Sandra K. Moore - Dead Reckoning

He didn’t grin this time.

The first cars started bumping up and over the landing ramp. Behind her, an SUV revved its engine. She waited until the Buick eased forward, then quickly opened the pickup’s door and hopped inside. One tap on the accelerator and the Chevy roared, settled into its purring rhythm.

“Go ahead,” she muttered at Falks as she put the pickup in Drive. “Follow me.”

Because her first stop would be the Galveston Police Department.

Chris woke instantly. Someone was aboard.

She lay perfectly still in her cabin, holding her breath and trying to listen beyond the hum of the corner box fan. The boatyard’s shed lights glowed outside the open portholes.

Damn kids. She knew Dave should have run the little heathens out of the boatyard. Probably stealing electronics.

Footsteps above, in the salon. Heavy. Not a kid’s. A man’s.

Her skin tingled with fear. The face of the cadaverous man, pale, thin, eerie in the new moon’s light, floated in her mind’s darkness. Eugene Falks. She’d have to do something, not just lie here waiting for him to find her. Her arms and legs lay like stones. Was it really Falks? How strong was he? Could she fight him? God, she hadn’t hit anyone since seventh grade when awful Jimmy McAllister tried to French-kiss her in study hall.

No way was she going to let some weirdo come onto her boat and steal something or attack her. This was her home. Her home. No freakin’ way.

The molten lead that had filled her veins a moment ago surged into adrenaline. What were her options? Her cell phone was in the galley. Her tools were all put away. There was nothing in the stateroom she could use as a weapon. She hadn’t oiled the engine room doors, so opening either of those to grab a tool would alert the intruder to her presence. Still, he might not expect her to be aboard while the boat was in dry dock. She could take a chance on the noise.

The wrench. She saw it clearly propped up behind the door to her ensuite head. She’d used it yesterday and forgotten to put it up. Fortunately, it was a nice, hefty seven-eighths.

She slid out of bed and pulled on her robe, belting it tightly around her waist. She retrieved the wrench from the head, paused. Silence upstairs. Whoever was up there had stopped moving. She eased open her stateroom door, crept into the hall.

She paused again by the spiral staircase, heart pounding, to listen. A familiar click and shush told her the door to the port side office had opened. She switched hands on the wrench, then flipped it around so the open end—the end that made two prongs—was the business end. Swing or jab, it would work fine.

She crept up the staircase, skipping the step that creaked. The upper passageway loomed, dark and empty. On the port side, the office. On the starboard side, the galley. Aft, the salon, whose sliding glass door opened onto the aft deck. Dim light from that door cast long shadows of sofa and chair onto the floor. Beside her, the office cabin door was ajar. She sidestepped into the galley. The smooth tile cooled her bare feet.

Shoes. She should have put on shoes.

Without taking her eyes from the office door, she reached for the counter beneath the starboard window where her cell phone lay. Her hand found a notebook, a pen, the bowl of fruit. Chris tore her eyes from the office door’s sliver of darkness. The cell wasn’t on the counter.

Yelling wouldn’t do any good. Nobody hung around a boatyard after midnight. She hefted the wrench.

Knife?

She shuddered. No. No knife.

Leave.

Now there was a plan. But if Falks was after her, and if he happened to hear her, she’d never outrun him on foot. Not barefoot through a debris-strewn boatyard. She needed her car, to get to the police substation.

Car keys? She slid down the starboard cabinet to the floor, facing the office and willing herself to be small and unnoticeable while she tried to remember where she’d left them. After a frustrating and fruitless visit to the Galveston cop shop about Eugene Falks (Sorry, ma’am, we can’t post anyone at the yard, but we’ll send a patrol car by once in a while), and an equally frustrating call to Garza (Please leave a message), she’d driven home, climbed up the ladder to the aft deck, come inside, made sure all the doors and windows were locked, then tossed her keys in…

…the office.

Dammit.

She’d have to chance it on foot.

Chris turned the wrench in her grip. Right. Just slip around the L-shaped counter that separated the galley from the salon, walk across fifteen feet of carpet, ease on out the open door to the aft deck, then down the ten-foot ladder to the ground. No problem.

Except she was sitting on the galley floor, butt frozen to the tiles, legs locked in place, eyes riveted to what little she could see of the office’s dark doorway. The only part moving at any speed was her brain, imagining Falks coming through that office door like a storm, his sickly grin plastered on his face.

“Move,” she whispered.

She stood. Her heart banged away at her chest wall, fouled her hearing. Crouching, she slunk through the galley, paused briefly at the salon’s edge to silently suck some air into her lungs. Her trembling hands clenched. The wrench felt like a puny baseball bat. Note to self: Buy a Louisville Slugger.

She straightened and took a step toward the salon door. Dark movement flashed on her right.

She swung, head-high.

A soft thunk—metal on flesh—then a muffled grunt. Chris recoiled, ducked instinctively into the shadowy galley rather than the backlit salon. On the other side of the L-shaped counter, just in front of the office door, the intruder wheezed.

Had she hit him in the throat?

She gripped the wrench tighter. Outside. She needed to get outside. The wheeze moved from the hallway toward the elbow of the counter’s L. He’d be an arm’s length from either the salon or the hallway. She remembered Falks’s long, spindly, angular arms. Come into my parlor.

The wheeze permeated the air like a metronome: Hiiiss, ruuush. Hiiiss, ruuush.

Options. Right. A galley door led forward into the pilothouse. But the door, like so many on the yacht, would creak when opened and Falks would know instantly what she was doing. She’d never have a chance. Nor was she fast enough to reach the office and grab her cell.

She had another option.

She could attack.

Chris breathed silently through her mouth while she laid the wrench on the linoleum next to her right foot. She felt behind her for the cabinet door she wanted, the one with the little plaque on it.

Hiiiss, ruuush.

Falks started moving again, inching along the L toward the little passage between the galley and the salon. A shaft of boatyard light speared the passage.

The plaque’s sharp edge pricked her fingertips. She opened the cabinet door and reached inside.

Hiiiss, ruuush.

Falks’s fingers curled around the cabinet’s sides. Chris’s own trembling fingers found the smooth, cold cylinder she was searching for. Falks eased into the light—an ear, a stretch of pale skin, one wide, pale eye.

“I see you,” he whispered.

Calm wrapped itself around Chris like a cloak, as it always did the moment before an irrevocable action: a softball arcing toward the plate and her waiting bat, the red-circled target coming into focus just before she squeezed the trigger, pen poised above paper as she prepared to sign her resignation. It was the moment anything was possible.

Falks was a man. Only a man.

Chris smiled. “Come and get me.” She drew in a deep breath and held it.

He leaped. She wrenched the cylinder from its holding clips and yanked out the safety pin. By his second step, she gripped the mini fire extinguisher’s handle, and by his third—he fell toward her like an avalanche—she shot a hard stream of chemical agent into his wide and glaring eyes, then skittered away, out of reach.