Home Repair is Homicide 13 - Crawlspace (35 page)

Then she remembered the flashlight, checked her pocket, and found it. Not that it would still work. Or that it would do any good, even if it did.

She fumbled it out, thumbed its switch. To her astonishment it went on, just as she spotted the lights out on the water.

Running lights, red and white. She swayed, nearly losing the flashlight, but caught it just in time and aimed it out at them, praying that whoever was on the boat out there would see

And that they knew Morse code. Spasms of shivering palsied her hand over the flashlight’s lens as she covered it.

And uncovered it.
Dot-dot-dot. Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dot-dot
. SOS, the universally known distress signal … but only if they saw it. She sent it again.

Each time she let go of the rock, she nearly slid off into the waves. But it took two hands to hold the flashlight and cover the lens.

A wave rolled in suddenly, its bulk blocking the light beam, its rogue height first confusing her, then pinning her in terror. In the next instant it was on her, spinning her, twiglike. Up and down, time slowing to a stretched-out instant …

Impact. Like slamming a wall. Everything in her stopped. No pain, just an astonished feeling …

Alive. She lifted her head. Blood smeared the rock beneath her, thickly gleaming in the light from …

No pain yet. Cautiously, she peered around. The wave had carried her shoreward, toward the tall bank of granite riprap along the shore at the edge of the boat basin.

And there it had dropped her. Saved her, really.

So far. Slowly, drenched and iced right down to the center of her bone marrow and feeling her wits still engaged in the very uncertain process of gathering themselves together, she got her arms and legs straightened out underneath her and began pushing herself up.

CLAMBERING PAINFULLY UP AND OVER THE GRANITE RIPRAP TO
the walkway between the harbor and the boat basin, Jake made herself forget everything except making it that far.

Next came a short, steep path between two of the old brick buildings that fronted on Water Street. She took it on hands and knees, at last hauling herself upright on the sidewalk directly in front of the Artful Dodger.

Still no one on the street. She could try to find someone, but the moments she would spend doing that and then explaining might make all the difference to Bella and Ellie.

If there was still any to be made. The Artful Dodger’s door stood open; gazing wildly around for a passing car once more and seeing none, she went in.

The light behind the bar was still on but the cell phone was gone from its stand under the mirror. In the alcove by the restrooms, the pay phone’s receiver lay with the cord yanked out.

She hurried through the darts area and past the karaoke machine,
snatching one of the darts from the dartboard as she passed, gripping it in her fist. Across the small stage to the stairs …

Silence. And if he had any brains at all, Roger would be far away from here by now.

But then, good old Roger hadn’t demonstrated a lot of brain power recently, had he? He’d gotten himself neck-deep in all this already. So he could still be in here somewhere.

With the dart raised to eye level, ready to jab with it, she hurried down the stairs. “Bella? Bella, if you can hear me—”

No sound came from the end of the hall. She raced to the trap door; the ladder lay beside it. By now the room below must be flooded… . How long had she been on the rocks?

She didn’t know, but now a terrible suspicion struck her that it was longer than she’d thought—maybe a lot longer. Flinging herself at the trapdoor’s lid, she yanked up on the iron loop.

The heavy lid rose. At last it swung high. A strong smell of sea-water rose from the open hole. No sound came from it.

She shouted, still heard nothing, wrangled the ladder’s legs into the hole and lowered them, then clambered down into the dark water.

The chamber was flooded, the water over her head. No voices, no cries for help, came from anywhere in it. But there had been nowhere else for the trapped women to go.

So they were still down there. And Bella couldn’t swim. Holding her breath and with her eyes clamped shut against the gritty, acidly burning salt water, Jake swam to where she thought she’d left them, fingers searching blindly ahead.

Stuff swirled around her in the cold water, the seaweed and unidentifiable slimy bits clasping themselves horridly to her. Tendrils of vegetation poked at her eyelids and explored her lips as if seeking a way in.

A convulsive shudder went through her as something curled
briefly around her wrist and then was gone.
Gah
, she thought, but it was too late for disgust.

Too late for anything. The utter foolishness of what she was doing struck her. But she couldn’t just leave them, she just …

The clasping thing grabbed her again, hung on tight. A hand, clinging … at the same instant the plastic tube she’d given Bella to breathe through floated up, smacking her on the forehead.

