Dead on the Island (15 page)

Chuck Ferguson was dead.

Someone apparently wanted Dino dead, and he
almost had been.

I started to feel lucky that I'd only been
beaten up.

The sky kept getting grayer, but that was
it. There wasn't going to be any sun, not for a while if at all.
Heavy, low clouds hung down, almost low enough to touch the roof of
the Subaru. The Capris were singing "There's a Moon Out Tonight."
Not here, there wasn't.

Something occurred to me just as the lead
singer was stretching out that last "to-ooo-oo-oo-ni-iii-iigt."
Sharon had only recently found out about her mother's past. She
hadn't been overjoyed by what she'd discovered. How might she have
reacted, under the circumstances? Was it possible that she could
have engineered her own kidnapping? She could have seen it as a way
to make her father pay--if she'd known who her actual father was
and not just what her mother had been. Even the shooting made a
crazy kind of sense if you looked at it right. She decided that
she'd rather have a dead father than have his money. She'd been
told that her father was dead, so she'd seen to it that he
was
dead.

I thought about that angle. If I was right,
Terry Shelton and Chuck Ferguson were mixed up in the plot
somewhere. Why not? Sharon would need help to pull off something as
complicated as a kidnapping.

So where did that leave me? Clyde MacPhatter
was asking "A Lover's Question," but I had a different kind of
question in mind. I thought maybe I knew the answer now, or at
least part of the answer. I sent the Subaru over the bridge and
down toward Broadway just as a pink rim appeared on one of the
clouds. Maybe the sun was going to shine after all.

~ * ~

Nameless was waiting for me when I got home.
I stashed the pistol under the seat again, fed him, and changed
sweatshirts. The bruises on my ribs looked like hell, but they
didn't hurt as long as I didn't make any sudden moves.

While I was changing, I watched the early
morning news from Houston. The remains of a young woman had been
found in a field near La Marque. The sheriff was understandably
agitated, since it was the fifth body that had been found in the
same general area in less than a month. Someone very unpleasant was
using the sheriff's county for a dumping ground. There wasn't
really much left of the body, mostly scattered bones and a few
scraps of clothing. The investigators estimated that the remains
may have been in the field for as much as eight months. Maybe a
year. Two grade schoolers had found the remains late the previous
afternoon when returning from a rabbit hunt.

I thought about Jan. I'd have to remember to
call the sheriff's office and remind them to check her dental
records. I'd sent them some time before, when the first body had
been discovered. I didn't think this one was her, either, but I had
to make sure.

Strangely enough, the reporter's story
didn't bother me as much as it would have even a few days before. I
was beginning to accept the fact that Jan might really be dead and
that I was never going to find her, something that I had accepted
intellectually a long time ago. It had never reached me
emotionally, though, down in that dark cavern of the mind where we
all really live. It reached me now, and my interest in Dino's
problems had turned the trick. Maybe it was just that I had
something else to occupy my thoughts. Or possibly I had really
reached acceptance.

I didn't have time to worry about it.
Nameless had spread himself out on the couch, his back pressed
against the cushions, his legs extended. He was nearly as long as
the couch.

I picked him up and carried him down the
stairs. "Sorry," I said. "But it's outside again." I tossed him out
and went down the steps to the car. He sat and looked at me
resentfully as I drove away.

I went by McDonald's for an Egg McMuffin and
then drove down to the Bolivar ferry. I drove right by the street
where Evelyn Matthews lived, but I noticed nothing out of the
ordinary there. At this time of day and year, there was no wait for
the ferry. I drove right on the Gib Gilchrist, stopped the car, set
the brake, and got out.

The ferry was far from full, but it began
its journey anyway. There was a slight chop on the bay water, but
nothing to make me uncomfortable. I get seasick very easily.

I hadn't brought any popcorn or stale bread
to feed the seagulls with, and neither had anyone else. This wasn't
a tourist time of day. The gulls that followed us for a short
distance, swooping and diving at the boat, soon gave up and went
away. I looked for the dolphins that sometimes came to observe the
ferry, but they were elsewhere, or maybe they were asleep. I didn't
know what hours dolphins kept.

