An Incident At Bloodtide

Chapter Eight

There were a number of messages waiting for me when I got back to New York, but there was one in which I was particularly interested. It was from Captain Perry Farmer of the NYPD, and he wanted me to get back to him as soon as possible. I picked up the phone, dialed his precinct station house, and asked for his extension.

"The prints you gave me matched up, Mongo," Perry said after some preliminary chitchat. "Your guy's name is Charles 'Chick' Carver."

Well, well. I cradled the receiver under my chin as I wrote it down, underlining the last name. "That's great news, Perry. What have you got on him?"

"He spent five years in Greenhaven for-now get this, Mongo-aggravated malicious mischief. He'd gotten fines and short jail sentences a few times before for similar things, so the judge in the last case decided to throw the book at him. It seems that when Mr. Carver takes a dislike to somebody, he just can't leave it alone. He served three and a half months in a halfway house rehab program and got out on parole nine months ago.

He also had an extensive juvenile record. Some of that is sealed, but from the kind of flag on the file, I'd say he may have been sent to a mental hospital, probably Rockland Children's Psychiatric Center up near where Garth lives now."

"You got an address for him?"

"Yeah; it's a walkup on the Lower East Side, but if s a phony. It's a real enough apartment, and the rent's paid up, but he hasn't been there in six months. I had one of my men talk to some of the neighbors. His probation officer isn't too happy about it, and he's going to have some explaining to do the next time he talks to her."

"You've spoken to his probation officer?"

"Yeah. I got kind of curious about what kind of guy can draw a five-year prison sentence for malicious mischief."

"A very malicious guy. Hey, Perry, you're a prince for taking the time you have."

"I haven't forgotten I owe you, Mongo."

"What did his probation officer have to say about him?"

"She says he can be a real charmer when he wants to be-like most sociopaths. He's pretty bright, but he has a real child's outlook on life. He wants to be a big man, but he doesn't have the patience or self-discipline needed to acquire the skills to become a big man. And so he's a schemer, a manipulator. He apparently has this witchcraft gig he likes to do on people he thinks will swallow it. Anyway, he may yet turn out to be a big man, because somebody arranged for him to get a job with the shipping company his family is connected with. It sounds to me like some strings were pulled."

"Indeed," I said, drawing a circle around the last name I had already underlined.

"Incidentally, when I say he's pretty bright, I'm talking fluorescent. He's a member of Mensa, for what that's worth. His probation officer thinks that he really could amount to something if he ever did get some discipline and learn to channel his intelligence and energy, but she's not optimistic. She thinks he's dangerous, says she wouldn't be surprised if he ends up killing somebody one day."

"Indeed."

"It's like having a Rolls-Royce engine under the hood of a Yugo. Anyway, that's what I've got for you. Any help?"

"Knowing who he is helps a lot. Now I want to find him."

"I never did ask you where you got those prints. What's Carver done that makes you so interested in him?"

"At the very least, more malicious mischief. But now I'm thinking it could be even more than that. I'll stay in touch. Thanks again, Perry."

"Anytime, Mongo."

I hung up, then got out my Manhattan directory and looked for Carver Shipping. There was no listing. There was also no listing in the Rockland directory, but I hit pay dirt when I checked the New Jersey directory. Carver Shipping's headquarters was in Jersey City. I dialed the number, and a pleasant woman's voice answered.

"Carver Shipping. May I help you, please?"

"I hope so. I'd like to speak with Mr. Carver."

"Mr. Carver is retired, sir."

It seemed Chick Carver had not quite yet achieved big-man status. "Not the founder. I mean the younger one, Charles."

"Oh, I'm sorry, sir. I just started this job yesterday. Just a moment, please. I'll look in the company directory." There was a pause for a few seconds, and then the woman came back on the line. "Sir?"

"I'm still here."

"There's a Charles Carver working in Security. I'll switch you over."

"Thanks-oh! Who's the head of that department?"

"Mr. Wellington, sir."

"Would that be Frank Wellington?"

"I believe his name is Roger, sir. Shall I switch you over?"

"Please."

There was some electronic whirring and clicking, and then another pleasant voice, this one a man's, said, "Mr. Wellington's office."

"Mr. Carver, please."

"Mr. Carver isn't at his desk at the moment."

That didn't surprise me; I was pretty certain he was in Cairn.

