Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery (25 page)

“The Boston police—” said Shelly, also gasping. “Sid left word. He had a friend on the force. Kevin James turned up in the morgue. Where’s Sid? Don’t worry about a thing when Sid gets there. You’ll be hearing a seaplane overhead any time now. Also, Sid is very heavily armed, Artie.”

“We’re having a little fog, Shelly.”

“Fog? Fuck!”

“Shelly—what happened to Kevin?”

“You mean how was he…?”

“Yeah.”

“His head was split right down the middle. Like with an ax, Artie.”

In common with so many of our fellow citizens, we retired that night with a gun by the bedside. Lock and load, say your prayers, hit the hay. We lay there stiffly side by side holding hands, listening. I’m not sure if I slept or not, so I’m not sure when I heard the first noise. I strained to concentrate. Was I conscious? Does a gun beside the bed engender intruders? But where did the noise, if there really was one, originate? That was what I strained to understand.

“Artie—!” Crystal hissed.

Damn. It was real. She’d heard it, too.

Jellyroll barked twice before I told him to hush. What to do? My heart was pounding. I could see my feet bouncing with it. I dropped my hand over the side of the bed and felt for the stock of the shotgun—

Something thudded in the other room. Someone was moving around out there in the dark. The bedroom door was ajar. I could see only half the living room.

“Let’s get off the bed, Artie—” Crystal whispered in my ear. She rolled off. She meant to place the bed between us and the door.

I followed her with the shotgun. “Jellyroll, come—”

He did so, nestling between us.

We hunched behind the battlements, panting with terror. There wasn’t enough oxygen on the island to accommodate my sudden increased need. Yet the edges of things were very crisp in my vision, even in the near absence of light. The adrenaline was pumping, and things moved more slowly than normal.

Someone was on the porch. Someone
else??
Or the same as in the living room? The house creaked with the fulcrum weight out there. I could feel Crystal trembling, even though our bodies were a foot apart, but I couldn’t comfort her, not yet. I was riding this wave of atavistic purity, protecting, to the death if necessary, my loved ones and myself from—

“Maybe it’s Sid,” said Crystal in a tight whisper.

“Think I should call out?”

“Yes.”

“Sid! Sid, is that you?”

No response. No movement.

“Hawley! That you!” Nope. “We’re armed!” I squeaked. I got a hold of my voice and screamed, “We’re armed! And I’m gonna fucking kill you if you don’t get out of this house!” I was working myself into a rage, and it took little effort. Like when I kicked
that guy’s lunch. I was atwitch with the impulse to kick open the door and fire, screaming, like in some jack-off G.I. Joe fantasy. I did, however, decide: If someone appears in the doorway, I will shoot him without a word of warning. That decision was clear and unequivocal. I cocked the gun and braced it on the bed. I couldn’t miss.

We waited. Silence…Had we scared them off? I couldn’t sustain this level of readiness over the long haul.…

“You think I should go out and see?” I asked.

“Hell, no,” she said.

“What if they’re gone?”

“Then what difference will it make?”

Jellyroll was trembling so hard it looked like he was running in place.

Then, suddenly, it was dawn, a gray pasty one, but we had made it through the night. Everything is easier in the daylight. We must have slept, at least periodically, at our stations, but now we were both awake. Crystal, I noticed for the first time, was wearing only a pair of green bikini panties and I only a T-shirt. I hugged her close. And then we went into the living room together, but I led the way as the designated shooter. The boathouse was empty.

Jellyroll sniffed the edges of the floor. He knew someone had been here. I went out on the porch. I peered over the railing down to seaweed-covered rocks. No one was lurking down there. From the porch, I looked along the sides of the house. No one was hiding there, either.

Then I realized there was a stiff wind blowing, not so much down in the cove, but the tops of the tall pines were swaying, and the fog had dissipated but not lifted. I still couldn’t see the mouth of the cove, but I could see fifty feet in that direction, and I felt a vague disquiet as I looked. Something was different out there. Something was wrong. What?

