I aimed at him and fired.

“Goddamn it!” he bellowed, jerking back into safety. Then his hand snaked out and he fired at me. One bullet thudded into the deck. The next was closer, ricocheting off the anchor stanchion.

“Keep her alive! I want her alive!” Quince shouted a reminder.

“I’ve got a fuckin’ hole in my arm,” the crewman yelled at him.

“If she’s dead, I’ll do to your ass what I was going to do to her cunt,” Quince roared at him, silencing his complaints.

Did I have one or two bullets left? I desperately tried to count the shots I had fired. Two. But I wasn’t positive.

The shadows were appearing again.

The river or my gun. Which would it be?

“Give up, Micky. If you give up now maybe it’ll be a quick bullet,” Quince offered me. But he was an empty man with no mercy in him.

“You can’t win,” Vern seconded him, his shadow defiantly standing on deck. “The harder you make it for us, the worse it is for you.”

A figure joined him on the other side of the deck. Then the man on the upper deck jumped down to this level. They all slowly came toward me, confident of victory.

“Pull that trigger one more time and you’ll find out what pain can really be like,” Vern taunted me.

“You lied to me,” the man in the middle shrieked. It was Ron. “You left me in that cabin. I’ll teach you to be mean to me.” And it was pathetic Ron, a blade glinting in his hand, who charged my barricade, his humiliation goading him.

I fired. He didn’t scream, didn’t moan, simply crumpled to the deck, the long knife in his hand slipping out with only a slight clatter. I had wanted my penultimate bullet for Vern, but I didn’t get that choice. I had so few choices now. One bullet and what to do with it. Which second out of a very few minutes, to put the gun barrel in my mouth and pull the trigger.

Another shadow joined them, taking Ron’s center position.

“I told you not to pull that trigger,” Vern cooed, a hideous joy in his voice. “Now I’m really going to have to teach you a lesson.”

Suddenly the boat lurched, its keel digging into the river bottom with a grinding moan. The stern slew about, pivoting on the grounded bow. I grabbed one of the anchor stanchions to keep myself from being thrown overboard. The Earthly Delightshuddered like an animal in a trap.

Someone on the upper deck screamed, “My leg. Oh, God, my leg.”

And near me, a few yards away, another voice, no longer triumphant, begged, “Help me, help, I can’t hold on.” Vern had been thrown under the railing, one foot caught on one of the supports, a hand holding to the edge of the deck.

The throb of the engine changed; the helmsman had thrown us into reverse in an attempt to get the ship unstuck. The Earthly Delightshivered as if suddenly chilled at what was taking place on her decks. The stern pivoted back, violently shaking the boat.

Vern screamed as he lost his grip. He had no life jacket. The river would be merciless. I watched him slip away with detached interest, not even feeling the horrific joy of seeing him destroyed. For a moment, I imagined that it was my cousin slipping into emptiness in the dark waters. Still, I felt no emotion, no victory. I realized that his destruction would not be my salvation.

“Goddamn it! Get us off,” Quince was roaring.

The boat jerked again, groaning and scraping against the sandbar. I still had to hold on to my pillar for support. Quince was having the helmsman turn the still-free stern from side to side, trying to wiggle the boat off the bar.

The stalking shadows had retreated, away from the precarious edges of the deck.

“Full astern! How could you ground this fucking tub?” Quince shouted at the helmsman.

But the Earthly Delightremained hard aground and all she could do was pivot her stern a few degrees either way. Quince finally gave up on that and in desperation yelled for full ahead in an attempt to ride over the bar. The boat lurched, the bow digging further into the river bottom, the stern nosing up. I heard a number of crashes below deck from things being thrown about by the lurching of the ship.

“Full astern,” Quince yelled, but it was a useless order and he knew it. For several minutes, he let the engine’s whine pitch higher and higher. Then they were cut off.

Into the silence, I heard his voice say, “We’ve got to get her. She can’t be alive when the Coast Guard comes.”

