A Superior Death

sweethearts, Anna banged open the side window. Cold air burst in and with it came a sound that was not made by the Bertram’s powerful engines.

“Can either of you drive a boat?” Anna demanded. She thought of the aluminum runabout and amended her question: “A real boat?”

“Damien can,” Tinker replied. At another time Anna might have found the pride in her voice touching. As it was, it only served to deepen her natural skepticism.

“Mmm,” she returned noncommittally, but she had no choices. “When I tell you, take the helm-the wheel,” she told Damien, who had crowded out past Tinker to stand near the pilot’s bench. “Do nothing till I’m clear of the deck. Then pull these back. Both of them. At the same time. All the way.” Anna laid her hands on the twin throttles. “Shove these two levers down halfway. That’s neutral.” Anna put her left hand on the gear levers. “Then just wait. Don’t drive anywhere. If you don’t hear from me in twenty minutes or so, start calling for help on the radio. Eventually, somebody’ll come get you. Got it?”

“Got it,” Damien replied, with such boyish earnestness that Anna’s misgivings increased substantially.

On some level she knew she should let Patience escape, knew she worked without backup, endangered Tinker and Damien, knew, at best, she was courting a tort claim against the National Park Service by enlisting the aid of noncommissioned employees, SCAs-scarcely more professional by legal standards than tourists. But Anna’s joints were aching as if they’d been bent backward to just short of snapping and her vision had narrowed till, unless she concentrated, it was as if she viewed the world through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. The bends. The truly bent could sometimes never get straight.

And Patience Bittner was not going to get away with it.

The green blip lost focus. Half a dozen yards ahead the Belle Isle’s spotlight illuminated the ghostly outlines of a boat’s stern. In the soft green tones of folding money, the name Venture was blazoned across it.

Anna held the Belle Isle back a little longer. The instant Patience recognized it she would run. The Belle couldn’t outrun her and Anna hadn’t the firepower to stop her. Wouldn’t use it if she had. Carrie would be with her mother. Risking a child’s life-however unpleasant the child- didn’t fall under the direction to Protect and Preserve.

“Here.” Anna traded places with Damien but kept her hands on the wheel and throttles as she would have with a student driver in a hazardous situation. “I’ll pull alongside. You hold it there till I’ve cleared the Belle Isle and am aboard the Venture. Then what?”

“Pull back the throttles, put her in neutral, and wait,” Damien repeated dutifully.

“Hand,” Anna demanded. He raised his right hand. She moved hers from the throttle and he laid palm and fingers over the handles as if he’d been doing it all his life. A flicker of hope, not bright enough to be called optimism but welcome anyway, sparked in Anna’s breast.

She placed her hand over his and opened the throttle all the way. The Belle Isle surged ahead, came alongside the Chris-Craft, her port gunwale less than a yard from the smaller boat’s starboard side.

Trading action for thought, Anna snatched up her.357 and ran from the cabin back to the Belle Isle’s deck. The ribbon of water between the two moving boats boiled black, reminding her of the cold and lightless death she had cheated and was, perhaps, still waiting for her. “Because I could not stop for Death,” she whispered, “he kindly…”

Using the seven feet of deck to get a running start, she threw herself across the widening gap between the boats. Through fog, all visible surfaces moving at differing speeds, through dark and fleeting arms of white light, she had an uncanny sense of flying as one flies in a dream.

The dream came to an abrupt end when the toe of one foot caught the Belle’s gunwale. The rushing black water came up. Throwing her arms forward, Anna grasped the Venture’s gunwale but her lower body was sucked down into the lake. The dry suit kept the cold from her.

The ache in her shoulder pried between the bones, letting what strength had returned after the exhaustion of the swim leak away. The lake was reclaiming her. The drag of the water, the pull of the Venture cutting through it, was ripping Anna in two, pulling her arms from their sockets.

Slowly, she loosed her grip, let the water and momentum pull her back along the gunwale toward the boat’s stern. The jets of water where the wake turned under made a last try for her, but Anna had one foot up on the waterline diving deck. A foot, a knee, another knee, and the lake had to relinquish its claim. Anna tumbled over the stern rail onto the deck.

She landed on Patience’s cast-off dive suit and fins. Damage and noise were somewhat alleviated. But the revolver was gone, dropped in the channel.

“Shit,” Anna muttered.

For a moment she stayed where she’d fallen, watching the twin Plexiglas windows in the rear of the cabin. No alarmed face appeared, no concerned head peeked out of the cabin door. Either the noise of her arrival had been masked by the roaring of the engines, or Patience had assumed the thump was due to the flapping of unstowed fenders or a sideswipe by the Belle Isle.

Anna pushed herself up far enough to look back. The Venture’s wake curled in two tight lines of pale water on the black lake. The sudden appearance of another boat had put Patience into high gear. The Belle Isle, engines silent, was already losing herself in the fog. Only the red and green glow on her bow gave away her whereabouts. Damien had done his part admirably.

Now Anna must do hers.

No gun, no way off the boat: it was not a good corner to have painted oneself into. Surprise was on Anna’s side, height, weight, and training. Maybe training, she amended as she eased herself noiselessly to her feet. Patience could drive a boat, could dive like a pro, and could choose the right wine to go with the fish. If there’d been aikido or tae kwan do mixed in with the ballet and cooking classes, Anna might be in for a more entertaining evening than she’d bargained for.

And the thought of facing even a tiny murderer without a revolver was nearly as daunting as the thought of all the government forms she would have to fill out explaining how she lost it.

Perhaps Patience would give up without a struggle, bend to the will of the law as personified by Ranger Pigeon. It could happen. “Yeah,” Anna said and looked around the crowded deck for something she could use as a weapon.

In addition to Patience’s dive gear, the pockets along the gunwales just above deck level had the usual maritime paraphernalia. There were several hundred yards of line, scrub brushes, a fish gaff on a long wooden handle, and cleaning supplies: detergent and something blue in a plastic bottle with a metal spray-pump top.

Anna lowered herself gingerly onto her aching knee and unscrewed the top from the spray bottle. Closed in her fist, it might pass muster if she maximized her shock value- people never saw much when they were frightened.

It crossed Anna’s mind to kick down the door like John Wayne in McQ, uttering only a terse dry “Knock, knock” as the wood splintered. But doors, even cabin doors on boats, were a good deal tougher than one might think. There was the possibility she’d only break a few bones in her foot and alert Patience to her presence.

The engine slowed. The Venture was nearing the end of the channel and would head out into open water at the marker buoys in Middle Islands Passage. The upcoming interview was not one Anna cared to conduct any farther from land than she had to.

The customized Evinrude engine that propelled the small boat was housed in an engine box to the rear of the stern deck. Anna turned the butterfly nuts and lifted back the cover. Though it was of higher caliber and horsepower, the engine was much the same as the twin engines on the Bertram. Black spark plug wires popped up to meet her grasp. With a jerk, she pulled them loose and dropped them overboard.

The engine coughed once and died. In the ensuing silence Anna felt naked, exposed. At any moment Patience would come out on deck to see why the engine had failed.

Bent double to avoid the windows, Anna stepped across the narrow deck. Bracing one shoulder against the cabin wall on the port side where the opening door would help shield her, she waited with the aluminum spray