Hell's Bay (31 page)

We watched a squadron of pelicans skimming the bay.

“From the bit I heard,” I said, “it sounded like Mona was pulling the woman's strings.”

“I heard what you heard,” Rusty said. “No question Mona's trying to call her off. Flip her switch. But I can't tell if she's running things or not, and at this point, frankly, I don't give a shit. If Sasha's taking orders from her, then fine. It's over, Sasha's gone. We'll watch our backs with Mona, get the hell out of here, sort it out later. Is that a plan?”

“And if Mona's not running the show, then what we heard was her pleading, not giving an order.”

“Yeah,” Rusty said. “I like the first choice better.”

“You believe she's dirty?”

“I honestly can't tell.”

“Maybe I'll give it a shot.”

“Yeah.” Rusty cut a look my way, then shifted her gaze back to the water. “You two seem to have such a nice rapport.”

“Where's she now?”

“Last I saw she was up on the roof, off by herself.”

“The walkie-talkie?”

Rusty patted her hip pocket.

“And our other passengers? How're they faring?”

She shook her head and sighed, then took a minute to fill me in.

When it became clear the Mothership was sinking, there'd been panic, shouting, name-calling. Apparently there'd been a slap, Rusty on Annette. Then even louder name-calling and threats. Holland sticking his camera in Rusty's face until she snatched it away and slammed it into the wall.

“Wish I'd had a ticket for that.”

“It got worse,” said Rusty.

Holland, by God, was going to sue her for damages, pain, suffering. He'd take Rusty Stabler's last goddamn nickel. His father happened to be a personal-injury attorney, best in Philly. He'd make it his life's work to destroy her. And Annette chimed in. Her magazine had a shark pool full of lawyers who'd salivate at the thought of dismantling Rusty's operation, selling that stupid boat to the junk man piece by piece.

That's when Rusty ordered Annette and Holland to go cool off. They refused. Rusty gave them one more chance, but they refused even more snottily, so she grabbed their collars, hauled them to her cabin, and pitched them in and slammed the door.

“Both at once?”

“Both at once.”

“You're some kind of strong.”

“I'm running on nitroglycerin, Thorn. Best not to fuck with me.”

Then I told her about finding Milligan's body, leaving out the part about the shark.

She groaned, took a thin, whistling breath, and closed her eyes.

“I think he'd been drowned. I had a good look at his body floating in the water and I didn't see blood or bullet wounds.”

“This drowning thing,” Rusty said.

“Yeah?”

“Mona says it has to do with how Sasha's husband died, and the way her kid's suffering. Lung cancer. Gasping for breath, suffocating.”

I looked off at the horizon. It was darkening in the north, some pink ribbons of sunlight in the west, sprays of gold and green shooting through the gaps. Not much daylight left.

Rusty said, “Like Sasha's doing some kind of fucked-up poetic justice. 'How long can you hold your breath?' Tit-for-tat bullshit. Make us suffer what her loved ones suffered.”

“Sink the houseboat. Get us in the water, take us under one by one.”

“Be a lot easier to shoot us. Like she did Teeter. Get it done and go.”

I shook my head.

“This woman's not into easy. I think what she did to Teeter was only to slow him down. She probably meant to finish him in the water, drown him like she did Abigail Bates and John, but I showed up before she could do it.”

She looked at me for a long black moment.

“You got something in mind, Rusty? Some plan?”

“I want to get my hands on her,” she said. “Beyond that, no.”

“She's strong. Milligan was no weakling. We have to do this smart.”

“You got a smart idea?”

“How's your night vision?”

“What? Wait till dark?” Rusty said. “You think we have that long?”

“Twilight would be better.”

“To do what?”

“Fake her out.”

“Talk to me, Thorn.”

“You paddle out in the kayak, like you're offering yourself up.”

“And where are you?”

“You're towing me with a rope. I'm in the snorkel, mask, fins, I've got the dive knife. I'm a few inches below the surface. When you get close enough, you tug, I go down a few feet, circle past you, flank Sasha, and while you keep her busy, I pop over her stern.”

