Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

“ Good God, he’s alive!” Patty shouted. “Ken, Ken, it’s us. We’ve got you. Hang in… hang in there.”

“ We’ve got to get him to a hospital, now!” Mullins shouted. “Take the wheel and follow my lights!”

Bill cast off and raised anchor, turning his boat directly for shore. Patty situated herself at the helm of Delta-4 and did precisely as Bill had instructed, following in his wake, her tear-filled eyes ever on his lights rather than on the bodies of her two friends in her peripheral vision, rushing her precious cargo to shore.

Bill radioed dispatch as to what was going on, and Bob Fisher promised that an ambulance would be waiting at Madeira Beach.

Meanwhile, the other Marine Patrol boats continued a frantic circling about the fog in an ever-widening arc from the original quadrants that’d pinpointed what Ken Stallings had called in as the Tau Cross, the suspect ship. They intended to search all night for it if need be. But somehow, Patty Lawrence feared, the Night Crawler had already escaped the net.

When Jessica and Eriq arrived in Tampa Bay, the TV newscasters and the radios were aflutter with news that two Florida Marine Patrol officers had been struck down by what officials suspected to be the infamous Night Crawler, who had been approached by the FMP officers on a routine check which had turned out to be not so routine when one officer saw the body of a Night Crawler victim. Both men were fired upon, the suspect boat owner using a speargun. One of the officers was dead, shot through the heart, while the other was fighting to regain consciousness from a coma induced by a nasty blow to the head by another spear which, fortunately, had not penetrated his skull.

Both Eriq and Jessica knew how valuable Ken Stallings had suddenly become to their case; what he saw out there on the water was the ship which everyone in America wanted to see hauled ashore with its evil captain in chains. He had information no one else had. They raced to Grant Memorial Presbyterian Hospital in Madeira Beach, where Stallings was hanging on to life. When they arrived, they found an army of family, friends and newshounds, gathered in an enormous vigil which the hospital personnel were perturbed about and trying desperately to force into a small waiting room. A spokesperson, a Dr. Cameron Daniels, told the waiting crowd, “Mr. Stallings appears stable in every respect; we don’t expect to lose him. At this point, we can only give time the opportunity to do its magic and heal this man. We are hopeful, but as yet, he remains in a deep coma.”

“ When do you expect he’ll be out of the coma?” asked one foolish reporter.

“ If I knew that, I could tell you all to come back fifteen minutes before, now couldn’t I? I could also make book on the next Buccaneers game and make some real money. I’m sorry, people, but I can’t make such predictions at this point.”

“ Doctor! Doctor!” the press called out after Daniels, but the spry little man was through a pair of double doors marked Hospital Personnel Only before anyone could cut him off.

“ Let’s get out of here before someone spots us,” Jessica warned Eriq.

“ Right you are.” Outside in a drizzle, they decided to locate Bob Fisher, the dispatcher who had been in contact with Manley and Stallings during the crisis. “I want to hear that tape,” Eriq told Jessica.

“ That makes two of us.”

They made their way back to the rental car and were soon motoring toward the local headquarters of the Florida Marine Patrol. Local FBI field operatives, having expected them, guided them about the unfamiliar territory and informed them of all that had transpired out on the waters fronting Madeira Beach.

Fisher was not hard to find. He was, in fact, still manning the board when Jessica and Eriq were introduced to him. “I’ve got two boats out there still, along with two county patrol boats and a fifth from the sheriff’s office. Coast Guard is out there, too. They’ve searched high and low for that damned bastard you people’ve chased clear up here, but they haven’t so much as a whiff of diesel oil to track him by, and that fog out there’s playing havoc with our guys. We’re ready to call ‘em all in.”

Fisher was a bony, gaunt man with piercing gray-green eyes, a mustache and thinning hair dyed an awful shade of red-brown.

“ That’s your decision, of course,” replied Eriq.

“ You don’t want to risk any more lives, and that’s quite understandable,” agreed Jessica.

“ That’s all well and good, but these men and women out there now, they’re out for revenge. They’re not out there for the FMP or the county or the state; they’re out there for Manley and for Ken Stallings. Ours is a small community. All these watercops know one another. Don’t know if they’d come in off the Gulf if we ordered them, and if we do, and they refuse, then we’ll have sanctions against men who’ve worked all night at risk to life and limb to end this thing. So, I’ve given ‘em rope… let them take the tether for the time being, and I’ve got my boss on the wake-up line. He’s been checking in every few minutes and’s on his way.”

“ We’d like to hear whatever you have of Stallings and Manley on tape,” Jessica told Fisher.

He nodded. “Sure. There’s a soundproof room there,” he said, pointing. “I’ll run it through to you. You just go on in there.” They listened to the moments leading up to death for Manley and coma for Stallings. They listened a second and a third time, and they told Fisher that they’d like a copy of the tape, and that it wasn’t to be given out to the press or TV. He readily agreed and obliged, dubbing them a copy and listening for any new excitement out on the water all at the same time, but he also warned that TV types were going to be offering big sums of money for the tape, and that the FMP was in dire need of funding, and that it wouldn’t be up to him to make the final decision on that one.

“ Certainly sounds like our guy,” Eriq whispered in Jessica’s ear.

“ Ninety-nine percent sure. A body trailing off the back end of the boat, the boat has the words Tau Cross painted at its rear, registration numbers blurred, teakwood all around. Possibly of foreign manufacture.” These were all statements which Stallings had made at one point or another during the course of the night to Fisher’s dispatch office.

Eriq began thinking aloud, saying, “So now that someone’s reached out and touched his boat, he’s got to know we know; he’ll be painting it, changing her look, renaming it. We’ve got to canvass every dry dock along the coast from here to Louisiana and back again to the Keys and the Eastern seaboard to be on the lookout for anyone anxious to maul teakwood with paint and anyone with a boat that bears a name with the word Cross in it. And now this-the Tau Cross. I’d count ourselves lucky: This creep is no longer quite so completely invisible.”

“ The kind of scare those watercops must’ve put in him, I agree. This guy I know. He’s afraid of capture and exposure; he’d probably prefer death. So now he’s running scared.”

“ That’s what I mean,” agreed Santiva. “He’ll run to the nearest boat works, try to sell the boat or overhaul it. If we put out an APB on the boat, he’s dead in the water, so to speak.”

“ He’s scared, but he’s not stupid, Eriq.”

“ What does that mean?”

“ He’s running; he’s going to open that schooner up, take her out of these waters altogether, sail for another location entirely, if he’s as scared as I think he is.”

“ How can you know how frightened he is?”

“ Somebody’s got to think like the bastard.”

“ And you think he’s going to run?”

“ As far and as fast as that schooner and his will will take him, yes.”