Three Can Keep a Secret (3 page)

Joe reached the interstate overpass, and Sammie redirected the conversation by pointing out her side window. "Oh, God. I hate that. Look at those stupid kids."

They watched as two teenaged boys
in
bathing trunks rode
a
large inner tube down the middle
of
the grassy median strip between
I
-9l's
two lanes, which at the moment was
a
roaring, Whitewater brook.

"They're gonna love the drop-off between the bridges around the corner," Willy said. He reached into his pocket with his one good hand and pulled out a cell phone. "I'll tell the state police to either pick 'em up or scrape 'em off Williams Street below."

Joe kept driving, knowing that Willy was right. In the time it would take him to swing around and access the interstate, the two boys would have either had the ride of their thoughtless lives, or been mangled at the bottom of where
I-9
l's twin bridges leaped over Williams.

Assuming that Williams hadn't become a torrent itself, he continued thinking as they passed a couple of shuttered gas stations and entered West Brattleboro
—
a row of stores, restaurants, a church, a service station, and a post office, all paralleling the racing Whetstone Brook. Here the water was making a shallow river of Route 9. They all knew what this meant, even before they got there: Farther west, the topography flattened, spread out, and became more level with the brook, meaning that what was a passable sheet of water here was most likely a cascade beyond.

As Willy talked into his phone, Joe said to the rest of them, "Take your seat belts off, people. If we need to move fast, you don't want them in your way."

All became silent in the car, aside from the deep-throated thrumming on the roof.

The mood in the car carrying Caspar Luard had worsened. Tom, his driver, had committed a fundamental blunder. Somewhere between Rockingham and Springfield, on Route 5, he'd rounded a corner, calculated the dimensions of the lake swamping the road ahead, and despite Al's growing apprehension, white-knuckled the wheel and gunned the engine.

"Holy Jesus." Al yelled out in fear as the car plowed into the water, twin plumes sprouting like wings to both sides. For an instant, they were fine. Tom felt the bite of the road beneath him, and thought he glimpsed its emergence beyond.

But it didn't last. There was a lurch from underneath, the engine suddenly roared as the tires left the road, and the entire vehicle sloughed and twisted on its axis as it was transformed from car into raft.

"Damn," Tom almost whispered as the cruiser began listing, first slowly, and then with increasing speed, as it found a downward embankment and slid into deeper water.

"It's coming in." Luard shouted, kicking at the seat before him, fighting against the chain around his waist. "Hey, you assholes, it's coming in through the doors. Come on, guys. Come on. Make it stop."

But there was no stopping anything now, Tom knew, his hands glued to the wheel while they slid like a newly christened ship into the middle of a bounding, curling, mad rush of earth-brown water. Now it was just a matter of finding out where they'd end up.

Until Al changed the dynamics by opening his door.

"I'm getting out," he yelled, oblivious of the idiocy of both gesture and statement.

Tom stared at him in astonishment as Al put his weight against the door and was instantly sucked from the car, the current having reacted to the sudden appearance of what amounted to a large oar by snapping them around like a leaf in a torrent.

There was no time to respond. The cruiser nipped, Caspar's screaming from the back was overwhelmed by the symphonic blending of rushing water, the tearing of metal as the door vanished altogether, and
—
most ominously to Tom, who heard it all in distinct detail
—
the deep, throaty rumbling of thousands of unseen boulders tumbling in the heart of the river into which they'd been delivered.

It was that primordial growl, above all else, that caught his attention, as dreadful to him as watching footage of lava flows and eruptions of molten rock
—
a childhood terror he'd never been able to handle.

"Hang on," he shouted to his hysterical passenger, finding himself gripped by a cold and calculating understanding of their situation, their odds, and their options.

Hearing the engine still roaring, he seized upon what he assumed were the car's death throes to reach out and hit the automatic door locks, lower the windows, put the transmission into park, and unhook his seat belt. The last gesture popped him free of his seat and pressed him up against the steering wheel, since right then, the car was riding the river nose down, its engine acting as an anchor.

Caspar looked around in panic as the water poured in through both windows and shot through the partition like a geyser. "Holy fuck, man. You're killin' us."

Tom didn't answer. The surrounding water had a smothering menace to it
—
opaque with mud and filled with grit. It entered from all sides, weighing him down and lunging for his throat. He spat out a mouthful and took a deep breath before sliding through the gaping door opening like a porpoise as the car caught on a boulder and twisted, driver's side down. His prisoner's screaming was swallowed by the roar and tumult around them.

