And Emmet Renner still had Alex Cooper.
I didn’t know what to do next. I was overwhelmed by the activity I had put in motion, and now I couldn’t figure which one of us was at greatest risk.
I decided to move forward toward the lighthouse again, hoping to get close before anyone else arrived there or lights went on around us. Emergency Services would have no choice but to move in to protect the oncoming good Samaritans. To protect everyone except Coop.
That was when I heard the sound of the Intrepid’s engine. I had left the keys in the cockpit and someone had just turned on the engine. Had Paddy Duffy freed himself from the hold? Had Emmet Renner’s accomplice circled the lighthouse and found the boat?
I was as close to panicking as I had ever been when I turned away from Renner to find out who was on board.
FIFTY-FOUR
I heard a man’s voice say my name. “Chapman?”
“Yeah.”
“Scuba. It’s okay.”
I wasn’t shaking as badly as Lonigan, but it was close.
The police diver was in a black dry suit with a full face mask. He’d come to the rocks on a small dark-gray Zodiac that he’d tied up to the Intrepid, then swam ashore.
“Cue me,” I said. “What do they want me to do?”
“Just what you’re doing. Let Renner think you’ll give him the boat before backup arrives. That’s why I turned on the engine,” the cop said. “So he’d hear it.”
“But Coop?”
“We’ll have you covered.”
“How?”
“Better you don’t know, Chapman. You’d unintentionally tip it off.”
“Chapman?” Renner called out to me.
I turned my attention back to him.
“The boat is ready for you. I’m not releasing Cormac until you walk down here and meet me halfway,” I said.
I crossed over the largest boulder, and this time, instead of heading for the shadows of the bridge tower, I stayed close to the shoreline. I was going to the lighthouse.
“I hear the boat, Chapman. Where is it?”
“Just past the rock. Past Cormac.”
The kid was whimpering now, probably out of strength to do anything louder.
“You’d better move fast, Renner. People are coming.”
I almost wanted him to see me. I wanted Coop to hear my voice.
Emmet Renner was really between the rocks and a hard place. His entire plan was crumbling, but he wasn’t quite ready to let go of his prey.
“Uncle Em,” Lonigan screamed one more time. “Come get me.”
For the first time since I had arrived on Jeffrey’s Hook, Emmet Renner walked toward me from the small terrace of the lighthouse.
Now to add to the barking dogs was the sound of police sirens coming from the West Side Highway and the streets in the neighborhood.
He knew time was running out. He clearly thought the water was an actual means of escape, and that the only police presence was coming from the park behind him. I was thankful Mercer had convinced the Harbor Unit to stay out of sight.
Emmet Renner stood at the top of the steps that led from the lighthouse to the rocks. His gun was in his hand. He turned his head to look back at Coop.
“I’m here, Renner,” I called out.
He swiveled around to try to find my position, but I couldn’t see him clearly enough to try to take him out.
“Step down, Renner.” I lifted my gun and pointed it in his general direction. “I didn’t think Westies killed broads.”
“She’s not a broad, Chapman. She’s a prosecutor.”
“Get moving before the dogs come. And the cops,” I said. “You’ve got about a minute to go. The key’s in the ignition. Walk on by me and I’ll cut Lonigan loose.”
Emmet Renner took his first step. “I don’t want the boy, Chapman. I want the boat.”
Bloodless after all. Not even his own family made a difference in the end. Emmet Renner just wanted to save his own skin.
I threw my Glock onto the rock and watched it skid down toward the water.
Renner heard it, must have guessed what had happened, and started to run down the remaining steps and in the direction of the Intrepid.
Before I was able to race across the rock, two more scuba rescue cops in black dry suits hoisted themselves out of the water and onto the boulder.
The first one out tore off his flippers and ran to the lighthouse. He practically threw himself on top of Coop, shielding her from whatever unknown harm still lurked around us.
I was there within seconds, after he ripped the gag from her mouth and as he was cutting the plastic cuffs off her wrists.
I lifted her limp body in my arms, carried her inside the lighthouse, and sat on the floor with her in my lap, cradling her head against my chest as I whispered my apologies to her over and over again.
FIFTY-FIVE
“Nobody died?” Coop asked.
“Nobody,” I said.
“The Lonigan kid?”
“Severe hypothermia. He’ll be fine. He’s in another wing.”
We were in a private room at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, just ten blocks from Bennett Park. Coop had been examined in the ER and admitted for observation. It was three o’clock in the morning.
“Emmet Renner?”
“No shots fired,” I said. “He might need his nose fixed again, but in the meantime he’s reacquainting himself with the New York City jail system.”
Coop was in a hospital gown, in bed, with extra blankets to cover her. An intravenous tube was dripping fluids into her arm to rehydrate her. I was sitting on the other bed, dressed in surgical scrubs. Our clothing, damp and dirty, had been vouchered as evidence. I stood up and she reached for my arm. “Please don’t leave me alone.”
“Hey, now. I’m not going far. I just need to borrow something from the cops in the hallway.”
There was a police detail outside Coop’s room and would be for as long as she was hospitalized. Probably for a good period of time after her release. I asked two of the guys for their handcuffs.
She was sitting on the edge of her bed when I came back in. Her eyes were moist again and she was dabbing at them with tissue.
I’d never seen her quite this way-so skittish and clinging to me. But she’d never been through an ordeal like the past forty-eight hours.
“Handcuffs?” She seemed startled to see me holding two pairs. I should have been more sensitive to the visual of them after her own experience, but I was out of gas, too.
“I got a problem with hospitals, Coop. There’s no king-size beds.”
I unlocked the wheels of my bed and pulled it right beside hers. I reached under the mattress and cuffed the metal frames to each other in two places so they didn’t split apart.
It was one of the first times that night I had seen her smile.
She got back under the covers and I put an extra pillow behind her head.
“How about something to eat?” I asked. “There’s room service, you know.”
Renner had given her only a couple of oranges and a few bottles of water in the forty-eight hours she’d been held.
“I can’t think about food yet. I’m still kind of nauseated.”
“They’ve added something for that to your IV, Coop,” I said, stroking her hair.
She turned away from me, onto her side.
“You want to talk?” I asked.
She shook her head in the negative.
“You did a good job filling in a lot of the blanks for the commissioner,” I said.
Coop had confirmed things that we had tried to piece together, like the original abduction. There were parts too hazy for her to have remembered, including the stops to change the license plates on the SUV. She was conscious when they first carried her onto a small motorboat that had been waiting for them at the boat basin after midnight on Wednesday, piloted by a friend of Paddy Duffy’s who drove it across the river from a small marina near Edgewater. It was the same boat that delivered Renner and Coop from Liberty Island to the lighthouse. Police were looking for it now.