Coldwater Revenge, James Ross [books for 9th graders txt] 📗

Tom tried to kicked harder and stroke with his one good arm. Hassad’s high-pitched taunts struck cold, hollow notes of madness. But it did not make them untrue. It was unlikely Tom could survive long in this frigid water. His teeth were cracked from chattering. He’d lost all feeling in face and limb. But he forced himself to kick with two legs and paddle with his one good arm. If his body quit, so be it. But he would not let his mind give the order, or assent to it.

He kicked again, though he could no longer sense movement, and raked the water with his one good arm. When the image of a resurrected canine flashed across the back of his eyelids, he withdrew his mind. When numbed extremities signaled stalled movement, he brought himself back. Misery crouched on his shredded shoulder and whispered surrender.

A needle-like pain stabbed the back of his leg. He shot a panicked hand to stop it. Knuckles scraped ragged hardness. Fingers touched where hard and soft connected. Numbed brain thawed the answer to what had punctured the back of his leg. Had his frozen face retained the required mobility, he would have laughed. His butt had found Sunken Island in the dark.

The tiny voice that sometimes appears when you’re about to do something stupid, hissed at Tom to be thankful, sit still and keep his mouth shut. Instead, he braced himself on the underwater rock, gathered breath and shouted.

“Yo!” His throat was raw and his lungs shredded, but he continued to bellow. “Eat shit and die, asshole!” Tom struggled to his feet and staggered noisily through the shin-deep shallows. The spotlight from the patrol boat leapt toward the sound. As the boat drew nearer, he dropped and rolled to his back, as if he were afloat in deep water. The twin Sea Witch outboards roared and the thirty-foot cruiser leapt through a cone of halogen light. Tom lifted his one good arm and waved. The battered cruiser hydroplaned erratically through the water like a wounded shark. The bow-mounted spotlight bounced above and around its target, losing and then finding it again. Tom could see Hassad’s face in the halo of light—cadaverous and grim. He could see his eyes, mad and murderous. The little voice screamed at Tom to be quiet and lie still. He crouched in the shallow water, extended his arm and raised a finger.

The thunder of colliding rock and boat was orgasmic.

Twin six hundred pound outboards knifed their skegs into the edge of Sunken Island. Twelve thousand pounds of forward thrust ripped the engines from the transom and the transom from the boat. The butt-less police cruiser skidded a dozen yards and began to settle at the stern. Within seconds it was underwater.

CHAPTER 31

Tom lay in a Coldwater Hospital bed, wrapped shoulder to shin in tight, white bandage. Clear thin tubes snaked between layers of gauze on either side of his body. One drained from his crotch, another from beneath his arm pit. He could move his head and one of his arms, but everything else was wrapped tight. A fat nurse with a faint mustache helped him with the essentials.

A week of dozing and watching cable television began to heal his body. But his head and soul felt flayed beyond repair. When he thought about Susan, the fingers around his heart closed in a fist. When he thought about his busted career, they moved to his gut. The sessions with Johnsen and his pals were almost a welcome distraction.

The BARDA boys started questioning him even before the painkillers kicked in, and they kept at it until they’d sucked everything he had to give. They wanted to know about Frankie, Billy, Susan and Joe, and each of their histories and interconnections. They asked little about Hassad, realizing early that he knew little. They focused instead on Coldwater’s legacy of live and let live cross-border commerce, spending hours on the Heller junkyard depot, and even longer on MadDog Morgan’s “scheme” to send his sons north every summer to perfect their “foreign language.” Who had Tom stayed with? Who had he met? Who had he slept with? It was obvious his inquisitors hadn’t a clue what they were looking for. But he fed them answers until they quit asking. It wasn’t like they were going to stop, or that he had any place to go.

Tom asked to see Joe, but Johnsen said he was busy helping them with their inquiries. They let Mary and her friend Herbert come twice, and Bonnie called once with a distraught Luke listening in. The boy needed to hear that his uncle was okay. Tom babbled in Pig Latin, telling Luke that he should take his dad and Mr. Thompson out to try and catch that big salmon.

Between naps, Tom lay thinking about Susan, her theory about happiness, about the Eurocon mess and how he’d better get used to the idea of “starting over again” at nearly forty, and how he needed to get to the mental place where that felt like an opportunity and not an unjust punishment. But what it really felt like was spiritual and financial bankruptcy, with the specter of jail at the end.

He knew he should call Silverstein, but he didn’t have the energy. CNN and Headline News were running endless, breathless ‘terrorist foiled’ stories. But none of them mentioned Susan Pearce, Pocket Island or the Morgan brothers. That pissed him off, but he watched anyway. It was a distraction.

Some octogenarian named Inglesby gave a scary interview about aerosolized anthrax and the frightening implications of what BARDA was rumored to have found in a small boathouse in upstate New York. A spokesperson for the State Police held a press conference and replied to questions, but offered no meaningful answers.

Joe finally showed up at the hospital on day ten. The rings under his eyes would have done justice to a marsupial. “You made a mess