Page 111 of The Maverick
It opened soft above me.
I rode it down.
Right on cue, the neat tap of Noah's round landed exactly where Noah had wanted it to land, and the outboard went silent.
The boat coughed, sputtered, and held its forward momentum the way every boat held its forward momentum when the engine quit, gliding along the surface with the dumb physics of a thing that hadn't yet been told it was no longer being driven.
It glided into me.
I hit the deck behind the man at the helm, released the chute, and the silk took the wind and went sideways into the water.
The driver was on his knees in front of his dead outboard, cursing.
The second man was forward. He had the long gun.
I read the deck in one sweep through the goggles. Two scuba rebreathers in a rack behind the helm. Wet. Dive knives. A pair of black duffels lashed under the gunwale. These were not fishermen.
I shot the driver in the back of the head.
He went down across his outboard like a man who'd been deciding what to do with his hands, and he was not deciding anymore.
The second man turned. Fast. The rifle came around with him.
I put three in his face.
This was not the movies. You did not shoot to wound when a man was bringing a rifle on you on the deck of a boat that wasn't yours. You ended the negotiation.
He went over the gunwale and dropped to the deck.
The boat slid on its lost momentum, drifted, and rocked in the chop.
I keyed my coms.
"All clear."
"Copy, all clear," Noah said.
I lowered the optics. The deck went back to the harder, plainer dark of moonlight on water.
I clicked on my flashlight, knelt beside the second man and pulled the cloth off his face.
Scraggly beard. Untrimmed. Sun lines of a man who'd spent his life outdoors. Not a federal jaw. Not Charleston. Mountain country. North Carolina or Tennessee, near as I could read it.
I went to the helm and pulled the cloth off the driver.
Same look. Same beard.
That was a mercy and an answer at once. We’d taken a risk. If I'd come down on a boat full of Bureau agents, Dominion Hall had just authorized me to kill two federal employees on the deck of a fifteen-foot outboard, and the morning would have beeninteresting.
They’d risked it because they’d known.
Or because they’d known I'd handle it, if it went wrong.
I felt around the driver's pockets.
The phone was in the inside pocket of his jacket. I got it out and held it up to his face and the device unlocked.
Photos.
