Cut and Run 08 Ball & Chain (21 page)

Kelly glanced up at him. “Yeah, I have my kit with me. And I bet Deacon has something with him if I don’t. Whatever he used on the butler, if he has enough to put Nick out. I kind of doubt he does.” He looked back to Nick, who was watching him. They sat staring at each other in silence for a few seconds before Nick nodded.

Kelly patted Nick’s knee and stood. “I’m going to go see what I can find.”

The rest of them remained where they were as Kelly jogged off into the house. Zane turned his attention back to Ty and Nick.

“What now?”

Nick sat back, taking a deep breath. “Everyone has a shaky alibi. The couple you two saw on the beach are the only anomaly, and I can’t figure out who the fuck they could be.”

“No one fits?”

“A
lot
of people fit. That’s the problem. Then there’s the broken watch, which is wrong every way we look at it. Whoever came back and cut him open, they took that watch, so it’s got to be important for some reason.”

“Do you have the pictures you took?” Zane asked.

Nick nodded and pulled his iPad out of a pocket inside his jacket. He handed it over.

Zane looked at the iPad with a frown, brushing his fingers along the edge of it. Nick had been carrying it with him since this morning, but the screen was spotless. Maybe Nick cleaned obsessively like Ty did when he was bothered by something. Zane glanced at the two of them again, sitting side by side like two little boys who’d been sent out of class for misbehaving. Nick’s head was down, his shoulders slumped. Ty was staring off into the horizon, watching the last rays of the sun disappear.

“I think we should call it a night. Let you two recover,” Zane said.

Ty nodded in agreement. He absently raised his hand to Nick’s back again. Zane didn’t know if Ty did it to comfort Nick or himself.

“These islands have a reputation for being hit with rogue waves,” Nick said without raising his head.

Ty and Zane locked eyes, both of them frowning in confusion. They both looked back to Nick, waiting for him to connect rogue waves to
anything
that had happened today. Nick raised his head, glancing at them both. Then his eyes fixed on the cliff not far off.

“Ships would dock at these remote islands where nothing but lighthouses stood and find them completely deserted. Food still on the plates. Fires nothing but embers. Clocks not wound for weeks. Everyone on the island vanished. They called them the Ghost Isles, no one would go near them because they were cursed.”

Ty began to run his hand over Nick’s back in slow circles. “Nick,” he whispered.

“The theory of anyone who didn’t believe in curses was rogue waves. Ninety, sometimes a hundred-feet high or more, just sweeping in out of the blue and taking everything on the island with it.”

“Nick,” Ty said a little more forcefully. “You’re not going to die in Scotland.”

Nick turned to meet his eyes, and they sat there simply staring at each other for several moments. Zane shifted his weight, realizing he was a little unnerved by the monotone of Nick’s voice. He was seriously beginning to wonder just how messed up Nick’s mind was, but then Nick leaned closer to Ty, narrowing his eyes.

“How many places do you think we swept through, leaving people to wonder where the rogue wave came from?”

Ty blinked rapidly, obviously taken aback by the direction Nick had gone. “What?”

Nick glanced at Zane, then stared out at the cliffs again. “Nobody’s safe on this island as long we’re out of touch with the mainland.
Everyone’s
going to die in Scotland if we don’t stop this.”

Ty couldn’t seem to tear his eyes away from Nick, but Zane turned and glanced into the house. “Where the hell is Kelly with those fucking sedatives?” he said under his breath. Nick was starting to make even him nervous; he didn’t need Ty losing his shit, too.

“Irish, you have to look at this as just another case, okay? Just another murder. That’s all it is,” Ty was saying, keeping his voice low as he leaned closer to Nick. “You have to take the island and the boats and the phones out of the equation.”

“Why?” Nick asked pointedly.

Ty opened his mouth to respond, but then snapped it shut again.

“Why would you discount all that? Why, when it makes for the perfect backdrop to wipe out a company with defense contracts? To take out a team of mercenaries? Target a family whose wealth fuels Philadelphia? Why would you think that storm destroyed those boats when it could just as easily have been a person?”

Ty was left with a frown of consternation, and Zane was left even more unsettled than he’d been.

Nick was still shaking his head when Kelly returned, a canvas bag with a red cross sewn onto it slung over his shoulder. Nick stood and waved him off. “We don’t need that,” he mumbled. “I’ve got stronger shit in my suitcase.”

