All a Man Can Ask

by Virginia Kantra

  Or maybe Faye would want to move back up here for a while, Aleksy mused, piling ham and cheese on a slice of bread. The commute would be a bitch for him, of course, but there was something appealing about finishing the summer here in Eden, where it all began.

  He was whistling as he loaded his sandwich onto a plate and carried it into the living room.

  Almost out of habit, he glanced through the sliding doors and across the dark inlet.

  And his appetite died.

  You can’t run away from your problems, Faye had told Jamal only this morning. You have to face them.

  So she sat with the sheet tucked under her arms, every muscle nearly weeping in gratitude, and faced her feelings squarely.

  She was in love. All the way, head over heels in love with Aleksy Denko.

  She drew a tight breath. This was a problem.

  She understood, she truly did, that he wasn’t ready to make a commitment outside of his job. All right. She accepted that. That didn’t mean they couldn’t—

  The door banged open.

  Aleksy sat on the end of the bed, depressing the mattress under him, and began to lace up his boots.

  No amount of understanding had prepared her for this.

  “What are you doing?”

  He glanced at her over his shoulder, his face hard, his eyes dark and distracted. “I have to go out.”

  She hitched the sheet higher over her breasts. “When will you be back?”

  “I don’t know.” He stood. “Can I borrow your camera?”

  “I—I guess so. Yes.”

  “Thanks.” Bare-chested, he began to leave the room.

  Her heart beat like a rabbit’s, fast and frightened. “Where are you going?”

  He looked at her as if he’d forgotten who she was. Maybe, for a moment, he had. “I have to get a sweater,” he explained.

  And his gun, she thought. Of course he would need his gun.

  He was gone before the sheets beside her had completely cooled.

  There was a difference between quitting and being defeated, she’d said to Jamal.

  Defeated, she covered her face with her hands and wept.

  Faye drifted like a ghost through her own living room, her chest hollowed out and her throat achy.

  When he came back, she thought, they would talk. In the meantime, she would keep moving. Keep busy. She could transfer Jamal’s laundry to the dryer. She would straighten the living room. She could…

  Wait.

  She turned on a lamp at the corner of the couch. The light pooled on an uneaten ham sandwich, mute evidence of Aleksy’s desertion.

  She closed her eyes. How did Tess stand it? she wondered. How would she?

  Where was Aleksy now? She was sure his disappearance had something to do with the case. With Richard Freer.

  Old white guys with guns make me nervous.

  She carried the plate into the kitchen and covered it with plastic wrap. Aleksy would be back. He had to come back. For his sandwich. She put it in the fridge.

  Hugging her elbows, she wandered back to the cottage’s main room, avoiding the temptation of the long windows. The Irish in her made her superstitious. As long as she didn’t look, her attention couldn’t draw other watchful eyes in the night to search for Aleksy.

  She bit her lip. Oh, God, she was losing her mind.

  She emptied the jar of paint-tinged water on her worktable. She dug one of her sandals from under the couch. She plucked the white Weiglund’s Camera bag from the floor.

  Idly she broke the adhesive seal. Casually she slipped the photos from the envelope. The most recent ones were on top: six different camera angles of the wood pile by the house and a breathtaking shot of the sunset that completely failed to capture the colors she remembered. She’d never make a photographer. Frowning, she thumbed through the stack.

  And there, from the beginning of the roll, were two developed prints of a beige midsize cabin cruiser riding the coral lake at dawn.

  Her heart pounded. The first wide shot showed the sag of the dock and the angles of the boathouse behind the sport cabin. And the other—the hand holding the pictures trembled—the other, taken with the zoom, showed a tiny string of numbers printed just below the cabin’s flat black window. The registration number. She had to tell Aleksy.

  Aleksy wasn’t here.

  She forced herself to breathe. To think.

  She could tell Jarek. Jarek would know what to do.

  She wasted seconds wondering how she could get the police chief’s home number. Stupid. She could just call 911.

