My breath stopped. The tank was dry.
I dropped the heavy bundle and fumbled to unsnap the vest clips, yanking myself free of the scuba gear and tank. They drifted slowly downward, chasing the bundle that had already disappeared into the darkness near the bottom. I surfaced as quickly as I dared, tearing off the mask and snorkel as I rose, until my head bobbed up out of the water like a seal’s.
Floating a hundred feet away was the big powerboat. Not just any boat.
The Francesca.
For an instant I forgot all about the cold. What the hell was Hollis doing here? Had he somehow followed me? Or guessed that this was where I was headed? That sounded crazy.
I couldn’t see Hollis anywhere aboard the Francesca. The speedboat was on the far side of the big cruiser, just out of my view. I heard voices. Two figures climbed up from the speedboat into the cockpit of the Francesca, and it felt for a moment like I was struggling for air from the empty tank once again.
Alec. And Boone McGann.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE FRANCESCA BOBBED LAZILY on the gentle surface waves, its engines idling to keep it near to the anchored speedboat. It was sixty yards from where I was floating, about halfway down the long shallow cove of the island. I had a clear view of its port side.
The storm the night before had washed the big cruiser clean, and the bright noon sun gleamed off its metal stanchions and teak trim. It could have been a photo in an advertisement.
Alec climbed the ladder to the flying bridge at the very top of the boat. He was wearing a light blue hoodie and khaki pants, and his blond hair caught the sun. Alec took the helm, shifting the Francesca into slow reverse.
Boone came into view in the cockpit, a sliver of his tall frame just visible around the edge of the cabin. Salt in my eyes or not, I had no trouble recognizing what he was carrying: an M4 carbine. With a telescopic sight.
I ducked my head under the surface before either of them looked in my direction. Without the diving mask on, I swam almost blind back to the shore and felt my way into the shelter of the crevice. When I surfaced again, I was deep in the island’s cleft, out of sight of the boat.
Alec was alive. Somehow he had escaped Ondine. Or she had set me up.
And he and Boone had hijacked the Francesca.
Which meant Hollis must be dead. Murdered. Probably only minutes after I’d seen him. I gripped the rock wall of the crevice, barnacles cutting into my palms through the gloves.
My chest was quivering. My body trying to force more circulation. Another ten minutes in the water and my limbs would be useless. I’d literally turn blue.
Think. I’d averaged about twenty knots in the speedboat getting to the island. The Francesca with its twin screws could manage a little more than half that over the ocean swells. Alec and Boone must have left the marina right on my ass for the big cruiser to catch up with me this quickly.
But there was no way they could have kept me in sight. So how the hell had they found the island?
The speedboat. Fuck. Of course it was the speedboat.
Alec must have tracked the old man’s movements around town for weeks, using the GPS transmitter on his truck. So if Dono had visited his boat even once during that time, Alec would know about it. Of course he’d have put another transmitter on board.
I’d led them right to the diamonds. Like a goddamned bird dog.
I heard the Francesca’s engines roar once, then slow again to a steady thrum. Which way was it headed? I edged toward the mouth of the crevice to peer around the rocks.
The Francesca was making a wide arc, away from the island, and starting to circle back. The slow pounding of its props made a trail of white froth. Boone was climbing the ladder to join Alec up on the flying bridge. He was dressed in black trousers, black shirt, jungle boots. Carbine held almost lazily across his shoulder. Ready for hunting.
I was somewhere between very bad and truly fucked. I couldn’t go ashore here. I’d be on the rocky beach with no shoes and no decent cover for thirty yards. Alec and Boone would spot me within seconds. And I sure as hell couldn’t stay hidden where I was for much longer.
My .32 and Dono’s weapons were aboard the speedboat. Had been aboard, I corrected myself. Boone and Alec would have taken them. They would also have taken the keys in the ignition, or disabled the outboard. Even if I could swim to the speedboat and board it without being spotted, it was a dead end.
I caught their voices on the light wind. Not words, just tones. Excited. Maybe angry. Alec was pointing toward the island.
