Sandra K. Moore - Dead Reckoning

Falks shrieked, jerked away. “Shit!” he shouted, scrubbing his face, tearing at the smoky dust. “You bitch!” He collapsed back against the counter, reeling. Chris let out her breath, extinguisher raised and ready to strike. He fell backward into the salon. His curses stuck in his throat, then the coughing started as white smoke drifted around his head like a veil.

Chris bolted into the office, snagged her cell. Fire extinguisher in one hand, she punched 911 with the other. Falks’s coughs rasped, fading.

“Come on!” she shouted at the phone. Why weren’t they picking up? She looked at the phone’s LED screen. Because she’d dialed 991.

A thud and the crash of shattering glass, then a scrabbling on the aft deck.

The bastard was getting away.

Chris skirted the dying edge of chemical smoke as she ran from the office into the salon. She stopped short at the aft deck doorway that glittered with broken shards.

Falks’s long, white hand shone like that of a picked-clean corpse before it slipped from the deck railing and disappeared.

Chris studied Smitty’s lean back from her sofa vantage point. He stood in front of the salon door’s remains, hands stuffed in his shorts pockets, his shoulders hunched as if against a cold wind. Or blame.

“I should have been here,” he said to the spray of glass at his feet.

The breeze kicked up by the box fans blowing from the galley ruffled his shirt sleeves. Outside, the predawn darkness carried a hint of dew. The cops had long since taken down their notes, given their assurances they’d find Falks and gone. They’d stayed almost as long as the residual chemical smoke, which had left a film of mica dust over the floor where Falks had jumped Chris.

“Are you sure it was Falks?” Antonio Garza asked. He leaned from his chair to scribble on his ever-present yellow legal pad.

Chris wrapped her fingers more tightly around her coffee cup and drew her legs onto the sofa. “I’m positive. No doubt.”

“I’m sorry, Chris,” Smitty said for the fourth time since he’d arrived.

Garza sighed. “It’s not your fault. It’s mine. Had I picked up my messages in time—”

“There’s plenty of blame to go around,” Chris remarked. “Galveston didn’t send a patrol car, you didn’t pick up your messages, Smitty isn’t clairvoyant, and I should have gotten a motel room once I got the impression Falks was stalking me. That’s not the point.” She set her cup on the table, finally able to trust her hands not to shake. “The point is I don’t know what Falks is doing.”

“I’ve got a call in to McLellan,” Garza told Smitty’s back. “He’s running Falks’s name to see if it comes up connected to Scintella.”

“You think Falks is stalking me because of Natalie?”

“The timing’s right,” Smitty said without turning.

“But he tried to run me down before I even found out what was going on with her,” Chris pointed out.

Garza’s head shake looked tired, resigned. “It’s still possible. Scare tactic. Scintella knows Natalie would call you for help if she needed it. Maybe he was trying to make sure you wouldn’t pick up the phone.”

“Yeah, but Falks missed that chance. Why is he stalking me on the ferry and then breaking into my boat? Why didn’t he just finish the job when he had the chance?”

Smitty’s shoulders stiffened. They sloped down from his linebacker neck, Chris noticed, as if worn down by a yoke of suffering. “Change of plans. Scintella found out Natalie called you. That’s why Falks called your cell. To let you know he knows.”

“Shit.” Chris scrubbed her hands over her face. “Then she’s in even more danger.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Smitty said to the window. “From your description, Falks was searching for something. You must have something he wants.”

Chris gave a short laugh in spite of herself. “You’ve seen this boat and what I drive. I don’t have anything of value.”

“Has Natalie sent you anything?” Smitty asked. “A box, a letter?”

“Nothing lately.” Nothing that had arrived yet, anyway. She straightened. “I’m supposed to get a package of clothes from her in a few days.”

“Clothes?”

Chris shrugged. “She likes giving me designer clothes.”

Smitty grunted. “Expensive hobby.”

“She can afford it.” Chris irritably swept her feet from the sofa to the floor and grabbed her coffee cup. Damn shakes were back. And she had work to do. But she still had questions. “So do you think Jerome’s ticked off about an Italian dress?”

“Maybe she’s sending you something valuable—like a document. Something incriminating.” Garza glanced at Smitty. “You know the way Scintella works. Could he have left a paper trail and his wife got hold of something?”

“Maybe,” Smitty conceded. “He’s not the brightest bulb in the candelabra.”

“Natalie could have dug something up to use against him,” Chris mused. “She’s scared, but she understands power.” She had, after all, wrapped their grandfather around her little finger.

Garza grunted. “Scintella’s not the kind of man you want to manipulate.”

Chris tried to tamp down the fresh fear rising through her stomach. “What if Falks wasn’t sent by Scintella? What if he’s just a random stalker?”

“He’s Scintella’s man.” Smitty crossed his lean, muscled arms. “I’ll be here 24/7.”

“But what does that mean for my sister?” Fear pierced her chest, making it hard to breathe. “If Jerome knows…”

Garza’s scar throbbed red above his ear. “Anything could happen, Ms. Hampton.” His gaze, when it met hers, lay heavy with the weight of his experience. He finds missing people, she remembered. How many had he found dead? How many mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters had he been forced to face?

Natalie could die, his gaze said. But it said more than that. Natalie could already be dead.

“I have to call her. She gave me a special number where I could reach her.”

Chris grabbed her cell from the table but before she could hit the speed dial, Garza said, “What reason are you going to give her for calling?”

Chris paused. He had a point. Why would she call in the middle of the night? Just to chat? Because she couldn’t sleep? The penalty for making Jerome even more suspicious was too high to pay just to assuage her anxiety.

“I’ll wait,” Chris said through her frustration. “Until morning.”

“Don’t mention the package,” Garza ordered. “If she’s managed to ship something on the sly, let’s not tip off Scintella.”

“This is going to turn into a waiting game, isn’t it?” Chris asked. “Waiting to call Natalie, waiting for the package, waiting to get under way.”

Garza’s half smile was sympathetic. “I’m sorry. It doesn’t get easier. But you have plenty to do in the meantime.”

“McLellan will arrive on Monday morning,” Smitty added.

“Can he help us work?” Chris asked, dragging her attention back to the task in front of her. First things first.

Smitty abruptly grinned his charming, lopsided grin. “You’ll see for yourself.”

“I hope so. We’ve got to launch in thirteen days,” she said, feeling her nerves prick the skin, itching to get things done, and done fast. “Time’s wasting.”

Outside, faint peach light colored the sky, and the resident green monk parrots, so social, so busy, had already begun to chatter up the dawn.

Late Monday afternoon, Chris lay on a catwalk stretched inches over oily bilge water, a rough-drawn map of Obsession’s hull in one hand and a flashlight in the other. She didn’t much care for poking around in the bilge, but necessity was a mother and there was no getting around it. Every through-hull—every hole in the boat that fed water into or out of the boat, through the hull—needed to be watertight. The last thing she needed was a hose to give way at sea.