A Bat in the Belfry (32 page)

Just fine, the life she’d given up for Dylan’s lie. But she didn’t miss it, she realized suddenly. Since arriving here in Eastport, she hadn’t missed it at all, not even the apartment she had been so very proud of. Hardly thought of it, even.

He glanced over at the gun she still held. “So, are you going to shoot me with that thing or what?”

She shrugged. “No.” She put it into the nylon holster under her jacket. “So … tell me something. After we … after it ended. You never called. Was it because you didn’t want to, or …?”

He closed his eyes, leaned back against the headrest. “I’d promised her I wouldn’t. Sherry, that is. And for once I thought I ought to keep a promise, you know?”

He took a deep breath, grimaced at the pain, and let it out. “Just for once. And then she was gone. For a while I was sort of stunned, too paralyzed to do anything, and after that so much time had gone by that I figured you would be too pissed off.”

“You were right. I was.” And yet she was glad he’d managed to keep his promise. One tiny bright spot in his character … it was something, anyway. It gave her hope for him.

She glanced up from the age-progressed photograph of Nicki. A pretty little girl with cornflower-blue eyes, flaxen hair … she looked just like Sissy had at that age.

Just like her. “But now here we are, anyway.”

Outside it was getting dark, though it was barely three in the afternoon. Raindrops skittered warningly across the puddles on the paved parking lot.

“Just one thing, Dylan.” She started the car.

He was already nodding. “Yeah. I figured you’d have to ask. I was at a bachelor party in Augusta when I got the call. Guy in my old squad’s getting married.”

The call about a dead girl in an Eastport church, he meant. “Don’t worry, I’ve got alibi witnesses,” he added lightly.

Witnesses to say, that is, that he hadn’t been here killing a kid just so he’d have an excuse to be in Eastport when Lizzie arrived. Terrible thought, but she was a cop, so she’d had it.

She shrugged. That kind of coincidence was … well. It could have happened.

Stranger things had. “How were you planning to get together with me? I mean, before the girl got killed and brought you here as part of your job, how did you think we’d run into each other?”

“Um,” he said. “I hadn’t quite figured that part out yet. But … just take a ride, end up here, make it my business to run into you on the street or something. Since I knew you wouldn’t meet with me on purpose.”

Which actually reassured her more than anything else he could have said; a pat answer was her least favorite kind, in the believability department.

“Where are you staying?” He must’ve hoped to be staying with her by now.
But then, we all hope for a lot of things, don’t we?

And we don’t get them
. “Ah, there’s a cot at the cop shop; I’ll bunk there again if Bob Arnold lets me,” he replied.

She turned that direction, out of the motel parking lot. On the street the other cars had their headlights on, their wipers slapping at the rain gusting crosswise in bursts. A few pedestrians hustled along leaning sideways, holding on to hats or gripping plastic shopping bags to their chests.

At the corner she slowed for an eighteen-wheeler headed for the breakwater. A massive freighter with open cargo bays was tied up to the outer berth; near it, men in reflective vests directed the truck traffic under swaying dock lights.

Then, just as she was about to turn into the police station’s asphalt parking area, a familiar car—where had she seen it?—approached from the opposite direction. Before she could glimpse its plate, it pulled a U-turn and raced away.

Instinctively she hit the gas, only then recalling where she had noticed the fleeing vehicle before. Oh, for a dashboard beacon, a radio, anything … because she wasn’t a cop here and didn’t play one on TV, either. But she was about to behave like one.

Oh, was she ever. A dead girl with her throat slit, and then a dead boy with
his
throat cut, too … now
there
was a coincidence worth pursuing.

At the corner she swung the wheel hard to the left and hit the gas, accelerating into a narrow, tree-lined lane. Dylan glanced at her questioningly.

“Detour,” she told him flatly. The car ahead made another sharp left, fast, as if the driver knew she was following and had a guilty conscience.

She peeked at Dylan again; he looked … interested. Then she noticed something else about him.

“Dylan, buckle your damned seatbelt.”

