A Face at the Window (30 page)

Or possible. "Nope. Got a look at him a few times is all," said Anthony. "In that bar of his. And I saw the picture Marky got from him."

Hastily she buckled the final life jacket strap just as Marky peered around suspiciously. He looked almost as ghastly as his partner, but he was getting his wind back, his face less greenish and his eyes hard and unwavering.

Anthony frowned again at the rapidly approaching shoreline, then turned to face her once more. "Your hair was different in it.
Longer, and you were wearing earrings. The guy's got one just like ‘em. Wears it, too."

Buoyed by the promise of dry land, his voice strengthened. "Carries the picture in his wallet, the guy does. Marky said so."

With her mind racing, she turned sideways enough to get the outboard's tiller arm into her peripheral vision. Below it, on the floor nearly under her seat, lay a green plastic tackle box.

"Part of the earring," Anthony corrected himself. The second wind he'd gotten was making him chatty. "The round part, not the dangly part like you had on in the picture."

But by now she was barely listening to him, because in that tackle box were the cotter pins for the outboard's propeller, she was almost certain. That was where they kept extras in case one broke, not back in the house.

It was the way Sam did it in his boat, too. Plus—please-maybe an extra spark plug. Given the way they'd left gas in the tank to get all sludgy, she figured there was only about a fifty-fifty chance this boat's owners had done something so sensible as put a spare plug in the box. But…

She forced her mind back to what Anthony was saying; by now he was looking oddly at her, and she didn't want him to see any further hint of a plan in her face.

Crazy and unlikely to work, but the only plan she had. She would just have to worry about Helen later. "I don't get this," she began. "I've never worn the earrings you're describing."

Because her mother's ruby earrings were clearly what Anthony was talking about, but that didn't make sense. Her dad wore one, and the other-Campbell had it. A gift of love, he'd always insisted, claiming Jake's mother had given the earring to him long before her murder; it was how he explained how it came to him.

And then it hit Jake, whose photo Campbell must be carrying:
not hers, but her mother's. The thought made her shudder, but just then the wind shifted, slamming them broadside; the skiff heeled over hard again and threatened to swamp as Marky cursed loudly, then leaned helplessly over the rail in renewed wretchedness.

Good, she thought, but now was no time for entertainment. "Pull hard on the left oar, get the bow into the wind," she told Anthony, who obeyed without question; the skiff settled. Now if she could only get the engine started, get the tackle box open and find a spark plug in it—

"Hey." Marky's voice was flat, his eyes blackly glittering as he pushed himself up from the rail, his face smooth with the realization of Anthony's betrayal.

He'd spotted the Glock. And whatever else the awareness of his partner's hidden weapon had done, it had definitely cured his seasickness. "Don't you move a freakin’ inch, you little punk." He plucked the gun from Anthony's waistband.

Not much time…"Sorry, kiddo," she whispered to Lee as she slid the child's unresisting body onto the boat bottom, fumbled the box open—no lock, thank heavens, just a plastic latch— and found—

A white, cylindrical spark plug. "You punk," Marky repeated. Gripping the Glock in one hand and his own gun in the other, he had no eyes for anyone but Anthony.

Hurry…Desperately she sank the spark plug into its socket and turned it down tight, found the ignition wire and attached it, and seized the pull-rope's spray-slick grip-Seeming suddenly to understand how big a disaster had just befallen him, Anthony dropped the oars with a clatter, turned in a smooth, catlike maneuver that surprised her with its ease and grace, and leapt at Marky in a fluid pouncing motion.

She pulled the starter cord. The engine coughed once, died
with a metallic clatter just as Marky stuck his weapon like some short-bladed cutting tool deep into Anthony's ribs and fired. But with an already uncertain footing, the recoil was enough to knock Marky off-balance, and then the boat lurched really hard.

