I was more than halfway to where the metal frame of the bridge met the elevated roadway when I heard the scream of Ross’s outboard in the distance. Flipping the rope around two more girders, I stopped, waved up at Otis, and shouted for him to open the bridge.
With a shudder, I felt the locking mechanism disengage, and the bridge slowly began to move. Working faster, I continued to thread the rope around the outside of each diagonal brace and upright beam. Finally, I reached the last one and stepped off the moving part of the bridge onto the fixed part, with only a few feet to spare.
People climbed out of their cars to see what I was doing, but I ignored their shouts. The bridge continued to open, the rope now stretching up and away from me, to the top. I watched Ross as his boat picked up speed, thankfully heading to the right side. I could see his face now, his eyes focused on the Revenge speeding away toward the gap in the marsh.
In the back of my mind, a part of me ridiculed his lack of situational awareness. He didn’t even realize the bridge was making an unscheduled opening, much less that I was standing on the end of the roadway with a rope in my hands. Fighter pilots call it target fixation. Oblivious to anything but the plane they were trying to shoot down, they often found themselves with a second enemy plane behind them.
Yeah, he’s the dumb one, I thought as I studied his speed and where his boat was located in the channel.
Pulling the rope tight, I reached up and out as far as I could grasp it and waited. Then I was falling toward the water, swinging out on the rope. The physics of it were ridiculous. With an eighty-foot span and the top of the bridge sixty feet above the water, I’d splash long before the rope reached its apex. But, all I needed was to be four feet above the water when I got halfway across the span.
I timed it almost perfectly, but I could see that I was going to miss him. Releasing my grip with my feet, I extended my leg out as far as I could, flailing to reach the man in the boat. My right leg struck Ross in the shoulder, catching him completely unaware, and I let go of the rope.
My shin was already throbbing in pain before I even hit the water, somersaulting sideways. When I came up, gasping for air, I could see Ross bobbing in the water twenty feet away. His boat had come to a stop just beyond the wooden jetty and I swam toward it as hard as I could.
Ross suddenly figured out what was going on and was angling toward me, trying to beat me to the boat. I put my head down and swam harder, my shin screaming at me to stop with every kick. Swimming is something I’m pretty good at. I usually swim three miles every other day. When I lifted my head, I could see Ross just a few feet away to my right and timed it correctly this time.
My right fist slammed into the back of Ross’s head. He rolled over and started to go under. I grabbed him by his hair and sidestroked toward his boat. I had to let him go for a moment as I levered myself up and over the gunwale of the low boat. Reaching down, I then grabbed Ross’s inert body and dragged him aboard.
At the helm of the small center-console, I put it in neutral and tried to start the engine. It turned over with a whine but didn’t fire. I looked back and cursed the engine. That’s when I saw the coiled red lanyard attached to Ross’s belt buckle. The kill switch lanyard.
Grabbing the end of it, I yanked it loose, slipped the pronged end under the kill switch and started the engine. I saw Manny descending a ladder from the open center span and motored over to him.
“You are insane!” he shouted, stepping off the ladder onto the foredeck with my rifle slung over his shoulder.
“There’s one more guy out there somewhere,” I said, turning the boat to go after the Revenge. “See if you can find something and tie that asshole up.”
The flat-bottomed skiff bounced off of every little ripple as we got up on top of the water. Each slap of the hull sent a new pain shooting through my right shin. Looking down at it, I could see that it was already swollen, and I’d undoubtedly have a big blue goose egg there very soon.
Manny found a length of nylon rope, and before tying Ross’s hands, he unbuttoned and removed the man’s shirt. Picking up Ross’s hat from where it’d fallen on the deck, he handed the clothes to me. “Whoever might be watching downriver could be expecting this guy to follow.”
“Good thinking,” I said. Manny took the wheel so I could put the shirt on over my own wet tee shirt. Ross was a lot smaller than me, but along with the hat, it was close enough.
Ross started moving around, so I quickly rolled him onto his belly and tied his wrists and ankles. “What’d you do that for?” Ross asked groggily.
