"Your gun, Jer. Throw it as far as you can."
"Yeah, right."
"Listen, Cyclops, I'm counting to five. If I don't hear your pistolahit the water, the package will. Then you can go home and explain to Mrs. Stomarti what happened to her hit single. Explain how you're a tough guy, and tough guys can't part with their guns. I'm sure she'll understand."
Jerry raises his right arm. It's not so dark that I can't make out the shape of the barrel, aimed more or less at my beak. Soiling myself would not be an inappropriate reaction.
Yet I continue to brandish the prized hard drive over the water. "One," I hear myself saying. "Two ... three ... "
"Shit, Jerry, do what he says!" Finally Loreal has something to contribute. "If he drops the damn thing, we lose all the tracks and then we're screwed. I'm fucking serious."
"Listen to the man, Jer. He's a pro."
The bodyguard emits a crude slur on my ancestry, then he rears back and heaves the gun. From the sound of the splash, it was a big one.
He says, "Okay, now gimme the fucking package."
I'm a man of my word. "Here, Jerry. Catch."
I toss the plastic box at his squat silhouette. The hard drive bounces off his chest and falls to the deck of the airboat. While he and Loreal clamber to retrieve it, I shove off.
Stepping to the stern of the skiff, I twist the throttle wide open.
"Jack?"
"It's okay, Emma. Everything's fine."
I reach for the hood and tug it off. She looks haggard and dazed. Smiling numbly, she clutches at my hand. Juan peeks out from beneath the tarpaulin. "We cool?"
"Not quite." A mild understatement.
We'll never outrun that airboat if they come after us, which is a distinct possibility. Jerry didn't even ask for the CDs that we burned from Jimmy's master. It would be calamitous for Cleo if they turned up on some radio station at the same time her album came out. She made a point of telling me to bring those discs tonight, so that she could destroy them. I'd have been pleased to hand them over, too, but that sonofabitch Jerry never said a word.
Which means he either forgot, or he doesn't intend to let us get off this lake alive.
Juan crawls back to take the tiller and to deliver Carla's gun, which he'd held cocked for the duration of the rendezvous. That was one of our contingency plansin the event of an especially violent double cross, Juan was to burst from beneath the tarp and plug Cleo's bodyguard in the brain. It wasn't a particularly original idea, but we were looking to keep things simple.
Delicately I slip the Lady Colt into my waistband, the challenge being not to shoot myself. I move forward to sit beside Emma, who is wobbly and shuddering. I wrap one arm around her and with the other I point the Q-beam at twelve o'clock, so that Juan is able to see where we're heading. In his fist the GPS screen glows a cozy green, and the unanimous hope is that it will guide us back to Ernie Bo Tump's marina.
For all the neurotic ruminating I do about death, I never before felt the ice-cold breath of the beast. In all my life I cannot recall a singular moment I thought would be my last. Even when no-neck Jerry was whaling on me in the apartment, I was more angry than scared, which doesn't say much for my survival instinct. Tonight a large-caliber handgun was pointed at my nostrils, and my response was cinematic defiance. Whether that was brave or merely idiotic, it plainly reveals a new, more flexible attitude toward the concept of dying. Emma has no frame of reference, but Anne might call it a breakthrough.
In any case, I'm not off the hook. None of us are.
"Jack, look! Look!" Juan points ahead. Emma stiffens in my embrace. Streaking off our port side is another white lightthe air-boat, angling on a course to intercept us. Instantly I kill the Q-beam and start fumbling for the gun. I tell Juan not to slow down, no matter what.
Jerry the goon is wilier than I thought. He circled far around us to get downwind, so that we couldn't hear him coming until it was too late to hide. And he's not going to leave us full of bullet holes, which would arouse suspicion. Instead he intends to run us down, making it appear as if we accidentally wrecked the johnboat. Jerry figures that even if the cops wonder about the mess, nobody will put it all together.
The lake was dark, they must've hit something ...
Their spotlight slashes back and forth as Cleo's boys feverishly try to find us again. We're all crouched low, Juan panting and Emma's fingers digging into my leg. We're holding to a steady speed, a daring strategy in inky darkness. If we strike another log, the chase is over.
"Shit," I hear Juan say. "Jack! They're ... "
His warning is smothered by the rising roar. I twist around to see the airboat skimming up our wake, not more than fifty yards behind us. Loreal is braced in the bow, manning the spotlight. The beam is fixed on the back of Juan's head, radiating an unwanted halo. In the glare I can't see Jerry on the driver's perch, but he most certainly can see us.
The gap shrinks with a sickening inevitabilitypowered by a cropduster-sized aviation engine, the airboat is nearly twice as fast as our dinky outboard. It's also twice as wide and probably three times as heavy. At fifty miles an hour it will flatten us like a lily pad. Either we'll die on impact or go down screaming.
In any event, we will be long past caring by the time the gators get around to us.
Juan thumps my arm and gestures disgustedly at our motor. The prop is picking up weeds and we're slowing steadily. Jerry has taken dead aim at our flimsy transom.
"Grab Emma," Juan tells me, "and jump."
"Oh, I don't think so."
"Jack, please!" Emma says. It's the same tone she uses in the newsroom when I'm being impossible.
"Everybody get down!" I hear myself yelling, though I'm standing as straight as a fence post. Carla's gun is gripped with both hands and my arms are extended, the way the cops showed me that day at the firing range. I'm squinting because Loreal is blasting the spotlight in my face. The airboat bears down with a rising backbeat of heavy pistons, like an oncoming locomotive. At roughly one hundred feet I start pulling the trigger, the pistol jumping in my hands. The odds of me actually hitting these pricks with a .38 slug are slender indeed, but Loreal appears to have taken due notice of the muzzle flashes. A yelp of alarm goes up from both men in the airboat, and the spotlight beam wavers madly. A heated downshifting can be heard, then a sibilant rush of air.
Unfortunately, we're no longer moving. The outboard has quit. As I throw myself upon Emma, Juan jumps off the stern.
The next sound isn't the expected crunch of impact but rather a long turbulent splash, followed by the thumping, fading grind of the aircraft engine. A gargled cry arises before silence reclaims the darkness.
In a whisper I ask Emma if she's all right.
"Yes, but I'm very thirsty, Jack. Thirsty and tired." Her voice is somnolent and hollow, from another galaxy. They must have drugged her with a goddamn horse tranquilizer. Hastily I make a bedding of the yellow tarp and lay her down on the deck. Meanwhile Juan has jetted out of the water like an otter. Wordlessly he cleans the duckweed off the outboard's lower unit while I re-attach the Q-beam cables to the battery.
The crashed airboat is easy to find. Bow skyward, it rests in a dense bank of cattails. The gunshots evidently spooked Jerry into cutting the rudders sharply, a maneuver for which flat-bottomed watercraft traveling at high speeds are not favorably designed. Also working against him was the lack of one eye, which undoubtedly affected his depth perception as he struggled to control the boat. It spun violently before tipping backward at a radical cant, its stern embedding in the mud.
I'm guessing Jerry got bucked off when the airboat began to whirl. He was probably sitting on his ass in the cattails, gaping in dull wonderment as the boat upended and wallowed back on him, the blade still very much a blur. His head should be landing in Pahokee any time now.
Loreal went next, though not as instantly. His fall appears to have been stopped by the frame of the driver's seat, but his silken ponytail slipped unluckily through the mesh of the engine cage. The propeller must have snagged it and continued to rotate, dragging his face in a brutally concentric pattern across the metal grid, until the scalp ripped loose. It now hangs like a soggy red pennant from one tip of the blade.