The big question was whether his business there was strictly personal or also corporate. "Can you tell me how I can reach him? This is the Esoteric Bookshop. Mr. Carver's order has come in. However, there seems to have been a mix-up concerning his current residential address and phone number. He did say he wanted the materials as soon as they came in. Could you give me his address and phone number, please?"

There was a short pause, then, "I'm afraid I can't give out that information over the phone, sir. Who did you say you represent?"

"The Esoteric Bookshop. Well, just tell him that the books he ordered on coprophilia, necrophilia, pedophilia, bestiality, and suicide by masturbation have arrived, and he can pick them up at his convenience. Have you got that, or would you like me to repeat it?"

"I will make sure he gets your message, sir," the young man replied after some hesitation. I thought I detected more than a hint of bewilderment, and I certainly hoped he would share this newly discovered information about Charles "Chick" Carver's reading habits with the rest of the office staff.

"Thanks. Have a nice day."

Next, I got my Rockland directory back out, called the Cairn Fishermen's Association. Lonnie Allen answered.

"Lonnie?"

"Yes. Who is this, please?"

"This is Mongo Frederickson, Lonnie. I was in the office with Garth the other day."

"Oh, Dr. Frederickson!" she said as if she were truly pleased to hear my voice. "I didn't know who you were when you were in here, but now I do. You're famous. I should have asked you for your autograph."

"Anytime, Lonnie. Listen, I'd like you to do me a favor."

"Of course, Dr. Frederickson. What can I do for you?"

"My friends and beautiful women like yourself call me Mongo. I need some information, and I'm not sure how to get it. I was hoping CFA might be able to help."

"What do you need, Mongo?"

"I'd like you to do some checking for me with the members of your association, and anybody else who's in tune with things that happen on the river. I'm looking for hard facts, but would also like to hear any gossip or rumors you might pick up. Specifically what I'm looking for are examples of bad luck, anything harmful, that may have happened to anyone who may have filed a pollution complaint against, or had any kind of run-in with, Carver Shipping."

There was a brief pause on the other end of the line, then Lonnie said, "Bad luck? I'm not sure I understand what you mean, Mongo."

"Well, take Tom Blaine as an example. He was almost certainly gathering evidence against Carver Shipping when he was sucked up into those propeller blades. Some people might call that bad luck. But I'm not necessarily talking about people dying; I'm looking for examples of anything unlucky happening to someone after they got on Carver Shipping's case in any way whatsoever. Does that make it clearer?"

"Yes, I think so. I'll make some calls."

"Good. But make sure you're discreet. Keep the conversations low-key, and just try to slide into the subject. Don't mention that you're making inquiries for me. I don't want any bad luck coming Lonnie Allen's way."

"I'll do it like you say, Mongo."

"Thanks, Lonnie. I appreciate it. I'll check back with you in a couple of days."

"Suicide by masturbation," Garth said drily. "Cute. But a bit sophomoric, don't you think?"

"It seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm not sure just what we're dealing with here, and I didn't want our boy Sacra Silver to know yet that I know who he really is. At the same time, it wouldn't bother me at all if he became the object of a little gossip and ridicule around the office. I was feeling a bit vicious."

"He dumps a boatload of needles and bloody bandages for my wife to walk on, and you pay him back by starting a gossip campaign. You call that vicious?"

"Cut me some slack, brother. I found out who he is, didn't I? Let him worry for a while about who made the call."

"He'll know it was you or me."

"Oh, I'm not so sure. I suspect our occultist bullshit artist has any number of enemies strewn over the countryside. That's why he's so leery of telling people his real name."

Garth grunted, sank back deeper into his canvas chair. We were sitting on his deck, drinking coffee and feasting our senses on the wide, sailboat-dotted expanse of river before us. After a week, we had ourselves quite a collection of photographs of Carver Shipping tankers going up and down the river. Every one of them rode as deep in the water heading seaward as they had been when they were heading upriver to make their deliveries; Carver Shipping certainly hadn't let Tom Blaine's death slow down their illicit sideline enterprise.

"So," Garth said, pointing to the stack of photographs on the glass-topped coffee table between us. "We've got lots of pretty pictures. Now what do we do?"

"I'm not sure."

"Turn these over to the Coast Guard? The CFA people? Or do we go diving now to get our own water samples?"

