Cast back on the faith of his youth, pleading with the Holy Virgin, Mother of God, to save him, Tommy pumped another round into the breech, fired, worked the pump action again, and fired a third round, both from a distance of only three feet.
The hands on the railing were not human any more. They had metamorphosed into chitinous pincers with serrated edges and were locked so fiercely that the stainless-steel tubing actually appeared to be bending in the creature’s grip.
Tommy pumped, fired, pumped, squeezed the trigger,
pumped, squeezed the trigger, and then realized that he was dry firing. The magazine of the Mossberg was empty.
Shrieking again, the beast hauled itself higher on the pulpit railing as the bow of the reversing yacht came around to port and away from the dock.
Tommy dropped the empty shotgun, snatched up the Desert Eagle, slipped, and fell backward. He landed on his butt on the bow deck with his feet still in the anchor well.
The gun was beaded with rain. His hands were wet and shaking. But he didn’t drop the weapon when he landed.
Clambering over the railing, shrieking in triumph, the serpent-eyed Samaritan loomed over Tommy. The moon-round, moon-pale visage split open from chin to hairline, as if it wasn’t a skull at all but a strained sausage skin, and the halves of the bifurcated face peeled apart, with the demented green eyes bulging at either side, and out of the sudden gash sprouted an obscene mass of writhing, segmented, glossy-black tentacles as thin as whips, perhaps two feet long, and as agitated as the appendages of a squid in a feeding frenzy. At the base of the squirming tentacles was a wet sucking hole full of clashing teeth.
Two, four, five, seven times Tommy fired the.44 Magnum. The pistol bucked in his hands and the recoil slammed through him hard enough to rattle his verte-brae. At such close quarters, he didn’t have to be as first-rate a marksman as Del was, and every round seemed to strike home.
The creature shuddered with the impact of the shots and pitched backward over the pulpit railing. Pincers flailed, grabbed, and one of them locked tightly on the steel tubing. Then the eighth and ninth rounds found their mark, and simultaneously a section of railing gave way with a gong-like clang, and the beast plunged backward into the harbour.
Tommy scrambled to the damaged railing, slipped, almost pitched through the gap, clutched a firmly anchored section tightly with one hand, and searched the black water for some sign of the creature. It had vanished.
He didn’t believe that it was really gone. He anxiously scanned the water, waiting for the Samaritan-thing to surface.
The yacht was cruising forward now, east along the channel, past the other boats in the moorings and the small marina. A speed limit was in effect in the harbour, but Del wasn’t obeying it.
Moving aft along the short bow deck, clutching at the starboard railing, Tommy searched the waters on that side, but soon the area where the creature had disap-peared was well behind them and receding rapidly.
The crisis wasn’t over. The threat wasn’t gone. He was not going to make the mistake of taking another breather. He wasn’t safe until dawn.
If then.
He returned to the pulpit to retrieve the shotgun and the ski jacket full of ammunition. His hands were shaking so badly that he dropped the Mossberg twice.
The yacht was cruising fast enough to stir up a wind of its own in the windless night. Although the skeins of rain still fell as straight as the strands of a glass-bead curtain, the speed at which the boat surged forward made it seem as if the droplets were being flung at Tommy by the fury of the storm.
Carrying both of the guns and the ski jacket, he retreated along the narrow port-side pass way and hur-riedly climbed the steep stairs to the upper deck.
The aft portion of the open-air top deck contained a built-in table for alfresco dining and an enormous elevated sun-bathing pad across the entire stern. Toward starboard, an enclosed stairwell led to the lower deck.
Scootie was standing on the sunbathing pad, gazing down at the foaming wake that trailed away from the stern. He was as focused on the churning water as he might have been on a taunting cat, and he didn’t look up at Tommy.
Forward on the top deck, the upper helm station had a hardtop roof and a windshield, but the back of it was meant to be open in good cruising weather. Currently a custom-sewn vinyl enclosure was snugged to the supporting rear framework of the hardtop, forming a weather-proofed cabin of sorts, but Del had unsnapped the centre vent to gain access to the wheel.
Tommy pushed through the loose flaps, into the dim light beyond, which arose only from the control board.
Del was in the captain’s seat. She glanced away from the rain-streaked windshield. ‘Nice job.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said worriedly, putting the guns down on the console behind her. He began to unzip pockets on the ski jacket. ‘It’s still out there some-where.’
‘But we’re outrunning it now, on the move and safe.’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ he said as he added nine rounds of ammo to the Desert Eagle magazine, replenishing the thirteen-shot capacity as quickly as his trembling hands could cope with the cartridges. ‘How long to cross the harbour?’
Bringing the Bluewater sharply and expertly around to port, she said, ‘We’re starting the run right now. Going so fast, I’ll have to throttle back just a little, but it should still take like maybe two minutes.’
At various points down the centre of the broad harbour, clusters of boats bobbled at permanent moorings, grey shapes in the gloom that effectively divided the expanse of water into channels. But as far as could be seen in the rain, theirs was the only craft currently making way. Del said, ‘Problem is - when we get to Balboa Island, I need to find an empty slip, a suitable dock to tie up to, and that might take some time. Thank God, it’s high tide and this baby has such a low draft, ‘cause we can slide in almost anywhere.’
Reloading the Mossberg, he said, ‘How’d you start the engines without keys?’
‘Hot-wired the sucker.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Found a key.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Well,’ she said airily, ‘those are your choices.’
Outside on the open top deck, Scootie began to bark ferociously.
Tommy’s stomach fluttered nervously, and his heart swelled with dread. ‘Jesus, here we go already.’
Armed with both the shotgun and the pistol, he pushed through the vinyl flaps, into the night and rain.
Scootie still stood vigilantly on the sunbathing pad, staring down at the churning wake.
Balboa Peninsula was swiftly receding.
Tommy stepped quickly past the dining table and the upholstered horseshoe bench that encircled it, to the platform on which the dog stood.
No railing encircled the outer edge of the sunbathing pad, only a low wall, and Tommy didn’t want to risk standing on it and perhaps pitching over the stern. He wriggled forward on his belly, across the wet canvas -upholstered pad, beside the Labrador, where he peered down at the turbulent wake.
In the murk, he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
The dog barked more savagely than ever.
‘What is it, fella?’
Scootie glanced at him and whined.
He could see the wake but nothing of the boat’s stern, which was recessed beneath the top deck. Easing forward, his upper body extended over the low sun-deck wall, Tommy squinted down and back at the lower portion of the yacht.
Under Tommy, behind the enclosed first deck, was a back-porch-type afterdeck. It was overhung by the sunbathing platform on which he lay, and was therefore largely concealed.
Sans raincoat, the fat man was climbing out of the harbour and over the afterdeck railing. He disappeared under the overhang before Tommy could take a shot at him.
The dog scrambled to a closed stair head hatch immedi-ately starboard of the sunbathing platform.