Coming Back

by Marcia Muller

  “Yes, on the way back from Marin the first time. She’s doing fine. She’s one resilient young lady, and Trish and Chelle Curley have been looking in on her.”

  “When we get back, will you ask somebody from RI to drop me at Richman Labs, and then go see that doctor?”

  “McCone, I’m okay.”

  “Humor me. And keep your promise this time.”

  CRAIG MORLAND

  Rupert Joslyn, Adah’s father, was sitting on their couch holding That One, surprising the hell out of Craig when he walked into the apartment.

  “Sorry,” Rupert said, “I used my key. Thought something might’ve happened to Adah. Or you.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Son, you know Adah’s called her mother every Monday night since she moved into her own place at eighteen. Barbara’s been beside herself for two nights now, but she didn’t want to interfere, in case there was trouble between you two. I fed these critters, by the way.”

  Craig hung his keys on the rack by the front door, went to his recliner chair, and sat down, head in hands.

  “You okay?” Rupert asked.

  “No.”

  “Need a drink?”

  “Yes.”

  “Still into Irish whiskey?”

  “Uh-huh. Bottle’s in the cabinet—”

  “I know where you keep your liquor.” Rupert got up, sliding That One to the floor.

  Craig raised his head and watched the big, barrel-chested man, white-haired and slightly bowlegged, walk into the kitchen. How was he going to tell him about Adah? She was the Joslyns’ only child and they delighted in her. Had worried about her every day she’d been on the police force, had been thrilled when she’d moved to the admin job at the agency. They loved him like a son, counted on him to take care of her. Well, he’d done one hell of a job, hadn’t he?

  Rupert returned with two glasses, handed one to Craig. “Now tell me what’s wrong.”

  Craig threw back most of the Irish and then laid the story out for Rupert, omitting some details and trying to keep a positive note.

  The old man flinched once, then went back to the kitchen for the bottle of Bushmill’s. As he poured, he said slowly, “I think we won’t tell Barbara about this.”

  “Why not?”

  “She has a bad heart. We haven’t talked about it to you kids, because she doesn’t want to worry you. It’s not all that life-threatening, but a shock like this…”

  “Right. We won’t tell her, then.”

  “So what’s being done about the situation?” In spite of the bad news, Rupert had recovered quickly. His eyes were keen and his posture told Craig he’d adopted a battle mode. A former labor organizer for longshoremen, he was as tough as ever.

  Craig gave him a capsule report of what had happened in Marin.

  “And what’re the folks at the agency doing?”

  “Pursuing it.”

  “Meaning you’re not up to speed on them.”

  “I just got back—”

  “Hell’s afire, man! This is Adah we’re talking about.”

  “You’re right. Let’s you and I go in for a briefing.”

  SHARON McCONE

  A Richman Labs tech was able to tell me the number on the key tag—112 C—and provided an enhanced image of the design below it, a sunset, as I’d previously guessed. Nothing else to indicate what kind of establishment it came from. That in itself was odd, because the tag was of a vintage—seventies to eighties, he said—when many lodging places had an address printed on their tags to which the key could be returned postpaid if the guest lost it or forgot to turn it in.

  No longer, in these days of extreme security precautions.

  The newer keys—one to a dead bolt, the other to a heavy-duty padlock—the tech said were commonly available and had probably been cut in the past year. The others were from the same period as the tag. One was to a standard snap lock, the other one didn’t show up on any of their references. The tech had put out inquiries as to what kind of lock it might operate.

  I called Chelle from the lab and asked her to pick me up and deliver me to the pier. She said she’d have to come in my MG, so it might take a while. It did, and when she pulled to the curb she stalled the engine.

  “Look, Chelle,” I said when I got in, “you have to learn to operate a stick shift better. You’re ruining the MG’s gearbox. That ride to the pier to borrow Ted’s car the other day was a nightmare.”

  “I know. Stalling on the Muni tracks wasn’t my finest hour.”

