I froze in place: stupid, I know, but I really was not my abnormal self. Crowley didn’t have that problem, and he wasted no time trying to see under the towel to confirm my identity. He dropped his duffel bag, yanked Astor off her feet, tucked her under one arm, and ran for the dock. She immediately began to wiggle frantically and yell at the top of her lungs, but without even slowing, Crowley punched her on the side of the head, hard, and she went limp.
I dropped the towel and jumped after them, paused for one second, and looked at Cody. “Go inside the fort,” I said. “Find the park rangers and tell them you’re lost.” And without waiting to see whether he would obey, I turned and sprinted after Crowley.
He had a good head start, but he was slower because he was carrying Astor, and I was closing fast when he pounded out to the end of the dock. A forty-five-foot sportfishing boat was backing in to tie up, and Crowley jumped onto the deck, where a woman in a bikini stood gaping at him and clutching the stern line. Crowley shoved her hard, and she went backward into the water, still holding the rope. An elderly man on the flybridge yelled, “Hey!” in a hoarse voice as Crowley dropped Astor to the deck. She slid up against a cooler and lay motionless, and Crowley lunged up the ladder to the flybridge. The old man yelled, “Help!” in a strangled self-conscious way, and then Crowley punched him in the gut and took the controls. The old man bent over and fell to his knees and the boat began to move away from the dock.
I was almost close enough to leap onto the deck when Crowley shoved the throttle forward and twirled the wheel hard over. The boat spun sluggishly around and began to move out toward the channel. And for once in this whole miserable adventure I did not hesitate or pause to think and bemoan. I ran the last few feet as fast as I could, and I jumped.
It was a good jump, very athletic, a nice arc to it and a near-perfect trajectory, and it was just good enough to splash me into the water three feet behind the boat. I went under and floundered to the surface again, just in time to see the boat start to accelerate. The prop wash boiled back at me, pushing me away and filling my mouth with water. And as I swallowed water and tried without hope to swim through the wake and grab the boat, something thumped me hard in the back and shoved me underwater again.
I had a horrible moment of panic as I remembered what the pilot had said about the Channel Hog, the largest hammerhead shark known to man—but the thing that had hit me felt too smooth to be a shark. I grabbed on to it and felt it pull me to the surface, and as I sucked in a breath and blinked the water out of my eyes I saw that I was holding a human leg. Even better, it was still attached to somebody—the bikinied woman Crowley had dumped into the water, and she was grimly clutching the stern line and dragging along behind the boat.
The boat began to pick up speed, and the wake foamed up around us, making it nearly impossible to see, and difficult to hold on. Very shortly I was sure it would be too much for the woman whose leg I was holding. She would let go, and then Crowley would be gone, taking Astor and all my hopes with him, probably for good this time. I could not let that happen.
And so, throwing caution and good manners to the wind, I grabbed higher up. My fingers clamped on to the band of fabric at the woman’s waist and I pulled myself forward—and suddenly I was sliding backward again as the bikini bottom shimmied off and down her legs, taking me with it.
I grabbed again, this time clamping on to her knee and then reaching up around her waist with both hands, and pulled upward until I got a hand on her shoulder. And just as I got one hand on the rope, the woman finally let go. Her body bumped against me, hard, and she scrabbled for a grip along the whole length of my body. For a moment I didn’t think I could hold on. But then she whirled away in the foamy white wake and I got my other hand on the rope and began to work my way toward the boat.
Slowly, hand over hand, fighting the turbulence every inch of the way, I jerked closer to the transom. I could see it clearly, tantalizingly close, bright blue letters spelling out its name and home port: REEL FUN, ST. JAMES CITY. And finally, after what seemed like hours but was probably no more than a minute or two, I got close enough to grab on to the boat’s dive platform, a narrow wooden shelf jutting out from the transom, and I clambered onto it, shoulders aching, breathing hard.
I flexed my hands; they were stiff and knotted up—and why not? After all they had been through the last few days I should have been grateful that they had not withered and fallen off. But they would have to perform one last good deed, and so I sent them ahead of me up the chrome ladder and I climbed into the cockpit of the boat.
I could just see Crowley’s head and shoulders above me; he stood on the flybridge, ten feet higher than the cockpit, looking forward and steering the boat out into the channel. Good—he didn’t see me, had no idea I was on board, and hopefully he wouldn’t until it was too late.
