Without Remorse

CHAPTER 33

Poisoned Charm

It usually took all night, Billy had told him. That gave??ll? time to eat, relax, and prepare. He moved Springer in close to the cluttered ground he would be hunting tonight and set his anchors. The meal he prepared was only sandwiches, but it was better than he'd had atop 'his' hill less than a week before. God, a week ago I was on Ogden, getting ready, he thought with a rueful shake of the head. How could life be so mad as this?

His small dinghy, now camouflaged, went into the water after midnight. He'd attached a small electric trolling motor to the transom, and hoped he had enough battery power to get in and out. It couldn't be too far. The chart showed that the area was not a large one, and the place they used had to be in the middle for maximum isolation. With darkened face and hands he moved into the maze of derelicts, steering the dinghy with his left hand while his eyes and ears searched for something that didn't belong. The sky helped. There was no moon, and the starlight was just enough to show him the grass and reeds that had grown in this tidal wetland that had been created when the hulks had been left there, silting up this part of the Bay and making a place that birds loved in the fall season.

It was like before. The low hum of the trolling motor was so much like that of the sled he'd used, moving him along at perhaps two knots, conserving power, guided this time by stars. The marsh grass grew to perhaps six or seven feet above the water, and it wasn't hard to see why they didn't navigate their way in by night. It truly was a maze if you didn't know how. But Kelly did. He watched the stars, knowing which to follow and which to ignore as their position rotated in the arching sky. It was a matter of comfort, really. They were from the city, were not seamen as he was, and as secure as they felt in their chosen place to prepare their illicit product, they weren't at ease here in this place of wild things and uncertain paths. Won't you come into my parlor, Kelly told himself. He was more listening than looking now. A gentle breeze rustled through the tall grass, following the widest channel here among the silted bars; twisty as it was, it had to be the one they'd followed. The fifty-year-old hulks around him looked like ghosts of another age, as indeed they were, relics of a war that had been won, cast-offs of a much simpler time, some of them sitting at odd angles, forgotten toys of the huge child their country had been, a child now grown into a troubled adult.

A voice. Kelly stopped his motor, drifting for a few seconds, pivoting his head around to get a fix on it. He'd guessed right on the channel. It looped around to the right just ahead there, and the noise had come from the right as well. Carefully now, slowly, he came around the bend. There were three of the derelicts. Perhaps they'd been towed in together. The tugboat skippers had probably tried to leave them in a perfect line as a personal conceit. The westernmost one was sitting at a slight angle, and listed seven or eight degrees to port, resting on a shifting bottom. The profile was an old one, with a low superstructure whose tall steel funnel had long since rusted away. But there was a light where the bridge ought to be. Music, he thought, some contemporary rock from a station that tried to keep truckers awake at night.

Kelly waited a few minutes, letting his eyes gather a fuller picture in the darkness, selecting his route of approach. He'd come in fine on the bow so that the body of the ship would screen him from view. He could hear more than one voice now. A sudden rolling laugh from a joke, perhaps. He paused again, searching the ship's outline for a bump, something that didn't belong, a sentry. Nothing.

They'd been clever selecting this place. It was as unlikely a spot as one might imagine, ignored even by local fishermen, but you had to have a lookout because no place was ever quite that secure... there was the boat. Okay. Kelly crept up at half a knot now, sticking close to the side of the old ship until he got to their boat. He tied his painter off to the nearest cleat. A rope ladder led up to the derelict's weather deck. Kelly took a deep breath and started climbing.

