The Breakers

by Marcia Muller

  A mewling sound, like a sick kitten. But it was a human voice, a woman’s voice.

  Chelle!

  Quickly I pulled myself through the opening, dropped to a concrete floor. The mewling sound came again and I pinpointed it with the flash beam. She was lying on a cushioned mat, a wool blanket draped over her, at the base of the middle support post. When I reached her I saw that her hands were tied around the pole with thick nylon cord, tightly enough that she couldn’t move them more than a few inches. Her legs were free, but the position had to be extremely uncomfortable. A blue-and-white dishtowel was tied securely over her mouth.

  “It’s me, Chelle—Shar. Don’t be afraid.”

  She seemed not to hear me. She looked straight up into the flash’s beam, moaned, and then turned her head away.

  “Chelle!”

  No answer.

  I went to work getting her free of her restraints. My multiuse tool had never been more useful. Once I’d cut the nylon cord binding her hands, I rolled her onto her back and checked to see if she was wounded in any way. No, there were no marks on her except for cord burns on her wrists and a few small scrapes and bruises; her clothes were disarranged but not torn. I lifted her into a sitting position with her back against the pole, began gently massaging her wrists.

  She came around after a bit, licked her dry, cracked lips. “Water,” she whispered, and moved her head to the right. “Please.”

  Water. The closed door…Could there be a bathroom behind it? I stood and hurried over there. The first thing I saw when I opened the door was an old chemical toilet, but this wasn’t a bathroom—just an alcove that was mainly used for storage. No sink. No running water.

  I went back to Chelle.

  “Please. So thirsty…”

  Did I have anything in my bag that would slake her thirst? No. Not even a tube of ChapStick for her dry, cracked lips.

  “Water,” she whispered again. “Behind wall.”

  God, was she delirious? She still didn’t seem to recognize me.

  “Puddles.”

  Puddles? What the hell did that mean?

  “Chelle, what puddles?”

  “Behind the wall. He told me about them.” Her voice was stronger now. Good sign.

  “What wall?”

  “Over there.” She jerked her head toward the makeshift wall with the workbenches leaning against it.

  And then I remembered the underground aquifer and the cisterns that could be reached by a cave entrance at Albion Castle.

  “Be right back,” I said.

  I followed my flashlight’s beam along the floor to the makeshift wall. It had been built where the concrete ended, was constructed of the same disparate materials as the exterior of the building, and stretched between another row of support beams. There was no door in it, but I found a loose board at the far end. When I pulled it free, there was just enough room for me to squeeze through to the other side.

  The ground there was mostly mud pockmarked by a half-dozen small puddles of water. Apparently the brewery’s cisterns leaked, and the water seeped under the adjoining warehouses and in here.

  What to put it in? I had nothing that could hold liquid. I reached into my bag and my fingers touched cloth—a headscarf I kept there for bad weather. I pulled it out, shone the light on it. Dirty.

  What the hell, she’s been through this much—a little dirt won’t hurt her.

  I soaked the scarf in one of the puddles and hurried back to her. Propped her head on my arm and held the scarf to her lips. She sputtered, mumbled in protest, tried to push me away.

  “Chelle, it’s water,” I said. “Fresh water from the springs.” I thrust the scarf at her mouth and she began to suck on it.

  It took three more trips to the seepage before Chelle had ingested enough water that she could sit up on her own. She looked me in the face, her eyes finally showing recognition.

  “Shar,” she said. “Oh, Shar, thank God you found me.”

  “It’s going to be all right now.”

  She rubbed her upper arms, wincing. “Sore,” she muttered in a rough voice, “So sore.”

  “Poor circulation. It’ll go away soon. How long have you been tied up in here?”

  “Don’t know. Out of it most of the time.”

  “Drugged?”

  “…Yes.”

  “Why did he bring you here? What was he planning to do to you?”

  She shook her head, her tongue flicking over her lips again.

  “More water?” I asked.

  “No. Might puke.”

  “No puking allowed,” I said inanely; I was trying to think of a way to get her out of there. I’d need more help than she could give me.

