Kilbranish shook his head. “You crossed me. If we’d had the paintings, if we’d had the money, the movement would never have died. You killed it. You and yours.”
“Please,” Devon said. “Please give me my daughter back.”
“You want her back?” Kilbranish said. “Then you take her back!” He pushed her hard in the back, not toward Devon, but toward the slurry wall that ran along the edge of the river, falling off on the other side to a deepwater slip at the edge of the pier. With her feet bound, Sally had no way to stop the descent. Her hands shot out in front of her to brace her fall, but it was useless. Her shins hit the wall and her momentum carried her forward, over the edge and into the water.
“No!” Devon screamed. He rushed forward to the spot where Sally had gone in. As he did, Kilbranish was in retreat, headed to the van’s open driver’s-side door. He turned and let loose a volley of gunshots. Finn hit the ground, looking up just in time to see Devon dive into the water.
Kilbranish fired twice more in Finn’s and Kozlowski’s direction, but they were wild efforts, intended more to buy time than to actually hit anything. He jumped into the van; the engine was running, and he hit the gas, kicking up rocks and dust as he peeled out.
Kozlowski took a few running steps after the van, drawing his own gun. “Koz!” Finn shouted. The ex-cop turned around. “Forget him, he’s not our problem! We’ve got to get to Sally and Devon!”
Finn ran to the edge of the river, looking down into the black water. He could see nothing. The wind off the shore churned the river, and he couldn’t even tell for sure where Sally and Devon had gone in. He looked behind him and saw Kozlowski hesitating. “Koz, I need your help!”
“I can’t swim!” Kozlowski yelled back.
“You don’t have to; you need to help us out when I find them!”
Kozlowski took one last look at the back of the van as it sped away. Finn could see that the cop in him wanted to give chase. He’d been a police officer for too long for the instinct to die. After a moment, though, he pulled himself away and ran to the river wall where Finn was standing.
“You better be here when I come up!” Finn told him. Then he jumped into the frigid river without waiting for a response.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
It all went so fast, Sally didn’t know what was happening. One moment she was looking at her father; the next she was airborne-twisting the way people fall in dreams, waiting for an impact that seemed never to come. Her hands were wrapped in tape, and paddled the air as she turned over and over in the fall. If it truly had been a dream, she would have woken with a start, heart racing, hands shaking as she breathed deeply to calm herself to a point where she might be able to get back to sleep.
She wasn’t dreaming, though.
When she hit the water, she experienced a pain greater than she’d known in her life. She went in headfirst, and as her forehead made contact, she thought she’d hit cement. Her neck snapped back, and it felt as if she’d been hit with a baseball bat. Next she felt the water. It spread out from her head down to her shoulders, and then engulfed her. She thought for a moment it was blood, spilling from a gash on her head, burning her with an icy-hot fire as it ran like a waterfall from what she could only assume was a mortal wound. It wasn’t until her lungs expanded that she realized what had happened, and then the panic truly set in. Her mouth was gagged, and as she breathed in reflexively the water flooded into her nostrils, through her sinus passages, and down her windpipe into her lungs. The sensation sent her body into spasms, her inability to breathe intensifying her body’s desperation. She involuntary gasped for more air. It was a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle.
In that moment she went under she knew she was going to die. She felt her life ripped away with complete certainty, and she experienced a torrent of memories and emotions. They assaulted her, violent and unbearable. She fought against them, thrashing back and forth as they closed in on her. Finally she gave in, and her body went still. She’d fought her entire life, but at that moment the fight was too much for her; at last she let herself drift with the current of the river.
Stone and Sanchez heard the shooting. “We gotta get in there,” Stone said. He started the car, but left the lights off.
Sanchez looked over toward the car where Hewitt and the other FBI agent sat. They were closer to the building, closer to the drive that wound around toward the back, in the direction from which the gunshots had come. Sanchez was hoping they would be moving in that direction, so she and Stone could maintain their surveillance-not only of Finn and his crew, but of the FBI as well. Hewitt and the other agent gave no sign of moving, though.
“What are they doing?” Sanchez asked no one in particular.
“They’re not doing a goddamned thing,” Stone said. “We’ve got to move.”
Sanchez still hesitated.
“C’mon, boss. We’ve got to get in there.”
Finally she nodded. “Okay, let’s go.”
Stone hit the gas. As he pulled out from the parking space he flipped the switch on the portable flashing light and reached out to put it on the roof of the car. Then he grabbed the wheel with both hands and pushed the gas pedal to the floor. They sped down along the side of the building, accelerating as they approached the corner near the river’s edge. As they neared the end of the drive, they passed the two FBI agents, still parked. Sanchez looked over at them, saw their faces illuminated in blue by the flashing light on top of the car, stretched in shock.
She turned her attention back to the assault. They were just about at the corner of the building when she pulled out her gun and readied herself for the confrontation.
When Liam’s foot hit the gas pedal, he breathed a sigh of relief. It was done: Malley and his people would be busy trying to save the girl, and Liam had the paintings. His mission was complete. He had succeeded.
He was still unsure how he would get the paintings out of the country; he didn’t even know where he would spend the night. He couldn’t return to the house in Quincy; the girl was probably dead, but he couldn’t take that chance-if she survived, the place was compromised. These were problems he could deal with, however. There were enough people in Boston still loyal to the cause. As for getting the paintings out of the country, it had been twenty years; the investigative pressure that had prevented Bulger from getting them out of the country two decades earlier was surely gone. Once his superiors learned that the mission had been successful, they would make sure that the paintings made it to Ireland.
He was thinking through his plans and gathering speed as he came around the corner of the building. He could do nothing when the car appeared in front of him.
He saw the flashing blue light first, and he instinctively hit the brakes with both feet. There was no way to avoid the collision, though; the police car was coming around the corner at full speed. He let out a scream of rage as he saw the front of the onrushing car disappear underneath his bumper. He could feel the van ride up onto the hood as it crumpled in toward the two silhouettes in the front seat. He saw them for only a split second before the air bags deployed in the van, and he was thrown back into the seat. It felt as though his nose was broken, but he ignored it. He was too angry to feel pain.
He flailed at the air bag with his arms, buying enough space to get out of the van. The door was bent, and he had to throw his shoulder against it before it gave way.
His mind was churning, assessing his situation. He had to deal with one issue at a time, and the first priority was making sure the police officers in the car were dead. If they survived, he would lose whatever head start he had, and law enforcement would be on him before he could move the paintings. Once they were dispatched, he could figure out his transportation problem-his van was totaled.