It wasn’t hard to guess their thinking. They assumed that I had anchored the speedboat and waded ashore. I must still be there, with the rest of Dono’s treasure. I would have heard their boat approach. The best bet was that I was hiding somewhere in the three or four acres of fir trees and madrona and scrub that made up a haphazard forest in the center of the small island.
I realized I couldn’t feel my feet in the fins. I clenched my arms and legs, hard, embracing the agony because it meant that the limbs were still responding.
Alec turned the wheel, and the Francesca straightened itself to point directly at the shore. Boone put a foot up on the dash and climbed right over the short windshield to jump down onto the roof of the cabin. Eager. He went up to the tip of the bow and waited as the boat edged closer to the island.
When it was about fifty feet from the beach, Boone stepped over the rail and dropped into the water. He began swimming ashore, an easy sidestroke that allowed him to hold the carbine over his head, same as I’d learned in the army.
Alec put the boat into reverse and began backing away. As I watched, he picked up another carbine and placed it on the dash in front of him.
Two M4s against my pair of swim fins. With the carbines’ telescopic sights and time to aim, they could pick me off at a quarter mile. The island was barely twice that on the long side.
Of course, Boone and Alec didn’t know I was unarmed. They thought I’d waded ashore, so logically I’d have at least a handgun with me. I’d have traded one of my thumbs for that to be true.
So the two hunters would take their time, reducing my chances of popping up and blowing Boone’s head off. The smart approach would be for Boone to stay within sight of the boat and sweep the island slowly from one end to the other while Alec tracked him, watching for movement in the brush. They had hours of daylight left. If they carried handheld radios, all the easier for them. They could flush me like a pheasant, with the same result.
It was a solid plan. And it gave me a sliver of hope. Because so far they hadn’t thought to look for me in the water.
I forced myself to take deep, full breaths, my chest fighting to expand against the crush of the cold. The Francesca was closer now, turning parallel to the shore, a hundred feet from the beach, backing slowly in my direction. They would start their sweep at this end of the island. Thirty-five yards from me. Thirty.
Now. The moment Alec put the Francesca into forward, even at a walking pace to keep up with Boone, my odds would go from slim to less than zero.
I dove. Or tried to. For a moment my limbs jerked clumsily before I got my legs kicking in rhythm, driving down.
The pressure even at five feet under felt like chisels jammed into my temples. The cruiser’s big engines made a drumbeat I could feel all around me as the sound reverberated. It seemed to push me back as I fought against the current. My kicks were weaker.
I was out over the island shelf. Below me the bottom changed from the dull gray of the island’s shore on my left to sudden black to my right as the shelf fell off toward the sea floor.
Then I finally saw her, the Francesca, all at once. A huge, dark mass, her shadow a black column. Her churning propellers painted circles of foam.
How close? Fifteen feet? Ten? I reached out toward her. There she was, right in front of me.
My hand banged against the stern swim platform. I grabbed at it, clutching my unfeeling fingers around one of the drainage slits.
<
br /> As I did, the Francesca plowed forward. The propellers spun hungrily, six feet from my head. The wake bore me up to the surface. I gasped in a huge breath of air, hearing nothing at all over the engines and roiling water.
I tried to get an elbow up onto the platform. The push of the Francesca’s wake was dragging me away from the boat. I got an arm up, grabbed the platform from the top this time, and heaved myself up and out of the water.
For a moment I lay on the teak platform staring dizzily at the foot-high letters spelling the boat’s name in gold script across the white transom. Alec couldn’t see me from up on the flybridge. But where was Boone? I craned my neck to see the beach. Boone’s tall black figure was walking along the tree line, looking into the forest. If he turned around, there was no way he could miss me. I had to move.
I put a hand up on the transom and stood, tottering, and clambered into the cockpit. Ducked down below the rail, out of sight.
An eight-foot ladder led from the cockpit up to the flybridge. Maybe five more feet of open space to where Alec stood at the wheel. His carbine on the dash right in front of him. Could I reach him before he could grab it?
