“I’ll go out the back window,” he told her. “I know that window well. You’ve helped me look out through it a lot over the past ten years.” He smiled, wondering if she was able to perceive his feelings if not his actual expression. “I’ve gotten real good at going out windows lately.”
“If you can get away from the house without anyone seeing you, you should be okay, Uncle Jake. Then you come and get me and we’ll sneak out of here and go to the police. “We’ll… we’ll have to tell them everything, Uncle Jake. About you and me, I mean, or they’ll never believe us.”
“I know, princess. I didn’t think we could keep our secret forever.”
“How are mom and dad?” Little girl thoughts and feelings now, the fear beginning to overwhelm the rational, brilliant teenager.
“Scared for you, like you’d expect,” he thought back at her. “They don’t know what’s happened to you or why, and I can hardly wake them up and tell them, can I?”
“No. Come and get me out of here, Uncle Jake, and we’ll go to the police and everything will be alright again. Even if we do have to give away our secret.”
“I can get out of the house without them seeing me,” he said as he buttoned his shirt, “but how am I going to get to you? Until they have me they’re going to be watching the bus station and the highway. I can’t take your parent’s car because they’d see me right away. And if they’re watching the roads I can’t hitch a ride. Princess, I can … I can feel where you are, but it’s much too far for me to walk.”
“I know, Uncle Jake. I’m right on the waterway. Go out behind the house and turn north. A couple of blocks up the seawall there’s a small floating dock where everybody in the neighborhood keeps their private boats. Most everybody we know has a rowboat or something to fish from. Except dad. He doesn’t like to go fishing for fun. Maybe you can find one you can start. You have to, Uncle Jake.”
“Don’t worry, little girl,” he thought. “I’ll find something. Been a lot of years since I jumped an ignition.”
“Maybe you won’t have to do that, Uncle Jake. This isn’t Los Angeles. People don’t lock things up around here the way they do in big cities.”
“I hope you’re right, princess. I’m ready now.” He stood there in the dark room, digesting her thoughts, orienting himself to something inexplicable yet terribly real. It wasn’t that difficult. He’d been orienting his mind to hers for years. She was … that way.
He stepped toward the window, the window he’d looked out of so many times while lying on his bed back in Riverside. It opened easily and he cautiously surveyed the narrow back yard and the seawall beyond. There was no one in sight. Of course, if there was someone out there who did this for a living and he didn’t want to be seen, it was unlikely Jake would be able to spot him.
Hope for the best rather than the worst, he told himself. A light breeze drifted in off the bay, cooling him. From down the hall came the light sleeping sounds of Wendy and Arriaga. He put a leg over the sill, then the other, and pushed off.
No one confronted him as he crept toward the seawall, using bushes and trees for cover. If I’d been in the army instead of the shipyards, I’d know how to do this, he thought. But there was no reason for them to bother watching the back of the house, no reason for them to expect Jake to slip out in the middle of the night.
He reached the seawall, had a last look at the house, then dropped gratefully over the rocks. So far his heart wasn’t giving him any trouble. Right now he had too much to think about to get dangerously tense. As long as he didn’t have to do any hundred-yard sprints, he should be okay. If not, his medicine rested in his breast pocket, ready to work its chemical magic on his damaged chest.
Using the seawall for cover he started northward along the yard-wide strip of sand and gravel. It hid him completely from any landward observers. Ten minutes later he reached the floating dock Amanda had described, a flat square built of old timbers and planks. Old automobile tires lined its sides and pleasure craft bobbed against it like piglets nursing a sow. The slap-slap of water against boat hulls was a relaxing sound in the night.
The first two boats he boarded were secured as tightly as any low rider you might find parked on an East Los Angeles street, but the third had keys lying on the floor in front of the pilot’s chair. He’d never driven a boat before. A careful inspection of the controls and instruments revealed nothing incomprehensible, however, and he was sure he could manage it.
Actually, he had a harder time figuring out how to untie the lines holding it to the dock than how to start the engine. He just hoped that the big house nearby wasn’t the home of the boat’s owner.
The engine rumbled to life when he turned the key in the ignition. It wasn’t much different from driving a car, though he bumped up against the dock twice before figuring out how to put the inboard into reverse. A moment more and he was crawling out into the bay. The waters were calm and the new sensation was a pleasant one. No hint of seasickness. Not yet, anyway. Experimentation with the controls and switches activated the running lights and a single bright forward-facing searchlight.
“That’s it, Uncle Jake.” Amanda had never left him completely. She’d simply thought silly nonsense thoughts while he’d worked his way to the boat. “I can feel where you are. It’s a lot easier than it was when you were in California.”
“I’m a lot closer, princess.”
“Start… start in a big circle. Head north and make a curve back southward.”
“Whatever you say, Mandy.” He turned the wheel, his confidence intensifying the longer he handled the boat. If the circumstances surrounding this nocturnal excursion weren’t so desperate, this could be fun.
“No, wait, that doesn’t feel right,” she whispered at him. “Turn north again.” Obediently he swung the inboard around, enjoying its responsiveness as it pivoted in the water. “That’s better, that’s better. You’re coming toward me, Uncle Jake. I know you are. I’ll be … I’ll be on your port… your left side.”
