Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery) (28 page)

I heard him clear his throat. “Will do,” he gargled.

Ten minutes later, as we motored across Commencement Bay, the tension inside the cabin was thick as concrete.

Brett’s face was gray and hard. His breath came in short ir-regular bursts, and he began to sweat.

As for me, adrenaline overload had my cheeks tingling like a funny bone, and I could feel the beating of my heart. I came a foot off the deck when my cell phone rang.

“They just went in,” George said. “Two cars. One of them Humper things.”

I figured he meant a Hummer. The clock read ten fifty.

“Lock ’em in and get over to the other side,” I said.

“Party time,” I said to Brett, with more bravado in my voice than I actually felt. He put the hammer down, and the boat rose up on plane and roared across the water.

Brett used the thrust to ease the boat alongside the dock. I didn’t bother to put fenders out. Seemed a good bet that a couple of scratches on the hull weren’t going to bother anybody at this point.

The clock said eleven, straight up. The dock was empty.

“Where’s that yacht controller thing?” I asked.

He pulled open a drawer beneath the chart plotter, pulled it out, and handed it to me. “Set the switch for the yacht controller,” I said.

Brett skittered across the cabin and flicked the center toggle into the upward position. The little red light at the center of the device blinked.

I dropped the controller in my pocket. Checked the dock through the scope. Still nothing.

The depth sounder said we were in six and a half feet of water. The clock read 11:02. The volume of the rain had increased; a hissing a wall of sound pounded down onto
the fiberglass roof of the boat. I looked through the scope again. The eerie green light wavered for a second and then came into focus.

“Here they come,” I said.

At the far end of the dock, a trio of hazy figures lurched our way. They had Rebecca by the elbows, forcing her along from behind, using her more or less as a shield as they short-stepped over the uneven boards.

I thumbed the AX9’s safety to off, wiped my sweaty palm on my pants, and stepped onto the dock. I had the extra double-drum magazines jammed into every pocket. I rattled like a car wreck as I moved out onto the pier.

“Come on,” I said to Brett. “Don’t get between me and them,” I whispered, not that I really imagined he would.

He didn’t move. Looked like he was welded to the deck.

“Unless you want to sail off into the dawn with those two, I’d suggest you get your skinny ass out here.”

Apparently the idea of a romantic moonlight cruise didn’t appeal to Brett. Next thing I knew, he was standing beside me on the pier. The rain was unrelenting, pouring down from the blackness overhead in torrents. Took all of thirty seconds to soak us to the skin.

Rebecca and her captors were a quarter of the way down the dock. A big, thick Hispanic guy in a yellow raincoat and a pimply white guy that kept popping his head out from behind her to see how close they were getting.

“Collins,” Brett said.

“Trevor Collins?”

“Guy I used to get the boats from.”

“You know the other one?” I asked.

He squinted through the curtain of raindrops. “Never seen him before.”

I figured Trevor Collins was along to drive the boat, which made the other guy Colombian muscle. I stepped over to the far rail, putting as much distance between the muscle and me as I could get.

Above the static hiss of the rain, I thought I heard a clap of thunder. Then it happened again and a third time before I realized that what I was hearing were bursts of gunfire out in the street. Dread rolled down my spine like an icy ball bearing.

The trio approaching us was about thirty yards away, still hazy through a steady curtain of rain, moving slowly and deliberately, making sure they kept Rebecca in front of them as they approached our position. Neither Collins nor the Colombian seemed concerned by the weapons fire behind them. Just another day at the office.

I reached in my pocket, grabbed my phone, and started to call George.

Another, longer burst of automatic weapon fire sounded from the street. Thing was, my left ear heard the burst of fire in real time. My right ear heard the same burst from the phone’s speaker half a second later. George hadn’t broken our last connection. The line was open, preventing me from making another call. I heard George scream and then another burst of gunfire.

“Shit,” I said, and jammed the phone back into my pants.

Collins finally looked back over his shoulder, wondering what the hell was going on on Marine View Drive. A metal-on-metal crash, an interval, and more gunfire and another earsplitting crash. The Colombian never twitched. From
twenty yards away I could feel his shark eyes on me. Parts of me contracted like a dying star.

Rebecca’s knees suddenly buckled. She would have gone down, but the big Colombian grabbed her around the waist, set her on his left hip, and kept walking without breaking stride or removing his right hand from the raincoat pocket.

They were twenty feet away when I called out, “Leave her right there.”

They stopped walking, but that was all. No move to set her down.

“Everything’s just where you left it,” I said. “I just want the woman. Got no desire to spend the next twenty years looking over my shoulder, waiting for you guys to show up and blow my brains out.”

The Colombian nodded his understanding. “That’s the smart money move,” he said in a flat, expressionless voice.

“Just set her down right there,” I said again.

He shook his big head resignedly. “Gotta see the product,” he said.

He looked at Trevor Collins and nodded toward the boat. Collins put his back against the opposite railing and began to sidestep past us.

“Check him for weapons,” I told Brett.

For once in his life he kept his mouth shut and did as he was told, stiff-legging it across the dock, and patting Collins down like he’d seen cops do on TV.

I kept both eyes glued to the Colombian and my trigger finger just outside the guard. I figured there was no way either of us would survive a shootout at this range, and I was hoping like hell he saw it that way too.

“He’s clean,” Brett said.

“Hurry up,” I prodded.

Collins hustled over to
Yachts of Fun
and jumped aboard.

“Just business,” the thug said.

I told him I understood.

A tense minute passed. Then I heard Collins’s voice. “It’s all there.”

The big guy set Rebecca gently on the dock and began to move toward the boat. He inched along the rail slowly, never turning his back or taking his eyes from mine, until he ducked into the cabin and disappeared from view.