"Maybe, maybe, and maybe. But what would be the point? We've probably got the goods on them right now as far as taking on river water is concerned. We might even persuade the Coast Guard to make a call asking them to stop, assuming our friend Captain Marley was in a good mood. And they'd stop. If the Cairn Fishermen's Association decides they have enough evidence and witnesses now to take them to court, they'll stop. Then we'll be worse off than we are now, because we'll have tipped our hand. We didn't start this to prove Carver Shipping is polluting and stealing water; that's a sideshow. We want to find out if one of their captains is a killer."

"So what do we do next?"

"You must enjoy hearing me repeat myself. However, since you insist on probing the devious and resourceful mind of this master investigator, I might suggest we have another option besides turning over these photographs and putting everyone, including Julian Jefferson, on guard."

"What option would that be, O master investigator?"

"Work on our pal Chick Carver. He's a loose thread."

"Loose thread? He's a loose cannon."

"That too. But maybe we should pull on him for a while and see what unravels."

"You think he was involved in Tom's death?"

"I don't know. What we do know is that he works for Carver Shipping, as an assistant to the head of security. He sure as hell knows about the water-stealing scam; probably everyone in the company down to the shipping clerks knows. Whether he knows anything about Tom's death is something we may find out if we pull at him a bit."

"How?"

"Maybe he'll give us the answer to that question. He certainly is a persistent son-of-a-bitch, so I think it's safe to assume he'll make another pass at one or both of us. When he does, he may leave himself vulnerable in some way we can't know until he does it."

"It sounds to me like you want to keep playing with him, Mongo. The idea doesn't much appeal to me."

"I prefer my original metaphor of pulling on a loose thread," I replied a bit testily. "If you've got a better idea for forcing an investigation into your friend's death, please share it with me."

"I still say he's a fucking loose cannon."

"Then maybe he'll backfire."

"I want to be perfectly clear about something, Mongo," Garth said in a calm, casual tone of voice that, when combined with my brother's air of steely resolve, was always a powerful sign of danger. "I understand what you're saying. If it were only you and me Sacra Silver was playing with, your approach wouldn't bother me; I might even enjoy the game. But Silver sees Mary as the prize in this contest; he's playing with, and for, her. And that's where I have to draw the line. So you play with him; pull his chain all you want. But if I meet up with him face-to-face, I won't be playing any game."

I raised my coffee mug to him, nodded. "I think I get your drift, brother. Perchance you thought I'd forgotten the danger Carver poses to Mary?"

"I didn't say that, Mongo," Garth replied, uncharacteristically looking away. He picked up his binoculars from the coffee table and began scanning the river. "I just don't want you getting pissed off at me if your loose thread ends up with a broken back."

"We are in excellent communication, as usual."

"So we wait?"

"Wait, keep taking pictures, and see what happens with Mr. Chick Carver."

"Fine. Just so long as you remember what-" Garth suddenly stopped speaking, stiffened in his chair, then abruptly stood up and stepped to the railing of the deck. He was looking to the south through the binoculars.

"What is it, Garth?"

He motioned with his right hand for me to join him at the railing. I did, and he handed me the binoculars. Then he pointed downriver, toward an approaching tanker in the distance. "Check it out."

I peered through the binoculars, adjusting the focus. It was a big tanker, maybe seven hundred feet long, with a gray hull highlighted by red and yellow stripes along the waterline. As big as two football fields, the deck of the tanker was dotted with vent stacks, pallets of supplies, and large orange cranes on both its port and starboard sides. An enormous superstructure containing an elevated wheelhouse rose up into the sky at the stern end; painted white, the superstructure looked a bit like a three-tiered wedding cake. The tanker was negotiating its way between red and green buoys in an area where the deep channel crossed from one side of the river to the other, giving me a clear view of its length. The tanker's registration number was clearly visible on its stern end: 82Q510. Julian Jefferson was back in the neighborhood.

I said, "Son-of-a-bitch."

"Yeah," Garth replied softly. "That's what I was thinking."

I watched as the tanker made its turn, then continued to proceed north, toward us. Suddenly two medium-size tugs appeared in my field of vision, coming from the north. The water at the stern of the tanker began to churn even more as the captain reversed his engines. A half hour later, with the help of the two tugs, the tanker was securely anchored to a permanent mooring offshore from the tool and die manufacturing complex across the river, perhaps fifty yards from the end of the complex's steel and concrete dock. A half dozen crewmen appeared on deck, and we watched as the men went about their business opening valves and attaching enormous black hoses that would be connected to fittings on the dock.

