Frost Hollow Publishers | Books for Boys

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Dead Reckoning

"Of all the books I have read by Mr. Holland, Dead Reckoning is the best yet! I like how Charlie is a teenager and he is fighting off criminals and stalkers. All boys will enjoy this book."

— Matthew Piispanen, age 13

"Dead Reckoning is easily Robert Holland’s best book yet! In this thriller, Charlie puts all of his knowledge and experience to work in stopping the actions of a madman, saving the beautiful Andrea James from near death, and taking on a U. S. Senator in a sailing race. With two intense mysteries to solve and a good dose of exciting water sports, everyone will find it hard to put this book down. Each page contains action that will keep the reader’s heart beating fast as he or she anticipates the next twist in the plot. It doesn’t get any better than this!"

— Keegan Bannon, age 16

Chapter One

1... Mosquitos

I’m always looking for places to dig clams ... always. And when you live on an island, even an island as small as Martha’s Vineyard, there are a lot of places to look. All you need is time and with Pete having gone off to college on the first of July, I had most of the summer ahead of me.

Charlie Dollarhide had taken over my job, putting up and taking down signs for my mother’s real estate office, and I had no other obligations. Nothing weird had happened in over six months. Nobody had called with something to investigate and the only thing keeping the cops busy were the summer people.

I’d read that violent human behavior increases dramatically during periods of high sun spot activity and after I checked and discovered that during the period of time between last July and Christmas there had been a rash of sunspots, I assumed that explained the weirdness. In the past six months there had been no sunspots at all and that seemed like pretty good evidence. But it was only evidence and not proof. I’d need to go back as far as recorded sunspot activity and compare it to history.

But that would have to wait for another time. Just now I was focused on quahogs. It’s a matter of priorities. In the summer I don’t do research. And on a hot July afternoon, with the tide just right in Pocha Pond on Chappaquiddick, it was time for digging clams. I like clams. I like cherrystones and little necks and quahogs in pasta sauce, chowder, and as stuffers.

Trips to Chappy, which is what we call the sometime-island that is part of Edgartown, had become a trial after the ocean broke through the causeway at Norton Point Beach and left a mile of open water in its place. It meant having to wait in line for the On Time Ferry and the lines were long. Usually, I timed my trips to avoid the lines, but as they say, time and tide wait for no man, so I knew I’d end up in a line. I allowed for that by bringing a book.

But wonder of wonders, the line was short, with only eight cars ahead of me and because the ferries (there are two of them) take three cars a trip, I got over to Chappy well ahead of what I’d planned and that meant I’d have about an hour before slack water to explore.

I left my truck in the Trustees of the Reservation parking lot out near Wasque, took the rake and my clam basket from the back of the truck, and headed down the trail that led to the marshes and Pocha Pond that lies behind East Beach. I’d spent a lot of time fishing from East Beach and when I looked over at the pond and the marshes I knew I was looking at clamming waters.

The trail runs downhill at the edge of a large field and then through a thick woods. It is well maintained and wooden walkways have been built to get hikers over the wetlands without damaging the plants.

Twice I jumped deer and watched them vanish with a single bound into the thick brush that grows below the canopy formed by the oaks. I sorted out the birds by sight and sound and looked for tracks crossing the path.

For the most part the trail is hard and only when I came to the sandier places did I see any footprints. There was just one set going the way I was headed and no set coming back. It probably meant that someone was exploring the string of small islands that reached out into the pond, and I’d meet them coming back. Or maybe they had just continued on, picking up the next trail in a long circular hike of the island.

That was when I had the feeling that I was being watched.

I have an exceptionally hot imagination. All it takes is a single idea and I can build mountains of possible horror ahead. I know that, of course, and I usually beat such ideas back to reality but this time they wouldn’t go away. I stopped and looked around but I saw nothing even slightly suspicious. I shrugged and decided to explore the shallow water for clams.

I took off my running shoes, waded out a short way, and began running my long handled clam rake over the bottom. I found a few cherrystones and littlenecks, but not enough to keep me digging.

I waded out into deeper water and the results were the same: a clam or two here and there. Time to try another spot. I waded back out, put on my shoes and walked to where the causeway ended and the woods on the first island began.

The feeling had grown stronger and it grew stronger still as I looked into the woods ahead and the very narrow trail. In a place like that, where the woods grew up thick and tight to the sides of the trail, I needed to be on full alert.

Worse, carrying the long-handled clam rake and the clam basket, which is surrounded by an small inner tube, would be a definite drawback if someone came at me out of the brush.