  “Can you stand?” I asked her.

  “…Try.” She flopped her arm around my shoulders and I helped lift her upright. Her knees immediately gave out. I eased her back down onto the cushioned mat.

  “All right. Keep trying to restore circulation. I’m going to call for help. I doubt you can navigate the way I came in, and the door’s padlocked.”

  “Okay.”

  No signal when I tried to call 911. Damn! This must be one of the city’s dead spots. I hurried over to the window, boosted myself up, and dropped to the ground outside. I got a clear signal out there and made the call asking for an ambulance as well as the police.

  Then I decided to reconnoiter. It was full dark now, but I didn’t want to use my flash, so I crept forward, feeling my way along the building’s side. It had gotten cold, as August nights will do here in the city. What few streetlights hadn’t been vandalized were dim. In the distance I could hear traffic noises and the wail of sirens from the hospital complex a few miles away.

  Male voices from down the street, quarreling. Probably the guys who had passed by earlier. Downhill, brakes were screeching, horns honking. I heard the pop-pop-pop of fireworks. Babies were crying, a woman yelling, powerful engines revving. Car coming…

  I’d arrived at the front of the building by now, and I risked a look around it. An old, noisy white truck. It turned uphill and parked in front of the shop. A tall man got out and started working the locks on the door.

  I ran back to the window, boosted myself inside, and whispered Chelle’s name. No reply, and I couldn’t find her with the light. The ropes she’d been tied with lay in a tangle on the ground; she must have become frightened and hidden herself somewhere. But where, in her weakened condition?

  Locks clicked outside the door. A chain rattled. I took out my .38, held it in my right hand, and with my left aimed the flash at the door. When it opened, I switched the beam on.

  Yellow eyes flared at me. But not Ollie’s eyes.

  It was Al.

  He dropped the Carl’s Jr. bag he carried and dodged to one side, trying to avoid the light. He must have been wearing those yellowish glasses that help you see at night, but the flashlight’s glare was too powerful for them to do him any good. He kept shifting his feet around even after I’d steadied the light.

  “Hold it there, Al,” I said. “I’m armed.”

  He stopped still. After a few seconds, he asked, “What is this?”

  “You know.”

  “Sharon? That you?”

  He glanced over toward where Chelle had been trussed up. The place was wrapped in shadows, invisible from where he stood with the light in his eyes. He couldn’t know yet that I’d found her. He took a step forward.

  “Stay back!”

  “What’re you doing here?”

  “You know that too.”

  “What? I come here to my shop and I find you poking around in the dark. How should I know why you’re here? Far as I’m concerned, you’re guilty of breaking and entering, trespassing.”

  “Keep it up, Al.”

  “Keep what up? Look, there’s no money in the place. No drugs either. I don’t get into any of that stuff. I’m just a broken-down construction worker trying to scrape up enough cash for my nightly beer.”

  I didn’t rep
ly. I was listening to my surroundings, trying to figure out where Chelle had gone.

  Al took another step toward me. I brought the flash up on his face. His features were chiseled into hard lines, but a corner of his mouth twitched.

  “Come on, Sharon,” he said, “let’s talk this over like reasonable people.”

  Another step, gliding as if he hoped I wouldn’t notice.

  “Stop right there!”

  His eyes narrowed. He feinted to the right, then to the left. And then he sprang at me.

  I sidestepped, but he plowed into my left shoulder and twisted me around, and I stumbled into the sidewall. Recovered my balance and dodged clear. Before he could lunge at me again, I set my feet and fired the .38.

  The shot narrowly missed him, froze him in his tracks. The flash wobbled a little in my hand, the beam creating eerie patterns on the wall behind where he stood.

  “Give it up, Al!” I shouted. “The next shot won’t miss.”

  “You’ll have to kill me first.”

  “Like you killed all those people on the Central Coast and Zack Kaplan here in the city.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “You know, all right. Stand still! Don’t make me shoot you, Al.”

  “You can’t fire fast enough.”

