Nail Biter (31 page)

Sure; all that good outdoor gear he'd had cost plenty. Ellie waved insistently at us.

He ignored her. “And . . . I know this doesn't make sense either but I felt sorry for Luanne Moretti. She's like . . . I don't know. A helpless animal. Made me think.”

He took a deep breath. “So the truth is, I've been buying up the stuff myself, anyone who'd sell it to me, and dumping it in the ocean as much as I can.”

Which also made little sense because all he was really doing was driving up the drug's street price. But I figured I could lecture him on supply-side economics some other time.

I did have to tell him one thing, though. “Mac, you know she can't go with you, right? Wanda, I mean.”

He said nothing, his huge fists clenching reflexively at his sides.

“You do know that, though, don't you?” I persisted. “Wanda can't be out there on the run with you, wherever you're going. It's just not right for her.”

For an instant I thought he was going to hit me. But instead he relaxed his fists with an effort, stuffed his hands defeatedly into his pockets.

Then an odd look crossed his face. “Just wait one second,” he muttered, vanishing back into the brush and brambles.

Criminy, now what? Call of nature, I figured, hoping he'd be quick about it. Ellie swung the engine down over the boat's transom; hurrying to join her, I stuck my good hand into my bag for the Bisley.

I didn't expect to need it anymore. I just wanted to be sure it was there. Only it wasn't. That was when I realized he'd taken the weapon, probably right after he'd shoved me down. And—now what was he up to?

“Mac!” I called when he didn't reappear. No answer.

“He's got my gun,” I told Ellie, wondering if maybe he'd been lying about where the shotgun was, too; had I had it wrong again?

“Get that engine started,” I added, splashing into the cold water to heave myself into the vessel. But then a shot rang out.

I mean that's exactly what it did. It
rang,
the concussive
pow!
of the big firearm mingling instantly with a musical, just-like-in-the-movies
ker-whang!
of a projectile ricocheting off granite.

“Go!” I shouted, shoving again, but I hadn't reckoned on Wanda. At the sound of the gunshot she scrambled overboard with a howl of . . . well, I didn't know what it was a howl of, but it was damned inconvenient.

A second shot sounded. I made a grab for the girl, lost my footing on slippery stones, and went down hard, wrenching my arm yet again and letting out, I am reliably told, an impressive howl of my own.

By that time Wanda had made it to shore and was struggling into the woods. “Wait!” I yelled as Ellie leapt from the boat and we both ran after the girl, finally catching up to her in the clearing where she and Rickert had camped.

And where he now lay unconscious, bleeding from a head wound and from his right arm. Over him stood Jenna Durrell, clad in storm gear and holding the Bisley in her left hand.

“Hello, Jake,” she said mildly. In her right hand was the .38 pistol she'd used to shoot Mac Rickert. It looked like he'd gone for the Bisley but she'd winged him and he'd dropped it.

And then she'd dropped him. I searched for words, couldn't find any. Probably she'd had the .38 on her ever since she'd used it to kill Dibble.

Good shot, too, from the way she'd turned Mac into a target. All that cop-job handgun practice she'd probably taken, I figured; another thing that didn't exactly make me feel confident about our situation.

“Fancy meeting you here,” I said when my dry mouth had eased enough so I could speak.

Weak, but it was all I could muster. Jenna hadn't blown our heads off yet, but that only meant some other plan must be on her agenda.

Not a better one, though, as I soon discovered.

Much worse.

Jenna gestured sharply
with the Bisley, gathering me, Wanda, and Ellie into a group around Mac Rickert's body.

He was breathing, but I didn't know for how long. “He needs a doctor,” I said.

Jenna laughed, not a pleasant sound. “Sure, what do you say we call an ambulance?” she asked sarcastically.

Wanda dropped to her knees by Rickert, laid her hand on his forehead. But whatever odd powers of healing she had for animals, they weren't going to work here.

Jenna spared her a pitying headshake, then addressed Ellie and me. “You two have been a real pain in the ass, you know that? The rest of them, too, Marge and Hetty and Greg—if they'd just come back a little later I could've finished her. . . .”

Suddenly the whole thing spread out like a movie in my head: Wanda seeing Jenna shoot Gene Dibble. Then the others coming home so Jenna couldn't deal with the inconvenient witness.

