Jackpot (Nameless Dectective) (19 page)

Outrage tightened Polhemus’s voice as he spoke those last several sentences. He had begun to hate his best buddy when he learned the true amount of the stolen money: the price of friendship to Jerry Polhemus had been one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And his hatred really blossomed a few days later, when the whole thing blew up in Burnett’s face and the backlash caught him, too.

There was more, but most of it was self-pitying maunderings. And one nasty aside: He’d almost told Karen the truth after the funeral, he said, “to get back at Dave for siccing those enforcers on me,” but decided it was smarter to keep his mouth shut. The tape had been made before Allyn hired me, so there was nothing about his reactions to my reopening the whole can of worms.

He had been wrong about Burnett’s death; there was no question in my mind that David Burnett had died by his own hand. Terrified kid no brighter than Polhemus, with a warped sense of loyalties, in way over his head with people who had a reputation for making good on their threats. The pressure had been too much for him, and so he’d taken the easy way out. I could just see him rationalizing it: He was sacrificing himself for Allyn and Karen, the two people in his life he had actually cared for. If he was dead, the Mob would just write off the balance owed and that would be the end of it. All very noble—the last act of a coward and a fool. He’d made the right guess about Arthur Welker’s decision, but he could just as easily have been wrong. He could have put Allyn’s and Karen’s lives in even more jeopardy than if he’d stayed around and faced the consequences of his greed.

No loss, David Burnett. No loss, either, Jerry Polhemus.

I let the tape run for a full minute after Polhemus’s voice stopped, to make sure he hadn’t recorded anything else; then I pushed the rewind button. I had closed the car door midway through the cassette and John Wovoka and I were sitting there in the dark. I still had the .38 resting on my lap but I might as well have tossed it into the backseat. Or given it back to John Wovoka.

So here we were, at the end of it, with the last link in place. Nothing much left to do now except to call the sheriff’s department and explain the whole sorry business to the authorities. Tell them about Arthur Welker, too—sure. Let them listen to the tape. Only problem was, Polhemus hadn’t mentioned Welker’s name. Likely never knew it because it had never been given to him or to Burnett. Welker had let Manny Atwood handle things and kept himself hidden in the background. There was nothing to tie him to Burnett or Polhemus, no evidence of any wrongdoing on his part.

WELKER WINS. Like a gleeful headline in Satan’s newspaper. WELKER WINS.

The recorder made a low clicking sound and switched off. I retrieved the tape, put it into my pocket. I was aware, then, that John Wovoka had turned his head and was looking at me for the first time since we’d got into the Cougar. I met his gaze in the faint glow from the tape deck’s red indicator light.

He said, low, “Pigs—rutting pigs. I’m glad they’re dead, both of them.”

“You have a right to feel that way. But they were victims too, John. Just like Janine. The real villain is the owner of that two hundred thousand dollars.”

“The Mob,” he said, nodding. “Scum of the earth.”

“Just one man. His name is Arthur Welker.”

“You know him?”

“I know him,” I said. I explained about Welker, with the name bitter in my mouth. I even confessed my humiliation at Welker’s hands on Lobo Point.

“He won’t pay,” John Wovoka said, “not in this life. His kind never pays. They’re above the law.”

“Not always. This time ... yes.”

He was silent for a clutch of seconds. Then he said, “‘When your loved ones die or are hurt you must not cry or do harm to anyone in return. You must not fight. You must do right always. It will give you satisfaction in life and rewards in the afterlife.’ ” He laughed, a short sharp humorless bark. “The words of the false prophet Wovoka, disciple of Wodziwob.”

“They’re good words,” I said, “for the most part.”

“I believed in them once. No more.”

“What do you believe in now? That sometimes you have to fight? Maybe even fight evil with evil?”

“Would I have come here tonight if I didn’t?”

“No. No, you wouldn’t. Let’s go into the house, John.”

He switched off the ignition and we went on into the house. From the foyer, you could see the phone on the kitchen wall. John Wovoka stopped, looked over at it, looked at me.

“No,” I said, “I’m not going to make the call. Not now, maybe not at all.”

A puzzled frown added creases to his deeply lined face. He stood watching me.

