Blackwater Sound (28 page)

But Johnny Braswell was one of those rubbery, strong young men. A kid who'd probably never spent a second in a gym, done nothing but work on a marlin boat to earn his strength, but that was enough, more than enough, because it was hiding there under the husk of fat and sloppiness, the power of honed muscles, a bullish, unmoving bulk. Thorn wrenched backwards, tried to cut off Johnny's air, twisting hard and sagging his knees to bring all his weight against the boy's throat like some wrangler twisting a calf to the rodeo dirt.

Johnny didn't budge. He widened his stance and rode Thorn's grinding hold. Then when he sensed Thorn was weakening, about to change his angle of attack, Johnny swiveled to the side and wrenched the butt of the shotgun into Thorn's belly. The blow would've broken down a door, but it missed by inches, creased his ribs and knocked only half the breath from his lungs. Thorn staggered and dropped his hold. Something giving way inside his gut, some nameless organ whose function he didn't know. He heard a shrill whistle as he dragged down a breath.

Maybe those people trained in street fighting saw it all as a diagram. He'd heard that somewhere. That if you fought enough battles, then everything slowed down, got simpler. You saw with perfect clarity the geometry of punch and counterpunch, you feinted and dodged and suckered a less skilled opponent into your snare. But for Thorn it was all wild confusion. It was that way now and it always had been that way. He acted without subterfuge or strategy. If there was anything on his side at moments like that one, it was his simple creed. Inflict the most damage as fast as possible. Stay awake as long as you can.

He was only dimly aware of the nail file he'd palmed, that it had been riding in his hand through the mayhem. But as Johnny wheeled
around, driving the heavy black barrel of the Remington toward the side of his head, and as Thorn ducked back out of its vicious arc, the nail file fit itself into his right hand as naturally as if he'd been facing off against switchblade punks all his life.

The shotgun clipped the edge of the door and threw Johnny off-balance for a half second, and as he was cocking his arms back to take a left-handed swing, Thorn seized the barrel and flung the shotgun across the cabin. It hit the wall next to the bed and clanged to the floor.

Thorn cocked his right fist and was measuring an uppercut to Johnny's jaw, when the kid whisked his hand by his belt and came up with a knife. Same kind as Thorn had pulled out of Lawton. Not for skinning rabbits, not for cleaning fingernails. Good for one thing only.

Johnny started to square off, take a stance, like they would play by some formal rules of knife fighting. But Thorn didn't wait for him to get set, he lunged at the boy, jabbed the nail file into the first available patch of flesh, which happened to be the side of Johnny's neck, and he pulled down and to the side and then back to the other side, ripping a ragged hole. Johnny gagged and stumbled backwards. He took a wild swipe at Thorn with that exotic blade, but Thorn blocked his wrist and deflected the blade downward. It nicked his shirt and left a warm trail across his right ribs.

Thorn continued to work the nail file back and forth, esophagus and windpipe and Adam's apple, his hand slick with Johnny's blood.

Johnny bleated and his knife clattered to the floor.

That was the precise moment when Thorn could have stopped. Stepped away and let the boy fall on his back, but he didn't. He kept bulling forward, partly for Farley and Lawton, partly for the hundred strangers in a diving jet, but mainly for reasons of his own, because this was the only way he'd learned to handle rabid dogs. You didn't give in to human sympathy. You didn't weigh it all out on some delicate moral scale. You made sure the dog was dead and then you made sure he was even deader than that.

Thorn dug the nail file back and forth in the boy's neck, through the hot gristle, the meaty layers, shoving him backwards until Johnny thumped against the wardrobe, his butt riding up onto the countertop. The boy gurgled like a newborn at his mother's breast, his eyes rolling inward. Behind him the wardrobe mirror shined. Thorn looked past the dying boy at the creature reflected in the glass. Killer caught in the act. Blood smeared across Thorn's mouth and cheeks as if he'd eaten a pie without his hands. Blood seeped from Johnny's artery, coating Thorn's arm. A look on Thorn's face he didn't recognize. A look he'd never seen on any human face.

Morgan heard the shots coming from down below. Johnny executing Thorn and the old man as instructed. She would've left the flybridge, gone down to supervise, hold his hand, make sure the klutz didn't screw it up, killing two men who were bound up head-to-toe, but she was a little preoccupied at the moment, watching another boat approaching across the dark water. From the spread of its running lights, it looked like a small fishing boat, which meant she could almost certainly outrun it if it came to that. But now she wanted to know who it was that kept changing their course each time she changed hers. Dogging her, now getting even more aggressive, on a heading that would cross her bow in only a minute or two.

