Nail Biter

by Sarah Graves

  But his anger faded as he turned to watch Wanda again, only glancing at us often enough to prevent me from getting the Bisley from the satchel without him noticing.

  “This is her last chance,” he said. Wanda still stood by the animal, her body and expression passive.

  Not coaxing, the way you might try to draw in a creature you wanted to feed or capture. Only waiting . . . but for what?

  With my eyes I drew Ellie's attention to the satchel. She understood, nodding minutely.

  Just then Wanda took another step. The big buck snorted once more but held its ground. “I told her what to do,” Rickert said. “I told her, but if she can't . . .”

  All at once I understood: Mac Rickert the outdoorsman, the well-known animal lover.

  And a deer wounded by a poacher. Must've been, since no one was allowed to hunt on Tall Island. Rickert would've known what fate awaited the animal, doomed to die slowly and painfully over the course of a coming winter it couldn't hope to survive.

  Not with that arrow stuck through it, and you couldn't just pull it out, because of the barbed tip at one end and fletching—that's what the feathered part was called—at the other.

  If a game warden or veterinarian were here, he or she could simply dart the animal with a tranquilizer gun, remove the arrow, then let the deer wake up little the worse.

  But Mac couldn't call anyone like that. Wanda took another step.

  “See that arrow tip?” Mac whispered. “Not even legal the way it's barbed.”

  The girl stood beside the wounded creature. Her vulnerability gave me the heebie-jeebies, as did the wind, which just went on rising, bending the sweetgrass blades flat and clattering bare branches together over our heads.

  Wanda was barely even tall enough to reach the arrow but she did it. Standing on tiptoe to reach the fletched end with both hands, she grasped the thing as the buck's hooves danced uneasily.

  “Now's when you pray,” Mac Rickert whispered, his eyes on the girl. His hands were pressed together in a worshipful gesture. “Pray that arrow's a cheap piece of crap.”

  I understood. A good new arrow was a high-tech item; Wanda wouldn't be able to break it even if that deer just stood there and let her try forever.

  On the other hand, good arrows could run a hundred bucks, and most poachers weren't made of money. If they were they'd just take the bowhunting safety classes, pay for the hunting licenses, and buy legal gear.

  Mostly. Thinking this, I watched Wanda's fingers close around the arrow's shaft, her brow knitting with effort. But then . . .

  Her foot slipped. In reaction the big animal ducked its head, bleating with pain, and tossed that massive rack of antlers sideways.

  “Wanda!” I lurched up as an antler tip grazed her cheek, just missing her eye. She touched the wound wonderingly with her finger, licked blood from it as Mac Rickert's big hand put me down hard again.

  A jolt of pain rocketed through my shoulder, surprising me. I'd nearly forgotten the injury but now it was stiffening up again. Mac still hadn't noticed the satchel, though, too intent on the girl and the animal to pay attention.

  The deer quieted; again Wanda strained to grasp the arrow shaft, but faster this time, and with a new glint in her eye that I could see and comprehend even at this distance.

  If the arrow was breakable at all she didn't mean to fail on her second—and possibly final—try. A drop of blood slid down her cheek but she ignored it, seizing the shaft once more, straining against it.

  Until it broke with a sharp snap, the feathered part falling to the ground as Wanda ducked lithely under the buck's muzzle, launched herself at the arrowhead end of the shaft, and pulled.

  The animal bellowed with sudden anguish and fear, yanking its massive head one way as Wanda pulled the other. Then, her momentum carrying her forward, the girl landed hard with a cry of pained triumph as the buck reared up, its bellow one of fury and power.

  The moment seemed to stretch on forever. Wanda scrambled to her knees, her eyes on the great beast. For an instant it stood outlined against the forest. Then it turned toward us, ears twitching alertly as if sensing us there. Finally its white tail flipped up and, with a snort, it bounded off into the woods.

  Wanda came toward us with the barbed half of the arrow still in her hand. Halfway to us she dropped it carelessly, waded into the sweetgrass and through it until she spotted Rickert, then ran toward him.

  Gritting my teeth against pain, I struggled up, thrust my hand into my satchel, then hesitated as Wanda sprinted the last dozen yards through the grass and into Mac's arms.

