Mortar and Murder (35 page)

She shook her head. “I’ve seen it, though. Sitting at the dock. There’s no motor.”

“I’m sure there’s a motor somewhere. Just not hanging off the back. Down below, maybe. It’s much bigger than ours. If there’s a key and a steering wheel, I’m pretty sure I can figure it out.”

I was less sure than I made out to be, but really, what was the alternative? Sitting on the island and waiting for rescue? When no one knew where we were and when they were all probably stuck on the Appalachian Trail?

I wondered if there was fog there, too. If so, they might have had to stop walking and hunker down to wait it out. They could be there until tomorrow. And really, how hard could navigating a boat be? If I could drive a car, surely I could drive a boat. The water was deep around here, I didn’t have to worry about hitting any sandbars, and as long as I stayed clear of the islands, I ought to be able to get us back to Waterfield. The fog would make things more difficult, since I wouldn’t actually be able to see where I was going, but it’s amazing what one can accomplish when the alternative is certain death. As long as there was a key on the boat, things looked good. I wouldn’t know how to hotwire it if there wasn’t—is it even possible to hotwire a boat?—but we’d cross that bridge when we got to it. If it came down to that, we could at least push off from the dock and float away. Go out a few yards and drop anchor, far enough off the island that no one would risk swimming out to the boat in the frigid water to get to us. And then we could hang out there and wait for the fog to lift and someone to spot us. Sooner or later Derek would realize that I was gone and come looking for me. It might take a couple of days, especially if he was stranded on the Appalachian Trail overnight, but he’d get here. All we had to do was survive until then.

We started moving again, around the corner of the house, all in a cluster now. And all of us even more hyper-aware of our surroundings than before. We were so close, and it was so tempting just to make a break for it and get to the boat as quickly as we could, but we couldn’t afford any mistakes. Not when we were almost safe.

We made it around the house unchallenged and started crossing the small meadow in front of the house, going down to the water and the dock. Under other circumstances I’d be freaking out about having to cross open ground. That wasn’t an issue now, with the fog. Even if the guy was hunkered down among the trees, gun at the ready, he had to see us to aim. An automatic weapon would take us all out, of course, with one quick
rat-a-tat
of a trigger finger, but I didn’t think we were talking about that kind of criminal. These guys weren’t professionals, just a couple of amateurs who had managed to run a human trafficking ring for a few years without getting caught. Probably because it was such a small operation—two or three women once a year—out here on the edge of the world . . . just amateurs. Yes, my heart was beating double time, but I wasn’t worried about walking into a hail of bullets. I was worried about maybe
one
bullet, but I comforted myself with the knowledge that if we couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see us, either. At least not well enough to hit any of us.

We reached the dock unchallenged and crept onto the slick planks.

“Careful,” I muttered as Olga slipped and threatened to slide into the water and pull Svetlana with her. Irina grabbed them both and kept them upright, and did it with a minimum of noise.

The cabin cruiser was up ahead; we could see the dark outline getting clearer through the fog with every step we took. Just another minute now, and we’d know whether we’d have a chance to get off the island or not. Gert might have the key in his pocket, and if he did, we were SOL.

Irina helped me to hold the boat steady and I slithered over the low railing and onto the wet deck, where I stood weaving for a few seconds, arms out for balance, teeth gritted against the need to squeal, while my legs got used to being on the water and my shoes struggled for traction on the slippery wood. Once I felt fairly confident in my ability to stay on my feet, I slip-slid toward the below-deck steering house. Maybe I could peek in and see whether . . .

Yes! There was a steering wheel, and—even better—there was a key. Already in the ignition. I turned to the others and beckoned, smiling for the first time in the past two hours, at least.

The others scrambled on board, too, less carefully now, while I swung myself down into the steering house. There were four low windows in the front, letting me look out onto the deck and the fog, and behind me, a set of doors leading into what had to be the little cabin that made this thing a cabin cruiser. The doors were closed. While I turned the key in the ignition—holding my breath and praying—Svetlana pulled the doors open and pushed Olga inside. Irina, meanwhile, stayed on deck, keeping an eye on the fog and getting ready to cast off.

