The Gambit

by Allen Longstreet

  With her, it was like I had forgotten that I was in trouble to begin with. She made it all melt away.

  “Have you been to Florida before?” she asked.

  “Only to Disney World and Universal.”

  “Typical answer from someone not from Florida,” she laughed.

  “Oh, come on, Florida is like the Devil’s armpit. The humidity is miserable.”

  “Yes, it is horrible, but Central Florida is the worst. The coast is breezy, it keeps you cool. So I understand why you think all of Florida is like that, but it’s not.”

  “Well, that’s what it’s like where we are going.”

  “Not now,” she smiled. “It’s fall. It’s starting to cool off.”

  “I thought you were a journalist, not a meteorologist.”

  “I wear a lot of hats in life.”

  I chuckled at her idiom.

  “I assume you do too,” she said. “Chemist turned politician?”

  “Don’t forget terrorist,” I replied, keeping a straight face.

  “That’s the one we are trying to get rid of.”

  “We could at least donate it,” I joked. “Give it to the real criminals.”

  “We have to figure out who they are first.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  A chime sounded.

  “The gas light just came on,” she said. “After all of this talking I wasn’t paying attention.”

  She got off exit 36 in Brunswick. The moment the ramp declined I saw something that made me cringe—cop lights.

  “Oh my God. The cops. It’s a roadblock, Owen. What do I do?”

  I was already pulling at my hoodie and putting my shades back on. My heart was pounding.

  “Rachel, stay calm, please. They aren’t looking for you, remember? Just act normal and give them your license.”

  There were only two cars ahead of us.

  “Okay, okay—but what do I do if they question you? I need to know what to do. Fuck! There’s only one car ahead of us.”

  I could feel my gut tremble. “If they ask me for my ID, floor it.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. Floor it,” I said, and put my hood as far up as it could go.

  I tried to control my breathing as I heard the power window slide down.

  “License and registration, please,” the cop instructed.

  Rachel grabbed the registration from the dash and looked at her feet for her purse.

  “Honey, can you give me my purse?” she asked in a loving tone and stared at me with wide eyes.

  I didn’t answer. I scrambled to grab it and hand it to her.

  She quickly slid out her license and gave it to him. In my peripheral I could see him hand the license back to her. There were two cop cars on each side. My palms were sweaty.

  I saw the cop lean in toward the window.

  “Sir, if I could see your ID also?” his gravelly voice asked.

  My heart sank. I barely turned to him.

  “Officer, my husband was released from the hospital yesterday. He had a tumor removed from his kidney. I’m taking him to see my family in Jacksonville. You don’t really have to see his, do you? That can’t be standard.”

  Good. She lied.

  Her voice was feminine yet firm. I saw her adjust her hair, and I couldn’t see clearly, but I thought she was flaunting her bust to the officer.

  “Ma’am, your husband is going to have to give me his ID. This isn’t a standard roadblock.”

  She didn’t respond. She just stayed quiet. My heart was in my throat.

  “Ma’am, is there a problem?”

  My head slammed against the headrest. The smell of burnt rubber filled my nose. The shrill sound of tires screeching along with bullets being fired were a deafening combination. She drifted left into traffic and accelerated as fast as she could.

  She did floor it. She listened.

  Jerkily, she darted around other cars. I saw cops far behind us in the rearview. We had a head start.

  “Owen! What the fuck do I do?” she shouted.

  “Drive! Just drive!”

  I had no idea what to do. The back windshield was cracked from a bullet. The low-gas chime sounded again. Fuck. We had to get somewhere. Horns were being honked all around us. People swerved out of our way. The signs said Highway 25. The road was becoming smaller and we were coming into town. Rachel blew through red lights and laid on the horn as she approached them. If we got hit it would all be over.

  “We are gonna run out of gas! Where do I go? Tell me where to go!”

  “Calm down! Go as fast as you can like you are! We wait till the road ends.”

  I heard the back windshield shatter. Rachel let out a piercing scream.

  “Faster!” I yelled.

  “I’m going as fast as I can!”

  I saw a bypass road on the right. Highway 341.

  “Take that right!”

  She turned and the rear end fishtailed before it straightened back up. I didn’t see the cops. I prayed their route wouldn’t intersect ours.

  “You got this Rachel! Go! Go! Go!”

  “I’m going, I’m going!” she yelled as the engine growled in the background. I saw a turn approaching and before I could say anything she braked, then gunned it as she made the corner. Water was to my right. The bay. We were close to the ocean. I saw a bridge in the distance.

  “Owen! Owen, the road ends!”

  I turned to see a T in the road a quarter-mile away. We had to make a left or a right.

  “Lay on your horn and turn right!”

  The traffic that passed was minimal. Please, let us not get hit. Please.

  She slammed the brake, whipped the wheel, and floored it as she turned. We drifted and cars behind us honked. I glanced in the rearview. The cops were a half mile behind us.

  “Floor it!” I shouted.

  “I am!”

  We accelerated to over 110 miles per hour. The other cars looked blurry. What I did notice though, was our surroundings were flat. Barren marshlands in every direction, with no place to hide. The bridge was coming up, and when I checked the mirror again I saw we had gained more distance.

