Home Repair is Homicide 13 - Crawlspace (24 page)

The water rose to her armpits. “Bella, we’ve got to swim for it.” A driftwood chunk swirled past. Jake grabbed for it, missed.

“Hah,” Bella replied. “Just one small problem.”

“What’s that?” Another chunk, larger; missed again. But if an even bigger hunk came along, they might be able to—

“I can’t swim,” said Bella.

Oh, fabulous
. “I mean, I don’t know how. If you must know,” Bella added reluctantly, “I’m afraid of the water.”

“Oh. Well. That is unfortunate.” A large wave rolled in, and then another. The shoreline looked farther away. Jake’s own toes now barely touched the dissolving sandbar.

She tried to keep her voice calm. But it was hard to do with the water all around them getting suddenly so much …

Deeper. “Okay, then, maybe you can just hold on to me, and I can—”

A section of tree trunk appeared, bobbing around as it raced at them. Jake let go of Bella, reaching out with both arms for the impromptu life raft. Only at the last moment did she realize:

It really was a tree trunk. A whole one, roots and all, its huge bulk looming menacingly, charging toward them in a blur of churning water and jagged wooden daggers.

“Bella!” Jake grabbed for Bella’s arm, too late. The tree trunk rotated lazily, one big broken-off stump section aimed out at them like a battering ram.

Desperately Jake dove, found Bella’s legs and wrapped her arms around them, and kicked out hard. Water and sand rasped on her face and arms, filled her ears, and made a gritty, salty mush that forced its way up her nose and between her lips.

In her embrace, Bella’s body went horrifyingly limp. Chunks of wooden stuff charged by overhead, as if a whole lumberyard had been
emptied down a sluiceway up there. Rocks, gravel, and slick seaweed, all with the consistency of thick pudding, cascaded endlessly.

Or so it seemed. Something hit Jake hard from behind, jolting Bella away from her. Any instant, her lungs would burst. They would, or the water would fill them, unless—

Her foot found a rock, then another. Found it and pushed … Her face broke through to the surface. “Bella?”

No sign of her anywhere. “Bella!”

She didn’t dare shout. Only a few hundred yards off in the other direction, the dark boat still sat like an evil omen.

“Bella!” Jake’s feet found a steadier purchase and balanced on it, her hand dragging something it had found floating beneath the waves …

Hair. It was Bella’s hair. Jake hauled on it. Bella’s bony face popped up, dripping and wheezing.

“Shhh. He might be—”

Listening. Or creeping up on us, right this minute …

Bella nodded wordlessly. “Thank you,” she gasped when she got her breath back. “That was very resourceful of you.”

“You’re welcome.” Besides nearly drowning them, the rushing water had pushed them nearer to shore. So when they emerged, it was just possible for them to stagger, limp, lurch, flounder, and in places flat-out crawl on their hands and knees back to the beach where they’d started.

So they did that, and all the while Jake thought for sure that Randy Dodd might appear any instant, grinning and shooting. But he didn’t, and at last Bella collapsed to the wet sand.

Her henna-red hair, ripped out of its rubber band, hung around her face like a nest of snakes. “I never thought we’d—”

Make it
. “Me neither,” Jake said, yanking on Bella’s arm to get her moving again.

But they had, and they’d found Randy’s boat. Sam might be on it. And Chip’s friend Carolyn.

Maybe even Chip himself. So all they had to do now was …

“I’m so glad you’re with me,” she told Bella humbly as they stumbled back under a paling sky to where they’d left the car.

“I’m not.” Bella’s teeth chattered audibly. “I’m cold, I’m wet, and if I don’t catch pneumonia, I’ll be amazed. I wish,” she finished earnestly, “that I was home in my own bed.”

With that, she yanked open the car’s passenger-side door and fell in. Jake got behind the wheel and pulled the keys from under the seat, hugely glad she hadn’t stuck them in her satchel, which she’d lost back on the beach somewhere.

“All I want to do,” said Bella, “is put the heat on.”

“Me too,” agreed Jake, and turned the ignition key.

“Oh, that’ll be elegant,” said Bella.

Jake turned the key again.

HAULING HIMSELF UP OVER THE STERN OF THE FISHING
boat in the thin light of near-dawn, Chip thought he heard stealthy movement again and knew for a certainty that any second, Randy Dodd would appear with a gun in his hand and murder in his heart.

