Читать книгу Blood at Bay - Sue Rabie - Страница 14

All David felt was water rising up to meet him, and the murky green of the marina smacking into him. He was underwater, drowning, the ocean gushing into his lungs. Suddenly, the nightmare was coming true.

There was no sound, just the hiss of his own escaping breath around him, the churning of the water above him. He couldn’t tell how deep he was, couldn’t tell which way was up or down. He was floating in the deep, somewhere between the surface and the floor of the ocean, an indeterminable depth. Was he dreaming? Had he hit his head falling from the boat?

Kathy. He looked down, or in the direction he thought was down, searching for her in the bottomless water below him. And then he saw it, something rising, reaching for him, rising up to drag him down, to pull him under. He tried to swim up, to get away, but he couldn’t. He was trapped in the nightmare, in the thick, suffocating ocean.

He broke the surface in a spray of gushing air, took half a breath and then promptly sank beneath the water again. The hands gripping him heaved him up once more.

“Mr Roth!” came the spluttered demand. “Come on, Mr Roth! Swim!”

Someone had him around the chest and was trying to tow him towards the jetty between two boats. David struggled feebly through the water.

“That’s it,” came the gasped encouragement from the man behind him. “Keep going.”

Baumann.

David took several deeper breaths and then gasped for Kathy.

“She’s safe!” Baumann told him, pushing David towards the wharf. “She’s out.”

David could see her, kneeling on the jetty, her hair matted wetly to her head, her blouse almost transparent against her skin. There were others, a white man and a black man in uniform. Bernard King, the club’s commodore. And Blessing, the security guard.

It took all three of them and a great deal of pushing from Baumann to fish him out of the water. David ended up lying on his back on the jetty gasping for air, his feet still in the water, and Kathy hovering over him, anxiously wiping hair out of his eyes.

“David? David!”

Bernard King stared at David as he lay there, shocked at the watery blood smearing his chest and the side of his face; then Bernard looked at Baumann, who levered himself out of the water.

“Baumann? What the hell’s going on?” Bernard demanded.

Baumann shook his head, water spraying everywhere. “Don’t know, Mr King,” he said. “But I think we’d better make sure those two are gone.”

David hoped he was talking about Bruce and Thomas. “Be careful,” he managed to gasp at them. “One has a knife.”

Baumann and Bernard King glanced at each other; then Bernard motioned for Blessing to accompany them. They left David and Kathy on the side of the jetty and made for the security gate where the two thugs had escaped.

David put a hand over the gash on his chest. Kathy put a shaking hand over his. She pressed down hard. “You need a doctor,” she told him in a trembling voice.

David shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said, his voice husky.

Kathy tried to help as he slowly sat up. David groaned, pressing harder as he felt the first twinge of pain in his chest.

“David, I don’t think you should be—”

“I just need a minute,” he said, trying to compose himself for her sake. “Stowaway,” he said. “See if you can find Stowaway.”

Kathy nodded and slipped her hand away. She stood up, mainly to go and fetch something to staunch his bleeding rather than to find the cat.

David held his hand against the cut and watched Kathy hurry along the jetty towards Sea Scout. As she disappeared inside he sagged against a pole. He was drained. He needed to lie down, but instead he waited for Kathy to reappear.

She did, after several calls to Stowaway, eventually emerging with the kitten bundled in David’s jacket and tucked under one arm. She held his T-shirt in the other.

“She’s fine,” Kathy told him as she pushed the shirt against his chest. “Hold this there.”

Baumann and Bernard King returned, Bernard’s face flushed from the jog.

Baumann shook his head. “They’ve gone.”

David was actually relieved. He managed to get to his feet, with Baumann helping.

“Do you want us to call the police, Mr Roth?” Bernard asked.

“No,” David said. He was in enough trouble with the police already.

“What about an ambulance?” Bernard said, looking at the already bloodstained shirt.

“It’s shallow,” he told them. “I’ll be fine.”

“Were those the two that delivered the boat? I didn’t get a good look at them. What the hell were they after?” the commodore asked him as he straightened.

“I don’t know,” David said. It was true. He didn’t know if they had been the men who had delivered the boat or the men who had murdered Peter Calder. He didn’t even know what they had been after.