Vineyard Prey (7 page)

“Was that him?” I asked. “Was that the Easter Bunny?”

She was angry. “What are you doing here? Why are you following me?”

Anger begets anger. I tried to repress my own. “I'm not following you, but that guy was. I was in the store to buy a book. Did you see him? Did you recognize him? And stop pointing that damned pistol at me!”

She took her hand from her pocket.

“You're getting careless,” I said. “He was watching you in the bookstore and he was right behind you on the sidewalk when I called to you. Well, did you see him? Do you know who he is?”

She shook her head. “I only saw his back. I didn't recognize him.”

“Because you were really looking at me instead of at him.”

“What if I was? What difference does it make? I don't know what the Bunny looks like. That could have been him but it may have been an innocent bystander.”

He hadn't looked so innocent to me, but maybe he was just a guy hot for a beautiful woman. Maybe he'd gone after her to hit her up for a date.

“I'm not your enemy,” I said. “You've got to get that idea out of your head and open your eyes to other people who might be. First you got lost in that book you were reading and then you stayed lost right here on the street. Your mind was somewhere else when it should have been focused on why you came here to the Vineyard.”

She looked up and down the sidewalk. It was a chilly day and there weren't too many people nearby, although I recognized one woman coming toward us. “I needed a break,” Kate said. “Joe and I have been up there in the woods too long. Nothing's happened. I'm a city girl. I need some entertainment. I'm getting claustrophobic.”

Boredom has probably done in a lot of people. They get twitchy and leave their safe places and go out into the world, where they get into trouble. I offered Kate that opinion.

She frowned, then nodded. “You're right, but this waiting is getting on my nerves. The damned Easter Bunny is taking his time getting here.”

“He may already be here,” I reminded her. “That may have been him just now. Did you see the guy's face at all? Would you know him again?”

“No. How about you?”

“I'll know him. I saw him watching you in the store.”

At that moment the woman I'd recognized coming down the street stopped in front of me, thrust her angry face up toward mine, and said, “Murderer!”

I bowed. “Nice to see you, too, Mrs. Quackenbush.”

The woman said, “Humph,” glared, and walked on up the street.

Kate looked at her back. “What on earth was that all about?”

“That's Irma Quackenbush,” I said. “She's president of VETA, Vineyarders for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. She hates everyone who eats meat.” I explained what VETA was all about.

“I've heard of those people,” said Kate, “but this is the first one I've actually seen. Are they all like her?”

“No, Irma is an extreme case. I think the only thing that keeps her from shooting hunters and fishermen is that we're animals, too. Someday, though, she may change her mind about that.”

The VETA fanatics are pretty closely related to all the other fanatics who think they alone are righteous. I consider such moralists to be far more dangerous than professional terrorists like the Easter Bunny, who kill for money, plain and simple. You can reason with a professional shootist but you can't reason with an Irma Quackenbush.

But I wasn't thinking about Irma and her fanatic friends, I was wondering what had really brought Kate to Martha's Vineyard and now into Vineyard Haven, which is as far from Joe's house in Aquinnah as you can get and still be on the island. Her emotions had seemed a bit out of whack from the beginning, and still did.

First, she'd almost shot me for no good reason. Even after seeing my ID and finding no weapons on me, and having no reason to believe I was other than I said I was, I thought she still would have
pulled the trigger. Pro assassins, one of which she apparently was, generally don't kill people unnecessarily because, if for no other reason, any killing attracts attention and attention is the last thing they want. Whenever someone deliberately commits a public killing, you know you're dealing with an amateur or a professional politician who wants the publicity. All of the martyrs who willingly die for the Cause are amateurs. Their leaders, on the other hand, may be very professional. They never die if they can help it. Their job is to get the amateurs to do the glorious killing and dying.

Kate was supposedly a professional, but her raw emotions when she'd ambushed me were inconsistent with that persona.

And those emotions had only changed when Joe Begay had insisted that I was to be trusted, and she had acquiesced. Or seemed to.

And now, three days later, here she was in Vineyard Haven, paying no attention to her surroundings even though she knew that the Easter Bunny was seeking her and might already be on the island. It wasn't the sort of move a trained professional agent would make. Allowing yourself to be distracted in a war zone is the act of an amateur.

“What were you thinking about, anyway?” I asked.

She lifted her chin. “None of your business.”

“You may be right. Are you staying up at Joe's?”

“None of your business.”

“Right again, I guess. Do you have a car?”

“I have transportation.”

“Where is it?”

She hesitated, then nodded toward the town parking lot. “Down there. Don't try to be protective. I've got my eyes open now.”

On the bright side, my old Toyota was parked in that lot, too. On the dark side, that's where the man in the green coat had been headed when last seen.

“Your mind isn't on your work,” I said. “I suggest that you get out of this town. I'll walk you to your car and make sure no one follows you when you leave.”

She sniffed a ladylike sniff, but a sniff nevertheless. “And just how will you do that?”

“By following him in my own car if he follows you, and making sure he knows I'm there. I doubt if the Bunny wants to be caught between two enemy cars. I think he'll drop the tail.”

