Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ethan had the Sundancer's lines off and the diesels turning before the man who took Sloane’s wake had finished slapping the pilings, and he knew, even as he did it, that the boat under him could not win a straight race against the thing taking Sloane away.
The center-console was lighter and faster and already up on plane and gone, a gray smear making for the channel mouth, and the Sea Ray was a forty-two-foot cruiser that wallowed before she gathered, a boat built for comfort and not for this, and any man who put her stern-to and tried to run the lighter boat down would watch it shrink to a dot and lose it past the markers.
Sloane had read that herself from inside the man's arms. A boat wouldn't make a mark before the tide turned.
So Ethan didn't chase. He stood at the helm with the throttles in his hand and did the only thing his training had bought him that the cleaner didn't have, which was that he knew where the man had to go and what the bottom was going to do to him when he got there.
“Caleb. He can't run the main channel straight out.” Ethan brought the bow around, not toward the channel mouth where the cleaner was headed, but across the basin on a hard diagonal toward the north shore, away from the obvious line.
“The channel doglegs east around the Spit Marsh shoal before it opens to the Gulf.
Eleven hundred yards out, it necks down to forty feet wide between the markers and a sandbar, and it's a dead-low tide, and a stranger running it at speed in a strange boat either slows down hard or he puts that outboard into the bar and stops dead. He doesn't know that. I do.”
“You're cutting the dogleg,” Caleb said, getting it.
“There's a flat behind the Spit Marsh shoal the locals run at half tide if they draw under four feet. The Sea Ray draws three-eight. I can take her across the back of the shoal while he runs the long way around it, and I come out at the neck the same time he does, except I come out ahead and on his inside.” Ethan pushed the throttles to the stops, and the Sundancer dug in and came up heavy and determined, not fast but committed, pointed at a stretch of pale green water that any sane captain avoided.
“If I read the bottom wrong, I put us both on the shoal and lose her for good.
If I read it right, I'm waiting at the neck when he gets there.”
“Coast Guard's twelve minutes out now,” Caleb said. “They can't be the catch. You know that.”
“I know. They're the back door. I'm the catch.” The shoal water came up under the bow, paling from green to the milky tan that meant the bottom was close, and Ethan put one hand flat on the throttle and the other on the wheel and ran a forty-two-foot boat across a flat he had no business taking at speed, reading the water with the eyes that were trained on this coast had taught him, the subtle darkening that meant a foot more under the keel, the streak of turtle grass that meant a foot less, threading a boat between the bottom and the disaster on instinct sharpened to the edge a man only found when the only other option was watching a woman disappear.
The depth alarm started screaming. He turned it off without looking and kept reading the water with his eyes, because the alarm only knew numbers and he knew this flat, and he held the boat in the thread of slightly darker green that ran across the back of the shoal like a seam, and the Sundancer skated across water that should have stopped her, and on the far side the bottom dropped away into the channel neck, and Ethan brought her around hard into the forty-foot gap between the markers and the bar exactly as a gray center-console came around the long way at speed and found a forty-two-foot wall of fiberglass already sitting in the only road to the Gulf.
Sloane had spent the run learning the man the way she'd spent years learning her docks, because learning a thing was the only power she had left, and she was not going to waste it being afraid.
He'd put her on the deck of the cockpit with her back against the console and a zip tie on her wrists, fast and practiced, and then he'd mostly forgotten her, because a woman with her hands bound on the deck of a moving boat was not a problem a man at the wheel had to keep solving, and that forgetting was the first thing Sloane filed.
He drove with his whole attention forward, on the water, on the channel coming up, and he checked her with a glance every few seconds, and the glances were getting further apart as the driving got harder, and she understood that the busier the water got, the less of him she'd have to deal with, and the channel ahead was getting very busy.
The zip tie was tight, but it was on her wrists in front of her, not behind, because he'd bound her fast and rough in the half-second after he'd thrown her down and he'd taken the easy purchase, and a man in a hurry made the choices a hurry allowed.
Her hands were in front of her. She kept them low against her stomach and still, so he'd keep reading them as bound and done, and she worked the slack she had, the quarter-inch a fast zip tie left, turning her wrists against it slow and steady while she watched the back of his head and learned the rhythm of his glances.
She didn't know boats the way her brother had, but she'd grown up on this water and she knew this channel, knew the dogleg, knew the markers, knew the bar at the neck that her father had warned her off before she was tall enough to see over the wheel, and when the boat came around the long bend toward the neck, she understood from the geometry of it that the water was about to force the man to slow, that there was a place coming up where he'd have to bring both hands and his whole attention to the wheel or put them both on the bar, and she stopped working the zip tie and got her feet under her, low, coiled, and waited for the place she knew was coming, the way she'd taught herself to wait for everything, the storm and the slow season and the four years of mornings, patient and ready and watching for the one moment the water would hand her.
And then the boat came around the last of the bend and the man hauled back hard on the throttle and swore, because there was a wall of white fiberglass sitting square in the neck where no boat should be, and his whole body went forward and tight over the wheel as he fought the boat down out of plane in a channel suddenly too narrow to turn in, and his attention left her completely, all of it, forward, on the disaster in front of him, and that was the moment, the one she'd been waiting for, and Sloane Mercer came up off the deck of the cockpit with her bound hands and drove both of them and all her weight up into the back of his head.
