Ticktock (23 page)

Del and Scootie hurried along a dock head serving several slips and moorings, looking over ten boats before stopping at a sleek white double-deck cruiser. “This is good,” she said as Tommy joined them.

“Are you kidding? You're going to take
this?
It's huge!”

“Not so big. Bluewater 563, fifty-six-foot length, fourteen-foot beam.”

“We can't handle this—how could we ever handle this?—we need a whole crew to handle this,” Tommy babbled, wishing that he didn't sound so panicky.

“I can handle it just swell,” she assured him with her usual ebullience. “These Bluewater yachts are sweet, really sweet, about as easy as driving a car.”

“I can drive a car, but I can't drive one of these.”

“Hold this.” She handed him the .44 Magnum and moved out along the finger of the dock to which the Bluewater was tied.

Following her, he said, “Del, wait.”

Pausing briefly to untie the bowline from a dock cleat, she said, “Don't worry. This baby's got less than two feet of draft, a windage-reducing profile, and the hull's after sections are virtually flat—”

“You might as well be talking alien abductions again.”

“—two deep, wide-spaced propeller pockets give it a whole lot more turning leverage,” she continued as she passed three smaller lines and went to the back of the craft, where she untied the stern line from another dock cleat, coiled it, and tossed it aboard. “You have real shaft-angle efficiency with this sweetheart. Twenty-one tons, but I'll make it pirouette.”

“Twenty-one tons,” he worried, following her back to midships. “Where are you planning on taking this—Japan?”

“No, it's a coastal cruiser. You wouldn't want to take this too far out on the open sea. Anyway, we're just going across the harbor to Balboa Island, where the police aren't all agitated. We can get a car there without being spotted.”

As Del unzipped her ski jacket and stripped out of it, Tommy said, “Is this piracy?”

“Not if no one's aboard. Ordinary theft,” she assured him brightly, handing her jacket to him.

“What're you doing?”

“I'm going to have my hands full with the boat, so you're our only line of defense. The jacket pockets are full of spare ammo. You might need it. Position yourself on the bow deck, and if the damn thing shows up, do what's necessary to keep it from getting aboard.”

As the skin crawled on the nape of his neck, Tommy looked back across the dock, along the pier and east to the gate through which they had come from the Fun Zone. The Samaritan-thing was not yet in sight.

“It's getting close,” she assured him.

Her voice was no longer at his side, and when he turned to her, he saw that she had already climbed aboard the yacht through the gap in the port railing.

Scootie was also aboard, ascending the port-side steps to the open upper deck.

“What about these lines?” Tommy asked, indicating the three dock ties that she had not cast off.

“Forward spring, after spring, and breast line. I'll take care of them. You just get in position on the bow.”

He shoved the Desert Eagle under the waistband of his jeans, praying to God he wouldn't stumble and fall and accidentally blow off his manhood. Draping Del's jacket over the shotgun in his left hand, he grabbed the railing with his right hand, and pulled himself aboard.

As he started forward, another worry occurred to him, and he turned to Del. “Hey, don't you need keys or something to start it?”

“No.”

“For God's sake, it can't be like an outboard motor with a pull cord.”

“I have my ways,” she assured him.

In spite of the deep gloom, he could see that her smile was even more enigmatic than any with which she had previously favored him.

She leaned toward him, kissed him lightly on the mouth, and then said, “Hurry.”

He went forward to the open bow deck. At the foremost point of the yacht, he stepped into the slightly depressed well in which the anchor winch was mounted. He dropped the jacket, which wasn't going anywhere because it weighed about ten pounds with all the ammo in its pockets.

With a sigh of relief at not having been neutered, he gingerly withdrew the pistol from his waistband and placed it on top of the jacket, where he could easily get hold of it if the need arose.

The rain-swept docks were still deserted.

A halyard rattled mutedly against a mast on a sailboat. Dock rollers creaked and rasped over concrete pilings, and jammed rubber fenders squeaked between a boat hull and a dock.