The boat.

“Crystal, the boat’s gone!”

She came out, Jellyroll trailing. She had a grim look on her face. “Artie, where did you leave the telephone?”

“Right on the table.”

“In clear sight?”

“Why?”

“It’s gone.”

TWENTY-THREE

T
hey took our phone
and
our boat?” We stared out dispiritedly. We were too tired to fight anymore. The psychos had taken our only means of communication and our only means of transportation.

“Wait a minute,” said Crystal, pointing out into the murk. Maybe her gaze hadn’t been blank and helpless, maybe only mine had. “See out there? Isn’t that the boat? I can’t see it if I look right at it, but if I look to one side or the other…I see a shape.”

I looked out the corner of my eye. I saw it. I got the binoculars, but they didn’t work in the fog, magnifying obscurity. “I’ll go see,” I said.

“How?”

“In the dinghy.”

“No, Artie, suppose it’s a setup,” she said, squeezing my forearm so hard it hurt. “Suppose they’re waiting out there in the boat. Suppose that’s how they planned it all along. You come rowing up, and pow.” She made a fatal chopping motion with the side of her hand.

That was a factor, all right, the chop. But what if the boat had come loose because I didn’t tie it on very well? The tide was ebbing. In a little while our boat would be irretrievable, and we’d have no way out except by foot along a rocky trail ripe for ambush.
That
could have been the setup.

“Then we’ll go together,” said Crystal.

“I couldn’t row the dinghy fast enough with all of us in it.” We argued briefly over who’d take the shotgun. She insisted I take it.

“Do you have a life jacket?”

“Yes, but it’s in the boat. Crystal, maybe you ought to pack a few essentials while I’m gone. Maybe we should get out as soon as I bring the boat back.”

“Okay,” she said grimly.

It began to rain fat, heavy drops. The sky was black and low. There was another storm coming.

It was a hard row. The wind kept blowing me off course. In the gusts, the raindrops stung when they hit my face. Water ran freely over my glasses. I was almost blind now…I could see why the Indians invented the canoe. This facing backward was a drag. Looking over my shoulder, I feared I wasn’t gaining on the shape. Maybe the tide was carrying us out of the cove even now. Maybe I’d never catch up. Maybe I’d soon look around and realize I was alone on a gray sea. In a dinghy. In a building storm. With no idea where I was, and my body would never come up.

No, I was making progress. I was rowing marginally faster than the Hampton boat was drifting. The next time I looked around, I could see I was actually closing on it. I could distinguish bow from stern.

I couldn’t detect any activity aboard, but then if they were lying in wait for me in the bottom of the boat, they wouldn’t show themselves yet. They’d wait until I was closer, within ax range, maybe when I was trying to climb aboard. Thwack. Five minutes later I had pulled within two dinghy lengths of the Hampton boat. I put the shotgun in my lap and gave two final, straining pulls on the oars to get up some momentum. Then I slid off the seat, crouched in the bottom, and let the nose of the dinghy hit the bigger boat, but I didn’t look up over the gunwale. Not yet. We drifted together for a while. I listened…silence.

There was no one aboard, I decided, but I still didn’t risk it. I grabbed the side of the Hampton boat so we wouldn’t separate, waited still longer, before, gun first, I peered over the rail. There
was, in fact, no one there, but I got a scare climbing aboard. I did one of those Buster Keaton splits between two quickly separating boats, and I nearly went in the drink. I always expect the ludicrous, even in extremis. On the second go I got aboard.

