by Sue Henry
Shoving him ahead of them, they entered the galley through a small hall with the door to a storage closet and an ice machine. They’d almost reached the guard when he heard them and turned halfway around. The assault rifle he was holding was immediately trained in their direction, and he took a step backward.
Jensen shoved at Prentice, who reluctantly shook his head at the man. Realizing who they held prisoner, the guard’s eyes widened, and his expression turned hesitant.
“Step in here and put the gun down,” Alex told him. “We have all but you two in custody on the upper decks. We’re armed, and you really don’t want to try anything. Put it down, right here on this counter.” He indicated the section beside the escape hatch he and McKimmey had successfully used, what seemed a long time ago.
The man’s resolve wavered. He looked questioningly at Prentice, who glared at him. Then he walked forward and, as told, laid the weapon on the countertop.
McKimmey, with his roll of tape much diminished, was on him in a second, pulling him back farther into the galley, where Repasky could hold a pistol on him, while the tape went on.
Jensen was surprised to see that Walker was missing and that only five of them had come into the galley. Where the heck was he? But he didn’t have time now to find out. He was about to move the group into the dining room when a new voice, a woman’s voice, startled them all.
“I don’t really think that’s necessary. Leave him alone. Step back and lay your guns on the floor, please.”
McKimmey had managed to tape the guard’s arms, and was just starting on his legs. He stood up and, with the rest, turned to investigate this new challenge.
The assistant chef stood in the food preparation corridor of the galley, facing them, the assault rifle the guard had laid down on the counter in her hands, calmly trained on them.
“Carla?” Jensen said.
“Yes,’Carla. You never guessed, did you? But why would you. Dumb. Now, put the guns down.”
Unwillingly, they complied.
“Just what do you think you’re going to do alone, Carla?” Captain Kay asked.
She gave him an angry look.
“Exactly what I was going to do all along. Leave, with the one box of gold I have already had put into that boat out there. I’ve got it coming. I worked three years on this tub, only to have you hire an outside chef, after I asked for the job. You’re about to get what’s coming to you. You’ve earned it.”
Prentice jerked around to glare at her.
“You really thought I would take you?” she half-spit at him.
It fell into the equation and made so much sense, as Jensen thought about it. Who else had an excuse to rise early—to get breakfast going? Who could move around the ship without being questioned? Who better to open the outside door immediately next to the galley and let them in? Alex had all but forgotten there was supposed to be a person on board who helped—had assumed it was Prentice—a bad error in judgment.
She had fooled them all, even Jessie, with her crocodile tears over Julie Morrison. Something hot began to burn in his stomach. She had covered her tracks by going to the captain with the tale of her missing roommate, then hunted with the rest of them, all the time knowing the woman had been dead for hours. The hotness intensified. He glanced at McKimmey, found that the look on the engineer’s face expressed a similar loathing, and knew that he was remembering the same fruitless search and Carta’s fake reaction to it.
She spoke again to Prentice, bound and gagged. “I should never have picked you to depend on, that’s obvious. Well, so much for that. I’ll leave you with the others when I go. Good riddance, you dummy.”
Prentice’s face turned red, then pale. He shook his head, trying without speech to communicate with her.
“Forget it. Shouldn’t have got caught, with the rest of the incompetents. I warned you.”
Prentice was not the boss. Carla had, somehow, organized and planned the heist—somehow conned him into helping. Conned, hell. He had, beyond a doubt, fallen in willingly, disguised himself as a passenger, and helped take over the ship. But, Carla was the Boss. Damn. And damn, again.
“Move. All of you. Into the dining room, and bring them with you.” She motioned at Prentice and the guard they had neutralized. “We’ll take the tape off the guard, in there, where we can watch the passengers. Keep them still, just like they’ve been for the last couple of hours. Move.”
Slowly, they did, leaving their weapons on the floor where they had been standing. As they passed, moving toward the dining room door, she came out from between the cabinets and counters, to follow them from the galley. For an instant, Jensen glanced back.