He walked off toward the house, shoulders hunched and head down. Kelly gave Ty and Zane a mystified glance before turning on his heel to follow.

“He’s insane,” Zane finally said to Ty once they were alone, horrified by the realization. He’d always been under the impression that Nick was the sane one, the
only
sane one, the one who kept the others all in line, the one who kept Ty from going for rides on the loco coaster. Now it looked like Nick was driving the damn thing.

Ty nodded. “He always has been. He controls it well. It’s part of his charm. The hell of it is, he’s right, too.”

“Right about what? Rogue waves and dying in Scotland? I mean, I’m no goddamn psychiatrist, but even I can see he’s under way too much stress. He’s rambling, Ty. He’s cracking.”

“So what if he is?” Ty said heatedly, standing to face Zane. “He deserves to after what happened! How many times have you seen me crack and you still listened to what I was saying, even if it sounded like I was losing my mind?”

Zane sighed and squeezed Ty’s arm to calm him. “You’re right.”

Ty stared at him like he’d been expecting him to argue.

Zane pulled him closer, tightening his grip on Ty’s arm. “What the hell happened to you guys?” he whispered. “Whatever it was, it’s driving you both over the edge.”

Ty blinked and licked his lips, trying to speak and failing. He finally swallowed and managed to say, “You know I can’t tell you that.”

“You need to tell someone,” Zane said gently. “You both do. Before it eats you up inside.”

The haunted look in Ty’s eyes returned briefly before he turned away. “Can we just deal with one thing at a time here?”

Zane nodded. He knew when to stop pushing Ty, and he’d reached his limit. “There’s not much else we can do tonight. Let’s go to bed.”

Ty shook his head, glancing up at the house. “Nick was right. We didn’t even look at the boathouse. I want to go down to the dock.”

“Now? Ty, it’s dark, what do you expect to find?”

“I don’t know,” Ty said with a frustrated shrug. “But it’s time we start looking at this as the perfect location to massacre a group of people instead of a few freak accidents.”

Zane had been looking at it that way all along, but he realized he’d also been looking at it as strictly Not His Problem. This wasn’t their jurisdiction. The victims were strangers to them. And since no one Zane cared about had been accused of the murders, he’d simply been shrugging his way through, waiting until help came from the mainland. Ty had, too, to an extent, until Nick’s words had sparked something.

“If that boathouse was taken out on purpose, it means someone intends to have his way with this island and everyone on it,” Ty hissed. “We’ve been looking at it as a murder. What if it was a shot across the bow instead?”

Zane sighed. “I was so hoping this would be a normal vacation.”

Ty smacked him on the side of the head. “Don’t use bad words,” he said as he walked off.

They followed the cliff path, taking an indirect route to the boathouse and dock so no one would see them heading off and wonder where they were going. The way to the dock was wooded and kind of creepy at night. It was also a long walk in the cold, something they should have realized since they’d ridden in the golf cart when they’d arrived.

“Did you bring a flashlight?” Zane asked as he glanced up at the trees reaching over them, their skeletal branches silhouetted in the moonlight.

“I admit I didn’t think this through,” Ty mumbled. He dug in his pocket and extracted his phone. “This is all I have.”

“Me too.”

“Awesome.”

They carried on in the darkness, using the spotty moonlight to show their way for as long as they could. When they broke the edge of the woods and came up to the rise in the path just before the docks, they both stopped at the same time. There was a light moving around the ruins of the boathouse, playing over broken boards and twisted rope. Everything else was dark. As they stood watching, disjointed voices drifted toward them, two or three people speaking quietly.

They both crouched and moved closer, silent on the dirt path. When they got close enough to the docks to hear the words being said, they moved off the path and knelt behind a pile of broken and battered canoes.

“What brings you boys out the night?” a voice asked. Zane recognized the barely understandable Scottish brogue of Lachlan Mackie, the ferryman who’d met them on the docks the afternoon they arrived. He held a lantern, its weak glow not quite reaching the two figures he was addressing.

“We came to see you, Mackie,” one of the men responded.

Ty gasped when he recognized the voice.

Zane smacked him in the shoulder. “It’s Kelly,” he hissed.

Ty put his hand on Zane’s head. “I know, shut up.”