The work was every bit as menial and boring as Burt had told them it would be, Phil thought. Mixing the milk sugar in was the easy part, sifting it into large stainless-steel bowls like flour for a cake, making sure it was all evenly distributed. He remembered helping his mother with baking when he'd been a small child, watching her and learning things that a kid forgot as soon as he discovered baseball. They came back now, the rattling sound of the sitter, the way the powders came together. It was actually rather a pleasant excursion back to a time when he hadn't even had to wake up and go to school. But that was the easy part. Then came the tedious job of doling out precisely measured portions into the little plastic envelopes which had to be stapled shut, and piled, and counted, and bagged. He shared an exasperated look with Mike, who felt the same way he did. Burt probably felt the same way, but didn't let it show, and he had been nice enough to bring entertainment along. They had a radio playing, and for breaks they had this Xantha girl, half-blasted on pills, but... compliant, they'd all found out at their midnight break. They'd gotten her nice and tired, anyway. She was sleeping in the corner. There would be another break at four, allowing each of them enough time to recover. It was hard staying awake, and Phil was worried about all this powder, some of it dust in the air. Was he breathing it in? Might he get high on the stuff? If he had to do this again, he promised himself some sort of mask. He might like the idea of making money off selling the shit, but he had no desire at all to use it. Well, Tony and Henry were setting up a proper lab. Travel wouldn't be such a pain in the ass. That was something.

Another batch done. Phil was a little faster than the others, wanting to get it done. He walked over to the cooler and lifted the next one-kilo bag. He smelted it, as he had the others. Foul, chemical smell, like the chemicals used in the biology lab at his high school, formaldehyde, something like that. He slit open the bag with a penknife, dumping the contents into the first mixing bowl at arm's length, then adding a premeasured quantity of sugar and stirring with a spoon by the light of one of the Coleman lamps.

'Hello.'

There had been no warning at all. Suddenly there was someone else there at the door, holding a pistol. He was dressed in military clothes, striped fatigues, and his face was painted green and black.

There wasn't any need for silence. His prey had seen to that. Kelly had reconverted his Colt back to.45 caliber, and he knew that the hole in the front of the automatic would seem large enough to park a car to the others in the room. He pointed with his left hand. 'That way. On the deck, facedown, hands at the back of the neck, one at a time, you first,' he said to the one at the mixing bowl.

'Who the hell are you?' the black one asked.

'You must be Burt. Don't do anything dumb.'

'How you know my name?' Burt demanded as Phil took his place on the deck.

Kelly pointed at the other white one, directing him next to his friend.

'I know lots of things,' Kelly said, moving towards Burt now. Then he saw the sleeping girl in the corner. 'Who's she?'

'Look, asshole!' The.45 went level with his face, an arm's length away.

'What was that?' Kelly asked in a conversational voice. 'Down on the deck, now.' Burt complied at once. The girl, he saw, was sleeping. He'd let that continue for the moment. His first task was to search them for weapons. Two had small handguns. One had a useless little knife.

'Hey, who are you? Maybe we can talk,' Burt suggested.

'We're going to do that. Tell me about the drugs,' Kelly started off.

It was ten in the morning in Moscow when Voloshin's dispatch emerged from the decoding department. A senior member of the KGB's First Chief Directorate, he had a pipeline into any number of senior officers, one of whom was an academician in Service I, an American specialist who was advising the senior KGB leadership and the Foreign Ministry on this new development that the American media called detente. This man, who didn't hold a paramilitary rank within the KGB hierarchy, was probably the best person to get fast action, though an information copy of the dispatch had also gone to the Deputy Chairman with oversight duties for Voloshin's Directorate. Typically, the message was short and to the point. The Academician was appalled. The reduction of tension between the two superpowers, in the midst of a shooting war for one of them, was little short of miraculous, and coming as it did in parallel with the American approach to China, it could well signal a new era in relations. So he had said to the Politburo in a lengthy briefing only two weeks earlier. The public revelation that a Soviet officer had been involved in something like this - it was madness. What cretin at GRU had thought this one up? Assuming it really was true, which was something he had to check. For that he called the Deputy Chairman.

'Yevgeniy Leonidovich? I have an urgent dispatch from Washington.'

'As do I, Vanya. Your recommendations?'

'If the American claims are true, I urge immediate action. Public knowledge of such idiocy could be ruinous. Could you confirm that this is indeed under way?'

'Da. And then... Foreign Ministry?'

'I agree. The military would take too long. Will they listen?'

'Our fraternal socialist allies? They'll listen to a shipment of rockets. They've been screaming for them for weeks,' the Deputy Chairman replied.

