Pell went down to his knees, the girl fled into the depths of the ship and Daisy hurled herself at her stepfather.
It all happened in less than five seconds.
I grabbed Daisy before she could pounce, and when I looked up, the situation was upside down. Phelan had his gun digging into Sue Ann’s neck, the mirror image of a moment before.
Pell shouted to Berman, “Louis, you’ve got the cop’s gun! And your Beretta! You have the angle on Phelan. Take him out!”
Berman shrugged. “I don’t think so. This ain’t my fight. And I haven’t been paid in three weeks. For the record.”
“Typical,” I muttered, struggling to keep Daisy under control.
Gasping for breath, Pell still managed to croak out a laugh. “That’s profiling on Nantucket,” he said. “Rich guys are all cheap bastards.”
“You want to buy your loyalty—without paying for it,” Phelan said. “That was your first mistake, you worthless slab of shite. You thought your crew was on your side. Wrong. They hate you! They wanted to break out the Perrier Jouet when they heard the plan.”
“The plan?” Pell looked nervous for the first time. “What plan?”
Phelan turned to me, shifting Sue Ann as his human shield. “Here’s the thing, Chief—step back! I’ll kill her and you know I will. Then I’d bring her back to life if I could, just to fucking kill her again! So listen…LoGran isn’t doing so well these days. Lots of bad investments, lots of gambles that didn’t pay off.”
David Trezize was right again, I thought.
Liam kept talking. “The only way they could raise the money for the big Land Bank deal was leveraging this ship. You’re standing in the collateral, Chief. Without it, they can’t buy the Land Bank property, and without the Land Bank property, Blue Heron can’t close with its subscribers. Without that core group to secure the deal going forward, there’s no eminent domain action, no INS raids, no ancillary house sales. It’s just one deluded sociopath’s wet-dream. It’s nothing.”
“Don’t do this, Phelan,” Pell croaked. “You do this, your life is over.”
He ignored his boss, still talking to me. “My life is over already. I had a dream ten years ago, when Jilly was six—most vivid dream of my life. She was playing near an open elevator door, and I knew she was in danger and I tried to call out but I couldn’t make a sound. She was dancing around, closer and closer to the edge. I started running, but it was like wading against a cross rip. I was almost close enough to reach when she fell. Do you know what I did then?”
A chill washed over me. I’d had this same dream, or close enough. Maybe all fathers had. “You jumped in after her.”
“That’s right, Chief. I figured I could get below her and cushion her fall. I might die but if she died I didn’t want to go on living anyway. Of course I woke up before we landed. But then it really happened. Jilly’s dead and the dream came true. Only I couldn’t even jump.”
He faced Pell again. “So don’t think for a second I give a shite for the consequences of my actions at this moment, Mr. Jonathan Pell.”
We could all feel the engines strike a deeper note.
“Where are we going?” Pell shouted. “Where are you taking us?”
“Just under five nautical miles from shore, off Tom Nevers Head. A little north of Old Man Shoal. A lot of ships have run aground there over the years, but that’s not going to happen to the Nantucket Grand. You can salvage a boat that’s run aground. Now, a little ways north of the shoal it’s a whole different story. The water is fifteen fathoms deep there—that’s ninety feet, for you landlubbers. This vessel is going all the way to the bottom. And your precious deal is going down with it.”
“No!”
Pell lunged up and the bo’sun clobbered him, knocking him flat on his face on the polished ash wood deck.
I stared at Phelan. “You’re going to sink this boat? Is that even possible?”
“Don’t make me laugh, Chief Kennis. It’s easy.” He addressed the bo’sun: “Get Daniels to launch the tenders, get the crew aboard. Hand luggage only.” He pointed at Pete. “If this rat moves, knock him out. He’s going down with the ship.”
The bo’sun nodded. “Got it.”
Phelan glanced over at me. “Come with me. Bring the girl.”
