Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery) (29 page)

We were three-quarters of the way across the waterway. The thirty-horsepower outboard began to smoke from the strain as we slogged toward the far shore. A flash of movement pulled my eyes to the left.

I guess Collins saw that his pals’ plans for us had gone awry and had decided to help them out.
Yachts of Fun
had turned around and was on plane, screaming toward us at something like twenty knots. No way we were going to make it to shore before she cut us in half and ground us to fish bait.

“The controller,” Brett yelled. “Gimme the controller!”

I fished the yacht controller from my pocket and handed it to him.

“Take the wheel,” he screamed.

I levered myself onto the seat next to him and took the helm.

Rebecca was on her hands and knees, trying to struggle to her feet. I reached over and pushed her back to the bottom of the boat as another round screamed overhead. I watched in terror as it plowed into the far bank, sending a geyser of stone and dirt spiraling high into the air.

When I looked up again, Brett was madly pushing buttons on the controller. I snapped my eyes to the left just in time to see
Yachts of Fun
turn sharply to port, sending a wall of spray high into the air as it veered into the middle of the channel.

And then the red light on the yacht controller went out.

“He figured it out,” Brett yelled and pitched the controller over the side.

I snapped my eyes forward. We were no more than forty yards from the south bank of the waterway. Our maneuver with the controller might have bought us the time we needed. From the look of it,
Yachts of Fun
had given up the chase.

“Not enough water in here for him,” Brett screamed.

As we approached the shore, I kept the throttle pegged.

Twenty yards from shore. Then ten.

“Hang on,” I shouted.

Brett threw himself into what remained of the bow in the instant before we plowed headlong into the bank. The impact sent him sprawling out onto the muddy slope and flipped me completely over the steering console. I landed on a pile of life jackets in the middle of the boat. I groaned, grabbed Rebecca under the arms and started pulling her up the bank, hoping like hell I didn’t take one in the back of the head as we struggled up the slope. She was trying to walk with me, but her legs were like linguini. Coupla steps,
fall down, and slide back. Coupla more steps and slide back. My leg muscles screamed from the effort.

We got to the top and I realized nobody was shooting at us anymore. I checked the opposite shore. Looked like a body lying out at the end of the dock. Otherwise it was deserted. I was contemplating the possibility that I’d actually hit somebody when two sets of headlights went roaring up Marine View Drive. I couldn’t make out the first, but the second vehicle was a big black Hummer. My breath froze in my chest. So much for plan A. Somehow or other, they’d broken out of the yard, and were on their way over here to finish what they’d started.

I pushed myself to my feet and looked around.

No George. No car.

Brett struggled to the top of the rise. The front of him was crusted with mud and gravel. His nose was bleeding again. His mouth hung open as he swiveled his head in nearly a circle. Took his fear-addled brain a second to figure it out.

“Where’s the car?” he wheezed.

I shook my head and pointed to the
Emerald Queen
riv-erboat. “Take her over that way,” I said. “Get some cover.”

I reached into my belt, pulled out the 9 mm, and handed it to him.

“The boat,” I said. “Get her to the boat.”

Brett liked the idea of getting to cover. That was right up his alley. He pocketed the nine, lifted Rebecca into his arms, and staggered toward the deserted riverboat on the near shore. I could tell by the way his legs quaked and quivered that he wasn’t going to be able to get her there on his own.

I pulled my phone from my pocket. The noise coming from the phone’s speaker sounded like George was strapped to the wing of a 747 during takeoff. “George,” I screamed. “Answer me, goddamn it! George. Do you hear me, George?”

Nothing. Just more of that screeching wall of sound.

I pushed the End button over and over, hoping to break the connection so I could call 911 and get some help because the minute Junior’s troops got over to this side, we were going to be dead. But nothing happened. The screeching and squawking continued unabated. I cursed again, pocketed the phone, and looked around.

Out in the waterway,
Yachts of Fun
was a half mile away, rocketing past the Hylebos Bridge, heading out into the darkness of Puget Sound at full throttle.

