A Bat in the Belfry (20 page)

Shifting gingerly, she angled her body around toward the driver’s seat, while outside, the sirens screamed nearer and the rain hammered down.

That was when she saw the blood.

T
wenty minutes later she sat in the front seat of Eastport police chief Bob Arnold’s squad car, its roof rack strobing the rainy gloom with red and its radio sputtering intermittently. The heater was on, but she shivered uncontrollably despite the warm jacket someone had thrown over her.

The EMS guys had tried cajoling her into an ambulance, but she’d refused; as far as she could tell, sore muscles in her neck and shoulder would be her only injuries out of this mess.

Dylan, though, was another story. From across the road, she watched them remove him from the bent and broken Saab, secure him to a stretcher, hustle him through yet another downpour, and hoist him up through the brightly lit back door of the emergency vehicle.

He wasn’t bleeding anymore that she could see. But he wasn’t moving, either. A plastic oxygen mask covered his face; one of the EMTs held up an IV bag. She bit her lip hard as Bob Arnold appeared, leaning in through the open squad car window.

“Here.” He thrust in a steaming-hot paper cup of coffee.

She took it gratefully. “Thanks. Is he—?”

Bob shook his head. “Breathing. Got a pulse. That’s all I know. Pickup driver bumped his head but that’s all, and those people in the van ended up okay, too, don’t ask me how.”

She nodded, sipped some more of the hot liquid as Bob strode off again. Now that the adrenaline from the crash was fading, she felt flattened, as if most of her own blood had been drained from her. In the wind and rain, flashlight-carrying figures moved in the road, routing cars over onto the shoulder to get by, waving them along.

The boxy red ambulance’s rear doors were closed, so she couldn’t see Dylan anymore. But he had a heartbeat, and he was breathing … 
Please
, she thought.
Just let him be okay
.

Even her anxiety over Dylan’s condition, though, didn’t wipe out her doubts over what he’d been saying just before the crash. He’d told her he wanted to hear anything she found out about Chip Hahn’s activities the night of the murder, incriminating or not. But the trouble was, she realized with deep regret as she sat in Bob Arnold’s squad car getting her wind back …

The trouble was, she didn’t believe it. He was after the bad stuff, if there was any, or anything about Chip Hahn that Dylan might be able to make look bad. Not that she had any particular loyalties to the suspect, or to his hostess Jake Tiptree, either.

Still, she’d rather liked Jake and her redheaded friend, Ellie White. They’d both seemed to be pretty straight-up people; she’d felt bad about, in effect, lying to them about who she was. So to stay straight with herself, Lizzie realized as she sat gathering her wits, there was one more thing she was going to have to do about this whole situation.

And there’d be no need for Dylan to know what that one thing was, either, she thought … because of
course
he was going to be okay, of
course
he was.

The ambulance backed up, turned sharply, and sped toward her, activating its lights and siren as it went on by. Then a cop who’d been helping the EMTs sprinted over, one hand tucked into the front of his jacket as if protecting something he held.

It was the young Eastport cop she’d gotten herself into the beef with last night, at the church.
At the murder scene …

When he reached her, his face changed, official courtesy giving way to recognition and personal dislike. “He said to give these to you.”

“Who—?” Squinting through the gloom, she made out only the shapes of cops and fire department personnel, and of a tow-truck guy ready to haul the Saab up onto a flatbed. Confused, she took the sheet of paper the young cop held out.

But then she saw what it was, and realized: Dylan must have been alert at some point after the crash, awake enough to—

Hope energized her suddenly; she sat up straight. “Thank you,” she called after the departing officer, then looked down again at what Dylan, even injured and in pain as he must’ve been, had wanted her to have.

It was the picture of Nicki
—if it is her
, Lizzie reminded herself—the photograph he’d received at about the same time as Lizzie herself had been getting two of them. But that wasn’t all. Folded behind the picture was a sheet of paper, a printout of something that someone had emailed to Dylan.

Today, to judge by the date at the top. It was an annotated list of odd, alphabet-soup-like website addresses.

Private websites, Lizzie realized, with addresses consisting of meaningless letter sequences; they could be accessed only by people who already knew about them, not casual Web surfers.

The practical result, she knew from an Internet security in-service she’d taken in Boston, was that the sites were “members only,” but why?

And then, from the websites’ real names noted alongside the scrambled ones—names with the words “death,” “women,” and much worse things figuring prominently in them—she understood why.

B
ub Wilson stuck his close-clipped blond head up through the moonroof of the car filled with his buddies as it pursued David slowly up the steep hill of Adams Street.

“Hey,
Dweeb
!” Behind the wheel was Jerome Kadlick, a thin, fox-faced teenager with dark eyes and a sullen expression. The boys had caught sight of David on Water Street on his way home from the library, and noticed that he was alone.

Bogie Kopmeir was keeping a low profile today for some reason; David hadn’t seen him yet. With the boys in the car still keeping pace with him, David walked faster.
Just don’t look at them
, his dad always said about situations like this.
Don’t antagonize them, don’t give them anything to—

Something buzzed fast past his face with a quick, hot
zzzzt!
At the same time he heard the
snap!
of a BB gun being fired.

“Hey, Dweebles, pay attention when I talk to you,” ordered Bub. Glancing sideways at him, David noted the BB pistol in Bub’s hand. “You ain’t got Bogie with you now, punk, so listen up.”

Another shot. This one smacked the street, sending sharp grit spraying stingingly up into David’s face. Head down, fists jammed in his jacket pockets, he felt hot tears filling his eyes. Half a block now, past the quarter acre of scrub woods and partly emerged granite boulders of a vacant lot, and he would be able to turn onto the narrow back lane leading to his house.