"So near and yet so far," Garth continued quietly.

"Yeah."

"You want to go rent some diving equipment?"

"I didn't think our mother raised any stupid children. When was the last time you were scuba diving, brother?"

Garth shrugged. "Seven, maybe eight years ago-in the Virgin Islands."

"You think you can find the underwater venting ports on that hull in total darkness, with a four-or-five-knot current nudging you in the ass?"

"You're saying we're not qualified?"

"I'm saying Mom wouldn't approve, and you remember, I'm sure, Dad's lectures on the difference between courage and stupidity."

"I seem to recall him lecturing you on the difference between courage and stupidity. The fact remains that we have the ship that probably killed Tom sitting over there right under our noses. We don't know how long it's going to stay there, and we don't know when it will be back. We've got to go for it now."

"Go for what?"

"I don't know. Maybe call the Coast Guard again. Something."

"It would be a waste of time to call the Coast Guard. All they're doing right now is unloading a cargo of fuel oil."

"Mongo-"

"Okay, let's go," I said, hanging the binoculars on a peg on the railing.

"Where?"

"To see if we can't rattle the captain's cage, and see what transpires."

Garth obviously liked the idea. He grunted his approval, then quickly fell into step beside me as I walked out of the house and headed down toward the beach. "I thought the master investigator didn't think we should tip our hand."

"The master investigator has changed his mind; master investigators do that all the time, which is one reason why we're master investigators. I said we didn't want to tip our hand to the company.''''

"That's not what you said."

"This is-maybe-the captain who murdered Tom Blaine. If so, he may still be more than a bit edgy, and he might make a mistake. On the other hand, maybe what happened to Tom really was an accident, in which case Jefferson may not have any idea what happened. I just think it would be interesting to see how he reacts to us."

"You think he'll talk to us?"

"I guess we're about to find out, aren't we? It's risky, but we don't really know what we're going to do about Tom's death anyway, and we may never get another chance to get this close to the captain and ship that probably killed him."

"Agreed," Garth said, then slowed his pace. "I should probably leave a note for Mary."

"You do what you feel you need to do, but if the church meeting she's at lasts as long as usual, we'll probably be back before she is."

"You're right."

We went into the boathouse to retrieve a length of rope, as well as one of the green plastic jugs we had taken from Tom Blaine's basement office. We tied the jug to the lacing between the two halves of the catamaran's canvas trampoline, then dragged the cat down to the river's edge. Garth raised the sail, locked it into place. We pushed the cat into the water and hopped on, with Garth in the middle and me at the tiller, and we were off.

We were in no danger of being becalmed. It was, in fact, an ideal day for sailing, with white cream puffs of cloud high in an azure sky, a warm sun, and a steady twelve-to-fifteen knot wind from the southwest. The tide was going out, so I pointed a few degrees north of the tanker, on a starboard tack, and sheeted in the mainsail. The cat shot forward, its pontoons hissing, leaving nice rooster tails of surf in our wake. When I felt the pontoon beneath me begin to rise, I slipped both my feet beneath the hiking strap, let out the traveler to just past the three-quarters mark, and loosened the sheet a bit. It would have been great fun to fly a hull, but we were out on business, and I didn't want to take a chance on dumping. There was some swell, but Garth was expert at shifting his weight at the right moment to keep our center of gravity toward the rear to prevent us from accidentally pitchpoling.

Three quarters of the way across the river, and perhaps a quarter mile north of the tanker, I tacked, heading high into the wind, beating on a direct line toward the tanker's bow. A hundred yards away, I tacked again, heading directly into the wind and intentionally going into irons. I brought the traveler back to the center point and cinched down the boom to minimize luffing of the sail. While the wind was in our face and trying to push us back, our surface area was minimized; as I had hoped, the current caught us and carried us forward at one or two knots. Five minutes later we were drifting beneath the tanker's bow, looking up at two crewmen who had taken time off from their chores to watch us pass by. One of them, a dark-skinned man with a handlebar moustache and a puffy, black birthmark on his cheek, looked downright hostile; the other, a sallow-faced crewman wearing a rumpled seaman's cap low on his forehead, merely seemed curious. I waved to the curious-looking one, who waved back.

"Ahoy, there," I called. "How's it going?"

"No hablamos ingles," the gloomy-faced man called back. Then he looked at the other man, and they both laughed.