I checked my life jacket one more time, making sure it was tightly fastened. I clutched the other jacket to me. I could use it as a small raft or throw it away to give Quince another life jacket to fire at.

The relentless shadows reappeared, coming for me.

I fired my last shot at them.

Giving myself no more time for thought or hesitation, I ran to the side of the boat. I leaped onto the railing, using it to push myself off as I dived into the Mississippi. I had chosen the river, preferring the slight chance it offered, or at least the reprieve that I would not be the one to take my own life.

The water was cold and hard. I went under, the force of the dive taking me deep. The life jacket yanked me back up, gasping and sputtering out the muddy water.

But the current spun me about, tumbling me over and over, the life jacket pulling me back up only to be grabbed again by the river. It was much colder than I’d expected. I struggled against the current, thrusting my face above the dark water to gasp in a breath.

A bright light blinded me. I could hear nothing beyond the roar of the river, but I saw the wake of the bullet as it hit the water beside me. When I heard it, the crack of the pistol sounded so far away.

I gulped a breath and forced myself under water. Maddeningly, the current thrust me back up again, into the glare of the light. I exhaled to take another breath and try again, but I was tumbled under before I could get air into my lungs. The river held me under until I had to struggle and claw my way to the surface.

I spat out the brown water as I surfaced, still managing to swallow a nauseating amount of it. The light had lost me and I was again in the dark with the water.

I clutched the second life jacket to me, jamming it under my chin in an attempt to keep my head out of the swirling muck. For a moment I floated easily, the eddies teasing me with their gentleness.

Somewhere I had lost my gun. I couldn’t recall throwing it away on deck. I thought I still had it in my hand when I had jumped, but I didn’t have it now. I had one of those irrational pangs at losing it, as if it could matter at the moment. But the gun had been my father’s, he had gotten it in the Second World War. I had carried it more because it was a connection to him than for any other reason. It really wasn’t a very suitable gun, an old .45. But it was gone now, the river had claimed it.

Then the current grabbed me again, pulling and twisting my legs like the limbs of a puppet held by a malicious child. A wave slammed into and over my face, forcing itself up my nose. I couldn’t hold the other life jacket under my chin. It spun away, then back, covering my face until I clawed it away in panic. I was pulled under again, surfacing only long enough to get a watery breath.

When I came up again the second life jacket was gone, and I thrust forcefully with my arms and legs in an attempt to get my head far enough out of the water to take a clean breath. I gasped in air, but the river tugged me back, the water again covering me for an instant, before the life jacket pulled my face only slightly above it.

I wondered if you could drown by degrees, a little bit of water in each breath until one little bit became too much. Just the effort of keeping my head above water was exhausting me. It seemed so long ago when I had been back on the boat. Back when I thought I could possibly swim, with the help of a life jacket and make it to shore. Now I knew how utterly impossible that was.

I caught a glimpse of a light playing across the river’s surface. They were still hunting for me. And for the few more minutes I would have in this existence, I got satisfaction from knowing that Quince would lose to the Mississippi, the impersonal river would not enjoy killing me.

I thought of Cordelia. I should have said, “I love you,” when she had been close enough to hear. I should have called her instead of letting the silence build. But those regrets hurt too much to hold near.

The light swung near, heading for me just as the river pulled me under. I was tumbled over and over again before being spewed to the surface, a deadly lethargy of exhaustion and cold seeping into me. But still I took another breath, still spitting out the water that attempted to accompany air into my lungs.

Bits and pieces of flotsam and jetsam, the debris of a major river, spun downstream with me. A board came threateningly close, the force of the water making it deadly. Something tangled in my legs for a moment before being torn away. I had a nightmare vision of Vern’s drowned body being flung against mine, but the shape that passed was only a garbage bag.

The roar of the river increased, as if, bit by bit, it would be all I would ever know—until there was nothing.

