Tuna cocked her head. “You hear that?”
Mickey raised his eyes to the sky. “Sounds like a chopper.”
Now Jared Gordon was steaming. “Jest git the motor runnin’! Now!”
“Try again,” Wahoo told his father.
This time the engine coughed to life, and the airboat’s jumbo propeller began turning.
“Well, hooray,” Tuna’s dad muttered, though no one could hear him over the racket.
Then, just as suddenly: silence.
“No! No! No!” Jared Gordon was hopping with exasperation. “Are you kiddin’ me? Did you flood this stupid thing?”
Mickey said, “Actually, I turned it off.”
“What! You better have a damn good reason, Sparky.”
“I believe the owner of this vessel wants a word with you.”
“Uh?” Tuna’s father swung the torch toward the shoreline, where a broad-shouldered stranger loomed.
“Git out my boat,” he said. It was Link.
Jared Gordon sneered. “And who the heck’re you?”
“The man what you shot in the back.”
“Yeah? Well, I’ll shoot you in the front, too, you don’t vamos outta here.”
Tuna shouted, “Daddy, that’s enough!” She lunged to grab him, but he shoved her to the deck.
Wahoo helped her sit up. Where is that chopper? He scanned the sky anxiously.
“Gimme my airboat,” Link said, and he began sloshing toward them.
Mickey Cray raised a hand. “Easy, brother. It ain’t worth dyin’ over.”
“Says you.” Link was wheezing.
“Stop!” Wahoo said. “You’ll get your boat back, I promise.”
But Link kept coming.
Jared Gordon steadied himself against the propeller cage. He raised the torch higher to better illuminate the intruder, and with his gun arm he took aim.
“I warned you, Tarzan,” he said.
His mistake was taking his eyes off the wrangler’s son. Wahoo nailed him broadside with a flying tackle that carried both of them overboard. The revolver in Jared Gordon’s hand went off harmlessly, and the torch flew up on the muddy bank.
The option of doing nothing had never occurred to Wahoo, even for a split second. He was acting on gut reflex and pure adrenaline. There’d been no time to ponder the extreme danger of tangling with Tuna’s whacked-out father. The man plainly intended to shoot Link-and not just in the foot, either. His pistol had been leveled at the center of Link’s forehead when Wahoo had sprung at him.
Tuna jumped in to help while Mickey, cursing his crippled foot, watched from the driver’s seat. The scene in the shallows was pure turmoil, a frantic thrash of arms and legs. It reminded Mickey of bull gators fighting. Link was trying to gain control of the gun as the kids struggled to subdue Jared Gordon, who kicked and flailed like a madman.
Mickey couldn’t stand being a bystander. He restarted the airboat and nosed it against the shore at an angle from which the propeller’s gale-force backwash blew full blast into Jared Gordon’s face.
Incredibly, the man didn’t go down. Somehow he got his back turned and held his balance. Soon he shook free from his daughter, then from Wahoo.
Only Link kept his hold on Jared Gordon, though barely. The pain from the lung shot had sapped his strength. Mickey could see him begin to wobble and wheeze, while the revolver remained firmly in Jared Gordon’s fist.
Meanwhile, Wahoo and Tuna were preparing to rush at her father again. Mickey shut off the boat engine and hollered for them to stay back. A rumble drew his gaze to the southern sky. It wasn’t thunder; it was the helicopter, locked in a low hover no more than a mile away. Its violet search beam was sweeping back and forth across the black swamp below.
“Let’s go, Sparky!” Jared Gordon rasped. His shirt was in tatters and his face was clawed. The airboat’s slipstream had made a spiky nest of his hair.
Mickey saw Link keel and go down. The kids began hauling him toward dry land, trying to hold his head above the water.
Jared Gordon fired into the air. “I said let’s go!”
Wahoo’s father motioned him toward the boat. “Whenever you’re ready.”
The helicopter was moving closer. Jared Gordon glared up at it. “They spotted our fire,” he mumbled sourly.
“Hop in,” Mickey said. “I’ll take you wherever you want.”
Wahoo and Tuna had placed Link on the ground and were working to make him comfortable. Jared Gordon waded to shore and snatched his daughter by the jacket collar. Wahoo grabbed him around the knees but got booted in the jaw and fell back.
Furious, Mickey attempted to climb off the boat and help his son. His mangled foot was useless, and he tumbled in agony from the driver’s platform.
“Git up, you! Git up and drive!” screamed Jared Gordon as he slogged with his daughter toward Mickey.
Wahoo rolled over and tried to call Tuna’s name. She couldn’t hear him over the din of the oncoming chopper. She fought to break away, but her father hooked a beefy arm around her neck. The gun he waved at Mickey Cray, still crumpled on the deck.
“I’m gonna count to three!”
“I can’t move, brother.”
“You will move, Sparky! Or you’ll die!”
“But-”
“One!.. Two!..”
The counting faded away. Wahoo rose to his knees and saw Jared Gordon hunched in a bright spear of bluish light, Tuna writhing in his grasp. The police helicopter was no more than a hundred feet above them.
Under a halo of flitting insects, Jared Gordon appeared demented in the eerie cone of the search beam. Squinting like a shrew, he ranted and cussed up at the chopper, his drooling threats smothered by the heavy thump of its rotor blades.
Wahoo knew what would happen next, and he knew he couldn’t possibly cover the distance between him and Tuna’s father in time to stop it.
Jared Gordon aimed his revolver directly at the cockpit of the helicopter.
Sick with dread, Wahoo almost looked away. Had he done that, he would have missed a truly unforgettable sight, one he could never have foreseen.
Derek Badger exploded with a howl out of the woods. At a dead run he bounded from the bank of the island to the bow of Link’s airboat, from which he vaulted himself at Tuna’s father, who stood there gaping in disbelief.
The three of them toppled with a heavy splash-Derek, Jared Gordon and Tuna. By the time Wahoo reached them, Tuna was back on her feet and she was clutching the gun.
Jared Gordon had worse problems. Gagging on swamp muck, he found himself pinned underwater by a plump, wild-eyed stranger.
A stranger who, for some reason, was chomping him ferociously on the throat.
TWENTY-SIX
“It’s not even a full moon,” Tuna pointed out.
Derek Badger shrugged. “What can I say?”
He had no future as a vampire. Jared Gordon’s blood had tasted awful.
Wahoo reached out and shook Derek’s hand. “That was huge. Thanks.”
“No worries.” Derek didn’t know what in the world had come over him. It wasn’t in his nature to risk his life
