Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(68)

The helicopter on my side came straight at me, and I realized almost too late that it was trying to land. I scooped up shoes and jacket and stumbled back from the ledge and then to my left as the front of the legs dipped toward rock, then jerked back and swung its tail rotor to the left.

When it came back at a slightly higher elevation, the blast from the rotors was strong enough to knock me down, and the whine of the turbine dug against my eardrums like a metal pick.

As I scrambled to my feet, the helicopter bounced once, then twice off the smooth stone. I could see the pilot’s face tighten in the cockpit as he fought for purchase, and the nose dipped and the tail rose and for a second I thought the rotors would scrape the crop of rocks that separated the cliff top from the tree line.

A cop in a dark blue jumpsuit and black helmet jumped from the cabin and kept his head low and his knees bent as he ran across the rock toward me.

“Kenzie?” he shouted.

I nodded.

“Come on.” He grabbed my arm and pushed my head down as the other helicopter shot away from the water and off toward the slope where we’d left Poole. There was no way they’d land over there, I knew. It was too tight, no clearing to speak of. Their only hope of getting him out of there was to drop a man and a basket over the side and pull Poole up and out.

The cop shoved me into the cabin as the rotors continued to whip overhead, and as soon as I was inside, the machine lurched off the rock and dropped over the side.

I could see Angie below us as we swooped down toward her. She held Amanda’s doll in one hand and dropped below the surface. As the helicopter slid over the surface, the water began to churn and swirl.

“Go back up!” I screamed.

The co-pilot looked back at me.

I jerked my thumb toward the ceiling. “You’ll drown her! Go back up!”

The co-pilot nudged the pilot and the pilot pulled back on the throttle and my stomach slid into my intestines as the helicopter banked to the right and a graffiti-strewn cliff loomed through the cockpit window and then broke away from us as we rose and turned in a full circle and hovered from a height of about thirty feet over the last place we’d seen Angie.

She came up and flailed at the eddies engulfing her, spit water from her mouth, and turned onto her back.

“What’s she doing?” the cop beside me said.

“Going to shore,” I said, as Angie backstroked toward the rocks, the doll arcing with the windmill motion of her left arm.

The cop nodded, his rifle aimed at the tree line.

Angie’s high school had no swim team, so she competed for the Girls Clubs of America, won a silver medal when she was sixteen in a regional competition. Even with the years of smoking, she still had the stroke. Her body cut cleanly through the water, barely disturbing it, leaving so little in her wake that she could have been an eel as she slid toward shore.

“She’s going to have to walk back,” the co-pilot shouted. “We can’t land down there.”

Angie sensed a small outcropping of jagged rocks just before she would have crashed into them. She turned her body and floated the rest of the way to the rocks, placed the doll gingerly in a crevice between them, then pulled herself up on top.

The pilot swung the helicopter down by the rocks and spoke through a megaphone mounted above the light: “Miss Gennaro, we cannot attempt evacuation. The walls are too close and there’s no purchase.”

Angie nodded and waved tiredly, her body white in the harsh spotlight, strings of her long black hair clamped to her cheeks.

“Directly behind those rocks,” the pilot called over the megaphone, “is a trail. Follow it down and keep turning left. You’ll end up on Ricciuti Drive. There’ll be someone there to meet you.”

Angie gave him a thumbs-up and sat down on the rocks, inhaled deeply, and placed the doll on her lap.

She shrank to nothing but a pale dot in a wall of black as the helicopter banked once again and shot up over the quarry walls, and the land raced far too quickly underneath as we dipped over the old railway route and then headed west for the ski slopes in the Blue Hills.

“The hell was she looking for down there?” The cop beside me lowered his rifle.

“The girl,” I said.

“Hell,” the cop said, “we’re going back in with divers.”

“At night?” I said.

The cop looked through his visor at me. “Probably,” he said, with a bit of hesitation. “Definitely in the morning.”

“I think she was hoping to find her before it got to that point,” I said.

The cop shrugged. “Man, if Amanda McCready’s in that quarry, only God decides whether we find her corpse or not.”





19





We landed on the bunny slope of the Blue Hills Reservation, dropped down neatly between the ski lift lines, and watched as the second helicopter did the same, settled gently about twenty yards away.

Several police cars and ambulances, two MDC ranger cars, and a few trooper units greeted us.

Broussard jumped out of the second helicopter and raced toward the first police car, pulled the uniformed cop from the driver’s seat.

I jogged over as he started the engine. “Where’s Poole?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “He wasn’t where we left him. He wasn’t anywhere on the trail. I think he either tried to make it back down on his own or came up to the top when he heard the shots.”