than ours, and I couldn’t see anyone on it, so I aimed for the cabin windows but again didn’t seem to hit anything.
Our cabin cruiser’s engine was whining like a wood-chipper with a stump caught in it, and I began to wonder if we were even going to make shore. We took a sharp, deck-swamping turn toward the nearest bank and began slaloming through an inlet where reeds grew high on either side, hiding us for the moment. I crawled to the cabin stairs. “They can’t see us.”
“Stay the hell down,” my friend suggested. “You’re not that much fun, but I still don’t want to lose you.” As if to prove the opposite he suddenly swung the wheel wildly to one side, sending me tumbling. “Old dock,” he called as I picked my bruised body up from where I’d slammed against the outside of the cabin wall. “Now, shut up.”
I wanted to point out that he’d been doing most of the talking, but I was too busy clinging to the slippery deck with my fingernails. Try it some time, it’s fun! A moment later I saw a searchlight beam sweeping the reeds just to one side. Eligor’s men were much closer. The narrow, shallow estuary didn’t seem to be slowing them down much at all.
In fact, it slowed them down so little that a moment later the light fell directly on us and made the cabin glow like a Nativity scene in the town square as shots began to ring out again. This time they were definitely hitting things. Bits of wood and aluminum and fiberglass, and whatever else held the cabin cruiser together, were flying everywhere like razor-sharp pinwheels. One splinter about the size of my hand stuck into the cabin wall near my head and quivered as each new bullet slapped the boat. I scrambled on my belly until I could slide headfirst down the steps into the cabin. “Where’s this landing?”
“What are you doing down here?” Sam asked, risking a look back at me. “Get the hell up there and shoot something!”
Turning around in that narrow space wasn’t easy. I had just reached the top again when somebody or something squared up our cabin cruiser like a hanging curveball, bringing us to a surprisingly immediate, noisy, violent halt. I pitched backward, managing to keep my feet on the steps but smashing the base of my head against the low doorway. My gun flew away, bouncing then sliding along the darkness of the deck. I tried to crawl after it, but my body abruptly decided that my muscles should stop working for a few moments, and I collapsed onto the wet boards.
Even as I lay with a skull full of sparks, trying to remember which of me was the top part and which the bottom and how to make either of those work, everything around me, gunwales, bullet holes, shattered cabin windows, suddenly leaped into brilliance as a cruelly bright light set it all ablaze. A moment later I heard another loud crunch, this one farther away, and angry voices shouting, but I was still trying to find the correct sequence that would make my rubbery body function again so I could get up onto my hands and knees and look for my gun. I heard nothing but ominous silence from the cabin where Sam was.
I had just begun to crawl when shadows started clambering over the railing of our boat, dark, shouting shapes. I tried to stand but it didn’t work. Something cold and hard pressed against the back of my neck.
“Got you, you little shit,” said Howlingfell. “Fucked up the boss’s boat, but it was worth it.”
The pressure increased, the barrel of the gun pushing brutally hard against the base of my skull until I gave in and let him force me onto my belly. He slid the gun down to rest against the highest knob of my backbone.
“You think you’ll get lucky and make me kill you, Dollar.” He was breathing hard, but not that hard-it sounded more like hunger than pain. “But I’ll just put one in your spine. We can do everything we need to do with just the nerves of your head working-eyeballs, teeth…oh, there’s plenty to work with. You’ll scream out everything you know, Dollar, but it still won’t end. Not for days. I promise.”
thirty-six
So there I was doing what comes naturally, dripping wet on my hands and knees with a gun against my neck, surrounded by the lights of Howlingfell’s nearby boat and the worried shouts of his men, who seemed to be dealing with a fairly large hull breach of their own. Even though my head had slammed into the wall thingy above the steps leading down to the cabin, and now felt like a beachball full of sand and broken glass, I still couldn’t help noticing a weird noise close behind me. Howlingfell noticed it too, and though he still held the gun against the knob of my spine, I felt the pressure ease just a little as he turned to look behind him. I know I should have heroically leaped to my feet and punched his lights out in his moment of distraction, but to be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure where my feet were. But I did crane my neck so I could look, too.
A big shape came trudging up the steps from the cabin below, and for a brief, happy moment I thought it was Sam. It wasn’t-it was one of Howlingfell’s men, but he was making a strange gargling sound that didn’t quite form words. As he rose into the light I could see he was struggling with something; one more wobbly step, and I saw the gaff hook through his throat, the long handle banging against his chest as he struggled to pull the barbed metal out of his neck.
“Shit!” was the only comment Howlingfell had time for, then Sam came up the steps behind the gaffed guard and shoved him out onto the deck where he fell beside me and lay twitching, still trying to get that hook out of his neck. It would all have been great, except Sam’s hands were up, and they were both empty of firearms.
Howlingfell swung the gun away from me and pointed it at Sam. Eligor’s men may have wanted me alive, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t true for my buddy, so I did the only thing I could manage while down on my hands and knees-I slammed my thick, useless head right into Howlingfell’s gut. He stumbled back against the rail and the gun flew up as he squeezed the trigger, the bang so close to my face that for a second I thought he’d blown my head off, but the shot hadn’t hit anything. Sam took a step over the dying guy and, because he couldn’t get close enough to do anything else, gave Howlingfell a hard shove in the chest that sent him over the rail and into the estuary.
Sam dragged me to my feet. I spotted my gun and lunged for it just before my buddy climbed over the rail and jumped into the dark water. I could hear Howlingfell thrashing nearby but couldn’t see him. I squeezed a shot off in his direction anyway, and then, just for good measure, shot one of the nearest moving shapes on the brightly lit boat, sending it spinning down to the deck.
“Tell the boss we need
The water was cold and muddy and just disgusting, but in that moment of unexpected freedom it felt like the finest spa treatment ever as we swam and sloshed and splashed toward the bank and its thicket of reeds. We had slipped beyond the glare of their lights, and I could hear the shouts behind us turning to panicky rage as the guards realized their leader was in the water and we were gone. The footing was terrible, slippery mud and tangles of roots, but we pushed and shoved and dug our way forward through the close-packed reeds like we were still swimming. A couple of shots snapped past us, and I realized we were probably creating a visible trail of thrashing stems, so I grabbed at Sam’s collar and whispered for him to slow down. A few more shots cracked the night but none of them came close enough to make me nervous. We hunkered down until only our heads were above the water and kept going.
Something close to half an hour later we abandoned the reeds at last and collapsed in exhaustion on a bare, muddy lump of exposed ground. The moon looked down with its usual magnificent unconcern as we coughed and spat out water and only the Highest knew what other muck, then spent several more minutes just trying to get air back into our lungs. At last I sat up and made a quick inventory. Wet shoes, wet pants, wet jacket. One gun with three bullets in the pipe and a few more that had stuck in my pockets. The rest had fallen out into the ooze during our escape. It took me long moments to make my cold, slippery fingers work well enough to hand-load these extras, but I now had half a dozen fifteen-dollar silver rounds in my gun (it would have been cheaper to throw bottles of Chivas Regal at them) no other weapons and no cellphone-mine had tumbled out of my pocket with the extra bullets. I turned to Sam. “Do you still have your phone?”