  The low-gas chime sounded a third time.

  I tried to press the button near the cabin lights to open the convertible. Nothing happened.

  “What are you doing? We are going too fast, it won’t open!”

  “It has to open. We are going to run out of gas any moment.”

  “I have to slow down to 30 miles per hour!”

  “Do it! Do it now, and quick, before they catch up!”

  She braked until it was below thirty. I held the button down and it began opening.

  “Owen….Owen! Hurry! They’re coming!”

  “Just a few more seconds!”

  “We don’t have a few more seconds!”

  I used my strength to push against the electric motor that opened the convertible.

  “Gun it!” I screamed.

  The tires screeched and we were now on the bridge. It was a long, smooth incline. I realized how high above water we were. A fall from the apex of the bridge would kill us. It looked to be close to two-hundred feet.

  “Rachel, when we reach the lowest part of the bridge, I want you to slam into the guardrail as hard as you can.”

  “What? We can’t! Not my car!” she yelled hysterically.

  “We don’t have a choice! Say goodbye to your phone, say goodbye to your car! We have to get off this bridge!”

  “We could die!”

  “If we don’t, we are already dead!”

  We were descending the bridge.

  “The guardrail is weak, do it now, and keep your feet straight down towards the water!”

  We readied ourselves on the edge of our seats and she glanced over to make sure our right lane was clear. My backpack was on both shoulders securely.

  “Now!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

  She whipped right and we hit the guardrail. Metal crush
ing metal hurt my ears. We were catapulted off the bridge. I put my hands up and feet together, trying to do a pencil dive. Rachel copied me, and the murky water raced up to meet us. I sliced through it. The pressure of the water slamming against my ears as I displaced it was excruciating. The temperature was unbearably chilly. My backpack was filled with air, and I could feel myself floating up towards the surface.

  There were no sounds. For a blissful moment, I let go of the worries that lay above me. No sirens, no horns, no bullets…just silence. My throat flexed from wanting to breathe. I broke the surface and gasped to catch my breath. I immediately whipped around to find Rachel. I didn’t see her.

  “Rachel!” I shouted in panic.

  I used my hands to turn around in circles and didn’t see her. Fear entered my being.

  I heard her gasp for air behind me and I turned around to see her a few feet away.

  “Rachel!” I yelled, and swam to her.

  “O—Owen—it’s so cold,” she said, shivering violently.

  “I know. I know it is,” I panted.

  I glanced at both sides of the bay, and we were moving fast. Very fast. We had already slid underneath the bridge. Once every few seconds, a bullet would miss us and hit the water. The tide was going out. We were being taken out to sea. I leaned back to see the bridge. Some of the cops were backing out to try and find a different route to us.

  Rachel and I faced each other. Our bodies were inches apart, and we bobbed up and down in the tidal current that pulled us out to sea. She kept pushing her wet hair out of her face and breathed erratically. She was shaken up.

  “How are we going to get out of this?” she asked, and choked as she let out a cry. “We are fucked. It’s over. We’re going to get caught.”

  I held her by her shoulders, unsure of what to say. Then I saw something promising. It was a boat.

  “Rachel, I’m going to need you to do me a favor.”

  “We’ve found him,” a voice behind me announced.

  “Where? Pull up what we’ve got,” I said.

  My voice sounded crazed. I was frustrated and on edge.

  “He went through one of our roadblocks off of 95 and was in the passenger seat with a female driver in a black BMW.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “They just crashed the car into the Sidney Lanier Bridge in Brunswick, Georgia.”

  “Come on, I told you to pull up anything! Do we have any cameras?” I yelled.

  The screens displayed a video-feed. It was a security camera on the bridge. There was the BMW, barely recognizable and mangled. Smoke rose up from the engine and there were dozens of cop cars behind it.

  “What do you have on the girl?” I asked.

  The keyboard clicks from the agent were followed by the sound of the data populating the screens.

  “The car is registered to Rachel Flores. She is twenty-three years old, born in Brooklyn, New York, and now lives in Garner, North Carolina. She is a journalist for the Raleigh News and Observer.”

  “A journalist,” I murmured. “Tell me more.”

  “Puerto Rican descent, moved to Miami from New York when she was seven. Her father was Emilio Flores.”

  “Why does that name sound familiar to me?”

  “He was one of the lead reporters in the field for CBS News in the late nineties. He was killed by rebels in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War.”

  I remembered him.

  “Why Florida? What is there for them?”

  There was a pause. I pressed my lips together, impatient for an answer.

  “Ma’am, from as far as we can tell, it is her mother. She lives in a house in Melbourne Beach.”

  “Get some undercover officers in the surrounding area, stat. We don’t want her to know she is being watched, though. Get on the line with the Coast Guard, we need them mobilized immediately to apprehend Owen and Rachel. They can’t get too far in the ocean.”

  “I’m on it,” the man said.

  A journalist…I stared at Rachel’s brown eyes on her driver’s license displayed on the massive screen in front of me. Her smile was beaming and symmetrical. The bitch looked so damn happy I figured she thought she was in a photo-shoot and not the DMV.

