Crawlspace

by Sarah Graves

  He turned his gaze on her. The surgeon had gotten something about the corners of his eyes wrong. His nose, too, trimmed to a hawklike beak, looked like a plastic piece stuck above his lips, which had been plumped out cartoonishly.

  “Well,” she amended smoothly, sensing something going wrong but not knowing quite what, “not really about you in detail. Not so anyone could ever—”

  Find you, the girls chorused spookily. Find you and catch you and—

  “Kill you,” he said flatly, his eyes searching the shore for anyone who might be watching from there. “That’s what I want.”

  Anyone who might see her and save her. “That’s the plan,” he added. “And there is no other plan.”

  He met her gaze, which was when she realized how hopeless it was, talking to him. Arguing, trying to persuade.

  Because there was nobody in there. He might have been a real person once, with rational thoughts, feelings, empathy for anyone else.

  But not anymore. Now he was just a walking, talking, deadly compulsion. Sick, twisted, and getting more grandiose—convinced he could do anything and get away with it—with each passing minute.

  “That’s what I want. That’s what I’m going to do,” he said, his voice calm and hideously matter-of-fact. “I’m just waiting for the time to be right. So do yourself a favor: Don’t get your heart set on anything else.”

  CAROLYN PROBABLY THOUGHT CHIP HAHN WOULDN’T BE able to hear her trying to bargain with Randy Dodd, but he could. Typical, he thought. She would try to get herself out of this first.

  Not that it would work. Wherever Randy was going, it would be a place he could hide three bodies and get away.

  Out of the country, carrying a million bucks, or so Randy still thought. It wasn’t all in the scrapbook, but Randy had the rest somewhere, and that was all he wanted: freedom and cash.

  And the pleasure of doing with Carolyn whatever bad deeds he could devise. Chip thought there were probably plenty.

  Beside him on the floor of the boat, Sam Tiptree breathed in and out. His color wasn’t too bad, and from the way the stain on his shirt had stopped spreading, he wasn’t bleeding the way he had been.

  But overall he still looked terrible. Lips dry and cracked, his face drawn and creased deeply with pain, the young man who in his childhood had thought Chip was the next best thing to a comic book hero now hovered close to death.

  A doctor, preferably a surgeon, was what he needed. And if he didn’t get one soon, Chip thought Randy might as well have dumped Sam into the waves and been done with it.

  Sam opened his eyes. “Hey, guy,” Chip said, trying to sound encouraging.

  Sam didn’t look fooled. “Check my pockets,” he managed, and when Chip did, he came up with a small leather case containing a fire kit: matches, flint, and steel.

  He tucked these into his own pocket. Sam watched, nodding approvingly.

  In the stern, Carolyn was still trying to sell Randy on the idea of being famous. With her indispensable help, of course …

  A burst of impatience flooded Chip. Didn’t she know they were past that now, that if something didn’t change soon, it was all over?

  Because it was daytime, and even a big risk-taker like Randy wouldn’t want to be out here where anyone could see them for very long. He had some destination in mind, and it wasn’t far. And when they got there …

  Sam was trying to say something more. Chip leaned in so he could hear, caught a sweet, familiar whiff of something chemical on Sam’s breath. Searching his memory for where he’d smelled it before, he realized: The Old Bastard had smelled like that after his kidneys started failing, and he’d had to go on dialysis.

  True to form, the Old Bastard had refused to be treated at even the finest Manhattan clinic. Instead, he’d had a guest suite in the Fifth Avenue apartment turned into a dialysis treatment room complete with full-time professional staff, and repaired to it three days every week to have his blood cleansed in patrician splendor.

  Chip wondered worriedly if Sam’s organs were failing, too, on account of all the blood he’d lost. Sam’s head fell forward. He was asleep again, or unconscious; Chip didn’t know which.

  Then he felt the boat swerve as Randy pulled hard on the Evinrude’s tiller arm. It had taken him about ten seconds to find and fix the loose fuel line Chip hadn’t been able to diagnose. Now he turned the small boat into a narrow inlet and cut the engine.

