Juan thumps my arm and gestures disgustedly at our motor. The prop is picking up weeds and we’re slowing steadily. Jerry has taken dead aim at our flimsy transom.
“Grab Emma,” Juan tells me, “and jump.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.”
“Jack, please!” Emma says. It’s the same tone she uses in the newsroom when I’m being impossible.
“Everybody get down!” I hear myself yelling, though I’m standing as straight as a fence post. Carla’s gun is gripped with both hands and my arms are extended, the way the cops showed me that day at the firing range. I’m squinting because Loreal is blasting the spotlight in my face. The airboat bears down with a rising backbeat of heavy pistons, like an oncoming locomotive. At roughly one hundred feet I start pulling the trigger, the pistol jumping in my hands. The odds of me actually hitting these pricks with a.38 slug are slender indeed, but Loreal appears to have taken due notice of the muzzle flashes. A yelp of alarm goes up from both men in the airboat, and the spotlight beam wavers madly. A heated downshifting can be heard, then a sibilant rush of air.
Unfortunately, we’re no longer moving. The outboard has quit. As I throw myself upon Emma, Juan jumps off the stern.
The next sound isn’t the expected crunch of impact but rather a long turbulent splash, followed by the thumping, fading grind of the aircraft engine. A gargled cry arises before silence reclaims the darkness.
In a whisper I ask Emma if she’s all right.
“Yes, but I’m very thirsty, Jack. Thirsty and tired.” Her voice is somnolent and hollow, from another galaxy. They must have drugged her with a goddamn horse tranquilizer. Hastily I make a bedding of the yellow tarp and lay her down on the deck. Meanwhile Juan has jetted out of the water like an otter. Wordlessly he cleans the duckweed off the outboard’s lower unit while I re-attach the Q-beam cables to the battery.
The crashed airboat is easy to find. Bow skyward, it rests in a dense bank of cattails. The gunshots evidently spooked Jerry into cutting the rudders sharply, a maneuver for which flat-bottomed watercraft traveling at high speeds are not favorably designed. Also working against him was the lack of one eye, which undoubtedly affected his depth perception as he struggled to control the boat. It spun violently before tipping backward at a radical cant, its stern embedding in the mud.
I’m guessing Jerry got bucked off when the airboat began to whirl. He was probably sitting on his ass in the cattails, gaping in dull wonderment as the boat upended and wallowed back on him, the blade still very much a blur. His head should be landing in Pahokee any time now.
Loreal went next, though not as instantly. His fall appears to have been stopped by the frame of the driver’s seat, but his silken ponytail slipped unluckily through the mesh of the engine cage. The propeller must have snagged it and continued to rotate, dragging his face in a brutally concentric pattern across the metal grid, until the scalp ripped loose. It now hangs like a soggy red pennant from one tip of the blade.
What this looks like is a dreadful accident. Two joyriders in a stolen airboat.
The lake was dark, they must’ve hit something…
Emma is breathing softly—in the sudden quiet she has fallen asleep. I hear Juan slap at a mosquito. I hang over the gunwale and vomit as discreetly as possible.
“It’s getting late,” Juan says.
“Maybe I hit ’em with a shot.”
“Right, Jack. And maybe one day hamsters will sing opera.”
“That bad, huh.”
“Yeah, but it sure did the trick.”
Not far from Jerry’s body, my spotlight snares the flash of an object submerged on the muddy lake bottom: a black plastic box, slightly larger than an eight-track cassette.
Jimmy Storm’s widow will be mighty disappointed.
29
Emma and I lounge in bed until nearly noon. Juan calls to check on us.
“That was a bad scene out there.” He sounds tired though unshaken. “Those guys got what they deserved, Jack.”
“The case could be made. But what a godawful mess.”