The motor was ridiculously overpowered for a bass boat, even one that was usually loaded with cigarettes. But still it was no match for the size of the RCMP cruiser; I could feel the cruiser catching up to us. The white light stayed pinned to us like a vaudeville spotlight.
Ollie sat up, looked around in the dark, then pointed a few degrees off to our right. Less than a hundred meters away, barely visible beyond the glare of the RCMP light, lay a hunk of rock and trees.
“The Hen!” she said. “Stay on the gas!” Even shaking with hypothermia, Ollie had a better sense of direction than I did. I’d seen l’Île Hen on the pen map. It was a banana-shaped patch of land only a couple hundred feet long. The US–Canadian border was only about a thousand meters beyond the island, cutting diagonally across the river. But that was still too far; the RCMP boat would be on us in less than thirty seconds.
“We’re not going to make it!” I said
“What are they going to do?” Ollie said. “Ram us?” She was grinning. Why was she—how was she grinning?
Ollie aimed us toward the Hen. A few dozen feet from it she cut right, skimming the northern tip of the banana, then jammed hard to the left. The spotlight cut out; the island was between us now. We shot along the shore, so close that the trees hid the eastern sky. A rock or submerged log would throw us from the boat. But I held the wires together and we flew at top speed, the sound of the outboard doubly loud this close to the land.
In a handful of seconds we were back in open water. The mainland was half a kilometer or more ahead of us, only visible because of the distant glow of streetlights. As near as I could figure we were heading southeast, paralleling the border. We should have been going due west. I shouted, “What are you doing? That’s Quebec!”
“No,” she yelled back. “It’s Mohawk land.”
The white light slid across us again as the RCMP boat made the turn around the Hen, but we had gained some distance. Ollie pointed us at an outcropping. Did she know where to land? Or were we so outside the plan that it was all improvisation now?
Dr. Gloria pointed behind us. “Ladies?”
The police boat seemed to be charging at us at a speed it hadn’t displayed before.
“Mohawk Land” seemed to be growing no closer. In moments the RCMP had pulled up along our right side, less than ten yards away, but we could see little beyond the glare of the spotlight. The man behind the bullhorn yelled “CUT YOUR ENGINE!” and then followed up with a barrage of French commands.
Ollie waved.
The police boat surged ahead. “They’re going to cut us off,” Ollie said.
Their boat was thirty meters ahead of us now, and it suddenly swerved in front of us. Ollie jerked us to the left. We hit the big boat’s wake and went airborne.
I reached for the side of the boat, but before I could get a grip we slammed down, and I crashed shoulder first into the wet aluminum floor.
“Throttle!” Ollie yelled. The engine had died; I’d dropped the wires.
I got to my knees. My shoulder felt like it had been whacked by a baseball bat. Ahead of us the RCMP boat made a hard left, the spotlight swiveling to keep us in its glare.
“They got us, Ollie.”
“No,” she said. She stooped, trying to find the wires dangling from under the engine. “No no no.”
The police boat finished its turn. It was heading toward us now, coming at us from our left, but the turn had forced it to slow. Dr. Gloria said, “What’s that?”
A silver boat smaller than our own zipped out of the dark to our right, engine keening. The aluminum body was narrow as a canoe, with a massive black outboard weighing down the end. It skipped along the top of the waves at tremendous speed, nose high, the prop barely staying in the water. The boat had no lights, but I could make out a figure of a man sitting tall, his hand firmly at the tiller. He was aiming straight for us, racing to beat the police boat to us.
“Ollie!”
She looked up, the wires in her hand. The new boat roared toward us. There was something wrong with the driver. At first I thought he was wearing a white plastic mask, but then I realized that he wasn’t a man at all. His head was a stuffed garbage bag with a face drawn in black marker. His hand was attached to the tiller by a silver mitten of duct tape.
“We’re going to be rammed by a scarecrow,” Dr. G said.
I’d like to think I yelled “Hold on!” But it may have been only, “Fuck!”
The dummy flashed past us, less than a meter from the front of our boat. It wasn’t us that it was aiming for. A dozen meters past us it swerved hard toward the RCMP cruiser. The silver boat hit the hull of the cruiser and flipped up, catapulting the dummy into the air. The body cartwheeled over the deck of the police boat in a convincing impersonation of a drunken boatman flying to his death. The dummy came down somewhere on the other side, out of our line of sight.
The motor behind me shook to life; Ollie had found the right pair of wires. “Aim for the trees!” Ollie said. I didn’t move. I couldn’t process what I’d just seen.
“Steer, please,” Ollie said.
The spotlight had swung away from us—probably looking for the madman that had suicided against their boat—and I could see across the water more clearly now. The mainland was only two or three hundred meters away. I pushed the tiller to my left, aiming us away from the RCMP boat and the crash.
“What the hell just happened?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” Dr. Gloria said.
Ollie said, “Lyda, just hold on for now, okay?” She pointed toward the outcropping. “There!” A pair of car headlights winked off, then flicked back on. I aimed for them. The police, thank God, had stopped following us.
As we approached the shore, Ollie feathered the throttle wires, slowing us without killing the engine—basically doing a much better job than I had. She directed me to a stretch of grass that sloped up to where we’d seen the headlights. I ran the boat straight into the grass, and Ollie cut the throttle.
A male voice above us said, “Well that was a hell of a run.” Several other voices broke into uproarious laughter.
I helped Ollie out of the boat. She was still wet, and shivering uncontrollably. Dr. Gloria landed beside us. She flicked her wings, shaking the water from them.
Half a dozen men walked down to us, most of them still cracking up. Hilarious. I couldn’t make out their faces in this light, and I couldn’t tell whether they were armed. At least two of them held cans of beer. Another of them had a foot-long box hanging from a strap around his neck. As he stepped closer I realized it was a remote control unit, with a viewscreen and multiple game controller pads.
The lead man was round-faced, about sixty years old, with dark hair. Unlike the guys we’d met at the marina, he looked like my idea of an Indian elder. He regarded me without smiling and said, “You got our money?”
The money. A thrill of fear paralyzed me, and for a moment I couldn’t think. Ollie looked at me sidelong. What had I done with the money? I’d gotten into the boat with the Mr. Squiggly lunchbox, but after all that had happened, I’d completely lost track of it. Was it even still in the boat? We’d been flying at top speed over the river, bouncing all over the place.
“Sure,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “Just a sec.”
I made sure Ollie could stand upright, then went to the bass boat. I didn’t see the box. I climbed over the side, then crouched and looked under the front bench. It wasn’t there. I patted the floor under that bench, as if to make sure the bag hadn’t turned invisible.
Dr. Gloria said, “Don’t panic.”
Too late, I thought.
I stood up and duck-walked to the back of the boat. I could picture the green fucking lunchbox flying up into the air when the boat went airborne. It was all too plausible. And without the money, what would these men do to us? We’d sabotaged their boat, and they’d wrecked another one just to distract the police. Ollie was already too cold to run. Even if she could, where would we run to?