T
he car ahead shot up over the top of the hill. Lizzie hit the gas again, gripping the wheel with one hand, reaching inside her jacket with the other. Dylan went after his own weapon, came up empty, and uttered an oath, then stuck his hand out for hers.

“Give it here. Come on, I know you’re a hardass at heart, okay? But on paper …”

She’d have argued, but he was right. A civilian did not get to fire from a moving vehicle at another moving vehicle, not for any reason. Not unless she wanted a lot of trouble.

No matter what she’d been empowered to do two days ago in another state. “Here.”

She passed the weapon to him without looking. As it crested the hilltop, the CRV caught air, slammed down onto its tires, and shot forward again after the fugitive car, which blew through the stop sign at the approaching corner and swung around it. Lizzie floored the Honda, flew around the same corner, and raced down a curving slope through what turned out to be a sprawling cemetery spread out on both sides of the road, entered by way of iron gates set into granite-block posts.

The gates were open. In the thickening gloom of approaching evening, the marble gravestones gleamed wetly under rain-haloed streetlights. Ahead, the fleeing car showed under them, too, as it entered the cemetery. It was a small red sports car with a black cloth top.

A Miata, Lizzie thought. More power, less weight … the Honda was great for off-duty, the little four-banger under the hood as economical as hell. But right now she’d have killed for a V-8 and to hell with better gas mileage.

Inside the graveyard with the Honda trailing, the Miata cut between two large stone angels onto a grassy track, paralleled the graveyard’s cast-iron fence for a hundred yards, then found the cemetery’s open iron gates once more and shot back out onto the road. The fleeing car’s brake lights flashed briefly at another corner, then rounded it faster than she’d have thought possible. The driver was nuts—

Or guilty of something, and Lizzie was betting hard on the latter. But why run from her? No one here even knew her, and they certainly didn’t know she was a … but then she realized:

Dylan. They could’ve glimpsed him through the windshield, and he’d been at the church right after the murder. He’d been there in an official capacity, inside the crime-scene tape with all the other …

“Cops,” she said. “They know we’re …”

In the dim glow of the dashboard lights, his face was tight with pain, but his grip on the gun looked solid. “Yeah. I betcha you’re right.”

The next turn put the Honda on two wheels momentarily, but it set down solidly again when instead of panicking, she floored it and let the car’s engineering do what it was designed to: not roll them. They raced down a dark, twisty road between big pine trees whose branches thrashed heavily in the rising wind.

“Hey. One other thing.” Dylan spoke calmly, just as if they weren’t exceeding the posted limit by triple or so.

“Yeah?” Taillights still glowed intermittently ahead each time she raced around another sharp curve, tires squealing. But unless she had her directions mixed up, they were approaching a larger thoroughfare where there could be more local traffic.

Storm or not, it was getting to be the hour when working people would be on the road going home. And whoever this jerk up ahead was, he wasn’t worth the collateral damage she could cause by chasing him much farther right now.

“When this thing here is over, you’re going to let me help you,” Dylan said.

“Hah.” The mirthless laugh got punched out of her by a bump in the pavement. “Are you kidding?”

Then she concentrated again on catching up with the small red car. It had disappeared around a curve ahead, but if memory served, the main road was still a little ways distant.

So she might still catch up. “Yeah, they’re still up there,” Dylan said as she pressed the gas pedal harder. “And if whoever’s running from you is doing it ’cause they saw me in your car …”

Then maybe it was because they’d seen him at the church
, she completed the thought silently.
Because they’d done the crime
.

“Or if it’s you they recognized …,” Dylan added.

Right; she’d been at the scene, too. Not only that, but she’d been in this very car not twenty-four hours ago, watching four punks until they twigged to her and split.

Four punks who could’ve known the dead girl; it was why she had been watching them in the first place.

Punks who could be in that car right now; as soon as she thought it, she knew it was true.

“I owe you, Lizzie. I got you here, it’s my fault. So if Nicki really is still alive and in Maine, maybe in Allagash—”

“Yeah. But listen, we’ll talk about it later, all right?”

Because for now it was all she could do just to hurtle down this wet, barely familiar road. Gripping the wheel, pushing the CRV as fast as she dared—faster, even—she frowned into the thickening drizzle. But no taillights showed ahead now, just the swaying evergreens lining both sides of the dark road.

