Read Last Exit in New Jersey Online
Authors: C.E. Grundler
Beneath the shadow of the Palisades, Hazel tried to focus, fighting her growing panic. She couldn’t reach her father and Micah, not at her father’s number or Joe’s.
Was she too late? Who had Stevenson been talking to? The file offered no clues. Hazel scrolled through the menus on Stevenson’s cell. The Received Calls history was empty, and Calls Dialed listed only her attempts to reach home; Stevenson must have deleted his records.
Hazel surveyed the helm, scanning the backlit gauges. The anonymous white boat had seemed the best choice for escape; better than driving a car already reported stolen, better than Stevenson’s black boat, which was low on fuel and highly conspicuous. By all appearances the white boat looked to be a fast, modern sport-fisherman and a wise choice for a quick getaway.
The key turned, lighting the gauges and confirming full fuel tanks. Once she’d located the fuel cutoff override, posing as a bait pump switch, the engine softly rumbled to life. It wasn’t until she was underway that she discovered the boat moved at the sedate, fuel-efficient speed of a displacement cruiser, with a hull that would never break nine knots. On a good day,
Witch
could go faster, but by that point there was no turning back; she was better off slowly pressing on.
The flybridge console was a mess of empty 7-Eleven coffee cups, soda cans, Twinkies, and Good Humor wrappers. One area not buried was an illuminated Plexiglas chart table overflowing with paper charts of the region: well-used and worn, cluttered with scribbled notes of headings, with corrections for magnetic variation and compass deviation. Her temperature was dropping in the damp night air so Hazel slipped on the old sweatshirt hanging from the pilot’s seat. She tucked her hands into the pockets, finding a tiny flashlight, Sweet Tarts, receipts, and mint Chapstick.
Closer to the city, the waters were twilight bright, and Hazel strained to distinguish which of the endless lights of the harbor were floating, underway, or shoreside red and green traffic signals. She’d be glad once she cleared lower Manhattan.
She hit redial on the phone again, and fresh tears welled up when no one answered. Something had gone wrong, she was sure of it. There was no way to help. She’d given up on leaving messages for her father to call back: they were pointless and the phone’s battery was down to one bar.
“Who would beat Stevenson senseless and take
Revenge
?” Gary asked as he headed
Temperance
, his twenty-eight-foot Seabright Skiff, down the dark Hudson River. He studied Hammon, whom he’d located in Piermont futilely attempting to hot-wire a twenty-three-foot Searay.
Hammon didn’t have an answer. Annabel did, and he searched his memory, trying to understand why she’d left him. Did his brain delete something critical? That happened sometimes; there’d be gaps and blanks where he couldn’t recall things he’d said or done; they’d been occurring more and more lately.
“And you’re sure you didn’t fuel up,” Gary said.
“Positive,” Hammon said, though the more he thought about it, the less certain he became.
“So the gauge reads full, but their range is limited. We’re moving at twice
Revenge
’s top speed. We’ll catch up in no time.”
Shadowed step for step by Yodel, Hammon paced the cockpit, stepping over Charger every fourth step. Lights from buoys, ships, roads, vehicles, traffic signals, and waterfront buildings glowed like a multicolored galaxy. And somewhere within that galaxy, aboard one little boat, was Annabel. He had to find her.
At the helm, Gary turned. “Sit down already, damnit!”
Hammon dropped into the other seat, and Yodel, tail tucked under, curled at his feet.
Gary said, “They sabotaged Stevenson’s boat, so they figured they might be followed and didn’t want to be.” He studied the laptop’s screen, which displayed a digital image of the water and shoreline. A slow-moving red dot progressed past Jersey City.
Hammon said, “That’s off by miles.”
“Just look for your boat.”
“It shows us by Ellis Island; we’re nowhere near there.”
“The settings must be off. Just watch for
Revenge
.”
Hammon looked across at the Spuyten Duyvil swing bridge spanning the entrance to the Harlem River. “Why are we going this way?”
Gary scanned the laptop display. “Odds are they’re heading to open water.”
“She could’ve taken the Harlem River? She could be headed toward the Sound. What if…”
“She?”
Hammon hiccupped. “
Revenge
.”
