water- line, as the waves were cresting higher and higher. “Marine Patrol!” Manley bellowed again, but still there was no response from anyone aboard. “Maybe they’ve taken a launch in?” he suggested, but the lone dinghy was lashed to the deck.
“ Let’s try that registration number.”
Manley began the chant. “Oreo-Two-Charlie-Niner, Niner-no damnit, that’s an eight-no, hell! Can’t make it out. Damned if it doesn’t look’s’if it’s been intentionally obscured with paint or something.”
Marine law prohibited their going aboard without knowledge of the owner unless there was probable cause, provocation or impending need. If anyone were aboard, the siren ought to’ve blown out his hearing, and certainly he had to feel the bump and grind of the boats. If a guy were looking out a porthole-and there were several on this starboard side-he’d have to know they were cops, Stallings told himself. From their Stetsons to their 9mm Glock pistols, they were dressed identically to their state trooper counterparts. Besides, their boat was clearly marked.
Stallings brought the Boston Whaler around to the rear of the mystery ship, where they read her name, the Tau Cross. Hadn’t there been talk that authorities in Miami were looking for a boat in which the letter T and a cross might figure prominently in the name of the boat? Didn t the killer sign his bloody notes with a T-cross?
Manley almost whispered, “You see what I see, Ken?”
“ Yeah, I see…”
“ You take that and the obscured numbers and missing port of origin for probable cause in a murder investigation?”
“ Could be… could be…” Stallings knew they had plenty of reason to board the other boat, but a foreboding had overtaken him, a sense not of fear but of a palpable and distressing evil, a darkness, a force not unlike the now encroaching, engulfing fog, and he wondered if they ought not call in backup right this moment, surround the godforsaken suspect boat with numbers. “Maybe we’d best call it in, tell ‘em what we’ve got before we go any further. Get some backup out here, Rob.”
“ Something sure smells here, Ken.”
“ Agreed.”
“ No, I mean something really smells over here, just over the surface of the water.”
Stallings had worked with dogs on boats to search out drowning victims. Dogs could smell decay out over the surface of the water and when they sent up a howl, the divers knew where to search. Had Manley’s nose picked up something similar? Ken could smell nothing but the salt air, and a touch of metallic copper was filling his nostrils, a sure sign of an impending rain, possibly a squall. But he knew, too, that Manley’s instincts and senses were razor- sharp, like those of a hound.
Stallings was about to call it in when he heard his partner say, “Damn, damn… whata we got here?” Stallings looked over to see Manley tugging on a sleek black snake, a quarter-inch nylon rope hanging off the rear of the mystery ship. The rope was obviously weighted down with something.
Manley tugged hand over fist, and suddenly an eyeless, bloated, dead face rushed up at him, making him slip and fall on his elbows and butt, causing him to explode in a litany of curses as the unholy package he’d lifted from the water dropped back into the depths with an easy splash. “Mother-J-fuckin’-Christ-a-minny-damn! Call it in, damn you, Stallings! Call it in now! Get us backup out here. We’ve got a crime scene here! Damnit if it ain’t him; Jesus if it ain’t the freakin’ Night Crawler! Stallings began making the call, saying “Urgent, urgent” to clear the airways as much as possible.
Manley had regained his feet, but not his composure. “Call it in, damnit! Call it in and take us round to the side,” he demanded.
“ All at the same time? I’m doing my damned best.” Only a static-filled radio replied to Stallings’s call. Dispatch had obviously gotten busy with other calls.
Manley announced, “I’m climbing aboard.”
A Florida summer fog continued rolling in as if from nowhere, as if the clouds from heaven had come upon them to mask their doings. It seemed the work of a devil’s lieutenant, Stallings thought. The fog only lightly covered them at the moment, but it was thickening as it moved across their bow and creepily veiled the mysterious death ship, the Tau Cross.
