Murder in a Hot Flash (22 page)

“No rock did this.” John B. was the first to voice the obvious.

“There aren't any rocks on this beach,” she pointed out, soaking up the moods around her with stomach-dropping intensity. If they'd been in a room the fear, anger, and suspicion would be bouncing off its walls.

The director knelt to ream the slit edges with a finger, his gaze lingering, accusing each of the group in turn. Even Charlie. “Smooth, like a knife cut.”

Homer Blankenship checked his belt to find his hunting knife still in its sheath and gestured above his wounded craft, palms up, as if he were offering it a baby goat with a slit throat. “I'm not going to sabotage my own boats.” He raised and lowered the invisible offering and then repeated the action. “Christ, the wife's barely eking out grocery money cooking and slaving in a bed and breakfast, our house. I'm not going to risk my river license and have to move my family back to the city … who could have done this?”

Charlie's half-baked idea that the killer was along on this trip instead of back in California, soaking up civilization, was on the money. It made her feel less triumphant than trapped. One thing to ask for something, another to get it.

A totally insensitive idiot could have sensed Charlie was not alone with this inspiration. The difficulty with being accused of psychic sensitivity is you can never tell what's normal intuition because anything you say is held up to you as proof of your superiority to rational thought processes. It was a royal pain.

Mitch Hilsten wasn't the only one giving Charlie slit-eyed, sideways glances. What, they wanted her to make an announcement?

Hard to believe the slam-heavy sun on her head and the parched air smelling of rain. At the same time lightning blazed from a black cloud much too near them and moving closer on a powder-dry wind that rippled the water and shuddered the sunken end of the boat.

Sidney Levit straightened his shoulders, stretched his chin toward the unpredictable sky, and blew a couple of audible breaths through his nose. “This is unforgivable, unwarranted, unnecessary, and banal.”

Mitch Hilsten stood slumped and ashen, the California tan overpowered. Then again, he was an actor. “No, Sid, this is one good-sized problem.”

Dean Goodacre spit out the weed stem he'd been chewing and wiped sweat off his forehead with a beefy forearm. “This problem could be deadly.”

Scrag Dickens rolled his eyes, shook his ponytail. “Let us not get carried away. One night in the wilderness does not a catastrophe make. All kinds of people knew we were coming up here. They'll be searching for us by morning if not before.”

That's when Charlie decided the self-styled desert rat must be the murderer. Anybody without an agenda could see one night in the wilderness in such a situation could easily a dead body make.

Earl Seabaugh, however, looked the most suspicious of them all, causing Charlie to shift yet again. He
had
to be the murderer. After all, she could feel the hatred emanating from the cameraman, instead of just the fear and suspicion being given off by the others.

Damn it, Charlie, you don't
feel
anything of the sort and you could miss noticing something important that would help Edwina if you don't concentrate on what you
know
.

Oh, help Edwina. Sure.

Charlie's mother might be up a creek without a paddle but Charlie was down the river with a killer.

Chapter
25

The intelligent thing to have done would have been to stick together by the injured boat until discovered by a search party.

But the earth jarred with the force of a lightning strike. Smoke rose from something on the other side of a mound of slickrock across the river. The palpable static charges in the air on this side were reminiscent of the fatal shoot at the power substation last night. Everybody dove for cover.

And thus separated.
Not
the intelligent thing to do.

An onrush of wind blew sand into Charlie's face and it wasn't until she opened her eyes that she realized she'd lost a contact. She closed the good eye with the lens still intact, leaving her operating with the nearsighted one.

She flattened herself in a dry arroyo next to somebody else. Maybe the murderer.

“Be over in a minute,” Homer Blankenship said close to her ear. Thank God. He was the only person here Charlie did not suspect. “Weather moves through pretty fast in this country.”

“Don't you have a patch for the boat?”

“Nothing strong enough to withstand that load.”

You don't think of rain as your biggest worry on a desert, but Noah would have been hunting building supplies about then. Not so much where Charlie winced next to the river guide as upslope from their shallow depression.