Tom hooked onto the door post between front and back and reached into the window to grab Caspar's seat belt, following it underwater to the buckle, doing his best to avoid the other man's thrashing upper body as he fought his restraints in a burst of fading energy.

The car shuddered again, almost throwing Tom free, but not before he'd slipped the buckle loose and grabbed Caspar's shirt, pulling him halfway out of the window to where he could breathe.

Caspar coughed and spat and threw his head back, gasping for air, as Tom continued extracting him from the tossing car.

"Oh, my God. Thanks, man. Holy Mother of Mary."

The two of them were finally thrown free in one final, explosive encounter with a boulder, Tom clinging to his prisoner as to a long-sought-after lover.

Now separated from the vehicle, but weighed down by his gun belt and his manacled companion, Tom slipped an arm around Caspar's chest in a lifeguard's grip and struck out in a clumsy stroke for a passing tree, catching one of its limbs like the baton at a relay race.

In itself, it was no solution, but the tree caught something along the edge of the bounding river, and swung them around into a small island of more vegetation, bobbing within the relative calm of a temporary eddy.

Tom clawed them farther into the tangle, away from the water's grasping embrace, dragging Caspar Luard as if he were a duffle bag filled with rocks. He cursed all the way, as Luard's clothing and chains got caught in the branches, or as Tom's feet slipped through holes on the shifting matting beneath them.

"Who're you yelling at?" Caspar complained. "You got us into this."

"Shut up," Tom ordered him. "Or I'll throw you back. Use your feet."

Slowly, they worked their way to the top of what appeared to be a makeshift hummock of debris, perhaps crowning firm ground but surrounded by the fast-snaking tendrils of the caramel-colored river they'd just left.

At the far end of it was Al, Tom saw, stretched out like a beached whale, bleeding and torn, but alive enough to offer a feeble wave. Too tired to resent his abandonment of them earlier, Tom merely returned the gesture.

"Hey, Chief?" Caspar's plaintive voice brought him back.

"What?" he asked almost peevishly.

Caspar jangled his chains. "Do I still have to wear these?"

Joe rolled to a stop in the middle of the road. Ahead, the Whetstone Brook was arcing over the Route 9 bridge, the railing no longer retaining errant vehicles, but instead acting as a launching ramp for a continuous rooster tail of liquid mud fountaining through the sodden, gray air like a broken water main spewing across the road.

"Gee, boss," Willy commented. "Not gonna go for it?"

Joe didn't respond, craning to see to their right through the streaming water on the glass. "The address is over there. We might be able to get closer to the trailer park using the back feeder road, instead of the main entrance."

"We putting a lot of effort into this?" Lester asked from the back. "I mean, not to be coldhearted . . ."

Joe held up his hand. "I know, I know. They had no idea what was out here when they assigned us." He put the car in reverse and began turning around. "Let's just give it a vague look around. We may not even get out."

They'd barely engaged the road in question when Sam announced, "There, to the left. Two guys in a tree."

The rest of them turned to stare.

"Idiots," Willy said.

Joe cast him a look. "You don't know that's them."

"Yeah I do," the old sniper assured him. "The one on the upper branch is Zach Nee-ley. Worthless piece of crap. This is totally his style. I don't know the other one."

"Thank God for that," Sam muttered.

"It's gotta be one of his new recruits," Willy finished. "Nobody's dumb enough to do more than one job with Zach."

"They look comfortable enough," Lester said hopefully.

"They look half dead," Joe stated, reaching for the radio. He gave their location and an update to Dispatch, adding that the priority of the call should be pretty high, as the situation looked "fluid."

"You did actually say that," Willy challenged him after he finished.

Joe shook his head and flipped on the car's blue lights, to indicate their location to responders. This wasn't going to be easy, he knew. Plucking these two morons from their perch would involve many skilled people trying their best not to get killed in the process.

"Now you did it," Willy said.

Joe looked back at the men in the distant tree. One of them was pointing and waving at them, attracted by their flashing strobes.

"Oh, for Christ's sake," Sammie said, and without further comment, opened her door and stepped out into the storm, Les sliding out right behind her.

Joe immediately followed. The treed men had reacted to the sight of them by jumping into the water in obvious hopes of swimming across.