Walker and the crewman who had been watching the powerboat were silently closing in on her from behind. To keep her from hearing any accidental sound, he began to say whatever came into his head … anything would do.
“You can’t really expect to get away with this, can you, Carla? We’ve got all your men but these two. You’ll never find where we’ve stashed them. It’ll be …”
“Ugh!”
Then, without warning, the assault rifle went off, and two bullets were flying somewhere in the room.
Jensen counted them—one—two—as he threw himself to the floor, pulling Repasky, the only one he could reach, down with him. They both rolled behind the counter they had just passed. He knew there were a lot more bullets in that gun, up to twenty-eight more, if it had been fully loaded.
Everything went crazy with the sound of people in motion, and Alex registered a scream from the dining room. He lay without moving for a second, then turned his head to look at Repasky, who looked back in shock.
Then it grew very still in the galley.
35
9:50 A.M.
Thursday, July 17, 1997
Spirit of ‘98
Grenville Channel, Inside Passage
British Columbia, Canada
“IT’S OKAY. WE’VE GOT HER. ANYBODY HURT? SHE HIT anybody?”
Walker’s voice brought them up and off the floor, checking carefully to see if anyone had been shot. Miraculously, no one had. Both bullets had gone into the ceiling, as Walker had reached one long arm over Carla’s shoulder to lift away the gun she held on the others.
“Pretty big risk,” Jensen told him, reclaiming his .45 as they bound her along with the other two.
“Didn’t have much planning time. If she’d got you into the dining room, it would have complicated things considerably.”
The dining room, Alex thought. There was still one man with a gun in the dining room. Why hadn’t he appeared by now?
Stepping to the door, he carefully looked in.
The passengers were on their feet. Moving—surging away from the galley door—but he could see no sign of the other guard. He thought briefly of the steerage compartment, or of being forced to search the rest of the ship for this one man.
“It’s okay, Jensen. They’ve got him,” Bill Berry called from the middle of the room, where he was holding Nella’s hand. “He’s over there.”
Alex crossed the room, almost at a run, followed closely by Walker and McKimmey.
“We’re safe.”
“There’s the captain.”
“It’s okay now.”
Jensen caught scraps of comments as he moved to the farthest table, next to Soapy’s Parlour, where a crowd had gathered in a ragged circle. It opened to let him through.
A most incongruous sight met his eyes. Dallas Blake sat calmly in her wheelchair, every hair in place, the picture of an aging southern lady, except for the eager sparkle in her eyes, self-satisfied smile on her mouth, and assault rifle in her lap.
“Hey,” she greeted him. “We got ours. You get the rest tied up?”
On the floor beside her, the last gang member lay, plainly unconscious. Jessie and Rozie stood behind Dallas’s chair.
Lou Stanley was taking pictures of the whole scene with Jessie’s camera and the wide-angle lens.
“You
made it back.”
“Yes, thanks once again to Cindy, who distracted this one with questions.” She looked down at the unconscious man. “We didn’t hurt him—really. When that gun went off, he started for the galley, so Dallas casually reached out with her cane and tripped him. He hit his head on the edge of the table as he fell.”
Behind Alex, Lawrence Walker began to chuckle. McKimmey joined in. Then, suddenly, they were all laughing, with relief as much as anything else. Repasky, who caught up in time to view the entertaining scene, laughed so hard he had to sit down and wipe his eyes.
“Where were you?” Jensen asked Walker, when it was all over.
“Went down to check on that old man. Didn’t want him coming up from behind to give us problems.”
The old man, Nelson, had slept through it all in the gold room. They found him on one of the beds, the box, with what was a remote-controlled bomb, as they had guessed, beside him on the floor. When they woke him, all he would say was, “I knew it. I told ‘em so. I just knew it.” Then he threw up.
Mrs. Walker came out of the crowd to join her husband, with her anniversary jewelry still in her pockets.
“Lawrence,” she said. “It took a little longer than I expected. Are you all right?”
Her husband seemed almost sorry it was all over, but he kissed her and settled down to tell her all about it.