  She left her name and number with the pleasant-voiced dispatcher and waited in an agony of impatience by the phone.

  When it rang, she jumped. “Hello?”

  “Faye, it’s Jarek Denko.” The police chief’s voice was reassuringly official. “What can I do for you?”

  “I found another photograph,” she blurted. “Of the boat. I just had it developed.”

  He didn’t ask which boat. He said, “Does Aleksy know?”

  “He’s not here. He went out. In a hurry.”

  The receiver in her hand was silent as Jarek put the two pieces of information together.

  With nothing to do but think for long, anxious minutes, Faye had run some mental calculations of her own. “Was that—could that be why my purse was snatched this afternoon?”

  “Could be,” Jarek said slowly. Calmly. “Did anyone know you had the pictures with you?”

  “I was holding the bag from the camera shop. When we walked down the street.” She swallowed. “We stopped at Liberty Sporting Goods. Someone—” Richard Freer, she meant “—could have seen.”

  “How clear is the picture?” His voice was sharp now.

  “Pretty clear. I had my zoom.”

  “Can you read the registration number?”

  Her palms were damp. “I think so. There’s a 2, and then a 3 or an 8, another 3 or an 8, and then a 5.”

  He repeated the numbers back to her. She confirmed them.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “What?” she demanded, and then bit her tongue.

  “I’m just running that number through the—” He broke off.

  Her stomach contracted into a tight little ball. “Jarek?”

  “Did Aleksy say why he went out?”

  Oh, God. “No.”

  “The boat,” Jarek said. “This is a long shot, but—is it there now?”

  She hadn’t looked. She hadn’t thought to look. Or she’d been afraid to.

  Clutching the receiver, she scrambled to the window.

  “It’s dark. It’s half a mile to Freer’s dock and the security lights aren’t on.”

  Why, she wondered frantically, would Freer turn out his lights?

  “Faye.” Jarek’s voice was hard as January ice. “Can you see the dock at all? How many boats are there?”

  “I don’t—” She strained to see through the dark. The quarter moon shed petals of light on the water but barely disturbed the shadows on the opposite shore. “Two, I guess. Three?”

  “Two, or three?”

  “I can’t tell. Maybe three.”

  “Okay,” Jarek said. “If that boat matches the registration number you just gave me, we’ve got our probable cause. Give me twenty minutes to get a warrant, and I’ll be there to check things out. You stay put.”

  Staying put was good, Faye told herself, hanging up the phone.

  She wasn’t Dick Tracy.

  She wasn’t even Nancy Drew.

  She didn’t want to get involved.

  Shivering, she stared out at the gleaming water and the dim, indistinct bank. The drone of unidentified insects—crickets? water bugs?—created a curtain of sound. Frogs sang in cadence.

  Until a shot cracked over the water, shattering the night.

  Aleksy hadn’t spent so much time crouching in bushes since he and Jarek used to play war with the Dolan brothers at Indian Boundary Park. His heart still thumped. His boots still got m
uddy. And no matter how carefully he scouted the ground beforehand, he still wound up with a rock jabbing his knee and twigs sticking the back of his neck.

  He had a good view of the dock, though.

  Three boats.

  Including a pale tan Parker Pilothouse with a Yamaha outboard engine and no one on board.

  The tinted glass made it difficult to see inside but it was dark enough that anybody on that boat would need a light. No light shone in the cabin. No light shone on the deck. Therefore nobody was home. Which suited Aleksy just fine.

  He crawled from his bush into the shadow of the boathouse, Faye’s camera bumping his chest, feeling as if at any moment Tommy Dolan was going to leap out of hiding and pound him to the ground. Nothing. No Tommy. No Dick or Harry, either. Richard Freer and his nameless, faceless guest stayed conveniently out of the way at the house.

  The grassy bank was gray in the moonlight. Aleksy crossed to the dock, stopped and listened. More nothing. Just the chorus of slimy night life, the slap of the water and the rasp of his own breathing.