It helped that I had remembered to bring one of my Gil Hibben throwing knives. I carry it a lot around salt water because it’s one piece of stainless steel so rust is not a problem. Back home I had ten more of those knives which I used to practice my throwing skills. You see a lot of that stuff in the movies, but it’s just for show. Knives can be thrown accurately but only at just the right distance. It’s based on how many times a knife has to turn in the air before it gets to the target. At twelve feet I can stick the knife every time, but only at twelve feet.

Recently, though, I had discovered that it is possible to throw at other distances and still stick the knife. The key is the old story you hear baseball coaches tell their pitchers. Don’t aim, just throw. That notion connected to Rob English when he was throwing lightening bolts from the pitcher’s mound two springs past.

In one game he suddenly lost his control and sitting behind the bench I heard the coach say, “he’s aiming the ball, He just has to throw it.” Then he went out to the mound and as he was walking back I saw Rob look over at his brother in the stands. He was holding up a stone.

That too had been a mystery but now because of my knife throwing I understood. He had always been able to throw one stone in the air and hit it with a second stone. You did that by instinct, not by aiming. But it took a lot of practice.

On the other hand, in combat you don’t throw away your weapon. I’d had enough training to know how to use a knife in a fight, if it came to that, and I shifted the rake to my left hand along with the basket, and kept my right hand close to the sheath.

To tell you the truth, I felt kind of foolish, plowing through the brush, trying to act combat ready while carrying the basket and rake and making as much noise as a busy water buffalo. What made me feel even more ridiculous was the way the rake kept hanging up in the bushes.

The trail ran out into the marsh and over a second tidal causeway out to the next island. The feeling had not gone away. It was starting to bug me. It meant I had to make a decision about leaving the basket in the water and the rake in the brush and walking on out to the end of the trail to find out whether there was any basis for my suspicions.

And just about the time I began to shake my head and admonish myself for such stupidity, I looked down at the trail. It gets wet there because the high tide covers the path and though it was low now, it was muddy, and suddenly there were two sets of footprints, the second set a good deal smaller than the first.

Logic demanded one conclusion. If I kept going the way I was headed, I’d probably meet up with them because there was only the single trail out and back.

I shrugged, ditched my clamming equipment, and kept walking, determined to settle this thing so I could get down to some serious clam exploration.

The trail grew steadily fainter, the brush thick at the sides and now my system was running on red alert. You can’t practice as many fighting skills as I have, for as long as I have, without reacting to the possibility of attack. It’s part of the training. And when J.D. Witness was doing the training, nothing got left out.

But I still wasn’t used to the woods. Most of my life had been spent in open areas, a lot of that on the beaches and the water, places where you could see what was coming long before it got there. This was split second stuff and it made me think back to my adventures in the woods around Edgartown Great Pond with the sasquatch. The wind had come up and because the sound of it in the trees made it difficult to hear anything else, I discovered that the danger zone had wrapped itself closer to me. I kept my right hand close to the knife sheath. I moved more slowly, falling into ninja mode, trying to make myself part of the place itself. I stayed on the trail because I could move more quietly. You make a lot of noise moving through brushy woods.

The trail led in a sort of circular path, allowing me to circumnavigate (there’s a word I never expected to use) the island. Here the ground had hardened again and we’d had no rain for two weeks so the only tracks I saw were those left by the deer, and even then, only the sharply pointed ends of the hooves showed in the hard clay ground.

On the other hand, my heart was racing, flooding my system with adrenalin and testosterone, and that allowed me to hear better and to see from the corners of my eyes and it heightened my sense of smell. I felt like the consummate hunter, a perfectly tuned, lethal weapon, ready to explode into action. Once you’ve felt that, you want to experience it over and over.

I’m a little over six feet tall, two hundred and ten pounds with the muscle I added the past year from football and continual workouts, so I am not a pushover, even for someone carrying a gun, unless they’re beyond my reach. For that I carry throwing stars, which, owing to some brilliant planning, were now sitting in the glove compartment of my truck. Hey, nobody gets everything right all the time.

But with the brush so close, the stars wouldn’t have been much use. It was just too easy for someone to pop up out of the brush at close range with a pistol. Knowing that, can make you a little twitchy and you have to guard against letting your system recoil too soon. But that’s hard to control in the thick woods, with the trees growing close to the ground and the underbrush running at five feet high or better. There are way too many places for someone to hide.

I had thought there were only two islands, but when I reached the point where the trail came out of the woods, I found that there was yet another, mostly just a very small patch of woods between the two larger islands.

I couldn’t decide which bothered me more, the woods, or the open ground. It looked like about a fifty yard run, a distance I could cover in a little over five seconds. At that speed, it would take one heck of a shot to take me out, even if he had a shotgun.