Garth shouted, "We want to talk to the captain!"

"No hablamos ingles," the crewman with the cap replied, and they both laughed again.

I untied the jug from the trampoline lacing, held it aloft. "Try speaking this, amigos! We want to speak to your captain about what's in this jug! Agua mala from this ship! It's important! He's going to want to talk to us! Tell him we want to come aboard! Go get him!"

The two men conferred as we continued to drift down the length of the massive tanker. Then, somewhat to my surprise, the glum-looking one with the birthmark saluted us, then turned away from the railing and disappeared from sight. The second crewman stayed where he was, staring after us with a somewhat amused expression on his face.

We came abreast of the stern. It was evident that the ship had already begun to unload its cargo, for the thick top of the great steel rudder was just visible above the waterline. It was time to turn around. I waited until we were about fifteen yards astern of the tanker, then nodded to Garth. I pushed the tiller as far as it would go to the starboard side while Garth unlocked the sheet and pushed the boom as far out as he could in the same direction, causing us to backwind. A catamaran is very fast when sailing in a straight line, especially on a beam reach, but it's a pig in water when coming about; locked in irons, the wind constantly tends to suck the craft back into a line parallel with, and facing, the wind's direction. However, after three near misses, we finally managed to get the stern kicked around to a degree where we had a proper angle to the wind and could make headway. I pointed north, at a forty-five-degree angle away from the tanker. I sailed us in a broad semicircle, then repeated my original maneuver, sending us into irons near the bow of the ship, cinching down the boom, and letting the current carry us along the port side of the ship. The two crewmen we had originally spoken to had been joined by a third at the railing. This crewman was thickset, with very large black eyes. He wore a red bandana around his head, and, despite the heat of the summer day, a heavy black wool sweater. His expression was somber as he stared down at us.

"Yo!" I called to the man in the black sweater. "You Captain Jefferson?"

"No," he replied in a deep, rich baritone that carried clearly down to us. He had a pronounced Greek accent. "What do you want?"

"We'd like permission to come aboard. There's a big police and Coast Guard investigation going on concerning the man who died under your ship a few weeks ago. He was taking samples of the bad water you people were flushing out of your tanks, and they think somebody on board may have purposely turned on your ship's engines while he was under there. That would make it murder. All we want to do is get Captain Jefferson's side of the story before the police, Coast Guard, and newspaper people begin swarming around here and he gets too busy to talk to us. How about it? You got a rope ladder we can tie up to? We don't have that many questions, and we won't take up much of the captain's time."

"Who the hell are you people?"

We were drifting out of earshot, and since the English-speaking Greek did not seem inclined to follow us down the railing, it meant we would have to come about once again.

"We're investigators working for your insurance company!" I shouted as I pushed the tiller hard to starboard to initiate the maneuver that would bring us around. "Just wait there! We'll be right back!"

"This is a waste of time, Mongo," Garth said evenly as he pushed on the boom, and I struggled to get us under sail. "Maybe worse than a waste of time."

"You could be right, but sitting around on your deck and watching the river flow was getting to be a waste of time too, wasn't it? You wanted to do something, remember? We're doing something. At the worst, we can always go to the Coast Guard with the photographs when we get back. The only way we can get a murder investigation started is to catch somebody else's interest. If we can't interest the police or Coast Guard, then we have to try to interest the captain-and hope he says or does something incriminating."

Garth merely shrugged. "I didn't say I disagreed with your reasoning, and I wanted to come out here even more than you did. We gave it a shot, but now I think we're wasting our time. I'd like to see Jefferson's reaction too, but we're not going to get on board."

"Ah, but we don't know yet how the powers that be on board that ship are reacting to my insurance investigator ploy. I say we make one more pass."

"Go for it."

We went around the horn again, with Garth making only an occasional disparaging remark about the believability of insurance investigators conducting official business on a fourteen-foot catamaran. The sallow-faced crewman with the rumpled cap had been left alone at the rail to chart our progress. However, after we'd gone into irons and once again begun to drift with the current alongside the ship, the Greek suddenly appeared at the railing.

"Go away!" he bellowed in his resonant baritone, gesturing angrily. He paused, glanced toward the south, then looked back at us. "You're crazy! Get out of here!"