How typical, the Academician thought, inorder to save American lives we will send weapons to take??r? of them, and the Americans will understand. Such madness. If there was ever an illustration as to why detente was necessary, this was it. How could two great countries manage their affairs when both were involved, directly or not, in the affairs of minor countries? Such a worthless distraction from important matters.

'I urge speed, Yevgeniy Leonidovich,' the Academician repeated. Though far outranked by the Deputy Chairman, they'd been classmates, years earlier, and their careers had crossed many times.

'I agree completely, Vanya. I'll be back to you this afternoon.'

It was a miracle, Zacharias thought, looking around. He hadn't seen the outside of his cell in months, and just to smell the air, warm and humid as it was, seemed a gift from God, but that wasn't it. He counted the others, eighteen other men in the single line, men like himself, all within the same five-year age bracket, and in the fading light of dusk he saw faces. There was the one he'd seen so long before, a Navy guy by the look of him. They exchanged a look and thin smiles as all the men did what Robin was doing. If only the guards would let them talk, but the first attempt had earned one of their number a slap. Even so, for the moment just seeing their faces was enough. To not be alone any longer, to know that there were others here, just that was enough. Such a small thing. Such a large one. Robin stood as tall as his injured back allowed, squaring his shoulders while that little officer was saying something to his people, who were also lined up. He hadn't picked up enough Vietnamese to understand the rapid speech.

'This is the enemy,' the Captain was telling his men. He'd be taking his unit south soon, and after all the lectures and battle practice, here was an unexpected opportunity for them to get a real look. They weren't so tough, these Americans, he told them. See, they're not so tall and forbidding, are they? They bend and break and bleed - very easily, too! And these are the elite of them, the ones who drop bombs on our country and kill our people. These are the men you'll be fighting. Do you fear them now? And if the Americans are foolish enough to try to rescue these dogs, we'll get early practice in the art of killing them. With those rousing words, he dismissed his troops, sending them off to their night guard posts.

He could do this, the Captain thought. It wouldn't matter soon. He'd heard a rumor through his regimental commander that as soon as the political leadership got their thumbs out, this camp would be closed down in a very final way, and his men would indeed get a little practice before they had to walk down Uncle Ho's trail, where they would have the chance to kill armed Americans next. Until then he had them as trophies to show his men, to lessen their dread of the great unknown of combat, and to focus their rage, for these were the men who'd bombed their beautiful country into a wasteland. He'd select recruits who had trained especially hard and well...nineteen of them, so as to give them a taste of killing. They'd need it. The captain of infantry wondered how many of them he'd be bringing home.

Kelly stopped off for fuel at the Cambridge town dock before heading back north. He had it all now - well, he had enough now, Kelly told himself. Full bunkers, and a mind full of useful date, and for the first time he'd hurt the bastards. Two weeks, maybe three weeks of their product. That would shake things loose. He might have collected it himself and perhaps used it as bait, but no, he couldn't do that. He wouldn't have it around him, especially now that he suspected he knew how it might come in. Somewhere on the East Coast, was all that Burt actually knew. Whoever this Henry Tucker was, he was on the clever side of paranoid, and compartmentalized his operation in a way that Kelly might have admired under other circumstances. But it was Asian heroin, and the bags it arrived in smelled of death, and they came in on the East Coast. How many things from Asia that smelled of death came to the Eastern United States? Kelly could think of only one, and the fact that he'd known men whose bodies had been processed at Pope Air Force Base only fueled his anger and his determination to see this one thing through. He brought Springer north, past the brick tower of Sharp's Island Light, heading back into a city that held danger from more than one direction.

Onelast time.

There were few places in Eastern America as sleepy as Somerset County. An area of large and widely separated farms, the whole county had but one high school. There was a single major highway, allowing people to transit the area quickly and without stopping. Traffic to Ocean City, the state's beach resort, bypassed the area, and the nearest interstate was on the far side of the Bay. It was also an area with a crime rate so low as to be nearly invisible except for those who took note of a single-digit increase in one category of misbehavior or another. One lone murder could be headline news for weeks in the local papers, and rarely was burglary a problem in an area where a homeowner was likely to greet a nocturnal intruder with a 12-gauge and a question. About the only problem was the way people drove, and for that they had the State Police, cruising the roads in their off-yellow cars. To compensate for boredom the cars on the Eastern Shore of Maryland had unusually large engines with which to chase down speeders who all too often visited the local liquor stores beforehand in their effort to make a dull if comfortable area somewhat more lively.

