Dead Reckoning. Sandra K. Moore

      She gripped the wrench tighter. Outside. She needed to get outside. The wheeze moved from the hallway toward the elbow of the counter’s L. He’d be an arm’s length from either the salon or the hallway. She remembered Falks’s long, spindly, angular arms. Come into my parlor.

      The wheeze permeated the air like a metronome: Hiiiss, ruuush. Hiiiss, ruuush.

      Options. Right. A galley door led forward into the pilothouse. But the door, like so many on the yacht, would creak when opened and Falks would know instantly what she was doing. She’d never have a chance. Nor was she fast enough to reach the office and grab her cell.

      She had another option.

      She could attack.

      Chris breathed silently through her mouth while she laid the wrench on the linoleum next to her right foot. She felt behind her for the cabinet door she wanted, the one with the little plaque on it.

      Hiiiss, ruuush.

      Falks started moving again, inching along the L toward the little passage between the galley and the salon. A shaft of boatyard light speared the passage.

      The plaque’s sharp edge pricked her fingertips. She opened the cabinet door and reached inside.

      Hiiiss, ruuush.

      Falks’s fingers curled around the cabinet’s sides. Chris’s own trembling fingers found the smooth, cold cylinder she was searching for. Falks eased into the light—an ear, a stretch of pale skin, one wide, pale eye.

      “I see you,” he whispered.

      Calm wrapped itself around Chris like a cloak, as it always did the moment before an irrevocable action: a softball arcing toward the plate and her waiting bat, the red-circled target coming into focus just before she squeezed the trigger, pen poised above paper as she prepared to sign her resignation. It was the moment anything was possible.

      Falks was a man. Only a man.

      Chris smiled. “Come and get me.” She drew in a deep breath and held it.

      He leaped. She wrenched the cylinder from its holding clips and yanked out the safety pin. By his second step, she gripped the mini fire extinguisher’s handle, and by his third—he fell toward her like an avalanche—she shot a hard stream of chemical agent into his wide and glaring eyes, then skittered away, out of reach.

      Falks shrieked, jerked away. “Shit!” he shouted, scrubbing his face, tearing at the smoky dust. “You bitch!” He collapsed back against the counter, reeling. Chris let out her breath, extinguisher raised and ready to strike. He fell backward into the salon. His curses stuck in his throat, then the coughing started as white smoke drifted around his head like a veil.

      Chris bolted into the office, snagged her cell. Fire extinguisher in one hand, she punched 911 with the other. Falks’s coughs rasped, fading.

      “Come on!” she shouted at the phone. Why weren’t they picking up? She looked at the phone’s LED screen. Because she’d dialed 991.

      A thud and the crash of shattering glass, then a scrabbling on the aft deck.

      The bastard was getting away.

      Chris skirted the dying edge of chemical smoke as she ran from the office into the salon. She stopped short at the aft deck doorway that glittered with broken shards.

      Falks’s long, white hand shone like that of a picked-clean corpse before it slipped from the deck railing and disappeared.

      Chris studied Smitty’s lean back from her sofa vantage point. He stood in front of the salon door’s remains, hands stuffed in his shorts pockets, his shoulders hunched as if against a cold wind. Or blame.

      “I should have been here,” he said to the spray of glass at his feet.

      The breeze kicked up by the box fans blowing from the galley ruffled his shirt sleeves. Outside, the predawn darkness carried a hint of dew. The cops had long since taken down their notes, given their assurances they’d find Falks and gone. They’d stayed almost as long as the residual chemical smoke, which had left a film of mica dust over the floor where Falks had jumped Chris.

      “Are you sure it was Falks?” Antonio Garza asked. He leaned from his chair to scribble on his ever-present yellow legal pad.

      Chris wrapped her fingers more tightly around her coffee cup and drew her legs onto the sofa. “I’m positive. No doubt.”

      “I’m sorry, Chris,” Smitty said for the fourth time since he’d arrived.

      Garza sighed. “It’s not your fault. It’s mine. Had I picked up my messages in time—”

      “There’s plenty of blame to go around,” Chris remarked. “Galveston didn’t send a patrol car, you didn’t pick up your messages, Smitty isn’t clairvoyant, and I should have gotten a motel room once I got the impression Falks was stalking me. That’s not the point.” She set her cup on the table, finally able to trust her hands not to shake. “The point is I don’t know what Falks is doing.”

      “I’ve got a call in to McLellan,” Garza told Smitty’s back. “He’s running Falks’s name to see if it comes up connected to Scintella.”

      “You think Falks is stalking me because of Natalie?”

      “The timing’s right,” Smitty said without turning.

      “But he tried to run me down before I even found out what was going on with her,” Chris pointed out.

      Garza’s head shake looked tired, resigned. “It’s still possible. Scare tactic. Scintella knows Natalie would call you for help if she needed it. Maybe he was trying to make sure you wouldn’t pick up the phone.”

      “Yeah, but Falks missed that chance. Why is he stalking me on the ferry and then breaking into my boat? Why didn’t he just finish the job when he had the chance?”

      Smitty’s shoulders stiffened. They sloped down from his linebacker neck, Chris noticed, as if worn down by a yoke of suffering. “Change of plans. Scintella found out Natalie called you. That’s why Falks called your cell. To let you know he knows.”

      “Shit.” Chris scrubbed her hands over her face. “Then she’s in even more danger.”

      “Maybe, maybe not,” Smitty said to the window. “From your description, Falks was searching for something. You must have something he wants.”

      Chris gave a short laugh in spite of herself. “You’ve seen this boat and what I drive. I don’t have anything of value.”

      “Has Natalie sent you anything?” Smitty asked. “A box, a letter?”

      “Nothing lately.” Nothing that had arrived yet, anyway. She straightened. “I’m supposed to get a package of clothes from her in a few days.”

      “Clothes?”

      Chris shrugged. “She likes giving me designer clothes.”

      Smitty grunted. “Expensive hobby.”

      “She can afford it.” Chris irritably swept her feet from the sofa to the floor and grabbed her coffee cup. Damn shakes were back. And she had work to do. But she still had questions. “So do you think Jerome’s ticked off about an Italian dress?”

      “Maybe she’s sending you something valuable—like a document. Something incriminating.” Garza glanced at Smitty. “You know the way Scintella works. Could he have left a paper trail and his wife got hold of something?”

      “Maybe,” Smitty conceded. “He’s not the brightest bulb in the candelabra.”

      “Natalie could have dug something up to use against him,” Chris mused. “She’s scared, but she understands power.” She had, after all, wrapped their grandfather around her little finger.

      Garza grunted. “Scintella’s not the kind of man you want to manipulate.”