And even though Wanda had been at the time utterly language-deficient, a killer wouldn't want to depend on that. Oh, no; the girl had to be shut up permanently.

“Why?” I asked Jenna, stalling for time in case one of us might think of something to get us out of this. But I wanted to know, too, and Jenna didn't disappoint; this was the only chance she would ever get to tell her side of it.

“Greg Brand screwed my mother out of every cent she had. But that wasn't the worst part.”

“Dibble,” I guessed. “When they were in jail together they'd cooked up a plan.”

“You got it. Find a woman with money. One of them marries her, introduces her to the other one, who's supposed to be able to do all these repairs on the house. She'd never have gone for it if darling Greg hadn't said it was all right,” said Jenna.

Another sad laugh escaped her. “That's what she called him. Gene was a little younger than Greg, all baby face and red lips. And his hands . . .”

Her shudder clued me in to the rest. “And he—”

She cut me off. “Let's not get into the gory details, okay?”

Rickert moaned. She didn't seem to hear it. “For a while I thought I'd gotten over it. Got to be a cop, working for other victims. I was good at it, too,” she said.

I'll bet. Dealing with the wreckage of other people's lives probably distracted her from her own.

For a while. “I even started writing those how-not-to-get-screwed articles. A few of the smaller magazines bought them.”

A wave of regret for her washed over me. She'd done so many of the right things: kept on going, made a life for herself. Trouble was, for all her energy and talent she'd still needed help.

And hadn't gotten it. “But I always kept track of Gene. Greg Brand, too,” she continued. “And when Brand cooked up a witches-in-training scam and decided to bring it here, I knew it was my chance.”

“You signed up,” I said. “Stole the drugs from . . . where? The evidence room where you worked?”

She nodded agreement. “Right before I quit,” she said. “To make it look more like a drug deal gone bad. A few weeks ago I came up here to set it up in advance, asked around, then put it together with him.”

Her tone hardened. “And just like I thought, he didn't recognize me any more than Greg did. I found him in the bar at the Mexican restaurant and got him talking.”

She paused, remembering. “When I told him he wouldn't even need any money up front . . . well. Gene always was a greedy bastard.”

“Why'd you need the drugs at all? I mean, if you were going to shoot him the minute he showed up . . .”

I'd been right about the oxycontin tablet. She'd probably had the drugs hidden down in the crawl space, dropped one while transferring them to the paper bag. As for Dibble's body—well, just leaving it was safer than trying to dispose of it.

Wanda's too, probably, if it had come to that. Heck, Jenna had been a cop, she knew how to arrange a murder scene.

Including how to create the victims. “You still don't get it,” she said impatiently. “Killing him wasn't enough.
He took my dreams
. I wanted him to be seeing that big stash, the score of his life, practically in his hands. And then I wanted him to
see
someone taking it from him.”

She inhaled deeply. “It all had to be real. His dreams, like mine. I paid that son of a bitch back with interest. At last.”

But once she did she'd had a problem. She hadn't realized the silent girl was even in the house. Still, Wanda was no
immediate
risk. Jenna would have to improvise . . . which she'd done.

Rickert groaned again, weakly.

“They'll know you rented a boat, they keep records,” I tried. That must've been how she got here. “And when they find us they'll realize . . .”

But Jenna just laughed. “You don't think I actually signed it out, do you? Oh,
please
. I'm not stupid, you know. I copied a key, slid out of the boat basin. . . . I've been using that boat every day, no one's going to check the key rack if they even notice it's gone.”

Her smile was triumphant. “And I can handle a boat without running lights at least as well as this dope,” she added, kicking at Rickert's body.

“You did help me, though, Jake, for a while. Once you started snooping, all I had to do was follow you around. To that moron, Joey, for instance.”

Poor Joey, I thought. About as attractive as a car accident, but still. “And he died because . . . ?”

She shrugged dismissively. “Hey, he had a boat, too. I knew he could get the dynamic duo here out of the area. And I didn't want them skipping town at an inopportune moment.”

So she'd murdered a little schmuck who'd done her no harm other than posing a mere threat of getting in her way. She pushed Wanda aside, then inspected Rickert's sheet-white face.

