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right back into the brain. I squatted there beside him in the morning light,
sweaty and cold, and held my fingers on his wrist, and felt his heart go
slower and slower and softer and softer and then it stopped all the way and he
shivered sort of, and after a while I figured out it would seem likely he had
enough troubles to want to kill himself, and figured out how to make it look
like he did and at the same time cover up the places I'd tunked him. You see,
I knew if I had to tell what happened, I'd get run out of police work for
good, maybe, and it's the only way I feel good, with the uniform and people
listening when you tell them something."
"But Arlene Denn saw you."
He shook his head slowly. "All those weird kids. I thought I was in the clear
on Bannon. Then she said she watched. I stood out there in the night trying to
think of some way I could kill all of them. Like tunk them all on the head and
an overdose or something. Or a fire. But I was on the dispatch book because
they gave me the complaint. I had those pictures, and I had that stuff I took
off them. She didn't want trouble. I could give her a lot. So when she was off
her high and made sense, I asked about maybe if Mrs. Bannon was playing
around, or if there was some friend she could say she saw instead of me. So...
"
There was a stir beyond the yellow couch, a grunting sigh. Freddy got up
quickly and went to Janine. When he bent down over her, he was out of sight. I
heard the tone of his gentle voice but not the words. It sounded as if a lover
were murmuring to his beloved, comforting her fears. I heard the tiny thud
once more.
When he came back and sat as before, I said, "That isn't going to do her any
good, Deputy."
"Or no harm, Mr. McGee. I know just where and how hard. It just kind of puts a
jolt onto the brain, with hardly even a headache afterward. I'll be thinking
on what I should do so I can get some sleep without worrying about either one
of you. You know, if you'd only been right here on this boat when Shawana
County made the request to have you picked up and held, everything would have
been all smoothed over."
"Don't count on it. No matter how good you make it look, Freddy, the people I
was with at the time you killed Tush would have come forward and cleared me
and left you with a lot of explaining."
"By then there would have been no Arlie to change her story. It maybe would be
a big mystery, but there'd be no way to get me mixed up in it."
"So Tush was an accident, and the woman with the rake in her neck was an
accident, but Arlie Denn was going to be on purpose."
"You get pushed so far there's only maybe one little narrow way out of the
corner. I better get you two..."
I awakened lame and sore, with no knowledge of time or place. Daylight came
from overhead, around the edges of a hatch cover that did not fit as well as
it should. I had what I thought was a hangover headache, and when I realized
that I was in the forward bilge area of the Flush, curled close to the anchor
line well, the old frame members of the hull biting into my side, I thought
that only a sorry drunk would pick that as a place to sleep. But when I tried
to bring my right hand up and rub my face, it stopped with a jolting clink of
chain. I turned my head and saw that my right wrist was handcuffed to one of
the forward braces made of two-inch galvanized pipe, braces I had installed
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long ago to give her more forward rigidity in rough water. And I wasn't going
to yank one of those loose, not without a chain hoist and a power winch.
I fingered my skull with my left hand and found a tender area above the right
ear and a little behind it. I could not remember being "tunked," or where the
conversation had stopped. My thinking gear was sluggish. It took me a long
time to realize that my houseboat could not be moored at Bahia Mar. The motion
was wrong. She was at rest, bow into a gentle swell, lifting and falling.
Sometimes she would get out of phase with the swell and I could feel the soft
tug of the anchor line snubbing the soft of the bow.
I sat up and shifted and found a better place to stretch out, where no white
oak ribs dug into me. I kept telling myself that Janine was perfectly all
right. There wasn't a thing in my pockets of any earthly use to me. And there
was nothing I could reach. I managed to doze off a few times. The motion was
restful. At eleven fifteen by my watch I awoke and heard the latch on the
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