From the helm of the Sundancer, Ethan saw it happen in pieces that his mind only assembled afterward.
He saw the center-console come around the bend and buck as the man chopped the throttle, saw it slew sideways in the narrow water, saw the gray hull heel and lose way and broach in the chop coming back off his own wall of fiberglass.
And he saw, in the cockpit, low and fast, Sloane come up off the deck where he hadn't even let himself look for her yet, come up with her hands bound in front of her and her whole body behind it, and hit the man at the wheel in the back of the skull with everything four years of grief and twenty minutes of fury had stored up in her, and he saw the man pitch forward into the wheel, and the boat, with nobody driving it and its bow already swinging, slewed the rest of the way around and went up onto the bar with a sound like the world tearing and stopped dead.
Ethan had the Sundancer alongside before the cleaner got his hands back under him.
He came over the gunwale of the grounded boat with the boat hook in one hand because it was the nearest hard thing and eight months of cover did not change what twenty years before that had trained into his hands, and the cleaner was up on one knee shaking the blow off and reaching for the waistband at the small of his back, and Ethan didn't give him the half-second it would have taken to find what he was reaching for.
He put him down. It was not clean, and it was not pretty and it was nothing like the eleven seconds Graham had spent on Doyle, it was a man removing the only thing standing between him and the woman on the deck, and when it was done the cleaner was face down in six inches of bilge water and not reaching for anything and Ethan had a knee in his back and the man's own zip ties off his belt and around his wrists, pulled harder than custody required and exactly as hard as Ethan needed them pulled.
“Clear,” he said into the radio, breathing hard, the word coming out wrecked. “I've got her. Subject down and restrained. We're on the bar at the channel neck. Send the Guard to us.”
Then he left the cleaner in the bilge water and turned to Sloane.
She was on her feet, braced against the canted deck, her wrists still bound in front of her and a welt rising along her cheekbone where something had caught her in the grounding, and she was looking at him with the steady blue directness that had taken him apart on a dock a lifetime ago and took him apart now.
She was, against everything, almost smiling.
“You cut the dogleg,” she said. Her voice shook; the words didn't. “You took the Sea Ray across the back of the shoal. I felt the bottom rise under us as I watched you do it. Nobody runs that flat.”
“You hit him,” Ethan said. He had his knife out and her wrists in his hand, working the blade under the zip tie carefully and fast. His hands were not as steady as he needed them to be, and he let them not be, just this once.
“I had the wall. I didn't have the inside of that boat. You made the opening. I just walked through it.”
“We made the opening.” The tie came free, and she brought her hands apart and flexed them.
The welt on her cheek was going to be a bruise by noon, and she looked down at the cleaner face down in the bilge and then back up at Ethan.
The almost-smile went, and what came up under it was the thing she'd been holding off with the learning and the waiting and the work.
The size of what had just happened, the cold water of it.
“He came in for Doyle. He asked me about slip nine. Ethan, that man came to my marina to—” She stopped.
She was shaking now, fully, her body finally taking its turn after holding still for all of it.
“What is happening. What is this? You said you'd tell me. You said when it was done.”
And there it was, on a grounded boat on a sandbar with a restrained man in the bilge and the first sound of the Coast Guard's engines coming up the channel behind them.
The edge of the thing he'd promised her, the thing he'd carried onto her dock and through the sandwich and the storm and two mornings of her asleep against him, asking to be said.
She'd come through the worst of it and she'd earned the truth, he'd promised it to her looking at her, and every cell in him wanted to give it to her now, here, with his hands still on her wrists, because she'd just fought her own way half out of a kidnapping and there was nothing left he wanted to keep from a woman like that.
But not here. Not on a sandbar with a man in the bilge and federal engines closing in, and her body still shaking with the adrenaline of having saved herself.
The promise had been from him, looking at her, in a room, whole and true and at the right time, and the right time is not a crime scene with a welt rising on her face.
To do it here would be to do it for himself, to set the weight down the first second he could, and she deserved better than to learn where her brother was on the worst-best morning of her life with her wrists not five minutes free of a zip tie.
“I'll tell you everything,” he said, and held her eyes, and meant it with the whole of him.
“Today. In a few hours, when you're off this water and warm and there's a wall at your back and nobody else in the room.
I will not let it land on you out of nowhere, and I won't dump it on you on a wrecked boat either.
You've taken enough hard things in the last hour.
The next hard thing waits until you're standing on something that isn't sinking.
That's still me keeping the promise. I need you to trust me one more time, for a few hours.”
She searched his face, and he let her, he held still under it as he had on the couch, gave her the most honest face he had, and whatever she found there was enough, because she nodded, and then she did the thing that nearly took his legs; she stepped across the canted deck and put her face against his chest, over the place she always put her hand, and let him put his arms around her, and stood there shaking against him on a grounded boat while the Coast Guard came around the bend.
Holding onto the one solid thing on the water, except this time the thing she was holding onto was not taking her anywhere she didn't want to go.