“Not quite.” A mild understatement.
We’ll never outrun that airboat if they come after us, which is a distinct possibility. Jerry didn’t even ask for the CDs that we burned from Jimmy’s master. It would be calamitous for Cleo if they turned up on some radio station at the same time her album came out. She made a point of telling me to bring those discs tonight, so that she could destroy them. I’d have been pleased to hand them over, too, but that sonofabitch Jerry never said a word.
Which means he either forgot, or he doesn’t intend to let us get off this lake alive.
Juan crawls back to take the tiller and to deliver Carla’s gun, which he’d held cocked for the duration of the rendezvous. That was one of our contingency plans—in the event of an especially violent double cross, Juan was to burst from beneath the tarp and plug Cleo’s bodyguard in the brain. It wasn’t a particularly original idea, but we were looking to keep things simple.
Delicately I slip the Lady Colt into my waistband, the challenge being not to shoot myself. I move forward to sit beside Emma, who is wobbly and shuddering. I wrap one arm around her and with the other I point the Q-beam at twelve o’clock, so that Juan is able to see where we’re heading. In his fist the GPS screen glows a cozy green, and the unanimous hope is that it will guide us back to Ernie Bo Tump’s marina.
For all the neurotic ruminating I do about death, I never before felt the ice-cold breath of the beast. In all my life I cannot recall a singular moment I thought would be my last. Even when no-neck Jerry was whaling on me in the apartment, I was more angry than scared, which doesn’t say much for my survival instinct. Tonight a large-caliber handgun was pointed at my nostrils, and my response was cinematic defiance. Whether that was brave or merely idiotic, it plainly reveals a new, more flexible attitude toward the concept of dying. Emma has no frame of reference, but Anne might call it a breakthrough.
In any case, I’m not off the hook. None of us are.
“Jack, look! Look!” Juan points ahead. Emma stiffens in my embrace. Streaking off our port side is another white light—the air-boat, angling on a course to intercept us. Instantly I kill the Q-beam and start fumbling for the gun. I tell Juan not to slow down, no matter what.
Jerry the goon is wilier than I thought. He circled far around us to get downwind, so that we couldn’t hear him coming until it was too late to hide. And he’s not going to leave us full of bullet holes, which would arouse suspicion. Instead he intends to run us down, making it appear as if we accidentally wrecked the johnboat. Jerry figures that even if the cops wonder about the mess, nobody will put it all together.
The lake was dark, they must’ve hit something…
Their spotlight slashes back and forth as Cleo’s boys feverishly try to find us again. We’re all crouched low, Juan panting and Emma’s fingers digging into my leg. We’re holding to a steady speed, a daring strategy in inky darkness. If we strike another log, the chase is over.
“Shit,” I hear Juan say. “Jack! They’re… ”
His warning is smothered by the rising roar. I twist around to see the airboat skimming up our wake, not more than fifty yards behind us. Loreal is braced in the bow, manning the spotlight. The beam is fixed on the back of Juan’s head, radiating an unwanted halo. In the glare I can’t see Jerry on the driver’s perch, but he most certainly can see us.
The gap shrinks with a sickening inevitability—powered by a cropduster-sized aviation engine, the airboat is nearly twice as fast as our dinky outboard. It’s also twice as wide and probably three times as heavy. At fifty miles an hour it will flatten us like a lily pad. Either we’ll die on impact or go down screaming.
In any event, we will be long past caring by the time the gators get around to us.