And One to Die On(97)

“Go now,” Hannah shouted suddenly, at the top of her lungs.

She drew backward and then launched herself forward, pushing against the catwalk as if it were a diving board. She did not hit the shingles or the gutter as she went down. She went right out into the air and fell, screaming, straight into the sea.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Kelly Pratt muttered.

Geraldine Dart turned her back to the rest of them and got violently and definitively ill.





4


Five minutes later, when they were all soaked to the skin and chilled to the bone and holding out on the roof only because they were more afraid of the bats than they were of the storm, they heard the sound of chopper blades in the distance, and looked up to see that the damn thing was right above their heads. The wind had been too high and blowing in the wrong direction for them to have heard it earlier. It was not an army helicopter, but a coast guard one—exactly the kind of detail, Gregor thought, that Bennis always did get wrong. It was, however, a serious vehicle, the kind with two propellers, one on each end. It had medical insignia as well as U.S. Coast Guard insignia painted on its sides.

“We’ve got to remind them to go down and get Lydia and Mathilda and Richard,” Bennis said unnecessarily.

“What are we going to be able to tell them about Hannah and Cavender?” Geraldine asked.

Hannah and Cavender were the least of it. Gregor knew that. There were two corpses down in that house, and a third body that might be a corpse by now and might not. They were going to have to explain all of those before they got around to the denouement, and it wasn’t going to be easy. Gregor knew what he would be thinking, if he were the law enforcement officer charged with the investigation of this case. He’d be thinking that the six people who were still alive and well in this house had a lot of talking to do.

A door in the side of the chopper opened. A man in rain gear and thick boots came swinging out, attached to a thick cord line. He blew around in the wind. The cord lowered him very slowly. Gregor and Bennis and Kelly and Geraldine stepped back to give him room to land.

The man was good at his work, and experienced. The wind was bad. Gregor expected him to fall at least once. Instead, he landed without difficulty, unhooked the cord, and looked around at the four people watching him.

“How do you do, sir,” he said to Gregor, holding his hand out. Maybe, Gregor thought, I look like I have more authority here than I really do. “I’m Petty Officer Robert Moreby. We were advised of a medical emergency here.”

“He’s downstairs,” Geraldine Dart said. “We couldn’t move him.”

“To get to him you have to go through bats,” Kelly Pratt offered. “The attic is lousy with them.”

Petty Officer Robert Moreby took all this in. Then he got his squawk box off his belt and spoke into it.

“Doctor will be down in a minute,” he told them, when he’d finished. “You people can go on up if you want to.”

“How are you going to get through the bats?” Bennis demanded.

“Rubber weather suits,” Petty Officer Moreby said. “I was wearing one when I got hit with half a bucket of flying glass during Hurricane Andrew. If that didn’t get through it, bats won’t.”

Gregor considered this. “Do you have any of these suits lying around that I could borrow?”

“Yes, sir,” Moreby said. “But you don’t have to do that. We can take care of everything from here on out. We’d just as soon you got into the chopper and let us take you to safety.”

Gregor looked up. Another man was coming down at them out of the sky. The chopper and the man were bouncing around in the wind like hollow plastic balls in a blow tank.

“That’s all right,” Gregor told Petty Officer Moreby. “First you’d have to get me into the chopper, and if you ask me, I’ve had a bad enough day already.”