Repasky took a couple of stitches in his own eyebrow, set Sawyer’s arm, and doled out pain pills from his bag to make them both comfortable. He also had another look at McKimmey’s head, which he said was hard and healing well.
They rounded up the gang of nine: one each from the engine room, the purser’s office, the linen storage room, and the bridge, Prentice, the two dining room guards, Carla, Nelson, and tossed Judy Raymond in for good measure to make an even ten. For two hours, they waited at the south end of the Grenville Channel, until the Canadian police showed up in a swift-moving boat and a floatplane. The police took all ten aboard, to remove to Prince Rupert, where they would initiate legal proceedings. They also took a lot of names, for a lot of people had been involved. With the crimes having been committed in Canadian waters, the whole affair would wind up in Canadian courts. The police also took custody of the bomb and the powerboat, though it would eventually be returned to its owner in Ketchikan.
While they waited for all this to be over, the passengers had an early lunch and watched a crowd of sea otters in the water at ten o’clock off the port bow. A few went back to bed. Some had never been up; Wayne Johnson had not been seen since the breakfast after his drunken display of temper in the lounge, and he would not be seen again. He and Edith would slip off, quietly, upon reaching Seattle, after most of the others had left the ship.
Cindy filled in for the absent assistant chef. “It’s a job I’ve been angling for anyway.”
After lunch, the captain talked briefly to those who had been held in the dining room, and answered their questions diplomatically. The Wests and Gordon Thorn came down from the owner’s suite to join them and their willingness to socialize clearly helped unfrazzle many nerves.
The group of rescuers had all agreed not to mention the bomb.
“Seems like adding insult to injury to tell them they might have been blown to bits or drowned,” Dick West commented. “Let them settle down and enjoy the rest of the trip. They’ve earned it.”
Jensen agreed, as did Jessie.
“Why didn’t you stay in the owner’s suite?” he asked her.
“Well,” she answered. “I really wanted to check on Lou and her claustrophobia. Behind the bar in Soapy’s Parlour was better, but still a pretty small place to spend so much time …”
“Any pretzels left?”
“Not a one.”
Long after it was over, Jensen would find out that Judy Raymond had indeed stolen the gold nugget chain, that Prentice had beaten the guard from the gold room because he had stolen the items from the staterooms and killed Julie Morrison when she had seen him in passing. The bodies of the two men originally assigned by their company to guard the gold would be discovered just outside Whitehorse, where they had been hijacked on their way to Dawson City, where the gold had started its long trip south. No one confessed to their murders, but their names were added to the long list of crimes committed by the gang.
But none of this mattered during the following afternoon, when everyone felt safe, and glad it was all over.
Cocktail hour was particularly spirited. Dinner was served as the Spirit crossed Campania Sound, headed south toward Laredo Channel. The open reach of water, across which they could see for a long ways, felt wonderful to most of the passengers, who couldn’t help associating the whole experience with the confining walls of the Grenville Channel that they had now, thankfully, left behind.
The evening was pleasantly filled with the hilarious conclusion to the mystery play. Laurie Trevino, Jim Beal, and the rest of the players outdid themselves in an effort to make everyone forget their unfortunate experience, and, for the most part, they succeeded famously. They offered Alex a second chance at his role of Arizona Charlie Meadows, but he turned it down, deciding, he said, to rest on his laurels.
Bill and Nella Berry won the prize for solving the mystery, which didn’t surprise Alex. Berry was an expert in his knowledge of the gold rush, which gave him a head start on figuring out the clues. The prize was a bottle of champagne and a fake brick of gold.
Jeff Smith won second prize—his own bottle of champagne and a bag of dried raisins painted gold to look like nuggets. Once again in his Soapy Smith costume, he recognized the crowd’s applause by sweeping off his hat and bowing to them all.
McKimmey disappeared, but Alex found him later, happily tending to his engines in the hold.
“Sure glad I don’t have your job,” he told the engineer, when they had left the regular roar and climbed back up to the engineer’s quarters, where Ray intended to take more aspirin and a nap. “I’d never be able to keep those huge babies running smoothly.”