There was a thickness in my chest; I felt sweaty, hot and cold at the same time. A voice in my head said: Don’t do this, you’re as big a fool as David Burnett if you do. But I had been thinking about it for some time now, off and on. I had started thinking about it on the drive down from Pyramid Lake.

John Wovoka said, without emotion, “What, then? Will you help me, help Janine?”

“Not by dumping Polhemus’s body in the lake, no.”

“Then—?”

Don’t do this!

“There’s another way,” I said.

IT WAS JUST 2:00 A.M. when we slipped out of the boat shelter onto the lake.

The boat that had been tied in there was a twelve-foot Chris-Craft powered by a 3.0-litre MerCruiser—an open-cockpit four-seater with plenty of deck space. John Wovoka had had no difficulty hot-wiring the ignition. The engine hadn’t been fired in some time and it was balky at first, but once it caught and held, it purred along soft, throaty, with no hitches. The exhaust was quiet, too, at least at idle and at crawling speed.

John Wovoka did the piloting. He knew boats better than I did. And he knew Lake Tahoe as well. Thanks to his job as a game warden, he kept government navigational charts and topographical maps of the area in his pickup. That made our task a little easier. So did the fact that the Chris-Craft was outfitted with a compass.

I sat next to him in the left-hand forward seat. Oddly, now that we were under way, I felt very calm, almost detached. Not thinking ahead, not thinking about much of anything. The apprehension had all been in making the decision myself and then laying it out for John Wovoka. If he had balked at the idea, there might have been more anxiety for me, more soul-searching; but he hadn’t. Just listened to what I had to say, asked a few pertinent questions, thought it all out for a couple of minutes, and then agreed in a flat, determined voice. His emotionless acceptance, the machinelike precision with which he set about making the necessary preparations, had had a catalytic effect on me. It allowed me to function in the same way, to approach what we were about to do as if it were a military operation: two soldiers, linked by purpose and discipline, feelings screwed down under tight lids, with the mission and its success outweighing every other consideration.

When we were a hundred yards out, he opened the throttle to quarter-speed, then to half, to three-quarters, to full. The engine stayed quiet at low speeds, which was all that mattered, and there was no backfiring through the exhaust. Good boat; we couldn’t have found a better one, it seemed, if we’d set out with a list of requirements.

He set a southeasterly course at full throttle. The distance we had to cover was about a dozen miles all together. The lights of South Lake Tahoe and the Stateline casinos made a long stationary curve on our right; car headlights ran through them now and then like pinballs on a neon-lit board. More clouds had gathered but a high wind kept them moving, so that when one of them obscured the moon it was only for a few seconds at a time. Out here on open water, the night wind was chilly enough to make me glad I’d thought to get my topcoat out of the car. The droplets of spray that came over and around the windshield were icy on my cheeks.

There were no other boats anywhere that I could see. Us alone on all that silver and black, with the stars like firepoints strewn among the clouds and the surrounding mountains lifting huge black and white-crowned goblin shapes against the sky. It was supposed to make you feel small and insignificant, all that dark immensity, but that was not the way I felt. Instead I felt a part of both the immensity and the darkness, like a cell within a vast body—integral, vital to the whole.

For a while we seemed to be making no real headway, as if we were suspended in time and space between two points. Then, all at once, it seemed, the Nevada shore grew from a wall of shapeless black, broken only by a sprinkling of lights, into individual landmasses, houses, trees. Off on our right, the cluster of high-rise casino-hotels took on definition as well, burning varicolored holes in the darkness less than two miles away. The outjut of land that appeared directly ahead of us would be Zephyr Point. It was the landmark John Wovoka had chosen, the easiest to spot from a distance on this part of the shoreline.

He took us to within a few hundred yards of the point before he changed direction, northward. When we cleared Zephyr Cove he angled in closer to land and cut back to three-quarter throttle. A little less than three miles to go. The passive waiting had drawn me taut, made me aware of the dragging weight of fatigue; but I could feel the tightness easing again as we closed in. I leaned forward, my hands on the dash, peering ahead over the top of the windshield.