I once again held up the green plastic jug. It was time to let out all the stops. "This jug contains samples of water flushed from this tanker into the river. It proves you've been polluting. We can also prove that you've been taking on river water, in violation of the law, shipping it somewhere else and selling it. This sample was collected by the man who was killed under your ship. Now, we're trying to be fair about this. This is absolutely the last chance your captain is going to have to tell his side of the story before his picture and the Coast Guard's version of what happened get splashed all over the newspapers. It's in his interest to talk to us. We won't take up much of his time." I paused, waiting to see if my words would have some effect. They didn't. The two men remained where they were at the rail, but they were no longer paying any attention to us; both crewmen were now looking to the south. And we were once again almost out of earshot. "At least bring him up on deck to talk to us!" I shouted. "He's being accused of murder! Let us-!"

Suddenly both men turned and abruptly walked away from the railing.

"So much for rattling cages," Garth said in disgust. "Let's get out of here. We'll call the Coast Guard and the CFA, turn over what we've got, and be done with it. We've done everything we could, and we're at a dead end. Maybe we can leak some information to the papers, see what happens. There's no way we can do everybody's fucking job for them."

"When you're right, you're right," I said with a sigh, and pushed the tiller hard to starboard. "But Tom was your friend, and I had to hear you say we'd done enough."

From somewhere in the distance, from the south, the low rumble of a powerful engine could be heard. Garth shifted his weight toward the stern, uncinched the boom, pushed it out. I jiggled the tiller, trying to kick the stern around, but the wind had increased in velocity; we kept getting sucked back into irons, while at the same time being pushed ever closer to the tanker.

"Let's goose it out of here, Mongo," Garth said tersely, glancing back at the steel hull behind him at the same time as he pushed the boom even further to starboard.

"I'm trying, I'm trying."

The rumble of the powerboat's engines had become a roar; the boat was not only coming in our direction but sounded unusually close to shore, not out in the middle of the river where you would expect a large powerboat at full throttle to be. I turned, squinted, and could see a black shape on the surface with a large rooster tail of wake rising into the air behind it. The airplane-like sound the craft was producing indicated the boat was carrying an engine-maybe two-generating upwards of 350 horsepower; that would make it a cigarette boat, or an equivalent model. On its present course, it was heading right for the tanker-and us.

The breeze shifted slightly, and a puff of wind kicked our stern to port. I quickly sheeted in the mainsail and straightened the tiller. We began to slowly move away from the tanker as we stayed just on the edge of going back into irons. We were heading directly into the path of the approaching powerboat, but at the moment I was more concerned with avoiding being pinned against the hull of the tanker than with the powerboat and its cowboy driver. There was no way the man or woman at the helm of the black boat could avoid seeing our sail sticking up into the air; since anything under sail always has the right-of-way over powerboats, the driver would turn away. There was going to be some pretty powerful wake to contend with, but we'd been in rough waters before, and I was sure we could handle it. I eased the tiller over a bit, putting us on more of a port tack that would enable me to steer across the boat's wake at a forty-five-degree angle.

The problem was that the driver of the black boat wasn't bearing off; he was heading for us straight amidships.

"Son-of-a-bitch!" Garth said sharply. "The guy's crazy! He's coming right across our bow!"

I pushed the tiller hard to the right, trying to bring the bow of the catamaran to an angle that would enable me to head into the other boat's wake head-on-our only chance, under these circumstances, to keep from capsizing. I anchored my feet in the hiking straps, firmly gripped the handle of the tiller with one hand, and the steel frame behind me with the other.

"Hang on!" Garth shouted as he laid himself out flat across the trampoline, spreading his arms and legs out to his sides.

With a deafening scream of engines more familiar to an airport than a river, the thirty-foot-long, jet-black cigarette boat shot across in front of us, not more than six feet from our bow. In the quarter second before its bow wave hit us, I noticed that the name of the boat painted on the hull had been covered over with silver, water-resistant duct tape. The driver, only his head and shoulders visible from where he sat in the cockpit, was wearing a black ski mask.

Since it was a tad warm to be wearing a ski mask, my master investigator's instincts told me that the boat's close passage was no accident, and that the driver clearly intended to kill us.

