P Deutermann - The Moonpool

“Don’t tell Comrade Putin that,” she replied. “Or better, visit Russia and see for yourself. I have.”

“The Russians can’t help themselves,” I said. “They like their tyrants. You, on the other hand, sound like a one-woman propaganda machine. What other Americans are going for revolution? None.”

“You think?” she said. “Have you asked yourself why Carl Trask told your boys where you were? It wasn’t to get you out, big guy-it was to get me out. That’s why you changed rooms. Our thing is a lot bigger than you know.”

“You’re telling me the major was part of this?”

“No, but he’s devoted to Carl Trask and his ideas about the decay in this country.”

“You and the military guys are on different sides, Moira.”

“They think so, and you think so. The difference is that my side is using them.” She glanced at her watch and got up. “I’ve got a plane to catch.” She pointed at our portable computer on the kitchen table. “You might want to get rid of that. That’s the computer that actually hacked into Helios. It’s a slave to the ones I have in here.”

I blinked. I was impressed and said so. Then I asked her where she was going.

She laughed. “As if I would tell you?” she said. “Oh, let’s see, then-how about, I don’t know, Mexico?”

“Mexico.”

“It doesn’t matter where I go,” she said, pointing at her computer bags. “As long as there’s one or two of these around.” She zipped up her jacket and headed for the back door. She saw the water bottle. “May I?” she said.

“Be my guest,” I said, keeping my voice absolutely neutral. She grabbed the bottle, stuck it in her jacket pocket, and pushed open the back screen door.

“Moira?” I called. “If you actually do go down to Margaritaville?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Don’t drink the water.”

The next morning, Tony and I went back to the hospital to be there when Pardee surfaced. We were too late. Alicia was beaming at his bedside. Pardee had come out of it on his own and announced he was hungry, damned hungry. The doctors were very pleased and yet equally adamant that there would not be a party just yet. They asked us if we would mind very much just going away and coming back later. We slunk away to find some coffee in the hospital cafeteria. I told Tony about what had happened last night, and he looked at me with new respect. I told him that he’d eventually get his vehicle back if he’d just be patient, and that, no, I didn’t intend to share the news of Moira’s departure call with Creeps and company.

We had our coffee and then went down to see Bernie Price to close the loop on the Thomason case. He had been in touch with the reluctant sister, who was now on her way home to the U.S. to see about her brother, and possibly even her sister, Allie. She had told Bernie that there had been an inheritance from their parents, but Allie’s revolt and subsequent enlistment with the sheriff’s office had provoked their father to verbally disown her. When the second parent died several years later, the money had been much larger than they’d known, and the older brother, acting as executor, had divided it between himself and Allie’s sister, even though the trust had specified a three-way split. Allie had apparently just found out, and had gone to Helios to confront Dr. Thomason. Whether she threatened to expose him wasn’t known, but when I had made that call to the sister in Turkey, she had known that the chickens might be coming home to roost. I suspected Thomason had admitted to Allie what he’d done, and when she threatened to expose him, he poisoned her with moonpool water. The loving sister would probably never admit that, but Bernie said she was in for some pointed questioning.

Alicia took Tony back to Triboro when she went back for a day with the kids. The docs would not let Pardee go until he’d been observed operating normally for forty-eight hours. I drove back over to Southport. I decided to stay at the beach house as long as Pardee was still stuck in the hospital, even though Alicia said she’d be back down in a day or so. That evening, Sergeant McMichaels stopped by the house again. He had a rustic-looking individual with him. I thought he’d come for his bottle of radioactive water, but fortunately that wasn’t the case. He introduced the other man as a local fisherman, who had some news for me.

“Think mebbe I got your dogs,” the man said. “One German shepherd, one black wolf-lookin’ one?”

My heart jumped. “Where?”

“My place,” he said. “On the river. They wandered in yesterday mornin’, I called the sergeant here. He’d had word out, you was lookin’.”

“Are they hurt?”

The man shuffled his feet and looked warily at McMichaels. “You can tell him,” the sergeant said.

“The black one? He’s done lost him a back leg. Looks like somebody shot it off. Got him a hurt eye, too. Bad hurt, I reckon. The other one’s okay, but she won’t eat nothin’ and she keeps makin’ teeth at me.”

That would be Frick, I thought. “Let’s go,” I said. Frack’s lost a leg? The thought of that almost made me wish it wasn’t them. Almost.

The man turned out to be an inshore fisherman. He ran a one-man-band operation and plied his trade in the Cape Fear estuary for the Wilmington restaurant markets. His riverside place was in a small community of riverbank places whose yards were cluttered with boat gear, junked cars, wobbly-looking piers and boats, and weathered mobile homes. He took us out back to a makeshift dog kennel, where I heard a familiar bark.

Hallelujah. It was them. Frick was thin and a bit tattered, but she perked right up the moment she saw me coming across the backyard. I heard a couple of other cars pulling up out front but concentrated on greeting Frick and then examining Frack. I could tell immediately that his right eye was a total loss. His left rear leg was gone from the elbow down. The fisherman had put some kind of horrible goo on it that stank of fish, but I didn’t see any swelling or other signs of infection. He couldn’t stand up, but he was very glad to see me, and his tail worked just fine. I sat down in the pen between them and just talked to them, trying to keep a dry eye and not really succeeding as I watched Frack try to get closer to me. It was such a relief to see them alive, battered as they were.

“Y’all gonna put that one down?” the fisherman asked. McMichaels studied his shoes, as if already knowing the answer to that one.

“Hell, no,” I said. “He’s going to be like me-retired.”

“Well,” Sergeant McMichaels said, “there’s one more thing. Lots of folks in town appreciated what you did. We talked about what happened to the shepherds. So, well, over there.”

I looked through the pen wire to see a dozen or so locals standing by the corner of the fisherman’s trailer. I recognized some faces from the Southport diner.

“Seems that some of the folks in town wanted to do something, pay you back,” McMichaels said, pointing to my dogs with his chin. “Your partners here getting hurt and all. We got together. We have something for you. Some one, actually.”

He signaled to the small crowd by the trailer, and a man came around the corner with a very large sable shepherd on a leash. No one spoke as he walked over to where I was sitting in the pen. Frick got up and stared, but the big dog ignored her and simply sat down and looked at me through the wire. I don’t think I’d ever seen a shepherd with as much gravitas as this one. She turned out to be a female. Calm, amber eyes, erect ears, broad chest, and an aura of complete superiority.

“This here,” the man said, “is Kitty. She’s yours, you want her. Folks here were trying to think of some way of repaying you. I bred her, but she’s yours, if you can use her.”