Unfortunately, the pepper spray had temporarily impeded Jocelyn’s swimming skills, so once I saw her having trouble, I threw her one of the Merilee’s life rings. Since she was still half-blind and couldn’t see it, I wound up jumping into the dirty harbor water myself to clamp her arm around the ring. While I was doing that, she swung at me again, but in muscle tone a puppeteer is no match for a zookeeper.
I socked her in the nose. Hard.
The blow sent her under the dirty water again, so I had to dive down, grab her by the hair, and haul her back up. Then I left her clutching the life ring, floundering and snorting, while I climbed back onto the Merilee.
“You’ve blinded me!” she sobbed, after hacking water out of her lungs.
“Be grateful I didn’t kill you. But if you try to get back on board, I will, and with your own damned lug wrench!” I waved it at her.
She settled down after that, so I set about summoning help, which turned out to be more complicated that it should have been since I’d foolishly left my cell phone in my truck.
Damn Seduction Jeans.
Fortunately, just as I was about to ascend to the Merilee’s cabin roof and start screaming FIRE!!!—the only certain way to get the attention of partiers who were still singing their way through another verse of “Drunken Sailor”—I saw Walt MacAdams walk toward the dock with Annette and Terri.
“What’s going on?” he called.
Before he could attempt to rescue the waif in the water, I gave him a quick rundown on the night’s events, whereupon he sent Annette and Terri to take shelter in Running Wild’s cabin. Then, leaving Jocelyn hissing and screeching in the water, he called 9-1-1.
A few minutes later Joe arrived.
Apparently, Joe had been calling incessantly for the last fifteen minutes to tell me we needed to put off our romantic evening because one of the ninja car thieves had kicked out the side window of a deputy’s cruiser. As soon as the kid had managed to weasel his way out, he’d been run down by a golf cart filled with partiers from the San Sebastian Country Club. The kid would be fine, but the paperwork, oh, the paperwork.
“Why the hell didn’t you respond to my calls?” he said, furious.
He wasn’t happy about my answer.
He was especially unhappy when I handed him my soggy notes—they’d been in the pocket of my Seduction Jeans when I’d gone into the water—detailing how and why Jocelyn Ravel, aka Honey Bee Estancia-Barnes, had murdered five people. Somewhere along the line, more law officers and EMTs arrived, and Jocelyn Ravel was fished out of the drink, handcuffed, and taken away to the hospital to get the harbor water pumped out of her stomach.
Before the ambulance was out of the lot, one of the deputies who’d been sent over to check out Starvin’ Marvin shouted, “We’ve got another one down!”
Poor Nestor Vanderman. When one disturbed child meets another, the answer isn’t always Romeo and Juliet.
Sometimes it’s more like Nightmare on Elm Street.