“You were resisting arrest,” I said. Then I hit him again and shoved him over close to the starboard gunwale.
I took the wheel, and Manny quickly got down in a prone position against the same gunwale, with his feet against the transom. If the third looker was out here somewhere, he’d be on the west bank of the river. There was nothing but marsh on the Lady’s Island side. If they saw us, Manny and Ross would be out of sight.
I turned into the same gap through the marsh that Tony had taken the Revenge through. Far ahead, she looked like a bull charging a matador, up on plane and rocketing along the river’s eastern shoreline at nearly fifty knots.
Out of nowhere, a streak of light and smoke snaked out from the other side of the marsh to starboard. At the same time I saw it, another red streak flew up from the Revenge. The first streak turned upward and I realized it was a heat-seeking RPG.
The explosion was spectacular, but there was nothing I could do. My boat was a mile ahead and moving away fast. I knew there was a good supply of signal flares on the bridge, so it was just a matter of who could reload faster. My hand went to the side of my head. The earwig had fallen out in the water and I was without communication. I brought the little skiff down off plane and turned toward the marsh to starboard. I knew the other man was somewhere just ahead, near Spanish Point, and the reeds would keep us concealed from him.
Would he try to pursue the Revenge? I asked myself. There weren’t many fishing boats that could keep up with her, and I hadn’t seen any racing boats when I was scanning the riverbank earlier.
“What happened?” Manny asked, rising beside me.
“RPG,” I replied. “Tony must have spotted the guy and fired a flare to take it off course.”
Manny looked down the river to where the Revenge was quickly becoming a speck in the distance. “Guess it worked. Wonder why the guy didn’t try a second shot.”
The little skiff nosed up into the seagrass as I scanned the far shoreline. The old workboat Chyrel had mentioned was moving away from a dock nearly at the tip of Spanish Point, moving way faster than was prudent.
“That’s him,” I said. “You got a phone?”
“Arrested?” Swimp shouted into the phone. “What the hell you mean he was arrested? He’s a damned congressman, they can’t be arrested.”
“Musta been some kind of undercover thing,” Damien said. “They got Marcel, too. So they musta been on to him.”
“Pull your hook and head this way,” Swimp said. “I’ll blow the fucker outta the water when they come by here.”
Without waiting for a reply, Swimp ended the call and turned toward his cousins, to tell them to get the boat untied. That’s when he saw his wife standing on the rickety old dock, hands on her hips, obviously angry as she stepped down onto the boat.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Swimp said, then pointed to his cousins. “Toss the lines.”
“You promised to take me shopping,” she replied.
“Shopping? Dammit, woman, I’m working here!”
She sat down on the toolbox mounted to the deck behind the pilothouse and crossed her arms. “Then we’ll just go to the Kmart when you’re done.”
Swimp started the engine and looked north toward the wide sweeping curve of the main channel. He could hear the powerful roar of the big fishing boat’s engines, but it was coming through the shallow creek through the marsh, way out of the channel. Worse yet, it was hugging the f
ar riverbank, moving a lot faster than he thought it could go.
Swimp scrambled for the rocket launcher and picked it up. There wasn’t going to be any flagging them down. From the other side of the river, they couldn’t even see his boat. He lifted it to his shoulder and aimed ahead of the fast-moving boat. Aiming the device wasn’t all that necessary. The heat-seeking missile needed only to be pointed in the general direction and it’d find its target.
When Swimp pulled the trigger, there was a whoosh and someone screamed behind him. The missile flew out of the tube, turned slightly and headed straight for the big fishing boat. As Swimp watched it fly across the water, a streak of red shot up from the boat and the missile turned upward, exploding harmlessly a hundred feet above it.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Swimp shouted, stomping on the deck as he turned around. Rick knelt on the deck next to his brother. Joe’s face was almost completely burned off.
“What the hell happened?” Swimp roared as he threw the boat into gear and spun the wheel. The stern came around and crashed into a rotted dock piling with a sickening crunch. The old dock promptly began to fall apart.