"That's about right," Willy groused, joining them in the downpour. "Trust a moron to think he can walk on water."

Joe gestured to the rear of the SUV. "Get whatever you can find
—
ropes, vests, whatever makes sense. Maybe we can snag 'em on the way by." He began jogging toward where the swollen brook crossed the road ahead, his eye on a long branch he'd spotted lying along the impromptu bank.

To his left, he could barely make out the two bobbing heads amid the trees, building fragments, furniture, and personal belongings, all careening toward him at high speed. With the sound of the water obliterating all chances of being heard, he began waving at them to swim toward his side of the river.

"They might as well be tennis balls," Willy shouted beside him as Lester and Sam began rigging a coil of rope to the branch Joe had spotted earlier, hoping to extend a hanging lasso to the two men as they swept by.

It didn't take long, but it only half worked. With the four of them as a counterbalance, they got the branch well in position, but only the man they didn't know managed to snag the loop. Neeley took a swing at it and missed.

"I knew he wouldn't let me down," Willy said as he dropped the branch, took off at a sprint alongside the churning water
—
trailing a second coil of rope that he'd unobtrusively tied around his waist
—
and leaped almost on top of the flailing Zach Neeley.

Sam and Joe threw themselves onto the quickly vanishing rope as Lester kept pulling the unnamed man ashore.

"Willy, you son of a bitch," Joe heard Sammie grunting as she struggled for a foothold against the dead weight of the two in the water. "I will kill you if you survive this."

In Waterbury, Bonnie Swift
—
her ears stuffed with toilet paper against the incessant, malfunctioning fire alarm
—
finally managed to use a fire extinguisher to smash the handle off the locked door to the Brooks Rehab unit in the basement, only to be pushed back by a four-foot wall of dammed-up water and a stationery store's worth of papers, files, books, plastic trash cans, and, incongruously, one poster featuring surfing off Hawaii. She stumbled against the stairs behind her, fell on her back, and felt the tidal wave wash over her, smelling of diesel fuel and oil, among other things she didn't want to know.

Spitting and rubbing her mouth, she staggered back to her feet, swearing and looking into the murky water for the flashlight that she'd dropped. In her search for the wandering Carolyn Barber, she'd found several people feverishly trying to rectify the building's electrical problems, but no sign of the Governor.

And by now, what little light had been supplied by the heavily masked sun was all but gone, and the normally long summer day was shortened by the weather to resemble its briefest winter kin.

She followed a faint glow to her submerged waterproof flashlight, near the bottom step, and sloshed through the open door ahead, into a maze of shadowy corridors.

Carolyn Barber had blundered into the state hospital's famed tunnels. Unperturbed, even smiling at the novelty of her surroundings, she walked slowly ahead, hands outstretched, along the narrow corridors. The state office complex sat atop a honeycomb of such passages, some large enough to house offices to either side; others so cramped as to qualify as crawl spaces. The purposes of these tunnels had varied over the decades, as had access to them, depending on the overhead building's function. The state hospital and the public safety headquarters had been considered drum-tight, for instance. Others were pretty much common areas.

Until the water had altered all such distinctions.

Carolyn hadn't been looking to escape. She hadn't even known about the tunnels. She'd just wanted to return to her room. The tunnels
—
by the doors, defaulting to unlock instead of to lock
—
had simply been delivered to her. With the ebbing light, the disorienting noise, and her desire for peace and quiet, they'd appeared to offer solace.

She was beginning to fret, however. The water, for one thing, had deepened. Initially reminding her of when she'd enjoyed wading as a child, it had now reached her waist, and was not smelling good, either.

She stopped, working her perpetually fogged brain for a clear thought. She had memories of being able to do that. She remembered a time, long ago, when she hadn't felt trapped in a daydream. But she couldn't swear to it. After all, she also vaguely recalled having been called a leader once, although none of her listeners seemed to know of it, which made her doubtful. They did honor the title she'd insisted upon, the Governor, which sounded right to her, if again tempered by their bemused expressions.

She looked ahead. There was the tiniest sliver of light, perhaps from a small window, itself out of sight. It was enough for her to see that the water level and the low ceiling almost met as the floor ramped down beneath her. It didn't seem like a good idea to keep going.

She turned to retrace her steps and let out a startled cry. Something large had appeared right behind her, floating up without a sound and wedging itself into the tight passage. She tentatively tried determining what it was, and what to do with it, her terror heightening. In fact, it was a large wooden desk, liberated from a nearby office by the rising water, and set free to float like a clumsy crate.