A short dark peninsula loomed ahead, lightless, heavily furred with trees. That ought to be it, I thought—and when John Wovoka throttled down to quarter-speed and shut off our running lights, I knew it was. Lobo Point. I stared up at the rise of land beyond, inshore. We were within a hundred yards of the point before I could make out the roofline of Arthur Welker’s house; the rest of it was obscured by the trees.

John Wovoka chopped down to crawling speed as we came past the tip. No clouds covered the moon now; I could see the cove and the rest of the property clearly. Strip of beach, dock and boathouse, the
Arthur III
tied up at the end of the dock; brushy slope bisected by stairs and chair lift; three terraces and the house above, dark and monolithic from this perspective. None of the facing windows was lighted. There were a pair of night-lights in ornate lantern-type casings mounted one on either end of the house at the ground-floor level, but neither one gave off much illumination. The terraces and slope and beach area were all dark except for dustings of moonshine. Everywhere I looked there was stillness. The entire place had a somnolent aspect, turned in on itself for the night.

We glided on past, beyond the land finger on the north side of the cove, until the house and grounds disappeared from view. Ahead the shoreline was barren and lightless for at least a mile, thick with timber close by. John Wovoka made a tight turn, came back on the north end of the finger; we were twenty yards offshore when he shut the throttle all the way down to idle. The boat settled into a faint rocking drift. The throb of the engine and exhaust was pitched so low, I could hear the rise and fall of insect noise filtering out of the woods.

The shore along the finger here was a low rocky cutbank, overgrown with ferns and brush and the tangled roots of pine and fir trees. John Wovoka had gotten out of his seat as soon as he shut down the throttle and was up on the bow; he held us off with the boat’s emergency oar. I was on my feet too, by then, shedding my topcoat and jacket.

I said in a whisper, “Just the way it was yesterday. And no night guards or dogs.” It was the first time either of us had spoken since a few minutes before we’d left Paradise Flat.

“Better hurry, then.”

He let the boat ease in sideways until the port side was tight against the cutbank. There did not seem to be any underwater snags here; he felt safe in letting the Chris-Craft lie in close like this. It would have been easy enough for me to climb ashore, make my way through the woods and around to the beach. But that was the fool’s way. You can’t walk through woods and brush at night without making noise that might carry; and there was no way to get from the trees to the dock without coming right out into the open. More importantly, I remembered Welker bragging that his house and property was protected by an expensive security system. It was likely he’d installed safeguards out here as well—photoelectric cells, pressure-sensitive alarm devices. Men like him make enemies among their own kind, deadly enemies, and they don’t like to leave themselves vulnerable to attack from any direction.

But not even the Arthur Welkers can think of everything, safeguard every possible contingency. The one thing he apparently wasn’t concerned about was the one spot in which he was vulnerable—his Achilles’ heel.

I stripped down to my shorts. The night wind burned cold against my bare skin. But the water would be worse; mountain lakes are always bitter cold, even in the middle of summer and especially at night. If we’d had more time to prepare, I’d have gotten a wetsuit. As it was ...

Even though I braced myself, set my teeth and jaw as I lowered my body over the side, the first shock almost took my breath away. I submerged to the neck, hanging on to the gunwale with one hand, enduring the chill until my body temperature could adjust. I have always been a good swimmer, and I’m a better one now that I’ve slimmed down and gotten myself in condition, but I had to swim several hundred yards in this icy water; starting out prematurely would only make me tire sooner.

John Wovoka’s head and upper body leaned out above me. He said, “If anything goes wrong, swim straight this way. I’ll pick you up.”

“Will do.”

He seemed to want to say something else, turned away instead.

I hung on to the gunwale for another minute or so. Dangerous business coming up, but I felt no apprehension. Seemed to feel even more detached, now, as if I were observing all of this at the same time I was taking part in it. Stray thought:
I really don’t know myself anymore.
Then I quit thinking and shoved away from the boat and began to swim.

I used a steady crawl out around the tip of the finger and into the cove. Trod water long enough to get my bearings and to make sure that nothing had altered the quiescent aspect of the house, then struck out again toward the dock. I made sure to keep my arms and legs moving in a smooth, even tempo, so that I cleaved the water without sound. I no longer felt the cold. The muscles in my legs and shoulders were tight when I neared the dock but without any immediate danger of cramping. Exhaustion was the big worry; it was dragging at me again. There was still plenty to do, and on the swim back I would have to put forth twice the effort because of the company I would have.