I tied the dinghy to the cleat in the stern. I retrieved my keys from under the seat cushion where I kept them, but I stopped myself before starting the engine. The sniff test. I wouldn’t even feel the explosion, a flash of white light, then nothing. Atomized within sight of the boathouse. Maybe little bits of me would drop into Crystal’s hair with the rain. Jellyroll would eat the bigger parts when they came down. I’d been noticing an increased stink lately. I raised the engine box. It reeked of gasoline, but the wind quickly blew the fumes away. Did I have a gas leak or was that normal? I started the motor with the cover open. Then I headed for home—

I hadn’t gone more than two boat lengths before I hit something. I put the transmission back into neutral. It wasn’t a rock—I was well clear of the sunkers. It felt like a rotten tree trunk or something. I looked into the water, saw nothing unusual, so, gingerly, I put the lever forward and we began to move…No problem dead slow. Everything felt fine. I sped up—and I hit it again with the same thunk.

I yanked the lever to neutral and stood there frozen, my shoulder bones pressing against my ears, water running down my spine. I went back to look over the stern, because it felt like only the propeller or the rear part of the boat had hit the thing. I watched the water longer this time. Twice I checked my position. Was I way off course? No. There was still fog, but it wasn’t opaque anymore. I could see the boathouse ahead. I could make out landmarks, a dead tree hanging over the water on the right, the big round boulder cracked in half on the left. I knew exactly where the sunkers were—

Something pale was rising slowly from the green, turgid water. I had read somewhere that cold northern waters are murky
because of the rich plankton and other minute marine organisms in suspension, and tropical waters are clear because they are relatively barren. This water was rich in life; I couldn’t identify the pale thing until it was about to break the surface.

It was a man’s naked leg.

It floated up right under my nose as I leaned over the stern. The leg was pudgy. It had been severed at the hip. The sickening white cartilaginous ball remained intact as if the propeller had wrenched, not chopped, the ball out of the socket. Two parallel bone-deep gashes in the calf streamed raggedy red tissue. Little black hairs danced on the pale flesh as water sloshed over it. His forlorn foot still wore a brown-and-white argyle crumpled around the ankle.

Where was the rest of him? In a kind of trance, I circled my boat looking—

There was a line hanging over the bow. I hadn’t noticed that before. It was taut. That meant there was something on the other end of it, some weight. The anchor? No, I was standing on the anchor. I knew it wasn’t the anchor, anyway. I knew what it was.

I untied the line and held the end in my hand, felt the weight, while I decided what to do with it. After all, I could just cast the line overboard and not pull on it at all—

An empty shoe, an oxblood wingtip, surfaced languidly. It bobbed upright but awash. I knew that shoe. That was Sid’s shoe. Then Sid himself surfaced. I hadn’t consciously pulled on the rope.

“Crystal!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. Again. But I knew in a wave of despair that it was futile; she’d never hear me in the wind. “Crystal!” I screamed again, nonetheless.

They had tied the rope around Sid’s waist, and his body had bent around it. He surfaced in that attitude. He had hung straight down until the boat moved forward, and then the force of water had brought him up right into the propeller. His pants had been ripped off his body, his shirt and jacket rumpled under his armpits.
I never saw Sid’s face, but I saw the back of his head. It was stove in, and triangular chunks of his skull had floated away. I heard myself whimpering, but I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop. Sid had tried to help us. Sid sank back, opening up as he did so, arms and legs akimbo like a skydiver’s. I had let his body pull the end of the rope from my hands before I clearly understood that was happening.

I shoved the throttle forward hard. The engine roared, but it seemed to take two days for us to pick up any speed. I strained to see Crystal on the porch as I drew near, but she wasn’t there. Neither was Jellyroll—

I hit the flat rock a glancing blow that drove my knee against the steering console. Blades of sick pain stabbed up my leg. I threw the bow line ashore, but I didn’t take time to tie it onto anything. I leapt off the boat and hobbled to the stairs—

“Crystal!” No answer from the house! “Jellyroll!” I ran around back, past Jellyroll’s woodpile, screaming their names, but they didn’t answer. I went up the steps three at a time, though I knew neither Crystal nor Jellyroll would be there—

No phone! I was on my own. Where would they take Crystal and Jellyroll? That’s what I needed to think about. Where would I take them if I were a psycho stalker? I realized that I had the shotgun clutched so tightly my fingers throbbed. Where!