Trooper First Class Ben Freeland was on his regular patrol routine. Every so often something real would happen, and he figured it was his job to know the area, every inch of it, every farm and crossroads, so that if he ever did get a really major call he'd know the quickest way to it. Four years out of the Academy at Pikesville, the Somerset native was thinking about advancement to corporal when he spotted a pedestrian on Postbox Road near a hamlet with the unlikely name of Dames Quarter. That was unusual. Everybody rode down here. Even kids started using bikes from an early age, often starting to drive well under age, which was another of the graver violations he dealt with on a monthly basis. He spotted her from a mile away - the land was very flat - and took no special note until he'd cut that distance by three quarters. She - definitely a female now - was walking unevenly. Another hundred yards of approach told him that she wasn't dressed like a local. That was odd. You didn't get here except by car. She was also walking in zigzags, even the length of her stride changing from one step to another, and that meant possible public intoxication - a huge local infraction, the trooper grinned to himself - and that meant he ought to pull over and give her a look. He eased the big Ford over to the gravel, bringing it to a smooth and safe stop fifty feet from her, and got out as he'd been taught, putting his uniform Stetson on and adjusting his pistol belt.

'Hello,' he said pleasantly. 'Where you heading, ma'am?'

She stopped after a moment, looking at him with eyes that belonged on another planet. 'Who're you?'

The trooper leaned in close. There was no alcohol on her breath. Drugs were not much of a problem here yet, Freeland knew. That may have just changed.

'What's your name?' he asked in a more commanding tone.

'Xantha, with a ex,' she answered, smiling.

'Where are you from, Xantha?'

'Aroun'.'

'Around where?'

'Lanta.'

'You're a long way from Atlanta.'

'I know that!' Then she laughed. 'He dint know I had more.' Which, she thought, was quite a joke, and a secret worth confiding. 'Keeps them in my brassiere.'

'What's that now?'

'My pills. Keep them in my brassiere, and he dint know.'

'Can I see them?' Freeland asked, wondering a lot of things and knowing that he had a real arrest to make this day.

She laughed as she reached in. 'You step back, now.'

Freeland did so. There was no sense alerting her to anything, though his right hand was now on his gunbelt just in front of his service revolver. As he watched, Xantha reached inside her mostly unbuttoned blouse and came out with a handful of red capsules. So that was that. He opened the trunk of his car and reached inside the evidence kit he carried to get an envelope.

'Why don't you put them in here so you don't lose any?'

'Okay!' What a helpful fellow this policeman was.

'Can I offer you a ride, ma'am?'

'Sure. Tired a' walkin'.'

'Well, why don't you just come right along?' Policy required that he handcuff such a person, and as he helped her into the back of the car, he did. She didn't seem to mind a bit.

'Where we goin'?'

'Well, Xantha, I think you need a place to lie down and get some rest. So I think I'll find you one, okay?' He already had a dead-bang case of drug possession, Freeland knew, as he pulled back onto the road.

'Burt and the other two restin', too, 'cept they ain't gonna wake up.'

'What's that, Xantha?'

'He killed their ass, bang bang bang.' She mimed with her hand. Freeland saw it in the mirror, nearly going off the road as he did so.

'Who's that?'

'He a white boy, dint get his name, dint see his face neither, but he killed their ass, bang bang hang.'

Holy shit.

'Where?'

'On the boat.' Didn't everybody know that?

'What boat?'

'The one out on the water, fool!' That was pretty funny, too.

'You shittin' me, girl?'

'An' you know the funny thing, he left all the drugs right there, too, the white boy did. 'Cept'n he was green.'

