“ 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. He heard a voice from deep within himself, calling him a coward, telling him that he should someway, somehow find his sight, find his feet, find his lost weapon and blow this freak’s head off. He also heard a voice of reason, a child’s voice, his child’s voice telling him to survive this night.
Another voice, a cold, clinical voice, told him that a powerful spear had creased his temple, turning the world into inky blackness. If he got to his feet, even if he could locate his weapon, he’d stumble, feel for a handhold and clumsily alert the killer to the fact that a third spear needed to be put into Ken Stallings. His leg had now gone completely numb. His mind raced for a way to beat this, a way to counter this, a way to find vengeance before he blacked out. His last thought was a running question: What about Jenny, the kids, tomorrow? Will I die here like this, never see them again, never open my eyes again, never feel again, never live to stop this bastard who’s killed me and Manley? Never… ever… ev… er…
The dispatcher’s voice from Stallings’s radio wafted across the water as the Tau Cross, with Warren Tauman aboard, made its way out into the Gulf and into the stormy sea.
NINETEEN
The blank page; difficult mirror, gives back only what you were.
Other FMP officers, Coast Guard and county marine cops arrived at the quadrants called in by the 7-11 Team, and they were at first confused by the onslaught of pea soup that they had motored into, a wall of rain and darkness. Somewhere in here their comrades were in trouble, unable to respond to repeated radio calls. Fear for Manley and Stallings ran high. The officers now searching for them were both friends and admirers of the two men.
Patty Lawrence was the first to spot the listless, bobbing little Boston Whaler, all instincts telling her there was something terribly wrong. She had been listening in when Stallings and Manley had made their last radio call to dispatch, advising of their position and intent. She and partner Bill Mullins hadn’t hesitated, but had raced toward the unfolding incident just off Madeira, hoping to be first backup, and then when dispatch lost contact, she’d become terribly worried. It wasn’t like Stallings to leave his radio for so long a time.
She advised Bob Fisher at dispatch to continue hailing the Delta-4, the 7-11 club, as loudly as he could, and that she and her partner would use his hail as a buoy, since a blinding fog had overrun the waters off Madeira.
“ How bad is the fog?” Fisher at dispatch wanted to know.
“ Like a goddamn blanket of misdirection, like a star nebula.”
“ Star what?” asked Fisher from his safe haven ashore. “Like in those Star Trek movies when the ship goes into a cloud of gases created by an ancient exploding star, so you don’t know what’s up, what’s down, what’s right or left.”