Arrow's Rest by Joel Scott (best books to read all time .TXT) 📗

it’s changing all the time, down to seventy-five, up to sixty-four. It’s just too shallow.”

“What do you think?”

Travis considered the problem. Not nearly deep enough to sink the sailboat out of sight. Christ, the goddam stick alone might be over sixty feet high. Burn it? That would draw attention and someone might get out here in time to put it out. Smoke and fire would show a long way off, and there were some pleasure boats fishing off in the distance, as well as a tug and tow on the horizon that could be heading in their direction. If someone managed to get on board and found Arrow deserted, it would raise a lot of questions. The whole point was to make it look like Arrow and Jared had vanished. Gone into hiding.

Travis looked at the chart plotter and it showed that the bank ran for another few miles. They just weren’t where they needed to be. It would probably take over an hour motoring in this slow-motion piece of shit once he figured out how to get rid of the sails. He knew he could start the sailboat’s engine all right, motors were motors, no problem there, but he hadn’t a fucking clue how to get the nervously flapping sails down. It can’t be all that hard, he reasoned, look at all those dipshits out there sailing, screaming and raising their fists at him as he cut close across their bows.

Another squall hit and Arrow tilted before it and Travis, staring upwards with his brow furrowed in thought, felt the boat take a sudden list and as he turned to grab the cabin rail for balance, the boom swung viciously across and smacked him across the forehead and he dropped like a stone. Arrow rotated and swung into the squall and the sails flogged and flapped and the lines jerked and jittered and the noise increased, like, fucking tenfold and the boom crashed back and forth and everything was chaos and Clint thought Screw this and dropped to his belly and crawled over to Travis and dragged him to the stern and shoved him over the rail into the dinghy on top of Jared. He jumped in after him and fired up the big Yamahas and took off on a foaming plane. He never looked back once.

Behind him Arrow’s boom swung and crashed against the shrouds and her sails backed and filled and emptied as she moved in erratic circling motions seeking equilibrium. High above her a raven circled and one of the threshing main sheets caught and wrapped around a winch and the sail filled and Arrow steadied up and moved slowly off before the wind in halting irregular progress, hauling up till the sail shivered, then falling off again, but always returning to her meandering northerly course, moving towards Desolation Sound like an erratic resurrected shade of the Mary Celeste.

Chapter 44

Clarke glared at the battered handheld VHF radio lying mute on his desk. He’d retrieved it from the lost and found and plugged in the charger that was stowed in the case alongside. He knew it was sending and receiving perfectly; he could hear the traffic on channel sixteen and had talked to his buddy on the harbour patrol boat over an hour ago. The problem was not with the radio, it was with that bloody Jared who had gone silent. He’d phoned Cat and gotten a message. Similarly with Danny. Likewise with texts to all of them. Nobody wanted to communicate with him and Clarke knew from long experience that was a bad sign. He’d caught up with Erin and Jaimie at the hospital, but of course they knew nothing. Or so they claimed. His captain walked past his desk, slowed, cleared his throat, and Clarke snarled, “I’m flummoxed,” and his boss moved on repeating Clarke’s pending retirement date under his breath like a mantra.

Five days now, five days since the fire and he hadn’t turned up one single damn piece of new information. He’d been down to the commercial docks on three separate occasions and asked around and was met with blank stares and head shakes from the fishermen. No one had seen Arrow leave or heard any mention of her on the VHF. For all the good he was doing Clarke thought he might as well take more leave and go back and work on Legalese. Merlynn had talked about getting away for a long cruise before the fire happened, and he wondered if they should take Legalese up to Desolation Sound for a few days. You never know, they might just get lucky. He toyed momentarily with the idea of justifying it as an official search for Jared and Arrow and claiming expenses from the department. It was probably a bit much, but the look on the captain’s face might be worth it.

He had other cases pending but none that required his presence at the moment. Two were coming up for trial in three weeks, and he’d already reviewed and signed off on his testimony with the prosecutor for both of them. He absentmindedly shuffled papers around on his desk while he considered his options. He came to a decision and went and spoke to the captain who quickly agreed to a two-week leave starting immediately. Clarke wasn’t surprised; he thought if he’d asked for three months of leave, the man might have embraced him.

He went over to the filing cabinet and pulled out the arson file and witness statements and made copies for himself. The case would be nagging at the back of his mind anyway, so he might as well bring the files along in the event something new came up that he needed to check. The fire was still classified as an active investigation but he knew that wouldn’t last much longer. They were up against dead ends every which way they turned. No leads on the arsonists and no evidence obtained from the scene so far, other