Death by Sudoku (22 page)

“Okay. Take this for a moment—and don’t run into any haystacks while I’m away.” Michael left a somewhat worried Kevin at the wheel as he stepped out onto the deck.

The fishing boat cleared the headland south of the entrance to Maiden’s Bay. It jutted out into the ocean, the rays of the setting sun creating weird shadows in the craggy rocks of its sides. But there must have been some soil up on top. A lone tree clung at a crazy angle, its branches trailing behind it like a banner—topiary created by the prevailing winds.

Unfortunately, Kevin didn’t have much attention for the scenery. He kept looking round for other vessels or any other marine hazards sneaking up on them.

“That’s a hell of a view out there,” Michael said, returning to the cockpit.

Kevin’s response was a stifled sigh of relief to have the supposed seafarer of the crew back near the controls again.

“We’re in luck,” Michael announced as he took the wheel. “The wind is from the south. Usually, sound travels pretty clearly across water. But this breeze will blow our engine noise away from the ruins of Bayocean. If there is anyone out there, they shouldn’t hear us coming until we get fairly close.”

“That
is
good.” Kevin began rummaging around the cabin. “There ought to be a pair of binoculars somewhere. Then I can keep a watch.”

Kevin successfully turned up the binoculars as they proceeded along their southbound course. He stationed himself beside Michael, scanning the horizon as more of the craggy coastline passed beside them.

“We’re coming up on the inlet,” he announced. “It should be just past this cape—yes! There’s smoke coming up from the spit.”

He passed the binoculars to Michael, who took a look. “Yeah, just a thin plume, but definitely smoke. So somebody is there.” He glanced at his companion. “The question is, how can we get ashore and find out who it is?”

 
Cal Burke leaned against a chest-high masonry wall. This corner was all that was left of Bayocean’s ritziest hotel. He crossed his arms over his chest, sneaking a worried glance at the girl warming her hands over the small campfire he’d built.

He’d always thought of the ruins of the town as the coolest hideout there could be. That’s why he’d told the Captain about it. But the place wasn’t just cool—he could feel the dampness from the wall seeping deep into the flesh of his back where it leaned against the salt-stained brick. It wasn’t exactly foggy, but a fine mist seemed to hang in the air. Every time he came out here to check on Jenny, Cal’s bad leg started to ache about ten minutes after he arrived. By the time he left, his knee had stiffened almost to uselessness.

The place never seemed this cold and soggy when he’d visited it as a kid. Or maybe it’s because those days always seemed like summer.

Today, dealing with real-world weather, he had to admit that the corner of a wrecked building, open to the sky and right beside the water, wasn’t such a good choice for a campout. For one thing, it wasn’t healthy. Even though Cal set up a small pup tent for Jenny Robbins, she’d developed a worrying cough.

Yeah, maybe that happens, lying around all day tied up.
But he couldn’t let her just hang around when he had to work all day. She’d get away.

Cal forced back a sudden gust of wild laughter at his worrying over Jenny’s health . . . after the Captain had ordered him to kill her.

Cal had thrown the cell phone out into the ocean as far as he could. But that didn’t solve the problem.

When he’d hooked up with the Captain, Cal thought he’d joined a fight he could believe in. It wasn’t about saving a country or the world. Cal was saving the people around him—the people of Maiden’s Bay—from turning into Californians. Oh, people in town bitched and moaned about the newcomers turning up and waving their money around. But they were becoming more and more like those people every day—take Mr. Schenck, of Schenck’s Motors. He’d given Cal a car to go off to college. But after Cal blew out his knee and came home, Mr. Schenck was there, taking the car back—acting like a Californian.

Stumbling across the Captain’s movement while surfing the Net, Cal had envisioned himself sticking it to government types, to office people like those smug bastards at the college, to people who paid a bazillion dollars for a house, then nickeled and dimed the person they hired to fix it—treating him like dirt.

Instead, he ended up being ordered to kill a girl. If things had gone differently, he could imagine having a daughter like Jenny. How could he kill her?