The
Arthur III
was tied across the outer edge of the dock, her bow to the north. Sixteen-foot Bayliner, mostly long, sleek hull and superstructure, with a short squared-off stem; she would sleep at least four belowdecks. Baby of his fleet. Yeah. But it was also his Achilles’ heel. He thought it possible somebody might try to sneak in at night to attack him or his house, but to steal one of his boats? Not many craft are stolen on Tahoe, and cruisers of this type almost never. Where would a thief take it once he got it?

You’ll find out, Artie, I thought. Yes you will.

I swam along the cruiser’s port side, around the stem to the dock. A scum of algae lay in the water there; when I broke through it it gave off a faint rotting-humus smell that made my throat close up. For a time I hung on to one of the pilings to rest and study the house and grounds again. Still sleeping. Clouds drifted over the moon, turning the slope and terraces into masses of inky shadow. When that happened I leaned up to where the
Arthur III
’s stem line was looped around a dock cleat, untied it, coiled it enough to push all of it up over the stem and onto the deck so it wouldn’t drag loose. Then I swam back along the port side and around the bow to the north side of the dock.

The shifting clouds continued to cut off most of the moon’s hard white shine as I untied the bowline from the cleat there. I coiled the rope but this time I held on to it. When I laid my shoulder against the bow and shoved, using the dock for leverage, the cruiser swung outward with a low scraping sound: starboard gunwale rubbing against a Styrofoam bumper astern. Not a carrying sound. I paddled back along that side and made my next push amidships, to get the Bayliner completely clear of the dock. Back to the bow, then, and a nudge there to swing her farther out until she was aimed past the tip of the land finger, northward.

John Wovoka was out there waiting. I could just make out the shape of the Chris-Craft in the still-clotted dark, lying a few yards offshore.

I stroked forward of the cruiser’s bow, letting the rope uncoil behind me. There was just enough of it so that I could take one loop around my chest under my arms and still maintain some slack. It took me several seconds to tie it off; my fingers were starting to numb. Treading water, I glanced back toward Welker’s property. Nothing had changed in the dark tableau. One, two, three deep breaths and I struck out again in the same steady crawl, not too fast, not too slow.

The strain of towing the Bayliner began to tell almost immediately. Its resisting weight threatened to cramp muscles in my legs, arms, and back; I had to stop and rest every couple of minutes. Seventy yards to where John Wovoka waited. Sixty. Not far now. Fifty. Not far, not far, almost there—

Cramp in my right calf, so sudden and savage that I had to bite my tongue to keep from crying out. I twisted around, clawed up the rope until I had hold of a bow-rail stanchion, and clung there with one hand and rubbed at the calf with the other, flexing the leg and foot, until the muscle unknotted. I was shaking with cold and weakness when I submerged again.

I wasn’t sure if I had enough strength to swim those last fifty yards—but I did not have to find out. John Wovoka had seen that I was having trouble and took the risk of coming to meet me. I saw him swing out from beyond the finger, make a wide slow loop to come in along the
Arthur III
’s port side. I trod water, working my leg to keep it from cramping again, listening to the faint throb of the Chris-Craft’s exhaust and looking back toward Welker’s property. The damn moon was out again, silvering the house and grounds, but nobody had woken up and seen us out here and raised an alarm. Not yet, they hadn’t.

John Wovoka shut the throttle down and nosed the Chris-Craft in just ahead of where I was. I had the Bayliner’s bowline untied from around my chest by the time he leaned over the stem; I gave him the rope, and while he made it fast to a cleat I swam ahead along the port side. I was struggling to haul myself over the gunwale—my arms felt as if they had lead sinkers tied to them—when he caught hold of my arms and lifted me aboard.

“All right?”

“... All right.”

Immediately he went to the wheel and opened the throttle just enough to get us moving. There was a jerk as the
Arthur III
’s bowline pulled taut, a creaking of the rope; we began to glide ahead at an angle past the finger. I encased myself in the heavy wool blanket we’d brought from the Paradise Flat house, then sat on the forward seat shivering, trying to get my wind back—watching behind us.