“Lori….” he said again.
“LORI,” he said, his own voice waking him.
It took Jim a few moments to reassert his hold on reality. They were all still safe in the rowboat, the gray Pacific around them glittering under the cold moonlight. He noticed at once that Carrie had changed position in sleep, her right hand and lower arm now dangling in the water.
And a few yards away, moving toward them with an inexorable, unstoppable power, was the triangular fin and glistening flank of a huge shark.
Chapter Thirteen
Nanci Simms returned to the others, emerging from the feeble moonlight, holding the Heckler & Koch, the Port Royale machine pistol slung across her shoulders.
“Jesus, you made me jump,” exclaimed Henderson McGill. “Never heard you coming.”
She smiled at him. “You wouldn’t, Mac.”
The others had been dozing in sleeping bags, but all of them, except for Sukie and Jocelyn, came out to hear what the woman had to report.
“Was it Hilton?” asked Jeff Thomas.
“Most likely.” She nodded. “They outed three of the good people of Eureka and wounded another. From the sound of the shooting, it was Jim’s Ruger that did the business. Must say I’m impressed with his marksmanship. I overheard the talk, and it seems he killed the three guards on the boats with his first three shots.”
“How do you know it was Jim?”
She brushed back a stray strand of hair from her eyes. “Bulky, middle-aged man. Woman with blond hair. Young girl. And a teenager, who seemed a mite clumsy.”
Mac nodded. “Sounds like Jim and Carrie, for sure. So they got away north in the boat, did they? You figure why they did that, Nanci? Run out of fuel, maybe?”
“I don’t know. Surely there’s gas in a town like this, unless they tried for it and failed. Don’t know. I wonder whether these quakes have blotted out the highways north. Could even be the sea’s come in.”
“How the fuck do we find out?” Jeff was almost in tears. “We got so close to being with them again.”
“We don’t find out, Jefferson,” said Nanci. “I do. I’m going in to ask some questions. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. I want everyone ready to move when I come back.”
“Move where?” asked Jeanne McGill.
“Jim Hilton reckoned the best bet was a boat…he could be right. I’ll find out. Scout the harbor. They won’t look for another raid in the same night.”
As quickly and silently as she’d appeared, the woman vanished again.
SHE WAS RIGHT.
The shooting and the theft of one of the twelve-foot rowboats had left the settlement in a state of shock.
There was a movement among some of the younger men for sending out one of their bigger sailing vessels after the killers, but caution won out.
With three corpses to be readied for burial on the morrow, and wounds to be tended, nobody gave a lot of thought to protecting the remaining vessels. As a token gesture, one of the teenage boys, Nathan Gambon, was ordered out.
He was given a 9 mm Llama Omni automatic—one of the best handguns in the whole township—to overcome his moaning about being given the shitty chore.
“They are gone,” he complained. “Won’t come back, will they? No fuckin’ point.”
But his father cuffed him so hard around the side of the head that his ear started to bleed.
Now Nathan was sitting on the end of the jetty, practicing drawing and cocking the gun, the checkered plastic grips firm in his hand. The moon was sinking behind a bank of thicker cloud, and the ocean was dark as pitch.
One of the church clocks was still kept wound, and he was able to keep track of the passing time by the chiming bell. His father had promised that someone would come out to relieve him on watch. But his father had been intending to bury a cask of home brew with some friends, and Nathan wasn’t too optimistic about his ability to recall the promise.
The night had become bitingly cold, and the lad turned up the collar of his borrowed parka, huddling down into the warm, quilted material.