The trip took only about twenty minutes, and
it wasn't until I drove off the boat that I remembered I hadn't
found out Terry Shelton's address. It had occurred to me that
Shelton's house might be a good place to hide if you were Sharon
Matthews and you wanted people to think you'd been kidnapped. It
was free, after all, and there was really no reason for anyone to
search there. Terry would have said that he hadn't seen her for
several days if anyone had asked.

But no one was going to ask him because he
was dead. Did Sharon know that? Would she still be there, if she
had ever been? Had the police searched the house? It wouldn't take
me long to answer at least one of those questions. The others might
take a little longer.

I drove past the Bolivar Lighthouse. A
hundred or more people had weathered the 1900 storm there. It
didn't look any the worse for wear or for the ninety years that had
passed. It stood as straight as ever, but it was safely out of the
public's way behind a chain-link fence.

In the little town of Port Bolivar I stopped
at a Stop-and-Go to ask about the Shelton house. The clerk was a
woman about thirty-five, a little on the heavy side, wearing a
striped uniform top. Her nametag said that she was "Debbie." I got
a can of Big Red from the cooler and then paid her.

She gave me my change. "Thank you," she
said. "Have a nice day."

I started to tell her that I had other
plans, and then thought better of it. No one wants to help out a
smart aleck. "I'll try," I said. I started out the door and then
turned back as if I'd just thought of something.

"Can I help you?" Debbie asked.

"Maybe so. I was just wondering. I heard the
Shelton house was for sale."

"Oh, no, I don't think so," Debbie said.
"You must've heard about something else. Wasn't it terrible about
the Shelton boy, though?"

"What about him?" I took a sip of Big Red
and looked guileless, or as close as I could come.

"Why, he got killed over in Galveston. Got
his neck broke!" Debbie's eyes were wide with the horror of it.

"No kidding," I said.

"No kidding. Everybody wonders what it was
all about." She looked around to see if any big-time drug dealers
were listening. "I bet it was some kinda drug deal."

For an area that had once been known for
bootlegging, drugs had become a new form of an old vice.
"Probably," I said. "There's a lot of that going on. Well, I
wouldn't want to buy a drug-dealer's house."

Debbie shook her head. "I don't think it's
for sale."

"I'm sure I heard it was. That big house
just down the street from here, faces on the Intracoastal
Waterway?"

"Well," she said, "it faces on the Waterway,
all right, but it's about half a mile up the road. It's yellow,
with a green porch."

"Not the one I heard about, then," I said. I
went on out the front glass doors, and tossed what was left of the
Big Red, which was most of it, in the trash. Even for me, it was
too early in the morning for Big Red.

I found the Shelton house without any
trouble after that. I could see why Debbie thought Terry might have
been involved with dope. The house was an ideal location. A boat
could tie up at the dock, wait for a load of the stuff to arrive
from Columbia, or wherever it was coming from these days, and sail
out into the Gulf to meet the ship, then sail back to the dock and
unload into station wagons or vans that could carry the junk into
Houston. It would work, if the Coast Guard didn't catch you. Since
you'd have to sail right in front of the Coast Guard station, you'd
have to have pretty good nerves, or very little sense. Money does
strange things to people, though.

I stopped the car a few houses away from the
Shelton place. It looked deserted, but I didn't feel like taking
any chances. I didn't see anyone anywhere around, and for just a
second I thought about slipping the pistol out from under the seat,
but I didn't. This looked like a perfectly peaceful area, the kind
of place where nothing ever happened and where kids played in the
yards with their dogs.

I walked down to the house, which was raised
up on posts about ten feet off the ground. There was a place
underneath to park a car, but there wasn't one there. The curtains
were drawn in all the rooms that I could see. There was no sign
that the police had visited it, though I thought they probably had.
And it was likely that Terry Shelton's parents had been there to
look at his things. It would have been easy for Sharon to leave and
return, of course. But if she had left, where had she gone?

