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Rapid Descent. Gwen Hunter
Читать онлайн.Название Rapid Descent
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Автор произведения Gwen Hunter
Жанр Зарубежные любовные романы
Издательство HarperCollins
Orson was pretty sure his dad had started to sweat. He nodded like he couldn’t help himself. He’d probably have agreed that the sky was green if she told him to. Twenty-five years as an investigator questioning the biggest and baddest the streets had to offer, and this little bitty woman…Orson laughed silently. She scared the hell outta him.
“I understand that,” she said. “But you gotta understand that I gotta job to do too. And my job is to protect my baby. And if you try to hurt her, if you try asking mean questions jist to see her cry, if you try to make her feel worse than she does now for gettin’ hurt and makin’ her husband go down a dangerous river alone to get her help, and then not come back from it, I’ll scratch out your blasted eyes. I’ll cut out your innards and leave your bloody, dead body where only the maggots can find it. And then I’ll pray over your dead, bleeding body that the Lord will somehow save your immortal soul, if you really have one. Are we clear?”
“Pretty clear, ma’am.”
“Come back later.” Claire stomped back up the steps and closed the door in his face.
“Did that little woman just threaten you with blinding, death and maggots?” Orson asked from the shadows. “Isn’t it against the law to threaten an officer of the court?”
Nolan looked over at Orson, leaning a shoulder against the side of the RV, arms crossed over his wet suit, ankles crossed. Amused as hell and not hiding it. Nolan shook his head. “Yeah. I think I’m in love.”
Orson snorted. “She’d eat you up and spit you out, old man.”
“Like I said. I think I’m in love.”
“One ’a these days your love of bitchy women is going to get you killed.”
“Feisty. Not bitchy.”
“You say potato, I say bitchy. But I did notice that she didn’t use a single cussword in all that tirade.”
“And she did offer to pray for me.” Nolan laughed and nodded his head at the river; the two men walked toward the slow-moving water. “You ready to go undercover?”
“I’m ready. But you know for a fact that the more experienced men will say I got this job on your coattails.”
“I asked who had river experience. You were the only one, Junior. Get in there and make nice with the kayak search crew. And don’t screw up, son.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he said wryly.
“You want a pat on the butt, play football.” Nolan Lennox turned and walked back to his unmarked car, leaving Orson to join the search team and find out who knew what about Joe Stevens. As lead investigator on the Joseph Stevens case, his dad had bigger fish to fry.
As the shadows lengthened along the Leatherwood Ford Bridge, in the extended dusk that steep valleys and rivers always experience, Nell stood on the shore, hiding beneath a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, waiting. Her mother was at her side, with one arm around her waist, body heat a comfort at her back. She wanted to be there when the boaters brought Joe’s boat in.
There were four news vans behind them, all with cameras trained on her, one van for each of the competing networks working out of Knoxville, the closest city big enough to have its own TV stations. NBC, CBS, ABC and the local cable van were all present. Nell had seen her own interview on the air before shutting the TV off. She knew how unlikely it was for reporters to get the details right this early in the search, before they found someone—an unnamed source—to give them the skinny. She wasn’t interested in hearing their on-air misconceptions and mistakes or their take on the search.
Joe’s disappearance had made state news, and some pundits were implying that she had done away with Joe, an implication that should have made Nell furious, but only left her exhausted and more determined than ever not to grant interviews to predatory reporters. After hearing the insinuations on local talk radio, Claire had agreed that they were vultures. She had stepped in to protect her daughter’s privacy, telling reporters to stay back or she would shoot them herself, not that Claire owned a gun. Nell leaned in to her mother’s body as she stared at the empty water, the current only a ripple.
Near 4:00 p.m., the first kayak came into view, followed by the rest of the small craft and then by the Maravia Ranger raft, Mike sitting up high on the stern of the boat. Nell saw them all, but her eyes were on the red playboat being towed by the kayaker in the middle of the pack. It moved in erratic patterns behind the towboat, the lack of weight making it skitter across the surface of the quiet pool like a water spider.
Playboats were used by extreme kayakers who wanted to take class V rapids, and then do tricks and stunts in them. The responsive little boats required the weight and experience of a skillful paddler inside to track smoothly. Empty, Joe’s boat had no grace or style or spirit. Nell had an instant of memory—Joe in the boat, practicing a backflip, his body and boat in the air, upside down, churning water below him, his paddle spinning, a wide grin on his face.
She quivered with reaction. Her husband wasn’t dead. He was alive. He had to be. He was too vital, too vibrant to be…to be dead. Tears started to fall again.
Wavering in her tears, the boats scraped onto the shore, hulls rubbing on sand and rounded river rocks. Nell blinked hard and focused solely on her husband’s boat. She moved into the shallow water and knelt, one hand out to pull the forty-pound boat close to her. It ground across the surface of the shore, the empty hull hollow-sounding, magnifying the noise like a drum. She ran her hand across the boat.
It was battered, with long scratches along the sides, new gouges where it had impacted rock. Some parts of the top-of-the-line outfitting—the hip pads, and knee braces that Joe had duct taped in for a permanent fit—were missing, leaving only the seat, structured metal bracing and hard plastic.
Nell had seen a lot of boats in her time, many that had taken rapids without a boater. A lot of them had looked like this, the insides partially missing. Wherever Joe had come out, it hadn’t been just before the location where she found the small craft. It had happened upriver of the rock that had snagged his boat. Maybe at the top of the El. The boat had taken several drops or been caught in a hole to look this banged up.
Blinking hard, Nell wiped her nose and stood. Silently, she touched the shoulder of the kayaker who had brought the boat in. It was Harvey, one of the guides who had made the trip up from the Pigeon to help in the search. His beard was beaded with river water, his hazel-gray eyes not meeting hers. His shoulder was cold through the dry suit he wore.
“Thank you for bringing Joe’s boat in, Harvey.”
He shook his head, staring across the river. “Shouldn’t ’a happened,” he mumbled.
Nell laughed, a bleep of pain that she quickly smothered in the crook of her elbow, covering her mouth and chin. Her hand tightened on his arm as Joe’s image fluttered in her grief. “No. It shouldn’t have. If I’d seen the strainer in time, Joe wouldn’t be hurt somewhere on the river. He’d be here right now.”
Harvey slanted his eyes at her, his expression guarded and grieving. Nell stepped back. Realized that he believed Joe was dead. He believed it completely. In his mind there was no hope for Joe. None at all.
Nell dropped her hand as if his touch burned her.
Picking up his boat and equipment as if the forty-pound kayak weighed nothing, Harvey walked off. Horrified, Nell watched him walk away.
His helmet beneath one elbow, paddle to the side, Mike approached and hugged her, seeming not to notice her unyielding body or the tremors that coursed through her. He said, “We’re going back out soon as we can get up to the confluence put-in. We’ve got enough time to do a good search above and along the shores of the Long Pool. I’ll drive your RV and you ride with Claire.”
A freckled,