  “We can’t keep appropriating Ted’s car.”

  “Um, I hate to say it but… even if I could drive a stick well, your car is a piece of crap.”

  “You’re talking about my classic MG!”

  “Crap.”

  “The agency van is an automatic—”

  “And it’s usually needed for people running surveillances. You’ve got to buy an inconspicuous, reliable personal car.”

  “With an automatic transmission.”

  “Right.”

  Reliable and inconspicuous: those were the key words. The MG hadn’t been either for some time now, despite a new engine and transmission. Just as with Hy’s ancient Morgan and the classic Mustang he had replaced it with, it should be put out of its misery or sold to somebody who had the patience, money, and time to keep it restored and running.

  But a boring car with an automatic transmission?

  I pictured myself driving along the coast highway without the control and satisfaction of downshifting on the curves, upshifting on the straightaways. Driving—like flying—had been an intense source of pleasure and adventure to me; I’d been so looking forward to getting back to it.

  But not in some slug of a car.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said. And I would—until next summer when I could drive myself again. In the meantime I’d rent something inexpensive from Enterprise for Chelle.

  She must’ve sensed my thoughts, because she said, “You and that vehicle are gonna be buried together.”

  The agency hummed with purposeful activity as I climbed to the catwalk. I stopped in at Ted’s office for a briefing. Craig had come in with Rupert Joslyn in tow—permissible to brief Adah’s father, under the circumstances—and now they were with Patrick, going over the case’s status.

  “So Craig finally told Adah’s parents.”

  “No. Rupert came to him because they hadn’t heard from her.”

  “How’re he and Barbara holding up?”

  “He’s pitched in. Barbara doesn’t know yet.” There would be hell to pay when she found out, even if Adah was returned to them safely.

  Thelia, Ted added, had gotten a hit on one of Adah’s credit cards and gone out to interview the clerk at the convenience store in San Rafael where it had been used.

  San Rafael—approximately halfway between Inverness and the city. But could Bob Samson have used a card with an obviously female name on it?

  “Did Thelia mention what time the card was used?”

  “After two in the morning.”

  Possibly the woman who had visited Samson? He would have taken Adah’s ID from her, maybe left it somewhere in his cabin where the woman had found and pocketed it.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “Beyond the usual calls from your family? As of this minute, I have twelve messages for you—all of them urgent.”

  I sighed. “None of them urgent. Just stack them in my in-box, unless somebody dies—which isn’t likely.”

  “Speaking of your family, Mick is onto something. Steaming. Better go cool him down.”

  Steaming was the right word for it. He didn’t even look up, just waved me to Derek’s chair and went on staring at the monitor, clicking again and again.

  I said, “I want you to look at something—”

  “Not now.”

  “What are you—?”

  “Be quiet!”

  “That machine isn’t talking to you. Can’t you listen and talk at t
he same time?”

  “No!”

  “All right.” There was a time, I thought, when the little shit hadn’t dared talk to me like that. Of course, he wasn’t a little shit anymore, and if he told me to shut up, there was probably good reason.

  Click, click, click…

  God, he really was onto something.

  A minute, two, three…

  A final click and the printer started up.

  “So?” I asked.

  “Wait a minute.”

  “In the meantime, can I give you something I need you to work on?”

  He held up his hand, then removed the sheet the printer spat out and extended it to me at the same time I extended the enhancement of the key tag that Richman Labs had provided.

  They were the same: a sunset. Only at the top of Mick’s page there was a logo.

  Circle K Cruises, San Francisco.

  Circle K was a defunct cruise line that had plied the waters between the city and various Mexican ports from 1980 till 2004, when they’d gone bankrupt. They’d owned four ships, two of which had been sold for scrap and two that had been purchased by a rival company but never been put into service. The Circle Star and the Circle Diamond were berthed at a mothball fleet in a small private marina on San Pablo Bay, north of the sprawling suburb of Hercules and south of Richmond-Carquinez Bridge.