“I know which way port is,” he thought back at her. “Maybe I’ve never driven a boat before, but I sure built enough of them.”
She went back to the nonsense talk again, the rhymes, the monotonous reciting that served not to communicate but to guide him. Drugged, he thought. No wonder she hadn’t been able to get in touch with him these past days. The more he knew of the people who wanted to make a guinea pig out of him, the less compassion he could muster for them.
How strange to feel some genuine hate for a change! Maybe he’d been too nice all his life. He sighed. A little late to go back and change seventy years of decision-making. Now he wanted only one thing: to be rid of these people once and for all and to make sure they never bothered his grandniece or her family ever again.
He didn’t care that much about himself. If someone else wanted to run some tests on him, like the government, maybe he’d let them. But not these people, no, not after what they’d done to him and those he loved.
But he was sorry for Mandy. If they revealed their secret to the authorities, she was the one who would be subjected to a lifetime of testing. But like she’d said, there didn’t seem to be any other way.
He wanted to see some seagulls. Amanda had shown them to him many times. Sensible birds, they were fast asleep in unseen nests. Only an occasional crane flew between the bay and the moon, crying to the night. Excepting such isolated apparitions, it was quiet save for the engine’s steady hum and the splash of water against the boat’s flanks.
Once he had to steer to starboard to avoid a small cargo ship coming down the waterway toward him, but there was plenty of room for him to pass. He was thankful for the clear night and the brilliant moon. Steering the boat through darkness and fog would have been impossible even with Amanda’s aid.
The fuel gauge read full, so he wasn’t going to worry about running out of gas. Hopefully Amanda was right and she wasn’t too far away. There was no reason for her kidnappers to extend themselves that way because they’d have control of him as soon as they told him they had his grandniece. Evil, vicious people. His gnarled fingers tightened on the wheel.
“Don’t you worry, princess,” he thought into the night as he gazed over the bow. “Your Uncle Jake’s going to take you away to where you’ll be safe, and none of these people will ever bother you again. You just wait.” Off to his left, the lights of isolated farms imitated frozen fireflies.
“I’m waiting, Uncle Jake,” she thought back at him. “I know you’re coming for me, I know you’re coming closer all the time. I’m sorry for all the trouble.”
“Why should you be sorry? I’m the one who’s responsible. If it wasn’t for me you’d be home in your own bed now, warm and comfortable. Don’t worry though, princess. You’ll be sleeping there tomorrow night.” He concentrated grimly on her steady mental callings, tried to resonate in time with her own thoughts even as he scanned the western shore for the kind of building she’d described to him.
XVI
“Remember now,” Huddy was saying as he opened the door and started to slide out of the driver’s seat, “all we want to do is get him outside. He may be a little reluctant at first, especially if he recognizes me. I’ll get the parents to one side and you whisper to him that we have the grandniece. He should know about her by now. They’ve had all night to break the news to him. Once he hears that I’m sure he’ll come along quietly.”
“Don’t worry about me.” Somerset exited opposite him. This is the way it should have been handled from the start, she mused. We should have picked up the grandniece as soon as the old man left California. She could sympathize with Huddy’s reluctance to go to such extremes, though. The end justifies the means, however, and Pickett’s now fully revealed abilities certainly justified the abduction of one small-town girl.
He’d been wrong about some things, Benjamin had, but he’d sure been right about Pickett. He’d been right about something else, too: as far as this project was concerned, the sky wasn’t the limit. There were no limits. There was no telling how far Pickett might take them.
The morning came with clouds and humidity; not hurricane weather, but typical of the summer thunderstorms which haunted the South Texas coast. Fat, heavy drops spattered on the windshield of the rented car as it turned up the tree-lined street.
Huddy was first up the steps onto the porch. A stocky, muscular latino answered the door, gazing curiously at his visitors. Huddy was a little surprised. It was his first view of Arriaga Ramirez. From the report of the men who’d bungled the disabling of the van he’d expected a much bigger man. Looking down always made him feel superior.
“Hello,” said Ramirez politely. “What can I do for you?”
“We’re from the Bureau,” Huddy told him. If Ramirez pressed him for further identification they’d be forced to show their bogus FBI ID cards.
Ramirez did not press them and Huddy breathed a little easier. They were still guilty of a number of transgressions, but so far imitating an FBI officer wasn’t one of them. The world was full of bureaus.
The fisherman frowned as he stepped aside to admit them, looking past both toward the car parked at the curb. “Where’s Roeland? The agent who was here yesterday?”
“He’ll be along later,” said Huddy reassuringly. “We’re from a different section.”
That satisfied Ramirez. If these people were not from the Bureau (and where else could they be from?), then how could they know the name of the agent who’d taken the deposition the other day?
“Have you found out anything about my daughter yet?”
“Not yet, sir,” said Somerset. “We’re working on it as hard as we can.” She complimented him on the house as they went into the living room. Pitiful little shack, she thought.
Wendy Ramirez emerged from the kitchen. She wore an apron which wasn’t properly tied. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying.
