Charley’s leathery face was contorted with pain. I wasn’t sure if it was from the rifle shot or how hard I had landed on him.
From my seat in the sand, I could see Egan’s Grumman drifting downstream. In the confusion, Chasse must have pulled the boat off the sandbar. He wanted to deprive us of a means of escape or pursuit.
He had to be hiding in the water now behind his Grand Laker. I could have started firing at it—the cedar planks wouldn’t have stopped the sixteen hollow-point bullets in my Beretta, although I would have preferred jacketed rounds. But I wasn’t as blasé about murdering a man as Lamontaine had accused me of being.
“I know where you are, Chasse,” I said.
Another burst of gunshots: suppressing fire, in the language of the military. When I dared raise my head again, I saw that the Grand Laker had also come unmoored. It was moving away in the river, pinwheeling in the current. As it drifted farther from the island and the glow of the campfire, I saw Chasse pull himself up from the water over one of the gunwales.
I fired three shots.
One of them must have struck, because he fell backward out of the boat before he could gain his balance.
He was at the mercy of the water now. He wasn’t wearing a life vest. His gun belt weighed somewhere between fifteen and twenty pounds. His body armor, assuming he was carrying the full complement of steel-core plates, might have weighed forty pounds.
He was a strong man, but not stronger than the river.
Charley worked his shoulder in a rotation, but the movement only made him wince. “Where’s Lamontaine?”
“In the river. I think I might have winged him. He’s going to drown, Charley.”
“Where’s Egan’s boat?”
“Gone,” I said. “But there’s one left.”
Charley could have let Chasse Lamontaine die, just by hesitating. Instead he sprang to his feet like a man half his age. “Let’s go.”
We trotted back up the spine of the island.
“I had figured out he was smarter than he pretended to be,” said the pilot, behind me. “I should have realized he’d set his son up as a sniper, the same as I did with Nick.”
So it was Nick Francis up there on the ruined bridge, or wherever he’d made his nest, who had saved us from being picked off by C. J. Lamontaine.
I found the canoe in the light of my headlamp.
“That’s not much of a watercraft,” said Charley.
“And there’s only one paddle.”
“Better let me take it, then.”
There was no argument. As old and injured as he was, Charley Stevens was one of the best boatmen I had ever known. I had seen him pole a canoe up Class III rapids: a feat I had believed impossible until he accomplished it.
I’d barely taken my seat in the bow before I lurched forward. Charley, running, pushed the boat along the sand. I heard the splashes of his boots and then the forward shove as the keel scraped free of the gravel and floated into the current. There was barely a wobble as the injured old man leaped into the stern.
He rarely sat in a canoe, preferring to stand (if he was poling) or kneel, like the Penobscots and Passamaquoddy did in their slender birchbark creations. Kneeling was an ancient way of paddling, and there was something holy about it beyond the churchly posture. It was how you demonstrated humility before the power of the river.
I fired up my headlamp. As we drifted past the south end of the island, I turned my illuminated gaze on the dying fire. Egan was wriggling around on the sand. I wished I’d thought to cut him free.
“You all right there, Jon?” I asked with real concern.
“Fuck you,” was his reply.
As the bowman, it was my job to shout out the obstacles ahead and spotlight the water for signs of Chasse Lamontaine. I focused on the nearly phosphorescent froth.
Running water appears dark above channels and certain eddies but bubbles white where it gains speed in the narrows. Follow the waves and shoot the vees between the rocks and you should be fine. Steer even a little off course and you might crash against a boulder and flip over. If you’re particularly unlucky, you might find yourself held beneath the surface by the hydraulics of a falls, doing endless somersaults. Or you might be pinned between the overturned canoe and a rock by the force of the river until your crushed lungs fill with water.
I saw no personal flotation devices in the canoe—a violation I used to cite paddlers for every day when I was a patrol warden. We’d be in the same tough spot as Chasse if we spilled in the rapids.
Spray, tasting of wet moss, exploded in my face. I kept watch for the missing boats.
Even before we came to the serious white water, the river had already begun to step down—I experienced the sensation of descending, the top half of my body tipping forward. The current guided us through the first of the real rapids and sucked us forward and faster into a white expanse of waves.
“On your left!” Charley said.
I swung the light around but not before the hull knocked against the submerged part of a boulder I had missed seeing. The impact might have been enough to turn us broadside if not for Charley’s expertise. Somehow he made a series of strokes that centered us once more in the white water.
I wished I had a paddle to help him.
It wasn’t just that we needed speed to find Chasse before an eddy sucked him under. Navigating the stepped falls without spilling required us to keep pace with the current.
I never even heard the crash.
But all at once we were upon the wrecked boat. The unmanned Grand Laker had failed to navigate two boulders—Scylla
