The world got crazier year by year. Nastier, too.
Kenny lived in and worked out of a spacious loft in a Seattle warehouse converted into apartments that were rented mostly by people who thought they were artists of one kind or another. They were painters, sculptors, writers, actors, and YouTube video-star wannabes. Kenny kept his distance from all his neighbors because none seemed to be rich in common sense or to understand that the performance-artist poet next door might possibly have a really bad day with rhyming and might relieve his frustration by stabbing you in the face.
That’s the kind of world it was.
At seven thirty Friday morning, Wyatt Rider called Kenny with an urgent assignment. He had a client in Montana whose home computer system and associated electronics were served by a satellite dish that had apparently been compromised by some hacker who was on the Max Gurn end of the profession. Wyatt provided the dish address, all essential telecom account information, as well as the client’s passwords. Without having to leave his loft in Seattle, Kenny could frontdoor the system in Montana and sleuth through it in search of evidence that a worthless black-hat turd had commandeered the house. He would then follow the data-crumb trail to the culprit, so that Wyatt could break the bastard’s legs, figuratively speaking.
“One question,” Kenny said, taking notes while sitting up in bed with a nude girl named Bruce Ann Leigh, or maybe Leigh Ann Bruce. “This doesn’t involve Dark Web chainsaw goons, does it?”
“I’d bet everything I own that it doesn’t,” Wyatt said.
“Would you bet your cojones?”
“You mean my cantaloupes? Absolutely.”
“All right, then. I’m on it,” Kenny said.
27
Supplied by a river, Lake Sapphire did not rise with a tide, but only in the event that the outflow spillway could not cope with the volume of runoff produced by a major storm. The lake was stirred by currents, however, provided by the river running through it. The water ceaselessly licked the shore, chuckled among the dock pilings, and, in the boathouse, caused an eighteen-foot electric Duffy to wallow gently in its slip. The boat knocked against the cosseting rubber fender, and the taut belaying rope strained against the cleat with a whisper of a screech.
With the Duffy six or seven feet below him, Wyatt stood on the docking at the head of the gangway, which creaked and clicked with the barely perceptible, rhythmic rise and fall of the floating slip. Whether or not anyone had waited here for him the previous night, the high windows under the eaves now admitted more than enough light to confirm that he was alone this morning.
Some people might have been surprised that a billionaire and his family would choose a craft as mundane as the electric Duffy, with its open sides and its blue canopy trimmed in white piping, a boat that dawdled along rather than zoomed. Of course, this was ideal for cruising with two preteen children, and it was quintessentially Liam and Lyndsey; for all their wealth, they did not move with a flashy crowd.
As Wyatt was about to turn away, he saw something large glide through the dark water below, a phantasm as pale as the corpse of a leviathan from which death had bleached all color. It entered under the lakeside garage-style roll-up door, at least twice as large as a man, a torpedo shape broader at the front than at the rear. The creature was too quick and too distorted by the roiled water to allow Wyatt to discern identifying detail. The thing disappeared under the Duffy. In its wake, displaced water sloshed against the big door, rattling it in its tracks, and the boat wallowed gently.
Wyatt stood transfixed, waiting for the intruder to swim out from beneath the vessel. The water quieted and became as still as it had been before this apparition, and the thing did not reappear.
Here at the end of the dock, the lake wasn’t nearly as deep as it was farther from shore, maybe eight or ten feet. But the Duffy had a draw of perhaps only two feet, which left plenty of clearance for whatever had positioned itself beneath the boat.
In a body of fresh water as large as this lake, no fish existed as big as the thing that Wyatt had seen. No sharks. No manta rays. Just bass, maybe trout. When a fisherman hooked something here, he would expect to reel it in with little effort. The thing under the Duffy would snap an eighty-pound line as if it were spider silk.
When you endeavored to put your larcenous parents in prison, especially knowing they were capable of murder, you didn’t back away from a situation like this, or from anything. Whatever waited under the Duffy must be some kind of aquatic animal, and no damn fish could harm you—not a shark, not a piranha—unless you got into the water with it.