So she didn't go down below to oversee her little brother. She kept her eyes on the boat, watching it drawing closer. Coming from her starboard, which gave it the right of way if you wanted to get tech
nical, but she didn't think the rules of the sea were going to apply to this situation. She didn't think any rules were going to apply. She just had that feeling.

 

“Try both of them at once,” Sugarman said. “Both buttons.”

“My father's on that boat. And Thorn.”

“Your father wear a pacemaker?”

“No.”

“So what're you worried about? It didn't kill anybody at Neon Leon's. It just shut off the power. That's what you said.”

“You sure about this?”

“I'm not sure about any damn thing. But hey, we gotta do something quick. They make a run, we're screwed.”

So, Alexandra shifted the cone, directing it toward the
ByteMe
, and took a deep breath and pressed both buttons. The device hummed. Quiet as a small electric shaver, then a few seconds later she felt a sharp tingle in her sinuses, a sudden rush of electrons or neurons or some damn thing flashing up her spinal cord. That could've been the electromagnetic pulse, or just a jolt of her own adrenaline.

Even though she hadn't been to Mass in twenty years and had long ago lost hope that God was watching every sparrow as closely as she once believed, still, at that moment, as another throb brightened her nerve endings, Alex said a few silent words of thanksgiving.

 

In the mirror Thorn watched Lawton crawl back onto the bed.

He caught Thorn's eyes. Thorn starting to feel the buckshot smoldering in his leg, and the sting that swiped across his right ribs.

“I think you can stop now,” Lawton said. “Looks like the boy's finished.”

Thorn nodded. He let go of the nail file. Let his arms fall to his sides. The bones had turned to iron. He might never lift them again.

“So, tell me,” Lawton said. “You done that a lot, kill guys with your bare hands?”

Thorn stepped away from the dead man. Johnny's chin slumped forward, pressing against his chest, long blond hair falling around his face.

Thorn looked at Lawton.

“Not for a while,” he said.

“Could've fooled me,” the old man said. “Could've fooled the hell out of me.”

And a second later, Thorn was still looking at Lawton, trying to find something to say, when the lights went off and the big diesels shut down.

 

“Mother of God,” Sugar said. “The damn thing works.”

“There's a couple of lights still on,” Alex said. “Up on the bow.”

“Well, it works ninety percent.”

Alex said, “Now what?”

“We give them a good ram.”

“What?”

“Hit them broadside, knock them senseless.”

“What's that accomplish, Sugar?”

“I don't know. Maybe it's all Thorn will need to change the balance of power in there. Shake things up; in the chaos, we come aboard, take over.”

“Damn risky,” she said. “A lot of unknowns.”

“At this point, what isn't risky? Safe thing is to call for help on the radio, sit out here all night till somebody comes. But I don't know how safe that is for Lawton and Thorn.”

“Can this old barge take the hit?”

“Thorn spent the last couple of months replanking the hull. All new wood, like iron.”

She looked out at the dark. Shaking her head.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “Ram 'em. Ram the hell out of them.”

“Aye, aye.”

Sugar eased the throttle forward, got the engine revving, five knots, ten, the pleasant acceleration, fifteen, rising up to plane, the sweet night air, lush and tropical and freshened by its long trip across the open ocean, twenty knots now, and then a little more, twenty-two, twenty-three, nice cruising speed, that big engine not straining at all, the rush of water off the bow, the white foam behind them glowing in the moonlight.

He aimed at the yacht's bow, going to give them a glancing blow. Despite his words to Alexandra, and though he trusted Thorn's workmanship, Sugar knew when their wood hull bashed against the Braswells' reinforced fiberglass at this speed, chances were good they'd crack something structural, almost certainly start taking on water. Then it was just a matter of how big the leak was versus the efficiency of Thorn's bilge pump.

Alexandra leaned close, spoke through the bluster.

“You sure about this, Sugar? You're sure?”

He nodded. Though he wasn't sure, not at all.

“Hold on,” he said. “This isn't going to be pretty.”

They were a hundred yards out, no sign of movement on the boat. Not even a flashlight, just a couple of lights burning up on the flybridge and the top deck. Could be a ghost ship for all he knew. Everyone dead or dying. Could be anything. He didn't let himself consider it. Just kept his eye on the dark profile of the hull, closing faster now, fifty yards, forty. The moonlight giving the water a ghostly look, golden white glaze, like some eerie frost.

Thirty yards out, he picked his spot, three feet back of the point of the bow.

“Hold on.”

Twenty yards, then ten, that's when he heard the outboard motor roar and saw the stern lights moving off behind the bow, heading north. He had to blink to make sure it was real. A dinghy bouncing
across the dark sea. And he jerked the wheel hard to starboard, hard, hard, but still not quick enough. He watched the big black shape looming now, bigger than it seemed before, enormous. A goddamn freighter. What was he thinking, ramming a boat like that?