“Twilight,” she said. “Gotta be at least twilight. Otherwise she sees what's coming.”

“Twilight, but not full dark. I'd never find my way.”

“It should be you in the kayak, Thorn. Me in the water. She knows you're part of the Milligan clan. She's not interested in me.”

“My way confuses her. You distract her long enough, it could work.”

“I'm going to have to roll that around.”

She reached out and poked a fingertip to my elbow.

“What happened to your shirt?”

“A brush with the wild kingdom.”

“Hell, I always liked that shirt. That was the doc's, right?”

“You knew this shirt?”

She nodded. “Like losing an old friend.”

“I think it can be saved,” I said.

“Yeah?” She slipped a fingertip through the rip and touched my arm. “You think so, huh?”

“A little patching up can work miracles.”

She tilted her head, giving me a skeptical look. “What're we talking about?”

“Shirts,” I said. “Mending things.”

Rusty worked her eyes across my face for a moment, then tried and failed to conceal a swallow. Her short sandy hair was riffling in the wind. Sweat had darkened her shirt, revealing the sharp outline of her breasts.

“All I wanted,” she said, “the only goddamn thing I was trying to do was take some people out here, explore some spots nobody'd ever seen. Sit up on that deck at night with those damn stars, a glass of red, shoot the shit after a great day of fishing. That's all I wanted.” The words were thickening in her throat.

“We'll get it back on track.”

“Oh, the ship can be salvaged. But when all this gets out, this disaster, my backers will run for cover, insurance canceled. Coast Guard'11 pull my ticket. This is the end, Thorn. Scratch one off the dream list.”

I was never very good at fake solace. She was probably right.

“Shit, I could end up like you, Thorn. Hermit in a cave.”

“It's not so bad. You could try it for a while. Might grow on you.”

Her eyes clicked to mine, squinting to be sure she'd heard right. Like I'd uttered a proposal of marriage.

“It might come to that,” she said. “The mother of all last resorts.”

“Go ahead insult me, but you're always welcome at Club Thorn.”

She blinked away the haze in her eyes.

“Christ, listen to the self-pity bullshit. Teeter's in there with a blanket over his face, and I'm whining about the goddamn houseboat and my freaking captain's license.”

We stood in silence, looking out at the bay, listening to the wind hiss around the hard edges of the ship like the whispery voice of evil.

I watched the next blue-black mass thickening in the northwest, clouds piling on the backs of other clouds, rising up.

“We've got to keep our focus, Rusty.”

“Yeah? On what?”

I reached out with my right hand and cradled her cheek.

“On the good fight.”

Her hands rose slowly and she gripped my wrist and seemed to debate it for a moment before letting her cheek settle against my palm. Her body softened, then a moment later she caught herself and drew back.

“Not now, Thorn. Take your famous charm upstairs, use it on your kissing cousin. And while you're at it, find out whose team she's on.”

 

 

 

 

Sugarman got Dr. Dillard's home address from the Summerland phone book. His house was a boxy two-story, several blocks from the downtown historic district. The charm factor dropped off drastically in those few blocks. Second-tier Summerland was treeless and stark, and the air smelled of fried food and motor oil. Battered pickups in driveways, spavined couches and recliners parked on porches, the grass patchy and brown. A pack of skinny mutts were foraging along the garbage cans left out by the street.

When no one answered Sugar's knock, an old lady who was smoking on the front steps next door called out that Dillard was probably out back.

“With his brand-new choo-choo,” she said when Sugar thanked her. The old lady pointed her cigarette to the side of her head and made a crazy twirl.

The door to Dillard's workshop was ajar, so he stepped inside without knocking. Banks of fluorescent lights glared from overhead, sun poured in from two large windows, and a couple of halogens were aimed toward the center of the room. The good doctor was wearing bib overalls, a blue work shirt, a red-and-white-striped engineer's cap, and some kind of magnifying spectacles. He was stooped over a plywood table, using a pair of tweezers and a long needle to make adjustments to the tiniest model railroad set Sugarman had ever seen.