“Well, wouldn't it hold enough for one or two to go upriver for help?”

“Might. Have to wait out the storm to know though.” He added in apology, “Never rains hard in this country until it decides to.”

There was moisture seeping under Charlie, trying to get to the river but soaking up in her clothes instead.

“Think we might have to move.” Homer pointed out the obvious. “Just kinda roll up on the edge next to you, but stay flat.”

Charlie did and ended up buffeted by alternate waves of blowing grit and gigantic drops of cold wind-driven rain. She'd gone from sweaty hot to shivering chill so fast her body couldn't adjust to the change if she continued to breathe normally. Sort of like Edwina used to before beginning estrogen-replacement therapy.

Well, I sure as hell better stay in better control than she did. This is no time to lose it.

Uh-oh, there we go, admitting to ourselves that our mother's change of life could make her dangerously unstable. Playing right into the hands of Sheriff Ralph Sumpter and those who won't vote for women in government.

Oh my God. Now what? There was Scrag-the-desert-rat and Earl-the-cameraman duking it out by the boat. Charlie changed eyes quickly, realizing she couldn't have identified the fighting figures if she'd been protecting the one with the lens. And immediately the battle degenerated to a blur.

A blur that both Homer Blankenship and Sidney Levit were crawling toward on hands and knees. Them she could see, even nearsighted, because they passed her on their way. Being either wiser or more cowardly, Charlie followed on stomach, knees, and elbows. Her focus was not on the macho histrionics but on what appeared to be a plastic bag she imagined to contain patching material and maybe glue to repair their boat. It looked in danger of being kicked into the mighty Colorado River. Even when she checked out the scene with her one good eye.

She was wrong again. It was a Ziploc which, when she unzipped a corner, smelled like more bologna sandwiches with mustard and pickle. So much for psychic intuition.

But she held on to the bag and inched an awkward reverse crawl out of the scuffle, nearly choked by the kicked and blowing sand. Somehow keeping both the correct eyelid and her mouth closed at the same time was too much under the stress of the moment.

Hey, I survived backing off a goddamned cliff a zillion feet high. I can handle this. We're talking one murderer and five people in the same boat I am, right?

Poor choice of words.

It was clear that Scrag was merely defending himself, and quite well, when Homer-the-guide and Sid-the-producer brought a struggling Earl to the ground with a knee tackle, ending the fight.

Scrag wiped blood from his nose with the back of his hand. “You are really overreacting, Earl-my-man. All I said was it would be logical if anybody torched poor Tawny on purpose, then it must be somebody from our crew, and if it was an accident, it was somebody from Sid's. I didn't say you'd killed her.”

“Yeah you did.” Earl struggled out from under Sid and pushed Homer off him with an ease that made Charlie uneasy. But the cameraman didn't advance on the desert rat, who obviously took time from his hitchhiking to work out and had biceps to go with his chest. “You accused me of scuttling the boats. Same thing.”

“Not if you were just trying to trap her murderer. That's what I meant.”

Earl scuttled the boats?

Where were Mitch and John B.?

Scrag winked at Charlie. The consummate ham. Ever aware of an audience.

Charlie pushed herself up to a sitting position. Hell, most of the men were standing. Lightning didn't strike them. Earl followed Scrag's look at Charlie as if contemplating a conspiracy. Dean braced behind him.

And the drama dissolved, not because of the threatening weather, but because of John B. Drake's laughter. It dripped scorn. “Earl, you scuttled the boats?”

“No, you did. The first one at least. Where're the sugar packets you keep your pockets stuffed with for that sweet tooth, Drake? Dumped them in the gas tank, didn't you?”

“Why would I use sugar when there's all this sand?”

Charlie sat on the sidelines munching on the bologna sandwich, watching the interplay, the personalities revealed under stress. Everyone would be afraid of the murderer and he afraid of exposure.

Where was Mitch Hilsten?

Dean watched Sidney Levit for orders but every now and then glanced at Charlie Greene for approval.