I looked up at the house for a minute or
two, and then climbed the green stairs that led to the door. The
door was not on the front of the house, but on the side. I knocked
as if I were an insurance salesman or a poll taker. There was no
answer.

I waited a second or two before I tried to
doorknob. It didn't budge. I wondered if there was an alarm system.
Well, there was one way to find out. I took a Visa card out of my
billfold and slipped the latch. It didn't take more than a couple
of seconds. The door opened easily. There was no deadbolt.

And no alarm. No bells rang, no buzzers
buzzed, no lights flashed. Of course the phone could already be
dialing the police station, but I didn't think that was likely. I
eased into the cool dimness and shut the door behind me.

I stood quietly, waiting for my eyes to get
used to the dim light. There was nothing exceptional to see when
they did. A room with a couch, a bookcase, a TV set, and a coffee
table. A few magazines on the coffee table,
Time
,
Newsweek
,
National Geographic
. The subscription
labels all had Terry's name on them. There was carpet on the floor,
but it didn't quite fit the size of the room. Probably bought as a
remnant. There was no padding under it.

I was looking through the bookcase when I
started getting the feeling that I wasn't alone. Terry Shelton's
taste in reading, or his parents', ran to paperbacks by writers
like Stephen King and Robert R. McCammon. I had just flipped
through a copy of McCammon's
They Thirst
, which was
apparently about the vampire take-over of Los Angeles, when I began
to suspect that someone was watching me.

I put the book back in place and turned
around slowly. There were two doors leading out of the room I was
in, and both probably led to bedrooms. The kitchen/eating area was
a part of the room I was in, separated from the living section only
by a long breakfast bar at which three stools stood.

I could decide if there was someone in the
room on the right or the one on the left. I wasn't even sure that
there was anyone there at all. Maybe I was just reacting to the
paperback I'd been looking at, with its bloody, toothy cover.

I stood and watched the doorways. There was
no motion, no sound in the dimness behind them.

"Sharon?" I said. My voice cracked slightly,
so I said it again. "Sharon?"

There was no answer. I walked to the door on
the right, feeling like that character in "The Lady or the Tiger?"
I could see a double bed, covered with a dark spread. There was a
line of light on the floor at the bottom of the curtains.

"Sharon?" I said.

There was no answer, no sound of any kind.
Feeling like a fool, I stepped through the doorway. I was convinced
there was no one there.

Luckily my conviction didn't slow me down. I
stepped pretty quickly and thereby avoided most of the blow that
was aimed at me. It missed my head and hit me right between the
shoulder blades. Even at that, I was flipped ass over elbows and
landed on the bed.

My mind momentarily went into neutral and my
body was paralyzed. Pain jabbed me in the ribs.

I got over my paralysis quickly and rolled
to the side, which was just as well, since I managed to avoid the
chair that came crashing down on the bed where I had been.

I slipped off the side of the bed onto the
floor. I got my knees under me and raised my head up carefully,
jerking it back down to avoid the chair once more. It was a black
bentwood chair, very light weight, but I had no desire for it to
come into contact with my head no matter what it weighed. I wished
sincerely and futilely that I had brought the Mauser, especially
since the man wielding the chair was one of the gorillas from The
Sidepocket's parking lot.

I didn't know what else to do, so I slid
under the bed. It was dark and dusty under there, but I could look
out and see the guy's feet. He was wearing a pair of white canvas
deck shoes, and he was standing on the side of the bed opposite the
one I'd slid off of, no doubt wondering what to do next.

He didn't know whether I was armed, but he
was pretty sure I wasn't dangerous. After all, he'd taken me out
once, with the help of his pals. As soon as he figured out where I
was, he could toss the bed over and beat me to a pulp or just kneel
down and shoot me if he had a pistol.

Maybe I could take him. I wasn't a small man
by any means, and I was probably in good enough shape unless he
kicked me in the knee, but there wasn't very much I could do in the
uncomfortable position in which I found myself. I eased closer to
the deck shoes, then reached out and grabbed the ankles sticking
out of them. I jerked forward as hard as I could.