The Mystery of the Kidnapped Whale - Marc Brandel [8]
The truck stopped at last. Pete heard the tailgate being lowered and then the slither of bare feet coming toward him. He held his breath. There was a slopping sound as the plastic container was lifted. The bare feet moved away. The tailgate was lifted back into place.
He waited three minutes before poking his head out from under the canvas.
The truck was parked outside a long, expensive-looking ranch house. There was a lamp over the front door and a flight of concrete steps that led up to the house. At the bottom of the steps was a mailbox. Pete could just read the name on it.
SLATER
He waited another minute, then climbed carefully out on the side away from the house. He moved softly around to the front of the truck so that he could look over the hood without showing any more than the top of his head.
No one was in sight. He hadn’t really expected there would be in an isolated residential district like this. But what did surprise him was that except for the lamp over the door, the ranch house was completely dark. Not a single light showed from any of its windows. Wherever Constance Carmel had gone, it didn’t look as though she had gone into the house.
Well, no sense crouching here all night, Pete thought. There were obviously only two sensible things he could do now. He could walk to the nearest corner, make a note of the name on the street sign there, and report the Slater address to Jupe and Bob. Or he could investigate a little further himself, try to find out where Constance Carmel had gone and what she was doing there with a bucket of live fish.
He had almost decided to walk to the corner and then find the nearest phone booth when he heard a woman’s voice calling from somewhere out of the night.
“Fluke,” she called. “Fluke. Fluke. Fluke.”
There was no answer.
Pete was sure the sound of the voice had not come from inside the house. It had come from somewhere outdoors, maybe from the back of the house.
For the first time he noticed that a steep concrete drive led up to a garage, attached to the left side of the house. Beside the garage was a little wooden gate, and beyond it he could see the silhouette of a palm tree against the faintly glowing sky.
Pete walked up to the gate. It was fastened with only a latch. He lifted it and walked on, closing the gate behind him.
He was on a cement path that ran beside the dark wall of the garage. Pete crouched down, moving slowly, softly, toward the backyard.
“Fluke. Fluke. Fluke. That’s a good baby, Fluke.”
The woman’s voice was much closer now. It seemed to come from only a few yards away.
Pete stopped dead. Ahead and to his left, across a stretch of grass, was the palm tree he had noticed from the street. He couldn’t see anything to the right. The garden, or whatever there was behind the house, was still hidden by the wall of the garage. He braced himself for a second and then sprinted for the palm tree.
He reached it, slipped behind it, took a deep breath, and looked.
The first thing he saw, because it was the only thing to see, was an enormous swimming pool. Bright and shimmering with underwater lights, it ran the whole length of the ranch house.
“Fluke. Fluke. Fluke. Good baby, Fluke.”
Constance Carmel, in her two-piece swimsuit, was standing at the far end of the pool. The plastic container was on the concrete verge beside her. As Pete watched, she reached into the container, took out a live fish, held it up for an instant, and then threw it in a long, looping arc over the water.
Instantly a gray shape broke the surface of the pool. It rose, up, up, until its whole seven-foot length was clear of the water. It seemed to hang there for a second as though it were flying. Its mouth opened. With a quick flip