The water was oil black and had a faint briny smell. In the detective novels he wrote, this was the cold, murky, secret-keeping water into which villains sometimes dropped chain-wrapped victims in concrete boots. In other writers' books, such water was home to great white sharks, giant killer squid, and sea serpents.

He looked back at the dark windows of the enclosed lower deck, immediately behind him, wondering where Del had gone.

The smaller top deck began farther aft, and as he raised his gaze to it, soft amber light appeared at the windshield of what might have been an upper helm station. Then he glimpsed Del as she slipped behind the wheel and looked over the instrumentation.

When Tommy checked the docks again, nothing moved on them, although he wouldn't have been surprised to see policemen, harbor policemen, Coast Guardsmen, FBI agents, and so many other officers of one law-enforcement agency or another that the Samaritan-thing, if it showed up, would be unable to shoulder its way through the crowd. He had probably broken more laws tonight than in his entire previous thirty years combined.

The Bluewater's twin diesel engines chugged, coughed, and then turned over with a hard rumble of power. The foredeck vibrated under Tommy's shoes.

He looked toward the top-deck helm again and saw, beside Del, Scootie's head, ears pricked. The Labrador was apparently standing with his forepaws on the instrument board, and Del was patting his big head as if to say,
Good dog.

For some reason he couldn't grasp, Tommy was reminded of the swarming birds. He flashed back, as well, to the courtyard of Del's house, when they had entered from the street with the Samaritan in pursuit of them, and the previously locked front door had seemed to be open before she could have reached it. Abruptly he felt poised on the brink of a
satori
again, but then the moment passed without bringing him enlightenment.

This time, when he turned his attention to the docks, he saw the Samaritan-thing hurtling through the gate at the sea wall, no more than two hundred feet away, raincoat billowing like a cape behind it, no longer dazzled by birds, its eyes on the prize.

“Go, go!” Tommy urged Del as the yacht began to ease backward out of its slip.

The demon descended to the dock head and raced westward along the base of the sea wall, passing all of the boats that Del had rejected.

Standing in the anchor well, Tommy held the Mossberg in both hands, hoping the creature would never get close enough to require the use of the shotgun.

The yacht was halfway out of the slip and moving faster by the second.

Tommy heard the thudding of his own heart, and then he heard an even louder pounding: the hollow booming of the demon's footfalls on the dock planks.

The yacht was three-quarters of the way out of the slip, and waves of black water rolled in where it had been, slapping the dock.

Skidding on the wet planks, the fat-man-that-wasn't-a-fat-man reached the head of the slip and sprinted onto the port-side finger, desperately trying to catch them before they reversed all the way into the channel.

The beast was close enough for Tommy to see its radiant green eyes, as improbable and frightening in the pale face of the Samaritan as in that of the rag doll.

The Bluewater reversed all the way out of the slip, churning hard through water now festooned with garlands of phosphorescent foam.

The demon sprinted to the end of the port-side finger of the slip just as the yacht pulled away. It didn't stop, but leaped across the six-foot gap between the end of the dock and the boat, slammed into the pulpit only three feet in front of Tommy, and seized the railing with both hands.

As the thing tried to pull itself over the railing and aboard, Tommy squeezed off a round from the shotgun, point-blank in its face, flinching at the roar and at the gout of flame that spurted from the muzzle of the Mossberg.

In the pearlescent glow of the running lights, he saw the fat man's face vanish in the blast, and he gagged in revulsion at the grisly spectacle.

But the Samaritan-thing didn't let go of the pulpit railing. It should have been torn loose by the powerful hit that it had taken, but the relentless beast still hung from the bow and continued trying to drag-heave-roll itself onto the foredeck.

Out of the raw, oozing mass of torn flesh left by the shotgun blast, the fat man's glistening white face at once miraculously re-formed, utterly undamaged, and the green serpent eyes blinked open, radiant and vicious.

The thick-lipped mouth yawned wide, gaping silently for a moment, and then the Samaritan-thing screamed at Tommy. The piercing voice was not remotely human, less like an animal sound than like an electronic shriek.

Cast back on the faith of his youth, pleading with the Holy Virgin, Mother of God, to save him, Tommy pumped another round into the breach, fired, worked the pump action again, and fired a third round, both from a distance of only three feet.