The light swung on me again, before the river tumbled me out of it, almost as if they were playing a child’s game of hide-and-seek with my battered body.

I heard the bullhorn and my name again. I thought by now I would have been taken away from the ship, away from Quince’s voice. I struggled up to look, to see where I was. The river, the shore, everything was blackness around me. I spun wildly, throwing myself around to see behind me, expecting the Earthly Delightto be looming there. But only the same black river confronted me. Maybe I was hallucinating.

I heard it again, my name, and the light found me.

If I could get my life jacket off, I would be gone, the river would take me quickly. My hands were numb and trembling with exhaustion as I fumbled with the straps.

The voice repeated my name over and over again, the river dragging me off, then thrusting me back, forcing me to listen. I realized that it was not Quince. “Micky, Micky, wave if you can hear me,” it shouted.

I made an attempt at a wave, but the current spun me around, washing another wall of water over my head. I lost the voice as I choked and gasped.

The light was still on me. I couldn’t see. Another bullet zinged by. The light snapped off and the river thrust me up enough so that I could see that the light was now focused on the Earthly Delight.I heard two distinct roars, the river swirling about me, and another that sounded like a helicopter.

“Micky. We’re going to drop a ladder,” the bullhorn voice shouted. “Wave if you understand.” It sounded like O’Connor.

I managed the best wave I could. I heard the splash of something hitting the water, but I couldn’t see it in the dark. For a moment the light flashed on the ladder, then off. It was yards away from me, too far to get to.

The distant crack of a rifle shot let me know that Quince and his crew were still shooting at us. The helicopter needed the light to see where to drop the ladder, I needed the light to see it, but Quince was using the light to fire.

Suddenly the ladder swung by me. It caught me on the neck, then scraped over my shoulder before disappearing out of reach. The river threw me around and under. I couldn’t find the ladder when I resurfaced.

“Micky,” O’Connor called, but his voice sounded fainter. The sound of the helicopter was receding.

Then the light swung nearby. I reached out for it as if I could grab it and pull it to me. Someone must have seen or sensed my motion, because the light returned and found me.

“Grab the ladder,” O’Connor yelled as the helicopter turned back to me.

This time I saw the ladder dragging through the water toward me. I seized a rope side as it twisted by, wrapping it around my arm. The river tried to drag me away, pulling me so fiercely into the current that all I could do was hold on to the rope. I couldn’t get my other arm around to hold with two hands. The relentless pull of the water was sucking all the strength from my arm. I couldn’t hold on much longer.

Then the river let go, as if saying, perhaps another time. I was able to kick my legs over, getting one through a rung on the ladder. I gripped the ladder with my other arm; the one that had held me felt numb and dead, a bloodied rope burn across my palm and around my wrist. I wrapped myself into the ladder, pulling a shoulder through one rung, winding the hanging rope around my other leg. It wasn’t possible for me to climb it, I was too exhausted for that.

The light shone on me again for a moment. I heard the bullets that it attracted whiz by. The light snapped off, and, with a sickening jolt, I was jerked out of the river and into the air. The helicopter was climbing with dizzying speed. The river was now hundreds of feet below me. I could make out lights on both banks. The shape of the Earthly Delightwas visible, and as the helicopter ascended, it turned into a toy ship.

The height revived my numb arm. I looped it around a ladder rung. I tried closing my eyes, but that was even more sickening than leaving them open.

My sudden transition from the water to the air caused me to shiver uncontrollably. If I let go, this rescue wasn’t going to do me any good. I wondered how the hell O’Connor was going to get me off this rope ladder and if he knew he had to do it very soon.

Then my sick stomach noticed that the ladder was moving. Not just moving with the helicopter, but swinging in ways that meant the people inside were pulling me in. It wasn’t doing much for my stomach, and I didn’t dare lift my head and look up. My vertigo was already more than severe. The ladder lurched again. I felt a runner brush my hair. Then the ladder swung away from the helicopter and its underside and some of the running lights came into view. The ladder careened back, slamming me into the runner. I screamed from both the pain and the shock of it.