The rage and even the energy had drained out of Daisy. Phelan held her responsible for his daughter’s death, and she knew it. She had recruited Jill in the first place. She must have assumed Phelan was going to kill both her and Sue Ann, and the posture of resigned, exhausted dread telegraphed that she thought she deserved it. She was finished, no matter what happened. She didn’t have a chance and she’d never had a chance, lost from the moment her mother met Pell and checked out his Tom Ford suit and his Franck Muller wristwatch and started planning a brighter future.
This was where that future ended up.
Phelan led us out to the stern deck, into the sharp salty wind, and down the metal stairs to the engine room doors. The south shore of Nantucket had shrunk to a low green ridge on the horizon, off the starboard side. The big ship moved steadily through calm seas. I saw a couple of sailboats, the speck of a kite surfer, a brief raucous swarm of sea gulls, but no other big ships—no Coast Guard cutter.
“I killed all the electronics, Chief,” Phelan said, reading my mind—or noticing my desperate scan of the water around us. “We’re dark. No one can track the ship now.”
I had to give Phelan credit—he had thought this one through: picked and manipulated a plausible accomplice at the police station, organized his crew, mapped out his destination. He clutched Sue Ann in a brutal half nelson. She grunted in pain with every step, but said nothing. I could see her mind moving, turning over the elements of the situation, recalibrating her options, looking for an opening.
Phelan led us into the heat and buzz of the engine room, past the bank of blacked-out electronics, and between the two giant engines, the pistons of some immense machine lying side by side. Thick white pipes, maybe two feet in diameter, rose from the deck beside each engine, capped with clamped metal lids and smaller pipes connected to the turbines.
Phelan walked Sue Ann to the far end of the cramped little chamber and stood between the engines. “See these, Chief? The engines are cooled with sea water, and these are the filters—there’s a lot of particulate junk in the cleanest sea water—algae, plankton, kelp, you name it. We have to shut the engines down to clean the filters. If we opened these seals while the engines were running…all that water would flood the engine room and then the rest of the lower deck compartments at a rate of a hundred gallons a minute. That would be catastrophic.”
He released Sue Ann and pushed her at us. She stumbled across the floor, lurching into Daisy. The impact woke Daisy up and Phelan laughed. “You can keep those two wildcats off of each other. I have real work to do.”
“Liam—”
“Don’t bother, Chief. This is my world. You’re just a passenger.”
He opened the hatches one-handed, waving the gun at us. There was no way he couldn’t get a shot off if any of us moved, and he was right—I had my arms full keeping Daisy off her nemesis. In a few seconds we had more important things to worry about—the sudden geyser and then the churn of water from the two pipes, and sloshing and swirling over the floor, sluicing into our shoes, dense and icy. The shock of cold ocean at our ankles brought every other action to a halt.
“You’d best find your way out of here,” Phelan said. “This end of the ship goes down first. And don’t even think about closing these hatches. Ten people couldn’t do it. There’s no going back now.”
The water surged around my knees. It was survival time and we all knew it. We started wading back toward the door. Phelan was right behind us. And somewhere above us, Pell lay unconscious on the main cabin. I pulled myself out of the engine room and up the exterior stairs. The ship was tilting to v
ertical already, poised above that ninety-foot gulf of water beside Old Man Shoal. I could hear things sliding inside—chairs and lamps, a crash as the upright piano hit the cabin wall.
My job now was to save Pell. Whatever Liam’s plan, the man was going to stand trial for what he’d done. Whatever his crimes, that was a fundamental right as a citizen of this country. It wasn’t Liam’s job or my job or Daisy’s job to determine his guilt or innocence. That was up to a jury of his peers, after a fair hearing in a court of law. But he would never get there unless I could drag him off this boat. As for Daisy and Sue Ann, I had to hope that the immediate need to get away from the Nantucket Grand and the suction field it created as it sank would trump their schemes and grudges. If they didn’t drown, the law would determine their futures. Pell was my job now.