  Neither of Freer’s boats—an open console motorboat and a flat sailboat, low on the water—provided much cover as he picked his way along the dock. But that was okay. A few more yards and he stood beside the pilothouse.

  Supporting himself with one hand on a piling, he stepped cautiously over the side and onto the deck. It rocked and shifted underfoot and he nearly lost his balance. He was a street cop, not a damn Coast Guard patrol. He couldn’t navigate, couldn’t steer, could barely walk upright without slipping.

  But he did know how to conduct a search.

  The pilothouse door had a standard lock, easy to monkey. Aleksy was grateful. He didn’t mind a little B & E, but he didn’t want to leave signs he’d been there. A switch activated the dome light overhead. He left it alone, turning on the tiny desk lamp clamped to the left of the console instead. In the dim light, he surveyed the cabin.

  He didn’t have a clue what all those gauges and dials were for, but the setup sure looked high-tech. His blood hummed. There was a PC flush mounted into the console, more than any Sunday fisherman would need. He took the lens cap off Faye’s camera, set it to imprint with the date and time, and lifted the flash bar to take a picture. Several pictures, standing with his back to the tinted windows to minimize the flash.

  A tiny access door led to the forward cabin. He tried it. Locked. And not with any sissy lock, either. Whatever proof he needed, whatever arsenal Freer had amassed for illegal sale to Amir, was probably stored below. But he took another minute to search the pilothouse, opening drawers, reaching under the console. Working vice had taught him how to find the things most people wanted to hide.

  Bingo.

  His heart pumped in excitement. In the cushioned seat box to the left of the door was a fifty shot Calico semiautomatic carbine rifle—legal, if purchased legally in the United States. It would be interesting to see what the ATF would turn up on a firearms trace.

  And in a sliding drawer under the dash, within easy reach of the pilot, along with the usual fishing boat junk, hooks and wire and flashlight batteries, were two pineapple style military hand grenades.

  Aleksy grinned a wolf’s grin. Illegal possession of destructive devices. Hot damn.

  He adjusted the lens and took more pictures. You didn’t go fishing with those suckers. Unless you liked your catch belly up and by the hundreds.

  He stepped back to get a wider console shot, with the open drawer and the grenades nestled inside. A videotape would have been even better, but he figured he had enough evidence here to send the right guys after Karen’s killers.

  This one’s for you, partner.

  A rifle barked. The window cracked. Something smacked into the console.

  The night erupted in a flash of light and pain, and Aleksy dropped to the cabin floor.

  “No way.” Jamal shifted to block the door. The teenager was clearly uncomfortable. His voice was embarrassed. His eyes were miserable.

  But his stance—Faye’s heart sank—his stance was determined.

  “Sorry, Harp,” he mumbled. “But I can’t let you go out there.”

  “Jamal, I am an adult. You can’t stop me.”

  This was so patently untrue that the boy didn’t even bother to contradict her. He looked at her, then away, and shuffled his feet.

  Faye changed tactics. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Weren’t no car backfire that woke me up,” Jamal said. “Whoever is out there has got a gun.”

  Nerves jittered in her stomach. “No one’s going to shoot at me,” she said.

  Who was she trying to reassure? Jamal? Or herself?

  Jamal shook his head. “Anybody dumb enough to mess with Denko would shoot you as soon as look at you.”

  “I’m not a threat to them.”

  The teenager raised his eyebrows. “You know who they are?”

  “I—” For the first time, she sympathized with Aleksy’s determination to keep her in protected ignorance. “It’s a police matter,” she said.

  “Then let the police handle it.”

  “I called the police. They’re on the way.”

  “What do you need to go out there for, then?”

  I am practicing facing my fears. I’m afraid that the noble, thickheaded adrenaline junkie I’m in love with could be out there bleeding to death.

  “Chief Denko said it would take him twenty minutes to get here. That might be too late.”

  “You mean, like, if he’s been shot.”

  She winced. It sounded so melodramatic. “Yes.”

  “You know where he is?”

  “I can guess.”