I hurried across the deck. The old man lay to one side, cradling his forearm and moaning softly. Crowley had clearly dumped him off the bridge and he had probably broken his arm in the fall. Very sad, but it didn’t really matter to me. I stepped past him to the ladder that led up to the flybridge. Astor lay at its foot, crumpled into a small untidy heap next to a cooler. The lid had bumped open, revealing ice and cans of beer and soda. I bent down beside Astor and felt for a pulse in her neck; it was there, steady and strong, and as I put a hand on her face she frowned and made soft and grumpy sounds. She would probably be all right, but there was nothing I could do for her right now.
I left her there and slithered up the ladder, pausing when my head came up just over the top step. I was looking at the back of Crowley’s legs. They looked spry, surprisingly muscular for someone I had thought of as doughy. I had misjudged him every step of the way, underestimated what he was capable of doing, and it made me hesitate now as a very un-Dexter thought came over me.
What if I couldn’t do this? What if I really had met my match, and he was just too much for me to handle? What if this was it, and the Dexter Show was about to end?
It was a truly horrible moment, and it got even worse when I realized what it was—real live human uncertainty. I really had fallen low. I’d never before doubted myself or my ability to perform routine executions, and this was a terrible time to start.
I closed my eyes for just a second, reaching out for the Passenger in a way I never had before, pleading for one last charge of the Dark Brigade. I felt it grumble, sigh, and rustle its wings—not really encouraging, but it would have to do. I opened my eyes and climbed quickly and quietly the rest of the way up the ladder onto the flybridge.
Crowley stood with one hand on the wheel, guiding the boat through the channel and away from the fort, and I hit him with my whole body as hard as I could. He slammed forward into the controls, bumping the throttle. The boat lurched forward, coming to top speed as I put my arm around Crowley’s throat and choked him with all my strength.
But he really was stronger than he looked. He dug his fingers into my forearm and pivoted, lif
ting me off the floor and bashing me into the side of the cockpit. My head bounced off the console; I saw stars, and Crowley slipped out of my grip.
Before I could throw off the dizziness he was on me, thumping me in the stomach, and although it took my breath away, at least it cleared my head, and I dropped to one knee and then punched sideways, connecting solidly with his kneecap. He said, “Oog,” very distinctly, and threw an elbow at my head that would have decapitated me if it had landed. But I ducked under it and scrambled to the other side of the bridge, jumping to my feet and turning shakily to face Crowley.
He straightened and faced me and we stood for a strange frozen instant, looking at each other. Then he took a step forward, feinted with his right hand, and, as I dodged, reached out with his left and yanked the boat’s throttle all the way back. The boat staggered to a stop, and I staggered with it, hitting the console with my hip and tipping toward the windscreen, struggling to regain my balance.
Crowley didn’t need to struggle; he had been braced for the sudden stop, and he was on me before I could recover. He hammered a knee into my midsection, and then he put both his hands on my throat and began to squeeze. Things quickly began to grow dim around me, and everything started to slow down.
So this was how it ended. Strangled by a Cub Scout leader—and not even the leader, merely an assistant. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot of glory in it. I got my hands onto Crowley’s wrists, but things were fading around me and it was getting very hard to stay interested.
And look there—I was already hallucinating houris in Paradise. Or was that really Astor coming up the ladder? It was her, and she was holding a can of soda from the cooler in the cockpit. Very thoughtful—my throat was hurting, and she had brought me a cool drink. It was unlike her to be so considerate—but now she was shaking the can as hard as she could. That was more like it. She was going to prank me with a spray of soda. A last sticky bath before dying.
But Astor stepped quickly around to Crowley’s side and pointed the can at his face. She screeched, “Hey, asshole!” And when Crowley turned to face her she pulled the tab. There was a very satisfying explosion and a great brown gout of soda shot out, right into Crowley’s eyes. Then she threw the can as hard as she could. It hit him squarely in the nose, and without a pause Astor stepped in and kicked him in the crotch.
Crowley staggered sideways under this unexpected onslaught, grunting with pain and taking one hand from my throat to wipe at his eyes, and as the pressure on my throat let up, a small trickle of light seeped back into my brain. I put both hands on the fingers remaining on my throat and I pried up hard. I heard one finger snap, and Crowley made a weird gargling noise and let go of me. Astor kicked his crotch again, and he took a drunken half step away from her and slouched over the railing.
And I, never one to waste an opportunity, hurtled forward and put my shoulder into him. He went right over, and there was an ugly thud-splash as he hit the gunwale below us and then flopped into the water.
I looked over the side. Crowley was bobbing in the water facedown, drifting slowly past us as the boat moved forward at idle speed.
Astor stood beside me, looking at Crowley as he bobbed away into our wake. “Asshole,” she said again. Then she gave me a wonderfully fake smile and said sweetly, “Is it okay to use that word, Dexter?”