Chapter 8 - THE RAM AT THE EMBANKMENT
The flat aluminum bow hit the muddy marsh bank with a bone-jarring crash.
The skiff launched five feet out of the water, plowing through the pluff mud and salt reeds like a steel sled.
The first guard didn't even have time to raise his rifle.
The port gunwale struck him across the thighs at twenty miles per hour, throwing him fifteen feet backward into the deep tidal ditch.
The second guard scrambled back toward the pipe, firing three wild pistol rounds that sparked off the boat's reinforced bottom.
PING. PING.
I kept the throttle pinned.
The mud propeller churned through the roots and black sludge, throwing a ten-foot rooster tail of liquid mud that blinded the shooter.
The skiff skidded to a halt four feet from where Graham knelt in the grass.
I killed the kill-switch.
The engine died into a ringing, suffocating silence.
“GET IN!” I screamed over the rain.
Graham looked up through the curtain of mud and water.
His face was unrecognizable—covered in soot, black river sludge, and fresh blood leaking from a scalp wound.
His dark eyes were wide, glassy with shock, staring at me as if I were a ghost risen from the creek bed.
“Eleanor...?” he croaked.
“I said GET IN, Graham!”
I scrambled to the bow, leaning over the aluminum rail.
I hooked my fingers into the collar of his ruined tuxedo jacket.
My muscles burned.
My right wrist screamed with agony where the gun had recoiled.
I hauled with all the strength of a woman who refused to let her husband die in front of her twice.
Graham dug his combat boots into the slick mud.
With a ragged, animal grunt, he threw his heavy torso over the gunwale, collapsing onto the aluminum floorboards between the passenger seats.
Behind us on the ridge, Julian Vance stumbled out of the burning grass.
His shearling coat was half-charred, his right cheek blistered and black from the fuel fire.
He held a semi-automatic rifle in his uninjured left hand.
“KILL THEM!” Vance shrieked, his voice cracking into a ragged sob of rage.
“SINK THE BOAT!”
I didn't reach for the push-pole.
I grabbed the heavy iron reverse lever on the mud motor.
I hauled the pull-cord again.
The motor caught on the first stroke, screaming at maximum RPMs.
The propeller bit into the deep water of the creek.
The skiff slid backward off the mud shelf into the black current just as a volley of rifle fire stitched across the bank where our bow had rested half a second earlier.
Thump-thump-thump.
Bullets chewed through the mud, spraying black grit across my face.
One round punched through the thin aluminum siding two inches above Graham’s knee, leaving a jagged silver hole.
I kept the tiller handle pinned against my hip, steering blind through the darkness of the winding marsh channel.
The high-rises of downtown Charleston receded behind us, their glittering lights blurred by the sheets of torrential rain.
We were in the Ashley River cut.
A maze of abandoned rice trunks, sunken barges, and black cypress swamps that even the Coast Guard avoided at low tide.
No one could track us here without a spotter plane.
I throttled the motor down to an idle, letting the skiff drift beneath the overhanging branches of a massive, moss-draped live oak.
The canopy shielded us from the worst of the rain.
The only sound was the steady dripping of river water from the leaves onto the aluminum hull.
I dropped the anchor into the shallows with a soft splash.
I turned around.
Graham lay on his back in the center of the skiff, his chest barely rising.
His breathing had turned into a shallow, wet rattle.
His left arm was completely motionless, dark venous blood pooling around his ribs on the cold floorboards.
I scrambled across the benches, dropping to my knees beside his head.
I ripped the hem of my navy silk dress, tearing off a three-foot strip of heavy fabric.
“Graham,” I whispered, pressing the silk hard against the bullet hole in his tricep.
“Stay with me.”
“Do you hear me?”
“Stay awake!”
He coughed, a thin line of red trickling from the corner of his lip.
His right hand moved weakly across the floorboards.
His fingers, coated in river mud and blood, found the edge of my bare foot.
He didn't pull away from the coldness of my skin.
He held my ankle with a desperate, trembling grip.
“You... you came back,” he rasped, his voice barely audible above the river current.
“I came back for your father’s memory, Graham,” I lied, my voice shaking with tears I couldn't stop.
“I came back so you couldn't die like a coward in a ditch.”
His bloody fingers slid up my calf, stopping at my knee.
He pulled himself up two inches, his eyes searching my face in the shadows of the cypress trees.
“The lounge...” he choked out, blood bubbling on his tongue.
“In the lounge tonight, Eleanor...”
“Don't talk,” I ordered, pressing harder on the wound.
“Save your breath!”
“No,” he whispered, his eyes blazing with a sudden, desperate clarity that cut through his fever.
“Listen to me.”
“The men in that room... Kane, Sterling, Vance...”
“They were wearing wires, Eleanor.”
I froze.
My hands stayed pressed against his bleeding arm, but my breath trapped in my throat.
“Wires?”
“The Commission... sent them to verify if I had grown weak,” Graham wheezed, his fingers digging into my knee.
“They told me forty-eight hours ago... that if I still loved you... they would execute you at the harbor dinner.”
“They said a married boss is a liability unless his wife is nothing more than a front.”
Tears spilled over Graham’s soot-blackened cheeks, cutting clean tracks through the blood on his jaw.
“I said those words... because I knew Marcus had a directional microphone pointed at the lounge door.”
“I said you were an investment... so they wouldn't put a sniper on your car when you left the estate tonight.”
He reached up with his trembling right hand.
His fingers touched the hollow beneath my throat, brushing the cold platinum wedding ring hidden inside my dress.
“You were never an investment, Eleanor,” he wept, the mafia kingpin dissolving into a broken, bleeding man.
“You were the only thing in this city... that kept my soul alive.”
His eyes rolled back.
May you like
His hand fell from my chest, slapping limp against the bloody floorboards.
His breathing stopped.