Freeland didn't have much idea what this was all about, but he intended to find out just as fast as he could. For starters he lit up his rotating lights and pushed the car just as fast as the big 427 V-8 would allow, heading for the State Police Barracks 'V' in Westover. He ought to have radioed ahead, but it wouldn't really have accomplished much except to convince his captain that he was the one on drugs.

'Yacht Springer, take a look to your port quarter.'

Kelly lifted his mike. 'Anybody I know?' he asked without looking.

'Where the H have you been, Kelly?' Oreza asked.

'Business trip. What do you care?'

'Missed ya,' was the answer. 'Slow down some.'

'Is it important? I have to get someplace, Portagee.'

'Hey, Kelly, one seaman to another, back down, okay?'

Had he not known the man... no, he had to play along regardless of who it was. Kelly cut his throttles, allowing the cutter to pull alongside in a few minutes. Next he'd be asked to stop for a boarding, which Oreza had every legal right to do, and trying to evade would solve nothing. Without being so bidden Kelly idled his engines and was soon laying to. Without asking permission, the cutter eased alongside and Oreza hopped aboard.

'Hey, Chief,' the man said by way of a greeting.

'What gives?'

'I was down your sandbar twice in the last couple of weeks looking to share a beer with you, but you weren't home.'

'Well, I wouldn't want to make you unfit for duty.'

'Kinda lonely out here with nobody to harass.' Suddenly it was clear that both men were uneasy, but neither one knew why the other was. 'Where the hell were you?'

'I had to go out of the country. Business,' Kelly answered. It was clear that he'd go no further than that.

'Fair enough. Be around for a while?'

'I plan to be, yeah.'

'Okay, maybe I'll stop by next week and you can tell me some lies about being a Navy chief.'

'Navy chiefs don't have to lie. You need some pointers on seamanship?'

'In a pig's ass! Maybe I ought to give you a safety inspection right now!'

'I thought this was a friendly visit,' Kelly observed, and both men became even more uncomfortable. Oreza tried to cover it with a smile.

'Okay, I'll go easy on you.' But that didn't work. 'Catch you next week, Chief.'

They shook hands, but something had changed. Oreza waved for the forty-one-footer to come back in, and he jumped aboard like the pro he was. The cutter pulled away without a further word.

Well, that makes sense. Kelly advanced his throttles anyway.

Oreza watched Springer continue north, wondering what the hell was going on. Outof the country, he'd said. For sure his boat hadn't been anywhere on the Chesapeake - but where, then? Why were the cops so interested in the guy? Kelly a killer? Well, he'd gotten that Navy Cross for something. UDT guy, that much Oreza knew. Beyond that, just a good guy to have a beer with, and a serious seaman in his way. It sure got complicated when you stopped doing search-and-rescue and started doing all that other cop stuff, the quartermaster told himself, heading southwest for Thomas Point. He had a phone call to make.

'So what happened?'

'Roger, they knew we were coming,' Ritter answered with a steady look.

'How, Bob?' MacKenzie asked.

'We don't know yet.'

'Leak?'

Ritter reached into his pocket and extracted a photocopy of a document and handed it across. The original was written in Vietnamese. Under the text of the photocopy was the handwritten translation. In the printed English were the words 'green bush.'

'They knew the name?'

'That's a security breakdown on their side, Roger, but, yes, it appears that they did. I suppose they planned to use that information for any of the Marines they might have captured. That sort of thing is good for breaking people down in a hurry. But we got lucky.'

'I know. Nobody got hurt.'

Ritter nodded. 'We put a guy on the ground in early. Navy SEAL, very good at what he does. Anyway, he was watching things when the NVA reinforcements came in. He's the guy who blew the mission off. Then he just walked off the hill.' It was always far more dramatic to understate things, especially for someone who'd smelled gunsmoke in his time.

That, MacKenzie thought, was worth a whistle. 'Must be rather a cool customer.'

'Better than that,' Ritter said quietly. 'On the way out he bagged the Russian who was talking to our people, and the camp commander. We have them in Winchester. Alive,' Ritter added with a smile.

