An Incident At Bloodtide

by accident, or shooting me, or both.

'Just take it easy, Sacra,' I said very quietly. 'Calm down, and we'll talk about what it is you want.'

Suddenly, in a sea change of emotion that both astounded and terrified me, his features wrinkled up, and he burst into tears. 'You thought this was between you and me?' he sobbed. 'You brought my family into this! You went to see my mom and dad, and you talked about me behind my back. You had no right to do that! You made me lose my job! Now I'm supposed to go to Europe and never come back, or I'll lose my inheritance. I don't even know anybody in Europe. Now even my mom doesn't want to see me anymore, and it's all because of you. It isn't fair!'

So that was that, I thought with a decidedly sinking feeling. Chick Carver aka Sacra Silver had skidded right around the bend. Garth had been absolutely right in insisting that I not invite the police to the party; this man was now more than ready to start doing his own killing, at the slightest provocation, and his first victim was only a footstep, or a twitch of his trigger finger, away.

'Where's the girl, Sacra?' I asked softly.

'Vicky's safe.'

'She's not safe,' April interjected in a low, dignified tone laced with anger and defiance. 'She's unconscious in the trunk of this man's car. He made her drink some milk on the way down here, and it must have been drugged. She could suffocate in there. At the very least, she's going to be terrified out of her mind when she wakes up and finds herself locked up in a small, dark space.'

'We're not going to be here that much longer,' Carver said. He had stopped blubbering, and had undergone another mercurial shift in mood, this time to gloating.

'Sacra got April's name and address out of my address book when he was here before,' Mary said in a curiously mild, wooden tone that made me wonder if she might not also be drugged. I looked over to where she was sitting behind the white piano, and found her staring off into space at a spot somewhere above my head. 'Vicky was here then, and I told Sacra about her situation.'

I sighed. 'What do you want with Vicky and April, Sacra? They have nothing to do with any of this.'

'You stuck your nose into that girl's family business too, didn't you, you little shit? After Mary told me about Vicky, I did some reading in the library. I know all about what happened. That's why I brought Vicky here, along with the woman who's been helping you to turn the girl against her parents. If I knew where your parents lived, Frederickson, they'd be here too. I'm going to teach you a lesson you'll never forget about sticking your nose into other people's private, family business and involving their parents. Now let's see how you like it!'

'You've already taught me a lesson I'll never forget, Sacra. And if I hadn't interfered in Vicky's family business, as you put it, she'd be dead. What do you plan to do with her?'

'She can't go back to her parents; thanks to you, they're both in the loony bin, and probably will be for the rest of their lives. So I'm going to be her father, and Mary will be her mother. If I have to go away, I'm not going to be alone. I'm tired of being alone, with nobody to love me. It's time I started my own family anyway.'

There was no telling precisely what was going on in Chick Carver's decidedly deranged mind at the moment, the same as there was no telling what he was going to do from moment to moment, but the prospect of at least two lives being saved was infinitely better than a zero score, and so there was no way I was going to pose the unasked question.

Mary answered it anyway, speaking in the same wooden tone. 'I've agreed to go with him, Mongo. Sacra's been right all along. He's the only man who's ever really understood me, and the only man I've ever really loved. Now that I realize that, I don't want to die.'

Looking at Mary's face, listening to her voice, I didn't believe her at all-except, naturally, for the part about not wanting to die. I didn't think Garth believed her either, and I was surprised Chick Carver did. But the fact that the man had apparently bought her story could only be good news, of a sort; her ploy, if that's what it was, had at least gained her freedom of movement, even if at the moment I couldn't see what good it was going to do. She couldn't very well attack Carver with her piano. If I could get close enough to her to whisper, I'd tell her about the gun on the bookshelf outside the door, but I doubted whether Carver was going to let me do too much moving around. I had to find a way to stall and look for some kind of opening before killing time began, and the only weapon I had close at hand, in a manner of speaking, was my mouth. Sooner or later, Carver was going to tire of whatever game he was playing, and I had to make my move before then.

'Sacra,' I said evenly, 'take your family's money and split. If you kill us, the police are going to be after you no matter what country you try to hide out in. Considering the fact that you've already killed one man, some people would say that you're getting off easy.'

'I didn't kill anybody!'

'You caused a man to be killed; you ordered his death. It's the same thing.'

'Sacra,' Mary said in a more animated tone, one that had become companionable and soothing, 'tell Mongo what happened the same way you told us before. Explain why what's been done to you is so unfair.'

Carver turned his head slightly to look at Mary, but the barrel of his pistol didn't move away from its dead aim on my chest. Mary gave him a reassuring smile, and he looked back at me.

'The whole business of using empty tankers to haul water to the Middle East was my idea,' he said in a whiny voice that was laced with both rage and self-pity. 'I put it in the office suggestion box. They loved it! The chairman himself took me to dinner to tell me what a wonderful idea it was. I got a five-thousand-dollar bonus, and they told Wellington to put me in complete charge of making sure that the plan was carried out.'

'Do you know why they did that, Sacra?' I asked quietly, my gaze fastened on his trigger finger.

'To make me the fall guy if something went wrong!'

'Good thinking, Sacra. You'd be the fall guy if things went wrong-if charges started to go up the ladder. So far, that hasn't happened; everybody seems to have bought the story about the rogue captains. But things could change. That's another reason why you should leave now without doing something very stupid that's sure to draw attention to you, and make people start asking questions again.'

I thought it was pretty good advice, but Chick Carver wasn't listening to anything but the twisted, emotionally stunted voices in his own head. He said, 'Everything would have been fine if that son-of-a-bitch Blaine hadn't started messing around! He deserved to die! The company was making millions of dollars in extra profits on that water. Nobody else cared! Kuwait needed the water after all the fires, the company was happy to provide it for them, and I know I was due for a big promotion. And then it was all threatened because some jerk from some jerkwater river town was ready to make trouble just because the ships were dribbling a little oil in his precious river! What kind of sense does that make?!'

'It didn't make sense to you, so you gave the order to kill him. Tom Blaine was taking samples from all the ships, but you waited until he got to that particular tanker, because you knew you could bully its sorry liquor bottle of a captain into doing what he did. In the eyes of the law, that makes you equally guilty. Like I said, you should quit while you're ahead.'

'He got what was coming to him, the same as you're going to get what's coming to you! Nobody gave a thought to that man's death until you and your brother started nosing around. And then you turned my parents against me. Now I don't have anything, and you're going to pay for what you did!'

Chick Carver was getting himself really worked up. Killing time was getting nearer, but I didn't have the slightest idea what to do to stop it. With my quickness, I was pretty certain I could dart to one side and start rolling. The chances were good that he'd miss me with his first shot, and by the time he tracked me and got off another I would have pulled the Seecamp from my ankle holster and put a bullet in his head. But Garth would die. I had to wait, keep hoping that something would happen that would give me at least a slim chance of saving my brother's life, along with April's and my own.

'You've already got me in your sights, Sacra,' I said, suppressing a sigh. 'You're taking Mary and Vicky with you. Why threaten April and Garth? What more do you want?'

'I want to hear you say you're sorry for turning my parents against me, and I want to hear you beg for your life!'

'Okay. I'm sorry I turned your parents against you, and I'm begging you for my life. Can we go now?'