  He held her gently, said something I couldn't hear. “How?” I demanded. “What just happened, how did she . . . ?”

  He shrugged. “Don't know. But she's old Horeb Cathcart's kin, so maybe she inherited something.”

  I opened my mouth again but she interrupted me. “I'm cold,” she uttered fretfully. Stepping away from Rickert, she wrapped her arms around herself, shivering espressively.

  “I want to go home.” Wanda—mute Wanda—was speaking.

  I approached the girl. “Okay, honey. We're going to take you there. But Wanda, tell me if he hurt you, okay? If he bothered you, if he did anything to you, just . . . tell me now.”

  And get it over with. So you won't have to carry it around with you all your life.

  “No,” she said. “No, he—”

  “You heard the lady,” Rickert cut in harshly. “She wants to go. I think you two had better get up and get ready to take her.”

  Whereupon the skies opened abruptly and rain began pouring down by the bucketful.

  “Here,” Mac said when we got back to his campsite, handing me his pack to hold while he gathered up the rest of his gear.

  Wanda's pills were in his pocket, he'd told me; he had made her take them, and he'd kept her diet as adequate as he could, he'd added gruffly.

  “So I guess you really are kind of a Boy Scout,” I said with as much lightness as I could summon.

  No reply.

  “What happened to the bat?” I asked, trying again. “Back at the house she'd made a pet of one of those little brown bats. She was keeping it in . . . gah!”

  Something fluttered past my face in the gathering darkness. “Never mind,” I said faintly, and zipped my windbreaker a little tighter up around my neck.

  “Okay,” Rickert pronounced, taking the pack back from me and hefting it. “We'd better go. There was somebody out there earlier scanning with binoculars. I saw the reflection.”

  He waved at the water. “And I don't think it was the cops back for another look. But I still don't think we've got a lot of time.”

  Fresh anxiety washed over me. Someone else scoping out the camp couldn't be a good development. “All right,” I said. “You too, though. You're coming with us.”

  To my surprise Mac didn't argue, but I could wonder why later; at the moment what we needed was Ellie's boat.

  “Listen, Mac,” Ellie said as we made our way through the brush toward it, “what's going on? Because we don't think you killed Gene Dibble the way you said you did.”

  “Right, and especially not your own . . .” I began.

  But then too late I realized: Mac probably didn't know his brother Joey was dead. By now that news was all over the island but Rickert wasn't in a position to have heard it. And the GhOulIE gUrl had foundered on the other side of the channel, where he couldn't have seen it.

  “. . . anyway, if you didn't kill Dibble, someone else did and Wanda might've been a witness,” I finished lamely.

  He must have heard something in my voice, though. “What?” he demanded. For a moment there was no sound but wind and the patter of rain; the downpour had slacked off as swiftly as it began.

  “What?” he asked again. “What happened?”

  So I told him about his brother. “I'm sorry,” I added, but he'd already turned away and I wasn't sure he'd heard me. I ran after him.

  “Did Joey have the shotgun?” He didn't answer that
either at first, his shoulders shuddering convulsively as he shoved through a stand of saplings. But finally he turned, his face fighting tears.

  “He was just a harmless dope, Joey was.” He tried to get control of himself. “Just . . . I tried to watch out for him, put him on the right track. He always . . . he always wanted to be like me, that's all.”

  He took a hitching breath, wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve. “And yeah, he had the shotgun. We loaded most of the heavy stuff I had here on his boat last night before he left.”

  Looking out at the water, he went on, “I kept the .22. He was supposed to come back here tonight after dark, pick up the rest of the gear. And us,” he added with a glance toward Wanda.

  We reached the stretch of beach where we'd left Ellie's boat on the gravel. The rising tide was beginning to lift the stern now, so we had to hurry; the currents would already be vicious.

  Suddenly Mac spoke. “Wanda. Who killed that man? The one you saw getting shot, who . . . ?”

  Her pinched face flattened at his questions; she shrank away and for a moment his eyes grew dark. Obviously, he wasn't used to being defied by anyone. Then his expression softened.

