Home Fires (27 page)

Skip touched his lips before turning to Oberdorf. “Do you know how he happened to lose his cabin card?”

“I haven’t talked to him, sir.” He pressed the worn button that summoned the elevator. “But I know a lot of people lose things in the infirmary. They’ve got those lockers in there, and they hang the patients’ clothes in them. Only they don’t lock. Visitors come in and go out all the time. I got my foot broke once, and they put me in there for a couple of days before we made port, so I know how it is.”

“Chelle had a private room,” Skip said.

“Is that a lady? They’ve got two rooms like that for women, because it’s nearly all men. So they get those and don’t hear the nasty words. Not that they don’t know them already, if you ask me.”

The freight elevator arrived. They went into it, and Oberdorf pressed a button for the signal deck.

“I don’t understand this at all,” Vanessa whispered.

“Later,” Skip told her, and turned to Oberdorf. “Will you have to open the door to change the lock?”

“Sure. That’s the only way you can get those locks out, sir. You open the door, take off both knobs, and slip the lock out the side. That lets you get at the little keyboard. When you’ve got it, you can wipe the old code and stick in your new card. Press a couple of buttons and your new card opens the lock.”

“I see.”

“Hotels and so on use a different system, mostly. They can send a wireless signal that will change the code. Only a hell of a lot of people can send them now, and read them, too. Ours is more secure.”

“You’ve got to have a card?”

“Yes, sir. Or a master. Got to be able to open that lock before you can change the lock. Only a hell of a lot of passengers just walk off with their cards at the end of the cruise, sir. We try to get them to turn them in.” He shrugged.

“But they don’t.”

“Right. About half don’t. So one of the things we’ve got to do when we refit is recode those locks. Generally it takes one man four days to do them all. After the last cruise it took Walt and Ray three.”

Skip had to brace himself against the side of the elevator.

“She pitchin’ now,” Trinity remarked. “This wind behind her. Don’t nobody like it.”

Vanessa said, “It must make us sail faster, though.”

“No, ma’am. Off to the side and jus’ a little bitty bit back is what they want. That’s the fastest, and don’t pitch much. Don’t roll much neither.”

“Are we gonna sink?” Jerry clearly hoped they would.

“Not us, honey. We been through lots worse than what this is.”

The elevator doors slid open. The ship’s motion seemed more pronounced here, the thunder almost deafening. Oberdorf ambled down the corridor, compensating for the pitching floor without apparent effort.

Skip hung back. “There might be shooting.” He kept his voice down. “I’ll take the lead. Try your best not to shoot me in the back.”

“How ’bout this li’l boy?”

“Keep him away from the doorway.”

As they neared the door, Oberdorf slid a master cabin card into the lock, pushed the door open, and froze.

“Come in.” To Skip, still a dozen steps away, it sounded like an old man’s voice.

“Come in. We must talk to you.”

Oberdorf raised his hands, and Skip drew his gun.

*   *   *

When consciousness returned, he could not remember firing or being shot. Nor did he, for a minute and more, know where he was. He knew only that his head felt ready to split.

His questing fingers found a broad strip of tape.

Someone’s shoes were rather too near his eyes. They were white and nearly new, wing-tip shoes with pointed toes and a sprinkling of vent holes. He studied them, and could not have said for how long. Having marooned him, time had not yet returned for him.

White shoes, and the crutch-tipped end of a blackthorn walking stick.

Voices droned overhead: A man’s voice, quick and clipped, youthful and energetic. Another man’s, quietly humorous and overprecise. A woman’s, dark, frustrated, and angry. Another woman’s, mocking and almost too proper. A third, tremulous with … fear? Anger? A boy’s.

Then a new woman’s, violent, profane, and lovely beyond every other voice in the world.

Skip sat up. The man seated in front of him had overlong white hair, a wide white mustache, and a neatly trimmed white beard, the beard shaped like the blade of a spade. Blue eyes swam behind thick lenses.