Within seconds, Collins had reversed the thrusters and the boat started to float into the current. I got as much of me as I could behind the rail and watched through the scope as the big boat began to churn forward.

“Get the skiff,” I whispered to Brett.

I didn’t have to ask twice. At that point old Brett would have done just about anything to get off that frigging dock. The words were hardly out of my mouth when he was over the side and working his way down the rickety ladder.

I crossed quickly to Rebecca. Her eyes were closed, her breathing shallow. She had one arm curled across her forehead. The inside of the arm had enough needle tracks to start a trolley line.

Out in the waterway, Collins fed diesel to the engines and the boat started to come up on plane. The Colombian stood sentry on the stern. He gave me a curt nod before stepping inside and sliding the door closed.

I brought the AX9 to my shoulder and shot out the overhead light, sending glass and metal debris showering down on the end of the dock. Turned out it was probably a good idea, because a second later the first incoming round
arrived, and any thought that these guys were smart enough to wait for us to get back on shore before they whacked us was gone. Apparently, I’d seriously overrated my enemy.

Whatever they were firing must have been about three million caliber. Something in the howitzer family of weapons. The first incoming took out a whole section of dock railing, reducing it to splinters in the nanosecond before the sound of the shot arrived. Took me a second to realize what had happened. Those crazy bastards were shooting at us with a rocket launcher.

I raced to Rebecca, scooped her into my arms, and sprinted toward the missing section of railing. The subsequent incoming round passed about six inches above my right shoulder. Sounded like a flock of Canada geese on the wing. If I’d loaded Rebecca into my arms facing the other way, the round would have taken her head off. I watched the rocket hit the water about halfway across the channel, sending a fountain of spray powering into the night sky. The hundred yards of moldering dock beneath my feet shook from the impact.

I veered toward the missing section of railing, pulled down a final gulp of air, and launched both of us out into the darkness. I was five feet from the edge of the dock, hanging in midair with Rebecca cradled in my arms, when it occurred to me that I had no idea what was waiting for me in the water below; images of old, splintered pilings just below the surface raced through my brain in the split-second before we hit the water. Last thing I heard was the sound of the skiff’s outboard motor sputtering to life.

Even to a man already soaked to the skin, the frigid water was a shock to the system. My muscles spasmed. My
knees involuntarily drew close to my chest as I sunk to the bottom of the channel, hugging Rebecca to my chest, trying desperately not to swallow any of the carcinogenic water.

And then my feet hit the muddy bottom and I used what little power I could still summon from my legs to push off, sending us upward, until what seemed like a week later, my head breached the surface, and I could gulp another breath and shift Rebecca so that we were parallel and our heads were at the same height.

Brett and the Boston Whaler were about ten feet away.

“Get her,” I yelled, kicking my legs, trying to keep both of our heads above the surface. “Come get her!”

He used his hands to propel the dingy from under the dock. That’s when Rebecca’s autonomic nervous system jolted her into consciousness and she began to swim for her life. Her frenzied thrashing pushed my face below the waterline; I held my breath and lifted her upward for all I was worth.

After what seemed like an hour and a half, I felt her weight begin to lessen and knew Brett had ahold of her, so I let go and kicked my way to the surface, where I grabbed the side of the dingy with one hand and Rebecca’s belt with the other. We got her over the side in two tries, but I didn’t have enough muscle power left to force myself that high, so I swam around to the stern and launched the top half of me up onto the transom. The outboard belched exhaust fumes into my face as I inched my way on board.

Having rolled Rebecca into the bottom of the boat, Brett reached back and grabbed me by the shoulders. Together we hauled the last three feet of me on board the skiff. Between labored breaths, I could hear the sound of
footsteps thundering along the dock. Lots of heavy footsteps coming our way.

“Go, go,” I shouted to Brett. “Get us the hell out of here,”

No hesitation this time either. He threw himself behind the wheel, jammed the throttle lever all the way forward, sending the boat roaring out into the channel.

Rebecca babbled incoherently and rolled from side to side fighting off dream demons, as I crawled to the rear of the dingy and brought the rifle to bear on the dock.

“Go, go,” I still chanted as I brought my eye up to the night vision scope. Even with night vision, the figures running toward the end of the dock were muddy and indistinct. Before I was able to steady my weapon, muzzle flashes lit up the night, and the water around the speeding boat began to boil.

I aimed and squeezed the trigger. Looked like I was shooting fireflies. Each round glowed phosphorous green as it arced in their direction. Joey Ortega was right. I wasn’t much of a marksman, but when you could see where the rounds were going, it was easy to make adjustments.

I raised my aiming point two feet and let go another burst. My second attempt sent our pursuers flat-bellied onto the deck, as the AR began chewing up the locale. I kept my finger on the trigger until the magazine ran dry, ejected the empty clip, and slapped another into the breach.

Brett slalomed the boat back and forth across the channel, trying to make us harder to hit. Before I could loose another burst, a halogen-white muzzle flash the size of a trash can lit up the dock, and the Boston Whaler shuddered violently as the whole bow of the boat disappeared in a scream of tortured metal.

By the time I recovered my wits, the boat was beginning to sink. From where I sat, it looked as if we surely were on our way to the bottom.

“Back here! Everybody back here,” Brett shouted.

I grabbed Rebecca and slid past him, half carrying, half dragging her to the extreme rear of the skiff. By the time I got both of us as far aft as we could get, the boat had taken on the better part of a foot of water and our speed was down to nothing. And then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, our combined weight began to lift the nose just enough so that we were no longer plowing water. I ducked a hail of small-caliber rounds buzzing by. As the bow cleared the surface, the accumulated water in the boat sloshed toward the stern, leaving us hip deep as the boat labored across the channel.