'That's how you got the dispatch? I figured SigInt,' MacKenzie said, meaning signals intelligence. 'How'd he manage that?'

'As you said, a cool customer.' Ritter smiled. 'That's the good news.'

'I'm not sure I want to hear the bad news.'

'We have an indicator that the other side might want to eliminate the camp and everyone in it.'

'Jesus... Henry is over in Paris right now,' MacKenzie said.

'Wrong approach. If he brings this up, even in one of the informal sessions, they'll just deny, and it might spook them so much that they'll try to make sure they can deny it.' It was well known that the real work at such conferences was done during the breaks, not when people had to address the issues formally over the conference table, the very shape of which had taken so much time.

'True. What then?'

'We're working through the Russians. We have a pipeline for that. I initiated the contact myself.'

'Let me know how it turns out?'

'You bet.'

'Thanks for letting me talk to you,' Lieutenant Ryan said.

'What's this all about?' Sam Rosen asked. They were in his office - not a large one, and the room was crowded with four people in it. Sarah and Sandy were there, too.

'It's about your former patient - John??ll?.' That news didn't come as much of a surprise, Ryan saw. 'I need to talk to him.'

'What's stopping you?' Sam asked.

'I don't know where he is. I was kind of hoping you folks might.'

'About what?' Sarah asked.

'About a series of killings,' Ryan answered at once, in the hope of shocking them.

'Killing who?' This question came from the nurse.

'Doris Brown, for one, and several others.'

'John didn't hurt her -' Sandy said before Sarah Rosen was able to touch her hand.

'Then you know who Doris Brown is,' the detective observed, just a little too quickly.

'John and I have become... friends,' Sandy said. 'He's been out of the country for the past couple of weeks. He couldn't have killed anybody.'

Ouch, Ryan thought. That was both good and bad news. He'd over-played his hand on Doris Brown, though the nurse's reaction to the accusation had resulted in a little too much emotional response. He'd also just had a speculation confirmed as fact, however. 'Out of the country? Where? How do you know?-'

'I don't think I'm supposed to say where. I'm not supposed to know that.'

'What do you mean by that?' the cop asked in surprise.

'I don't think I'm supposed to say, sorry.' The way she answered the question showed sincerity rather than evasion.

What the hell did that mean? There was no answering that one, and Ryan decided to go on. 'Someone named Sandy called the Brown house in Pittsburgh. It was you, wasn't it?'

'Officer,' Sarah said, 'I'm not sure I understand why you're asking all these questions.'

'I'm trying to develop some information, and I want you to tell your friend that he needs to talk with me.'

'This is a criminal investigation?'

'Yes, it is.'

'And you're asking us questions,' Sarah observed. 'My brother is a lawyer. Should I ask him to come here? You seem to be asking us what we know about some murders. You're making me nervous. I have a question - are any of us under suspicion of anything?'

'No, but your friend is.' If there was anything Ryan didn't need now, it was to have an attorney present.

'Wait a minute,' Sam said. 'If you think John might have done something wrong, and you want us to find him for you, you're saying that you think we know where he is, right? Doesn't that make us possible... helpers, accessories is the word, isn't it?'

Are you? Ryan would have liked to ask. He decided on, 'Did I say that?'

'I've never had questions like this before, and they make me nervous,' the surgeon told his wife. 'Call your brother.'

'Look, I have no reason to believe that any of you has done anything wrong. I do have reason to believe that your friend has. What I'm telling you is this: you'll be doing him a favor by telling him to call me.'

'Who's he supposed to have killed?' Sam pressed.

'Some people who deal drugs.'

'You know what I do?' Sarah asked sharply. 'What I spend most of my time on here, you know what it is?'

'Yes, ma'am, I do. You work a lot with addicts.'

'If John's really doing that, maybe I ought to buy him a gun!'

'Hurts when you lose one, doesn't it?' Ryan asked quietly, setting her up.

'You bet it does. We're not in this business to lose patients.'

