'Uhhh,' he grunted, favoring the foot; the elbow to the stomach was like hitting rubber-coated concrete. Limping and the pain of it put a fury in him and she could feel it, palpable, as if it were an aura. He grabbed her neck and she felt as if he might snap it.
Then he wrenched her arm and the pain shot up her shoulder, exploding in her head.
'You bitch,' he said in a whispered rage, still favoring the foot she had wounded.
She was vaguely aware that Frick's boat was roaring away from the dock.
He let up. 'Say anything and I'll kill you.' She saw the flashing lights of a sheriff's boat and wondered how long they'd been there. Then it took off after Frick's boat.
Immediately he went back to twisting her arm.
'Okay. Okay,' she muttered in response to the pain. She relaxed, unable to take the torque on her arm. 'I'll go.'
'Bitch,' he muttered, still twisting her arm. 'Tell me where Ben Anderson is or I'll break it off before we even get to Frick.'
'I don't know. I don't know. I haven't talked to him.'
'Have you talked to anyone?'
'Yes. They said they would meet me at my house,' she lied. 'And then you people came.'
'Lying bitch. Your bags were packed.'
'I thought they would take me away to Ben. I swear I did. But I saw Ben's boat. In the bay here. If you'll let go of my arm, I'll tell you where.'
He let the pressure off.
'Who said they'd take you to Ben?'
'I don't know. A voice.'
Instinctively she had known that the man with the walrus mustache was way over the line and he was convincing her that brutality was a viable option as a strategy to break her down and get her talking. And that confirmed that they would murder her when they were finished, and that had made her desperate.
Now they were on the radio and it was apparent that they were going to take her to Friday Harbor and Frick.
She couldn't let that happen.
Walrus Face had a layer of fat over most of him, especially in the belly, and he was round in the face with a bull neck. She guessed he was in his forties, had led a worthless life, and didn't know where he was going or just what he wanted, except enough ale and enough women. Worst of all, he seemed to have a nasty, cunning sense of what she loathed and what she feared.
The thin man had odd angles about his face. Things seemed as if they had been knocked askew: His Adam's apple stood out and his nose was long and a bit crooked. His hair was dark and starting to gray. She suspected that long ago someone had taught him right from wrong, but he was willing to forget it for enough cash. There was a maddening resignation about him that obviously allowed him to partake in things with which he had no agreement.
Now 'Thin Man' held her while Walrus Face tried to get some kind of a charley horse out of his foot.
'Where is the boat?' Walrus Face muttered, sounding like he was ready for another round of brutality once he took care of the foot.
'You want to go to it?'
'Whatever the hell gave you that idea?' Walrus Face said.
'No, go ahead, tell us where it is,' Thin Man asked her. He had held on to her by the arms, but didn't put his hands on her body. It was Walrus Face who had the obvious propensity for degrading women.
'Driving down the road, I believe I saw Ben's boat near one of the docks,' she said.
'You wouldn't be bullshitting us now, would you?' Walrus Face said.
'No, I wouldn't. It's a twenty-seven-foot boat. A Sea Ray with an open bow. There aren't many around here.'
Sarah hoped that Ben's boat had been left there many hours earlier and that Ben had been sending a different boat to fetch her.
They got on the radio and spoke with Frick a second time and received the go-ahead to check out Ben's boat.
'So you gonna be cooperative with the authorities?' Walrus Face asked as Thin Man untied the boat.
'You're thugs,' she said. 'Not the law.'
Walrus Face stared at her with beady eyes and ran his hand over his mustache.
Thin Man jumped back in the boat and started the motors.
'You wouldn't dare turn me over to a real deputy,' she said.
'No, ma'am, we wouldn't.'
His forthright answer frightened her more than anything else.
CHAPTER 22
Haley could barely keep the boat on a course as it skipped through the blackness. To the eye, it was like hurtling through an abyss; to the stomach, it was a pounding free-for-all.
There was no anticipating the jarring. The waves were a blur in the spotlight and the mind was taxed to the max trying to control the foot throttle. Weary, she had backed off to seventy again in order to maintain some semblance of control and to minimize going airborne.
When she was almost across the San Juan Channel, near to Shaw Island, she glanced back and saw one set of deputies just exiting the Fisherman's Bay. The other sheriff's boat was in the middle of San Juan Channel coming in her direction. Using the GPS and the radar, she headed right for Point Gregory on Shaw Island. Behind the point was Parks Bay, rimmed in rock to the sides with a nice flat beach at the bottom of the boot.
On sunny days the rock and the trees surrounding the sheltered bay relaxed her mind. It was away from the busyness of Friday Harbor and it was nice to lunch at anchor.
Tonight she intended to hide in it and to get near enough the rocks that, again, her pursuers couldn't discount the fact that passengers may have landed on the island. The other more important factor was that Sam might not yet be through in Sanker and she was a major distraction for Frick.
Suddenly there was a loud bang and a jolt, and a split second later, she knew she had hit a small piece of wood. The engines are still running. No vibration. RPM's good. Rudder indicator okay. Trim tabs fine. If she'd hit a prop, the damage wasn't bad; the drive units were still straight. No sooner had she assimilated that information than she had covered another half-mile.
She slowed to about fifty, and flashed by Point Gregory less than two hundred yards off the rocks. Her chart plotter indicated that the water was only about thirty feet deep. The shore was but a shadow in the night. After she dropped the power a bit more, she lay the boat over in a turn so tight it threw her into the side of the seat. She sped around the point and into the bay, then went in close behind the point and killed the power. At idle the engines made a throaty rumble. She waited-her gut in a knot. The thought of guns gripped her. She was shaking. This time she didn't want to pass close enough for the sheriffs to shoot.
After waiting for just a couple minutes, she stomped the pedal and the engines came to life. Then she heard a sound that was a cross between a lip smack and a quiet tap on a bass drum. She glanced at the temperature and saw that the starboard engine was overheating. Kelp leaves or sea grass on the cold water intake. She prayed that it hadn't gone into the sea strainer. She watched in horror as the temperature climbed toward 220 degrees. Once she was back out in the channel, she headed toward Friday Harbor. As she applied power, the wind blurred her eyes; the skin on her face was smoothed back and she became engulfed in the feel of an unremitting hurricane. One sheriff's boat was coming at her, the other was in the distance moving away from Fisherman's Bay at Lopez. In the lee of Shaw Island the water was relatively calm. Going over one hundred miles an hour, she came to port twenty degrees with a barely perceptible nudge of the wheel and headed right at her adversaries.
They were more worried about living than she was. They kept coming, their closing speed over 150 miles per hour now, less than a few seconds to collision.
