Hostage Zero

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Harvey Rodriguez made his way along the boat launch docks that ran behind and below Jimmy’s Tavern. He’d exited the front door, but rather than walk directly back to the mansion, he’d hooked a right to track along the water for a while. He figured he was far less likely to run into the mysterious Bostonian here than up on the street. He’d wander among the yachts for a block or two downstream, and then cut right and meander his way back to where he wanted to be.

About fifty feet into his plan, Denim stepped around the corner and cut off Harvey’s path. “Hi, again,” the man said. “We need to talk.” He held a pistol in his right hand.

Harvey reacted with the speed of a reflex, spinning on his heels and taking off at a dead run in the opposite direction. It’s amazing how quickly the brain can process thousands of bits of information when it’s fueled by raw terror. Denim needed information, which meant that he needed Harvey alive, which meant that the gun was purely a bluff. He couldn’t afford to fire anyway. Here along the water, the echo would roll for miles.

Still, the skin on Harvey’s back itched at the point between his shoulder blades where the bullet would hit if it was fired.

As his feet pounded along the dock’s wooden planks, he both heard and felt the drumbeat of his pursuer’s strides, but they sounded slower than Harvey’s, reflecting the thirty pounds that separated them.

Harvey dug deeper with each stride and quickened the rhythm. Back in high school, this was how he’d competed in track meets, and later, in the Marine Corps, this was how he’d finished in the top rankings of his training unit. But that was back when he was in shape.

If he was going to win this race, he’d have to do it in the next few seconds, before reality overcame adrenaline and he started to lose steam.

Ahead and to the left loomed the steps that led back to street level, but the stairs would require even more effort than running, and they would shave distance off whatever meager lead he’d opened up against his pursuer. Steps were out. Running wouldn’t be an option for long.

That left only a swim.

Navigating only by moonlight and the wash of light from the buildings up along the street, Harvey turned right at the next slip. When he caught a glimpse of Denim in his peripheral vision, his heart jumped. Harvey’s lead, such as it was, had closed to about ten feet.

“Stop, goddammit!” Denim commanded.

Harvey poured on more gas. He was still running full tilt when the wooden decking below his feet became only air, and he launched the best racing dive he could muster. He hit the water palms first, and when he realized that he hadn’t drilled himself into the mud and broken his neck, he scissor kicked hard and dove deep, fully expecting to be tackled from above or shot through the water, which was astonishingly cold for July.

Apparently, Fisherman’s Cove was blessed with a deepdraft marina. He never did find the bottom. Instead, he found a forest of pilings and spiderwebs of rope, which in the inky darkness felt predatory, threatening to grab him and hold him under until he drowned.

He had no idea how long he stayed underwater or how far he swam-it felt like three slips, but how could you know? — but when the urge for a new breath hit him, it hit him hard. Harvey kicked again and pulled hard with his arms. His lungs screamed for relief, and it occurred to him in his disorientation that he could just as easily be pulling himself deeper as rising to the surface.

The new rush of panic redoubled his need to breathe. Now.

He kicked and pulled again, but as he saw the surface rushing to meet him, he aborted the effort, sculling madly to slow his ascent. If he exploded out of the water, he’d surrender any advantage that this swim might have bought for him.

He slowed to an easy float, again sculling to rise as slowly as possible. Just a few inches from the surface he saw a white fiberglass hull through the murk, and he rose to meet it with his hands, then used its support to hand-walk to the surface. Of the whole ordeal, the final five inches were the worst. The pressure in his lungs and the panic in his mind screamed at him just to give up and give in. He refused.

He broke the surface vertically, crown of his head first, then his eyes, and finally his nose and mouth. He pursed his lips to keep from exhaling with a burst of noise, gulped a new lungful of air, then took in his surroundings.

He had, in fact, swum under two slips and past four ranks of moored boats-maybe a hundred feet, farther in the water than he’d been since basic training. He allowed himself a moment of pride.

But Denim was still out there somewhere, armed with a gun and a plan that Harvey wanted nothing to do with. He couldn’t see him and he couldn’t hear him, but he was definitely there.

