The Never Game. Jeffery Deaver

shock and pain of the initial plunge had worn off, but he was shivering hard.

      Ashton Shaw had taught his children how to prepare for cold-water survival—dry suit, number one. Wet suit, second choice. Two caps—heat loss is greatest through the skull, even with hair as thick as Shaw’s blond locks. Ignore extremities; you don’t lose heat through fingers or toes. Without protective clothing, the only solution is to get the hell out as fast as you can before hypothermia confuses, numbs and kills.

      Twenty-five minutes left.

      Another attempt to wrench open the door to the cabin. Another failure.

      He thought of the windshield overlooking the bow deck. The only way to get her out.

      Shaw stroked toward the shore and dove, seizing a rock big enough to shatter glass but not so heavy it would pull him down.

      Kicking hard, rhythmically, timing his efforts to the waves, he returned to the boat, whose name he noticed was Seas the Day.

      Shaw managed to climb the forty-five-degree incline to the bow and perch on the upward-tilting front of the cabin, resting against the murky four-by-three-foot window.

      He peered inside but spotted no sign of the thirty-two-year-old brunette. He noted that the forward part of the cabin was empty. There was a bulkhead halfway toward the stern, with a door in the middle of it and a window about head height, the glass missing. If she were here, she’d be on the other side—the one now largely filled with water.

      He lifted the rock, sharp end forward, and swung it against the glass, again and again.

      He learned that whoever had made the vessel had fortified the forward window against wind and wave and hail. The stone didn’t even chip the surface.

      And Colter Shaw learned something else too.

      Elizabeth Chabelle was in fact alive.

      She’d heard the banging and her pale, pretty face, ringed with stringy brown hair, appeared in the window of the doorway between the two sections of the cabin.

      Chabelle screamed “Help me!” so loudly that Shaw could hear her clearly though the thick glass separating them.

      “Elizabeth!” he shouted. “There’s help coming. Stay out of the water.”

      He knew the help he promised couldn’t possibly arrive until after the ship was on the bottom. He was her only hope.

      It might be possible for someone else to fit through the broken window inside and climb into the forward, and drier, half of the cabin.

      But not Elizabeth Chabelle.

      Her kidnapper had, by design or accident, chosen to abduct a woman who was seven and a half months pregnant; she couldn’t possibly fit through the frame.

      Chabelle disappeared to find a perch somewhere out of the freezing water and Colter Shaw lifted the rock to begin pounding on the windshield once more.

LEVEL ONE:

       1.

      He asked the woman to repeat herself.

      “That thing they throw,” she said. “With the burning rag in it?”

      “They throw?”

      “Like at riots? A bottle. You see ’em on TV.”

      Colter Shaw said, “A Molotov cocktail.”

      “Yeah, yeah,” Carole was saying. “I think he had one.”

      “Was it burning? The rag part?”

      “No. But, you know …”

      Carole’s voice was raspy, though she wasn’t presently a smoker that Shaw had seen or smelled. She was draped with a green dress of limp cloth. Her natural expression seemed to be one of concern yet this morning it was more troubled than usual. “He was over there.” She pointed.

      The Oak View RV park, one of the scruffier that Shaw had stayed at, was ringed with trees, mostly scrub oak and pine, some dead, all dry. And thick. Hard to see “over there.”

      “You called the police?”

      A pause. “No, if it wasn’t a … What again?”

      “Molotov cocktail.”

      “If he didn’t have one, it’d be embarrassing. And I call the cops enough, for stuff here.”

      Shaw knew dozens of RV park owners around the country. Mostly couples, as it’s a good gig for middle-aged marrieds. If there’s just a single manager, like Carole, it was usually a she, and she was usually a widow. They tend to dial 911 for camp disputes more than their late husbands, men who often went about armed.

      “On the other hand,” she continued, “fire. Here. You know.”

      California was a tinderbox, as anybody who watched the news knew. You think of state parks and suburbs and agricultural fields; cities, though, weren’t immune to nature’s conflagrations. Shaw believed that one of the worst brush fires in the history of the state had been in Oakland, very near where they were now standing.

      “Sometimes, I kick somebody out, they say they’ll come back and get even.” She added with astonishment, “Even when I caught them stealing forty amps when they paid for twenty. Some people. Really.”

      He asked, “And you want me to …?”

      “I don’t know, Mr. Shaw. Just take a look. Could you take a look? Please?”

      Shaw squinted through the flora and saw, maybe, motion that wasn’t from the breeze. A person walking slowly? And if so did the pace mean that he was moving tactically—that is, with some mischief in mind?

      Carole’s eyes were on Shaw, regarding him in a particular way. This happened with some frequency. He was a civilian, never said he was anything else. But he had cop fiber.

      Shaw circled to the front of the park and walked on the cracked and uneven sidewalk, then on the grassy shoulder of the unbusy road in this unbusy corner of the city.

      Yes, there was a man, in dark jacket, blue jeans and black stocking cap, some twenty yards ahead. He wore boots that could be helpful on a hike through brush and equally helpful to stomp an opponent. And, yes, either he was armed with a gas bomb or he was holding a Corona and a napkin in the same hand. Early for a beer some places; not in this part of Oakland.

      Shaw slipped off the shoulder into the foliage to his right and walked more quickly, though with care to stay silent. The needles that had pitched from branch to ground in droves over the past several seasons made stealth easy.

      Whoever this might be, vengeful lodger or not, he was well past Carole’s cabin. So she wasn’t at personal risk. But Shaw wasn’t giving the guy a pass just yet.

      This felt wrong.

      Now the fellow was approaching the part of the RV camp where Shaw’s Winnebago was parked, among many other RVs.

      Shaw had more than a passing interest in Molotov cocktails. Several years ago, he’d been searching for a fugitive on the lam for an oil scam in Oklahoma when somebody pitched a gas bomb through the windshield of his camper. The craft burned to the rims in twenty minutes, personal effects saved in the nick. Shaw still carried a distinct and unpleasant scent memory of the air surrounding the metal carcass.

      The percentage likelihood that Shaw would be attacked by two Russian-inspired weapons in one lifetime, let alone within several years, had to be pretty small. Shaw put it at five percent. A figure made smaller yet by the fact that he had come to the Oakland/Berkeley area on personal business, not to ruin a fugitive’s life. And while Shaw had committed a transgression yesterday,