Wild Card

“What you did to him tells me everything I need to know,” he said.

Eckers shrugged.

“Does it?” he said. “The poor fellow was enjoying himself when he slipped and took a nasty fall. What I’d call a piece of bad luck, or couldn’t you see?”

Nimec nodded toward the other man, who was now busy loosening the ropes that secured the racer to the pontoon boat’s gunwale, his own portable weapon in a sling harness at his side.

“I saw your friend hit him with whatever was in his hand,” he said. “Go ahead and call that a fall, or anything you want.”

“You know what you know, is that it?”

Nimec didn’t answer.

Eckers looked at him and smiled coldly.

“It’s your knowing too much that changed your situation,” he said. “Changed it in a sudden, drastic way. Turning you from an invited guest to an interloper.”

“I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about,” Nimec said.

“Nothing to what I’m saying, is that it?” Eckers motioned toward Annie with the Steyr. “And you? Also without any ideas about why we’re all here? Or do you mean to keep them to yourself like your husband?”

She just stared at him in silence, as if simply trying to process what was going on. Eckers’s companion, meanwhile, had finished unfastening the lines between the boats and come around to stand slightly off to one side of Nimec.

“Whatever I saw, or you think I saw, I didn’t tell my wife.”

Eckers shrugged a third time.

“Maybe, or maybe not,” he said. “Sadly, I won’t leave maybes swirling around.”

Nimec felt his stomach tighten.

“Whatever you intend to do out here, you’re out of your mind to think you’ll get away with it.”

“Because?”

“Because of who I work for,” Nimec said. “Because they won’t let up on you or the people you work for.”

Eckers continued to look at him, his weapon steady in his grip.

“Accidental deaths happen,” he said. “Your employers can have suspicions. They can search, and investigate, and they can be left with their nagging doubts. But in the end, if the evidence still points to an accident, none of that will matter.”

Nimec was silent. He hadn’t wanted to use words like death or kill or murder, had hoped to protect Annie from hearing them. But while he’d done a lousy job of protecting her from anything so far, that might be about to change.

If the evidence still points to an accident, he thought.

But how could it, if both he and Annie had bullet holes in them?

He stood watching as Eckers glanced over at the racing boat.

“Take it out to the ledge,” he said to the two men inside it. “Kettering and I will join you shortly.”

The man at the wheel nodded, and a moment later the racer’s powerful engines roared to life. Then it turned in the water and sped off westward toward the buoys, churning up a long, white wake of foam.

“We’re almost finished now,” Eckers said, looking back at Nimec. “This may give you small comfort, but I’m a professional and will be”—he hesitated a beat—“as efficient as possible.”

Nimec had kept his eyes locked on Eckers’s, peripherally aware of the man he’d called Kettering sidling closer. How did they intend to do it? He needed to buy some time. Seconds, minutes, whatever he could.

“Except your plan won’t work,” he said, thinking hard. “You figure you’ll ride this boat out to the ledge, or outcrop, or whatever it is. Wait there till the tide goes down, make it look like it crashed and took on water, then head away with your friends. Could be you’ve even got a Mayday logged somewhere so you’re covered on that end.” Nimec paused a second, took a deep breath, wishing again that he could have spared Annie from what he needed to say. “But we won’t stand around waiting for you to drive us into the rocks,” he resumed, then. “Not if we’re going to die anyway. We’ll try to stop you and you’ll have to use that gun of yours to stop us. And the people who come out searching won’t stop till they find our bodies. You know that. You need them to find us for this to seem real. And they see bullet holes, there goes your accident.”

Eckers’s cold smile reappeared, but Nimec believed he saw something in his eyes that conflicted with it.

“Gamma hydrooxybutyrate,” he said. “Ever hear of it?”

Nimec looked at him. He hadn’t, but he wasn’t giving that away.

“It’s a drug classified as a sedative and anesthetic,” Eckers said. “Short form nomenclature, GHB. Common street names ‘soap,’ ‘scoop,’ ‘grievous bodily harm,’ ‘easy lay’… although by now the kids who use it for date rape have probably replaced them with a dozen others, our youth culture always being in a hurry to move on.”

Nimec watched him silently. Watched his eyes. And at the same time remained watchful of Kettering.

“As far as you’re concerned, the important things to understand about GHB are that it’s odorless, tasteless, and instantaneously induces rapid sleep or coma at elevated doses. And it becomes undetectable soon afterward,” Eckers said. “In fact, it’s synthesized from a chemical that’s normally manufactured in our brains… that’s present in every one of us… and that increases its concentration in a human body as death occurs. Which makes it a forensic pathologist’s nightmare, and a defense attorney’s dream. Especially in the form my own people have developed.”

Silence. Nimec had realized he was almost out of time, his thoughts racing along as he listened.

“Your drug doesn’t change anything,” he said. “You use it on one of us, you think the other’s going to stand and watch? Knowing you can’t chance shooting that damned gun of yours? Or you want to convince me you’ve got designer bullets that evaporate and close their own wounds?”

Eckers looked at him. Again something turned in his eyes. And again Kettering slipped closer to Nimec, easing slightly behind him, almost breathing down his neck.

And then Eckers extended the Steyr further in front of him.

“I don’t need both of your bodies to be found,” he said. “There’s Blake, whose skull will have been pounded by the ocean rocks. And then there’s one or the other of you that will be dredged up, it makes no difference whom. Two floaters, a third body lost to the sea, and that will be that.”

No, Nimec thought. No, it wouldn’t. Because the man holding him at gunpoint was professional, and smart enough to figure he’d probably have gotten in touch with somebody at UpLink about his sightings at the harbor, and that UpLink’s investigators would be more than suspicious if he was the one who disappeared. That happened, they would know without question what took place out here. They would know, and wouldn’t quit till they found a way to prove it.

Which exposed the gunman’s bluff. He needed Nimec. Needed his body intact to pull off his scheme.

Leaving Annie — and Annie alone — immediately vulnerable to the gun.

Nimec did not wait so much as another heartbeat to make his move. Glancing quickly around, he spun in a half circle and snatched hold of Kettering’s wrist with his right hand, wrenching it up and backward as he jammed his left shoulder against Kettering’s chest, driving into him with all the momentum he could summon. Kettering grunted and began to stumble backward, but Nimec held on to his wrist, seeing the hank of cloth bunched in his gloved hand, saturated with the goddamn sleep drug he’d been about to smother him with. Nimec simultaneously jerked the hand up again and twisted it over and around, slapping it over Kettering’s face, holding it there over his nose and mouth.

“Stop or I’ll kill the bitch!” Eckers yelled, waving his Steyr as he moved forward in a kind of charge. “You hear me, I said sto—”

“Down, Annie!” Nimec said, shouting over him. And she did, hurling herself flat to the deck as he whipped Kettering around in front of him, pushing his suddenly limp body between Eckers and himself while reaching for the stock of the submachine gun against Kettering’s side, tearing it from its harness, and getting his finger around the trigger to squeeze off a two-round burst.

His chest soaked with blood, Eckers wobbled on his feet a moment, looking straight at Nimec as Kettering sagged and then fully collapsed between them. Then his eyes rolled up in his sockets so that only their whites were