“I’ll bandage it later.”
Carlyle turned to Nash. “It’s time to move out. You ready to finish the trip?”
“I’m fine. Let’s get going.”
“You still look a bit shaky,” Carlyle said. “I better take over lead boat.”
Nash laughed. “I can’t wait to see what Marshall says, but go right ahead.”
Carlyle gathered up his gear and stepped into the cockpit of Betts’s raft.
“What’s going on?” Betts said.
“What’s it look like? You can’t drive us back to North River with your hand like that.” Carlyle grabbed the guide paddle and shoved his foot into the restraining strap.
“You’re not licensed for this.”
“You think some ranger’s going to ticket me because I took over for an injured guide?”
“Fine. Just get us out of here. My hand’s killing me.”
Carlyle leaned out over the water, pulled them into the current, and maneuvered the raft slowly between a series of boulders. Five minutes later, the clouds lifted as they floated clear of Harris. Nearing the remains of the old trestle spanning the river, Carlyle kept the raft far from the concrete bridge pilings as the Hudson, near flood stage now, poured south.
“Looks like it’s all coming back to you,” Betts said.
Carlyle didn’t take his eyes from the river. “Did you really think I’d forget everything I’d learned about this business?”
They came up on Greyhound Rapid at two thirty. The Hudson was over a hundred yards wide here. A rock wall bisected the current, creating a deep trench with a ferocious low-head dam on its downstream side. On days when they had strong crews, Carlyle and the other guides would surf the boil line over and over. They stopped playing this game when the teenage son of a TV anchor got tossed into the trench one afternoon and almost drowned.
Carlyle told his crew, “Because we’ve got to get sissy-face here to a doctor, we’ll go round this thing today. Come back again when the river’s boiling and I’ll show you some real fun.”
As Betts nursed his wound, Carlyle led Nash, Hernandez, and Marshall down the Hudson, past the now-abandoned Barton Mines, and out of the gorge.
Ten minutes later, Betts said, “Shit.”
Carlyle spun around to check the rafts behind him. All looked fine. “What’s wrong?”
“I dropped my knife.” Blood seeped from his injured hand.
Marshall’s four rafts pulled into a small cove near North River at 3:15. The state police helicopter that had been hovering over the convoy for the past ten minutes banked right and raced back toward the gorge. Carlyle could see Bognor, Pierce, two DEC forest rangers, and a half-dozen stone-faced state troopers standing just off the road. The rain had stopped, but a thick gray fog had begun to settle over the valley.
The cops who’d been on the river today shook hands with their five guides, gathered up their gear, and marched toward two sixteen-passenger government vans with blacked-out windows.
Before she left, the woman who’d saved Nash’s life in Harris walked up to him. “I admire the way you took over that raft after the ordeal you went through.”
“I’m fine now, but I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You could ask for my phone number for a start.”
“Are you kidding me?” he said with a smile.
She pulled a card from her pack. “Just call. I’ll be home tonight after seven.”
A state police sergeant approached Marshall. “I’d like you to follow me. My boss wants you to provide a statement about what happened out there today.”
“Who’s going to watch our gear?” Marshall said.
The sergeant slowly looked around at the gathering of law-enforcement personnel and raised an eyebrow at Marshall. “I guarantee, no one’s going to touch your stuff.”
After Betts and Hernandez left for the lodge, Bognor, limping slightly, came over to Carlyle.
“How’d you all hear about the accident?” Carlyle said.
“That’s was one of the best equipped outfits I’ve ever seen. One of the people in Nash’s raft even had a satellite phone.” Bognor stared at Carlyle. “You want to talk about it?”
Carlyle described the accident in Harris. “We almost lost Nash back there.”
“How come you were you driving that raft when you pulled in just now?”
Carlyle told Bognor how Betts had cut his hand freeing the canoe from the river. “Don’t tell Pierce I was working without a license. I’ve had enough grief for one day.”
Bognor pulled out a notebook. “I’ve got a few more questions. You mind going over this once more?” They moved to a patch of open ground overlooking the valley. “Any idea why our suspect put that canoe right there?”
“It seems pretty obvious. He knows that Marshall always takes that route.”
“How’d he get that thing into the gorge?”
Carlyle looked to his left, upstream, toward the mountains. “There’s only one way he could have done it. He brought it down through the Narrows.”
“What do you mean, brought it?”
“You’ve never back been in there, have you?”
“Ric, I’m five ten and weigh two-forty. Do I look like someone who would run that river?”
“He paddled the canoe through the gorge himself.”
“When?”
“It had to be around dawn, before anyone else showed up.”
“Are you serious?”
“Getting a canoe through that canyon when the river’s this high is nearly impossible. But with almost no light, it’s sheer madness. I’ve been on that river in some terrible conditions, but this stunt was off the charts.”
“Goddamn.”
“So now we know something else about our suspect—he’s an expert boatman, so obsessed with his hatred of Marshall that he’s willing to kill another guide and risk his own life if necessary.”
Bognor glanced over his shoulder. “Could it be one of Marshall’s guides?”
“I thought about that. Only Nash and Betts have that kind of skill. But neither of them had enough time to make the canoe run and get back in time for this trip.”“Any idea how he got away once he finished with the canoe?”
“He must have bailed out somewhere in the backcountry,” Carlyle said. “He could still be out there now, for all we know.”
Bognor lit a cigarette. “You realize what this means?”
“He’s not bottled up west of the Narrows like we thought. Terrain is irrelevant. He