“ Hold off on that, Rob.” Stallings worked the marine radio even as he maneuvered the Whaler into position alongside the port side of the seventy-foot schooner. His eyes took in the teakwood beauty presented them by the ship. It was a ship of foreign manufacture. Stallings called in their location once again, this time being more precise, drawing on his twelve-week training at the FMP academy, doing it by the book. Into the radio, he gave their unit number-Delta-4-followed again by their exact quadrants, the partial number and name of the boat they were about to board, and the fact that they had a body dangling over the side, and the fact that they believed the boat belonged to the suspect Patric Allain, otherwise known as the Night Crawler. “And if it ain’t him,” Stallings wryly added, “it’s his first cousin Beevo! We’ve fished out a body lashed at the rear of the boat. I repeat, these quadrants, just west of Madeira Beach, a crime has been committed, a body located at this site.”
There had been word in police circles that the killer had entered Gulf waters, that he’d spent time in Naples and was expected to move northward, and now here he was. “Go careful, Manley,” Stallings cautioned, but Rob was already over the side, standing flat-footed on the deck of the Cross and tying their smaller craft to a stanchion.
Night operations were always more difficult than day, Stallings was thinking when he heard a strange little pa- plunk noise. At first he thought it some odd sound floating across the bay from shore, maybe a backfiring car or the bad note from one of the many ocean deck bands, but then he saw Manley stumble backward and fall over the side and back onto the Boston Whaler with a crack-thud, and now Manley was flat on his back, looking just as he had when the corpse had so frightened him, except this time he wasn’t cursing, not a sound was coming out of him, only a long spear protruding from his chest. Stallings whipped up his 9mm Glock, but he found nothing to target, nothing to focus his anger on, no one in the fog shroud.
He then shouted, “Manley!” tearing to get to his partner.
He momentarily crouched over Manley, realizing the finality of the moment, that the other man wasn’t breathing. His best friend’s eyes were wide open but unseeing. A noise to his right sent Stallings into a sprawl on the deck of his boat, his gun poised, ready. Still, he could see nothing to target his weapon on.
The damnable fog and the lights mirroring off it had created a surreal pocket here on the water. Stallings realized suddenly that their own lights had blinded them to the killer’s whereabouts.
He inched along the deck, trying to stay down, to get to the high-powered spotlight, to click it off, knowing that it’d created a large and easily targeted silhouette of big Rob Manley. And now the damned light was doing the same to him, sending up a clear picture of him for the killer to focus on.
He got to the light, crouched on his knees to reach for the off switch, then slammed it home. At the same instant, he heard another pa-plunk sound, followed by something hitting the water the other side of the boat. Was it the noise of a tightly strung speargun, followed by a miss-the arrow striking the water?
Alone now, unable to do anything for Rob, Stallings desperately tried to keep his head. He kept his eyes trained on the killer’s boat, every inch of it. Then he saw a shadow flicker into his peripheral vision, making him wheel and fire, the explosion of his Glock sending shock waves across the water, but hitting no one. It was as if he’d fired on a ghost, completely ineffectual.
He then saw another slight movement, this one at the rear of the seventy-foot schooner. Were there two Night Crawlers? He’d wheeled and fired off several more rounds, when at once the ear-splitting noise which he’d created was silenced, when in a moment something hard and cold grazed his forehead, when he felt his leg turn into a raging fire, when he went suddenly blind and cold and weak and hurt from slamming so hard on his back. Unable to move now, paralyzed, he smelled blood-his own; he felt the heavy weight of the shaft that’d torn through his leg muscle, and he could sense the terrible gash to his left temple where the earlier spear had tagged him, sending him sprawling to the deck alongside Rob’s body.
All went silent for a time, but then he could hear his crackling radio, Bob Fisher at dispatch trying to hail him and Manley; he also heard a birdlike, choking, devilish laugh, footfalls, curses, but he could not see, and something in his psyche told him that if he so much as groaned, he was a dead man.
He heard the Crawler’s guttural curses from the other boat as he worked to separate the two boats, casting off the line which Manley had tied to the Cross. Again, he heard his radio, hailing him by name now. “Ken, Ken… come in! Stallings? You out there?”
He heard the motorized lift on the Cross’s anchor as it began to mechanically tug the chain from the water.