“Skip!” It was she, and in a moment she was on her knees beside him, her sound arm embracing him and her immobilized right arm trying to. She kissed him and kissed him again, and he was too stunned to respond. Thunder roared outside, lightning flashed beyond the glass doors, and he longed, suddenly and painfully, to make love to her in the midst of such a storm. They had never done it, and it seemed likely that they never would.

“I told you we shouldn’t have untied her.” Rick Johnson needed no handhold to brace himself against the pitching of the ship.

“Quite the contrary,” the older man replied. “The wisdom of my course is being made apparent to you. You are too stiff-necked to see it, which is a real pity.”

On Skip’s left, Oberdorf said, “They’re going to kill us.”

“These amateurs?” Chelle broke off another kiss to snarl it.

“I’m no amateur,” Johnson told her.

“It seems unlikely.” At that moment, Skip felt that he would sell his soul for two acetaminophen tablets and a glass of water. “It seems much more probable that some accommodation can be reached.”

“I’m going to k-kill you, Mr. Grison.” Susan’s face was tearstained. “Mr. White says I can. That I can be the w-w-one if we decide to.”

“Do you really hate me that much?”

“No! Don’t you see?” Her voice shook; so did the hand that gripped her short-barreled revolver. “I’ll k-kill you because I l-love you. It ought to be somebody like me, somebody who l-l-loves you.”

“I would rather it were nobody at all.”

The boy, Jerry, moaned. “I just wanna go home.” His face was less tearstained than Susan’s, but the stains were there.

“You’re going to kill me,” Skip told Susan. “Who’s going to kill this kid?”

Chelle said, “Oh, for God’s sake! Shut your fuckin’ mouth.”

“It’s a serious question.” Skip’s attention had never left Susan. “It deserves a serious answer. Because you’re going to have to kill him. He knows who you are and where you are, and I imagine he’s got some idea of what you’re doing. So if you three are going to kill us, you’ll find he’s one of us.”

Silence, save for Jerry’s sobs.

At last Johnson said, “You think you can get us to swear you to silence and let you go.”

“I don’t,” Skip told him, “but I’d like to propose a rational plan that will end this mess without bloodshed. I know the information you wanted from Chelle—I don’t mean that I have it. I don’t. But I know what it was. Have you got it?”

Johnson nodded. “I’ve got it, and I won’t forget it. I don’t forget.”

“Good. That makes everything much easier. We’re what? Ten days out of Boswash?”

The white-bearded man said, “Closer than that. Less than a week.”

Johnson jogged Susan’s elbow. “Keep your gun on them, darling. Keep it on your boss. He’s dangerous.”

“Less than a week,” Skip said. Privately, he was trying to place the white-bearded man. “That’s fine. It makes everything easier. There are six of us. You can take hostages. I’d think you’d want two at least, and I’ll volunteer to be one of them. Give us your word that you’ll release your hostages unharmed as soon as you get clear of the ship. If the rest talk, you’ll kill the hostages.”

“Absurd!” The white-bearded man was fumbling in a coat pocket.

“Hell, yes!” Johnson turned to face him. “For once I agree with you. We’ve got to kill them, and we’ve got to do it now, while we’ve got the storm to cover the noise.”

“It will last for hours. Before they die, we need to find out how they found us.” His corncob pipe clenched between his teeth, the white-bearded man rose, gripping the edge of Lieutenant Gerard Brice’s desk. “I questioned the others, Mr. Grison. They told me they didn’t know, that you were the one. So how did you do it? I speak as an unwilling admirer.”

Vanessa said, “I have some questions for you, too. May I ask them?”

“Later.” The white-bearded man waved the interruption aside. “Later, madam, or never.”

Every few seconds the floor heaved beneath them; Susan muttered, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

The blackthorn pointed at Skip like the barrel of a pistol. “How, Mr. Grison? How, precisely, did you find us?”

“By good luck, mostly. Achille’s a friend of mine. Do you know him?”

The white-bearded man shook his head. It seemed to Skip, as it had earlier on deck, that there was something familiar about him.

“He has no hands. When the hijackers captured him, they took his hooks. Mr. Oberdorf here made him new ones, sharp hooks that he can fight with; they have spikes for stabbing. You may have seen him.”