Gary regarded him suspiciously then fiddled with the laptop, adjusting
Temperance
’s course slightly. He seemed more preoccupied with the screen than the water around them. Hammon leaned over, examining the display. He had enough problems; the last thing he needed was Gary trusting a defective navigational program.
“You really should use paper charts,” Hammon said.
“I thought I told you to look for your boat.”
Hammon glared at the computer. “I don’t trust electronics.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“What program is that? Maybe I can fix it.”
“Zap, you couldn’t fix your way out of a paper bag. Just watch for your damned boat.”
It didn’t look like any navigational programs Hammon knew. He recognized the features of the harbor, but there were no depths or navigational aids. Gary never used the laptop for navigation, he usually went by the radar display beside it, which offered an accurate picture of their present position. The dot on the laptop generated a constantly moving GPS position, far ahead of them but progressing slower than
Temperance
’s current speed, more like—
Hammon jumped up, pointing at the screen with a shaking hand. “That’s…that’s…”
Gary slumped back wearily.
It was…it had to be…that dot was…“It’s
Revenge
.”
Gary nodded in defeat.
That was
Revenge
, and…
Horror washed over Hammon as the cluster of pixels progressed across the digital harbor. “That…that…that’s…”
“Your worst nightmare.”
“You’ve been
tracking
me? YOU?
TRACKING
ME?”
“Making sure you stayed out of trouble. And monitoring engine temperature, rpm, everything. Sorta a digital babysitter.”
“You…had…a tracker in
Revenge
…all this time…You swore…”
“I lied. You gave me the idea to begin with, always ranting about everything they do. Point is, there’s your damned boat. Have a meltdown after we get it back.”
Hammon gazed numbly at the screen. Upset as he was, he was also that much closer to finding Annabel and some answers.
“What I still don’t get,” Gary said, “is who’d want to beat the shit out of Stevenson?”
Hammon leveled a skeptical look at him.
“Besides you. And why would anyone bother stealing that barge?”
Hammon stared out at the dark water. “Dunno.” He hiccupped.
Gary’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
He couldn’t say it. Gary would go ballistic.
“Spit it out!”
Hammon shook his head.
“Okay, then.” Gary pulled back on the throttle.
Temperance
drifted to a stop, settled in the water, and rocked with the outgoing tide. “I guess you don’t want your boat back.”
Hammon’s stomach lurched with each roll. If he told Gary, he knew what would happen. But the longer he remained silent, the greater the distance between him and
Revenge
grew. He swallowed hard and forced his dinner to stay put.
“Annabel did it.”
Hazel noted the time on the chart as she approached the shoreside Lincoln Tunnel ventilator shafts. To port, marking West Forty-sixth Street, the
USS Intrepid
was strung with white lights like a well-armed house at the holidays. The Empire State Building and Chrysler Building gleamed, jewels in a postcard-perfect skyline. It was amazing how beautiful the world could be even as it disintegrated.
Green buoy 31 leaned with the outgoing tide, gonging softly as Hazel passed Ellis Island. She marked her time and position. Ahead, the Statue of Liberty beckoned and green 29 flashed. Beyond that, the upper bay opened up and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge arched across the water forming a glittering gateway. She kept herself distracted by plotting her course and calculating the boat’s lack of speed as she reached each mark.
Aside from radar, depth finder, and a VHF radio, the boat was oddly electronics-free. The entire trip north, Stevenson navigated solely by a high-end GPS chart-plotter, and panic hit as Hazel realized her slow motion escape had one massive flaw. Like his cars, the boat may have been equipped with a locator beacon; Stevenson could have been following her position all along. Hazel studied the chart and the surrounding waters, eased the throttle back, and moved out of the main channel. The depth finder showed the bottom rising to thirty, then twenty, then eighteen feet. To her relief no one nearby changed course. She slowed to a stop, reversed, and let the windlass feed out the anchor line, pausing to feel it bottom out and set, then laying out a modest scope. She wouldn’t be staying long.
With the boat in neutral, she left the engine idling. Diesels operate on the principle that highly compressed fuel self-detonates. No distributor, no spark plugs. Even with the batteries disconnected, so long as the fuel pump was mechanical, the engine would run until either fuel or oxygen was cut off. She’d have no running lights, instruments, or gauges, but she had the compass, a flashlight, and a chart. That was all she needed.
