Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery) (25 page)

I cut him off again. “I want to see her. Face-to-face, Skype…I don’t care. You figure it out. I don’t see her, you
don’t see your dope again, and we get the cops involved in this thing.”

Long, ominous pause and then he said he’d get back to me and hung up, which was just as well. I needed time to think. Things had happened so fast I hadn’t had a chance to work anything out. I paced the room.

I hadn’t really meant what I’d said about getting the cops on the case. As much as I would have liked to arrive with a SWAT team secreted onboard, there was no way it was going to happen. The minute the authorities were involved, things would be beyond my control. Hell, I’d be lucky if they didn’t clap me in jail. Worse yet, there was no way the powers-that-be were trading a thousand pounds of heroin for Rebecca Duval, even if she was one of theirs. That’d be strictly against policy, whereas I had no qualms whatsoever. So it was no cops. I was going to have to do this on my own.

I checked my watch. Just after three o’clock in the afternoon. Brett was huddled on the far end of the couch, licking his wounds, and staring at the wall. I could hear Barbara P banging around in the kitchen. Sounded like she was lobbing pots and pans into the sink from across the room. I suspected she’d watched the video and was more than a little miffed.

The phone rang. Mr. Blocked calling again. Before I could bring it to my ear, the phone blinked a couple of times and there she was, Rebecca, barely able to stand, propped up between two pairs of hairy hands, her head lolling back and forth as she wavered on unsteady legs. Her face was lumpy and her eyes seemed unable to focus.

The screen went black. “Satisfied?” Robbie the Robot inquired.

“Where and when?”

“You know the Hylebos Waterway?”

He pronounced it wrong. Said Hillybus instead of Hilee-bus, which told me he was getting his information from somebody who wasn’t familiar with the area.

“Tacoma,” I said.

“Eleven tomorrow night.”

“She walks down the dock under her own power,” I said. “No more than two people with her.”

“You so much as blink and she’s dead.”

“Where in the waterway?”

“Right after the Hylebos Bridge. North side. You’ll see a big pile of scrap metal piled up. Hundred, hundred and fifty feet tall. You can’t miss it. There’s an old wooden dock along the west side of the yard. Right there. Eleven o’clock.”

“We’ll be there.”

The Hylebos Waterway was one of several heavy industrial canals dredged out of the Puyallup River delta. Its man-made shores were lined with all manner of shipbuilders, scrap yards, recyclers, and receiving docks. Anything deemed too unsightly, too smelly, or just plain too ugly for Seattle had been relegated to Tacoma, and anything too unsightly, smelly, or ugly for Tacoma had been relegated to the waterways.

All in all, it was a good choice for the exchange. The heavy industrial part of Tacoma would be completely deserted at that time of night. Even the bars and coffee shops closed up when the business day was over. That time of night, the only things moving were rent-a-cops and Rottweilers.

Brett looked my way.

“Get up,” I said. “We’ve got a lot to do.”

Sometimes the smallest things tell you all you need to know. The name of the boat was
Yachts of Fun
. Need I say more?

Ballard Marine wasn’t happy to see us. You want to splash a seventy-foot boat back in the water, they expect a little advance notice. As a means of expressing their displeasure, they let us stand around for an hour and a half before they got around to dropping us in the drink, so it was six-forty by the time we left the fuel dock and headed for the locks.

The Hiram M. Chittenden Locks negotiated the twenty feet of elevation difference between the lakes and Puget Sound and were a mecca for the tourists, who showed up in droves every year to watch the boats go up and down, and check out the salmon runs in the attached fish ladder. Commercial maritime traffic always has the right of way in the locks, and as a trio of Argosy sunset cruise tourist boats were lined up in front of us, it was another hour and a half before we motored past the last green channel marker.

“Which way?” Brett asked.

“South,” I told him.

As might be expected,
Yachts of Fun
was a big, blue party barge. Seventy feet of fiberglass and polished wood, powered by a pair of Detroit Model 60 diesels, capable of pushing her over twenty-four knots, as long as you didn’t mind burning the better part of a hundred gallons an hour. Brett settled into the pilot’s seat and goosed the engines.

To starboard, the sky was the color of a day-old bruise. The jagged outline of the Olympic Mountains rose black and menacing above the wooded hills of Bainbridge Island. The tide was ebbing and the wind had switched around
from the south, which, around these parts, was generally a portent of bad weather. We motored along in silence as the big yacht cut through the chop without so much as a quiver. I could feel the low rumble of the engines in my feet but otherwise the boat was like a floating hotel.

Brett was twitchy. Every time I got within arm’s length he flinched and put as much distance between us as he could. His eyes held that same hangdog expression I’d seen in Ricky Waters, as if a major portion of his foundation had suddenly been washed away, casting him adrift in unfamiliar waters.

Wasn’t until we motored past Alki Point, when he finally worked up the courage to ask me exactly where we were going.

“Tacoma,” I said. “I need to see the place where we’re going to make the exchange tomorrow night. Think things through.”

“Maybe we could…” he began.

“Just shut up and drive the damn boat,” I said.

But, of course, he couldn’t do that. Not Mr. Irrepressible. Something in his makeup required that he maintain a constant flow of patter. Mr. Salesman overcoming objections, I figured. It was as if nothing was more terrifying to him than the prospect of silence.

“I didn’t mean for this to happen…” He started babbling about how sorry he was. How he was just trying to make Rebecca proud of him. How he never intended…

I tuned him out.

By the time we arrived at the Puyallup River delta the onboard clock read 10:12 in the evening. The two halves of the Hylebos Bridge jutted into the sky like post-industrial
church steeples. If I recalled correctly, about ten years back the mechanism that opened and closed the bridge had slipped an irreplaceable gear. In order to keep the waterway navigable, they used cranes and cables to yard the bridge into the open and upright position, where it had remained, signaling touchdown for the past decade or so.