The engine caught, and Irina started to lift the rope that held the cruiser tethered to the dock. I hunted for the maritime equivalent of a gearshift to put the boat into reverse, and I had just found it when Svetlana and Olga came back out of the cabin. Moving backward, and with their hands in the air.

A few steps behind them—or rather in front, seeing as they were coming out butts first—was a man with a gun. I gulped.

I guess I’d realized, sometime after standing in the village with Irina and Gert what felt like a lifetime ago, that Ned Schachenger wasn’t the second bad guy in this scenario. Ned lived in Boothbay Harbor. Our Bad Guy Numero Uno, Hal the shop owner, had knocked on the door of someone right here on the island. I just hadn’t given much thought to...

“Calvin!”

He glanced over. “Hi, Miss Baker.”

Great. He remembered me, too.

I waited for him to order me to turn the key in the ignition and shut the boat back down, but it didn’t come. Instead he just stood there, with that nasty little gun pointed at my stomach, and waited for Irina to cast off. I opened my mouth to let her know what was going on—maybe she’d, at least, get away and back onto shore if, as it seemed, he was planning to take the rest of us into open water—but he shook his head and wiggled the gun. I closed my mouth again.

Irina finished her part of the job and came toward the steering house. As soon as she had swung herself down, the gun moved away from me and in her direction.

It didn’t really matter which one of us he was aiming at, and he must have realized it. I mean, yeah, if it came down to the bottom line, and only one of us could survive, I didn’t want to die. But as long as there was a gun pointing at any of us, we were all likely to do what he wanted.

What he wanted, in the first instance, was for Irina, Svetlana, and Olga to go back into the cabin and sit down, side by side, on one of the built-in bunks along the curved wall. Then he turned to me.

“Go.”

“I’ve never driven a boat before,” I protested. The added incentive of having a loaded gun pointed at me didn’t make it any easier. Yeah, it made me want to succeed, so I wouldn’t get shot, but on the other hand, it didn’t make it any easier to concentrate.

“You drive a car?”

I nodded.

“Same thing. Except you don’t have to worry about staying between the lines.” He chuckled at his own wit.

Until I could figure out a way to take advantage of the situation, cooperating seemed like the best course of action. So I grabbed the gearshift handle and moved it toward reverse and managed to get away from the dock without flooding the engine or doing whatever the maritime equivalent is.

“Go away from the island,” Calvin said.

I moved the shift back to neutral and then forward. Slowly. The boat started picking up speed. Very little speed, since I had no idea where I was going and what might be in front of me. We couldn’t be more than a few yards out from land, but there was fog everywhere, and I’d already gotten turned around. I didn’t know whether he was taking us toward the mainland or out to sea.

I decided to ask. “Where are we going?”

He glanced at me. “Boothbay Harbor.”

Good to know. “Why?”

He arched his brows. “I have buyers for these two girls. And money to make.”

Yowch. “Won’t they . . . I mean, with the fog and all, are you sure they’ll still be there?”

“Oh, they’ll be there. Just concentrate on driving.”

I concentrated.

On boats they build these days, there’s probably lots of newfangled electronic stuff: computers and radar and satellite systems that tell you where you are in relation to everything around you and let you know when you’re about to run aground. Gert’s boat was an antique; it lacked all those helpful things. There had to be some sort of navigational thingy somewhere, because Calvin kept ordering small adjustments, a little to the left, a little to the right, but I couldn’t figure out how. We didn’t run into anything, though, so he must have known what he was doing. I was getting more of a feel for the controls, too, which gave me more confidence that we might make it out of this situation with our lives.

A few minutes ticked by as we crept through the fog. I had no idea what was going on in the cabin behind me; whether Irina was planning some way to overpower Calvin and take over command of the boat, or if she and the others were waiting for me to figure something out. I could hear the murmur of their voices—in Russian—but, of course, I couldn’t understand what they were saying. And I was too worried about Calvin and the gun—and the fog—to look over my shoulder for more than a second at a time. Most likely they were just catching up with one another and with what had happened over the past couple months.

