Sleep with the Fishes (16 page)

Lachfurst turned briefly to the window overlooking the river. He could see what looked like Fest in a motorboat, headed downriver.

He turned back and tapped Penelope’s thigh with the rod tip. “What you really need is a good spanking.”

“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you, Principal Lachfurst? I’ll bet there’s a lot of girls at the school you’d just love to paddle.”

“You have a dirty mind, Penelope, and what I’m going to do is tell your parents about your absenteeism.”

Penelope jumped to her feet.

“My parents? But why not just kick me off the field hockey team or revoke my smoking privileges? Oh please, don’t tell my parents?!” she pleaded.

Lachfurst caught a glimpse out a side window of a woman in a yellow rainsuit and Sid dashing by. Car doors opened and slammed in the side yard.

“No, I’m afraid I’m going to have to call your parents.”

A car started, and the white LTD fishtailed up the drive.

“Please, Principal Lachfurst, not that, please! I’ll do anything.”

“I’m sorry, Penelope. Rules are rules. I have to be strict.” Lachfurst stopped pacing and sat in an armchair.

Penelope stood and walked close in front of him, straddling his knees. “You wanna know what I was doing?”

Penelope glanced out the back window. Russ and Lloyd were in a motorboat headed downriver, Reverend Jim swooping alongside them.

“The case is closed, young lady.”

“I was just going to tell you what I was doing. When I was playing hooky.”

“A confession?”

“I was with Mona. She and I snuck off into the woods and played a little game.” Penelope hiked her skirt up, just a little, which was a lot.

“A game?”

“Yes. What you do is you close your eyes, reach out, touch the person across from you with one finger, and just from that little contact try to tell what body parts you’ve touched. Have you ever played that game, Principal Lachfurst?”

“I can’t say as I have.”

“Here, try it. It’s fun.”

“Penelope, my mind is made up, I—”

“Here, I’ll go first…”

Penelope put one hand over her eyes and reached out with the other. She smiled. She wasn’t touching anything, but Mr. Lachfurst was.

“Why, Principal Lachfurst! That’s your tongue!”

Jenny braced
herself against the dash as the LTD’s tires sang along one of 241’s sharp curves.

“Sid, what the hell is goin’ on? Day started out normal. Trailered my boat to the launch at Mink Run, put in, motored up to your place, and then this loony-toon jumps out of the bushes next to your house and takes me hostage. Now he’s swiped my boat! And I don’t much favor a knife to my throat or him pushin’ me in the river.” She wiped river water from her face.

“You need your boat, and we need that tape. Jenny, listen t’me here. Now’s when we gotta keep our heads, all right? Think first and fast, be pissed off later. Where can we get in at the river?”

Jenny wiped at a rivulet running down her neck, glowered at the road, and said nothing.

“Are you thinking or what?” Sid prodded. “If you wanna get that boat, we gotta figure a way to grab him, either when he comes ashore or…”

“Hey.” Jenny’s eyes brightened. “Go straight here on 241.” Her heart beat to the rhythm of the windshield wipers. “Sid, when ya was a kid, your dad ever take ya to the rodeo?”

“A what?” Sid glanced in the rearview mirror and noticed Big Bob’s Bronco veer off behind them. “When I was a kid, the only place my dad took me was the woodshed. You got an idea?”

“Yup. Make a left at the railroad crossing.”

The Bobs veered off at 383, headed for the bridge to New York.

“Where are they going?” From the passenger seat, Little Bob pointed at Sid’s LTD barreling straight on 241.

“Hell, I dunno. Jenny’s plenty angry, though. River’s pretty cold this time of year to get dunked in it.” Big Bob shrugged off a sympathy shiver.

“Couldn’ta missed the turn, and that way they’re just gonna drive away from the river.” Little Bob shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

“Well, what we gotta think about is what we’re gonna do. So we drive down 79 on the New York side, follow him. Then what?”

Little Bob shrugged.

“He’s gotta be headed somewhere, and when he gets there, he’s gonna come ashore, right?”

“Yeah, well, we just better hope it’s the New York side of the river, maybe right at Mink Run. We won’t be able to cross again until we hit Frustrumburg.”

The Bronco buzzed across the simple truss bridge spanning the Delaware River called the Mink Run Bridge. They slowed to a stop midcrossing.

“There he is, comin’ this way.” Big Bob tapped the glass, pointing.

“Wow, but I don’t see Russ and Lloyd.” Little Bob craned to see past Big Bob’s bulk.

