Just when she could have used a nice gale-force breeze to make some covering noise in the rigging, the wind died. She must have made some sound, because Gault whipped around and looked up, in the same motion raising the gun. There was a loud bang, a smack and a whine of a bullet hitting and ricocheting off metal, Gault's savage curse, another shot and another as Kate crouched back out of range. She thought of Andy, all smiles and ideals, all energy and enthusiasm, all blood and silence on the forward deck, and she hurled herself forward, boat hook in hand, and thrust blindly before her into the shower of bullets.
The hook struck something and caught. There was a flat, heavy tug, like a large halibut on a line, and a kind of a gurgle. Grimly, sickly determined, Kate sawed back and forth on the pole. There was a hideous grunting sound, a clang of something metallic falling. And then silence.
Kate released a long, shuddering breath, and looked over the side of the catwalk.
The boat hook had caught Harry Gault beneath his chin, the hook penetrating up through his jaw. He stared at her, eyes wide and surprised. His mouth was slack and through his open lips she could see the bloodstained hook had penetrated the roof of his mouth.
She was afraid she was going to vomit. There was a step behind her and she felt a surge of relief. "Andy?
Are you okay?"
She turned and looked straight into Seth Skinner's mild, slightly mad gray eyes.
Her mouth opened and closed. At last she said, her voice weak, "But you're in the freezer."
His mouth twisted into something that might have been a grin. I was. Harry let me out." The grin widened. "Your turn, Katie."
He raised the monkey wrench over his head. Kate wanted to close her eyes, but she couldn't. She wanted to move, to run, but she couldn't do that either. All she could do was lay there, too exhausted to flee, too numb for fear, and watch Seth Skinner kill her.
And then Andy Pence came around the corner of the bridge with an avenging rage in his blue eyes and a feral scream ripping out of his throat and the Louisville Slugger in his hands. He brought that baseball bat down across the back of Seth Skinner's head and Seth Skinner's eyes rolled up and he went limp and he dropped the monkey wrench and he fell, heavily, across Kate's prone, unresisting body.
The next thing she knew Andy had her by the shoulders and was shaking her roughly. "Come on, Kate. Wake up.
Wake up, dammit!"
"Andy?" she said groggily. She came upright and clutched at him. "Andy. I thought you were dead."
He grinned down at her, a fearful sight what with all the blood and swelling. "Turnabout's fair play. You okay?"
"I think so," Kate said vaguely. She couldn't look at the thing sprawled so obscenely on the deck below, the boat hook still protruding from its head. She shoved Seth's limp body farther away. "Is Seth dead?"
"Him?" Andy said contemptuously. "Not a chance. I just brained him a little. Come on, let's get you below and out of those clothes."
She shoved him away. "Take care of-take care of it first. Please?" she said when he would have argued with her. "Please, Andy?" She offered him a tired smile. "I'd do it myself but I don't think I can."
For all his bravado Andy stumbled a little as he produced a blanket from the chart room and tucked it around her where she sat, with her back against the bridge bulkhead.
He shinnied down the ladder from the catwalk to the deck and handed her up the pistol. She held it in a loose grip, not sure she could summon up the strength to fire it if Seth woke up.
Andy produced a tarpaulin, rolled Gault's body in it and rolled the body into the fo'c'sle. Armed with Gault's pistol in one hand and the baseball bat in the other and with the biggest butcher knife in the galley clenched between his teeth, he got Ned out of the hold. Ned was numb and dazed and didn't put up much of a fight. Seth moaned when Andy dragged him by his feet down the stairs and over the raised sill of the galley door, but he, too, was safely behind the locked door of the fo'c'sle before he woke up enough to protest. Andy pushed a crab pot in front of the door to be sure, and to be surer still pushed and shoved another seven-by in front of it.
Fifteen hundred pounds of insurance. He decided it was enough.
Kate watched him, sitting on the catwalk with her back against the bulkhead and her feet hanging over the edge. Andy climbed the ladder, took one hand and pulled her to her feet and hoisted her over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. In their stateroom, he stripped her down and bundled her between the covers. "I'm starting to feel like your mother," he told her.
"Can you get us back to Dutch?" she managed to ask him.
"Piece of cake,"' he said, pushing the blond thatch of hair out of his eyes. "After all, the lady's line is out, and I know my girl's been pulling on it since we left the breakwater."
"You have a girl?"
"Sure. Just haven't found her yet."
Kate smiled in spite of herself.
Before he left he pulled out his first-aid kit and rummaged through it. He held up two slender whitish rocks, flat-sided and columnar, about three inches in length.
"Tabbies," he pronounced, and at her confused look elaborated, "tabular crystals." He closed her right hand around one, her left hand around the other. "A tabbie in each hand balances your energy flow and assists in communication with your higher self. They're especially good in helping ease extreme emotional stress. Every first-aid kit should have at least two. I chose them and they know me, but they'll help you because you're my friend."
Looking up, he saw her eyes closing and broke off the lecture. "Relax," he said, patting her shoulder. "Sleep.
I'll get us home."
It might have been sheer exhaustion, it might have been the tabbies. Kate slept, her last conscious sense the feel of cool quartz crystal warming to the palms of her hands.
TEN
"So he bought up a bunch of old boats with nothing down and a promise of balloon payments within six months."
Te reneged on the balloons," Kate guessed.
Tot it in one."
When was this?"
Jack's grin widened. "April of 1989."
"Right after the RPetCo oil spill."
I told you you'd like it."
"Gault was a millionaire, wasn't he? He signed on with RPetCo, and his boats worked the spill."
"Got it again." Jack nodded smugly. "There's a guy at RPetCo we're talking to, seems he may have earned a little extra that summer for putting Harry's boats at the top of the hiring list. Then, when RPetCo declared the cleanup a success, Gault skipped on the mortgages, the boat crews' last paychecks, and boogied Outside. Next known address-"
" Freetown, Oregon," Kate said.
Jack cocked his thumb and fired his finger at her.
"Where he married the boss's daughter and was rewarded with a boat of his own. Nice work if you can get it." He remembered and looked as abashed as a grown man can.
"Sorry, sir."
Nordensen inclined his head. "Don't be. It is the truth."
Kate thought of the freezing wind, the icy salt spray, the slippery, shifting deck beneath her feet, tossing her cookies every two hours. Nice work if you can get it?
She wouldn't go that far.
"And," Jack said lightly, recovering from his embarrassment,
"as I taught you when you worked for me in the D.A.'s office, if a perp has screwed up once, it's even odds he's screwed up in a prior life."
"Don't start holding out on us now," Kate said. She was warm and full and rested for the first time in what felt like months and she didn't really care if Harry Gault had cheated on his wife, robbed his grandmother and beaten his dog all on the same day, but she summoned up a dutiful interest to keep Jack happy and the story rolling. "Tell, tell."