“Joe was watching you from behind,” Rick shouted. “He’s hurt real bad, man. We gotta get him to a hospital.”
Turning to his wife, Swimp said, “Take the wheel, bitch. Head south, after that boat.”
She reluctantly obliged, and Swimp knelt beside the younger cousin, putting a finger to his neck. The flesh was charred and crusty, his lips and cheeks burned off by the backblast of the missile, giving Joe a grotesque smile.
“He’s dead,” Swimp said. “Ain’t no hospital gonna help him.”
Shoving his wife aside, Swimp took the wheel and mashed the throttle. The old boat chugged, but slowly began to accelerate, churning up mud and debris from the bottom. Far ahead, the fishing boat rounded the tip of Spanish Point. For a moment, Swimp expected to hear it explode, before remembering what Damien had said about Cross being arrested. He wasn’t going to be making the phone call.
Taking the scrap of paper from his pocket, he began to punch in the number on his cell phone, then stopped. With Cross arrested and the Jamaicans blown up, he’d get nothing. The money in the briefcase was all there was going to be. All of it was his, if he could find it and get it away from the Jamaicans.
Swimp put the phone down and stuffed the paper back in his pocket. Past Spanish Point, the river turned southeast and was visible all the way to where it joined Broad River on the other side of Parris Island.
If the Jamaicans go that way, it’s over, Swimp thought. Sure, he could blow them up and probably kill them all. But that’d mean blowing up the money, too. With Cross arrested, there wasn’t going to be a big payday.
So, Swimp waited. His old boat slowly gathered speed, heading toward the channel. As he’d hoped, the fishing boat didn’t reappear. That meant that it wasn’t going downriver, but had instead turned up Battery Creek.
A slow smile crossed Swimp’s face. If their boat was smaller, they’d have a chance of getting away that direction. But there was just no way that big boat could make it through Archers Creek and cut across Parris Island to Broad River. For a boat that size, there was only one way into Battery Creek and one way out.
He was going to need more men. When word got out to his kin that Joe was dead, they’d all want revenge. They’d wait until nightfall, sneak up Battery Creek and find the boat. Then they could capture the Jamaicans and the women and take them all back over to Frogmore. At Swimp’s place, they could kill the Jamaicans slowly, peeling their skin off with fillet knives a little at a time. They’d pay, for sure. At the same time, he and his cousins would have a lot of fun with the two women.
Too bad Uncle Marcel can’t be there, Swimp thought. He’d surely like the younger one.
Swimp picked up his phone again and punched in a number to alert the family.
Watching from the cover of the seagrass bed, I could see the old boat turn and follow after the Revenge. A large crowd was gathering around the boardwalk area, quite a few of them in uniform. Using Manny’s cell phone, I called Deuce.
“What the hell possessed you to jump off the bridge?” Deuce asked after he realized it was me.
“Seemed like the thing to do at the time,” I replied. “How are Tony and the others?”
“No injuries,” Deuce replied. “Tony found a bomb in the briefcase, too. He disarmed it.”
“A bomb?” I asked, becoming irritated. I’d already watched the first Revenge get blown out of the water by an RPG and it had just now almost happened to the second one.
“It was crude. A couple of sticks of TNT in a box with some nails and a cell phone. Tony said the dynamite was pretty old. Deteriorated and unstable. It’s a wonder it didn’t detonate when he was running with it. He flooded the live well and put the whole thing underwater. No chance it’ll detonate.”
“The redneck on the boat is following,” I said. “But not very fast. From his vantage point, he had to have at least heard the Revenge coming out of Battery Creek earlier.”
“I was watching them,” Deuce said. “Three men on an old salvage boat of some kind. Just before casting off, they were joined by a woman.”
“So there’s four of them?”
Deuce chuckled slightly. “No, still only three. One of the men was standing right behind the rocket launcher when the guy fired it. It’s a pretty good bet that he’s dead.”
I winced slightly. The backblast of an RPG launching from a tube could peel the paint off a car. “What do we do now, Deuce?”
“Inform the sheriff. Our job’s done here.”