  Dry reeds and beach roses suddenly pulled up close on either side of the tiny waterway. The rose thorns hung into the boat, tearing at Chip’s scalp. A branch appeared, low enough to knock Chip’s block off; he ducked just in time and shot an angry look toward the man in the stern.

  “Hey,” he protested, unable to help himself. And what did it matter, anyway? Randy couldn’t kill him any deader than he already meant to. “Can’t you call out a little warning when—”

  Randy didn’t answer, or even bother to look at him. Carolyn, either, slumped over with her head against the transom seat. She had given up trying to talk to their captor, apparently.

  Trying to convince him that she would be more useful to him alive, that he should let her introduce him and his exploits to the big world.

  Like Jack the Ripper, or the Boston Strangler. Because if he let her do that, then he’d be Somebody.

  And she’d get to live. But Carolyn had misjudged. Chip could tell by the look on her face, thwarted and petulant, as if someone had just told her that Chip Hahn wouldn’t be lugging her satchel around for her anymore.

  Or writing her books, or schlepping her carry-ons through airport security. Funny how clear things get when you’re out here in trouble, Chip thought. Alone and at the end of your rope. He’d have done those things in a heartbeat now; all of them and more. He wondered if he would ever again get the chance to.

  Probably not. He shivered inside his topcoat, glad for even the minimal protection that it and the life jacket he still wore provided in the icy autumn weather.

  Randy let the boat drift up the channel, the brush on either side giving way first to small saplings and leafless bushes, then to massive trees. The biggest one, an enormous old white pine, stuck up from the rest like a giant peering over the shoulders of the smaller trees, from deep in the forest.

  A tan carpet of pine needles spread between the tree trunks. Here and there a massive, moss-encrusted boulder jutted. No bird sang. Everything was silent.

  Chip thought that if it wasn’t for Sam, he would jump out and run, take his chances on Randy being able to catch him. He’d let Carolyn try some more to make it on her own, let her see just how well her powers of persuasion worked when push really came to shove.

  But Sam was here. Chip couldn’t just leave him. And anyway, Chip wouldn’t have any idea which direction to go, even if he did get out of the boat before Randy shot him.

  The boat bottom scraped rocks. Randy pulled the outboard up and stood. “Get out.”

  He had the gun in his hand as he stepped past Carolyn and over Sam, then across to the stony shore where small waves moved. He waved the gun at Chip.

  “Out,” he repeated flatly.

  Chip bent and shook Sam’s shoulder, trying to rouse him, while Carolyn hesitated. Do something, he thought at her. Put that supposedly fabulous mind of yours to work and—

  Drop the engine, push the starter button, ram that sucker into reverse, and get us out of here, he urged her silently. Try, for God’s sake, just do it. But she didn’t know how.

  “Sam,” Chip said softly. But Sam didn’t rouse at all, only muttered something Chip couldn’t make out, and then Randy stepped back aboard.

  Blank-faced, he lunged at Carolyn, grabbed her, and threw her out into the shallows. Carolyn uttered a breathy scream and began struggling clumsily up onto the stony bank, weeping.

  Then Chip felt himself being lifted. The world turned upside down and when it stopped he was on shore, too, flat on his back. Stunned, he lifted his head. He spotted Carolyn scrambling away on her hands an
d knees as fast as she could.

  But not fast enough. Randy fired a shot past her head. The sound clapped itself to Chip’s ears, deafening him. Granite bits flew as Carolyn fell facedown, covering her head with her hands.

  Randy took Sam by his collar and belt, heaved him overboard into the water, stepped out and took Sam’s hair in his fist, and dragged him up onto the beach, dropping him there.

  He walked over to Chip and looked down at him. Chip had the sudden unpleasant realization that he was about to be shot. This cold beach, water, and sky were the last things he would see.

  Looking up, he met Randy’s gaze. The gun didn’t waver. Time seemed to stretch out as Randy’s finger tightened.

  Do something. …

  Chip kicked out, hard, connecting with Randy’s knee. At the same time he glimpsed Carolyn, miraculously on her feet, rushing at Randy. She leapt, hurling herself onto his back, her red nails clawing at his eyes.