“How'd you do it? I mean he wouldn't have just let you . . .”

Jenna's grin turned scornful. “Faked being in distress. He let me aboard, I waited till his back was turned and put one in his head. Then I used a piece of gear you helpfully supplied.”

“What? How did I . . . ?”

“The ice-fishing stuff in the shed out at the rental house,” she answered with a smirk. “Handy-dandy.”

At first I didn't get it, but then I did. Ice-fishing gear, including . . . the auger. You could drill a good-sized hole with it. In, for instance, the bottom of a boat. You could even do it from outside, when you were back in your own vessel.

As she had. Mac Rickert's eyelids fluttered. “Guy's got a hard head,” she observed, and waved the gun at us again. “Toss me that bag of yours,” she ordered, and I didn't have much choice, so I did it.

Then, “You two drag him,” she told Ellie and me. “I'll bring our witchy little friend.”

And we didn't have much choice about that, either, so Ellie and I hauled the big man's limp body back to the boat, with Wanda following along disconsolately.

“Put him in,” Jenna commanded. “And you, go get the cotter pin out of that engine propeller,” she added to Ellie.

In other words, disable
our
boat; worse and worse. Ellie and I exchanged looks; somehow we had to slow her down.

“How would you know anything about cotter pins?” I asked, putting a deliberate note of skepticism into my voice. “From what I've seen you're no expert mariner, whatever you say.”

As I'd hoped, Jenna took the bait. But her response was not what I was hoping for at all.

“I grew
up,
” she recited impatiently to me, “on
Nantucket
.”

Get it?
her face added.
You dummy.

Belatedly, the dummy did: island, water, boats . . .

“The beach club we belonged to when my dad was alive had boats, and lessons for the kids. Contests, too.”

By now I knew what must be coming, the reason for her lean, athletic build and the same kind of easy grace I'd seen in my son Sam and his friends, all of whom were as comfortable on boats as monkeys are in trees.

But the details were even less reassuring than I expected. “I won my first sailing regatta division when I was seven,” Jenna bragged, “and my first overall at eleven. We had a cabin cruiser, too, I tooled around in that a fair amount.”

She gave me a smug smile. “So yeah, I guess you could say I'm fairly okay on the water. And considering where we are . . .” She waved behind her at the bay. “I had a feeling there'd be boating stuff involved sooner or later.”

Her voice hardened. “And I figured it might work out better if everybody thought Jenna was a klutz. Now get him into the boat and get the damned cotter pin.”

When we'd obeyed she snatched it from Ellie's hand. “You all get in, too, and sit there,” she ordered. “I'll be back here in less than a minute and if you've moved I'll find you and waste three shots. Or,” she added chillingly, “as many as it takes.”

She vanished into the woods. “Now's our chance,” I told Ellie when she had gone. “We'll take Wanda and . . .”

I was already half out of the boat, wincing at the cold raindrops blown stingingly into my face by the rising gale. But Wanda didn't move, refusing to leave Rickert.

No
, her mute face expressed clearly. “Please,” I exhaled in frustration. But she wouldn't. I couldn't even pry her arms from around him.

And we couldn't leave her. “It doesn't matter anyway, Jake,” Ellie said when I'd stopped struggling with the girl. “There's no place we can go.”

She waved at the wild water. Through the sound of the wind an engine was already approaching, even as Ellie held our useless engine's propeller in her lap.

That was what the cotter pin was for, to hold the propeller on. “Can we get anywhere without it?” I asked her, knowing the answer. And that it was probably already too late anyway.

She shook her head helplessly. “No. And the tide's too high now to walk across the channel, or even swim. That current . . .”

She didn't need to say more. By now the rushing water there was easily eight feet deep. It would have been like going over Niagara Falls without the barrel.

“We could still try hiding in the woods.”

Ellie made a face, gesturing at Wanda, who remained crouched by Rickert's sprawled body, glaring up fiercely again at the bare suggestion of abandoning him.

And then it really was too late as the other boat came out of the storm at us, Jenna at the helm. As she'd implied, it was one of the day rentals from Quoddy Marine, a little smaller than Ellie's but with a bigger, more powerful engine; Deke Meekins didn't believe in underpowering his vessels.