“I recognize a kindred soul when I see one,” Kelly continued. The light continued to play over the wrecked boathouse. Zane assumed Nick had the flashlight. “See, we had to go through airport security to get here, left our hands a little empty.”

“Ah, I see,” Mackie said with a chuckle. “I think I can show you some hospitality.”

“Are they here buying weed?” Zane whispered in Ty’s ear. “We walked half a mile through the creepy woods to watch them buy weed?”

Ty shushed him, shaking his head.

“Do you stay out here, Mackie?” Nick asked.

“Aye. I make quarters up yonder the path.” Mackie was doing something with his hands, probably pulling out or rolling a blunt, if Zane were to guess.

“Must have been one hell of a racket when the storm hit,” Nick commented carelessly. He took the rolled cigarette Mackie handed him.

“Aye, that it was. It was pelting down. I got out here in time to see the tree falling. Stood right where you are. Wasn’t until the lightning strike I saw the dock was gone, the boats all with it.”

Nick stepped closer, and Mackie lit the blunt for him.

“Must’ve been hard, watching all your boats head out to sea without you,” Kelly said.

“Wasn’t the first time, won’t be the last.”

“Really?”

Mackie nodded. “These islands, they weren’t meant to be lived on. That old castle on the hill, she’ll tell you some stories. The house will, too. Even the caves in the cliffs, they’ll sing to you about death. The island likes to be left alone.”

Nick and Kelly stood side by side as Mackie turned and headed back up the path, using an old wooden oar as a cane. Smoke rose as one of them took a hit.

“You boys have a good night.”

Ty and Zane crouched lower as Mackie passed by. There was no reason to reveal their presence, not until the old ferryman was gone.

“Dude’s kind of creepy,” Nick said after he was out of sight.

“That’s you in twenty years.”

Nick jabbed Kelly hard in the stomach, making him double over with a bark of laughter.

Ty sighed heavily, shaking his head. In the moonlight, Zane could see Kelly quietly poking fun at Nick as he lit the blunt again. But Nick was staring over Kelly’s head, looking in their direction.

“He spotted us,” Ty whispered dejectedly.

“Grady?” Nick called out. Kelly turned to peer into the darkness.

Ty and Zane both stood, coming out of their hiding spot. “What gave us away?” Zane asked.

“I saw you come over the rise,” Nick admitted, smirking. He waved his flashlight as they made their way toward them. “Did you hear?”

“Most of it,” Ty answered.

“Sounds like I was wrong, it really was an accident. Unless Mackie set the boats loose himself.”

“That means the murderer is stuck here just like we are,” Zane surmised.

Kelly nodded. “And probably really pissed about it.”

Nick glared and took the marijuana from him, shaking his head. Zane narrowed his eyes when Nick stuffed the blunt in his pocket. Kelly clapped a hand over his mouth, trying not to laugh.

“How’d you two get here so fucking fast?” Ty demanded. He swiped at Nick, smacking him in the arm. “And how do you go from full-fledge meltdown to out here investigating? Rambling about rogue waves and scaring the shit out of us! You had me all freaked out!”

“We rode,” Nick answered, gesturing toward the darkness up the coast. He let out a whistle, and there was a gentle nicker in response. Hooves stomped the wet ground.

Ty glanced around. “Rode what?”

“Horses. We went to the stables.”

“There are stables?” Zane asked, his mood lightening at the mere mention of it.

“Nope,” Ty said.

“Did you two walk through the Sleepy Hollow woods in the dark?” Kelly asked.

“Yes, and it was scary!” Ty shouted. “Why are there horses?”

Nick and Kelly both laughed. “Do you want one of our horses for the way back?” Nick asked.

“Yes,” Zane answered at the same time as Ty’s emphatic, “No!”

Nick flicked on his flashlight again, pointing it at the sound of clopping hooves. The two horses came closer, and Kelly moved toward them, talking to them in gentle tones. Both Nick and Kelly seemed comfortable and knowledgeable around the animals. One of them nudged Nick’s shoulder and he patted the horse’s neck, then took the reins.

“Here,” he said, handing them over to Zane. “They know the path, so their footing’s sound in the dark. You don’t even have to lead them.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m not getting on that thing,” Ty insisted. They watched Kelly mount, his movements natural and easy. Zane recognized a man who’d worked with horses a great deal. Kelly offered Nick his hand, and Nick pulled himself into the saddle behind him.