Or a knife. Something. Chip’s own hand slipped on the rail and he nearly fell backward, flailing wildly. Then his searching grip latched onto a cleat fastened to the rail …

The cleat with the line knotted to it … Clinging to it, he clambered past the engine, smelled diesel and the stink of fish. Ahead, the open wheelhouse gaped vacantly, its instruments dark.

A man lay on the deck, his hands clasped over his middle and his back propped against a storage bench set starboard along the rail. Even in the deep gloom, Chip could see that the man’s hands were stained with something dark.

Something …
unpleasant
. The man didn’t move. Chip couldn’t even tell if his eyes were open or closed. Tiptoeing forward, he tripped over a bunch of blankets, barely caught himself, stumbled again as a loop of tape stuck in the blankets snagged his shoe.

What’s in those blankets? he wondered coldly, not liking the shape of them. His chilled skin felt suddenly as if extra nerves had sprouted from it, all tuned to something nasty going on here, all bristling with unease.

He made his way to the man on the deck. If it was Randy, then Chip could relax a little.

It wasn’t. It was Sam Tiptree: older, larger. A man now. “Sam? It’s me, Chip Hahn.”

He crouched by the slim, bloody shape. Sam’s eyes opened in puzzlement that changed to recognition. “Chip. What’re you …”

Sam smiled weakly, but then a grimace of pain wrinkled his face. The last time Chip saw Sam, he’d been waving through the back window of a car on its way to Maine.

Sam had been a kid then, with problems that Chip’s lonely efforts at friendship couldn’t fix. But Sam had still been good company. Hunkered down by him, Chip remembered Sam’s standard greeting, when Chip would show up at Sam’s door with a couple of skateboards or a new pair of catcher’s mitts.

“Yeah, it’s me, your old pal the Chipster,” Chip said now, trying to sound reassuring. Trying as well to wrap his mind around the change that had happened to Sam while he, Chip, wasn’t around to see it. He’d never known anyone as a kid and then seen them as an adult, before. It meant …

It meant time was passing, that was all
, his mind told him sternly. Which was not exactly an original observation, and by the way, it was passing now, too.
So hop to it, buddy, before …

“Sam, the guy who took you … do you know where he is?”

Sam shook his head minutely, biting his lip. The blood on his shirt looked fresh, thick, and shiny. Chip thought briefly about opening the shirt to see what was under it, decided not to. He wouldn’t know what to do about it, and the sight of it would only scare him.

And he was already scared enough.
Radio
, he thought. If the boat had one, and he could get the power on, he might be able to get help.

Assuming Randy Dodd wasn’t in the cabin right now, waiting. When Chip looked down again, Sam had passed out. His chest rose and fell regularly, but he still didn’t look good, and you didn’t need to be a brain surgeon like Sam’s dad to know so much blood was a bad sign.

Sam moaned faintly. How long, Chip wondered, beginning to feel panicky again, before things really got bad? An hour, a few minutes? Less?

He turned toward the roughly framed doorway to the boat’s cabin. No sound came from it. Everything he needed might be down there. First-aid kit, maybe. Some kind of equipment to get help with, a radio, or even some signal flares. And possibly even a gun.

Or his next few steps might be his last. Holding his breath, he straightened. “Sam, I’ll get you out of this,” he promised, though Sam couldn’t hear him.

Sure
, his mind added mockingly.
Sure I will
. But Chip wasn’t listening anymore, either, so intent was he on spying any flicker of movement from the cabin below, any hint of sound.

Silently he approached the opening. The stealthy sounds he’d heard had been coming from this area of the boat. He wanted to peek past the doorframe, but the best way was surely to just charge through it, shouting and swinging. Maybe he could get a lucky punch in.

Or maybe Carolyn was down there, dead … .

But he didn’t dare continue to think that way. Instead he looked around at the dark water and the lightening sky.

Small birds swooped batlike near the shore. A humped form, and then another, slid through the waves a hundred yards distant in the other direction.

Porpoises, or the small, graceful minke whales that while doing his pre-visit research he’d learned were numerous in these waters. Too bad the articles he’d read hadn’t mentioned killers.

Overhead, the stars were going out as the day came on. There was
still no sign of Randy Dodd anywhere.
All right
, Chip told himself.
One, two …

“Yearrgh!” He flung himself at the opening and through it, fists clenched and arms windmilling. As he hurled himself through the hatchway something thudded into his scalp with a hot stabbing pain, dark blood spurting out in a curving arc.

