Cold Vengeance - Lincoln Child [117]
Maggie brightened. “You need a place to crash for a few days?”
“Do I!” Corrie smiled.
“Hey, it will be great having somebody here. Living alone can kind of creep you out sometimes. Do you know, when I got home yesterday evening I had the strangest feeling that somebody had been in the apartment while I was gone…”
CHAPTER 67
BY TEN PM, THE WIND HAD PICKED UP, raising faint whitecaps on the dark surface of the Hudson River, and the temperature hovered a few degrees above freezing. The tide was ebbing, and the river flowed smoothly southward toward New York Harbor. The lights of New Jersey glowed coldly across the dark mass of moving water.
Ten blocks north of the Seventy-Ninth Street marina, on the riprapped shore below the West Side Highway, a dark figure moved down by the water. It was dragging a broken piece of flotsam over the rocks—a battered remnant of a floating dock, some planks of wood adhering to an abraded chunk of marine Styrofoam. The figure eased the piece into the water and got aboard, covering himself with a rotten section of a discarded tarp. As the raft hung next to shore, the figure produced a stick, whittled flat at one end, which when dipped in the water became almost invisible and which subtly controlled the progress of what looked like a mass of floating detritus.
With a small push of the stick, the man shoved the improvised barque away from shore, where it drifted into the current, joining other random pieces of flotsam and jetsam.
It moved out until it was a few hundred feet offshore. There it floated, turning slowly, as it drifted sluggishly toward a group of silent yachts in a mooring field, their anchor lights piercing the darkness. Slowly, the flotsam floated past the boats, bumping against one hull, then another, on its seemingly random journey. Gradually, it approached the largest yacht in the anchorage, knocking lightly against its hull and drifting past. As it neared the stern there was the very slightest of movements, a rustle and a faint splash, and then silence as the now-tenantless piece of garbage continued past the yacht and vanished in the darkness.
Pendergast, in a sleek neoprene suit, crouched on the swim platform behind the stern transom of the Vergeltung, listening intently. All was silent. After a moment, he raised his head and peered over the edge of the stern. He could see two men in the darkness, one relaxing on a sitting area on the aft deck, smoking a cigarette. The other was walking around on the foredeck, barely visible from this angle.
As Pendergast watched, the man on the aft deck raised a pint bottle and took a long pull. After a few minutes, he rose—unsteadily—and took a turn around the deck, pausing at the stern not five feet from Pendergast, looking across the water, before reinstalling himself in his nook and taking another long drink from the bottle. He stubbed out the cigarette, lit another.
From the small dive bag he carried, Pendergast removed his Les Baer .45 and gave it a quick check. He shoved it back into the bag and removed a short length of rubber hose.
Again he waited, watching. The man continued drinking and smoking, then finally rose and walked forward, disappearing through a door into the interior of the yacht, where dim lights glowed from various windows.
In a flash Pendergast was over the stern and onto the aft deck, crouching behind a pair of tenders.
Thanks to his new friend Lowe, Pendergast had learned there were probably only a few crew members on board. Most had gone ashore that afternoon, leaving, the general manager believed, only four on the vessel. How accurate this information was remained to be seen.
According to Lowe’s description, one of the men was undoubtedly Esterhazy. And then there were the supplies Lowe had observed being loaded recently, including a long stainless-steel dry-goods box large enough to hide an unconscious person—or, for that matter, a corpse.
Pendergast briefly considered what he would do to Esterhazy if the man had already killed Constance.
Esterhazy sat on an engine