I took a deep breath, edged out into the open and when I looked down, I saw another set of tracks, the larger set, coming back. I stopped and shook my head. I’d been way too busy trying to conjure up the least plausible explanation, while ignoring hundreds of other perfectly logical possibilities. For example, it could have been nothing more than a guy with small feet, maybe a kid, going out to dig some clams and someone else had simply gone for a walk and then returned.

Except that I didn’t buy it. I couldn’t. I had to stay with danger.

I had to. I couldn’t take the risk of letting my system relax. Suddenly, I whirled and ran back the way I had come, fast, recklessly.

I wanted to find the man who’d made the second set of prints and to get a look at him in case I needed that later.

I dodged and ducked, avoiding any branches that hung out over the path and I took the trail that ran down the center of the island, though it was clearly the less well-traveled.

I jumped the guy just the way you jump a deer. He heard me coming, probably squatting down out of sight, and without knowing it I put the pressure to him. He couldn’t be certain I wouldn’t spot him and attack so he ran, bursting out of a thick patch of cover just as I could see far enough ahead to see the movement. I redoubled my speed and I can flat out run.

He wasn’t halfway across the open ground when I came out of the woods and I stayed right on him, gaining rapidly but he got into the next patch of woods before I could reach him.

I plunged into the woods and stopped. I knew two things. He didn’t want anyone to see him or catch him so he had to have been up to something illegal or immoral, or just plain nasty. I also knew he had stayed on the trail because his feet had gotten wet in the marsh and his tracks were easy to follow.

The question was whether he’d keep on running or whether he’d try to ambush me. I shrugged. I’d run. The ground was hard and I knew how to run almost soundlessly so if he had ambush in mind, my speed would throw off his timing and I figured in a fight he was dead meat.

He was very tall and skinny and he was no athlete. His arms flailed when he ran instead of pumping and while there are plenty of thin, wiry guys who are tough as nails, this guy wasn’t one of them.

Because of his height, I could see him above the underbrush and I ran faster, figuring that I’d catch him where the trail crossed the last marsh. I came out of the woods about fifty feet behind him and kicked my legs into another gear and that’s when my left foot slipped in the mud and I went butt over bandbox, rolling forward, tucking my head so I would come back up onto my feet.

But in the open he was a lot faster than I had thought, his long legs eating up the ground, and by time I’d finished rolling in the mud like some happy hog, he’d disappeared into the woods.

Probably, I could still have caught him, but it would have depended on which way he turned on the main trail, and by the time I figured that out, he’d have gotten away.

Pissed? Take a guess. A whole football season and that had never happened once. I was as sure-footed as a goat. I looked down at my shoes. That would, of course, have been a goat wearing football cleats instead of running shoes which quickly clog with mud and offer no traction.

My shirt and shorts were also covered with mud, along with my head and arms and legs. I took off my shoes, waded out into the salty pond and ducked down to get as much of the mud off as possible. Getting wet didn’t matter. It was summer. I’d dry quickly enough. The fact that I was gonna smell like a rich clam flat for some time didn’t bother me. Martha’s Vineyard perfume. Nothing sweeter.

I rinsed off my shoes, put them on, and walked back across the first island and out to the far island, not worrying now about making any noise. The danger level had receded from red to a nice normal green. What I wanted to know was what had happened to the guy with the small feet. It didn’t take long.

I found him in a small clearing at the tip of the last island. He was a small man, which explained his small feet, and he’d been blindfolded and tied to a big old oak and he was either dead or out cold. The worst part was that he wore only shorts and every inch of open skin was blanketed with sucking mosquitoes. I began sweeping the mosquitoes away, running my hands down through them and leaving long streaks of blood over his skin, and I kept at it until the mosquitoes were dead or gone.

The pulse in his neck was slow but strong. I took out a can of bug spray, decided he had way too many open wounds to allow spraying him with chemicals, and sprayed the ground and the tree and then sent a cloud into the air around him. Finally, I removed the blindfold and cut away the ropes that bound him to the tree. He stirred and groaned.

More mosquitoes were arriving and I sprayed bug dope onto my arms and legs and then rubbed some on my face and through my hair to replace what I’d washed off along with the mud.

I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and watched the water run out of it. Cell phones do not like baths any more than cats. It wouldn’t even turn on.

It was time to get him out of there. I picked him up, threw him over my shoulder, walked out to the water, kicked off my shoes, and waded in, taking him off my shoulder and sitting him on the sandy bottom in the shallows where I began scooping handfuls of water over him to wash away the blood and the dead mosquitoes. Salt water is good for wounds of all kinds.

I carried him back to shore, put on his tee shirt and his boat shoes and watched him, hoping he was coming to, because I didn’t exactly feature carrying him all the back to my truck.

I still had my clamming gear to carry and I was not looking forward to a two-mile stagger.

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