Home Repair Is Homicide - Crawlspace Part 19

"Did you look around downstairs?" Chip asked her as he opened the lids of storage bins on either side of the deck behind the life rings.

"Yes, I looked everywhere for the best thing to ..."

Stab you in the head with. "I didn't know it was you," she added defensively at his look, which he had not been able to hide. "Chip, are you sure you know what you're doing?"

He didn't. But this was no time to worry about it. "I've got a boat. We're going to put Sam in it, okay? Start trying to wrap him in that blanket."

He went on hunting for a weapon. The knife would be fine at close range, but he didn't want to get any nearer to Randy than he had to.

About a thousand miles would be good, and so would a guided missile, he thought as he rooted through the boat's contents. A Styrofoam chest contained crushed beer cans. The cubbies by the wheel-house were empty.

As he rummaged, Carolyn stared at him in confusion and the beginnings of her old scorn showed. "Chip, what do you mean, you've got a-"

She wasn't doing anything. He abandoned his search, helped her spread the blanket and roll Sam onto it.

Sam roused and tried to help, too, which Chip thought was a positive sign. Not great, but something.

"How do you think I got here?" he asked Carolyn while they tied Sam's belt around the blanket to try keeping it on. "Do you think I swam?"

He waved at the fishing boat's stern. "It's back there. We can get in it and get away."

I hope. There was still the little matter of the stone-dead engine to deal with. "So get moving."

She bridled at his tone. Starting to get her wind back, he realized, and that was a good thing, too. But somehow she seemed to think that just Chip's being there was all she needed.

"Move," he commanded. "We haven't got much time."

"Okay, okay." She knelt alongside Sam again. There was a lot of thick, sticky tape still on the blankets, and she used some of it to secure more of the covering around Sam.

"I don't see why you have to-"

This time he didn't bother answering. The sky was trending rapidly toward full day. And the tide was high again, or nearly. "Let's get him overboard."

Which was going to be a good trick all by itself. Chip looked past the big diesel engine of the fishing boat, over the transom. It was only about a five-foot drop to the smaller craft, but that was plenty far enough to have to try lowering a guy, especially one who seemed to be bleeding to death.

Still, they didn't have much choice. They dragged Sam down the deck, hauled him around so that he hung over the transom feet-first. "Now what?" Carolyn demanded.

"I'm not sure." What did she think, that this kind of a situation came with an instruction booklet?

"Well, it was your idea," she began. "You should-"

He whirled on her, suddenly near tears. "I don't know, okay? I don't know what to do; why should I? You're the one who got us here, you're the one who got so loaded you didn't pay attention to what was going on around you."

Fists clenched, he went on. "I'm the errand boy, remember? The one you can bully and boss around and steal from. But now I'm trying to fix it, as usual, and you are not helping."

His voice was shaking. He didn't bother trying to control it. "So unless you want to end up like that one-"

He pointed at the hatchway. Beyond it in a sc.r.a.pbook lay the evidence of Randy Dodd's handiwork, what he'd done while he was away. A mental picture of the girl in it-what remained of her-popped back into his head.

Along with something else. "Stay here," he ordered Carolyn as he strode past her, ignoring her shocked expression.

It wasn't fair, what he'd said to her. It hadn't been her fault, and it was mean of him to suggest that it was. Randy Dodd would've found a way to grab her one way or another, the way he'd grabbed the other ones.

Blaming Carolyn was the easy way, was all. The way to make it all make sense. Which it didn't. And never would. He glanced back at her as he ducked down through the hatchway.

"Carolyn," he began. "I'm ..."

Sorry, he would have finished. But she was crying again and refused to look at him.

In the cramped, stinking cabin he s.n.a.t.c.hed the sc.r.a.pbook lying on the fish-cleaning table and riffled through it. The faces of Randy's previous victims flipped by: blonde, redhead, brunette.

A real equal opportunity sicko, he was. But even full of clippings-and, dear G.o.d, some of these pictures were Polaroids-the book was a lot heavier than it should be.

And the pages were thicker. Hurriedly, Chip pulled one of the clear plastic page covers apart. Inside were two sheets of paper, each with clippings and photographs mounted on it, their blank back sides placed together so they formed a single page.

The sc.r.a.pbook was made that way so you could rearrange just one page at a time, Chip realized. You could move the front side without moving the back, or the back without moving the front.

Biting his lower lip, he parted the sheets of paper to look between them and found ... money. Five hundred-dollar bills to a page, four laid horizontally top to bottom, one more vertically.