Everything had just gone to hell since he saw that coded message in the paper. A phone arrived in the mail, and that Carruthers jackass had called with plans to lean on this dumb Hollywood guy who was sticking his nose into the Captain’s business.

He thought Carruthers knew what he was doing, but he began to wonder when the guy told him his real name. Then he said they could use an idiot trick he’d seen in a movie—holding the guy over the end of that mountainside terrace. Carruthers fumbled the hold, and then Cal’s knee had given out. He nearly got pulled through those planters, trying to keep hold of the actor guy, only to lose him in the end. Carruthers had been in a panic to get them out of there. He’d actually pulled a gun when they bumped into the girl coming home.

Cal had had enough. He’d flatly told Carruthers the girl wasn’t going to die, and he was big enough to make it stick. Carruthers had used one of the special cell phones to bitch to the Captain, but they’d been tasked to keep Jenny as a hostage. Cal had been glad when Carruthers was called away—he hadn’t liked the way the guy had looked at Jenny.

At first he’d been told to move the girl and hold her up here on the coast. Then, suddenly, he’d gotten a call on the cell phone, a bossy voice telling him Jenny was no longer useful as a hostage—and telling him to eliminate her.

Cal said no and flung the phone away. But he’d spent the time since just sort of moving in place. He didn’t want to hurt Jenny. But if he just let her go, there’d be a kidnapping charge—not to mention murder. For about the fiftieth time, he tried to pull his thoughts together, to figure some way to explain things to Jenny.
If I could just get her to promise—

His fumbling thoughts were shattered by the sound of a boat engine. Calvin jumped over to the fire, kicking sand over it. “You got to get down,” he told Jenny almost apologetically, pushing her behind the wall.

He yanked up the binoculars hanging from his neck. Okay. It was just a fishing boat heading into the bay. Two people in the wheelhouse—he couldn’t make them out well in the gathering dark.

Cal breathed a sigh of relief as the engine sounds grew more distant. He turned to help Jenny up. “I’m sorry about that. Hell, I’m sorry about everything. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, believe me—”

Another approaching engine shut him up. Cal peered over the wall. This time the noise was coming from land. He saw a pair of car headlights bouncing over the dunes toward the tip of the spit. The car pulled up near the wall. It was a rental model from the Portland airport, obviously driven hard since it had gone off the road.

The door swung open, and a short little guy with thinning blond hair came out. He carried a five-cell flashlight in one hand. The beam glinted off his glasses as he reached to push them back up his nose.

“Burke!” the man called. His voice sounded like the one that had barked in his ear over the phone. “Are you there? It’s the Captain.”

This was the Captain? Calvin stepped around the clump of dune grass that clung round the ruined wall. “I’m here.”

“And the girl?”

Jenny joined Cal. “H-hello?”

The Captain began shouting, calling Jenny dirty names—Cal, too, as well as Leo Carruthers, Derrick Robbins, even Liza Kelly. When that ran down, the man’s voice was still quivering with fury as he said, “I told you to dispose of her. I came to check on it, since you apparently lacked the brains to follow a simple order.”

He shook his head, light glinting off his eyeglasses again. “Just another faulty tool, like so many have failed me. Well, that can be remedied. I can find new followers—efficient ones—after I’ve moved on.

“But first, I need to deal with some loose ends. The Captain may disappear, but those who tried to cross him should know that he means business.” Reaching into a pocket of the baggy jacket he wore, the man pulled out an automatic pistol.

“Hey,” Cal said, moving between the man—the Captain?—and Jenny.

“What a gentleman.” The look on the stranger’s pudgy face reminded Cal of some of the people he’d done work for—people who’d stiffed him, claiming the job wasn’t done right. “Or are you getting some, Calvin? Is she trying to lie back and earn her freedom?”

“That’s not nice.” Cal took a step forward.

“It doesn’t matter,” the Captain’s voice grew hard. “Ladies don’t have to go first.”

The guy began to raise his gun hand, and Cal made his move. It was just like the old days on the field. The other side could never believe a guy his size could move so fast. He was almost on top of the Captain—or whoever—by the time he got his gun up.

Cal saw a flash. Something pounded the right side of his chest and a volcano seemed to erupt there, even as a roar blasted his ears.