  “I’m an expert shot.”

  “I’ll kill you, you bitch—!”

  “No, you’re all through killing people. And all through carving the evil eye into your victims.”

  He went berserk then, let out a roar that must’ve strained his throat muscles, yanked something out of his pocket. There was a snick, and the flash beam glinted off the long blade of a switch knife. I had no choice then. As soon as he made a move toward me, I shot him in the fleshy part of his thigh.

  The impact made him drop the knife, threw him off balance, but didn’t knock him down. He staggered away from me, sideways toward the door. But something got in his way before he reached it; there was a crashing sound, another, and then stillness.

  I steadied the light and pinned him with it. He’d fallen over the two sawhorses with the plank between them that held open paint cans. He must have banged his head when he fell, for he appeared to be unconscious, his respiration erratic. A smear of blue paint stained the front of his work shirt, a brighter smear of red glistened on his pants leg. My bullet had gone through the fleshy part of his thigh. It hadn’t severed an artery, or there would have been more blood. He wouldn’t bleed to death before the EMTs showed up.

  I took a couple of steps closer to him. That was when I saw that his shirt was ripped at his right shoulder and down his arm, revealing the area below his clavicle. A crudely executed tattoo was visible there—an eye with Medusa-like hair and an arrow piercing through it.

  The evil eye, this time on living flesh.

  When I was sure he was unconscious, I called out Chelle’s name to let her know I was all right and it was safe for her to show herself. Then I picked up the nylon cord Al had used to tie Chelle and tethered his hands behind him. While I was doing that, I heard sounds over by the makeshift wall, then the dragging of bare feet on concrete. Chelle limped up to me and put a hand on my arm. Her hands and clothing were wet and streaked with mud.

  “I heard the shot,” she said. “Is he dead?”

  “No. He’ll live to stand trial.” I shielded the flash so it didn’t shine in her eyes, took a look at her face. “You okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “No, you’re not.” Her face was milk pale, there were cuts on her forehead and chin, and she cradled her rope-burned right wrist.

  “Don’t give me that look, Shar,” she added. “This is nothing. You should see me after a good game of—” And then she collapsed in my arms.

  Where the hell were the police and the ambulance? Late as usual. San Francisco has one of the lowest response rates of any major city in the country. Our medical personnel do a great job—when they get there.

  I maneuvered Chelle back onto the mat, held her till she came around again. “Whooo!” she said. “That was weird. I’ve never fainted before. Al—is he dead? No, you said he wasn’t. You know…I can’t help but feel a little sorry for him.”

  “He tied you up in here, was going to kill you. And you feel sorry for him?”

  “He wasn’t going to kill me. At first I thought he was, but he couldn’t make up his mind. So then I decided to play confessor. You know—let him work out his demons.”

  “And did he?”

  “He’s got too many demons for that.” She tried to smile, but the corner of her mouth spasmed.

  Stockholm syndrome, I thought, the captive forming an unwitting bond with the captor. She’ll get over it before his trial.

  I asked, “Where were you hiding?”

  “Where the puddles are, behind the partition.” She shivered, then managed a wan smile. “I drank some more of the water. It’s not bad—somebody ought to bottle it.”

  “They did,” I said, “during Prohibition.”

  “What happened?”

  “Prohibition was repealed and everybody went back to booze.”

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 17

  1:30 p.m.

  I wasn’t sure whether Chelle’s bandages and dressings made her look better or worse than when she’d crawled out of “the swamp,” as she’d taken to calling it.

  After two days she still bore the physical marks of her ordeal: bruises and cuts and scrapes and rope burns. But she was in good condition otherwise. The drugs Al had fed her proved to have been tranquilizers that had been prescribed for Ollie and so presented no lasting problems. Neither did the effects of trauma, evidently. She was young and mentally healthy, and her spirits were good. She cheerfully claimed that all the attention from law enforcement and the media made her feel like a celebrity. And she certainly had been glad to see all the well-wishers crowded into her hospital room, the floor attendants having decided to ignore the official two-visitor policy.