Sid was talking up a storm trying to smooth over hard feelings and to encourage them all to plan a strategy for survival until rescue came. His was the voice of reason—listing the options, greasing the wheels to smooth out life, particularly this sticky part at hand.

Good film producers are like building contractors. They can keep their cool and convince others to keep theirs when the plumber doesn't get there before the dry wallers and both are scheduled elsewhere into the next century and starting tomorrow. Or when the director's fired halfway through the filming and the new one hasn't read the script.

Pleasant, relaxed, practical—Sidney Levit used his cool on them until it was obvious it wasn't going to work. And then he lost it. He was about as wrinkled and wet as his white shirt. His white face had lost its sunburn, his white hair its part and the air of aplomb it helped him give off. His deep voice cracked. And he was just an angry, helpless, old man.

His ace pilot looked to be chewing on his cheek as he glanced around the group hoping for another leader. Dean Goodacre, Charlie decided, couldn't be a murderer because he was such a follower.

Not that the ace detective sitting bedraggled and stringy-haired and smelling of bologna and mustard was that great an inspiration at the moment.

Homer rose stiffly to his feet to deliver an incoherent diatribe. But Charlie couldn't hear it and nobody else seemed to be listening anyway. He finally backed up to sit deflated, a fellow noncontender, next to her.

“Homer, where's the patching stuff?” Charlie asked when there was nothing more to eat and her discomfort refused to be ignored.

He squinted at her in disbelief. “Those jerks aren't going to let me near that boat.”

“They might not notice. But then again some people just sit back and watch.” Feeling guilty for baiting him, she crawled on hands and knees between Dean Goodacre and the bullying match. When she reached the boat she found the deflated section hadn't widened so the pontoon rim was, as would seem logical, segmented. The tear in the floor was still pretty ugly though.

Homer, suddenly beside her, reached into a compartment next to the thing that held the jet engine onto the boat and extracted a thick plastic bag and cut it open with his knife. Its handle was wrapped in leather strips.

The bag held smooth-edged patches in graduated sizes, a tube of what Charlie hoped was glue, and a disposable plastic air pump.

The patch, if it held at all, might help the boat hold the two of them, he explained as he worked. And the rip in the bottom, too large to patch, wouldn't sink them because the pontoon would keep them afloat. But not dry. So Charlie spent the time piling anything movable onto the beach.

She was soaked anyway, sick of detecting, and just wanted out of here. But where was Mitch?

She'd been staring at rocks and into bushes awhile before she realized both the weather and the combatants had grown quiet on her. The guys were hovering all of a sudden.

“Just what is it you are doing here?” John B.'s exaggerated confusion sounded more threatening than it should and seemed to rally the other warriors to his allegiance.

“Well, Homer and I are going up the river to bring help back and the patch won't hold up with any more weight than ours and … and we're leaving all the supplies for the rest of you and—”

“And leaving the rest of us alone with the murderer.”

Seemed like a good idea at the time. “We don't know the murderer is along on this trip.” Just because someone wrecked the boats doesn't mean anything—much. “And just because he murdered once or even twice doesn't mean he has any reason to again.” There wouldn't be anybody left on earth if they never quit. “Anybody know where Mitch is?”

Blank stares all around.

“I thought he was right behind me.” John B. looked over his shoulder and then called, “Hey, Hilsten?”

No answer.

What to do? Leave the boat unprotected to search for Mitch and risk the murderer returning to sabotage it for good this time? Or leave one person behind to guard it and risk the one person chosen being the murderer? Or leave two people behind and risk one of them being the murderer and killing the other as well as destroying the boat? Charlie wasn't sure that's what all but one of the disheveled little group was thinking but it should have been.

There could be more than one murderer.

Oh great.

And it could be somebody else wrecking the boats. Someone wanting to force the killer's hand for instance. Someone single-minded enough not to care that he's endangering us all in the process.

Charlie, so miserable her stomach forgot to hurt, wished mightily that there
were
such things as Unidentified Flying Objects. Real life was too unpredictable.