First things first. She went forward and confirmed the anchor line was just that: line, not chain. Chain would be difficult to haul up once the windlass had no power. Line, on the other hand, she could cut and run, sacrificing the anchor for a quick exit.
She returned to the cockpit and tried the door.
“The boat is locked,” said a soft voice within the cabin.
“Let me be sure I got this right,” Gary said. “You think Annabel beat the shit out of Stevenson and stole your boat.”
Hammon nodded. “Uh-huh.”
Gary slumped back in his seat. “Dear God. Why me?” He looked at Hammon, shaking his head. “We’ve talked about this. Shit, kid.” He rubbed his face. “You stopped taking your damned medication again, didn’t you?”
Hammon blinked, saying nothing. The pills didn’t help. They only made things worse.
“You haven’t been taking your meds,” Gary said.
“Does NoDoz count?”
Gary looked at the laptop and sighed. “Look, it’s not like I got something against you being happy, and I really hate to rattle your coping mechanisms, but there is
no
Annabel.”
“No! You’re wrong!” Hammon insisted, his voice breaking. This was why he couldn’t talk to Gary about Annabel. Gary didn’t understand.
“For your sake I wish I was. She doesn’t exist. You understand that, don’t you? Annabel isn’t a real person, she’s just something you created in your head, a delusion or whatever.”
“No!” Hammon clapped his hands over his ears, turning away.
“Christ, Zap, are you seriously that messed up? I hate to say it, but like it or not, that’s the truth. Annabel doesn’t exist.”
Gary was wrong; she
was
real. She had to be. “What about her clothes…and her…her…stuff. Her books, her music, her magazines, her toothbrush, her…”
“All bought by you, right?” Gary stared ahead with a pained expression. “Why in all the years I’ve known you, have I never seen her?”
“She pilots
Revenge
…She keeps a better course than me.”
“It’s called an autopilot,” Gary said flatly.
“So then who messed up Stevenson? I saw Annabel; she drove right past me.”
“You think you saw her. Like you think your nonexistent little girlfriend beat a two-hundred-fifty-pound man unconscious, stole his car and then your boat.” Gary sighed. “Or maybe you snapped, went postal, and now you can’t deal so you’re blocking it out and letting your imaginary friend take the blame.”
“That’d be pretty fucked up.” Hammon paced the cockpit, scouring his brain. “Am I really that screwed up?”
“That, my friend, is and always has been the big question.”
“Then what about
Revenge
?”
“Don’t know. Coincidence?” Gary put
Temperance
into gear. “I’ll tell you one thing. We’ll overtake them soon enough. It’ll be real interesting to see who’s aboard.”
Heart pounding, Hazel stood, knife raised to the darkness, listening. Only the engine’s soft idle replied, exhaust gurgling as water slapped the transom. Buoy 31 gonged in a tug’s wake.
She’d assumed the boat was empty, but Stevenson said a friend had borrowed it, and a horrifying realization hit: whoever was aboard may very well have been the other half of Stevenson’s phone conversation.
There was nowhere to go; Hazel knew she had to face whatever lay beyond that door. Throat tight, fighting not to panic, she said, “We have to talk.”
Nothing. The boat rolled and Hazel shivered as dew collected on the decks.
Damnit. This wasn’t good. She couldn’t stand there all night like that.
“Please…I had to get away and…”
Still no answer. She tried again to open the door.
“The boat is locked,” said the soft feminine voice within the cabin.
“I got that, yeah.”
She took a deep breath, trying to stay calm as her shaking fingers brushed the handle. The instant she did, the same voice repeated, “The boat is locked.”
She pulled back, paused, and tried again.
“The boat is locked.”
Each time her fingers contacted the cool metal, the reply was identical. Fear eroded into disbelief. She touched the knob.
“The boat is locked.”
It was a recording, activated by touch. How and why was something else altogether. And sure enough the boat was, as it insisted, locked. Leaving the engine running, Hazel separated the keys and unlocked the cabin. The boat had nothing to say about that.