The hands on the railing were not human any more. They had metamorphosed into chitinous pincers with serrated edges and were locked so fiercely that the stainless-steel tubing actually appeared to be bending in the creature's grip.

Tommy pumped, fired, pumped, squeezed the trigger, pumped, squeezed the trigger, and then realized that he was dry-firing. The magazine of the Mossberg was empty.

Shrieking again, the beast hauled itself higher on the pulpit railing as the bow of the reversing yacht came around to port and away from the dock.

Tommy dropped the empty shotgun, snatched up the Desert Eagle, slipped, and fell backward. He landed on his butt on the bow deck with his feet still in the anchor well.

The gun was beaded with rain. His hands were wet and shaking. But he didn't drop the weapon when he landed.

Clambering over the railing, shrieking in triumph, the serpent-eyed Samaritan loomed over Tommy. The moon-round, moon-pale visage split open from chin to hairline, as if it weren't a skull at all but a strained sausage skin, and the halves of the bifurcated face peeled apart, with the demented green eyes bulging at either side, and out of the sudden gash sprouted an obscene mass of writhing, segmented, glossy-black tentacles as thin as whips, perhaps two feet long, and as agitated as the appendages of a squid in a feeding frenzy. At the base of the squirming tentacles was a wet sucking hole full of clashing teeth.

Two, four, five, seven times Tommy fired the .44 Magnum. The pistol bucked in his hands and the recoil slammed through him hard enough to rattle his vertebrae. At such close quarters, he didn't have to be as first-rate a marksman as Del was, and every round seemed to strike home.

The creature shuddered with the impact of the shots and pitched backward over the pulpit railing. Pincers flailed, grabbed, and one of them locked tightly on the steel tubing. Then the eighth and ninth rounds found their mark, and simultaneously a section of railing gave way with a gonglike
clang,
and the beast plunged backward into the harbor.

Tommy scrambled to the damaged railing, slipped, almost pitched through the gap, clutched a firmly anchored section tightly with one hand, and searched the black water for some sign of the creature. It had vanished.

He didn't believe that it was really gone. He anxiously scanned the water, waiting for the Samaritan-thing to surface.

The yacht was cruising forward now, east along the channel, past the other boats in the moorings and the small marina. A speed limit was in effect in the harbor, but Del wasn't obeying it.

Moving aft along the short bow deck, clutching at the starboard railing, Tommy searched the waters on that side, but soon the area where the creature had disappeared was well behind them and receding rapidly.

The crisis wasn't over. The threat wasn't gone. He was not going to make the mistake of taking another breather. He wasn't safe until dawn.

If then.

He returned to the pulpit to retrieve the shotgun and the ski jacket full of ammunition. His hands were shaking so badly that he dropped the Mossberg twice.

The yacht was cruising fast enough to stir up a wind of its own in the windless night. Although the skeins of rain still fell as straight as the strands of a glass-bead curtain, the speed at which the boat surged forward made it seem as if the droplets were being flung at Tommy by the fury of the storm.

Carrying both of the guns and the ski jacket, he retreated along the narrow port-side passway and hurriedly climbed the steep stairs to the upper deck.

The aft portion of the open-air top deck contained a built-in table for alfresco dining and an enormous elevated sunbathing pad across the entire stern. Toward starboard, an enclosed stairwell led to the lower deck.

Scootie was standing on the sunbathing pad, gazing down at the foaming wake that trailed away from the stern. He was as focused on the churning water as he might have been on a taunting cat, and he didn't look up at Tommy.

Forward on the top deck, the upper helm station had a hardtop roof and a windshield, but the back of it was meant to be open in good cruising weather. Currently a custom-sewn vinyl enclosure was snugged to the supporting rear framework of the hardtop, forming a weatherproofed cabin of sorts, but Del had unsnapped the center vent to gain access to the wheel.

Tommy pushed through the loose flaps, into the dim light beyond, which arose only from the control board.

Del was in the captain's seat. She glanced away from the rain-streaked windshield. “Nice job.”