“They’ll be along. Russ’s motor’s got ten horses, Jenny’s got seven. They’ll be along any—hey, there they come!”

A thousand feet upriver was Russ’s boat in full-speed pursuit.

Big Bob drove the Bronco to the New York side of the bridge and pulled in to Mink Run’s dirt lot and boat launch, right next to Jenny’s pickup and trailer.

They got out and scrambled along a slippery path down to the river, headed for some boulders under the bridge at its pier. The drizzle had slackened to mist, and the sky was brightening.

Price looked at the bridge and the shore, then slowed his motor. Then he noticed the Bobs, throttled up, and zoomed on.

“There he goes,” Little Bob moaned.

“Maybe we shoulda stayed up top, caught him when he landed. What do ya think?” Big Bob jerked a thumb back toward the Bronco.

“I think he’s headed for Frustrumburg.”

Price’s mind was soaring on sleepless wings, empowered by greed, aloft in skies clouded by the persistent gong of a shovel blade bashing his parietal bone. The sutured bullet wound on his chest bled lazily.

“There’s a whole lotta these people in on this thing. That woman, the old guy, the big guy, the little guy, the bearded guy—they’re all in on it! Boy, maybe there’s rewards for them. Maybe they’re all fugitives.”

Motoring toward the right shore, he cut the boat into a flume, glancing off a rock and wending through some rapids.

“Let’s see, now the hundred grand will be all mine, and if you guess that, on average, each of the others gets me, say, five grand…Maybe I’ll end up with a hundred twenty-five grand.”

He tried to wipe some of the dried mud from his face with a filthy forearm. Sweat beaded on his brow.

“Lord knows how many people these folks have bumped off. They lure them up there, then run them over with trucks! Probably where the New York mobs dispose of people. Who would ever think of Hellbender Eddy! Ha! It’s brilliant. Maybe that tough old bird’s the ringleader.”

Price saw something black coming at him in his peripheral vision and ducked—Reverend Jim swooped down and landed on the boat’s bow. The boat swerved under some willow branches and veered back out toward the channel. The prop fouled briefly in the weeds, and he played with the throttle a moment to make sure the outboard kept running. He squinched his eyes shut and gave his brain a rattle. Sleep had been a stranger to him these past couple of days. Was that a one-legged bird sitting on the bow?

Reverend Jim considered Price with one eye, then the other, his head cocked in anticipation.

“Maybe I should just forget about calling Captain Reuster. Yeah, maybe I should just call the FBI. This is interstate, after all. Reuster, if I call him, he’ll just laugh. Those bastards at the hospital! Ha! Try to keep me from my wife, will ya?”

His watery, feverish eyes scanned the shore, then focused on Reverend Jim. What did that damn bird want, anyway?

“Damn.” Russ nodded at the bridge ahead. “I thought he was gonna pull over at Mink Run.”

Lloyd looked downriver.

“The Bobs scared him off. But now where’s he going to come ashore? Beyond here, he’ll have to walk a mile or so or do some rock climbing to get outta the woods.” Lloyd scratched his beard. “He can’t be thinking about going to Frustrumburg.”

“Can’t he?” Russ snorted.

“But what about Peekamoose Falls?”

Widely known as the Delaware’s most treacherous rapids, Peekamoose Falls gave pause to even the most seasoned canoeists and kayakers. As the sides of the falls were comprised of unruly mobs of boulders, there was only one way through the rapids—right down the center, a quarter mile of unpredictable liquid maelstrom. Recreational boaters knew to take out at Mink Run to avoid the falls altogether. Though there were no sheer vertical drops along Peekamoose Falls, the remarkably turgid boils thundered downhill, aimed at one rock that stood out from the gangs to either side. Known as “The Moose,” this towering boulder was the biggest, meanest, most igneous rock of them all, a drunken, belligerent bully who’d stepped out to face down all challengers.

Russ throttled back his outboard at the Mink Run Bridge, where signs to either side of the river warned boaters: “DANGER: IMPASSABLE RAPIDS—POINT OF NO RETURN.”

Lloyd pointed downriver. “Is that Reverend Jim in the boat with him?”

“Jenny, I gotta tell you, this is nuts!” Sid looked up and down the tracks. “What should happen, if, like, a train comes?”

“Ya got any better ideas?” Jenny coiled rope around her forearm. “Besides, trains don’t come along that often.”

Sid heaved the rest of the rope out of the trunk of his LTD and slammed the lid. It was the same rope he’d used for dropping Fest’s body down the pile casing. He and Jenny stood on a high, narrow steel and stone bridge with one track and no handrails.

