The Keeper

by George C. Chesbro

  “You just stay right where you are, you nosy bitch,” the red-haired man said in a voice that had become a rasping growl. “Move, and I’ll shoot you between the legs like you did to Henry.” He paused and, without taking his eyes off Jade, inclined his head slightly toward the shorter man. “Get rid of her boat,” he continued. “Take it up to the light marker beyond Hook and run it up on the rocks. Then swim out toward the deep channel. We’ll sweep you up. I’ve got to interrogate this Arab whore to get some answers, but that won’t take me five minutes. Go.”

  “Right,” the man with the scar replied before moving around the engine housing to untie Jade’s line from the stern cleat.

  “Don’t hurt me!” Jade sobbed as she cringed back against the bulkhead, covering her face with her hands and drawing her knees up to her chest. “Please don’t hurt me! I have children! I’ll tell you anything you want to know! I’ll do anything you want! Just please don’t hurt me!”

  “I’ll do more than hurt you, cunt,” the redhead said as he leaned over to grab Jade’s arm. “I’m going to-”

  The man uttered a high-pitched scream as Jade suddenly slapped his hand away from her forearm, and then struck out with the stiffened middle and index fingers of her right hand at his muddy brown eyes. She missed his right eye, the tip of her index finger caroming off the bone of his eye socket, but her middle finger hit his left eye dead center, penetrating the socket, bursting the eyeball and sending the viscous aqueous humor inside squirting out to the sides.

  She kicked the screaming man in the chest, knocking him backward. She grabbed for the machine pistol that had dropped from his hand, but the weapon had bounced over the lip of the shallow gangway to her left and fallen down into the cabin. Jade sprang to her feet and leaped toward the man with the sunglasses, who was struggling to pull a knife from an ankle scabbard beneath his tight jeans. Halfway across the distance separating them Jade planted her right foot and spun as she lashed out with her left leg. She hit the man full in the face with her heel. His nose snapped with a loud crackling sound and he collapsed across the starboard gunwale.

  Jade used the momentum of her spin to leap up on the port gunwale and then dive across the short stretch of open water between her and the man with the scar, who was standing at the stern of her Boston Whaler and watching her with a stunned expression on his face. She hit him in the chest with her head, at the same time jabbing with her thumbs at his kidneys.

  As they fell to the deck, the man wrapped his thick arms around Jade’s waist to pin her arms to her sides, and then began to squeeze. He butted at her face with his forehead, but Jade moved her head aside, avoiding the blow which would have knocked her unconscious and broken her face. But the scar-faced man’s powerful arms continued to inexorably squeeze the air from her lungs and bend her back. Her vision was beginning to blur, and she knew that in a very short time her spine would crack or be crushed. She was going to die unless she acted immediately.

  Focusing her chi, gathering all her dwindling strength and consciousness into one small sphere in the pit of her stomach, she willed her mind to soar somewhere high above the terrible pain and darkness closing over her and imagined herself taking a deep breath and shoving the man away from her. Then she turned her right hand, which had nearly lost all feeling, inward and clutched the man’s testicles. Firing the strength gathered in her chi to her wrist and fingers, she simultaneously twisted, pulled and squeezed, tearing the ligaments in the scrotum. The man howled as he reflexively released his death grip and clutched at his groin. Jade straightened him up, and then squatted and shot up under him, catching her attacker in the chest with her right shoulder at the same time as she pulled at the back of his knees. She had just enough leverage and remaining strength to move him, and he flipped over the port gunwale into the water.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw the man she had kicked, a piece of his shattered sunglasses still dangling from one ear, appear at the gunwale of the cigarette boat. He was holding one hand to his bleeding face, but in his other hand he held the machine pistol.

  Jade dove headfirst toward the front of the boat, using her right hand to sweep back the throttle on the Boston Whaler. The idling engines roared to life. Rolling onto her back, she reached up and pulled sharply on the wheel as the boat shot forward through a fusillade of bullets that tattooed the stern and raked the deck, splintering wood and fiberglass, shredding the Bimini and smashing her marine radio.

