Doc Ford 19 - Chasing Midnight (36 page)

But then my mood changed when Odus Neinabor, on his knees, peering at the downed aircraft, said, “I wish those asswipes woulda crashed and burned to death. Woulda served them right for trying to stop my brothers.”

Touching the throttle, I turned sharply toward the Dragos, then lowered my voice to tell Tomlinson, “He’ll be so busy watching the chopper, he won’t see us if we pull alongside.”

I meant Geness.

“Christ, Doc, you’re not going to ram her again. I mean, it was exciting and all, but—”

“I’m getting off,” I told him. “You’re taking the wheel. And if
that little son of a bitch even tries to touch that”—I nodded toward the rifle lying at our feet—“you push him overboard. Promise me. You’ve got to swear you’ll do it.”

When my friend didn’t respond instantly, I knelt, picked up the rifle and tossed it over the side.

I wasn’t smiling anymore.

T
he Dragos Voyager was only six hundred yards from the Regency Hotel marina when I finally steered the Whaler into position along the yacht’s starboard side where, earlier, we had punched a hole in its glistening skin. Now, though, the hole had disappeared beneath the waterline, which told me the vessel was sinking fast.

There was another indicator she was going down: the vessel was heeling to starboard, and two scuppers forward of the midship line were jettisoning leakage with the force of fire hoses. Tomlinson noticed, too, as he got ready to take the wheel. It told us the yacht’s multiple bilge pumps were fighting a losing battle, and that water had now risen near the forward cabin. Until that moment, I hadn’t given the welfare of the sturgeon much thought, despite what I’d told Odus. Now I did.

The word “fingerling” is an inexact term when applied to fish, but the age of Kazlov’s sturgeon—if they were still alive—was suddenly important. Sturgeon are an anadromous species, which means that, at a certain stage, they migrate to sea when not spawning. For
many sturgeon, the transitional age is two years or older. Until then, their physiology requires fresh water. If the Russian truly had transported finger-length beluga to Florida, the flooding salt water would probably kill the fish even if I managed to take control of the yacht.

“It’s two minutes until three,” Tomlinson reminded me as we changed places. Apparently, he, too, was worried there might be another explosive aboard the vessel. It wouldn’t be the first time Odus had lied to us.

I nodded, but then gestured toward the hotel, where we could see the miniature silhouettes of late-night stragglers and what were probably maintenance staff on the casino boat’s upper deck. We didn’t have time to stand off and wait for the deadline to pass, I was telling him. If I was going to surprise Geness, I had to act now.

Odus, sitting in front of the steering console, had slipped into catatonia, or so I believed. And he remained motionless when I hurried onto the Whaler’s casting platform and motioned to Tomlinson to swing us closer… closer… until the two vessels were nearly bumping, our speeds in sync, traveling at less than ten knots.

From experience, I knew how difficult it was to keep the boat in position while also contending with wind and volatile updrafts of displaced water. Tomlinson couldn’t hold us there long, so I didn’t hesitate when the yacht’s safety railing descended within reach. Almost within reaching distance, anyway, because at the last instant I had to jump and grab the lowest rail with my right hand, which kicked the bow of the Whaler out from under me.

It was then that Odus sprung into action. As I hung there, fighting to pull myself up, a pair of hands grabbed me around the waist. Then I felt the full weight of the little man as he wrapped his legs around mine. Odus buried his fingernails into my belly and began screaming, “Don’t let me go! I can’t swim! You know I can’t swim!”

My first thought was,
The little bastard’s going to shake the pistol free,
because I’d stuffed the weapon into the back of my shorts. There, even if it was dislodged, my underwear would catch it like a safety net—not an ideal place to carry a pistol that has a round chambered yet it was the only place that would leave my hands free.

With a glance, I saw that Tomlinson was helpless. If he abandoned the wheel to grab the twin, the outboard’s propeller would automatically kick the boat into a sharp left turn. If that happened, he not only couldn’t pull Odus off me, he’d probably be flung overboard.