Until suddenly she did see 
…
“Dylan.”

She touched the brakes. The road, slick and wet in what was rapidly becoming another downpour, felt like ice under the tires. She braked to a stop by the side of the road and put the flashers on. Beyond a row of pine trees, a low, dark shape sent up plumes of steam.

She hoped it was steam. She pulled her cell phone out.
No signal …

Yet another charming fact about downeast Maine: crappy cell reception, or at least it was with the phone she had. Fifty yards away, though, house lights glowed through the trees.

“Get out.” He obeyed while she yanked her own seatbelt off, swung the car door open, and jumped out into rain pouring down in a nearly solid stream. Cursing, he headed for the house up behind the line of evergreens while she slogged into the field where the little red sports car lay on its side, wheels still spinning.

Nothing else moved there but the steamy spew of whatever was rising, smokelike, from the hood area of the crashed vehicle. A
lot
like smoke …

The rain on the road’s pavement sounded like bullets. Lizzie forced her way through a thicket of some kind of thornbush, then into a ditch full of cold muck. Hauling herself out, she slipped and fell, clambered up again and forced herself on. Slogging into the field, she scanned the wreck for any sign of life.

And if I see any, it’d better have its hands in the air the very instant I say so, or …

But she didn’t see any. The stink of antifreeze mingled with a sharp, familiar smell that sent a pang through her: gasoline. And even though the rain would douse any fire outside the car …

Then, through the vehicle’s torn canvas top, she saw flames flickering. Tiny at first, they lapped up briefly and then with a bright
floof!
they were everywhere.

And so was the screaming.

What happened next was a confusion to her, then and later: shouts. A stabbing anguish in her hands, sounds of rain sizzling on a hot surface, a blood-slick gripping on her arm. Then she was staggering, half urging and half carrying someone.

There was the smell of sweat and blood, but it was okay, she was getting somewhere, she thought. Hauling someone out of a car fire, alive, until something hit the side of her head very hard; then came the taste of blood, sickening her, and stars flaring behind her eyes.

Somebody grabbing her again, dragging her away. The rain in dizzying circles … falling again.

Falling and falling.

B
ob Arnold thought that if anyone in Eastport knew where the murdered girl, Karen Hansen, had been planning to get enough cash to run away on, it was probably local bad boy Harvey Spratt. He knew everything about anything bad that anyone was ever planning; it was a talent of his, that and taking advantage of whoever was planning it.

Harvey was bad, and dangerous to know, and sooner or later Bob intended to catch him at something serious, a plan that Harvey with his animal-like cunning had so far thwarted.

Bob also knew that foul weather rarely kept Harvey from his haunts: the picnic tables on the breakwater, the old scaffolding under the defunct canning factory, or the storefront doorstep at the corner of Water and Washington Streets, where he could stand under the brick archway and see everyone coming and going.

Especially cop cars, so Bob left his squad car at the Mobil station and borrowed one of the station’s junky loaner vehicles. By now it was past dusk, the clouds heavy overhead and the wind-driven rain coming down in earnest again. Down at the breakwater, men in slickers waved baton lights to herd the last freight trucks away from the big vessel tied to the massive pilings. Deck lights on the ship shed a silver-white glow onto angular cranes hovering mantis-like over the cargo holds; most of the fishing boats and other vessels in the boat basin were lit up, too, their owners unwilling to leave them with more ugly weather imminent.

As Bob passed the breakwater’s entrance he ran a practiced eye down the row of pickup trucks parked on the dock, thinking about whose wives might be home alone tonight with kids and need help if later on the storm got extra nasty. Then he was at the corner where he’d expected to find Harvey.

But he didn’t. Instead, Bogie Kopmeir loitered in the arched doorway of the brick storefront, smoking a cigarette and peering around as if waiting for someone.

Bogie was a short, solidly built kid with a round baby face; his porkpie hat and leather jacket were no doubt intended to make him look older. Instead he resembled a large, oddly dressed baby, and this pretty much required him to be good with his fists and any other fighting tools he could get his hands on.