“What, a train once a week, once a month, what?”

Jenny pointed an arresting finger. “Look, buster, you owe me one.”

“How often?”

“Once a day or so.”

“Once a day? Or so?”

“If a train comes, we’ll pull off the tracks, O.K.?”

“Jenny, we’re in the middle of a goddamn bridge here! Pull off where?” Sid gestured to the river below. “Into that mean-lookin’ piece of river? I don’t think so.” He ran a hand through his hair, shaking his head at Peekamoose Falls far below. He knew he shouldn’t be doing this, not with Jenny wearing those damned red hikers. Sid wasn’t just tempting fate, he was baiting it.

Jenny cinched a slipknot in the rope and fixed a loop in the end. “We’ll be outta here in no time, Sid. Don’t be such a chickenshit.” She tossed her lasso over an I beam and down the side of the trestle.

Sid glowered at her. “Can y’at least tell me which way the train comes, so I’m not, like, driving toward the friggin’ thing as it comes at me?”

“From Frustrumburg, from New York, that direction.” Jenny lashed her end of the rope to the bumper of the LTD. “Now get in the car and I’ll tell ya when t’go.”

“That direction?” Sid pointed, taking the opportunity to wipe sweat from his brow with a forearm. “You’re sure?”

“Will ya get in the damn car, Sid? He’s coming….”

“The train’s comin’?” Sid prepared to run.

“No, Sid. Look, upriver. That fool with my boat is what’s coming. Now get in the car.” Jenny shoved him toward his charge.

Sid glanced skyward, where the sun seemed to have edged its way between the clouds so as not to miss the action. “What’d I do to deserve this?”

Actually, he could think of a few things.

Price hardly noticed the “POINT OF NO RETURN” signs, but he did notice the car above, the woman, and the snare. There was no real way around the rope’s area of influence. It was evident to Price, even in his state, that any effort to avert a direct shot at the main channel would put him into some nasty-looking rocks. Peekamoose’s roar blended with the shovel clanging in his head.

A lasso hung just three feet above the water. But there was nothing to keep Price from deflecting it, which, as he drew near, he prepared to do with an outstretched arm. If nothing else, he hoped the lasso would scare off that damn black bird that was circling above him.

Reverend Jim ducked under the loop as it passed over the bow, then seemed to sense trouble and took flight.

The loop approached Price’s hand.

The loop went suddenly up, over his head.

Then down, behind him. It was a fake-out. The snare came down flat, and right over the outboard.

“Go!”

Sid could have sworn he heard a locomotive blast at some distant grade crossing. The LTD rolled five feet, and the rope snapped taut with a sound like the crack of a bullwhip.

Price was struggling to pull the snare back over the outboard’s cowling when the rope lashed tight. The outboard punched him in the chest and a jolt folded him over the motor. His next, gasping sensation was like getting clonked over the head with a shovel again. Spinning, buzzing, floating. He caught a flash of the boat drifting pretty-as-you-please down the rapids. From above he heard a resounding shout.

“SHIT!” Jenny shouted again, stomping the gravel and kicking the ties with her crimson hikers. She leaned back over the bridge to reaffirm the disaster. Yup, there went her boat, drifting down Peekamoose Falls. Below dangled her motor, still sputtering on fumes, the fuel hose hanging down like a monkey tail, and Price draped over the top. The idea had been to lift the boat by the engine and dump Price.

The rope crackled as it slid over the I beam, her catch-o-the-day twirling as he rose.

“Sid! Stop, Sid!” The LTD didn’t stop. In fact, it sped up. “What the…?” Jenny propped a foot on a rail and her kneecap hummed. Steel rail plates clattered up and down the track.

“Oh, damn it to hell!” She took a few steps backward, turned, and hightailed it over the bridge toward New York.

“Jenny? Hey! Jenny!” Lloyd shouted from Russ’s boat under where Price hung.

Russ had the boat pointed upriver, three-quarter throttle just to remain in place. He noted tiny bits of leachate and rust starting to fall from the trestle, dimpling the water.

“Uh-oh.” Rope bristled over the I beam overhead as Price rose steadily into the air. Russ looked toward the Pennsylvania bank and saw the LTD’s shadow on the swirling water, headed for shore.

“You hear that? Is that a…? That’s a train!” Lloyd shouted. “When it rolls over the rope…if Jenny, or the car…” Lloyd looked over at the LTD’s shadow.

Rail plates clanked above, while Price twirled and moaned.