For the next couple of minutes I was pretty busy. The storm winds were rising, gusting at what I guessed was over fifty knots. Lightning flickered, thunder banged, and the wind screamed in the rigging.
This was a tricky passage, with a lot of unmarked reefs and flats, and if I strayed from the channel I could end up facing a serious storm while aground. As soon as I got clear and Nancy felt good enough to take the wheel, I’d call the Coast Guard. No hurry now.
I’d beaten the odds. I should be dead, but I wasn’t. Instead I was sailing away with a beautiful woman and a storm at my back. I’d slain the dragon, won the fair maid. I was going to be all right.
I suddenly felt better than I had in months, more alive, more hopeful.
That’s when I heard Nancy call, “Billy! Look out!”
Chapter Thirty-Four
I spun around into a faceful of wind, rain, and lightning.
And Doyle.
Before I could more than blink stupidly, he was up over the transom and on me, swinging his open left hand at my face almost playfully, with that terrible speed and power.
I saw stars and dropped to one knee and in that brief moment he stepped past me and hit Nancy hard on the side of the head with the gun in his right hand. She dropped without a sound and lay on the deck.
As I struggled to stand, Doyle grabbed my collar and lifted me off my feet, holding his pistol in my ear.
“One of the nice things about the Glock,” he said in a conversational voice, “is that it’s waterproof. Recently most Miami police officers have switched over to it for just that reason.” He could have been talking to a friend over lunch instead of standing on the deck of a pitching sailboat in a rising storm with a gun in my ear.
“I get the idea,” I said. I looked for some sign of life in Nancy’s still form. I didn’t see any. A bolt of lightning slammed into one of the nearby islands two hundred yards away. The following thunder almost deafened me. I could barely hear Doyle’s polite voice.
“I know you understand, Billy. I have been impressed by your intelligence and tenacity. But now is the time for you to realize you can’t win.”
“I was about to say the same thing to you, Doyle.” There—had Nancy’s chest moved slightly in a soft breath? Or was that wishful thinking? Would it happen again? Was I going to lose someone I loved while I stood by helpless?
Doyle smiled, that soft, fond-uncle smile again. “But I can win, Billy. And I will.”
“Alone? In a hurricane? With the Coast Guard looking for you?”
He nodded. “Yes.” To him it was that simple. And maybe he was right.
“I don’t think so,” I said, but it was hard to sound convinced. He still held me off the ground, apparently without effort. In the brief struggle he had turned me. I was now looking forward and he was facing the stern, where the Windshadow still bobbed in our wake.
There—Nancy moved, a small breath, I was almost sure of it.
“I think so,” Doyle was saying. “This boat is rigged for single-handed sailing. I could solo it around the world if I wanted.”
My eyes flicked from Nancy to the bow and my heart thumped with a small spark of hope.
The boat was headed straight for a shoal.
Keep him talking…just a moment longer…
“You can’t sail through a manhunt. Every port in the Caribbean, Central and South America will be looking for you. You’ll never slip through.”
His gentle smile widened. He was a very fond grownup, proud of a child’s cleverness. “Of course not, Billy. That’s why I’m sailing to South Africa.”
I blinked. Why not? If he was half as good as he seemed to think, if he had a little luck and missed the big storms, a boat like this could make South Africa easily. And he would certainly find friends there.
He nodded again. “I can see you agree. It’s not a problem, really, is it?” The lightning and thunder blasted again. The rain blew at us in blinding sheets. Doyle sighed regretfully. “There’s really only one problem left, and that’s you, Billy. I’m afraid I can’t wait to drop you into the Gulf Stream, so—”
The loudest sound I ever heard, far louder to me than the thunder, was Doyle working the slide on his pistol with it still in my ear.
“I really am sorry about this, you know,” he said. I thought I could hear his finger contracting on the trigger. And then—