Neil looked at the retreating passengers.
“All right, Jeanne,” he answered. “But explain to her about the food situation.”
While Jeanne hurried forward to overtake the nursing mother Neil turned to speak to Jim; as he did he saw that the man with the .45 was still sitting on the settee and beside him the much younger man with the pink shirt and green pants. Neil went over to them.
“What are your plans?” he asked the older man.
“What are yours?”
“We wait here until ten to pick up the owner, then we’re probably heading out the bay into the Atlantic.”
“All right.”
“All right what?”
“We’d like to come along.”
Neil studied the man. His business suit seemed somehow inappropriate, fraudulent. His round unshaven face never seemed to lose its placid expression. The young man beside him looked morose.
“Who are you?” Neil asked.
“Conrad Macklin,” he replied. “This is my friend Jerry.”
“What do you do?”
The man shrugged. “I used to be a Marine,” he said. “Paramedic. After Vietnam, I flew planes, freelancing. Now… I sail a trimaran.”
“We don’t have much food,” Neil said.
Macklin shrugged again.
“We’re going shopping,” Neil said, starting to feel irritated. “Could you two contribute some cash to the cause?”
Macklin took out his billfold, removed two bills, and handed them to Neil. They were hundreds.
“Jim,” said Neil, turning away. “I want you and Jeanne to go into town to the nearest supermarket and buy everything you can carry. I’ll give you three hundred dollars and don’t hesitate to pay double for anything you can get. Triple if you have to.”
Jeanne reappeared in the wheelhouse alone.
“What happened?” Neil asked.
“She’d hooked up with a man and he had a car,” she answered, apparently disappointed that her offer had been rejected.
Neil wrote out a brief list of basics for Jeanne and Jim and sent them off. Skippy had fallen asleep during the crossing, so Neil had Lisa begin making an inventory of the supplies already on hand. Although uneasy about the presence of Macklin and his friend, he decided Macklin already had what he wanted—namely a boat to escape in—so now there should be nothing to worry about.
He took a few minutes to get Lisa started on the inventory and was impressed by how quickly she worked; then he went back up into the wheelhouse.
“I’ve got an important job I’d like you to do for us,” he said to Macklin.
“Yes?”
“The boat’s got a bent propeller shaft and we can’t get it out,” Neil explained. “We need a slide-hammer puller—it’s a tool. I want you to try the boatyard over there and see if you can rent, buy, or borrow one. How about it?”
“Why don’t you go?” Macklin asked.
Neil met the man’s cold gaze with equal coldness.
“You’ll help when I ask you to help or you’re not sailing with us,” he said, feeling absurdly for an instant as if he were in some western and both he and Macklin were about to go for their guns.
Macklin in fact looked down at the pistol in his lap and caressed the barrel with his left hand.
“That sounds reasonable,” Macklin said and, standing up, put the gun into a shoulder holster beneath his suit jacket. He smiled for the first time. “Relax, captain,” he went on. “I’m just out to save my ass like the rest of you.”
“A slide-hammer puller,” Neil repeated coldly.
“Got it,” Macklin said and ambled off the boat.
“And I want you,” Neil said to the man named Jerry, “to go along the docks and see if there’s an outlet we can get water from.” The man—he seemed to be only a couple of years older than Jim— nodded and went off.
The other thing is fishing gear, Neil thought, and his mind immediately returned to the task of preparing the boat for a long survival voyage. It would help if they had extra nylon line and metal lures, another rod maybe too. Those might actually be easier to pick up than food. He looked restlessly ashore: Jeanne and Jim were already returning, empty-handed. The two of them jumped down onto the side deck and came over to him.
“There was a line forty yards long outside the supermarket,” Jeanne explained. “And then the manager came out, counted off about twenty people, and told the rest of us to go home.”
“Every other grocery store was closed,” Jim added. “Half of them were boarded up and the others had an armed guard.”
Neil simply nodded.
“Give me the money, Jeanne,” he said. As Jeanne fished in her pocket he said to Jim, “We need to get water aboard. All we can get. I sent that guy Jerry to locate an open tap. Fill the tank and all the plastic jugs.”
“How about that leaky ten-gallon container?” Jim asked.
“That too,” Neil replied. “I sent Macklin—that’s the one with the .45—after the puller. I’m going to take a shot at getting us some supplies. Stay here, get your .22 out again, and don’t let anyone aboard except Macklin. When he’s back, have him stand guard.”
“You trust him?” Jim asked.
“I trust him to keep unnecessary people off the boat,” Neil explained.
“Okay.”
Neil hesitated, gauging Jim’s character.
“This time…” he began, as Jim looked at him attentively, “if you feel you have to shoot… shoot.”
“Macklin?” asked Jim.
“Anybody,” Neil replied.
The situation in Crisfield was just as Jeanne and Jim had described it. Fortunately the local hardware store was open.
“Cash only,” a clerk announced as he entered. “All prices triple what’s marked.”
Neil went to the fishing gear section and quickly picked out three lures, two wire leaders, and 500 feet of 30-pound test line. As he walked over to the cashier he grabbed two kerosene lanterns. The manager said he didn’t sell kerosene, but Neil bought the lamps anyway.
Back out on the main street he considered his tactics. He’d hidden his gun under a loose-fitting jacket and the bag of supplies he was carrying. He’d become aware throughout the day of a feeling he hadn’t had for a long time: that he was ready and able to kill, that he had killed in the past, and that this readiness gave him a power and confidence in this situation that was essential for survival. He felt he could sense when others lacked that readiness—as with the gray-haired man on the yawl who had kidnapped Jeanne—and when they did have it, as Macklin did.
This feeling of power had always bothered him, ever since he’d first sensed it in Vietnam more than a decade ago, but he knew that now it was one of his chief assets.
Neil passed a closed grocery store, behind the door of which sat a fat man with a shotgun across his knees. Neil felt it would be easy enough to take such a store, but it didn’t feel right, and he walked on. Ahead he saw a line of about twelve people outside a large Foodtown store. He went around to the back. The first door he came to was locked but at the other end of the building he saw another. A man in a white apron was leaving with an armload of boxes. When Neil followed him back to the door, he turned around.
“You can’t come in this way,” the young man said.
Neil pulled out a hundred-dollar bill and held it out to him.
“I’d like to go in and do a little shopping for my family,” he said casually.
The boy squinted at the bill, grimaced, and shook his head. “I just can’t do it,” he said. “The manager would know.”
Neil let the bill flutter to the ground and pulled out his gun.
“Tell the manager I pulled a gun on you but that I promised to pay double for all my food.”
Neil pushed past him, slipped the gun back under his belt, and went in the back of the supermarket.