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“Do you have a marine radio?” A
“Yes.”
“What do I call you?”
“The Venture.”
“Why don’t you head back around Blake’s. Watch the coast, check the camps again. The water’s been pretty flat today, even around the point, so I doubt she’s come to any harm. I’ll head down toward McCargo and see what I can find. She may already be home. Radio if you find anything, or if you don’t. We’ll look until it’s dark. If she’s not home by midnight, I’ll call Lucas and Ralph. They’ll stage a search for tomorrow. I doubt it’ll come to that-I need the overtime too badly.”
Patience laughed. “You’re a comfort, A
“Your tax dollars at work.”
“I’ll tell Lucas,” Patience volunteered.
The di
The glow ignited by Hawk and two beers was gone. All that remained was a mild alcohol-induced lethargy. A
The dock, though still populated, was quiet: people talking softly, listening to the loons calling down the night. The 3rd Sister was gone. In the distance was the dull thunder of their air compressor filling tanks. De
The gold had drained from the water, leaving silver and peach petals of evening on the smooth cha
A great blue heron, the color of the sky, stood on a stone several feet from shore. Two female mergansers sharing a brood of eighteen or twenty ducklings paddled in the shallows. Once A
Puttering down the silent cha
Darkness gathered. Near Kamloops Island, A
The last fragile light of day glowed in the western sky. Overhead the stars were coming into their own. A
A faint offshore breeze brought her the sweet complex smell of land and she thought how heady that perfume must have been to sailors months at sea. The smells of the desert had come one at a time: a clear stream of sage on a dry wind, a gust of rain-damp earth on the last hurrah of a sudden thunderstorm. In the vegetation-rich north country A
The breeze freshened and carried a new fragment of news: the grumbling of a vessel. By the low-pitched sound and the high rev of the engine, A
Traveling after sundown without ru
Having fetched her field glasses from the cabin, she stood in the stern, her eyes trying to follow the cues her ears were receiving. Finally she spotted the perpetrator: a light-colored cabin cruiser just barely big enough to go by that grand title. The boat was powering slowly along just out from the cliffs between Twelve O’Clock Point and Hawk Island. As she watched, it made an apparently senseless dogleg out from the shore, then, squaring the corner, in again.
Whoever the pilot was, he knew there were three barely submerged boulders on that section of shore. No one that well versed in underwater topography would be foolish enough to run without lights. Unless they were up to something-or their electrical system was on the fritz, A
Though ISRO seldom got involved in the Drug Enforcement Agency’s business, this close to the Canadian border, drug ru
A
The roar of the Belle’s inboards swallowed all other sounds. Deafened by her technology, A
She switched on the Belle’s searchlight and spotlit the cruiser, picking the fiberglass hull out in a circle like the star of a stage show. The vessel speeded up as if the pilot had decided to make a run for it. A
A
The Belle Isle had eaten up the distance. A
Since the initial impulse to run, it was the first sign that the pilot knew she was there. A
A
It could have been a trick of the light, or it could have been someone ducking down, hiding. A