disorder.
“You first, Johnny, into the boat,” Mike decided. “Drop down and take off the tarp. You keep the light on him, Lorraine, and if I see you going for a spanner, Johnny, that's it, right there.” The white of his teeth showed in the blur of his features. “You could probably dive under the pier and get away; I know you're a fish in the water, but I think you'd rather get your hands on me.”
How right you are, Mike Larsen, Johnny thought to himself as he swung down the piling ladder and reached for the deck with his feet. And I know how I'm going to do it. In the beam of light directed down at him from the pier above he knelt and loosened the ties on the tarp, bundled it and tossed it amidships.
“Take off the engine cowling.” Mike's voice sounded right at his elbow; sound carried in the night. Johnny slid off the metal casing and stood it up in the stern. “Lorraine's coming down now. I'm watching you.”
Johnny watched her cautious descent of the ladder; was it more typically feminine to be afraid of falling from the ladder between the creaking, barnacled pilings and the dark water line than of the gun in Mike Larsen's hand? He stepped up from the cockpit to the deck, scooping up an air-filled seat cushion as he did so. He reached up and lifted her down from the ladder, and with her body as a shield pushed the cushion under her arm, his whisper a breath in her ear. “Hang onto this.” He released her; she made no sound, but her arm gripped the seat cushion.
Mike's carefully contrived face-forward descent, flashlight under an armpit and the gun in his free hand, was a strain on him. Explosive relief was again evident in his tone as he dropped the final three feet to the deck planking. “Now!”
Johnny smiled tightly to himself. He thinks he's crossed his last river. He doesn't know his white water is still ahead of him.
Mike pointed with the gun to the opposite side of the cockpit from his own station at wheel and throttle. “You, Johnny. Over there. Carefully.” He groped in a locker cupboard behind him and tossed a fish knife to Lorraine. “When I say so cut the lines.”
The cockpit sprang to trembling life as the engine roared, and Mike gunned it a time or two to make sure it had fully caught. A flip of a switch and the port and starboard red and green lights came on, and the masthead running light.
“Cut the lines!” Mike had to raise his voice over the engine sound; he waited as Lorraine cautiously picked her way from stern to bow. Mike eased back delicately on the bar throttle as they inched away from the pier. In a boat as over-engined as Ye Olde Beaste slow speed was nearly as ticklish as high; long ago Mike had wound a strip of tape, now dirty and discolored, around the throttle bar at the point beyond which it was not safe to advance the lever arm.
Around them Long Island Sound glimmered black and slick as Lorraine came back and sat down to Johnny's left. They moved out beyond the point, and as the shoreline disappeared behind them a faint swell manifested itself even in the flat calm. An occasional wave slapped lightly under the bow and hissed along the water line; Mike touched the throttle bar and the engine took on a deeper note. The stern-heavy Ye Olde Beaste settled even more deeply in the water as the powerful propeller took hold, and the bow rose correspondingly steeper in pitch.
Johnny looked at the silvery wisps of spray filtering in over the stern, then up at the stars. With the toe of his right shoe he forced his left shoe off and in an unhurried movement picked it up in his toes and lifted it to where he could reach it with his hand without bending down. He placed it gently on the thwart beside him; he had a feeling it would not be long now. The gun should be no problem; Mike wanted no bullet holes. When Mike went for a spanner, or next attempted to position Johnny differently, possibly…
Mike Larsen moved out a step from his helmsman post, his left hand negligently on the wheel behind him. The gun which had dangled at his side in his boat-handling preoccupation swung up and around in deliberate presentation. Mike's voice was crisp; his face was calm. “Sit still, Lorraine. Johnny-” His left hand left the wheel and groped in the locker beside him, and in the second his eyes veered fractionally Johnny stood up, picked up his shoe and threw it at the throttle bar.