'How did it feel to lose Doris Brown?' She didn't reply, but only because her intelligence stopped her mouth from reacting as it wanted to. 'He brought her to you for help, didn't he? And you and Mrs O'Toole here worked very hard to clean her up. You think I'm condemning you for that? But before he dropped her off with you, he killed two people. I know it. They were probably two of the people who murdered Pamela Madden, and those were his real targets. Your friend Kelly is a very tough guy, but he's not as smart as he thinks he is. If he comes in now, it's one thing. If he makes us catch him, it's something else. You tell him that. You'll be doing him a favor, okay? You'll be doing yourselves a favor, too. I don't think you've broken the law to this point. Do anything for him now except what I've told you, and you might be. I don't usually warn people this way,' Ryan told them sternly. 'You people aren't criminals. I know that. The thing you did for the Brown girl was admirable, and I'm sorry it worked out the way it did. But Kelly is out there killing people, and that's wrong, okay? I'm telling you that just in case you might have forgotten something along the way. I don't like druggies either. Pamela Madden, the girl on the fountain, that's my case. I want those people in a cage; I want to watch them walk into the gas chamber. That's my job, to see that justice happens. Not his, mine. Do you understand?'

'Yes, I think we do,' Sam Rosen answered, thinking about the surgical gloves he'd given Kelly. It was different now. Back then he'd been distant from things - emotionally close to the terrible parts, yet far away from what his friend was doing, approving it as though reading a news article on a ballgame. It was different now, but he was involved. 'Tell me, how close are you to getting the people who killed Pam?'

'We know a few things,' Ryan answered without realizing that with his answer, he'd blown it after coming so close.

Oreza was back at his desk, the part of his work that he hated, and one reason he worried about striking for chief, which would entail having his own office, and becoming part of 'management' instead of just being a boat-driver. Mr English was on leave, and his second-in-command, a chief, was off seeing to something or other, leaving him as senior man present - but it was his job anyway. The petty officer searched on his desk for the card and dialed the number.

'Homicide.'

'Lieutenant Ryan, please.'

'He's not here.

'Sergeant Douglas?'

'He's in court today.'

'Okay, I'll call back.' Oreza hung up. He looked at the clock. Pushing four in the afternoon - he'd been at the station since midnight. He pulled open a drawer and started filling out the forms accounting for the fuel he'd burned up today, making the Chesapeake Bay safe for drunks who owned boats. Then he planned to get home, get dinner, and get some sleep.

The problem was making sense out of what she said. A physician was called in from his office across the street, and diagnosed her problem as barbiturate intoxication, which wasn't exactly news, and then went on to say that they'd just have to wait for the stuff to work its way out of her system, for which two opinions he'd charged the county twenty dollars. Talking to her for several hours had only made her at turns amused and annoyed, but her story hadn't changed, either. Three people dead, bang bang bang. It was less funny to her now. She'd started remembering what Burt was like, and that talk was quite foul.

'If this girl was any higher she'd be up on the moon with the astronauts,' the Captain thought.

'Three dead people on a boat somewhere,' Trooper Freeland repeated. 'Names and everything.'

'You believe it?'

'Story stays the same, doesn't it?'

'Yeah.' The Captain looked up. 'You like to fish out there. What's it sound like to you, Ben?'

'Like around Bloodsworth Island.'

'We'll hold her overnight on public drunkenness... we have her dead-bang on possession, right?'

'Cap'n, all I had to do was ask. She handed the stuff to me.'

'Okay, process her all the way through.'

'And then, sir?'

'Like helicopter rides?'

He picked a different marina this time. It turned out to be pretty easy, with so many boats always out fishing or partying, and this one had plenty of guest slips for transient boats which in the summer season plied up and down the coast, stopping off on the way for food and fuel and rest much as motorists did. The dockmaster watched him move in expertly to his third-largest guest slip, which didn't always happen with the owners of the larger cruisers. He was more surprised to see the youth of the owner.

'How long you plan to be here?' the man asked, helping with the lines.

'Couple of days. Is that okay?'

'Sure.'

'Mind if I pay cash?'

'We honor cash,' the dockmaster assured him.

Kelly peeled off the bills and announced that he'd be sleeping aboard this night. He didn't say what would be happening the next day.