Huckleberry Finished (21 page)

“Get back, blast it!”

Williams ignored the warning. He leaped at Vince and reached for the gun.

The shot was deafeningly loud in the relatively close confines of the pilothouse. I didn't see smoke or flame gush from the barrel. There was just the roar of the shot, and then Williams was falling back against the wheel with blood welling from the hole in his chest and staining his uniform jacket. He flung out one hand and grabbed a spoke in an attempt to catch himself, and that caused the wheel to spin as Williams fell to the floor.

The riverboat began to turn.

At the same time I realized that Rafferty had pulled the same trick as I had earlier. He had been playing possum, pretending to be unconscious as he listened to what the rest of us were saying. Now he twisted around and kicked out at Vince's legs, catching him on the side of a knee. Vince cried out in pain and fell. Rafferty went after him, trying to get his hands around Vince's neck.

Vince slashed at him with the gun, raking it across Rafferty's face. Crimson spurted from a cut on Rafferty's forehead opened up by the gun's sight. Vince hit him again, breaking his nose this time. Rafferty groaned and sagged back. Vince crashed the gun down in his face twice more. I thought I heard bone splintering. Vince's face twisted in lines of insane hatred.

I didn't see any more. I lunged for the doorway, my injured hip slowing me down a little.

But I made it out the door despite that and started down the stairs toward the third deck. I had taken only a couple of steps when a familiar voice called, “Delilah!”

I looked down and saw Mark Twain at the bottom of the stairs, white suit, bushy mustache and all. But I thought I either had lost my mind or was seeing things, because there were four Mark Twains in all, scattered along the deck near the bottom of the stairs, peering up at me. I stopped, blinked, shook my head.

Then Vince flung the door to the pilothouse open behind me, stepped out, and started shooting. I saw one of the Mark Twains go down.

“Mark!” I cried, but I wasn't talking about the writer. I had recognized Mark Lansing's voice when he called my name, and for all I knew, he was the Twain who was hit.

Furious, I turned and threw myself at Vince's legs, driving my body into them as hard as I could. The collision upended him and made him fall over me with a startled cry. He hit the stairs and continued bouncing down them toward the third deck. I couldn't tell if he still had the gun or if the fall had caused him to drop it.

The closest Mark Twain charged up the stairs and landed on Vince before Vince hit the bottom. He crashed a fist into Vince's face—once, twice, three times—as hard and fast as he could, then leaped over Vince's senseless form and hurried on up the stairs to me. I felt his hands on my arms. They pulled me up, and Mark Lansing said, “Delilah! Delilah, are you okay?”

So he wasn't the Twain who'd been shot. I took a second to be grateful for that, then gasped, “What time is it?”

“What?” Mark asked, clearly startled that I'd be wondering about such a thing right now.

“What time is it?” I repeated.

Mark let go of me with one hand and used it to pull an old-fashioned turnip pocket watch out of the watch pocket of his vest. “This is a prop, but it keeps good time,” he said. “I've got eight thirty. Why?”

“Because in seven minutes,” I told him, “a bomb is gonna blow this riverboat to kingdom come.”

T
here's nothing like the word
bomb
to make folks go nuts. Usually with good cause, of course. The other Mark Twains heard it, including the wounded one, who was on his feet again and obviously not hurt too bad, and they took off, yelling at the top of their lungs.

Mark's hands tightened on my shoulders. “A bomb?” he repeated. “Are you sure?”

I nodded. “It's too long a story to go into right now, but I'm sure.” Something Vince had said earlier popped up in my mind. “And I think I know where it is. You've seen the police reports. Where was Hannah killed?”

Mark frowned. “As far as the cops could determine, she was struck on the head and then thrown into the paddlewheel from the third deck.”

I believed it. Rafferty was big enough and strong enough to throw an unconscious young woman that far, so that she'd clear the lower decks and fall into the paddlewheel.

That jibed with what I'd thought. I said, “Come on,” and pushed past Mark to start down the steps.

He followed close behind me, steadying me with a hand on my arm. “Delilah, we've got to get off this boat.”

