It seemed like these guys weren't going to be shooting at me, but to make sure I picked up their submachine guns. They looked like Bart's UZI-replica water pistols but they were much heavier. I spun them off into the river. Then I ran for the gangplank, carrying my last bottle of putrescine like a grenade. “Gangplank” is a primitive word; it was an aluminum footbridge, complete with safety railings and a nonslip surface. And I was right in the middle of it when the hatch opened up, right in front of me, and Laughlin stepped out.
The jumbo chrome-plated revolver - the one he'd bought to protect himself from terrorists - looked a little tacky so close to his gold Rolex, but that's in the nature of a revolver. He was carrying a briefcase in his other hand, an executive to the fucking end. And when he saw me blocking the gangplank, he did a funny thing. He held it up between me and him, like a shield, and peeked at me over the top. I got a couple of steps closer. Then he dropped the briefcase.
Which didn't help me a bit. I wasn't here to subpoena the bastard. I kept moving, trying to decide when I was going to chicken out and jump off into the water.
Movement on a ship ain't easy. The stairs are narrowed and steep, the hatches weigh a lot and you have to step over a big ledge when you go through them. Laughlin was centered in the hatchway, but his right shoulder, the one attached to the revolver, was interfered with by the doorframe. When he tried to bring his arm up, he twitched against the trigger - already had the thing cocked, the guy was a born killer - and fired off a shot underneath the pier.
I wound up and tossed a kind of weak Bob Stanley palm-ball in the general direction of his face. The jar described a neat stinky parabola through space, bounced off the top of his head and exploded behind him. He fired again and drilled a hole in the Basco factory. I was scared enough to fall down on my face. Hard to run with an oxygen tank on your back, damn hard.
He had to be wading through a putrescine sea by now anyway, but he didn't notice. A good yuppie has no sense of smell. Laughlin's next shot hit a railing support right next to me and drilled a few metal splinters in my direction. Some of them stuck in my flesh and one shattered the face plate on my Darth Vader mask. Laughlin closed in for a closer shot, made the mistake of stepping through the hatchway and then Boone nailed him in the ear with the output of a CO2 fire extinguisher.
I fucked up my hand trying to rip all those little triangles of glass out of my facemask. Managed to smear a nice gob of blood and putrescine directly on the bridge of my nose. I could still breathe bottled air, fortunately.
Several barfing blue-collar gnomes came up from below, stumbled over the writhing Laughlin and headed toward me, which is to say they tried to get the fuck out of there. Boone had grabbed Laughlin's revolver and that scared the shit out of them.
I grabbed the mask and pulled it away from my mouth.
“Take him!” I shouted, pointing at Laughlin. “Get that nicker out of here. Take him with you.”
If we stole the ship with them on board, it'd be kidnapping: a serious charge. We had to get Laughlin off. But if we dragged him off, that might be kidnapping too.
They grabbed Laughlin and dragged him down the gangplank. The ship was empty. Boone had put on an oxygen mask, he'd stolen from a fire box somewhere.
He was pointing at Laughlin's briefcase. He gave it a kick so it slid a few feet away, then brought the revolver down and fired at it. The bullet dug a crater in the fine Moroccan leather, then stopped. Kevlar-lined. Anti-terrorist luggage for the paranoid executive.
For the first time, I got a chance to look down the river, toward the Mystic River and the open sea. The megatug, Extra Stout, was crawling toward us through the blue predawn light, looking like a power plant on a toboggan, plugging the entire river, kicking out a galaxy of black smoke. It was atonement time for Clan Gallagher. 21,000 horses of Irish diesel proceeded ass-backwards, shaking the earth and the water, rattling the windows of the factory. It almost drowned out the meaty splash made when we deposited the gangplank into the Everett River.
We had to get this damn ship disconnected from the pier. That was the whole objective. It was connected by a bow line, a stem line, and two spring lines: four lines. Something big and heavy slapped into my hand. Boone had gotten me a fire ax. He had one of his own.
“This is your only warning,” said a voice over some loudspeakers. “Put your hands in the air now or we will be forced to shoot.”
One warning. I was guessing we could each take out a rope during the one warning. We headed for the stern. There were two ropes attached to bitts back there.
Ever chop wood? Sometimes if you flail away in a panic, you don't get anywhere, but two or three solid chops will do the job. I used both techniques on the spring line, and I didn't chop it through, but I reduced it to a few shreds of yam that could be relied on to break. Boone severed the stern line in about four strokes.
The guys with the guns had a basic problem here. The deck was a few feet higher than the pier. If we stayed on our bellies, they couldn't see us. So we spent the rest of the gig on our stomachs.
Boone had less stomach than I did, and he knew how to do this GI crawl, so he traveled about twice as fast as me. He ripped off the oxygen mask and splashed it.
By the time I made it to the other end, pushing Laughlin's briefcase in front of me, Boone was way out on the prow, feeding a rope down through one of the hawse-holes, the tunnels that the anchor chains passed through. Bart was down below us on the Zodiac, waiting. He was going to take it out to Extra Stout, now about fifty feet away; they'd attach it to a hawser, and we'd haul that up here and attach it to the Bosco Explorer. I was several yards behind Boone, my Swiss Army knife deployed, sawing through the bow lines strand by strand.
I was lying on the deck with my head sideways, and I noticed that I could see a Basco water tower a thousand feet away. And I could see some guys climbing up there. Guys with guns. Three of them.
Something whizzed over our heads and we heard a distant crack-crack-crack.
“M-16s,” Boone said, “or AR-15s, actually.”