“How long have you and . . . um . . . your friend been running this racket?” I asked Calvin. Talking was better than listening to the silence, plus I was curious.

“My uncle.” Calvin’s voice was cold. “Three years.”

“So Irina was one of the first women you brought over.”

Calvin glanced at her. “Uncle Hal picked her. I wouldn’t have. Too old.”

“I guess you picked Olga and Katya, then.” The cute little—dead—blonde and the buxom brunette.

Calvin confirmed that he had.

“What . . . um . . . Did you happen to go into the store earlier ? Did anyone survive? Your uncle? Or Mr. Heyerdahl?”

“I think Uncle Hal might have made it,” Calvin said. “I didn’t see him.” He shrugged.

“And Mr. Heyerdahl?”

“Lying in a pool of blood. I figured he was a goner.”

“But you didn’t check to see?”

“Excuse me, but I had some runaway merchandise to track down. I didn’t have time to mess around.”

Well, excuse
me
. I went back to steering the boat. Silently thanking God that Gert might still be among the living.

With that worry off my mind, I could turn my attention to other things. There had to be something I could do to stop this guy. I mean, there were four of us and only one of him. Yeah, he had the gun, which did even the odds a little, but I had control of the boat, and surely that had to count for something. Could I run it aground? Make him stumble and lose the gun?

Probably not. He knew more than I did about where the obstacles lay around here, and he was directing me clear. He’d shoot me before I got anywhere close to grounding the boat.

Could I haul back on the gearshift handle and stop the boat dead in the middle of the water? That might make him overbalance. Would it work, though? I didn’t know enough about boats to be sure. So was there a way to push him overboard? Dropping him into the chilly waters of the Atlantic would take care of him. It had killed Katya. We’d make sure Calvin didn’t come to that—I wanted him to survive to stand trial—but if he got a good dunking, maybe he’d be easier to deal with.

But for that we’d have to get him up on deck first, and how would we accomplish that?

It might be better to ambush him. For all four of us to jump on him and knock him down. And sit on him. Then again, if we did, if we somehow managed to communicate that plan to one another, and by some miracle nobody got shot in the process, and we got the gun away from him, and we tied him up and made sure he wasn’t a threat anymore . . . then we’d have to navigate to shore on our own, and I had no idea how to do that. So long as this fog lasted, I depended on Calvin to tell me where to go.

So maybe the best thing would be to make use of him. He’d said we were going to Boothbay Harbor. He could be lying, sure—but I doubted it. If he had let us go instead of running after us earlier, he could have gotten away. There were plenty of boats in the harbor on Rowanberry Island he could have used to make a break for it. But he’d come after us. He must have wanted the Ukrainian girls back badly enough to take the chance.

So it seemed safe to assume that he’d told the truth and we were actually going to Boothbay Harbor.

Waiting until we got there before trying to tackle Calvin might be the best course of action. Once the harbor was within sight, I could open the throttle, aim straight for the nearest pier, and slam into it. That would take care of him. He might shoot me first, but if we were that close to shore, someone would hear the shot and come to investigate, and his chance of disembarking on the QT would be zero. I might even survive, if the nearest hospital wasn’t too far away. Melissa survived getting shot back in December.

My mind made up, we spent the next fifteen minutes cruising in silence while I rehearsed the plan in my head, trying frantically and uselessly to consider unforeseen angles and plug any holes I could think of. By then Calvin’s behavior clued me in that we were getting close to land. That and the fact that his cell phone was working. He used it to call someone and arrange to meet them right at the harbor to hand over the “merchandise.”

It was time to make my move.

I had no idea how close to shore we were, but with Calvin’s attention divided between me and the phone, and between the phone in one hand and the gun in the other, we wouldn’t get a better chance. I pushed the shift forward, just a little, and yanked hard on the wheel. The boat banked. I yanked the wheel the other way. The boat bucked. Calvin stumbled. And here came Irina. She must have realized that I’d been planning something and been waiting just inside the doors, ready for the action to start.