He didn’t think the boys would follow him there. The rarely used lane’s ruts were deep, with a rise at the center that would take out the muffler of Jerome’s dad’s car.

Between here and the lane, though, was the hill’s steepest part.
Zzzt!
Bub’s third shot caught the bill on David’s baseball cap, nipping a few threads from its tip.

David flinched hard, provoking gufffaws from his tormentors keeping pace with him in the slowly moving car.

“Dweeb! Look at me, you little mutt.”

David stopped, transfixed by the sight of the tiny tear in his Red Sox cap. He’d gotten it at an actual game, in Boston with his father and his uncle Joe, who’d been skinny and pale and who had died a few weeks afterwards of pancreatic cancer.

“Shut up,” he said, taking the cap off to hold in both hands as he turned to Bub.

At the same time, he was calculating the distance through the vacant lot to his house. Too far; he should have thought of that before he opened his stupid mouth, he realized. But the words had just come out of him.

“What?” said Bub incredulously, hauling his slim frame out through the moonroof and leaping easily from it to the street in a single, liquidly athletic motion.

He stalked toward the sidewalk. David took off running but Bub was on him in a heartbeat, one big splay-fingered hand clamped around David’s arm and the other clutching a fistful of his hair.

“You little dirtbag,” he snarled, muscling David backwards until he had him shoved up hard against the old gatepost marking what once had been a driveway, curving into the vacant lot.

Bub’s face contorted menacingly, teeth bared, small ice-blue eyes glaring. His breath smelled like pizza. Pinning David, he drew his fist back, ready to punch and punch for the sheer animal joy of it, and then out of nowhere Bogie was on him.

Bub staggered backwards, flailing ineffectually, while Bogie clung to the basketball player’s back with his short legs wrapped around the bigger boy’s torso. The amount of blood suddenly gushing from Bub Wilson’s nose shocked David, as did the number of blows Bogie managed to deliver to Bub’s face while essentially slugging him from behind.

Bogie spat curses, kneeing Bub in the kidneys, scratching and headbutting while the boys from the car scrambled out but then hesitated, unwilling to get within punching range. Bogie aimed a last, open-handed slap at the side of Bub’s head, cocking his arm back and slamming his palm flat to Bub’s red, bitten ear:
smack!

Bub dropped like a felled tree. The other boys started forward. Bogie whirled, screaming, pounding his chest with his fists, which were spattered with Bub’s blood.

“Yah! Yah! You want summah this? Yah!”
he screamed as he advanced on them, whereupon they scuttled back to their car and raced off in it, leaving Bub lying there.

David stood shakily by the gatepost as Bogie stomped back, not sparing the moaning Bub Wilson a glance. “Come on,” he said.

Looking back as he followed Bogie into the vacant lot, David faintly suggested that maybe they should call help for Bub.

“Call him a freakin’ hearse,” Bogie responded irritably. “I hope he freakin’
dies
there.”

By now Bub was struggling up. So he could still move, anyway, David thought with a combination of disappointment and relief. Bogie chuckled, spinning the BB pistol he’d taken from Bub around his index finger as if it were a six-shooter. He looked happy, like a little kid with a new toy.

What just happened back there?
David wondered. It was as if he’d witnessed some violent force of nature in action, a volcano erupting or something, and now it was over.

They came out of the vacant lot, crossed the lane into the rear yard of David’s house. A pie was cooling on the small cast-iron café table on the back porch, set on a blue gingham-checked dish towel, and the sight suddenly made David feel like bursting into tears.

URGENT WEATHER MESSAGE
WEATHER SERVICE CARIBOU MAINE

FOR INTERIOR HANCOCK-COASTAL HANCOCK-CENTRAL WASHINGTON-COASTAL WASHINGTON-INCLUDING THE CITIES OF … EASTPORT … PERRY … PEMBROKE … CALAIS … LUBEC … MACHIAS

WEATHER ADVISORY CONTINUES IN EFFECT UNTIL MIDNIGHT EDT TOMORROW NIGHT …

THE WEATHER SERVICE IN CARIBOU HAS ISSUED A WEATHER ADVISORY FOR HEAVY RAIN AND GALE FORCE WINDS

* PRECIPITATION TYPE … RAIN HEAVY AT TIMES. LOCALLY AS MUCH AS 1 INCH PER HOUR.

* ACCUMULATIONS … RAIN 3 TO 5 INCHES TOTAL EXCEPT WHERE DOWNPOURS FREQUENT.

* TIMING … TODAY INTO TOMORROW NIGHT.

* TEMPERATURES … IN THE LOWER 40S.

* WINDS … NORTHEAST 35-65 MPH. WITH POSSIBLE HIGHER GUSTS ESPECIALLY COASTAL.

* IMPACTS … IMPACT FROM THIS STORM WILL BE CONSIDERABLE. EXPECT SOME TRAVEL DIFFICULTIES. WIND DAMAGE AND POWER OUTAGES LIKELY, LOCAL FLOODING LIKELY.

PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS …

TRAVEL DELAYS MAY OCCUR. TRAVEL WILL BE DIFFICULT. PLAN EXTRA TIME TO REACH YOUR DESTINATION. MARINERS SHOULD STAY IN PORT. SECURE LOOSE OBJECTS. POSTPONE TRAVEL AT HEIGHT OF STORM IF POSSIBLE. DO NOT DRIVE THROUGH FLOODED AREAS. HIGH TIDES. HIGH WINDS MAY IMPACT COMMUNICATIONS TOWERS ESPECIALLY DOWNEAST. EXPECT OUTAGES.

  
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