“There's no time,” I told him. “We couldn't swim far enough away to be safe. And there's no way everybody could get off in time.” We stepped over Vince, who was still sprawled near the bottom of the stairs, out cold. I glanced upriver toward Hannibal and saw flashing lights coming toward us. A police boat, I figured. But it wouldn't get there in time, either.

“What are you going to do?” Mark asked. “Disarm the damn bomb?”

He had me there. I didn't know anything about disarming bombs.

“I don't reckon you know how to do that?” I asked him.

He shook his head.

“Well, come on,” I said. “Maybe we can get the blasted thing off the boat.”

I went at a run toward the observation deck. Vince had been sitting there when I'd found him earlier in the day, and he'd had a backpack with him, I recalled. And this was the place where Hannah had been killed. What more appropriate spot than that to plant his instrument of vengeance for her?

I started jerking open the doors of the storage areas underneath the benches. Mark got the idea and started helping. After only a couple of seconds, he recoiled like he'd found a snake and said, “Son of a—! Delilah, over here.”

I hurried to his side and bent down to look. The light wasn't good, but there was enough for me to see the simple-looking box, about a foot square, with some wires and a cheap, battery-powered digital clock attached to it. The readout on the clock said
7:35
.

Two minutes left.

I reached for the box. Mark grabbed my wrist, stopping me. “What if it's rigged to go off instantly if anybody disturbs it?”

“It's not,” I said, trying to put some conviction in my voice. “Vince didn't think anybody would find it. It's just a simple device, the kind the insurgents in Iraq used. Vince probably saw a lot of 'em over there.”

“You can't know that,” Mark said.

The last number in the display switched from
5
to
6
.

“It's gonna blow up in another minute anyway,” I said.

Mark said, “Yeah,” and reached past me. Before I could stop him, he picked up the bomb.

It didn't go off. He turned and ran for the rail and when he got there he heaved that box as hard as he could. I lost sight of it in the dark, but I heard the splash as it hit the water.

“Noooo!” Vince screamed behind us.

We turned and saw him standing there looking horrified and grief stricken, and then somebody kicked his knee from behind and brought him down. Detective Charlotte Travis landed on top of him, planting a knee in the small of his back to pin him to the deck as she grabbed his arms and brought them behind him. He didn't fight her as she slipped plastic restraints around his wrists. He had failed to avenge his lost love, and nothing else mattered to him.

Travis looked up at Mark and me and said, “Does somebody want to tell me what in the world—”

That was when the bomb went off.

I had hoped that being dumped in the Mississippi would deactivate it, or whatever you call it, but clearly, that wasn't the case. The
Southern Belle
literally jumped as the force of the explosion shot through the river. Water flew a hundred feet or more in the air and came back down like a sudden thunderstorm. The explosion had sounded like thunder, muffled as it was by the river. The current increased suddenly like a tsunami, and for a second it felt like we were flying.

But the vast waters of the Mississippi also acted to spread out the power of the blast, and as the water flung high into the air pattered back down, the effects began to subside. We had all been jolted off our feet by the initial concussion, but now we were able to sit up.

“Was that a
bomb
?” Travis asked.

That seemed like a pretty dumb question to me. It must have to her, too, once she thought about it, because she glared at me and said, “I hope you can explain all of this, Ms. Dickinson.”

“Why me?” I asked.

“Well, it's either you or Mark Twain,” she said as she got to her feet, nodding toward Mark.

“‘Every man is a moon and has a dark side,'” Mark quoted.

Travis frowned. “What?”

I pointed to Vince Mallory. “He showed his dark side. We'll tell you all about it, but first you'd better go on up to the pilothouse. I reckon you'll find another killer up there.”

 

Rafferty was still in the pilothouse, all right. He wasn't going anywhere, not with the fractured skull Vince had given him. He died in a St. Louis hospital two days later without regaining consciousness.

Captain L. B. Williams was already dead when the police reached the pilothouse. Vince's bullet had nicked his heart, and he'd bled to death.

Clyde Garvey spilled everything about the crooked gambling in the casino, though, and was quick to implicate Rafferty in Hannah Kramer's murder. He and Williams had both known what Rafferty had done to cover up their scheme.