  Circle K Cruises. Piper and Ryan Middleton had won a cruise to Mexico in a supermarket raffle and decided to make it their honeymoon. On Circle K? That would dovetail nicely. It fit with the messages to Middie, wanting to swap.

  “Bring up the Quinn file,” I told Mick.

  There it was—the happy couple had been given their choice of Circle K ships. No mention of which one they’d chosen.

  “Find out more about that location, where those out-of-commission ships are berthed,” I said.

  “Don’t need to. I know it pretty well. A biker buddy of mine lives just down the road from there.” He drew up a map on the screen. “One way in and one way out of there. Here”—he moved the cursor—“is the road. And here is a little houseboat colony that the residents call World’s End. And down at the end of the road is the commercial mothball fleet.”

  “Pretty deserted out there?”

  “Reasonably. World’s End is a quirky, rundown little community. A few people who live there are probably hiding out from the law. Others like their privacy and being on the water. They’re all eccentric, so they can tolerate each other’s weirdnessess. You can’t see the mothball fleet from there because a point juts out between them. I doubt anybody ever goes to the end of the road. At least I’ve never seen anyone.”

  “I think somebody has. Recently. Can your friend get us out there?”

  “I’d say this guy can do just about anything.”

  ADAH JOSLYN

  There were no more screams or gunshots, and the men’s voices were silent. Adah listened intently but heard nothing. Finally she went to sit on the quilt.

  Okay, what had she heard? An argument, gunshots, and a woman screaming. And the reverberations of the shots had produced an image of the place’s shape and size.

  She was on a ship. Docked someplace sheltered, which accounted for the creaking, the dank smell, and the slight motions on the water. The drip—a slow leak somewhere? There had to be holding tanks for water on board, because it was available to her in the bathroom. What if they ran out and she had no supply?

  She and Craig had taken a cruise in the Caribbean last spring. Princess Lines—the Golden Princess. This ship, she sensed, was older and much smaller, and the cabin on a lower deck than theirs had been. And it had been out of commission for a while. Where was it berthed?

  Somewhere in the Hunters Point area? A lot of storage marinas there. Somewhere else on the chain of bays and waterways that ran from the Golden Gate to the Sacramento Delta? A lot of territory, much of it sparsely populated.

  She pictured the Delta: narrow levee roads, weedy marshes, fertile fields. Suisun Bay: bordered on one side by farmland and on the other by suburban sprawl. Carquinez Strait: spanned by two wide, soaring bridges. San Pablo Bay: an expanse stretching from the poverty-stricken former military town of Vallejo to San Francisco Bay. The Port of Oakland and the South Bay: shores crowded with industry, hotels, homes, and the airport.

  No, she wasn’t in a marina at Oakland or in the South Bay; if she was she’d’ve heard traffic sounds, planes taking off and arriving at the area’s two major airports. San Francisco Bay was the same—too populated. Somewhere north, then. Tucked away in a place where few people ever came. But not so remote that it didn’t have a nearby McDonald’s: the food her captor brought her had still been warm.

  Well, no point in further speculation. Before the people had arrived, argued, and the shot had been fired, she’d almost gotten the door open. She’d start working on it again, have to chance that they were gone now and get herself the hell out of here.

  No matter who or what she found aboard, nothing was worse than this dank, stuffy prison.

  CRAIG MORLAND

  He drove over the Bay Bridge from the city, hands tensed on the wheel, eyes focused on what the spreading beams of the SUV’s headlights revealed to him. Took I-80 to the Hercules exit and passed through outskirts of suburbia that were like outskirts everywhere—Taco Bell, Mickey D’s, Burger King, KFC; malls and strip malls. Shar, sitting beside him, was equally tensed, and her mouth twitched frequently. With pain? He remembered what she’d told him about the constant sharp pain that had plagued her in the months since she’d been recovering from her locked-in state:

  It’s like a vicious animal that has hold of you, gnawing. Sometimes you think it’s gone away. But after minutes of relief, it’s back with its big sharp teeth.