“Get her up! Get her up! We’re losing her!” someone shouted.

The ladder swung again, this time short and abrupt. Then I felt hands roughly tugging me into the helicopter.

“You okay?” someone asked.

I lay on the floor, catching my breath, and trying to calm my nausea as violent shudders racked through me.

“She okay?” someone else asked.

Someone was untangling me from the ladder. I lay still, panting on the floor, unable to answer. Then I crawled like a drunk crab until my head was resting at the cockpit door. I started retching and coughing up the river water. For a moment, I watched a thin stream of vomit fall away, then I closed my eyes. I hoped it landed on Quince’s head.

It felt like forever before the shudders that coursed through me were only shivers from cold.

Someone had a hand on my back, holding the straps of my life jacket to keep me safely inside. “You okay?” he asked. It was O’Connor.

I nodded weakly, then grunted, since I didn’t know how well he could see me. I spat one more time, then rasped out, “I’m finished.”

O’Connor pulled me back into the helicopter. I was totally limp. He placed a blanket around my shoulders, then used a knife to cut the life jacket straps so I could take it off. He wrapped the blanket completely around me and pulled me across his lap, with my head resting on his arm.

I shuddered, the warmth from the blanket and his body reaching me very slowly.

“The kids…in a lifeboat,” I choked out. “Six kids…Cordelia James. Somewhere on the river. Maybe ashore. Need to find them.”

“Don’t worry, we will,” O’Connor assured me. I heard him repeat my message to the copilot who then radioed it in.

That was all I could do. I shivered and tried to get warm.

Finally, when the worst of my shuddering had passed, I asked O’Connor, “How’d you know to look for me?”

“Can you drink this?” was his first response. “It’s coffee.” He poured some out of a thermos.

I took the cup from him, holding it with both my hands. The coffee was loaded with milk and sugar, something I usually don’t like. But milk and sugar were as close as I was likely to come to dinner, so I gulped the warm liquid down, then held the cup out and asked, “More?”

O’Connor filled the cup again, before answering my original question. “Karen Holloway. I hate to say it, but it’s a good thing she’s a rich white lady, otherwise her story would have been thrown out as too bizarre to believe. We were going crazy trying to figure out where you’d disappeared to when we get the call that someone had picked her up down by Violet. I got her on the phone, got the story, and hopped in this bird. You know the rest.”

“What about them?” I asked, a not very clear question.

But O’Connor know who I meant. “A couple of Coast Guard cutters left about the same time we did. We radioed them a little while ago, so they know that you, Dr. James, and the kids aren’t on the boat anymore.”

I grunted a question, my communication skills rapidly dying.

“Karen Holloway, again,” O’Connor answered. “She gave us a rundown of who was on the boat.”

“She okay?” I managed to actually articulate.

“Physically? Yeah. She’s got a lot of questions to answer about this, but a good lawyer can probably get her off with just a slap on the wrist.”

I could think of no more questions that merited shouting over the rumble of the helicopter. All that mattered now was finding Cordelia and the kids.

Chapter 34

I must have dozed, because I was startled into consciousness by the bump of landing and then the sudden cessation of the motor. Still groggy, I slowly sat up. Even my grogginess couldn’t disguise all the places I ached. I glanced at my watch. It was filled with water.

“Easy there,” O’Connor said, keeping a steadying arm across my shoulders.

“There’s no way it’ll be easy here,” I muttered as I stiffly stood up. I was still wet and chilly, so I kept the blanket wrapped around my shoulders. I stumbled to the door of the helicopter and probably could have gotten out on my own (I like to think so), but the pilot and O’Connor insisted on handing me out to the copilot and the ground crew. The copilot was nonchalant as she grabbed my arm, but the ground crew treated me like something a not-well-liked cat had drug in.

