What he’d failed to see was the half-submerged log in front of his bow.
The boat struck the dead tree with a terrific noise—the same metallic shriek you hear during a car crash—and slammed to a stop. The collision caused Smith to tumble forward and over the gunwale nearest to me. He must have struck his skull on one of the aluminum seats, because he went down like a lead weight.
I backed off the bowrider to a safe distance, tossed out the mushroom anchor, and dived headfirst into the lake. In the shallows, the water was as warm as a baby’s bath.
Unidentifiable clumps of vegetation, torn loose by the roots, floated before my eyes along with sand stirred up from the bottom. I kicked hard toward the spot where I’d seen Smith go under, hearing the thwack-thwack-thwack of his still-spinning propeller. If he had been using a dead man’s switch, the engine would have gone off the second he fell overboard.
I stayed down as long as I could, trying to peer through the shimmering sand, feeling that incomparable sensation when you begin to run out of oxygen and your brain becomes a circus balloon expanding inside your skull. Finally, I popped up to fill my lungs. I scanned the surface for a floating body. Seeing none, I dived down again, disturbing a musk turtle that had been trying to pass unnoticed along the bottom. I saw sunken beer bottles but no Smith.
If I didn’t find the unconscious man soon—assuming he was unconscious—he would drown.
The third time I rose to the surface, I realized that I’d been played.
I began swimming at top speed toward Max Glassman’s runabout. Sure enough, Smith had already pulled himself into the bobbing craft. However bad a tumble he had taken, he hadn’t been knocked cold. He had a fresh cut on his head. Blood streamed along his jawbone and dyed his salt-and-pepper beard pink.
He was pulling up the anchor, hand over hand, as I came up on him. Maybe he thought he could hurl the toadstool-shaped weight at me, but I was too close. He threw himself forward into the cockpit, desperate to restart the engine before I could gain a handhold on the swimming ladder.
“Hey!” I said. “Asshole!”
Distracted, desperate to flee, he ignored me.
“You’re not going anywhere! Not without these!”
I raised my right arm out of the water like Excalibur from the mere. My middle finger protruded through the steel ring that held the keys to Glassman’s boat.
16
I drew my Beretta from its Kydex holster and trained the sights at him while treading water.
“Don’t think it can’t fire because it’s wet. Now raise your hands above your head.”
As he followed my instructions, his robe parted, revealing a belly emblazoned with offbeat motorcycle tats. DON’T WORRY BE HORNY. ADVENTURE BEFORE DEMENTIA. LOUD WIVES LOSE LIVES. He’d even had blood-red bullet holes tattooed across his abdomen.
“Back up to the bow while I climb up,” I said. “I will shoot you if you so much as flinch. That’s a promise, not a threat.”
Clutching the keys tightly in my palm, I used that hand to pull myself up until my waterlogged boots found the bottom rung of the swimming ladder. Then I stood up carefully. If Smith had thought to rock the boat, I might have lost my balance and fallen back into the lake. But he had come to terms with the reality of his predicament.
John Smith stood in the bow with hands raised. There were bits of plant matter—torn rushes and pondweed—in his bloody beard.
It was my first real look at the man in the flesh. Underwater, he had lost all but one of the bandages from Charley’s alleged assault. The exposed wounds were ugly in the extreme. There was a laceration, stitched with black sutures, under his right eye and a blue-green bruise under the left. There was yet another contusion on his bald temple.
“Turn away from me,” I said in my most commanding voice. “And kneel down.”
Not that I needed to fake the anger.
“I can’t kneel. I’m disabled.”
I understood now what Carol Boyce had meant about Smith being “but a ruin of a man.” His body was all out of kilter. One rounded shoulder rose higher than the other. That knee didn’t bend. I wondered how many months he’d spent in the hospital after the motorcycle crash that (I guessed) had rearranged his skeleton.
I ordered him to lift his hand while I cuffed one of his wrists. He didn’t fight me, but he didn’t help either. I dragged him to the cockpit. I pushed him down in the passenger seat—his bad leg extended out straight—and cuffed his wrists together behind the seat back.
“You and I are going to have a conversation,” I said, “but first, I need to make sure your neighbor isn’t adrift out there.”
“Fuck that Jew,” he said.
I swatted him on the side of his shaved head. He glared at me.
I stuck the key into the ignition and restarted the engine, then turned the runabout around and began cruising north toward the spot where I’d jettisoned Max.
Halfway up the lake, I slowed and surveyed both shores. There was no trace of Glassman, but I sighted his orange life vest hanging from a piling at the end of someone’s dock. I had been correct in my judgment that the lean man was a daily swimmer.
Still, I faced a difficult explanation at best and a potential lawsuit at worst.
“What are you doing now?” Smith asked.
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m dropping anchor.”
“What the fuck for?”
“You’re going to answer my questions before I bring you back to shore.”
“Who are you?”
“A friend of Charley Stevens.”
At the mention of the pilot’s name, Smith’s mouth trembled. There could be no question that my friend had inflicted the lopsided man’s injuries. I