Feeling around desperately, her hand found a mass of hair; she dug her fingers into it, trying to raise it. But it wouldn’t come, and with her last scrap of panicked energy, she let herself sink, bent her knees, touched the floor with her feet, and pushed.

Whatever she’d grabbed was stuck. Caught on something. Or it was dead weight … But then as her lungs were about to explode she felt her body surging upward, still dragging a hank of hair … .

Jake found the ladder by chance, grabbed onto it with one hand, and dragged the hair along with the other. At the top she couldn’t climb anymore, with one hand still clutching Bella, but then Bella began moving.

One pale hand waved like a seaweed frond, then grasped the ladder rung in front of it purposefully. Jake hauled herself up out of the hole; right behind her, a wet mass of henna-red hair burst through the water’s surface.

Bella’s face followed. Jake seized Bella’s shoulders, heaved her up and out of the hole the rest of the way, sucked a breath in, then plunged down through the hole and under again.

This time she opened her eyes, and the hell with how it hurt them. Ellie sprawled bonelessly, clothes billowing out around her like laundry in a tub.

Jake wrapped her arms around the cloud of fabric and pushed off again, dragging dead weight. Weeping, sure she had been too late. She reached the ladder, but as she tried to shove Ellie up ahead of her she felt her lungs rebel, sucked in a big breath of seawater, and panicked.

But from above came Bella’s hand, searching and finding. She pulled Ellie from the hole, then reached down again and grabbed Jake, who let herself be pulled until her face felt breathable air, then battled the rest of the way herself.

Ellie lay by the trapdoor. Coughing and choking she gagged up an enormous gush of ugly water, rolled over onto her stomach with a groan, and finally spoke.

“You cut it a little close,” she said, gasping through the sick, wet-sponge sound of her lungs reinflating.

But she actually smiled when she said it, or at any rate it was as close to a smile as a person could get while regurgitating half the bay.

Jake crawled between the two exhausted-looking women. “Come on. You can finish being sick later. Right now we need to—”

But neither of them were listening to her, staring in horror instead at a ripple appearing suddenly on the murky water in the trapdoor opening.

Randy Dodd’s face lunged up out of it, eyes narrowed into a glare of murderous fury and teeth bared. The rest of his big body followed; roaring, he heaved himself up at them.

“Oh, shut up,” said Bella tiredly, and stuck her fist out at his nose; it flattened like a tomato. His eyes rolled up whitely as he submerged again, the water closing around him.

Bella slammed the trapdoor shut. “Nice one,” said Jake, and would have laughed bitterly. But she was already crying, because all of it was for nothing:
Sam
.

By now he must be dead; Carolyn Rathbone and Chip Hahn, too. Randy had taken them, and she doubted he’d set his captives up comfortably somewhere to wait for him. She would probably never even find Sam’s body, never know—

“Come on,” she said again, eyeing the trapdoor unhappily. “Let’s just get out of here before that jerk decides to try using up another one of his nine lives.”

Bella helped Ellie as they struggled up the stairs, pausing to rest sometimes, and sometimes to weep. At the top, the rooms were as Jake had left them, dim and silent. The mingled smells of chlorine and stale beer hung in the still air.

Through the back window overlooking the breakwater, the bay spread out darkly. Some men were unloading something from a small boat, but from this distance she couldn’t see what it was and she didn’t care anymore, anyway.

She turned from the window. Bella and Ellie were in the bar area, on their way to the front door. Jake could hardly move her feet anymore, she was so exhausted suddenly, the taste of blood on her lips nauseatingly pungent.

Ellie looked back over her shoulder questioningly.

“Give me a minute,” Jake began, but then Ellie’s expression changed. Turning slowly, Jake faced Roger Dodd, who stood behind her with a gun in his hand.

He put it to her head.

“I want Ellie and Bella to walk outside and get in Jake’s car,” he said. “Both in the front seat, Ellie driving.”

He nudged Jake’s scalp with the gun. “Toss her the keys.”

Jake found the car keys at the bottom of her pants pocket, tossed them. Ellie caught them as Roger went on, “I’ll be right behind.”

