Clive Cussler - Thriller 2 - Stories You Just Can’t Put Down

“So where is she?”

“He’s not living here,” Boldt said, back in the hall now, looking around. The place had been cleaned up. The kitchen was immaculate but a wire strainer had left a rust ring in the sink, suggesting the passage of a good deal of time. “This is his mausoleum.” He indicated the small living room where two of the deputies stood awaiting instruction. There were no fewer than twenty framed photographs of the same woman spread around the room.

“We gotta find him,” LaMoia insisted, stating the obvious. “How’re we going to do that, Sarge?” He sounded on the edge of tears.

“We’re good,” Boldt said. “Basement?” he called to the deputies.

“Clear,” a deputy answered.

Boldt stepped into the living room, studying the various photographs more closely. Answers weren’t handed you; you had to extract them.

“It’s here somewhere,” he told LaMoia. “Start looking.”

LaMoia joined him. They worked the house: drawers, closets, cabinets.

Boldt made a phone call and announced himself to his Skagit Sheriff’s Office counterpart with whom he’d been dealing for the past hour and a half. “We need to check tax records for other properties, a trailer or mobile home. A boat? Someplace he could have taken her…Yes. Okay. As soon as possible.”

He called out for LaMoia to bring him the photos from the bedroom. Even with the front and back doors open it reeked inside the small house, but Boldt wasn’t going anywhere.

Together the two lined up and rearranged the nearly three dozen framed photographs. Then they reshuffled them several times.

“These five,” Boldt said, rearranging them yet again. All were taken in bright sunlight. In three of the five, water could be seen behind the woman’s head. One was clearly taken on a boat, but not a pleasure craft.

LaMoia turned to say something but Boldt’s phone rang. It was his contact at the Sheriff’s Office.

“We struck out on the tax records, at least for this guy, but we did pick up tax records for a commercial trawler, registered to Norman Malster. It’s in arrears, but until about a year ago it had been paid up regularly for nearly twenty years.”

“A brother?”

“Not a common name,” the sheriff’s deputy said.

“Do we know where-?”

“I got my guys making some calls. Everyone knows everyone here. It shouldn’t be-”

“Orange metal,” Boldt said, pulling one of the photos closer. “One piece is curved down, the other straight.”

“That’s not Oak Harbor. Hang on a second…” The deputy went off the line. When he returned he said, “ La Conner. That ’s the bridge in La Conner.”

Boldt and LaMoia were out the door to the shouts of deputies. Across the street to a vacant lot where the helicopter waited.

“Have you there in three minutes!” shouted the pilot.

The door was slid shut, the helicopter already lifting into a graying sky.

Daphne contained her impatience. With the first knot untied, both ankles were free. But her upper legs remained bound, and her captor, perhaps sensing her intentions, pulled the harness up her calves, restricting her movement before loosening the rope that bound her legs.

She needed a split second. Her legs were painful and weary from the stun stick. But she couldn’t allow him to slip the harness past her knees where it would immobilize her once again-clearly his plan.

“It was your mother, wasn’t it?” she said.

Her captor froze, his stunned expression exactly what she’d hoped for.

She pulled her knees toward her chest, leaned to the right and kicked out like she was on a rowing machine. Her captor flew back and into the wall.

She rocked and fell off the table, turning sideways, her hands and arms still bound, her left shoulder twisting toward dislocation. She kicked him again. And again.

The third blow did damage: his head struck the wall.

Metal, she knew from the sound of it. A boat!

The loop of rope binding her wrists slipped off the head end of the table. Her wrists were connected by three feet of loose rope. She pulled the rope to her mouth and sank her teeth into the knot.

Her captor leaned forward.

Daphne kicked him again, this time in the groin, and he buckled forward.

But his hand came up holding a fish knife, and he lashed out at her, catching her forearm.

“Your mother is dead!” she shouted, assuming that to be the case and knowing this was the message that would unnerve him.

She whipped the rope in front of her, catching him in the side of the face. He slashed with the knife, catching her knee.

She screamed and kicked out, and in her effort to push him away the rope caught around his head and she had him by the neck now, his back to her, her knee on his spine and she pulled back with all her strength.

Something came at her from the side-a gas canister. It caught her in the temple and she went down hard. She rolled beneath the table and the rope, still caught around his neck pulled him with her. She couldn’t get away from him now-they were tied by the rope around his neck.

He punched the knife toward her. She dodged it and, in the process, looped another length of rope around his neck.

He swung the knife upward. The rope cut.

Her hands were free.

She scurried under the table and rose to her feet while he unwrapped the rope and gasped for breath. He turned to face her.

“My angel,” he said.

“Not going to happen,” Daphne said.

She reached out for anything-the nearest thing she could grab.

She blasted an air horn that was so loud in the enclosed space they both went deaf.

Then she saw it: the stun stick. He had it in his hand as he came around the table toward her. He’d made the right choice, driving her toward the bow and away from the only steps she saw.

She fired off the air horn again: three short, three long, three short. SOS.

“She’s dead,” Daphne repeated, hoping to incite his rage, to drive him to emotion and toward making mistakes as a result.

“Did she jump to her death?” she said, guessing. “Did she leave you unfairly?”

“You don’t deserve to be like her,” he said, brandishing the stun stick as he moved ever closer. “What are we going to do with you?”

An explosion behind him, turned him around. It was not an explosion after all, but the door to the cabin disintegrating behind LaMoia’s efforts to kick it in. LaMoia took one step and fell into the cabin, and her captor lunged forward and hit him with the stun stick. LaMoia’s body spasmed and then fell limp-unconcious.

But a stun stick took time to recycle its charge. Daphne rushed him and struck the back of his head with the air horn canister.

Boldt slid down the stairs, landing on LaMoia, knocked the stun stick from the captor’s hand, took the man under the arms and threw him-threw him like he was a matter of a few pounds-across the narrow hold and into the metal hull. He followed around and pulled the man to him and struck the man in the face, blow after blow.

“Lou!” she shouted, the man’s blood coming off Boldt’s knotted fist. Again she shouted his name.

Boldt stopped and looked back at her, still holding the captor by his shirt.

He averted his eyes.

“You’ll kill him,” she said, her voice nothing but a faint whisper. She pulled a mackinaw around her. She staggered back and sat down.

“SOS,” he said. “That was a nice touch.”

“His mother,” she mumbled.

Boldt let the man go. He hit the floor with a thud. Boldt came around toward her, but she recoiled and he raised his hands.

“We’ll get you help,” he said.

She nodded, a look of defiance in her eyes, her right hand still gripping the air horn.