One breath. Another. The blood was returning to my limbs. My hands felt like I’d grabbed a stripped wire, but at least I could stand.
There was a fishing gaff strapped alongside the ladder, a sawed-off wooden shovel handle with a wicked steel hook bound to one end. I’d seen it on my previous visits to Hollis. My fingers didn’t want to cooperate with one another. They tangled in the elastic cords as I pulled the gaff loose.
One more deep breath. And then I went up the ladder, as fast as I could move my feet, and took the last two rungs in a jump.
Alec’s reflexes were excellent. He didn’t turn toward the sudden noise, just lunged for a big Colt revolver hanging in its holster by the wheel. I swung the gaff wildly with my free hand. Its wooden haft came down like an ax onto his outstretched arm. The gun went off, the shot going skyward. The crack of it echoed off the island.
I dropped the gaff to grab Alec’s shooting arm with both hands. He swung a haymaker, his fist glancing off the side of my head. I slammed his wrist onto the low windscreen, and the revolver fell, skittering across the cabin roof toward the foredeck.
Alec got a grip on my shoulder and head-butted me in the face. I felt something crack. Dazed, I bulled him backward. We slammed into the side of the bridge.
The cowling next to us exploded, sending splinters of fiberglass and teak into our faces. We both jerked back reflexively, breaking our clinch just as the high, supersonic whap caught up with the bullet. Boone. He was shooting at us from the beach. A second round tore a massive chunk out of the dashboard as my vision cleared.
Alec ducked away from the barrage, astonishment overwhelming the rage on his face. He scrambled for the M4 carbine on the dashboard. I launched myself off the wall and punched him with all my strength across one of his perfect cheekbones. The carbine skittered out of his hands and over the rail into the water. I clubbed him again, and he fell back onto the controls.
The Francesca leaped forward as if horsewhipped.
The sudden surge of the engines threw me backward. I hit the low canvas siding at the rear of the flybridge and crashed right over it, falling to land with a sledgehammer thud on my spine in the cockpit.
Everything slowed to the pace of drifting fog. I couldn’t find the handrail to get up. I wasn’t even sure I was reaching for it.
I saw the cabin window nearest me vaporize. Didn’t hear it shatter or the crack of Boone’s carbine. My ears were filled with nothing but a banshee keen.
In a sudden rush of clarity, I knew that Alec would go for the revolver. On the forward deck. The bow was that way. I should be moving.
A shuddering boom shook the boat, and I rolled across the cockpit. The Francesca was bouncing on the swells, big lunging leaps across each wave to crash down into the next. There was no one at the wheel. The boat was canted to starboard, the powerful engines carving a huge circle at full speed. Another shot whipped through the cabin windows.
Get up, boy. Dono’s voice. Kill the bastards. Good idea. I got my legs under me.
I tried to focus. The Francesca was starting to draw parallel to shore again as she circled, the beach now a hundred yards off the starboard bow. I saw Boone, a miniature black stick figure, wading into the low surf. Swimming for the speedboat? No. Trying to get a better shooting angle around the rocks.
A noise behind me, port side. I fell to my left just as Alec came off the side deck and swung for my head with the gaff. The razor tip of the hook gouged my shoulder muscle. The boat hit a wave, and the impact flung us together. Alec tried to raise the gaff again, but we were too close. I got a hand under his chin and pushed. He dropped the gaff and clutched at my throat. I kept pushing. Trying to keep him from strangling me before my world went black. I was losing. Too tired.
Another wave smacked into the boat broadside. Alec and I were stumbling together like drunken dancers, down the slope of the tilted cockpit. The small of Alec’s back hit the transom. The propellers carved a deep trough of thrashing water below us.
Both my hands pushed at Alec’s chin now, my weight behind them. His head was over the stern, his body arched like a cliff diver’s. He flailed crazily. I pushed harder. He made a long sandpaper sound as his nails tore at my scalp. Then red sprayed across us, a pretty fan shape.
Alec was two hundred pounds of wet cement, sagging to the teak floor of the cockpit, dragging me with him.