Start, damn you. Jake
cursed silently at the outboard as, seemingly in slow motion, Marky began falling, put his hand out to catch himself, and missed. He fired once more on the way down, his second shot going wild as his head hit the skiff's rail with a sound like a melon splitting, the gun flying from his right hand in a shining, end-over-end arc out into the waves.

Just then the outboard caught and died again, as Marky's left hand came up still holding the weapon he'd had all along, the .38.

"Punk," he said thickly again as she braced her left hand on the outboard's chassis and with her right gave the mightiest pull of her life.

"Freakin’ punk." He seemed half stunned, his eyes slightly unfocused and his speech thickened. But his hand still worked and his finger tightened suddenly as Anthony grabbed for the .38.

Again…
The engine caught, howling; Jake fell on the throt-tle arm, twisted the sleeve, shoved the tiller as hard as she could to the right. In response the wooden craft veered obediently toward Old Sow, whose wide, green whorls with the tide running hard now took on a knifelike edge.

You want a boat ride?
she thought grimly at the men still struggling over the weapon.
I'll give you a boat ride.
And then, irrele-vantly,
I wonder what Sam would say if he could see me?

Seizing the .38, Anthony fell on his partner and punched him, just as the skiff hit the first of the Old Sow's innocent-appearing ripples. While she'd been working on starting the engine and the men had been busy fighting, they'd drifted away
from shore again. Gripping the tiller, she swung away from the seductive swirl of the sinkhole at the monster's vortex; the skiff's bow whipsawed wildly.

"Anthony, do this," the taller man recited as he hit Marky again. "Anthony, do
that"

Without warning another slowly rotating depression opened up in the water, a good two feet deep with a blackish-green spot at the center of it, the color of a bruise. The bow dropped before she could steer away from it; the stern rose up abruptly and the prop screamed, lifting out of the water still spinning.

Lee's blanket-wrapped body slid forward on the wet boat bottom, stopping only when Jake slammed her heel down onto the corner of the fabric. At the hard thump near her head, Lee's eyes drifted open; groggily, she looked around.

"Mama," she whimpered, trying to escape the blanket.

"Oh, baby, don't do that," Jake begged. She couldn't let go of the tiller or the whirlpool would swallow them; she'd gotten them in too far and now the water surged and pummeled them with a force that was purely geological, uncaring and blind. If she stopped steering for an instant or the engine failed, it would suck them down into its netherworld. Forever and ever…

Anthony hit Marky again. He'd been doing so for some time now, Jake realized belatedly. His fist made a wet, pulpy-sounding smack on what had been Marky's mouth. "Punk? I'm
a punk?"

Marky made an answering sound. It was by no stretch of the imagination a word, or anything like one. Nor did there seem to be any meaning behind it. It was just one of the sounds a human body could make when it had not yet finished dying.

Not quite. A sudden upsurge hit the skiff amidships, heeling it over with a vicious lurch and popping the bow up out of the sucking hole in the water. Jake dropped the tiller and snatched
Lee's sleeve just as the child was about to go over the nearly horizontal rail. And then…

Then the real thing was upon them. Eerily silent, dead ahead and devoid of mercy, the Old Sow turned majestically, its surface mirror-bright. A bit of flotsam bobbled toward it like a leaf in a storm drain, popped under like something being yanked hard from below, and vanished with a small wet
thup!

Anthony slammed his bloodied fist a final time into Marky's limp form and straightened, just as Lee escaped Jake's grasping hand and began crawling determinedly toward him under the rowing thwart.

Anthony turned, steadying himself on the heaving rail with the .38 still in his other hand and his face deathly pale, as if in the aftermath of some terrible seizure. His glance fell on Lee, and on the life jacket still wrapped tightly around her.

"No!" Jake cried, and dropped the throttle to idle for the barest instant before cranking it again hard, shooting the skiff forward and knocking Anthony sprawling.

The gun flew; she leaned down and snatched it before it hit the puddle of water pooling freshly in the boat's bottom—Where had
that come
from? she wondered for an instant—then grabbed up the tackle box, popped the weapon inside, and snapped the box shut.