He marched Jake forward a few steps. “If you do anything but what I tell you, or if you see anyone and try to talk to them or signal them, I’ll blow her head off. Then I’ll kill myself.”

So this was it. The endgame … “You and Randy were together on it all along, weren’t you?” she said dully.

He didn’t reply. “Chip Hahn was right about you. I should have seen it, too. But you’d done the grief thing so well. Faked it, that is. And I got snowed by it, just like everyone else. Especially when you faked Sam’s call.”

Because she’d wanted to believe …

He nudged her again. “It wasn’t all fake. I loved Anne. But my
brother, Randy … well.” A humorless laugh escaped him. “You may have noticed that he can be persuasive. Could be, rather.”

As was the gun to her head. “He came up with the plan. If I went along with it and helped him, fine,” Roger explained. “But if not—”

“He’d kill you, too.” She felt his nod of agreement in the movement of the gun barrel, now cold at the base of her skull.

And knew he was still lying. “Do it, please,” she told Bella and Ellie. “Do what he says. And, Bella, no heroics.”

Bella looked rebellious, but as it sank in that Roger Dodd was in control now, she nodded grimly; she and Ellie went out.

“They’ll call help,” Jake said when they’d gone. “The minute they get out there, they’ll try to—”

Roger reached over the bar to the open cash drawer, scooped out the contents. “Nobody’s around. They’re all out searching.”

He stuffed the money into his jacket pocket. “And anyway, if anyone tries to stop me, I’ll do what I said.”

Kill her, he meant. “You don’t come back from a thing like this,” he said, marching her forward.

She spoke again. “So you helped Randy disappear. You knew he’d come back to kill his wife, and then yours, so the two of you could inherit. That’s the way you’d planned it.”

“The way
he’d
planned it,” Roger corrected her. “I told you that already. My plan was to let him do the dirty work, then get rid of him.”

Keep talking
, she thought. “So the map, the fake money, they were all just—”

He laughed again. “Window dressing. To give him something to think about, make him believe I was still on board. I told him if he got in trouble to leave the money where I could retrieve it.”

“So he made a map and planned to float it on the same buoy where you left the cash. The fake cash,” she said. “So you’d know where he put it.”

“Right, so he could get out of the country without trying to smuggle it past customs.” He pushed the door open ahead of her. “We’d try again to make the transfer sometime later, I told him.”

Outside it was dark and silent. “But you double-crossed him, had the fake money all ready in advance?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, of course I did. My plan was, he’d either get caught—if that happened I’d play victim, of course—or he’d figure it out about the money and when he came back for me, I’d be waiting for him, kill him in self-defense.”

He shoved her outside. “I didn’t know he’d turned into a nut job. A freaking girl-grabber, the kind you only read about in the paper. Who the hell would expect that?”

Glancing up and down the empty street, he kept the gun at her head. “And I didn’t know those two goofballs from the city would show up at the wrong moment, wanting to interview him.”

Chip and Carolyn, he meant. He kept close behind her as she crossed the dark parking lot to her car. But as they neared it he slowed uncertainly.

No one was in it. No Ellie, no Bella.
Sam
, she thought, and then,
Oh, the hell with it
.

They’d be here or they wouldn’t. Swiveling on one foot, she ducked hard away from the gun, punched out at Roger, and felt her fist sink into his midsection.

Ellie, hunkered down in the darkness at the rear of the car, jumped out as if on signal and landed a solid jab to the side of his head as he doubled over, wheezing in pain.

Bella jumped out, too, caught the gun he dropped, and pointed it at him as he collapsed. “Think I won’t shoot you if you move?” she asked him. “Think I’m scared to?”

But she obviously would and wasn’t, so he didn’t.

“Jake,” said Ellie. “Look.”

A man was approaching, running toward them down the street as
fast as he could. It was her husband, Wade, and as he ran he was shouting something. When he got nearer and she heard what it was, her knees went wobbly.

“Jake! Are you all right?” He sprinted up to her and threw his arms around her. “We were on the water, we saw the—”

Distress signal. SOS. On the rocks with the flashlight; it felt like forever ago.
“Yes
,” she managed, leaning on him.