I hauled myself into the main cabin, past a coffee table that had shattered the glass door. Pell was groggy but conscious. A couch scraped past me and I heard another impact. In a few seconds I’d be slipping backward, too. I clambered up to Pell on all fours, sat him up and dug my shoulder into his stomach. He groaned but didn’t struggle as I wrestled him into modified fireman’s carry. Could we exit by the canopied deck on the bow? The glass doors behind us were hopelessly blocked by a jumble of furniture.
The end tables were bolted into the floor. I used them as handholds to reach the far doors as the ship continued to tip. The opening had become a hatch, bombarded by redwood deck chairs that shattered the glass and tumbled through the opening to land with the rest of the furniture at the stern. The attached tables probably saved both our lives. I swung from the support leg of one table to the next.
As I reached up to grab the edge of the table, Pell regained full consciousness. After a second of disorientation and panic he grasped the situation. I could feel my shoulder start to separate as he scrambled over my head and used my shoulders for a foothold to stand upright, teetering on the blade of the table edge, reaching for the metal door frame, pulling himself up and out.
I followed him, managed to stand on the same thin ridge of mahogany and jump for the metal frame. I caught it and dangled for a few seconds thirty feet over the rear wall of the cabin, with its jagged clutter of smashed furniture. I wrestled myself up and onto the intact sheet of glass beside me. Pell had already reached the end of the window wall. He jumped the gap to the railing, spun around it in a grotesque pole dance, and vanished over the side.
I was on my feet as he made the leap, and I could feel the heavy tinted glass of the window wall shivering ominously under my feet. If it broke I was a dead man. But it held my weight and I plunged after Pell, grabbing the slick wet rail and pivoting myself around it to fall beside the massive white hulk of the sinking ship.
The frigid ocean closed around me and paralyzed my lungs for a second; my shirt, pants, and shoes turned into ballast, weighing me down, tangling me up. The thought of pulling my shirt over my head hit me with a vivid stab of physical memory, the claustrophobic panic I had felt during lifesaving practice when my shirt got stuck halfway off, the fabric blocking my nose and mouth, pressing down on my head. Forget it—pull some oxygen into your lungs! I thrashed my way to the surface and took a deep gulp of fresh air.
I looked around. Pell was five feet away, choking and flailing, going under. Was it possible he didn’t know how to swim? Maybe he was too disoriented to function properly. I could feel the tug of the subsiding boat, a vertical riptide pulling me under. We had to get clear and we had to do it fast. I stroked over to him, weighed down by my clothes, and got my arm around his chest.
After a brief struggle, Pell gave up and I sidestroked him away from the surreal overwhelming vision of the vertical mega-yacht, still more than a hundred feet of it above water, a blinding white fiberglass slab the height of the Unitarian Church from the sidewalk to the steeple, slipping into the roiling maw of frothing water that was swallowing it whole.
The ocean’s throat was deep but not deep enough to wholly submerge the Nantucket Grand. It shuddered as it struck the bottom, then gradually, majestically, tipped over and fell in slow motion, slapping the surface with a dull thunder, shoving out a bulge of water with the impact.
The slap of the wave tumbled us under for a second or two, but I got us to the surface again in time to see the whole opulent length of the giant ship slowly sinking into the water until there was nothing visible but the radar towers. Finally they were gone, too. There was nothing to show the ship had ever been there but the field of churning foam that marked its descent.
I thought of a telephone pole struck by lightning when I was a kid. It happened on a road in rural Vermont, a flash summer downpour. The pole had tipped over the same way, with the same eerie sense of deliberation, and crashed across the black strip of asphalt, pulling the wires with it in a tangle of sparks and disconnection—severed links and broken conversations, tarred wood across the blacktop, phone lines coiling like snakes in the flood. I remember staring at the new chaos, awestruck even at ten years old by the fragility of the complex modern world I had taken for granted.