  “And you think you can get to him before the police? And before whatever bad guys are out there find him and finish him off?”

  Uncertainty shook her. She said, honestly, “I don’t know. All I know is I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t try. At the very least, maybe I can provide a distraction until—until the police arrive.”

  “You mean, a target,” he said in disgust. “Damn. Okay. I’ll go with you.”

  “No,” she objected instinctively. “It’s not—”

  He waited for her to say it. It’s not safe.

  She sighed. “What will you say if we’re caught?”

  Jamal hunched his shoulders. “What would you say?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I say. I’m not a threat,” she repeated and heard the teasing echo of Aleksy’s voice. You’re a cream puff. “I’ll claim I heard a noise and needed a big, strong man to protect me.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s why you got me along,” Jamal said.

  Gratitude warred with doubt. She should argue with him. She should make him stay. But debating would only prolong her uncertainty. She needed to know if Aleksy was all right. And if he wasn’t—if he was lying somewhere, hiding, bleeding, alone—then she needed to find him.

  “We’ll take my car,” she decided. “It’s almost two miles around by road. And when we get there, you stay in the car, understand? I don’t want anyone to see you.”

  “They won’t spot me.” The teenager grinned crookedly. “I’m harder to see in the dark than you are.”

  Chapter 15

  He had to get up.

  Get moving.

  Fast.

  Dizzied, deafened and almost blind, Aleksy squinted at the splintered pattern in the safety glass, glittering like a spiderweb in the moonlight.

  He was lucky they hadn’t blown away the top of his skull. The ricochet had ploughed through his scalp instead, thanks to the darkness, the distorting glass and the rocking boat. But the constant stream of blood into his eyes was annoying.

  Not to mention that it hurt like a son of a bitch.

  He’d hurt a lot worse if he didn’t get his butt out of here. He started to crawl. Around the pedestal pilot’s chair, across the cabin floor. At the door, he listened, blinking away blood. No shouts, no footsteps. Good or bad? he wondered.

  He pulled himself up the st
ep and through the door onto the deck of the cockpit.

  The security lights snapped on, flooding the bank. Shadows jumped on the deck.

  He rolled into the narrow darkness cast by the side of the boat, his heart thudding, his blood pumping over his forehead and into his eyes.

  Somebody had decided they wanted to find him more than they wanted to minimize the presence of the boat. Which meant they wanted him. Bad. Maybe dead. Hell.

  Your move, hotshot.

  He could hear footsteps now. Running.

  Move fast.

  He put his hands on the side, pulled up and swung a leg over. The movement made him dizzy. Sick. He lay flat along the side a moment, fighting nausea and gravity. He couldn’t splash. He must not make a splash. Reversing his grip, he took a deep breath and lowered himself over the side, into the water.

  The camera scraped the side of the boat before it bumped below the surface. The film could be salvaged by a knowledgeable developer, but the camera would be ruined. Damn. He was going to owe Faye a new one.

  He owed her a lot of things, but he had to pay his debts in order. Justice for Karen, and then…

  First he had to stay alive.

  His boots filled until they felt like ten-pound weights at the end of his ankles. He released his hold and went down, water filling his ears and nostrils, pain seeping, eating along his wound. He bit back a gasp, fought not to kick, struggled not to make a sound.

  Blind and breathless, he blundered into a piling. His hands patted and groped at the slick surface before he found a hold and pulled himself up.

  Warm blood and cold water streamed over his face. Blink. Breathe. He tasted salt and silt and gasoline. He was under the dock. Okay.

  Footsteps thumped down the dock. They sure as hell weren’t trying to hide from him. He edged around the piling, deeper into the black, weedy shadows. He needed to get out, get away. He hugged the piling, held his breath, as his pursuers—pursuer, he only heard one set of feet overhead—moved toward the boat.

  He still had his gun. Although getting a drop in the dark on a mope with a rifle while he was three-quarters drowned and bleeding profusely from a bullet wound in the head… Yeah. Not a good idea.