I’m not a natural-born swimmer, and I thrashed my way back to the surface, coughing up river water and jerking my throbbing head in all directions looking for Kylie. Our Zodiac had righted itself, and she was still in it, but there were at least thirty feet of open water separating the two of us.
Benoit made another U-turn, saw the gap between us, and roared straight down the middle, firing at me as he came. Somehow I had managed to hang on to my piece, and, keeping it above water, I fired back wildly without a prayer of hitting him.
His bullets were much more on target, cutting through the water to my left, my right, and one striking less than a foot in front of me. He barreled right past me and swung the Zodiac into a wide arc so he could make another pass. I knew it was only a matter of time. I was a fish in a barrel, and Benoit was hell-bent on shooting fish.
And then, over the roar of the engine, I heard Kylie yell, “Zach, fake a hit! Go under.”
Benoit was bearing down on me again, but much more slowly so he could line up his shot.
He fired once. I grabbed my right shoulder, stopped treading water, and dropped straight down. The last thing I saw before I let the river swallow me up was Kylie kneeling in a shooter’s position on the hull of the Zodiac, both arms outstretched, aiming straight at Benoit.
Aiming? Aiming what?
As of two minutes ago, her gun was at the bottom of the Hudson River.
Chapter 94
GABRIEL HAD SEEN it a hundred times in the movies. In a high-speed chase scene, the cop car turns into the back wheels of an escaping vehicle, causing it to spin out of control.
He used the exact same concept to flip the cops’ Zodiac around and send Jordan flying into the water. The cop landed flat on his back.
By the time he got his bearings, he was totally separated from his partner, and now Gabriel could take them out one at a time.
Jordan first. Benoit closed in on him, firing as he went. At one point he was less than ten feet from his target, but the water was choppy, and none of his shots hit the mark.
Slow down, a voice said.
It was Gabriel the director.
Gabriel the action hero eased up on the throttle and circled the boat for another run.
Steady, steady, steady, the director said. Now.
He fired.
Jordan grabbed his shoulder, flew back, and went under.
“One down,” Gabriel said. He turned to Kylie. Her boat was disabled or she’d have come at him. She had no place to go.
He slowed his Zodiac to a crawl and stopped twenty feet from her.
It was dark, but her body was clearly backlit by the setting sun. She was kneeling in a shooter’s stance.
“NYPD!” she yelled. “Drop your gun and hold your hands up high.”
“You don’t have a gun, bitch!” he screamed. “Otherwise you’d have opened fire on me before I nailed your partner.”
“Final warning!” she called out. “Drop your gun and get your hands in the air.”
Shoot her, the voice said. This time it wasn’t the director.
It was Lexi. She was here for the final scene. Uninvited, but of course she showed up anyway. He laughed. That Lexi—he never could control her.
Shoot her for me, Gabe. Shoot her.
He pulled the trigger.
Click.
He was out of bullets.
Ram her. Run her down. Cut her in half. Kill her.
Gabriel put his hand on the throttle. MacDonald’s Zodiac was directly in his path. She was still aiming at him. And then he saw it in her hand, silhouetted against the sky.
It was boxy with a square front and yellow stripes on the side.
She squeezed the trigger.
Chapter 95
I SURFACED JUST in time to see the standoff. Kylie and Benoit, about twenty feet apart, neither of them moving.
And then the river exploded. A heart-stopping, earsplitting volcanic bang shattered the serenity of the Upper Bay and reverberated from Brooklyn to Bayonne. For an instant, the world turned a blinding bright orange. Then a geyser of boiling hot white water shot up, followed by large plumes of thick black smoke that blossomed out across the sky, showering down pieces of flaming Zodiac and human body parts.
Benoit, who had been at the center of the explosion, was vaporized. Kylie was only twenty feet away, and the seismic waves lifted her boat out of the water. One second she had been on her knees drawing a bead on Benoit, and the next her body was arcing through the air.
She hit the water fifty feet away from me and went under.
I called her name and started swimming through the oil slick and burning remnants of the fiberglass hull hissing in the water. I waited for her to pop her head up, but she didn’t, which meant she was either unconscious or worse.
My clothes and my shoes were dragging me down, and I felt like I was swimming in a dream—no matter how hard I pushed myself, I never seemed to get any closer.