He flung a hand up, grabbing at whatever was stuck there. A curtain of red fell over his eyes, warm and thick. Fear made him strong; one thrust-out foot connected with something soft, while his free hand seized a fistful of something else and—

“Chip! Oh God, Chip, stop, it’s me—”

Carolyn. She was alive. He’d have wept, probably, just sat right down and bawled like a baby in a combination of startlement and relief. But he didn’t have time. And—

Blinded by the blood streaming into his eyes, he tried again to grab the slippery handle of the thing stuck in his …“Gah.”

He pulled it out, feeling a shudder of revulsion go up his spine at the sound of bone on metal as it came free. With his breath coming in great, tearing sobs, he swiped an arm over his eyes and peered at it: a knife, a great big thick serrated one.

“Jesus, Carolyn,” he managed, and dropped the thing.

She stood a few feet away in the cramped cabin, staring at him through eyes wild with fright, a thin runnel of snot mixed with tears leaking down her lip.

“Sorry,” she babbled. “Sorry—oh, Chip, I’m so—”

Grabbing a filthy towel from the low table at the cabin’s center, she flung herself at him and began madly dabbing at his bleeding head. “Sorry, sorry …”

“Okay.” He seized her arms and held her away from him. She was alive. But then he saw what else was on the table.

It was a scrapbook open to a black-and-white snapshot of a woman. A newspaper clipping was pasted in beside the picture.

The woman was dead. Staring, Chip felt his guts shrivel up into themselves as if they, too, wanted nothing more than to be as far as possible from what the photograph represented.

The woman’s pose had been carefully, even lovingly, arranged. Her face had been made up and her hair curled inexpertly.

He got to like it
, Roger Dodd had said frightenedly of his brother, and now Chip understood. Roger might have been lying about a lot of things, but not about that.

Not about Randy. The woman’s eyes were open. Tearing his own gaze from the photo, Chip scanned the filthy cabin for anything they could use. But …

No radio, no first-aid kit. “Carolyn.”

He grabbed her by the shoulders again. Her whole body was trembling and her eyes looked unfocused, smeared makeup making them raccoonish. Without wanting to, he contrasted the way she looked now to the dead woman in the photograph.

She burst into tears. “Chip, he just grabbed me, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t—”

Suddenly, to his horror, she was hyperventilating. He took her in his arms awkwardly, then wrapped them around her tight.

“Okay,” he said into her wet hair. “Okay, now. We’ll get out of this, Carolyn, I promise. I’m here now and we’ll figure this out. We’ll figure it out together.”

She drew back, still gasping and shuddering. He pulled some wadded tissues out of his pocket and handed them to her, waited for her to wipe her face.

“Where is he?” Chip asked when she was finished. “It’s Randy Dodd, right? And he’s alive, just like you said.”

She didn’t speak. Or couldn’t. “Carolyn, do you know where he is?”

“Out there somewhere.” She gestured tremulously at the cabin’s murky oblong plastic window.

“He’s been gone awhile. He’ll come back. Chip, can you get the boat started? Can you get us out of here?”

“I don’t know. I might be able to start the engine.” Or not. He’d never run anything with a diesel on it. “But we’re jammed in here and there’re rocks all around. Even with the tide rising …”

He peered out the small, cloudy window. The huge, dead limbs of the fallen tree blockaded one whole side of the boat.

“We’ll get stuck on the rocks if we don’t know what we’re doing. He must know a channel in and out of here, but I don’t.”

Carolyn’s face threatened tears again. “But we’ve got to get away, we can’t just sit here and wait for him to—”

Kill us
. It was lighter outside, the sky pearly gray. Real sunrise, Chip thought, would be in half an hour or so. The cold light of day would make it easier to see Randy Dodd, when and if he returned. But he would see them, too. Chip put a hand to his head and felt the wound there, still oozing.

Not bad, really. Just messy. But up on deck, Sam Tiptree had a larger hole in him, one that had not stopped bleeding.

“Let’s go.” Chip put a hand on Carolyn’s shoulder to guide her ahead of him through the hatchway. Once on deck, he gave his immediate surroundings a thorough scan in the growing light.

Carolyn crouched by Sam, who wasn’t moving. But he was still breathing.