She almost rolled her eyes. “Ye gods! You're not armed and you're not trained for this work. You're more a danger to me and yourself than to him.”

I nodded. “Maybe. But he doesn't know that. I might be the second coming of James Bond, as far as he's concerned.”

“Ha!” But she was sweeping the street with her eyes. “All right, let's go. I've already made an idiot of myself once. I can't afford to do it again.”

“We're just old friends who happened to bump into each other,” I said. “Come on, we'll walk down to the parking lot. Did you notice that the police station fronts on the lot? A gambling man might think that was a plus for our side.”

“I did notice that. I parked as near to the station as I could get.”

We crossed the street and walked down the alley beside the movie theater. As we went, I was looking for the man, and when we came into the parking lot I put a hand on Kate's arm and stopped her while I surveyed the lot for sign of him.

He wasn't in sight and we went on to Kate's car, which turned out to be a rental. I wondered if the Easter Bunny had followed her into town and knew what she was driving. I asked her.

“No one followed me,” she said coolly. “I know how to spot a tail and there wasn't any.”

“The guy was with you in the bookstore,” I said.

“He might have been an ordinary guy on the make.”

I suspected that she'd had experience with such guys.

“My truck is right down there between here and the street,” I said. “You pull out and I'll wave byebye. If anyone follows you, I'll be on him like ugly on an ape before you get out of town.”

“You islanders have quaint turns of phrase,” said Kate. She got into the driver's seat, backed out of the parking place, and drove away. I waved a friendly good-bye and watched her go out of sight in front of the brand-new Stop and Shop. No one followed her. No one even looked her way.

I waited awhile and then walked back up to Main Street and went into the bookstore. I looked around and didn't see the mystery man anywhere, then went over to the biography section. After a while I found the book that I thought Kate had been reading. It was a biography of a woman whose passions
and scandalous affairs had made her name notorious and had kept her in the international society columns for most of her life.

I put the book back on the shelf.

Hmmmmm. Could it be? Was Kate in love with Joe Begay? It would account for her rush to the Vineyard to be with him in a time of danger; it would account for her willingness to shoot me just in case I wasn't who I said I was but was really the Bunny or a Bunny accomplice; and it would account for her distraction and her need to get away from Aquinnah if, during their three weeks together, Joe, who I knew loved his wife and children, had shown no romantic interest in her.

So maybe the beautiful assassin was infatuated. If so, she was in trouble. And so was Joe, if he was depending on her, because love intrudes on cold thought, and cold thought was what was needed to deal with the Easter Bunny.

I turned toward the door and as I did so I saw the man across the street, looking at the store. As if he spotted me looking back at him, he turned and walked away. There was a pretty good crowd in the store, and by the time I got past them and into the street, he was gone. I ran down to the parking lot but he wasn't in sight.

Uncle Bill Vanderbeck would have known how he performed that disappearing act, but I didn't. I wondered if the man was watching me even though I couldn't see him. I felt as I sometimes had when I was a kid and it was night and my bedroom was dark, and something seemed to be lurking in that
far corner. It could see me but I couldn't see it. My only hope was to lie so quiet and still that it wouldn't notice me under the covers.

Here and now I couldn't hide and try to hold my breath, so I got into the Land Cruiser and started home. About a mile out of town I noticed a black car behind me. I slowed down; so did the car. I speeded up; so did the car.

Trouble at River City.

  7 

I took a right at the new four-way stop sign and drove toward the airport. Behind me, the black car did the same. I cut left on the road leading to the state forest headquarters, and then went left again onto the road that led back to the regional high school.

By this time the driver of the car realized that I knew he was tailing me. He pulled into sight behind me but then stopped and got out of his car. In my rearview mirror I saw that he was wearing a green coat and a felt hat. He lifted binoculars to his eyes.

Blast and drat! I slammed on the brakes and slid to a stop with the Toyota sideways in the road. Back toward forest headquarters the driver lowered his glasses, got back into his car, made a U-turn, and drove out of sight. I grabbed my own binoculars but before I could adjust them the car was gone.

I tossed the glasses aside and turned and followed the car, but by the time I got back to the airport road it was nowhere to be seen.

Not good, Kemo Sabe. It was possible that the guy had not gotten my license plate number, but I doubted that and I definitely hadn't gotten his, so he had the edge.

Spilt milk. I drove on home. There was no one in my mirror, but that didn't make any difference. It wasn't hard to trace a license plate to its owner.

Zee was still at the ER and the kids were in school. Only the cats, Oliver Underfoot and Velcro, were at home. I checked their food and water then got John Skye's house keys and drove to Oak Bluffs, where I loaded up on groceries at the Reliable Market before driving on to John Skye's farm.

John and Mattie Skye generally summered on the island, but they wintered in Weststock while he taught at the college there. Their twin daughters, Jill and Jen, whom I'd known since they were tots, were now college women at Weststock. I'd never been able to tell them apart, but both of them were cute and full of zip and hormones and had no shortage of young men in their lives, which meant no shortage of worries for their parents. Because John and the twins would be busy in class until the Christmas holidays, they wouldn't be using their Edgartown house for a while.