His smirk faded when, with one more step, Drummond launched himself into the air. He effectively flew, feetfirst, at DeSoto.
The real estate agent pulled the trigger. The ear-splitting shot scattered birds from unseen perches all over the island. The bullet struck the shore, several small stones leaping upward.
Drummond’s sole smacked into DeSoto’s elbow, causing him to lose his grip on the gun.
Drummond landed on his side, rolled, and sprang back toward the weapon.
The real estate man rallied, snatching it off the slats. He wheeled around and pressed the nose of the gun against Drummond’s neck.
Drummond balled his left hand into a fist and drilled it into DeSoto’s gut. Staggering backward, the real estate agent fired again.
The bullet sent up a water spout fifty feet away.
Drummond heaved a roundhouse into DeSoto’s jaw. The real estate agent sank to the pier. Grabbing the gun on its way down, Drummond regarded him with remorse.
From her hiding spot behind a bush at the top of the clamshell pathway, the young chambermaid shrieked, distracting Drummond. He didn’t notice DeSoto draw a keychain from his trouser pocket and fling it at the darkest blue patch of bay.
Having anticipated this action, Charlie jumped to his feet, sprinted down the pier, and sprang off a rickety slat in what he meant to be a dive. Cold water slapped his face and chest. His momentum carried him down, to about fifteen feet below the surface, where the pressure made his head feel as if it was about to burst.
The key ring was a veritable strobe light in the colorless depths. He snatched it and launched himself upward, breaking the surface to find DeSoto flat on his back, out cold now, and Drummond ensconced at the runabout’s wheel.
Hauling himself over the opposite gunwale, Charlie tossed Drummond the key.
Turning it in the ignition and adding throttle, Drummond glanced at the police cutter, now close enough that Charlie could make out the two men aboard, until, with a boom, the entire craft was obscured by whitish smoke streaming from its thirty-caliber cannon.
A shell screamed toward the Riva.
29
The shell-or small-caliber rocket-zoomed wide of the bow, sending up a twenty-foot-high spout of seawater. A second shell hammered the Riva’s stern. Everything not tied or bolted in place slid or tumbled to starboard. Drummond fell from the portside captain’s seat, slamming onto Charlie. It felt as if the runabout would flip over.
In apparent defiance of gravity, Drummond heaved himself against the elevated portside gunwale, righting the boat and catapulting hundreds of gallons of seawater out.
Now maybe he could contend with the islet directly in their path, a mound of sand and rocks not much larger than a porch, but enough to turn the runabout to splinters.
He clocked the wheel. The Riva sashayed past the landmass, slicing through the waves as if they were air. But the corner of her stern was a mass of splinters, and the big police cutter appeared to be gaining on them.
“I thought the Riva Aquarama was the fastest boat made,” Charlie shouted.
“At the time it was made, fifty years ago, that was true.” Drummond turned the wheel a degree or two, allowing the runabout to slalom past another tiny islet.
A third blast shook the air.
With an eardrum-piercing clank, the starboard half of the Riva’s windshield disappeared. A column of seawater rose over the bow, lashing Charlie, the salt lodging in and burning each cut and scrape in his now- extensive collection.
His father was also struck by the water but remained steady at the helm. And, oddly, at peace. Charlie recalled one of Drummond’s favorite adages:
“We need to keep them close,” Drummond said through the onrushing air, more forceful with no windshield to deflect it.
Before he could ask what his father was thinking, Charlie glimpsed sparkling sand ahead, capping a diminutive islet that was long and winding, like a sea serpent. He shot a hand forward. “Do you see that?”
“By my reckoning, that’s Bernadette,” Drummond said.
Even within a hundred yards, it would have been easy not to notice the large sandbar, then sail smack into it.
Drummond ought to begin to steer clear of it about now, Charlie thought.
Another mammoth round walloped the Riva, cleaving the sundeck and sending slivers of mahogany flying like darts. Like Drummond, Charlie ducked. One shard whistled past him, carving a groove alongside his left cheek before knifing into the black plastic radio at the base of the control panel.
The searing pain barely registered, as Drummond continued straight for the islet, focused on it, as if he were trying to hit it.
“Dad?”
“Hold on!”
Charlie grabbed the sides of his seat and braced himself.
The Riva’s prow hit Bernadette Islet with a deafening crack. If the police cutter hadn’t already blasted away his side of the Riva’s windshield, Charlie’s face would have pancaked against glass. His joints felt like they’d been struck individually by a mallet.
Mostly intact, the entire craft took to the air.
The stern came down onto the sand first, like a giant’s gavel. Every one of Charlie’s cells seemed to throb. Then, with a boom, the prow landed too.
The runabout sleighed forward through wet sand and puddles, the irregularities in the surface having a bumper-car effect. Sand grated away the caramel varnish, rocks abraded the hull. The inboard engines gasped, the propellers spitting a gritty brown haze in place of a wake.
Still the craft’s momentum carried it forward, fast.
Charlie hung on, white-knuckled. Drummond retained a firm grip on the wheel, his head lowered against the rush of sand and water and other bits of Bernadette Islet.
The far shore came into sight, a dune in miniature.
The Riva slid off the land, going airborne again, entering a stomach-wrenching plummet, then thumping into the Caribbean, walls of water erupting all around.
Surely the battered craft would now collapse into flotsam, Charlie thought, but the engines purred and the Riva shot forward through the waves.
Charlie was shocked just by the fact that she remained in one piece.
“Now for the real test,” Drummond said, looking at the rearview mirror until he discovered that the glass there had been broken away.
With a shrug, he throttled the runabout ahead, accelerating to an even faster speed than they’d gone before.
Charlie turned to see the police cutter within a hundred feet of Bernadette Islet. He read the horror on the machine gunner’s face as the man scrambled off the foredeck and leaped toward the wheelhouse while the pilot threw his full weight into turning the steering wheel.
Bernadette was too wide. The cutter smashed into the shoreline. Charlie momentarily lost sight of the craft behind a cloud of kicked-up bits of earth. The propellers on the giant engines hacked away like saw blades before being smothered by sand. The behemoth lurched to a stop twenty feet inland. Beached.