The Nantucket Grand had pulled down much more than itself. Pell’s grand scheme, his distorted, disassociated vision of Nantucket’s future, the very survival of his teetering company, had all of it capsized with his grandiose yacht. And floating there in the frigid ocean I felt a pulse of animal ecstasy, a rude angry joy to see this man so utterly defeated. I jacked a fist into the air with a shout of triumph.
The gesture snapped Pell out of his daze.
“You…bastard!” he grunted, and twisted out of my grip. He lurched at me, getting his hands on my head, ducking me under the water.
We punched at each other in ludicrous slow motion as we struggled back to the surface. He clipped the side of my head and jammed me under again before I could get a breath. The guy was actually trying to drown me after I had just saved his life. I had no air in my lungs and I was starting to black out.
A second later he was yanked off me from above—the bo’sun had him by the collar, dragging him up into the first of two tenders.
“Don’t kill him,” I sputtered, gasping for breath.
The detective, Louis Berman, helped me up into the second boat. “So that’s it.” He inclined his head toward the field of whitewater where the Nantucket Grand had been floating a few minutes before. “We need Celine Dion to sing it down for us.”
“I was thinking more about Gilligan’s Island than Titanic.”
“Really? The Minnow?”
“It shows appropriate disrespect.”
I checked out our tender—various crew members, along with Daisy and Sue Ann. But no Phelan. I couldn’t see him on the other boat either. I finally caught sight of him in the water, swimming away roughly in the direction of Portugal.
The kid at the outboard saw him too. “It’s Mr. Phelan! We’re coming, Mr. Phelan!” He gunned the motor, turned the little skiff in a fan of spume and chugged toward the engineer.
Phelan rolled over onto his back as we approached. “Leave me alone,” he said. “Go on, get out of here.”
“Liam, get in the boat,” I said.
“No.”
“Come on, don’t be crazy, just—”
“I’m not crazy, and you know that very well. Now leave me alone.”
I turned to the boy at the motor. “Hand me that rope!” It was coiled up at his feet.
“You mean the bowline?”
“Jesus Christ—whatever you call it! Just give it to me!”
He handed it over and I heaved over the side toward Liam. It spun in slow motion like a giant Frisbee, unwinding. The bulk of it hit with a splash a few feet from him. “Grab it!”
“No thank you, Chief. I’m done.”
He started swimming again, and the boy at the motor revved it to follow. I grasped his arm, shook my head. Liam had made his decision. In his position I might very well have made the same
one.
I lifted my own hand in a final wave and then turned back to the other passengers.
Daisy had a knife against Sue Ann Pelzer’s throat.
Pell, the yacht, Phelan and his swim to oblivion—all gone in an instant, dragged under by the gleam of the blade.
I heaved myself forward. “Don’t do it!”
Daisy flinched back. The knife drew blood.
“Get away from me!”
“Daisy—”
“I’ll cut her throat, I mean it.” Sue Ann squirmed but Daisy had her in a vise. She was stronger than she looked.
I took a breath. “Daisy, don’t do this.”
She tossed her head toward Phelan, still swimming strongly away. “Why not? My life is over anyway—just like his.”
“But it’s not. You never wanted any of this. You were coerced, and now you’re the main witness against Pell. All you have to do is tell the District Attorney what you told me today. If you agree to testify, they’ll cut you a deal. You could get immunity—or a stint of community service.”
“Working with kids? I’m sure everyone would love to see me working with kids again.”
“No, no—obviously not. I mean—but there’s all kinds of things you can do. Park clean-up, working at the food bank—”
“I don’t want to do any of that. I just want to kill this bitch and die.”
“Think about Andrew—”
“She killed him! Don’t you get it?”
“But what would he want you to do? What would Andrew say now? You’re no killer. He knew that. I know that. You’re better than she is. Let me arrest her. Let the State put her on trial. She’ll be convicted—she’s confessed! She’ll go to jail for the rest of her life, Daisy. She’ll have a whole lifetime to think about what she’s done. And you’ll be free.”
Nantucket Grand Page 32
