Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

about the height of a man in a wheelchair. Reaching above his head with his right hand, he grabbed a handle and did a one-armed chin-up. The locker handle creaked but held. He moved on to the next handle.
    She simply stared at the naked strength of him as he chinned himself again. “Do you really think Len could do that?”
    “Easier than me,” Archer said through his teeth. “He wasn’t hauling as much weight—in his lower body. He would have smiled—every inch of the way at how—he was fooling the world.”
    Breathing hard with the effort, Archer grabbed another handle and kept on pulling himself up.
    “But the top center locker was empty when I looked,” she objected.
    He didn’t waste breath replying. Sweat gathered and ran down his spine as he dragged himself up the face of the vault until his eyes were level with the top rank of lockers. On the way up, he noted the marks on several of the lockers along the right side. He found out how the gouges were made when his right hand slipped and raked over the vault. Steel screeched over steel, leaving new marks.
    “What’s the—combination?” he asked.
    “Ummm.” Hannah gathered her wits. The sight of Archer pulling himself up the vault hand over hand was as unnerving as the sight of a dead man’s ring on his hand. “Eight right, twenty left, thirty right, one left.”
    He started to work, lost his grip, swore, and went back to it.
    “Brace yourself on your feet,” she said.
    “He—didn’t.”
    The instant the last tumbler clicked, Archer let himself down the same way Len would have, hand over hand, fast, breathing hard. When he had his feet under him again, he looked at the wall of closed lockers and rubbed his shoulders until his breathing leveled.
    “Right,” he said after a minute. “By the time Len opened that locker, he wouldn’t have been feeling up to much more in the way of monkey tricks.” Sweaty hands closed around a handle that would have been within easy reach of Len. Then Archer stopped cold. “No good. I was pulling handles all the way down and nothing opened. Shit.”
    “One at a time,” Hannah said.
    “What?”
    “You were only pulling on one handle at a time. Try two.”
    Archer looked over his shoulder and gave her a smile. “Right. Now, let’s pray that Len really wasn’t feeling tricky when it came to this point. There’s an infinite number of ways he could have mixed and matched open doors to make another combination.”
    “He wasn’t really left- or right-handed. Not after the accident. He trained himself to do everything with both hands.”
    Archer knew that Len had trained himself to be lethally capable with hands, feet, and head long before he had met Hannah. But there was no need to remind her of that unhappy past. It would soon be gone. All the way gone. And Archer would be gone with it.
    “Step back out of the shed,” he said.
    “But—”
    “He could have booby-trapped this,” Archer cut in, overriding her objections.
    “Then you walk off and I’ll open it.”
    He gave her a disbelieving look.
    She gave it right back.
    “All or nothing,” he muttered.
    He bent over and pulled two waist-level handles that would have been convenient to Len.
    The lockers opened, revealing rows of trays. Empty trays. But Archer already knew about them. Breath held, he stood and listened, listened, listened for the sound of a hidden mechanism releasing. He wasn’t worried about a booby trap anymore. If there had been one, he wouldn’t have had to wait and listen. It would already have happened.
    Silence.
    He let out a soft, rushing curse and reached for two more waist-high locker doors. Before his fingers closed around them, he heard a faint sound. Then another.
    Click. Click.
    “Archer,” Hannah said urgently.
    “Yes.”
    Click.
    Scraaaaape.
    Intently he watched the vault. But it was Hannah who spotted the faint line where a panel was trying to open. She jumped forward, stuck her fingers in the gap, and pried. Nothing budged.
    “Here,” Archer said, handing her a slender metal bar.
    She jammed the bar into the opening and pulled back sharply. More metal scraped on metal. Shifting her grip, she yanked again.
    A waist-high panel swung open, revealing several long, narrow drawers. There were no locks, no combinations, no handles, nothing but a perforated disk to indicate how the drawers might be opened.
    Hannah looked at Archer. “Now what?”
    “This, I hope.”
    After a few tries he fitted Len’s odd