She started working on the ropes around Charley’s hands with the razor blade, trying not to slit his wrists in the process. At the other end of the room, Kagan and Coral were still standing toe to toe, fists raised like contenders in a boxing match. They looked at each other, smiled. He shrugged his shoulders; she stretched her neck, bending it this way and that; he cracked the knuckles on both his fists. Then she drove a right cross into his face. He swayed for a moment and fell like a tree. He didn’t get up.
“My goodness,” Tricia said.
“I don’t mean to be selfish here,” Charley said after a moment, “but do you think you could...?”
“Oh, yes—sorry.” Tricia finished slicing through the rope.
Coral, meanwhile, bent to grab Pantazonis’ gun.
“Is there any other way out?” Tricia said.
“Not unless you can fit through that porthole.”
Tricia thought she might—it wasn’t that much smaller than the bathroom window at the Satellite Club. But there was no way Coral or Charley could, and anyway none of them could swim to safety from wherever they were, somewhere outside U.S. coastal waters. The nearest land was probably miles away.
“Then let’s get out of here,” she said, just as a pair of Nicolazzo’s men burst through the door with guns in hand.
Before Tricia could react, Coral had dropped them both, one with a bullet to the gut, the other with a pair in his leg, the second shot blowing out his kneecap. Both fell to the ground moaning. Coral threw away the gun she’d used and pried theirs out of their hands. “Here,” she said, handing one to Tricia. “These’ll be fully loaded.” Tricia had only used one bullet from Kagan’s gun; she held onto both.
They went cautiously out into the hall. There was no one there at the moment, but halfway to the stairs they saw a pair of legs coming down. Coral didn’t wait, just took aim and fired, and the possessor of the legs slid to the bottom in a heap.
“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” Tricia said.
“You pick things up,” Coral said.
“Sure,” Tricia said, following her up the steps to the deck, “but not things like that.”
“You do if you have to,” Coral said.
A bullet caromed off a metal railing beside them and they dropped to their hands and knees, crawled behind the nearest bulkhead. Coral poked one arm around the side to blindly squeeze off a shot, then fell back.
“How many of these guys are there?” Tricia said.
“I’m not sure. Fewer than ten, I think. Maybe it’s ten with the ones that brought you.”
“Then we’ve already gotten rid of half of them,” Tricia said.
“You always were an optimist,” Coral said, and rose from her crouch to take another shot.
Behind them, Tricia heard Charley crawling away. “Where are you going?” Tricia said.
“I have an idea.”
“How about not getting shot? I’d think you’d like that idea.”
“I love that idea,” Charley said, “but I’m not convinced sitting here waiting to run out of bullets is the best way to accomplish it.”
“We should stick together,” Tricia said.
“With Annie Oakley there on your side? You don’t need me.”
“At least take a gun,” Tricia said, and tried to hand him one.
He held up his taped hand. “Broken trigger finger. Thanks, anyway.”
“Be careful, Charley,” she said.
“Always.” He hesitated a moment, then leaned in and kissed her. “In case I don’t get another chance,” he said. Then he scurried away, around the corner, chased by gunfire.
Someone patted her roughly on the shoulder.
“Hey,” Coral said, “are you listening? I said give me that gun.”
“Sorry,” Tricia said, and passed Kagan’s gun to her.
Coral pointed across the way, the opposite direction from the one Charley had gone. “When I say go—”
Tricia nodded.
“Go!”
Tricia scuttered through a wide open No Man’s Land while Coral laid down protective fire and followed her. Return fire plowed up the wooden deck at their feet and one splinter caught Tricia in the calf. She could feel the bite and the blood running down her leg.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, grimacing. She hunched behind a broad wooden bitt with a hawser coiled around it. Coral crammed in beside her.
“Ladies,” came a booming voice, Nicolazzo’s, “if you put your guns down right now, I won’t kill you.”
“You think we’d fall for that?” Coral shouted back.
“Your sister’s got a lot of money that belongs to me,” Nicolazzo said. “Much as I would enjoy killing you both, I wouldn’t pay millions of dollars for the pleasure.”
“ ‘Kill the sister,’ ” Coral said. “I heard you three times.”
“Clearly the situation has changed.”
“Yeah,” Coral said, “it’s changed because I’ve got a gun. How about you put your guns—”
The boat lurched before she could get the rest of her thought out. Tricia felt the engines turn on belowdeck and over the side she saw the water churning as they got underway.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Coral said.
The men on the other side of the deck seemed confused as well, judging by the argument being carried out in yelled Italian. Tricia glanced up, over the side, toward the horizon. “Look!”
She pointed.
There was another boat in sight, headed their way, bouncing in the spray as it chewed up the distance between them. Nicolazzo’s boat was trying to get away, it seemed, powering in the same direction but more ponderously, a wildebeest being chased down by a cheetah.
A red light mounted on the other boat’s fly bridge went on and began spinning. A harsh voice amplified through a bullhorn said, “Cut your engines. This boat is operating under the authority of the Federal Bureau of—” The voice went silent for a second. “—under the joint authority,” it resumed, “of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department. Prepare to be boarded.”
Nicolazzo’s yacht was gaining speed, grinding angrily through the waves. Off in the distance, through the early morning haze, Tricia thought she could just make out the outline of the coast. They were making headway. But the police boat was making more, growing larger and louder—a siren went on, to go with the flashing light—and pulling up alongside them.
Nicolazzo’s men ran to the railing, Tricia and Coral forgotten, and began shooting down over the side. More sounds of gunfire came up from below, and one of Nicolazzo’s men fell backwards, clutching his throat.
“You are firing on agents of the United States government, a federal offense punishable by life in prison. Drop your weapons and allow us to board.”
The ships kept racing, jostling each other for position, the big yacht pulling away in one direction, then the other, only to find itself headed off by the more nimble boat. Finally, Tricia felt the engines cut out and they slowed to a dead stop with the police boat out of sight on the far side of the pilot house. Nicolazzo and his men ran down that way; once they were past, Tricia and Coral followed.
By the time they arrived, O’Malley and two uniformed cops were standing on the deck alongside a half dozen federal agents, thick flak jackets protecting their torsos, steel helmets covering their heads. The feds had machine guns cradled at the ready in their arms and Nicolazzo’s men had their hands up, guns littering the deck at their feet.
Tricia dropped her gun. When one of the feds looked Coral’s way, Tricia nudged her with an elbow and Coral reluctantly released hers as well.
Two of the feds cleared an opening at the rail and Special Agent Houghton Brooks, Jr. climbed up through it. He wasn’t wearing any armor or protective gear, just the gray suit he’d had on in the interrogation room. But he walked blithely into the middle of this deadly crowd as if he’d been taking a stroll down Fifth Avenue.