  As the boat careered in an arc, slapping into waves and occasionally skipping through the air, she turned the wheel back to straighten her course, and then cautiously raised her head to look back.

  The redhead whose eye she had put out was apparently still lying on the deck, but the man with the smashed face was hauling the third man out of the water. She knew that in a few moments they would be after her, for they could not allow her to get to shore and a telephone. She got to her feet and sat down in the pilot’s chair, hunching her shoulders and leaning over the wheel to present as small a target as possible as she shot out toward the center of the river and tried to think of a course of action. When she glanced back over her shoulder she saw the cigarette boat, its enormous power train screaming like an airplane engine, speeding in her foaming wake and gaining on her.

  Her radio was useless, but she doubted it would be of any help even if it were working; it was a weekday, and the river in her immediate vicinity was empty of any boats except her own and that of her pursuers. The nearest Coast Guard cutter would be far too distant to arrive in time to save her, for she estimated that the far more powerful cigarette boat would catch up to her in the next two or three minutes, four at the most. She could probably make it across the river to Petersen’s Boat Yard in Upper Nyack, but her pursuers would be right behind her and she knew it would be impossible to jump out of her boat and run up the open dock before she was riddled with bullets. There was also the danger that there might be staff or boat owners in the marina, and Jade knew that the killers chasing her would not hesitate to gun down any innocent bystanders who were witnesses.

  She ducked down and swerved the boat as a hail of bullets flew all around her, thudding into the fiberglass hull and whining off the engine housings at the stern. She swerved a second time, zig-zagging back and forth. When she glanced back again she could see that the racing boat was perhaps two hundred yards behind her, gaining rapidly as it flew off the crests of waves and slapped down hard. She knew she had but one slim chance for survival, and she straightened out her course and headed directly for the western shore just north of Petersen’s.

  She had no gun, and she was being pursued by three men with at least one automatic weapon in a boat more powerful than her own. But she had one small advantage, possessed one thing the killers after her presumably did not, and that was an intimate knowledge of these waters. She had memorized charts of the river from West Point to the Palisades during her first few weeks on the job, and now she hoped that knowledge could save her.

  It was high tide. The jagged wooden pilings and rectangular caissons of concrete, wood and rock which were all that remained of many docks that had once jutted out from the shorelines of the riverfront mansions in Upper Nyack but that had been destroyed in storms would now be just under the surface. Obstructions and hazards to navigation, they were clearly marked on the charts; she knew precisely where they were, and she was counting on the strong probability that the men gaining on her did not. The killers had followed directly in her wake as they had crossed the river, and she could only hope that they would continue to do so and that she could reach her target area before she was hit.

  Barely twenty yards from shore, with her pursuers almost on her stern, she yanked hard on the wheel, sending up a wall of spray as the Boston Whaler veered sharply to starboard and she sped north on a course parallel to the shoreline. She ducked under another hail of bullets, keeping her head just above the bulkhead so that she could see where she was going and carefully gauge her perilous course between th
e treacherous underwater obstacles she knew were there. The cigarette boat followed, but Jade’s sharp turn had gained her a little time. The racer was now perhaps fifty feet behind her, slightly off her starboard side, with the driver attempting to pinch her in even closer to shore. It was exactly the situation she had hoped for.

  The scar-faced man had climbed up on the broad bow of the boat and was lying prone, his legs spread apart for balance as he took careful aim at her with the machine pistol. He never got to pull the trigger.

  The bow of the cigarette boat hit a submerged concrete caisson with a resounding crack that sounded like a cannon shot. Jade glanced to her right in time to see the large power boat rise up out of the water and sail high into the air, slowly turning end over end. She knew what was going to happen next, and she again yanked hard on the wheel, sending up another rooster’s tail of spray as she turned to starboard at a nearly ninety degree angle and sped beneath the somersaulting boat back out toward the center of the river.