  Was she in that kind of pain now? He glanced at her.

  No. Her grimace was one of determination and just plain rage.

  What he felt.

  “There’s the road we want,” she said. “Turn left.”

  In the backseat, Mick’s phone rang.

  “Okay,” Mick said after he’d ended the call. “My friend has a boat and he knows that marina. We’ll go out there and—”

  “Craig and I will go out there,” Shar told him. “Not you.”

  “I can help—”

  “An extra person who’s not armed is only going to be in the way.”

  “But the guy who took Adah is dead. There’s not going to be anybody there but her.”

  “Are you forgetting TRIAD? You have no idea how many people they have—or where they’ve stashed Piper.”

  Mick fell silent. Feeling impotent, Craig thought. The way he’d felt for so long without the prospect of action. The way Rupert must feel. The old man hadn’t liked it when they’d told him he couldn’t come along, had shouted that a man had a right to try to save his daughter, that he was tough enough, fit enough to help. It had taken a lot of persuasion to get him to go home and wait for word.

  “Turn left here,” Mick said.

  They’d been paralleling the shoreline and the I-80 freeway. Now the lights on the hills behind them sparkled in the clear sky. The moon was bright and full.

  “The road to World’s End is coming up in about fifty yards,” Mick said. “Long row of mailboxes there.”

  Craig spotted them, turned again. His headlights picked out an abandoned car and a trailer on blocks, a half-sunken fishing trawler, a dredger listing to one side in the oily black water.

  “People live here?”

  “Quite a few of them.”

  They passed a newish cabin cruiser, lights aglow. A collapsing shack, and a corrugated metal Quonset hut. A wrecked craft that looked as if it had been through the war in the Pacific. A houseboat with its stern immersed.

  “Stop here.”

  Another houseboat with shingles that were weathered gray; intact, riding high on the water. Smoke came from a stovepipe chimney and light spilled around blinds in the windows. As Craig pulled the SUV to the side of the rutted
road, a man emerged onto the sagging dock, shotgun cradled in his arms. His hands tensed on the wheel.

  “No worries,” Mick said. “It’s only my friend Leon. The gun is just in case—he’s got a thing about his privacy.”

  SHARON McCONE

  I liked Leon Moskowitz from the moment we stepped inside his houseboat. A giant with shiny clean dark hair pulled back in a neat ponytail, clad in olive-green sweats. Muscular body, gentle manner, clear intuitive gaze. He hugged Mick, called him “little brother” and enveloped all our hands in his own large one.

  He laid the shotgun in a rack and said, “So I hear we’re going for a boat ride.”

  I said, “This may be dangerous.”

  “So Mick told me. I never shied away from danger in my life.”

  “You’re sure?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “This isn’t your fight.”

  “Somebody’s in trouble in my territory, it’s my fight.”

  This man would be a definite asset to our search, I thought. Everything about him spelled confidence.

  “Okay. Thank you.” I motioned at the gun rack. “Better bring that along.”

  “I got others on the boat. Rifle, and a handgun. You carrying?”

  “Yes. Both of us.”

  “Then we’re set to go. You hold down the fort here, little brother, monitor us on the ship-to-shore. If we call for reinforcements, go next door and have Rab come out. I’ve already briefed him on the situation.”

  Mick’s mouth turned pouty again, but he didn’t argue.

  Leon led us from the cabin and down the dock to a small but fast-looking power boat tied up at its end. He and I got on board while Craig undid the lines. The boat’s engine burbled as we pushed off.

  Leon steered us toward the open water. I sat beside him, Craig leaning on the back of my seat. The marina was dead calm, its lights receding behind us. There was a light wind, and the smells of salt water and creosote were strong. Something else in the air, too—raw and unpleasant, perhaps oil seeping from the older craft or from the refineries south at Point Richmond. Craig was keyed up, but I felt surprisingly calm.