A Maidens Grave

him,” Shaw muttered through the wind.
    “—he’d be right about there by now. Just where that thing is. Whatever it is.”
    Shaw struggled to rid himself of memories of last night’s dinner—his wife’s tuna casserole. “I’m not feeling too well here, Buzz. What’s your point, exactly?”
    “I see a hand!” Marboro was standing up.
    “Oh, no, don’t do that. We’re moving round enough as it is. Sit your heinie down.”
    Tuna and cream of mushroom soup and peas and those canned fried onions on top.
    Oh, man, can’t keep it down much longer.
    “Looks like a hand and look at that thing—it’s red and white—hell, I think it’s one of the hostages got away!”
    Shaw turned and looked at the debris, just above the surface of the choppy water, rising and falling. Each glimpse lasted no more than a few seconds. He couldn’t tell what it was exactly. It looked sort of like a net float, except, as Buzz Marboro had pointed out, it was red and white. Blue too, he now saw.
    And moving away from them, straight into midstream, pretty damn fast.
    “Don’t you see a hand?” Marboro said.
    “No . . . . Wait. You know, it does look like a hand. Sorta.” Reluctantly, and to the great distress of his churning gut, Arnie Shaw rose to his feet. That made him feel, he estimated, about a thousand times worse.
    “I can’t tell. A branch maybe.”
    “I don’t know. Look how fast it’s moving. It’ll be in Wichita ’fore too long.” Shaw decided he’d rather have a tooth pulled than be seasick. No—two teeth.
    “Maybe it’s just something the takers threw out to, you know, distract us. We go after it and they get away out the back door.”
    “Or maybe it’s just trash,” Shaw said, sitting down. “Hey, what’re we thinking of? If they were friendlies they wouldn’t’ve just floated past without calling for help. Hell, we’ve got our uniforms on. They’d know we’re deputies.”
    “Sure. What’m I thinking of?” Marboro said, sitting down too.
    One pair of vigilant eyes returned to the ass end of the slaughterhouse. The other pair closed slowly, as their owner swallowed in a desperate effort to calm his stomach. “I’m dying,” Shaw whispered.
    Exactly ten seconds later the eyes opened. “Oh, son of a bitch,” Shaw spat out slowly. He sat up straight.
    “You just remembered too?” Marboro was nodding.
    Shaw had in fact just remembered—that the hostages were deaf and mute and wouldn’t be able to call out for help to save their souls, no matter how close they’d passed by the skiff.
    That was one of the reasons for his dismay. The other was that Shaw knew that while he himself had been an intercollegiate state finals swim champion three years running, Buzz Marboro couldn’t dog-paddle more than ten yards.
    Breathing deeply—not for the impending swim but merely to keep his turbulent stomach at bay—Shaw shed his weapons, body armor, helmet, boots. A final breath. He dove headfirst into the raging, murky water and streaked toward the disappearing flotsam as it headed rapidly southeast in the ornery current.
     
    Arthur Potter gazed at the window where he’d first seen Melanie.
    Then at the window where he’d almost seen her shot.
    “I think we’re moving up against the wall here,” he said slowly. “If we’re lucky we’re going to get maybe one or two more out but that’s it. Then we’ll either have to get him to surrender or have HRT go in. Somebody tell me the weather.” Potter was hoping fora hellsapoppin’ storm to justify a longer delay in finding a helicopter.
    Derek Elb turned a switch and the Weather Channel snapped on. Potter learned that the rest of the night would be much the same—windy, with clearing skies. No rain. Winds would be out of the northwest at fifteen to twenty miles an hour.
    “We’ll have to rely on the wind for an excuse,” LeBow said. “And even that’s going to be dicey. Fifteen miles anhour? In the service Handy’s probably flown in Hueys that’ve landed in gusts twice that.”
    Dean Stillwell called in for Henry LeBow, his laconic voice tripping out of the speaker above their heads.
    “Yes?” the intelligence officer answered, leaning into his microphone.
    “Agent Potter said to relay any information about the takers to you?”
    “That’s right,” LeBow said.
    Potter picked up the mike and asked what Stillwell had learned.
    “Well, one of the troopers here has a good view inside, sort of an angle. And he said that