  She glanced back at the instant the other boat crashed bow first into the water, and she ducked down as the craft blew apart in a great, thundering blossom of blue and red flame and black smoke. Shrapnel whistled through the air all around her and rattled like hail as it ricocheted off the hull of her boat.

  She went out two hundred yards, then turned around and throttled back, waiting for the smoke to clear. When it did she was amazed to see all three men in the water. The red-haired man whose eye she had gouged out appeared to be unconscious, but he was being supported in the water by the two other men. Their stunned expressions turned to grimaces of hate and rage as Jade slowly approached. Fearing that they were about to be run over, the two men who were conscious began thrashing in the water, desperately trying to pull their comrade to shore.

  Jade easily cut them off, then began to slowly circle the area where they were treading water. Holding the wheel with one hand, she turned and propped her foot up on a section of the gunwale where the Bimini had been shredded. “I can’t believe what charmed lives you guys lead,” she said in a casual tone as the bow of her boat slowly moved through a clump of fiberglass flotsam. “Too bad you all weren’t wearing seat belts. Incidentally, you’ll save energy if you stop treading water and stand up. It should be shallow enough here for you to touch bottom.”

  The two men stopped struggling and stood, supporting the redhead by floating him on his back between them. The faces of all three men were smeared with blood and oil, and black, half-clotted blood continued to ooze out of the gore in the socket where the redhead’s left eye had been. By craning their necks back, the two others were just able to keep their mouths and noses out of the water.

  “Get us out of here,” the scar-faced man said, his eyes glittering with hatred as he glared at Jade. “We’re all hurt, and this man could bleed to death or drown.”

  “You call that bad news? You’re lucky I don’t just run you worthless pieces of shit under.”

  “Fuck you, bitch,” the man with the broken nose said. “You’re still dead meat no matter what happens to us.”

  The men again started struggling toward shore, pulling their unconscious comrade between them. Jade tapped the throttle. She swung the boat around to cut them off from the shoreline, and then throttled back again. She opened a storage locker bolted to the deck, took out a flare gun and pointed it at the men. “Just stay where you are, boys,” she said easily. “Make another move toward shore and I’ll light up your lives.”

  The two men eyed the flare gun, and the scar-faced man said, “That’s not going to do you any good if we duck under water.”

  “And leave your good buddy to drown? Sounds good to me. I’ve got plenty of flares to use for target practice on you shitheads. When you come up for air, I’ll just burn holes in the backs of your stupid skulls. Even if you could make it to shore without my torching you, where are you going to go? It’ll only take me a few minutes to get to a telephone, and the cops will have you before you go half a mile. My advice is to stay put while I figure out what to do with you.”

  The two men remained still, glaring at Jade with their bloodshot eyes as the redhead rolled in the gentle swells.

  Jade turned and looked back in the direction of Nyack. She could hear sirens calling firemen and other volunteers from their homes and workplaces. However, the explosion had taken place close to shore, and the sound would have been muffled and the smoke obscured by tall trees and the mansions that rose majestically into the sky at the top of the steeply sloping lawns that bordered North Broadway in Upper Nyack. Unless someone had actually seen what had happened and called the police to report where they were, it was going to be a few more minutes before local authorities arrived at the scene.

  Then the men in the water would be arrested, and she would be left with nothing but a badly scarred boat and a whole new set of problems.

  She desperately needed answers to a number of questions, not more complications, and she was quite certain that she was going to get very few of the former and a lot of the latter once the would-be assassins were taken off her hands. She would not be able to avoid the publicity that was bound to follow in the wake of the incident, and she could not cooperate with the Orangetown police by telling them anything about what had certainly triggered the attack. The police would want answers she couldn’t give them, and she doubted very much that the three men would be forthcoming about who had sent them, and why. She was going to be branded as uncooperative, and any information extracted from, or about, her assailants would probably be kept from her. In the meantime, she would remain a target for another team of assassins that could be sent after her, and she would be no closer to finding out who was responsible for the nightmare unfolding around her.