I don’t know what my pal did after that because I had to muster every bit of strength to steady myself and fill my lungs with air. Then, with the twin still screaming, I attempted an impossible one-handed pull-up. Most days of my life, I do pull-ups. Thirty-three without stopping is my personal best, and I commonly do two hundred in descending sets, starting at twenty. But I’ve never successfully used only one arm—not backhanded, anyway. I didn’t succeed this time, either, but I did manage to lift us enough to get my left hand on the boat’s deck, then hung there for a moment, aware that Odus was now screaming, “Shoot him, Genesis! Help me, then shoot this fucker!”

Above us, I sensed rather than saw the cabin lights click on. Then I heard the sizzle of a halogen spotlight, which gave me the adrenaline charge necessary to ladder my left hand onto the railing, which was beginning to buckle beneath our weight. After another moment’s rest, I kicked free of Odus’s legs and got an ankle hooked around a stanchion.

I don’t know what the man expected when he jumped on my back to stop me. Because he was a poor swimmer, maybe he assumed I would put his welfare ahead of my own objective or even pity him—an assumption that a sociopath, secure in his preeminence, might make.

If so, Odus had badly confused Tomlinson’s kindheartedness with
my chillier attitude toward moral cripples, obnoxious assholes and other conveyors of dead-end genetics.

When my leg was around the stanchion, I grabbed Odus’s wrist with my left hand and said, “Hands off!
Remember?
” which he didn’t hear because he was still hollering for his brother. Even when I levered his hands apart, he continued to cling to my left side. As if on a trapeze, Odus’s face then swung into view, his mouth wide in a sustained howl, his eyes venomous, and that’s where I hit him with the back of my hand—on the forehead, between the eyes. He screamed a last profanity as he fell, and the only reason I bothered to watch him hit the water was because I feared he would land on Tomlinson.

He didn’t.

Seconds later, I was on the foredeck of the yacht, gun in hand, and immediately rolled behind a bow-mounted dinghy to hide from the halogen glare. Because of all the noise Odus had made, I wasn’t surprised when I took a peek to see Geness aiming the rifle at me from inside the steering room. The man was so short, he’d had to settle himself into a captain’s chair to get an elevated view.

I ducked, not expecting him to fire, but he did. The rifle made a muted
TWHAP
ing sound because of the silencer, and also because Geness had stupidly tried to shoot through the forward window. The Dragos was an oceangoing yacht, which meant all ports were sealed with marine-grade acrylic or tempered glass nearly an inch thick. Even if he’d had me in his sights, the slug would have been knocked askew.

I crawled to the stern of the dinghy, which was attached to a stainless davit cable, before risking another look. The bullet had blown a hole in the window, but the glass hadn’t shattered. As Geness shucked another round, he was screaming something at me, but his
words were indecipherable in the din of wind and rumbling diesels. I was ready to duck once again, even before he shouldered the rifle, but then I stopped and stood my ground. It was because I saw the man’s expression change as he struggled to close the bolt.

This time, I heard Geness when he bellowed, “Why are you
doing this
?”

The twin wasn’t screaming at me. He was yelling at God or the rifle, and I knew why. On some rifles the bolt won’t close when the magazine is empty. It’s a safety feature, particularly on military weapons, that tells the shooter it’s time to reload. In a firefight, no matter how experienced the operator, counting rounds is difficult, often impossible.

Kahn had overheard the twins say they were low on ammunition. Finally, finally, it was true—or appeared to be.

But I wasn’t going to bet my life on it or Umeko’s life—if she was still alive. It was too late in the game to take stupid chances. So, cautiously, I began to move toward the port side of the cabin, which rode at an elevated angle because the vessel was listing, my pistol in both hands as I sighted over the barrel.

Twice, I yell the man’s name—“Geness!”—because I wanted his full attention. If he realized that I, too, would have to fire through a wall of glass, he might go on the offensive instead of sitting there like a madman, pounding at the rifle, oblivious to the reason the bolt wouldn’t close.

