The Taken

Read The Taken for Free Online Page A

Book: Read The Taken for Free Online
Authors: Inger Ash Wolfe
Tags: Fiction, Mystery
it into the water as Tate turned the winch on. The hook vanished into the black. On the finder, Calberson’s body and the object in the water appeared to be dancing around each other. And then, suddenly, Calberson’s form vanished. They stared at the screen in silence. Tate said, “What just happened?”
    “I don’t know.” Jellinek fiddled with the controls, but only the smaller, unmoving object at ten metres registered.
    Tate looked over the side, then quickly crabstepped a circuit of the railing, scanning the water. “Go aft, Detective! Forward!” he shouted from the rear of the boat. “Look for his air!”
    Wingate went to the front of the boat and looked down, but the surface was undisturbed. “You see him?” he shouted over his shoulder to Jellinek.
    “Nothing!” Tate was in a full-fledged panic and ran to the console, his eyes wild. He smacked the finder once with the flat of his palm. “Hey!” shouted Jellinek.
    “Where the hell is he? Move this fucking barge! Find him!” The tone of Tate’s voice seemed to wake Jellinek up to the seriousness of the situation and he put the boat in reverse, but as he did, the thing on the finder began to rise. “Is that him?” Tate said, pressing his finger to the screen.
    “Not unless he lost half his body weight down there.”
    “Jesus Christ,” said Tate. The depth measurements on the object were declining. It was coming up slowly. Nine metres,seven metres. “Where the fuck is he?” The object was at four metres. Jellinek said it was surfacing starboard. “English,” said Wingate.
    “To your
right,”
said Tate. He unhooked his walkie from his belt and called his dispatch. “Come in Eighty-one, Eighty-one come in.”
    “Eighty-one,” said the walkie, “go ahead.”
    “10-78 Marine Unit 1, silent diver, repeat, I have a 10-78 –” Wingate stood over the railing, his heart hammering against the steel bar. He could see something rising through the dark water. It looked like a body, but why was it rising on its own? He unsnapped the clasp on his holster. “Two metres,” said Jellinek. Dispatch was getting the boat’s coordinates off Tate’s GPS. The thing was almost at the surface. Wingate saw it was human. Somehow greeny-beige. Then he saw the green was a small-gauge nylon netting wrapping the body, two or three layers of it, and the fishing rod Barlow had said she’d let go of was still hooked to it. It reeked of mud and rot, and Wingate felt the back of his throat opening. Tate was staring at his walkie as if his vanished partner’s voice might issue from it. And then it seemed to.
    “Motherfucker was weighted to the lakebed,” came Calberson’s voice from the back of the boat. “I had to swim along the bottom and cut it loose.” He was treading water behind them. “Someone want to give me a hand?”
    Tate leapt to the rear of the boat, shouting “10-22! 10-22!” into his walkie, the code for
disregard
. Jellinek handed Wingate a short grappling hook, and he latched the netting with the end of it and pulled it in. What he drew over the side of the boat weighed no more than fifty pounds. But how could it?Calberson was tumbling back over the rear, and Tate was slapping him repeatedly on his upper arm as if to assure himself his partner was really alive. “You okay, Calberson? You okay?”
    The man had his forearms up to deflect the blows. “Jesus, Vic, I’m fine, stop pounding me.”
    “Holy frig, I thought you were dead, I thought you were a fucking dead man.”
    “I’m not! Okay? Now what is that thing?”
    Wingate was kneeling over it, disentangling the end of the grappling hook from the netting. The three other men gathered behind.
    It was a mannequin.

] 5 [
    They took over one of the cells in the holding-pen hall, cells that were almost always empty, and this sometimes struck Hazel as a pity because they were nice cells, as far as cells went, with barred windows looking across Porter Street to the little picnic park, and they

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