  They were up to something, and whatever it was—I would stop it. She was in for a wake-up call. She had put her allegiance in the wrong place. When I took Owen down, she was going down with him.

  “Help, help!” Rachel screamed, waving her hands around wildly to the boat that approached us. She purposely let herself sink in the water and coughed when it went into her mouth. “Help me, help, please! I can’t swim!”

  She was a great actress. I was impressed. I also bobbed up and down behind her, but I didn’t struggle. I wanted her to be the center of attention for a reason.

  I could hear the boat motor begin to idle. Yes.

  It was a standard fishing boat, good for deep sea fishing, about twenty or so feet long. I scanned it as it stopped beside us. The guy driving it was alone. He had a scraggly brown beard and a Georgia Bulldogs cap atop his head.

  “Here, grab onto this!” he called out as he left the wheel and dropped the ladder on the backside of the boat. The boat lurched up and down with the receding tide. Rachel went toward it first.

  “Be careful! Watch out for the propeller!” he yelled over the sputtering gurgle of the motor.

  She flinched as he said that and latched onto the ladder. She slipped and lost her footing. The man grasped her by her forearms and pulled her into the boat. I heard her make a choking noise, like if she had swallowed water. She continued choking and coughing violently.

  Perfect.

  The man scrambled over to her for a moment and I heard him slapping her back, hard. It was just the amount of time I needed to remove my backpack and take the pistol out from it. I slid it behind the breast pocket of my jacket and put my backpack back on.

  “Come on, son. Tide’s goin’ out fast!”

  I made it to the ladder and up the steps. He pulled me up by my arms until I was standing on the deck along with him. My eyes met Rachel’s. She gave me a quick nod. She knew what to do.

  “Ow!” she yelped. “I hit my nose when I slipped on the steps. I think it’s bleeding. Can you take a look at it?” her voice was muffled as she cupped her nose.

  The man returned to her side. I pulled out the gun and held it behind his head. When she revealed her undamaged nose, he turned to me.

  “Whoa, partner!” he cowered back. “I don’t want no trouble with ya’ll.”

  “We don’t either,” I responded calmly.

  “Well is this how you treat someone who just pulled you out of the cold water? What kinda shit is that?”

  Anger riddled his words. His southern accent was thick.

  “We are thankful. We just need your help.”

  “No shit ya’ll need help! If you two were the ones who wrecked on the bridge you both need to be in a hospital!”

  His body-language was becoming more volatile. I was worried he might try to attack us.

  “I promise we are both fine. We don’t have time for this shit! I need you to get the hell out of this bay and go south, now!”

  He seemed hesitant. “Ya’ll know the Coast Guard is just over yonder. They’ll get ya before long anyhow.”

  “I don’t think you understand me!” I shouted through gritted teeth and pressed the gun against his chest. “I’m going to need you to take us south, now.”

  He turned around and grabbed the wheel, and pushed the throttle up. The double motors roared to life and expelled a massive stream of water. I held onto a rail, and the bow of the boat rose up with the sudden propulsion. Rachel crawled on her knees and wedged herself in the narrow walkway that connected the deck to the bow. She grasped the railing along the edge and shuddered from the cold air that rushed around our wet bodies.

  With every rise and fall of the hull, I received a splash of saltwater-mist. I struggled to keep my footing while also pointing the gun at t
he man’s head. He continued to speed up, and once we were out of the cut, the rolling waves of the ocean were even more jarring. He turned the boat to the right, and we began heading south.

  To my right was an island. Judging by the signs I saw on the interstate, it was Jekyll Island. It moved slowly. We were but a tiny blip in the vast Atlantic Ocean. Rachel was silent. She just wrapped her arms around herself and looked out at the water. I had so many thoughts running through my head…all of which were jumbled and uncertain. The man had mentioned the Coast Guard. If they were close by, they wouldn’t take long to get to us.

  I saw another opening, to an inlet, and then another island. This island appeared lusher and overrun with dense forest. The farther we made it alongside its coast, the longer it appeared to be.

  “What is that island?” I asked over the groan of the engines and pointed with my gun.

  “Cumberland Island National Seashore.”

  “Is it deserted?”

  “Pretty much,” he said. “More animals than people.”

  “How long is it?”

  “Fifteen miles I reckon.”

  “Hurry,” I demanded, pointing the gun closer to him.

  “Look, I’m getting low on gas. I can take you to the St. Mary’s cut and I have to turn back around.”

  “Fine.”

  Close to half an hour passed. I glanced up at the sky often, paranoid of a helicopter spotting us. I knew we were running against the clock. It was only a matter of time before the Coast Guard received the orders to come searching for us. Suddenly, the island began to end and another inlet appeared. Before I could say anything, the man whipped the boat in that direction. The sky was a dreary gray, and I couldn’t tell whether it was beginning to rain or if it was just ocean spray.

  In the inlet, the man positioned the boat halfway between Cumberland Island and the mainland. Both directions looked swampy. The engine slowed, and the boat rocked back and forth as it came to a stop. He turned around and stared straight at me—his face was inches away from the barrel.

  “Well, here’s where the road ends,” he announced.

  Rachel stood up and she glanced between me and him nervously.