On each side. So a thousand per page, basically. With sweat-slicked fingers he inspected more of them. Each page was fattened with money. A hundred pages or so ... a hundred thousand right here in the book.

So Roger must have put the money out on the water just as he'd said, and Randy found it. But this wasn't all of it. There should be more somewhere.

Almost a million more, most likely hidden on this boat. But as he examined the one's he'd already located, he realized that there was no point looking for the rest of the cash. Because the bills were identical, and that meant ...

He stuck one of the hundreds into his pocket, stuffed the sc.r.a.p-book down his jacket front, his fingers coming unexpectedly as he did so upon the map he'd found, floating out on the water.

A hand-drawn map scrawled in blue ballpoint on a torn-out sheet of notebook paper, the paper wrapped in clear plastic. Soon after he'd found it, he'd gotten so busy avoiding a watery death that he'd forgotten all about it.

And there was no time for wondering about it now, either. Shoving it down with the worthless bill he'd taken, he turned for a last glance around the cabin in case there was anything more in here that they might be able to use.

There wasn't. Time to get out of here ...

"Looking for something?" The voice came from behind him. Not Carolyn's, and definitely not Sam's.

"Or maybe you think you've already found it."

Randy Dodd's big hand seized Chip's shoulder, spun him, and went into Chip's jacket front. The sc.r.a.pbook landed on the table alongside the knife Carolyn had used on Chip.

The hand came back clenched into a fist, and when it arrived all the lights went out.

DAWN WAS BREAKING WHEN JAKE AND BELLA FINALLY stumbled to the end of the gravel road and onto the pavement; the first pa.s.sing vehicle, a bread truck, gave them a ride.

The driver, an apple-cheeked young guy wearing a Yankees cap, wanted to take them directly to the cops, but they argued him out of it, and with difficulty persuaded him to let them out at the customs station between Maine and New Brunswick.

Cars were already lined up at the border crossing in the thin morning light as Jake stood at a pay phone just inside the building, talking to Bob Arnold.

"Bob, we saw him, okay? Never mind how we did it, he was in the water, he's got a boat, and-"

Dripping and shivering, Bella sat on a bench wrapped in a coat one of the clerks had lent to her. Bob was talking again, explaining to Jake what a fool she was, and that when he saw her in person he would go into even more detail on the subject.

But right now he had questions to ask her, and based on her answers, urgent tasks to accomplish, and had he mentioned just how risky, how dangerous, how reckless, she had ...

Jake waited until he was finished. The swelling around her ankle had progressed down into her foot; soon she might have to cut the shoe off.

"Someone'll be up to get you," he concluded when she'd told him all she could about where she and Bella had seen Randy Dodd. "So sit tight."

He hung up, not gently. Turning from the phone, Jake watched a customs officer walk up to Bella with a paper cup of hot coffee in his hand and an interested look on his face. He offered the cup to Bella, then sat and began asking questions.

Apparently two women, one half-drowned and the other with an ankle the size of an elephant's, required some investigation before they could be allowed to cross back peacefully into their own home country.

Bella opened her purse, which was when Jake remembered that she did not have her pa.s.sport with her, and no birth certificate, either, because they also had been in the lost satchel. Her ankle now felt like the elephant was stepping on it.

Across the room, the border official had stopped smiling at Bella and begun looking grim. He stood and beckoned to another much less pleasant-looking fellow wearing a badge. Bella had not had the required paperwork, either, it seemed.

And from the look on her face, she had not appreciated being reminded of this. Meanwhile, through the lobby window, Jake saw two U.S. customs guys hustling out of their own building, on the far side of the bridge.

Judging by the customs guys' expressions, Jake knew she and Bella must've interrupted something crucial, like making sure a carful of nice blue-haired Canadian ladies bound for a day of stateside shopping plus lunch wasn't also secretly smuggling in an improvised nuclear device.

The U.S. customs officers entered the Canadian building and looked around suspiciously. "Look," she began to tell them, "this can all be-"

Straightened out, she'd meant to finish. But suddenly it was all too much; her throat tightened and her eyes p.r.i.c.kled.

"Ma'am?" The two U.S. officers stood over her. They wore the kind of all-purpose smiles apparently issued nowadays by the U.S. government. "Ma'am, could you please come with us? Your friend here, too?"

"Sure." She sighed, straightening. No pa.s.sport, no driver's license, no birth certificate ... oh, this was going to take hours. Maybe days.

At least Bob Arnold already knew where they were, and where Randy was, too. "Come on," she told Bella, who was already up and knew the drill as well as Jake did.