I was still deciding what to do next when my peripheral vision picked up the shower of sparks, a great yellow rooster tail of molten metal fanning up into the night sky like a thousand Fourth of July sparklers. “What the…,” I whispered.

I was still collecting my lower jaw when the Tahoe came fishtailing around the corner, three of the tires completely gone, running on the rims. Even from two hundred feet away, I could hear the rims shredding the asphalt and the big engine screaming as the car bore down on me like a crippled rhinoceros.

I dropped to one knee, thumbed off the safety on the AX9 and put my eye to the scope. I couldn’t quite make out who was driving, but from the size of the passenger, I knew it had to be Norman riding shotgun. I eased my finger from the trigger, scrambled to my feet, and waved frantically.

The car slid back and forth across the road, shaking its rear end like one of Joey Ortega’s dancers as the one remaining rear tire alternately gained and lost traction.

George locked up the brakes and plowed to a halt about fifty feet in front of me. The relentless rain hissed and spattered as it came into contact with overheated metal.

I raced to the driver’s door and jerked it open. George’s face was white with fear.

“They seen us, Leo,” he yelled. “Caught us chaining the gate.”

I pulled him out of the car. Pointed at the retreating figures of Brett and Rebecca, barely visible through the curtain of water. “That way,” I shouted. “Go that way!”

Norman stumbled around the front of the car, his left arm bloody and hanging limp by his side. I pointed at Brett and Rebecca again. “Normy,” I shouted. “Help him get her to the boat.”

He took off running in long, slow-motion strides. Looked like Frankenstein doing the hundred-yard dash.

George was frozen in place. His eyes looked like pin-wheels. He held his hands in front of his body, his fingers still clenched around an imaginary steering wheel.

“Go,” I yelled.

He looked at me as if I was speaking Turkish, then shook himself from his stupor and went skittering off after the others.

That’s when the first of the pursuit cars came roaring around the corner.

I brought the AX9 to my shoulder and pulled the trigger. The automatic spewed a glowing arc of tracers. The car’s windshield instantly disappeared; the car drifted lazily
to the right. I watched as the Lexus blasted off the edge of the embankment, hovered in midair for a long moment, its wheels spinning, and then belly flopped into the Hylebos Waterway, where it sank nose first into the dark waters.

Having witnessed its predecessor’s fate, the Hummer wasn’t taking any chances. I heard the screech of tires and watched as three figures threw themselves from the car and ran for cover. One guy ran to the right, the other two to the left. Koontz and Ng were easy to spot, their comic book profiles unmistakable as they hustled over and put portions of the bank between us. I ducked behind the Tahoe, ejected the empty magazine, and slapped in another.

When I peeked around the fender, the blood began to eddy in my veins. Koontz and Ng were lying on their bellies pointing what looked like a rocket launcher my way. My survival mechanism sent me crawling backward, keeping my car between us, trying to put as much distance between the Tahoe and me as I could get.

Good thing too. A second and a half later, I heard the launcher’s ignition whoosh and then, in another half a second, the Tahoe was blown to pieces. The shockwave drove me face-first into the ground. Flames shot twenty feet into the air. I covered my head as big chunks of molten metal and glass and plastic rained down from the skies. When the overhead onslaught subsided, I pushed myself up to one knee and looked around. The last mortal remains of my car had been reduced to the size of a VW bug and were engulfed in flames.

At that point, I got smart and began to act counterintuitively, trying to do something, anything they weren’t expecting. Instead of running for cover, I crawled back up and got
as close to the Tahoe as the roaring flames would permit. Close enough to smell my hair beginning to singe. I shielded my eyes from the heat and peeked around the edge of the burning wreck.

Like I figured, all three were sprinting hard in my direction, thinking there was no way I could have survived the explosion. I had a better line of sight on the guy on the right, so I started with him. I set my sights low and allowed the natural pull of the weapon to bring the barrel up as I emptied the clip. I watched as the firefly slugs stitched him from crotch to chin. He went down in a heap and stayed there.

Seeing their compatriot go down sent Koontz and Ng scurrying back over the bank. I squinted through the rain. Ten seconds passed before I saw the rocket launcher reappear. I took off running, keeping the remains of the car between us. And then—bang—my car exploded again. Two direct hits had morphed my former Tahoe into little more than a pile of flaming metal, ready for the Miramar scrap heap.