“All aboard,” Sugar said.

Dillard straightened and frowned when he saw who it was. He pulled off the jeweler's eyeglasses and set them and his tools carefully on the plywood sheet, just beyond the border of his imaginary world.

The track looped and twisted through green hills with cows standing beneath one-inch trees, past ponds and cascading waterfalls, then the locomotive and its cars and red caboose descended into a valley and clickety-clacked through a charming American village somewhere in New England. Church steeples and storybook main street, kids on bikes, teenagers in convertibles, a firehouse with its dalmatian. Sugarman bent close to make out some of the finer detail.

“That's awful tiny,” he said. “But I guess even fleas need to travel.”

“You dropped by to make jokes?”

The two of them watched the train pass through the little town. A crossing guard lowered, the tiny whistle whooped, but all the people and dogs and cows and a herd of horses galloping through a meadow stayed frozen.

“In case you're interested,” Dillard said. “That strand of hair is not the victim's. But that doesn't mean it's the killer's. It could be anybody's. It's like you found a random fingerprint or drop of blood. It's meaningless without having another hair to associate it with. Do you happen to have one of those?”

“I'm working on it.”

“Oh, are you?”

“Actually, I didn't stop by about the hair.”

“I'm sorry, is this a game? I'm supposed to guess what you want?”

“Something you said earlier. At the time it seemed weird, but now that I've seen the videos and I'm up to speed on this, it seems even weirder.”

“Well, well. What in the world did I say?”

“You said
misdirected
. That was the word you used.
Misdirected
.”

Dillard turned back to the hills and valleys and rivers and waterfalls.

“We were talking about the public meetings,” Sugarman said. ” ‘A lot of anger seething around these parts.' Those were your exact words. Then you said, 'Misdirected, I must say.' Referring to the anger, like you knew something all those other people didn't.”

“You have a remarkable memory.”

“It was just a few hours ago. I'm not dotty yet.”

“All right, so what do you want to know?”

“Just that. What did you mean when you said their anger is misdirected? They're mad at Bates, they're mad at the gypsum stack, at the high readings of radon. How's that misdirected?”

Dillard shot a longing gaze at his train. Still on its tracks, still circling, the dalmatian still asleep in the shade of the fire truck.

“Well, it's complicated. It involves scientific matters.”

“Try me. If I don't understand something, I'll raise my hand.”

He sighed and reached out to the transformer box and switched off the power. The train halted on its downward swing through Happy Valley.

“Are the radon detectors accurate? The measurements really that high?”

“Those electronic gadgets Olsen bought are nothing but cheap toys.” Dillard stepped past Sugarman to the door. He hooked his hat on a nail and went outside.

Sugar followed the doctor into the shade of the neighbor's house—a box as characterless as his own.

“Toys, meaning they're inaccurate?”

“Oh, they're probably accurate within a few points, I suppose. But to be taken seriously by the scientific community, a true study of ambient radon levels would have to be done by exposing a charcoal canister for several days and performing gamma spectroscopy for absorbed decay products.”

Dillard fingered some of the fine gold threads of his remaining hair into place. His pale scalp glowed beneath.

“Let's put the science aside for a second,” Sugar said. “How's the community's anger misdirected? What do you know that they don't know?”

Dillard shook his head and firmed his lips so not even a peep could escape. Sugar stepped closer to the man, inside his comfort zone. DiUard took a step backward, bumped into the trunk of a scrawny tree. Sugarman took another step, closing into body-odor range. Dillard's was as moldy and rank as mushrooms left too long in the fridge.

Sugarman whispered the words: “Who should the citizens be mad at?”

Dillard swallowed.

Another whisper: “Unburden yourself, Doctor. Let it out.”

“I want immunity.”

Sugarman had just been poking for rotten places, weak spots in the story line. He hadn't held out much hope for Dillard and the whole “misdirected” thing, but after the sticky trail of sweat appeared on the doctor's cheek and he blurted out the magic word
immunity
, Sugarman felt the decayed place give way, as if he were about to plunge his hand down into the moist underbelly of this whole rotten mess.