  Ellie threw his pack in the boat. “Come on, it's not getting better out there, and with four of us, we'll be overloaded.”

  But Mac didn't budge. He just kept gazing at Wanda, and from the way he looked at her I suddenly knew I'd had it wrong.

  All wrong. The girl stood helplessly, eyes frantic with the hopeless effort to get the words out of her mouth.

  But she couldn't. “Okay,” he relented finally. “You don't have to try anymore now if you can't. Maybe later.”

  Her face relaxed in gratitude. Whatever it was that had kept her speechless had descended upon her again, I guessed, at the memory of Dibble's murder.

  “You go get in the boat,” he told her, and as she obeyed he turned to me. “Look, I've got to tell you something. Maybe you can straighten this out once I'm out of here . . .”

  Because he might be coming with us, but not all the way; not to the police. And suddenly I didn't want him to; this was all different from what I'd thought.

  Way different. “. . . and get them to see,” he went on. “'Cause you're right, I didn't . . .”

  “Make it fast.” Ellie was already aboard and the clouds over our heads resembled a sack of anvils ready to drop; that earlier downpour had been only a preview.

  “Gene Dibble said he had a deal, a big score,” Rickert told me hurriedly. “But he had no way to get rid of that much stuff, so he got me in to be his man on the sales end of the operation. He thought I could dispose of it in volume.”

  I must've made a face. “Yeah, I know,” Mac said. “But Dibble had some info on my brother that I didn't want spread around. He threatened to . . .”

  I got it; a fellow like Joey could've been vulnerable to all kinds of blackmail. Rickert rushed on.

  “The pills were supposed to be in the house but there turned out to be tenants in it so he had to sneak in. I agreed to drive his car there and watch his back.”

  Ellie was helping Wanda into the boat. She shot an impatient grimace at me; I waved her off. One minute, I mouthed at her.

  “On the way, I asked where he'd gotten the money to do the deal,” Rickert continued. “That's when he told me he didn't have any money, that he hadn't needed any. The seller was fronting him the stuff.”

  In other words, buy now and pay later. Even I knew this was not exactly standard operating procedure in the illicit drug business.

  “When he told me that, I knew it was some kind of a setup,” Rickert said. “Maybe cops, maybe something else, but something wasn't right. I tried to tell him but he wouldn't listen. A deal like that was once in a lifetime for Gene. He couldn't let it go.”

  “So you got to the house. You were behind the wheel. Then what happened?” I asked.

  “He got out. The bag was supposed to be in the shed. But he took a long time, so I decided to go in, too.”

  His eyes narrowed regretfully. “I was outside the shed and looking right at him when somebody shot him. I couldn't see who it was,” he added. “Wrong angle. But I saw . . .”

  “Wanda,” I finished for him, and he nodded.

  “In the doorway. And from her face I knew whoever'd done it was there with her, somewhere real close.”

  “So then you ran.” As I spoke, the air temperature dropped about ten degrees all at once; this weather really wasn't fooling around.

  “Yeah. I had to. Whatever was going on, it was bad.”

  “You thought it had nothing to do with you.” The wind had taken on a deep, ugly tone. “Dibble getting shot, I mean.”

  “Not if I could help it,” he agreed. “But her face. The way she seemed to beg me with it, like I was her only chance. So even though I knew it was stupid . . .”

  His eyes met mine. “I can't explain it but I went back there that night. And it was like she'd been waiting.”

  After she'd tried and failed to muster up courage to rouse me, to somehow ask me for help, because she couldn't do it while Jenna was listening. And because she hadn't known Rickert would return . . . but he had, probably soon after Wade and I left.

  “Do you know why she hadn't told her mother?”

  “Uh-uh. Don't know much, actually.” His eyes met mine again. “I can't explain any of it,” he repeated.

  “You guys, come on,” Ellie called insistently.

  “You got her onto Joey's boat in the storm?” I asked.

  “Walked her back the whole way. Freakin' gale, but she was a little trouper,” he agreed admiringly, remembering it.

  So the barrette could have been Wanda's after all. “Why didn't you tell me all this the other night?”