I murmured farewell and thanks to the crew as O’Connor led me across the tarmac to a waiting patrol car.

“You want to go to the hospital?” he asked me.

“I’ll be okay. I want to find out what happened to the kids. And Cordelia.”

“We can go back to my office and find out. You up to making a statement?”

“Yeah, sure,” I mumbled.

I dozed on the drive from the helicopter pad to the station house.

“You sure you’re up to this?” O’Connor asked as I stumbled sleepily out of the car.

“I’m going to sleep for a week when this is over, so you’d better get me now,” I informed him.

He shrugged and took my arm. It might have been to steady my shambling gait, but I guessed it was to prove that I wasn’t some waterlogged lunatic wandering into the precinct.

“We did it,” O’Connor announced as we entered the main room. “The suspects are with the Coast Guard and the kids should be okay.”

“And some of us are even ready for next Halloween,” I added.

There were cheers and applause for O’Connor’s news. He led me to some smaller rooms in back.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” I said, wanting to get that out of the way before I sat down and endured a long round of questions.

“You’re on your own,” O’Connor said as he left me at the door of the women’s restroom.

I didn’t really need to pee, I wanted to wash my hands and face and make sure I didn’t have any dead fish tangled in my hair. Draped in the blanket, my hair scraggly, I did look like I should be rattling chains and intoning, “I am the ghost of Christmas past,” at least in an amateur production.

I took off the blanket, then my jacket, and shivered for a moment before taking off my sweater. I let the water run until it was hot, then washed my hands and face. I wrung out my sweater before putting it back on. I quickly peed, then put my jacket back on. It probably wouldn’t be good for much else, but it did offer some warmth. I was still chilly, so I draped the blanket back on before leaving the bathroom.

O’Connor was waiting for me a few discreet doors down the hallway. I joined him and he ushered me into an interrogation room. It was set up with video cameras, tape recorders, all the latest fun stuff. I didn’t really feel up to giving a statement, let alone answering questions, but I had to know if they’d found Cordelia and the children.

“Can I have something to drink?” I asked as I hunched into a chair. “Maybe juice?”

“Sure,” O’Connor answered and dispatched tonight’s bottom-of-the-rung peon to fill my order. “The FBI’s gotten involved in this,” he informed me. “Interstate pornography, kidnapping, the whole shebang.”

I nodded stoically. The more questioners, the more questions. “Any word on the children and Cordelia?”

O’Connor shook his head. “Do you want me to ask again?” he offered.

I nodded yes and he left the room. Several other police types were setting up the cameras and tape recorders. My fifteen minutes of fame were awaiting me.

The door opened and Danny came in. I wasn’t prepared to see her here, although she seemed ready for me. “Danny!” I exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m an assistant DA, remember? If you had made it to Alex’s birthday, you’d have found out that I’ve been promoted to the special sex crimes prosecution team. The minute O’Connor started working with us on this case, you landed right in my lap.”

I started to say that I had always liked being in her lap, but that wasn’t a prudent comment when Danny was in her professional mode and we were surrounded by tape recorders.

“I would hug you,” she continued, “but I shouldn’t have bought this suit, and I don’t want it ruined before I pay it off.”

“It’s okay,” I mumbled. “I’ve been…sort of a shit lately.”

“Sort of, yes,” Danny said matter-of-factly. “Although I will admit that since I’ve been on this case, I’ve gotten complaints about how out of sorts I’ve been. And I’ve only had to deal with it in an office.”

“Yeah, well…”

“Besides, this isn’t the place to get into personal areas,” Danny reminded me. “We’re being joined by the FBI, O’Connor and his team, a few more people from my end, and you get to tell us all about the fun you’ve been having lately.” As she said it, Danny reached out and squeezed my hand.

Then the door opened and she let go. O’Connor, the peon with my juice, about twenty other men and one woman entered. Showtime.