  Hy and I were the only two there now. A pair of Chelle’s friends from the rehabbers’ association had just left. Brother John had dropped by earlier, bringing a book of her favorite puzzles. Rae had called and the two of them had chatted for a while; then she’d asked to speak to me.

  “I’m coming home tomorrow and bringing you guys a present,” she said.

  “What? Not one of those ugly Chinese urns Ma collected. I know they’re valuable, but they’re so damn awful.”

  “Nope. This is something much nicer.”

  “Oh?” When Rae takes on her upbeat cheerleader’s tone I’m always wary.

  “Samuel the cat. He needs a home, but Ricky and I can’t take on any more than we’ve already got. So Samuel is about to become the latest addition to the McCone-Ripinsky household.”

  “I don’t know if Alex and Jessie will accept him.”

  “Sure they will; he’s a sweetheart.”

  I’d put the phone on speaker, and now Hy raised his eyebrows in helpless surrender.

  “Okay,” I said with a sigh. “We’ll see the two of you when you get here.”

  Less than a minute later, Ollie Morse entered the room shyly. Chelle patted the chair beside her bed and he sat tentatively, as if he felt he wouldn’t be welcome.

  Ollie wore rumpled chinos and a sport shirt that was missing two buttons. His pale-blue eyes looked sad and lost. The dog of many faces with the dead eyes. Pincus had meant Ollie, whom he’d seen working at the Breakers, but that business about witnessing him commit murder had been pure delusion. But a fortunate one, or I might not have found Chelle.

  When she took Ollie’s hand, he brightened some, but I could tell he still felt out of place. “How’re you feeling, Ollie?” she asked him.

  “Kind of fuzzy.” He grinned humorlessly. “But there’re a lot of people who think I’m always fuzzy.” Then his mouth turned down. “I just can’t understand about Al. I always thought he was one of the good guys. Saved my life in battle, looked out for me after we
got back. How could he do all those crazy things and I never had a clue?”

  “He was two different people in the same body,” Chelle said. “You know, like Jekyll and Hyde.”

  “Right,” I added. “The good part of him was the friend you knew, Ollie, the bad part he kept locked inside him.”

  He nodded, looked down at his clasped hands.

  Ollie had told the police that he’d seen the tattoo on Al’s shoulder but hadn’t known what it was, and that Al wouldn’t talk about it. But Chelle had known when she saw it. Al had taken off his shirt while doing some plumbing, thinking he was alone in the Breakers, and she’d walked in on him and remembered the Carver clipping on the killers’ wall. She blurted out, “My God, that’s the Carver’s symbol!” and he’d flown into a sudden, violent rage and tried to grab her. She’d managed to get away from him and run.

  She was in such a panic she didn’t know what to do. She did try to get hold of me, and when she couldn’t she should have gone straight to the police. She hadn’t because she didn’t trust them and was afraid they wouldn’t believe her. “A leftover kid thing,” she’d said. “Pretty stupid, huh?”

  She remembered Billy Clyde and started out to the airport with him, thinking of going to her folks in Costa Rica. But he’d driven a weird route out by Hunter’s Point and taken all the money she had. She jumped out of the van and went to her friend Ginny’s house because it was nearby, but Ginny didn’t have any money either. The only place she could think of to go then was home. But Al had had the same idea and found her hiding. Instead of killing her, he’d trussed her up and driven her to the shop on Innes. He’d kept her tied up there except when he allowed her to eat and use the toilet, not letting Ollie go near the shop the entire time.

  He seemed conflicted about what to do with Chelle; that was why he’d brought the mat, blanket, and food for her. Once she’d gotten her fear and her wits under control, she’d taken advantage of his uncertainty and got him talking about himself. And eventually convinced him to let her write the note to Zack. She’d told him it was so it would seem she’d disappeared voluntarily, but her real purpose was to include a code word that she and her folks had made up as an alert if any of them found themselves in danger. But Al insisted on dictating the single “right to disappear” line and wouldn’t let her add anything else.