“Just like that?” I asked, becoming angry. “Somebody shoots a damned RPG at my boat and we’re not doing anything about it?”
There was a pause, then Deuce calmly replied, “That’s right, Jesse. The Ross clan is a problem for the local authorities. I want you to head back to the marina and join up with Art and Andrew. The FBI has Cross in custody. They’ll take him to their field office down in Savannah.”
“Now, wait just a minute, Deuce. You’re gonna let them take credit for everything?”
“Has to be that way, brother. We’re a covert group. Even this little bit of exposure is more than we need. You jumping off a bridge in full view of dozens of civilians who probably caught the whole thing on cell phones is way more publicity than we need.”
“Shit,” I muttered. “I didn’t even think about that. Everyone carries those things now.”
I’d only recently started carrying a cell phone myself. I’d always hated any intrusion on my privacy. If anyone wanted to talk to me that bad, they could come out to my island or wait until I came into town. Since I’d renewed my relationship with my daughters after not being a part of their lives for many years, though, I began to keep closer tabs on where my phone was. They both called at least once a week, Kim usually two or three times. It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t spoken to either one since leaving my island almost a week ago.
“You’re right,” I finally said with a long sigh. “Where’s Andrew and Art now? I’ll join them and get a cab or something back to the house. I’m ready to go home.”
“Head to the fuel dock,” Deuce said. “Turn Damien Ross over to Sheena. She’ll have a sheriff’s deputy take them to the jail for booking. But Cross is going with her and Craig to Savannah. She’ll handle everything with the local authorities, and you guys can head back to the Keys. We’re done there.”
I ended the call and fired up the engine, handing Manny’s phone back to him. “Your boss pulling the plug?” he asked.
“Yeah. He’s turning everything over to the Bureau. Can your CO cut you adrift for the rest of the day? Be nice to catch up on things over a coupla cold beers, before we have to leave.”
“Yeah, I don’t think he’d have a problem with it. No recruits on the range for a couple of days.”
I brought the skiff up on plane, wincing with every bump in the water. A few minutes later, I slowed the boat
, reversed the engine, and spun the wheel, bringing the skiff alongside the fuel dock as Manny tossed a line to a waiting deputy.
Sheena was standing beside two EMTs with a stretcher. She was smiling. “That was some crazy stunt,” she said. “We could have had a deputy run him down.”
“Yeah, but he’d have been able to call his cousin. You have people on the way to pick him up?”
“The sheriff is handling it,” Sheena replied. “How long’s that one been out?” she asked, pointing to the unconscious Damien Ross, lying on the deck.
“Pretty much since I hit him in the water,” I lied, figuring that would be acceptable. I didn’t want Sheena to know that I’d cold-cocked him again afterwards. She had a pretty straight and narrow view, where these turd fondlers’ rights were concerned. My own view wasn’t so rigid.
Manny helped the deputy get Ross out of the boat, where he was loaded onto the waiting stretcher and they wheeled him away.
“That doesn’t look good,” Sheena said, pointing at my right leg. “Next time, you might want to use your head. Less chance of injury that way.”
I grinned as I stepped up beside her on the dock. “Are you heading to Savannah right away?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “Duty calls. We got him stone cold, Jesse. The video and recording have already been sent to our office and charges filed. Two counts of conspiracy to commit murder. He’s going away for a long time. If you ever find yourself in Atlanta, give me a call.”
“If you ever find yourself in the Keys,” I replied.
Sheena turned and followed after the deputy and EMTs. I had to admit the idea of a trip to Atlanta might be fun. I just wasn’t sure if there was a deep enough river to get there.
Manny and I found Andrew and Art when we got to the shore end of the pier. They were waiting beside a cab, at the west side of the parking lot, where tourists were loading onto a horse-drawn carriage.
The four of us jammed ourselves into the big taxi, and Andrew told the driver where to go. The ride was short and when we got to the house, Tony was waiting outside with the two DEA guys. Keenan and Dannell said they had to shove off, and we exchanged handshakes before they left.
Fallen Angel: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 9) Page 19