“Well, I’d rather have mine than yours, so we’re even. I’ve had all I want of police work. You can have it.”
“It’s not all such a lot of work and excitement as this. In fact, a great deal of it’s pencil pushing; reports, things like that.”
“I’ll still leave it to you. But thanks for … well, for including me.”
“Ray,” Alex told him honestly, “without you, it would never have been taken care of. We’d all have died in the icy water of the channel. It took the two of us to get it started, and the whole bunch of us to stop it. But anytime you need anything I can provide, all you’ve got to do is ask.”
McKimmey’s face turned red with embarrassment. He held out a hand that gripped Jensen’s with surprising strength, but “Thanks” was all he said.
As Alex walked back up to meet Jessie, he thought of Dallas and Rozie, and made a turn toward their stateroom, where he found a light shining between the curtains and an answer to his knock.
“Just thought I’d stop and check on you two giant-killers,” he grinned, stepping into the room at Rozie’s invitation. Dallas was already in her bed, reading a book. Rozie held a towel and excused herself to take a shower, leaving them to talk.
“We’re just fine, thanks,” Dallas told him. “Haven’t had such a helluva fright, or so much fun, in years.”
“Well, you did a great job, Dallas,” he told her. “Thanks, too, for taking care of my girl. That guy might not have been so out cold as he appeared. You looked like you could have used that rifle.”
“When it comes to my Rozie, or your Jessie, for that matter, I would do just about anything,” she said seriously. “But it was you, and that intrepid gang of volunteers, who did the real work. Took a lot of chances there, Alex. Got damned lucky a few times too, didn’t you? Lot of ridiculous nonsense. Why can’t people just behave?”
“I guess that’s it, all right. Some people just don’t seem to be able to behave. Says it pretty well.”
“Where’s Jessie?”
“Went back to the room for a warmer coat. We’re going to walk a little. She says she feels like exercise after sitting in the Parlour for most of the morning.”
“She took good care of that pretty little girl, Lou. I was glad when I found out she was with Jessie, and so was her father. He’d been worried sick.”
She gave him the same kind of look she had given him when they’d returned from Sitka and she’d asked what Jessie had been worried about.
“What was there about this whole mess that you and the rest, including Captain Kay, didn’t tell us, Alex? There was the smell of something bad hanging in the air there for a while. What?”
He shook his head at her and smiled. “Boy, I hope I never, ever, have to lie to you, Dallas. Might as well give it up before I start.”
“Well?”
“Okay, but it needs to be between us. We all agreed to just forget it for the rest of this trip.”
“Yes?”
He told her about the bomb and plot to sink the ship. When he had finished, she sat thinking for a minute or two.
“And you thanked me?” she said. “My God, Alex. You are the most incredibly interesting man. Get out of here. Go back down to that lovely woman who doesn’t know just how damn lucky she is, and tell her how much you appreciate her.”
He kissed her cheek and left to do as told. As he was going out the door, she called one last thing to him.
“Ask her, please, to come and see me tomorrow. I’ve got something that belongs to her.”
36
11:30 P.M.
Friday, July 18, 1997
Spirit of ‘98
Queen Charlotte Sound, Inside Passage
British Columbia, Canada
THERE WAS A MOON, JUST PAST BEING FULL, THAT SAILED along in a clear sky spread with a million stars that left a reflection here and there on the calm dark water through which the ship was passing. It was so late, on this last night of the cruise, that even the Grand Salon and Soapy’s Parlour were closed, and the decks of the Spirit of ‘98 were almost empty of passengers. Frequent lights visible along the shorelines of islands and the mainland reminded those still out on deck that they were back within sight of civilization, leaving wilderness, except for photographs and memories that would keep it alive somewhere in the back of their minds for a long time to come. The breeze created by the ship, as it sailed through the islands scattered south of Queen Charlotte Sound and north of Vancouver Island, had warmed slightly since leaving the latitudes with temperatures that suggest to visitors and residents of the Inside Passage that they are only visitors and residents at the benevolence of ice ages past and those yet to come.