  Instead of belting me with an oar and dumping me overboard, I thought but didn't add. Because his reasons for that now were pretty obvious to me; Bella Diamond had been right in describing Mac as looking like a mountain man.

  Big, shaggy-headed, heavy-browed, and with muscles in places I hadn't even known people could have them . . . bottom line, he was a physical guy and he'd wanted me to believe that if I didn't do what he said, bad things would happen.

  And when you looked like he did, it didn't take a mental giant to know how to play to your strengths. But we could expand that conversation later.

  Mac shook his head regretfully. “Wish I had told you,” he confessed. “But I didn't trust you and I wasn't sure what was going on myself. I mean,” he added helplessly, spreading his big hands, “it was like she expected I'd come back. Come back and . . .”

  Save her. Which in a way he had. “Okay,” I told him. “Now I understand, I guess. But come on, we've really got to go.”

  He followed along obediently until we were nearly onto the beach. But there he hung back stubbornly.

  “Listen, there's one other thing I want you to know. Maybe it's dumb for me to care what you think of me, but I, uh, haven't been actually selling anything for a while.”

  I turned. “What? Then why'd you even . . . ?” Want the oxies at all, I meant to finish. But he cut me off.

  “Get Dibble off my back,” he answered simply. “I'd built up quite a bankroll from when I was dealing, see.”

  Sure; all that good outdoor gear he'd had cost plenty. Ellie waved insistently at us.

  He ignored her. “And . . . I know this doesn't make sense either but I felt sorry for Luanne Moretti. She's like . . . I don't know. A helpless animal. Made me think.”

  He took a deep breath. “So the truth is, I've been buying up the stuff myself, anyone who'd sell it to me, and dumping it in the ocean as much as I can.”

  Which also made little sense because all he was really doing was driving up the drug's street price. But I figured I could lecture him on supply-side economics some other time.

  I did have to tell him one thing, though. “Mac, you know she can't go with you, right? Wanda, I mean.”

  He said nothing, his huge fists clenching ref
lexively at his sides.

  “You do know that, though, don't you?” I persisted. “Wanda can't be out there on the run with you, wherever you're going. It's just not right for her.”

  For an instant I thought he was going to hit me. But instead he relaxed his fists with an effort, stuffed his hands defeatedly into his pockets.

  Then an odd look crossed his face. “Just wait one second,” he muttered, vanishing back into the brush and brambles.

  Criminy, now what? Call of nature, I figured, hoping he'd be quick about it. Ellie swung the engine down over the boat's transom; hurrying to join her, I stuck my good hand into my bag for the Bisley.

  I didn't expect to need it anymore. I just wanted to be sure it was there. Only it wasn't. That was when I realized he'd taken the weapon, probably right after he'd shoved me down. And—now what was he up to?

  “Mac!” I called when he didn't reappear. No answer.

  “He's got my gun,” I told Ellie, wondering if maybe he'd been lying about where the shotgun was, too; had I had it wrong again?

  “Get that engine started,” I added, splashing into the cold water to heave myself into the vessel. But then a shot rang out.

  I mean that's exactly what it did. It rang, the concussive pow! of the big firearm mingling instantly with a musical, just-like-in-the-movies ker-whang! of a projectile ricocheting off granite.

  “Go!” I shouted, shoving again, but I hadn't reckoned on Wanda. At the sound of the gunshot she scrambled overboard with a howl of . . . well, I didn't know what it was a howl of, but it was damned inconvenient.

  A second shot sounded. I made a grab for the girl, lost my footing on slippery stones, and went down hard, wrenching my arm yet again and letting out, I am reliably told, an impressive howl of my own.

  By that time Wanda had made it to shore and was struggling into the woods. “Wait!” I yelled as Ellie leapt from the boat and we both ran after the girl, finally catching up to her in the clearing where she and Rickert had camped.

  And where he now lay unconscious, bleeding from a head wound and from his right arm. Over him stood Jenna Durrell, clad in storm gear and holding the Bisley in her left hand.

  “Hello, Jake,” she said mildly. In her right hand was the .38 pistol she'd used to shoot Mac Rickert. It looked like he'd gone for the Bisley but she'd winged him and he'd dropped it.