Past Imperfect Read Free Page A

“baiting-on.”
    â€œLet’s get him over to a dry spot.” McIntire stepped over a pile of soggy netting and grasped the slick, rubber-clad legs, leaving the exposed flesh of the shoulders to the other man. Together, accompanied by panting and grunts, they maneuvered the body along the deck and around the still hot potbellied stove to place it in front of a closed hatch opposite the one where Nels had been retrieving his catch. As the doctor eased his burden gently to the deck, McIntire retrieved the fisherman’s crumpled shirt and slid it under his head.
    Guibard extracted a gleaming white handkerchief from his coat pocket and pressed it daintily to his brow. “I’ll zip back into town and call for the ambulance. I’d as soon get well back into the bay before the wind starts to kick up. Simon tells me Jonas drives this beast all the time, so he should be able to get you back okay. But take your time, eh? Once I get in, it’ll be at least another half an hour before the ambulance can make it out from Chandler. We don’t want to be hanging around the dock attracting a crowd any longer than necessary.” He made a circuit of the deck, frowning slightly as he surveyed the surroundings a final time, peering down into the greasy mechanical innards. He turned back to McIntire with abrupt severity. “Oh, and be sure you leave everything the way you find it here. Don’t take anything off the boat.” Before McIntire could respond he added in a milder tone, “If Nels had life insurance there might be questions.”
    McIntire nodded. Curses! The looting and pillaging would have to wait for another day. He pulled the string that switched off the single naked bulb, plunging the cabin into twilight. They didn’t need a dead battery. “Will you be doing an autopsy? Hold an inquest or anything?”
    â€œWhat for? There’s no doubt about what killed him. I’ll give him another once-over when I get in some better light, see if I can find the stinger. But bees don’t always leave their stinger behind.” The doctor looked down upon the inert body. “He spent the last ten years of his life scared shitless of this happening. Took every reasonable precaution and a hell of a lot of unreasonable ones, and for what? Made life miserable, looking over his shoulder every minute, and in the end one of the little buggers nailed him anyway. We might have been able to desensitize him, but he went into conniptions every time I brought the subject up. Wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Damn fool.”
    â€œWhat about the antidote or whatever you call it? Didn’t he give himself the shot?”
    â€œEpinephrine—adrenaline. He must have gotten some of it in anyway. There’s a mark on his leg from the injection. But there are no guarantees.” He pulled the bib of the dead man’s waterproofs up a little higher over the pale abdomen. “Not a very dignified way to die, eh? I told him to put the shot in his thigh. I wanted him to get it into a good-sized hunk of flesh. If he’d tried to jab himself in the shoulder and tensed up, he’d have snapped that needle like a toothpick. His muscles were like concrete.”
    McIntire swallowed. “How long would you say…?” He let the question trail off.
    Guibard shrugged. “Oh, I’d figure he’s been dead between an hour and an hour and a half—not more than that for sure. It couldn’t have happened very long before he was found. He’d already started to pull in the nets when he died, and he wouldn’t have got out here much ahead of the Lindstroms.”
    It didn’t take a coroner to figure that out. “I meant to ask,” McIntire said, “how long did it take for him to die?
How
, exactly, did he die?”
    Guibard rubbed his palms with his handkerchief and gazed out over the water. McIntire followed his line of sight. The sun had