"Give it to me." Anthony pulled himself halfway up onto the rowing thwart. Behind him in the bow lay Marky, unconscious.

Or dead. Jake kicked the tackle box behind her under the seat. "No, Anthony. I'm not giving it to you. It's over, don't you see? If we don't want to drown, we've got to try to—"

She waved at the devouring monster ahead. Even despite the remarkably helpful little two-and-a-half-horse Evinrude, the wooden skiff had begun turning, sucked inexorably toward that green mouth.

"Anthony," she began again, but then the obvious dawned on her: Water. In the boat. She looked down; the puddle was already an inch deep, and at the center of it a fountain bubbled merrily.

Marky's second shot had gone wild, all right.

Just not quite wild enough. He'd blown a hole in the bottom of the boat.

And now they were sinking.

For a moment
everything was quiet. Calm before storm, Jake thought as the whirlpool crept steadily nearer like a predator sneaking confidently up on its prey.

She met Anthony's gaze. "Unless you want to die," she told him, "sit down and shut up."

He looked at the leak, and at her again, and in his eyes she saw Marky's .38 dropping suddenly from his wish list.

Now he wanted her life jacket. "Come near me or Lee and this boat's going down," she warned him, meanwhile watching the water for the slightest hint that the whirlpool might be drifting away slightly. Because it did, sometimes; here one minute, there the next. The wind, the currents and tides changing so swiftly…

It could move a quarter mile in an instant. That, Sam had warned her, was what made it so treacherous. If it did, that was her cue to cut hard in the other direction. But it had to happen, first.

And it had to happen before they sank. "Hang on," she said, pushing the tiller to the left as she cranked the throttle again, engine howling as the prop spun foam, then dug in with a guttural moan.
Come on, baby, I'm begging you now.
A hundred yards off, a seagull sailed over with pink dawn shimmering in its wingtips.

Come
on…
The engine gurgled, giving out a sick groan, hit an air pocket and screamed briefly, bit in again with a chug. But it wasn't enough, they couldn't escape it, and—

Something rattled under the seat: a coffee can. She kicked it at Anthony. "Bail, damn you." Three inches deep, then four, the leak was lowering the skiff's transom very rapidly. Soon the bow would tip up, the transom would swamp, and—

Marky sat up, swaying. "Anthony," he garbled hideously.

He struggled to his knees, caught sight through swollen eyes of the heavy oar inches from his hand. "Anthony," she warned.

But he didn't hear, and the whirlpool was still a sucking monstrosity in the water, one that was apparently not going away until it swallowed them and took them on what Sam would've called the voyage to see what's on the bottom.

Meanwhile, the only thing she could remember about getting out of a rip tide—which was all that a whirlpool was, really, except its current went around in a circle instead of parallel to the shore—was the old advice everyone knew: Go with it. Relax and let it carry you along, until—

And suddenly she had it. Scary, like letting a riptide have its way with you. But it was their only chance.

Gently, she angled the tiller again, this time easing it to the right. The prow slipped toward the sinkhole, the boat's wild bouncing and juddering gone calm all of a sudden as its battle to escape quieted, the water sliding easily along its sides.

All the way around: Dog Island, the distant Narrows and the bridge, the nearer shores of Campobello all whirled, faster and faster as the engine and the current together sped them along…

Faster, until they'd gone all the way around and the wooden boat's prow aimed like a compass needle at Dog Island again—

Now.
Straightening the tiller and cranking the throttle a final time, she charged straight at the Old Sow's devouring edge.

A final time, because this was it; the boat's gathered momentum would either shoot them from the whirlpool's clutches or capsize them, to be dragged under and drowned.

As the prow hit the first edge-ripples like a fist hitting a concrete wall and the Evinrude howled miserably in agonized protest, the sun creeping up behind Campobello's green hilltops rose redly at last, its sudden brilliance near-blinding on water turned abruptly the color of Anthony's shirtfront.

The color of blood.