It was too much to hope, though, because Geness was the shrewd one. He was the homicidal one in whose head the monster triplet, Abraham, lived.

When I was midway along the cabin, where the deck was only a meter wide, the monster reappeared. Geness stared at me a moment, his eyes narrowing as if he finally realized my disadvantage. Then, in a rush, he tossed the rifle aside and lunged for the controls, turning
to leer at me as he disengaged the autopilot and spun the wheel hard to port.

It wasn’t just the torque of the engines that nearly threw me overboard. It was the collective mass of water belowdecks that slammed against the hull and heeled the boat so precariously that when my feet slid under the safety railing the rush of passing salt water tried to wrench me into the sea.

Geness didn’t expect the boat to respond that way. He
couldn’t
have anticipated what would happen or he wouldn’t have done it no matter how desperate he was to buck free of me. When the mass of water shifted, the dual propellers, even though spinning in opposition, locked the rudders into a grinding turn. The turn slowed our speed and caused the bow to nosedive when the weight of water then suddenly flooded toward the front of the boat.

Our sudden dive was like impacting a wall. Once again, I would have been vaulted overboard had my legs and arms not been wrapped around the railing. For long seconds, I held myself there, pleased I’d managed to hang on to the pistol while also dreading Geness’s next turn. If he swung hard to starboard, that would be the end of the Dragos because we would capsize. Probably the end of us, too.

It didn’t happen.

When the yacht continued its grinding turn to port, I disentangled myself from the rail and crawled on hands and knees toward the cabin’s aft bulkhead. There, above me, was the stainless handhold that Odus had grabbed earlier before scrambling down the ladder to join Kahn and Trapper. I used it to get to my feet and took a few seconds to steady my breathing. I also scanned the water for Tomlinson in the Boston Whaler.

No sign of him. A mile away, though, on Big Carlos Pass Bridge, emergency vehicles were already gathering, their lightbars strobing blue and red. Below and to my right was the yacht’s afterdeck. It was
an expanse of teak that was end-capped by hydraulics and corrugated metal—a cargo elevator when the sliding deck was retracted. Kazlov had built a yacht that fit the needs of a womanizer who was also a smuggler and black marketeer. His genetically modified sturgeon would be somewhere below that deck; tanks probably secured on metal tracks to facilitate loading. But it was something I couldn’t think about now.

I took a last look for Tomlinson—still no sign—then made sure the Smith & Wesson’s safety was off before sliding along the bulkhead toward a bank of windows. My eyes locked themselves to the pistol barrel, which scanned the flybridge above, then swung to look inside the lighted cabin.

Geness was there. He was sitting beneath a bank of instruments, in a detritus of glass and shattered electronics. His head was down, and he was rocking as he clutched his shoulder, which suggested he’d been injured when the bow had impacted.

I was done making assumptions, though. The deck was bucking as the yacht continued to turn, so my feet gauged the sea’s rhythm while I studied the cabin, looking for a solid place to brace myself once I was inside. When I was ready, I threw open the door, pistol at shoulder level, and charged straight to a mahogany rail that separated the steering room from the salon.

It wasn’t until I spoke, though, that Geness bothered to look up, his eyes weirdly pearlescent in the muted light, when I yelled, “Where’s the girl? Tell me where she is!”

In reply, I heard: “Fuck you! Where’s my brother? Tell me how you killed my brother, then maybe we’ll discuss the bitch.”

It was the whiskey voice of the dead triplet, but I was in no mood to tolerate evasions ascribed to the man’s alter ego. I waited for the boat to lift and yaw, then went up two steps to the helm and kicked the rifle out of his reach.

As I did, I heard: “‘There are eunuchs born from their mother’s womb, or whose testicles have been crushed! But they may not be admitted to the community of the Lord’—Book of Matthew. I’m talking about my brother, asswipe!”