So, what to do next? Staying right where he was appealed to him for the time being, but that was ultimately self-defeating. Silhouetted as he was against the white fiberglass, he was nowhere near as invisible as he needed to be. Sooner or later, Denim would see him, and then Harvey would have no choice but to become a victim.

Harvey needed to get to the street. He needed witnesses-a crowd that would make it impossible for Denim to hurt him. Down here on the water, isolation worked to the attacker’s benefit. Up there, the tables turned.

His mind conjured a memory of the long staircase that led to the street. Moving with excruciating care to remain silent, he pressed his hands against the hull to guide himself through the water toward the aft end of the boat-he figured it to be a twenty-eight footer, a speedboat-away from the dock, but toward the swim deck that he believed to be standard equipment on boats this size. Hey, if you can’t ski or go tubing off the back of a speedboat, what was the point of owning one?

He wasn’t disappointed. Actually, it was more of a shelf than a deck, slats of imitation wood hovering no more than eight inches from the surface. He faced the trailing edge of the deck, wrapped his fist around the closest plank, and did his first chin-up in a very long while.

As he strained to raise high enough to hook the deck with his leg, he realized for the first time that the night tasted like oil. A half-roll more and he was completely out of the water, watching the sky.

He didn’t move. He couldn’t afford to move. As long as his pulse was the only discernable sound, he’d be vulnerable to anything. He counted to sixty, and then he counted to sixty again. After two minutes, he felt in control again. At least a little.

Measuring every motion, Harvey gently rolled from his back to his stomach and pushed up to his haunches, where he froze again to reassess. Except for the slapping of the moored boats and the occasional sound of laughter from Jimmy’s up the street, all seemed silent. All seemed normal.

The way things always seemed to victims in the moments before an ambush.

Where had Denim gone? Harvey had expected to find him two slips over, peering over the side into the water, waiting for him to rise and give himself away, but now he realized that it wouldn’t make sense. Whole minutes had passed since Harvey’s headlong dive. The smart move for Denim would be to pull back to a place that allowed the best recon and allowed him to set up the ambush that Harvey had been dreading. But where?

Careful to move only his head, Harvey scanned the marina, looking for any anomaly that might give away the presence of his enemy. But he saw nothing.

And then he did.

As if reading Harvey’s mind, Denim had taken a position in the middle of the very stairway that Harvey had planned to use as his escape route.

Harvey cursed under his breath. When hunting, you wait at the spot where your prey must sooner or later go. He was screwed.

“Stop it,” he said aloud. It was just a whisper, but the sound of his own voice startled him. “Grow a pair, pussy.” The phrase made him smile. It brought him back to a memory of Mike Brown, one of his closest friends over in The Sandbox. He could almost hear Mike speaking the words.

Yeah, grow a pair.

He lowered himself back below the level of the rear gunwale and copped a squat. Okay, we know what’s broken, he thought. What’s working?

One: Denim clearly didn’t know where he was. As long as Harvey remained invisible, he continued to have options-even if he didn’t yet know what they were.

Two: Denim had taken a defensive position, betting that Harvey would ultimately make a break for it. If Harvey waited him out, maybe time would make it all go away.

Three: Well, he couldn’t think of a third.

Harvey rose again for another peek, just to make sure that the status still remained quo. Sure enough, his enemy hadn’t moved. He was ready to wait-

A steadily burning red LED light caught Harvey’s attention. He saw it through a window to the boat’s cockpit, which itself was locked up tight.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he whispered. The boat had a burglar alarm. And why not? Sitting out here unattended, probably for weeks at a time during the slow months, you’d want to have some deterrent to keep kids from breaking in, wouldn’t you?

Kids and homeless guys named Harvey. “Consider the pair grown,” he whispered, smile blooming.

He pulled himself over the gunwale, grabbed the rail, and rolled on his belly over the rail onto the padded bench, and from there onto the wooden deck. It was all noisier than he wanted it to be-noisy enough that he feared he’d alerted Denim to his presence. He didn’t dare peek to see if he had.

Instead, he started kicking the door to the boat’s cockpit. On the first blow, everything held strong. On the second, he heard something crack, and on the third, it all came apart.

Then the alarm went off.

Oh, my, the alarm.