I was the only one who could testify as to what Vince had said about killing Ben Webster, but he never denied it in court. The trial six months later resulted in him being convicted on one count of murder, two counts of voluntary manslaughter, and multiple counts of attempted murder since he'd tried to blow up the
Southern Belle
with everybody on it. His attorney tried to argue the insanity defense, using testimony from army psychiatrists who said that Vince had been dishonorably discharged for the mental problems he had exhibited when he was in the service, but the jury found him guilty anyway. He had enough life sentences stacked consecutively that he'd never see the outside of a prison again. Of course, he would probably spend that time in a prison mental ward, since he went catatonic following his conviction and showed no signs of coming out of it.

I didn't think it really mattered much, one way or the other. Vincent Meadows—his real name—was in a prison of his own making and would never get out of it.

Ben Webster's real name, by the way, was Todd Shepherd. From what I learned later, they had indeed been best friends while serving in Iraq. Shepherd had tried to rein in Meadows's violent, obsessive tendencies, according to other soldiers who knew them. Unfortunately, he had failed.

As far as Detective Travis was ever able to find out, Vince had dated Hannah Kramer exactly twice. From those two dates, he had spun out the whole fantasy about them having a future together. Evidently he had lived in a world of his own, and had for quite a while. That was one reason he was able to adopt different identities so easily and convincingly. To Vince, nothing was real except his own fantasies.

Learning all that came later, though. That night, once the riverboat was docked at Hannibal again and everything had settled down, what I wanted to know was where those extra Mark Twains had come from.

“They perform as Twain in dinner theaters here in town,” Mark explained with a smile as we sat on the observation deck with Louise and Eddie Kramer. He had taken off the wig and mustache and make-up but still wore the white suit. “They're all friends, so they decided to come over here between their shows and take in my performance. Checking out the competition, as it were. The cops let them come on board, since Detective Travis just said to keep the passengers and crew from getting off.”

Louise said, “I heard that one of them was wounded. Not badly, I hope?”

Mark shook his head. “Grazed his arm, that's all. I'm sure it hurt like blazes, but it's not a serious injury.”

“How'd you all show up on the third deck like that, at just the right time?” I asked.

“Everybody knew something was wrong when the boat left the dock like that, without any announcement or anything,” Mark explained. “I just had a hunch you were mixed up in it somehow, Delilah, and went looking for you. The other guys came with me. I was going to start by asking Captain Williams if he'd seen you, as well as trying to find out why we were headed downriver.” He smiled. “Luck was on our side, I guess.”

Eddie said, “I don't think we can ever thank you enough for finding out what happened to our little girl, Mark.”

Again, Mark shook his head. He pointed at me. “Delilah did that. She kept poking around until Rafferty finally made a move against her, just like he did with Hannah. Thank God it didn't end up the same.”

“I wish it hadn't ended like that with Hannah,” I said.

Eddie sighed. “We can't change the past. Lord knows, I sometimes wish we could.”

Louise slid both of her arms around his right arm as she sat beside him. “But we'll hold the good memories in our hearts forever,” she said. “Nobody can take those away from us.”

We sat there in silence for a while longer, and then Eddie and Louise went back to their cabin, leaving Mark and me alone on one of the benches. The police had already gone over the observation deck, since this was where Vince had hidden the bomb, but there really wasn't anything to find. They had taken down the crime scene tape.

“It seems strange that right where we're sittin', there was a bomb that nearly blew us all sky-high,” I said.

“‘Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't.'”

“Mark Twain?”

“Yep. It's from
Pudd'nhead Wilson
. Most of his really famous sayings are. I like this one, too: ‘Let us endeavor so to live that when we die, even the undertaker will be sorry.'”

“Well, the undertaker's gonna have to wait a while for me,” I said. “I've got to get this tour group back to St. Louis and then head home to Atlanta.”

“Think you might ever want to cruise the Mississippi again?”

“You don't plan to stay on as Mark Twain, do you?”

He shook his head. “No. I sort of enjoyed it, but I'm a detective, not an actor. I thought I might take this cruise again as a passenger, though, one of these days. You think I could book it through your agency?”

“Nothing stoppin' you,” I told him. I didn't stop him when he slipped an arm around my shoulders, either.

The mighty Mississippi kept rolling, and I figured that for a while, I would just roll right along with it.