However, Carolyn didn't know that. She just felt hemmed in, which was a bad thing for her in particular. She therefore opted for her original route
—
away from the hard, large, slightly bobbing threat and into the deeper water.

Jenn stared openmouthed at her colleague. "Oh, my God. Bonnie. What happened to you? Are you all right?"

Bonnie Swift was drenched, covered with filth, and appeared exhausted. Jenn gently moved one of the patients from a nearby chair and steered Bonnie toward it. They were all on the second floor, the lights were back on, the alarms had been stilled, and, other than the staffers keeping a perpetually keen eye open for any mishaps or sudden movements, things had become relatively boring.

"I lost the Governor," Bonnie admitted, dropping into the seat.

Jenn's eyes widened. "She's dead?"

But Bonnie shook her head and shrugged. "No. I don't know. Maybe. I lost her in the tunnels. She's gone."

"She still pissed at me?"

Joe smiled as he applied a Band-Aid over Willy's left eye. "She mentioned something about a newborn's father risking his life for the sake of a dirtbag who didn't have the brains of a urinal cake."

Willy burst out laughing. "She said that?"

Joe sat back, his task completed. "Almost a direct quote
—
the last part, anyhow."

"I love it."

"So, yes, she is still pissed at you," Joe concluded, just so the point wasn't missed.

Willy made a face. "I know."

Joe put away the first aid kit. They'd moved to a small staging area not far from their river rescue site, recently established for unrelated reasons. There were several trucks from various fire departments surrounding them, an assortment of vehicles from FEMA and the National Guard
—
places aplenty for Sam to get out of the rain, have a hot drink, maybe find some dry clothes, and cool off far from Willy. Lights on tripods had been rigged around the periphery, which
—
given the comings and goings of strobe-equipped vehicles and the people milling about in electric-colored slickers
—
lent the entire scene the look of an alien landing site.

Joe understood both sides
—
the impulse that made Willy dive in after a man who was now claiming Willy had hit him on purpose in the process; and Sam's maternal outrage. It spoke to the passion and decency of each of them, as far as Joe was concerned. One of the graces he'd valued during his career was that for as long as he could still show up at the office, he'd get to work with people whom he'd have happily selected as his own kids.

Even if, on occasion, they were ready to kill each other.

Lester Spinney ducked under the raised hatch door of the SUV that Willy and Joe were using as a rain tent.

"All patched up?" he asked.

"They take care of our two burglars-in-training?" Joe countered.

Lester nodded. "Took 'em out back and executed 'em. Beat 'em to death
—
didn't want to waste bullets."

Willy laughed as Joe just gave him a look.

"Yeah, boss," Spinney conceded. "They're under lock and key. No trip to Springfield, though. You hear what happened to the last transport detail that headed that way? Got swept up in the river. Lost the EQ; damn near lost the crew."

"Everyone okay?" Joe asked.

"Wet and embarrassed, but fine. We're gonna hear a thousand stories like that before this is done. Guaranteed."

"Got anything for us?" Willy asked, already getting restless and, Joe suspected, wanting some more time between now and when he and Sam reconvened at home.

"Oh," Lester said, "Yeah. We've been called up north. It's a little vague, since communication is falling apart, but we should be able to make it. We're supposed to hitch a ride with some other folks on a Humvee to a spot somewhere in Newfane. They say we can still reach it, at least for now. You hear they're talking about evacuating the state EOC? The whole Waterbury complex flooded and it's threatening their computers and power."

"You're full of good news," Joe told him. "What're we supposed to check out?"

"That part's a little jumbled. The emergency coordinator in the area
—
don't ask me who or what
—
said he didn't have time to go into detail. Apparently, most of South Newfane is being washed into the Rock River and beyond. But he said first that he needed cops, and then that they should be detectives
—
he was specific. 'We got a missing person up here,' or something to that effect. Sorry I don't have more. I did ask."

Willy was not in a mood to argue. "I'm in," he said, sliding out of the SUV's back.

Joe addressed Spinney. "They need a full crew?"

"Not our choice," Les responded. "The Hummer only has room for two more. Pretty packed as it is. This is more the incident commander's call than ours."

Joe glanced at Willy. "You and me?"

Willy gave him a crooked smile. "Me and anyone 'cept you-know-who."