I was kneeling in a pool of blood. Mine? No. The inside of the transom was painted in crimson, where one of Boone’s rounds had torn through his partner.
Boone. I needed the revolver. Anything. Where was the shore? I saw only ocean. Heard only the howl of the redlined engines.
To port, suddenly, there was a blur of stone and tree and surf. The boat was screaming past the tip of the crescent cove, past the huge wooden stump of the madrona tree. We were headed into the rocks.
Get to the helm. Now, boy.
Up the ladder, arms and legs grinding like rusted pistons. I flung myself at the wheel and spun it hard, knowing that it was too late, just as I saw Boone straight ahead. He was up to his thighs in the surf, teeth bared, his loose black shirt fluttering like wings. He raised the carbine to aim at me, his mouth forming a great O as the boat bore down on him.
Then a giant hand swatted me high into the air, a blow that spun me over and over like a guttering firework until its flame went black.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I WATCHED THE TINY CRAB, no bigger than a nickel, inch cautiously around the shape of a hand that was unfamiliar to both of us. I’d been watching the crab and the hand for a very long time, it seemed. The crab came closer to my nose. When I exhaled, it scuttled hastily away.
There was something behind me splashing, playing in the gentle waves. I wanted to look in that direction, but I wasn’t sure how to do that. There was something important about the idea, though.
After a lot of thinking, I worked out how to stand up. Arm there, knee there. Easy as pie. I was twelve feet tall, and as thin as a drinking straw.
The world was very bright, except for the huge patch of shade a few yards away from where I tottered. The shadow of the beached Francesca.
She was completely out of the water, tilted pitifully on the rocks and sand. Looming above me like a church, thirty feet high. Behind her was the broad stripe she had gouged through the rock and sand, up from the sea.
My brain laboriously assembled the pieces. She’d been running nearly parallel to the shore when she’d hit. Another few degrees to starboard and she’d have missed the island completely. Instead the boat had beached itself at top speed. A fifty-foot-long, thirty-ton craft traveling at nearly twenty knots, crushing the brittle rock of the tidal pools in her path as efficiently as a diesel locomotive. She had massive holes in her fiberglass bottom, as if a gigantic mallet had splintered her sides.
I heard another splash
. I staggered to my right, around the stern of the wounded cruiser. There was a big seal in the shallows, its black fins flapping, beating against the water.
I waded in shin-deep for a closer look. The sand moved treacherously under my feet.
The seal was Boone, lying on his belly in eighteen inches of water. He was half in and half out of the path that the boat had carved in the island. My brain vaguely warned me of danger, until I spotted his carbine. It was thirty feet from where Boone lay. The waves splashed around it, trying to push the weapon farther up onto the beach.
That was just about where the boat hit him, Dono’s voice said, and knocked his ass all the way to where you see him now. The voice sounded joyous.
Boone ponderously raised his right arm and let it fall to slap the surface. His other arm was underneath him, pushing to keep his head just above the water. His legs were mostly buried in the shifting sand. They didn’t move, even as his upper body twisted.
Again his arm rose and fell. A wave broke over him, and he coughed violently, flecks of something darker than salt water flying from his mouth.
I didn’t think he knew I was there until his eyes rolled to meet mine. His mouth went wide in a horrible stained smile.
“Here,” he said, so softly that the sound blended with the next wave. “Here. Burt. I’m here.” He kept on saying it. “Here.”
I walked forward and bent down, my mouth close to his ear.
“It’s okay, brother,” I said thickly. “I’m with you now.”
He rasped something that sounded like relief. His supporting arm was trembling. Failing. The right arm rose once more, not even clearing the water this time. He sank a little lower, as another wave washed over the useless legs. His head dipped under, rose, dipped, and his long body gave a cruel, thrashing tremor that turned him halfway onto his side before it ended.
With Boone still, the only sound was the lulling wash of the surf. I was tired. I wanted to lie back down on the sand and sleep for days and days. I thought about lying next to Luce, and the memory made me turn and retrace my steps, following the gashed stripe of the Francesca’s trail back out of the water.
Past Crimes Page 26