“No.”

Skip shrugged. “Rick and Susan have, I know. Anyway, Achille’s a friend, so when I had volunteers searching the ship for Chelle, he was one of them. He called me and said he thought Mr. Oberdorf might know where Chelle was.”

Oberdorf interrupted, “I didn’t, and I have no idea why anybody’d say something like that.”

Skip nodded. “I imagine Achille had been impressed by your knowledge of this ship. It may have been no more than that.”

He turned back to the white-bearded man, who was still erect, still grasping the edge of the desk to keep from falling. “It didn’t sound like much, but we had no other leads. Trinity here and Chelle’s mother had been searching with me, and we decided we ought to follow this one up.”

“Admirable.” The blackthorn was laid across the arms of the chair.

“So we trooped down to M Deck, meeting Mr. Oberdorf on his way up here. He told us he had no idea where Chelle was and didn’t have time to talk. Lieutenant Brice had lost the card to his stateroom; the lock would have to be reprogrammed so he could give Brice a new card.” Skip smiled. “After that I had an idea, whether Mr. Oberdorf did or not.”

“Elucidate.”

Johnson snapped, “He’s grinning. Can’t you see he’s about to put something over?”

“I’m not,” Skip told him. “It’s just that your boss seems—”

“He’s not my boss!”

“Reasonable. And if he’s reasonable, he won’t kill us. Or let you do it.”

“I refuse to be diverted,” the white-bearded man said, “just as your explanation becomes interesting. Continue, please.”

“You see, we hadn’t searched the officers’ staterooms. The officers were in and out of them several times a day, and an absent officer would have been noticed immediately; so there seemed no point in looking there. But Lieutenant Brice was in the infirmary, and now his card was missing. Someone had taken Chelle out of the infirmary. It seemed entirely possible that the people who had taken her had taken Brice’s card, too. Mr. Oberdorf told us he would have to open the door to reprogram the lock, so we tagged along. After that, well, I seem to have been shot in the head; but you’ll have to tell me about that—I can’t tell you.”

Chelle said, “Dammit!” and her embrace tightened.

“The cry of a guilty conscience,” Johnson murmured.

“You were shot,” the white-bearded man explained, “by Mr. Johnson here. You can hardly blame him for it, since you were shooting at him at the time. You missed. He did not. At first, we thought you dead. When we realized you were not, Ms. Clerkin here put that tape over your wound to stop the bleeding.”

“She’s soft,” Johnson said. “I’m soft on her, but she’s soft on everybody.”

“I suppose she is.” For a moment, the white-bearded man struggled to regain his balance. “I let her because you were making a dreadful mess. Though no physician, I can offer an opinion concerning your wound. Do you wish to hear it?”

“Yes,” Skip said. “Very much.”

“I believe Mr. Johnson’s bullet struck your skull and was deflected by it. It appears to have traveled about three and one half inches between skull and scalp before exiting. You are fortunate to be alive.”

“He won’t be lucky much longer,” Johnson said.

The white-bearded man shrugged. “Who is to say the living are luckiest?”

Chelle took her arm from Skip’s shoulders and lifted his hand from her left leg. “I’m not going to let this go on. Skip loves me and he lied for me. I love him, and I’m not going to let him.”

“Indeed?”

“Right. Mom threw a little party for us vets, and I went. I could’ve brought Skip, but I didn’t. I went alone and met Jerry Brice there. We made out, and Skip caught us at it.”

The white mustache twitched. “My, my!”

“Yeah. He caught us, and Jerry beat it—grabbed his clothes and ran. He left his shoes, but they were black and I shoved them under the bed. They were on my side, which was damned lucky.”

“Chelle, darling, don’t you—”

“Shut up!” She turned to Skip. “They’re going to kill us, and I don’t want to die with this on my chest. I don’t give a fuck who else knows, but you’ve got to. It’ll hurt you and I’m sorry, but I’m going to die clean. I met Jerry again the next day, and he gave me a card to this room. I stuck it in my pocket thinking maybe I’d use it sometime and maybe I wouldn’t.”