To the south, the Art Deco remains of the ferry
Kalakala
slouched half in, half out of the water, its rounded electro-welded superstructure looking for all the world like a two-hundred-and-seventy-foot Airstream trailer.

Over on the next channel, an honest-to-God Mississippi riverboat bobbed contentedly in the chop, its giant red paddlewheel silent and still. Back in the mid-1990s, the Puyallup Tribe had purchased a riverboat named the
Emerald Queen
and turned it into a Cajun-themed casino, with card games, costumed crew, and all. Six or seven years later, the tribe parlayed their floating foot-in-the-door riverboat into a series of dry-land casinos that now dotted the northern Pierce County landscape like neon mange, making the
Queen
more or less superfluous and relegating it to an ignoble fate alongside this fetid industrial waterway.

Mr. Blocked had been right. You couldn’t miss the enormous pile of scrap steel thrusting high into the sky, enough rust to make the surrounding air smell like fresh blood, and to get my nostrils twitching with fear.

Brett idled the engines as we crept in front of the scrap yard, moving only marginally faster than the outflowing tide. The dock was old and falling apart, with a rickety-looking ladder running down the east side. A remnant of an earlier age, before cargo boats grew to the size of small towns and the Port of Tacoma mostly shipped logs from place to place.

Looked like there used to be another dock a bit farther west, but it was gone now, leaving only a series of rotted pilings jutting above the waterline like broken teeth.

I told Brett to hold our position while I looked the place over. From their perspective, the place was perfect. Isolated, deserted that time of night. The minute we handed over the boat and the dope, we’d be faced with a hundred-yard death march back to dry land. A hike I felt certain they had no intention of allowing us to complete. Even if we did make it to terra firma, the broken bridge limited our landside escape routes to one.

Interestingly enough, the place worked for me too. The narrow hundred-yard pier was my own personal Thermopylae, giving me ample time to see who was coming our way and prevent them from launching any sort of frontal attack. The secret was to use that hundred yards to my advantage, which, unless I was mistaken, meant not using it at all. The way I saw it, every step we took on that dock brought us one step closer to being dead.

“Where’s the tide?” I asked.

Brett pushed a few buttons on the Simrad chart plotter. “Be all the way out in an hour,” he said. “Low, low.”

“What about at eleven tomorrow night?”

More button pushing. “Gonna be a minus three,” he said. “One of the lowest tides of the year.”

I turned it around in my head, trying to look at it from their perspective, as if I was the one plotting an ambush. You had to figure that Billy Bud owned the scrap metal business, which meant our adversaries had the keys to the gates. And what about security? With all the metal thievery going on, there must be some sort of security at night. If I were
them, I’d call off security for the night on some pretense or another and lock myself in the yard. That way nobody could walk in on what was going down, and then…then what?

My first thought was that I’d station a couple of shooters on the mountain of steel. Maybe another one laying low in the weeds along the western fence line. Put us in a cross fire. Pick us off the minute the boat and the dope were safely in the channel and out of the line of fire.

Problem was that killing us out at the end of the dock presented a very sticky “what the hell to do with the bodies” problem. Carrying three deadweight bodies a hundred yards was no small feat and required more people than you wanted involved in something like this. Wasn’t like they could kill us and leave us lying there for the day shift to find either. Not with Billy Bud owning the place. Too many questions about how the perpetrators got in and out of the yard. And sooner or later somebody was going to wonder exactly who removed the security patrol for the night and why. And what if one or more of us went in the water—what then? A boat standing by? Way too James Bond for these guys.

No. Unless I was mistaken, they were going to have to be neat about this. We were going to have to completely disappear, which meant they were probably going to let us walk back to dry land before they put us out of our misery. That way they could cut us down and cart us off in some sort of motorized conveyance, never to be seen again.

I walked to the back of the boat. No davit, no dingy, no nothing.

“Where’s the skiff?” I asked.

“In the garage,” Brett said.

I watched as he flicked a couple of switches on the control panel.

“Watch your hands,” he advised.

The whine of hydraulics filled the air as the back of the boat began to rise, revealing a fourteen-foot Boston Whaler secreted in a little fiberglass compartment.

“Put us on the dock,” I said.

Brett engaged the thrusters and began to cozy us up to the end of the dock. I threw a couple of orange fenders over the rail and tied them off at dock level, and looped a line over the nearest piling and tied it to a cleat.

“We’re going to tie the skiff under the dock,” I said. “By the time it gets light, the tide will be up and it’ll be out of sight.”

“Yeah…sure,” Brett said. “I’ll get it out for you.”

“No,” I corrected, “you’ll get it out for
you
.”

No way I was giving Brett Ward the opportunity to motor off in the yacht and leave me behind. I watched as he grabbed what looked like a small TV remote from the dashboard and pointed it my way.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Yacht controller,” Brett said. “You can run the whole damn boat with this thing—engines, thrusters, system controls—the full Monty.”

“How does the boat know which nav station to respond to?”

He pointed to three toggle switches immediately above the radar screen on the yacht’s main console. “To the left, she listens to this nav station here. To the right, she listens to the station up on the flybridge. The one in the middle gives priority to the yacht controller.”

“What happens if somebody tries to run it from here when the controller switch is on?”

“The boat does what you tell it, unless the controller switch is on and somebody starts telling it to do something else.”

“In which case?”

“In which case it does what the controller tells it to do.”

“Tie it up good,” I said. “Fore and aft, and make sure you leave enough slack in the lines to account for the rise and fall of the tide.”