That was all the time for thinking I had. The bow wave hit only a split second before the spray from the rooster-tail wake washed over the cat, blinding me. The bow wave rolled under the pontoons, lifting us high up in the air, then throwing us back toward the tanker. I leaned forward as much as possible, for at that moment the critical danger was of flipping over backward. In the next moment, the danger was the reverse as we shot down the face of the bow wave; if the tips of the pontoons nosed into the water at the bottom of the wave's trough, we were sure to pitchpole. Garth had rolled back toward the stern to bring the bow up. The nose of the cat did disappear into the water at the bottom of the trough, and for one sickening moment I thought we were going to be catapulted forward. But then the nose came out, and we rode up and over another wave.

In our situation, the cat's raised sail was worse than useless, for there was no way to harness the wind blowing at us in order to sail away; the Mylar sheet was flapping violently, causing the steel boom to bang back and forth over Garth's head and only inches from my face. The result was that we were turned ninety degrees, and the waves were coming at us broadside.

With the passage of the bow wave, and the next two or three that rolled under us, the worst of the wake was spent, and we had not capsized. However, we were turned broadside, caught in irons, and the cigarette boat was making a very tight turn in order to make another pass at us. And we were no more than a few feet from the steel wall that was the hull of the tanker. There was no way of getting the cat under control before the powerboat came back at us, and I braced for the inevitable collision with the hull of the tanker as I looked out over the water, searching for other boats; there were two other sailboats in the area, but they were some distance away, across the river and to the south, and it was impossible to gauge if they could see what was happening-not that it would make any difference to the man in the cigarette boat; we were likely to be dead long before any kind of help could arrive. When we whapped up against the side of the tanker, we could either be knocked unconscious, and unceremoniously drown, or be forced underwater and carved up by barnacles on the hull that could slice like millions of tiny switchblades.

Without having any idea of just what I intended to do with a length of rope when I had it, I released the boom, grabbed hold of it, then untied the knot securing the sheet to the traveler's car. Garth saw what I was trying to do, rolled over on his back, reached up, and gripped the boom with both hands, holding it steady. I reached out for where the other end of the line was tied to a clew at the heel of the mainsail. I broke three fingernails, but finally managed to pull the line loose just as the powerboat, and its deafening wall of sound, roared past once again, this time only a yard or so from our starboard pontoon. The bow wave lifted us, hurled the cat back against the tanker's steel hull. The tip of the mast hit first, and there was a sound like a gunshot as one of the steel shrouds snapped, and the deadly end of the wire whipped through the air just inches from my face. The mast snapped at its base. The hull of the catamaran banged once more against the hull with a force that I could feel in every bone of my body, then flipped over, dumping us into the churning water.

I clawed my way to the surface, felt a moment of heart-freezing panic when my right hand touched Mylar; the sail was over us. With my heart pounding, terror consuming all the oxygen in my system, I jackknifed in the water, forcing myself to dive deeper, the only direction I could go if I hoped to survive. I flattened out, began desperately pulling with my arms and kicking with my legs, unable to see anything in the murky, silt-roiled water. With my lungs bursting, I shot up for what I hoped was the surface, knowing I would never have a second chance if I still came up under the death shroud of the sail. My head broke the surface only inches from the edge of the floating mass of Mylar. Pent-up breath exploded from my lungs, and I just managed to gulp some air before a wave washed over me, driving me back under the surface. The water carried a troubling new threshing, metallic sound that throbbed in my ears.

The ominous, deep growl was the tanker's engines rumbling to life, ripping the river with their giant talons of shaped steel.

I came back up, gulped more air, desperately looked around for Garth, and finally spotted him. One of the cat's pontoons had cracked open and sunk below the surface, but the other was still afloat, and Garth, blood from a gash on his forehead streaming down over his face, was draped over it, feebly moving his arms in an effort to hang on. But he was losing the battle, slipping. Fifteen feet beyond him, the water at the stern of the ship was frothing and churning from the thrust of the mighty engines far below the surface. That's where the current was carrying us both.

I clawed at the sail, pulling it into me, and it finally caught on the tip of the floating pontoon. I pulled myself hand over hand to the pontoon, heaved myself up on it, straddling the tiny island of fiberglass. Garth's head was slipping below the surface. I grabbed the back of his polo shirt, gave a mighty heave, and managed to pull him back up. His head lolled back, and I could see that his eyes were out of focus.

"Garth!" I screamed. "Garth, you've got to hang on! I can't haul you up! I can't do it alone, Garth! Hang on! Get your arms up!"

