a son of a gun, from where I’d smacked it on the bed frame.

“Here.” Ellie found her way to the cooler, dug out some ice cube remnants floating around in there, and located a dish towel to wrap it in. “Put this on it.”

“Double ouch …” Ice might make it feel better in the long run, but in the short run, see
son of a gun
, above.

“I’ve been trying to send an email,” she said. She’d put the Kindle back into its case; with the world’s most energetic and inquisitive five-year-old at home, Ellie was compulsive about keeping electronic devices in padded surroundings.

Wishing hard that our attacker were in some, I tried opening and closing my eyes a few times, noting that they still worked but that I also wished I’d had some kind of padded enclosure for my head.

“I didn’t know the Kindle had email capability.” In Eastport it didn’t even have a reliable download connection, due to the remoteness of the place; the joke in town was that the island community was the best place to be in the event the world ended, since we wouldn’t find out about it until ten years later.

But here at the cottage, Ellie and I were nearer to one of Canada’s wireless towers, so the gadget’s bells and whistles worked. “It’s supposed to be able to hook up to a Web-based mail site,” Ellie said. “With the browser.”

She frowned, setting the thing aside. “So I tried. But it’s really not what the Kindle’s meant for, so who knows if it went through. I couldn’t tell for sure.”

A small, uncertain laugh betrayed how worried she was; like me, I supposed. But there was no point in dwelling on that. “Anyway, while you were out cold, I nailed the front door shut. And the front window shades are all down. He can lurk, but he can’t watch us.”

The back windows looked out over the deck construction, and after that, sharply downhill through more trees, to the lake. You couldn’t see in through those windows unless you were in one of the trees—unlikely, since they were paper birch trees with long, smoothish trunks, difficult to climb—or on stilts.

Or on the deck itself, but of course that wasn’t finished yet—it didn’t even have steps, much less anything to stand on—so she hadn’t nailed that door shut. Besides, if Hooper got up to more tricks, we might need a way to escape.

“Wow,” I said, still feeling woozy. “Good work.”

She lit a battery lantern, set it on the kitchen counter. A dim golden glow spread through the cabin, half wrecked by gunfire—and by plain, old-fashioned regular fire.

“Thanks for saving me back there,” I said. The pain in my head began to ease, but my ears were still ringing. “Back in the truck, I mean. And for the ice, too.”

She looked up, the soft red curls framing her face glinting in the lamplight. “For the ice, you’re welcome. But for the other part, I’m afraid the only thing you have to be grateful for is my own selfish wish to survive. You were stuck in the truck window, and I couldn’t get out until I’d pushed you out first.”

It wasn’t at all the way I remembered the event; just the opposite, in fact. But that was Ellie, rarely giving herself any credit until everyone else had gotten at least two helpings.

“So listen,” she went on. “We need to set a trap. A
sturdy
trap that we can catch him in and
keep
him in somehow until we get help.”

Yeah,
somehow
. Glum discouragement washed over me; getting nearly drowned, shot at, firebombed, and bonked on the noggin can do that to a person, or so I’ve heard.

“Jake.” She shoved a mug at me: noodle soup out of a packet. The steam rising from it smelled of bouillon cube, not one of my favorite flavors. “Drink it,” she commanded.

Obediently, I sipped. The stuff tasted like chicken-feather stew, liberally seasoned with some kind of onion by-product. But at least it
was hot, and I could feel sodium- and MSG-powered strength oozing back into me as I swallowed it.

“The thing is, though, the only traplike thing we’ve got is the deck we’ve been building,” Ellie went on.

“Huh.” I drank more soup. The noodles were like strips of plastic. Little green bits floated in there, too; freeze-dried vegetables, I hoped, since if those were chicken pieces I was in trouble.

“Underneath it, you mean.” I tipped the cup up, swallowed determinedly and got the stuff down.

In the dim light, she nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, because we’ve got it all boxed in under there already with all the wooden lattice we nailed up.”

I hate exposed porch underpinnings. Junk gets stuffed in under there, wild animals nest in the dark recesses of the space underneath the house, and spiders build cascading webs as thick as draperies, studded with egg casings and insects’ bodies.

Also, two words: hornet’s nests. And because of that lattice, right now you could’ve kept goats or a flock of chickens penned up underneath our deck-in-progress.

Or just one homicidal nutball, especially if you held a gun on him until help arrived; otherwise he could break out just by hurling himself against the lattice, which although it might slow him down some wasn’t sturdy enough to confine him for long.

But the way I felt at the moment, I was willing to hold a gun on him forever, preferably with the end of the barrel stuffed an inch or so right up into his ear canal. The only hard part would be getting him in there.