  Those eyes … blank and empty, like there was nothing in them but smoke. Randy howled, whirling around on one leg in an attempt to dislodge Carolyn, but she hung on tight as Chip struggled up to try to help. Grabbing a rock, he hurled it at Randy’s head and missed. He found another and flung that, too.

  It connected just above Randy’s left ear. Blood streamed down the side of his face as he battled to get rid of the furious woman who had attacked him so suddenly, clinging to him like a mad thing.

  Which she was. Hang on, Chip pleaded silently as he advanced on Randy through the stones and seaweed. Both Randy’s hands were on the gun now, but he couldn’t see to fire it.

  Don’t let go. … Over Randy’s shoulder, Carolyn’s face was a mask of pain and terror. Her hands, even the one that was swollen and discolored, scratched like savage talons. Even in his terror she reminded Chip of someone, and then he realized:

  The girls, the ones in the first crime that he and Carolyn had ever worked on together, for their first book. Their faces, so hurt and ruined they hardly looked human. Their eyes …

  Chip snatched up another rock and charged Randy, raising the rock over his head as he ran. Aiming for the nose, because he knew that would hurt the most—

  Gripping the gun in both hands, Randy Dodd brought his fists straight back over his right shoulder, slammed the barrel of the weapon into the center of Carolyn’s forehead. Her arms loosened abruptly on impact; she dropped off him like an empty sack.

  Turning, Randy Dodd swung his arms like a scythe, his fists smacking Chip’s head as if it were a baseball, Randy the cleanup batter. Chip staggered backward, his legs suddenly insubstantial and his vision gone blurry.

  He tried stepping forward again, thought about the boat. He could get it running, he could …

  Randy yanked Chip upright. Carolyn lay still. Sam too. Chip felt his legs moving as if from a great distance as Randy marched him roughly up a short, steep embankment.

  At the top Randy let go and began urging Chip forward with short, sharp jabs of the gun into his back. Once, Chip nearly fell but caught himself; once, he thought he heard a cry from somewhere behind him.

  He hoped it was Carolyn, hoped she could get into the boat and get away. But he knew she wouldn’t.

  Randy jabbed him again, painfully. Chip kept putting one foot in front of the other, sure each time that this step would be his last.

  Because Randy was just waiting for a good place to kill him. Chip didn’t know what kind of spot it would be. Soft earth, to dig a grave in, or by a fallen tree trunk that Randy could roll on top of him.

  But whatever it was, when it came, that would be it. The end.

  All done. And no one to save him. Randy poked him once more as Chip stumbled, caught himself, and resumed walking.

  Nothing more to be done about it. In this way they proceeded together into the woods.

  CHAPTER 9

  CHIP KEPT ON WALKING UNTIL RANDY TOLD HIM TO STOP at the edge of an old pit that looked as if it had once been mined for gravel. A rickety-looking old superstructure hung over it, built of timbers with a metal wheel bolted to it.

  A fraying rope still hung down from the wheel. For hauling the gravel out, Chip imagined, as he peered down into the pit. Its steep sides were sandy, with a few dead, dry weeds poking up at intervals from the tan soil.

  Pockets of stones interrupted the sand, extending downward in a flow pattern as if the stones had come out as a liquid, then frozen. Last summer’s grass bristled yellow and brown in a narrow long-ago-cleared area all around the top of the pit.

  A rough trail had led here, barely visible now, twin narrow tracks recalling the passage of wheels. Chip noticed each separate thing in a sort of hyper-vision, the colors brighter and the edges of everything sharper than normal.

  It was freezing out here, even more than on the boat. He was getting tired under the weight of the life jacket, heavy with its straps held tight by thick metal buckles. And it was damp; it had rained here sometime in the recent past, and he could smell the cold water at the bottom of the pit.

  He supposed he should feel afraid, but he was long past that. He felt angry; he felt as if he had nothing to lose. So he said it as soon as he thought of it.

  “The money’s fake.”