Jake and Bella had been on-gasp!-foreign soil, and they wanted to-gasp!-come back. So now a decision had to be made: Should they be allowed to? Or had the foreignness infested both of them, like bedbugs?

It was only about five hundred feet between the Canadian building and the U.S. one, but to Jake the distance looked like ten miles. Felt like it, too, on her b.u.m ankle.

A truck roared by, spewing foul exhaust. The U.S. customs building had a muck-tan exterior and a low concrete portico. Inside, they were left to wait in a room about as charming and hospitable as a gas station restroom.

The chairs were hard plastic. Bella sneezed. They were both still in their wet clothes. Jake unlaced her shoe, tried pulling it off her swollen foot but couldn't.

Bella got to her feet. "Stay here," she said, and disappeared down a hall made of cinder blocks painted yellow. She looked angry and miserable, and in danger of coming down with double pneumonia.

But as she paused before an unmarked door, her look changed to one of mild-mannered reasonableness tinctured with a drop of pathos. Only the glint of purpose in her eye betrayed what an act this was; even now, Bella was about as pathetic as your average steamroller.

Her act must have worked, though, because when she returned she had two pleasant middle-aged clerks with her, one carrying dry clothes and the other bearing a lot of rough cotton towels. An hour later Jake and Bella were warm, dry, and dressed in outsized U.S. customs sweatshirts and huge pairs of regulation trousers.

But still they were waiting. Jake leaned back again in the hard plastic chair, sighing with impatience, then looked at the clock whose minute hand had refused to move since the last time she'd looked at it.

"What d'you suppose is happening?" Bella asked tonelessly.

Jake just shook her head. Purgatory, she thought, must be like this. But then through the building's front window she spied a familiar face.

Square jaw, blond brush-cut hair, eyes that in this early-morning light were a pale bluish-gray- It was her husband, Wade Sorenson.

CHAPTER 8.

IN THE NEXT MOMENT, WADE'S ARMS WERE AROUND HER. Jake pressed her face into the rough fabric of his heavy blaze-orange hunting jacket and felt his embrace tighten.

"Hey," he said into her ear. Not until then did she realize how much she'd needed his presence, that doing this all alone was, of course, possible ...

But it was dreadful. "Hey, yourself." He smelled like soap, lime shaving cream, and the sharply herbal scent of the bag balm he used on his hands to keep them from cracking in cold weather.

"Is there any news about Sam?" Because in the hour since she had talked to Bob Arnold, anything could have happened.

But Wade only shook his head. "I got home just as Bob was hanging up the phone from talking to you. So I heard him out, and then I turned right around and started up here."

Half an hour later, the U.S. Customs and Immigration people accepted the copied doc.u.ments Wade had brought with him. Wade had been on the phone again with Bob meanwhile.

"He sent a boat over to where you said you saw Randy," Wade reported as they left the customs building.

"And?" she said, steeling herself.

Because if the news had been good, he would already have told her about it. Bella sneezed again and wrapped the wool blanket Wade had brought along more tightly around herself.

"He said they found the fishing boat, but Dodd was gone. No Sam or anyone else on it, either."

They drove through the market town of Calais between tire shops and convenience stores. As they pulled out of town, Wade reached over and turned the heat up even higher, then let his arm fall around Jake's shoulders.

Along the road old maples and cedar trees screened barns and farmhouses from traffic noise. A little snow dusted the north sides of the tree trunks. As well as she could through a haze of fatigue and fear, Jake brought Wade up to date on the events of the night, until at last he steered the truck through the final pair of downhill S-turns before the turnoff to Eastport.

In the distance, the leafless white maples on the hillsides looked like stands of soft paintbrushes. "Randy was hunting us, back there on the beach. If something more important hadn't come up, I think he might've found us and ..."

Beaten us to death. Or shot us. "He's got some plan in his head," she said. "But I don't know what. And if he's not where Bella and I saw him ..."

He'd already proven he could hide, that he knew the coves and inlets as well or better than anyone around here. So by now he could be anywhere.

Then she saw in Wade's face that there was something more. Something worse. "Sam's old friend," he answered her unspoken question. "Chip Hahn is his name?"

She nodded.

"When they found the fishing boat, they found a life jacket floating nearby. Bob Arnold's pretty sure it's one from the dory Chip stole out of the boat basin yesterday. Guy it got stolen from, he says he'd left two jackets on that dory."

Wade went on. "But the dory's gone. Bob thinks maybe Chip's with them now. That maybe he's on the missing dory with Sam and the girl."

And Randy Dodd, Jake thought, chilled. Her ankle felt huge, and as sore as a boil. "But how would Chip have-"