His right arm slowly came up out of the water, dropped over the pontoon. I gave his shirt another tug, then let go, quickly reached down, lifted up his left arm, draped it over the pontoon. The roar of the powerboat was rising, behind me and slightly to my left, as the driver came at us once again. The sail was now billowing in the water all around us, and the rope I had pulled loose from the rigging was floating on its surface. I grabbed it and pulled it in, gathering it in loose coils around my waist, looking for an end. I found one, and quickly formed a loop around Garth's chest, under his arms, and tied it off with a bowline.

The airplane-engine scream of the cigarette boat swept past behind me, and I braced for the thunderous wake and spray, gripping Garth's shirt collar tightly with one hand while holding a coil of rope in the other. I twisted around on the pontoon and stuck out both feet to fend off as we were swept up once more against the tanker's hull. I knew the shock might very well break my legs, but it was better that my legs be broken than Garth's back. Where there was life, there was. . something, even if I couldn't quite recall at the moment what it was. I certainly preferred it to death.

The bow wave hit, lifting the catamaran, turning it, smashing its stern end into the steel hull, and saving my legs. The second wave turned us once again, and this time it was my head that smacked against the steel, barely a foot above a field of barnacles that would have scalped me. I felt the shock through my entire body, but, incredibly, there was no pain. For a moment everything went dark, but I managed to stay on the pontoon and maintain my grip on Garth's shirt collar. Knowing that to lose consciousness meant death for both of us, I screamed inwardly at myself, concentrating in the prickly, star-streaked darkness on the tactile feel of Garth's shirt, the fiberglass under me, the water pounding all around and over me; if those sensations went away, we went away.

Then my vision cleared, just in time for me to see that we were inside the frothing circle of water at the ship's stern, nudging up against the great steel rudder. I could feel us being sucked down.

As the shriek of the cigarette boat faded into the distance, heading back south, I looked around for something to grab hold of. There was nothing. With the water frothing all around us from the churning propeller blades below, I looked in a different direction-up. Throughout the attack by the powerboat, the tanker had apparently continued to off-load its cargo of oil, for the stern was now perhaps a foot higher in the water than it had been, exposing even more of the squared-off top of the massive rudder blade. It was the only angular surface in town, and it was the one I was going to have to reach if we were to keep breathing for more than another minute or two.

I checked to make certain that the loop around Garth's chest was secure. I had no idea where the other end of the line was, nor time to find it. What I did have was a coil of rope in my left hand, with the rest of the line floating in the white water around me. I stood up on the pontoon, flexing my knees for balance, then gathered in more rope and flung the coil over my head, trying to catch the edge of the rudder blade. I missed by an inch, and the rope fell back into the water. Swaying unsteadily on the slippery fiberglass surface of the sinking pontoon, I gathered up the rope, flung it aloft once again. This time a loop caught on the edge of the rudder. I began to draw in the slack, hoping with some fervor that I wasn't simply pulling up the loose end. Then, suddenly, the rope went taut. I pulled even harder, and Garth's torso rose a few inches out of the water. It would have to be enough, for I was running out of time and in imminent danger of losing consciousness. I tied off the rope in the loop I had already knotted around Garth's chest. As the ruined catamaran was sucked under the boiling water, I leaped onto Garth's back, wrapping one arm tightly around his neck below his windpipe and using my free hand to cup his chin and tilt it back in order to keep his head above water.

If we could just survive for another five or ten minutes, if the rope held, I thought there was a chance we could make it. The tanker was continuing to unload, and rising ever higher in the water as it did so, lifting us with it. The crew and captain of the tanker couldn't see us, but two men dangling on a rope off the rudder of their ship should certainly attract some attention from the crew of any other boat that passed close enough to see us.

I thought I felt the rope slip a little. I looked up to try to determine if the line was slipping over the edge of the rudder, and was amazed to find that I couldn't see that far. My field of vision was filled with sparkling red, blue, and green dots surrounded by a shiny black border that kept growing, swallowing up the dancing points of light. I tasted blood, but wasn't sure whether it was mine or Garth's, since I had my cheek pressed against his.

I tightened my grip around Garth's neck, closed my eyes. The rope was going to hold, I thought; I just had to make sure that I held. We weren't going to drown, we were going to be lifted clear of the water, I was going to be able to maintain my grip, somebody was going to see us dangling, and we were going to be rescued. I kept repeating those thoughts in my mind like a mantra, and I was a third of the way through the third rerun when I passed out.