In front of me, Norman had Rebecca tucked under one arm and was loping toward the
Emerald Queen
with George zigzagging along in his wake. Brett was nowhere in sight. He’d dropped her on the ground and run for his life. I silently cursed myself for trusting him and especially for giving him back his gun. My ire was short-lived, however. Movement in the corner of my eye said Koontz and Ng were setting up to launch yet another rocket-propelled grenade in my direction, so I made a dash for it. Holding the assault rifle tight against my chest, I gave it all I had in a sprint for cover. I’d barely gotten started when another massive round whizzed by my ear, missed the
Emerald Queen
by a foot and a half, and disappeared into the darkness. I threw my head
back and ran for my life. I don’t sprint much these days, so by the time I arrived at the
Emerald Queen
, my breath was about gone and my legs felt like they were about to rotate out of the sockets.

Norman had kicked in the casino’s double front doors. He and George and Rebecca lay scattered on the casino floor like fallen poker chips. I stayed outside, ducked behind the ornate rail, and flattened myself on the deck.

The combination of terror and oxygen must have had a regenerative effect on my brain, because that was the moment I realized that coming to the boat was, in all probability, going to be the last dumb decision I would ever make.

What had kept us alive thus far had been the fact that we were out in the open. When you fire at somebody with a rocket launcher, you’re not trying for a direct hit. That’s not what the weapon was designed to do. What you’re hoping to do is to blow up something in your quarry’s immediate vicinity and take him out as part of the collateral damage of the explosion.

As long as we were in the middle of the Superfund site, there was nothing for the grenades to hit, nothing to blow up. Either they scored a direct hit and vaporized one of us on the spot, or the rockets just flew off and eventually dropped into Puget Sound. What they really needed was something substantial that would create enough shrapnel to shred anything and everything in the immediate impact area, and that’s just what running to the boat had given them. I cursed again and waited for the final rocket to punctuate the sentence. But nothing happened.

An eerie silence settled around us like a shroud. A minute had passed when I heard the riverboat’s engines roar
and felt the rumble beneath as the boat came to life. Had to be Brett, I figured. Scrambling to save his own life. I cursed again, and then duck-walked a hundred feet up the deck and peeked over the rail.

Koontz and Ng must have heard the engines too. They worked their way up the south bank of the Hylebos until they were parallel with the boat. I saw a yellow muzzle flash and waited to for the end to come. And come it did, but not in the caliber I’d imagined. No rocket. Just a long burst of automatic weapon fire tearing up the section of deck where I’d been half a minute ago.

“Stay down,” I screamed to the trio inside. “Stay down!”

Why they had switched weapons was beyond me. They had us right where they wanted us and they…Then it came to me: They must be out of rockets. How many of those things could anybody lug around, anyway? A short, dry laugh escaped my throat.

Now, if there was any strategic advantage, it was ours. They were seventy or so yards away, with nothing but open ground between us, and we might actually be able to motor off into the sunset and save our collective ass.

I popped my head up, sighted and let loose a short burst of fire designed to keep their heads down as I crawled forward, untying the lines as I went along. Not surprisingly, another prolonged burst of fire from shore pulverized the area I’d vacated. I pulled another line from its cleat and crawled some more, working my way from cleat to cleat. By the time I reached the back of the boat, the red paddle-wheel had begun to churn the water like a giant eggbeater.

Just above my head, the woodwork and windows were shredded by another prolonged burst of automatic weapon
fire. I flattened myself, covered my head with my arms, and hoped to God that everybody inside was doing the limbo.

And then suddenly we were moving. I could feel it. The big boat began to slip out into the waterway just as the next salvo slammed into us. Not down here on deck this time, but higher. Up at the pilothouse where Brett presumably was at the helm.

I popped up, put the scope to my eye, and let loose everything I had at the bright green muzzle flashes. Above the roar of the engines, the drumbeat of lead crashing through the boat and the tinkling of broken glass, I thought I heard a scream, something long and high pitched, and final.