At the short range of the crowded cockpit he scored a direct hit on the lever arm, and Mike Larsen yelled hoarsely as the arm jumped the restraining tape and jammed at the full-speed end of the bar. Johnny crouched as the engine boomed in a long unused explosion of power, and Ye Olde Beaste jumped forward beneath them. The engine sound was fantastic; the stern flattened, and the bow canted higher. The boat began to shudder uncontrollably, and Mike Larsen by main strength clawed himself off the cockpit rim against which he had been flung and stared wild-eyed at the water shipping in over the stern. Beneath their feet a deep grinding noise punctuated splintering sounds as the hull began to disintegrate under the pounding of the water, and a high-pitched whine filled the air.
The white-faced man dived for the throttle as black water spurted through the sprung seams; his frantic grab jerked the lever arm from full speed to zero, and Johnny leaned forward, picked up Lorraine Barnes and threw her over the side. Behind him the stern rose like a cork; the high-canted bow dipped deeply and plunged its blunt nose into an oncoming swell like a fat man stabbing his toe into the ground in the middle of a hundred-yard dash. There was a shivering crash; Mike Larsen screamed shrilly as the heavy stern rose inexorably in a monstrously grotesque cartwheel while disintegrated planking flew like popcorn.
Johnny went over the side in the deepest dive he could manage as the boat stood on its nose; he hit the Sound's unyielding bottom with an impact that nearly stunned him. His ears rang both with the concussion of his own dive and the nearby cataclysmic dull thunderclap of sound as Ye Olde Beaste pounded back into the water, upside down. He struggled back up in a frenzy of arms and legs, surfaced and roughly sleeved the water from his eyes. The night was filled with a hissing, bubbling noise, and seventy yards ahead a black blot that bore no resemblance to a boat disappeared altogether in a leisurely curving arc.
Johnny swam to the spot in a thrashing scramble. He criss-crossed back and forth through the gaseous bubbles and the little pieces of flotsam that popped to the surface all around him. No man could possibly survive such an impact, but still he swam. The bubbles weakened and died, and the flotsam drifted away; the only sound in Johnny's ears was the water awash on his shoulders as he plowed stubbornly on his course, until he was sure.
No man had survived.
He turned and swam in the opposite direction. He bored into the chop, breasted it and trod water while he scanned the surface of the Sound. A faint sound to his right sent him strongly in that direction, riding high in the water. He saw her, finally; Lorraine Barnes rose and fell in the inky swell, her upper body across the air-filled cushion to which she clung like grim death. She sobbed when she saw him; her hair was like wet seaweed all over her face, and her nose was bleeding from the force with which she had struck the water.
“M-Mike!” she choked, and Johnny reared up alongside her, unbelieving.
“I ought to leave you out here, you fool!”
She didn't even hear him. “Mike, Mike, oh, Mike!”
The thick surge of anger swelled in his throat and then died. This was Vic's wife. Mike had tried to frame her twice and would certainly have killed her tonight, and still she could call for him. This was Vic's wife, about as wrong as a woman could be, but he had to get her back to shore. “Shut up and listen to what I tell you.”
A stinging little wavelet slapped her in the face, and she spat a mouthful of chop. “We'll d-drown!” She strangled. “Drown!”
“Not in this pond.” Johnny reached down and pulled off his other shoe. “I could swim it both ways, if I had to.” He pulled the belt out of his slacks and peeled them off. He ripped and tore at shirt and T-shirt until he felt a blessed freedom. He looked up at the stars, orienting himself, and then turned back to the sobbing woman. He pulled her clothes off in great, bunched handfuls.
He bounced erect in the water for another look at the stars, then settled back. “Put your left hand on my right shoulder,” he told her curtly. “Hold the cushion in your right armpit. Don't fight it; let it balance you. And hang onto me.”
He set out at a steady beat and in three hundred yards had made the adjustment for the drag on his right side. He bored persistently through the rising swells, with head turned to one side to breathe deeply between onslaughts. Twice he paused to check the stars again and altered course slightly; the only noise he heard beside the roar of water in his ears was an occasional animal-like sound from his companion.
He swam strongly, thinking not at all of time or distance, and was surprised when the dark mass of the shoreline blotted out his waterlogged horizon. He had thought they were farther out; he shook his head to clear his ears of the benumbing water pressure and tried to listen. If the noise he heard was surf, and not just the roaring of