They clipped the edge of the hull, Sugar cringing at the scream and crunch of the surfaces colliding, a piece breaking off the
Heart Pounder
, a chunk of chrome flying off into the night. The jolt sent Alex toppling into him, knocking him away from the wheel, the old Chris-Craft heeling over, still going full speed, but now listing hard. Crashes in the galley, broken glass, pots, skillets. A fishing rod tumbled across the cockpit deck. Sugarman had one hand on the wheel and was pulling himself upright, with an arm looped around Alex to keep her from going overboard. Noticing in that second how rawboned strong she was, feeling that strength as she pushed away, grabbed hold of a chrome handle and hauled herself up.

“I guess we didn't fry everything,” he said.

“I guess not.”

Off-balance, wedged sideways against the cockpit wall, Sugar corrected the wheel. Doing it slowly, pulling back on the throttle at the same time, drawing them out of their tilt. When the boat was under control, he pushed himself erect, flattened the throttle, giving chase.

For half a mile he trailed the zigzagging dinghy across the black sea, long enough to know it was useless. It was skipping along at fifty knots, a third again as fast as their top end. As it pulled away, Sugar fixed Thorn's handheld spotlight on the boat, managed to still its shudder long enough to see only one person aboard. Dark hair fluttering in the moonlight.

Sugar swung around in a wide arc and headed back toward the yacht, using the spotlight to locate it in the shadows. They came alongside, Sugarman cutting the engines, idling up, putting their starboard hull against the port of the
ByteMe
. Alex went up on the bow and got the lines ready. Sugarman inching closer, squinting at the dark boat, feeling suddenly exposed.

The familiar voice came from the shadowy cockpit.

“That you?”

“Yeah, it's me, Thorn. It's me. You okay?”

Thorn said he was fine. Everything was fine, except they lost Farley Boissont.

“And Dad?” Alexandra's voice was stony, bracing herself for the worst.

“A couple of nicks, nothing serious.”

Something splashed out in the dark water, then it splashed again. Overhead the sky was immense, more stars than Sugar had ever seen.

Alexandra tossed the lines across to Thorn and he leaned his weight against them and hauled the boats close. He hung a couple of white bumpers overboard and the boats snugged tight against them. He made the lines fast, then came back to the cockpit and put out a hand, and Alexandra gave him hers and stepped up to the taller gunwale.

“Thorn killed a guy.” Lawton stood beside the fighting chair. “He killed Johnny Braswell. I watched the whole mess. But it was self-defense all the way. Johnny had a twelve-gauge, Thorn had a nail file.”

Sugarman chuckled.

“Even odds for Thorn.”

Lawton stood beside the chair waiting for Alexandra, waiting with his arms slack at his side in the moonlight, watching as she hopped down from the gunwale and took two steps and pulled him into an embrace and hugged him hard. Then after a minute or two, she stepped back and held him at arms' length, wiped her eyes and peered into his face.

“Your ear,” she said.

“Punk cut off my earlobe,” Lawton said. “Wouldn't you know. There goes my earring.”

Sugarman stepped aboard.

“And the father?”

Thorn said he was lying down in his stateroom. Doing okay but not saying much.

“Man's in shock,” Lawton said. “Just found out what a piss-poor job he'd done raising those kids.”

Alexandra put her arm around Lawton's back.

“Speaking of piss-poor,” Thorn said. “That was some kind of thump you gave us, Sugar. You didn't dent my boat, did you?”

“Little ding. Nothing you can't fix, Thorn. Doesn't seem to be taking on any water.”

“We should get back,” Thorn said. “Notify people. Stop Morgan from getting off the island. Turn Braswell over to the cops.”

“I don't think you need to worry about Morgan,” Sugar said. “The HERF was on board your boat the whole time. That's how we turned off your lights.”

“What if there's another one?” Thorn said.

“It's not our problem,” Sugar said. “We're done.”

Sugarman took a seat on the transom.

“Banks,” said Lawton. “That's what I'd do. I'd turn off their alarms and help myself. Go down the street, one by one, load up my sack. Buy me a big boat, sail around the world.”

“It's not our problem,” Alex said. “This is FBI, CIA, anti-terrorist people. It's what those boys live for. This is way out of our league.”

“We'll need to give statements,” Sugar said. “But beyond that, I think we're free and clear.”

“Well, good,” Lawton said. “Then we can stay over here in the islands, do a little marlin fishing.”

Everyone was silent, looking around in the glow from the
Heart Pounder
's lights.

“Damn right,” Thorn said. “We're here in marlin paradise. Let's put some meat on the deck.”