I been shot. Jeeze, this is worse than when I did in my knee
, he thought. The force twisted him around, but he still managed to fling out his left arm. His fist made a satisfying contact with the other man’s head, even though the shock made the pain in his chest worse.

Cal managed to grab onto the other man’s coat, so he’d fall after him—across him. Landing brought new flames to his shoulder and blossoms of flame across his vision. But if he could hold this guy down—

“Run,” he tried to shout to Jenny, but his voice came out more as a croak.

The man under him was trying to get loose, and there was no more Cal could do. Then, suddenly, there were two more men joining the struggle, holding the Captain down.

As long as Jenny is all right
, Cal thought.

The darkness that had edged his vision expanded until it swallowed everything up.

If the aftermath of the bombing attempt at Grauman’s Chinese was an example of how the LAPD reacted to averted crimes, Liza didn’t want to see how they dealt with the unsolved variety. By the time she finally got finished with the bureaucratic nonsense and flew back to Oregon, night had fallen.

At least she and Ava had heard the good news before leaving police headquarters. While she was signing her official statement, a detective came in, announcing that Jenny Robbins had been rescued and the mysterious Captain had been caught.

“The guy had a suitcase full of money and papers for four different identities,” the detective told his colleagues. “He was all ready to get into the wind, but he still had his real ID in his wallet—
Abner Oscar Galt
.

“Turns out Abner was one of those computer whiz kids who made a bundle during the dotcom days. He started a small company that got bought up by a bigger company for mucho dinero. It should have been enough to set him up for the rest of his life. But when the bubble burst and times got tough, Abner got pretty crazy over parting with any of his capital gains—especially for taxes.”

“How did he go from nerd to Captain?” one of the detectives working with Liza asked.

The first detective shrugged. “Looks like he got real busy on the keyboard, writing for
Soldier of Fortune
-type magazines and ranting online—blogs, chat rooms, newsgroups, you name it. He had a whole bunch of people listening to him, and found a few who were willing to go to the next level. The problem was, most of the losers he recruited fu—” The policeman looked at his female, non-cop audience. “er, screwed up, so Cap’n Abner figured he’d move along and try again somewhere else. But he had another problem. He began to believe all this tough-guy nonsense he was spouting, taking his act a little too seriously. So he decided to act like a hard man and kill off that girl.”

That bit of bravado had proven to be the Captain’s—or rather, Abner’s—downfall. Kevin and Michael had managed to stop him, and the man’s crazy conspiracy had ended.

Liza was glad it was all over and even gladder to be getting home. She and Ava had a moment of doubt and fear at the Portland airport. In their rush to catch the plane to L.A. and reach the Chinese Theatre, neither of them had paid much attention to exactly where they’d parked. Now, facing ranks of cars in the darkness, Liza admitted she couldn’t even remember what kind of car Michael had rented.

“A Lexus?” Ava guessed, then nodded in triumph as she dug out the keys. “It comes with that doohickey.”

At last they spotted the flashing light and sounding horn. “Hopefully we didn’t wear out the battery,” Ava tried to joke. She was a little hoarse, having spent considerable time on the phone with the head office of the
Oregon Daily
, relating her first-person experience averting the bomb plot. Liza was also due to come in for considerable ink, and Liza K was definitely going to be outed.

Michelle had been surprisingly mellow about this development. Or rather, as she put it, “Publicist who develops and writes about geeky puzzles—weirdo. Publicist who decodes brain-busting puzzles to save a theater full of people—hero. In fact, the only drawback I detect with this whole thing is that you saved Alden Benedict doing it.”

She glanced at her partner. “See the difference, Liza?”

Liza had to admit she did. “I guess that’s why you’re the boss, Boss,” she said.

“Here’s another reason.” Michelle handed Liza a thick envelope. “I zipped back to the office for this. It’s a contract for Jenny Robbins, along with advice on representation if she hasn’t got any yet.”

“Michelle, the girl is still in the hospital,” Liza began.

“Like that would stop any of the barracudas in The Business,” Michelle scoffed. “Just take it along and see what happens.”