  She needed access to the men in a situation where she might be given the opportunity to interrogate them herself, or at least be provided with any information that might be obtained from or about them. However, alone and armed only with a flare gun, she could not afford the risks involved with taking the men on board so that she could bring them back to Cairn. She had no radio with which to contact anyone who might be an ally, and so it seemed there was nothing for her to do but wait for the Orangetown police to show up.

  She turned back and was startled to see an instantly recognizable elderly woman dressed in slacks, sneakers and a baggy pink sweater standing on the shore thirty yards away. Jade didn’t know why she should be so surprised to find out that Sarah Hampton lived in Upper Nyack, because a host of celebrated actors, authors, artists and other celebrities lived here as well as in Cairn and all the other riverfront communities, but to see this old woman who for almost sixty years had been one of America’s most celebrated stars of stage, screen and television in this situation was somewhat disorienting. Sarah Hampton was a small woman, and seemed even smaller in person than in films, but she suddenly loomed very large in Jade’s plans.

  “Hello, Mrs. Hampton.”

  “Hello, dear,” the actress called back cheerfully. “I thought I heard quite a bang back here. Are those poor men in the water all right?”

  “They’re going to be just fine, Mrs. Hampton. I’m Jahli Aden, the riverkeeper. As you can see, I’ve got a little problem. Can you help me?”

  “Of course, dear. Would you like me to make you all some nice hot tea? Those men must be freezing. April’s no time to go swimming in the Hudson.”

  “No, thank you, Mrs. Hampton. They need to cool off. But I do need help, and my radio’s broken. Could you please go back in your house, as quickly as you can without hurting yourself, and call the Cairn Police Department? As for Detective Mannes—Roy Mannes. It’s important that you talk to him. If he’s not at the police station, ask whoever answers the phone to contact him immediately. Detective Mannes should be told that the riverkeeper is in trouble and needs help right away. He should take the fastest powerboat he can get his hands on and get down here as quickly as possible. Would you do that for me, Mrs. Hampton?”

  “Of course, dear
. But the Orangetown police are much closer. They may be on their way here now. I hear sirens.”

  “I still need you to call Detective Mannes, Mrs. Hampton. He and I have a special arrangement for cleaning garbage out of the river.”

  ii

  Now Jade wished she’d run them under, simply killed them and be done with it.

  She stood in the narrow corridor outside their cell watching the three men watch her. Despite their injuries and the considerable pain she knew they must be suffering, all three sat together, ramrod-straight, on the edge of one of the two cots in the cell. Their feet were flat on the floor and their hands rested on their knees, as if they were at attention. The redhead whose eye she had put out was ashen, but he sat just as straight as his two companions. Both the man whose nose she had broken and the man whose testicles she had twisted stared back at her impassively and stoically, giving no signs of discomfort. Although at least one, and possibly all three, of the men were going to require surgery, they had refused all but the most perfunctory medical attention to clean, bandage and truss their injuries, and they had refused to be hospitalized. Those refusals had been the last words any of them had spoken. None had even asked to make a phone call.

  The three men had the demeanor of prisoners of war, and Jade suspected that was how they viewed themselves—except that these captives weren’t even going to give their names, ranks and serial numbers, much less offer up any information about who had sent them after her. What was clear was that they were professionals thoroughly trained for covert operations, and they had taken strict precautions even for what must have seemed to them an easy assignment; they carried no identification of any kind, and even the labels in their clothing had been torn out.

  Jade had spent the last forty-five minutes trying to interrogate them, asking questions about everything from the dead Jolly Roger to their mention of Sergeant Henry Bolo. She had been by turns cajoling, threatening, and even pleading. Through it all the three men had simply sat in stony silence, staring at her intently, just as they were doing now.