  The words hung in the cold, clear air as if printed there. Chip felt Randy stop short right behind him. They’d reached the huge old white pine—a sentinel tree, that kind of big, solitary evergreen was called, he remembered irrelevantly—that he’d been able to see from shore.

  Around it, the breeze made a rattling sound in the few brown leaves still remaining on the smaller maples and birches. About twenty feet up, a thick dead branch stuck straight out from the pine like the lowered arm of a railway crossing: Stop.

  “How’d you know that?” asked Randy with what Chip knew was deceptive mildness. But he answered anyway.

  “I looked. On the big boat, in your book.” The memory of it sickened him: clippings and photographs.

  “Between the pages where you’d hid it. Though I guess there must be more of it somewhere. Because …”

  “Shut up.” Randy poked him in the back with the gun barrel. There was a long silence while, Chip supposed, Randy thought it over. Then:

  “I don’t believe you.” But it was clear from his voice that he did. Chip could practically hear Randy thinking now, trying to come to grips with it.

  With how he’d been fooled. Chip was still trying to figure it out himself, how it had happened and what Randy might do when he knew: That his brother, Roger, had screwed him.

  That, somehow, that was what the map had been all about. Not for Randy, but for someone else, and who would it be but Roger? And besides, something had always been wrong with the story.

  No matter what Roger Dodd or anyone else said, there was no million dollars. Chip’s belief in it and his attempt to get it had, like Randy’s, been doomed from the start.

  “How do you know?” Randy’s voice, asking it, was as calm as if he’d been asking the time of day.

  Keep him talking, Chip thought. “I looked at the bills. And they look real.” Felt that way, too. Someone had gone to a whole lot of trouble printing them up. “But they’ve got identical serial numbers.” And that meant counterfeit; there was no getting around it.

  In as few words as possible, Chip explained this to Randy, felt him taking it in and believing it, finally: That it had all been for nothing. That the money had never been real.

  That he’d been had. “You were supposed to bury it out here.” Chip was trying it all out in his own mind by saying it aloud. “If things went wrong, you’d need someplace to stash it, where Roger could find it. And this was it.” He looked down at the sandy soil at the foot of the sentinel tree. “Roger was supposed to come here later and check. That’s what the map was for, to let him know where you’d put it. He’d go out to the buoy where he’d left the money; you’d have hung a map on the buoy for him.”

  Which now that he’d said it actually sounded straightforward enough so that Chip thought it wa
s probably true: There’d been a bail out option. “But you lost the map and I found it,” he said.

  Randy kept listening. “If the money was here, Roger would know you’d had to leave it. He would take it back and you could try again to make the transfer later.”

  When, for instance, alerted border officials weren’t looking for a guy with bad surgery, bad ID papers, and a satchel full of cash. The whole bailout option was a smart move on Randy’s part, since lots of other things could have gone wrong besides the pair of them that had: first Carolyn, then Sam.

  Carolyn had given Randy another chore to accomplish in Eastport: shutting her up, vanishing her off the face of the earth. Then, just when Randy must’ve thought he had her taken care of, Sam had showed up at the wrong moment.

  And finally Chip himself had arrived, yet another glitch in the plan. Still, Randy had handled it all well; was handling it now, even, by deciding whether to kill Chip or do something else.

  Chip hoped the unexpected worthlessness of the money would nudge Randy toward the “something else” option, since whatever it turned out to be, it was probably not as terminally disastrous as a bullet in the head.

  Meanwhile the moments dragged on as Randy stood there thinking about it: Which?

  The gun was at his side. His face, in the thin morning light a map of scars and stitch marks, wore no expression at all. But his eyes …

  His eyes, empty of emotion, inspected Chip clinically. Chip thought that under the circumstances this represented progress, until a grim smile curved Randy’s misshapen lips. They resembled the fake wax lips Chip had gotten as a kid around Halloween, too big and red, as if they were already melting a little on the inside.

  As if Randy’s whole mouth were collapsing and his face might follow. Around them the forest brightened, daylight filtering in through the trees.

  “How’d he do it?” Randy asked unexpectedly.

  Roger, Chip guessed he meant. “Fake the money?”

  Randy nodded.