Night Moves (Doc Ford) - By RandyWayne White Page 0,105

vessel like a ski ramp.

I did.

A lunar halo, a wafer of orange showing—that’s the only reason I saw the Stiletto. Thirty feet of boat that punched a black hole in the moon, a silhouette shaped like an axe blade, the sharpest edge rocketing toward me at a speed that exceeded my experience on the water—seventy, eighty knots. The shock of it froze me for an instant: a rodent awareness of a stooping falcon, no point in resisting or attempting to flee—something else I’d never experienced. The Stiletto’s Kevlar hull, only fifty yards from impact, cleaved air molecules so cleanly that the warning scream of engines didn’t slingshot ahead until too late.

Even so, I lunged and hammered the throttles forward, my swollen left hand spinning the wheel to port. The Zodiac reared itself, bow-high, like a breaching whale, the combined torque throwing me to starboard, which probably saved me from being flung overboard when the Stiletto, engines suddenly in reverse, dug its stern deep to avoid colliding. The abrupt stop ejected a ton of displaced water that hit my aft quarter as a towering wave. For one long, shaky microsecond, I thought my prototype, high-tech, bullet-resistant special ops craft was going to flip like a cheap bathtub toy. To stabilize, I pulled throttles into neutral, as I almost fell but caught myself. One knee on the deck, a hand on the pilot’s seat, I looked up.

Sunrise isolated waves with horizontal light, stars still glimmering in the west, the sea gray beyond the Stiletto, which appeared massive because its bow had swung directly above me. Close enough that the bowsprit banged the Zodiac’s T-top and caused me to duck. This time, though, when I came up I had the khaki gun bag in my hands, fighting with the damn zipper.

“Morning, Dr. Ford! Imagine running into you out here!”

Vargas Diemer’s voice above the rumble of engines while a cloud of scudding exhaust delayed his appearance. He was standing on the flybridge, wearing surgical gloves, I noticed, a familiar pistol in his hand: the .22 Mosquito, sound suppressor attached. Beside him was a sumo-shaped little man in a Nehru shirt of red and green, holding what looked like an Uzi machine pistol.

Kondo Ogbay.

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JUST TALL ENOUGH TO PEER OVER THE RAILING, KONDO showed me a party grin and said, “Mon, we just havin’ some fun wid you. Stay mellow, no one get hurt!”

Diemer, not smiling, backed him. “It’s not what you think. Shut down your engines—and stay away from that!”

The pistol case inside the gun bag, he meant, which held my 9mm Kahr. Or did he mean the VHF radio, the mic within arm’s reach?

Both. “Move away from the console, Ford. Now.” He used the pistol to motion me toward the bow, his voice flat, no accent at all, a man who’d been homogenized by travel.

I might have done it, but the Haitian was on his way down the ladder fireman style, moving fast for a fat guy, yelling, “Come out, come out, scarecrow man! Your good frien’ Kondo, I come say good morning to you!” The machine pistol was at his waist, ready to rock ’n’ roll when his feet hit the deck.

Diemer told him, “Don’t do anything stupid, Sylvester,” using the Haitian’s real name, which proved a connection, then warned me again, “Step away from the controls—and that goddamn bag!”

I killed my engines and pretended to comply by placing the gun case on the seat, the case unzipped but closed, while Kondo hollered, “Tomlinson! I know you there. Pissing me off again, mon, that dumb!” His weapon now aimed at the Zodiac’s storage console, the only place big enough for a man to hide.

I took half a step back from the pistol case, giving myself room to move, and became the indignant citizen. “Who in the hell are you talking to?”

“Who you think, dumbass! Tell yo no-’count surfer dude come out there ’fore I smoke his ass.”

“With the Coast Guard coming?” I leaned my head toward the VHF radio.

Diemer replied, “Strange—we had the scanner on, didn’t hear a thing.” Then attempted to calm Kondo: “Hey, man, chill—I’ll handle this,” sounding Chicano suddenly, because the Haitian, far from home, was getting fired up while he threatened me, “Shoot yo damn boat to pieces, how else that gonna happen without a gun?” but his attention was on the storage console, convinced Tomlinson was inside. Called, “Ain’t gonna hurt you, my brother! Not kill you, anyway. You insulted me, though, mon! My respect deserve somethin’! And